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Lebanese Judge Ahmad Mezher has given orders that a survey be conducted of Lebanese occupied territories in the Shebaa Farms, Kfarshouba, Huneen, Ideise and Bleeda. These villages are bordering Hasbaiya, Rashaya al-Fukhar and Kiyam and have been under Israeli occupation since 1981, as Syria’s Golan Heights have been since 1967. This step coincides with the illegal “gift” of the Syrian Golan Heights offered by US President Donald Trump to his closest ally Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu. Although Trump’s move was verbally condemned by the international community, no other state or international body seems likely to openly oppose Trump’s move at the moment.

However, Lebanon has decided to confront this move on the ground, showing its readiness to defend its territory if US “gifts” were ever seen to include Lebanese occupied territories. The Lebanese presidency, the Parliament and the government agreed that it is the right of Lebanon to regain its occupied territory and that the equation “the army, the people, the resistance” is united under one umbrella. Thus, the possibility of confrontation between the Resistance – i.e. Hezbollah in this case – and Israel is now on the table.

The level of tension and chances of confrontation increased during Lebanese President Michel Aoun’s visit to Moscow. During meetings with his homologue Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Christian President Aoun rejected US pressure on his country. The US establishment, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his envoys to Lebanon, wants to prevent the over one and a half million Syrian refugees in Lebanon from returning home. President Aoun also rejected Trump’s gift to Netanyahu, stating clearly that the Golan Heights is Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel,  and not the property of  the US to dispose of as it will.

It remains unclear whether the Shebaa Farms, Kfarshouba and neighbouring villages are part of Trump’s gift to Israel. This is why Lebanese authorities have requested the judiciary authority officially survey the southern Lebanese territories occupied by Israel. If, in response to the survey, any attempt is made to assert that these areas are part of Israel, then the Lebanese triad (the army, the people and the resistance) will be bound to recover its occupied territory. The timing of the decision is important because it shows the readiness of the Lebanese government to raise the subject and to confront Israel in the wake of the US decision on the Golan Heights, a territory closely linked to the Lebanese farms and villages. As recently as 2009 some of these lands were contested between Syria and Lebanon, but now that Lebanon is in a better position than Syria to vindicate its claims against Israel, the Syrian government will be happy for it to do so.

President Aoun raised these issues with President Putin in the context of Trump’s previous gift of Jerusalem, by virtue of his recognition of an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Lebanon fully supports the right of return of Palestinians to their land, particularly since there are over 800,000 Palestinians living in Lebanon. Just as the US would prefer these Palestinians to remain in Lebanon, the US now seems to want Lebanon to accept an ongoing presence of Syrian refugees on Lebanese soil. The US policy of keeping Syrian refugees in Lebanon has several goals.

The first is to shift the religious balance of power in Lebanon. Most Syrian refugees are Sunni (mainly hostile to Assad and to his allies) and the US would like to see a Sunni plurality in Lebanon to confront Shia Hezbollah and the society behind it. All Israeli wars have failed to curb Hezbollah and could not reduce its strength. On the contrary, Hezbollah military power is increased to an unprecedented level domestically and regionally. Moreover, in the last Lebanese Parliamentary polls, Hezbollah won more votes than any religious party, surprising everyone. Support for Hezbollah goes beyond any one religious confession; it has proved itself as a force defending Christians and Shia against Wahhabi takfiri extremists. Confronting Hezbollah face to face would lead to certain failure, hence the US need to strategically build another society to stand against it.

President Aoun insists on the return of Syrian refugees to Syria, notwithstanding the financial incentives being offered by the US and Europe to keep them in Lebanon. The presence of the refugees upsets the religious equilibrium in Lebanon, and accelerates the process by which Christians are becoming a minority on Lebanese soil. The religious terrorism that hit the Middle East over the last decade targeted regional minorities, notably the Christians. The same NATO leaders whose governments sponsored takfiri terrorism against Christians in the Levant proposed to Lebanese Christian leaders that they leave the land of their ancestors and settle in the west. Christians (and other minorities) who were raped, murdered and terrorized by ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria would have suffered the same fate in Lebanon had Hezbollah decided to entrench themselves only in the south of Lebanon, in the Beirut suburbs, or in selected villages of the Bekaa Valley and did not move its forces to Syria and Iraq to face and fight Takfiri.

Moreover, the Lebanese President considers the Syrian refugees a security and a financial burden that is placing a heavy burden on the fragile and chaotic Lebanese infrastructure.  These refugees currently represent a third of the total Lebanese population.

Another objective of US refugee policy in Lebanon is to recover from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad what it failed to achieve by arming militants to overthrow his government over the last 8 years. The US establishment would like to keep over 5 million Syrian refugees outside Syria, mainly in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Europe. This, in US thinking, could impede forthcoming presidential elections in Syria, and prevent both the rebuilding of the Syrian Army and the reconstruction of the country. Syrians are skilful craftsmen; keeping them away from home impedes rebuilding.  All these US objectives do not help Lebanon in any way. On the contrary, they weaken Lebanon, which needs a healthy relationship with neighbouring Syria for its security and commercial development.

Trump has made the Middle East less secure. He has offered Israel an illegal and unnecessary gift. Israel was already controlling the Syrian Golan Heights; Syria posed no threat to it. Syria had not fired a bullet against Israeli occupation of the Golan for 30 years and will be busy for the next ten years rebuilding its destroyed infrastructure. Moreover, the late President Hafez Assad had engaged with Israel, through US mediation, to negotiate a peace deal in exchange for the Golan Heights. It was Israel who rejected the deal at the last minute. Assad then said he would leave liberation of the territory to the generation to come.

The US establishment is undermining Lebanon’s security and peace by imposing one and a half million refugees on the country, destabilizing the local society, and threatening to impose sanctions if Lebanon does not submit to US bullying.

Trump gave Jerusalem to Israel and can no longer be considered a partner in any peace process. This realization has given new urgency to the Palestinian cause. He is not willing to give a state to the Palestinians, but he is disposing of their rights.

US forces are unwelcome in Syria, occupying a third of the country and a bordering passage, while ISIS no longer controls any Syrian territory in the north-east. At the same time the US is keeping tens of thousands of Syrian refugees at the al-Rukban camps from returning home.

In Iraq, the parliament is divided between those willing to see the last US soldier depart and those who want to maintain some training and intelligence collaboration. Iraqi politicians are afraid of asking the US to stay or to leave permanently for fear of seeing ISIS return with US support in either case (if US forces stay there is fear of seeing the US support for ISIS, an eventuality Iraqis also fear if the US were to leave).

Finally, the US is now seen as a superpower ruled by a thug sucking wealth from the oil-rich Arab countries, forcing them to buy US weapons so that Middle Easterners can continue killing each other at their own expense. Arab countries, once very rich, are imposing local taxes they have never imposed before on their own nationals and are going through a financial crisis unheard of for decades. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine and Lebanon are on the floor financially and even Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, Qatar and Bahrein are not in their best financial shape. Iran’s nuclear deal was revoked and since Trump took power the country is facing the harshest sanctions ever.

It is unclear when the next war may erupt to challenge US hegemony in this part of the world. It is clear that Russia and China are already present in the Middle East, ready to take the place of a US establishment which is no longer regarded as a friendly nation by any state but Israel.

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I’m in the UK on my farm. Tomorrow, 29th March, is ‘Brexit Day’. But the reality is far from it – in fact the UK is faced by a constitutional crisis – as the 29th March quitting the EU was enshrined in an Act of Parliament – which has never been rescinded! To rescind this requires a vote in the Commons and a new act stating the new terms. Instead (so far) some lady peer stood up in the House of Lords and read a letter saying that 29 March is no longer the recognised date for England quitting the EU.

What we are witnessing is, in fact, a type of ‘treason’. The Country is being sold to Brussels.

Perhaps ‘given-away’ would be more accurate.

Theresa May has, all along, been playing a double game: claiming to be negotiating departure terms wile actually ensuring no departure actually happens in reality. It is simply stepping stones in the progression: Nation State gets swallowed by Super State gets swallowed by Totalitarian State becomes swallowed by New World Order. The UK is being taken-apart from the inside. All the ballyhoo is about obfuscating the steady march to total technocracy and control.

An interesting constitutional observation is that the Queen – who opens the new parliament after the summer recess every year – did so in September 2018 without wearing her crown. Just a plain blue hat. This has never happened before – and some picked it up as a symbolic gesture. Resigning her role as constitutional/titular head of the nation?

In UK old law (which still applies) the people are sovereign and parliament carries through the will of the people by representing them in the House of Commons. The Queen retains her ‘Royal Prerogative’, which counts for little these days, but remains highly symbolic – and in fact, if ever actually used, carries genuine political weight. On her Coronation in 1953, the Queen swore to uphold the constitution of the Country as long as she lived.

However, as Britain’s monarch, she clearly has a foot in two contrasting camps. One gets the impression that the hole shebang is being orchestrated, if not choreographed, to shift the ‘chosen’ 0.2% into their ‘negotiated’ new roles as heads of an empire that will considerably eclipse the British Empire of around 100 years ago.

In the mean time, unprecedented scenes outside the House of Parliament, as thousands of (mostly young) ‘remainers’ wave European Union flags and vociferously demand to stay in the EU. As Moses found out all those years ago, people are so reticent to give-up their slavery.

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

His Excellency Bashar al Jaafari issued an urgent statement on Syria’s Golan, via a UN stake out, 22 March 2019. While maintaining his immaculate standard of professional diplomat, the Syrian ambassador crushed US President Donald J. Trump’s “irresponsible tweeting.” He laid waste to the escalation of “American arrogance,” and explained the many UN Security Council Resolutions which support Syria’s sovereignty over its Golan, resolutions which call for the end of illegal Israeli occupation.

We, in the United States, have yet to realize both the futility and immense consequences of war even as we develop, store, sell, and use hideous weapons. The number of children killed is rising.

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At 9:30 in the morning of March 26, the start of the fifth year of the Saudi-led coalition war against Yemen, the entrance to a rural hospital in the northwest part of the country was teeming as patients waited to be seen and employees arrived at work. Suddenly, missiles from an airstrike hit the hospital, killing seven people, four of them children.

Jason Lee of Save the Children, told The New York Times that the Saudi-led coalition, now in its fifth year of waging war in Yemen, knew the coordinates of the hospital and should have been able to avoid the strike. He called what happened “a gross violation of humanitarian law.”

The day before, Save the Children reported that air raids carried out by the Saudi-led coalition have killed at least 226 Yemeni children and injured 217 more in just the last twelve months. “Of these children,” the report noted, “210 were inside or close to a house when their lives were torn apart by bombs that had been sold to the coalition by foreign governments.”

Last year, an analysis issued by Save the Children estimated that 85,000 children under age five have likely died from starvation or disease since the Saudi-led coalition’s 2015 escalation of the war in Yemen.

“Children who die in this way suffer immensely as their vital organ functions slow down and eventually stop,” said Tamer Kirolos, Save the Children’s Country Director in Yemen. “Their immune systems are so weak they are more prone to infections with some too frail to even cry. Parents are having to witness their children wasting away, unable to do anything about it.”

Kirolos and others who have continuously reported on the war in Yemen believe these deaths are entirely preventable. They are demanding an immediate suspension of arms sales to all warring parties, an end to blockades preventing distribution of food, fuel and humanitarian aid and the application of full diplomatic pressure to end the war.

The United States, a major supporter of the Saudi-led coalition, has itself been guilty of killing innocent patients and hospital workers by bombing a hospital. On October 3, 2015, U.S. airstrikes destroyed a Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, killing forty-two people.

“Patients burned in their beds,” MSF reported, “medical staff were decapitated and lost limbs, and others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”

More recently, on March 23, 2019, eight children were among fourteen Afghan civilians killed by a U.S. airstrike also near Kunduz.

Atrocities of war accumulate, horrifically. We in the United States have yet to realize both the futility and immense consequences of war. We continue to develop, store, sell, and use hideous weapons. We rob ourselves and others of resources needed to meet human needs, including grappling with the terrifying realities of climate change.

We should heed the words and actions of Eglantyne Jebb, who founded Save the Children a century ago. Responding to the British post-war blockade of Germany and Eastern Europe, Jebb participated in a group attempting to deliver food and medical supplies to children who were starving.

In London’s Trafalgar Square, she distributed a leaflet showing the emaciated children and declaring: “Our blockade has caused this, – millions of children are starving to death.” She was arrested, tried, convicted, and fined. But the judge in the case was moved by her commitment to children and paid her fine. His generosity was Save the Children’s first donation.

“Every war,” said Jebb, “is a war against children.”

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Kathy Kelly is Co-coordinater of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Featured image is from Felton Davis | CC BY 2.0

The archives in question will be opened on March 2, 2020.

And while historians around the world are already preparing to record parts of the pope’s documents explaining his role in the Holocaust, Croatia and the region will probably be more interested in his role the post-war rescue of war criminals, Croatia-based website Index is reporting.

The article said that a ratline ran through the Vatican that was used, among others, by Ustasha leaders to escape justice after WW2. This ratline was organized by Croatian Catholic priest Krunoslav Draganovic, whom Boris Raseta refers to as “the Ustasha James Bond” in his book.

The Ustasha regime was in power in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a WW2 entity allied with the Nazis that set up and operated death camps for Serbs, Jews, and Roma, including Jasenovac.

Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic (image on the right) himself escaped thanks to his connections in the College of St. Jerome in Rome, as did many other criminals, while Index is reporting that Pope Pius XII must have known a lot about the crimes of the Ustasha – “if for no other reason than because of what (high ranking Croatian Catholic cleric) Alojzije Stepinac was saying.”

“The speeches of Church dignitaries don’t go unnoticed by the Vatican. It will be interesting to see what the pope thought of post-war Yugoslav authorities, especially in light of (Croatia’s) efforts to proclaim Stepinac a saint. Both canonizations (of Pius and Stepinac) are stuck and sidelined, both of them knew a lot about the biggest crime in the history of Europe. And neither was overly upset,” Index writes.

Pope Pius XII is best known for the concordat between the Vatican and the Nazi Germany, signed in 1933, which he arranged while serving as the Holy See’s ambassador to Germany.

When became the pope shortly before WW2 broke out, Pius XII was warning more about communism than Nazism, and was later silent on the Holocaust.

Over 150,000 documents that will be made public should provide the answer to the question that is troubling historians the most: Did the pope know about “the final solution,” the extermination of the Jews, did he know about the Holocaust?

“Hardly not. The Vatican has had an excellent intelligence service for centuries, and they hardly missed the slaughter of six million people. And a more important question arises: Why didn’t the head of the Catholic Church react?,” the website wondered.

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The following article appeared in the February 2019 issue of the European Financial Review.

It’s main theme is to show that the Fed, like all central banks, is not independent–of either government or private banking interests pressures–quite contrary to accepted academic economists’ widely held myth. Nor is it true the Fed doesn’t respond to financial markets’ conditions, but only to real economy inflation and employment conditions. Events since last November 2018 clearly reveal that both central bank independence and policy setting apart from financial markets’ performance are just myths.

“It was just a few months ago, October 2018, that Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, announced the Fed would continue raising its benchmark federal funds interest rate in 2019 and 2020. A next hike was due in December 2018, followed by four more in 2019, and a possible three more in 2020. That would put the fed funds rate at around 4% by the time of the 2020 November national elections.

Powell cited, as justification for the 7 to 8 more hikes, a strong US labor market with robust job creation and moderate, though rising, average wages; inflation remaining stable around the Fed’s target 2% annual rate; and indications of a continued growth in the US economy well above a 2.5% annual GDP.

If Not the Economy—What?

Fast forward just a couple months—to January 2019—following Powell’s fall announcement to stay the course on rate hikes. Somehow the entire economic scenario had reversed, justifying Powell to announce a halt in future rate hikes. The keyword Powell offered for the media was that the Fed was now adopting a policy of ‘patience’, as he called it, with regard to future rate hikes. Translated, the reference to ‘patience’ really meant no more rate hikes in the foreseeable future unless US economic data strongly recovered. But had the US economy downshifted that much between October and late December 2018 to assume it was now so weak, in early January 2019, that a halt to all future rate hikes was justified? Had the GDP, jobs, and the US economy dramatically ‘reversed course’ between October 2018 and December 2018, in just a few months, to justify Powell’s abrupt reversal of Fed policy?

Not really. US GDP growth rate, QoQ, from late October to late December 2018, had declined only 0.1%, and after December 21, 2018 up until Powell’s announcement in January the US economy was forecast to continue to continue to grow at 2.7%–i.e. a normal post-holiday seasonal softening and comfortably still above the Fed’s 2.5% GDP target. The same lack of data indicating a dramatic shift in employment or wages over the October to January period was also evident. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% on average each month in the 3rd quarter 2018 (0.9% for the quarter). And it continued to rise at the same 0.3% per month in the 4th quarter. Employment from October through January 2019 grew on average at 241,000 jobs a month. At the same time, the Fed’s target inflation indicator, the PCE, continued to hover around 2-2.2%, suggesting no change in rates necessary in either direction.

So if the US real economy hadn’t radically shifted direction after October, i.e. had not fallen off an economic cliff in just two months, what then lay behind Powell’s mid-January 2019 decision to reverse course and abruptly halt 2019-2020 anticipated rate hikes?

One possible explanation is that President Trump’s repeated and intensifying criticism of Powell’s rate hikes resulted in the Fed chairman doing an ‘about face’ with regard to Fed interest rate policy that had been in place since 2016. But if Powell shifted policy direction in response to Trump criticism that would mean that the oft repeated claim that the Federal Reserve acts independently of the government is something of a fiction. So was Powell’s shift in response to Trump criticism? Or was it a response to something else? And if something else, what?

Central Bank Interference—From Elected Politicians?

The idea of the Fed always acts independently is somewhat a myth of conventional wisdom. The notion of central bank independence became generally accepted only around the early 1970s, when monetary policy (and the central bank) arose as the preferred policy choice compared to fiscal policy, which had been viewed as the primary policy choice before that decade. According to the notion, elected government officials were too prone to change policy to ensure their re-election, it was argued. Only appointed, long term, ‘experts’ in monetary theory and practice would not be influenced by personal gain and would decide on behalf of the economy and not their careers.

But the idea that central bankers would not be responsive to outside pressure is a fiction. Moreover, the source of outside pressure need not be limited to elected politicians. Since the emergence of the notion of central bank independence there have been several notable cases of political interference to the contrary. And who knows how many cases of private sector pressure on the Fed resulted in Fed policy shift—given the rising frequency of ‘revolving doors’ career changes between appointed Fed governors and Fed district presidents in recent decades.

The more obvious cases of political interference have been occurring since the 1970s.

President Richard Nixon sacked the standing Fed chairman, McChesny Martin, when he came into office in 1969 and replaced him with his personal friend, Arthur Burns, who proceeded to do Nixon’s bidding by lowering interest rates—despite a massive fiscal stimulus at the time—in order to help ensure Nixon a booming economy in 1972 and his re-election.

In 1979 president Jimmy Carter was pressured to replace his standing Fed chairman with a new chair, Paul Volcker. Who were the private and political forces, outside as well as inside government, who forced Volcker on Carter?

In 1985, president Reagan, together with his de facto policy vice-president, James Baker, Secretary of the Treasury and later Secretary of State, engineered the removal of Fed chair, Paul Volcker. Volcker had refused to go along with Baker’s demand to shift Fed interest rate policy more aggressively, to drive down interest rates further and more rapidly in order to boost the stock market. Volcker refused and was gone. His replacement, Alan Greenspan, who had done Reagan’s bidding as chair of his Social Security Reform commission, readily agreed to Baker’s demands upon assuming the Fed chair in 1986. That shift in Fed rate policy contributed heavily to accelerating financial speculation that followed Greenspan’s appointment.

Excess liquidity from the Fed lowered rates, which in turn played a central role in the subsequent stock market crash of 1987, the concurrent junk bond bubble at the time, and the residential housing bubble and crash that followed both.

Another case example was the relationship between president George W. Bush and Fed chairman, Alan Greenspan, during Bush’s first term in office, 2001-2004.

As Bush took office in early 2001 the US economy slipped into a moderate recession following the dot.com Tech bust of 200-2001. Though moderate, the 2001 recession showed signs of faltering once again in 2002. The economy appeared to be slipping back into a second contraction after a brief recovery in late 2001 due to a quick infusion of US government spending in the aftermath of 9-11 and accelerated government spending for the invasion of Afghanistan in the fourth quarter of 2001. However, Fed interest rates were already low in 2002 by historical standards. Nevertheless, Bush met with Greenspan and the Fed lowered rates still further after 2002, to an unprecedented 1% fed funds rate. That boosted a housing market that was already long ‘in the tooth’, as they say, and had largely run through a normal cycle that began seven years earlier in 1996-97. The Fed’s further lowering of rates to 1% resulted in the housing market an artificial second wind again in 2003, boosting the US economy out of recession and setting the stage for a robust recovery in 2004 just before Bush’s re-election. Bush thereafter named Greenspan to an extended term as Fed chair. Greenspan continued on the job as chair. Bush got re-elected. But at the cost of the artificially low 1% rates driving the housing market into a bubble starting 2003 for another four years until it bust in 2006-07. Perhaps more of a ‘smoking gun’ case example, the Bush-Greenspan relation suggests the Fed bowed to Bush pressure (i.e. interference) and represents a case of a central bank acting less than independently. Certainly Greenspan must have known that stimulating the housing market so late in its cycle, with so unprecedented low 1% rates, could only have resulted in an inevitable bubble with all its consequences.

Were these examples of Presidents—Nixon, Carter, Reagan, G.W. Bush—pressuring Fed policy in order to ensure their re-election chances? In the case of Nixon. perhaps. Certainly not in the case of Carter. By appointing Volcker—who had publicly indicated he would quickly raise rates in the 1980 election year as high as necessary if he were appointed—Carter surely must have known it would seriously jeopardize his re-election prospects that year. The rapid escalation of rates in fact played an important role in the 1980 recession and Carter’s losing the election that year.

In the case of Reagan, it appears that stimulating financial asset markets were the primary motive for removing Volcker. There was no re-election on the horizon in 1985. Which raises the question: on behalf of whom and whose interests was James Baker acting by driving out Volcker and replacing him with a more compliant Greenspan? If the motivation was not political re-election, and it was clear the real economy was not in recession and in need of a low interest rate boosting, why then was Baker so determined to have rates lowered? Who would it benefit? In retrospect, the main beneficiaries were the financial markets and investors, especially those associated with junk bond financed mergers and acquisitions and the residential housing-commercial property markets.

In the case of Bush, both financial markets and re-election appear the likely motivations for the Fed policy shift. The financial sector in 2003-2007 had a lot to gain from selling securitized assets and related derivatives on subprime mortgages. Their lobbying the Bush administration, and undoubtedly Greenspan as well, was intense at the time. Lower Fed rates played a crucial role in keeping the quantity of new housing contracts rising—upon which the securitization and derivatives financial boom at the time depended. Of course, it may not have been solely financial markets motivated. Bush got his recovery—and thus economic cover to invade Iraq in 2003 and his re-election in 2004 with a strong economy and a war.

The point is that presidents don’t interfere with central bank policy only for their own personal political gains. They interfere as well on behalf of other private interests, who may also be ‘interfering’ by lobbying the Fed behind the scenes as well—or lobbying key committee members of Congress and the President to interfere on their behalf as well. It is therefore too simplistic to argue that politicians’ interference in central bank policy is always for personal political reasons, just as it is too simple to assume that private investors and bankers have no access to the Fed and never try to influence Fed policy behind the scenes.

This does not mean that private interests do so on the eve of every Fed rate policy decision before its Open Market Committee meets bi-monthly to decide on short term rate changes. The interference typically intensifies when a strategic shift in Fed policy is desired.

Central Bank Interference—From Bankers?

Reaching back further in US central banking history, the original Federal Reserve created in 1913 was essentially the economic sandbox of private sector bankers. It was structured so the Fed districts and their presidents were primarily staffed by bankers themselves, while the Washington Board of Governors was dominated by representatives of the big New York banks as well. This private banker dominated and run structure prevailed for more than two decades following the founding of the Fed.

Only when the Fed screwed up during the great depression of the 1930s, and especially by raising rates in 1932 into a rapidly collapsing US economy—which it did in order to try to protect the financial assets of bankers and investors—did the era of direct banker control of the Fed come to an end. Fed rate hikes in the midst of the depression caused an even worst contraction. Thereafter, central bank reforms were introduced under Roosevelt to bring more direct government appointed governors onto the Fed’s Washington Board of Governors. Other reforms also dampened banker influence at the district Fed. One may argue with evidence, however, that the era of direct banker-investor operation of the Fed ultimately gave way in the course of ensuing decades to a more subtle, indirect banker-investor influence over Fed strategic directions by more indirect means.

The direct dominance by banking interests over Federal Reserve day to day, tactical decision making during the Fed’s first two decades was generally considered normal and acceptable at the time. There was no notion that the Fed should be ‘independent’ of the bankers themselves.

With Roosevelt’s 1935 Fed reforms, for the next two decades at minimum the central bank was relegated to a more passive policy role. The US Treasury Secretary effectively ran monetary policy from the background. It was widely accepted from World War II and immediately beyond that the central bank, having screwed up in the early 1930s, should relinquish its independence to the government—i.e. to the US Treasury. The Fed was relegated to serving as the government’s fiscal agent and to selling bonds to pay for the US debt incurred during depression and war time. Its interest rate policy was ultimately decided by the US Treasury. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the Fed was permitted to slowly reassert a more independent and active role in monetary policy matters. And it was not until the 1960s that monetary policy itself was perceived as an activist economic tool once again. Through the 1950s and 1960s fiscal policy was still king.

The Fed gained more policy independence in the 1970s, as fiscal policy failed to stabilize the economy and, in fact, was viewed as having contributed heavily to its destabilization. It was at this time that the notion of central bank independence gained more credence. The collapse of the postwar Bretton Woods international monetary system in 1973, and the dollar-gold standard as means to stabilize currency exchange rates, provided further impetus to monetary policy as primary and thus to a greater role for central banks’ in the ‘managed float’ international monetary system that replaced Bretton Woods. With the even greater reliance on central banking and monetary policy in the post-1980 period in the US, and globally, the notion that central banks were, and should remain, independent grew concurrently.

Behind Trump’s Attack on Powell

President Trump’s recent attack on Powell and the Fed, building throughout 2018 as the Fed continued its rate hikes, and intensifying at year end 2018, is thus in the long tradition of presidential interference in Fed policy—its strategic direction if not its tactical day to day decision making.

But this still leaves open the question of ‘why presidential interference’? Is it because the president wants a robust real economy prior to a re-election? Trump’s attack on Powell and the Fed peaked the week of the Christmas holiday, well after the midterm elections. It’s unlikely therefore that political motivation lay behind Trump’s attacks. Nor could a deteriorating real economy been the motivation. As noted early, nearly all real economic indicators at the time of October-December 2018 show no collapse or even downward trend.
On the other hand, financial markets were in freefall after October 2018. US stock markets had collapsed by 30%. Oil was falling by 40%. Emerging markets’ currencies were plummeting, and as a consequence depressing US multinational corporations’ offshore profits repatriation from those economies. For the first time, virtually no high yield corporate bonds were sold.

As Trump turned up the heat on Powell in late December, it is likely that representatives of financial interests and investors in the private sector were demanding political action by Trump to halt financial asset deflation—and the massive loss of wealth and values that deflation threatened? Treasury Secretary Mnuchin did not appear panicked for no reason. It was beginning to look a little like late August 2008.

The Fed’s Dangerous Legacy: Low Rates Addiction

As this writer has written elsewhere for some time, financial markets (and the real agents behind them, the wealthy investors and their institutions) have become addicted to low interest rates since 2008. This writer has predicted that the Fed funds rate could not rise above 2.75% without precipitating a major financial markets’ negative response. The Fed has stopped at 2.5% in response to the November-December markets contraction, the worst since 2008 or 1931. Since the Fed halted its rate hikes in January, the same markets have recovered much of their loss—i.e. further evidence of the growing elasticity of stock and other asset prices to Fed interest rate cuts.

The financial crash of 2008 was set in motion, at least in part, by the excessive Fed rate hikes in 2008. Well behind the curve of real developments and events, the Bernanke Fed kept raising rates into the slowing real economy and growing financial instability. The Fed funds rate topped off at 5.25% in 2008—i.e. almost twice as high as the peak in 2018 of 2.5%. Fed rate hikes may not have been the fundamental cause of the 2008-09 crash, but can be accurately considered one of the main precipitating causes. In previous recessions and financial crises, in December 2000 and July 1990, respectively, the Fed Funds rate had peaked at 6.5% and 8%.

The longer term trend clearly means the US real economy (i.e. real asset investment) is becoming less and less responsive to interest rate change, while the financial side of the economy (i.e. financial asset investment) is becoming increasingly sensitive and responsive to rate changes. The question is why is this so? What’s behind the declining ineffectiveness of interest rates in stimulating the real economy and goods and services prices, while the rate policy is becoming more effective in stimulating the financial economy and financial asset prices? A complete answer to that critical question is not possible here, except to say it has to do with the radical structural changes that have been impacting both financial and labor markets that are being driven by increasingly rapid technological change and the very nature of capitalist economy itself.

The Financial Markets, Trump & Powell

Presidents act on behalf of financial interests when called upon. And this is probably more true in the case of Trump, himself a long time financial speculator in commercial property markets. It’s not by accident that the press often reports that Trump sees the stock market as the prime indicator of the health of the economy. Trump likely perceived the stock and financial markets steep correction of last November-December as the possible unraveling of the economy in general. He therefore probably intervened in Fed policy without the further factor of at-large financial investors, officers of investment and commercial banks, hedge fund and private equity CEOs, and others lobbying him to do so. But those sources directly lobbying Trump cannot be disregarded either. The relationship between financial sector interests and Trump is undoubtedly quite tight, given Trump’s own origins and his business investments. It has been reported that Trump often calls private business supporters and contributors for advice in critical situations. And they no doubt call him.

It is also likely that those same financial interests in late 2018 as markets were imploding were not limiting themselves to just lobbying Trump. Their deep connections with Fed district presidents and their committees (on which they typically hold 3 to 6 of the nine committee seats in each district) almost certainly means they were communicating, interceding, and demanding action by the decision makers within the Fed structure itself. Many former Fed governors and district presidents return to the banking industry after a stint at the Fed. Their personal connections with the Fed enable them to informally and indirectly ‘lobby’ with their Fed colleagues.

What these relations between Presidents, the Fed, and financial sector players suggest is that what may appear at one level as presidential or political interference in central bank policy may, at a deeper level, represent private financial interests demanding action by politicians and presidents in particular to ensure the central bank in a crisis shifts its strategic policy direction in order to back-stop and support financial markets. The Fed and Powell may deny that the central bank responds to financial markets, that its mandate is only goods and services price stability and employment, but the reality suggests otherwise. That is especially true of the recent Fed policy shift—where no issues of the real economy demanded Fed policy shift but the financial economy strongly demanded the Fed respond by changing strategic direction. The real economy showed no justification for Powell and the Fed to reverse course with regard to interest rate hikes and policy. But the collapse of US stock markets and other financial asset markets after October 2018 clearly coincides with Trump’s intensifying attacks on the Fed—as well as Powell’s abrupt shift in policy direction in response.

Central Banking Myths & Prospects

It is a myth, and a more contemporary one at that, that central banks always act independently. So too is the corollary, that politicians should not interfere with central banks decision making. Central banks’ strategic decisions are often influenced by elected government officials—and should be. That’s because central bank chairpersons and their committees are not perfectly shielded or uninfluenced by private banking interests. It’s not a question of central bank independence or lack thereof. It’s a question of ‘independence from whom’? It’s a question of central banks functioning on behalf of the public interest—and not in the service of interests of private bankers and finance capitalists or serving politicians acting on their own behalf.

But central banks, whether the Fed or others, have never been structured up to now to serve first and foremost the public interest. Central banks were born out of, and emerged and evolved from, the private banking industry, and their first function was to serve as loan aggregator for governments and the political system. They serve those two masters, in a tug of war depending on the crisis at hand. In the latest iteration of that contest between financial interests and government interests, the Fed has clearly responded to the financial sector (despite its denial it never does so) to stop hiking interest rates in order to relieve pressure on the financial asset markets which were beginning to fracture and break due to Fed rate hikes.

But the longer term trend appears that central banks, the Fed in particular, can serve both masters increasingly less effectively. Central bank interest rate policy actions are growing increasingly ineffective and destabilizing at the same time. In the case of Europe and Japan, central bank responses to the last crisis in 2008-09 (and subsequent double dip recessions) has rendered their potential for response to the next crisis virtually nil. Rates are near zero or negative. QE appears baked into the monetary structure going forward. Balance sheets cannot be recovered—i.e. QT is dead. Europe and Japan (and Bank of England and Swiss Bank, etc.) have shot off their ammunition and the gun is now jammed and cannot be reloaded. They will resort to ever more risky economic and political alternatives come the next crisis.

The US Fed’s is a situation not much better. It has created trillion dollar annual budget deficits for the next decade. The central bank must raise rates to fund an additional $12 trillion in debt coming (on top of the existing $21 trillion today). To do that the Fed must raise interest rates to attract more buyers of its Treasury bonds. But Trump and Powell have stopped raising rates—in response to financial markets’ fragility and inherent instability. And there’s the rub, as they say. The Fed can’t raise rates above 2.75% without precipitating more financial instability. And it must raise rates to finance a $33 trillion US national debt by 2028.

All the talk about global trade war pales in comparison to this great contradiction in monetary-fiscal policy now looming on the near horizon.”

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Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, 2017; ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, March 2019; and ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’, Clarity Press, 2016. He teaches economics at St.Marys College in California and blogs at jackrasmus.com.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a concentration camp is defined as “a place where large numbers of people are kept as prisoners in extremely bad conditions, especially for political reasons.” It is undeniable that the Rukban camp fits this definition to the letter.

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The United States military has rejected offers to resolve the growing humanitarian crisis in the Rukban refugee camp in Syria, which sits inside a 55 km zone occupied by the U.S. along the Syria-Jordan border. The U.S. has also refused to let any of the estimated 40,000 refugees — the majority of which are women and children — leave the camp voluntarily, even though children are dying in droves from lack of food, adequate shelter and medical care. The U.S. has also not provided humanitarian aid to the camp even though a U.S. military base is located just 20 km (12.4 miles) away.

The growing desperation inside the Rukban camp has received sparse media coverage, likely because of the U.S.’ control over the area in which the camp is located. The U.S. has been accused of refusing to let civilians leave the area — even though nearly all have expressed a desire to either return to Syrian government-held territory or seek refuge in neighboring countries such as Turkey — because the camp’s presence helps to justify the U.S.’ illegal occupation of the area.

Though the U.S. has long justified its presence in al-Tanf as necessary to defeat Daesh (ISIS), the U.S. government has also acknowledged that al-Tanf’s true strategic importance lies in U.S. efforts to “contain” Iran by blocking a connection from Iran to Syria through Iraq. Al-Tanf lies near the area where the borders of Syria, Iraq and Jordan meet. Thus, in the U.S.’ game of brinkmanship with Iran, Rukban’s estimated 40,000 inhabitants have become pawns whose basic needs are ignored by their occupiers.

U.S. shows no interest in meeting

On Tuesday, delegations from Russia, Syria, the UN, and the Rukban refugee camp met to discuss the fate of the camp’s inhabitants after a UN survey found that 95 percent of the camp’s inhabitants wanted to leave the camp, while 83 percent wanted to return to their hometowns in areas of Syria now under Syrian government control.

However, the U.S. military and State Department officials in nearby Jordan rejected an invitation to Tuesday’s meeting. The U.S. military also prohibited a Syrian-Russian delegation from entering the Rukban camp on Tuesday. The delegation had sought to assess conditions in the camp, which have become increasingly desperate according to reports from a variety of outlets, including U.S. government-funded outlets like Voice of America.

The U.S.’ refusal to attend the meeting or allow the delegation passage comes less than a month after the U.S. military blocked the entry of evacuation buses overseen by Russian and Syrian forces that would have allowed refugees to leave the camp.

The buses would have entered through the “humanitarian corridors” that were recently opened on the Syrian-controlled side of the U.S.-occupied enclave. While camp inhabitants can, in theory, leave the camp through the corridors on foot, the barren area’s remoteness makes such evacuations unfeasible without vehicle transport. Although some families have left this way, the lack of record keeping within the camp has made it impossible to know how many have tried leaving this way since the corridors were opened last month.

An aeriel photo of Rukban, between the Jordan and Syria borders, Feb. 14, 2017. Photo | AP

An often overlooked problem that has prevented them from leaving is that U.S.-backed and U.S.-trained “moderate rebel” groups have been known to block camp inhabitants from leaving, demanding large payments in U.S. dollars to leave the area. The U.S. military took control of Al-Tanf alongside “moderate” rebel forces in 2014 after wresting the area from Daesh. Many of those opposition groups have since been revealed to have ties and sympathies to terrorist groups, including Daesh.

The U.S. has not given a reason for its rejection of Tuesday’s meeting and had previously said that its rejection of the evacuation buses was based on its view that the buses did not meet the U.S.’ “protection standards.”

Horrific conditions and a U.S. shrug

While the U.S. has claimed that it has blocked refugees from leaving on Russian-Syrian buses are under U.S. “protection,” it has done little to abet the suffering of the tens of thousands of civilians in Rukban, even though the area is under complete U.S. military control and a U.S. military base is just a few miles away. Indeed, the extent of U.S. “aid” to the Rukban camp has been medical training of the handful of nurses in the camp, who work in conditions they describe as being like “the Stone Age” owing to the chronic lack of basic medications and doctors.

While medical care is decidedly lacking, the most pressing problem is the access to food, as starvation has become a real threat for those living in Rukban. Last October the opposition-aligned news service, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), reported that the Rukban camp had been without food or essential supplies for months. Only two aid deliveries, managed jointly by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the UN, were able to enter the camp.

One of those shipments, however, almost didn’t happen after the UN delayed the aid “for logistical and security reasons.” While the UN did not specify which “security reasons” had prompted the delay, it was apparently not the Syrian government, as the UN also said in the same statement that the convoy had received approval from Damascus. This suggests that the “security” concerns were related to U.S.-backed militants in the U.S.-controlled area surrounding al-Tanf. Notably, Russian and Syrian sources have claimed that these same militants often “plunder” the aid intended for the camp’s inhabitants for themselves.

Children look for food scraps in a pile of trash in the Rukban camp in Syria, Nov, 2018. Photo | SNHR

Since then, the situation inside the camp has continued to deteriorate. Indeed, things have gotten so desperate that, in January, a mother attempted to set herself and her three children on fire after she couldn’t find food for three straight days and preferred to give her children a quick death rather than watch them starve. Others in the camp rescued the family, though the mother and her infant were seriously injured. Recently aid from the UN and SARC arrived in early February, the first aid shipment in over three months.

The lack of food combined with the lack of medical care has been responsible for scores of deaths in the camp — the majority of which are of children under the age of two, who often die from malnutrition and preventable diseases. Others have died from freezing weather owing to a lack of adequate shelter, with eight children dying in January for that very reason. Satellite images taken of the camp in early March showed the recent creation of a mass grave containing an estimated 300 bodies adjacent to the camp.

Despite the desperate conditions less than 13 miles from its military base, the U.S. has declined to send food, doctors, medical supplies or other forms of aid to Rukban’s inhabitants, while also preventing them from leaving. However, the U.S. has been providing militant groups in the same area with military and logistical support.

Rukban provides a pretext

In addition to presiding over the squalid and starvation conditions in the Rukban camp, the U.S. has also given militant groups present in the area it controls — including Daesh terrorists who have “embedded” themselves in the camp on the U.S.’ watch — free rein to terrorize the camp’s refugees. These militant groups not only control the flow of food and aid in the camp but terrorize its most vulnerable inhabitants, forcing women and children into sex slavery and engaging in human trafficking. All of this is taking place in a “deconfliction zone” controlled by the U.S. military.

These extremist groups, including Daesh, are well-armed, according to Jordanian Brigadier General Sami Kafawin, who told NBC News in 2017 that these groups “have whole weapons systems … small arms, RPGs, anti-aircraft.”

The official reason for the U.S. base in al-Tanf has long been counterterrorism operations that ostensibly target Daesh. However, very few attacks against the terror group have been launched from this base and a UN report released last August found that Daesh had been given “breathing space” in U.S.-occupied areas of Syria, including al-Tanf. The U.S. has stated that it uses the al-Tanf base to train Syrian opposition fighters who then control the area around the base, including Rukban.

Unidentified Syrian rebels surround a piece of US weaponry during training by an American special forces member in Tanf. Photo | Hammurabi’s Justice News

With the U.S. now having claimed that Daesh has been completely defeated in Syria, the official justification for its illegal occupation of Syrian territory is wearing thin. With that justification now on shaky ground, the U.S. is increasingly having to acknowledge its main motive for its presence in al-Tanf — containing Iran and keeping Syria divided.

Indeed, a recent Reuters article notes that the U.S.-controlled area around al-Tanf that includes the Rukban camp “is designed to shield U.S. troops at the Tanf garrison and maintain for Washington a strategic foothold in an area close to a crucial supply route for Iranian weapons entering Syria from Iraq.” This was confirmed by General Joseph Votel late last year when he told NBC News that the U.S. base in al-Tanf was key in countering “the sway of Iran” in Syria.

This followed statements made last July by National Security Advisor John Bolton that U.S. troops would remain in Syria “as long as the Iranian menace continues throughout the Middle East.” This policy of Iran containment has clearly guided U.S. policy in Syria of late, with at least 1,000 U.S. troops set to stay in Syria illegally despite Daesh’s defeat and President Donald Trump’s recent calls for a troop withdrawal.

The U.S. has been accused of using the civilians trapped in Rukban as a “shield” for its continued operations in Syria aimed at containing Iran’s regional influence. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said earlier this month that “the fact that people are not allowed to leave [the camp] and are held hostage makes one suggest that the U.S. needs this camp to continue justifying its illegitimate presence there.” There appear to be few other explanations for the U.S.’ refusal to let camp inhabitants leave the area.

The hypocrisy of U.S. “humanitarian concerns”

The situation in the Rukban camp reveals the dark reality behind the U.S.’ occupation of Syrian territory in Al-Tanf and elsewhere. In order to pursue its policy of Iran “containment” and a divided and partitioned Syria, the U.S. is willing to imprison some 40,000 people — many of them children — in a concentration camp where international aid is blocked and where food is so scarce that mothers are setting themselves and their children on fire so they can avoid slowly starving to death.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a concentration camp is defined as “a place where large numbers of people are kept as prisoners in extremely bad conditions, especially for political reasons.” It is undeniable that the Rukban camp fits this definition to the letter.

That the U.S. justifies its aggressive policies around the world — from Syria to Venezuela and elsewhere — as being motivated by “humanitarian concerns” — when a refugee camp under the U.S.’ complete control in Syria is facing starvation conditions and its inhabitants are being forcefully kept confined in the camp by the U.S. military despite their expressed desire to leave — is an obscene Orwellian twist.  All this to “contain” Iranian influence in the Middle East.

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Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Featured image is from SANA

In a stunning rejection of the will of five million online petitioners, and over 100,000 protestors this weekend, the European Parliament has abandoned common-sense and the advice of academics, technologists, and UN human rights experts, and approved the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive in its entirety.

There’s now little that can stop these provisions from becoming the law of the land across Europe. It’s theoretically possible that the final text will fail to gain a majority of member states’ approval when the European Council meets later this month, but this would require at least one key country to change its mind. Toward that end, German and Polish activists are already re-doubling their efforts to shift their government’s key votes.

If that attempt fails, the results will be drawn-out, and chaotic. Unlike EU Regulations like the GDPR, which become law on passage by the central EU institutions, EU Directives have to be transposed: written into each member country’s national law. Countries have until 2021 to transpose the Copyright Directive, but EU rarely keeps its members to that deadline, so it could take even longer.

Unfortunately, it is likely that the first implementation of the Directive will come from the countries who have most enthusiastically supported its passage. France’s current batch of national politicians have consistently advocated for the worst parts of the Directive, and the Macron administration may seek to grab an early win for the country’s media establishment.

Countries whose polity were more divided will no doubt take longer. In Poland, politicians were besieged by angry voters wanting them to vote down the Directive, while simultaneously facing brazen denunciations from national and local newspaper owners warning that they would “not forget” any politician who voted against Article 11. The passing of the Directive will still leave that division between the Polish people and the media establishment, with politicians struggling to find a domestic solution that won’t damage their prospects with either group.

The rhetoric in Germany in the last few days was not much better. German politicians claimed with straight faces that the tech companies had paid this weekend’s protestors to march on the streets. Meanwhile, the Christian Democratic Union, Angela Merkel’s party, whose own Axel Voss as the ringleader for the Directive, put out a policy proposal that suggested it could implement Article 13 not with filters, but with a blanket licensing regime. Legal experts have already said that these licenses won’t comply with Article 13’s stringent requirements – but it’s going to be hard for the CDU to walk back from that commitment now.

Which brings us to the future prospect of legal challenges in Europe’s courts. Again, unlike the GDPR, which gave existing regulatory bodies the clear power to adjudicate and enforce that law and its ambiguities, it’s unclear who is supposed to impose consistency in the EU between, say, a harsh French regime and a potentially softer German solution, or interpret the Directive’s notoriously incoherent text.

That means it will fall by default to Europe’s judicial system, and the long, slow road to a final decision by the EU’s superior court, the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

We can expect media and rightsholders to lobby for the most draconian possible national laws, then promptly march to the courts to extract fines whenever anyone online wanders over its fuzzy lines. The Directive is written so that any owner of copyrighted material can demand satisfaction from an Internet service, and we’ve already seen that the rightsholders are by no means united on what Big Tech should be doing. Whatever Internet companies and organizations do to comply with twenty-seven or more national laws – from dropping links to European news sites entirely, to upping their already over-sensitive filtering systems, or seeking to strike deals with key media conglomerates – will be challenged by one rightsholder faction or another.

But there’s also opportunities for the courts to rein in the Directive – or even throw out its worst articles entirely. One key paradox at the heart of the Directive will have to be resolved very soon. Article 13 is meant to be compatible with the older E-Commerce Directive, which explicitly forbids any requirement to proactively monitor for IP enforcement (a provision that was upheld and strengthened by the ECJ in 2011). Any law mandating filters could be challenged to settle this inconsistency.

But who will represent Internet users in court? Big Tech has some of the motive and the millions to do it, but after this heavy defeat, those increasingly defensive giants may well decide that it will be better to settle out of court, and strike a deal that pays a danegeld to the established media in Europe – at a price that will conveniently lock out any potential tech upstarts to their market dominance in that market.

That means Europe’s Internet users can’t depend on the tech companies to fight this. The battle will have to continue, as it has done in these last few weeks, with millions of everyday users uniting online and on the streets to demand their right to be free of censorship, and free to communicate without algorithmic censors or arbitrary licensing requirements.

EU netizens will need to organize and support independent European digital rights groups willing to challenge the Directive in court.

And outside Europe, friends of the Internet will have to brace themselves to push back against copyright maximalists attempting to export this terrible Directive to the rest of the world. We must, and we will, regroup and stand together to stop this Directive in Europe, and prevent it spreading further.

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Featured image is from EFF

No one can agree how high above the sea level that La Rinconada really lies at: 5,300 meters or 5,200 meters? On the access road, a metal plate says 5,015. But who really cares? It is indisputably the highest settlement in the world; a gold mining town, a concentration of misery, a community of around 70,000 inhabitants, many of whom have been poisoned by mercury. A place where countless women and children get regularly raped, where law and order collapsed quite some time ago, where young girls are sent to garbage dumps in order to ‘recycle’ terribly smelling waste, and where almost all the men work in beastly conditions, trying to save at least some money, but where most of them simply ruin their health, barely managing to stay alive.

I decided to travel to La Rinconada precisely during these days when the socialist Venezuela is fighting for its survival. I drove there as the European elites in Bolivia were trying to smear the enormously popular and successful President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, while the elections were approaching.

As in so many places in the turbo-capitalist and pro-Western Peru, La Rinconada is like a tremendous warning: this is how Venezuela and Bolivia used to be before Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. This is where Washington wants the entire Latin America to return to. Like those monstrous and hopeless slums surrounding Lima, La Rinconada should be a call to arms.

Just some five years ago we thought: This is how Latin America was never supposed to look again. We thought so, before the extreme right-wing forces in Washington managed to regroup and to deploy old dogmas of the Monroe Doctrine back to the frontlines, against Latin American independence and socialism.

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A driver refused to take me to La Rinconada, alone. For me, the fewer people involved the better. Even in Afghanistan, I work alone, only with my trusted Pashtun driver. But here it is different: the reputation of La Rinconada is that “you can enter, but you will never manage to leave.” I am told about the new mafia that operates there, and about the totally deteriorating security situation. In the end, I had no choice but to accept a crew of two men: a driver and a person “who is familiar with the situation related to Peruvian mines”.

We leave the city of Puno in the morning, passing along the magnificent shores of Lake Titicaca, which with a surface elevation of 3,812 meters, is the highest navigable lake in the world, shared by Peru and Bolivia.

“From the Peruvian side, the lake is getting poisoned by mercury,” explained Freddy, a mining expert. “La Rinconada and its gold mines are still very far, but the River Ramis is now bringing contaminated water from the area, particularly from the mining town of Ananea, directly into the lake.”

There is some sort of a motorway between Puno and Juliaca, a ‘center of commercial activity’ in the region; in fact, a huge, unkempt dusty city full of slums. Right after Juliaca, it is just rural misery.

I used to work in Peru during the so called ‘Dirty War’, fought between two Communist guerillas (the Maoist Shining Path and the Marxist, pro-Cuban MRTA) and the Peruvian state, which officially ended in 1992. Since then, the rural misery of Peru has not changed: dwellings made of earth, the desperate faces of villagers, and almost no social services, have remained. Right across the border, in socialist Bolivia, life in the countryside improves dramatically, continuously. But not here; not in Peru. And so, tents of thousands of anxious men are ‘going up’, reaching tremendous heights, risking their lives and ruining their heath, for at least a tiny chance to find gold, and to escape the endemic misery.

“My wife saved me,” I was told by a driver who, two days earlier, took me from the Bolivian border of Desaguadero, to the Peruvian city of Puno:

“I was totally broke. We just had a baby. I had no idea what to do. And so, I told my family that I am going to La Rinconada. My wife stood up and said: ‘If you go, you will never return. And if you do, you will not be the man that I love, anymore. You stay in Puno and work here. I will work, too. We will somehow manage. Don’t you know: La Rinconada is a death sentence.’ I stayed. She was right. I saw people who went and came back totally destroyed.”

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It is getting cold. Our Toyota Hilux climbs up, grumpily, with badly damaged suspension, but going nevertheless. The higher we climb, the colder it gets. It rains, then it stops.

Miners taking break

The views are magnificent, but the countryside is covered by garbage. The river is filthy. The Llamas are eating garbage, cars are being washed in the rapids, and entire villages appear to be abandoned, turned into ghost towns.

After more than four hours of driving, after insane, neck-breaking serpentines, the first mines appear on the horizon. Then more filth, primitive machinery, and a mining town – Ananea.

Ms. Irma, the owner of a local eatery, prepares strong coffee and coca leaves soaked in hot water, the best remedy for altitude sickness. She is chatty, realizing that we represent no danger:

“Sometimes, miners from La Rinconada, escape here. Ananeo is a bit below, and safer. We have water here. There, it is all poisoned; by mercury and other horrible stuff. You know the concept, how they work up there: 29 days they are laboring for free, and then for one day a month, they are allowed to grab what they find. It is a gamble: if they are lucky, they get rich during that one day. Or they find very little, or nothing. And even if they do, at night, it can get stolen from them.”

She sounds old, maternal, compassionate, concerned. She has seen it all, it appears.

We pay and drive up.

Then, we see it: enormous lakes, yellowish, brownish, with streams coming from their surface. Long blue hoses. Everything is ruined and poisoned. Freddy says that there are some new technologies that could be used to extract gold, but the miners here use mercury, as it is cheaper. Primitive machinery is at work, just like on the Indonesian island of Kalimantan/Borneo; there, illegal mining is poisoning mighty rivers, here, it is leveling entire mountains, creating huge lakes, and moonscapes at some 5,000 meters of altitude.

The guards are obviously very unhappy about our presence. Still, I manage to film and photograph, and then we drive even further up.

The piles of garbage appear. Behind them, two tremendous mountains covered by snow. And an ironic metal sign: Welcome to La Rinconada”, “Do not litter.”

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I have seen a lot, on all the continents, but La Rinconada is truly ‘unique’.

Mountains and valleys are dotted with metal shacks, with makeshift structures. The filth is everywhere. There is no water supply. Electricity is scarce.

Garbage even covers the humble graves of a local cemetery.

In the main square, heavy drinking is in progress. It is dangerous to photograph here. I hide; use zoom. Two plastered miners are lying on their stomachs, and someone is throwing food into their open mouths, as if it was feeding time in a zoo.

Prostitution is rampant. Children are doing odd jobs. At one of the garbage dumps, I ask two young girls about their age.

“25,” comes the ready answer. I guess 15, at most. But their faces are covered.

“How dangerous is it here?” I ask one of the miners.

He replies readily: “Very dangerous, but we have no choice.”

“Do people get injured on jobs? Do they get killed?”

“Of course. It happens very often. We are all taking risks. Some people get horrible injuries, others die. If they cannot treat them here, they take them to Ananeo, and if they are lucky, to a Juliaca hospital. Others are left here to die. It’s life. Some get saved, some don’t.”

Do they blame capitalism, the extreme savage pro-market system, adopted by their country?

“It’s life,” I hear the same fatalistic reply.

Do they know about Bolivia; about the great changes just across the border? Do they know that some 30 kilometers away from here, ‘as the condor flies’, on the Bolivian side, there is the pristine Uila Uila National Fauna Reserve?

Some know that it is much better ‘there’, in Bolivia, now. But they do not associate it with socialism or with the independent and pro-people policies of President Evo Morales. And they know very little about Venezuela.

All they know is that they were barely surviving on Altiplano, and that they are fighting for their lives, here, in La Rinconada.

Like in Indonesia, another savage pro-Western capitalist regime, people here are too preoccupied with their immediate essential problems; they cannot be bothered with ‘abstract’ thoughts about the environment, or lawlessness.

I see people pissing in the middle of the street.

“It is not just mercury,” I am told. “Everything here is mixed: poisons related to mining, urine, shit, urban waste…”

The altitude is hitting me hard. 4,000 in Puno is bad; over 5,000 here is fatal. I am being held by two people as I film on the edge of a ravine, in order not to fall down.

Somehow, in a very twisted way, I acknowledge that the vistas around me are beautiful, stunning. I am impressed. Impressed by the ability of human beings to survive under almost any conditions.

Post-mining craters

Virtually all of this is illegal. But hundreds of millions are made, and washed.

People gain nothing; almost nothing. A miner makes 800 to 1,000 Soles (roughly $250 to $300) per month. Private companies and corrupt government gain billions. Once again, Latin America is getting poorer. But the West is not pushing for ‘regime change’ in Peru, or in Paraguay, or Brazil. This is how it is supposing to be; this is how Washington likes it.

Another miner dares to talk to me:

“Most of the gold goes abroad. But before it does… If gangs do not rob us, miners, at night, they often murder small middlemen, those who buy gold directly from us.”

Is he scared?

“Everyone here is scared,” he confirms. “Scared and sick. This is hell.”

“It is like a war…” I utter.

“It is a war,” he confirms.

But almost nobody comes here to report and to investigate. The life of a poor Peruvian person is worth nothing; nothing at all.

I film, I document… It is all that I can do for them. And for Bolivia, for Venezuela.

While I work, I feel that hell is near, it is here. It is not abstract, religious: it is real. But it could, it should be stopped.

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This article was originally published on RT.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Four of his latest books are China and Ecological Civilizationwith John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

All images in this article are from the author

In March of 1999, NATO, at the behest of President Bill Clinton, unleashed an aerial assault on Serbia under the pretext of “humanitarian intervention.” This led to massive destruction and heavy loss of life.

The attack violated international law and the UN Charter, and became a precedent for similar attacks on Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

But in some ways it was the end of Russian compliance with Washington’s “new world order.” Tiphaine Dickson reports on an important conference in Belgrade calling for a “World of Equals.”

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Any measure of annexation is based on the extension of a military’s boots.  Diplomats tend to be silenced before the noise of tanks, weaponry and garrisons.  Countries may claim to possess territory but can only dream in the absence of military weight.  When it came to the issue of negotiating the post-World War II agreements, Generalissimo Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union had a clear sense of this in charting out Soviet influence in east European states.  Israel also bullied its way into recognition, making sure that it acquired, at various stages, the Sinai (since relinquished), the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights.

The status of the Golan Heights has been a disputed business since the 1949 armistice line hammered out between Syria and Israel.  The seven-hundred-square-mile stretch features all gazing vantage points: Jordan to the south, Syria to the east, Lebanon to the north, and Israel to its west.  To military advantage could also be added water security: the edge of the Golan Heights features the freshwater Sea of Galilee.

Israel remained convinced that the mandate lines of Palestine and Syria should have finalised the issue but rendered much of that moot with the seizure of the territory in the Six Day War of 1967. (Syrian forces made use of their elevation during that war by shelling Israeli farms in the Hula Valley.)  The UN Security Council proceeded to pass Resolution 242, calling for Israeli forces to be withdrawn from territories occupied during the conflict and “acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries.”  The international lawyers duly fussed over the wording and quibbled over niceties: the issue of “secure… boundaries” kept plaguing the issue, as Israel refused to budge; translation matters between the French and English versions of the resolution were also seized upon.

No international body was going to stop the Israeli push to incorporate the heights and do what it has become so adept at doing: colonising it into new reality.  The Knesset showed its disdain in 1981 by adopting the Golan Heights Law, passed by 63 votes to 21, which effectively acknowledged that the law, jurisdiction and administration of Israel would be duly extended into the territory.  Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s views on Syrian hostility, reflected in the deployment of missiles on Lebanese soil, was also cited as an excuse.

The recent turn of events centred on the Syrian Civil War renewed interest in the Golan.  Syria seemed to be collapsing, the Assad regime in dire straits.  Iran and Hezbollah came into play.  Given the assisting presence of Teheran’s Quds Force, Israel’s strategists have seen a further need to maintain a forward presence, mindful of militants of all persuasion moving through the territory.

The position of Israel’s unqualified and foremost ally was, at least notionally, with international reservation on the status of the Golan.  But that contested state offered another overturned convention for the Trump administration and US foreign policy.  On March 21, President Donald Trump decided, via his own chosen, special medium, to claim that,

“After 52 years, it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s [s]overeignty over the Golan Heights.”

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

As is operating protocol in the administration, it was not initially clear whether Trump had merely cyber-aired an opinion in an act of spontaneous release or announced a genuine policy shift.  The US State Department preferred to direct press concerns to the White House; certainty was, for a period, suspended in the scramble for elusive facts.

Those scrounging for some hook to hang their questions on did have an additional statement from National Security adviser John Bolton, also made on Twitter:

“To allow Golan Heights to be controlled by the likes of the Syrian or Iranian regimes would turn a blind eye to the atrocities of Assad and the destabilizing presence of Iran in the region.  Strengthening Israel’s security enhances our ability to fight common threats together.”

Unsurprisingly, for Bolton, there was no reference to the body of international norms he has come to regard as absent.

In Israel, clarity had cooled, and the mould set. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was convinced by Trump’s meditations, revealing that the White House had been most accommodating towards a shift.  Trump had “made history.”  Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights had been recognized, and there was no better time than now, “when Iran is trying to use the Golan Heights as a platform for the destruction of Israel.”  But in addition to the security justification came the old sinister and stretched notions of exclusive, lengthy habitation.  “Jews lived there for thousands of years and the people of Israel have come back to the Golan.”

Next to Netanyahu was US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who made the stumbling affirmation of the position: the Golan Heights were to be considered an appropriate “sovereign part of the State of Israel.”  Israelis should also “know the battles they fought, the lives that they lost on that very ground, were worthy and meaningful.”

It all comes as a measure of grades.  Start gradually, then push the issue with force and settlements.  Over time, the attrition might convince; international opposition would melt away.  The Golan-based human rights group Al-Marsad is gloomy about Syrians in the area, seeing the existential demise of its residents.  “Syrians in the occupied Golan face calculated Israeli efforts to restrict their building and land use, destroy their enterprise, cleanse their Arab culture, manipulate their Syrian identity, and suffocate their freedom of movement.”

The Trump decision, similarly to its stance on East Jerusalem, tilts the head of US foreign policy away from the basic principles of peace and security embedded in the UN Charter, as weak a document as it has proven to be over the years.  It will also further muddy the waters with the Assad regime, ever keen to restore order as the bloody civil war painstakingly comes to a close.  And as for the issue of Arab-Israeli peace?  Forget it.  Boots, construction and missiles are proving far more effective than diplomatic advances.

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

Brazil: 55 years after the army staged a coup on 31 March 1964 and overthrew President Joao Goulart, the new far-right President, Jair Bolsonaro has announced a celebration of this said event. There can be no doubt about the active support provided by the US government, the World Bank and the IMF. On 2 April 2014, a US NGO, the National Security Archive (NSA!) publicized an impressive amount of declassified official documents that testify to Washington aiding and abetting the Brazilian army officers who had overthrown Joao Goulart’s democratic government 50 years earlier. See this.

In the PhD dissertation I presented at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège in 2004 [1], I discussed the support provided to the coup by Washington, the WB and the IMF. The relevant section is reproduced below.

Support for the Brazilian military junta after the overthrow of President Joao Goulart

President Joao Goulart’s democratic government was overthrown by the military in April 1964. WB and IMF loans, suspended for three years, resumed very soon afterwards. [2]

A brief time line: in 1958, Brazilian president Kubitschek was about to undertake negotiations with the IMF to gain access to a loan of 300 million dollars from the United States. At the end, Kubitschek refused the IMF-imposed conditions and did without the US loan. This earned him wide popularity.

His successor, Goulart, announced that he would implement a radical land reform programme and proceed to nationalise petroleum refineries: he was overthrown by the military. The United States recognised the new military regime one day after the coup. Not long afterwards, the WB and IMF resumed their suspended lending policy. As for the military, they rescinded the economic measures the United States and IMF had criticised. Note that international financial institutions were of the view that the military regime was taking sound economic measures [3]. Yet, the GDP fell 7% in 1965 and thousands of firms declared WBruptcy. The regime organised harsh repression, outlawed strikes, caused a dramatic drop in real wages, and eliminated direct ballot voting, disbanded trade unions and made systematic use of torture.

President Joao Goulart’s democratic government was overthrown

Since his first trip in May 1968, McNamara regularly visited Brazil where he did not miss meeting the military rulers. The public reports of the WB systematically praised the policies of the dictatorship in reducing inequalities [4]. Nevertheless, inside the WB, the discussions took a bitter turn. When Bernard Chadenet, Vice-President of Project of the WB declared that the image of the WB is going to degrade following the support to the repressive government of Brazil, McNamara recognized that there was a tremendous amount of repression but he added that it “is not necessarily a great deal different from what it had been under previous governments, and it did not seem to be a lot worse than in some other member countries of the WB. Is Brazil worse than Thailand?” [5] Some days later, Mc Namara followed up “No viable alternative to the Government by generals seemed open” [6]. The World WB realised very well that inequalities would not diminish and that its loans in the agricultural sector would reinforce the big landowners. Nevertheless, it decided to carry on the loans because it absolutely wanted to put the government under its influence. Now, at this juncture, the WB met an obvious failure: the military regime demonstrated a deep mistrust in the context of the WBs desire to increase his presence. Finally, at the end of the 70s, they took advantage of a profusion of loans from the international private bankers granted at a lower rate of interest than that of the WB and moved away from the WB, which they found less useful.

How political and geostrategical considerations influence World WB lending policy

Article IV section 10 stipulates:

“The WB and its officers shall not interfere in the political affairs of any member; nor shall they be influenced in their decisions by the political character of the member or members concerned. Only economic considerations shall be relevant to their decisions, and these considerations shall be weighed impartially in order to achieve the purposes (set by the WB) stated in Article I.”

The WB has found many systematic means of getting round the prohibiting its operations taking “political” and “non-economic” considerations into account, one of the primary stipulations of its charter, from its founding onwards. The WB refused loans to post-liberation France as long as the Communists remained in the government. The day after they left the government in May 1947, the loan France had requested, blocked until then, was granted [7].

The WB has repeatedly contravened article IV of its own statutes. In truth, the WB has made many choices based on political considerations. The quality of governments’ economic policies is not the determining element in its choices. The WB has often lent money to the authorities in countries despite the dismal quality of their economic policies and a great degree of corruption: Indonesia and Zaire are two cases in point. Specifically, WB choices relative to countries that play a major political role in the eyes of its major shareholders are regularly linked to these shareholders’ interests and outlooks, starting with the United States.

From 1947 to the collapse of the Soviet bloc [8], World WB and IMF decisions were determined in large part by the following criteria:

• avoid shoring up self-reliant models;
• provide funding to large-scale projects (WB) or policies (IMF) enabling major industrialised countries to increase exports;
• refuse to help regimes seen as a threat by the United States government or other important shareholders;
• attempt to modify the policies of certain governments in the so-called socialist countries so as to weaken the cohesion of the Soviet bloc. This is why support was granted to Yugoslavia, which had dropped out of the Moscow-dominated bloc from 1948, or to Romania from the 1970s at the time when Ceaucescu was attempting to take his distances from the Comecon and the Warsaw Pact;
• support strategic allies of the western capitalist bloc and in particular of the US, (i.e.: Indonesia from 1965 to the present day, Mobutu’s Zaire, the Philippines under Marcos, Brazil under the dictators after the 1964 coup, dictator Somoza’s Nicaragua, Apartheid South Africa);
• Attempt to avoid or to limit in so far as possible, closer links between Third World countries and the Soviet bloc or China: for example, distancing the USSR from India and Sukarno-era Indonesia.

To carry out this policy, the World WB and the IMF have generalised a tactic: greater flexibility towards right-wing governments (less demanding in terms of austerity measures) facing a strong left opposition than to left-wing governments facing strong opposition from the right. Concretely, that means IFI are more demanding and make life more difficult for left-wing governments to weaken them and ease the right’s path to power. According to the same logic, the IFI have made fewer demands on right-wing governments facing a left-wing opposition to avoid weakening them and preventing the left from coming to power. Monetarist orthodoxy has variable geometrics: the variations depend on many political and geostrategic factors.

The IMF and World WB did not hesitate to support dictatorships when they (and other major capitalist powers) found it opportune. The author of the World Report on Human Development published by UNDP (1994 edition) says so in black and white:

“But rhetoric is running far ahead of reality, as a comparison of the per capita ODA received by democratic and authoritarian regimes shows. Indeed, for the United States in the 1980s, the relationship between aid and human rights has been perverse. Multilateral donors also seem not to have been bothered by such considerations. They seem to prefer martial law regimes, quietly assuming that such regimes will promote political stability and improve economic management. After Bangladesh and the Philippines lifted martial law, their shares in the total loans given by the World WB declined” [9].

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This article was originally published on CADTM.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man(2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc.

Notes

Dimitri Lascaris: This is Dimitri Lascars reporting for The Real News Network.

Media have descended on Puerto Rico since Hurricane Maria devastated the island a year and a half ago, and many reported on its struggle to rebuild its energy grid. But behind the scenes, some policymakers and fossil fuel industry leaders are using the crisis to transform Puerto Rico into a hub for liquefied natural gas–gas obtained from hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the mainland United States.

Speaker: To rebuild the devastation of Hurricane Maria, this LNG has potential to reshape the Puerto Rican grid, making it safer and more reliable.

DL: Climate activists have decried these efforts.

S: The interest of the gas producers in the United States pushing for a gas market in Puerto Rico for their products.

DL: Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is methane gas that’s been super chilled to a liquid state. It gets shipped via tankers from oceanic ports. LNG export shipments from the U.S. have greatly expanded in the fracking area. That tie to the fracking drilling method has not been lost on advocates in Puerto Rico.

S: Trying to sell us that gas is clean energy, and it’s not. Especially the gas that comes from the United States, which is fracking gas. That is dirty gas because of the effect it’s causing on the environment.

DL: Industry supporters tout natural gas as a more climate-friendly fossil fuel and potential “bridge fuel” to a renewable energy future.

Video: Energy Source carries tremendous benefits for consumers and the environment. It is versatile, clean burning, and abundant.

DL: Yet scientists fear that gas infrastructure could pose a major climate threat due to its capacity to lock in a long-term supply chain.

S: Scientists know that methane traps about 87, I’ve also seen 90, times as much carbon–as much heat as carbon would, over a 20 year period. And that’s really what’s important. It’s the short-term, the short-lived climate pollutants like methane that are really going to pack the biggest punch over the short term.

DL: Despite those concerns, Puerto Rico included the buildout of three LNG import terminals as a central component of its Integrated Resources Plan, the plan for its energy grid published in February.

S: There’s so much of it people have described it as a glut of natural gas in the U.S. There are people and corporations interested in making Puerto Rico the natural gas hub, or the fracked gas hub, of the Caribbean.

DL: And the Trump administration has made it easier to export LNG to the island by reclassifying tankers as “small scale.” It’s a move allowing gas to flow via deregulation. A new classification of LNG tankers dubbed “small scale” are now considered in the public interest under the Natural Gas Act of 1938 as a result of a regulation published in July by the Energy Department. That fast track means companies no longer have to go through public hearings for their project proposals, or pass an environmental review when aiming to export small-scale LNG.

In its press release announcing the rule, U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry cited the Caribbean market as a key destination of small-scale LNG.

Though billed as small scale, the actual size of the shipments are as big, if not bigger, than conventional LNG exports. Meg Gentle, CEO of the company Tellurian, which specializes in small-scale LNG exports, explained it herself at a 2017 event.

Meg Gentle: LNG construction is a massive economies of scale business, and there are some projects that talk about small scale. And in fact, we did some research on trying to reduce the size of the plant, to bring smaller quantities into market as the market grows. What we learned is that there really are no economies of small.

DL: These efforts have triggered ire for the Puerto Rican climate activists.

S: The politicians publicly is we shouldn’t build our future on the top of the people who are being harmed in the north.

DL: While Puerto Rico does have regulations in place promoting renewable energy, the country has failed to achieve its goals.

S: What is known as a renewable portfolio standard enacted into law in Puerto Rico, and those goals have not been met, not even by far. They haven’t been met. And so we’re still depending on, as I mentioned earlier, 97 percent to 98 percent fossil fuels.

DL: Some say that renewable energy, and solar energy in particular, should sit at the center of Puerto Rico’s future energy plans.

S: I think we are advancing. I think we’re making some progress. I don’t think it’s fast enough. We are talking about being 100 percent renewable by by 2050. I think climate change won’t give us that amount of time. Climate change will push us towards it quicker than that.

DL: In the meantime, some Puerto Ricans have taken the transition into their own hands.

S: One of the things that we learned, one of the lessons that were definitely learned from the Hurricane Maria aftermath, is that communities need to play an active role and not be just passive consumers, but rather what are being called prosumers; that is, producers and consumers of energy. They need to, you know, use rooftops, especially, and other places close to the point of use for installations of photovoltaic systems, battery energy storage systems.

DL: With The Real News Network, I’m Dimitri Lascaris.

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Featured image is from SocialistWorker.org

Em 24 de Março de 1999, a sessão do Senado foi retomada às 20h35 com uma comunicação de Sergio Mattarella, então Vice-Presidente do Governo de D’Alema (Ulivo – Pdci – Udeur): “Distintos Senadores, como as agências informaram, às 18h45 começaram as operações da NATO”.

Naquele momento, as bombas dos F-16 do 31º Esquadrão USA, decolados de Aviano, já tinham atingido Pristina e Belgrado. E estão a chegar novas ondas de caça bombardeiros USA e aliados, partidos de outras bases italianas. Deste modo, violando a Constituição (artigos 11, 78 e 87), a Itália é arrastada para uma guerra, da qual o governo informa o Parlamento depois das agências de notícias, quando a mesma já está iniciada.

Vinte dias antes do ataque à Jugoslávia, Massimo d’Alema – como ele próprio diria numa entrevista a Il Riformista (24 de Março de 2009) – tinha sido convocado a Washington, onde o Presidente americano Bill Clinton lhe havia proposto: “A Itália está tão perto do cenário de guerra que não lhe pedimos para participar nas operações militares, basta que coloque à disposição as bases”. D’Alema tinha-lhe respondido, orgulhosamente, “vamos assumir as nossas responsabilidades como os outros países da Aliança”, ou seja, a Itália teria disponibilizado não só as bases, mas também os seus bombardeiros para a guerra contra a Jugoslávia. Nos bombardeamentos participarão, de facto, 54 aviões italianos, atacando os alvos indicados pelo comando USA.

“Era moralmente justo e também era o modo de exercermos plenamente o nosso papel”, explica D ‘Alema na entrevista. “Pelo número de aviões, fomos os segundos em relação aos EUA. A Itália é um grande país e não devemos surpreender-nos com o compromisso demonstrado nesta guerra”, declarou em Junho de 1999, como Presidente do Conselho, salientando que, para os pilotos, tinha sido “uma grande experiência humana e profissional.”

Assim, a Itália assume um papel de importância primordial na guerra contra a Jugoslávia. Das bases, em Itália, decola a maior parte dos 1.100 aviões e, em 78 dias, efectuam 38.000 surtidas, lançando 23.000 bombas e mísseis (muitas com urânio empobrecido) na Sérvia e em Kosovo. Deste modo, é activado e testado, em Itália, todo o sistema de bases USA/NATO, preparando o seu fortalecimento para guerras futuras.

A guerra seguinte será contra a Líbia, em 2011. A guerra de há vinte anos, foi a condição necessária e suficiente para a activação da nova e pesada servidão militar no nosso território.

Enquanto decorre ainda, a guerra contra a Jugoslávia, o Governo D’Alema participa em Washington na cimeira da NATO, de 23 a 25 de Abril de 1999, que oficializa o “novo conceito estratégico”: a NATO é transformada numa aliança que obriga os países membros a “realizar operações de resposta a crises não previstas no Artigo 5, fora do território da Aliança”. A partir daqui começa a expansão da NATO para Leste, considerada um indicador de novos “confrontos” perigosos, mesmo pelos vultos do ‘establishment’ USA. Em vinte anos, depois de ter destruído o que ainda restava da Federação Jugoslava, a NATO amplia-se de 16 para 29 países (30 se agora englobar também a Macedónia), expandindo-se, cada vez mais, ao redor da Rússia.

Hoje, a “área do Atlântico Norte” estende-se até as montanhas afegãs. E os soldados italianos estão lá, confirmando o que D’Alema definia com orgulho “o novo estatuto de um grande país”, conquistado pela Itália há vinte anos, por participar na destruição de um país que não tinha atacado ou ameaçado, nem a Itália, nem os seus aliados.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

il manifesto, 23 de Março de 2019

A GUERRA À JUGOSLÁVIA SERÁ UM DOS TEMAS

DA CONFERÊNCIA INTERNACIONAL SOBRE O 70º ANIVERSÁRIO DA NATO

O tema «Jugoslávia: Há 20 anos a guerra fundadora da nova NATO» é tratado, também com documentação em vídeo, na Conferência Internacional “Os 70 anos da NATO: qual é o  balanço histórico? Sair do sistema de guerra, agora “, que acontece no domingo, 7 de Abril, em Florença (Cinema Teatro Odeon, Piazza Strozzi, 10: 15-18). Entre outros tópicos «A Europa na vanguarda do confronto nuclear».

Oradores: M. Chossudovsky, Director de Global Research (Canada): V. Kozin, perito político militar do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros da  Russia; Ž. Jovanović, Presidente do Forum de Belgrado (Serbia); Diana Johnstone, Ensaísta (Usa); P. Craig Roberts, Economista (Usa). Entre os oradores  italianos: A. Zanotelli, G. Strada, F. Cardini, F. Mini, G. Chiesa, A. Negri, T. Di Francesco, M. Dinucci.

Promotores: Comitato No Guerra No Nato e Global Research, juntamente com Pax Christi, Comboniani, Wilpf e outras associações. Para partecipar na Conferência (entrada ingresso) comunicar o nome e o lugar de residência a G. Padovano: Email [email protected] / Cell. 393 998 3462

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

From one day to the next,  following the release of the Mueller report, the shaky RussiaGate consensus created by the corporate media has collapsed.  

What the Mueller investigation contends is that there is no proof that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential elections. 

The demise of the RussiaGate narrative, however, does not mean that the Trump administration will renew its relations with the Kremlin. “The Russians are still coming”… without RussiaGate. Russia is still portrayed as a threat to America’s National Security. 

In this regard, the objective of the Neocons has been achieved. The Trump administration, with its hawk team of  advisers including Pompeo and Bolton, not to mention Gina Haspel at the CIA, is towing the line. 

Corporate and Political Rivalries

The RussiaGate narrative was required to sustain the multibillion dollar contracts in favor of the military industrial complex including the 1.2 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program.

What was at stake in 2016 were fundamental rivalries within the US establishment marked by the clash between competing corporate (and political) factions, each of which was intent upon exerting control over the incoming US presidency.

In this regard,  Trump was not entirely in the pocket of the lobby groups. He was not a groomed politician. As a member of the business establishment, he had his own corporate sponsors and fund raisers. His stated foreign policy agenda including his “commitment” to revise Washington’s relationship with Moscow did not fully conform with the interests of the defence contractors.

Prior to the elections, a smear campaign was launched by the media on behalf of the  “Clinton faction”. At the height of the election campaign Trump was portrayed by the US media as  “an agent” of the Kremlin, a modern Manchurian candidate.  Barely a month before the November 8 2016 elections, former Secretary of Defense and CIA Director Leo Panetta  intimated that Trump represented a threat to National Security. The Atlantic (October 8, 2016),  described Trump is a “Modern Manchurian Candidate”.

Belleville National Democrats, Jan 13, 2017

Vanity Fair November 1 2016

The Atlantic October 8 2016

This anti-Trump campaign continued unabated in the wake of the elections. Ironically, Rod Rosenstein who had been nominated for the position of Deputy Attorney General by president Trump in February 2017, acted against Trump almost immediately following his confirmation on April 27, 2017.

Rosenstein’s mandate was to organize the so-called Russia Probe pertaining to alleged Kremlin interference in the November 2016 elections. Rosenstein’s first step consisted in the firing of FBI Director James Comey and appointing former FBI Director Robert Mueller as Special Council to lead the Russia Probe.

Rod Rosenstein had prepared a three page memorandum, which  criticized James Comey for his handling of the Clinton email investigation and the release of Comey’s October 28, 2016 “Second Letter to Congress” 11 days before Election Day.

This action by Comey referred to as “October Surprise” (2016)  was largely detrimental to Clinton’s candidacy. It certainly did not go against the interests of Donald Trump.

The Fake News Witch-hunt. Clamping Down on Independent Media

RussiaGate was not only a conspiracy against Trump, largely in response to his 2016 election campaign commitment to restore “normal” diplomatic relations with Russia, it also took the form of a Witch-hunt directed against the independent online media,  which were casually tagged as “Russian trolls”, “Russian bots”,  “political commentators acting on behalf of the Russian government.” etc.

In chorus, the Western media was involved in accusing Moscow of election meddling without a shred of evidence.

In contrast, the lies and fabrications as well as the criminality underlying the Democrats’ 2016 election campaign were the object of  independent online media reports which were immediately branded as “fake news” on behalf of the Kremlin.

According to Reuters:

 “Russian President Vladimir Putin supervised his intelligence agencies’ hacking of the U.S. presidential election and turned it from a general attempt to discredit American democracy to an effort to help Donald Trump, three U.S. officials said on Thursday.” (emphasis added)

The New York Times (December 15) focussed on Kremlin meddling. Donald Trump is tagged as “a Useful Idiot”:

Kremlin meddling in the 2016 election warrants further investigation, with an eye toward preventive or retaliatory measures. President Obama has asked the nation’s intelligence community to deliver a fuller report on its findings before he leaves office on Jan. 20, …

Mr. Trump’s reaction to the C.I.A.’s findings leaves him isolated, … There could be no more “useful idiot,” to use Lenin’s term of art, than an American president who doesn’t know he’s being played by a wily foreign power. (emphasis added)

According to the Washington Post in a report published one month before the 2016 November elections:

The Obama administration on Friday [October 2016] officially accused Russia of attempting to interfere in the 2016 elections, including by hacking the computers of the Democratic National Committee and other political organizations.

The denunciation, made by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Security, came as pressure was growing from within the administration and some lawmakers to publicly name Moscow and hold it accountable for actions apparently aimed at sowing discord around the election.

“The U.S. Intelligence Community is confident that the Russian Government directed the recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including from U.S. political organizations,” said a joint statement from the two agencies. “. . . These thefts and disclosures are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process.” (WP, October 7, 2016)

While the Washington Post (supported by the Deep State?) was spreading rumors on Russia’s alleged election meddling, it was also involved in engineering the Blacklisting of the independent media which was questioning the RussiaGate consensus.

In an “authoritative” Washington Post article, (published 6 days after the November 2016 election) reporter Craig Timberg  reviewed an anonymous website called “PropOrNot,” which had blacklisted several hundred independent online news sources intimating that these websites and social media accounts were part of a Kremlin propaganda network.  Timberg had no evidence in support of his allegations. The objective was to trigger the crackdown against the online independent media:

“Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem. (Washington Post, November 14, 2016, emphasis added)

Screenshot of WP article, November 24, 2016

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The Washington Post is “Fake News” at its Best. The report served as an endorsement of the Blacklisting campaign. Sustained by the RussiaGate narrative, a smear campaign was launched.  Several hundred online media sites including Global Research were tagged as “fake news” by Facebook and Google.

The Washington based Atlantic Council and NATO’s Centre of Excellency (COE), a  “Research Centre”  based in Latvia have published several “authoritative reports” which identify the independent online media “with links” to the Kremlin. Much of this “analysis” is fabricated.

The objective was to use the RussiaGate narrative (which had become a broadly accepted public consensus), as a means to suppress critical analysis of neoliberal economic policies, US foreign policy, US-NATO war plans, etc.

What happens now?

While the Mueller report confirms that the corporate media were spreading “fake news” in support of RussiaGate, it is highly unlikely that the mainstream media will indulge in a mea culpa. Moreover, it is also unlikely that social media and search engine censorship against the independent online media will be removed.

What is of course significant is that the broader public is now fully aware that they have been lied to. The public has been deliberately misled by the mainstream media from the very outset of the RussiaGate saga. The corporate media has endorsed war propaganda, it has granted  legitimacy to acts of war and military aggression, through lies and fabrications. Under Nuremberg, war propaganda constitutes the ultimate crime: “the Crime against Peace”.

The Skripal Affair

The Skripal affair –which hit Britain’s tabloids– was an integral part of the RussiaGate Op. It was based on fake intelligence and media disinformation directed against Moscow. Launched by the UK government of Theresa May, a political consensus had unfolded. Moscow was casually accused of conducting a mysterious covert nerve gas attack against a former Russian intelligence operative and his daughter.

While the story was refuted, the objective of the Skripal affair  ultimately succeeded. It consisted in pressuring EU member states to jeopardize their diplomatic relations with Russia.

Meanwhile, the RussiaGate saga also provided legitimacy to NATO threats against Russia, resulting in massive military deployments at Russia’s doorstep.

US Foreign Policy

The Mueller report does not restore sanity in US foreign policy.  Quite the opposite.

What it confirms is that there is no evidence of Russian support of  Trump’s candidacy in the 2016 presidential elections.

Since Trump’s inauguration, however, the objective of normalizing diplomatic relations with Russia has largely been scrapped.

With Bolton and Pompeo, the NeoCons control Trump’s foreign policy.

War scenarios with Russia and China are contemplated.

Nuclear war is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.

The RussiaGate narrative against Trump is no longer required.

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The Democrats cannot stop making fools of themselves.  Thom Hartmann is an example. He writes for Common Dreams and has a progressive talk radio program.  During the George W. Bush regime I was a frequent guest on his program.  It was OK to tell the truth about the Bush regime’s deceits and illegal wars of aggression.  But telling the truth about the Obama regime’s deceits and illegal wars of aggression left me unqualified for his program.

Hartmann, like the rest of them, will never escape from Democratic partisanship. He asserts that Attorney General William Barr, who he calls “cover-up general” covered up Mueller’s Russiagate report.  Hartmann seems to think that Mueller found all sorts of damning evidence against Trump, but we will never know because Barr, “without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report decided that there are no crimes here.”  He accuses Barr of “burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior.”  He tells his readers that “Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department.” (See this)

Hartmann ignorantly accuses Barr of withholding Mueller’s report. To the contrary, Barr’s summary of the report clearly states that federal laws, which he identifies, govern the release of information that can be made public.  Once the DOJ has identified “material that by law cannot be made public,” the report will be released.  

I know Democrats are disappointed not to have Trump’s head presented to them by Mueller on a silver platter.  But surely not even Democrats are stupid enough to believe the Russiagate conspiracy tale.  It was all cooked up by the military/security complex to prevent Trump from normalizing relations with Russia, thereby removing the enemy that justifies the $1,000 billion annual budget.

Before writing such nonsense as Hartmann has written, he should have read Barr’s summary of the report.  Barr quotes Mueller directly from the report: 

“The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” (See this)

Again from Mueller’s report: 

“The evidence does not establish that the President was involved in an underlying crime related to Russian election interference.”

Other Democrats who cannot cope with their disappointment claim that although cleared of election theft collusion Trump was not cleared of obstruction of justice.  This is nonsensical even for Democrats.  As Trump committed no crime, what evidence did he obstruct?  The evidence of his innocence?  Just as murder requires a body, obstruction requires a crime to obstruct.

But facts are boring to Democrats.  They were certain that all the lies that they and the media told would find their way into Mueller’s report. Mueller’s staff was Democrat to the core, and Mueller used every dirty trick in the book in his effort to get something on Trump.  It simply couldn’t be done.

Democrats will never get over it, just as they never have got over Iran-Contra.  Hartmann couldn’t write about the “Russiagate coverup” without dragging in Ronald Reagan and the “Iran-Contra coverup.”

What coverup is he talking about? The Reagan administration started an investigation that continued during the George H.W. Bush administration.  It resulted in a dozen indictments and convictions of high level officials, not lowly grunts as in the Abu Ghraib torture case. Among the convicted were Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, National Security Advisor John Poindexter, Chief of Covert Ops-CIA Clair George, Chief of the CIA’s Central American Task Force Alan D. Fiers, Air Force Major General Richard Secord, Lt. Col. Oliver North.  

Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger was indicted but pardoned by President Bush prior to being tried.  Poindexter’s conviction was overturned.  North was granted immunity for testifying. With the exception of General Secord, the others convicted were later pardoned by President Bush.  

Under precedents established by the George W. Bush and Obama regimes, an Iran-Contra investigation would not be possible today.  In the 21st century US presidents have successfully asserted powers as commander-in-chief that are beyond the reach of Congress.  For all practical purposes, the Boland Amendment is a dead letter law.

Iran-Contra was a scheme involving Israel to prevent what was perceived to be a communist takeover in Nicaragua and to obtain the release of US hostages held by Hezbollah.  As a scandal its illegality pales in comparison to the Clinton regime’s bombing attack on Serbia, the George W. Bush regime’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama regime’s overthrow of Gaddafi and attempted overthrow of Assad by military force and Obama’s overthrow of democratically elected presidents in Honduras and Ukraine, and the Trump regime’s threats against Iran and current attempt to overthrow the democratic government in Venezuela.

Iran-Contra was three decades ago. No one under 50 would know anything about it. Yet we hear more about it from the liberal/progressive/left than we do about the massive abuses of power and war crimes of our own time.

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This article was originally published in the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy. 

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

On Wednesday, Trump demanded around 100 Russian military forces leave the Bolivarian Republic, repeating his warning about “all options…open.”

Moscow is undeterred by his threat, acting in support of  Venezuela and President Maduro.

John Bolton repeated Trump’s warning, saying “(a)s (he) made clear today, “Russia needs to get out” of Venezuela.

“The United States will not tolerate hostile foreign military powers (sic) meddling with the Western Hemisphere’s shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law (sic)” – notions Republicans and undemocratic Dems abhor, tolerating them nowhere, especially not at home.

Pompeo made similar remarks, falsely accusing Russia and Cuba of “undermining the democratic dreams of the Venezuelan people and their welfare,” blaming them for harm caused by Trump regime war on the country by other means.

The State Department said he told Lavrov that the US won’t “stand idly by as Russia exacerbates tensions in Venezuela (sic),” adding:

“The continued insertion of Russian military personnel to support illegitimate Nicolas Maduro (rule) in Venezuela (sic) risks prolonging the suffering of the Venezuelan people who overwhelmingly support…Guaido (sic).”

Around 100 Russian military forces and equipment arrived in Caracas last Saturday for what a Russian embassy source said was for “exchange consultations,” in accordance with a 2001 bilateral agreement.

In January, both countries held joint military exercises in Venezuela. Two Russian Tu-160 strategic bombers flew to the country, capable of carrying nuclear and conventional weapons.

Venezuelan Minister of Defense Vladimir Padrino Lopez said both nations will continue to create a “productive and energetic team of brotherhood and effective cooperation…We are getting prepared to defend Venezuela when it is needed.”

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed the Trump regime, rejecting the notion of Latin America as Washington’s “backyard,” stressing Moscow’s actions fully comply with international law and Venezuela’s Constitution.

Trump regime bombast and threats won’t change Moscow’s legitimate relationship with the Bolivarian Republic, she added.

Sergey Lavrov denounced Trump regime “attempts to organize a coup d’etat in Venezuela,” adding its “threats against the legitimate government are in violation of the UN Charter.”

Trump hardliners are conducting “undisguised (illegal) interference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.”

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang stressed that all nations may collaborate with others, free from foreign interference, adding: Latin America “does not belong to any country and it is not anyone’s backyard.”

Russia’s lower house State Duma’s International Affairs Committee chairman Leonid Slutsky slammed Trump’s unacceptable demand for Russia to leave Venezuela, saying:

His remark was “a wild statement in the spirit of colonial approach. Trump can dictate neither to Venezuela, nor to Russia how to build bilateral relations, where, in which industries and on which territory to cooperate,” adding:

“The United States is again trying to impose its will by using force and by ignoring the law. And I agree with my colleagues: Washington should first show how it is to leave by fulfilling its (hollow) promises in Syria” – along with ending its illegal occupation of other countries, he should have added.

On March 25, US House members passed the so-called Russian-Venezuelan Threat Mitigation Act by voice vote.

It “requires a threat assessment and strategy to counter Russian influence in Venezuela, an assessment of foreign acquisition of CITGO assets in the United States, and for other purposes.”

Russian upper house Federation Council Foreign Affairs Committee member Oleg Morozov described the measure as “legal nonsense…call(ing) for  preventing absolutely legitimate cooperation between two UN member states…which is illegal by definition,” adding:

The measure likely heading for Senate passage and Trump’s signature, enacting it into law, will have no affect on Russian/Venezuelan relations.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed the measure, saying:

“Continuing its aggressive rhetoric towards Venezuela, openly making efforts to organize a coup in that country, the US is simultaneously trying to threaten those who are cooperating with its legitimate authorities,” adding:

“The US Congress is considering on a fast-track basis a bill on measures to influence the participants in Russia-Venezuela cooperation, believing that Moscow can be influenced through sanctions, to which Russia has already adjusted itself and has stopped paying attention to.”

A Final Comment

In Wednesday testimony to House Foreign Relations Committee members, pertaining to Trump regime foreign policy strategy and its FY 2020 State Department budget request, Mike Pompeo said the following:

“This budget (aims to) make sure that China and Russia cannot gain a strategic advantage and edge – in an age of renewed great power competition,” adding:

“This budget prioritizes countering Russian malign influence (sic) in Europe, Eurasia and Central Asia, and further strengthens the Department’s own systems against malign actors (sic).”

The US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners comprise unparalleled “malign influence.” Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and other sovereign independent states are a vital counter force against them.

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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.

Tony Perrottet’s Cuba Libre! Che, Fidel and the improbable revolution that changed the world is a “colourful page turner”.[i] Perrottet wanted a book that is “entertaining and readable, unsaturated by ideology”. He succeeds in the first, not the second.

It’s about a “scrappy bunch of idealistic young people who … beat a professional army of [dictator Fulgencio Batista’s] 40,000 soldiers”. Indeed, it is fun to know how Castro, with 18 followers, few guns, convinced (the New York Times’) Herbert Matthews of a well-armed force of hundreds.

But the Cuban Revolution was not improbable. And the story about that is not fun. It is serious, involving ideas.  They expose lies: that are lived.

Perrottet’s book is typical of how many, who admire Cuba, write about it: as if Cubans are steeped in ideology while liberals on the left have none. They are “anti-authoritarian”, ignoring the tyranny of their own rich lives. They make no “value judgments”. They “just listen” and tell stories.

It’s easy. But it has a dark side: It imposes ideology, ignorantly or dishonestly.

According to science, no one “just listens”, at least not without mental training, which we don’t believe in in the North because of the same ideology Perrottet assumes. To “just listen” requires mental control.[ii] It takes work. Cuban philosopher and diplomat, Raúl Roa, says the Renaissance, instead of reviving ancient humanism, buried it. It buried the contemplation part of human well-being.[iii]

It glorified the “man of action”, the “anti-authoritarian” who listens to an “inner voice”, made plausible by power. This story was known to the “scrappy bunch”: part of centuries-long traditions of poets, philosophers and revolutionaries who rejected the ideology that says stories are just stories.

Perrottet notes the rebels didn’t kill prisoners. They treated them well. They gave scarce medicines to Batista’s soldiers when they set them free. They educated each other: about literature, history, language. Perrottet reports these facts but not their importance.

They have explanatory significance. Read Zona Roja.[iv] It opens with phone calls on September 9, 2014. Ebola was devastating Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The Secretary General of the UN called personally to United States, France and the Netherlands.

He also called the president of a fourth country, small and poor: Cuba. Cuba mobilized more doctors, faster, than all the rich countries put together. When Liberia’s desperate president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, received Raúl Castro’s answer, that Cuba was mobilizing, she said, emotionally, “We knew Cuba would not desert us”. She told him to tell the Cuban people: “We will never forget”.

Cubans are medically well trained. Of a 256-member contingent, only one contracted Ebola and, after recovering in Cuba, returned to Sierra Leone to complete his mission.

Zona Roja is about extraordinary people, but not “improbable”. Many had been in internationalist missions in Africa, Asia and Latin America, including liberation struggles in Angola and Nicaragua and natural disasters in Haiti and Pakistan.

Author Enrique Ubieta Gómez describes them as ordinary folk who know we live in an unequal world. They know something else, not ideological, or at least, not any more than science is ideological: We exist interdependently. Ubieta describes Cuban internationalism as an “inescapable ethic”. Once you’ve lived it, you cannot not live it You receive the human benefits of knowing inescapable interconnection.

Che Guevara called it “moral incentives”. It is felt. But not just Marx noticed we don’t live alone, and we don’t think alone. Frei Betto is a Brazilian priest, who committed to Christianity at 21 because he saw the “vida religiosa” bringing revolution to Brazil.  Betto, imprisoned for four years by Brazil’s dictatorship, has lived his life in activism for the poor.

As liberation theologist, he supported the revolution in Nicaragua, proud to be part of its literacy campaign. But Betto no longer goes there. He says the church and government abandoned the poor.[v]  Not so in Cuba. At an international conference in Havana in 2019, Betto said: “No traicioné ni a Cristo, ni a Castro.” [vi]

Why? The story’s been around for millennia. Those who are rational investigate available explanations. They look for the one with most explanatory capacity, that is, the one explaining more of the facts than rival views. But elite philosophers are not rational when it comes to Cuba, or the South generally.

Noam Chomsky holds the same (philosophical) view as Perrottet. In a documentary at Russia Today, Chomsky says the US is the freest place on the planet: It’s because of minimal government interference. That is, the US is free because, more than anyone else, US folk can do what they want.

That Chomsky holds this implausible view of freedom is not as interesting as the fact that he doesn’t defend it.  Philosophers call it “begging the question”. It means you assume you are right before you start the debate. You do that by taking for granted your own view of the concept at issue: freedom, for instance. Your view needs no defense, and your rivals don’t exist or are talking about something else.

Theirs is a story “gone awry”, as Perrottet says (without argument) about Cuba. It works if your view dominates and if everyone in the conversation, or recognized to be so, holds the same view.

It’s bad argument. It’s also uninteresting. But so it goes with the “anti-authoritarian left”, assuming a view of freedom without defense because it can. The rivals, we all know, are “ideologically saturated”. Cuban philosopher, José Martí, commented that it is like an oyster in a shell, seeing the shell and mistaking it for the world, thinking the world is dark.

It is dark if you think freedom is doing what you want. But never mind. It’s fun.

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014).

Notes

[i] Newsday (January 16 2019).See my:https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/cuba-libre-che

[ii] E.g. William Hart, The art of living (HarperCollins)

[iii] “Humanismo y servidumbre”, Viento sur,1953

[iv] Enrique Ubieta Gómez, 2016, Casa Editora Abril.

[v] Frei Betto,Una biografía, (Editorial José Martí) 337

[vi] “I didn’t betray Christ or Castro”,  Por el equilibrio del mundo, Havana, January 28-30, 2019

Featured image is from NEO

The US Ambassador to Israel revealed on Wednesday three key elements of the long-awaited American Middle East peace plan known as the “deal of the century”, Anadolu has reported. David Friedman, who is a member of the three-man team tasked with formulating the plan, told this week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington that the plan would give Israel full security control over the occupied West Bank.

Friedman is a strong supporter of Israel’s illegal settlements across the occupied Palestinian territories. He added that the deal will allow Israel to maintain a permanent security presence in the Jordan Valley.

“Can we leave this to an administration [in Washington] that may not understand the need for Israel to maintain overriding security control of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and a permanent defence position in the Jordan Valley?” he asked.

The current administration, he pointed out, would continue to work with Israel, the Palestinians and other regional players in pursuit of a final peace deal.

With regard to Jerusalem, Friedman claimed that “For the first time in 2,000 years, Jerusalem has become a dynamic and prosperous city fully open to worshippers of all three faiths.” He ignored the armed incursions by Jewish settlers at the Noble Sanctuary of Al-Aqsa and the frequent lock-outs of Muslims from Al-Aqsa Mosque. Moreover, Palestinians are being driven out of the city by Israel’s apartheid policies which remove their residence rights and allow illegal settlers to take over their homes.

In the wake of US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, the ambassador noted that, without annexation of the territory,

“Syria would be right on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, which provides 40 per cent of Israel’s fresh water.”

International law clearly takes second place to Israel’s security, said observers.

In response, Secretary-General of the PLO Saeb Erekat tweeted,

“Trump, Netanyahu, and their teams should look in the mirror every time a Palestinian or an Israeli is killed to know who is responsible.”

The veteran negotiator went on to cite a recent tweet by Aaron David Miller, a prominent American Middle East analyst, who said:

“Based on Trump’s moves on Jerusalem and Golan, it’s clear he’s revolutionising US policy. Maybe parts of the West Bank are next.”

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Featured image is from MEMO

“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.” — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

The U.S. government, in its pursuit of so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.

This is not a new development, nor is it a revelation.

This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

Mind you, there is no greater good when the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.

Unfortunately, the public has become so easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.

These horrors are being meted out against humans and animals alike.

It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty” of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.

What I’m about to share goes beyond heartbreaking to horrifying.

For instance, did you know that the U.S. government has been buying hundreds of dogs and cats from “Asian meat markets” as part of a gruesome experiment into food-borne illnesses? The cannibalistic experiments involve killing cats and dogs purchased from Colombia, Brazil, Vietnam, China and Ethiopia, and then feeding the dead remains to laboratory kittens, bred in government laboratories for the express purpose of being infected with a disease and then killed.

It gets more gruesome.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has been removing parts of dogs’ brains to see how it affects their breathing; applying electrodes to dogs’ spinal cords (before and after severing them) to see how it impacts their cough reflexes; and implanting pacemakers in dogs’ hearts and then inducing them to have heart attacks (before draining their blood). All of the laboratory dogs are killed during the course of these experiments.

It’s not just animals that are being treated like lab rats by government agencies.

“We the people” have also become the police state’s guinea pigs: to be caged, branded, experimented upon without our knowledge or consent, and then conveniently discarded and left to suffer from the after-effects.

Back in 2017, FEMA “inadvertently” exposed nearly 10,000 firefighters, paramedics and other responders to a deadly form of ricin during simulated bioterrorism response sessions. In 2015, it was discovered that an Army lab had been “mistakenly” shipping deadly anthrax to labs and defense contractors for a decade.

While these particular incidents have been dismissed as “accidents,” you don’t have to dig very deep or go very back in the nation’s history to uncover numerous cases in which the government deliberately conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting populace—citizens and noncitizens alike—making healthy people sick by spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and exposing them to airborne toxins.

At the time, the government reasoned that it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society such as prisoners, mental patients, and poor blacks.

In Alabama, for example, 600 black men with syphilis were allowed to suffer without proper medical treatment in order to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis. In California, older prisoners had testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts implanted in them to test their virility. In Connecticut, mental patients were injected with hepatitis.

In Maryland, sleeping prisoners had a pandemic flu virus sprayed up their noses. In Georgia, two dozen “volunteering” prison inmates had gonorrhea bacteria pumped directly into their urinary tracts through the penis. In Michigan, male patients at an insane asylum were exposed to the flu after first being injected with an experimental flu vaccine. In Minnesota, 11 public service employee “volunteers” were injected with malaria, then starved for five days.

In New York, dying patients had cancer cells introduced into their systems. In Ohio, over 100 inmates were injected with live cancer cells. Also in New York, prisoners at a reformatory prison were also split into two groups to determine how a deadly stomach virus was spread: the first group was made to swallow an unfiltered stool suspension, while the second group merely breathed in germs sprayed into the air. And in Staten Island, children with mental retardation were given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured.

As the Associated Press reports,

“The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs … because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.”

Moreover,

“Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the ’60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.”

Media blackouts, propaganda, spin. Sound familiar?

How many government incursions into our freedoms have been blacked out, buried under “entertainment” news headlines, or spun in such a way as to suggest that anyone voicing a word of caution is paranoid or conspiratorial?

Unfortunately, these incidents are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the atrocities the government has inflicted on an unsuspecting populace in the name of secret experimentation.

For instance, there was the U.S. military’s secret race-based testing of mustard gas on more than 60,000 enlisted men. As NPR reports,

“All of the World War II experiments with mustard gas were done in secret and weren’t recorded on the subjects’ official military records. Most do not have proof of what they went through. They received no follow-up health care or monitoring of any kind. And they were sworn to secrecy about the tests under threat of dishonorable discharge and military prison time, leaving some unable to receive adequate medical treatment for their injuries, because they couldn’t tell doctors what happened to them.”

And then there was the CIA’s MKULTRA program in which hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel were dosed with LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. As Time reports,

“before the documentation and other facts of the program were made public, those who talked of it were frequently dismissed as being psychotic.”

Now one might argue that this is all ancient history and that the government today is different from the government of yesteryear, but has the U.S. government really changed?

Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights of the citizenry?

Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law? Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?

Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?

Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?

Consider this: after revelations about the government’s experiments spanning the 20^th century spawned outrage, the government began looking for human guinea pigs in other countries, where “clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules.”

In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study… even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria, children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven children died and many others were left disabled.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Case in point: back in 2016, it was announced that scientists working for the Department of Homeland Security would begin releasing various gases and particles on crowded subway platforms as part of an experiment aimed at testing bioterror airflow in New York subways.

The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might spread. And look how cool the technology is—said the government cheerleaders—that scientists can use something called DNATrax to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the kinds of surveillance that could be carried out by the government using trackable airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)

Mind you, this is the same government that in 1949 sprayed bacteria into the Pentagon’s air handling system, then the world’s largest office building. In 1950, special ops forces sprayed bacteria from Navy ships off the coast of Norfolk and San Francisco, in the latter case exposing all of the city’s 800,000 residents.

In 1953, government operatives staged “mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipegusing generators placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan to Kansas.

In 1965, the government’s experiments in bioterror took aim at Washington’s National Airport, followed by a 1966 experiment in which army scientists exposed a million subway NYC passengers to airborne bacteria that causes food poisoning.

And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold to us as being in our best interests—GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons, etc.—and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.

So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years. It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.

The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always the same: money, power and total domination.

It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.

The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts, Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”

The Nazi’s unethical experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.

The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back, in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following the second World War, the U.S. government recruited many of Hitler’s employees, adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation, and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.

Sounds far-fetched, you say? Read on. It’s all documented.

As historian Robert Gellately recounts, the Nazi police state was initially so admired for its efficiency and order by the world powers of the day that Herbert Hoover, then-head of the FBI, actually sent one of his right-hand men, Edmund Patrick Coffey, to Berlin in January 1938 at the invitation of Germany’s secret police, the Gestapo.

The FBI was so impressed with the Nazi regime that, according to the New York Times, in the decades after World War II, the FBI, along with other government agencies, aggressively recruited at least a thousand Nazis, including some of Hitler’s highest henchmen.

All told, thousands of Nazi collaborators—including the head of a Nazi concentration camp, among others—were given secret visas and brought to America by way of Project Paperclip. Subsequently, they were hired on as spies, informants and scientific advisers, and then camouflaged to ensure that their true identities and ties to Hitler’s holocaust machine would remain unknown. All the while, thousands of Jewish refugees were refused entry visas to the U.S. on the grounds that it could threaten national security.

Adding further insult to injury, American taxpayers have been paying to keep these ex-Nazis on the U.S. government’s payroll ever since. And in true Gestapo fashion, anyone who has dared to blow the whistle on the FBI’s illicit Nazi ties has found himself spied upon, intimidated, harassed and labeled a threat to national security.

As if the government’s covert, taxpayer-funded employment of Nazis after World War II wasn’t bad enough, U.S. government agencies—the FBI, CIA and the military—have since fully embraced many of the Nazi’s well-honed policing tactics, and have used them repeatedly against American citizens.

It’s certainly easy to denounce the full-frontal horrors carried out by the scientific and medical community within a despotic regime such as Nazi Germany, but what do you do when it’s your own government that claims to be a champion of human rights all the while allowing its agents to engage in the foulest, bases and most despicable acts of torture, abuse and experimentation?

When all is said and done, this is not a government that has our best interests at heart.

This is not a government that values us.

Perhaps the answer lies in The Third Man, Carol Reed’s influential 1949 film starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles. In the film, set in a post-WW II Vienna, rogue war profiteer Harry Lime has come to view human carnage with a callous indifference, unconcerned that the diluted penicillin he’s been trafficking underground has resulted in the tortured deaths of young children.

Challenged by his old friend Holly Martins to consider the consequences of his actions, Lime responds, “In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we?”

“Have you ever seen any of your victims?” asks Martins.

“Victims?” responds Limes, as he looks down from the top of a Ferris wheel onto a populace reduced to mere dots on the ground. “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax — the only way you can save money nowadays.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is how the U.S. government sees us, too, when it looks down upon us from its lofty perch.

To the powers-that-be, the rest of us are insignificant specks, faceless dots on the ground.

To the architects of the American police state, we are not worthy or vested with inherent rights. This is how the government can justify treating us like economic units to be bought and sold and traded, or caged rats to be experimented upon and discarded when we’ve outgrown our usefulness.

To those who call the shots in the halls of government, “we the people” are merely the means to an end.

“We the people”—who think, who reason, who take a stand, who resist, who demand to be treated with dignity and care, who believe in freedom and justice for all—have become obsolete, undervalued citizens of a totalitarian state that, in the words of Rod Serling, “has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the ripping imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom.”

In this sense, we are all Romney Wordsworth, the condemned man in Serling’s Twilight Zone episode “The Obsolete Man.”

“The Obsolete Man” speaks to the dangers of a government that views people as expendable once they have outgrown their usefulness to the State. Yet—and here’s the kicker—this is where the government through its monstrous inhumanity also becomes obsolete. As Serling noted in his original script for “The Obsolete Man,” “Any state, any entity, any ideology which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man…that state is obsolete.”

How do you defeat a monster? You start by recognizing the monster for what it is.

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On the occasion of 20^th anniversary of the aggression of NATO Alliance against Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the FRY), on 22^nd and 23^rd March 2019 Belgrade was the venue of the International Conference under slogan NEVER TO FORGET, and title “Peace and Progress instead of Wars and Poverty”. The organisers of the Conference are the Belgrade Forum for the World of Equals, the Federation of Associations of Veterans of the National Liberation War of Serbia, the Serbian Generals and Admirals Club, the Society of the Serbian Hosts, in cooperation with the World Peace Council. Besides the participants from Serbia, the Conference was attended by more than 200 distinguished guests from some 35 countries from all over the world, whom the organisers welcomed and expressed sincerest gratitude for their solidarity, support and huge humanitarian relief during one of the most challenging periods in the recent history of Serbia and the Serbian nation.

The program of activities marking this anniversary was dedicated to preserving the lasting memory and paying tribute to the military and the police personnel who made the ultimate sacrifice in the defence of their country against the aggression, as well as to the civilian victims including the very young, the very old, and the ailing victims killed during this 78-day aggression by NATO.

The participants have unanimously condemned NATO aggression, affirming that in its essence it was an illegal, invading and criminal war against a peaceful sovereign European country, waged without the UN Security Council mandate and under brute violation of the United Nations Charter, the OSCE Helsinki Final (1975) and the basic principles of international law.

By attacking Serbia (the FRY), the leading Western powers championed by the USA had exposed the freedom-loving and justness-oriented Serbian people to anguish, devastation, and lasting suffering for the sake of attaining their imperialistic geopolitical aims for control of natural and energy resources, the road of transport and the sphere of influence. This was neither ‘a small war’ nor ‘a humanitarian intervention’, but rather a war of underlying geopolitical goals for the long-term deployment of the US troops in the Balkans, for the establishment of case precedent for future aggressions, and for the toppling of legitimate governments, all within the Eastbound Expansion Strategy and the overall goal of setting the global dominance. The history will note the fact that, back in 1999, blindly following alien geopolitical interests, Europe fought itself.

The Balkan is today more unstable. Europe is even more divided. Europe’s backtracking to itself requires some soul-searching, courage and the vision, including confession that the attack against Serbia (the FRY) in 1999 was a colossal historical error.

The aggression’s masterminds and executors should be held responsible for their crimes. The aggression killed some 4,000 persons (including 79 children), whereas additional 6,500 people were seriously wounded. Direct material damage amounted to US 100 billion. It was stressed that NATO and its members participating in the aggression had duty to compensate the war damages to Serbia.

The participants of the Conference were informed about the findings of scientific and expert analyses conducted so far, all confirming that the use of ammunition filled with depleted uranium, and of graphite and cluster bombs and other inflammable and toxic means of warfare, have resulted in high levels of the long-term environmental pollution and the massive-scale endangering of the Serbian citizens. They welcomed the establishment of special bodies of both the national Assembly and of the Government of Serbia tasked with determining the consequences of NATO aggression reflected on the health of population and the safety of environment, and expressed support to the work of those bodies.

The forcible and unlawful tearing Kosovo and Metohija off Serbia continues, through the constant pressuring of Serbia to formally acknowledge the splitting off of a part of territory of its State. Participants of the Conference underscored that a forcible taking of Kosovo and Metohija apart from Serbia would become a precedent which, in turn, would inevitably pave the way for drawing the new borders in the Balkans and the creation of the so-called Greater Albania at the expense of territories of the states of Serbia, North Macedonia, Greece, and Montenegro, what must not be permitted.

NATO aggression against Serbia (the FRY) was a direct and simultaneous attack on the peace and security system in Europe and in the world, which has been constructed on the outcome of the Second World War. As conclusively demonstrated by the subsequent interventions of the USA and its allies (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Syria, etc.), this aggression has served as case-precedent and template to globalize the interventionism, a manual on how to utilize terrorism and separatism to carry out the Western powers’ plans of conquest, in order to forcibly topple ‘unsuitable’ regimes and impose geopolitical interests of the West, notably, of the USA.

NATO aggression against Serbia (the FRY), an act of most blatant violation of fundamental principles of the international law, is unjustifiable; aggressor’s responsibility cannot be diminished by hypocritical attempts to transfer responsibility onto Serbia or her that-time state leadership. This NATO aggression made history as an indicator of moral and civilisation decline that, twenty years on, the governments of the leading aggressor countries have neither been pardoned, nor gotten to learn the right lesson from.

Participants of the Conference expressed their strong support to, and solidarity with efforts Serbia invests in remedying the grave and lasting consequences of the aggression and to her striving to prevent the continuation of NATO aggression by other means. They explicitly supported Serbia’s efforts to preserve own sovereignty and territorial integrity and her contribution to resolve the future status of Kosovo and Metohija, which will be in line with international law and Resolution 1244 of the UN Security Council. They denounced the policy of coercion, pressures, and unilateral steps.

The aggressors’ responsibility for the committed crimes and the inflicted damage cannot be either justified or diminished. Serbia is entitled to seek indemnification, and legal and criminal culpability of NATO leaders and the responsible members. Demand was made to immediately prosecute all those responsible for the crimes against the Serbian nation, and in particular for the case of illicit trafficking in human organs harvested from the abducted Serbs, in accordance with the Report of Disk Marty and relevant decision of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe..

The aggression of 1999 against Serbia (the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and its other more recent military interventions have transformed NATO into an openly offensive military alliance, which is responsible for the present-day Balkans and Europe being more discordant and volatile, for militarization of Europe and of international relations, for reaching the lowest point of distrust and confrontation since the Cold War, and for the thoroughly shaken the global security order.

NATO is but a tool of the military industry complex and the largest capital domination, rather than a tool of peace, peoples’ needs, and progress. This is why NATO, a Cold War relic, should be dissolved and foreign military camps abolished, including military base Bondsteele in the Serbian Province of Kosovo and Metohija.

Participants of the Conference held that the world was going through period of growing distrust, tensions, and threats of new interventions and conflicts. The root causes are the aggressiveness of NATO and of alienated power centres, whose interests benefit from violations of fundamental principles of the international law, escalation of threats, renewed arms race, and militarization of international relations.

The participants have condemned all method of abuse of international institutions such as: United Nations, OSCE, UNESCO, WTO and others, demanding their improvement and strengthening, not weakening and bypassed.

The policy of domination based on military might, typical of unipolar world order, was rejected as unacceptable because being founded on privileges and self-proclaimed excellence and not on equality of all countries and nations. Multi-polarisation excludes dominance and opens window for democratisation of international affairs. The Conference sent an appeal to all peaceful forces in the world to join forces in the struggle for the observance of the international law as based on the UN Charter, for reinforced role of the United Nations and other universal international organisations.

Participants of the Conference unanimously demanded to urgently put an end to a new arms race and violation of relevant international agreements, and to redirect the funds from the military budgets into the domains of economic development, improving quality of people’s life, and eliminating the disheartening developmental and social divergences. They expressed profound concern provoked by unilateral USA withdrawalof the valid international agreements particularly of Intermediate range Nuclear Force Treaty (INF). They demanded for full respect of the existing agreements, and renewal of negotiations on stopping arm race, particularly nuclear. They demand full withdrawal of the US tactical nuclear weapons and missile defense assets from Europe that are worsening of the security on the European continent.

It was held that the imperialism system with its insatiable greed for someone else’s wealth, and unipolar order based on the strategy of exceptionality, dominance and NATO interventionism, are the key sources of instability, distrust, and conflicts. Peace, stability, democracy, inclusive progress, require radical changes in global relations, observance of sovereign equality, non-interference, multiculturalism, common interests, and exclusion of any egotism, protectionism, and privileges.

A statement was made that the imperialistic system, with its inherent insatiable greediness for other nations’ riches, and the unipolar order based on the strategy of exceptionalism and dominance, and NATO interventionism, are the key sources of instability, distrust, and conflicts. Peace, democracy, and progress require radical changed in global relations, observance of sovereign equality, non-interference, and multiculturalism. Stability, peace, and inclusive progress require observance of common interests, partnership, and exclusion of any egotism, protectionism, and privileges. Policy of confrontation, interventionism, and interference in the internal affairs, prompted by the military industry complex and big financial capital must give way to dialogue, partnership, observance of the basic norms of international law and international order, which are based on the common interests and mutual respect.

Participants of the Conference committed to peaceful political solution of all international problems, under observance of principles of international law, the UN Charter, and the decisions of the UN Security Council.

Belgrade, 23th March 2019.

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For over two decades, American families have faced an unscrupulous foe that threatens the public health and welfare. It is a rogue, unmanageable institution within our federal government, now seemingly beholden solely to private interests. Citizens have been horribly mistaken in believing that the nation’s leading health agency, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), honors its mandate to protect the public from “dangerous health threats,” both domestic and foreign. We are expected to assume the CDC relies upon the most advanced and cutting-edge medical science and data to make its policy decisions. However, the agency’s history of corruption and fraud contradict its own pledge, as outlined on its website. Instead of protecting the “health security of our nation,” the CDC uses bromides and meaningless pageantry to hide its true nature.

During the past year, especially in recent months, the fear-mongering spewing forth from the CDC has become virulent. It is a classic Orwellian script. The recent measles outbreak – although nowhere near as alarming as the flare-ups of bygone eras – has been seized upon as an opportunity to brainwash the public and reshape it into obedient livestock in order to increase vaccination compliance. Worse, this disinformation campaign ignores everything we know about measles infection and the failures of the MMR vaccine.

Unfortunately, we are no longer permitted to debate the pros and cons of the measles vaccine. The CDC consistently shuts down debate when its decisions are challenged.  Physicians, medical researchers, immunologists and former vaccine advocates who challenge the loose claims for vaccine safety and efficacy are frustrated and eager to publicly debate the best vaccine advocates the CDC and vaccine industry have to offer, but none will take up the challenge because the science is so clearly not on their side.

The agency consistently fails to conduct and apply the gold standard in its own medical research and ignores the best independent peer-reviewed science. In short, this agency is a mouthpiece for the pharmaceutical-industrial complex and operates for its own financial advantage, rather than for the benefit of society. Its revolving doors are kept spinning with a constant influx of pharmaceutical industry and vaccine insiders. In fact the lines separating corporate influence and public health are grossly blurred and distorted. It is no surprise that documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests paint the CDC as rotten in its core and one of the greatest health threats to the nation. The agency, in Robert Kennedy Jr’s words, is a “cesspool of corruption.”

What you will never hear in the mainstream media is that there is another medical institution that is supposed to have been granted the responsibility to assure the CDC receives quality and reliable scientific research to use as the basis for its healthcare decisions.  The Institutes of Medicine (IOM) does not possess the CDC’s legislative clout; however, it represents a far superior body of scientists and researchers in their medical fields.

Founded in 1970, the Institute of Medicine falls under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences started by President Abraham Lincoln and Congress in 1863. The Academy was founded for the purpose of bringing together the nation’s best scientific minds to advise the government on scientific matters. The IOM was founded later to provide expert advice and reliable medical research to the White House and Congressional legislators to guide their decisions, keeping them informed about the social, economic and political impacts of healthcare. According to its principles, and unlike the CDC, IOM members deliberating on vaccine research and policies are expected to be independent and not represent private interests.

During a press conference this month at Yale University, Children’s Health Defense founder Robert Kennedy Jr presented data (watch video below) from his investigations into the CDC’s culture of medical negligence and efforts to cover up of the compelling evidence for vaccine-induced injuries, including autism. Over the course of twenty years, the IOM has monitored and reviewed the medical literature to determine the most- and least- likely injuries associated with specific vaccines and provided recommendations to the CDC. In 1991, 22 illnesses were identified, 6 were confirmed as vaccine-related and 12 remained uncertain due to insufficiently reliable studies.

Those cases with confirmed causation included learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, and childhood diabetes. This data was collected subsequent to President Ronald Reagan signing the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Act, a point when autism rates started to climb exponentially. Three years later, the IOM identified 54 medical conditions, the medical literature supported 10 diseases as vaccine-induced and 38 were uncertain. Among the confirmed illnesses were seizures, demyelinating disease, sterility, transverse myelitis and, for the first time, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Again in 2011, the IOM reported a whopping 155 adverse conditions with 16 vaccine-induced injuries supported by the science, including a correlation between the DTaP vaccine and autism.

Unfortunately, the IOM holds no official authority over our federal agencies; consequently, its recommendations to the CDC to further investigate vaccines’ adverse effects went unheeded. Today, nothing has changed at the CDC. Instead, the agency has dug itself into a deeper hole of secrecy and corruption. With a budget of $11.5 billion, Kennedy notes that only a pathetic $20 million is designated for vaccine safety. The CDC is crying out for a thorough public audit.

These early IOM reports are extremely valuable. They identify many of the same childhood diseases that have grown to epidemic proportions in the intervening years, and they indict vaccines as a causal factor. Yet regrettably, the IOM has recently showed signs of becoming as compromised as other health agencies. It, too, may have become another pawn of the Medical Deep State that is infiltrating every state legislative body to pass draconian immunization laws with the end goal of vaccinating Americans by lies and even threats and force if necessary.

For example, in a 2013 report on the safety of the CDC’s Childhood Immunization Schedule, the IOM gave its stamp of approval while ignoring the fact that no vaccine trial, except for a poorly designed Gardasil trial, has conducted safety tests with a scientifically valid placebo. Nor are there credible and reliable studies to support claims that no synergistic health risks arise from administering multiple vaccines concurrently. Now the IOM, too, is basing its conclusions on junk corporate science.  Its recent reports also omit reviews of the scientific literature that note the toxicity of the aluminum adjuvant used in many vaccines, including the MMR.

Recent research conducted by Dr. Chris Exley at Keele University in the UK has uncovered the pathways by which high amounts of vaccine aluminum accumulate in brain tissue rather than being excreted. High brain aluminum levels were found in deceased autistic children whose tissues were donated for his research. Autistic children can have as much as ten times the amount of aluminum lodged in the brain compared to a normal adult. Blogging on the Hippocratic Post, Exley notes that Merck refuses to make its aluminum adjuvant available for researchers to conduct independent analysis.

The CDC’s crimes are a matter of public record. These are not secrets or confidential information. The documents and voices of whistleblowers within the CDC are readily found on the internet to support all of our charges against the agency. They are readily available to anyone who wishes to investigate. Unfortunately, our media has again failed to do its job in accurately reporting on federal corruption, instead becoming an instrument of the Medical Deep State and a mouthpiece to deceive the public.

CDC misconduct includes widespread corporate nepotism favoring private pharmaceutical interests, illegal destruction of clinical data that showed a correlation between the MMR vaccine and a 250 percent increase in autism among African American boys, hiring a criminal(s) to conduct fraudulent research to conceal the neurological risks of mercury-containing vaccines, the silencing of internal officials and whistleblowers, serving as the go-between on behalf of the beverage industry concerning the World Health Organization’s restriction of sugary soft drinks, etc. The CDC has fudged firearm safety statistics; that report led Harvard University’s Injury Control Research Center director David Hemenway to declare that no one should trust the CDC’s estimates.

During the 1970s, it was the CDC’s Dr. Colleen Boyle who covered up the hideously toxic nature of Agent Orange and dioxin that thousands of Vietnam War veterans were exposed to. Although the IOM and Congress revealed Boyle’s chicanery, the agency duly rewarded her loyalty with a promotion.

The CDC and the vaccine industry have been colluding for a long time. In 2004, Congress accused the agency of operating as a public relations firm for private interests, rather than as a watchdog ensuring the integrity of vaccine science. That same year, the US Office of Special Counsel uncovered potential evidence that the CDC and pharmaceutical companies were destroying data linking the vaccine preservative thimerosal with neurological disorders. Senator Tom Coburn’s expose reveals the agency’s widespread budgetary mismanagement has wasted millions of tax dollars and concludes that the CDC cannot demonstrate it is controlling disease.

In October 2017, Congressman Bill Posey sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions calling on him to resume efforts to extradite and prosecute Dr. Poul Thorsen for money laundering of over $1 million from the CDC. The catch is that Thorsen was contracted by the CDC to conduct fraudulent research in Denmark that would mask any association between the vaccine preservative thimerosal and autism. In 2011, Thorsen was placed on the Inspector General’s most wanted list; nevertheless, the CDC has continued to erect obstacles to extradition efforts. More worrisome, Rep Posey discovered that for at least three years after the FBI issued its arrest warrant, the CDC and National Institutes of Health continued to collaborate with Thorsen and even joint-published more junk science together.

Another misdemeanor involved the CDC providing erroneous data to Congress about its women’s health program, WISEWOMAN, commissioned to provide preventative health services to women between 40 and 65 to reduce cardiovascular disease. Native Americans were also targeted for assistance in the program. The data was cooked and enrolled far less women than the CDC reported to Congress.

These ethical violations are systemic throughout the agency and Congress has been paralyzed in any efforts to rein in the rottenness that saturates the agency’s leadership.

In 2016, a group of scientists within the agency submitted a letter stating their concerns to the CDC’s chief of staff:

“We are a group of scientists at the CDC that are very concerned about the current state of ethics at our agency. It appears that our mission is being influenced and shaped by outside parties and rogue interests…. What concerns us most is that it is becoming the norm and not the rare exception. Some senior management officials at CDC are clearly aware and even condone these behaviors. Others see it and turn the other way. Some staff are intimidated and pressed to do things they know are not right.”

Out of fear of retribution, this group of CDC employees filed their complaint anonymously.

Over the years, Congressional subcommittees have voiced warnings to CDC officials to clean up their act. A House Government Reform Committee reported that both the CDC’s and FDA’s advisory committees for vaccines were thoroughly compromised with pharmaceutical conflicts of interest.

Another voting advisory committee member held a patent on a rival rotavirus vaccine. Neither advisory committee complies with the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires a diversity of medical opinions; instead, the committees are stacked with corporate shills advocating for fast-tracking poorly developed vaccines with insufficient and untrustworthy safety and efficacy data to otherwise support their approval. In 2009, the Office of the Inspector General conducted an investigation of conflicts of interests within the CDC. The Office discovered that 97 percent of its advisors failed to declare their links to the pharmaceutical industry.

We have reported in the past how the CDC operates more like a private intelligence and surveillance firm rather than a federally funded public health service. In the meantime, epidemics of autism, neuro-developmental disorders, autoimmunity, childhood diabetes, febrile seizures, asthma and allergies roll on and federal health officials embrace the superstitions of vaccine magic and reside in a culture of medical denialism.

Finally, there is a fundamental question.

Would you hire someone with such an extensive rap sheet to care for your child, let alone a newborn infant? Would you trust them to undertake the correct measures in an emergency, or use sound judgment to assure your child’s well-being?  For the hundreds of thousands of vaccine-damaged children, the CDC remains a felon on the loose. And the rest of our government is less competent than inebriated Keystone cops to authorize a thorough housecleaning.

The agency displays no sincere interest in your child’s well-being and health, nor those of any American for that matter. And the mainstream media, every major network, newspaper and magazine, are similarly unconscionably complicit in preserving the CDC’s culture of deception. The entire media should be stamped with a warning as life-threatening dangers to the public health.

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including Poverty Inc and Deadly Deception.

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

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On NATO’s 70th Anniversary Important to Remember Its Anti-democratic Roots

By Yves Engler, March 28, 2019

Formally, NATO was the West’s response to an aggressive Soviet Union, but the notion that the US, or even Western Europe, was threatened by the Soviet Union after World War II is laughable.

Gaddafi Spy Chief – Libya Gave Ex-French President Sarkozy $8million Bribe

By True Publica, March 28, 2019

From Ian Allen at IntelNews comes the report the same senior intelligence advisor to Gaddafi has reportedly told French investigators that the Libyan government gave $8 million to the election campaign of France’s ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy as a bribe to clean up Gadaffi’s international reputation.

Jury Slams Monsanto for Corporate Malfeasance in Roundup Cancer Trial, Awards $80 Million in Damages

By EWG, March 28, 2019

Today, a second jury in less that 8 months found Bayer-Monsanto’s signature weedkiller Roundup responsible for causing cancer.

Kosovo War at 20: How Britain and America Backed Jihadists Throughout Conflict

By Kit Klarenberg, March 28, 2019

On 24 March 1999, NATO launched a 78-day-long bombing campaign against the then-Republic of Yugoslavia. Still hailed by the Western mainstream as a successful ‘humanitarian intervention’, the true story of the conflict’s roots and legacy is far darker, and points to extensive collaboration between London, Washington and extremist Islamist forces.

Ukrainian Security Official Says Ukraine Shot Down MH-17

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, March 27, 2019

298 Passengers and crew were murdered by Ukraine in order to create a propaganda attack on Russia.  The filth that comprise the Western media and governments hid the truth for the sake of Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda.  

Cancer Cluster at California Elementary School Results in Removal of Sprint Cell Phone Tower

By Zero Hedge, March 27, 2019

Weston Elementary School in Ripon, CA went on high alert after the controversy erupted two years ago – with some parents even pulling their children from school over the tower which Sprint has been paying the school $2,000 per month to place on its property.

Pompeo was a Firm Supporter of RussiaGate: Was he Jeopardizing Trump’s Foreign Policy Initiatives?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 27, 2019

It is worth noting that until the release of the Mueller report, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (and former CIA Director) was a firm supporter of the RussiaGate narrative. What is his position today?

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Governments that pride themselves on being either democratic or republican in nature claim that they are empowered by the will of the people, but the sad reality is that most regimes come to power based on promises that they have no intention of honoring after the election is over. In the United States we have seen President Donald Trump quite plausibly enjoy a margin of victory that was due to his pledges to end America’s involvement in senseless Middle Eastern wars and to mend relations with Russia. Neither has occurred, quite the contrary, with a serious threat that war with Iran on behalf of Israel is imminent and a relationship with Moscow that is worse than it was in the latter phases of the Cold War. Whether all of that is due to Trump’s own character and intellectual failings or instead the fault of the advisors he has chosen to listen to remains somewhat unclear.

Even when something emerges that might provide clarity over specific issues, some leading government official inevitably steps in and says something that suggests that the politicians are incapable to dealing with anything outside the scripted responses that they are accustomed to rely on.

The recently released long-awaited Mueller report on the 2016 election did not find any evidence that senior members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government to change the outcome, a proposition that has largely been promoted by Hillary Clinton and her supporters. The full report, if it ever surfaces unedited, may or may not determine that there was some “influencing” activity by Moscow on the peripheries of the electoral process, but everyone agrees that the result was not materially influenced by any foreign government. Nevertheless, the wily but brain-dead Senate Major Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledged the report with

“I welcome the announcement that the Special Counsel has finally completed his investigation into Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections. Many Republicans have long believed that Russia poses a significant threat to American interests. I hope the Special Counsel’s report will help inform and improve our efforts to protect our democracy.”

Mitch’s apparent belief that the Kremlin was the target may surprise some who thought that the purpose of the investigation was to uncover possible collusion by the Trumpsters, something that apparently was not demonstrated in the case of Russia but was revealed regarding Israel’s overtures to National Security Advisor designate Michael Flynn. However, while it is perfectly acceptable or even expected to say nasty things about Russia, doing the same about Israel is a no-no, so McConnell was being politically astute in failing to take the bait.

But the conclusion of the Mueller inquiry should be welcomed by everyone because it frees up resources that can now be used to determine whether God had a hand in electing Donald Trump. In a story reported by the BBC and elsewhere, dispensationalist Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded oddly to a question regarding the Jewish Purim holiday, which commemorates the alleged rescue of the Jewish people by Queen Esther from the Persians. When Pompeo, at the time in Israel, was asked if “President Trump right now has been sort of raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from an Iranian menace” he answered that

“As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible. I am confident that the Lord is at work here.”

So, Pompeo is “confident” that God elected Trump to protect the Jews from Iran. It is an interesting observation, particularly as the biblical Purim-Esther story has the Jews killing 75,500 Persians and then feasting to celebrate the event.

One must consider that the theory that there was a possible divine intervention to bring about the result of the 2016 election to save the Jews is possibly the most frightening bit of commentary to come out of the entire feckless Trump national security team. Pompeo, by virtue of his office, has great power to do good or ill and he has clearly chosen to make decisions relating to the conduct of United States diplomacy based not on American interests but rather on his own personal religiosity as reflected in his interpretation of a religious text. Has Pompeo never heard of “separation of church and state?”

Further, Pompeo is promoting American interference in an election in Israel which might have led to a rejection of the extreme right-wing philosophy that guides its current government. The recent White House move to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights was clearly part and parcel of a plan to promote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as the candidate who would be best able to secure unlimited support from Washington. More might be coming in the form of some additional recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Palestinian West Bank prior to the April 9th election or even some military action against Iran. Pompeo clearly believes that this is all part of some divine plan.

Anyone who persists in thinking that nations should pursue policies that are proportionate, rational and based on genuine interests should be appalled by the Pompeo comments and fearful of what the consequences might be.

Given the awfulness of the Pompeo remarks, one might wonder where is the condemnation of them on the editorial pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post? Surely there should be a demand for his resignation as he is suggesting that the United States should be fighting a divinely mandated war against Iran to protect Israel which is, for what it’s worth, not actually threatened by the Iranians while even the Pentagon has declared Iran to be a “rational actor” in foreign policy. But one hears mostly silence. The Washington Establishment clearly believes that one can and should condemn Russia without any evidence, but one cannot investigate or even challenge a Secretary of State who believes that he is receiving his guidance directly from God.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCF

“The power  of the communists, wherever that power flourishes, depends upon their ability to suppress and destroy the free institutions that stand against them. They pick them off one by one: the political parties, the trade unions, the churches, the schools, the universities, the trade associations, even the sporting clubs and the kindergartens. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is meant to be a declaration to the world that this kind of conquest from within will not in the future take place amongst us.” – March 28, 1949, Lester Pearson, External Affairs Minister, House of Commons

First in a four-part series on the 70^th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

With NATO turning 70 next week it’s a good occasion to revisit the creation of a military alliance operating under the stated principle that an “attack  against one ally is considered as an attack against all allies.” Now encompassing 29 member states, the north Atlantic alliance was instigated by US, British and Canadian officials.

Formally, NATO was the West’s response to an aggressive Soviet Union, but the notion that the US, or even Western Europe, was threatened by the Soviet Union after World War II is laughable. Twenty-five million people in the Soviet Union lost their lives in the war while the US came out of WWII much stronger than when they entered it. After the destruction of WWII, the Soviets were not interested in fighting the US and its allies, which Canadian and US officials admitted privately. In April 1945 Canada’s ambassador to Russia, Dana Wilgress, concluded that “the interests  of the Soviet privileged class are bound up with the maintenance of a long period of peace.” The Soviet elite, the ambassador continued in an internal memo, was “fearful of the possibility of attack from abroad” and “obsessed with problems of security.” Wilgress believed the Soviets wanted a post-war alliance with the UK to guarantee peace in Europe (with a Soviet sphere in the East and a UK-led West.) Internally, US officials came to similar conclusions.

Rather than a defence against possible Russian attack, NATO was partly conceived as a reaction to growing socialist sentiment in Western Europe. During WWII self-described communists opposed Mussolini in Italy, fought the fascists in Greece and resisted the Nazi occupation of France. As a result, they had a great deal of prestige after the war, unlike the wealth-holders and church officials who backed the fascists. If not for US/British interference, communists, without Moscow’s support, would probably have taken power in Greece and won the 1948 election in Italy. In France the Communist Party won 30 percent of the first post-war vote, filling a number of ministries in a coalition government.

At the time of Italy’s first post-war election, prominent Canadian diplomat Escott Reid, explained that “the whole  game of the Russians is obviously to conquer without armed attack.” For his part, Pearson decried an “attempt  at a complete Russian conquest of Italy by constitutional or extra-constitutional means” and described class struggle by workers as a “new and sinister kind of danger, indirect aggression.”

US officials were equally concerned. George Kennan, the top US government policy planner at the time of NATO’s formation, considered “the communist  danger in its most threatening form as an internal problem that is of western society.” For his part NATO commander Dwight D. Eisenhower explained:

“One  of the great and immediate uses of the [NATO] military forces we are developing is to convey a feeling of confidence to exposed populations, a confidence which will make them sturdier, politically, in their opposition to Communist inroads.”

NATO planners feared a weakening of self-confidence among Western Europe’s elite and the widely held belief that communism was the wave of the future. Tens of thousands of North American troops were stationed in Western Europe to strengthen the Western European elite’s confidence to face growing left-wing parties and movements. Apparently, “Secret anti-Communist NATO protocols” committed alliance countries’ intelligence agencies to preventing communist parties from gaining power. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, information surfaced regarding groups the CIA and MI6 organized to “stay-behind” in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. No invasion took place, of course. Instead, NATO’s Secret Armies notes:

“The real and present danger in the eyes of the secret war strategists in Washington and London were the at-times numerically strong Communist parties in the democracies of Western Europe. Hence the network in the total absence of a Soviet invasion took up arms in numerous countries and fought a secret war against the political forces of the left. The secret armies… were involved in a whole series of terrorist operations and human rights violations that they wrongly blamed on the Communists in order to discredit the left at the polls.”

Informally known as “Operation Gladio”, these right- wing “stay behind” groups were overseen by NATO’s Office of Security. A Spanish paper reported, in November 1990,

“The Supreme  Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE), directing organ of NATO’s military apparatus, coordinated the actions of Gladio, according to the revelations of Gladio Secretary General Manfred Wörner during a reunion with the NATO ambassadors of the 16 allied nations.”

At the time the European Parliament condemned Operation Gladio and requested an investigation, which hasn’t been undertaken.

Canada was one of two NATO countries omitted from Daniele Ganser’s NATO’s Secret Armies (Iceland was the other). No researcher has tied the two together, but the year after NATO was established the RCMP began a highly secretive espionage operation and internment plan known as PROFUNC (PROminent FUNCtionaries of the Communist Party). In October 2010 CBC’s Fifth Estate and Radio-Canada’s Enquête aired shows on “this secret  contingency plan, called PROFUNC, [which] allowed police to round up and indefinitely detain Canadians believed to be Communist sympathizers.” In case of a “national security” threat up to 16,000 suspected communists and 50,000 sympathizers were to be apprehended and interned in one of eight camps across the country. Initiated by RCMP Commissioner Stuart Taylor Wood in 1950, the plan continued until 1983.

Blunting the European Left was an important part of the establishment of NATO. As odes to the organization ring across the dominant media during this week’s 70^th celebrations, it’s important to remember that NATO was birthed with an elitist, anti-democratic intent. Its reason for creation was to manage “democracy” so that existing elites maintained their status.

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Underestimating the potential of one’s adversaries and expressing excessive self-confidence in one’s own abilities oftentimes leads to the said party being unpleasantly surprised if events don’t go exactly according to how they expect them to.

Russia would well to reconsider its position towards the US’ proposed “European Energy Security And Diversification Act of 2019” because it could potentially be a more serious threat to the country’s interests than Moscow seems to think. Publicly financed Russian media outlet TASS reported that Federation Council Speaker Valentina Matviyenko, the third most powerful person in the country, shrugged off this piece of legislation, writing the following about her interaction with journalists about this issue:

“”I would give another name to that bill. It should be named ‘On setting stage for extra supplies of shale and other gas to Europe’. That is blatant protectionism, willful breach of international trade rules, WTO rules, that is an attempt to limit economic and energy sovereignty of Europe,” she said.

 “I am confident that the leaders of European states will not go against the interests of their countries, and the bill will have no force,” the upper house speaker added. Matviyenko stressed that if enacted, the draft law “will not have slightest impact on economic interests of the Russian Federation” due to the fact that its “energy cooperation with Europe and other states is mutually beneficial.”

She considers the bill to be Washington’s “attempt to foist its more expensive gas on Europe and limit competition on that market.” “The bill has not been adopted by the Senate and signed by US President (Donald) Trump yet. A chance remains that common sense will prevail, but only a chance,” Matviyenko added.”

As can be seen, her words reveal a dismissive attitude towards the US’ latest moves that underestimate America’s resolve to hit Russia’s budget where it hurts and express excessive self-confidence in her country’s ability to thwart any scenario that could adversely affect its interests. That might not be the best approach, however, because it could result in Russia being unpleasantly surprised if events don’t unfold exactly like it expects them to.

Critiquing her commentary, the first part is definitely correct – the Act is indeed blatant protectionism and certainly goes against established international rules and norms, though it shouldn’t have been unexpected to any observers at this point more than two years into his presidency that Trump will act unilaterally in advance of his country’s interests irrespective of “international law” since there exists no credible enforcement measure to bring the US to account for violating it.

Building off of that, even the lowest level Russian pundits acknowledge by now that the US has been enforcing its political, economic, and military will on Europe at the expense of the continent’s own objective interests, but the bloc is largely unable to resist American pressure as evidenced by it going along with Washington’s anti-Russian sanctions and NATO policies, so the precedent is that it will actually fall in line with its energy ones too and not entirely resist them.

Ditto the same in principle when it comes to Mrs. Matviyenko’s other point about her “confidence that the leaders of European states will not go against the interests of their countries, and the bill will have no force.” It’s one thing if she was just saying that as a talking point for the media’s sake and another if she actually believes it, but either way, it suggests a serious underestimation of the US’ influence over the EU and a gross overestimation of their decision making freedom.

Unlike what she says, the draft law will indeed have much more than the “slightest impact on economic interests of the Russian Federation” because a much higher proportion of the Russian budget is obtained through energy sales abroad than the American one is, meaning that in the zero-sum game of gas geopolitics in the absence of any tangibly far-reaching economic restructuring on Russia’s part, Moscow could potentially be deprived of valuable revenue over the long term that it might be depending upon to fund the “Great Society” nationwide socio-economic development program.

The combination of proposed  DASKAA energy sanctions against Russia and “Energy Security Act” incentives to the EU could combine in such a way as to offset Russia’s budgetary stability during its sensitive domestic and international transitions into PP24 (Post-Putin 2024) and the emerging Multipolar World Order respectively if not preemptively and responsibly addressed by Russian decision makers, and downplaying this scenario won’t make it any less likely to materialize.

It’s certainly true that Russia’s “energy cooperation with Europe and other states is mutually beneficial”, but again, that doesn’t mean that the EU and other partners will pursue their own objective self-interests by successfully rebuffing American pressure. Some of them, such as Germany and Russia’s TurkStream Balkan & Central European partners, will undoubtedly go ahead with their plans, but the US will seek to impose higher financial and political costs upon them for doing so.

The whole point of this American pressure campaign is to artificially increase the cost of conducting energy-related business with Russia so as to make more costly US-exported LNG “competitive” by comparison, ergo the support that the “Energy Security Act” promises to provide to the EU and other entities in order to help them manage the costs of “balancing” out their energy imports between the US and Russia (such as providing financial assistance for LNG terminals).

The final point that can be made about Mrs. Matviyenko’s remarks is that she probably doesn’t care that “common sense” might prevail in the US in the event that the bill isn’t passed into law. The rhetorical question would be that “if the bill isn’t a problem, who cares whether it’s promulgated or not?” Moreover, the well-known aphorism of “never interrupting your enemy when he is making a mistake” makes one wonder why Mrs. Matviyenko hopes that the bill doesn’t pass if would supposedly only be a waste of time and treasure for the US anyhow.

It’s inconceivable that the third most powerful person in Russia sincerely cares about protecting US interests so her words should be seen as a sarcastic attempt at “reverse-psychology” that belies an understanding that the “Energy Security Act” is actually a much bigger deal than she just made it seem, though it’s still unclear whether she and her government are taking this threat as seriously as they should. One would like to hope that “common sense will prevail” and that they are are, but then again, “groupthink” affects all governments and Russia’s is certainly no exception.

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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.

Featured image: Valentina Matviyenko (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Almost 20 Palestinian rights groups – both regional and international – urged the United Nations to protect Gazans who participate in the anniversary of the “Great March of Return” protests this coming Saturday.

In a letter sent to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday, the groups warned that Israel “will once again resort to lethal and other excessive force, including live ammunition, to suppress the protests”.

“We urge the UN to take meaningful action to prevent further unnecessary loss of life and injury by the Israeli occupying forces, which entails individual criminal responsibility and may amount to international crimes,” the letter read.

They went on to issue an 11-point list of recommendations for the UN, including beefing up monitoring of Israel’s use of force on the protests, demanding accountability and making sure Israel adheres to the Geneva Convention.

Al-Haq & 18 Palestinian, regional & int’l CSOs sent a joint letter to #UN SG @antonioguterres & HC @mbachelet calling on them to take action to protect Palestinian protesters ahead of one-year commemoration of #GreatReturnMarch; to ensure #accountability. https://t.co/aaEz3feqmN pic.twitter.com/XhyddWI1AA

— Al-Haq الحق (@alhaq_org) March 27, 2019

According to the letter, 197 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israel since the protests began, which includes 42 children. More than 29,000 Palestinians have been wounded in the protests by Israel’s military and 1,200 of those injures include “complex limb injuries requiring multiple surgeries and long-term follow up”.

Since 30 March last year, thousands of Palestinians in the small coastal territory have demonstrated along the fence with Israel, demanding the implementation of Palestinian refugees’ right of return and an end to the crippling 11-year siege of Gaza.

While Israel has claimed that the protests have been orchestrated by Hamas, the de facto ruling party in Gaza, the organisers of the March have rejected these claims. For its part, Hamas has not formally recognised any of the slain Palestinians as belonging to its organisation.

The UN General Assembly has denounced Israel’s use of force against the demonstrators as “excessive, disproportionate and indiscriminate”, while many rights groups slammed it as illegal, “horrifying” and “calculated”.

Two Israeli soldiers have been killed over the same period, one by a Palestinian sniper and another during a botched Israeli special forces operation within the Gaza Strip.

Israel maintains a crippling blockade of Gaza that critics say amounts to collective punishment of the impoverished enclave’s two million residents.

Egypt also upholds the siege, restricting movement in and out of Gaza on its border.

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Featured image: Palestinian take cover as Israeli forces fire at protesters at the Gaza border on 14 December 2018 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]

The Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova acknowledged in Moscow on Tuesday that Russian “specialists” are indeed in Venezuela within the ambit of a 2001 military-technical cooperation agreement with Caracas. Zakharova underscored that Russia’s bilateral military cooperation with Venezuela is in accordance with the latter’s constitution and has legal underpinning, which “doesn’t require any additional approval from the (opposition-controlled) National Assembly of Venezuela.” 

This followed media reports that two Russian air force planes landed at Caracas on Saturday carrying Vasily Tonkoshkurov, chief of staff of the ground forces with nearly 100 military personnel and some 35 tonnes of material. An unnamed official at the Russian embassy in Caracas told the Sputnik that the Russian personnel had arrived to “exchange consultations. Russia has various contracts that are in the process of being fulfilled, contracts of a technical-military character.”

Zakharova’s remarks came a day after Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov received a phone call from the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on March 25. The Russian readout said Pompeo was “interested in certain issues related to the developments in Venezuela.” It added,

“Sergey Lavrov emphasised that Washington’s attempts to organise a coup d’etat in Venezuela and threats to its legitimate government are a violation of the UN Charter and blatant interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state… After stating principal differences in Russian and US positions, the officials agreed to stay in touch and continue to exchange assessments.” 

The state department readout, however, claimed that Pompeo warned Russia “to cease its unconstructive behavior” in Venezuela” and that Washington and its regional allies “will not stand idly by as Russia exacerbates tensions.” It also said Pompeo accused Russia of “continued insertion … to support the illegitimate regime of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela [which] risks prolonging the suffering of the Venezuelan people who overwhelmingly support interim President Juan Guaido”. 

Meanwhile, on Monday and Tuesday, in a series of tweets, US national security advisor John Bolton vent anger and frustration:

“Maduro has lost the support of the Venezuelan people, so he’s relying on Cuban and Russian support to usurp democracy and repress innocent civilians… Rather than sending nuclear-capable bombers and special forces to prop up a corrupt dictator, Russia should work with the international community to support the Venezuelan people. The United States will not tolerate hostile foreign military powers meddling with the Western Hemisphere’s shared goals of democracy, security, and the rule of law… Maduro asks for Cuban and Russian goons to suppress the people of Venezuela.” 

With these developments, the crisis situation around Venezuela may deem to have acquired a New Cold War dimension to it. Clearly, Moscow has weighed the pros and cons of the Venezuelan situation and has decided to be unapologetic about its support for the Maduro government. Despite the US outbursts, Moscow is showing no signs of backing off, either. 

The big question ahead is whether Russia is climbing the escalation ladder. Indeed, the stepping up of the military-technical cooperation stems from the assessment in Moscow that the desperate US attempts to engineer / sponsor a military coup in Caracas aren’t getting anywhere. Meanwhile, President Nicolas Maduro announced in an interview with the Russian state television today that “a high-level working session on intergovernmental cooperation” between Russia and Venezuela is due to take place in April where “we will sign over 20 documents on cooperation in economy, trade, culture, energy and education.”

Suffice to say, Moscow intends to step up its support for Maduro and is drawing up a plan of action to develop a comprehensive bilateral cooperation program with a medium and long term perspective. Now, that can only mean that in the Russian assessment, US’ blueprint to overthrow the regime through economic sanctions and other covert actions (such as the sabotage of power supply) and various methods of political and diplomatic pressure (including illegal confiscation of Venezuelan assets in western banks running into tens of billions of dollars) can be and must be countered. It is interesting that Cuba, which is rich in experience in countering the US’ coercive policies, is working shoulder to shoulder with Russia in this direction. 

From all appearance — so far, at least — a direct US military intervention in Venezuela to forcibly change the regime is not on the cards. Rather, a cold-war era war of attrition appears to be looming ahead. Can Russia sustain the financial and economic burden involved? But the analogy of the Russian intervention in Syria does not hold good here insofar as Venezuela is potentially a rich country with the world’s largest proven hydrocarbon reserves. Equally, China is also a stakeholder in Venezuela’s economic stability. 

On the other hand, it is vitally important for Russia that the US, which aspires to be the number one exporter of oil and gas, does not gain control of the vast Venezuelan reserves, as that would mean an enormous capacity falling into Washington’s hands to manipulate the supply and demand in the world energy market and set the price of oil and gas. 

In geopolitical terms, a strong Russian presence in Venezuela becomes a negotiating chip for Moscow in dealing with the growing NATO and American deployments along Russia’s western borders in central and eastern Europe and the Baltic states. That alone makes Venezuela a strategic partner for Russia. 

Plainly put, any projection of Russian power in the US’ backyard will at some point sooner rather than later impress upon Washington the imperative need to constructively engage Moscow in dialogue and negotiations, howsoever unpalatable that prospect might be. In fact, at one point, Zakharaova pointedly touched on the Trump administration’s Munroe Doctrine, asking in an acerbic tone,

“What are they (US) themselves doing in Eastern Hemisphere? Perhaps, they believe that the people of this part of the world will be thankful when Washington wilfully changes their leaders and kills the unwanted ones. Or the US still believes that people are waiting for the Americans to bring democracy to them on the wings of their bombers. Ask Iraqis, Libyans or Serbs about it.” 

Zakharova did not explicitly mention Ukraine or the Baltic states and Poland and the Black Sea and the Caucasus, but the implicit meaning is clear: If the US interferes in Russia’s backyard, Moscow serves the right to retaliate. Period. It is useful to recall that the denouement to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 was ultimately on the basis of a reciprocal withdrawal of Russian missiles in Cuba and the American missiles deployed in Turkey. 

Pompeo’s phone call to Lavrov suggests that the US is trying to figure out the Russian intentions. Interestingly, the Russian readout mentioned that Lavrov also brought up Syria and Ukraine during the conversation with Pompeo. Lavrov’s remarks were rather sharp:

“He (Lavrov) also stressed that the US’s intention to recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights would lead to a serious violation of international law, impede the Syrian settlement process and aggravate the situation in the Middle East. Speaking about Ukraine, Sergey Lavrov noted that Washington’s playing into the Kiev regime’s hands in torpedoing the Minsk Agreements on the settlement of the intra-Ukrainian conflict was unacceptable.” 

Curiously, on the contrary, the US state department readout completely omitted any references to Syria or Ukraine. Evidently, it was too much of a hot potato for Washington to even acknowledge that Lavrov might have drawn a parallel with the US behaviour in the ‘Eastern Hemisphere’, which Russia finds utterly unacceptable. 

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Featured image: An airplane with the Russian flag was seen at Simon Bolivar International Airport in Caracas, Venezuela, March 24, 2019. (Source: Indian Punchline)

Last week, France’s Yellow Vest movement entered its 23rd week. While the movement’s ranks have thinned, the government’s reaction to hasten its demise have been Orwellian. On Saturday, things got worse.

Macron’s Pain

The Yellow Vest (in French: “gilets jaunes”) movement doesn’t need much introduction at this point, but for those who wish to have their memory refreshed: In November of last year, thousands of people in major French cities (and their peripheries) protested the planned increase in fuel duties, which the government introduced in order to keep promises made under the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. The demonstrations were violent and, after initial stubbornness, President Emmanuel Macron decided not to go forward with the measure. In some areas in France, a liter of fuel can cost you as much as $2.15, while your region’s train connections might be unreliable at best.

The protests then mutated into larger demands for social justice, but due to their apolitical nature and lack of leaders beyond those who coordinate the logistics of the protests, there are multiple, occasionally contradictory calls to action. President Macron couldn’t be more upset: While he attempts to be the most thorough reformer of the European Union since its creation, he cannot even hold his own country together.

Macron’s opponents on the question of the centralization of the EU have been quick to jump on the bandwagon. Italian interior minister and far-right leader Matteo Salvini expressed his support for the yellow vests, going so far as to organize a meeting. Paris responded quickly, calling the meeting “unacceptable” and withdrawing their ambassador from Rome.

Macron’s legitimacy in the European Union will begin to fade if he does not manage to get the situation at home under control. But with the European elections coming up at the end of May, the yellow vests have every incentive to spit in his soup. His poll numbers reflect that: in the most recent survey, the “centrist” politician only garners 29 percent of the population in support.

“They Will Open Fire”

In an effort to reinforce security in Paris during Saturday’s protests, the government decided to activate 7,000 armed soldiers, deployed to defend strategic points.

In a FranceInter interview that has since gone viral, General Bruno Leray confirmed that his soldiers would “open fire” if their lives or the lives of the people they were charged with protecting were in danger. Leray’s comments were met with outrage; the government soon replied that soldiers were only in the city to defend against terrorism and that no soldier would come into contact with a yellow vest protester.

However, these same soldiers are still worried, with one telling FranceInter:

We don’t have the necessary equipment, because we only have telescopic batons and small pepper sprays, like the girls have in their bags. After that, we’re going straight to the assault rifle.

He also added that if the soldiers were cornered and overwhelmed by protestors, “there could be deaths.” Indeed, with 7,000 armed military personnel in key areas of the Parisian center, it is very likely that many protesters could escape the authorized areas and run into the military. Furthermore, just think about the message conveyed by the French government employing the military against its own people, a frequent tactic of authoritarian states.

“Terrorists”

Segolène Royale, former presidential candidate and socialist supporter of Emmanuel Macron, told RTL Radio France that there is a good reason to deploy the military: “Granted, the black bloc [violent protesters participating in yellow vest demonstrations] aren’t terrorists, but they terrorize, so it’s the same thing.” French parliamentarian Claire O’Petit (LREM, Macron’s party) claimed on French news broadcaster BFMTV:

We’re now facing terrorists. There are no more protesters.

Deploying the military and rebranding protesters as terrorists is only the latest example of the degradation of civil liberties by this French government. In a FEE article from the beginning of February, I explained the new “anti-troublemakers law,” which gives law enforcement the right to search all protesters without reasonable suspicion, levies a €15,000 ($17,000) fine on people covering their face, and gives prefects the right to impose bans at their own discretion on an individual’s right to protest.

The Power of the State

The yellow vests aren’t saviors by any stretch of the imagination. Their demands aren’t the solutions that France needs, and their violence is often turned upon innocent shop owners and companies. This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone, but you can protest your government without looting a Starbucks.

Far more worrying than some violent protesters, however, are the long-term consequences of the government’s reaction. Macron is setting a precedent, and the laws that his parliamentary majority approve are here to stay. Civil liberties have been eroded: that fact is here to stay.

Ironically, an initial call opposing government intervention in one aspect of the population’s lives has resulted in greater intrusion in the area of the protesters’ civil liberties.

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Bill Wirtz is a Young Voices Advocate. His work has been featured in several outlets, including Newsweek, Rare, RealClear, CityAM, Le Monde and Le Figaro. He also works as a Policy Analyst for the Consumer Choice Center.

Featured image is from The Bullet

The Independent’s multi-award-winning Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk, reports that the execution order for Gadaffi’s spymaster was simply a perversion of justice that suited the Western security services just fine.

“Shutting them up. That’s what it’s about. The hangman’s drop, the crackle of the firing squad, and their secrets go to the grave. Saddam Hussein didn’t get the chance to tell us about his dealings with the US and German companies who provided the gas he used on the Kurds. And now Gaddafi’s spymaster Abdullah al-Senussi will be shot in Libya before he has a chance to tell us about the cosy relationship he had with our Western security services when he liaised between his boss, the CIA and MI6.”

The article is illuminating and well worth the read. In the meantime, Gaddafi’s spymaster Abdullah al-Senussi is still alive and in part, spilling the beans. From Ian Allen at IntelNews comes the report the same senior intelligence advisor to Gaddafi has reportedly told French investigators that the Libyan government gave $8 million to the election campaign of France’s ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy as a bribe to clean up Gadaffi’s international reputation.

Sarkozy’s 30-year political legacy has been marred by a series of financial scandals, for which he is currently under investigation. In March of last year, the former French president issued strong denials of accusations that he accepted an illicit multi-million monetary donation from Gaddafi during his 2007 campaign for the presidency.

During a 20-minute television interview, Sarkozy described the investigation into the allegations that he acted as an agent of influence for Libya as “a waste of time”, arguing that it was over an alleged donation of less than $45,000, which represented a tiny fraction of his campaign budget.

But according to the French investigative news website Mediapart, a team of French judges was told by Gaddafi’s former spy chief that Sarkozy was given millions of dollars in secret by the Libyan state.

Abdullah al-Senussi, who oversaw the Libyan intelligence agencies under Gaddafi, reportedly told the French investigators that the funding was part of a secret deal between the two parties. In 1979, Senussi married the sister of Gaddafi’s wife and remained a trusted confidante of the Libyan leader until his violent death in 2011. According to Mediapart, he told the French judges that he personally supervised the transfer of funds to Sarkozy’s election campaign. He said that the payments entered the campaign’s coffers via a French government minister who received the funds from Libyan agents in two separate instalments in 2006.

In return, Sarkozy promised to help reinstate Gaddafi’s international image if he was elected president. He also promised to impede attempts by Western countries to arrest Gaddafi and some of his senior government aides —including Senussi— for terrorist crimes. Senussi allegedly said that Sarkozy himself promised him that his international arrest warrants would be quelled with the help of the French president’s personal lawyers. Sarkozy later hosted Gaddafi in Paris in a lavish setting in 2007.

Mediapart said that it accessed Senussi’s testimony before the French judges after getting hold of extracts from his formal statements during his interviews. It added that the information provided by Senussi appears to confirm similar claims made by other witnesses in the investigation about Sarkozy’s alleged illegal campaign funding. The former French president is currently involved in a separate legal dispute concerning alleged illegal spending during his failed campaign for the presidency in 2012.

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Featured image is from TruePublica

Today, a second jury in less that 8 months found Bayer-Monsanto’s signature weedkiller Roundup responsible for causing cancer.

The verdict in the case Hardeman v. Monsanto before a federal district court in San Francisco found exposure to glyphosate, the signature ingredient in Roundup, caused plaintiff Edward Hardeman’s non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Jurors awarded $80 million in damages to Hardeman.

 “Clearly, the testimony that informed the jury’s decision was Bayer-Monsanto hiding Roundup’s carcinogenic properties, manipulating the science and cozying-up with EPA so it would not have to warn consumers of its dangerous product,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Bayer-Monsanto has known for decades the cancer-causing properties of Roundup and I applaud the jury for holding the company accountable for failing to warn consumers of the known danger.”

“This verdict puts Bayer’s back firmly up against the wall as the cost of litigation mounts and its stock price gets pummeled once again,” said Cook.

Glyphosate is the most heavily used herbicide in the world. People who are not farm workers or groundskeepers are being exposed to the cancer-causing chemical.

A 2015 EWG analysis mapped the year-to-year growth in glyphosate use on American farmland from 1992 to 2012. According to the Department of Agriculture, in 2014, approximately 240 million pounds of glyphosate were sprayed in the U.S. As a result of widespread spraying, glyphosate has now been found to contaminate air, water and soil across vast expanses of the U.S. It also shows up in the food Americans eat every day.

Biomonitoring studies in a number of states, especially in the Midwest, found glyphosate in the bodies of children and pregnant women. According to initial data from a study in Indiana, women who were more heavily exposed to glyphosate during pregnancy were more likely to give birth to premature babies who weighed less than average.

Although the vast majority of glyphosate is applied to genetically modified corn and soybeans, it is increasingly being sprayed on oats just before harvest as a drying agent, or desiccant. Glyphosate kills the crop, drying it out so it can be harvested earlier than if the plant were allowed to die naturally. This allows easier harvesting but also increases the likelihood that the pesticide makes it into food.

Two separate rounds of laboratory tests commissioned last year by EWG found glyphosate in nearly every sample of popular oat-based cereals and other oat-based food marketed to children. The brands in which glyphosate was detected included several cereals and breakfast bars made by General Mills and Quaker.

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More than 160 conservation groups sent a letter to U.S. senators today urging them to oppose the nomination of fossil fuel lobbyist David Bernhardt as Interior secretary, citing his efforts to enrich corporations at the expense of the environment.  

Bernhardt’s confirmation hearing is set for Thursday before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

“He consistently puts private profit above the public interest, crafting policies to benefit past clients and rolling back longstanding rules to protect habitat, imperiled species and public health,” the letter says. “David Bernhardt’s conflicts of interest, industry ties and questionable judgment make him ill-suited to lead the Department, and his confirmation would place our most cherished natural and cultural resources at even greater risk.”

“Bernhardt has already shown us that he’s the most dangerous person to be in charge of our public lands and endangered species,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “He puts industry profits before public interest and the environment every single time. If Bernhardt is confirmed, his contempt for our natural world will become even more entrenched in the Interior Department. Any senator who votes to confirm him will be culpable.”

Bernhardt’s list of former clients includes Eni Petroleum, Noble Energy, National Ocean Industries Association, Cadiz, Inc. and Haliburton Energy Services ― the same industries he’s charged with regulating. Bernhardt has played a key role in rolling back protections for endangered species, migratory birds and sage grouse. He’s working to open the nation’s coasts to oil drilling and is greatly expanding fracking on public lands.

“The Trump administration’s dirty industry favor factory is working harder than ever with the nomination of David Bernhardt,” said Martin Hayden, vice president of policy and legislation at Earthjustice. “As a lobbyist, Bernhardt’s client roster reads like a who’s who of the worst corporate polluters in the United States, from Taylor Energy to Halliburton. The Senate should reject this industry-sponsored hack and send him out through the revolving door of Washington for the last time.”

“To confirm Bernhardt is to hand over the future of our public lands, wildlife, waters and everything they support to a man who made his living for decades attacking all of that to benefit the biggest industrial polluters on the planet. His sorry record in protecting America’s natural resources, wildlife and waters makes Bernhardt uniquely unfit for the job, and lawmakers should reject his nomination,” said John Bowman, managing director of government affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“David Bernhardt is a prime example of the culture of special-interest, big-money, influence peddling surrounding this administration,” said Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. “If we are serious about protecting and stewarding our nation’s wildlife and public lands, then the Senate needs to reject Bernhardt.”

“David Bernhardt is a fossil fuel industry hack who spent his career protecting corporate polluters,” said Nicole Ghio, fossil fuels program manager for Friends of the Earth. “His industry conflicts of interest make him absolutely unfit to lead the Department of the Interior. The Senate must reject Bernhardt’s nomination to protect our public health and public lands.”

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Featured image is from Boing Boing

Despite condemnation of the NLA’s activities by NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson — who dubbed them “a bunch of murderous thugs whose objective is to destroy a democratic Macedonia” — Washington provided extensive technical and material support to the NLA, to the extent US forces helped evacuate 400 of the group’s fighters when they became encircled by Macedonian forces. This backing was pivotal to the NLA’s success, and by August 2001 the group occupied and controlled almost a third of Macedonia’s territory.

At this point, due to pressure from NATO member states and the European Union, the US rescinded its assistance, and along with European negotiators pressured representatives of Slav and Albanian Macedonians to sign a peace deal. In return for constitutional and administrative changes designed to secure equal rights for Albanian Macedonians in Macedonian, insurgents would stop fighting and hand in many of its weapons to NATO, while receiving amnesty from prosecution. The deal was signed 13^th August — approximately a month later, al-Qaeda would carry out the infamous 9/11 attacks.

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3 Russian service members were killed in a terrorist attack in Syria in late February, the Russian Defense Ministry said on March 25. The defense ministry added that following the attack the Russian Aerospace Forces and Special Operations Forces tracked and eliminated a group of 30 terrorists linked to the attack.

The defense ministry provided no details regarding the location of the incident. However, the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq claimed earlier that ISIS members had killed several Russians in attacks in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. Most likely, the terrorist group was referring to this incident.

At the same time, a video of the supposed UAZ vehicle, in which the Russians were moving, when they came under attack is circulating online. It was reportedly filmed in 40km from the town of al-Mayadin.

This incident is further undeniable evidence that despite the formal defeat of ISIS’ self-proclaimed Caliphate in Syria, cells of the terrorist group still pose a threat to local security. So far, the limited security operations of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in desert areas near Palmyra and the Euphrates Valley have not been able to put an end to the terrorist group’s presence in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert.

According to the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance, ISIS terrorist use the US-occupied area of al-Tanf to hide from SAA operations.

Furthermore, the US is still denying any access to the al-Rukban refugee camp located in the area and is in fact preventing evacuation of civilians from the area of the humanitarian crisis.

On March 26, the Turkish Defense Ministry announced that Turkish and Russian forces had conducted a first patrol in the area of Tal Rifat.

“Within the framework of the previous agreement, the Turkish Armed Forces and the Russian Armed Forces carried out the first independent but coordinated patrol in order to achieve ceasefire, provide stability in the Tal Rifat area and prevent attacks on our elements,” the Defense Ministry said in a Twitter post.

The patrols reportedly covered the following areas: Kafr Lusin and Al-Dana in northern Idlib, Atarib in western Aleppo, and Qammari and Al-Eiss in southwestern Aleppo.

In fact, Russia and Turkey have still not launched any really ‘joint’ patrols at the contact line between areas controlled by the so-called ‘opposition’ and the government. Another important point is that these first patrols covered mostly calm areas. Most of the ceasefire violations are taking place in northern Hama and southern Idlib. On the other hand, the Tal Rifat development may become a fist signal indicating that the guarantors of the de-militarized zone agreement are going to undertake practical steps to put an end to the continuing presence of terrorists in the area.

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The comedian Dave Chappelle put it like this: why were accusations of inappropriate conduct directed at Michael Jackson always so superbly timed?  “Listen Michael,” goes Chappelle’s mock white executive voice, “we need you to jerk off another child.”  (Chappelle is also prudent enough to append a qualifying note: he might have done it, but who knows?) 

Jackson could always be relied upon to provide distractive, and mad fodder, for social angst and voyeuristic sickness.  Murders, atrocities and falling markets might be troubling, but a fit of moral hysteria would always be a reliable distraction.  From the dream confection of Neverland, he could be relied upon to be the ghoulish fairy, the floss of nightmares to distract a tormented and terrified population.  He could be spoken about, suggests Chappelle, because he was a freak, fair game to all.  For all that, goes the comedian, he “did it for you”, the audience.  He mutilated himself for you; he altered his persona for you, even as he hoped to influence you. 

In many concrete instances, Jackson did play on the gift of freak, ramping up the challenge to accusers and fans alike: I am weird, so celebrate.  His video of Ghosts suggests stylised horror, with the Maestro, skeleton robed in black, condemned as a freak who must leave town.  Margo Jefferson, writing in On Michael Jackson, deems the music “a bit insipid and nonsensical, the dance moves freakazoid and ridiculous, the scenario grandiose and egotistical, but the whole package is nevertheless a riveting, baroque and show-stopping amplification of Jackson’s fractured self-image.”

Even discussions attempting to remain serious fall for the assumption of sickness, weirdness, freakiness. Sharing bed with young boys, for instance, a point brought up in the notorious interview with Martin Bashir, had a “morally repulsive aspect”, chided Albert Mohler,  “In a very real sense,” suggests Mohler, not shying away from grandstanding, “the Michael Jackson affair represents the intersection of America’s celebrity culture and postmodern morality.”  Celebrity tickled a certain interest, but “the public mind is torn between moral repugnance and gawpish fascination.”

The documentary Leaving Neverland continues the freak theme with the additional suggestion of skill; Jackson proved adept, goes this theme, at concealing his pederastic tendencies.  He deployed his deft performing skills in the name of clandestine hook-ups and cover-ups.  James Delingpole of The Spectator is happy to speculate, showing how far presumptions have gone. “His entire career and persona, you might argue, were just one gigantic honeytrap, erected with the purpose of luring pretty little boys into the his web of sin.”  He did so with “cunning”.  

Such language has the purpose of attributing all-powerful agency to the man and discounting all else.  The adoring fans are not that relevant; the celebrity gawkers, boys and parents are treated as pathetic but somehow free of choice and ill will (what of money and fame, attained by feeding on the Jackson magic?).  Powerful stardom destroys volition.

The man, being dead, cannot defend himself, but Leaving Neverland details an assortment of sexual abuse accusations from Wade Robson and James Safechuck, the latter having joined the singer’s dance routines in the 1980s Bad tour.  Tagged on is commentary from the mothers of the alleged victims, Joy Robson and Stephanie Safechuck.  The grounds are laid for feistily expansive ponderings: the accounts provide burning matter for critics about faulty maternal rearing; supposedly, the women in question were nearby when Jackson was engaged in various bed room antics with the youths. 

Filmmaker Dan Reed, as stern judge, keen jury and celluloid executioner, is clear in his motivations for making Leaving Neverland, capitalising on the moral distemper of #MeToo.  “The Michael Jackson estate – the Michael Jackson machine – pumps out a lot of propaganda to the effect that he was just a childlike lover of humanity and a saviour of children, which is complete bilge.”  Reed easily discounts the fact that Robson defended Jackson in the 2005 child sex abuse trial, something he puts down to the muddy relations perpetrators and victims share in matters sexual. 

A battle of accounts and feeble memories did not stop with his death.  Jackson supplies an endless reserve for tabloid fantasists and publicist droolers across a spectrum of behavioural assessments.  They are sordid and rarely rise above the level of lavatory indulgence and the curious sidelong perve.  When the stream seems dry, a revitalising surge is provided.  Forget the music; focus on the man.  Recently, Lisa Marie, daughter of Elvis, was happy to share experiences as conjugally active partner to Jackson between 1994 and 1996, though, as ever, she was sharing them with Jackson’s “childhood friend” J. Randy Taraborrelli, dangerous business that sees much spillage in such rags as The Sun.

In life and in death, he can tease the interest of high-brow, middle-brow and low.  He is the Prince of Pop, the Gloved One, the Baby Dangler.  In life, he was riddled with financial problems (a $240 million debt with the Bank of America; legal actions from 90 of Neverland Ranch’s employees).  Some statements have hit the mark: Jackson as protean, according to Andrew O’Hagan in the London Review of Books (Jul 6, 2006), confused, desperate “but complete in his devotion to self-authorship.  His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood.”  He is instability in search of perfection; he is tormented product of excess of demand – demand, that is, of the public. 

In current moral climates of hysterical re-assertions and a newfound moral police in matters sexual, the dead are seen to deserve their drubbing.  Their remains need to be symbolically exhumed to be judged and burned.  If they are accused (and again, without ever being tested by the law) as kingpins of pederasty, they will deserve moral spite, their products shunned.  After the airing of Leaving Neverland, certain radio stations removed Jackson songs from their playlists.  “Michael Jackson isn’t currently on any MediaWorks Radio stations’ playlists,” explained an unconvincing Leon Wratt of MediaWorks.  “This is a reflection of our audiences and their preferences – it is our job to ensure our radio stations are playing the music people want to hear.”  Awfully considerate of him.

This is not to say that Jackson is guiltless; we are simply left to build upon images of degeneracy that, when viewed from a distance, confirm the ledgers of the accusers in the absence of rebuttal.  The colossally flawed jumble that was Jackson, a character mutilated in flesh and spirit, has ceased to command pity. Now, he is merely commanding the needs for the vengeful.  The freakish will bring that out in you, and the morally indignant will confuse the merits of a monster’s work with the monster’s own credentials.

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

“A Rússia já não pode ser considerada um parceiro estratégico e a União Europeia deve estar pronta para impor-lhe novas sanções se ela continuar a violar o Direito Internacional”: esta é a resolução aprovada pelo Parlamento Europeu, em 12 de Março, com 402 votos a favor, 163 contra e 89 abstenções.

A resolução, apresentada pela deputada letã, Sandra Kalniete, nega principalmente a legitimidade das eleições presidenciais na Rússia, defenindo-as como “não democráticas”, apresentando assim o Presidente Putin como um usurpador.

Ø  Acusa a Rússia não só de “violar a integridade territorial da Ucrânia e da Geórgia”, mas de “intervir na Síria e interferir em países como a Líbia” e, na Europa, de “interferir com o objectivo de influenciar as eleições e aumentar as tensões”.

Ø  Acusa a Rússia de “violar acordos de controlo de armas”, atribuindo-lhe a responsabilidade de ter prejudicado o Tratado INF.

Ø  Acusa-a, também, de “extensas violações dos Direitos Humanos dentro dela, incluindo tortura e execuções extrajudiciais”, e de “assassinos cometidos pelos seus agentes, com armas químicas, em solo europeu”.

No final destas e de outras acusações, o Parlamento Europeu declara que o Nord Stream 2, o gasoducto destinado a duplicar o fornecimento de gás russo à Alemanha, através do Mar Báltico, “deve ser interrompido porque aumenta a dependência da UE do fornecimento de gás russo, ameaçando o seu mercado interno e os seus interesses estratégicos”.

A resolução do Parlamento Europeu repete fielmente, não apenas no conteúdo, mas usando as mesmas palavras, as acusações  que USA e NATO fazem à Rússia. E, o mais importante, repete fielmente o pedido para bloquear o Nord Stream 2: objectivo da estratégia de Washington visando reduzir o fornecimento de energia da Rússia à União Europeia e substituí-la com o proveniente dos Estados Unidos ou mesmo, de empresas americanas.

No mesmo âmbito, enquadra-se a comunicação da Comissão Europeia aos países membros, entre os quais, a Itália, com a intenção de aderir à iniciativa chinesa da Nova Rota da Seda:

Ø  A Comissão adverte que a China é um parceiro, mas também um concorrente económico e, mais importante, “um rival metódico que promove modelos alternativos de governação”, por outras palavras, modelos alternativos à governação dominada até agora pelas potências ocidentais.

Ø  A Comissão adverte que é necessário antes de tudo “salvaguardar as infraestruturas digitais críticas, de ameaças potencialmente perigosas  para a segurança”, derivadas das redes 5G fornecidas por empresas chinesas como a Huawei, banida nos Estados Unidos.

Ø  A Comissão Europeia repete fielmente o aviso dos Estados Unidos aos Aliados.

O Comandante Supremo Aliado na Europa, o General americano,  Scaparrotti, alertou que as redes móveis ultra rápidas da quinta geração desempenharão um papel cada vez mais importante nas capacidades bélicas da NATO, de modo que não se admitem “ligeirezas” da parte dos aliados.  Tudo isto confirma qual é a influência que o “partido americano” exerce, um poderoso alinhamento transversal que orienta as políticas da União em simultâneo, com as linhas estratégicas USA/NATO.

Ao construir a imagem falsa de uma Rússia e China ameaçadoras, as instituições da UE preparam a opinião pública para aceitar o que os EUA estão a preparar para “defender” a Europa:

Os Estados Unidos – declarou à CNN um porta-voz do Pentágono – estão a preparar-se para testar mísseis balísticos com base em terra (proibidos pelo tratado INF destruído por Washington), isto é, novos mísseis europeus que farão novamente da Europa, a base e ao mesmo tempo, o alvo de uma guerra nuclear.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Il «partito americano» nelle istituzioni Ue

il manifesto, 19 de Março de 2019

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

A mysterious flight of a U.S. rendition plane to London and increase of plainclothes British police outside the Ecuador embassy has heightened concern for the WikiLeaks founder, as Elizabeth Vos reports.

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In four days, it will be a full year since WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange was severed from contact with the outside world by the government of Ecuador.

Concern for Assange was heightened as the anniversary approaches after a U.S. Department of Justice jet previously used for the rendition of an accused Russian hacker landed in London on Tuesday and remained there for days, only to return to the U.S. on Saturday. The flight reportedly departed from Manassas, Virginia.

WikiLeaks stated via Twitter regarding the flight:

“Note that the Edward Snowden DoJ grab team plane N977GA also departed from Manassas, Virginia.”

WikiLeaks tweeted regarding the flight:

“What is US Department of Justice jet ‘N996GA’ doing in London? The jet arrived on Tuesday from DC and was last noted rendering alleged Russian hacker Yevgeniy Nikulin to the US last year from the Czech Republic, causing a diplomatic incident with Russia.”

Assange’s Twitter account, run by members of his legal team, also tweeted:

“Note that the Edward Snowden DoJ grab team plane N977GA also departed from Manassas, Virginia.”

In response to the news, Christine Assange said on social media:

“This is of urgent and real concern! Under cover of the 24/7 media frenzy on the NZ Mosque shootings. Is the US planning to snatch my son Julian from the London Ecuador Embassy they have been trying to force him from, for a CIA rendition flight?”

While the jet remained in London, WikiLeaks quoted Assange’s lawyers describing an increase of plainclothes British police officers on the ground surrounding Ecuador’s London embassy:

“A build up of plain clothes ear-piece wearing operatives around the Ecuador embassy in London in the last two days has been sighted by Julian Assange’s lawyers. There are normally 2-4 plainclothes British operatives present. The reason for the increase is not publicly known.”

The jet arrived in London on March 19 — the same day that Twitter imposed a restriction on the account of Christine Assange which would last for more than 24 hours, followed shortly afterward by the placement of an identical restriction on the Twitter account of Telesur English, which has a record of accurate reporting about Latin America. The restriction, and the subsequent lifting of the measure, was never explained by the social media website.

A subsequent report by Consortium News noted:

“Ms. Assange told Consortium News by phone that she has had no contact with Twitter and still does not know why her account was restricted or precisely why it was restored. She was unable to post new Tweets or read anyone else’s while the restriction was in place. On Thursday, Telesur English, the Venezuelan state broadcaster’s English service, was hit with the same restrictions by Twitter as had affected Ms. Assange, who tweeted a complaint about it: ‘Telesur English account has been supportive of my son, arbitrarily gagged & tortured journalist Julian Assange. They have been one of the few media to factually update the public on his plight & the political context behind his persecution.’”

That these unexplained restrictions coincided with the arrival of a DOJ jet in London added to a growing sense of urgency surrounding WikiLeaks and its arbitrarily confined founder.

Ecuador Elections

At the time of the plane’s arrival, Ecuador was set to hold mid-term elections that could see what Bloomberg called the “beginning of a comeback” for former President Raphael Correa. Under Correa, Ecuador extended vigorous support towards Assange. In contrast, under President Lenin Moreno’s leadership, Assange’s asylum has been transformed into a state of torturous and near-solitary confinement.

In the United States, all eyes this week were fixed on the final chapter of the Mueller investigation coming to a close, and the establishment fall-out from the lack of indictments in Mueller’s highly anticipated report.

Meanwhile, the UK’s looming Brexit crisis raised the possibility that opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn could become prime minister. Corbyn’s stance towards WikiLeaks and Assange has been substantially friendlier than that of Prime Minister Theresa May. 

Since 2010, the global establishment has made no secret of its animosity towards Assange and WikiLeaks. The Trump administration has likewise made its desire to capture and prosecute Assange well known. WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning is again in solitary confinement due to her refusal to cooperate with a Grand Jury regarding Assange.

Though the jet in question departed from the UK on Saturday, Met police have been photographed outside the Ecuadorian embassy in addition to the plainclothes police described earlier this week by Assange’s lawyers.

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Elizabeth Vos is a freelance journalist and contributor to Consortium News. 

Featured image is from Consortiumnews

Events just fly by in the ever-accelerating rush of Trump Time, so it’s easy enough to miss important ones in the chaos. Paul Manafort is sentenced twice and indicted a third time! Whoosh! Gone!

The Senate agrees with the House that the United States should stop supporting Saudi Arabia in Yemen (and Mitch McConnell calls this attempt to extricate the country from cooperation in further war crimes “inappropriate and counterproductive”)! Whoosh! Gone!

Twelve Republican senators cross party lines to overturn Trump’s declaration of a national emergency on the U.S.-Mexico border, followed by the president’s veto! Whoosh! Gone!

Delegates to the March 2019 U.N. Environment Assembly meeting agree to a non-binding but important resolution drastically reducing the production of single-use plastic. The United States delegation, however, succeeds in watering down the final language lest it “endorse the approach being taken in other countries, which is different than our own”! Once again, the rest of the world is briefly reminded of the curse of American exceptionalism and then, whoosh! Gone!

Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be surprising if you had missed the Associated Press report about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announcing that the United States “will revoke or deny visas to International Criminal Court personnel seeking to investigate alleged war crimes and other abuses committed by U.S. forces in Afghanistan or elsewhere.” In fact, said Pompeo, some visas may already have been denied or revoked, but he refused to “provide details as to who has been affected and who will be affected” (supposedly to protect the confidentiality of visa applicants).

National Security Advisor John Bolton had already signaled such a move last September in a speech to the Federalist Society. In what the Guardian called an “excoriating attack” on the International Criminal Court, or ICC, Bolton said,

“The United States will use any means necessary to protect our citizens and those of our allies from unjust prosecution by this illegitimate court.”

By “unjust prosecution,” he clearly meant any attempt to hold Americans accountable for possible war crimes. An exception even among exceptional nations, the United States simply cannot commit such crimes. Hence, by the logic of Bolton or Pompeo, any prosecution for such a crime must, by definition, be unjust.

In calling it “this illegitimate court,” Bolton was referring to the only international venue now in existence for trying alleged war criminals whose countries cannot or will not prosecute them. By “our allies,” Bolton appeared to mean Israel, a supposition Pompeo confirmed last week when he told reporters,

“These visa restrictions may also be used to deter ICC efforts to pursue allied personnel, including Israelis.”

And when it came to threats, Bolton didn’t stop there. He also suggested that the U.S. might even arrest ICC officials:

“We will ban its judges and prosecutors from entering the United States. We will sanction their funds in the U.S. financial system, and we will prosecute them in the U.S. criminal system. We will do the same for any company or state that assists an ICC investigation of Americans.”

This is a dangerous precedent indeed, as the director of the American Civil Liberty Union’s Human Rights Project, Jamil Dakwar, told Democracy Now. It’s outrageous, he pointed out, that the U.S. would prosecute “judges and the prosecutors of the ICC for doing their job and for doing the job that the United States should have done — that is, to investigate, credibly and thoroughly, war crimes and crimes against humanity that were committed in the course of the war in Afghanistan.”

What’s all this about?

The story goes back to December 2017, when Fatou Bensouda, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, announced an investigation into the possibility that U.S. military and CIA personnel had committed war crimes during America’s Afghan War or in other countries “that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan.” These included some of the countries that hosted the CIA’s so-called black sites, where, in the earlier years of the war on terror, detainees were held incommunicado and tortured. Specifically, the ICC opened an investigation into the possible commission of “war crimes, including torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape, and other forms of sexual violence by U.S. armed forces and members of the CIA on the territories of Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania.”

When Bensouda made her announcement, it looked as if at least some Americans might finally be held accountable for crimes committed in the post-9/11 “war on terror” launched to avenge the criminal deaths of 3,000 souls in New York City and Washington, D.C. That never-ending war has seen the United States illegally invade and occupy Iraq; directly kill at least 210,000 civilians (not to mention actual combatants) in Iraq and Afghanistan; torture an unknown number of prisoners; and continue to detain without trial or conviction 39 men at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba.

But wait. Aren’t U.S. personnel immune from ICC prosecution, because Washington never ratified the treaty that created the court?

Abu Ghraib prison (Source: Wired)

That’s true, but the alleged crimes didn’t take place in the United States. They were committed in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, and Lithuania, all of which have ratified the treaty. Note that Thailand, site of egregious CIA abuses, doesn’t appear on the ICC’s list, nor does Iraq (the site of the now infamous Abu Ghraib prison, among other things), presumably because neither is a signatory to the treaty.

However, before it could prosecute such crimes, the ICC would have to investigate any potential charges, interview possible witnesses, and gather the evidence necessary to prepare an indictment. That would undoubtedly require its investigators to visit the United States. This, say Bolton and Pompeo, will never be permitted.

What Is the International Criminal Court and Why Does It Matter?

The ICC’s origins go back to the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II. In 1943, the leaders of the Allied powers — England, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union — met in Tehran, Iran. One subject on the table: how, once the war was won, the Allies would deal with Nazi war criminals. Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin is said to have proposed simply lining up and executing 50,000 Nazis. American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reportedly tried to break the resulting tension by jokingly suggesting that 49,000 might be sufficient.

Two years later, at war’s end, confronting evidence of barbarism on a scale previously unseen in history, the war’s victors found themselves responsible for bringing accountability to the perpetrators of genocide and some modicum of justice to its victims. It was decided then to establish a tribunal, a court, where such criminals could be tried. The problem the Great Powers now faced was how to create a process that the world would consider something more than vengeance masquerading as righteousness, something more than “victors’ justice.”

The solution was to demonstrate that their prosecutions had a basis in the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties — in, that is, the already existing laws of war. In the process of designing those prosecutions, they consolidated and advanced the meaning and power of international law itself, a concept particularly needed in a postwar world of atomic weapons and a looming U.S.-Soviet conflict. Three-quarters of a century and many wars and weapon systems later, enforceable international law still remains humanity’s best hope for adjudicating past war crimes and preventing future ones — but only if great nations like the United States do not declare themselves exceptions to the rule of law.

In addition to the verdicts rendered, the Nuremberg tribunal produced other enduring results, including the 1950 Nuremberg Principles, commissioned and adopted by the new United Nations. Those principles established that actions violating international law were punishable crimes, whether they violated any specific country’s domestic laws or not. Even heads of state or other high government officials were not considered immune from prosecution for such war crimes or crimes against humanity. And no one could be exonerated for them on the sole grounds of following the orders of a superior.

In the end, however, was Nuremberg really anything more than victors’ justice? There were those who said that was all it was, invoking what was called the “tu quoque” (Latin for “you did it, too”) argument. After all, hadn’t the allies also committed war crimes? Hadn’t the British and Americans, for example, firebombed the German city of Dresden, killing 25,000 civilians in one night and destroying 75,000 homes? Indeed, it’s been argued that, because the Allies didn’t want to answer for Dresden, they excluded the earlier German air war against England from the charges brought at Nuremberg.

Nevertheless, many observers there believed that, after rendering verdicts for Nazi crimes, a more permanent tribunal would turn its attention to the crimes of the Allies. It might even, for example, have taken up the legality of the U.S. use of the world’s first atomic weapons to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This, of course, never happened.

Nor has any court ever prosecuted those responsible for the U.S. firebombing of 67 Japanese cities. Those lesser-known attacks killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and reduced many of that country’s largely wooden urban areas to ashes. Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (and an architect of American policy in Vietnam), described those attacks in Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary The Fog of War. Reflecting on his own actions in World War II when, as an Air Force captain, he served in the Office of Statistical Control (where he analyzed the efficiency of bomber aircraft), he told Morris: “What one can criticize is that the human race, prior to that time — and today! — has not really grappled with what are called the rules of war. Was there a rule that said you shouldn’t bomb, shouldn’t kill, shouldn’t burn to death a hundred thousand civilians in one night? [General Curtis LeMay, who oversaw the firebombing campaign in Japan] said if we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.”

What does any of this have to do with today’s International Criminal Court? The ICC is itself an outgrowth of the Nuremberg process. Even during the original Nuremberg trial, observers expected that the newly established United Nations would create a permanent war crimes court as one of its earliest actions.

In the end, it took more than half a century, but in 1998, at a United Nations General Assembly convention in Rome, 120 countries adopted the “Rome Statute,” which established the court at The Hague in the Netherlands and described its jurisdiction and rules of operation. (Among the 148 votes, there were 21 abstentions and seven “no” votes, including the United States.) The ICC officially opened in 2002, when 60 nations ratified the Rome Statute. It took up its first prosecution in 2005. Today, about 120 member states back its role on this planet.

(A side note: The ICC is often confused with the International Court of Justice, commonly called the World Court. The ICC deals with the criminal prosecution of individuals. The World Court deals with civil disputes between nations. Unlike the ICC, the United States is a member of the World Court, although its record of abiding by that court’s decisions is spotty at best.)

The United States and the ICC — a Strange Dance

Despite having participated in the work of formulating the Rome Statute, the United States never ratified it or joined the court. The first administration to deal with it would take a confusing and contradictory stance. In 1999, President Bill Clinton signed a Foreign Relations Authorization Act that included language prohibiting federal funding for the ICC and the extradition of any U.S. citizen to a country that might surrender him or her to that court for prosecution.

The following year, however, Clinton actually signed the Rome Statute, the treaty creating the ICC. In fact, the United States had been instrumental in drafting the court’s procedures, rules of evidence, and definitions of various crimes. In spite of that Foreign Relations Authorization Act, it looked as if the U.S. was on the way to future full participation in the ICC. The year 2000, however, saw the election of George W. Bush. In 2002, the Bush administration rescinded Clinton’s signature and notified the United Nations that the United States would not ratify the treaty. It was hardly a surprising move given that the Bush-Cheney administration had already begun torturing detainees in its newly born war on terror. (Torture techniques would even reportedly be demonstrated to some of those officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, in the White House.)

It was John Bolton, then Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, who sent the notification letter to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and personally trekked to U.N. headquarters in New York City to “unsign” the Rome Statute. That, of course, is the very John Bolton who now is Donald Trump’s national security advisor and who attacked the ICC at the Federalist Society last September. This was hardly surprising, since his record of opposing any international constraints on Washington has been long and consistent. In fact, when George W. Bush tapped him as ambassador to the United Nations in 2005, the Senate refusedto confirm him. It took a recess appointment to get him the job. The Senate’s reluctance was reasonble, given Bolton’s contempt for the institution. (He’d once said that if its headquarters building “lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”)

In 2002, Bush signed the American Servicemembers Protection Act (ASPA), which, as the American Bar Association explains, contained “several provisions meant to prohibit or otherwise complicate U.S. cooperation with the ICC.” These included “restricting U.S. participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations, and prohibiting use of any appropriated funds to support or cooperate with the Court.” They also included a provision authorizing the use of military force “to liberate any American citizens held by the Court,” leading it to be dubbed by critics “the Invade The Hague Act.”

And yet even the ASPA demonstrated an American ambivalence towards the ICC. It had an amendment allowing the U.S. to cooperate with the court in order to bring “other foreign nationals accused of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity” to justice. In other words, the ICC was considered good enough to try other countries’ accused war criminals, just not ours.

Under President Barack Obama, the United States began a rapprochement with the court, opening diplomatic relations and starting to attend meetings of its Assembly of States Parties as an observer, which it continues to do today. In 2011, the U.S. sent a delegation to an ICC meeting in Kampala, Uganda, where important language was adopted defining the crime of aggression.

Making an aggressive war was the first of the three categories of crimes under which Nazi leaders were charged at Nuremberg. At the time, Washington officials strongly advocated for the position that all other Nazi atrocities sprang from that initial crime. The same could well be said of the Bush-Cheney administration’s decision to invade first Afghanistan and then Iraq. Cooperation with the ICC continued under Obama, who also signed a law providing rewards of up to $5 million for the capture of individuals indicted by the court.

It should be noted that the ICC is not without its critics. African nations in particular have rightly complained that the only people who have stood trial so far are from that continent, leading some to threaten to withdraw. In 2017, Burundi did leave, but so far no other African members have followed suit. Nonetheless, the ICC remains a court of last resort when it comes to bringing war criminals to justice.

Reversing Course Under Trump

Given Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, it should hardly be surprising that the ICC is among the international organizations he and his top foreign-policy officials particularly despise. As a result, his administration has already rolled back Obama’s rapprochement and then some. In view of the president’s lack of attention to detail (not to mention his short attention span), it seems likely that John Bolton is the true architect of this latest move. It’s the State Department that grants (or doesn’t grant) visas, so Mike Pompeo made the official announcement, but this approach fits Bolton’s M.O.

The poison now seeping out of Washington continues to spread. On March 18th, Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines became the second country to leave the ICC, where it, like the U.S., is being investigated for possible crimes — in its case, against its own people. As the Washington Post reports, the country is “under preliminary examination [by the ICC] for thousands of [domestic drug war] killings since Duterte rose to the presidency in 2016.”

In its menacing rejection of the court, the Trump administration is turning its back on the system of international law and justice the United States helped establish at Nuremberg. The rule of law must not hold only, as hotelier Leona Helmsley once said about taxes, for “the little people.” If Donald Trump had truly wanted to “make America great again,” he would have recognized that international law is not just for the little countries. The greater a world power, the more consequential is its submission to the rule of law. The attacks of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo on the ICC, however, simply represent a new spate of lawless actions from a lawless administration in an increasingly lawless era in Washington.

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Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. (Some of the material in this piece has been adapted from that book.) Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise the FBI and the DOJ obstructed justice last year when then acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee to pound sand after Republicans demanded he hand over work-related texts.

The obstruction of justice, however, is a trivial matter for the FBI. It has engaged in criminal activity for decades. 

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Obstruction of justice? https://t.co/xmNcju1gLH

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) March 26, 2019

It seemed like I’d entered a new dimension deep within Bizarro world labyrinth when Democrats suddenly became defenders of the agency. Liberals and leftists, especially those in the civil rights movement and actively opposed to the Vietnam War, were targeted by the FBI and its Operation COINTELPRO in the 1960s and 70s. Many of those targeted activists ended up in government and the ivory towers of academia. 

Likewise the Grand Inquisitor, Robert Mueller. He was FBI boss during the Bush and Obama administrations. He is a consummate insider. His mission as special prosecutor is to protect the establishment, the so-called Deep State. 

I can only conclude Democrats are either 1) suffering from a special kind of amnesia, or 2) they’re so ethically and morally bankrupt they will buddy up with an agency that seriously violated their rights in order accomplish the current objective: the impeachment and total destruction of Donald Trump. 

After J. Edgar Hoover died, the FBI remained the state’s secret police and kept busy sabotaging political opposition to the financial elite and its octopi tentacles, what we now call the Deep State, consisting of multitudinous “intelligence” (subversion and assassination) agencies, the national security state (NSC, Pentagon, and CIA), the ever-growing surveillance apparatus (NSA and appendages), and a hungry herd of “public-private” (in other words, fascist) business interests and contractors bidding to get a permanent spot at the federal feeding trough. 

From the Palmer raids prior to the establishment of the FBI (at the time the Bureau of Investigation in the Justice Department) to the Occupy Wall Street movement and beyond, the FBI has worked diligently to undermine antiwar, civil rights (the assassination of Martin Luther King), ethnic nationalist movements (Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican separatists, and others), and individuals associated with those political groups. 

In the case of the Black Panthers, the preferred method of disruption was assassination (Fred Hampton and Mark Clark), while the antiwar movement and other leftist movements were discredited, members of those groups arrested (usually for drug possession), audited by the IRS, fired and denied employment, and harassed in multiple ways. Many of the victims are organizers of the current leftist agenda, while others have taken over the curriculum of major universities. 

Many of these individuals are not opposed to such tactics, so long as the victims are their ideological enemies. Most don’t realize they are being played. 

“Just as too many on the left sleep-walked through the past two years waiting for Mueller—a former head of the FBI, the US secret police, for chrissakes!—to save them from Trump, they have been manipulated by liberal elites into the political cul-de-sac of identity politics,” writes author and blogger Jonathan Cook. 

Just as Mueller put the left on standby, into waiting-for-the-Messiah mode, so simple-minded, pussy-hat-wearing identity politics has been cultivated in the supposedly liberal bastions of the corporate media and Ivy League universities—the same universities that have turned out generations of Muellers and Clintons—to deplete the left’s political energies. While we argue over who is most entitled and most victimised, the establishment has carried on raping and pillaging Third World countries, destroying the planet and siphoning off the wealth produced by the rest of us.

These liberal elites long ago worked out that if we could be made to squabble among ourselves about who was most entitled to scraps from the table, they could keep gorging on the main course.

From the very start of this fiasco, I realized it was a turf war within the establishment. The political elite are not about sharing and certainly have nothing to do with democracy (except as a deceptive advertising slogan). Trump is an outlier. He didn’t come up through the ranks. He is not acceptable to the establishment, including the Republicans who reluctantly accept him as the leader of their faction of the corporatist political party. For establishment Democrats, he is a spoiler, a man who stole the election from Hillary Clinton, the chosen successor to Barrack Obama. 

Like chickens sans heads, average Democrats by and large are running around wild-eyed, frantically warning Trump is the new Hitler, a racist, a white nationalist, and he must be deposed at all cost. As usual, these Democrats are clueless to the real state of affairs—diversionary politics designed to keep folks immersed in largely meaningless political issues while behind the scenes the bankers and corporatists continue to call the shots and fleece the people, whom they have nothing but contempt for, and in the process save a corrupt system already sagging and teetering. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

ISIS is defeated, and the Syrian Defence Forces (SDF) announced the capture of thousands of ISIS terrorists in their custody, and the wives and children of the terrorists were taken to camps in north east Syria. The question on many minds is: where do these terrorists go? Who has the capacity and resources to house thousands of blood thirsty terrorists who are well known for chopping off heads?

Some of the terrorists have been moved to the US Base at Al Tanf and have been recycled into security contractors on the US payroll, while their wives and children will be held hostage in a camp in order to assure compliance. Their task is to prevent the Syrian Arab Army or their allies from recovering the oil and gas wells, and to create chaos and instability in Syria for the purpose of thwarting the peaceful recovery.

The US military were hampered by not being able to invade Syria with a large force in order to accomplish the US strategic goals of regime change and resource acquisition.  Unlike the massive invasion and direct involvement of the American military in Iraq and Libya; the Pentagon and CIA were forced to use ‘assets on the ground’.   The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the first asset on the ground, and later was usurped by the Al Qaeda branch in Syria: Jibhat al Nusra.

ISIS emerged from the shadows in Iraq, and came to center stage in Reqaa eventually holding much of Syria, and took possession of the life-blood of Syria: the oil and gas wells.  Finally, ISIS was defeated by a US Coalition ally: the SDF, a militia made up of Syrian Kurds and Syrian Arab tribes who took the oil wells which had made ISIS wealthy.  Now, in the last phase of the Syrian conflict, some of the ISIS prisoners are being recycled as armed support for the small group of American soldiers and officers at Al Tanf.

ISIS prisoners have been allowed to safely move before.  In 2017 the BBC uncovered a secret deal in Reqaa between the SDF and ISIS. The bombshell article quotes a lorry driver, “We took out around 4,000 people including women and children – our vehicle and their vehicles combined. When we entered Raqqa, we thought there were 200 people to collect. In my vehicle alone, I took 112 people.”

The convoy of escorted ISIS was six to seven kilometers long, and included almost 50 trucks, 13 buses and more than 100 of ISIS vehicles. The SDF escorted the convoy to a location in the desert, and while the US did not accompany the convoy, they did fly overheard providing lighting in the desert night.

The US strategy on Syria is to make sure the Syrian government in Damascus is denied peace, security and revenues to rebuild.  The US-NATO attack on Syria was for the purpose of regime change, and their jihadist ground troops, such as FSA and Al Qaeda branches, failed to achieve the desired outcome. What they failed to win on the battlefields, they want to win in the aftermath of their own defeat.  The core US-NATO strategy is to prevent recovery in Syria until regime change is achieved.

The US-NATO officials continue to chant the mantra “there is no military solution in Syria”, and yet that was exactly what they were fighting for, but they lost.  The Russian Air Force arrived in 2015 and changed the course of the war.  In the aftermath of the US-NATO defeat, they expect to gain what they lost on the battlefield.

They still expect to remove an elected President, discard a constitution ratified by public vote in 2012, and install an interim President groomed from the ranks of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Their goals have been shattered by the will of the Syrian people and their government, who were steadfast in their resistance to terrorism, and their secular values which remain totally incompatible with the US sponsored opposition.

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The “African Spring” seems ready to spread to the Democratic Republic of the Congo after there are visible signs that the US is stoking its “deep state” civil war in order create obstacles to China’s hitherto unrestricted access to cobalt there, with the possible success of this non-kinetic “containment” measure having the chance to dramatically turn the tables in the “tech arms race” and potentially be a game-changer in the New Cold War.

A “Deep State” Deal Gone Bad

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, henceforth known as the Congo) just underwent its first-ever “democratic” transfer of power in its nearly 60 year history after a controversial election that many observers believe was rigged so that outgoing President Joseph Kabila could retain power as the mineral-rich country’s “grey cardinal” through a newly installed proxy. As the narrative goes, popular anti-systemic opposition candidate Martin Fayulu was denied the presidency in order for supposedly distant second-place contender and scion of a famous opposition leader Felix Tshisekedi to take power instead as part of a speculated behind-the-scenes deal with the “Establishment”, though this arrangement might be on the verge of unraveling as a result of American interference.

Congo Follows In Angola’s Footsteps  

I wrote about this “power swap” two weeks ago in my analysis of the decade-long “African Spring” that’s resulted in slightly less than a dozen non-electoral regime changes all across the continent, with the Congo being one of the most prominent examples of a so-called “deep state” coup driving the latest developments there. Recalling that article, it’s now possible in light of recent events to wonder whether the country is beginning to proceed along the lines of the Angolan model where a similar leadership change surprisingly saw the state’s new leader stunningly turning against the very same “deep state” structure that brought him to power in an attempt to clean out the “old guard” and replace them with his own loyalists instead.

The reason for this educated conjecture is because Tshisekedi unexpectedly blocked the inauguration of newly elected senators from his coalition ally Kabila’s FCC on the basis that they were corruptly elected. He also postponed gubernatorial elections for a later date that has yet to be determined, which altogether suggests that Tshisekedi is turning against his patron and trying to gain control of the political structures that Kabila’s party dominates in order to liberate his presidency from their controlling influence. Interestingly, the US also imposed sanctions against some election officials both a month ago and also around this exact same time in what South Africa’s “Daily Maverick” interpreted as an American effort to help tilt the scales to his “deep state” favor.

The article explains the seemingly contradictory approach of the US recognizing Tshisekedi’s controversial rise to power while sanctioning some of the same officials who presided over it by pointing out that this could put pressure on Kabila by drawing into question his party’s parliamentary victories during that same poll. Delaying the gubernatorial elections could also be a preplanned ploy to prevent the FCC from consolidating its control over the public political wing of the “deep state” and hamstringing Tshisekedi’s chances of having an independent domestic and foreign policy. Due to these dynamics, it’s not an exaggeration to state that the Congo is in the opening throes of a “deep state” civil war that’s being stoked by the US.

“Containing” China In The Heart Of Africa

America’s interest in Congo’s “deep state” affairs directly derives from its desire to “contain” China in the geostrategic Heart of Africa from where the People’s Republic obtains practically all of its cobalt, a rare earth mineral that’s indispensable to all manner of modern-day electronics from gadgets to missiles. “Mining Technology”, one of the industry’s leading websites, reported last summer that “Chinese production accounted for 58% of global refined cobalt output in 2017, and 98% was imported, mostly from the DRC”, which caused them to wonder whether the People’s Republic is trying to “monopolise” the resource that the world’s future technological development is dependent on, especially in the forthcoming 5G revolution that will change life as the world knows it by heralding the era of the “Internet of Things” and autonomous vehicles, among other developments.

The outcome of the “tech arms race”, as I called it back in February, will largely determine the contours of the New Cold War for decades to come, and considering that cobalt is the key resource driving this competition and that most of the world’s supply of this mineral is located in the Congo, the Central African state becomes disproportionately significant to contemporary International Relations. It should therefore be seen as no coincidence that Tshisekedi will visit the US next week as he seeks America’s continued support in trying to liberate himself from Kabila’s Chinese-aligned “deep state” that was responsible for China’s meteoric rise in the global cobalt industry over the past decade. The US is especially concerned with China’s “cobalt cartel” there and presumably regards it as a strategic threat of the highest importance.

Tshisekedi’s trip will see him receive orders from his new foreign patrons about the most effective way to proceed with the Congo’s “deep state” civil war, which will probably include some elements from the successful Hybrid War on Brazil. The internationally recognized President is in a position to launch corruption investigations against the Kabila-allied FCC members of the “deep state” on the basis of disputed elections which could eventually uncover “evidence” (whether real, fabricated, or misportrayed) of Chinese-connected corruption through the country’s own version of “Operation Car Wash”. This could in turn serve as the pretext for transferring ownership of certain mines to Western companies so long as Tshisekedi is also successful in replacing the pro-Chinese military-intelligence factions of Kabila’s “deep state” with pro-American ones who wouldn’t resist this scenario.

Hybrid War And Sanctions

The abovementioned strategy is much easier said than done because it’ll be extraordinarily difficult for Tshisekedi to fully liberate himself from Kabila’s FCC and their “deep state” allies, let alone replace them with compliant pro-American ones who will go ahead with his plans to “contain’ China through the described scenario. As such, it shouldn’t be expected that significant progress on this front will take place anytime soon, nor that it’ll even be entirely successful in any case. Rather, it’s important to keep in mind the end game that the US is aiming to achieve and to forecast the most likely methods that it’ll try to employ in pursuit thereof. Although it’s tricky to toy with and could lead to serious blowback, it’s likely that some of the country’s Hybrid War variables might be instrumentalized to this effect.

To explain, I conducted a comprehensive Hybrid War risk analysis on the Congo nearly three years ago in which I detailed the many factors at play in this plot. Since then, Pandora’s Box was progressively opened as the US sought to put bottom-up pressure on Kabila to hold elections in which he wouldn’t change the constitution to run for a third term like many had speculated he would try to do in the run-up to the vote. Nowadays there’s no need to encourage these Hybrid War elements to dangerously bring the state to the brink of collapse since the main goal of facilitating a “phased leadership transition” (however “imperfect”) has been accomplished. Furthermore, another Congo Crisis might jeopardize the world’s access to cobalt and inadvertently harm American industries and those of its allies even if it also deals damage to China’s, too.

Nevertheless, Pandora’s Box was still opened and some uncontrollable forces were released that could be taken advantage of by the US in the context of the Congo’s “deep state” civil war. Kabila’s loyalists are mostly concentrated in the military-intelligence wing of the “deep state”, which is naturally its most influential, but they could be “picked off” one-by-one through the weaponization of selective sanctions against them in response to the Mainstream Media’s reporting about any alleged “crimes” that they commit in quelling sporadic Hybrid War disturbances across the country. That could in turn pressure them to either step down and/or trigger their replacement by Tshisekedi, thereby allowing him to gradually dismantle Kabila’s “deep state”. It’s expected that there’ll be some serious institutional opposition to these moves, but the President will surely rely on his American ally to “advise” him on what to do when the time comes.

The “Global Fragility Act” vs. “BRI-Aid”

All of the previously described analysis deals with the most likely behind-the-scenes talks that Tshisekedi will have during his upcoming trip to the US, but it should also be said that there’ll probably be some very positive public optics pertaining to this as well. The US understands that it needs to step up its game in the struggle to “win hearts and minds” in the “Global South”, and especially in Africa where China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) investments over the past decade have given Beijing an enormous soft power boost in the continent. Seeing as how the Congo is now smack dab in the center of the New Cold War given the enduring strategic importance of its globally significant cobalt deposits, it makes sense that the US will try to expand its influence there through the mechanisms suggested in the “Global Fragility Act’s” draft legislation irrespective of whether the document is ever promulgated into law.

Not only could the US give preferential trade privileges to the Congo and possibly tax incentives to American businesses to invest there, but it could also almost immediately begin dispatching more USAID and other “NGO” representatives in order to accelerate the spread of its influence throughout the country under Tshisekedi. The important point to focus on is that the US will probably try to make its newfound influence both visible and tangible in a way that benefits the majority of the country’s people and therefore increases their support of Tshisekedi during this sensitive moment in the Congo’s “deep state” civil war. If they come to conclude that he’s channeling Fayulu’s anti-systemic vision by going against Kabila’s “deep state” simultaneously with improving their livelihoods, then it could lead to the cultivation of genuine grassroots support for him that might take the form of street rallies and other peaceful manifestations if the “Establishment” starts vigorously pushing back against him.

Faced with the prospect of the US making significant soft power gains in the near future (especially if it joins forces in this socio-developmental respect with its “Scramble for Africa” allies of the UAE, India, Japan, and France), China will need to do more than just provide low-paying and dangerous extraction jobs to the Congolese if it hopes to retain their support under any scenario. It’s already helping to fund and construct various infrastructure projects in the country, but that might not be enough to viably compete with its rivals under these new conditions, ergo why it would do well to unveil what I previously coined as “BRI-Aid” in order to bring tangible USAID-like development to the country’s people in ways that they could directly benefit from the most. It’s admirable that China “thinks big”, but its comparative “neglect” of the “smaller things” might prove to be its Achilles’ heel if it doesn’t deal with this shortcoming soon enough.

Concluding Thoughts

The New Cold War might be over before the world knows it if the US gets its way and is successful with its latest high-stakes strategic gambit in the Congo. Kabila’s pro-Chinese “deep state” is being challenged by Tshisekedi and his American patrons, with the end goal seeming to be for the US to create the domestic political conditions by which the President can “plausibly” restrict China’s previously unhindered access to cobalt in the country (granted during Kabila’s rule) and therefore turn the tables in the “tech arms race” to the US’ favor. The consequences of this clandestine operation’s possible success could alter the course of global geopolitics this century, but the game is only getting started and its outcome is still far from certain.

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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.

In Ukraine a law on the recognition of members of military operations of nationalist organizations as ‘veterans’, including those of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), who fought in support of the Hitler-led German Nazy effort banned in Russia, came into force.

Previously, only UPA militants who participated in hostilities against the Nazi invaders in 1941-1944 fell into this category. The UPA generally collaborated with the German military, and after 1943 found themselves in skirmishes against the Nazi front. Under the new legislation, UPA members who fought alongside the German military will now qualified for a number of veteran’s benefits.

Under the new law, participants of the UPA will qualify for about 20 benefits, including the payment of utilities and free travel in public transport, as well as medical care and the provision of medicines. All of them in accordance with the law “On the legal status and memory of fighters for the independence of Ukraine in the XX century” are recognized as fighters for the independence of the country.

The relevant law was adopted by deputies of the Verkhovna Rada on December 6th, 2018. On December 22, it was signed byPresident of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, and was planned to come into effect today, as elections loom where Poroshenko stands on very shaky ground.

The UPA was formed in October 1942 as the militant wing of the organization of Ukrainian nationalists. Its activities were primarily in Western Ukraine and fought against the Soviet troops, and were known for their cooperating with the Nazis.

The UPA-OUN continued on with a guerrilla war against Soviet authorities until 1949, and against the People’s Republic of Poland until around the same time. The UPA was known for its campaign of ethnic cleansing against Poles. For this reason, Polish ultra-nationalists and Ukrainian and Galician ultra-nationalists have a difficult time seeing eye to eye on this historical matters of import. This has frustrated Atlanticist plans to use ultra-nationalists to support the creation of a ‘third pole’, a wide land-mass curtain separating Russia from Central and Western Europe, so to frustrate the inevitable rise of Eurasian integration.

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The two-plus year great hoax has come to an end. Trump is not Putin’s puppet, as the vast majority of the mainstream media and Democrats have claimed. There was no “collusion” with Russia.

So after so much wasted time and money, where do US/Russia relations stand and where should they be heading?

What does it mean for the Venezuela regime change operation? 

Tune in to today’s Liberty Report:

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298 Passengers and crew were murdered by Ukraine in order to create a propaganda attack on Russia.  The filth that comprise the Western media and governments hid the truth for the sake of Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda.  

The security official says that his suspicions were aroused by “the amazingly prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership,” which “indicated prior knowledge of the affair.”  Perhaps readers will remember that at the time I pointed out that the event was clearly staged as the same propagandistic accusation against Russia appeared everywhere instantly long before any investigation.  Indeed, the investigation was stillborn as it could not be concocted to indicate Russia’s guilt.

Don’t be surprised. Western governments and media only lie.  Never do they tell the truth.  Remember:  Russiagate.  Weapons of mass destruction.  Iranian nukes.  Assad’s use of chemical weapons.  Gulf of Tonkin.  9/11. Russian invasion of Ukraine.  JFK assassination. MLK assassination.  Bobby Kennedy assassination.  Skripal poisoning. Maduro starving his own people.  An endless list of lies.  The entirety of the West is nothing but a lie factory.  

See this.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Oriental Review

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov confirmed everyone’s suspicions last week when he said that he regards Kosovo’s ultimatum-like demand to Serbia to recognize its “independence” as having been encouraged by the US. This shouldn’t have surprised anyone since NATO’s War on Yugoslavia was carried out with the tacit objective of carving out a proxy state from where the US can exert its military influence all throughout the Balkans, which it ultimately did with the creation of Camp Bondsteel and Kosovo’s 2008 self-proclaimed “independence”.

Even so, Serbia refused to recognize this blatant violation of international law and was loathe to surrendering its legal claims to the region that it regards as the cradle of its civilization, though that’s begun to change over the past few years since President Vucic started flirting with the idea of “compromising” on this in order to facilitate his country’s entry into the EU.

It’s an open secret in the Balkans that he’d probably “recognize” Kosovo’s “independence” if the NATO-occupied criminal protectorate “swapped” its majority-Serbian-populated northern region for Serbia’s majority-Albanian-populated Presevo Valley, a proposal that picked up speed late last year but was eventually shot down by the entity’s political leaders who have since retained a stubborn position regarding this issue.

One might be inclined to think that this would have been the most “pragmatic” solution for them because they’d be able to expand the geographic scope of the fascist-era project of “Greater Albania” that’s been in the process of revival since 1999 concurrent with getting rid of the Serbian minority within “their” borders that opposes this without having to continue their ethnic cleansing of this demographic. Not only that, but they’d finally receive Serbia’s recognition of this geostrategic fait accompli and could then be “welcomed” into the “community of nations” as a “legitimate” member.

On the other hand, the Serbs of Northern Kosovo can only do so much to oppose the separatist authorities as it is given the international military dictatorship that prevails in the region, so the argument can be made that Pristina has no reason to “compromise” on their removal in “exchange” for the Presevo Valley when it’s actually in a position of strength vis-à-vis its American patron and Washington’s NATO vassals to make unilateral maximalist demands against Belgrade.

For the time being and in spite of some speculated dissent from various “deep state” factions within the Trump Administration, it appears as though the US supports Kosovo’s decision to swat away Vucic’s “compromise” proposal in order to one day obtain the maximalist gain of Belgrade’s “recognition” of the region’s “independence” and possibly even its surrender of the Presevo Valley even if Pristina doesn’t “exchange” it for Northern Kosovo, though there are serious risks inherent with this strategy.

Serbia is in the midst of an ever-escalating domestic political crisis largely provoked by what many patriots suspect to be his impending sellout of Kosovo one way or another irrespective of whether an “exchange” is agreed to or not. This grassroots pressure has the potential to greatly destabilize the country and possibly even lead to regime change in the “worst-case” scenario, the outcome of which would likely be the creation of a government firmly opposed to “recognizing” Kosovo (unless they want to experience the same political fate as Vucic).

It can’t be discounted that any speculative post-Vucic government in Serbia might actually sell out more of Serbia’s interests than he’s suspected of seeking to do, but for now at least, it’s most likely that they’d reverse his political moves in this respect in order to solidify their “legitimacy” if they do indeed succeed in taking power.

Still, they haven’t yet seized power and might never do so, but their disruptive Color Revolution tactics might just put enough bottom-up pressure on the government to get it to reconsider “recognizing” Kosovo under any circumstances in a desperate last-ditch attempt to mollify the protesters, which might actually work if they’re sincere in taking irreversible steps away from that possibility such as if Vucic publicly announced that he’s pulling out of all negotiations with Pristina and indefinitely suspending talks on this issue.

Again, it can’t be guaranteed that he’d do this even though he’s largely delegitimized himself by letting the Albanians humiliate him as much as they already have, but there’s nevertheless a conceivable chance that he might be cajoled into undertaking this course of action if he was convinced that it was necessary in order to remain in power in the face of intensifying resistance to his rule.

Bearing this backdrop in mind, it might even turn out that the “window of opportunity” for Serbia to “smoothly” “recognize” Kosovo has already passed after the populace wised up about this impending plot and took direct action to stop it, thereby making it politically impossible for Vucic to pull off without risking regime change one way or another.

Should that be the case and he chooses not to sacrifice himself for the geostrategic sake of his Western “partners”, then the Kosovo Albanians would be entirely to blame for forcing their maximalist outcome on him and refusing to “compromise” on a territorial “swap”. There might still be a workaround of some sort that could be devised under those circumstances, but its chances of success are low because the Kosovo Albanian leaders have staked all their political “legitimacy” on the maximalist scenario, meaning that only regime change against them might make that back-up plan feasible.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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.

On March 31, the first round of the 2019 presidential election will take place in Ukraine. A record number of candidates – 39 – is campaigning for the presidential post in the biggest country in Europe. Most of them have no real chance of victory. According to polls, there are three main candidates – comedian Vladimir Zelenskiy, the ruling oligarch Petro Poroshenko and the contesting oligarch Yuliya Timoshenko.

Despite the high number of presidential candidates, their election programmes are mostly focused on four topics: the military conflict in the eastern part of the country, the Crimea issue, political reforms and the economic situation. Presidential candidates employ populist rhetoric and make fantastic promises of various sorts. Since the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014, the real opposition in the country has been fully suppressed by repressive measures. Nationalistic propaganda and war hysteria are the dominating and main attribute of public politics and media coverage. In this kind of political situation it’s unlikely that potential presidents of Ukraine are going to turn their promises into reality. As has been repeatedly demonstrated, it’s always possible to call critics of the ruling government “Kremlin agents”, to accidentally find in their flats maps showing Crimea as a part of Russia or use another contrived pretext to detain them over treason. However, leaders of the presidential race and marginal candidates do have some differences in their public rhetoric.

The election programme of Petro Poroshenko is called “A major country with free and happy people.” He promises that Ukraine will join the EU and NATO as a regional leader: the leader of the agrarian sector in Europe; one of five new global leaders in the IT sector; regional leader of industrial development; the transport hub of Eastern Europe; one of the ten most visited European countries under the slogan “A fashionable country, which the world is discovering.”

The basic principle of the program is: “Money follows people.”

This all sounds nice, but it is not very clear, just as it is not clear when exactly the country will join the EU. In 2014, the leaders of the coup used more unambiguous phrases promising their adherents almost immediate accession to the EU, a victory over corruption, and a living standard supported by Europe.

Poroshenko is going to return Donbass and Crimea through “political means”, which in fact does not seem to exclude artillery strikes and diversions with civilian casualties reported from the conflict zone on a regular basis.

Yulia Tymoshenko assures that she has an “alternative”strategy for Crimea and Donbass, but what this might be is still a secret. She promises to reduce the Parliament by 100 deputies (there are currently 450), and halve the price of gas, hot water and heating.

Volodymyr Zelensky was nominated by the Servant of the People Party, named after the comedy series of the same name on Ukrainian television. He says that he will attend the cabinet for only one term. He asked his fans on the Internet to write his political programme. The same approach was declared as the tool to form his future Cabinet. Promises – obvious populism: the removal of immunity from the president, deputies and judges; the introduction of a law on impeachment, the fight against rising tariffs, voting in elections and referenda via the Internet among others. Zelensky promises to put an end to the war in the Donbass region and return the lost territories. Additionally, the comedian intends to receive compensation for damages from Russia. Zelensky’s high rating is a result of a strong mood of protest in the country and fatigue with the empty promises of professional politicians.

The rating of the other candidates is not really high enough to allow them to claim victory in the upcoming election. Nonetheless, some of them have some very original promises. For example, Ilya Kiva promises to increase the military budget to 10% of GDP, stop cooperation with the IMF and introduce a visa regime with Russia. Ruslan Koshulinsky wants to use a polygraph to test candidates for officials and deputies for separatism. He also intends to suspend diplomatic relations and all bilateral treaties with Russia.

Vladimir Petrov says that he will provide every Ukrainian with free internet, apparently with the help of coupons, though, it must be added “in specific daily and monthly limits.”  He also promises free daily bread.

The political system of Ukraine was completely destroyed by propaganda, censorship, false promises, widespread corruption, nepotism and dependency. On the one hand, the political elite is not interested in the real opinion of the people, and the populist “pro-Western” and “anti-Russian” rhetoric is a convenient tool for knocking out aid from the EU and the US. On the other hand, the more depressed the population, the less it trusts the populist promises already made, and in order to get a reaction the authorities will need to whip tensions up further.

Over the past years, this approach has turned Ukraine into a de-facto colony of the Washington and Brussels establishment. Regardless of the public promises of Western officials however, the country is most likely doomed to remain no more than a tactical tool and bargaining chip in global confrontations.

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A Sprint cell phone tower will be removed from a California elementary school after four students and three teachers were diagnosed with cancer. 

Weston Elementary School in Ripon, CA went on high alert after the controversy erupted two years ago – with some parents even pulling their children from school over the tower which Sprint has been paying the school $2,000 per month to place on its property.

The Ripon Unified School District initially defended the cell phone tower earlier this month, with board president Kit Oase saying tests done on the tower had found it was operating within safety standards.

Monica Ferrulli, whose son was treated for brain cancer in 2017, said RUSD has cited an obsolete American Cancer Society study in keeping the tower in place since the controversy erupted two years ago. “It is just denial,” Ferrulli told the board. She vowed that parents will continue to fight and keep their children out of the school. –Modesto Bee

Around 200 parents attended a meeting after a fourth student was diagnosed with cancer on March 8.

Richard Rex, whose family lives across the street from Weston School, said a bump appeared on his 11-year-old son’s abdomen a month ago. He said his son’s classroom is near the tower.

The parents first thought it was a skating injury. Instead of going to science camp, 11-year-old Brad was taken to doctors for examinations and tests that found a tumor wrapped around his liver. The boy now has a portal for starting cancer treatment, the parents said.

Richard Rex said he’s hearing different options for treating the cancer. “They said they can shrink it and cut it out. They’re also talking liver transplant. It is very scary,” Rex said. –Modesto Bee

Sprint representative Adrienne Norton said that the company has been “working with the community in Ripon to address their concerns.”

The potential negative health effects from electromagnetic fields (EMFs) emitted by cell towers or transmission lines have been long debated. While the National Cancer Institute cites studies which conclude that EMFs are a possible human carcinogen based on research which focused on childhood leukemia. The institute’s website says there are no increased risks from brain tumors or other cancers based on European epidemiological studies.

According to notices posted by RUSD, the school district hired engineers for an evaluation in 2018 on the cell tower’s compliance with guidelines for limiting human exposure to electromagnetic radiation. The testing found exposure levels for people nearby were below the federal standard, the notices says.  –Modesto Bee

So while parents are blaming the Sprint cell phone tower is responsible for the cancer cluster at Weston Elementary School – it’s entirely possible that other environmental factors are at play.

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Featured image is from Zero Hedge

It is an attempt to make the whole world “get used to the fact” that in the new American-centered world order, where the US and their satellites are allowed to violate the basic provisions of the UN Charter and the entire international law brazenly and with impunity.

Today is the tragic date: 20 years ago, on March 24, US-led NATO coalition forces launched a war against Yugoslavia justifying it using a provocation in the Kosovar village of Racak (later investigation proved that the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) organized the provocation).

We have discussed this international crime for a long time and in great detail in the series of articles published in the newspaper Zavtra (Tomorrow), in the reports of the Soderzhatelnoe Edinstvo (Substantive Unity) discussion club, in the TV program called Sud Vremeni (The Judgment of Time) featuring Sergey Kurginyan, episode 27. Here is just a brief outline of the main objectives of the perpetrators (primarily the US) and the strategic implications of these crimes.

The main objectives of organizing the war against Yugoslavia “for the sake of Kosovo” were:

1. Destabilizing Europe by activating the “Balkan Knot”, which historically has always been a place of explosive conflict. It should be noted that this “Balkan War”, as acknowledged by many Western experts, slowed the EU’s consolidation process for a long time, and in particular, the implementation of plans to create a single European currency as an alternative to the dollar.

2. Forming cesspool of terrorism and international organized crime in Europe (and much more painful than the one created in Bosnia). Islamic terrorist activity in Kosovo with roots in Northern Africa, Chechnya, and Afghanistan has long been investigated, and it is well known, along with the fact that Albanian criminal leaders have seized the leading positions in organized crime all over Europe.

3. A blatant and demonstrative crackdown against Yugoslavia as one Russia’s most enduring allies in the Balkans, its political system and armed forces. Therefore, humiliating Russia and weakening its geopolitical position.

4. An unprecedented flagrant violation of international law in the middle of Europe. Including a military attack on Yugoslavia, a sovereign European country, without a UN Security Council mandate. Including military support for the separatist secession of a vast multi-ethnic territory from Yugoslavia. Also, direct and blatant support of terrorists, drugs and arms dealers such as Hashim Thaci, one of the leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) by well known international law enforcement officials from Interpol. It should be mentioned that US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warmly hugged him on television.

Everything mentioned above is an attempt to make the whole world “get used to the fact” that in the new American-centered world order, where the US and their satellites are allowed to violate the basic provisions of the UN Charter and the entire international law brazenly and with impunity.

5. Legitimizing the new criminal principle of Euro-Atlantic solidarity by “binding” the European NATO members as accomplices in bloody crimes against international law.

6. Reincarnating and transforming the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a judicial body created by the UN Security Council, into a US “puppet” institution demonstrating the ability of the US to falsify charges and decisions by the ICTY with impunity. In particular, the former chairman of the ICTY, Carla Del Ponte released a book after her resignation in which she described in detail a number of anti-Serb falsifications investigated by the Court under US pressure.

7. Preparing and justifying US decisions on the effective revison of the NATO Charter and NATO expansion to the east. Immediately after the war against Yugoslavia ended in 1999, the NATO Council in Washington adopted a new “Strategy of flexible response, taking into account the military-political situation that has developed since the end of the Cold War.”

In this strategy, the zone of “security threats” was extended beyond the scope of Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which implies the “collective self-defense”, meaning that it extends beyond the territories of alliance member-states or even the Euro-Atlantic region. So, NATO declared undefined areas as its “zone of responsibility” for “crises on the periphery” of the Alliance, that is, virtually the whole world. The expansion of NATO to the east and NATO wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria occurred under the banner of this new doctrine.

8. Building a massive US military base known as Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, which has become not only the most important military infrastructure object for the US presence in Europe, but also the largest hub for drug trafficking from Afghanistan and Africa beyond any jurisdiction.

Further US support for Kosovo once again convincingly shows that the US goal was not at all what was officially proclaimed as ”protection of human rights” and “stabilizing” the region. This includes: the immediate recognition of Kosovo’s self-proclaimed independence in defiance to international law, tacit assistance to “pushing” the remaining Serbs out of Kosovo,and a lack of any criticism against the creation of Kosovo’s own regular army.

In fact, the US encourages the Albanians to destabilize the political situation in neighboring Macedonia, the expansion of Kosovar in Europe, and the program that prominent Albanian and Kosovar politicians announced of creating the so-called “Great Albania”, which should include the territories of neighboring countries that have many ethnic Albanians .

At the same time, the US and its European allies not only initiated the secession of Yugoslavia’s most important historical ally Montenegro, but also hinder the independent development of Serbia, the last fragment of the former Yugoslavia, in every way possible.

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Featured image: NATO bombing campaign of Yugoslavia  (Sergey Kaysin © Rossa Primavera News Agency)

In 2016, longtime Trump advisor, and current ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, said Trump would recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the entire West Bank if Israel “deemed it necessary.”

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After U.S. President Donald Trump announced that he planned to unilaterally recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights — which is internationally recognized as Syrian territory — some powerful Israeli politicians are now petitioning Trump to also recognize Israeli sovereignty over Palestine’s occupied West Bank.

After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2019

Though Trump casually announced that it was “time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty [sic] over the Golan Heights” last Thursday, he made the U.S.’ recognition of Israel’s claim to the territory official on Monday, at a signing ceremony that was attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump’s willingness to use his executive power to grant Israeli land grabs “official recognition” — such as in Jerusalem and now the Golan — has emboldened far-right Israeli politicians who have long been eager to annex other territories.

Please, sir, may we have some more?

Following Trump’s announcement via Twitter regarding the Golan Heights, Israeli MK Bezalel Smotrich, a senior Israeli politician and deputy speaker of Israel’s parliament, stated, also on Twitter:

For 52 years, we’ve also been thriving in Judea/Samaria [Israeli name for the West Bank of Palestine]. Also of critical strategic, historic and security importance. It is time that we recognize our sovereignty. With God’s help we’ll move this forward soon, and hope for your [i.e., Trump’s] support then, as well.”

Smotrich’s tweet likely highlighted the West Bank’s alleged “critical strategic, historic and security importance” to Israel because Trump justified his upcoming recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli by stating that the Golan Heights have a “critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability [sic].”

Thank you @POTUS. For 52 years, we've also been thriving in Judea/Samaria. Also of critical strategic, historic and security importance. It is time that we recognize our sovereignty. With God’s help we'll move this forward soon, and hope for your support then,as well. https://t.co/eI0yWdcZUj

— בצלאל סמוטריץ' (@bezalelsm) March 22, 2019

Smotrich, who has lived almost all his life in illegal settlements in the Golan Heights and the West Bank, is one of the Knesset’s most vocal promoters of Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. MintPress reported last year on a bill authored by Smotrich that would allow for the government regulation of 70 illegal Jewish-only settlements and allow Israeli Jewish citizens to purchase land in Area C of the West Bank, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of the total West Bank territory.

Smotrich and his political allies in the Jewish Home Party — who form part of the current ruling coalition led by Likud — have recently been pushing for Israel’s annexation of the West Bank so overtly that it prompted the UN to warn last July:

After years of creeping Israeli de facto annexation of the large swathes of the West Bank through settlement expansion, the creation of closed military zones and other measures, Israel appears to be getting closer to enacting legislation that will formally annex parts of the West Bank.”

Whether Trump would entertain yet another Israeli request for unilateral recognition of illegally held territory — such as the West Bank — is a matter of debate. While it is known that Trump’s largest political donor — Zionist billionaire Sheldon Adelson — was responsible for the Jerusalem move, it is not known if Adelson had a hand in Trump’s recent decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

However, the Golan Heights decision seems to be a combination of an effort to boost Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s chances of reelection in May as well as pressure from the U.S.-based oil company Genie Energy, which seeks to develop the large oil reserves in the Golan discovered in 2015. Genie Energy’s Israeli subsidiary, Afek, was granted exclusive drilling rights in the Golan by Netanyahu soon after the oil’s discovery and the company’s board is stocked with powerful people, including Jacob Rothschild, Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch, among others.

Past statements from long-time Trump advisor, and current U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggest that Trump is likely to honor Smotrich’s request if it is repeated by other Israeli politicians with pull in Washington or connections to Adelson. Soon after Trump won the 2016 election, Friedman claimed that Trump would support Israel’s annexation of much of the West Bank and even the entire West Bank, if Israel “deemed it necessary.”

The “Deal of the Century” meets Israel’s “Manifest Destiny”

Since then, the only likely impediment to Trump’s backing of such an effort would be the fate of the administration’s “Deal of the Century” aimed at brokering “peace” between Israel and Palestine. That deal, largely drafted by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, would be severely undermined and essentially dead on arrival were Trump to recognize the West Bank as Israeli.

While Trump’s willingness to continue granting U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over any more contested areas remains to be seen, what is clear is that his recognition of both Jerusalem and the Golan Heights as Israeli territory has emboldened powerful elements of Israel’s government that have long pushed for the country’s expansion in essentially every direction. Indeed, even if Trump decides to recognize the West Bank as “Israeli,” it is unlikely that far-right nationalist politicians in Israel would stop there, given their ambitions in the Sinai peninsula, Lebanon’s offshore gas fields, and elsewhere in the region.

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Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Although the country is nowhere close to the next presidential election, twenty months away to be exact, yet my first Agita attack of the 2020 campaign season is expected at any time.  I can feel it coming on.

To date, there are fifteen announced candidates with that many in the wings deciding whether to give it a Go.  It is fair to say many of those contenders would settle for being a Vice Presidential candidate.  The Dems are attracting that number of candidates in the belief that PT Barnum will be easy to knock off and under normal circumstances,  that would be a correct assessment.  But Quantity of candidates does not translate into Quality; hence, an Empty Suit Club (ESC) needs to be established to sort the cattle from the herd.

According to Real Clear Politics, Bernie is polling at 24% with less support than he garnered in 2016 with former veep Joe Biden at 29%.  Does Bernie seriously expect those same people who defrauded him in 2016 to sit by as he takes the prize or even give him a fair shake?   It’s not going to happen.  Whether Bernie has schmoozed sufficiently with Perez or Wasserman-Schultz or the PTB (powers that be) to be acceptably docile remains a question.   It may be that some of the party’s stalwart professionals, now that Russiagate has not delivered as intended, will resume blaming Bernie for Hillary’s loss.  Some would almost rather lose again than let Bernie have the last word.  In any case, it is difficult to believe that the Dems, the DNC, the MSM or whoever makes that final call  will allow Bernie to win the nomination.

A recent entry into the ranks of the ESC is former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, a friend of the oil and gas industry who is polling at 1%.  Hickenlooper opposes Medicare for All and may best be described as a right-centrist.  Attendees at the 2018 Builderberg conference had an opportunity to check him out (although his name was later scrubbed from the attendee list) and he must have impressed someone as he raised $1 M immediately after his announcement.

The latest ES candidate to announce with 8% support in the RCP poll is Beto O’Rourke, a rich kid who married another rich kid, who supports Medicare for America rather than Medicare for All and raised $6.1 M on his first day as a candidate.  As a Congressman from one of the most Democratic districts in the country, O’Rourke is known to have frequently joined Republican votes on economic and environmental issues and has most recently joined AOC in scaring the hell out of ten year olds that the world will end in twelve years as the Green New Deal suggests.

Rounding out the Club with a noticeable lack of socio-eco-political achievement to benefit the public or in pursuit of peace are Sens. Booker, Gillibrand and Klobuchar with Harris promising to not attend AIPAC as she did in 2018 and Sen. Warren, who may be a marginal ESC member since, every once in a while, she has an innovative thought like breaking up the Big Tech companies.

Andrew Yang is a graduate of Philips Exeter, Brown University and Columbia Law School and supports a $1000 monthly basic income to offset the permanent loss of American jobs to artificial intelligence and advanced technology.  In March, 2019, he qualified to participate in the June and July Democratic Presidential primary debates by fulfilling DNC requirement (which is meant to eliminate the riff-raff) by receiving 65,000 donations in at least twenty states. The DNC reserves the right to limit debate participation to twenty candidates.

South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg who is the only gay candidate among this politically correct field and has yet to formally announce although he has already qualified to participate in the upcoming primary debates with 76,000 donors.   Will the DNC allow a non candidate who has met the donor threshold to participate in their first primary debate?

Where is #Metoo?  Even though he is leader of a barely distinguished pack, it is puzzling that former veep Joe Biden is seriously considering a run in 2020.   He must be living in a simulated reality to be unaware of the video clips on line displaying Joe’s affection for young girls, some of them in front of smiling parents who are assiduously avoiding his lecherous moves on their daughters.   A Biden candidacy could be beneficial to opening a national discussion related to pedophilia by the country’s elite and give the priests a rest.

While Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hi), a practicing Hindu, an Army Major and veteran of two tours in Iraq and a yoga practitioner, is polling at 1%, the MSM has done its best to diminish and belittle her non interventionist candidacy.   To her credit, she continues to appear on Morning Joe Show, the View or Stephen Colbert where the agenda is to entrap her as a supporter of Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

While she is firm in opposition to ‘regime change wars,” she narrowly sidestepped the trap agreeing with the repulsive Meghan McCain that “there is no disputing the fact that Assad is a brutal dictator; there is no disputing the fact that Assad has used chemical weapons against his people.  That is not something I’m disputing.” 

As Gabbard well knows, the charge that Assad gassed his own people has been refuted by no less an authority than former US Defense Secretary James Mattis who has said there is ‘no evidence.”  Perhaps Gabbard had a bad hair day in flubbing her lines but given the embedded support for war in the Democratic party, it will behoove her to step up her game, take the risk and tell the truth – even when face to face with the likes of McCain or Colbert.

In her recent standing-room-only appearance before enthusiastic students from the University of San Francisco, Gabbard linked domestic issues directly to the ‘cost of wasteful regime change wars’ ending with “I do not need the foreign policy establishment to tell me what to do” and that I am “not intimidated by stars on the shoulders or the military industrial complex.” With veterans in every audience, she recently gave repeat performances to full houses throughoutNew Hampshire.

With 44,000 donors, as Gabbard digs deep and finds the fortitude and inner grit to say what needs to be said, to be a strong voice for peace with no apology or equivocation, she will easily qualify for the debates.

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

In George Orwell’s 1984, the dictatorship of Oceania controlled perceptions by continuous propaganda broadcast through the “telescreen” and constant updating of news print so that the past would conform to the lies of the present. The device used to discard any document contradicting the fakery of the present was called a “memory hole.”

Orwell was acutely aware of the fact that empire thrives on imperial amnesia and constant historical revision of the past by the powerful. He knew that citizens would be much easier to control if they were forced to live in an eternal present — a place where it would be impossible to critically assess and compare today’s world by looking at what happened yesterday and the day before.

In the 21st century, we have constructed our own kind of Orwellian memory holes. The global nexus of economic and political powers in neoliberal corporate capitalist states and international bodies tend to view critical and historical consciousness as an impediment, if not an outright threat, to their hegemony. The reason is obvious: an informed, critical consciousness is the foundation upon which any flourishing democracy is built — where the “political” is understood as government of, by and for all citizens, not merely in the interests of the wealthy or powerful few.

No doubt, this was why the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News and The New York Times, could, without a hint of irony, claim that U.S. democracy was “undone” because a foreign power put Trump into office, while simultaneously praising Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guaidó after he received a directive from Vice President Mike Pence that he should just forget about elections and declare himself president.

Gore Vidal once said, “ … we are permanently the United States of Amnesia. We learn nothing because we remember nothing.” Yet, even in the U.S., it is still possible to uncover a “history of the present” where Central and South America are concerned. If you are prepared to put in the necessary time and effort, you can discover the truths and realities of a past that many of those in power would rather you just forget.

Here’s one of the key geopolitical lessons you’ll learn: The U.S. empire and its regime change proxies — the Organization of American States (OAS) and the Lima Group — have never had much interest in or respect for the sovereignty of any Central or South American country that did not show the proper level of obedience to the U.S. government and corporate interests. This imperialist perspective goes back to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine when the U.S. determined that only it had the moral authority to say who should be in power in its “own back yard.”

Reacting to the Monroe Doctrine, Simon Bolivar, the great revolutionary who helped South America gain independence from Spanish rule, accurately predicted that the U.S. was “destined to plague and torment the continent in the name of ‘freedom.’” Bolivar’s prediction has been borne out time and again as the U.S. imposed economic sanctions and funded right-wing military dictatorships in Honduras, Panama, Cuba, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador and Venezuela.

Pence’s intervention in the affairs of a foreign state follows on the heels of a long tradition of U.S. economic and military interventionism in Central and South America. The dictators put in place — from Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza García, Honduras’s Roberto Suazo Córdova and Roberto Micheletti, Panama’s Manuel Noriega and Chile’s Augusto Pinochet — all had one and only one objective: to turn what were once social democracies into subservient satellite states so that the U.S. might then gain access to resources and oil, privatize state assets, and impose what journalist and author Naomi Klein has accurately described as “neoliberal shock therapy.”

But empire is also aided and abetted by the hypocrisy of allies that cower before imperialist states while pretending that they subscribe to the norms of international law. Canada, Austria, Portugal, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden have all endorsed Guaidó’s claim to a de jure presidency, while Italy, Mexico, Ireland and Greece have, so far, refused to go along. The latter group of countries likely concluded what anyone with even a minimal understanding of international law would be forced to conclude: Guido’s actions were an illegal and undemocratic attempt to usurp a democratically elected president. Despite this, the Lima Group has not only signed a Declaration which recognizes Guaidó as the de jure interim president, it also included in this declaration a measure that prevents the Maduro regime “from conducting financial and trade transactions and doing business with their oil, gold, and other assets.”

In a Washington Post opinion piece, Guaidó outlined the case for his self-appointment as de jure president of Venezuela. The only problem is that the de jure constitutional foundation Guaidó relies upon expressly designates the vice president — not the president of the National Assembly — as the next in line should the president not be able to carry out his duties. Article 233 of Venezuela’s constitution also elaborates just when this can occur:

The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote.

One need not be a constitutional expert or even a lawyer to see that not one of the six criteria apply with respect to the legitimacy of Nicolás Maduro’s presidency: Maduro has not left this world, he has not resigned, abandoned his position or been removed by the Supreme Tribunal. He has no permanent physical or mental disability, and finally, has not been recalled by popular vote.

Moreover, even if one of the above events occurred, it would still be the case that an election would have to be held within 30 days of an interim president being appointed — something which is obviously not of great concern to Guaidó, since he has already declared himself the de jure, if not de facto president of Venezuela.

Guaidó is not the de jure president — unless what is meant by de jure is someone who declares that he is a “law unto himself.” Think about Guaidó in this context for a moment. Someone who has never been elected by anyone can declare himself as “interim president” so long as he is recognized by political leaders that exist outside of his or her country. This is assumed to be in keeping with the notion of “popular sovereignty,” with democracy, with constitutional legitimacy?

What of Maduro’s refusal of so-called humanitarian aid from the U.S.? Former United Nations rapporteur Alfred de Zayas has said that a country which imposes illegal sanctions and has waged an economic war on Venezuela for 20 years is certainly not giving aid in good faith. One need only look at the history of U.S. “aid” to Central and South America to know that it is rarely, if ever, “humanitarian.”

It was that wonderful “humanitarian” and “fierce advocate for human rights and democracy” Elliot Abrams who, in 1987, cooked up the U.S. plot to use a humanitarian program to send military arms to the contra death squads in Nicaragua. Abrams, Trump’s recent appointee as special representative for Venezuela, might be the textbook case of a war criminal. A well-known supporter of torture, death camps and decapitation, Abrams did everything he could to ease the way for Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt to commit acts of genocide against Indigenous people of the Ixil region; he lied to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal; he propped up a dictator in El Salvador and cheered on the military coup against the democratically elected government of Venezuela in 2002.

So long as Abrams — one of the most radical and depraved architects of U.S. foreign policy in Central America — is the U.S.’s “special envoy,” you can be fairly sure that there will not be anything remotely “democratic” or “humanitarian” in U.S. aid to Venezuela.

OK then, what about the charge that the 2018 election in Venezuela was “fraudulent and undemocratic”? Article 350 of Venezuela’s constitution calls for citizens to “disown any regime, legislation or authority that violates democratic values.” For this to happen, both the national and international community must unite behind a transitional government that will guarantee humanitarian aid, ensure that the rule of law is restored and begin to hold democratic elections. However, there just isn’t any unity of opinion outside or inside Venezuela, so the very idea that this article is being relied upon as grounds for recognizing Guaidó as the de jure president is completely unfounded.

Why? Venezuela is a federal presidential republic, and like most democracies, it is grounded on the separation of powers, with government divided into three branches: legislative, executive and judicial. The legislative branch, or National Assembly, declared Maduro illegitimate on the day of his second inauguration. However, the judiciary, the Supreme Tribunal of Justice (the highest court of law in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, empowered to invalidate any laws, regulations or other acts of the other governmental branches conflicting with the constitution) has countered that this latter declaration was itself unconstitutional.

This is the sort of internal constitutional conflict that any country has the right to work out for themselves, without any sort of external pressure or interference. Are there Venezuelans who oppose the Maduro government? Of course, there are — and there is no shortage of newspapers in Venezuela fiercely critical of the Maduro regime. That is not likely something most “dictators” would permit. The problem is that the international media focused almost exclusive attention on opposition protests. Those who still hold to the ideals of the Bolivarian revolution grasp that their present woes are not only a result of Maduro’s policies, but much more the consequence of debilitating U.S. economic sanctions which are precisely intended to accelerate the collapse of Maduro’s government. What Venezuelans need now is not more imperialist economic interventions or declarations that Venezuela is a national security threat, but rather some level of recognition that the 67 percent of those who supported Maduro might be capable of determining what is best for their country.

The National Electoral Council declared Maduro the winner of the elections and president of Venezuela until 2025. Secondly, a majority of authorized parties that ran were not supporters of Maduro; 11 of them were opposed to his government. Those parties prevented from running were not excluded because they opposed Maduro, but because they violated election and constitutional law. Thirdly, many of the right-wing parties that did not run were told not to do so by the U.S., which argued that their participation would give legitimacy (i.e. democratic standing) to an election that the U.S. declared in advance was not going to be democratic or fair. Fourthly, not only did the U.S. encourage opposition parties to boycott the 2018 election, they also demanded that the domestic opposition parties in Venezuela tell the United Nations not to send election observers — against the wishes of the Maduro government. In short, the U.S. did everything possible to undermine the 2018 Venezuelan election, precisely so they could later claim that it was “fraudulent and undemocratic.” That has essentially been the norm since the very early days of Hugo Chavez.

Chavez did the unthinkable from the point of view of any goodthinkful neoliberal: he nationalized Venezuelan oil for the benefit of the Venezuelan people; he defied the U.S. and impertinently stood as a socialist counter-example for other Latin American populations to emulate. That kind of political and economic independence simply could not be tolerated by the corporatized U.S. empire.

Such upstart socialist initiatives were enough for Venezuela to be considered an “extraordinary national security threat” and Chavez to be designated a “dictator” — despite being elected with 56 percent of the vote in 1999 and later elected with 59 percent support in 2004. Would the same conclusion be drawn with respect to two recent U.S. presidents (George W. Bush and Donald Trump) where the winner of the election actually lost the “popular vote”— a more direct and democratically representative assessment of voter support?

There may well have been irregularities in the last Venezuelan election. Then again, there have been well-documented irregularities, voter suppression and even fraud in a good number of U.S. elections. What do you imagine would have happened in 2000 had Al Gore declared himself the de jure president of the United States and Austria, Canada, Portugal, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden recognized him as such? Any such suggestion would be laughable.

None of this is meant to excuse the Maduro government — nor, for that matter, the Chavez government. Both are guilty of mismanaging the economy and relying almost exclusively on oil revenues rather than diversifying Venezuela’s economy. Their narrow economic approach certainly gave rise to a state of hyperinflation, a dysfunctional currency problem and the inevitable political corruption that follows from all this. However, it is also crucial to understand that oil companies, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the United States held Venezuela’s economy hostage before Chavez even came to power. As economist Michael Hudson reminds us, what Chavez was unable to do was “clean up the embezzlement and built-in rake-off of income from the oil sector. And he was unable to stem the capital flight of the oligarchy, taking its wealth and moving it abroad — while running away themselves.”

By further imposing economic sanctions that prevented Venezuela from gaining access to its U.S. bank deposits and the assets of its state-owned Citgo, the U.S. made it virtually impossible for Venezuela to pay its foreign debt. This forced the Chavez government into default, and at the same time, became the perfect excuse to foreclose on Venezuela’s oil resources and seize its foreign assets.

The ultimate goal of U.S. foreign policy has always been to impose economic shock therapy on weaker nations so that other social democracies in Central and South America don’t get the idea that they can use their own natural resources for the benefit of their citizens. Indeed, Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has made no secret of the fact that U.S. intervention in Venezuela is not about democracy, but about oil and the exploitation of Venezuela’s natural resources. This became all too evident after Guaidó began to make moves to privatize the country’s state-owned oil company by seeking money from the economic arm of global neoliberalism: the IMF.

It is indeed time for Maduro to open a new dialogue with both those who have been left out and other progressive voices; it is time for him to put forward a new economic program that meets the crisis of inflation, and speaks to the pain and dislocation of ordinary Venezuelans. This would require the kind of thoughtful diplomacy that has always been in short supply in U.S. foreign relations. The current strategy of the U.S., the OAS and the Lima Group is to ensure that Maduro is unable to resolve Venezuela’s problems. With help from a subservient mainstream media and compliant Western states, they will try their best to make the Bolivarian revolution disappear down the memory hole. We must not let that happen.

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Fred Guerin holds a Ph.D. in philosophy and teaches philosophy part-time at Vancouver Island University in Powell River, British Columbia.

Featured image is from Club Orlov

On Monday and Tuesday, 25 and 26 March 2019, Israeli forces carried out dozens of airstrikes on various targets across the Gaza Strip.  These airstrikes have been the most violent in recent months that have not spared civilians and displaced dozens of them after 10 days of a similar aggression.

For 12 hours, two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip lived in a state of terror and fear due to the continuous Israeli airstrikes that targeted various locations; some were in densely-populated areas throughout the Gaza Strip.

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It is worth noting that until the release of the Mueller report, Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (and former CIA Director) was a firm supporter of the RussiaGate narrative. What is his position today?

How will the Mueller report affect US foreign policy?

Will Pompeo retain his position as Secretary of State?

This article was first published in July 2018

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While both Trump and Pompeo are bona fide warmongers, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo –while upholding the President’s official statements– is also involved in countering Trump’s diplomatic, foreign policy and public relations initiatives.

Moreover, Pompeo seems to have endorsed the Russiagate narrative on behalf of the President.

He has been entrusted (not by Trump) to “convince senators that President Trump knows that Russia interfered in the 2016 election” See NY Post

“On Russia, Pompeo will tell senators that “I personally made clear to the Russians that there will be severe consequences for interference in our democratic process.” He doesn’t say what those consequences would be, but he goes on to list “a staggering number of actions to protect our interests,” including sanctions that were essentially forced upon the White House by Congress. He leaves open the question of whether Trump delivered a similarly tough message to Putin. Bloomberg News. (emphasis added)

The media casually tags Pompeo’s statement as “damage control” (on behalf of Trump).

What is at stake on the part of Secretary of State Pompeo is “damage” rather than “damage control”, i.e. a deliberate initiative to jeopardize the president’s public relations diplomacy initiatives with regard to Russia and North Korea, which go against the Russiagate consensus.

Video: Pompeo Before Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Prior to Helsinki, Pompeo was instrumental in jeopardizing the June 12-14 Trump-Kim Singapore Summit. Less than a month later in the words of the DPRK spokesperson following Pompeo’s visit to Pyongyang:

“We still cherish our good faith in President Trump … But, the U.S. side [Pompeo] came up only with its unilateral and gangster-like demand for denuclearization… The U.S. side [Pompeo] never mentioned the issue of establishing a peace regime on the Korean peninsula which is essential for defusing tension and preventing a war.” (DPRK Statement, July 8, 2018, emphasis added)

The Crimea Declaration

The controversial “Crimea Declaration” document hastily drafted by the US State Department was in large part directed against Trump who failed to blame or condemn Vladimir Putin  at the Helsinki summit.  Moreover, back in late June, responding to reporters on Air Force One regarding “US recognition of  Russia’s claim on Crimea”, president Trump responded: “We’re going to have to see.”

In testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Pompeo presented the “Crimea Declaration” which reasserted “U.S. condemnation of Russia’s 2014 attacks on Ukraine and its invasion and annexation of Crimea”.  According to US press reports:  “The declaration was designed, in part, to put to rest ambiguity created by Trump when he chose not to condemn Putin’s actions when the two appeared together in Helsinki, Finland, on July 16. (Los Angeles  Times, July 25, 2018, emphasis added)

With regard to Crimea, Moscow responded on the day following Pompeo’s statements to the Senate Committee, pointing to the democratic process underlying the reintegration of Crimea into the Russian Federation.

According to the Chairman of Russia’s Federation Council (Russia’s Senate) Foreign Affairs Committee Konstantin Kosachev. Washington’s “policy of non-recognition” of the reintegration of the Crimean peninsula into the Russian Federation is doomed to fail:

“Referring to their own experience of not recognizing the absorption of the Baltic republics into the USSR in 1940, [the Americans] ‘took a solemn oath’ to behave in the same way, this time concerning Crimea as part of Russia. American strategists believe (or want to believe) that these two stories are identical and that the strategy, which worked once, is suitable for all occasions. That’s a gross misconception,” he wrote on his Facebook page.

“History has indeed put everything in its proper place,” he stated.

“Crimea is a totally different story. There was no military force, nor was there any coercion. The overwhelming majority of the population supported the return to Russia, strongly and unequivocally, while its opponents were in the minority. These reports are not fake news akin to Soviet propaganda. This is the absolute truth,” the Russian senator stressed.

According to Kosachev, Washington now “opposes the people’s will.”

“See the difference. That’s doomed to failure, historically and politically,” he concluded.

When President Donald Trump moved the US embassy to occupied Jerusalem last year, effectively sabotaging any hope of establishing a viable Palestinian state, he tore up the international rulebook.

Last week, he trampled all over its remaining tattered pages. He did so, of course, via Twitter.

Referring to a large piece of territory Israel seized from Syria in 1967, Trump wrote:

“After 52 years it is time for the United States to fully recognize Israel’s Sovereignty over the Golan Heights, which is of critical strategic and security importance to the State of Israel and Regional Stability.”

Israel expelled 130,000 Syrians from the Golan Heights in 1967, under cover of the Six Day War, and then annexed the territory 14 years later – in violation of international law. A small population of Syrian Druze are the only survivors of that ethnic cleansing operation.

Replicating its illegal acts in the occupied Palestinian territories, Israel immediately moved Jewish settlers and businesses into the Golan.

Until now, no country had recognised Israel’s act of plunder. In 1981, UN member states, including the US, declared Israeli efforts to change the Golan’s status “null and void”.

But in recent months, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu began stepping up efforts to smash that long-standing consensus and win over the world’s only superpower to his side.

He was spurred into action when the Bashar Al Assad – aided by Russia – began to decisively reverse the territorial losses the Syrian government had suffered during the nation’s eight-year war.

The fighting dragged in a host of other actors. Israel itself used the Golan as a base from which to launch covert operations to help Assad’s opponents in southern Syria, including Islamic State fighters. Iran and the Lebanese militia Hezbollah, meanwhile, tried to limit Israel’s room for manoeuvre on the Syrian leader’s behalf.

Iran’s presence close by was how Netanyahu publicly justified the need for Israel to take permanent possession of the Golan, calling it a vital buffer against Iranian efforts to “use Syria as a platform to destroy Israel”.

Before that, when Assad was losing ground to his enemies, the Israeli leader made a different case. Then, he argued that Syria was breaking apart and its president would never be in a position to reclaim the Golan.

Netanyahu’s current rationalisation is no more persuasive than the earlier one. Russia and the United Nations are already well advanced on re-establishing a demilitarised zone on the Syrian side of the separation-of-forces line. That would ensure Iran could not deploy close to the Golan Heights.

At a meeting between Netanyahu and Trump in Washington on Monday night, the president converted his tweet into an executive decree.

The timing is significant. This is another crude attempt by Trump to meddle in Israel’s election, due on April 9. It will provide Netanyahu with a massive fillip as he struggles against corruption indictments and a credible threat from a rival party, Blue and White, headed by former army generals.

Netanyahu could barely contain his glee after Trump’s tweet, reportedly calling to tell him: “You made history!”

But, in truth, this was no caprice. Israel and Washington have been heading in this direction for a while.

In Israel, there is cross-party support for keeping the Golan.

Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the US and a confidant of Netanyahu’s, formally launched a plan last year to quadruple the size of the Golan’s settler population, to 100,000, within a decade.

The US State Department offered its apparent seal of approval last month when it included the Golan Heights for the first time in the “Israel” section of its annual human rights report.

This month, Republican senator Lindsey Graham made a very public tour of the Golan in an Israeli military helicopter, alongside Netanyahu and David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Graham said he and fellow senator Ted Cruz would lobby the US president to change the territory’s status.

Trump, meanwhile, has made no secret of his disdain for international law. This month, his officials barred entry to the US to staff from the International Criminal Court, based in The Hague, who are investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan.

The ICC has made enemies of both Washington and Israel in its initial, and meagre, attempts to hold the two to account.

Whatever Netanyahu’s spin about the need to avert an Iranian threat, Israel has other, more concrete reasons for holding on to the Golan.

The territory is rich in water sources and provides Israel with decisive control over the Sea of Galilee, a large freshwater lake that is crucially important in a region facing ever greater water shortages.

The 1,200 square kilometres of stolen land is being aggressively exploited, from burgeoning vineyards and apple orchards to a tourism industry that, in winter, includes the snow-covered slopes of Mount Hermon.

As noted by Who Profits, an Israeli human rights organisation, in a report this month, Israeli and US companies are also setting up commercial wind farms to sell electricity.

And Israel has been quietly co-operating with US energy giant Genie to explore potentially large oil reserves under the Golan. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has family investments in Genie. But extracting the oil will be difficult, unless Israel can plausibly argue that it has sovereignty over the territory.

For decades the US had regularly arm-twisted Israel to enter a mix of public and back-channel peace talks with Syria. Just three years ago, Barack Obama supported a UN Security Council rebuke to Netanyahu for stating that Israel would never relinquish the Golan.

Now Trump has given a green light for Israel to hold on to it permanently.

But, whatever he says, the decision will not bring security for Israel, or regional stability. In fact, it makes a nonsense of Trump’s “deal of the century” – a long-delayed regional peace plan to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that, according to rumour, may be unveiled soon after the Israeli election.

Instead, US recognition will prove a boon for the Israeli right, which has been clamouring to annex vast areas of the West Bank and thereby drive a final nail into the coffin of the two-state solution.

Israel’s right can now plausibly argue: “If Trump has consented to our illegal seizure of the Golan, why not also our theft of the West Bank?”

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

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

La Rinconada, 5,000 to 5,400m above sea level, corrugated iron shacks, glued to the hills of the surrounding mountains, home to some 50,000 to 70,000 mining inhabitants and competing mafia mobs that control them. La Rinconada, in the Peruvian Andes, the world’s highest, chaotic, poisonous and illegal goldmines, some 210 km northeast of Puno, a 4-hour drive by car over partially paved, albeit potholed roads. La Rinconada, near the just slightly more civilized mining townof Ananea (about 4,700 m above sea level), is also considered one of the most horrific places on earth: a crime gang-run city, spreading through a valley and up the hills, no running water, no sewerage, no electricity grid. La Rinconada looks and smells like a wide-open garbage dump, infested by a slowly meandering yellowish-brownish mercury-contaminated brew – tailings from illegal goldmining – what used to be a pristine mountain lake.

The thin, oxygen-poor air is loaded with mercury vapor that slowly penetrates people’s lungs, affecting over time the nervous system, memory, body motor, leading often to paralysis and early death. Average life expectancy of a mine worker is 30-35years, about half of Peruvian’s average life expectancy.

Source: amusingplanet.com

Life has no value. People are killed for carrying a rock that may contain some tiny veins of gold. Bodies are often just thrown on to garbage heaps to rot. Occasionally a body is found and then buried right on the garbage dump. It’s not unusual to find a grave right in the midst of a field of trash.

Human rights do not exist in Rinconada. Child work is common place. And so is child prostitution, women and drug trafficking. Time off is a life of drunkenness and drug deliria. Life is worthless. See also Andre Vltchek’s essay.

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Small boys are used to work in underground mining galleries, where adults hardly fit. When the galleries collapse and a child – or several – dies – nobody cares. Many are not even identified. Most likely they are not missed. They are children of non-parents, like in non-humans, those that run this hellish mining industry, and those who send their children there to help them make a living. No love, no ethics, no respect for nothing but the legendary gold nugget, for greed and necessity. No mercy.That’s La Rinconada.

Miners come voluntarily. Nobody forces them. Most are poor. Some are just greedy – the never-dying ‘Gold Rausch’ attracts them. The dream of getting rich in the goldmine makes them accept the most horrendous working and living conditions: surviving in an open dump-ground of everything, garbage, toxic heavy metals, wading in mercury-polluted tailings, thin air, contaminated by poisonous vapors, no heating, most of the year sub-freezing temperatures –trash and debris everywhere. But the miners don’t complain. Some bring their wives, few bring also their kids – it’s their choice. Some stay ‘temporarily’ only, 6 months, 12 months, 2 years? – For some the dream of hitting the riches never dies; they stay until they die. – They know they will be abused, enslaved. They know, they can take it or leave it.

Miners work for usually long hours and are working during 29 days for free. On the 30^th day they may keep whatever they take out of the ground, amounting to about 800 to 1,000 Soles per month (US$250 – $320). Sometimes day 30 brings nothing. Sometimes some rocks with traces of gold. All are hoping for a gold nugget. This type of mining wage is not unique to Peru. Bolivia and other Andean countries that are open to the most environmentally and socially destructive industry – mining – apply similar systems. The illusion to hit it BIG by finding the legendary ‘gold rock’ is a passion; it is obsessive. And if and when a miner does find a treasure to keep, he is vulnerable of being robbed, even killed, body discarded – another miner gone missing. Or not. Just disappeared. Maybe in a garbage dump. They are endless in Rinconada. They reflect the character of Rinconada. Refuse, waste, stench and death.

Source: researchgate

Nobody cares – or not enough to investigate the death, the missing. It’s the name of the game. Miners come by their free will. They are not coerced. They enslave themselves, in the vane hope to get rich. Instead, they intoxicate themselves from mercury fumes, from a totally poisonous environment, daily exposure to heavy metals. Their nervous system slowly but surely fails them. Memory loss; brain damage, muscular dystrophy, collapsing lungs, paralysis, early death. For many, it’s a dream gone dead. That’s what poverty does; it kills while dreaming of a better world.

Rinconada – mafia rules. Police work in connivance. Murders and assassinations are of the order. Prostitution, alcohol and drug abuse is rampant. Nobody cares. It’s survival of the fittest – and often survival succumbs to hardship, misery and yet hope for a better life.

These criminal organizations are all local, meaning from the vicinity, Puno, Juliaca and thereabouts. No foreign mining companies are allowed. They, huge world (in)famous gold and precious metals corporations, are waiting ‘downstream’ to buy the blood-ware, without identity, without origins. So that nobody can trace them to the crime.

Women generally do not work in the mines. Superstition. They bring bad luck. They make the gold veins disappear. They distract the men. The mines are masculine. Only men are allowed to work them. The mountains may get jealous, and who knows what jealousy is capable of doing. Women have other chores: collecting loose rocks that may contain some remnants of gold; they clean, prepare food, mind the household, children, if a family is unwise enough to bring their offspring to this hellhole – and, they are “taking care of the men”, in more ways than one.

La Rinconada – one of the most horrible places on earth. Hardly known to the rest of the world. Most people in Lima, the capital of Peru, have no idea that Rinconada exists, and if they have heard the name, they associate it with a lush country club in the elite district of “La Molina” of Lima. – They don’t know what it also stands for – The Devil’s Paradise.

What Rinconada produces is “blood gold”, akin to blood diamonds, blood emeralds in other parts of the world.

Who buys this gold?

Large corporations. One of them is the Swiss registered Metalor, One of the world’s largest gold foundries. Annually, about 3,000 to 3,500 tons of gold are mined across the globe. Switzerland refines about 70% to 80% of all the gold in the world. An estimated 20% to 30% of it is considered ‘blood gold’ – gold that stems from illicit mining practices, child labor, environmental and social destructions, land theft, corruption – like from Rinconada.

As of now, Switzerland, the host of the globe’s largest mining corporations and gold foundries does not want to know the origin of the gold – possibly the environmentally and socially most destructive precious metal. Switzerland does not impose a code of ethics on the corporations that enjoy the Swiss tax-haven. The Swiss Government pretends that these mining corporations have their own codes of conduct, and the Swiss authorities trust that they adhere to their own standards of ethics. What an easy way out!

When challenged with evidence to the contrary, i.e. Rinconada, or Espinar (also Peru), where Glencore beats up defenseless indigenous women, because they attempt to protect their properties and water from Glencore’s illegal confiscation – with the corrupt help of the local Peruvian authorities – the Swiss authorities close their eyes to open crimes of their corporations and if pressed, they simply say, “if we are too harsh with them, they will leave Switzerland” – and – “if they are doing something illegal, they are responsible to their host country”, apparently ignoring that corruption buys everything in most of these “host countries”.

That’s the level of ethics one of the richest and reputedly most noble countries of the universe applies to keep her corporations happy. Naturally, Switzerland is also the only OECD member that allows her parliamentarians to sit in as many corporate Boards of Directors as they wish. Imagine! – A totally legalized conflict of interest. And nobody says ‘beep’. The Swiss populace just accepts this blunt aberration – most of them don’t even know it exists. They live comfortably and well, and don’t care much about Human Rights abusing corporations, and less so that their Parliament is a humongous built-in corporate and banking lobby. In this environment of white-collar illicit behavior, corporations like Metalor and Glencore flourish.

A recently launched people’s referendum propagating ‘Responsible Mining’, was undermined in the Swiss Parliament by the ‘built-in’ mining lobby. It is common practice that Parliament, as well as the executive give their votum before the public vote on a referendum, another unfair practice, as it influences the voters’ final decision.

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In the meantime, the Government of Peru accuses the Swiss foundry Metalor of financing and buying tons of gold from suspicious sources in Peru, meaning illicit gold – or ‘blood gold’. Metalor is also investigated for participating in organized crime and money laundering from illicit gold deals (OjoPúblico, Peru, 14 March 2019):

“The Metalor Group was the exclusive importer of gold from illegal mining, sold or shipped by Minerales del Sur SRL (Minersur) in the period from 2001 to 2018 in the amount of more than US$ 3.5 billion. Metalor is headquartered in the Canton of Neuchatel, Switzerland.”

Metalor is also being investigated for financing Minersur’s purchasing and sales transactions of gold from illegal sources. One of these illegal sources is La Rinconada. Other illegal sources stem from gold-digging in Peru’s Madre de Dios Amazon Region, where thousands of hectares of rainforest are being raided and devastated by mafia-type organizations, similar to the ones in Rinconada. Metalor denies the accusation, saying they only deal with reputable mining corporations. The case is wide open and the stench of illegality that has been permeating Metalor for many years is as sickening as Rinconada itself.

What is it about gold that makes it destroy the environment, precious fresh water resources, the human spirit, sowing conflict among entire societies, abolishing their social fabric and bringing death to countless millions for centuries in exploited and abused regions of the globe? – The real industrial value of gold is only about 15% to 20% of its speculative market value. But the gold fever is such that banks invented ‘paper gold’, meaning that Mr. and Mrs. Anybody can buy gold without ever seeing the gold bar. The bank simply issues a certificate, an IOU for a certain amount of gold which, in theory, could be exchanged for the real thing at any time Madame Anybody would like to keep her gold bar in her personal household vault. Not so easy. There is more than 100 times more paper gold floating around than real gold is available on the market. If everybody would like to exchange their paper gold into real gold, the banking system would collapse, or would just simply fail to deliver.

Case in point was Germany. By tradition Germany had about 1,200 tons of gold, worth about US$ 50 billion, deposited in the FED in New York. In 2013, when the Germansawareness that their gold is being stored outside ofGerman borders resulted in a public outcry, the Bundesbank wanted to withdraw and repatriate all of their foreign stored gold by 2020, but the FED said no, they could not deliver. The gold was simply not available. Was the FED using the German gold and the gold of so many other countries deposited in the FED’s treasuries for speculation – rent seeking with somebody else’s assets?

Blood and crime are intimately linked to gold, it seems. Our western monetary system was for a long time backed by gold. Today, western moneys are fiat money, not even backed by gold, just hot air. But the Russian ruble and the Chinese yuan are backed by gold, as well as by their respective economies. – Who knows – as a last-ditch effort to save US-dollar and the western fiat money pyramid from collapsing, the west may again revert to some kind of gold standard, a man-made folly, when in fact, the only real value reflected in a county’s monetary system, is its economy.

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Back to La Rinconada, Metalor and Switzerland, home of more than two thirds of the world’s gold refining – how much of the reserve gold in the coffers of countries around the world is “blood gold”? – How many people, children and eventually entire generations have to live in misery, their health degenerating from exposure to heavy metals and eventually leading to early and painful death, until human consciousness is able to stop the gold craze? – Closing down hellholes like Rinconada and Madre de Dios mafia-run, all-destructive gold mines? – And hundreds more of similarlydevastatingtypesmines around the world. Perhaps when the value of gold becomes what it ought to be – its industrial value, and nothing more and nothing less, humanity becomes richer by the values of human decency and respect for each other.

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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 21^st Century; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of 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.

Featured image is from NEO

The US government has published its negotiating objectives for a trade deal with the UK, which include some worrying proposals on digital trade, including a ban on the disclosure of source code and algorithms, and potential restrictions on data protection.

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Trade negotiations between the US and the UK have recently received a lot of attention due to the publication of the official negotiating objectives of the US Government, which set out in sometimes candid detail the areas of interest and priorities. The US document is mainly written in coded “trade-speak”, with seemingly innocuous term such as “procedural fairness” or “science-based” masking huge potential impacts on a wide range of areas, from farming to NHS prescriptions. The document also sets out the priorities for the US around Digital Trade with the UK, with proposals that would affect the digital rights of people in the UK.

The UK started “non-negotiating” a trade agreement with the US soon after the country voted to leave the EU in 2016. While technically not allowed to enter formal negotiations on trade until it leaves the bloc at the end of this month, the UK government has conducted five official bilateral meetings and sent several business delegations, not counting the ongoing activity of UK officials in Washington.

A public consultation last year saw many consumer and rights groups raise concerns about a potential UK-US agreement, including ORG. We are worried about the inclusion of “Digital Trade” – also misleadingly termed “E-commerce” – in negotiations, which could lead to entrenched domination by US online platforms, lower privacy protections and more restrictions in access to information.

Last month a group of 76 countries, including the US, the EU and China, announced their intentions to start negotiations on “trade-related aspects of electronic commerce” at the World Trade Organisation (WTO). Once more this has led to widespread concerns by civil society groups such as the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue, of which ORG is a member. The proposed agenda covers non-controversial improvements, such as the use of e-signatures or fighting spam, but it includes similar proposals to those presented by the US in their digital trade objectives. These proposals will severely impact internet regulation by controlling the building blocks of digital technology: data flows, source code and algorithms.

What the US wants from the UK in digital trade

Keeping source code and algorithms confidential

The US wants to stop the UK government from “mandating the disclosure of computer source code or algorithms”. This is one of the most concerning aspects of the new digital trade agenda, already found in other recent trade agreements, and criticised by groups such as Third World Network. Restricting source code and algorithms is problematic for various reasons. In particular, the UK government has been pioneering open source software, despite some setbacks, and these clauses could be used to challenge any public procurement perceived to give preference to open source.

There are growing concerns about potential unfairness and bias in decisions made or supported by the use of algorithms, from credit to court sentencing, including the status of EU citizens after Brexit. Preventing the disclosure of algorithms would hamper efforts to develop new forms of technological transparency and accountability. The EU GDPR includes a right for individuals in certain circumstances to be informed of the logic of the systems making decisions that significantly affect them, in a potential conflict with the US digital trade proposals.

Maintaining cross-border data flows

Another objective of the US in its trade negotiations with the UK is to ensure that the UK “does not impose measures that restrict cross-border data flows and does not require the use or installation of local computing facilities”.

These demands are becoming a central feature of contemporary trade negotiations, encapsulating the key aspect of the global Digital Trade agenda: ensuring a global data flow towards the largest US-based internet giants of Silicon Valley that currently dominate the global Internet outside China and Russia.

Additionally, as we said in our response to the government consultation on the US trade deal last year, these requirements could openly clash with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which prohibits unrestricted data transfers. Wilbur Ross, US Commerce Secretary, has openly called GDPR an unnecessary barrier to trade. Agreeing to US demands would put the UK in a double bind that could jeopardise data flows to and from the EU.

Limiting online platform liability for third-party content

The US will also try to limit the liability of online platforms for third-party content excluding intellectual property, with caveats allowing “non-discriminatory measures for legitimate public policy objectives or that are necessary to protect public morals”. This is one topic that receives widespread sympathy from digital rights advocates, as policymakers across Europe try to open a new debate on Internet liability protections that could see online providers being forced to increase censorship over their users. We recently heard this argument in the report on Internet regulation by the House of Lords. Leveraging trade policy to advance a progressive digital rights agenda may seem a good idea,  but unfortunately the positives tend to be bundled with other worrying proposals, and trade negotiators lack the expertise required, so subtleties can be lost and mistakes made.

The wording in the US document reflects agreed exemptions in international trade rules, which have been applied in very few occasions. The exemption has been used by the US – to try to restrict online gambling from the Caribbean island of  Antigua; by China – to try to control the foreign influx of ideas into the country; and by the EU has to restrict the importation of products made from seals. In most cases the claim was either not successful or required modifications to the policy.

The concept of “public morals” is far from clear and as we can see from these case it can be applied quite broadly. It is meant to encompass human rights and environmental concerns, without mentioning them, but there is no agreement to how universal such morals have to be. This shows the dangers of bringing more spheres of human activity under the umbrella of trade. The UK is preparing to regulate harms to UK-based users of social media platforms, which will impact US companies, and it is unclear whether this activity could be considered a trade barrier and consequently defended under the public morals exemption. In our view, regulating online harms should not be linked to trade negotiations but examined on its own merits.

Preventing border taxes on digital products

The US wants to ensure that digital products imported into the country (e.g., software, music, video, e-books) are not taxed at the border. Right now,digital goods are mainly classified under their physical characteristics rather than content, so that DVDs and “laser-disks” including CDs are counted separately by UK customs and are generally exempt from custom duties although importers need to pay VAT. This exemption may become less relevant as the imports of tangible digital goods go down globally when compared to those distributed electronically. DVD sales are displaced by online streaming, and e-books are almost exclusively bought online, with Amazon accounting for almost 90% of market share in the UK.

Goods transmitted electronically are currently exempt from custom duties thanks to a WTO moratorium in place since 1998, which is currently being challenged by developing countries led by India and South Africa for incurring unfair revenue losses given the massive growth of online trade in the past 20 years.

The US wants to avoid any supposed discrimination against their digital products. Given the importance of the Silicon Valley giants, many measures designed to deal with large internet companies will appear to target US businesses. We are not sure yet about the specific agenda under this item in the UK context, but it is likely that they have in mind proposals to increase the taxation of tech firms. The US government has described EU proposals in this direction as “discriminatory”.  It is then likely that the UK’s own plans to tax digital services will clash with US demands. The distinction between products and services can be confusing in the digital sphere, but it is critically important in trade. In many cases, consumers do not own the music, films or e-books they “buy” online, they merely have a licence to the content ruled by terms and conditions, which is rather a service. UK consumer law has tried to deal with this confusion by creating specific protections for download purchases, called “digital content not on a tangible medium”, but it is not clear how this would impact trade categories.

What’s next?

The negotiations are advancing apace but it is difficult to predict what will happen. As the US document shows, behind the rhetoric there are hard economic interests that could slow down the process.

The above are only the official top level demands from the US government: US business groups are lining up to include many other issues. A recent public US government hearing in Washington on the negotiating objectives saw calls for full liberalisation of services, particularly financial services, among other issues that included access to the UK labour market for US workers. The hearing stressed that the economic relationship is important for both countries, not just the UK. The UK is the US largest partner in services trade and the largest buyer of digital services, and both countries are each others’ largest direct foreign investors. The UK is one of the few countries that does more trade in services with the US than in goods.

Despite the issues raised, the publication of the US document provides some level of transparency and enables public debate. We hope that the UK government will follow suit and publish its own negotiating objectives. Unfortunately, our experience in other bilateral areas, such as surveillance, indicates that the level of public accountability of the heavily politicised US federal government is not generally matched by Whitehall’s circumspect civil service. The advisory group created by the Department for International Trade (DfIT) for discussions on trade policy around Intellectual Property is a very encouraging step. A similar space should be created by DfIT where digital trade issues can be discussed with the attention they deserve.

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Three Lessons for the Progressive Left from the Mueller Inquiry

By Jonathan Cook, March 26, 2019

The left never had a dog in this race. This was always an in-house squabble between different wings of the establishment.  One wing wants to make sure the pig’s face remains painted, the other is happy simply getting its snout deeper into the trough while the food lasts. Russiagate was never about substance, it was about who gets to image-manage the decline of a turbo-charged, self-harming neoliberal capitalism.

Trump Recognizes Israeli Annexation of Golan Heights: Green Light for Global War

By Bill Van Auken, March 26, 2019

The hastily completed White House ceremony in which President Donald Trump signed a decree granting official US recognition to Israel’s illegal annexation of Syria’s Golan Heights is an act which, on its surface, appears to change few facts on the ground in the Middle East.

Venezuelan Gov’t Presents Evidence of Alleged Opposition Paramilitary Plot

By Ricardo Vaz, March 26, 2019

Venezuelan Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez presented what he claimed to be evidence of “ultra-right plans to promote regime change.” According to Rodriguez, Venezuelan intelligence services uncovered plans to contract mercenaries from Colombia and Central America and bring them into Venezuela to execute targeted killings and acts of sabotage, adding that “at least half” of the armed groups managed to make their way into Venezuelan territory and are currently being sought.

War or Uneasy Truce in Gaza? Renewed Bombing ordered by Netanyahu

By Stephen Lendman, March 26, 2019

For hours during day and nighttime hours on Monday, IDF warplanes reigned terror on Gazan targets throughout the Strip, including residential ones.

An Iranian April Surprise?

By Philip Giraldi, March 26, 2019

The Israelis are, of course, deep into the planning for a conflict, and have recently again been promoting their repeatedly discredited casus belli claim that Iran has a secret nuclear program.

In the Wake of the RussiaGate Witch-Hunt: Now We Will Find Out if Trump Is Really the President or Merely a Figurehead

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, March 26, 2019

We can conclude that it was a hoax cooked up by an utterly corrupt and immoral military/security complex determined to protect its $1,000 billion annual budget and the power that goes with it from the loss of its Russian enemy to normalized relations.

RussiaGate: Attorney General Barr’s Summary of the Mueller Report

By Common Dreams, March 26, 2019

The initial headlines on the contents of the summary highlighted that Mueller’s probe found no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 elections, but that the Special Counsel’s report “stops short” of exonerating President Donald Trump from allegations of obstruction of justice or other possible misdeeds.

Operation Condor and the United States: Torture, Death Squads and Echoes in the New Millennium

By Edward B. Winslow, March 25, 2019

On December 2, 1823 in the wake of rebellions in Latin America that had ended Spanish rule in the Western Hemisphere, US President James Monroe announced that European colonial powers that attempted to assert influence in the region would be an overt threat to the national security of the US.

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André Vitchek is a Russian-born American political analyst, journalist, and a filmmaker who has lived in the US, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Vietnam, Samoa and Indonesia. He has covered armed conflicts in Peru, Kashmir, Mexico, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Congo, India, South Africa, East Timor, Indonesia, Turkey and the Middle East.

He has traveled to more than 140 countries, and has written for Der Spiegel, Asahi Shimbun, The Guardian, ABC News and Lidové noviny and appeared on various television and radio shows including France 24,] RT, China Radio International, The Voice of Russia, Press TV, CCTV, Ulusal Kanal (Turkey), Al-Mayadeen (Pan-Arabic network), Radio Pacifika, and Radio Cape, among others.

No to NATO and War – Yes to Peace and Progress

Saturday, March 30, 2019 from 9:30AM-4:30pm CST

Cathedral Neighbourhood Center

2900 13th Avenue

Regina, Saskatchewan

This conference will be marking 70 years of war-making by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and 70 years of working for peace by the World Peace Council. The keynote address will be by André Vltchek, noted journalist, author, film-maker, globe trott’er, critic of NATO and Western interventionism and contributor to Global Research.

See André Vltchek’s Archive on Global Research 

The conference will also be addressed by Laura Savinkoff, Vice-President of the Canadian Peace Congress, and David Gehl, local peace activist/leader. At noon there will be an anti-NATO rally in Victoria Park.

Hosted by Regina Peace Council

From Venezuela to NATO: The Growing Danger of War

Wednesday April 3

7-9pm

Eckhardt Grammatte Hall

University of Winnipeg

515 Portage Avenue

Winnipeg, Manitoba

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, giving rise to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or NATO. The mission of the original 12-member military alliance was to oppose the Soviet Union. With the dissolution of the USSR on December 26, 1991, one might wonder why NATO still exists, much less why it has grown to 29 members including some which are far removed from the north Atlantic.

Please join us for a public forum on the role of NATO and the threat it presents to world peace. Our keynote speaker is journalist André Vltchek. His presentation will be followed by a question and answer session.

Sponsors:
Peace Alliance Winnipeg
Geopolitical Economy Research Group
Menno Simons College Department of Conflict Resolution Studies