Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo conveyed a message from US President Donald Trump to the Iranian leadership, asking the release of 5 US prisoners and inviting Iran to sit around a negotiation table, adding “he [Donald Trump] would be ready to suspend all sanctions only during the negotiations”. No guarantee was offered to freeze or revoke the sanctions. Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Leader of the revolution, rejected the message and any dialogue with the US President and told his guest that he considers Trump unworthy to “to exchange a message with”.

Informed sources close to Iranian decision makers repeated the words of President Hassan Rouhani and the Iranian advisor to Sayyed Khamenei for international affairs, Ali Akbar Velayati, namely that  “if Iran can’t export oil through the Persian Gulf, no-one in the Middle East will be able do this”. The source “expects further attacks in the future, given the US decision to stop the flow of oil by all means at all costs. Thus, oil will stop being delivered to the world if Iran can’t export its two million barrels per day”.

Two tankers  – Kokuka Courageous and Font Altair – were attacked in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, putting at risk the supply of oil to the West and making oil tanker navigation in the Middle East very unsafe.

“One more attack and insurance companies are expected to increase their fees. More attacks and no insurance company will agree to cover any oil tanker navigating in Gulf waters, putting Iran and other oil-exporters at the same level. Moreover, let us see what justifications Trump and Europe will offer their people when the price of oil becomes unaffordable”, said the source.

“Tensions in the Gulf can be eased only when sanctions are lifted on Iran. Otherwise, more objectives may be targeted and the level of tension will gradually increase. The US is selling weapons which are inadequate to protect oil tankers or to protect oil pipelines delivering oil to harbours. If Iran is in pain, the rest of the world will suffer equally,” said the source.

“The selling of oil was compared to a horde of wolves hunting together: when one is unable to hunt, others replace him. When Iran was under sanctions unable to sell its crude oil production daily, Saudi Arabia and Russia replaced Iran and increased their production and delivery. This is why Sayyed Ali Khamenei told the Iranian leadership to no longer consider any country as a durable friend and ally.”

Today, the Gulf of Oman has become the operational stage to attack oil tankers. The oil tankers suffered multiple attacks. Had the attackers aimed to sink the oil tankers, this would have created an ecological disaster in the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. Iran wants everybody to sit around the negotiation table, including the Gulf countries, but only once the sanctions are lifted.

“President Trump is betting on maintaining the status-quo. This doesn’t suit Iran, because its economy will suffer dearly. Binding the deep economic wound and holding on until Trump ends his first mandate is playing into Trump’s hand and this is not going to happen. The tension in the Gulf was generated when Trump decided to pull out of the nuclear deal (known as the JCPOA). Let him pay the price now. If Iran cannot export its crude oil it means the country must be ready for war”, continue the source.

Russia advised Iran to remain within the JCPOA and Iran promised to withdraw only gradually. The Iranian leadership believes Trump would like to see Iran pull out completely from the nuclear deal so he can accuse Tehran of moving towards a nuclear bomb.

It is a real war that is unfolding in the Middle East today, a war where oil tankers and oil delivery to the world (30% of world oil supply goes through the Gulf) are the targets. President Trump and his Middle Eastern allies will have to bear the responsibility of the losses and the increase in the oil price worldwide due to attacks on oil tankers that are not likely to stop even in the face of US threats.

If Iran considers the sanctions detrimental to the survival of its population in the medium term, it means Iran is ready to go to war and accept the consequences. It is not possible to threaten a country that is already foundering economically. However, for Trump to lift sanctions would provide ammunition for the Democrats to attack Trump in his forthcoming campaign.

The other choice would be to lift sanctions and invite Iran to negotiate. And the last choice would be to challenge Iran, confront it and accept that the entire Middle East will go up in flames. After all, the Iranian leadership welcomed the US aircraft carrier coming to the Gulf and called it a “shooting gallery”. The ball is firmly in the US court.

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The US’ decision to dispatch 1,000 additional “rotational” troops and even a squadron of surveillance drones to Poland makes the Central European country its most important NATO ally because of the threat that this poses to Russian strategic interests in Kaliningrad, Belarus, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine, which in turn revives the historical rivalry between these two regional powers over the shared space between them.

International commentators usually debate which of the US’ NATO allies is its most important one, but there should be no question nowadays that it’s Poland after the recent military deal that it clinched with the Pentagon last week. The US will dispatch 1,000 additional “rotational” troops on top of its already-existing presence of 4,500 ones and even deploy a squadron of surveillance drones to the Central European country in response to its request to beef up its military capabilities, which blatantly violates the 1997 Russia-NATO Founding Act by expanding the already-existing de-facto permanent NATO military presence in the region under the unconvincing cover of it only being “rotational”. Furthermore, it poses a serious threat to Russian strategic interests in Kaliningrad, Belarus, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine, which in turn revives the historical rivalry between these two regional powers over the shared space between them.

Its not the author’s intent to fearmonger that “war is imminent” like a lot of Alt-Media analysts are prone to do when discussing this issue  (in which case a few thousand troops anywhere in the world wouldn’t make much of a difference if the conflict goes nuclear), but just to point out the larger strategic impact of this decision, especially concerning the surveillance drone announcement. The US routinely attempts to violate Russian airspace with its spy planes, so it’s not unforeseeable that it’ll do the same with the Polish-based drones when it comes to Russia’s neighboring region of Kaliningrad, which is fast transforming into a fortress in response to the growing security threats unleashed by the US since 2014’s reunification with Crimea. In fact, the same type of surveillance missions could be undertaken from the US’ de-facto military bases in Poland against Belarus, Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine, thus making the country a hub for regional provocations.

Poland’s reinvigorated assertiveness towards its eastern periphery is due to a large part by its desire to restore its historical hegemony in the region that it regards as being within its so-called “sphere of influence”, which overlaps with the US’ strategic objective of “containing” Russia and therefore makes the country its natural “Lead From Behind” partner in this respect, a leadership position that’s vastly improved by the fact that it has the largest population and economy of the former communist satellites. Furthermore, the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” aims to expand the country’s soft power influence all throughout this domain, attractively presenting an alternative sub-regional development model between the “traditional” EU and the Eurasian Union. Now, with the US’ military support, Poland is attempting to expand its hard influence and might even possibly be planning to provoke Russia through the aforementioned scenario of violating its airspace with surveillance drones.

It’s difficult to predict what Russia’s response to this development will be apart from increasing its military capabilities in Kaliningrad like it’s usually done whenever something of this sort has occurred. While some people think that it’ll boost its military presence in CSTO-ally Belarus, there are realistic limits to what it can do given Minsk’s geopolitical “balancing” act between East and West. It’s technically true that the US’ new military deployments to Poland pose a security threat for the so-called “buffer state” between it and Russia, but Lukashenko knows that allowing his eastern neighbor to open up its long-sought-after airbase in the country would immediately jeopardize his relations with the West and might be a “crossing the line”, so it’ll remain to be seen how the Russian-Belarusian Strategic Partnership is leveraged in this respect (if it even is to begin with).

Nevertheless, from an American strategic perspective, the scenario of provoking a self-sustaining cycle of revived historical rivalry between Poland and Russia is already being advanced through this latest military decision and will therefore create a somewhat predictable regional model that the US can continue to work with going forward. It’s to the US’ benefit more so than anyone else’s to see Poland and Russia once again compete for the shared space between them, which therefore enables Washington to “contain” Moscow by proxy via Warsaw, or at the very least force its competitor to contend with yet another problem on its borders as it seeks to overwhelm it with security challenges. It’s for this reason why Poland is incontestably the US’ most important NATO ally and will likely remain so for the indefinite future because of the irreplaceable role that it fulfills for American grand strategy.

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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.

Featured image is from NEO

Belgium’s Left Breakthrough

June 17th, 2019 by Denis Rogatyuk

On May 27th, Europe awakened to what seemed to be like a new stage in the resurgence of the populist right and reactionary forces, and a major retreat for the radical left in the elections to the European parliament. In Italy, the growing political hegemony of Salvini’s project was solidified with his party’s clear victory across northern and central regions of the country, while the Left effectively ceased to exist on the institutional level. In Spain, Unidas Podemos returned only 6 out of 11 MEPs, the same amount as La France Insoumise, whose lacklustre performance saw them achieve only 6.31% of vote. Similar losses were observed for left-of-centre-left parties across Germany, Greece, Holland and the Czech Republic, while the left vote across Portugal and the Nordic countries remained stable compared to 2014. 

In 2014, Syriza had been one of the big stories of the European elections and, with strong performances for Podemos in Spain and Sinn Féin in Ireland, the rise of the Nordic-Green Left bloc (GUE-NGL) was one of the stories of the election. Five years on, these left-wing alternatives have faded against the backdrop of an increasingly-strong populist right. But one country stands as an exception to this trend, providing a stark contrast to the failures elsewhere on the radical left.

May 26th was a political earthquake in Belgium as the Workers’ Party (PTB/PDVA) won big across the regional, federal and European elections, and firmly established itself as a left alternative to both the centre-left and green parties across the country. It more than doubled its vote share in the federal elections, increasing its number of representatives from 2 to 12, while at the same time scoring major victories across Flanders, Brussels and Wallonia, obtaining a total of 29 seats in the various regional elections. At the same time, the party elected its first member of European parliament, Marc Botenga, in the French-speaking regions. Moreover, in the region of Flanders, they succeeded in capturing a political foothold despite dominating cultural and political hegemony of the conservative nationalist political forces throughout the past decade and the electoral success of the far-right Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang), which obtained 18 federal seats. 

An Emerging Force

Founded out of Belgium’s radical student movement in the 1960s, the Workers’ Party at first adopted a Maoist platform and focused on anti-imperial and anti-colonial struggles. In its early years it was very much on the fringes of Belgian politics, drawing only tens of thousands of votes through the 1990s and into the early 2000s. But by the mid-2000s, as the party moved towards a broader Marxist platform, its fortunes began to change. After the financial crisis, its vote increased sharply in the 2009 European elections and this was followed, in 2010, by a breakthrough federal election in which the party received over 100,000 votes. This grew to 250,000 in 2014, bringing with it two members of parliament. But their latest results are far more impressive: drawing 584,621 votes (8.62%) federally, with particular success in regional elections in Brussels (13.47% and 10 seats) and Wallonia (13.68% and 10 seats). 

The reorganisation of the party and the process of renewal during the congress of 2009 played a crucial part in allowing it to emerge as a credible alternative, offering both a social and an ecological narrative as well as practical solutions to the economic issues created by the financial crisis. This allowed the party to build a distinctive approach during its breakthroughs in the Walloon and Federal parliaments in 2014, with campaigns promising to “bring the voice of the working people” to politics.

The interventions made by PTB politicians, particularly Raoul Hebedouw, during parliamentary sessions, and the clear and consistent articulation of everyday problems faced by the population, further increased the party’s appeal across both traditional and social media in recent years. Despite its relatively meagre size, its parliamentary performances meant it often ended up leading debates on important social and economic issues such as pensions, retirement age, unemployment figures and insecure work.

The Workers’ Party also played a supportive role for the waves of industrial action throughout late 2018 and early 2019, which culminated in general strikes in parts of the country in October, February and May. At the same time, the resurgence of the climate change movement allowed the party’s eco-socialist message to gain traction, with its proposal of a green transition funded by new taxes on multinationals. The protests and the social movements for an increase in the pensions also helped the party to tap into the popular anger against both the ruling coalition of N-VA, Christian Democrats and liberals, and the centre-left’s track record of applying cuts to social spending. 

All of these factors were crucial in the party winning over parts of the electorate in the poorer and formerly industrial regions such as Henegouwen and Luik, scoring an unprecedented 15.64% and 16.45% in the two regions respectively, as well as significant parts of the progressive electorate in Brussels, where it achieved 12.28%. 

Flemish Breakthrough

On the surface, the results from the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders appeared to show a similar pattern of the rise of the reactionary nationalist and populist right forces across the continent. The New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), a member of the government coalition until December 2018, won almost 25% of the vote in the region and returned 25 seats, despite losing 8 federal seats to re-emerged Flemish Interest (Vlaams Belang), which re-emerged with its best result since 2003. 

On May 29th, King Phillippe met with the Flemish Interest’s Tom Van Grieken, the first time the Belgian head of state held an official meeting with a leader from the far-right of the country’s politics since 1936. Furthermore, Bart De Wever, the NV-A leader appeared to be willing to break the long-standing taboo of holding coalition talks with the party, considering the NV-A’s own narrow list of possible coalition partners for the next federal government. 

However, the success of the Workers’ Party bucked the right-wing trend. By breaking through the 5% threshold and electing its first four representatives in the Flemish parliament, the party has established an institutional foothold. It can now follow a similar strategy in the Dutch-speaking region to the one adopted by Raoul Hebedouw federally. This will allow it to advance motions on issues that the party campaigned on in Flanders, such as a demand to raise pension levels to €1,500 per month, to introduce free public transport, and to crackdown on tax evasion by multinational corporations.

The party hopes this will mean that a radical left-wing project that’s already gathering pace across Wallonia and Brussels can be extended into Flanders, combining institutional presence with an established space in the media. This foothold may also end the profiling of the party as a “phenomenon of the south” and strengthen its position as a genuine bi-national political force. 

The Flemish regions where the Workers’ Party saw its highest vote, particularly the large economic areas and old industrial heartlands of Antwerp and Ghent, shared a common pattern of social and economic problems that the party’s program was specifically designed to address – high unemployment or otherwise high levels of insecure work, poor public transport, high pollution, lack of affordable housing and low levels of pensions.

The electoral campaign built on a number of tactics previously utilised during the October 2018 local elections, when the party won a total of 157 local council seats across the country. Chief among these was a grassroots campaign utilising thousands of volunteers and a system of “vote by vote” cards designed to secure individual votes across neighbourhoods, participation in the debates in high schools and local branches of the ABVV and ACV trade unions, as well building an anti-establishment message to rival the Flemish far-right. 

In the latter case, the Workers’ Party’s message that multinationals, rather than workers, should pay for the climate and social crisis allowed it to simultaneously tap into the climate action movement while positioning itself against to some of the market-friendly and economically regressive proposals put forward by Green parties. Given the crisis precipitated by environmental reforms that penalised working-class and poorer segments of society across the border in France, the party sees this approach as especially important.

The current situation provides a stark contrast with the historical experience of the 1990s and early 2000s, which saw the decline of the centre-left Flemish Socialist Party (SPa) and other established political forces in favour of Flemish Interest. The Workers’ Party has sought to challenge the xenophobic politics which are the legacy of recent years by focusing on the origin of the refugee crisis–wars and intervention in the Middle East–rather than feeding scare stories about its management, while offering an economic agenda which threatens nationalist and right-wing dominance of the anti-establishment narrative.

The Future

The election of Marc Botenga as a Member of European Parliament (MEP) in the country’s French-speaking region was also a landmark for the PTB. 14.5% of vote catapulted the 38-year old to one of Belgium’s 21 allocated seats, the first time that a radical leftist had been elected in a Belgian European election. On election night, Botenga said the result meant there was a “left locomotive that [would be able] to offer an alternative to the far-right and to the policies of Macron or Merkel, who opened the door to the far-right with their Europe of competition, austerity and money”. 

The Workers’ Party will join the European Nordic-Green Left (GUE-NGL) formation in the European parliament, now deprived of some its recent support base across the Mediterranean. If the left is to regain the ground it has lost in recent years, it would do well to learn the lessons of the Belgian Workers’ Party, which looks set to become one of the country’s most impactful political forces just at the moment the threat from the far-right is growing.

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Denis Rogatyuk is a writer, journalist, and researcher based in London. He’s written for Jacobin, Green Left Weekly, TeleSUR, LINKS, International Viewpoint and other publications.

Featured image is from Tribune

It’s 10 years now since US president Barack Obama made his famous Prague speech, committing to a nuclear weapons-free world. I remember hearing his words broadcast, amid the tumultuous cheers of the crowd in Hradčany Square, as if it were yesterday.

I stood with peace activists in glorious spring sunshine outside the ‘No to NATO’ counter-summit in Strasbourg and our speculations ran riot. US nukes out of Europe? An end to Britain’s Trident system as part of a global disarmament deal? What heady days those were, what days of hope.

Then as president Dmitry Medvedev of Russia added his voice to the call, hopes were high that real progress would be made towards that goal.

Those were truly inspiring moments, and although, over the year that followed, there were times when I felt hope was receding, finally words were turned into actions.

The New START treaty was signed, which made significant reductions to US and Russian nuclear weapons, limiting their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to a combined total of 1,550. It wasn’t everything we wanted, but it was a step in the right direction.

How far away those days seem now. It’s not just that moves towards arms reduction and disarmament have stalled – they have actually gone into reverse.

INF finished

Since Donald Trump entered the White House, there have been sustained attacks on the treaty architecture that underpins the rules-based system that most countries struggle to uphold and extend. The whole principle of multilateralism has faced successive onslaughts, and with John Bolton at Trump’s right hand as US national security adviser, non-proliferation and disarmament treaties are not long for this world.

The Trump administration is doing its very best to destroy the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, while also banging the drums of war. Its withdrawal from the ‘Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action’ and its attempts to reintroduce sanctions on Iran can only lead to greater instability in the Middle East and increase the likelihood of more countries in the region pursuing nuclear weapons.

This move by Trump is not a popular one: all the other signatories to the Iran nuclear deal are trying to uphold it – including Britain – but it’s not clear how long this will be sustainable.

And now president Trump has announced that the US will withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Force (INF) treaty with Russia. Russia has since done the same.

This treaty has been a cornerstone of nuclear arms control since the Cold War, having eliminated thousands of nuclear missiles in Europe, playing a crucial role in ensuring that US missiles are not situated on our continent.

There are many possible dangers as a result of its cancellation: a new nuclear arms race, US missiles back in Europe – and that includes Britain – trained on Russia, US missiles in Okinawa trained on China, nuclear war.

As if it can’t get much worse, US withdrawal from the INF treaty also calls into question whether Washington will work with Moscow to renew Obama and Medvedev’s New START treaty in 2021, when it is due to expire. If Bolton has his way, once the treaty expires there will be no restraints on nuclear weapons left. A grim prospect indeed.

Cheering Trump

In Britain’s parliament, our house of commons defence committee has recently unveiled its report into the breakdown of the INF treaty.* As this is so vital to peace in Europe and beyond, it was disappointing to find this report a most unedifying read.

Indeed, it turns the committee into a cheerleader for president Trump – far from the actual role designated to it, which is essentially scrutiny and accountability. The parliament website describes it thus: ‘The Defence Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure, administration, and policy of the Ministry of Defence and its associated public bodies.’

Instead, it produced a disappointing and unbalanced report which fails both to address the reality of a US president who is abandoning the international rules-based system, and to consider what this means for Britain – particularly in light of the so-called special relationship.

The report sweeps aside any US responsibility for the breakdown of the INF treaty, despite Trump initiating US withdrawal, stating in its summary that ‘if the Treaty fails, the sole responsibility for its failure will lie with Russia’.

Trump’s withdrawal from the universally-applauded Iran nuclear deal was perhaps the clearest sign of his dangerous new approach to international legal norms, but the report doesn’t deem it relevant even to mention it.

The report also fails to point out how US withdrawal from the INF treaty will effectively legalise the activities for which Russia stands accused by president Trump, and removes the framework through which they could be investigated and resolved.

The truth is, both Russia and the US had concerns about each other’s compliance with the treaty – but how will these concerns be addressed when the treaty is gone?

This failure of critical thought by the defence committee is all the more disappointing because the committee has, in the past, played a valuable and objective role in scrutinising government actions.

In 2006, when the Blair government was trying to press ahead with Trident replacement without a full public and parliamentary debate, it was the defence committee which initiated a series of inquiries into Britain’s nuclear weapons that were probably the most in-depth and serious to date. That independence of thought now seems lacking and this is particularly dangerous.

Whereas the UK government seems to be vigorously supporting Trump on this issue, elsewhere in Europe deep reservations have been expressed.

Other European leaders seem to have a clearer recognition of the dangers that may ensue – a new nuclear arms race and the acceleration of a new cold war. Of course, it’s not just Europe that will be affected – China is being brought into the frame here, as with all US foreign and military policy.

It is necessary for the peace movement internationally to defend the treaties that restrain arms production, deployment and potential use. Without this security framework, we face a much more dangerous world.

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Kate Hudson is general secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Founded in 1958, CND campaigns for British nuclear disarmament and for a global ban on nuclear weapons: www.cnduk.org

Featured image: Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed a landmark nuclear arms control treaty in 1987. (Photo: White House Photographic Office/National Archives and Records Administration)

In a move aimed at gaining more support from the already-enthusiastic Donald Trump for their policies of land expropriation and expansion, Israeli authorities on Sunday established a new development they coined “Trump Heights”, with Binyamin Netanyahu presiding over the unveiling ceremony alongside U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

The location for the new colony is on land stolen by Israel from Syria in the 1967 war, an area known as the Golan Heights, and illegally occupied by the Israeli military since that time. Donald Trump recently announced that he recognizes Israel’s claim to the territory – despite no internationally-recognized treaty or agreement ever having been signed ceding the territory.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu held a ceremony on the site on Sunday, renaming the colonial settlement of Bruchim to ‘Trump Heights’.

In his statement, Netanyahu said,

“We are going to do two things — establish a new community on the Golan Heights, something that has not been done for many years. This is an act of Zionism and it is paramount. The second thing is to honor our friend, a very great friend of the State of Israel — President Donald Trump, who recently recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.”

Next to Netanyahu stood David Friedman, the Trump-appointed U.S. Ambassador to Israel who has long been criticized for his blatant support of Israel’s illegal annexation of neighboring territory (including heading an organization in the U.S. that helps to fund this illegal colonization activity).

Friedman has also been criticized for a complete absence of diplomatic experience — his only apparent qualifications for the job of Ambassador being his work as Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and his virulent support for Zionist expansionist politics.

“It’s absolutely beautiful,” said Friedman, adding, “I can’t think of a more appropriate and a more beautiful birthday present [for Donald Trump, who just had a birthday].”

Israeli journalists have pointed out that the ceremony is likely little more than a political maneuver aimed at feeding Donald Trump’s ego, since no action has actually been taken to establish the colony.

If action were taken to settle the area with Israeli civilians, it would be a direct violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the obligations of an occupying power.

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Featured image is from IMEMC

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) today launches the findings of SIPRI Yearbook 2019, which assesses the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security.

​​​​​​The modernization of nuclear forces continues

SIPRI Governing Board Chair Ambassador Jan Eliasson, former Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, says:

‘A key finding is that despite an overall decrease in the number of nuclear warheads in 2018, all nuclear weapon-possessing states continue to modernize their nuclear arsenals.’

At the start of 2019, nine states—the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)—possessed approximately 13 865 nuclear weapons. This marked a decrease from the approximately 14 465 nuclear weapons that SIPRI estimated these states possessed at the beginning of 2018 (see table below).

Of these 13 865 nuclear weapons, 3 750 are deployed with operational forces and nearly 2 000 of these are kept in a state of high operational alert.

The decrease in the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world is due mainly to Russia and the USA—which together still account for over 90 per cent of all nuclear weapons—further reducing their strategic nuclear forces pursuant to the implementation of the 2010 Treaty on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (New START) while also making unilateral reductions. In 2018, Russia and the USA announced that they had achieved the final New START force reduction limits by the specified deadline.

New START will expire in 2021 unless both parties agree to extend it. There are currently no discussions about extending New START or negotiating a follow-on treaty.

‘The prospects for a continuing negotiated reduction of Russian and US nuclear forces appears increasingly unlikely given the political and military differences between the two countries,’ says Shannon Kile, Director of SIPRI’s Nuclear Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-proliferation Programme.

Both Russia and the USA have extensive and expensive programmes under way to replace and modernize their nuclear warheads, missile and aircraft delivery systems, and nuclear weapon production facilities. In 2018, the US Department of Defense set out plans to develop new nuclear weapons and modify others to give them expanded military roles and missions.

The nuclear arsenals of the other nuclear-armed states are considerably smaller, but all are either developing or deploying new weapon systems or have announced their intention to do so. China, India and Pakistan are increasing the size of their nuclear arsenals. ‘India and Pakistan are expanding their military fissile material production capabilities on a scale that may lead to significant increases in the size of their nuclear weapon inventories over the next decade,’ says Kile.

North Korea continues to prioritize its military nuclear programme as a central element of its national security strategy, although in 2018 it announced a moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons as well as medium- and long-range ballistic missile delivery systems.

Absence of transparency in reporting on nuclear weapon capabilities

The availability of reliable information on the status of the nuclear arsenals and capabilities of the nuclear-armed states varies considerably.

The USA and the UK have disclosed important information about their stockpile and nuclear capabilities, and France has also declared some information. Russia does not make publicly available a detailed breakdown of its forces counted under New START, even though it shares this information with the USA.

The governments of India and Pakistan make statements about some of their missile tests but provide little information about the status or size of their arsenals. At present, North Korea has acknowledged conducting nuclear weapon and missile tests but provides no information about its nuclear weapon capabilities. Israel has a long-standing policy of not commenting on its nuclear arsenal.

* ‘Deployed warheads’ refers to warheads placed on missiles or located on bases with operational forces.
** ‘Other warheads’ refers to stored or reserve warheads and retired warheads awaiting dismantlement. Total figures include the highest estimate when a range is given. Figures for North Korea are uncertain and are not included in total figures. All estimates are approximate.

50 years of the SIPRI Yearbook

The 2019 edition is the 50th Yearbook that SIPRI has produced. Among other topics, SIPRI Yearbook 2019 provides analysis on armed conflict and peace processes, nuclear disarmament, arms control (conventional and nuclear) and non-proliferation—including key developments in Russian–US nuclear arms control, Iran and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Last year, SIPRI made the 2001–16 editions of the Yearbook freely available to download. In the next few months, SIPRI will make all 31 editions prior to 2001 available online for free. A 50-day social media campaign leading up to the launch of the complete back catalogue will start in July.

See some of Dan Smith’s reflections on the key findings of the SIPRI Yearbook 2019 in the latest episode of Peace Points:

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As we know, big lies can run free across borders with few joining the dots.

For example, no media reports that China’s growing dispute with Canada is based on Canada’s enforcement of the Trump administration’s unilateral and illegal embargo against oil-competitor Iran. A cynical reply is that this is predictable. Canada attacks any designated US Enemy in junior partnership with global corporate command.

But this time there is a new twist. Canada is attacking itself without knowing it.

A US Big-Oil backed juggernaut of Conservative provincial governments and the federal Opposition are well advanced in a Canada campaign to reverse longstanding parliamentary decisions, environmental laws, climate action initiatives, Supreme Court directions, first-nations negotiations, and bring down the government of Canada.  Yet no-one in public or media circles has joined the dots.

Canada’s vast tar-sands deposits are world famous as surpassing Saudi Arabia oil-field capacities in total barrels of potential yield. Great Canada! Yet few notice that over two-thirds of the entire tar-sands operations are owned by foreign entities sending their profits out of Canada, and almost all its raw product is controlled for refining and sale in the US.

What is especially kept out of the daily news is the incendiary fact that the infamous, election-interfering Koch brothers have a dominant stake in the toxic crude of the Alberta tar-sands seeking a massive BC-pipeline out to their US refineries.

Koch-owned industries have already extracted countless billions of their near $100-billion fortune from the tar-sands and deployed their well-known voter-manipulations to change the balance of power in Canada as they have done in the US.

The objective is the same in both cases – ever more tax-free, publicly subsidized and state-enforced control by US Big Oil of Alberta’s massive oil resources with no government regulations or interferences in the way.

A Short History of the Background Facts 

Prior to the wide-mouth pipelines of toxic Alberta crude planned through BC mountains, lands and waters to US processors, oil has to be extracted from the tar-sands first. This demands a continuous gargantuan depleting and polluting of the great Athabaska Lake, River and watershed to steam-boil the tar out of the vast open-pit mines. The immense open-pit mines are not formed or pumped out of desert as in the Middle East. They are torn in state-size chunks out of the earth’s mantle by monstrous wrecking machines ripping out the boreal forest lands by the roots to destroy the carbons sinks and water-hold stabilization they provide in the Northern region as well as pump out ever more climate-changing gases.

NASA Lake Athabasca.jpg

Lake Athabasca (Public Domain)

To boil the tar out of the endless open-pit mines already demands the equivalent of twice the amount of water the entire City of Calgary uses and recycles in a year. But water consumed by the tar-sand boiling is permanently polluted and wasted, and its fresh- water take from the great Athabaska watershed will only increase as the tar-sands ‘development’ is maximized, accessible oil fields are exhausted and prices rise. So too the annihilation of the boreal forests acting as a sink for carbon and holding the watershed together will be permanently lost.

Yet this is only the beginning of what ends up being the biggest single point-source of carbon pollution and climate destabilization in the world. It pollutes 2.5 times more carbon gases than natural oil. Extraction mechanisms cost almost 8-times more fossil fuels than natural oil, and use overall almost as much energy as is produced!

For many years now, the Kochs have made most of their vast fortune from processing billions of barrels of tar-sand crude in the US, not Canada. This is why their octopi funding fronts have relentlessly pushed for ever more pipelines through others’ lands (including Dakota’s indigenous Standing Rock) to control this bigger and safer business than tar-sand extraction itself.

This is also why the Kochs have led the huge financing of climate change denial against the known science, in which tar-sand extractions and burning produce far more toxic carbon gases than high-grade oil. Most of all, the Kochs have acted out of sight to ensure control over elected governments that might regulate and control their above-the-law activities. They spent more than the Republican Party itself on the 2012 US elections.

They invented and funded the Congress-upending Tea-Party, and finance endless attack ads against all resisters to their will to dominate the US Congress and Senate (and behind the scenes the Trump presidency).

Canada’s Love-in With US Big Oil as ‘Alberta’ and ‘National Unity’

In Canada, the governing corporate media and parties have had such a media-transmitted love-in with Big Oil that even Alberta’s NDP Premier Rachel Notley militantly demanded over years that the US-dominated tar-sands mega project receive ever more rights and public subsidies to run its toxic tar-sand crude over neighboring BC mountains and the inland whale-inhabited ocean channels as a moral obligation to Alberta.

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Source: Shutterstock

The spell of ‘national unity’ to sell Alberta’s US-controlled oil sands is not broken even as the forest fires and floods in BC and Ontario rage beyond all records from the fossil-carbon-destabilized climate. Now six new pro-developer premiers of Canada and the leader of the federal opposition are shouting that any more delays to the Big-Oil pipelines are “breaking up the country”.

US Big Oil led by the Kochs’ political war chest and already covertly dominating the US Senate and Presidency, has long gotten its way by such polarizing propaganda. Yet in Canada the line is swallowed whole and spread by the national media as the “unity crisis” facing the country.

Big Oil’s crucial step in putting  the tar-sands into the driver’s seat of Canada politics has been gone beneath the radar. First of all it assumes a premise which no-one questions that all  all the toxic raw product must be piped through Canada unprocessed “to market” (i.e., US refineries), and that Canada must duly enforce this off-shore refinement “as a national priority”. Once this full false premise is established as a given, it follows that the toxic Alberta crude must be piped raw across the BC mountain forests and aquifers, and then into its paradisal inland ocean channels for oil-tanker transport – now demanding a rising and rarely mentioned seven-times more oil-tanker traffic with toxic product that cannot be cleaned up.

Any ‘delays’ to this (never named) US-Big-Oil agenda with Canada juniors are then attacked as against ‘national unity’. They are called ‘illogical’ and ‘punishing Alberta’-  even when the time is legally required for amending legislation that has been ordered by the Supreme Court of Canada and for negotiating with the first nations whose lands and waters will be overrun by the the dirty-oil project in a period of ‘national reconciliation’.

In fact, the governing premises here are lawless and driven by what the Kochs specialize in – a fanatic anti-government agenda claiming to be for tax-payers and citizens. The rule of law is implicitly dismissed. Carbon pricing legislated by elected government – which sane oil corporations now accept as economically required – is ferociously attacked.

Even Parliament’s long-passed Bill C-48 protecting the Northern BC Coast from heavy oil-tanker traffic (tankers carrying over 10,500 metric tons of tar-sand crude) – a bill supported and voted for by over two-thirds of MP’s – is attacked in the Senate of Canada backed by Big Oil and Alberta.

Thus the single most important legal protection of Canada’s greatest environmental treasure, one that has been the negotiated decision of Parliament and a condition for the oil-pipe through BC, is marked for elimination. The federal Conservative Party goes along, and its ever-smiling leader Andrew Scheer has promised if elected in the approaching federal election to abolish Bill C-48.

The worst part of the whole multiplying Big-Oil tar-sands mega-project may be the mammoth toxin-filled tankers ploughing through and despoiling the world’s most awe-inspiring green inland coasts in BC.  It is like the Vietnam coast in this sublime natural beauty, but even more than Vietnam, it is an ecological paradise carrying a world of whales, eagles, biodiverse life and breathtaking music of nature with thriving indigenous peoples protecting the environment since ancient times in a breathtaking music of life from rising green peaks to the fish depths of the ocean.

That the current Big Oil forces, Alberta Conservatives, the federal Conservative Party, many in the Senate of Canada, and various corporate media and fronts are all seeking to reverse the already-legislated Bill C-48 protection of even the Northern BC coasts from this grossest abuse of majestic life and beauty at every level and scale of Creation demonstrates how cancerous the Big Oil tar-sands mega-project has become.

Yet in the unseen, historic shell-game going on behind the scenes, there is a convenient perpetual side-show of attacks on PM Trudeau whose unforgiveable sin is not to push the oil-pipes and tankers through BC fast enough.

Led by Jason Kenney as Premier and the so-far invisible Koch brothers,  the Conservative Party across provinces and federally has formed into an implicit war against any public control over and regulation of Big Oil. Any legal impediment  to the massively toxic extraction and export through Canada’s most pristine natural environments to US control, refineries and far more profitable foreign sale is reverse portrayed as an attack on Alberta and a strike at Canada’s unity as a country.

The assumed absolute necessity of this pipeline and tanker extension of the multiplying tar-sands project is,in fact, the demand of US-led Big Oil to loot and pollute Canada’s natural resources for value added in the US  (including for oil sale back to Canada at multiplied prices). Yet every politician is supine before the transnational Big Oil powers involved. Even Liberal leader Stephan Dionne who won the Liberal leadership in 2006 on an environmental platform dared not question the Koch-led tar-sands mega-project. “There is too much money in it”, he responded to environmentalist concerns.

With all these unseen premises against Canada’s common life interests now cast as inalterable necessity, the trap is well set.  As a federal election must occur before October 21, all the wheels are being oiled for Conservative toppling of the Liberal government and override of any resistance to the biggest force-play of US-led Big Oil in Canada’s history.

The Unspeakable Contradiction: Jobs, Environment, and Prosperity Lost by Raw-Crude Pipeline and US Refinement

No-one yet recognizes the Koch-led US Big Oil plan to extract Saudi-like treasure from  Canada’s boreal forests and to transport its toxic crude through and out of Canada with ever-rising environmental damages at all levels is actually throwing away all the Alberta “jobs”, “investment”, “tax revenues”  and “prosperity” which it promises to deliver.  All of these economic benefits would actually materialize and multiply many times if the tar-sands were processed and refined for Canadian, US and global sale inside Alberta.

Most ironic of all, the biggest immediate danger of Alberta tar-sand crude is that is irreversibly toxic because it is not processed first before transportation over land, aquifers, shorelands, and inland ocean channels. This is what the BC resistance on the ground is most motivated by – the irreversibly disastrous consequences when this unprocessed toxic crude spills anywhere along the rocky, ocean-tempest way. The spills are an historically demonstrated certitude, but like climate destabilization itself are denied by the Big-Oil beneficiaries in future tens of billions in private profit.

As always in the ruling narrative, there is ‘no alternative’.  ‘It must be done now to create jobs and get product to market’Astonishingly, no-one in government or the mass media observes the fact that many more well-paying permanent jobs, far more oil revenues, and infinitely more safety from tar-oil spills and dirty-oil carbon effluents are assured by processing the raw bitumen in Alberta itself.

On closer examination not yet considered, the political stampede for the trans-mountain pipeline of toxic Alberta crude through  the BC mountains and coastal waterways is based on a very big lie. If Alberta and Canada’s government, globally competitive Canada oil firms and working people reallywant to “create jobs”, “get product to market’, “achieve environmental  security”, “provide needed investment and revenues for the Canadian people”, and “reduce climate-destabilizing gases” the option is economically self-evident.

Process the tar-sand product in Canada and Alberta where the uncleanable toxins can be stripped out first by rigorous regulation and safely precautions before flooded through huge breakable pipes across mountains, aquifers, forests, and ocean coasts and the world-renowned lands and waters of a 5000-year-old ecological wonder larger and more unspoiled than any in the world.

Yet just as climate science does not matter to rogue Big Oil, so too the prevention of toxic Alberta crude running through Canada by processing it in Canada first is erased from discussion.  No public voice even mentions the environmental risks of pipelining the toxic crude through the mountains and coats of BC when it could be cleaned up in Alberta first. None yet flags all the lost Canadian fortune and economic development going down the drain by raw-crude pipelines straight to the control, refineries and global sale of foreign Big-Oil multi-billionnaires like the Koch brothers. As for the foreign interference in Canada’s elections manipulating every step, no-one reports this either.

For what? The driver is not “jobs and prosperity”, “creating and sharing wealth”, and “making the indigenous people independent” (what a Canada Senator incredibly just wrote to me). The truth is the opposite on every count. Tens of thousands of high-paying jobs, escalated tax revenues, immense new domestic profits and investment opportunities are now all wasted for Canada by letting four times more of the value-added go South to US Big Oil management, refineries and high-grade global sales.

The real driver here is dispossession of Canada’s workers, first peoples, taxpayers and the common wealth by ever more multi-billion private profits extracted from its public lands at the lowest oil-royalties in the world to further enrich the already obscenely rich who are mostly not tax payers and are, in effect, lead destroyers of the life support capacities of the planet.

 

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

Featured image: Creative Commons

Sales of new cars in China, today the world’s largest automobile market, plunged a dramatic 16.4% in May, making the worst month in the history of the relatively new China auto industry. According to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM), the disastrous May sales came after declines of 14.6% in April and 5.2% in March. It is questionable if this can be blamed on the US-China trade war. The depression in China vehicle sales, however, is having a significant impact on foreign automakers, especially in Germany. Could this China turn presage a major new global economic recession or worse?

One indication that the US trade war is not the main cause is the fact that May 2019 marks the 12thconsecutive month of auto sales decline in China. Sales between automakers in China and car dealers were down 44%. Moreover, domestic sales of Chinese brand autos in May were down a significant 26%. Baojun, Dongfeng and Trumpchi are Chinese brands that have fallen 40% so far this year. Only Japanese Honda and Toyota could show sales increases. Clearly something major and not good is afoot in China, the world’s second largest economy.

A clue to what is driving (pun intended) the drop was given by Xu Haidong, CAAM’s assistant secretary general. He said, “a decline in purchasing power in the low-to-middle income groups as well as expectations of government stimulus to encourage purchases” was a major cause.

Consumer debt

What the “decline in purchasing power in the low-to-middle income groups” means is the worrisome point. As I noted in an earlier piece, the years of Chinese prosperity, much like in the West, have been driven by easy credit, especially since the global financial crisis in 2008.

In 2009 China became the country producing the largest numbers of autos in the world. Many are US or Japanese or EU brands with Chinese production factories. Its car output since a decade has exceeded that of the USA and Japan combined, as well as that of the entire EU. By 2010 China was producing almost 14 million vehicles annually, largest of any nation in history and most of it for its “low-to-middle income” domestic market. China’s middle income earners saw car ownership as essential, and banks and soon non-banks or shadow banks were eager to lend. In 2009 total registration of cars, vans and trucks in China was registered cars, buses, vans, and trucks on the road in China reached 62 million. It will exceed 200 million by 2020. That means that the market for car ownership is, if not saturated, at least up against limits of household debt capacity.

For the past decade Chinese younger families with rising incomes and a car, turned to buy their own apartments or homes for the first time in a major way. By 2018 the explosion of household and other debt, much of it unregulated, began to cause alarm in Beijing and with the Peoples’ Bank of China. It is estimated that an alarming $15 trillion in off-balance-sheet or shadow banking loans were outstanding. At least $3.8 trillion of that was in the form of so-called trust funds that drew savings from ordinary Chinese citizens to invest in local government projects or in housing construction. The World Bank estimated that all China shadow banking had grown from 7% of GDP in 2005 to 31% in 2016. The Basle BIS calculates that some $7 trillion of that is at risk of default.

The current consumer boom was triggered after the 2008 global financial crisis, when the Beijing government made what many saw as a near-panic infusion of cheap money into the economy in a bid to keep employment and incomes rising. As regulators began to try to bring the problem under better control, millions of middle-income Chinese families have suddenly found the economic paradise that seemed to exist the past two decades suddenly was becoming a debtor prison, as property values ceased double-digit rising. One difficulty is getting accurate government economic data. Contrary to the official 6+% GDP growth that seems unshakeable, some Chinese economists have suggested it could well be around 1% or even negative.

In this situation, the recent decline in the Chinese car sales is more than alarming. It has global implications, not least in Germany. Germany’s VW which has production in China is the largest selling car in China with over 3 million in 2017.

Global Impact

In recent months, in large part as a result of the continuing decline in China car sales, the global car industry has entered a new crisis phase. That, atop issues such as diesel emission scandals, is not good news for the industry. Germany’s Center for Automotive Research estimates that global car production in 2019 will fall at least 4 million units, a huge shock. Most Western analysts did not expect the severe drop in China car sales to occur.

In May German Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche said that “sweeping cost reductions” are ahead to prepare for what he is calling “unprecedented” industry disruption. German auto parts suppliers such as Bosch and thousands of small-to-midsize supplier companies speak of their worst crisis since the oil shocks of the 1970s. Over the first six months of 2019 carmakers worldwide from Germany to Italy to USA and China have cut some 38,000 jobs in response to the global downturn. Bank of America Merrill Lynch auto analyst John Murphy stated, “The industry is right now staring down the barrel of what we think is going to be a significant downturn. The pace of decline in China is a real surprise.”

For German carmakers the timing of the China market collapse could not be worse. Just as they are pouring billions into developing future-generation electric vehicles, still believed years away from viability and far more costly than current gasoline or diesel models, they are being hit with draconian and arbitrary EU emission demands and uncertainty.

Were Washington now to impose new tariffs on imports of German and other EU cars, it could get quite nasty on the economic front. The globalization of industrial production since 2000 that has made China workshop of the world now begins to show tectonic cracks in the globalist foundation.

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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 Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO


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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

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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.

Trump and the Taiwan Gambit

June 17th, 2019 by Peter Koenig

Taiwan has become a new “eastern pivot” for Donald Trump. Against all international laws and UN charters, he is approaching Taiwan, as indicating to the world that regardless of the established world rules which make Beijing, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), the official and legitimate Authority of China, with Taiwan being a part of China – the self-styled emperor, Mr. Trump, pretends he prefers dealing with Taiwan as an independent country. By doing so, he intends to invite others to do likewise. Trump wants to make Taiwan an ‘ally’ – dreaming of setting up a US base on the island, thus further encircling China. It is the old game, divide to reign. But he can’t be as ignorant as to believe it will actually work. It’s just one more thing to annoy PRC. Frankly – seen from a step back, it looks more like attempting to dump one of those primitive Trumpish ‘diplomatic’ bombshells on PRC’s back. – Provoking the Dragon?

Dragons can be lethal, especially if exposed to nonstop strings of insults and debasement, attacks, and threats, sanctioned with trade wars, subjecting US$ 200 billion worth of Chinese exports into the US with 25% import tax, and, mind you, Trump just issued a new threat –raising the ante to US$ 300 billion, in case China refuses to attend the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan on 28-20 June 2019. Can you imagine – the insolence, ordering President Xi to attend the G20 summit?!? The man has indeed no manners, diplomatic or otherwise.

Trump further bragged on Monday, 10 June, that  China will make a deal with the United States “because they’re going to have to.” – And what would be the deal? He never explained. He added that “China has lost trillions of dollars since he, Trump, was elected president”.– Imagine this impunity in recklessness! – Well – surely, President Xi Jinping will not be duped or blackmailed by joker Trump.

On another front, Trump threatened Mexican’s new President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, AMLO for short, with a 5% tariff on Mexican agricultural exports to the United States, if illegal immigration to the US would not stop. AMLO approached President Trump with an open letter, saying that he seeks peace and not confrontation, dialogue not war, and that AMLO’s government will do whatever is in its power to stop illegal migration to the US.

He stated, correctly, that a trade war would do more harm than good to both nations. – Trump then dropped the threat, with worldwide publicity, to make sure his ‘goodness’ is recognized the world over. However, just a few days ago, Trump threatened Mexico again with the 5% tax, in case AMLO’s promise doesn’t hold and poor Mexicans keep illegally crossing the border into the great Promised Land (no, not Israel, but the western extension of Israel).

Of course, this tariff has nothing to do with trade. It is punishment, a sheer demonstration of supremacy. And – never mind, Trump probably doesn’t understand that California’s agriculture thrives on the low-wage illegal Mexican and Central American immigrants.

It is nevertheless amazing that the (western) world stands by and dares say NOTHING. The threats of sanctions seem to be effective. Anybody, or any nation that refuses to go along with Washington’s thuggish criminal behavior may be subject to punishment, be it by trade and / or financial sanctions, or outright military intervention. There is no international law, no rules of the community of nations, no political common sense that is respected by Trump and his handlers, and the world is afraid. Even though so far most of the threats have amounted to nothing more than ridiculous blabber and saber rattling.

More threats were thrown at Iran, with more sanctions and economic strangulations if Iran doesn’t “behave” – actually there are hardly any explanations given what “good vs. bad behavior” would mean for the US, other than Washington’s repeated empty accusations of Iran being a nuclear threat, disregarding the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or nuclear deal signed in 2015, freeing Iran of any further accusation of wanting to become a nuclear power (which, by the way was a farce in the first place – the subject for another essay).

This so-called nuclear deal was signed by the 5 UN Security Council members, including the US. But as we know, under pressure from Netanyahu, Trump reneged last year from the deal – and since then horrendous sanctions of economic strangulations and foreign asset confiscations – outright theft, in clear text – were imposed by the US on Iran, with ongoing pressure on the EU to do likewise. According to Trump – and his two minion mouth-pieces, Pompeo and Bolton – more are to come.

To that, Iran’s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, stated that Iran will not be blackmailed and added the philosophical observation that Trumps economic wars around the globe will eventually backfire. Well, yes. Trump’s reckless playing with tariffs, sanctions and other punishments around the globe will eventually drive everybody away from dealing and trading with the US, including away from the western monetary system. It’s the silver lining of the dark-dark US cloud. It’s economics 101.

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German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas shakes hands with Javad Zarif in Tehran (Source: picture alliance/dpa/M. Fischer)

Propelled by German business interests (but at the same time limited by Washington [and Brussels] on what he is allowed to say), German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, visited Iran a few days ago to seek a compromise for Germany and other EU members to still hold on to the Nuclear Deal, because Germany’s economy wants to deal with Iran, yet, seeking concessions from Iran that may assuage Washington. But Iran’s Foreign Minister, Zarif, didn’t fall for it. The meeting ended in nothing. Good so, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that any ally (except Israel) could do to change the Bully’s mind on Iran.

Frankly, does Trump seriously believe he possesses all that power over other world leaders? Or is he, Trump, just a convenient lackey of a force much stronger behind him, a force that controls both the Pentagon and, more importantly, the western financial and banking system – the Zionist designed western dollar-based monetary system. This Ponzi scheme has been able for the last 100 years or so – and as we witness, every day more – to usurp the world, holding it hostage, with artificially created economic booms and busts, with economic sanctions, strangulations, confiscation, with the theft of nations’ foreign assets and even their reserve funds, if they don’t bend to the will of the self-proclaimed super power USA.

Yes, it’s a fading super power, but it still has control over its forced allies and vassals – many of whom, by now are sick and tired of their ally-cum-vassal status, as they realize what their losses are. They believed in economic, diplomatic and military privileges, but are gradually awakening to reality. Progressively they see the empire as what it is, a shiny, blustering, preposterous house of cards that may come crashing down at any time. Their anger and courage of Washington’s vassalic allies is slowly raising, and they will eventually break out from their repressive situation. When that happens – and Trump is hastening that moment with his erratic ‘sanction-prone’ behavior around the world – a grand geopolitical shift for the better may take place.

With this partial backdrop of what the globe is facing – Taiwan is just becoming the latest peon in the war for preparation of Washington’s big WAR – dominating China and Russia. Making Taiwan – which is legally and by all international rules part of the PRC – a US ally and vassal, would further close the US power circle around the East Asian space. Trump may believe he is moving closer to ‘checkmate’, dominating the formidable Russia-China alliance.

With all the flattering and roses the leaders of Taiwan may get from Trump, do they realize that their role will just be that of one more enabler to enhance the empire’s dominion and increase the US’s wealth by helping it steal more of the world’s resources?

In the end, Taiwan may just become a mess, a chaotic island with lots of loose ends, with people pulling in different directions, as they realize that their government has been “bought” to give away their partial sovereignty and well-being – and they will raise up.

Taiwan, just look around the world! – The latest example being Sudan. Orchestrated chaos is controlling Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? – And look what is being planned, so far without success, in Venezuela? – Taiwan will just be another pawn on Zbigniew Brzezinski’s legendary Grand Geopolitical Chessboard.

The US has been fomenting worldwide hostility against China and Russia for the last 100 years, and especially since WWII, intensified by the fake and false Cold War, made possible thanks to an all-western-dominating AngloZionist lie-propaganda machine.

We know about “Russia Gate”, the never-ending bashing of President Putin and Russia. The more subtle US attempts to destabilize China have started soon after China had become fully self-sufficient and autonomous, when she gradually opened her borders to integrate into the world with exports and attracting foreign investments in the 1980’s. The so-called Nixon ‘ouverture’ to China, Nixon’s one-week trip in 1972 to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, was perhaps the first attempt by Washington to use the huge Chinese market for US exports, and at the same time constraining China’s rapid and foreseeable economic growth. Indeed, China grew exponentially and in 1986 gained observer status at GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), a precursor to WTO, and started negotiating membership of the World Trade Center – of which she eventually became a member in 2001.

Trade, Chinese highly competitive exports was then – and is today – a key issue for the US goal of world hegemony. In anticipation or rather to prevent China from becoming a world economic powerhouse, Tiananmen Square protests were introduced in 1989. The leadup to the so-called massacre was a huge false flag. A student protest movement, funded by the US State Department, through the infamous NED (National Endowment for Democracy – an “NGO” specialized in “regime change” operations – see also Venezuela). The 4thof June crackdown had been prepared months before, guided by the bloody hands of US Secret Services, CIA, NSA, and most probably MI6. The “students” had no common cause for the protest, just a sudden desire for more “freedom”, “reforming the communist party” without citing specifics they wanted reformed.

The 4thof June 2019 anniversary of the ‘massacre’ 30 years ago, is used by the western media to propagate against Chinese “tyranny”. The news of the massacre was repeated every hour on the hour by almost all radio and TV stations throughout Europe, lest you might forget, and the too-young-to-remember – should learn and be prepared for the coming Chinese monster. That’s the goal of the corporate presstitute. And they may succeed, as sleeping people have no clue of the truth, nor are they interested in abandoning their comfort and facing the inconvenient truth.

Let’s just juxtapose the forced memory of Tiananmen Square with real atrocities being perpetrated by the west, as these lines go to press. Take Yemen, devastated by the west and its proxies, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with weapons and funding from the US, the UK and France. Yemen is a non-aggressive peaceful country. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in the last 4 years of this atrocious war, most of them children and women, thousands from cholera and other water and improper hygiene related diseases; two thirds of the population suffer from famine. The related death toll is in the tens of thousands. This is exacerbated by the Red Sea Port of Hudaydah, the gateway for most of Yemen’s imports, being shut by Saudi and Qatari armed forces, so that not even emergency aid enters the country. The UN calls it the largest humanitarian crisis in recent history. – You hardly hear anything in the western news about this western funded and executed atrocious mass killing.

False flags from Tiananmen Square, to 9/11, to the Ukraine Maidan, to the sporadic string of terror killings in Europe and the United States, by ISIS / IS Al-Qada and associated groups –  all funded by the empire and it’s proxies and vassals – to the more recent ‘regime change’ or Color Revolution type protests in Hong Kong, the Umbrella Revolution of 2014 and street protests of the last week, with thousands of protesters in the street against a Beijing initiated extradition law to be introduced by Hong Kong’s legislation – are all US / western instigated, funded and guided so as to provoke and destabilize China.  And foremost, demonize China in the eyes of the western world. Most western countries have extradition laws for criminals to be turned over to the jurisdiction of the country where they may have committed the crime. But that’s not mentioned by the corporate lie-propaganda.

These permanent aggressions against the world power China – a world power with a pacific non-expansive life philosophy, could badly backfire. Just imagine, Beijing may eventually get sick and tired of Washington and its vassal-allies meddling in PRC’s internal affairs, could easily repeal Hong Kong’s semi autonomy and incorporate the city fully into the territory of the PRC – complete with Chinese laws, obligations and benefits. As simple as that. What would Washington do? What would the west do? – Scream murder? – Well, they do that already, so it couldn’t be much worse. A military aggression on China? – Hardly. The West wouldn’t dare. Attacking China is attacking Russia. There is a strong alliance between the two countries, one that was made even stronger by several new agreements signed between Presidents Putin and Xi during the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Similar provocations are planned and take place with Taiwan. In April 2019 the US sent two destroyers into the Taiwan Straits, claimed by mainland China as their territorial waters. Germany – which according to their armistice status’ obligation of non-confrontation and non-aggression – is considering sending a war ship to join the US and French warships in an attempt to demonstrate to the world that these are international waters.

What if such provocations, rather than gathering more world recognition of Taipei’s self-styled autonomy, they prompt President Xi Jinping to close in on Taiwan and actually absorb the island as a PRC owned territory? This would just conform to what Taiwan nominally already is since 25 October 1971, when the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 declared The Peoples Republic of China as the sole legal China.

Switch to another corner of the world with a different but very much connected scenario. Early this morning, 13 June, in the Strait of Oman, about 25 km from the coast of Iran, a Japanese-owned and a Norwegian oil tanker (the owner of which is an old friend of Iran’s) were attacked. Explosions and fire broke out, some seamen were injured, and 44 were actually rescued in the Gulf of Oman by Iranian ships. As of now, it is not clear what happened and who the perpetrators were. Never mind, Pompeo immediately accused Iran for the attacks – and keeps doing so, stating falsely that video evidence – never offered to be seen by the public – showed it was Iran. Why would Iran attack a Japanese oil tanker, while Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is visiting Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Thursday, the very day of the attacks, for talks to maintain the treaties of the Nuclear Deal?

World! Let’s face it. Only an idiot will believe that the world is idiotic enough to believe that Iranians are so idiotic as to attack foreign vessels in the Gulf, clients and friends of Iran. If this smells like a false flag – it is a false flag. Carried out by whom? Could be the Saudis, Israel, the Emirates, Mossad, the CIA, MI6… any one of the puppet allies of the emperor.

People, where are we going? – As a result of this incident oil prices rose immediately by up to 4% for fear that worse might happen, namely that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz through which about 25% of the world’s hydrocarbon are shipped. A closure could have oil prices jump to USD$ 200 / barrel or more – and sink the world in the worst recession of recent history. In the meantime, Wall Street bankers, notably Goldman Sachs, who have ample experience with oil price manipulation, are already playing with oil futures which under such a scenario could bring them hundreds of billions while the rest of the world goes belly up.

On another, but very much related topic: Many, especially unaligned countries, are losing trust in the US and especially in the US-dollar. They are quietly switching their reserves to Chinese yuans and / or gold. Trump’s handlers know about it. They may be contemplating as a last resort a new kind of gold standard. Losing out on dollar hegemony is one of the reasons they are pushing The Donald into a trade war with China. The (US) expectation is that a trade war with China would debase the Chinese currency, thereby discredit it and make it unattractive as a reserve money.

Creating a conflict between PRC and Taiwan, might, from a US point of view, have the same effect, degrading the yuan, in addition to bringing other Asian countries on board, those who are themselves worried about their territorial waters, i.e. the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia.

And yet, in an opposite corner of the world, namely in the swamp of Washington, the same Pompeo who just found another reason to increase sanctions on Iran, is utterly upset that his plans in Venezuela didn’t work out, because the stupid opposition cannot unite, cannot be trusted. That would leave only the ‘military option’ on the table – but that military option is too risky with Venezuela being supported by her strong allies, Russia and China.

Friends – what you must be aware of – all the dots of conflicts, wars, threats, harassments, false flags, sanctions and otherwise punishments, lies and lies and lies around the world, are dots that must be connected. Only then you get the Big Picture – and to understand the Big Picture is crucial. It is at once hilarious for the phantasy it portrays and catastrophic for the danger it presents. For the owners of this Big Picture, the Washington Swamp and Israel, it represents the illusion and desire to achieve the US-Pentagon-Banking plan – within the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century), a wishful thinking of Full Spectrum Dominance.

This Big Picture is best portrayed by Chris Black’s latest master piece: This Outlaw Power: America’s Intent is to Dominate China, Russia and the World– see this.

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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 21stCentury; 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.

Trump’s Trade Threats Are Really Cold War 2.0

June 17th, 2019 by Prof Michael Hudson

President Trump has threatened China’s President Xi that if they don’t meet and talk at the upcoming G20 meetings in Japan, June 29-30, the United States will not soften its tariff war and economic sanctions against Chinese exports and technology.

Some meeting between Chinese and U.S. leaders will indeed take place, but it cannot be anything like a real negotiation. Such meetings normally are planned in advance, by specialized officials working together to prepare an agreement to be announced by their heads of state. No such preparation has taken place, or can take place. Mr. Trump doesn’t delegate authority.

Trump opens negotiations with a threat. That costs nothing, and you never know (or at least, he never knows) whether he can get a freebee. His threat is that the U.S. can hurt its adversary unless that country agrees to abide by America’s wish-list. But in this case the list is so unrealistic that the media are embarrassed to talk about it. The US is making impossible demands for economic surrender – that no country could accept. What appears on the surface to be only a trade war is really a full-fledged Cold War 2.0.

America’s wish list: other countries’ neoliberal subservience

At stake is whether China will agree to do what Russia did in the 1990s: put a Yeltsin-like puppet of neoliberal planners in place to shift control of its economy from its government to the U.S. financial sector and its planners. So the fight really is over what kind of planning China and the rest of the world should have: by governments to raise prosperity, or by the financial sector to extract revenue and impose austerity.

U.S. diplomacy aims to make other countries dependent on its agricultural exports, its oil (or oil in countries that U.S. majors and allies control), information and military technology. This trade dependency will enable U.S. strategists to impose sanctions that would deprive economies of basic food, energy, communications and replacement parts if they resist U.S. demands.

The objective is to gain financial control of global resources and make trade “partners” pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys monopoly pricing “rights” for intellectual property. A trade war thus aims to make other countries dependent on U.S.-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade “partner” surrenders.

China’s willingness to give Trump a “win”

Threats are cheap, but Mr. Trump can’t really follow through without turning farmers, Wall Street and the stock market, Walmart and much of the IT sector against him at election time if his tariffs on China increase the cost of living and doing business. His diplomatic threat is really that the US will cut its own economic throat, imposing sanctions on its own importers and investors if China does not acquiesce.

It is easy to see what China’s answer will be. It will stand aside and let the US self-destruct. Its negotiators are quite happy to “offer” whatever China has planned to do anyway, and let Trump brag that this is a “concession” he has won.

China has a great sweetener that I think President Xi Jinping should offer: It can nominate Donald Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. We know that he wants what his predecessor Barack Obama got. And doesn’t he deserve it more? After all, he is helping to bring Eurasia together, driving China and Russia into an alliance with neighboring counties, reaching out to Europe.

Trump may be too narcissistic to realize the irony here. Catalyzing Asian and European trade independence, financial independence, food independence and IT independence from the threat of U.S. sanctions will leave the U.S. isolated in the emerging multilateralism.

America’s wish for a neoliberal Chinese Yeltsin (and another Russian Yeltsin for that matter)

A good diplomat does not make demands to which the only answer can be “No.” There is no way that China will dismantle its mixed economy and turn it over to U.S. and other global investors. It is no secret that the United States achieved world industrial supremacy in the late 19th and early 20th century by heavy public-sector subsidy of education, roads, communication and other basic infrastructure. Today’s privatized, financialized and “Thatcherized” economies are high-cost and inefficient.

Yet U.S. officials persist in their dream of promoting some neoliberal Chinese leader or “free market” party to wreak the damage that Yeltsin and his American advisors wrought on Russia. The U.S. idea of a “win-win” agreement is one in which China will be “permitted” to grow as long as it agrees to become a U.S. financial and trade satellite, not an independent competitor.

Trump’s trade tantrum is that other countries are simply following the same economic strategy that once made America great, but which neoliberals have destroyed here and in much of Europe. U.S. negotiators are unwilling to acknowledge that the United States has lost its competitive industrial advantage and become a high-cost rentier economy. Its GDP is “empty,” consisting mainly of the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) rents, profits and capital gains while the nation’s infrastructure decays and its labor is reduced to a part-time “gig” economy. Under these conditions the effect of trade threats can only be to speed up the drive by other countries to become economically self-reliant.

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Michael Hudson is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics.  He can be reached at [email protected]

Featured image is from PAS China – Public Domain

The Supreme Court is poised to decide two cases that could prove devastating to the right to vote — the very foundation of a democracy. One case will review the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. The other will consider whether partisan gerrymandering is constitutional. They are related because the citizenship question would “allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered maps to stymie Democrats,” the New York Times reported.

“It’s hard to overstate the significance of the census and partisan gerrymandering cases,” according to Professor Leah Litman of UC Irvine School of Law, interviewed in the Los Angeles Times.

“Upholding the addition of the citizenship question and foregoing any judicial oversight of partisan gerrymandering would allow Republican minorities to entrench their political power for decades.”

Moreover, Thomas Hofeller, a GOP strategist and architect of the citizenship question plan, was known as the “Michelangelo of gerrymandering.” Hofeller’s expertise in drawing partisan political maps “cemented the [Republican] party’s dominance across the country,” Michael Wines wrote in the New York Times.

The Census Citizenship Question

In December 2017, the Department of Justice (DOJ) wrote a letter to the Commerce Department, requesting that it add a citizenship question to the questionnaire for the 2020 Census. But Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross had already decided to add the question and he orchestrated the letter to make it look like he was responding to a DOJ request.

Ross testified before Congress last March that the purpose of the addition was to obtain “complete and accurate information for use in determining citizen age voting populations to enforce the Voting Rights Act.” Rep. Elijah Cummings, chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, pointed out the hypocrisy of Ross’s claimed rationale, saying the Trump administration has done “everything in its power to suppress the vote.”

A coalition of states, counties and cities are claiming in Department of Commerce v. New York that the addition of the question is unconstitutional. They assert it would cause a significant undercount because people in households with undocumented individuals would be deterred from responding.

Indeed, the Census Department estimated that 6.5 million people could remain uncounted if the citizenship question were added.

In January, a federal district court in New York blocked the government from adding the citizenship question. The district court found that Ross’s decision was arbitrary and capricious, calling his Voting Rights Act (VRA) rationale a “pretext” for a motive other than VRA enforcement. But the court said that the plaintiffs hadn’t demonstrated that the purpose of the question was to discriminate against Latinos and other immigrant communities of color, which is required for a violation of the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

The Fourteenth Amendment says, “Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” The amendment does not limit the count to citizens.

During oral arguments in the Supreme Court in April, the conservative justices seemed inclined to uphold the citizenship question. But on May 30, the Court was presented with newly discovered evidence of a cover-up of the illegal racist motive for adding the citizenship question. After Hofeller died in 2018, his daughter found documents showing that he urged inclusion of the question to “be a disadvantage to the Democrats” and “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites” in redistricting.

Accordingly, on June 13, the coalition plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to delay ruling in the case. Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, who represents the plaintiffs, said,

“The significance of this case cannot be overstated. The census happens once a decade and there is no chance for a do-over.” He added, “The Supreme Court should not permit the Trump administration to add a citizenship question to the census based on an incomplete and misleading record.”

Meanwhile, the House Oversight and Reform Committee recommended to the full House of Representatives that Ross and Attorney General William Barr be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide testimony and documents relating to the census question. A few hours before the committee vote, Donald Trump retaliated by asserting executive privilege to block the subpoenaed material.

The Partisan Gerrymandering Cases

Gerrymandering is “the intentional manipulation of district boundaries to discriminate against a group of voters on the basis of their political views or race.”

Although the Supreme Court has struck down racial gerrymandering, it has never agreed on a standard for assessing the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering.

Both political parties engage in partisan gerrymandering. But Republicans currently benefit from it more. This is largely due to their successes in the 2010 congressional election, which enabled them to redraw House district boundaries to advantage Republicans. They also used other strategies for voter suppression, including voter ID requirements and limited voting hours and locations.

Vicky Hausman, co-founder of Forward Majority, an organization geared toward helping Democrats win back state legislatures, listed in the Los Angeles Times several voter suppression tactics the GOP has utilized. They include trying to impeach judges who challenge gerrymandered maps, stripping power from newly elected Democratic governors, overturning voter ballot initiatives, passing voter suppression laws, and gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court will decide two cases involving partisan gerrymandering by the end of June. One challenges gerrymandering by Republicans, the other by Democrats.

In Rucho v. Common Cause, plaintiffs allege that North Carolina’s Republican legislative leadership drew a congressional map in order to entrench long-term Republican majorities. Even though they only won about 50% of the popular vote, Republicans still gained a majority of available seats in the 2018 Midterm elections by an extreme margin of 10-3.

A three-judge district court overturned the congressional plan drawn by the North Carolina legislature to replace a prior plan that courts had struck down as racial gerrymandering. The district court found the replacement plan violated the Equal Protection Clause, the First Amendment and Article I of the Constitution. The Supreme Court will review that decision.

Benesik v. Lamone involves a Republican challenge to the configuration of the Sixth Congressional District in Maryland. The plaintiffs allege that Democratic lawmakers violated the First Amendment’s freedom of political association by intentionally utilizing voters’ histories and party affiliations to move large numbers of Democratic voters into the district and large numbers of Republican voters out.

A three-judge panel of the appellate court granted the plaintiffs’ request for a permanent injunction against the electoral map. The Supreme Court will decide whether to uphold that injunction and rule that the Democrats’ partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional.

Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan and Sotomayor have indicated a willingness to clamp down on partisan gerrymandering. On the other hand, Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch oppose federal limits on partisan gerrymandering. Kavanaugh hasn’t ruled on a major gerrymandering case but his record on voting rights is disturbing. And Chief Justice Roberts has called standards for measuring the impact of partisan gerrymandering “sociological gobbledygook.”

If the Supreme Court refuses to strike down districts for partisan gerrymandering, it will be up to the state courts to hear challenges based on violations of state legislation and constitutions. But enforcement will be spotty and partisan gerrymandering will continue in many states.

From Shelby County v. Holder, which invalidated critical provisions of the Voting Rights Act, to Citizens United v. FEC, which allows unlimited money in elections, the high court has been steadily diluting voting rights. The census citizenship question and concomitant partisan gerrymandering by the GOP pose additional threats to the right to vote, and indeed, to democracy itself.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

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

Featured image is from GQ

There are many false conspiracy theories in current circulation, but there are also very real conspiracies. One of the latter is the so-called “Deal of the Century,” a thoroughly reactionary plan cooked up by the Trump administration.

The key conspirators, in addition to the governments of the United States and Israel, are a number of reactionary Arab regimes, particularly Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. These reactionary absolute monarchies, while sometimes posing as supporters of the Palestinian cause, have long feared the Palestinian liberation struggle and all other popular movements in the region.

Washington is also seeking to bring into the “Deal” other allies and dependencies from Europe and the Middle East, as well as major financial institutions.

While exact details remain unpublicized, core elements of the plan are widely known. Its architects are a trio of arch-Zionist supporters of Israel: Trump’s son-in-law, fellow real estate developer and “special advisor” Jared Kushner, Trump’s former bankruptcy attorney Jason Greenblatt, and U.S. ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

All three, along with the President, share utter contempt for the Palestinians.

On June 13, Friedman stated his view that Israel has the “right” to annex part or all of the West Bank, an assertion which is in complete contradiction to international law and international opinion.

Palestinian input not solicited

The Trump administration has not even pretended to be interested in Palestinian input. From moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, to recognizing Israeli “sovereignty” over the Golan Heights (Syrian territory), to cutting off funding for the United Nations agency that provides health, education, housing and other services to millions of Palestinian refugees, Trump and his operatives have offered nothing but unlimited hostility to the Palestinian people.

Their racist disdain was highlighted by Kushner’s comments in a June 2 HBO interview. When asked: “Do you believe the Palestinians are capable of governing themselves without Israeli interference?” Kushner replied:

“I think that’s a very good question. I think that’s one we’ll have to see. The hope is that over time they can become capable of governing.”

To kick-off this “Deal of the Century” project, an “economic workshop” has been set for Bahrain, June 25-26. Bahrain, is the home base of the U.S. Fifth Fleet which menaces the entire Gulf region.

‘A handout to make captivity palatable’

The purpose of this meeting is to solicit donations mainly from the oil-rich Gulf states to provide “economic incentives” to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in exchange for giving up their struggle for self-determination and statehood. The fundraising goal is said to be $70-90 billion, some fraction of which would go to Palestinian municipalities and economic projects.

Israel would annex the illegal settlements blocs in the West Bank (now housing more than 700,000 Israelis) and the connecting apartheid roads, and maintain control of the Jordan valley. Whether or not called a state – the name “New Palestine” is being floated – the Palestinian entity would be broken-up pieces of territory, unlike any other state on Earth. The Palestinian entity would not be allowed to have an army, and would remain under Israeli “security control.”

If enacted, the Palestinian entity would be a colony, completely dominated economically as well as militarily, as the West Bank is today. The greater part of the funds allocated by the “Deal” to the Palestinian entity would inevitably end up in the accounts of Israeli corporations and government agencies. This would mean, practically speaking, billions more in subsidies to the Israeli economy and state.

A  long-time Palestinian Authority  spokesperson, Hanan Ashrawi, tweeted that the Kushner plan is just “a handout to make our captivity palatable.”

Obstacles to implementation

But after more than two years of promising a new “peace plan,” the “Deal” appears likely to meet the same fate as the many that have preceded it from the Rogers Plan and Camp David Accords in the 1970s, to the Oslo Accord in the 1990s, to the “Road Map” in the first decade of the 21st century.

None of the many past attempts have succeeded in resolving the struggle and neither will this one, but if implemented, this plan could cause great additional suffering for the Palestinian population already living under brutal military occupation and an apartheid system.

The primary aim of the “Deal” is the liquidation of the Palestinian liberation movement, the latest in a long series of such attempts dating back to the 1940s when the State of Israel was erected on a foundation of stolen Palestinian land and the expulsion of more than 750,000 Palestinians.

Whether the “Deal of the Century” will actually be implemented is a very big if. Trump administration officials have been talking about a “peace plan” since he took office two-and-a-half years ago, but the release of an actual proposal has been repeatedly delayed.

Even today, the details of the plan have not been made public. Earlier this year, it was reported that specifics would be made public following the April 9 Israeli election. But the collapse of efforts to form a new Israeli government and the scheduling of a new election in September caused another delay.

Divisions among Arab states

Another factor is the division among Arab states, aside from the Gulf monarchies. Neither Egypt, the second-largest recipient of U.S. aid after Israel, nor Jordan, which also receives major U.S. aid, are at all enthusiastic about joining the Bahrain meeting. It’s not that either the Egyptian nor Jordanian governments are moved by sympathy for the Palestinian cause. They are worried about what participation in a project that the Palestinians as a whole are opposed to would mean for them. The Jordanian king, Abdullah, has to be especially worried as 60 percent of the country’s population is made up of Palestinian refugees.

Plan seeks to end Palestinian right of return

Another aspect of the plan’s goal of liquidating the Palestinian movement is the so-called “normalization” of the status of the millions of Palestinian refugees living in and outside of camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt and other Arab countries. The aim would be to put an end to the right of return for Palestinians who were driven from their homeland by means of terror in 1948-49 and 1967, and their descendants. At the same time, the “right of return” would be continued for any Jewish person anywhere in the world to “return” to somewhere they had never been.

Palestinian political parties and organizations across the board denounced the “Deal.”

A key factor working against implementation of the “Deal” is the unanimous opposition among all organized Palestinian parties and forces.

The Palestine Liberation Organization has labeled the plan as an attempt to bribe Palestinians into accepting Israeli permanent occupation of the West Bank. “This is an official announcement that Palestine will not attend the [Bahrain] meeting,” stated Palestinian negotiator Dr. Saeb Erekat on May 22. “This is a collective Palestinian position. We reiterate that we did not mandate anyone to negotiate on our behalf.”

Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement), the governing party in Gaza, rejected participation and called on all Arab states not to take part in the Bahrain meeting. “We warn Arab states against the malicious activities aimed to pave the way for normalization with the Israeli occupation and involvement in the ‘deal of the century.’”

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), “condemned the complicity of the Kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain with the plans of the U.S. administration against Palestine and the region.” This group’s Political Bureau points out that “the content of this Declaration tries to distort the concrete realities, [and] ignores the Palestinian Cause – by trying to change the compass of the conflict and divert it to other fictitious ones, when it considers the Islamic Republic of Iran as an enemy of the Nation instead of the real enemy, which is the Zionist [entity].”The plan “indicates that these reactionary Arab regimes are determined to place themselves in the trenches contrary to our Arab nation and to continue their opposition to the right of peoples to face occupation and colonialism.”

The PLO and PFLP have announced that they will hold a countering summit on the future of Palestine in Beirut at the same time as the Bahrain “workshop.”

Underlying the numerous failures to reach a “peace agreement” over the decades is the irreconcilable character of the struggle between the imperialist-backed, apartheid state of Israel on the one hand, and the dispossessed indigenous Palestinian people on the other. “Irreconcilable” means that it cannot be resolved within the presently existing political structures.

‘A deal that only the Israelis could love’

Within the U.S. foreign policy establishment, there are clearly doubts about prospects for the “Deal.”  In a audio recording of a private meeting with U.S. Jewish leaders obtained by the Washington Post in early June, right-wing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said he recognized that many would view it as “a deal that only the Israelis could love,” and said that it might “not gain traction,” and could be “unexecutable.” While the IMF and World Bank said they would participate, the CEOs of the three largest U.S. banks said that they would not.

Nevertheless, the Trump administration is pushing forward with the Bahrain “economic workshop,” twisting arms to get its client states and allies to join in.

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Washington is playing false flag again, but this time, in the Gulf of Oman as Washington has accused Iran of attacking two commercial tanker ships from Japan and Norway while tensions in the region are at an all-time high. Why would Iran attack commercial tankers in the Gulf of Oman belonging to Norway and the other to Japan in the first place?  Keep in mind that just hours before, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan and the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were going to meet in an attempt to ease the ongoing crisis between Iran and the U.S. The Wall Street Journal reported that “The attacks, including on a Japanese tanker, came just hours before Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan met in Iran with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to try to ease the standoff.” the report also said that “Mr. Abe has attempted to work as a mediator between Washington and Tehran, but Mr. Khamenei dismissed Mr. Abe’s effort, darkening prospects for dialogue. “We don’t believe these words at all because honest negotiations will not come from an individual such as [President] Trump.” An ABC news report stated that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo introduced Washington’s assessment that basically declared Iran is guilty as charged:

“It is the assessment of the United States government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today. This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication”

Pompeo also said that the U.S. “will defend its forces, interests and stand with our partners and allies to safeguard global commerce and regional stability.” So what proof does Washington have? The report from ABC news said that

“Some of the intelligence that Pompeo referred to includes overhead images taken by a U.S. Navy P-8 surveillance craft that shows Iranians on small boats alongside the Kokuka Courageous attempting to remove an unexploded mine that they had previously attached to the ship, a U.S. official told ABC News. While the images themselves weren’t disclosed, the descriptions suggested that the Iranians were attempting to remove evidence that would link them directly to the tanker attacks.”

Scripted: The Gulf of Tonkin and the Gulf of Oman

It is the same script that was once used on August 2nd, 1964 in what was to become the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Incident’which based on a false claim of an alleged attack by North Vietnam on a U.S. ship, the USS Maddox. Washington’s official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats had launched an “unprovoked attack” against the U.S.S. Maddox that was allegedly on “routine patrol” but the truth was that it was engaged in intelligence-gathering and that it was involved in coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by both the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force. Then two days later, North Vietnamese PT boats allegedly launched a “deliberate attack” on two U.S. destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy with 22 torpedoes but it was all a lie. There was no evidence to suggest that there was an attack or any damage by North Vietnam. However, US Congress wanted retribution against North Vietnam so they passed The Tonkin Gulf Resolution a couple of days later which gave President, Lyndon B. Johnson authority to enter Vietnam’s civil war and give its full support to South Vietnam. The resolution stated that “Congress approves and supports the determination of the president, as commander in chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” The Vietnam War lasted for about 10 years costing the lives of 55,000 US soldiers and roughly 3 million Southeast Asians including men, women and children.

The recent incident in the Gulf of Oman resembles the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. On August 5th, 1964, The New York Times published ‘The President Acts’ and stated the following:

President Johnson went to the American people last night with the somber facts of an enlarging crisis in Vietnam. He announced new steps in reply to “open aggression on the high seas.”. Air action by the United States is being executed against North Vietnam gunboats and supporting installations.

The President will put to the Congress a resolution expressing our united determination in support of the cause of freedom in Southeast Asia: He will put this grave situation before the Security Council of the United Nations. He has sought—and received—from Senator Goldwater, the Republican nominee for President, the assurance of bipartisan support in this critical hour.

The attack on one of our warships that at first seemed, and was hoped to be, an isolated incident is now seen in ominous perspective to have been the beginning of a mad adventure by the North Vietnamese Communists. After offensive action against more vessels of our Navy the President has backed up with retaliatory fire the warnings that North Vietnam chose frequently to ignore

Johnson called on congress to declare that “The United States regards as vital to its national interest and to world peace the maintenance of international peace and security in Southeast Asia” according to a Politico article titled ‘Congress approves Gulf of Tonkin Resolution: Aug. 7, 1964′ stated that “The resolution gave the president the right to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” LBJ gave a speech following the Gulf of Tonkin Incident:

My fellow Americans: – As President and Commander in Chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action in reply.

The initial attack on the destroyer Maddox, on August 2, was repeated today by a number of hostile vessels attacking two U.S. destroyers with torpedoes. The destroyers and supporting aircraft acted at once on the orders I gave after the initial act of aggression. We believe at least two of the attacking boats were sunk. There were no U.S. losses.

The performance of commanders and crews in this engagement is in the highest tradition of the United States Navy. But repeated acts of violence against the Armed Forces of the United States must be met not only with alert defense, but with positive reply. That reply is being given as I speak to you tonight. Air action is now in execution against gunboats and certain supporting facilities in North Viet-Nam which have been used in these hostile operations.

In the larger sense this new act of aggression, aimed directly at our own forces, again brings home to all of us in the United States the importance of the struggle for peace and security in southeast Asia. Aggression by terror against the peaceful villagers of South Viet-Nam has now been joined by open aggression on the high seas against the United States of America.

The determination of all Americans to carry out our full commitment to the people and to the government of South Viet-Nam will be redoubled by this outrage. Yet our response, for the present, will be limited and fitting. We Americans know, although others appear to forget, the risks of spreading conflict. We still seek no wider war.

I have instructed the Secretary of State to make this position totally clear to friends and to adversaries and, indeed, to all. I have instructed Ambassador Stevenson to raise this matter immediately and urgently before the Security Council of the United Nations. Finally, I have today met with the leaders of both parties in the Congress of the United States and I have informed them that I shall immediately request the Congress to pass a resolution making it clear that our Government is united in its determination to take all necessary measures in support of freedom and in defense of peace in southeast Asia.

I have been given encouraging assurance by these leaders of both parties that such a resolution will be promptly introduced, freely and expeditiously debated, and passed with overwhelming support. And just a few minutes ago I was able to reach Senator Goldwater and I am glad to say that he has expressed his support of the statement that I am making to you tonight.

It is a solemn responsibility to have to order even limited military action by forces whose overall strength is as vast and as awesome as those of the United States of America, but it is my considered conviction, shared throughout your Government, that firmness in the right is indispensable today for peace; that firmness will always be measured. Its mission is peace

Washington released a video claiming that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) removed an unexploded mine from one of the two tankers. Last Thursday, Navy Captain Bill Urban, a spokesman for the US military’s Central Command, said in a statement “At 4:10pm local time (00:10 GMT) an IRGC Gashti Class patrol boat approached the M/T Kokuka Courageous and was observed and recorded removing the unexploded limpet mine from the M/T Kokuka Courageous.”

The New York Times headlined with ‘Trump Accuses Iran in Explosions That Crippled Oil Tankers’ detailing what Trump had said in relation to the Gulf of Oman incident “Well, Iran did do it,” the president said in a telephone interview on “Fox & Friends” in his first comments since the ships were damaged. “You know they did it because you saw the boat. I guess one of the mines didn’t explode and it’s got essentially Iran written all over it.” The New York Times weighed in on the accusation by claiming that Iran’s proxy groups have increased attacks in the region, in a way siding with Trump:

In fact, some Iranian proxy groups in the region have stepped up attacks lately. The Houthi faction in Yemen, which has been supported by Iran, has attacked Saudi oil pipelines and other targets. Just this week, a Houthi missile slammed inot the arrival halls of a Saudi airport, injuring 26 people, according to Saudi news. The Houthis reported launching a drone attack on the same airport on Friday but the Saudi military said it intercepted five Houthi drones and the airport was operating normally 

According to The New York Times one of the Japanese operators said that the tanker was hit by a flying object not by a limpet mine:

Doubts about the American version of Thursday’s events were raised by the Japanese operator of one of the damaged tankers, which said that it was attacked by air. “Our crew said that the ship was attacked by a flying object,” said Yutaka Katada, the president of the operator, Kokuka Sangyo 

Washington’s Hit List: Iran

It’s no secret that Trump is acting in liaison with Israel (and Saudi Arabia) but that’s beside the point, the deep state insiders and the Military-Industrial Complex have been wanting a war with Iran since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 which ousted the U.S. backed dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi also known as the Shah of Iran. But there are a number of reasons why the U.S. wants a war with Iran, one of them being the fact that Iran has dropped its use of the U.S. dollar in trade with several key countries including Russia and China disrupting the petrodollar system. Israel also plays an important part by having the ambitions of becoming the “Greater Israel” in the Middle East, but Iran and its allies including Syria, Hezbollah, Lebanon and the Palestinians are preventing that from happening.  If Israel can succeed in pushing the U.S. to attack Iran and destabilize the country as they did with Iraq, then managing the Middle East in its entirely would allow the Zionist state to expand on more Arab territory (Trump recently declared Syria’s Golan Heights as a part of Israel). Then Israel will become a major power in the Middle East armed with nuclear weapons, sort of a mini-empire with teeth.

However, the U.S., Israel and the Gulf States will have their hands tied when it comes to Iran’s military capabilities that includes an estimated 534,000 active personnel and an additional 350,000 reservists in the army, air force, navy and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). It is also worth mentioning that Iran has the manpower which is close to 40 million eligible men and women who would unite no matter what side of the political spectrum they are on. They would rally around the Iranian flag and fight for their homeland. One certainty the U.S. and its allies would face is a nation that has much more people and a land mass that is at least four times larger than Iraq. According to Global Firepower Index, a military website ranked Iran at No. 13 out of 136 countries. Iran has more than 500 aircraft, 1,634 combat tanks, 2,345 armored fighting vehicles and 398 Naval assets including 34 submarines and 88 vessels. Iran recently produced an air defense system called the Khordad 15 that is “capable of tracking and shooting down six targets at the same time. The weapon was rolled out amid growing tensions around the Persian Gulf”according to a report by RT.com. The report said that “Iran unveiled its new domestically-designed air defense missile system Khordad 15 on Sunday. Equipped with long-range Sayyad 3 missiles, it can shoot down enemy jets and combat drones at a range of 120 kilometers, Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami said.” 

The U.S. war machine’s main objective is to destabilize and destroy Iran as a country so that the U.S., the Gulf states and especially Israel can dominate the Middle East and its oil supplies. It will also be a bonus for the Military-Industrial Complex which will profit from what will become a long-term war.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Silent Crow News.

Timothy Alexander Guzman is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from FAIR


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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

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US, Israel and Saudis Pushing for War on Iran?

June 16th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

What’s going on in Washington and the Middle East is eerily reminiscent of what preceded Bush/Cheney’s 2003 war on Iraq — weapons of mass deception the pretext.

All wars are based on Big Lies and deception. Pretexts are needed to sell wars. When none exist they’re invented. Secretary of State Colin Powell was Bush/Cheney’s point man for selling war on Iraq.

He faked evidence in Security Council remarks, falsely accusing Saddam Hussein of “concealing…efforts to produce” WMDs. He lied claiming:

“(E)very statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are the facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence,” adding:

“The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world.”

No WMDs existed, no Iraqi threat “to the world.” Powell sold US aggression on Iraq based on bald-faced Big Lies and mass deception.

Mike Pompeo is Trump’s Colin Powell, falsely blaming Iran for last week’s Gulf of Oman incident and earlier regional ones in May. Despite no credible evidence proving his accusation, he said the following:

The Trump regime’s “assessment (about Iran) is based on intelligence (sic), the weapons used (sic), the level of expertise needed to execute the operation (sic), recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping (sic), and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication (sic).”

The above bald-faced Big Lies reflected his Colin Powell moment, compounded by falsely blaming Iran for “attack(ing) four (UAE, Saudi, Norwegian) commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz” last month no evidence suggests it had anything to do with.

Despite the madness of war on Iran, risking the Middle East boiling more than already over if launched, rage by hardliners in Washington to transform Iran into a US client state could make the unthinkable reality.

On Friday, acting US war secretary Patrick Shanahan said he, Pompeo, and John Bolton are working on “build(ing)  international consensus to this international problem” — referring to falsely blaming Iran for the Gulf of Oman and earlier regional incidents no evidence suggests it had anything to do with.

Asked if the Trump regime intends sending more US forces to the region, Shanahan said

“we’re always planning various contingencies…should the situation deteriorate.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed false Trump regime accusations, saying the US “immediately jumped to make allegations against Iran without a shred of factual or circumstantial evidence” — nothing but Big Lies about incidents with US and perhaps Israeli fingerprints all over them.

On Saturday, Saudi energy minister Khalid al-Falih called for “a rapid and decisive response to the threat,” falsely pointing fingers at Iran.

Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman turned truth on its head, falsely blaming Iran for the Gulf of Oman incident, urging a “decisive stand” against the country, adding:

“We do not want a war in the region (sic). But we won’t hesitate to deal with any threat to our people, our sovereignty, our territorial integrity and our vital interests.”

Israeli military intelligence-connected DEBKAfile falsely accused Iran of “pulling off half a dozen attacks on US allies in the past month (sic), peaking in the sabotage of two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, June 13 (sic),” adding:

“Tehran managed to keep its plans hidden from the eyes of hostile spy agencies and catch them all by surprise.”

Israel and the Saudis are itching for the US to wage war on Iran. Haaretz is part of the propaganda war on the country, saying:

“Iran was responsible for Thursday’s attack on oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, as it was for other incidents in recent weeks in the area” — short of evidence proving it, adding:

“…Iranian denials don’t sound convincing.” Netanyahu so far said little publicly about last week’s incident.

Former Israeli national security advisor Yaakov Amidror said it’s important for Israel not to (publicly) interfere with Trump regime policies toward Iran.

What’s discussed privately is another matter. There’s no ambiguity about longstanding Israeli rage for wanting Iran eliminated as its key regional rival, wanting the US to serve its interests.

Separately, the Taliban claimed responsibility for a May 31 Kabul, Afghanistan suicide bombing, wounding four US military personnel and at least three civilians.

Pompeo falsely blamed Iran for the incident, calling it one “in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American and allied interests” — adding another reason to sell war on the country.

Deputy director of the right wing Wilson Center’s Asia program Michael Kugelman was skeptical about the above accusation, saying:

Trump regime hardliners are “itching for a fight with Iran. Unfortunately, that sometimes entails making some accusations against Iran that are somewhat questionable.”

Blaming Iran for a Kabul attack “seems like a bit of a stretch,” his remarks a clear understatement about another incident no evidence suggests Iran had anything to do with.

Making accusations is easy, proving them another matter entirely. Most important is world community and public perception as well as consensus.

Clearly Trump regime hardliners are trying to build a case for war on Iran or at minimum gain consensus to isolate the country, including by getting Brussels to cease supporting the JCPOA nuclear deal even though Britain, France and Germany have done little to enforce it after Trump’s May 2018 pullout.

The US wants Iran brought to its knees, its oil, gas, and other revenues from international trade cut off, forcing it to bend to Washington’s will.

If its war by other means fails, what’s been the case for decades, war may be the Trump regime’s fallback option.

That’s why it’s crucial for the world community to unite against the greatest threat to world peace in the post-9/11 era.

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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 JARED RODRIGUEZ / TRUTHOUT


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The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

The Bully Who Cried “Iran!”

June 16th, 2019 by Daniel Larison

Ali Vaez rebuts Mike Pompeo’s terse, evidence-free statement accusing Iran of responsibility for the two tanker attacks in the Gulf of Oman:

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Pompeo delivered his remarks without providing any evidence to support his accusations, and then walked off the stage without taking any questions. The Secretary of State’s credibility has already been shot to pieces by his frequent lies and misleading statements on a range of issues touching on everything from North Korea to Yemen to Iran, so he needed to clear an even higher bar than usual to back up his accusations. He didn’t come close. Aside from misleading the public and Congress about important issues, Pompeo’s serial fabrications have a real cost in that no one believes a word he says about anything. It might be the case that Pompeo is telling the truth for once, but if so it would be extremely unusual for him. I made that point earlier today:

I have previously discussed Pompeo’s complete lack of credibility, and it is worth revisiting part of that post now:

Pompeo is the chief representative of the United States abroad besides the president, so his habit of making things up out of thin air and telling easily refuted lies can only harm our reputation, undermine trust, and cause even our allies to doubt our government’s claims.

Pompeo is the bully who cried “Iran!” so many times that we have no reason to trust his anti-Iranian claims now. The fact that he and the National Security Advisor are so clearly slavering at the possibility of increased tensions with Iran gives us another reason to be skeptical. We assume that they are trying to turn even the smallest incident into an excuse for escalation, and so we naturally look at their claims of Iranian responsibility with great suspicion. Vaez’s thread goes through Pompeo’s statement very carefully and points out the serious flaws and falsehoods, of which there are quite a few.

Once again, we see Pompeo’s tendency to pin the blame for anything and everything that happens in the region on Iran, and many of these are no more than unfounded assertions or deliberate distortions. For example, the Houthi attacks on Saudi pipelines and airports are a result of the ongoing war on Yemen and the Saudi coalition bombing of Yemeni cities and towns. All indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets and infrastructure are wrong and should be condemned, but we also need to remember that these attacks are the direct consequence of belligerent and destructive policies of Saudi Arabia and the UAE backed by the United States. If the Saudis and Emiratis stopped bombing Yemen tomorrow, the missile attacks on Saudi targets would almost certainly cease thereafter. Just as Pompeo won’t acknowledge the administration’s role in goading and provoking Iran, he refuses to acknowledge the role of the Saudi coalition’s war in provoking Yemeni retaliation. He desperately tries to make Iran the culprit of every crime, but instead of proving Iran’s guilt it only calls into question Pompeo’s judgment and honesty.

Probably the most galling part of Pompeo’s statement was his declaration that “Iran should answer diplomacy with diplomacy.” What diplomacy would Iran be responding to? Does Pompeo think his list of preposterous demands delivered as a diktat last year counts as diplomacy? Does he think that waging relentless economic war on a country of eighty million people qualifies as diplomatic? The Trump administration has chosen the path of provocation and confrontation for at least the last thirteen months, and then they have the gall to fault Iran for its lack of diplomacy. If the administration had not trashed the most important diplomatic agreement that our government had with Iran and proceeded to penalize them for keeping up their end of the bargain, our two countries would not be as dangerously close to war as they are now. The administration bears responsibility for creating the heightened tensions between the U.S. and Iran, and it is their obnoxious and destructive policy of collective punishment that has brought us to this point.

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Who is attacking oil tankers in the Gulf between Oman and Iran? So far, the answer is still a mystery. The US, of course, accuses Iran. Iran says it’s the US or its local allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Magnetic mines are blamed for the damage, though there have been claims of torpedo use. Last month, four moored tankers were slightly damaged, though none seriously. This time the attacks were more damaging but apparently not lethal.

A few cynics have even suggested Israel may be behind the tanker attack in order to provoke war between Iran and the United States – a key Israeli goal. Or maybe it’s the Saudis whose goal is similar. The Gulf is an ideal venue for false flag attacks.

One thing appears certain. President Donald and his coterie of neocon advisers have been pressing for a major conflict with Iran for months. The US is literally trying to strangle Iran economically and strategically. By now, Israel’s hard right wing dominates US Mideast policy and appears to often call the shots at the White House and Congress.

However, this latest Iran `crisis’ is totally contrived by the Trump administration to punish the Islamic Republic for refusing to follow American tutelage, supporting the Palestinians, and menacing Saudi Arabia. Most important, the Gulf fracas is diverting public attention from Trump’s war with the lynch mob of House Democrats and personal scandals.

Many Americans love small wars. They serve as an alternative to football. Mussolini’s popularity in Italy soared after he invaded primitive Ethiopia. Americans cheered the invasions of Grenada, Haiti and Panama. However, supposed ‘cake-walk’ Iraq was not such a popular success. Memories of the fake Gulf of Tonkin clash used to drive the US into the Vietnam War are strong; so too all the lies about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Curiously, Trump’s undeclared war against Iran has had unanticipated effects. Japan, which relies on Iranian oil, is furious at Washington. Last week, Japan’s very popular prime minister, Shinzo Abe, flew to Tehran to try to head off a US-Iranian confrontation and assure his nation’s oil supply – the very same reason Japan attacked the US in 1941. Abe warned an accidental war may be close.

Canada used to have warm relations with China. They are now in shambles. Canada ‘kidnapped’ Chinese bigwig Meng Wanzhou, the crown princess of technology giant Huawei, at Vancouver airport while changing planes on a US arrest warrant for allegedly trading with…wait for it…Iran. Canada foolishly arrested Meng on a flimsy extradition warrant from the US.

This was an incredibly amateurish blunder by Ottawa’s foreign affairs leaders. If they had been smarter, they would have simply told Washington that Meng had already left Canada, or they could not find her. Now Canada’s relations with Beijing are rock bottom, Canada has suffered very heavy trade punishment and the world’s biggest nation is angry as a wet cat at Canada, a nation whose state religion is to be liked by everyone.

Now, Japan’s energy freedom is under serious threat. China mutters about executing the two Canadians it arrested for alleged espionage. Meanwhile, US-China relations have hit their nadir as Trump’s efforts to use tariffs to bully China into buying more US soya beans and to trim its non-trade commerce barriers have caused a trade war.

The US-China trade war is badly damaging the economies of both countries. President Trump still does not seem to understand that tariffs are paid by American consumers, not Chinese sellers. Trump’s nincompoop foreign policy advisers don’t understand how much damage they are doing to US interests. Putting gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson in charge of US foreign and trade policy is not such a good idea.

A good way to end this growing mess is to fire war-lover and Iran-hater John Bolton, send Mike Pompeo back to bible school, and tell Iran and Saudi Arabia to bury the hatchet now. Instead, the White House is talking about providing nuclear capability to Saudi Arabia, one of our world’s most backwards and unpleasant nations. Maybe Trump will make a hell of a ‘deal’ and have North Korea sell nukes to Saudis.

And now we wait the all-time bad joke, the so-called ‘Deal of the Century,’ which Trump and his boys hope will get rich Arabs to buy off poor Palestinians in exchange for giving up lots more land to Israel. It’s hard to think of a bigger or more shameful betrayal by Arabs of fellow Arabs, or a more stupid policy by the US. But, of course, it’s not a made-in-the-USA policy at all.

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Featured image: Smoke billows from a tanker said to have been attacked off the coast of Oman at un undisclosed location. The crews of two oil tankers were evacuated off the coast of Iran after they were reportedly attacked in the Gulf of Oman.
Image Credit: AFP

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The image of the Grenfell residential building on fire in London, one of the richest cities in the world and the heartbreaking stories of how the entire family from elders to infants were trapped and burned alive without any chance to be rescued, will be cauterized in the minds of working people around the world forever.

This tragedy due to the wicked negligence by the greedy profiteers against the low-income families is again proof that this system (which puts profit above people’s lives) is bankrupt and those who utilize and regulate it are the real criminals in our society.

More than ever, a need for a new and alternative solution to this irrational system is in order. Ironically, the only people who can end the savagery of the capitalist system are the very people who unknowingly have been sustaining this inhumane system by their hard work for centuries! However the tides of change are coming ashore. People around the world are realizing that the wealthy elite have nothing to offer except their curse of more misery, poverty, disease, war and disaster.

Working people (the actual producers) around the world must rise up and play their historical role and save humanity by building a peaceful and prospers future for all.

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Google cuts Huawei off Android; so Huawei may migrate to Aurora. Call it mobile Eurasia integration; the evolving Russia-China strategic partnership may be on the verge of spawning its own operating system – and that is not a metaphor.

Aurora is a mobile operating system currently developed by Russian Open Mobile Platform, based in Moscow. It is based on the Sailfish operating system, designed by Finnish technology company Jolla, which featured a batch of Russians in the development team. Quite a few top coders at Google and Apple also come from the former USSR – exponents of a brilliant scientific academy tradition.

In 2014, Russian entrepreneur Grigory Berezkin started co-owning Jolla, and from 2016 his Mobile Platform company started developing a Russian version of the operating system. In 2018, Rostelecom, a state company, bought a 75% share in Open Mobile Platform.

Ahead of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum last week, Huawei chairman Guo Ping discussed the possibility of adopting Aurora with Russian minister of digital development and communications, Konstantin Noskov. According to Guo, “China is already testing devices with the Aurora pre-installed.

In Moscow, before moving to St Petersburg, Presidents Putin and Xi Jinping discussed multiple possible deals; and these include Huawei-Aurora, as well as where to locate some of Huawei’s production lines in Russia.

Google, here we come

Aurora could be regarded as part of Huawei’s fast-evolving Plan B. Huawei is now turbo-charging the development and implementation of its own operating system, HongMeng, a process that started no less than seven years ago. Most of the work on an operating system is writing drivers and APIs (application programming interfaces). Huawei would be able to integrate their code to the Russian system in no time.

HongMeng, for its part, is a key project of Huawei 2012 Laboratories, the innovation, research and technological development arm of the Shenzhen colossus.

No Google? Who cares? Tencent, Xiaomi, Vivo and Oppo are already testing the HongMeng operating system, as part of a batch of one million devices already distributed.

HongMeng’s launch is still a closely guarded secret by Huawei, but according to CEO Richard Yu, it could happen even before the end of 2019 for the Chinese market, running on smartphones, computers, TVs and cars. HongMeng is rumored to be 60% faster than Android.

The HongMeng system may also harbor functions dedicated to security and protection of users’ data. That’s what’s scaring Google the most; Huawei developing a software impenetrable to hacking attempts. Google is actively lobbying the Trump administration to add another reprieve – or even abandon the Huawei ban altogether.

By now it’s clear Team Trump has decided to wield a trade war as a geopolitical and geoeconomic weapon. They may have not calculated that other Chinese producers have the power to swing markets. Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo, for instance, are not (yet) banned in the US market, and combined they sell more than Samsung. They could decide to move to Huawei’s operating system in no time.

By the end of August, probably at an industry fair in Berlin, Huawei should be announcing its new chip Kirin 985. And by September the first Huawei smartphone equipped with HongMeng could be hitting the market.

Watch that Lineage

Google bought Android in 2005. Android is based on Linux, a free software operating system. There are already similar and better free software systems on the market, such as Lineage, which has a version adapted to at least two Huawei models, the P20 Pro and the Honor View 10.

The existence of Lineage operating system is proof that Huawei is not facing a lot of hurdles developing HongMeng – which will be compatible with all Android apps. There would be no problem to adopt Aurora as well. Huawei will certainly open is own app store to compete with Google Play.

The next step for Huawei and other producers is to go for Made in China processing and memory chips, breaking the stranglehold by Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Micron Technology, Western Digital and the British ARM.

And then there’s the Holy Grail: 5G. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei has repeatedly stressed that what really matters is how advanced Huawei is compared to the competition. 

Total tech war is in full effect. Huawei may face a very hard spell ahead. But at the end of a long and winding road there may be a sweet, unbeatable prize; prevailing over Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and all that with invaluable help from the Trump administration.

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Featured image: Huawei’s stand at the 2019 Mobile World Congress. Photo: dpa / Andrej Sokolow

Plenty of Fish in Gaza Sea, but Not for Palestinians

June 16th, 2019 by Entsar Abu Jahal

In a dangerous development June 12, Israel announced a full naval closure on the Gaza Strip until further notice, denying Palestinian fishermen access to the sea. Israel said it took the measure in response to the continued firing of incendiary balloons at Israeli settlements by protesters in the ongoing “right of return” marches.

Media outlets reported that the balloons caused about seven fires June 12 in settlements in the “Gaza envelope” — the area of Israel that wraps around the Gaza Strip. A day earlier, Israeli authorities had decided to cut the fishing zone off the coast of the Gaza Strip to 6 nautical miles. Israel had already reduced this zone June 5 to 10 nautical miles (18.5 kilometers) instead of 15 (27.8 kilometers).

Of note, the Gaza Strip fishing zone was expanded to a maximum of 15 miles at the beginning of April, as part of the first phase of the Egyptian-brokered truce reached at the end of March between Israel and Hamas. This stage was supposed to be followed by reconstruction and large infrastructure projects in the Gaza Strip financed by Arab and European entities.

The closing surprised Gaza fishermen, who were looking forward to an expansion to 20 miles, as outlined in the Oslo Accord. The fishing season in the Gaza Strip started in mid-April and ends in June. Fishermen rely on this time to make ends meet. Another fishing season begins in mid-September and ends in November.

Since April, Israel has reduced and expanded the fishing zone between 6 and 15 nautical miles about 10 times by linking it to the continuous firing of balloons from Gaza. The recurrent changes in this zone have resulted in substantial losses for the fishermen.

Hamas leader Suhail al-Hindi told local news website Donia al-Watan on June 8 that Israel has been putting off implementing the truce understandings, noting that the repeated changes in the fishing zone contradict these understandings.

“Hamas could reconsider the understandings in light of the continued lack of commitment by Israel,” he said.

The latest ballon launch coincided with Israel’s failure to implement the steps of the first phase of the truce arrangement. Israel still imposes restrictions on materials entering and exiting the Gaza Strip.

Nizar Ayyash, head of the Palestinian fishermen’s union in Gaza, told Al-Monitor that by not following through on the understandings, Israel undermines the standing of Egypt as the intermediary.

“This is an Israeli political game aimed to increase pressure on the Palestinians by jeopardizing their sources of livelihoods,” he said.

Fishermen are usually informed of zone restrictions in the middle of the night by the Ministry of Agriculture, and sometimes the changes are made while fishermen are on the open sea, Ayyash said.

“They get shot at by the Israeli navy and are forced to leave their boats and nets behind. Some boats have been sunk, and nets lost,” he said. “Add to this the deliberate shooting at the headlights of boats and electrical engines to cause them material losses.”

The zone expansion in April enabled a number of large-boat owners to catch more fish than Gaza fishermen have caught for years, he said.

“[However], in light of the constant change of the fishing zone, fishermen [sometimes] refrained from entering the allowed zone, fearing for their lives and the confiscation of their equipment,” Ayyash said. “The situation is unbearable, especially as the change is suddenly implemented. Israel is using this measure as collective punishment.”

The understandings Egypt brokered had loosened restrictions on Gaza Strip imports of some fishing equipment that Israel had prohibited since 2006, citing the equipment’s potential for being used illegally — for example, in terrorist activities. But Ayyash pointed out that only a limited quantity of steel wire was allowed in June 2, barely meeting fishermen’s needs.

“International and local institutions should help fishermen and offer them relief and rescue projects,” he added.

Al-Monitor spoke to fisherman Faris al-Amoudi about how cutting the fishing zone directly affects fishermen’s livelihoods and catch.

“The sea zone should either be opened or closed. This change back and forth is nerve-wracking,” he said. “Fish are not abundant in the authorized fishing zones, but rather in deeper zones” more than 20 miles off the coast. “What we catch now are just fish making their way to us by chance. We are forced to catch baby fish just to make daily ends meet.”

Amoudi called on Palestinian politicians to demand international guarantees binding Israel not to change the fishing zones. “Our living conditions can’t improve if the status quo remains unchanged,” he said.

Fisherman Shaer al-Amoudi told Al-Monitor the changes are “ruining our lives.”

“We can’t adapt to this situation. Every time we hear of the expansion of the fishing zone, we prepare our nets, boats and fish bait, but the next day this zone is reduced,” he said. “We are suffering financial losses, not to mention being targeted by [Israeli] fire and arrested. We have nothing to do with politics; we’re just trying to earn a living.”

Amoudi said the real reason Israel keeps changing the fishing zone isn’t because of the return marches. Rather, Israel just wants Palestinian fisherman out of the sea.

“The repeated reduction of the fishing zone echoes Israel’s intention to prevent Gazan fishermen from benefiting from the current fishing season and catching plentiful quantities to improve their living and humanitarian conditions,” he said. “Fishermen want Hamas to pressure Israel into stopping this charade. Israel should stop arresting fishermen and confiscating their equipment, and allow the entry of all fishing equipment to the Gaza Strip without restrictions.”

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Entsar Abu Jahal is a Palestinian journalist covering current events. She is currently pursuing a master’s in journalism and works with several local and Arab journals, as well as various local stations.

Featured image is from UNRWA

“It appears that Mike Pompeo has a hard time kicking his old habits.  He appears to be as smug about lying as a CIA operative as he is as Secretary of State.  Categorically blaming the Iranians for the recent oil attack tankers has left allies scratching their heads; and perhaps leaving foes thinking: “Thank God my enemy is so stupid”!

On June 13, 2019, as Ayatollah Khamenei was holding talks in Tehran with Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, two oil tankers carrying oil to Japan were attacked.  As investigations into the incident were just beginning, Pompeo had already concluded his assessment and had it ready for the press.  Much to the audible surprise of the world, and without any proof or supporting documents, he laid the blame firmly at Iran’s feet citing “intelligence””. See  Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich‘s article below.

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Provocations in the Gulf of Oman: Will John Bolton Get His War on Iran?

By Michael Welch, Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Pepe Escobar, and Yves Engler, June 16, 2019

Is the world now on a trajectory toward war? Perhaps even a world war? This daunting possibility is at the heart of this week’s Global Research News Hour radio program.

Video: Mysterious Attacks on Oil Tankers Around Persian Gulf

By South Front, June 15, 2019

After the incident, Iranian state media reported that Iranian sailors had rescued all 44 crew members of the tankers. This statement contradicts to CENTCOM claims that said that 21 mariners from the M/V Kokuka Courageous, were rescued by USS Bainbridge.

The Gulf of Credibility. False Flag, Ludicrous Allegation. Iran Rescued the Crew of the Japanese Tanker

By Craig Murray, June 15, 2019

That Iran would target a Japanese ship and a friendly Russian crewed ship is a ludicrous allegation. They are however very much the targets that the USA allies in the region – the Saudis, their Gulf Cooperation Council colleagues, and Israel – would target for a false flag.

Pre-emptive Nuclear War: The Role of Israel in Triggering an Attack on Iran

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 14, 2019

The stockpiling and deployment of advanced weapons systems directed against Iran started in the immediate wake of the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. From the outset, these war plans were led by the U.S. in liaison with NATO and Israel.

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”.

Pompeo’s “Tanker Narrative” against Iran.“Thank God my Enemy is so Stupid”!

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, June 15, 2019

Although many states in the US and some countries in the world have banned shale oil production due to its adverse effects on the environment, specifically water, the United States’ goal is to be the biggest producer and supplier of oil depending on its shale oil production.

Timing of Gulf of Oman Attacks: Washington Aimed to Kill Historic Iran-Japan Talks in Tehran, Oil Tankers en Route to Japan

By Ben Norton, June 14, 2019

Hell-bent on isolating and suffocating Iran, the Trump administration derailed Japan’s historic talks by accusing Tehran without any evidence whatsoever of attacking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

False Flag Incident in the Gulf of Oman?

By Stephen Lendman, June 14, 2019

Given their rage to transform Iran into a US vassal state, anything is possible, even war on a nation able to hit back hard against US and Israeli targets if attacked.

Convenient “Tanker Attacks” as US Seeks War with Iran

By Tony Cartalucci, June 13, 2019

For the second time since the United States unilaterally withdrew from the so-called Iran Nuclear Deal, Western reports of “suspected attacks” on oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz have attempted to implicate Iran.

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Lots of readers have asked us via social media what we think are the reasons that led the government and the Central Bank (BCV) to publish, all of a sudden, indicators that, also suddenly, stopped being published over three years ago.

Some conjured their own theses amidst the questions: that it might be part of the Oslo negotiations [with the opposition], or that a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was on the way. These two were the most common. Others wondered if the Chinese or Russians had pressured the government to do so.

Also among readers’ concerns, but more pressing, was the issue of hyperinflation, whether the fact that the rise in consumer prices in March and April being below 50 percent meant we were out of the woods, whether it was good news, in the sense that the worst had passed and the economy was stabilizing.

Here are our thoughts on the matter:

On both matters, first of all, we need to point out that we cannot do what would be the first order of business in these cases. This would be to take into account the official explanations. However, this is not possible for the simple reason that there is no official version of the facts.

On what concerns the publication of economic indicators there has been no official comment, just like nothing was said when they disappeared. In that sense, what is produced is a vacuum where speculative theories prosper, either those who always look to make the government look bad or those who look to absolve it.

The same thing applies to inflation. But here the matter is more serious. The issue is that, according to the BCV, the National Index of Consumer Prices was at 34 and 33 percent in March and April, respectively (and May will surely be similar), after registering at 196 percent in January and 114 percent in February. Based on that, we would expect a party and an economic cabinet bursting with pride at their achievement: nothing less than putting an end to 15 months of hyperinflation. However, that’s not what we’re seeing. The attitude on the matter is one of complete silence, which mirrors what we saw when hyperinflation was rampant.

We know that communications is not, and has never been, the government’s strong suit. But in these cases we believe the silence has to do with other factors besides this deficiency.

Regarding the BCV indicators we don’t believe, in the short term, that there is an agreement with the IMF in the works. Given the recent tendency in economic policy, nothing surprises us any more, but a deal with the IMF would seem a bit extreme. With the blockade and everything there are other multilateral bodies (for example under the umbrella of the United Nations) which could offer credit and “technical assistance” in economic matters, like we already see in other areas. Furthermore, there are also private entities, which due to the blockade would not come from this side of the world, but from China or Russia, which could offer new loans in the framework of the “strategic alliances” which the government is clearly very keen on.

What we mean is that what’s usually associated with the IMF can be done by others, with a smaller political cost and reputational damage. They can even be presented as an alternative to the IMF in the framework of a multi-polar world, etc.

But however it turns out, whether the goal is to go to the IMF or another body, the truth is that the government’s reorientation towards orthodox economics explains the publication of the indicators. It is quite clear that the image being presented is that of an economy that is normalizing or stabilizing, embracing the principles and guidelines of a “normal” economy. In other words, an open economy, with no major controls or “populist” regulations from the government, with ample assurances to national and international private investors, where instead of communards we have entrepreneurs, etc.

Now, if that’s the case, and moving on to the second issue, why is the government not doing cartwheels after managing to slow down inflation, to the point where technically we are no longer in hyperinflation?

On this issue we think that, after everything that’s happened, the government is conscious of the fragility of this modest achievement, in the sense that slowing down the rhythm of price increases doesn’t mean doing away with its causes, which at this stage are quite a few and remain simmering.

Apart from that, and this is essential, we believe that the decision to not mention the subject has also to do with an awareness that the cost of the anti-inflation policies is very high and especially very unequally shared, in the sense that, basically, it is born by workers and medium to low income groups.

This is something we’ve been stressing: the essence of the anti-inflationary policies consists in shrinking people’s purchasing power as much as possible, so that they won’t buy dollars in the black market, – those who could afford it – thus stabilizing the exchange rate. But more than that, the goal is that people, in general, buy less of everything so that there’s less pressure on prices to go up.

Let’s be clear that no matter how efficient the political marketing is, this is something very hard to sell, especially for a government that defines itself in the tradition of Chavismo and the left.

That’s why at the time we said that the three economic policy targets published by the BCV in late January [when it massively devalued the exchange rate and restricted Bolivars in circulation], together, represented a trilemma. The targets were: stabilizing the exchange rate, slowing down hyperinflation, and restoring purchasing power. We argued at the time that with the methods chosen it would be possible, in the best of cases, to achieve the first two but not the third, since the success of the first two depended on sacrificing the third. Time has proven us right.

In addition, it is also evident that the strategy to stabilize the exchange rate involves reducing the pressure on it, and insofar as the government doesn’t have foreign currency to offer and the private sector actors that do refuse to do so, the lowering of pressure on the exchange rate can only be done by further raising it. In other words, devaluing the Bolivar (BsS), which is then reflected in prices. Therefore, in a strict sense, the rising tendency of the exchange rate is not eliminated but displaced.

In the framework of the new foreign exchange system run by the banks, which has been in place for a month now, the exchange rate has now gone over 6,000 BsS per dollar, some 800 more than when the system was set up, and with a rising tendency that will continue. It is worth pointing out that since [the monetary reconversion in] August, the exchange rate has devalued by more than 9,950 percent, which means the sovereign Bolivar has devalued with respect to the US dollar by more than 99%.

But what’s most complicated about this issue is that an anti-inflationary strategy that relies on constricting monetary flows to reduce consumption has the added effect of contracting the economy even more. As a result, and as paradoxical as it may sound, the economic policy ends up joining forces with the blockade and amplifying the terrible effects it has on the economy and the country in general.

An anti-inflationary economic policy such as the one chosen by the government has contracting effects by itself, even in normal conditions. A good example of this can be seen in Argentina, where a monetarist economic policy with many similarities to the one seen in Venezuela has sunk the country in a three-year recession, on the heels of a period of growth under the government of Cristina Fernández. But in Venezuelan conditions the effects are much worse, if that’s even possible by now. According to the very BCV, the country has seen six consecutive years of GDP contraction, which totalled 52 percent up until the third trimester of 2018. This means, in simple terms, that presently the economy is half as big as it was in 2012 and about the size of the one in 1999. Nothing suggests – quite the contrary – that the results of the missing trimester and of 2019 will buck the trend. Add to that that the effects of recent sanctions will start being felt in the second semester that we’re entering, and the prospects are not good. All of this without even mentioning the electricity crisis, with a situation that is much more dire outside Caracas.

To summarize: in economics, as in many other things, one cannot exactly predict what’s going to happen, only what’s likely to happen if things continue as they are and nothing suggests otherwise, which is that far from a stabilization we’re entering a very dangerous phase of contraction. We have to be very wary of mirages and of ending up eating more sand where it looked like there was water.

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“He wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.” – George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant”

The lobby of the temple of time travel called the Triplex Cinema in Great Barrington, Massachusetts was suffused with a nostalgic vibe tinged with the whiff of encroaching death when I walked in for The Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story.  I had earlier asked the ticket girl if most of the tickets for the two sold-out preview shows were being purchased by old people; she told me no, that many younger people had also bought tickets. However, I didn’t see any.  All I saw were grey or white heads and beards, not with “Time Out of Mind,” as Dylan titled his 1997 album, but with time on their minds, as they shuffled into the dark to see where their time had gone and perhaps, if they were not mystified by their fetishistic worship of Dylan, to meditate on who they had become and where they and he were heading in the days to come. I imagined most were aware that Dylan had said that he’s been singing about death since he was twelve, and that his music is haunted by images of love and time lost as bells toll for those traveling the road of life in search of forgiveness for their transgressions.

How, I wondered, would this Dylan documentary “story” fashioned by Martin Scorsese, whose own work  is marked by themes of guilt and redemption, affect an audience that might never have taken the roads less traveled of their youthful dreams but “fell” into the conformist and oppressive American neo-liberal way of life?  Would this film, in Dylan’s words, get the audience wondering “if I ever became what you wanted me to be/Did I miss the mark or overstep the line/That only you could see?”  Would nostalgia for their youth be a liberating or mystifying force, now that forty plus years have transformed American society into a conservative, postmodern, shopper’s paradise where commodity capitalism has reified all aspects of life, including art objects and artists such a Dylan, imbuing them with magical powers to redeem those who buy their products, which include songs and celebrity “auras”?  I knew I was sitting among people who had fetishized Barack Obama as a savior even while he was waging endless wars and killing American citizens, bailing out his Wall St. and bank supporters, and jailing more whistleblowers than any American president in history, and that Dylan had accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom from this icon of rectitude who had served to quell all thoughts of rebellion and whose war victims were not counted by those who bought his brand since God was on his side. Here in this darkened dream factory in a hyper-gentrified “liberal” town, my mind was knotted with thoughts and questions that perhaps the film would address.

The Man Who Isn’t

I knew that no one would answer my questions, but I asked myself anyway. Moreover, I knew there is no Bob Dylan.  He is a figment of the imagination – first his own and then the public’s.  Perhaps behind the character Bob Dylan there is a genuine actor, and I hoped to catch an unintended glimpse of him in the film, but I knew if he appeared it would be obliquely and through a gradual dazzling of truth, as Emily Dickinson would say.  An unconscious disclosure.  For if the real Bob Dylan took off his mask and stood up, his ardent fans would receive it as a slap in the face, and their illusions would transmogrify into delusions as the spell would be broken.  To tell the truth directly is a dangerous undertaking in a country of lies.

Dylan, the spellbinder, has, through his public personae, hypnotized his followers with his tantalizing and wonderful music.  “Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me,” wrote D.H. Lawrence in his poem, “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through.”  This sounds like Dylan’s artistic credo. His masks (personae = to sound through) have served as his medium of exchange.  He has been faithful to his tutelary spirit (if not to living people), what the Romans called one’s genius that is gifted to one at birth and is one’s personal spirit to which one must be faithful if one wishes to be born into true and creative life. If one sacrifices to one’s genius, one will in return become a vehicle for the fertile creativity that the genius can bestow.  A person is not a genius but a transmitter of its gifts.

Like Lawrence, Dylan has served as a vehicle for his genius. His many masks, unified by Bob Zimmerman under the pseudonym Bob Dylan, have served as ciphers for the transmission of his enigmatic and arresting art.  But while the music dazzles, the “real” man behind the name can’t stand up – or is it won’t? – because, as always, he’s “invisible now” and “not there,” as his songs have so long told us.

I wondered if my theater companions understood this, or perhaps didn’t want to.  Could that be because their own reality is problematic to them?  Do generations of his fans sense a vacancy at the heart of their self-identities – non-selves – as if they have been absent from their own lives while reveling in Dylan’s kaleidoscopic cast of characters? Do Dylan’s lyrics – “People don’t live or die people just float” – resonate with them? Lacking Dylan’s artistry, are many reluctant to ask why they are so intrigued by the legerdemain of a man who insists he is absent?  Has a whole generation gone missing?

I am only familiar with the musician who acts upon a special social stage, and I love his creations.  Because Dylan the performer has the poet’s touch, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic, he draws me into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truths.  He is an artist at war with his art and perhaps his true self, and therefore forces me to venture into uncharted territory and ask uncomfortable questions.  His songs demand that the listener’s mind and spirit be moving as the spirit of creative inspiration moved him. A close listening to many of them will force one to jump from verse to verse – to shoot the gulf – since there are no bridges to cross, no connecting links.

A Magic Show

From the start, The Rolling Thunder Revue, a fused compilation of film from a tour throughout New England concocted by Dylan that took place in 1975-6 as a rollicking experiment in communal music making, announces that we are going to be played with and that Dylan and Scorsese are conjurers whose prestigitations are going to dazzle us, which they do.  The film is gripping and cinematically beautiful. The opening scene is taken from a very old film in which a woman is sitting in a chair and a man throws a cloth over her.  When he pulls the cloth away, the woman has disappeared.  Call it playful magic, call it fun, call it entertainment – we can’t say we haven’t been warned – but after decades of postmodern  gibberish with the blending of fact and fiction, fake news, endless propaganda, and the fiction-of-nonfiction, one might reasonably expect something more straightforward in 2019, but these guys get a kick out of magic tricks and conning people.

I could understand it if it served some larger purpose, but as the film shows, it doesn’t. Later in the film, Dylan says, as if he needed to pound the point home, “If someone’s wearing a mask, he’s gonna tell you the truth.  If he’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely.”  This may be true for him, but as a general prescription for living, it is bullshit.  Of course lies are commonplace, but isn’t it best to strive for truth, and doesn’t that involve shedding masks. Then again, what does he mean by a mask?

Society trains us all from an early age to lie and deceive and to be socially adjusted persons on the social stage, and since person means mask, do we need some white face paint to obviously mask ourselves to tell the truth?  Why can’t one take off the masks and be authentic?  Why can’t Dylan?  In an interview in 1997 with the music critic Jon Parles, Dylan said while he is mortified to be on stage, it’s the only place where he’s happy. “It’s the only place you can be who you want to be.”  These are the sad words of a man living in a cage, and only he might know why. I am reminded of Kafka’s story of the caged Hunger Artist. Yet we are left to guess why Dylan is unhappy off stage, but such guessing is the other side of the social game where gossip and pseudo-psychoanalysis sickens us all as we try to decipher the personal lives of the celebrities we worship. Maybe we should examine our own looking-glass selves.

The Mask Falls

Despite being a masked man, there are times in this fascinating film when the lion in Dylan breaks out of the cage, and while the face paint and costume remain, one can see and hear a sense of short-lived liberation in his performances.  His performance of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is so true, so passionate, so real, so intense that his true face shines through in its genuine glory.  The same for his performance of “Hurricane” and a few others.  It’s all in his face and body, his articulation and energy, his fiery eyes.  The performances refute his claim that only a masked man can speak the truth.  As Joan Baez mordantly says, “Everything is forgiven when he sings.”

There is something elegiac about the film, for many of the people in it are now dead and their film presence – that eerie afterlife that technology confers – conveys the ephemerality of fame – and life.  Allen Ginsberg and Sam Shepard are dead, and many of the others are in their twilight years.  But to see them young and frisky and bouncing around on stage and off, giving off sexuality and joy in the music and the trip they’re on, one can’t help be gripped by the passing of time and the contrast between then and now when depression and it’s pharmaceutical fixes has so many in its grip.  Dylan’s craggy, lined face in interviews for the film belies the young man we see perform and laugh, and though he stills performs and is addicted to being on the road so often – quite a feat for a 78 year old – the juxtapositions of the images underscores the power of Dylan’s musical messages.  “Once upon a time,” Dylan croons these days, “somehow once upon a time/never comes again.”

When one puts the then and now into historical and social perspective – which is essential since works of art are rooted in time, place, economic and political realities – one is jolted further. It’s almost as if this Rolling Thunder Revue tour was the last gasp for a dying political and artistic culture that represented some hope for change, however small, while also being a symptom of the encroaching theatricality of American life, what Neal Gabler aptly calls, Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.

The Triumph of Techno-Entertainment

Trace, if you will, the transformation of the United States from 1975-6 until today.  It’s as if the theatricality of the tour was announcing the end of straightforward dissent and the ushering in of endless postmodern gamesmanship that is still with us.  Masks. Games. Generations disappearing into technological and consumer fantasies where making money, watching television, and entering the system that destroys one’s soul became the norm, as the American empire ravaged the world and Baby Boomers found life in their cell phones and on yoga mats, as Herbert Marcuse and his compatriots of the Frankfurt School warned. The culture industry absorbed dissent and spit it back out as entertainment in the service of the maintenance and consolidation of the power of the ruling class. How to transform a depraved society when the culture industry has corrupted so many people at their cores is where we’re at now.  “The carpet too is moving under you,” Dylan intoned in 1965, “It’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

I looked around the movie theater before the film began and the rows were lit up by old folks staring at their little lit-up rectangular talismans.  It was enough to bring me to despair. I was reminded of being in the circus in Madison Square Garden as a child where the kids were swinging sticks with cords attached with lights at the end that lit up the place.

They say the circuses are all closing, but I think not.  “It’s not dark yet/but it’s getting there.”

In an exchange between Dylan and Sam Shepard, who was on the tour as some sort of writer, Dylan asks Sam how he writes all those plays, and Sam says he does so by “communing with the dead.”  The Rolling Thunder Revue is like that, a medium between a time when passion still lived, and today when death, dying, and nostalgia are the norm for so many whose passion has fled into things. Capitalism has conquered consciences with commodities.

Home Before Dark?

Dylan had his fallow period after the late seventies.  To his great credit, he found new life, starting in the late 1990s with his TimeOut Of Mind album and continuing through his recordings of the great American songbook of love ballads, the terrain of Sinatra and Bennett. Listening to him sing these great songs he did not write, I find his masks have fallen away and that a sad, lonely man emerges.  A man filled with regrets and melancholia.  An old man lamenting in a movingly raspy voice lost loves and haunted by what was and what might have been.  A death-haunted man voicing raw emotion that is palpable.  An uncaged man.

So much about Bob Dylan is paradoxical, or is it contradictory?  Hypocritical?

Friedrich Nietzsche, another man of many faces, who advised us to “become who you are,” once wrote, “There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.”  I don’t know if the man behind the name Bob Dylan is a “genuine actor” (genuine being cognate with genius, both suggesting the act of giving birth, creating), for I have never met him.  I hope he has met himself. He hints that someone is missing, whether that is the fictional actor or the genuine one, is difficult to discern.  Is he becoming who he is, or is he lost out on the road “with no direction home”?  He is always on the go, leaving, moving, restless, always seeking a way back home through song, even when, or perhaps because, there are no directions.

The Rolling Thunder Revue is a nostalgic trip.  No doubt, audiences of a certain age will experience it as such.  Such an aching for home comes with a cost: the acute awareness that you can’t go home again. When the nursing and funeral home beckon, however, one can perhaps take a chance on truth by examining one’s conscience to ask if and why one may have betrayed one’s better youthful self and settled for a life of comforting conformity and resigned acceptance of the “system” one once raged against.

Younger people, if they are patient and watch the entire film, will experience a profound aesthetic shock that may give them hope.  To see through the camera’s eye the youthful Dylan’s face as he gives some of the most passionate performances of his life will thrill them so that a shiver will go down their spines and their hair will stand on end. “And this is what poetry does,” writes Roberto Calasso in Literature and the Gods, “it makes us see what otherwise we wouldn’t have seen, through a sound that was never heard before.”  To watch just a handful of these performances makes the film worthwhile.

Become Who You Are?

At one point, today’s Dylan says that he has always been “searching for the Holy Grail.”  I suppose one could interpret that as meaning eternal youth, happiness, redemption, or some sort of immortality.  He has surely created a capitalist’s corporate empire, though that doesn’t seem to satisfy  him, as it never has genuine poets.  But maybe to become very, very rich and famous has always been his goal, his immortality project, as it is for other tycoons.  One can only guess.

I prefer not to.  But without question, Dylan has the poet’s touch, a hyperbolic sense of the fantastic that draws you into his magical web in the pursuit of deeper truth.  In ways, he’s like the Latin American magical realist writers who move from fact to dream to the fantastic in a puff of wind.

He is our Emerson.  His artistic philosophy has always been about movement in space and time through song. “An artist has got to be careful never to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere,” he’s said. “You always have to realize that you are constantly in a state of becoming and as long as you can stay in that realm you’ll be alright.”

Sounds like living, right.

Sounds like Emerson, also.  “Life only avails, not the having lived.  Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. Thus one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes.”

Like Emerson, Dylan creates a sense of restlessness in the listener that forces one to ask: Who am I?  Am I? He has said “that a song is like a dream, and you try to make it come true.”  In a similar way, Scorsese has created a dream with this film.  It takes us back and forth in time via an hallucinatory experience.  A sort of documentary with a wink.

It is quite a story, powerful enough to induce one to ask: Who are we becoming in this American Dream?  Will we keep sleeping through the nightmares we create and support, or will be return home with Dylan and embrace the radical truth he once gifted us with and dare to “tell it and speak it and think it and breathe it/And reflect from the mountains so all souls can see it” that our country continues to kill and oppress people all around the world as it did once upon a time very long ago?

Our chance won’t come again.

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.

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Bernie Sanders Proposes New Economic Bill of Rights

June 16th, 2019 by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders delivered a full-throated defense of democratic socialism in his June 12 speech at George Washington University. Sanders quoted FDR’s 1944 State of the Union address:

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”

Sanders, like FDR, proposed an Economic Bill of Rights, including the rights to health care, affordable housing, education, a living wage and retirement.

“Economic rights are human rights,” Sanders declared. “That is what I mean by democratic socialism.”

Sanders cited figures of vast wealth disparity in the United States, where “the top 1 percent of people own more wealth than the bottom 92 percent.” He said there is higher income and wealth inequality today than at any time since the 1920s. And, Sanders stated, “despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, the average wage of the American worker in real dollars is no higher than it was 46 years ago and millions of people are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.”

He also noted,

“in America today, the very rich live on average 15 years longer than the poorest Americans.”

Economic Rights Are Human Rights

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights sets forth two different categories of human rights: (1) civil and political rights, and (2) economic, social and cultural rights.

Civil and political rights comprise the rights to life, a fair trial and self-determination; freedom of speech, expression, assembly and religion; and freedom from torture, cruel treatment and arbitrary detention. Economic, social and cultural rights include the rights to health care, education and social security; the right to form and join unions and to strike; and the right to equal pay for equal work, unemployment insurance, paid maternity leave, and the prevention, treatment and control of diseases.

These two types of human rights are enshrined in two international treaties — the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

The United States has ratified the ICCPR, but not the ICESCR. U.S. policy since the Reagan administration has been to define human rights only as civil and political rights, excluding economic, social and cultural rights from the realm of human rights.

The ICESCR, which has been ratified by 169 countries, guarantees the rights to work with favorable conditions, to the highest attainable standards of physical and mental health, to education, to housing, to an adequate standard of living, and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and cultural freedom. It protects the rights to form and join trade unions, social security and social insurance, equal rights for men and women, and protection and assistance to the family.

Cuba, whose human rights record is frequently criticized by the U.S. government, puts the United States to shame with its recognition of economic rights. Cubans enjoy universal health care, universal free education including higher education, the right to form and join unions, and government-subsidized abortion and family planning. Cuba has a higher life expectancy than the U.S., as well as a relatively small ecological footprint due to low energy consumption.

Democratic Socialism vs. Corporate Socialism

Trump and his fellow oligarchs oppose democratic socialism, Sanders said, but “they don’t really oppose all forms of socialism.” Indeed, “they absolutely love corporate socialism that enriches Trump and other billionaires.”

Sanders cited the $700 billion bailout of Wall Street in 2008 by the Treasury Department “after their greed, recklessness and illegal behavior created the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression — with millions of Americans losing their jobs, their homes and their life savings — Wall Street’s religious adherence to unfettered capitalism suddenly came to an end.”

He also mentioned tax breaks and loopholes for fossil fuel companies, pharmaceutical companies, Amazon, and the Trump family who “got $885 million worth of tax breaks and subsidies for your family’s housing empire that is built on racial discrimination.”

As Dr. King observed, the United States “has socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.”

Embracing Socialism Is a Winning Strategy

Sanders noted that FDR and his progressive coalition were successful, and their legacies continue to flourish in programs and protections like Social Security, regulation of Wall Street and unemployment compensation. He pointed out that Roosevelt aimed to go further.

“In 1944, FDR proposed an economic bill of rights but died a year later and was never able to fulfill that vision. Our job, 75 years later,” Sanders said, “is to complete what Roosevelt started.”

He then set forth his vision of a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights, which would recognize that all Americans should have:

  • The right to a decent job that pays a living wage
  • The right to quality health care
  • The right to a complete education
  • The right to affordable housing
  • The right to a clean environment
  • The right to a secure retirement

Sanders listed Democratic presidents vilified by the oligarchs of their time for their programs of alleged “socialism.” Lyndon Johnson was attacked for Medicare, Harry Truman’s proposed national health care program was dubbed “socialized medicine,” and Newt Gingrich called Bill Clinton’s health care plan “centralized bureaucratic socialism.”

Although none of the other leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidates has embraced socialism, the party’s base has. Candidate John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado, was roundly booed at the California Democratic convention earlier this month when he said, “If we want to beat Donald Trump and achieve big progressive goals, socialism is not the answer.”

Indeed, Thomas Piketty, author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues, “Without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite low-education, low-income voters from all origins within the same coalition and to deliver a reduction in inequality.”

Keith A. Spencer, writing at Salon, cites Piketty for the proposition that “nominating centrist Democrats who don’t speak to class issues will result in a great swathe of voters simply not voting.”

Moreover, a 2018 Gallup poll determined that a majority of young Americans have a positive opinion of socialism. According to a recent Axios poll, 55 percent of women ages of 18 to 54 would prefer to live in a socialist country.

Sanders said the U.S. and the rest of the world face two different political paths. “On one hand,” he noted, “there is a growing movement towards oligarchy and authoritarianism in which a small number of incredibly wealthy and powerful billionaires own and control a significant part of the economy and exert enormous influence over the political life of our country. On the other hand, in opposition to oligarchy, there is a movement of working people and young people who, in ever increasing numbers, are fighting for justice.”

After his speech, Sanders told CNN’s Anderson Cooper, that real change is generated by mass movements. He cited the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement and the labor movement.

“It is time for the American people to stand up and fight for their right to freedom, human dignity and security,” Sanders affirmed. “This is the core of what my politics is all about.” He clarified, “the only way we achieve these goals is through a political revolution.”

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

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

President Jair Bolsonaro appears intent on decriminalizing Amazon deforestation, ending most fines, straitjacketing law enforcement, and gutting environmental agencies with mass firings.

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The Brazilian government’s environmental agency, IBAMA, has so far this year imposed the lowest number of fines for illegal deforestation in at least 11 years, while the country’s other leading environmental agency and its federal parks’ protector, ICMBio (the Chico Mendes Institute), did not carry out any operations at all to monitor deforestation in May.

These developments, reported by the organizations themselves, reflect the extent to which the country’s environmental policies and law enforcement agencies are being dismantled by the government of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Fines for illegal deforestation were down 34 percent from Jan. 1 to May 15 this year, compared to the same period last year, according to the O Estado de S. Paulonewspaper. This is the largest percentage drop ever recorded in Brazil. In absolute terms, it marks the smallest number of fines ever (850), compared to 1,290 imposed over the same period in 2018.

The last year in which a comparable number of fines (952) were imposed during the same period was 2012 — but this was at a time when real advances were being made in the fight against illegal deforestation. Indeed, 2012 was the year with the lowest level of deforestation in the Brazil Amazon since records began.

The number of fines imposed by IBAMA in the first five months of the year has fallen heavily since 2016.

This is far from being the case today. Recent figures on illegal deforestation, published by the National Institute of Spatial Research (INPE) and confirmed by the federal government, show that the Amazon region recorded the highest level ever of illegal deforestation for a single month in May 2019: 739 square kilometers (285 square miles), an area nearly as large as New York City. This is a 34 percent increase on the area cleared in May 2018, which was 550 square kilometers (212 square miles). It seems likely that the rise stems from government policies favorable to deforestation.

This confirms what an unnamed IBAMA official told Mongabay before the recent INPE figures were published: “It’s very difficult to believe that the decline in fines reflects a decline in illegal deforestation.” Agency employees spoke to Mongabay on background, citing fear of reprisals from the Bolsonaro administration. IBAMA’s press office told Mongabay that its request for an on-the-record interview should be sent to the Ministry of the Environment, but the ministry did not respond, despite multiple Mongabay requests.

Illegal timber harvest seizures drop toward zero

Government seizures of illegally harvested timber fell even more dramatically than the number of fines: just 40 cubic meters (1,410 cubic feet), equivalent to 10 large trees, were confiscated in the first four months of the year under Bolsonaro. By contrast, 25,000 cubic meters (883,000 cubic feet) of illegal timber were seized in 2018 under the Michel Temer administration.

It seems unlikely the volume of seizures will increase by much in the near future: all six monitoring operations planned for coming months have either been cancelled or downsized.

And those that do go ahead are likely to yield few results: IBAMA’s website must now announce in advance when and where each operation will take place, even though it’s obvious that the success of the raids depends on secrecy and the element of surprise. This advance publicity also increases the risks to IBAMA agents, leaving them more vulnerable to criminal attacks.

The number of ICMBio operations has declined heavily this year.

 

Mass firings leave environmental agencies leaderless

According to experts, the disarray at IBAMA is largely due to the firing of the heads of the agency’s state bodies, which carry out most of the deforestation-monitoring operations. In February, Environment Minister Ricardo Salles axed 21 of the 27 state superintendents in a single day. To date, only four of the state bodies have official heads. Without leadership, there is no proper planning for operations to curb illegal deforestation.

It’s these state superintendents who have the authority to make decisions regarding the charging of smaller fines, those up to 500,000 reais ($129,000), which constitute the majority of fines. “The employees who occupy the top posts temporarily do not feel they have the authority to take such decisions,” said another IBAMA employee.

Morale is also very low at the environmental agency, with both Salles and Bolsonaro repeatedly attacking IBAMA. One incident that greatly affected employees was Bolsonaro’s surprise announcement that IBAMA agents could no longer set fire to tractors and other equipment used by illegal loggers. This legally approved policy had long been an effective deterrent for IBAMA agents to combat criminal deforestation in remote areas where it’s both difficult and expensive to confiscate illicit equipment.

In a short video interview, Bolsonaro, standing beside Marcos Rogério, a right-wing senator from Rondônia state, banned operations to end the illegal extraction of timber from Jamari National Forest, a protected area in Rondônia that is being extensively invaded by illegal loggers and land grabbers. That presidential statement was enough to not only stop all government monitoring operations in the forest, but also make IBAMA officials fear potential assaults if they set foot in the protected area, an official said.

“If before the video, staff were already being attacked by loggers, imagine what it is like with the president’s endorsement of the criminals,” an IBAMA employee said. In practice, the government’s new policies have forced a host of highly skilled environmental officials to be paid to sit idle and not uphold the nation’s deforestation laws.

Brazil’s conserved areas at grave risk

At ICMBio, the situation is similar. O Estado de S. Paulo reported that 350 fines, imposed by ICMBio officials, are awaiting confirmation from the institute’s president before they can be enforced. In other words, bureaucratic bottlenecks are holding up the process. The total value of uncharged fines is 146 million reais ($37.6 million). The Environment Ministry did not respond when asked by Mongabay for its response.

At the same time, just as in IBAMA, important bodies within ICMBio remain leaderless. There are no directors at 47 of Brazil’s 334 conservation units, which means there is no top-level management at conservation units covering 161,000 square kilometers (62,200 square miles), an area larger than England.

When an employee is removed from a management position, they remain a civil servant with a salary; they merely lose the right to extra payment for special duties. Under Brazilian law, employees appointed to their jobs in a public concurso (a lengthy selection process open to all) can only be fired as the result of a disciplinary process.

However, some IBAMA employees say they believe the system may change under Bolsonaro. “I have found out that the ministry has decided to begin disciplinary procedures against employees involved in monitoring operations on indigenous land and in protected areas,” one official said. “How can you continue to work in such conditions?”

Trade unions, representing Ministry of Environment employees, accuse the ministry of firing four employees this year without following proper procedures. Only one of those four had been accused of unacceptable behavior that could merit dismissal, but Salles decided to fire the other three as well. This was seen by many analysts as a sign of what lies ahead. “It’s part of process of intimidation, of putting fear into people,” said Beth Uema, director of the National Association of Environmental Employees.

Speaking to a gathering of landowners at the end of April, Bolsonaro said he had directed Salles “to clean out” ICMBio and IBAMA. He also told the audience that he had instructed the minister to order employees to stop fining those committing environmental crimes, and rather merely inform lawbreakers about environmental regulations. Employees say the new policy is already being rigorously adhered to.

Bolsonaro conduct may be investigated

Lucas Furtado, the deputy attorney general for public prosecution at the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), the government’s accountability office, has asked the TCU to open an investigation into whether the administration’s management of the country’s environmental policy is jeopardizing the monitoring and control of illegal deforestation.

The request resulted from a visit to the Attorney General’s Office on May 15 by representatives of 50 NGOs, led by the Brazilian Institute of Environmental Protection (PROAM). According to the Furtado, the NGOs delivered a document that details a series of Bolsonaro government initiatives aimed at “destroying the current environmental policy.” The administration initiatives range from the overriding of technical advice, to the hounding of civil servants “with the clear objective of changing procedures.”

Furtado says it is the TCU’s obligation to examine the NGOs’ accusations, as it is the federal body responsible for the review of public expenditures, including spending by the government on the management of environmental agencies. If the accusation about the dismantling of these agencies is substantiated, the administration would be guilty of the misuse of resources to actively work against the nation’s environmental laws.

Threats to Amazon Fund also being scrutinized

Furtado cited the Bolsonaro administration’s actions regarding the Amazon Fund as a particular potential example of resource misuse. The Amazon Fund was founded in 2008 and created an effective international partnership with developed world nations, particularly Norway and Germany, who agreed to fund efforts to prevent, monitor and combat deforestation, and to promote preservation and sustainability in the Brazilian Amazon.

However, economic support from those donors (roughly $87 million annually), and the Amazon Fund itself, could come to an end soon if Environmental Minister Salles does as he has said he will, and decides without consulting the major foreign donors to dramatically overhaul the fund’s rules.

Among those unilateral rule changes would be a move by Brazil to curtail the role of NGOs in implementing deforestation programs. The Bolsonaro government also recently announced its intention to use some Amazon Fund resources to pay for the forcible purchase of land, for instance when the government wants to pay compensation to property owners with land within protected areas. The issue is often complex, as some of the land was occupied after the creation of the protected area was announced, and the use of the resources in this way has not been approved by international donors Norway and Germany.

In his request for an investigation, which has not yet been authorized by the TCU ministers, Furtado has asked the Federal Court of Accounts to look into allegations, made by Salles, that his ministry has found irregularities and inconsistencies in past grants made by the Amazon Fund. Salles has claimed publicly that NGOs, whose deforestation-monitoring and sustainability projects are supported by the Amazon Fund, failed to account for more than $1.2 billion in spending.

Furtado said an audit carried out previously by the TCU itself determined that, in general, the resources of the Amazon Fund were being used properly. He says Salles’s claim that the funds are being misused “may compromise the arrival of more funds, which may make it more difficult to protect the Amazon forest.”

As the administration pushes ahead rapidly to dismantle the country’s environmental agencies, policies and funding, there is growing consternation in Brazil and abroad. It seems likely that opposition will grow even further when the far-reaching consequences of Bolsonaro’s aggressive policies become apparent in the Amazon rainforest, and with indigenous and traditional rural populations.

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Featured image: IBAMA operation against illegal loggers in the Brazilian Amazon, courtesy of IBAMA.

The Tory Leadership election is all but decided after the first round of voting:

Although Boris Johnson is some way short of a majority of the parliamentary party votes, it is very hard to see anyone else overtaking him, and he only needs 105 votes to make it into the top two and go forward to the vote of all party members in any case. He also leads all opinion polling of conservative party members and so we can more or less take his election for granted at this stage, barring some spectacular snafu, which, given this is Boris, cannot be entirely discounted. To avert this possibility, his handlers have been keeping him on a tight rein, limiting his public appearances, and even giving him a slightly tidier haircut…

It is difficult to imagine a leader less likely to extract concessions from the EU than Boris Johnson who has built his career on writing falsehoods about the EU as Brussels correspondent for the Telegraph and in some ways set the entire Brexit bandwagon rolling. Jeremy Hunt comes a close second for comparing the EU to the Soviet Union to the chagrin of all the eastern European states which had actually had to live under Soviet Union hegemony.

Economic realists assume the EU will eventually come to a deal with him because it is in everyone’s economic interests to do so, but that is to ignore the fact that the EU is primarily a political construct to maintain peace on the continent and some economic price is worth paying if it maintains that political solidarity and social cohesion.

With the European Commission Brexit negotiating team having been disbanded, with the Commission itself going on holidays for the summer, and with a new Commission and other key EU roles due to be appointed in the next few weeks/months and not taking office until November, it is hard to see how any substantive negotiations can take place before the UK is due to leave next November.

Boris will probably prefer talking face to face with Prime Ministers in any case, but, again, it is difficult to see the European Council unanimously agreeing a further A.50 extension barring a “democratic event” such as a General Election which might produce a new and different government before then.

It now becomes a question of whether Angela Merkel and other key leaders are prepared to throw Ireland under a bus and agree to drop the “Irish Backstop” from the Withdrawal agreement in order to facilitate “an orderly Brexit”, or will they maintain solidarity with the member state most effected by Brexit?

I humbly suggest the EU might as well fold up its tent and go into oblivion if it is prepared to do so. Not because Ireland is all that important, but because political solidarity and social cohesion is what the EU is, and should be all about. It is the Brexiteers’ wet dream to hasten the break-up of the EU, so why should the EU facilitate them?

Of course some fudge is always possible. Brexiteers like to point out that a hard “no deal” Brexit will force the creation of a hard customs border in Ireland in any case, but for how long could the UK maintain a no deal stance? Strictly speaking, if there is no deal, UK airline will lose landing rights in EU airports and customs controls would severely impact EU/UK trade.

Perhaps that is precisely what is required to inject some reality into UK political discourse… Brexiteers like to extol the virtues of trade under WTO rules, but WTO rules don’t cover services – 70% of the UK economy – and there is far more to EU/UK integration and cooperation than is ever covered under WTO or Free trade Agreements.

None of these issues are likely to be resolved, one way or the other, by November, so absent a general election, a hard, no deal, Brexit seems the most likely scenario. Dominic Raab has even suggested proroguing parliament to push through a no deal Brexit over the heads of parliamentary objections, but could the UK constitution, unwritten as it is, survive such a flagrant attack on democracy?

The Telegraph (which pays dearly for Johnson’s weekly column) is running with a poll which suggests Johnson could win a 140 seat majority in Parliament if he called a general election as PM, so that could well be the strategy. That didn’t work out so well for Theresa May though, who had even larger projected majorities when she called the June 2017 election.

Corbyn would probably run on the basis of a Labour renegotiated Brexit deal subject to a second referendum which could unite soft Brexiteers and Remainers against a hard, no deal, Tory stance. However even if Johnson won an overall majority (which I consider unlikely), he would no longer be tied to the DUP, and he conspicuously refused to reassure them that he wouldn’t go with a N. Ireland only backstop which would overcome Brexiteer objections to GB being “trapped” in the Customs Union and Single Market and be in line with the EU and Irish negotiating position all along.

Either way, a general election would probably be the only way to overcome the current paralysis in UK politics and lead to a more consensual way forward.

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This article was originally published on European Tribune.

Frank Schnittger is editor of the European Tribune [Eurotrib.com] and have authored and published over 500 front page articles on the site mostly on European and Irish  topics and latterly mostly on Brexit.

India’s drift towards ethno-nationalism under Prime Minister Narendra Modi is one of the biggest developments of the century. This shift has seen a marked change in the country as it ditches features of liberal democracy and embraces a political ideology that accommodates exclusivism and racism.

This transformation has been evident in its stance towards Israel and Palestine. After decades of standing behind the Palestinian people, India under the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has tilted in Israel’s favour as the Hindu nationalism of India finds common cause with the ethno-nationalism of the Zionist state.

A glimpse of this realignment was witnessed at the UN last week when Bombay’s representative at the global body voted in favour of Israel over a decision to grant consultative status to Shahed. The Palestinian human rights NGO lost its bid to join the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) in a 28 in favour and 15 against vote by member countries.

Israeli diplomats were overjoyed. “Thank you #India for standing with @IsraelinUN and rejecting the request of terrorist organization “Shahed” to obtain the status of an observer in #UN. Together we will continue to act against terrorist organizations that intend to harm” tweeted Maya Kadosh, Israel’s deputy chief of mission in India.

The vote marks an unprecedented step in relations between the two countries. India’s history in the anti-colonial movement made the country a strong ally of the Palestinian cause. Previous Indian prime ministers, including the country’s founder and revered leader Mahatma Gandhi, had opposed the Zionist state believing it to be a colonial enterprise. The leader of the Indian independence movement against the British was strongly opposed to the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine, believing it to be an expression of ethno-nationalism that was inimical to the values of secular liberal democracy.

Under Modi, however, India has made a radical shift and aroused right-wing Hindu nationalists who are known for their anti-Muslim hatred.

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Featured image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (R) seen in January 2018 [Narendra Modi/Facebook]

Is Pompeo Angling to Interfere in British Politics?

June 16th, 2019 by Richard Silverstein

Apparently, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had quite a lively, candid conversation in a recent closed-door meeting with Jewish leaders. Among the invited guests, someone recorded Pompeo’s comments, and they were quite revealing.  

The Washington Post, which was given the tape, reported last week that Pompeo had conceded Trump’s “deal of the century” was perhaps “unexecutable” – wonk-speak for DOA.

The Trump official was being candid, while also telling his audience what many of them wanted and expected to hear. Unlike the rank-and-file of American Jewry, the communal leadership is almost uniformly right-wing and pro-Likud.

Israel certainly doesn’t want a peace deal – at least not one that any self-respecting Palestinian leader could accept – so maintaining the status quo is far preferable.

Third-class citizens

This comes with the proviso that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, if he wins the next election in September, could implement an annexation plan for major portions of the West Bank. This would be the death knell for the two-state solution.

There are US presidential candidates and liberal Zionists who are indignant at this prospect, but I’m not so sure. If you consider the issue tactically, annexation serves two useful purposes: to further paint Israel’s far-right government as racist advocates of apartheid, and to set the stage for demanding that Israel accept all Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza into a single state.

Of course, Likud and its partners would refuse this option, because they don’t want Israel to become a truly democratic state. Their goal is a Jewish supremacist state with non-Jews either ethnically cleansed or relegated to third-class citizens with abrogated rights, if any.

Regardless of what Netanyahu and his lackeys want, annexation would set the stage for a campaign demanding that Israel offer full citizenship to both its Palestinian citizens within Israel and residents of the occupied territories. Such a campaign could build upon the existing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, which advocates a similar set of goals.

It would give BDS much more clarity and momentum, because Israel would no longer be able to maintain the pretence of being a democratic state.

‘Too risky and too important’

One Jewish leader at the recent meeting asked Pompeo whether the US would recognise the danger that a victory for British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would present to British Jews, and “take on actions” if this were to become a reality. Though the question itself is alarming, Pompeo’s response was even more so.

“It could be that Mr Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best,” Pompeo said, to fervent applause from attendees, according to the Post report. “It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened.”

If we consider that Britain is one of our closest allies, it’s beyond alarming that the US would consider “pushing back” or “doing our level best” to ensure he doesn’t become prime minister. This is interference in another nation’s internal political processes, invoking the spectre of Russian meddling in the US 2016 election.

This provokes the question: what methods would the US use to make its displeasure known? Standard diplomatic measures, or more covert ones, verging on subversion and sabotage?

Pompeo’s implicit endorsement of meddling in British domestic politics reminds us of many similar episodes in US history, including Henry Kissinger’s collaboration with Augusto Pinochet to topple Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile, and Kermit Roosevelt’s plotting with Shah Reza Pahlavi to topple the Mossaddegh government in Iran, fuelling decades of mistrust and hostility between Tehran and Washington.

Electoral interference

Given the Trump administration’s disdain for conventional approaches to international relations and alliances, one has to anticipate the US would do the worst and interfere with the election is a manner that would outrage Britons if they knew.

Returning to the question posed by a community leader to Pompeo, why would any of these individuals believe it’s their role to ask the US government to interfere in the affairs of a foreign nation, purportedly on behalf of the Jewish citizens of that nation? Have British Jews requested such intervention? And even if they had, do we owe it to them to lobby for such interference?

Why would anyone believe that Corbyn becoming prime minister would make life “very difficult for Jews in the UK”, as the questioner suggested? Are we expecting pogroms, or mass outbreaks of antisemitic hostility in the streets? The very premise of the question is ridiculous and hysterical.

Standing on shaky ground

Think about the issue of dual loyalty: when Jews ask their government to intervene in the domestic politics of another country, they risk arousing the ire not just of the citizens of that country, but the ire of other Americans as well.

The average American has no interest in telling Britons which candidate or party they should favour in a domestic election. We’re standing on very shaky ground when we, as Jews, follow such a path.

Not to mention that in this case, it would essentially involve asking the US government to take out a British candidate because the UK Israel lobby deems him an enemy of Israel (which he isn’t).

While there has been a great deal of noise in the mostly anti-Corbyn media and on the right of his party about his alleged soft spot for antisemitism, it is not backed up by the evidence. Corbyn has opposed antisemitism throughout his career. The problem is his well-known support for Palestinian rights.

Labour’s antisemitism problem is much like society’s at large: it exists, but is not more virulent than in any other party or institution.

There is absolutely no indication that British Jews as a whole feel the need for any such US intervention, nor any indication that British Jews or the British electorate as a whole accept the charge that Labour (and Corbyn by extension) is riddled with antisemitism.

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Richard Silverstein writes the Tikun Olam blog, devoted to exposing the excesses of the Israeli national security state. His work has appeared in Haaretz, the Forward, the Seattle Times and the Los Angeles Times. He contributed to the essay collection devoted to the 2006 Lebanon war, A Time to Speak Out (Verso) and has another essay in the collection, Israel and Palestine: Alternate Perspectives on Statehood (Rowman & Littlefield) Photo of RS by: (Erika Schultz/Seattle Times)

“America’s declared policy should be ending Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution before its 40th anniversary…Recognizing a new Iranian regime in 2019 would reverse the shame of once seeing our diplomats held hostage for 444 days.” – John Bolton (January 15, 2018) [1]

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Coincidentally or not, America’s ‘maximum pressure’ campaign against Iran began within a month of John Bolton’s installment as National Security Advisor. On May 8th of 2018, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. was backing out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by the U.S. under President Barrack Obama along with the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Germany and the EU in July of 2015. Consequently, the sanctions imposed on Iran previous to the JCPOA were reinstated, and additional sanctions imposed by the end of the year.

In April of this year, the Trump Administration took the unprecedented step of declaring the Middle East country’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to be a terrorist organization.

Two weeks later, the Trump Administration ended the waivers it had extended to other countries which had to that point allowed them to escape sanctions for purchasing Iranian oil. The aim of this manoeuvre being to strangle the Iranian economy by preventing its ability to profit from the sale of its main source of revenue.

Two weeks after that, Bolton announced the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group and Air Force Bombers to the Middle East as part of an effort to “send a clear and unmistakable message to the Iranian regime that any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force.”

The following week, four tankers were attacked in the Persian Gulf. Bolton and Secretary of State Pompeo blamed Iran for the attacks.

America’s choke-hold on Iran’s economy continued to tighten with further sanctions on May 8th of this year, the anniversary of Trump’s JCPOA pull-out.

Two weeks after that, President Trump ordered 1,500 additional troops to the Middle East, and was able to declare an emergency over Iran, allowing the White House to circumvent Congress, and move ahead with arms sales to allies Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.

By early June, the administration started sending out conciliatory signals. The President indicated he, unlike his National Security Advisor, was not seeking regime change in Iran, and shortly afterwards, Secretary of State Pompeo said the U.S. was prepared to engage the Iranians “without preconditions.”

Then, on Thursday June 13, two ships in the Gulf of Oman were fired upon. U.S. officials including Trump are pointing to Iran as the guilty party, although Iranian officials categorically deny the accusation.

Is the world now on a trajectory toward war? Perhaps even a world war? This daunting possibility is at the heart of this week’s Global Research News Hour radio program.

First up, we hear from prominent Canadian intellectual Michel Chossudovsky. Professor Chossudovsky, while not completely ruling out the possibility of a “bloody nose” operation or other forms of economic warfare, argues that the U.S. cannot expect to fight and win a conventional Iraq style conflict in light of developments in strategic regional alliances over the last decade. Chossudovsky explains his reasoning in the first half hour.

Our second guest, Yves Engler, brings a Canadian angle to the conversation by outlining the enmity America’s northern neighbour has expressed toward the Islamic Republic and that has not changed substantially since the more ‘progressive’ Trudeau Liberals took power in 2015. Engler details the factors influencing Canadian policy and how Canadians can hope to redirect relations in a more positive and peaceful direction.

Finally, the noted journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar shares his insights into America’s shifting attitudes toward the Iranian government, the recent attacks on ships in the Gulf of Oman, and what these developments say about divisions within the Trump Administration, and the prospect of a bloody war and economic depression rivalling anything the world has seen in the 21st century. (See transcript below.)

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa and the award-winning author of 11 books including his most recent America’s Long War Against Humanity. He is also the founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization and editor of Global Research.

Yves Engler is one of Canada’s foremost Canadian foreign policy critics and dissidents. He is the author of nine books on Canadian foreign policy including The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy (2009), and his most recent, Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada. His articles have appeared at rabble.ca, canadiandimension.com, and on his own site yvesengler.com.

Pepe Escobar is a veteran Brazilian Journalist, geopolitical analyst and Correspondent at large for Asia Times based out of Hong Kong. He has written for Tom Dispatch, Sputnik News, and Press TV, and RT. His articles appear in a number of websites including Global Research, and is a frequent commentator on radio and tv.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 264)

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Transcript – Interview with Pepe Escobar, June 14, 2019.

Global Research: I want to refer to a recent article you mentioned about a devastating hammer that Iran can use against the United States in the event of an overt attack. And the US knows it. What have your sources disclosed about the Strait of Hormuz and Iran’s capacity to fight back against an attack?

Pepe Escobar: Exactly. Look, I think the last article I published about it was after the Bilderberg meetings in fact. Because I was asked to investigate about at least some of the stuff they were discussing inside Bilderberg. I had a good banking source in fact. They did not disclose much. You know very well at Global Research how Bilderberg works–

GR: Chatham House Rules

PE: Exactly – you betcha. But I got some interesting information about how they were seeing the results of the European parliamentary elections as a sort of victory because now everyone in Europe is more or less the center-left and the center-right and the Greens are more or less on the same page, but from the point of view of Bilderbergers, there was a victory.

But then, I was asking, look I’m sure they discuss about China and Iran and all that, and my source was saying look, I cannot talk about this for obvious reasons. But then I got information from someone who’s above Bilderberg, if you can put it this way. This is one of my best sources for years, in fact. American, the only thing I can say is American. It’s not European, it’s not Asian.

And he told me look, I know what they discussed about Iran because the key information is actually on Trump’s desk. We all know that Trump doesn’t read anything, but this information came supported by Wall Street guys. And I’m talking about the big guys. Blackstone, Sumner Redstone, Jamie Dimon from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs people including Goldman Sachs projections, you name it. So, Trump must have seen it at least, or at least somebody must have read it to him in two or three minutes.

And I had written about this before. Now more…the studies are more detailed. It’s about if, essentially, if the Strait of Hormuz is shut down, whatever the reason, it could be a false flag, like most probably what happened yesterday with the two tankers, the Norwegian tanker and the Japanese tanker transporting petrochemical products back to Asia, was not in the Strait of Hormuz, it was more on the open sea and the Gulf of Oman. If it was in the Strait of Hormuz, it would be much, much worse than what happened yesterday.

So the projections, including Goldman Sachs projections, if this happens and the Strait is closed, whatever the reason, because mostly insurers would not risk ensuring any vessel leaving the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, and then further afield, the price of the barrel of oil in less than 24 hours would be over 100, after one day or two, 200, after a week, 500, and there is some projections that after a while we would even reach 1000. And more than that, the implosion of Casino Capitalism as we know it, especially because of the…

And then we have different numbers. The derivatives, especially oil derivatives and other derivatives as well. There are all sorts of numbers concerning how many derivatives are out there, from 500 billion dollars, which is the official Bank of International Settlements figure to 2.5 quadrillion dollars, in fact. So, it gets very complicated. I had to fight with the… with Asia Times to say, look, you should publish all the figures, and they prefer to go for the lowest estimate. And one of my sources told me no, this is the… Swiss bankers know this figure, implying more or less his source was from the Bank of International Settlements, and he’s adamant that it’s 2.5 quadrillion dollars. So this means that the whole western economy would collapse in a matter of literally nanoseconds.

So, this was in my story for Asia Times. I also wrote about this for Consortium News and more, and for the past month or so, I discussed this with Iranians but not directly with the Revolutionary Guards. People who have access to IRGC information.

And always the IRGC are very secretive. They know, and they do have the necessary means to shut down the Strait, whichever way they want. And that’s why I got from my Iranian sources this time, they are so sure that the Americans won’t try anything stupid, because the Pentagon knows what Iran is capable of militarily. They know about all those missiles lining up the northern shore of the Persian Gulf on the Iranian side pointed at everything that moves in the Strait of Hormuz and also in the Gulf of Oman.

And that was the main reason that Trump wants to talk. And this was discussed at Bilderberg, every single thing that I’m telling you. Why? Because Mike Pompeo, at the last minute, scheduled that stop in Switzerland, especially in Bern, to talk to the president of Switzerland, but he also talked to the people at Bilderberg afterwards. Because Bilderberg was in Montreux, not very far. He went to Montreux as well. And they talk, and I’m sure they talk obviously no leaks whatsoever about it, but obviously Pompeo had to talk especially with Europeans who are terrified about this, and some Europeans knew about this information, because this information was circulated by bankers to European bankers as well. Bilderberg, everything connected. So this was the reason why Pompeo actually went to Switzerland at that time. This was an unscheduled stop; we have to remember this all the time.

So… but still we have the major problem on the table, which resurfaced yesterday. Are the neocons around Trump playing their last card to force him to do anything on a military side against Iran? Because if it’s…I would say we still don’t have a mega smoking gun, but it’s more or less sure that what happened yesterday was a false flag. We still don’t know exactly how it worked. But if that’s the case, and Trump saying today, no if they close the Strait of Hormuz it’s not going to be for long, which is a diversionist tactic, he knows, he should know by now what that would mean in terms of a disaster for the global economy.

So now we are way beyond this already, we are in a horrible stage where the United States has painted itself into a corner, saying, Pompeo saying, on the record, that to Iran they’re responsible without examining any evidence at all. Today, very, very important, earlier today, since yesterday and earlier today, in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, guess who was in the same room? Putin, Modi, Xi, Imran Khan, and as an observer, Rouhani, President of Iran.

And obviously, they were discussing Iran. It was not on the final statement because Iran was an observer to the SCO. But they discussed, as far as, from my sources told me, it hasn’t leaked a lot so far, but they did discuss Iran, and Rouhani made a solemn promise, which was brilliant in geo-economic terms, to all SCO member nations: You’re going to have the… your companies, from any one of you, India, Pakistan, Russia, China, all the central Asians, all of your companies that invest the Iranian market, you’re going to have the best possible conditions anywhere. So, there’s going to be a lot of foreign investment from the SCO, companies from SCO member nations in the Iranian economy.

So, Iran, on the diplomatic side, they are doing very well. On the military side, as far as I know from my Iranian sources who know more or less in detail what the IRGC is doing, they tell me, look, they don’t care anymore, whatever the Americans say. And this comes straight from the top. from Ayatollah Khamenei when he says that it’s absolutely pointless to talk with the Americans. And Zarif is saying in a more diplomatic way to Ministers of Foreign Relations everywhere and leaders everywhere, including of course Putin and Xi. “We are ready for anything that happens, we want diplomacy of course, but if they ratchet up the pressure, we will ratchet up pressure from our side.” It’s getting to a very, very dangerous stalemate now, Michael.

GR: Yeah, I was wondering if you could address a point related… I guess you could call it palace intrigue in Washington. Because it’s been suggested by fellow Consortium News contributor of yours, John Kiriakou, that John Bolton’s days as national security advisor are numbered, given all the unwelcome provocations he’s directing at Iran. At the same time, the United States, Trump, presumably doesn’t want to have an unwinnable war on the eve of a major US presidential election campaign, nor does he want to bring down the global capitalist deck of cards. So, how… What options does he have? How can Trump avoid escalation with Iran without losing face at this point?

PE: Exactly, that’s a very good question. John’s information is very, very good. Because it ties with the information that I have from people in New York who do business with Trump. They told me the same thing. He’s absolutely furious, in fact, with the way he was painted into a corner by Bolton especially. Pompeo not so much. Pompeo is expected to go around blasting Iran. But Bolton is actually trying to implement something practical or false flag style on the ground. And now, Trump himself is painting himself into a corner. He is already accusing Iran of what happened in the Gulf of Oman on the record. How is he going to backtrack from that? Of course, now he cannot backtrack without just saying oh, look I was wrong, okay, here’s another tweet, I changed my mind!

So, it’s…what we know for sure is that he doesn’t want any kind of military scenario because he seems to know what that would imply. Considering the IRGC, their force, what they have, the missiles, and of course the financial angle, which is the derivatives crisis. At the same time, they keep ratcheting up the pressure under the so-called self-described maximum pressure campaign. And there’s no possibility of dialogue because this, what happened yesterday, was… when Prime Minister Shinzō Abe was talking to Khameini in Khameini’s office in Tehran, trying to defuse the whole situation, Japan as the intermediary, the messenger between Washington and Tehran, and this thing happens, this is completely cra– and anyone with an IQ higher than 12 can figure out that this doesn’t make any sense at all. Why would Iran attack a Japanese-owned tanker… the minute their prime minister is talking to the leader of the… This is completely absurd.

GR: And talking to the prime minister on behalf of Trump.

PE: On behalf of Trump – exactly, exactly! He had a letter. He had a letter which probably was sent by team Trump to Ayatollah Khameini. Khameini, from the beginning, he said look there’s nothing to talk about. In fact it’s fantastic. Somebody came up with two different pictures. Abe had the letter with him, he put it on the table when they were talking, and after a while he removed the letter from the table. A graphic sign that Khameini was not ready to read anything written by team Trump.

GR: Well, Pepe, I wish we had more time to discuss this, but, I know we’ve both got to go, but I want to thank you for lending your very knowledgeable voice to this critical discussion on breaking events.

PE: I hope this is helpful for everybody.

GR: We’ve been speaking with geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar. He joined us from Paris.

-end of interview –

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Notes:

  1. John Bolton (January 15, 2018), ‘Beyond the Iran Nuclear Deal: U.S. Policy should be to end the Islamic Republic before its 40th anniversary’, Wall Street Journal; https://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-iran-nuclear-deal-1516044178
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The Eurasian future that President Putin articulated during his keynote speech at the SCO is made possible by Pakistan’s leading role in this vision.

President Putin’s keynote speech at the SCO was brief but concise, laying out Russia’s envisioned future for Eurasia during its new year-long presidency of the organization. His address comprised two main parts, with the first one emphasizing that “the fight against terrorism and extremism remains among our top priorities” while the second spoke strongly about the need for enhancing economic ties between the bloc’s members. Putin made it a point to say that “the developments in Afghanistan require special attention”, while also reiterating what he said at the Belt & Road Forum in April concerning the “promising potential in integrating the Eurasian Economic Union with China’s Belt and Road project with a future aim of building a larger Eurasian partnership”. The specific manner in which the interconnected issues of security and development complement one another in Putin’s Eurasian vision is made possible by Pakistan’s integral role in the articulated paradigm.

The Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership has seen both countries conduct joint anti-terrorist exercises in order to prepare for tackling any adverse scenarios that might arise from Daesh’s presence in Afghanistan, which has reassured decision makers in both countries after their militaries shared their crucial experiences fighting against this unconventional threat in Syria and the tribal areas respectively. In addition, it was through Pakistan’s behind-the-scenes diplomatic facilitation that the Taliban unprecedentedly agreed to travel to the capital of their predecessors’ former Russian foes in a bid to revive the stalled Afghan peace process, with these two outcomes serving to satisfy the security half of Putin’s Eurasian vision. As for the developmental one of integrating the Eurasian Union with BRI, the latter’s flagship project of CPEC greatly contributed to Pakistan becoming the global pivot state and therefore being indispensable to the success of Putin’s plans.

This geostrategic fact obviously wasn’t lost on Putin, who chummed it up with his Pakistani counterpart all throughout the summit, with both leaders seen chatting and laughing together the entire time. Putin and Khan have a common interest in sports, too, which helped them bond much quicker than usual. In addition, the Russian leader is known to understand English and even be able to speak it pretty well too, only using an interpreter for formal occasions in order to ensure that he doesn’t accidentally miss anything important, which made it easier for him to exchange casual impromptu comments with PM Khan. The visible friendship between these two heads of state that was proudly on display during the SCO Summit will go a long way towards strengthening the Russian-Pakistani Strategic Partnership in the future, which in turn will enable Putin to actualize his Eurasian vision and accelerate the emergence of the Multipolar World Order.

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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.

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NATO terrorists murdered the Grand Mufti’s son.  They murdered the Minister of Reconciliation’s[1] son, all with a view to corrupting the Syrian government and to bending its will.  It didn’t work.

NATO terrorists murdered about 25,000 innocent people in Aleppo and Damascus, injuring and crippling another 40,000.[2] Aleppo and Damascus are now vibrant and rebuilding. The terrorists failed to occupy and destroy these ancient cities.

NATO terrorists stole everything they could steal from Aleppo, and shipped the stolen machinery to Turkey. What they couldn’t steal, they destroyed, immediately disemploying about tens of thousands of desperate people. Aleppo’s industrial base is now being reborn and rebuilt.

NATO coalition warplanes and their allied terror proxies destroyed about 80% of Raqqa.  Coalition planes have, since the beginning of Operation Inherent Resolve, targeted infrastructure, as have NATO terrorists.[3]  They target schools and hospitals and power plants and water sources.  They target and destroy everything and anything that sustains life and a civilized country. They have not succeeded in bending the will of Syria and its peoples. But that remains their goal.

More recently, SDF terrorists have been burning Syrian food crops. The goals are the same. This, and the West’s on-going economic warfare against Syria and its peoples, is also likely to fail.  But desperation will corrupt some.

Reportedly, Saudi’s Gulf Affairs Minister, Thamer Sabhan, Joel Rubin, US State Department Assistant Secretary for House Affairs, and Ambassador William Roebuk, have been meeting SDF officials and Arab tribes, as the crops burn.

Laith Marouf reports,

For the past month, Kurdish Contras in Syria implemented a scorched earth campaign against Arab and Assyrian farm lands, with 100s of acres of crops burnt to the ground in an effort to force the majority population to accept Kurdish minority rule and occupation by the Empire. Yesterday, as a follow up to this campaign, Saudi sent an envoy who has toured the areas along with the US ambassador offering money to Arab and Assyrian tribal leaders, now hungry and financially ruined after their annual harvest was destroyed, in return for their allegiance against their homeland. [4]

So here we see again Empire’s strategy of imposing depredations with a view to creating desperation, and exploiting the ensuing opportunities for corruption.  All of the strategies amount to Supreme International War Crimes, and Empire, clothed in impunity, is even now planning similar operations against Iran and its peoples.

Empire is imposing global war and poverty on humanity, as “International law” bends to its will, and the U.N sighs in exasperation.

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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] Mark Taliano, “Canada Supports War Crimes: Endorses Terrorism and Destabilization in Syria.” Global Research, 14 January, 2017. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-supports-war-crimes-endorses-terrorism-and-destabilization-in-syria/5568413) Accessed 15 June, 2019

[2] Mark Taliano,“Syria’s Children: ‘Condemned to Live’, Shackled by the Scars of US-NATO Terrorism.” Global Research. 22 April, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/syrias-children-condemned-to-live-shackled-by-the-scars-of-us-nato-terrorism/5637242)Accessed 15 June, 2019

[3] Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Air Strikes against Syria: Who are the War Criminals? Who is Supporting Al Qaeda? Russia or America?” (https://www.globalresearch.ca/air-strikes-against-syria-who-are-the-war-criminals-who-is-supporting-al-qaeda-russia-or-america/5548799) Accessed 15 June, 2019

[4] Laith Marouf, Facebook Post, 13 June, 2019.


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The tensions continued to grow around the Persian Gulf following a cruise missile strike on Saudi Arabia’s Abha International Airport carried out by the Houthis on June 12.

On June 13, Marshall Islands-flagged Front Altair and Panama-flagged Kokuka Courageous oil tankers were rocked by explosions in the Gulf of Oman.

After the incident, Iranian state media reported that Iranian sailors had rescued all 44 crew members of the tankers. This statement contradicts to CENTCOM claims that said that 21 mariners from the M/V Kokuka Courageous, were rescued by USS Bainbridge.

There are no confirmed details regarding what actually happened. Mainstream media outlets reported different scenarios that caused the incident: from a torpedo attack to naval mines. Nonetheless, the common point of all these speculations was that Iran was somehow responsible for the incident.

Later, U.S. State Secretary Mike Pompeo directly accused Iran of being involved in the supposed attack.

“This is only the latest in the series of attacks instigated by the Republic of Iran and its surrogates against American allies and interests. They should be understood in the context of four years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations,” Pompeo claimed.

He added that the attack was done in the framework of attempts to end “successful maximum pressure campaign” of the US sanctions. However, it remains unclear how such moves may help to Iran in this task.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif labeled the incident as “suspicious” hinting that this may have been a provocation. Another, factor contributing to this version is that the incident happened during a visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Iran. The Kokuka Courageous is owned by Japanese company Kokuka Sangyo Ltd.

On the previous day, a fire broke out on an Iranian oil platform of the South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf. The fire was subsequently contained and no fatalities were reported. Iranian authorities are investigating its cause.

These incidents come one month after four tankers were damaged off the coast of the UAE. After it, US National Security Adviser John Bolton said that naval mines “almost certainly from Iran” were used to attack the ships back then.

This series of mysterious incidents affecting oil tankers and facilities near the Persian Gulf as well as increased Houthis attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure have drastically increased tensions between key powers operating in the region. If the situation develops in the same direction, the Persian Gulf may become a new hot point in the Middle East.

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I really cannot begin to fathom how stupid you would have to be to believe that Iran would attack a Japanese oil tanker at the very moment that the Japanese Prime Minister was sitting down to friendly, US-disapproved talks in Tehran on economic cooperation that can help Iran survive the effects of US economic sanctions.

The Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous was holed above the water line. That rules out a torpedo attack, which is the explanation being touted by the neo-cons.

The second vessel, the Front Altair, is Norwegian owned and 50% Russian crewed (the others being Filipinos). It is owned by Frontline, a massive tanker leasing company that also has a specific record of being helpful to Iran in continuing to ship oil despite sanctions.

It was Iran that rescued the crews and helped bring the damaged vessels under control.

That Iran would target a Japanese ship and a friendly Russian crewed ship is a ludicrous allegation. They are however very much the targets that the USA allies in the region – the Saudis, their Gulf Cooperation Council colleagues, and Israel – would target for a false flag. It is worth noting that John Bolton was meeting with United Arab Emirates ministers two weeks ago – both ships had just left the UAE.

The USA and their UK stooges have both immediately leapt in to blame Iran. The media is amplifying this with almost none of the scepticism which is required. I cannot think of a single reason why anybody would believe this particular false flag. It is notable that neither Norway nor Japan has joined in with this ridiculous assertion.

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Trump Regime Lurching Toward Possible War on Iran?

June 15th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

The US is an aggressor state, its rage to control other nations, their resources and populations the greatest threat to world peace and stability.

Waging war requires selling it to manufacture public consent or at least prevent strong opposition.

Over a century ago, publisher William Randolph Hearst hyped the Big Lie about Spain sinking the battleship Maine, ignoring a coal bunker explosion for what happened.

Hearst told his Havana illustrator: “You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war.” To this day, Big Lies convince the public to go along with what wouldn’t likely be possible otherwise.

It’s been this way since Harry Truman’s aggression against North Korea to the present day under both right wings of the nation’s war party, especially post-9/11.

 

Since its 1979 revolution, Iran has been a prime US target for regime change by possible war if other tough tactics fail to topple its legitimate government.

Trump regime war on the country by other means rages, aiming to crush its economy and immiserate its people.

The strategy is highly unlikely to create an internal uprising against its ruling authorities or get them to bend to Washington’s will. What hasn’t worked for the past 40 years isn’t working now and won’t likely ahead.

Plan B is war if Trump regime hardliners dare go this far against a nation able hit back hard against US regional targets, Israel, the Saudis and UAE if they ally with US aggression, along with blocking the strategically important Strait of Hormuz, through which over one-third of world seaborne oil shipments pass, if prevented from selling its own resources.

False flags have been a US tradition from the mid-19th century against Mexico to the present day.

Based on Big Lies, they’re manufactured pretexts for militarism, using the US global empire of bases as platforms for naked aggression against nations threatening no one, along with domestic repression through police state laws, eroding freedoms en route to eliminating them altogether on the phony pretext of protecting national security.

The US global war OF terror, not on it, is a key part of its strategy for gaining control over other nations worldwide — Iran a key US target for regime change to gain control over its vast energy reserves, eliminate Israel’s main regional rival, and curb Sino/Russian Middle East influence.

Incidents in the Gulf of Oman and similar regional ones weeks earlier were Trump regime pretexts for enlisting world support against Iran — based on Big Lies.

No credible evidence suggests Iranian responsibility for what happened. Yet it’s blamed anyway by Trump regime hardliners.

On Thursday, CENTCOM used easily manipulated video footage to claim Iranian mines were responsible for damaging the Kokuka Courageous tanker, one of two vessels damaged in the Gulf of Oman.

On Friday, Yutaka Katada, president of the company owning the tanker refuted the claim, saying there’s a “high chance” that a “flying object” struck the ship, not a mine as the Trump regime claimed.

“I do not think there was a time bomb or an object attached to the side of the ship,” he stressed, adding: “The crew told us something came flying at the ship, and they found a hole. Then some crew witnessed the second shot.”

No credible evidence backs the Trump regime claim about Iranian responsibility for what happened.

Aside from Britain sticking to the fabricated Trump regime claim, other European countries are dubious about its accuracy.

On Friday, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the CENTCOM

“video is not enough. We can understand what is being shown, sure, but to make a final assessment, this is not enough for me.”

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini’s senior advisor Nathlie Tocci expressed a similar view, saying:

“Before we blame someone, we need credible evidence,” adding:

Claiming Iran attacked a Japanese-owned tanker while its Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran on a diplomatic mission “is not an especially rational thing to do.”

Operations Wolverines (OW) describes itself as follows:

“Deep State Denizen. COGSEC. IO. Critical thinking. Narrative Hijacking. High Brow Memetics. Fusion Analysis. Disruption Operations.”

In response to CENTCOM’s dubious video, falsely claiming an Iranian mine struck the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous tanker, OW tweeted the following:

“I’ve reviewed 100+ hours of BDA and I can tell you this, the Navy edited this video and it’s now misleading.”

Limpet Mine Removal 13 JUN 19

“Missing: data (skew angle, speed, GEO coordinates, etc), color (converted to black and white), platform, pilot commentary, and it’s too zoomed in.”

On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif tweeted the following:

“That the US immediately jumped to make allegations against Iran—w/o a shred of factual or circumstantial evidence—only makes it abundantly clear that the #B_Team is moving to a #PlanB: Sabotage diplomacy—including by @AbeShinzo—and cover up its #EconomicTerrorism against Iran.”

Russia’s Foreign Ministry responded to Thursday’s Gulf of Oman incident saying:

“Moscow resolutely condemns the attacks whoever might be behind them,” adding:

“We think it necessary to refrain from quick conclusions. It is inadmissible to place responsibility for the incident on anyone until a thorough and unbiased international investigation is over.”

“We are worried over the tensions in the Gulf of Oman. We take note of deliberate efforts to whip up tensions, which are largely encouraged by the United States’ Iranophobic policy.”

As of now, the Trump regime failed to get world community support for what appears to have been a Thursday false flag to blame Iran for what no evidence suggests it had anything to do with.

It’s likely just a matter of time before something similar occurs again, pushing things closer to war on Iran in a part the world already boiling from US aggression.

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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: National Security Advisor John Bolton in April, 2018.  By Evan El-Amin/Shutterstock

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It is known that the US has for long had a comprehensive and combined plan with Israel to attack Iranian targets with huge, non-nuclear, bunker-busting, 10 ton, GBU-43  air-blast bombs capable of destroying the deepest underground  installations – these are the most powerful non-nuclear ordnance pieces ever produced – but first the Trump-Netanyahu war-plan needed a credible excuse.

It is also known that the Israeli military have been an integral part of that US plan to first cripple the Iranian economy with global oil sanctions and then to initiate an air and sea attack against the Iranian state and its people.

But first, a credible excuse was required.  That excuse was orchestrated jointly by a belligerent Trump and Netanyahu, this week, when two oil tankers were structurally damaged by limpet mines, off the coast of Oman – subsequent to a similar action the previous week – and the sabotage immediately blamed by US Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, without any evidence whatsoever, upon Iran.  However, the state actor concerned was, almost certainly, not Iran but very probably the Israeli navy with its state-of-the-art, German-built, nuclear-armed submarines, covertly patrolling the deep waters of the Gulf.

Iran, of course, unlike Israel, has no nuclear weapons of mass destruction but does have a nuclear-power program and it is these non-military installations that the combined forces of the US and Israel are determined to destroy at any cost in order to further cripple Iran’s civil infrastructure in addition to enforcing a global ban on its oil so as to decimate its economy and to force, yet another, regime change.

The deliberate sabotaging of four shipping tankers in the Gulf and the too obvious accusations against Iran, indicate that US-Israeli plans for a combined attack against the Iranian state are now fairly imminent. And that fact should make the world take notice because such unwarranted and unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state could very easily escalate into a global conflict.  These are very dangerous times, indeed, with an unpredictable and unstable US President determined to instigate a war in the Middle East with a committed partner who has long wanted to destroy Iran in its own bid for regional dominance.

If the conflict materialises and there is an attack against Iran by combined US-Israeli forces, then oil prices could double overnight with devastating global consequences upon all but America who is self-sufficient in oil. That would be reflected in stock-markets worldwide and could lead to a global economic recession in which Europe would suffer disproportionately.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom government should carefully reconsider and recalibrate its response. Much of its future could depend upon it, and its rushed endorsement of unfounded US-Israeli accusations might well prove, in hindsight, to have been unwisely premature.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“I was the CIA director. We lied, We Cheated, We Stole”.  – Mike Pompeo

It appears that Mike Pompeo has a hard time kicking his old habits.  He appears to be as smug about lying as a CIA operative as he is as Secretary of State.  Categorically blaming the Iranians for the recent oil attack tankers has left allies scratching their heads; and perhaps leaving foes thinking: “Thank God my enemy is so stupid”!

On June 13, 2019, as Ayatollah Khamenei was holding talks in Tehran with Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, two oil tankers carrying oil to Japan were attacked.  As investigations into the incident were just beginning, Pompeo had already concluded his assessment and had it ready for the press.  Much to the audible surprise of the world, and without any proof or supporting documents, he laid the blame firmly at Iran’s feet citing “intelligence”.

To his relief, in no time at all, US officials claimed that they had managed to get their hands on videos and pictures. They presented a grainy video alleging to show an Iranian navy boat removing mines from the damaged Japanese ship. It is easy to understand why the grainy video’s existence was necessary.

Precisely a month prior, on May 13thfour oil tankers were damaged in the region. The United States blamed Iran without any evidence.  Saudi Arabia followed suit.  The rest of the world was skeptical and doubts floated about the accuracy of US claims.  This time around, Pompeo was saved by the video – although not for long! The Japanese vessel owner disputed the presence of mines damaging his vessel (as suggested in the blurry video).

Even allies were skeptical.  To enforce its position and allegations against Iran,  the Trump administration made its argument  based on misinterpreting what Iran had said about the oil embargo. Following Trump’s announcement on April 22nd that America would not renew US waivers for countries which imported oil from Iran, in essence, imposing an oil embargo, on April 25 the Iranian government retorted by condemning America’s illegal demands and stated that no other country could take its share of the oil market.

The Trump team would like us to believe that what Iran meant was the sabotage of the oil tankers. This is far from true. Iran was referring to its legal right under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) which legally allows it to impede the passage of oil shipments through its territorial waters – the Strait of Hormuz.

While UNCLOS stipulates that vessels can exercise the right of innocent passage, and coastal states should not impede their passage, under the UNCLOS framework, a coastal state [Iran] can block ships from entering its territorial waters if the passage of the ships harms “peace, good order or security” of said state, as the passage of such ships would no longer be deemed “innocent”[i].

Given Iran’s recourse to international law, American diplomacy at its all time low, and the rally behind Iran – if only verbally – it makes absolutely no sense for Iran to blow up oil tankers and turn the world opinion in favor of  Trump and his the warmongering advisors – Pompeo and Bolton.

But tankers were blown up.   What other motivation were there?

Perhaps NOPEC – No to Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act.   In February, House passed a Bill that would cripple OPEC.   The Bill would prohibit OPEC from coordinating production and influencing prices.  While the Bill was said to provide a useful leverage for the White House, Persian Gulf Arab states sent their warnings to Wall Street.

On April 5th, Saudi Arabia even threatened to drop Dollar for oil trades in order to discourage US from passing the NOPEC Bill.  The Saudi threat came on the heels of UAE cautions the prior month that if such bill passed, it would in effect, break up OPEC.

Perhaps this was the reason behind Saudi Arabia’s lack of cooperation.   After Trump announced his Iran oil embargo, a senior US administration official assured the world at large that Trump was confident Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates would fill any gap left in the oil market. He was mistaken. On April 29th, the Saudi Energy Minister, Khaled el-Falih made it clear that Saudi Arabia would not “rush to boost oil supply to make up for a loss of Iranian crude”.

After the May 13th incident, apparently America’s accusations did not carry any weight around the world, but they did have an impact on the jittery Saudis.   On June 3rd, Bloomberg reported that over the last month, the Saudis  raised their oil production to replace lost Iranian oil.    The oil market was satisfied and America could continue to put pressure on friend and foe to stop buying Iranian oil – there would be no shortages.

What then explains the second tanker incidents of June 13th?

Perhaps the motive is two-fold.  Firstly, the United States would reinforce its unfounded allegations that Iran is a ‘bad actor’ and discourage and dissuade the international community from cooperation with Iran.  And secondly, the hike in the price of oil as a result of the tanker attacks no doubt sent a sigh of relief to shale oil producers in the United States. A drop in oil prices would greatly harm or bankrupt US shale-focused, debt-dependent producers.

Not on Trump’s watch.

Although many states in the US and some countries in the world have banned shale oil production due to its adverse effects on the environment, specifically water, the United States’ goal is to be the biggest producer and supplier of oil depending on its shale oil production.  Currently, according to the latest US Energy Information Administration (EIA), the United States is a net importer of oil.   With low oil prices, a halt or slowing of shale, the trend would continue to be an importer.

Having Saudi Arabia cower to US demands, demonizing Iran, intimidating allies and non-allies with fear of conflict in the region in order to press further demands on Iran, increase in the price of oil, and the weapons that would be purchased by US allies in the nervous neighborhood, seems like a win-win situation for America.  For now.

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Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy. she is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[i] Martin Wahlisch, The Yale Journal of International Law, March 2012, citing UNCLOS, supranote 12, , art. 19, para1, and art. 25, para1.

Featured image is from High North News

Laboratory tests conducted nearly 20 years ago that have gone largely unreported found high levels of the toxic fluorinated chemical known as PFAS a number of popular supermarket foods.

The tests were commissioned by 3M, the giant chemical company that first manufactured the two most notorious members of the PFAS family, PFOS and PFOA. Last year, 3M paid $850 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the state of Minnesota that showed the company knew for decades about the health hazards of PFAS but hid that information from the public.

According to documents published in June 2001, a 3M-commissioned study found PFOA and PFOS in samples of beef, pork, chicken, milk, green beans, eggs, bread and other foods purchased in six cities in Alabama, Florida, Georgia and Tennessee. EWG first cited the 3M study in a Dec., 2002 petition to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, urging inclusion of PFOA and PFOS in the agency’s National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals.

EPA Screenshot

The chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, weakened childhood immunity and other diseases, were detected in six of 11 food types tested. PFOA was found in four of 18 samples of milk, and PFOS or PFOA in three of 18 samples of ground beef. PFOA was also found in samples of green beans, apples and bread. Levels detected ranged from 500 to 14,700 parts per trillion, or ppt.

Last week, EWG and the Environmental Defense Fund released results of recent tests by the Food and Drug Administration that found PFAS in food, including meat, seafood and dairy products; sweet potatoes; pineapples; leafy greens; and chocolate cake with icing. Those tests found PFOS in nearly half of the samples of meat and seafood, with levels between 134 and 865 ppt, but the FDA had not publicly disclosed the results.

On Tuesday, Rob Bilott, an attorney who has represented tens of thousands of victims of PFAS contamination and who led the legal battle that exposed decades of deception by 3M and other chemical companies, sent a letter along with the 3M study to an FDA official. Bilott asked whether the FDA was aware of the 2001 study.

“Please also confirm the extent to which FDA (or any other agency) has assessed the impact of the American public having been exposed to such levels of PFAS in food for such an extended period of time, without their knowledge,” Bilott wrote to Timothy Begley of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

EWG Senior Scientist David Andrews, Ph.D., said the 2001 study is more confirmation that Americans have long been exposed to PFAS in food. The Centers for Disease Control Prevention say that virtually everyone in the country has PFAS in their bodies.

“PFAS chemicals have contaminated the drinking water for at least 19 million Americans, but we know that food is one of the main pathways of exposure,” said Andrews. “The FDA needs to come clean and tell us the full extent of PFAS contamination in the American food supply and how long it’s been going on. More importantly, the agency must take immediate action to protect public health from these hazardous compounds.”

The Intercept’s Sharon Lerner, who has chronicled the PFAS contamination saga and the role 3M, DuPont and others have played in covering it up, reported on the 2001 study today.

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First published in November 2018

A second round of tests commissioned by the Environmental Working Group found the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer in every sample of popular oat-based cereal and other oat-based food marketed to children. These test results fly in the face of claims by two companies, Quaker and General Mills, which have said there is no reason for concern. This is because, they say, their products meet the legal standards.

Yet almost all of the samples tested by EWG had residues of glyphosate at levels higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety. The EWG findings of a chemical identified as probably carcinogenic by the World Health Organization come on the heels of a major study published in JAMA Internal Medicine that found a significant reduction in cancer risk for individuals who ate a lot of organic food.

The tests detected glyphosate in all 28 samples of products made with conventionally grown oats. All but two of the 28 samples had levels of glyphosate above EWG’s health benchmark of 160 parts per billion, or ppb.

Products tested by Anresco Laboratories in San Francisco included 10 samples of different types of General Mills’ Cheerios and 18 samples of different Quaker brand products from PepsiCo, including instant oatmeal, breakfast cereal and snack bars. The highest level of glyphosate found by the lab was 2,837 ppb in Quaker Oatmeal Squares breakfast cereal, nearly 18 times higher than EWG’s children’s health benchmark.

New EWG Tests Find Glyphosate in All Cheerios and Quaker Oats Cereals Sampled

Test information: EWG scientists purchased products in grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay area and Washington, DC, area. Either one or two different samples were purchased for testing, depending on the type of product. Approximately 300 grams of each product were packaged and shipped to Anresco Laboratories, in San Francisco. Glyphosate levels were analyzed by liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry method, with the limit of quantification of 10 ppb. Testing methodology is described here. A PDF of the testing results is available here.

Glyphosate, the most widely used herbicide in the world, is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as “probably carcinogenic” to people. The IARC has steadfastly defended that decision despite ongoing attacks by Monsanto.

In 2017, glyphosate was also listed by the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment as a chemical known to the state to cause cancer.

“How many bowls of cereal and oatmeal have American kids eaten that came with a dose of weed killer? That’s a question only General Mills, PepsiCo and other food companies can answer,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “But if those companies would just switch to oats that aren’t sprayed with glyphosate, parents wouldn’t have to wonder if their kids’ breakfasts contained a chemical linked to cancer. Glyphosate and other cancer-causing chemicals simply don’t belong in children’s food, period.”

Results of the new tests come two months after EWG’s first series of tests found glyphosate in all but two of 45 samples of foods made with conventionally grown oats, and in about one-third of the 16 products made with organic oats. About two-thirds of the samples of conventional foods had levels of glyphosate above EWG’s health benchmark.

Following release of the first batch of tests, General Mills and the Quaker Oats Company went on the defensive, noting that glyphosate levels found were within regulatory limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency.

But just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s safe. Federal government standards for pesticides in food are often outdated, not based on the best and most current science. The EPA’s standards for pesticides and other chemicals are also heavily influenced by lobbying from industry.

Studies regularly find that the legal limits on contaminants in food, air, drinking water and consumer products fall short of fully protecting public health, particularly for children and other people more sensitive to the effects of toxic chemicals. The EPA’s legal limit for glyphosate on oats, 30 parts per million, was set in 2008, well before the cancer findings of the IARC and California state scientists.

EWG does not believe chemicals linked to cancer belong in children’s food. Our recommended maximum daily intake of glyphosate in food is 0.01 milligrams. For a 60-gram portion of food, this daily intake limit translates to a safety standard of 160 ppb of glyphosate. This health benchmark is based on the risks of lifetime exposure, because small, repeated exposures can add up if someone eats food containing glyphosate every day.

After sitting on data from its own glyphosate tests for more than a year, the Food and Drug Administration finally made the results public last month. The FDA found glyphosate on about two-thirds of corn and soybean samples. But it did not test any oats or wheat, the two main crops on which glyphosate is used as a pre-harvest drying agent.

More than 156,000 people have signed a petition from EWG and Just Label It calling on General Mills, Quaker and Kellogg’s to get glyphosate out of their products. Last month EWG – joined by companies including MegaFood, Ben & Jerry’s, Stonyfield Farm, MOM’s Organic Market, Nature’s Path, One Degree Organic Foods, Happy Family Organics, Patagonia, PCC Community Markets and Amy’s Kitchen – petitioned the EPA to sharply limit glyphosate residues allowed on oats and prohibit its use as a pre-harvest drying agent.

“Once again, our message to General Mills, Quaker and other food companies is that you can take the simple step of telling your oat farmers to stop using glyphosate,” said Cook. “You can hide behind an outdated federal standard, or you can listen to your customers and take responsibility for cleaning up your supply chain. It’s your choice.”

EWG sent letters today to General Mills and PepsiCo asking each company if it had conducted similar analyses for the presence of glyphosate. And, if any tests have been done, we asked if the companies to inform the public when the testing began and what they found.

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At 11pm BST 13th of June 2019, the British Broadcasting Corporation, or more correctly, the British State Broadcaster, pumped this out on an ultra short bulletin, usual for this time of night. 

(Sometimes it is difficult to rest the mind for sleep after frequent strokes of black propaganda from the BBC.) 

The messages. That the US held Iran responsible for the attacks early in the morning of Thursday the 13th of June 2019 for the attacks on two ships in the Gulf of Oman, south of the Strait of Hormuz.

The Foreign Office of GB, that is currently without a government, had agreed that Iran was responsible.

What is the likely progress in this path towards a possible WW3 and what ‘lies upon lies’ will propel it?

Is the materiel at the ready?

The goading are the sanctions, an act of war by the US, and involving many nations using the strongest, illegal methods.

Firstly, the Jewish State, its name recently confirmed by a racist statute, has been urging its proxies the US and the UK to attack Iran with its 90 million people but in the shape of its ‘mullahs’, since 2009 or earlier.

This de facto state has six Dolphin class submarines(1).  These were, ironically, built by a subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp. About half the costs were met by Germany, in guilt or in place of reparations demanded of former East Germany by Israel.  Some have chambers for the egress of scuba divers and for mini-subs,  (echoes of the Dieppe raids).

At least two Dolphins, so mis-named, will be lurking in the Persian Gulf now.  The ‘attacks’ on four tankers in the Gulf of Oman a month ago, though patchily reported, could have been by limpet mine.  Whatever, Iran was in the frame constructed by the CIAs, the MI6s and the CNNs etc.

I recall the alleged enlargement of the torpedo tubes to allow firing of nuclear tipped cruise missiles.  This supports the basis for such as fear.(2)  I quote –

The Dolphins are quiet diesel-electric attack submarines that evolved from Germany’s famous and ubiquitous U209 Class. They can fire torpedoes and missiles from their 533mm torpedo tubes, perform underwater surveillance, and even launch combat swimmers via a wet and dry compartment.

The navy’s submarines also conducted 54 special operations in 2013, a similarly sharp increase from previous years. The operations included deployments to the Lebanese coast and deployments lasting several weeks that took the submarines thousands of kilometers from Israel.” 

These 54 ‘special operations’ would have been co-ordinated by the State’s Depth Corps(3).

The Jerusalem Post(4)

Israeli Dolphin-class submarines carried out a July 5 2013 attack on an arms depot in the Syrian port city of Latakia, according to a report in the British Sunday Times, which contradicted a previous CNN report that the attack was the work of the Israel Air Force.

The alleged Israeli naval strike was closely coordinated with the United States and targeted a contingent of 50 Russian-made Yakhont P-800 anti-ship missiles that had arrived earlier in the year for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime, the Times cited Middle East intelligence sources as stating.

CNN has set the scene(5), Nic Robertson the sort-of-straight guy, and ex-US navy ‘admiral’ John Kirby(6) the poison.

So how would a spark for a potential Armageddon (from Megiddo in the north of Palestine) happen now?

The pretext. An order from the Israeli Depth Corps, originating in an agreed order from the High Commands of the US,UK and Israel is given to a Dolphin commander close to the Iranian coast to fire a nuclear tipped cruise missile, range over 1000 sea miles, into the Negev. ‘Iran has fired one of its long range missiles.  It was presumed to be off target and aimed for Tel Aviv.  It might have been an Enhanced Radiation Weapon = Neutron Shell.  Although the blast is less, an explosion was heard by a party of German visitors by the DEAD sea.’

The USS Abraham Lincoln and its support fleet, including submarines has been ordered to retaliate in defence but in an ‘ordered’ way.

Charter of the United Nations!

“All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations…Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement under the present Charter.”

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David Halpin is a retired orthopaedic and trauma surgeon in his 80th year. He gets some peace from this Satanism in the woods he planted 30 years ago. He and Sue his wife, with many supporters, launched the Voyage of the Dove and the Dolphin 1-02-2003 to Gaza (7) – video – 20 minutes. This voyage was in common humanity with a people on the Cross and to shout against the looming Supreme War Crime, the bombardment and destruction of Iraq and many, many thousands of its innocent humans. ‘No mother and child should be in the least harmed anywhere in our still beautiful world’ – the author.

Notes

  1. https://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/germany-may-sell-2-more-dolphin-subs-to-israel-for-117b-01528/
  2. http://web.archive.org/web/20140715085245/http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/israel-deploys-nuclear-weapons-on-german-built-submarines-a-836784.html
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depth_Corps
  4. https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Report-Israeli-submarine-strike-hit-Syrian-arms-depot-319756
  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PY_zg4nNnew
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kirby_(admiral)
  7. https://dhalpin.infoaction.org.uk/videos/16-palestine/64-eyes-open-gaza

Featured image: Oil tankers pass through the Strait of Hormuz in 2018. Hamad I Mohammed / Reuters file

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Russia-China a Cimeira que não faz notícia

June 14th, 2019 by Manlio Dinucci

A  comunicação social mediática concentrou-se, em 5 de Junho, no Presidente Trump e nos dirigentes europeus da NATO que, no aniversário do Dia D, celebraram em Portsmouth “a paz, a liberdade e a democracia asseguradas na Europa”, comprometendo-se a “defendê-las quando ameaçadas”.  Referência clara à Rússia.

Os grandes meios da comunicação mediática ignoraram ou relegaram para segundo plano, às vezes em tons sarcásticos, o encontro ocorrido no mesmo dia em Moscovo, entre os Presidentes da Rússia e da China. Vladimir Putin e Xi Jinping, quase no trigésimo encontro em seis anos, apresentaram conceitos não retóricos, mas uma série de factos. O intercâmbio entre os dois países, que ultrapassou 100 biliões de dólares no ano passado, aumentou cerca de 30 novos projectos de investimento chineses na Rússia, particularmente no sector energético, num total de 22 biliões. A Rússia tornou-se o maior exportador de petróleo da China e  prepara-se também a sê-lo para o gás natural: em Dezembro entrará em função o grande gasoduto oriental, ao qual se juntará outro da Sibéria, mais duas grandes indústrias de exportação de gás natural liquefeito.

Assim, o plano USA para isolar a Rússia com sanções, também concretizadas pela UE, juntamente com o corte nas exportações russas de energia para a Europa, vai fracassar.

A cooperação russo-chinesa não se limita ao sector energético. Foram divulgados projectos conjuntos no sector aeroespacial e noutros sectores de alta tecnologia. Estão a ser incrementadas vias de comunição ferroviárias, rodoviárias, fluviais e marítimas entre os dois países. Existe um forte aumento também nos intercâmbios culturais e nos fluxos turísticos.

Uma cooperação em todos os campos, cuja visão estratégica emerge de duas decisões anunciadas no final do encontro:

Ø  a assinatura de um acordo intergovernamental para expandir o uso de moedas nacionais, o rublo e o yuan, nas transações comerciais e financeiras, como alternativa ao dólar ainda dominante;

Ø  a intensificação dos esforços para integrar a Nova Rota da Seda, promovida pela China, e a União Económica Euroasiática, promovida pela Rússia, com “a visão de formar, no futuro, uma parceria euroasiática mais alargada”.

Que esta visão não é simplesmente um projecto económico, confirma-o a “Declaração Conjunta sobre o Fortalecimento da Estabilidade Estratégica Global”, assinada no final da reunião. A Rússia e a China têm “posições idênticas ou muito próximas”, de facto, contrárias às posições USA/NATO, relativas à Síria, Irão, Venezuela e Coreia do Norte.

Advertem que a retirada dos EUA do Tratado INF (a fim de instalar mísseis nucleares de alcance intermédio perto da Rússia e da China) pode acelerar a corrida armamentista e aumentar a possibilidade de um conflito nuclear. Denunciam a decisão dos EUA de não ratificar o Tratado de Proibição de Testes Nucleares e preparar o local para possíveis testes nucleares. Declaram “irresponsáveis” o facto de alguns Estados, ao mesmo tempo que aderem ao Tratado de Não Proliferação, concretizarem “missões nucleares conjuntas” e exigirem que “devolvam aos territórios nacionais todas as armas nucleares instaladas fora das fronteiras”. Um pedido que diz respeito directamente à Itália e outros países europeus onde, violando o Tratado de Não-Proliferação, os Estados Unidos enviaram armas nucleares que também podem ser usadas pelos países anfitriões sob comando USA: bombas nucleares B-61 que serão substituídas a partir de 2020 pelas bombas nucleares B61-12, ainda mais perigosas.

De tudo isto não falou a comunicação mediática de destaque que, em 5 de Junho,  estava ocupada a descrever os trajes deslumbrantes da First Lady, Melania Trump, nas cerimónias do Dia D.

 

 

Artigo original em italiano :

Russia-Cina: il vertice che non fa notizia

il manifesto, 11 giugno 2019

Tradução : Luisa Vasconcellos

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A two-part archive, labeled “Activities of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem” and dated 1940-1941, sits in Britain’s National Archives in Kew. This writer successfully had the first part declassified in 2014. The second part remains sealed. My 2018 attempt to have these ten pages declassified was refused on the grounds that the archive might “undermine the security of the country [Britain] and its citizens.”[1] None of its secrets are to be available until January, 2042; and if the paired file is any precedent, even in 2042 it will be released only in redacted form.

The ‘Grand Mufti’ in the archive’s heading is Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian leader whom posterity best remembers for his alignment with the Italian and German fascists; and the years 1940-1941 place him not in Palestine, but in Iraq — and if the second archive extends to late 1941, in Europe. What could possibly be hidden in a World War II document about a long-dead Nazi sympathizer that would present such a risk to British national security eight decades later, that none of it can be revealed? At present, only the UK government censors know; but the answer may have less to do with the fascists and al-Husseini than with British misdeeds in Iraq, and less to do with Britain’s national security than with its historical embarrassment.

When in 1921 votes were cast for the new Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini came in last among the four candidates. But votes in Palestine mattered as little then as they do now, and the British, Palestine’s novice replacement occupiers for the Ottomans, handed the post to al-Husseini. At first, he proved to be an asset to the British. But as the years passed, his opposition to Zionism, support for Palestinian nationalism, and ultimately his involvement in the 1936 Palestinian uprising, led to calls for his arrest.

Photograph labelled 'Arab demonstrations on Oct. 13 and 27, 1933. In Jerusalem and Jaffa. Return of Grand Mufti from India. Met by hundreds of cars at Gethsemane, Nov. 17, 1933.'

Photograph labelled “Arab demonstrations on Oct. 13 and 27, 1933. In Jerusalem and Jaffa. Return of Grand Mufti from India. Met by hundreds of cars at Gethsemane, Nov. 17, 1933.” Library of Congress, LC-M33- 4218.

In mid-October of 1937, he fled from hiding in Palestine to Beirut. Two years later and six weeks after the outbreak of World War II, in mid-October of 1939, he slipped to Baghdad, where his sympathies for the Italian fascists further alarmed the British. Fast-forward another two years to late 1941, and al-Husseini is in Europe, meeting with Benito Mussolini on the 27th of October, and on the 28th of November meeting with the Führer himself at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Al-Husseini’s motivation for embracing the Axis was likely a combination of selfish political opportunism and the belief that the alignment would help safeguard against the takeover of Palestine by the Zionists. The reasoning, however grotesque, was the same used by Lehi (the ‘Stern Gang’) in its own attempted collaboration with the fascists: Britain was the obstacle both to Palestinian liberation, and to unbridled Zionism, and for both the Mufti and Lehi, defeating that obstacle meant embracing its enemies. Even the ‘mainstream’ David Ben-Gurion had no moral qualms about taking advantage of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis — a struggle for which his Jewish Agency was already conspicuously unhelpful — by exploiting Britain’s post-war vulnerabilities.[2]

Posterity has treated Lehi’s and the Mufti’s flirtations with the fascists quite differently. Lehi, the most fanatical of the major Zionist terror organizations, was transformed into freedom fighters, and ex-Lehi leader Yitzhak Shamir was twice elected as Israeli Prime Minister. In contrast, Zionist leaders quickly seized on al-Husseini’s past to smear not just him, but the Palestinians as a people, as Nazis.

The use of al-Husseini’s unsavory history to ‘justify’ anti-Palestinian racism continues to the present day. Most bizarrely, in 2015 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had not intended to exterminate the Jews — that is, not until al-Husseini planted the words in his ear — which translates as “got the idea from the Palestinians”. A private citizen would likely have been arrested under German law for this attempt to rewrite the Holocaust.

The mufti of Jerusalem, Sayid Amin al Husseini, meets with Hitler, November 1941.

The mufti of Jerusalem, Sayid Amin al Husseini, meets with Hitler, November 1941.

Iraq won limited independence in 1932, just before the Nazis came to power. When the Mufti ensconced himself in Iraq seven years later, the country was under nominally ‘pro-British’ Prime Ministers, and Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah for the four-year-old king, Faisal II. This uneasy British-Iraqi equilibrium ended on first day of April 1941, when four Iraqi officers known as the Golden Square, wanting full independence (and similarly aligning themselves with the fascists in the foolish belief that doing so would help them get it), staged a coup d’état. It lasted two months. British troops ousted the coup on the first day of June — and as they did, anti-Jewish riots rocked Baghdad. An estimated 180 Jewish Iraqis were killed and 240 wounded in this pogrom known as the Farhud.

Why would the momentary power vacuum of the British takeover lead to anti-Jewish terror? While doing research for my 2016 book, State of Terror, I was intrigued by the claim of one Iraqi Jewish witness, Naeim Giladi, that these ‘Arab’ riots were orchestrated by the British to justify their return to power.[3] Indeed, the riots seemed unnatural in a society where Jews had lived for two and a half millennia, and the “pro-Axis” Golden Square takeover two months earlier had not precipitated any such pogrom. Yet it was also true that Zionism had created ethnic resentment, and Giladi did not question that junior officers of the Iraqi army were involved in the violence. The evidence provided by Giladi was compelling enough to seek out clues among British source documents that were not available to him.

And that, along with the hope of shedding new light on the Mufti’s pro-fascist activities, brought me to the archive at issue and my qualified (redacted) success in getting the first part declassified– officially titled, CO 733/420/19. Not surprisingly, much of the file focused on legitimate worry over the Mufti’s dealings with the Italian fascists. Some of the British voices recorded considered him to be a serious threat to the war effort, and a report entitled “Inside Information” spoke of the Mufti’s place in an alleged “German shadow government in Arabia”. Others dismissed this as “typical of the sort of stuff which literary refugees put into their memoirs in order to make them dramatic” and suggested that the Mufti’s influence was overstated.

Whatever the case, by October 1940, the Foreign Office was considering various methods for “putting an end to the Mufti’s intrigues with the Italians”, and by mid-November,

it was decided that the only really effective means of securing a control over him [the Mufti] would be a military occupation of Iraq.

British plans of a coup were no longer mere discussion, but a plan already in progress:

We may be able to clip the Mufti’s wings when we can get a new Government in Iraq. F.O. [Foreign Office] are working on this”.

So, the British were already working on re-occupying Iraq five months before the April 1941 ‘Golden Square’ coup.

A prominent thread of the archive was: How to effect a British coup without further alienating ‘the Arab world’ in the midst of the war, beyond what the empowering of Zionism had already done? Harold MacMichael, High Commissioner for Palestine, suggested the idea “that documents incriminating the Mufti have been found in Libya” that can be used to embarrass him among his followers; but others “felt some hesitation … knowing, as we should, there was no truth in the statement.”

But frustratingly, the trail stops in late 1940; to know anything conclusive we need the second part’s forbidden ten pages: CO 733/420/19/1.

The redacted first part partially supports, or at least does not challenge, Giladi’s claim. It proves that Britain was planning regime change and sought a pretext, but gives no hint as to whether ethnic violence was to be that pretext. Interestingly, Lehi had at the time reached the same conclusion as Giladi: its Communique claimed that “Churchill’s Government is responsible for the pogrom in Baghdad”.[4]

Does the public have the right to see still-secret archives such as CO 733/420/19/1? In this case, the gatekeepers claimed to be protecting us from the Forbidden Fruit of “curiosity”: They claimed to be distinguishing between “information that would benefit the public good”, and “information that would meet public curiosity”, and decided on our behalf that this archive fit the latter.[1] We are to believe that an eight-decade-old archive on an important issue remains sealed because it would merely satisfy our lust for salacious gossip.

Photograph labelled “Visit of H.R.H. Princess Mary and the Earl of Harwood. March 1934. Princess Mary, The Earl of Harwood, and the Grand Mufti, etc. At the Mosque el-Aksa [i.e., al-Aqsa in Jerusalem].” Library of Congress, LC-M33- 4221.

Perhaps no assessment of past British manipulation in Iraq would have given pause to the Blair government before signing on to the US’s vastly more catastrophic Iraqi ‘regime change’ of 2003, promoted with none of 1940’s hesitation about using forged ‘African’ documents — this time around Niger, instead of Libya. But history has not even a chance of teaching us, if its lessons are kept hidden from the people themselves.

Notes:

According to Giladi, the riots of 1941 “gave the Zionists in Palestine a pretext to set up a Zionist underground in Iraq” that would culminate with the (proven) Israeli false-flag ‘terrorism’ that emptied most of Iraq’s Jewish population a decade later. Documents in Kew seen by the author support this. But to be sure, the Zionists were not connected with the alleged British maneuvers of 1941.

1. Correspondence from the UK government, explaining its refusal to allow me access to CO 733/420/19/1:

Section 23(1) (security bodies and security matters): We have considered whether the balance of the public interest favours releasing or withholding this information. After careful consideration, we have determined that the public interest in releasing the information you have requested is outweighed by the public interest in maintaining the exemption. It is in the public interest that our security agencies can operate effectively in the interests of the United Kingdom, without disclosing information that would assist those determined to undermine the security of the country and its citizens.

The judiciary differentiates between information that would benefit the public good and information that would meet public curiosity. It does not consider the latter to be a ‘public interest’ in favour of disclosure. In this case, disclosure would neither meaningfully improve transparency nor assist public debate, and disclosure would not therefore benefit the public good.

2. Ben-Gurion looked ahead to when the end of the war would leave Britain militarily weakened and geographically dispersed, and economically ruined. He cited the occupation of Vilna by the Poles after World War I as a precedent for the tactic.

For him, the end of WWII only presented an opportunity for the takeover of Palestine with less physical resistance; it also left Britain at the mercy of the United States for economic relief, which the Jewish Agency exploited by pressuring US politicians to make that assistance contingent on supporting Zionist claims to Palestine.

At a mid-December 1945 secret meeting of the Jewish Agency Executive, Ben-Gurion stressed that “our activities should be directed from Washington and not from London”, noting that “Jewish influence in America is powerful and able to cause damage to the interests of Great Britain”, as it “depends to a great extent on America economically” and would “not be able to ignore American pressure if we succeed in bringing this pressure to bear”. He lauded Rabbi Abba Silver in the US for his aggressiveness on the issue, while noting that he was nonetheless “a little fanatical and may go too far”. (TNA, FO 1093/508). The Irgun was more direct in 1946, stating that Britain’s commuting of two terrorists’ death sentences and other accommodations to the Zionists “has been done with the sole purpose to calm American opposition against the American loan to Britain”. (TNA, KV 5-36). Meanwhile, in the US that year Rabbi Silver’s bluntness on the tactic worried Moshe Shertok (a future prime minister). Although like Ben-Gurion, Shertok said that “we shall exploit to the maximum the American pressure on the British Government”, in particular the pre-election period (and in particular New York), but urged “care and wisdom in this” so as not to give ammunition to “anti-Zionists and the anti-semites in general”. Shertok criticized Silver for saying publicly that “he and his supporters opposed the loan to be granted to the British Government”. (TNA, CO 537/1715)

3. Suárez, Thomas, State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel[Skyscraper, 2016, and Interlink, 2017]; In Arabic, هكذا أقيمت المستعمرة [Kuwait, 2018]; in French, Comment le terrorisme a créé Israël [Investig’Action, 2019]
Giladi, Naeim, Ben-Gurion’s Scandals: How the Haganah and the Mossad Eliminated Jews [Dandelion, 2006]

4. Lehi, Communique, No. 21/41, dated 1st of August, 1941

Update: This post originally referred to the “four-year-old Prime Minister, ‘Abd al-Ilah,” not the four-year-old King Faisal under Regent ‘Abd al-Ilah. Commenter Jon S. corrected us, and the post has been changed.

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Tom Suarez is the author, most recently, of State of Terror, how terrorism created modern Israel.

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In a press conference that immediately evoked memories of the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday claimed Iran was behind alleged attacks on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman without presenting one single shred of evidence.

“This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication,” said Pompeo, who did not provide any details on the intelligence he cited.

After asserting Iran was also behind a litany of attacks prior to Thursday’s tanker incident—once again without presenting any evidence—Pompeo said that,

“Taken as a whole, these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace and security.”

Pompeo—who has a long history of making false claims about Iran—did not take any questions from reporters following his remarks, which were aired live on America’s major television networks.

“Mike Pompeo has zero credibility when it comes to Iran,” Jon Rainwater, executive director of Peace Action, told Common Dreams. “He’s long been actively campaigning for a confrontation with Iran. He has a track record of pushing bogus theories with no evidence such as the idea that Iran collaborates closely with al-Qaeda.”

“Once again Pompeo is not waiting for the evidence to come in,” Rainwater said, “he is picking facts to suit his campaign for confrontation with Iran.”

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of anti-war group CodePink, characterized Pompeo’s speech as a “deja vu” of former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous weapons of mass destruction speech before the U.N. in 2003, which made the case for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

“Secretary Pompeo gives zero proof but insists that Iran is responsible for ship attacks in Gulf of Oman this morning,” Benjamin tweeted. “Lies, lies, and more lies to make a case for war. Let’s not be fooled into another disastrous war!”

In a column following Pompeo’s speech, Esquire‘s Charles Pierce wrote that he is “not buying this in the least.”

“I remember the Iraq lies,” Pierce wrote. “I know this administration is truthless from top to bottom and all the way out both sides. I don’t trust the Saudi government as far as I can throw a bone saw. And this president feels very much like he’s being run to ground at the moment and needs a distraction.”

“And his Secretary of State is a third-rate congresscritter from Kansas who once advised American soldiers to disobey lawful orders, and who’s fighting way above his weight class,” added Pierce. “Also, too, John Bolton is eight kinds of maniac.”

On Twitter, Trita Parsi—founder of the National Iranian American Council—echoed Pierce, writing:

“A serial liar is president. A warmonger and a serial fabricator who helped get us into the disastrous Iraq war and who has sabotaged numerous attempts at diplomacy is the [national security] advisor.”

“But go ahead, media, treat Pompeo’s accusations as ‘evidence’…” Parsi added.

As Common Dreams reported earlier, critics warned that the timing and target of the tanker attacks on Thursday suggests they could have been a deliberate effort to “maneuver the U.S. into a war” with Iran.

Iranian officials denied any responsibility for the attacks.

In a tweet following the explosions in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said,

“Suspicious doesn’t begin to describe what likely transpired this morning.”

Rainwater of Peace Action said what is needed to calm the dangerous tensions of the current moment is an “impartial investigation” into the tanker incident.

But Pompeo’s statement only served to escalate tensions further and move the U.S. and Iran closer to a military conflict, Rainwater said.

“At a time when the world desperately needs cooler heads to deescalate tensions in the Gulf, the U.S. Secretary of State is instead fanning the flames,” Rainwater said. “Our elected officials need to push for diplomacy now to take us away from the brink of war.”

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The recent release by the Russian authorities of the Soviet copy of the infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact signed in August 1939 on behalf of Germany and the Soviet Union by Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov has led to a bout of rancorous discussion. In the West, the agreement is largely perceived as having had dire consequences for the peace in Europe, while in Russia it is largely seen as a last ditch attempt at staving off war. But while each perspective has its merits, analyses that is limited only to explaining the causes of the Second World War as well as which army played the greater role in defeating Nazi Germany miss a wider and enduringly crucial picture; this is the centrality of Germany to any calibration of the geopolitical power balance. 

The Nazi-Soviet Pact was an agreement which provided that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union would not attack the other or support aggressive third parties. It also provided each signatory state with spheres of influence. One week later, Hitler attacked Poland, occupying the western and central parts of the country, while the Soviet Union took over the eastern part. Hitler would later turn his military westward while Stalin would annexe the Baltic States.

The case for the pact as having served as a malign force in disturbing the peace among European nations would appear to be an open and shut one. The argument is that it enabled Hitler to attack and conquer much of Western Europe and thus start a colossal conflagration that would consume millions of lives. However, a compelling counter-argument to this from the Russian side posits that Stalin was forced into the unholy alliance simply because the Munich Agreement signed in September 1938 by Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had the motive of encouraging Hitler to embark on his anti-Bolshevik crusade.

It is, after all, widely accepted that many western politicians -and not only those who were right-wing conservatives- saw the Nazi regime as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet communism. Chamberlain’s declaration of “peace in our time” did not objectively include the Soviet Union whose western lands, Hitler regarded with envious eyes.

There is also evidence presented in a recently published Russian book, in which the Russian copy of the Nazi-Soviet Pact is reproduced, that Stalin had sought an anti-Nazi alliance with Britain and France, but that his overture was rebuffed. As revealed in 2008, the offer to move over a million troops to the border of Germany to deter Hitler was made in Moscow by senior military officials of the USSR to a visiting delegation of French and British officers two weeks before the Wehrmacht attacked Poland.

The truth is that the Western liberal democracies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, were trying to shift Nazi aggression onto the other side.

The back and forth was of course set against the background of the recent commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings from which the Russians were not invited. The not unreasonable assertion that the Soviet Union had borne most of the burden in defeating Nazi Germany was met by claims that the Soviets received massive material aid from the West which enabled them to resist the German invaders.

And while most serious scholars of military history would pinpoint the Soviet defeat of the Sixth Army and other axis armies in Stalingrad as the turning point in the war which set in motion the inexorable process of Germany’s defeat, the atmosphere among many Western analysts was not conducive to anything other than memorialising the sacrifice of allied soldiers who succeeded in the perilous venture of establishing a bridgehead in occupied Europe after the Normandy landings.

The point of this article is to put to one side the differing interpretations of the events which primed Nazi Germany to go on the attack as well as arguments pertaining to which side did the most to defeat Hitler and his axis allies, and instead to focus on the centrality of the German nation to the determination of the balance of power between the Western alliance and the Eurasian power of Russia.

The Cold War which followed Germany’s defeat after World War 2 as well as the present Cold War which has arisen since the emergence of Vladimir Putin place Germany as a focal point of the tension between east and west.

The German nation, which lost a great amount of territory, was divided into two countries because the Western allies and the Soviet Union realised that having a regenerated Germany in one of the post war camps would have given a monumental strategic advantage to one side. This issue remains at the heart of the contemporary east-west divide because a key condition; indeed, arguably the preeminent proviso which enabled the leaders of the old Soviet Union to consent to German reunification and German membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was the promise given by the leaders of the West not extend NATO “one inch eastward”.

This promise was not kept by the American-led Atlantic alliance which since the administration of President Bill Clinton has persisted in expanding NATO to Russia’s border. Guided respectively by the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the Brzezinski Doctrine, the United States has in the period since the ending of the ideological-based Cold War sought to impose a historically unprecedented form of global hegemony.

By this is meant that the ends sought by the brutal and perverted philosophy of Nazi Lebensraum was constricted in terms of the amount of territorial conquest and control of other nations. This was implicit in Hitler’s offer to Britain to keep its empire in return for giving Germany a “free hand in the east”.  The other belligerent of World War 2, Japan sought a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, imperialist by design, but not the global dimension suggested by the forged Tanaka Memorial.

But American worldly hegemony has its blue print in its domination of the global institutions of finance, namely the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which were created after the post-war Bretton Woods agreement. Furthermore, the U.S. dollar emerged as the de facto world reserve currency.

The “end of history”, as Francis Fukuyama infamously put it, occasioned by the fall of the Soviet Union and its dominion states in eastern Europe, meant that the free-market economic system and liberal democracy had won out in a dialectical struggle with Marxism. This would, he prophesied mean that free-market orientated liberal democracies would become the world’s “final form of human government.”

This line of thinking fell neatly into place in the new world order envisioned by those who believed in the strand of “American exceptionalism” that embraces the spread of American values by force of arms and those who subscribed to the ideology of neoconservatism and its Trotskyite-like fixation on a form of “permanent revolution” involving the export of the American economic and political system through the instrument of the American armed forces or its proxies.

Thus was born a new age of American militarism. The Wolfowitz Doctrine insisted on imposing the will of the United States even at the cost of abrogating multi-national agreements, while the Brzezinski Doctrine made a specific case for preventing the rise of a Eurasian power that would challenge Anglo-American supremacy. The latter doctrine explicitly sought to intimidate Russia to a state of military impotence, while creating the circumstances whereby Russia -preferably a balkanised Russian state- would service the energy and resource needs of the West.

Where does Germany fit into this? The projection of American military power under the auspices of NATO and the use of the European Union (EU) by the United States  to provide legitimacy for a succession of disastrously implemented interventions has exposed the necessity for restraint on the desire for the imposition of a unipolar model of an international order insisted upon by the United States to be its historical right.

Apart from providing it with the legal cover for illegal military endeavours, the EU has been used by the United States to apply pressure on other countries through the imposition of trade sanctions even when such a course of action has been to the disadvantage of members states such as Germany. For instance, the United States provided covert support for the coup which forced out the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovytch in Ukraine and brought to power ultranationalist, Russophobic parties who proceeded to threaten Russia’s vital strategic interests in the Black Sea.The not unreasonable Russian reaction of annexing Crimea after a plebiscite was construed by the United States as an act of aggression which necessitated a range of sanctions including, at US insistence, German sanctions; measures which many German business leaders opposed because they harmed the German economy.

Yet, for all its influence as the dominant nation within the EU, Germanyhas been unable to assert itself by putting a leash on American aggression. There are many reasons for this, not least of which is that after defeat in two world wars, Germany has remained somewhat in the thrall of the Anglo-American world. The presence of 32,000 American troops who are permanently based there, albeit reduced from the Cold War figure of 300,000, is officially part and parcel of the business of conducting a mutually beneficial military alliance. But for a sizeable segment of the German population, their continued deployment, far from providing an assurance of national protection, bears the aura of an army of occupation; a reminder of Germany being somewhat of a dominion state of the American empire.

The lack of assertion in Germany’s political leaders stem from an erosion of a form of national self-esteem that is based on fears that an assertive Germany may lay the seeds for a resurgence of German militarism. They are also conscious of the doubts which persist among allies. Margaret Thatcher, after all, was not initially in favour of German reunification because of this age-old fear. This fear, deeply rooted in the German psyche, was addressed by Goethe, who in the Napoleonic age cautioned his countrymen about their enthusiastic embrace of nationalism and militarism. He predicted that Germany would come to disaster if they followed that path and so called on them to invest in culture and the spirit: in other words, conquer the world with their talents in music, philosophy, trade and the sciences.

Today, shorn of its martial fixation and possessing the fourth largest economy in the world, Germany would appear to be firmly on the path of which Goethe advised. Many are inclined to view the EU as a German-dominated organisation, something made all the more glaring given the decline of French economic power. Germany imposes its values on economically struggling EU states by diktat. It is a state of affairs which some cynically view as the culmination of the ‘long desired’ German ‘conquest’ of Europe.

Yet, while Germany has forsworn the trappings and the burdens of militarism, some may lament that it does not use its economic might as the basis of tempering the excesses of the American empire. One way of achieving this is to manifest a greater resolve at casting away its inhibition at defying the malign enterprises pursued by the United States so far as consenting to the illegal military adventures pursued by the American, as well as the imposition of sanctions on those perceived to be the enemies of the United States.

Unfortunately, Germany has wilted under American pressure to maintain sanctions against Russia, and while a signatory to the Five Plus One Agreement with Iran, it has begun to buckle in regard to the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran after Washington abrogated on the treaty. Many larger German commercial concerns have ceased trading with Iran as a result of the threats issued by the United States  that they would face repercussions.

There have been instances when the Germans have tried to act independently of American machinations. For instance, through the Minsk Accord of 2015 which was jointly brokered by Chancellor Angela Merkel and former French President Francois Hollande. It was a worthy effort aimed at creating the circumstances for peace between the warring sides in the Ukraine, but one whose failure owed a great deal to the opposition of the United States.

American animus towards Russia, something developed after the replacement of the pliant Boris Yeltsin by Vladimir Putin, poses a grave threat to world peace. It also serves as an impediment to the German national interest. Not only does NATO’s expansion eastwards, reneging of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and deployment of a missile shield system imperil Germany, the United States has actively sought to impede the development of Nord Stream 2, the second offshore natural gas pipeline emanating from the Russian mainland which has its entry point to western Europe in Germany. The threat of sanctions issued in June 2019 by U.S. President Donald Trump against Russia is redolent of the sort of paternalism practised by the Americans after the ending of the Second World War. In the words of Trump:

We’re protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money.

These followed a letter writing campaign conducted in January 2019 by the US ambassador to Germany who urged the companies involved in the project to stop their work or face the possibility of sanctions.

The American claim -shared by some eastern European countries- that the project would increase Russian influence in the region, is one which Germany’s political and business leaders feel does not outweigh the benefits that will accrue once it is operational.

Nord Stream notwithstanding, the development of closer ties between Germany and Russia in a much broader sense is one which provides an existential threat of sorts to different parties. For the Anglo-American world, it would represent the beginning of the process whereby Germany jettisons out of their orbit of influence; severely weakening the basis by which British and American empires have sought to counterbalance and contain the rise of any Eurasian-centred power. The French may view it as a dynamic which would shift German focus away from Franco-German relations, which of course was at the heart of the creation of the EU project. The strengthening of Russo-German relations is also viewed with alarm by those nations in eastern Europe who have historically suffered from the projection of Russian and German power, not least of which relates to the implementation of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact.

Fears over an emerging power alliance were heightened in some quarters by the appearance of an article written in 2017 by a member of the Russian Izborsky Club. It called for a new geostrategic alliance between Germany and Russia which would serve as an updated version of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact by re-dividing eastern Europe between both countries.

Formed in 2012, and composed of a group of Russian intellectuals, the Izborksy club is a think-tank which disseminates strongly nationalist and anti-liberal views. The level of influence that it has in the Kremlin is something which is disputed. But the thoughts of Aleksandr Gaponenko, the head of the Baltic section of the club, were seized upon by anti-Russian think-tanks and media as evidence of what they believe would be the logical conclusion of a modern German-Russian axis.

Entitled “A Union of Russia and Germany”, Gaponenko argued that such an alliance would allow Germany to “recover” the Sudetenland, Silesia, East Prussia, Poland, Hungary and Romania as well as portions of Ukraine and Lithuania. Russia, on the other hand would take over the rest of the Baltics, Transdniestria and establish a protectorate over Belarus.

How such a fantastical enterprise could be made practicable was not addressed by Gaponenko.

What is more realistic and would be of benefit to the region is if Germany served as a bridge between the West and Russia; in the process diffusing the manufactured tension developed by successive administrations of the United States who are prodded along this path by the self-serving interests of its military industry and national security apparatus.

What is needed is a radical change in the political culture of Germany, one which has been for decades dominated by subservience to the United States, which is insistent on maintaining a form of global hegemony in regard to which Russia, China and Iran offer the last resistance.

Such a transformation of attitude and action through a new-style detente would not only serve German interests, but also the interests of the wider community of nations.

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Adeyinka Makinde is a lawyer and academic based in the U.K. He writes on topics pertaining to Global Security. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

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Read part I and II from the links below.

On Global Capitalist Crises: Systemic Changes and Challenges

By Dr. Jack Rasmus and Mohsen Abdelmoumen, June 09, 2019

On Global Capitalist Crises. Debt Defaults, Bankruptcies and Real Economy Decline

By Dr. Jack Rasmus and Mohsen Abdelmoumen, June 13, 2019

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Mohsen Abdelmoumen: How to explain why the influence of neocons in the US continues despite changes in presidents and administrations?

Jack Rasmus: The neocons represent a particular right wing radical social and political base in America that has existed for some time. In fact, it’s always been there, going back at least to McCarthyism in the early 1950s, and even before. This is a radical ideological right, even pro- or proto-fascism base in the US. It was checked by the great depression and world war II temporarily but quickly arose again in the late 1940s with the advent of the cold war and China’s successful war for independence. It formed around Barry Goldwater in the 1960s. It arose again in the 1970s with Nixon.When Nixon was thrown out, it reorganized and set forth a plan to take over the American government and political institutions.It even developed position papers and internal proposals how this takeover might be achieved.

Ideologues like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others assumed positions of power in the Reagan administration. Their movement took over the US House of Representatives in 1994 and vowed to create a dysfunctional government that would be blamed for gridlock and give their more radical proposals a hearing as to how to break the gridlock and govern again in their interests. We saw them reassert their influence when Cheney was made vice president in 2000. He was actually a co-president, and perhaps more, as George W. Bush, was the publicized president but really a playboy figurehead. Cheney and his radical right ran foreign policy, giving us Iraq and setting the entire Middle East afire in its wake.This radical right is also behind the decline of democratic and civil rights since 2000, using the 9-11 events as excuse to push their anti-democratic agenda. The Koch brothers, the Adelman and Mercer families, and scores of others are the moneybags in their ranks.They funded the teaparty movement that has since entered the Republican party, terrorized the party’s moderates and driven them out of office and the party itself. Without them, their money, their grass roots organizations, their control now of scores of states’ legislatures, their stacking of judgeships across the country, the Trump phenomenon would not have been possible in 2016. Ideologues like Steve Bannon, John Bolton, Navarro, Abrams, Miller and others are now running the Trump administration and its domestic (immigration) and foreign (trade fights, Israel, No. Korea, Venezuela, Iran) policies.

The point is they’ve always been there, a current in US politics below the radar, but since 1994 aggressively asserting itself and penetrating US institutions with increasing success—aided by media like Fox News and their analogues in radio and on the internet.

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Trump made promises of employment during his election campaign and was elected on the slogan “America first” by the disadvantaged classes, especially in rural areas. Isn’t Donald Trump the president of the rich in the United States? What is your assessment of Trump’s governance?

Jack Rasmus: That assessment must first distinguish between governance in the interest of whom? It’s been a disaster for working-class America. All Trump’s promises of bringing jobs back is just a manipulation of concerns by workers of massive job losses and wage stagnation due to offshoring of US jobs and free trade. While Trump talks of bringing jobs back, he opens the floodgates to skilled foreign engineers and workers taking more jobs based on H1-B and L-1 visas, covered up by cuts to unskilled workers entering from Central America.

Trump is a free trader, just a bilateral free trader not a multilateral one. Trump’s trade offensive is about the US reasserting its hegemony in global markets and trade for another decade as the global economy weakens. It’s a phony trade war against US allies. Just look at the deals made with South Korea, the exemptions given for steel and aluminum tariffs, the go slow and go soft with Japan and Europe. Contrast that with the increasingly aggressive attack on China trade relations—which is really about the US trying to stop next generation technology development by China in AI, cyber security, and 5G wireless. These are technologies that are also the military technologies of the 2020s. The neocons and military industrial complex in the US, along with the Pentagon and key pro-military chairpersons in Congress, want to stop China’s tech development. It’s really a two country race in tech now, with almost all the patents roughly equally issued by China and the US and everyone else way behind. So the trade war has delivered nothing for the working classes except rising prices now, and even for farmers who are the losers (but they’re given direct subsidies to offset their losses, unlike working families that have to bear the brunt of the tariff effects).

Look at the tax legislation of 2018 and the deregulation actions of 2017 by Trump. Who benefited. Business got big cost cuts. The rest of us got higher taxes to offset the $4 trillion actual Trump tax cuts for business and investors and wealthy households.US multinational corps got $2 trillion of that $4 trillion. And households will have to pay $1.5 trillion in more taxes, starting this year and accelerating by 2025. In deregulation, we get the collapse of Obamacare and accelerating premiums, while the bankers got financial regulations of 2008-10 repealed. As far as political ‘governance’ is concerned, what we’ve seen under Trump is widespread voter suppression, gerrymandering by his ‘red states’ to help him get re-elected next time, the approval of two conservative judges to the US Supreme court engineered by Trump’s puppy, McConnell, in the Senate. Then there’s the now emerging attacks on immigrants, including jailing their kids, and the attacks on womens’ rights that was once considered unimaginable.

Politically Trump has been engineering a bona fide constitutional crisis. He’s appeared to have gotten away with the Mueller investigation which should have led to his impeachment but hasn’t. He continually undermines US political institutions verbally. He clearly is moving toward bypassing Congress and governing directly by ‘national emergency’ declarations, refusing to allow executive branch employees to testify to Congress despite subpoenas, ordering the launching of a new McCarthyism by ordering his Justice dept. to start investigating opponents, etc.—i.e. all of which were the basis of Nixon’s impeachment.

In short, Trump’s governance has been a disaster for working-class America, immigrants of color, small farmers and even manufacturing companies, but a boon to far right and white nationalists whom he publicly supports. It’s been especially beneficial to wealthy households, businesses and investors, moreover. And maybe that’s the most important reason why the capitalists still tolerate him and let him remain in office. If they really wanted to impeach and remove him from office they could find a way. But he’s delivering for them financially and economically. He’s ‘good for business’, in other words. But so was Hitler.

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Global Justice Now has launched a legal challenge at the Information Rights Tribunal over the Department for International Trade’s failure to release details of numerous trade meetings it has held with the United States and other countries since the EU referendum in 2016.

It follows an outcry during last week’s state visit of US President Donald Trump over whether controversial areas like the NHS and chlorinated chicken will be on the table in negotiations over a post-Brexit trade deal between the US and UK.

International Trade Secretary Liam Fox has spent more than a year refusing to release attendee lists, agendas and minutes from the trade working groups, following Freedom of Information requests by Global Justice Now in late 2017.

At that time, the Department of Trade was known to have set up at least 14 working groups covering 21 countries including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China and India. While talks over new deals cannot formally be called negotiations until after the UK’s departure from the EU, regular quarterly meetings are nonetheless already taking place with the United States, for example.

A ruling by the Information Commissioner in March 2019 resulted in the release of hundreds of pages of documents relating to the working groups, but these were either entirely or heavily redacted on the basis of a variety of exemptions, including the “extremely sensitive” nature of international trade agreements.

However, minutes of UK-US Trade & Investment Working Group meetings in July 2017 and November 2017 did reveal that ‘Agricultural market access’ and ‘Services’ – potentially covering the NHS – as well as ‘Labour and environmental standards’, ‘Intellectual property’, ‘Financial services’ and ‘Data, digital and e-commerce issues’ have all been on the agenda in the talks.

Global Justice Now is working with barrister Dr Sam Fowles and law firm Leigh Day to challenge the ruling at the Information Rights Tribunal on ten grounds, including that the requirement for confidentiality has been exaggerated, and that the balance of public interest lies in favour of disclosure.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said:

“Trade deals are supposedly the number one benefit of Brexit, yet Liam Fox is fighting tooth and nail to keep his plans for them out of the public domain. After more than a year of appeals, Fox’s department has only ‘released’ hundreds of pages of blacked out documents relating to these secretive trade talks – making a mockery of democracy and taking back control.

“Donald Trump may have let the cat out of the bag over a US-UK trade deal last week, but the public has a right to know whether this government has already put the NHS or chlorinated chicken on the table behind closed doors. It is outrageous that matters as important as the future of our NHS and our food standards should be being discussed in secret, especially with parliament currently having no powers to vote to stop a trade deal after Brexit. We are bringing this appeal to ask the simple question: what does Liam Fox have to hide?”

Dr Sam Fowles of Cornerstone Barristers said:

“The Secretary of State has contended that it is not in the public interest to disclose details of his trade negotiations. This raises an important constitutional issue. International Trade Agreements can have domestic impacts that are equivalent to legislation yet are not subjected to anything approaching an equivalent level of scrutiny. We will be asking the Tribunal to find, as the House of Lords Constitution Committee found, that there should be a “general principle in favour of transparency” in relation to materials relating to international trade agreements.”

Rowan Smith, solicitor at Leigh Day, said:

“The UK government argues that details about Brexit trade talks must be kept confidential. To do otherwise, they say, would prejudice negotiations. But this blanket approach to secrecy is unlawful. Trade deals bind successive governments. Many governments, the US and Canada for example, allow their citizens to know about their negotiations.

“UK citizens were told by the Leave campaigns that the UK government would be able to broker better international trade agreements than the EU. The public has a right to know whether this is in fact true; is the government managing to negotiate better terms in our name?

“The law requires the Secretary of State to look at the specifics of the information requested by the public. It should not be imposing a blanket exemption. Our client hopes the Tribunal will intervene and ensure the Secretary of State changes his approach on this issue.”

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Notes

1. Global Justice Now commissioned Brendan Montague of the Request Initiative to submit the Freedom of Information request in 2017. The following information was requested on trade working groups in respect of 17 specified states and in relation to any state for which a working group existed but was not listed in the request:

(a) “Confirmation that a working group exists for each of the countries listed, and any that have not been listed but where a working group exists.”
(b) “Information relating to any currently existing work-streams or plans for the establishment of working groups in the period leading up to Brexit.”
(c) “The name of any working groups described at a.”
(d) “The date of the first meeting of the working group named at c. and then the dates of all subsequent meetings of these working groups.”
(e) “The list of invitees for each of the meetings set out in response to d.”
(f) “The list of attendees for each of the meetings set out in response to d.”
(g) “The agenda for each of the meetings set out in response to d. The minutes of each of the meetings set out in response to d.”
(h) “Any schedule for forthcoming meetings of the working groups described at a and/or b.”

2. The appeal has been filed with the First-tier Tribunal (General Regulatory Chamber), case number EA/2019/0154. A hearing is expected in the autumn.

Featured image is from GJN

Hell-bent on isolating and suffocating Iran, the Trump administration derailed Japan’s historic talks by accusing Tehran without any evidence whatsoever of attacking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

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Since entering office, the Donald Trump administration has been itching for a war on Iran. And it may have found an excuse to justify an escalation of military aggression — or at least kill independent international attempts at diplomacy with Tehran.

On the morning of Thursday, June 13, two oil tankers were allegedly attacked in the Gulf of Oman, just off the coast of Iran. The US government immediately blamed Iran for the incident, without providing any evidence.

The vessels happened to be en route to Japan at precisely the same time that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran. The first Japanese leader to visit Iran since its revolution 40 years ago, Abe was holding a historic meeting with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei when the incident took place.

This coincidence did not escape Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who said,

“Suspicious doesn’t begin to describe what likely transpired this morning,” and reiterated a call for regional dialogue and cooperation.

Prominent Iran expert Trita Parsi noted that the timing of the suspicious attacks suggests that there is fear in Washington that efforts at Iran-Japan diplomacy might succeed in softening the de facto US-led economic blockade of Tehran.

Since Trump illegally sabotaged the international Iran nuclear deal (known officially as the JCPOA) in May 2018, the US government has striven to isolate Iran and suffocate its economy by preventing the country from exporting oil, importing food and medicine, and trading with foreign nations.

The Trump administration has even threatened close ally Japan, the world’s fourth-largest consumer of oil, with secondary sanctions, forcing the country to halt Iranian oil imports.

Concerns that the Trump administration has been fretting about a potential Iranian diplomatic breakthrough with Japan were validated by the US response.

Secretary of State and former CIA director Mike Pompeo immediately pointed the finger at Tehran, calling the alleged attacks “a threat to international peace and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation, and an unacceptable escalation of tension by Iran.”

Saudi Arabia and its regime media went into overdrive amplifying the Trump administration’s accusations against Iran.

Many Western corporate media outlets, too, lazily echoed the US government’s unsubstantiated claims. The New York Times, for example, published a breaking piece headlined, “Pompeo Says Intelligence Points to Iran in Tanker Attack in Gulf of Oman.”

The Times did concede, however, that “Pompeo did not present any evidence to back up the assessment of Iran’s involvement.”

And several mainstream media outlets actually diverged from their traditional pro-war stances and expressed cautious skepticism about the secretary of state’s unproven accusations.

Surprisingly, CNN, NPR, and The Independent stressed that Pompeo provided no evidence for his claims.

Iran’s Press TV outlet published video of what it said were crew members of one of the tankers who had been saved by an Iranian rescue team.

The Iranian government-backed channel accused the Trump administration of exploiting incidents like this “to wage war.”

Press TV also tweeted photos of one of the tankers hours after the alleged attack, noting that the vessel was unharmed and the fire had been put out.

These facts nevertheless did not stop notorious war hawks and neoconservatives from beating the drum of war.

Fanatical anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel bizarrely described the incident as “an attack on the United States.”

Neoconservative commentator Michael Weiss, who has spent the past eight years pushing for regime change in Syria, implied the alleged attacks were proof that Iran is a “threat.”

Neoconservative Senator Marco Rubio, who has spent the past five months heavily lobbying for US military intervention in Venezuela, quickly turned his attention to Iran. He pointed the finger at the IRGC’s Quds Force, without citing any evidence.

Rubio also berated skeptics, insisting it would not “make sense” for any other actor to carry out the alleged attacks.

The US government has previously blamed Iran for alleged attacks on oil tankers, again without providing any evidence. In May, two Saudi vessels were attacked, and the Trump administration immediately accused Tehran — but in reality this attack was mostly likely carried out by Yemen’s Houthi movement, which governs northern Yemen and has been fighting a defensive war against US-backed Saudi and Emirati forces since March 2015.

Many observers noted how the Trump administration’s unsubstantiated accusations against Iran are eerily reminiscent of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the US government and a compliant corporate press sold lies to the public to justify a war of aggression on Vietnam.

It is certainly possible that Washington could exploit these supposed attacks to justify a war on Iran. But it is just as likely that the Trump administration could hope to use this incident to try to pressure Japan to halt its historic negotiations with Tehran.

Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in May 2018, blatantly violating a UN Security Council resolution and sabotaging an international deal that had been negotiated by China, Russia, Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union.

The far-right president has also surrounded himself with anti-Iran hawks, including Pompeo and neoconservative national security adviser John Bolton, who has spent years lobbying for war on Iran.

Trump has made it clear that his goal is to pressure Iran to renegotiate a nuclear deal with the United States, and is using a “maximum pressure” campaign to force Tehran to submit to Washington’s diktat.

On June 13, Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated that he rejected Trump’s offer to discuss a new agreement, stating, “I do not consider Trump as a person worth exchanging any message with.”

In the meantime, longtime US proxy Saudi Arabia stands to benefit from the escalating aggression. Oil prices immediately spiked in response to the alleged attacks on the tankers, enriching oil producers such as the viciously anti-Iran Saudi monarchy.

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Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

Russia, Serbia, and Belarus each derive certain soft power benefits from their participation in the “Slavic Brotherhood” military drills, with this year’s exercises taking on a greater significance for all of them due to the changed international context in which they’re occurring.

The annual trilateral “Slavic Brotherhood” military drills between Russia, Serbia, and Belarus are taking place this year right outside Belgrade and will last from 14-27 June. The aptly titled exercises reinforce the strong partnership between these three parties and have recently begun to generate substantial international media coverage because of the context in which they’re occurring, which is more important this year than ever before. Nothing of significance has changed in the New Cold War since last time, but there are signs that the relations between each of these three Slavic states are undergoing a period of uncertain reform, hence why they all derive certain soft power benefits from their participation in this latest drill.

To tackle the proverbial elephant in the room first, Russia’s Eurasian Union and CSTO ally Belarus has been “rebalancing” its ties with it over the past year after entering into a series of seemingly intractable disputes concerning energy and agriculture, which have occurred countless times before in the past but this time no solution has yet to be found. Making a long story short, Russia refused to continue subsidizing Belarus’ energy imports that Minsk was re-exporting for considerable profit abroad and also decided to crack down on the scheme that its neighbor was allegedly playing by acting as a lucrative backdoor for counter-sanctioned EU products to enter the Russian marketplace via the Eurasian Union free trade loophole.

Russia recently replaced its Ambassador to Belarus after less than a year following domestic pushback to some of his more controversial statements during this increasingly tense period, but both parties finally seem to have de-escalated the situation with the appointment of the new Russian representative and appear to be back on track to repair the short-term damage that was done to their relationship. Therefore, Belarus’ participation in the “Slavic Brotherhood” exercises is a reminder that the ties between these two fraternal states are much stronger than some observers might think, with both countries wanting to show the world that their military and cultural cooperation (the latter by virtue of the drills’ symbolic name) is still very close.

As for Serbia, it’s been practicing a complex “balancing” act for decades since the time of Yugoslavia at the dawn of the Old Cold War, but it’s recently tilted closer towards the West as it’s sought to receive EU membership as part of President Vucic’s bid to revive its struggling economy, though only on the condition of controversially “normalizing” relations with its NATO-occupied breakaway province of Kosovo & Metohija. It’s here where Russia is expected to play an enormous diplomatic role in legitimizing whatever decision Belgrade ultimately makes in this respect given the Great Power’s gigantic soft power appeal in both the country and the Balkans in general. Participating in military drills with Russia, let alone on Serbian territory itself, reinforces the notion that Moscow is Belgrade’s military ally.

That said, while the arms trade between the two is excellent, Serbia nevertheless cooperates more closely with NATO than Russia ever since entering into the so-called “Partnership for Peace” framework in 2006. Furthermore, there are obvious limitations to what Russia could do to militarily support Serbia in practically any scenario, but the country’s patriotic masses are easily guided by ruling party-controlled media into exaggerating the importance of the Russian-Serbian Strategic Partnership and imagining that Moscow would directly intervene in the event of worsening clashes in Kosovo despite it remaining on the sidelines during the latest ones when even its own UN official there was attacked by the Albanians.

This brings to mind the soft power benefit that Russia derives from the “Slavic Brotherhood” drills, which is that they signal to the West that Moscow is a stakeholder in Serbia’s security even if it’s realistically incapable of ensuring as much in the manner that many Serbs might expect. Nevertheless, it symbolizes that the Balkans are still within Russia’s limited “sphere of influence” and that it’s unwilling to surrender it entirely to the West, ergo the celebration of “Slavic Brotherhood” in Serbia for nearly the next two weeks. All in all, Russia, Serbia, and Belarus each benefit in the soft power sense from the ongoing drills, even if they have their own motivations for participating in them at the present moment.

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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.

In selling the yet-to-be-published “deal of the century” (DoC), its principle authors have said the following:

That the Palestinians are not yet capable of governing themselves (US president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner); that Israel has a right to annex parts of the West Bank (US ambassador to Israel David Friedman); and that the deal itself is probably unexecutable (US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo).

With friends like these, who needs enemies?

Killing the peace deal

In so brazenly and unashamedly entrenching Israel’s gains and trashing any possibility of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, in dealing with the heavy weight of refugees’ history by simply deleting it, the authors have done more than autodestruct.

They have killed too the idea that a peace deal can ever be constructed around the principle of a Jewish majority state living alongside a Palestinian one as an equal and stable neighbour.

This myth has spent too long in the intensive care unit of international negotiations. It has fuelled almost three decades of negotiations and it still lives on at the core of European policy.

It dominated and displaced all other ideas.

For 26 years after the Oslo accords there was no process other than the peace process. The Palestinian leadership, that recognise Israel, would never have declared it over on their own. But nor was Oslo’s demise the work of the rejectionist factions like Hamas, Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah. On the contrary, in rewriting its charter with the purpose of lessening the distance between it and Fatah, Hamas accepted the Green Line in 1967 as a basis for negotiations.

No, the gravediggers of the two-state solution are two zealots: Kushner and Friedman. They essentially believe Israel has won this conflict and all that the resolution of it requires is for the defeated party to accept this truth and take the money.

A ‘mission accomplished’?

The DoC is nothing more than declaring “mission accomplished”, as other invading armies have done in the Middle East. History teaches us that such pronouncements are premature.

Kushner, whose every public outing has turned into a PR disaster, has given the game away on several occasions.

Not least in his interview with Robert Satlov of the Washington Institute, where he declared that his quest was based on “truthing”. First truth: Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Second truth: Israel had the Golan Heights for 52 years, so he did not think there is “any question” that that it too should be part of Israel.

Does truth here mean recognising reality, or facts on the ground? Not entirely. He referred again to the truth in his joyous, messianic opening to his speech at the dedication ceremony of the US embassy in Jerusalem.

“I am so proud today to be in Jerusalem, the eternal heart of the Jewish people,” Kushner said, his face flush with revelation, adding, ”(President Trump said) he would finally recognise the truth, that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel.”

Truth here means the fulfilment of divinely ordered destiny. Kushner and Friedman are the mortal enemies of liberal Zionism, which was a secular project, precisely because they believe they are on a mission from God. Listen to Kushner describing Israel, in the same speech, as paradise on earth  –

“the only land in the Middle East where Jews, Muslims and Christians participate and worship freely… the protector of women’s rights… one of the most vibrant nations of the world” – and you get the picture.

No truth, no self-determination, no national aspiration, no history, no water, no land, no olive groves, other than Israel’s, can exist in the land between the river and the sea in Kushner’s book and the Palestinians simply have to accept this truth.

What goes on in Kushner’s and Friedman’s head is being acted out in grotesque reality by settlers.  As the farmers of al-Mughayyir and Kufr Malek villages prepared to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, Israeli settlers set fire to their crops, repeatedly.

As if to underline this, while Kushner has been in the Middle East, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to Washington, has been trying to prevent a bipartisan resolution from the Senate endorsing a two-state solution.

To say this so firmly and so clearly on behalf of Israel’s biggest sponsor is to hasten the day when the project to secure and seal a state based on the principle of religious supremacy comes to an end, and for that reason I am profoundly grateful to Kushner and Friedman. They are doing a good demolition job.

But there are other reasons too.

The Bahrain ‘workshop’

It has been a tough slog to get Arab leaders to attend the economic conference – now downgraded to a workshop – in Bahrain at the end of the month, when the money for this deal was due to be pledged.

Jordan, Egypt and Morocco have apparently agreed and Qatar will be there as well.

But their reluctance to do anything other than listen is based on the firm realisation that no Arab head of state could endorse such a plan. That’s as great a truth, as big a fact on the ground, as the fundamentalist Kushner himself can hatch.

Kushner was reported to be taken aback by the level of opposition his plan is getting among friends. Kushner’s WhatsApp date, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, assembled a focus group of government officials, intellectuals and newspaper columnists to road test the DoC.

“He seemed to have been surprised when he learned that the majority of people in the room were critical of his plan and told him that King Salman emphasised the rights of the Palestinians,” a source told the Washington Post.

If Kushner thinks about this – which he will not, because this process is not cerebral, it’s an act of faith and then an act of force – it means the private conversations he has been having with Arab leaders are not a reliable source of information. He should not trust the things he is being told in private, precisely because they cannot be said in public.

Palestinian struggle back

Far from burying the Palestinian cause, after a long period where it was sidelined by the Arab uprisings of 2011, the counter-revolution, the rise of Islamic State group (IS), the deal of the century has managed to push this ancient struggle back where it belongs in the centre stage of Arab politics.

Once there, no Arab government can ignore it, or do anything other than say they can only support a deal that the Palestinians themselves accept.

That, again, is no mean achievement, and Kushner and Friedman are to be congratulated on that too.

The DoC however presents the biggest opportunity to those who have the most to lose from it.

Once they acknowledge they are never going to get a Palestinian state living in autonomy beside an Israeli one, the Palestinian leadership have their work cut out.

What should be done

The first task is to suborn petty rivalry, ego, and personal interest to the cause of unifying the leadership composed of all its parties. No Fatah leader can carry on treating Hamas as a bigger foe than Israel.

No Palestinian leader can represent his people if he is vetted first by Israel and Washington.

If the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, really wanted to send a signal to Israel about the DoC, he would stop, or even suspend, security co-operation with the occupation forces. They would get the message overnight.

The second task ahead is to develop a joint programme of protest, civil disobedience and action. If the occupation has never been cheaper for Israel, make it more expensive.

The third task is to use the embassies it has got round the world to lobby for the diplomatic recognition of the Palestinian state and lobby each political party in Europe to make recognition a reality. You can not fight a highly active pro-Israel lobby around the world with inaction. Get active.

End of conflict

There are many elements which would form the basis of an end of conflict – Hamas’s offer of a long-term hudna is one of them. A post-Oslo generation of Palestinian youth yearning for leadership is another. It does not have to be one person.

It could be collective.

A new generation of 1948 Palestinians whose demand for equality is the cornerstone of the next phase of this struggle is yet a third. The one state option, or some version of it, is the only one capable of unifying and ultimately liberating all Palestinians from their carefully constructed ghettos.

There is, however, one option that is not on the table. And that is doing nothing.

There has been an active debate among those who follow these events in granular detail about why a political declaration is needed at all, as Netanyahu is getting all he needs – Jerusalem, Golan Heights, defunding of UNWRA – without it.

This has been expressed in a number of ways, one of them being that the deal is designed to fail, to give Netanyahu and Trump the excuse of saying there is no partner for peace.

A line in the sand

I am still inclined to think that the DoC will be published, although the longer it is delayed, the more it interferes with Trump’s re-election campaign. For one reason. Like the Clinton Parameters before it, it will be a line in the sand, whose purpose is to bury all other lines before it, principally the Green Line of 1967, which has disappeared entirely.

Plans are just as lethal as bullets. Allow this line in the sand to be drawn and the Palestinians may just as well take the money, give up and watch Abu Dhabi rise on the shores of Gaza.

I don’t think the Palestinian people, who have been through hell in the last seven decades, will give up. They are less likely to give up now than at any time before. That’s why I am optimistic.

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David Hearst is the editor in chief of Middle East Eye. He left The Guardian as its chief foreign leader writer. In a career spanning 29 years, he covered the Brighton bomb, the miner’s strike, the loyalist backlash in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Northern Ireland, the first conflicts in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, the end of the Soviet Union, Chechnya, and the bushfire wars that accompanied it. He charted Boris Yeltsin’s moral and physical decline and the conditions which created the rise of Putin. 

Featured image: President visit the Western Wall, Jerusalem, May 22, 2017. Credit: Photo credit: Matty Stern/U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv.

Protesters in Hong Kong attempted to storm the parliament on Tuesday in opposition to an amendment to the autonomous territory’s extradition law with mainland China. The protest’s messaging and the groups associated with it, however, raise a number of questions about just how organic the movement is.

Some of the groups involved receive significant funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA soft-power cutout that has played a critical role in innumerable U.S. regime-change operations.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi weighed in on the bill, which is being considered in Hong Kong’s parliament, arguing that, should it pass, Congress would have to “no choice but to reassess whether Hong Kong is ‘sufficiently autonomous’ under the ‘one country, two systems’ framework.”

The State Department has also weighed in, saying it could “could undermine Hong Kong’s autonomy and negatively impact the territory’s long-standing protection of human rights, fundamental freedoms and democratic values.”

The Canadian and British foreign ministries have also thrown their weight behind those opposing the bill.

By all indications, protesters are just getting started. On Wednesday, some told international media that they would try to storm parliament again. Protesters have been met with the use of tear gas and rubber bullets by police.

The protesters appear to be trying to raise awareness among Western audiences, using the “AntiExtraditionLaw” hashtag and signs in English. In one photograph, a group holds dozens of the old Hong Kong flags, when the territory was under the control of the British crown, while bearing a sign that accuses China of “colonialism.”

Major protests greet a minor change in law

The amendment to the extradition law would “allow Hong Kong to surrender fugitives on a case-by-case basis to jurisdictions that do not have long-term rendition agreements with the city.” Among those jurisdictions are mainland China and Taiwan. Ian Goodrum, an American journalist who works in China for the government-owned China Daily newspaper, told MintPress News:

It’s unfortunate there’s been all this hullabaloo over what is a fairly routine and reasonable adjustment to the law. As the law reads right now, there’s no legal way to prevent criminals in other parts of China from escaping charges by fleeing to Hong Kong. It would be like Louisiana — which, you’ll remember, has a unique justice system — refusing to send fugitives to Texas or California for crimes committed in those states.

Honestly, this is something that should have been part of the agreement made in advance of the 1997 handover. Back then bad actors used irrational fear of the mainland to kick the can down the road and we’re seeing the consequences today.”

The U.S. agenda ripples through major NGOs

Like the U.S. government, the NGO-industrial complex appears to be wholly on-board. Some 70 non-governmental organizations, many of them international, have endorsed an open letter urging for the bill to be killed. Yet it is signed only by three directors: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor (HKHRM).

The protests mark the latest flare-up in longstanding tensions over Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland. In 2014, many of the groups associated with the current movement held an “Occupy” protest of their own over issues of autonomy.

Hong Kong Democracy Protest

A police officer blows the whistle to the protesters as they remove the barricades at an occupied area in Mong Kok district of Hong Kong Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2014. Hong Kong authorities cleared street barricades from a pro-democracy protest camp in the volatile Mong Kok district for a second day Wednesday after a night of clashes in which police arrested 116 people.

Ironically, the issue of autonomy is not just of importance to Hong Kongers, but to the United States government as well. And it’s not all just harshly worded statements: the U.S. government is pumping up some of the organizers with loads of cash via the NED.

Maintaining Hong Kong’s distance from China has been important to the U.S. for decades. One former CIA agent even admitted that “Hong Kong was our listening post.”

As MintPress News previously reported:

The NED was founded in 1983 following a series of scandals that exposed the CIA’s blood-soaked covert actions against foreign governments. ‘It would be terrible for democratic groups around the world to be seen as subsidized by the CIA,’ NED President Carl Gershman told the New York Times in 1986. ‘We saw that in the Sixties, and that’s why it has been discontinued. We have not had the capability of doing this, and that’s why the endowment was created.’

Another NED founder, Allen Weinstein, conceded to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, ‘A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.’”

The NED has four main branches, at least two of which are active in Hong Kong: the Solidarity Center (SC) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The latter has been active in Hong Kong since 1997, and NED funding for Hong Kong-based groups has been “consistent,” says Louisa Greve, vice president of programs for Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. While NED funding for groups in Hong Kong actually dates back to 1994, 1997 was the year the territory was transferred from control by the British.

In 2018, NED granted $155,000 to SC and $200,000 to NDI for work in Hong Kong, and $90,000 to HKHRM, which is not itself a branch of NED but a partner in Hong Kong. Between 1995 and 2013, HKHRM received more than $1.9 million in funds from the NED.

Through its NDI and SC branches, NED has had close relations with other groups in Hong Kong. NDI has worked with the Hong Kong Journalist Association, the Civic Party, the Labour Party, and the (Hong Kong) Democratic Party. It isn’t clear whether these organizations have received funding from the NED. SC has, however, given $540,000 to the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions in the course of just seven years.

The coalition cited by Hong Kong media, including the South China Morning Post and the Hong Kong Free Press, as organizers of the anti-extradition law demonstrations is called the Civil Human Rights Front. That organization’s website lists the NED-funded HKHRM, Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the Civic Party, the Labour Party, and the Democratic Party as members of the coalition.

It is inconceivable that the organizers of the protests are unaware of the NED ties to some of its members. During the 2014 Occupy protests, Beijing made a big deal out of NED influence in the protests and the foreign influence they said it represented. The NED official, Greve, even told the U.S. government’s Voice of America outlet that “activists know the risks of working with NED partners” in Hong Kong, but do it anyway.

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Alexander Rubinstein is a staff writer for MintPress News based in Washington, DC. He reports on police, prisons and protests in the United States and the United States’ policing of the world. He previously reported for RT and Sputnik News.

Feature image: A protester bleeds from his face as he tries to stop a group of taxi drivers from trying to remove the barricades which are blocking off main roads, near a line of riot police at an occupied area, in the Mong Kok district of Hong Kong, Wednesday, Oct. 22, 2014. Hong Kong student leaders and government officials talked but agreed on little Tuesday as the city’s Beijing-backed leader reaffirmed his unwillingness to compromise on the key demand of activists camped in the streets now for a fourth week.

Pompeo Blames Iran for Likely Gulf of Oman False Flag

June 14th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Cui bono is most important whenever an incident like Thursday attacks on vessels in the Gulf of Oman occurs.

Clearly, Iran had nothing to gain and plenty to lose from the incident. The Trump regime and its anti-Iran imperial partners benefit greatly by blaming the country for an incident no evidence suggests it had anything to do with.

Perception matters, not reality on the ground, especially when propaganda pounds the official narrative into the public mind — establishment media serving as imperial press agents.

It works time and again. No matter how many times the public is fooled by disinformation and Big Lies, they’re easy marks to be duped again.

Polls show Americans view Iran unfavorably. An early 2019 Gallup poll asked respondents: “What is your overall opinion of Iran? Is it very favorable, mostly favorable, mostly unfavorable or very unfavorable?”

Over 80% of respondents said their view of Iran is mostly unfavorable (46%) or very unfavorable (36%). Only 19% said their opinion of the country is mostly favorable (13%) or very favorable (3%). A scant 3% had no opinion.

Even in the aftermath of the JCPOA nuclear deal (effective January 2016), Gallup found similar results in its early 2016 polling — only 14% of respondents viewing Iran very (3%) or mostly (11%) favorable.

Yet Iran hasn’t attacked another country in centuries. The Islamic Republic is a leading proponent of regional peace, stability, and mutual cooperation with other nations, threatening none, stating only that if attacked it’ll defend itself as permitted by international law.

As expected after yesterday’s Gulf of Oman incident, Mike Pompeo falsely blamed Iran for attacking and damaging the affected tankers. Citing no credible evidence backing his dubious accusation, he said:

“It is the assessment of the (US) government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today” — a bald-faced Big Lie, adding:

“This assessment is based on intelligence (sic), the weapons used (sic), the level of expertise needed to execute the operation (sic), recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping (sic), and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication (sic)” — more bald-faced Big Lies.

Pompeo falsely blamed Iran for “attack(ing) four (UAE, Saudi, Norwegian) commercial ships near the Strait of Hormuz” last months despite no evidence indicating it had anything to do with what happened.

He lied blaming what he called “Iran-backed surrogates (for) strik(ing) two” Saudi pipelines, again presenting no evidence backing the phony claim.

He suggested Iranian responsibility for a May 19 rocket landing harmlessly in Baghdad’s Green Zone, a May 31 car bombing in Afghanistan wounding four US soldiers, and a missile attack on a Saudi airport — again presenting no evidence.

“Taken as a whole,” he said, “these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation, and an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension by Iran.”

At a UN Security Council session on the Gulf of Oman incident, acting US envoy Jonathan Cohen repeated Pompeo’s Big Lie, saying

“the United States assesses that Iran is responsible for these attacks (sic),” adding:

“No proxy group in the area has the resources or skill to act with this level of sophistication. Iran, however, has the weapons, the expertise, and the requisite intelligence information to pull this off.”

Accusations without credible evidence supporting them are baseless. Pompeo and Cohen presented none because nothing suggests Iran’s responsibility for what happened.

Israel and Washington’s military regional presence have plenty of “resources or skill to act with this level of sophistication” — where blame for the incident likely lies with lots to gain, not Iran with much to lose.

Its deputy UN envoy Eshagh Al Habib “categorically reject(ed) the US’ unfounded claim with regard to 13 June oil tanker incidents and condemn(ed) it in the strongest possible terms,” adding:

“Neither fabrications and disinformation campaigns nor shamelessly blaming others can change the realities.”

“The US and its regional allies must stop warmongering and put an end to mischievous plots as well as false flag operations in the region.”

“Warning, once again, about all of the US coercion, intimidation, and malign behavior, Iran expresses concern over suspicious incidents for the oil tankers that occurred today.”

“Definitely, those that accuse Iran have the main role in creating those incidents and it could be the United States itself.”

The incident occurred while Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was in Tehran on a diplomatic mission. Was the incident planned to undermine it and sour bilateral relations?

Was its intent also to push Brussels back from taking any steps to circumvent unlawful Trump regime sanctions on Iran?

A dubious CENTCOM video claiming to show an Iranian patrol boat approaching one of the affected Gulf of Oman vessels should be taken with a grain of salt.

Videos are easily fabricated. No flag or other ID was visible on the small boat shown. Trump regime officials said the video showed Iranian personnel removing an unexploded mine attached to the hull of one of the struck vessels, suggesting evidence was removed.

Pompeo saying the US “will defend its forces, interests, and stand with our partners and allies to safeguard global commerce and regional stability” ups the stakes for possible Trump regime premeditate aggression against the Islamic Republic.

The incidents discussed above greatly heightened regional tensions. Not a shred of evidence suggests Iranian responsibility for them.

Based on the history of US false flags since the mid-19th century, 9/11 the mother of them all, the Trump regime was likely to blamed for staging Thursday’s Gulf of Oman incident — perhaps together with Israel.

Longstanding plans by both countries call for replacing Iran’s sovereign independent governance with pro-Western puppet rule.

Provocative incidents like what happened on Thursday advance things toward possible war in a region already boiling from US aggression.

Instead of pushing back against more possible US aggression against Iran based on Big Lies, establishment media failed to debunk the falsified official narrative — supporting the Trump regime’s malign intent against the country.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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 LobeLog


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

America’s Legacy of Regime Change

June 14th, 2019 by Stephen Kinzer

For most of history, seizing another country or territory was a straightforward proposition. You assembled an army and ordered it to invade. Combat determined the victor. The toll in death and suffering was usually horrific, but it was all done in the open. That is how Alexander overran Persia and how countless conquerors since have bent weaker nations to their will. Invasion is the old-fashioned way.

When the United States joined the race for empire at the end of the 19th century, that was the tactic it used. It sent a large expeditionary force to the Philippines to crush an independence movement, ultimately killing some 200,000 Filipinos. At the other end of the carnage spectrum, it seized Guam without the loss of a single life and Puerto Rico with few casualties. Every time, though, U.S. victory was the result of superior military power. In the few cases when the United States failed, as in its attempt to defend a client regime by suppressing Augusto Cesar Sandino’s nationalist rebellion in Nicaragua during the 1920s and 30s, the failure was also the product of military confrontation. For the United States, as for all warlike nations, military power has traditionally been the decisive factor determining whether it wins or loses its campaigns to capture or subdue other countries. World War II was the climax of that bloody history.

After that war, however, something important changed. The United States no longer felt free to land troops on every foreign shore that was ruled by a government it disliked or considered threatening. Suddenly there was a new constraint: the Red Army. If American troops invaded a country and overthrew its government, the Soviets might respond in kind. Combat between American and Soviet forces could easily escalate into nuclear holocaust, so it had to be avoided at all costs. Yet during the Cold War, the United States remained determined to shape the world according to its liking — perhaps more determined than ever. The United States needed a new weapon. The search led to covert action.

A news agency

During World War II the United States used a covert agency, the Office of Strategic Services, to carry out clandestine actions across Europe and Asia. As soon as the war ended, to the shock of many OSS agents, Harry Truman abolished it. He believed there was no need for such an agency during peacetime. In 1947 he changed his mind and signed the National Security Act, under which the Central Intelligence Agency was established. That marked the beginning of a new era. Covert action replaced overt action as the principal means of projecting American power around the world.

Truman later insisted that he had intended the CIA to serve as a kind of private global news service.

“It was not intended as a ‘Cloak & Dagger Outfit!’” he wrote. “It was intended merely as a center for keeping the President informed on what was going on in the world … [not] to act as a spy organization. That was never the intention when it was organized.”

Nonetheless he did not hesitate to use the new CIA for covert action. Its first major campaign, aimed at influencing the 1948 Italian election to ensure that pro-American Christian Democrats would defeat their Communist rivals, was vast in scale and ultimately successful — setting the pattern for CIA intervention in every Italian election for the next two decades. Yet Truman drew the line at covert action to overthrow governments.

The CIA’s covert-action chief, Allen Dulles (image on the right), twice proposed such projects. In both cases, the target he chose was a government that had inflicted harm on corporations that he and his brother, John Foster Dulles, had represented during their years as partners at the globally powerful Wall Street law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. In 1952 he proposed that the CIA overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, whose government was carrying out land reform that affected the interests of United Fruit. By one account, State Department officials “hit the roof” when they heard his proposal, and the diplomat David Bruce told him that the Department “disapproves of the entire deal.” Then Dulles proposed an operation to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran, who had nationalized his country’s oil industry. Secretary of State Dean Acheson flatly rejected it.

White House resistance to covert regime-change operations dissolved when Dwight Eisenhower succeeded Truman at the beginning of 1953. Part of the new administration’s enthusiasm came from Allen Dulles, Washington’s most relentless advocate of such operations, whom Eisenhower named to head the CIA. The fact that he named Dulles’s brother as secretary of State ensured that covert operations would have all the necessary diplomatic cover from the State Department. During the Dulles brothers’ long careers at Sullivan & Cromwell, they had not only learned the techniques of covert regime change but practiced them. They were masters at marshaling hidden power in the service of their corporate clients overseas. Now they could do the same with all the worldwide resources of the CIA.

It was not only the Dulles brothers, however, who brought the United States into the regime-change era in the early 1950s. Eisenhower himself was a fervent advocate of covert action. Officially his defense and security policy, which he called the “New Look,” rested on two foundations, a smaller army and an increased nuclear arsenal. In reality, the “New Look” had a third foundation: covert action. Eisenhower may have been the last president to believe that no one would ever discover what he sent the CIA to do. With a soldier’s commitment to keeping secrets, he never admitted that he had ordered covert regime-change operations, much less explained why he favored them. He would, however, have had at least two reasons.

Since Eisenhower had commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II, he was aware of the role that covert operations such as breaking Nazi codes had played in the war victory — something few other people knew at the time. That would have given him an appreciation for how important and effective such operations could be. His second reason was even more powerful. In Europe he had had the grim responsibility of sending thousands of young men out to die. That must have weighed on him. He saw covert action as a kind of peace project. After all, if the CIA could overthrow a government with the loss of just a few lives, wasn’t that preferable to war? Like most Americans, Eisenhower saw a world of threats. He also understood that the threat of nuclear war made overt invasions all but unthinkable. Covert action was his answer. Within a year and a half of his inauguration, the CIA had deposed the governments of both Guatemala and Iran. It went on to other regime-change operations from Albania to Cuba to Indonesia. Successive presidents followed his lead.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States was once again free to launch direct military invasions. When it found a leader it didn’t like — such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi — it deposed him not through covert action, but by returning to the approach it had used before World War II: the force of arms. Covert efforts to overthrow governments have hardly ceased, as any Iranian or Venezuelan could attest. The era when covert action was America’s principal weapon in world affairs, however, is over. That makes this a good time to look back.

Metrics for covert action

Books about the Cold War heyday of covert action era are a mini-genre. Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s contribution is especially valuable. Unlike many other books built around accounts of CIA plots, Covert Regime Change takes a scholarly and quantitative approach. It provides charts, graphs, and data sets. Meticulous analysis makes this not the quickest read of any book on the subject, but certainly one of the best informed. Chapters on the disastrous effort to overthrow communist rule in Eastern Europe, which cost the lives of hundreds of deceived partisans, and on the covert-action aspects of America’s doomed campaign in Vietnam are especially trenchant.

O’Rourke identifies three kinds of covert operations that are aimed at securing perceived friends in power and keeping perceived enemies out: offensive operations to overthrow governments, preventive operations aimed at preserving the status quo, and hegemonic operations aimed at keeping a foreign nation subservient. From 1947 to 1989, by her count, the United States launched 64 covert regime-change operations, while using the overt tool — war — just six times. She traces the motivations behind these operations, the means by which they were carried out, and their effects. Her text is based on meticulous analysis of individual operations. Some other books about covert action are rip-roaring yarns. This one injects a dose of
rigorous analysis into a debate that is often based on emotion. That rigor lends credence to her conclusions:

  • When policymakers want to conduct an operation that they know violates international norms, they simply conduct it covertly to hide their involvement.
  • Covert missions typically have lower potential costs than their overt counterparts, but they are also less likely to succeed.
  • Can interveners acquire reliable allies by covertly overthrowing foreign governments? Overall, I find the answer is no. Covert regime changes seldom worked out as intended.
  • The new leader’s opponents often accused him of being a U.S. puppet and, in some cases, even took up arms against the regime. In fact, approximately half of the governments that came to power in a U.S.-backed covert regime change during the Cold War were later violently removed from power.
  • States targeted in a covert regime-change operation appear less likely to be democratic afterward and more likely to experience civil war, adverse regime changes, or human-rights abuses
  • Covert regime changes can have disastrous consequences for civilians within the target states. Countries that were targeted by the United States for a covert regime change during the Cold War were more likely to experience a civil war or an episode of mass killing afterward.
  • Even nominally successful covert regime changes — where U.S.-backed forces came to power — seldom delivered on their promise to improve interstate relations.

Although these conclusions are not new, they have rarely if ever been presented as the result of such persuasive statistical evidence. Yet even this evidence seems unlikely to force a reassessment of covert action as a way to influence or depose governments. It is an American “addiction.” The reasons are many and varied, but one of the simplest is that covert action seems so easy. Changing an unfriendly country’s behavior through diplomacy is a long, complex, multi-faceted project. It takes careful thought and planning. Often it requires compromise. Sending the CIA to overthrow a “bad guy” is far more tempting. It’s the cheap and easy way out. History shows that it often produces terrible results for both the target country and the United States. To a military and security elite as contemptuous of history as America’s, however, that is no obstacle.

Although covert regime-change operations remain a major part of American foreign policy, they are not as effective as they once were. The first victims of CIA overthrows, Prime Minister Mossadegh and President Arbenz, did not understand the tools the CIA had at its disposal and so were easy targets. They were also democratic, meaning that they allowed open societies in which the press, political parties, and civic groups functioned freely — making them easy for the CIA to penetrate. Later generations of leaders learned from their ignorance. They paid closer attention to their own security, and imposed tightly controlled regimes in which there were few independent power centers that the CIA could manipulate.

If Eisenhower could come back to life, he would see the havoc that his regime-change operations wreaked. After his overthrow of Mossadegh, Iran fell under royal dictatorship that lasted a quarter-century and was followed by decades of rule by repressive mullahs who have worked relentlessly to undermine American interests around the world. The operation he ordered in Guatemala led to a civil war that killed 200,000 people, turning a promising young democracy into a charnel house and inflicting a blow on Central America from which it has never recovered. His campaign against Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, which included the fabrication of a poison kit in a CIA laboratory, helped turn that country into one of the most violent places on Earth.

How would Eisenhower respond to the long-term disasters that followed his covert action victories? He might well have come up with a highly convincing way to excuse himself. It’s now clear, he could argue, that covert action to overthrow governments usually has terrible long-term results — but that was not clear in the 1950s. Eisenhower had no way of knowing that even covert regime-change operations that seem successful at the time could have devastating results decades later.

We today, however, do know that. The careful analysis that is at the center of Covert Regime Change makes clearer than ever that when America sets out to change the world covertly, it usually does more harm than good — to itself as well as others. O’Rourke contributes to the growing body of literature that clearly explains this sad fact of geopolitics. The intellectual leadership for a national movement against regime-change operations — overt or covert — is coalescing. The next step is to take this growing body of knowledge into the political arena. Washington remains the province of those who believe not only that the United States should try to reconfigure the world into an immense American sphere of influence, but that that is an achievable goal. In the Beltway morass of pro-intervention think tanks, members of Congress, and op-ed columnists, America’s role in the world is usually not up for debate. Now, as a presidential campaign unfolds and intriguing new currents surge through the American body politic, is an ideal moment for that debate to re-emerge. If it does, we may be surprised to see how many voters are ready to abandon the dogma of regime change and wonder, with George Washington, “Why quit our own to stand upon foreign ground?”

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Stephen Kinzer is an author and newspaper reporter. He is a veteran New York Times correspondent who has reported from more than 50 countries on five continents. His books include “Overthrow” and “All the Shah’s Men”.

During the “Health in Buildings Roundtable” sponsored by the NIH & co-organized by the US CDC and several other organizations, Dr. Martin Pall from the Washington State University (WSU) concluded that the “5G rollout is absolutely insane”.

In this short presentation, Dr. Pall confirms that the current 2G/3G/4G radiation the population is exposed to has been scientifically linked with:

  • Lowered fertility
  • Insomnia, fatigue, depression, anxiety, and major changes in brain structure in animals
  • Cellular DNA damage
  • Oxidative stress
  • Hormonal disruption
  • Cancer
  • And much more

Dr. Pall briefly explains the mechanisms of how the electrosmog emitted by our cell phones, wifi routers, cell phone antennas and other wireless technologies affect human cells.

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  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video: “The 5G Rollout Is Absolutely Insane.” How Wireless Technologies Affect Human Cells. Dr. Martin Pall
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False Flag Incident in the Gulf of Oman?

June 14th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

The Gulf of Oman lies east of the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz, bordering Iran, Oman, and the UAE. It’s close to Saudi territory and Pakistan.

It’s a potential flashpoint area because around two-thirds of world oil passes through these waters en route to world markets.

According to Iran’s Arabic-language Al-Alam television, blasts affected two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday.

Initially it was unclear under what flags the vessels operate. Citing shipping and trade sources, Reuters said they’re the Marshal Islands-flagged Front Altair and the Panama-flagged Kokuka Courageous.

A statement by Kokuka’s Singapore-based BSM Ship Management company said 21 crew members abandoned ship following the incident damaging its hull on the starboard side, the vessel “not in any danger of sinking. Its cargo of methanol is intact.”

Carrying naphtha, the Front Altair is reported “on fire and adrift,” cause of what happened to the Kokuka not explained so far.

Chartered by Taiwan’s state oil refiner CBC Corporation, the company said it’s “suspected (that the vessel was) hit by a torpedo…”

According to the Tradewinds shipping broadsheet, a Norwegian-owned Front Altair was struck by a torpedo off the UAE coast, no further details mentioned.

Pakistani sources reported that distress calls were sent by the affected tankers, crews aboard evacuated and safe.

The incident reportedly occurred about 70 nautical miles from the UAE and 14 nautical miles from Iran.

Press TV said “(t)wo oil tankers c(ame) under attack (by explosions) in the Sea of Oman.”

Britain’s military-run United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations issued a Thursday alert related to the incident, urging “extreme caution” given heightened US/Iran tensions.

All of the above comes after John Bolton and Mike Pompeo falsely accused Iran of attacking vessels belonging to the UAE and Saudi Arabia in early May, as well as striking Saudi pumping stations.

Last month, the UAE called incidents affecting its vessels part of a “coordinated” operation likely carried out by a state actor, without directly blaming Iran.

Tehran was falsely blamed for a rocket hitting Baghdad’s Green Zone last month, causing no casualties or damage.

What possible benefit could Iran hope to gain by involvement in the above incidents? Clearly nothing whatever.

Its ruling authorities want provocations avoided — what the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners are responsible for time and again, not Iran or other sovereign independent countries seeking peace and stability, not conflict.

It’s unclear how much damage was caused to tankers affected by the Thursday incident — very possibly a US or Israeli false flag, heightening tensions more than already.

It’s reminiscent of the August 2, 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, a US-staged false flag, initiating full-scale conflict in Southeast Asia.

At the time, Lyndon Johnson got the war he wanted. Congressional passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution empowered him to take all measures believed necessary to repel aggression (that didn’t occur) — without formally declaring war.

Incidents in May were minor, causing little damage, no reported casualties. If Iran was responsible for what happened with malign intent, significant damage would have been likely, perhaps sinking the affected vessels and striking a Green Zone target accurately instead of amounting to nothing more than a harmless bang.

A US Baghdad embassy statement at the time said there were no casualties or damage. Falsely blaming Iran for incidents it had nothing to do with escalates tensions, upping the stakes for possible war.

Washington’s longstanding objective is to return Iran to US client state status — so far under Trump waging war by other means alone.

Regime tactics include hostile rhetoric, illegal sanctions, saber-rattling and threats. John Bolton wants war on all nations the US doesn’t control.

A critic once slammed him, saying “(h)e never met a country he didn’t want to destroy.” Another observer said he’s much more than “a run-of-the-mill hawk…He’s never seen a foreign policy problem that couldn’t be solved by bombing.”

His longstanding hostility toward Iran is well known, earlier calling for bombing the country to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons it abhors, doesn’t have or seek, and wants eliminated everywhere.

Pompeo reportedly favors war on Iran by other means, wanting its economy crushed, falsely believing its authorities will cave to US demands.

Trump reportedly told Joint Chiefs chairman General Joseph Dunford he’s against attacking the country militarily.

Netanyahu and other Israeli hardliners dream of war on Iran to eliminate the Jewish state’s main regional rival.

Longstanding US/Zionist plans call for redrawing the Middle East map, replacing sovereign independent governments with pro-Western puppet regimes.

It’s a divide, conquer and dominate strategy, wanting control over the region’s valued energy reserves, creating a so-called new Middle East, a region earlier carved up post-WW I by partitioning the Ottoman Empire.

The US global empire of bases is all about using them as platforms for endless wars and gaining control over world nations. That’s what the scourge of imperialism is all about.

A Final Comment

Citing the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), Press TV reported that “an Iranian rescue vessel had picked up the 23 crew members of one of the tankers and 21 of the other from the sea and had brought them to safety at Iran’s Jask, in the southern Hormozgan Province,” adding:

Details of what happened remain sketchy. This is a developing story. More on it when further information is known.

The Trump regime no doubt will blame Iran for what it surely had nothing to do with — likely increasing its “maximum pressure” on the country in the wake of the Gulf of Oman incident.

It ups the stakes for possible war in a part of the world already devastated by US aggression.

Is Iran next on its target list for greater greater war then? Do Trump regime hardliners intend making the region boil more than already?

Given their rage to transform Iran into a US vassal state, anything is possible, even war on a nation able to hit back hard against US and Israeli targets if attacked.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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: Smoke billows from a tanker said to have been attacked off the coast of Oman at un undisclosed location. The crews of two oil tankers were evacuated off the coast of Iran after they were reportedly attacked in the Gulf of Oman.Image Credit: AFP


150115 Long War Cover hi-res finalv2 copy3.jpg

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0
Year: 2015
Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

You live in the burbs, or what they call so many small cities nowadays. Strip malls, shopping centers and it seems a Wal-Mart is everywhere. We don’t live on streets, we live in subdivisions now. You want a bottle of pop… oh sorry, now they’re in cans or those plastic environmental killers. Or if you want a loaf of bread or quart of milk or whatever, you get in your car and you drive to the supermarket or convenience store.. usually where you pump your gas. There are no such things as avenues with lines of retail shops.

In ’69 in my Brooklyn neighborhood you walked up to Avenue U and sat at the luncheonette and had your soda… a real fountain one if you desired. You walked along to the bread store and got your loaf or fish as the shoppers in the Italian bakery called it. The corner grocery store had the milk you needed. The butcher shop is where you bought your meat. The produce store your veggies. The fruit store, all the bananas you needed or fresh in season peaches, apricots or watermelon if it happened to be June or July. That was then and this sadly is NOW.

On any evening from early Spring right up until late Autumn the stoops and front yards were filled with your neighbors… some you liked and some you didn’t. But, they were out there each and every non rainy evening after dinnertime. Some folks had their beach chairs (as we called them) set up with cigarettes (and some cigars) dangling from their lips, or perhaps a beer was chugged as the sun slowly exited the day. The boys were in the street playing ball as the young girls played jump rope or other games that young girls played.

People would walk up and down the street and mingle with neighbors, or maybe argue with them, especially on the subject of Vietnam, but there was this energy and vitality of the neighborhood. Then, when it got dark only the teenagers would be out there, with transistor radios humming rock and roll and guys coming on to the girls with lots of BS being slung back and forth. Around the corner at the nearest luncheonette or ‘Candy Store’ as many were still called, the adult men would hang out, comparing notes on the local sports teams interspersed with more debate on Vietnam. Plenty of Egg Creams and Lime Ricky sodas were being consumed, along with the usual cups of coffee or maybe a malted milk or two. When it got real late and the morning editions of tomorrow’s daily papers were delivered, most of the gambling types would wait to see what the daily number was. In those days it was obtained by the last three digits of the racetrack’s pari-mutuel handle.

In the spring of ’69, with Nixon being elected and an anti war movement taking hold, the neighborhoods really became as polarized as the nation. The draft was in full swing and more and more college students became radicalized. Some of the guys serving in the military from our neighborhood starting coming home, either on leave, or in pine boxes. Vietnam was each evening’s number one news story, and we all could watch the war right on the six and eleven o’clock news. ‘Kill counts’ became the new numbers game being played. Vietnam may have been thousands of miles away, but to many of us it was right next door… literally! If one of our neighbors got drafted, he sure as hell would wind up there real quick.

By the summer of ’69, despite the Apollo moon landing, the friction of this war was becoming really flammable. One neighbor, a student at NYU Dental School, came home one evening and joined us on our regular street corner. Amongst we college students was another neighbor, Don, a 32 year old Fire Marshall. Don bragged about how he had ‘served’ in the late 50s in the Army. His claim to fame was being so close, in his words, to being sent to the Middle East for some conflict that Uncle Sam initiated. “We were marching through the sands of the local New Jersey beach to get practiced at desert warfare. We were THAT close to being shipped over.” Don began parroting his love for both Nixon and country (in that order) and how those ‘beatniks’ were undermining our democracy. Gus, the dental student, jumped all over him. “I was at the dental clinic today, and you probably heard about the construction workers who broke up an anti war march and beat the shit out of the protestors. A whole bunch of us ran down to give medical aid to the victims… blood was all over the streets!” Don called Gus a Commie lover and the rest of us had to separate them before we had more blood on our street. From that day on I avoided Don as much as I could… Another chicken hawk! Marching on the sands of a New Jersey beach… give me a **** break!

In August of ’69 the horrific Sharon Tate and friends murder story made national headlines when the ‘Helter Skelter’ Charles Manson case replaced the Vietnam War as item number one. Those of us who understood how bad vibes can spread knew that things like this were part of the whole evil empire. Like attracts like and wanton killings come in streaks. Yet, the neighborhood kept chugging along. People got up each morning that summer and went to work. In the evenings they still sat outside and hung out with each other. The beaches were still filled with bathers and sun worshippers each weekend.  The movies were packed on Friday and Saturday nights, as were all the bars and discos. Life went on, for better or for worse. Maybe it was the whole Woodstock concert event later that month which really offered a ray of hope. Hundreds of thousands of young people, from literally all over the country, came together without violence, and just enjoyed each other and the music…and of course a few drugs of choice. Mellow was the color of the day, and yes, it did open up many eyes. Not enough to end the madness of the Nam, but perhaps ….

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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].

Something extraordinary began with a short walk in St. Petersburg last Friday.

After a stroll, they took a boat on the Neva River, visited the legendary Aurora cruiser, and dropped in to examine the Renaissance masterpieces at the Hermitage. Cool, calm, collected, all the while it felt like they were mapping the ins and outs of a new, emerging, multipolar world.

Chinese President Xi Jinping was the guest of honor of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was Xi’s eighth trip to Russia since 2013, when he announced the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

First they met in Moscow, signing multiple deals. The most important is a bombshell: a commitment to develop bilateral trade and cross-border payments using the ruble and the yuan, bypassing the U.S. dollar.

Then Xi visited the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), Russia’s premier business gathering, absolutely essential for anyone to understand the hyper-complex mechanisms inherent in the construction of Eurasian integration. I addressed some of SPIEF’s foremost discussions and round tables here.

In Moscow, Putin and Xi signed two joint statements – whose key concepts, crucially, are “comprehensive partnership”, “strategic interaction” and “global strategic stability.”

Xi and Putin cruising into a multipolar world: Aurora Cruiser Museum (Wikipedia)

In his St. Petersburg speech, Xi outlined the “comprehensive strategic partnership”. He stressed that China and Russia were both committed to green, low carbon sustainable development. He linked the expansion of BRI as “consistent with the UN agenda of sustainable development” and praised the interconnection of BRI projects with the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). He emphasized how all that was consistent with Putin’s idea of a Great Eurasian Partnership. He praised the “synergetic effect” of BRI linked to South-South cooperation.

And crucially, Xi stressed that China “won’t seek development to the expense of environment”; China “will implement the Paris climate agreement”; and China is “ready to share 5G technology with all partners” on the way towards a pivotal change in the model of economic growth.

So what about Cold War 2.0?

It was obvious this was slowly brewing for the past five to six years. Now the deal is in the open. The Russia-China comprehensive strategic partnership is thriving; not as an allied treaty, but as a consistent road map towards Eurasia integration and the consolidation of the multipolar world.

Unipolarism – via its demonization matrix – had first accelerated Russia’s pivot to Asia. Now, the U.S.-driven trade war has facilitated the consolidation of Russia as China’s top strategic partner.

Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs better get ready to dismiss virtually everyday statements coming, for instance, from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, when he alleges that Moscow aims to use non-strategic nuclear weapons in the European theater. It’s part of a non-stop process – now in high gear – of manufacturing hysteria by frightening NATO allies with the Russian “threat.”

Moscow better get ready to dodge and counteract reams of reports such as the latest from the RAND corporation, which outlines – what else? – Cold War 2.0 against Russia.

In 2014, Russia did not react to sanctions imposed by Washington. Then, it would have sufficed to merely brandish the threat of default on $700 billion in external debt. That would have killed the sanctions.

Now, there’s ample debate inside Russian intelligence circles on what to do in case Moscow faces the prospect of being cut off the CHIPS-SWIFT financial clearing system.

With few illusions about what may pass at the G20 in Osaka later this month, in terms of a breakthrough in U.S.-Russia relations, intel sources told me Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin is prepared to send a more “realistic” message— if push eventually comes to shove.

A 1936 map of Eurasia. (Flickr)

His message to the EU, in this case, would be to cut them off, and link with China for good. That way, Russian oil would be completely redirected from the EU to China, making the EU completely dependent on the Strait of Hormuz.

Beijing for its part seems to have finally absorbed that the current Trump administration offensive is not a mere trade war, but a full fledged attack on its economic miracle, including a concerted drive to cut China off from large swathes of the world economy.

The war on Huawei – the Rosebud of China’s 5G supremacy – has been identified as an attack on the dragon’s head. The attack on Huawei means an attack not only on tech, mega-hub Shenzhen, but the whole Pearl River Delta: a $3 trillion yuan ecosystem, which supplies the nuts and bolts of the Chinese supply chain for high-tech manufacturers.

Enter the Golden Ring

Neither China’s technological rise, nor Russia’s unmatched hypersonic know-how have caused America’s structural malaise. If there are answers they should come from the Exceptionalist elites.

The problem for the U.S. is the emergence of a formidable peer competitor in Eurasia – and worse still, a strategic partnership. It has thrown these elites into Supreme Paranoia mode, which is holding the whole world hostage.

By contrast, the concept of the Golden Ring of Multipolar Great Powers has been floated, by which Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China might provide a “stability belt” along the South Asia Rimland.

I have discussed variations of this idea with Russian, Iranian, Pakistani and Turkish analysts – but it sounds like wishful thinking. Admittedly all these nations would welcome establishing the Golden Ring; but no one knows which way Modi’s India would lean – intoxicated as it is with dreams of Big Power status as the crux of America’s “Indo-Pacific” concoction.

It might be more realistic to assume that if Washington does not go to war with Iran – because Pentagon gaming has established this would be a nightmare – all options are on the table ranging from the South China Sea to the larger Indo-Pacific.

The Deep State will not flinch to unleash concentric havoc on the periphery of both Russia and China and then try to advance to destabilize the heartland from the inside. The Russia-China strategic partnership has generated a sore wound: it hurts – so bad – to be a Eurasia outsider.

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Pepe Escobar is a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research

Featured image: Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands during their meeting at the Grand Kremlin Palace on Wednesday in Moscow. (Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

On June 12, the Ansar Allah movement (also known as the Houthis) launched a cruise missile at Abha International Airport in southern Saudi Arabia. The movement said that the missile had successfully hit the airport, which has a large military part to it.

Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari, a spokesman for the pro-Ansar Allah part of the Yemeni Armed Forces, said that “advanced U.S. air-defense systems” deployed inside the airport were not able to intercept the missile.

In their turn, the Saudi side said that the missile had hit the arrival hall in the airport injuring 26 civilians, including three women and two children. Most of the injured civilians were treated on the spot. Eight were transported to nearby hospitals.

A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition, Col. Turki al-Malki, called the Yemeni movement a terrorist group and described the attack as a war crime.

Later, Ansar Allah’s TV channel AlMasirah released an infographic claiming that the launched missile has a maximum range of 2,500 km. the warhead a weight of 450kg and uses GPS guidance.

According to experts, the used missile may have in fact been an Iranian Soumar cruise missile assembled from parts in Yemen. The Soumar is a developed on the basis of the Soviet-designed Kh-55 subsonic air-launched cruise missile. Iran obtained the Kh-55 from Ukraine in the 2000s.

Ansar Allah has a track record of using precision-guided weapons. In 2017, they launched what is suspected to be an Iranian Soumar cruise missile at the Barakah nuclear power plant in the UAE.

The June 12 strike is not unexpected. Yemeni forces resisting the Saudi-led invasion have repeatedly warned Saudi Arabia and the UAE they are ready to retaliate by targeting vital infrastructure of these two countries.

On March 16, Brig. Gen. Yahya Sari said that “legitimate targets” for missile and drone strikes extend to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. On May 14, a drone strike by Ansar Allah forced Saudi Arabia to halt temporarily the pumping on its 1,200km-long East-West pipeline.

Nonetheless, Saudi Arabia and its allies seem to be unwilling to halt their military invasion in Yemen, launched in 2015, and move towards a political solution with Ansar Allah, which controls key parts of the country, including the capital of Sanaa and the port of al-Hudaydah. The main reason being that any kind of such solution is seen by the Saudi leadership as an acceptance of the failure of its costly foreign policy in the region.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia and the US position the developing conflict in Yemen as a part of their campaign against Iran describing Ansar Allah is as an Iranian proxy. So, June 12-like developments may well lead to further attempts by the US and its allies to increase pressure on Iran.

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In December 2011, William Krehm, Anne Emmett, and COMER (The Committee for Monetary and Economic Reform filed a lawsuit in Federal Court with a view forcing a restoration of the Bank of Canada to its mandated purposes. “In essence, they want the Bank of Canada to provide interest-free loans to the federal, provincial, and municipal governments, as provided for in the Bank of Canada Act.”

Has William Krehm’s lifelong project of democratizing the Bank of Canada born fruit?

In late May, Senator Diane Bellmare in consultation with a group of 61 progressive economists introduced a debate in Canada’s Senate to reform the Bank of Canada, and restore its historical mandate as envisaged by William Krehm.

 

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This past April 11th William Krehm died peacefully. He was in his 106th year.

I had met him about a decade ago when I started attending meetings of the lobby group COMER. He founded it, the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform to force the Bank of Canada to go back to doing what it once did, finance government projects.

How Bill Krehm got involved in such a project is the story of his life. He was born over a century ago in 1913 in Toronto. He was a promising violinist and sent to Chicago to study. From there he went to New York until the depression hit and he returned to Toronto studied math and physics at the University of Toronto till the money ran out.

He was truly a Renaissance man. He became fluent in nine languages, studied music, mathematics and Marxism, went to Spain in 1936 to assist as a translator and journalist in the fight to defeat the fascists. There he met the man we know as George Orwell (author of 1984) who was among the many dedicated recruits who joined the cause like Ernest Hemmingway, Pablo Picasso, Norman Bethune and W. H. Auden. For his efforts Krehm spent the summer of 1937 in a Spanish jail.

During the second world war he lived in Mexico and South America earning his living as a freelance journalist until 1943 when Time Magazine hired him as their Latin American correspondent. They fired him in 1947 after he wrote a book critical of American foreign policies.

He then returned to Canada, worked as a journalist for awhile but with his Trotskyite past had trouble earning enough income. He had married and now had a growing family so he took on a new career in the real estate business. He founded a company that today owns 2400 rental units that his sons now manage.

He retired from business in the 1980’s and wrote about economics in several books the last of which was A Power Unto Itself; The Bank of Canada; the threat to our nation’s economy published in 1993. The book explained something few Canadians knew, that the Bank of Canada in the mid seventies gave up its role financing government projects, the role it was created for. The result was ever increasing debt and that unnecessary condition continues today.

I didn’t fully understand and appreciate Bill’s extensive background at the several COMER meetings I attended… he was then in his late nineties and was still alert and showing up to fight the fight for financial justice.

For further details on the lawsuit and the substance of COMER’s initiative led by William Krehm, see

Monetary Policy, Money Supply and The Bank of Canada

By Professor John Ryan, March 29, 2018

 

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