A draft US Senate resolution describing Saudi policy in the Middle East as a “wrecking ball” and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman as “complicit” in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if adopted and implemented, potentially could change the dynamics of the region’s politics and create an initial exit from almost a decade of mayhem, conflict and bloodshed.

The six-page draft also holds Prince Mohammed accountable for the devastating war in Yemen that has sparked one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, the failure to end the 17-month-old Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar, and the jailing and torture of Saudi dissidents and activists.

In doing so, the resolution confronts not only Prince Mohammed’s policies but also by implication those of his closest ally, UAE crown prince Mohammed bin Zayed. The UAE was the first country that Saudi leader visited after the Khashoggi killing.

By in effect challenging the position of king-in-waiting Prince Mohammed, the resolution raises the question whether some of his closest allies, including the UAE crown prince, will in future want to be identified that closely with him.

Moreover, by demanding the release of activist Raif bin Muhammad Badawi, better known as Raif Badawi, and women’s rights activists, the resolution further the challenges fundamentals of Prince Mohammed’s iron-fisted repression of his critics, the extent of his proposed social reforms as part of his drive to diversify and streamline the Saudi economy, and the kingdom’s human rights record.

A 34-year-old blogger who named his website Free Saudi Liberals, Mr. Badawi was barred from travel and had his assets frozen in 2009, arrested in 2012, and sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for insulting Islam. His sister, Samar Badawi, a women’s rights activist, was detained earlier this year. Mr. Badawi’s wife and children were granted asylum and citizenship in Canada.

A diplomatic row that stunned many erupted in August when Saudi Arabia expelled the Canadian ambassador after the foreign ministry in Ottawa demanded in a tweet the release of Ms. Badawi and other activists.

Prince Mohammed and Saudi Arabia, even prior to introduction of the Senate resolution, were discovering that the Khashoggi killing had weakened the kingdom internationally and had made it more vulnerable to pressure.

Talks in Sweden between the Saudi-backed Yemeni government and Houthi rebels to end the war is the most immediate consequence of the kingdom’s changing position.

So is the resolution that is unprecedented in the scope and harshness of the criticism of a long-standing ally.

While the resolution is likely to spark initial anger among some of Prince’s Mohammed’s allies, it nevertheless, if adopted and/or implemented, could persuade some like UAE crown prince Mohammed to rethink their fundamental strategies.

The relationship between the two Mohammeds constituted a cornerstone of the UAE leader’s strategy to achieve his political, foreign policy and defense goals.

These include projecting the Emirates as a guiding light of cutting-edge Arab and Muslim modernity; ensuring that the Middle East fits the crown prince’s autocratic, anti-Islamist mould; and enabling the UAE, described by US defense secretary Jim Mattis as ‘Little Sparta,‘ to punch above its weight politically, diplomatically and militarily.

To compensate for the Emirates’ small size, Prince Mohammed opted to pursue his goals in part by working through the Saudi royal court. In leaked emails, UAE ambassador to Washington Yousef al-Otaiba, a close associate of Prince Mohammed, said of the Saudi crown prince that

“I don’t think we’ll ever see a more pragmatic leader in that country.”

Mr. Al-Otaiba went on to say:

“I think in the long term we might be a good influence on KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), at least with certain people there. Our relationship with them is based on strategic depth, shared interests, and most importantly the hope that we could influence them. Not the other way around.”

The impact of the Senate resolution and what it means for the US policy will to a large extent depend on the politics of the differences between the Congress and President Donald J. Trump who has so far sought to shield the Saudi crown prince.

To further do so, Mr. Trump, with or without the resolution, would likely have to pressure Saudi Arabia to give him something tangible to work with such as an immediate release of imprisoned activists followed by a resolution of the Qatar crisis as well as some indication that the Yemen peace negotiations are progressing.

Whichever way, the fallout of the Khashoggi killing, culminating in unprecedented Congressional anger against Prince Mohammed and the kingdom, is likely to have significant consequences not only for the Saudi crown prince but potentially also for the strategy of his UAE counterpart.

That in turn could create light at the end of the Middle East’s tunnel of almost a decade of volatility and violent and bloody conflict that has been driven by Saudi and UAE assertiveness in countering dissent at home and abroad in the wake of the 2011 popular Arab revolts as well as Iran that has played its part in countries like Syria and Yemen in fuelling destruction and bloodshed.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

Especially at state funerals, media and politicians pretend that US presidents are honorable men, instead of the mass murderers that all of them become in office.

“The US has caused the deaths of 20 to 30 million people since World War Two, a level of carnage approaching that inflicted on Europe by Hitler.”

The daily whitewashing of imperial crimes that masquerades as “news” on corporate media becomes high ceremony when a Genocider-in-Chief dies. Now it is George Herbert Walker Bush’s turn to be canonized for bringing “’a ‘thousand points of light’ illuminating the greatness, hope, and opportunity of America to the world,” in the words of the current CEO of Empire, Donald Trump. Former White House denizens Obama, Clinton and Carter also lauded the life and works of their accomplice in global predation, as did the son-of-a-Bush, George W., the under-achiever who wound up out-doing his daddy in mass murder.

As high priests of American Exceptionalism, corporate news anchors absolve the dead leader of culpability for the mega-deaths inflicted on those countries targeted for invasion, drone strikes, regime change, proxy wars, or crippling economic sanctions under his watch — an easy task for the media glib-makers, since their colleagues sanitized those crimes while they were in progress, decades ago. But the whitewasher’s job is never done; the bodies keep piling up, “regimes” go “rogue,” meaning they disobey American dictat or otherwise get in the way of the imperial project, or run afoul of vital U.S. allies, as with the unfortunate Yemenis and Palestinians.

“The whitewasher’s job is never done.”

Whatever the human cost, it is “worth it,” as Clinton’s former Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright said of the half a million Iraqi children that died as a result of U.S. sanctions and the bombing of Iraqi infrastructure – carnage begun by Daddy Bush and continued by Bill Clinton, and then begun again with Bush Junior’s “Shock and Awe” demonstration of U.S. military might. Obama got hundreds of thousands more Iraqis killed when he armed and trained head-chopping legions of Islamist jihadists to swarm the region in an attempted imperial comeback that has killed half a million Syrians, to date.

Presidential funerals are venues of absolution, mainly for crimes that are unacknowledged.

Most Americans would be shocked – or feign surprise — if told that their country had caused the deaths of 20 to 30 million people since World War Two, a level of carnage approaching that inflicted on Europe by Hitler. But they do know the U.S. leaves dead bodies in its wake all around the planet — Americans are not clueless, and that which they don’t know is due as much to deliberate, determined ignorance as it is to the failings of the news media. A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution, and the United States has not experienced such a transformation. At least half the population sees the death of millions of non-whites as “collateral damage” from America’s civilizing mission in the world: it’s “worth it.”

“A nation born in genocide and slavery does not change its nature without undergoing a revolution.”

In such a country, eight million murdered Congolese can be vanished from national consciousness without a trace of guilt. The Rwandans and Ugandans that carried out this holocaust under U.S. protection, with U.S. arms, and in service to U.S. imperial objectives, are also absolved, lest their crimes taint the reputations of Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama, or besmirch the U.S. national character.

The oldest of the living former presidents, Jimmy Carter, has spent decades building houses for the poor to atone for his crimes in the Oval Office. In addition to contributing to the carnage in Angola and backing fascist military regimes that slaughtered or disappeared hundreds of thousands in Latin America, the peanut-farming bible-thumper set in motion the U.S. alliance with al-Qaida. The creation of the first international network of Islamist jihadists, initially to force the Soviets out of Afghanistan, was the brainchild of Carter national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. Tens of thousands of heads have rolled since then, thanks to the honorable and righteous Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter set in motion the U.S. alliance with al-Qaida.”

Barack Obama is a methodical man who claimed to be completing Dr. Martin Luther King’s work but instead added his own wars to the continuum of the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” Obama told the U.S. Congress that his unprovoked attack on Libya was not a war, at all, because no Americans died, thus establishing a new doctrine and definition of warfare in which only U.S. deaths count. His secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, established new lows in diplomacy when she greeted news of Muammar Gaddafi’s death, cackling, “We came, we saw, he died” – which could be the said of all the tens of millions of deaths at the hands of U.S. presidents.

International law has no place in U.S. foreign policy, or U.S. corporate media broadcasts, or in the U.S. political discourse. Bernie Sanders, the Great Gray Hope of leftish Democrats, prefers not to speak of foreign policy at all, and can thus ignore the millions of corpses left behind as a result of U.S. policy. And he is also considered to be an upright and moral man.

The current occupant of the White House has so far committed less carnage in the world than his peers, although the so-called “Resisters” that seek his ouster from office behave as if Trump is a greater criminal and threat than any of his predecessors. They applaud Trump only when he launches military attacks. Since he loves applause, it is certain that Trump will increase his body count before the election season begins in earnest.

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BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

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The Anti-BDS Derangement Syndrome

December 6th, 2018 by Kurt Nimmo

Democrat Ben Cardin, a senator from Maryland and a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is determined to sneak through anti-BDS legislation during the lame duck session of Congress. 

Most Americans are either ignorant or vaguely aware of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions aimed at Israel for its criminal treatment of the Palestinians. This is because the movement is scantily covered by the corporate propaganda media, but also because millions of Americans couldn’t care less what happens to the Palestinians, even though the Israeli military and its ethnic cleansing program are funded in large part by their tax dollars.

Liberty is dead in America. Prior to the American Revolution, the colonies boycotted British goods. In 1774, the First Continental Congress called for a boycott and this was enforced by new committees authorized by the Congress.

Boycotts are legend—from Gandhi organizing a boycott of British goods to the bus boycotts in Montgomery and Tallahassee during the Civil Rights movement. The predecessors of today’s Zionists used a boycott to stop the importation of German products in the US, Britain, Poland, and Mandatory Palestine. Additionally, Jews imposed a boycott on Henry Ford in the 1920s. 

All of that is largely forgotten, mostly because Americans don’t do history and their political understanding is sculpted and curtailed by the state and its propaganda media. The corporate media has managed to portray BDS as rabid antisemitism. 

But then, in America and especially Europe, any criticism of the Israeli apartheid state is considered a form of hatred—more egregious than all other hatred—that leads ultimately to the gates of Auschwitz. 

The anti-BDS push has thus far infected 25 states. In 2017, this mania and support for the international renegade state of Israel resulted in a city in Texas requiring businesses to certify that they would not boycott Israel before receiving hurricane aid.

Ryan Grim and Alex Emmons write that the

“Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which was introduced last year by Cardin and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, would amend the 1979 Export Administration Act to allow penalties for companies who join boycotts of Israel called for by international institutions—like the United Nations or the European Union. The new version clarifies that people cannot face jail time for participating in a boycott, but the ACLU has argued that it still leaves the door open for criminal financial penalties. Defenders of the bill say that it is strictly aimed at preventing companies from facing pressure to boycott Israel and that it is not meant to restrict an individual’s free speech.”

Eradicating the First Amendment comes in second to protecting Israel and its slow-motion ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. If you criticize Israel for its repeated violations of international law, you will face harassment—as I discovered back in the late 2000s. I received death threats and harassing phone calls at my place of employment at that time for the crime of taking the little apartheid state to task on my blog.  

At one point, an email arrived with an image attachment—my face photoshopped on the body of Julius Streicher, the founder and publisher of Der Stürmer, a Nazi newspaper. Streicher was one of the most virulent antisemites of the Nazi party. He was executed at Nuremberg. This sort of nasty and hysterical behavior is what critics of Israel face on a regular basis. 

If Cardin manages to attach his anti-liberty amendment to S. 720, an end-of-the-year omnibus spending bill, this will further embolden supporters of Israel to not only criminalize free speech, but physically go after critics. 

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Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Operation #Northern Shield: Countdown to Another Israel-Hezbollah War?

December 6th, 2018 by Timothy Alexander Guzman

The State of Israel has conducted an operation to destroy tunnels on the Israeli side of the what is internationally known as the Blue Line between Israel and Lebanon. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) tweeted “We have just launched Operation Northern Shield to expose and neutralize cross-border attack tunnels dug by Hezbollah from #Lebanon to #Israel. #NorthernShield.” According to a report by The Times of Israel ‘IDF says 200-meter attack tunnel from Lebanon uncovered as operation launches’:

The Israeli military on Tuesday said it uncovered the “first of sure to be many” cross-border attack tunnels dug by the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist group, this one from under a house in the Lebanese village of Kafr Kila, across from the Israeli town of Metulla.

This was the first tunnel that the Israel Defense Forces has said it discovered as part of a newly launched operation — Northern Shield — to find and destroy the offensive subterranean passages from Lebanon, which the army said are not yet operational and do not present an immediate threat to Israelis.

“At this time, having exposed the tunnel, IDF soldiers are conducting engineering and operational efforts before neutralizing it,” the army said in a statement.

The report quoted what IDF Spokesperson Ronen Manelis had said in regards to the operation and how far it can go,

“IDF Spokesperson Ronen Manelis indicated that other tunnels may be destroyed within Lebanon as well. “We are prepared for all options, and the operation is only in its first day. The neutralizing of the tunnels will not necessarily take place within our territory,” he said.”

What Manelis is stating that the Israeli operation will continue into Lebanese territory as a precursor to war between Israel and Hezbollah.

“The IDF said the “terror tunnel” originated under a Lebanese home in Kafr Kila and extended some 40 meters (130 feet) into Israeli territory. The army said the tunnel was approximately 200 meters (650 feet) long, some 25 meters (80 feet) deep, and was two meters (six feet) tall by two meters (six feet) wide” according to the report. 

Arutz Sheva (also known as the Israel National News) interviewed Professor Moshe Maoz of the Department of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who claimed that

“The operation will not improve relations because the two sides are on the verge of war,” Maoz said, “Since 2006 there has been a cease-fire and mutual deterrence.”

Professor Maoz also spoke about Hezbollah’s ties with Iran and that Israel has the potential to use its undeclared nuclear weapons against Iran:

“They are connected to Iran. They work in cooperation with Iran, and a single incident can have repercussions for the entire region. Therefore, I think that the sides will be more cautious,” Maoz said. He recalled Hezbollah’s decision to respond to Israeli actions in the past, a decision that they repeat over and over again in order to be considered as defenders of Lebanon.

“They will have to respond. The question of how they will respond, whether with gunfire or not. No one wants to get a response from mutual missile fire because there will be mutual destruction. We will be able to destroy large parts of Lebanon and they will be able to hit the Galilee and further south. I assume that even Nasrallah, who is a religious fanatic, is neither crazy nor stupid, and therefore he is also careful.

“Iran also knows that according to foreign sources, Israel has atomic bombs and we can inflict tremendous damage on them, so they will consider twice whether to attack Israel, unless it is a very extreme case.”

Israeli politicians and military officials including Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu can possibly use its nuclear weapons against Iran in what would be called a catastrophic mistake against Iran. It would create a backlash of extreme proportions of the Muslim majority in the region. Neocon extremist and warmonger in the Trump administration, John Bolton has also expressed “strong” support for Israel’s operation when he tweeted

“The US strongly supports Israel’s efforts to defend its sovereignty, and we call on Hizballah to stop its tunneling into Israel and to refrain from escalation and violence. More broadly, we call on Iran and all of its agents to stop their regional aggression and provocation, which pose an unacceptable threat to Israeli and regional security.” 

In the 2006 Lebanon War, according to a 2007 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, there were at least 1,109 Lebanese civilians deaths whom the majority were civilians with 4,399 injured adding an estimated 1 million people displaced. According to the HRW report, there were 43 Israeli civilian and 12 IDF soldiers dead and hundreds of civilians were wounded. There were also 300,000 Israelis displaced during the course of the war. Hezbollah has been a thorn on the side of Israel since its creation to fend off Israeli expansion into Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah understands that Israel wants a destabilized Middle East so that they can rule over the Muslim people. It is clearly stated in Oded Yinon’s ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties’ where he stated the following:

The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must 1) become an imperial regional power, and 2) must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all existing Arab states. Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently, the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel’s satellites and, ironically, its source of moral legitimation 

Israel wants to be the Imperial power in the Middle East controlling the Muslim people and it’s the natural resources including oil, gas and water which would benefit both Israeli and U.S. business interests. With the Trump Administration’s full support of Israeli actions against its neighbors, war is inevitable. Israel knows that it cannot move forward on its attack on Iran without neutralizing Hezbollah. Israel also knows that without the help of the U.S. military forces in the region, an attack on Iran is not possible. However, It is important to know that Iran has the backing of Russia, China and most of the Muslim world if Israel were to attack Iran, therefore it would guarantee a defeat for both Israel and the U.S.

It is clear that Israel’s time is running out in regards to the declining superpower of the U.S. Empire.  With the U.S. suffering from its recent military failures against Iraq and Afghanistan with an added $21 Trillion to its national debt and a collapsing U.S. dollar, Israeli officials know the time is now to start a new war because the U.S. will not be capable of fighting for the “Jewish State” especially when it’s experiencing its rapid decline.

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So much for a trade war truce between China and the US, or a stock market Christmas rally for that matter.

Shortly after the news hit that Huawei CFO Wanzhou Meng — also deputy chairwoman and the daughter of Huawei’s founder — was arrested on December 1, or right around the time Trump and Xi were having dinner in Buenos Aires last Saturday, and faces extradition to the U.S. as a result of a DOJ investigation into whether the Chinese telecom giant sold gear to Iran despite sanctions on exports to the region, China immediately lodged a formal protest publishing a statement at its embassy in Canada, and demanding the U.S. and its neighbor “rectify wrongdoings” and free Meng, warning it would “closely follow the development of the issue” and will “take all measures” to protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens.

Full statement below:

Remarks of the Spokesperson of the Chinese Embassy in Canada on the issue of a Chinese citizen arrested by the Canadian side

At the request of the US side, the Canadian side arrested a Chinese citizen not violating any American or Canadian law. The Chinese side firmly opposes and strongly protests over such kind of actions which seriously harmed the human rights of the victim. The Chinese side has lodged stern representations with the US and Canadian side, and urged them to immediately correct the wrongdoing and restore the personal freedom of Ms. Meng Wanzhou.

We will closely follow the development of the issue and take all measures to resolutely protect the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese citizens.

Meng’s arrest will immediately heighten tensions between Washington and Beijing just days after the world’s two largest economies agreed on a truce in their growing trade conflict. It will, or at least should, also prompt any US execs currently in China to think long and hard if that’s where they want to be, say, tomorrow when Xi decides to retaliate in kind.

Meng’s father Ren Zhengfei, a former army engineer who’s regularly named among China’s top business executives, has won acclaim at home for turning an electronics reseller into the world’s second-largest smartphone maker and a major producer of networking gear.

As Bloomberg notes, the CFO’s arrest will be regarded back home as an attack on China’s foremost corporate champions. While Alibaba and Tencent dominate headlines thanks to flashy growth and high-profile billionaire founders, Ren’s company is by far China’s most global technology company, with operations spanning Africa, Europe and Asia.

“Tencent and Alibaba may be domestic champions and huge platforms in of their own rights, but Huawei has become a global powerhouse,” said Neil Campling, an analyst at Mirabaud Securities Ltd. It is “5G standards that are at the heart of the wider IP debate and why the U.S. and her allies are now doing everything they can to cut to the heart of the Chinese technology IP revolution.”

At the same time, Huawei’s technological ambitions have also gotten the company in hot water with the US: its massive push into future mobile communications has raised hackles in the U.S. and become a focal point for American attempts to contain China’s ascendance.

Going back to the arrest, the U.S. Justice Department declined to comment about the circumstances involving the CFO, although the biggest question on everyone’s mind right now is whether Trump was aware of the pending arrest at the time of his dinner with the Chinese president, and why exactly he had greenlighted the move which would certainly result in another diplomatic scandal, promptly crushing and goodwill that was generated at the G-20 dinner.

Meanwhile, in a statement, Huawei said the arrest was made on behalf of the U.S. so Meng could be extradited to “face unspecified charges” in the Eastern District of New York.

“The company has been provided very little information regarding the charges and is not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng,” Huawei said. “The company believes the Canadian and U.S. legal systems will ultimately reach a just conclusion. Huawei complies with all applicable laws and regulations where it operates, including applicable export control and sanction laws and regulations of the UN, U.S. and EU.”

Tensions between the Chinese telecom giant and U.S. authorities escalated in 2016, when the US voiced concerns for the first time that Huawei and others could install back doors in their equipment that would let them monitor users in the U.S. Huawei has denied those allegations. The Pentagon stopped offering Huawei’s devices on U.S. military bases citing security concerns. Best Buy Co., one of the largest electronics retailers in the U.S., also recently stopped selling Huawei products.

In August, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill banning the government’s use of Huawei technology based on the security concerns. The same month, Australia banned the use of Huawei’s equipment for new faster 5G wireless networks in the country and New Zealand last week did the same, citing national security concerns. Similar moves are under consideration in the U.K. The U.S., which believes Huawei’s equipment can be used for spying, is contacting key allies including Germany, Italy and Japan, to get them to persuade companies in their countries to avoid using equipment from Huawei, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

In 2016, the Commerce Department sought information regarding whether Huawei was possibly sending U.S. technology to Syria and North Korea as well as Iran.

The U.S. previously banned ZTE Corp., a Huawei competitor, for violating a sanctions settlement over transactions with Iran and North Korea.

The cynics out there may claim that the US response is merely in place to delay the development of the company which in the third quarter overtook Apple as the No. 2 global smartphone maker, shipping more than 52.2 million units according to Gartner Inc.

“This is what you call playing hard ball,” said Michael Every, head of Asia financial markets research at Rabobank in Hong Kong. “China is already asking for her release, as can be expected, but if the charges are serious, don’t expect the US to blink.”

The biggest question is what will China do next. One look at futures, which flash crashed earlier when the news of the CFO’s arrest first hit, suggests that whatever it is, Beijing will probably not be happy.

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The next move for the French working people is to organize INDEPENDENTLY against a system that President Macron represents; a system that puts profit over people. This is possible only through unity with the closest allies, as well as the working people in Belgium, Bulgaria and the Netherlands who have already joined the “yellow vest” protests in France.

Those organizations that in the name of French workers suggest reconciliation or dialogue between the French government and working people should be rejected wholeheartedly. Between the reactionary Capitalists and revolutionary workers, there is no middle “progressive” ideology.

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

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EPA Sued for Records of Andrew Wheeler Meetings with Oil Lobbyists

December 6th, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity

The Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth sued the Environmental Protection Agency today for refusing to release public records concerning meetings and communications with the lobbying firm Faegre Baker Daniels, the former employer of EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler.

“Wheeler is crippling environmental protections that inconvenience his old clients,” said Bill Snape, the Center’s senior counsel. “The public needs to know what happened between Wheeler’s former employer and the environmental agency he’s now running into the ground. We seem to have another fox guarding the henhouse.”

Today’s lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. Before joining the EPA, Wheeler worked for almost a decade at Faegre Baker Daniels, where he lobbied for the fossil fuel industry against environmental protections. Wheeler promised to avoid conflicts of interests with his former clients during his Senate confirmation.

“Andrew Wheeler is continuing Scott Pruitt’s toxic, polluter-friendly agenda at the Environmental Protection Agency,” said Lukas Ross, a senior policy analyst at Friends of the Earth. “The public has a right to know just how much power Wheeler’s lobbyist friends have over the EPA. This lawsuit will help expose the dangerous influence of corporate polluters and root out corruption at the EPA.”

Under Wheeler the EPA has moved to weaken a wide range of environmental protections, including a proposal last month to gut a 2016 rule curbing methane pollution from oil and gas facilities.

The Center and FOE filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the EPA about meetings and communications with the oil industry in Spring 2018. In October 2018 the groups notified the agency that it’s in violation of the Act. Seven months have passed, and the agency has failed to release detailed records.

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“This is going to be one of the most infamous news disasters since Stern published the ‘Hitler Diaries.’” — WikiLeaks, Twitter, Nov 27, 2018

Those at The Guardian certainly felt they were onto something.  It would be a scoop that would have consequences on a range of fronts featuring President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Julian Assange and the eponymous Russian connection with the 2016 US elections. 

If they could tie the ribbon of Manafort over the Assage package, one linked to the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails in the summer of 2016, they could strike journalistic gold.  At one stroke, they could achieve a trifecta: an exposé on WikiLeaks, Russian involvement, and the tie-in with the Trump campaign. 

The virally charged story, when run towards the leg end of November, claimed that Manafort had visited Assange in the embassy “in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016.”  Speculation happily followed in an account untroubled by heavy documentation.

“It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed.  But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.”

It was a strikingly shoddy effort.  An “internal document” supposedly garnered from the Ecuadorean intelligence agency named a certain “Paul Manaford [sic]” as a guest while also noting the presence of “Russians”.  No document or individual names were supplied.

The enterprise was supposedly to come with an added satisfaction: getting one over the prickly Assange, a person with whom the paper has yet a frosty association with since things went pear shaped after Cablegate in 2010. Luke Harding, the lead behind this latest packaging effort, has received his fair share of pasting in the past, with Assange accusing him of “minimal additional research” and mere reiteration in the shabby cobbling The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World’s Most Wanted Man(2014). “The Guardian,” Assange observed in reviewing the work, “is a curiously inward-looking beast.”  Harding, for his part, is whistling the promotional tune of his unmistakably titled book Collusion: How Russia Helped Trump Win the White House.  The feud persists with much fuel.

Unfortunately for those coup seekers attempting a framed symmetry, the bomb has yet to detonate, an inert creature finding its ways into placid waters. WikiLeaks was, understandably, the first out of the stables with an irate tweet

“Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation.  @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” 

Manafort himself denied ever meeting Assange.

“I have never met Julian Assange or anyone connected to him.  I have never been contacted by anyone connected to WikiLeaks, either directly or indirectly.  I have never reached out to Assange or WikiLeaks on any matter.”

WikiLeaks has also pointed to a certain busy bee fabricator as a possible source for Harding et al, an Ecuadorean journalist by the name of Fernando Villavicencio.  Villavicencio cut his milk teeth digging into the record of Moreno’s predecessor and somewhat Assange friendly, Rafael Correa.

Glenn Greenwald, himself having had a stint – and a fruitful one covering the Snowden revelations on the National Security Agency – had also been relentless on the inconsistencies. If Manafort did visit Assange, why the vagueness and absence of evidence? London, he points out, “is one of the world’s most surveilled, if not the most surveilled, cities.”  The Ecuadorean embassy is, in turn, “one of the most scrutinized, surveilled, monitored and filmed locations on the planet.” Yet no photographic or video evidence has been found linking Manafort to Assange.

The grey-haired establishment types are also wondering about the lack of fizz and bubble.  Paul Farhi at The Washington Post furnishes an example:

“No other news organization has been able to corroborate the Guardian’s reporting to substantiate its central claim of a meeting.  News organizations typically do such independent reporting to confirm important stories.”

Another distorting aspect to this squalid matter is the Manafort-Ecuadorean link, which does little to help Harding’s account.  A debt ridden Manafort, according to the New York Times, ventured his way to Ecuador in mid-May last year to proffer his services to the newly elected president, Lenín Moreno.  Moreno could not have been flattered: this was a man’s swansong and rescue bid, desperate to ingratiate himself with governments as varied as Iraqi Kurdistan and Puerto Rico.   

In two meetings (the number might be more) between Manafort and his Ecuadorean interlocutor, various issues were canvassed.  Eyes remained on China but there was also interest in finding some workable solution to debt relief from the United States.  Then came that issue of a certain Australian, and now also Ecuadorean national, holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge, London.

Moreno has been courting several options, none of which seem to have grown wings.  A possibility of getting a diplomatic post for Assange in Russia did not take off. (British authorities still threatened the prospect of arrest.)  The issue of removing the thorniest dissident publisher in modern memory remains furiously alive.  

As ever, accounts of the Moreno-Manafort tête-à-tête vary.  A spokesman for Manafort, one Jason Maloni, suggests a different account.  Manafort was not the instigator, but merely the recipient, of a query from Moreno about “his desire to remove Julian Assange from Ecuador’s embassy.”  Manafort listened impassively, “but made no promises as this was ancillary to the purpose of the meeting.”  Russia, he sought to clarify, did not crop up. 

Fraud might run through Manafort’s blood (convictions on eight counts of bank-and tax-fraud is fairly convincing proof of that), but the case assembled against Assange seems very much one of enthusiastic botch-up masquerading as a stitch-up.  So far, the paper has batten down the hatches, and Harding has referred any queries through The Guardian’s spokesman, Brendan O’Grady.  Zeal can be punishing.  O’Grady will have to earn his keep. 

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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]

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Extreme weather events are occurring more and more frequently, in line with scientists’ prognostications about the increasingly-dire effects of global warming. Yet polls show that most Americans still do not take global warming seriously. What accounts for such a disconnect? In part, it’s due to how the mass media “stage” their news coverage.

Recent wildfires have wreaked absolute havoc in California, covering more than 242,000 acres, destroying more than 13,000 structures including an entire town of 26,000, and killing 85 people with others still unaccounted for. Driven by unprecedented drought conditions, this is the worst wildfire season in recorded state history and it’s far from over.

Less than two months ago, Hurricane Michael roared through the Florida panhandle and into Georgia, killing at least 60 and causing $15 billion in damage. It was described as “the worst hurricane to ever hit that part of Florida.” Last year there was Hurricane Maria that devastated Puerto Rico, with a death toll of almost 3,000 and $91 billion in damage.

If climate science is taken seriously, none of these events should have come as any great surprise. Indeed, climatologists have been warning about such calamities for decades, saying that global warming is an existential threat to all mankind. Virtually every national academy of science in the world has joined them.

Despite record-breaking natural catastrophes, many Americans don’t take global warming seriously

Yet a large percentage of Americans continue to believe that global warming either (a) does not exist or (b) if it does exist, is not caused by human activity and therefore is not something we can do anything about. A recent (Oct 29-Nov 1, 2018) ABC News/Washington Post poll of 1,029 registered voters nationwide, for example, found that global warming ranked only seventh in importance among respondents’ concerns, well below topics such as immigration, “reducing divisions,” and border security. Only 48% agreed it was even a “very important” issue!

National news coverage is partly to blame

If indeed global warming is the existential threat that scientists claim it to be, what explains such relative unconcern about it by the US public? Why the disconnect? Although there are of course many possible reasons, certainly one of them is the shortage of attention given to global climate change by the mainstream media. In particular, many natural disasters such as the wildfires and hurricanes cited above are covered extensively by the national news media but with little or no mention of global warming. Thus, many viewers no doubt fail to connect the dots.

Some examples

For example, in a long Associated Press report the day after Hurricane Michael hit the Florida panhandle, global warming was not even mentioned until 21 paragraphs into the article. (How many readers go that deep into any article?) And even then it was quickly dismissed: “The storm is likely to fire up the debate over global warming. Scientists say global warming is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme weather, such as storms, droughts, floods and fires, and Michael was fueled by abnormal water temperatures in the Gulf — 4-to-5 degrees above the historic norm for this time of year. But without extensive study, they cannot directly link a single weather event to the changing climate.” [my emphasis]

Far more often there’s no mention of global warming at all. For example, the CBS Nightly News devoted the first 13 minutes of its national broadcast (10.11.18) to Hurricane Michael, yet failed to mention global warming/climate change even once. With regard to the recent California wildfires, a study by Media Matters found that, on average, three main national networks (CBS, ABC, NBC) mentioned “climate change” in only 3.7% of their broadcasts about those fires.

“Staging”

To describe these sorts of textual manipulations, discourse analysts use a concept borrowed from the theater world: “staging.” Staging refers to the degree of prominence given to a certain concept in a text or body of texts. Concepts that receive significant attention are said to be foregrounded, those that do not are backgrounded. Backgrounding reaches an extreme when relevant information is entirely omitted.

The cases cited above all illustrate such staging at work. In national mainstream news reports about natural disasters, global warming is systematically backgrounded, most often not even mentioned at all. Headline stories capture the attention of countless citizens and could have educational value. When they conceal the linkage between global warming and natural disasters, golden opportunities are lost.

Why do they do this? Follow the money!

Why do the mainstream news media do this? Although a number of possible reasons come to mind, the cui bono principle leads us to two in particular. First, the United States today is extremely polarized politically, with one entire party notably in denial about anthropogenic climate change. Thus, if a national network devoted much attention to it, it would risk alienating a very large bloc of voters, thereby cutting heavily into corporate profits.

Another reason, I would suggest, is the corporate ownership and commercial sponsorship of these same national networks. ABC, CBS, and NBC (and CNN, FoxNews, etc.) are all heavily dependent on a consumerist economic system that does not protect but rather exploits our natural environment. It’s a system that stands to gain, at least in the short term, by suppressing public awareness of global climate change and its increasingly destructive consequences. Systematically downplaying or ignoring altogether the linkage between global warming and natural disasters serves that purpose.

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This article first appeared in The Daily Doublespeak (dailydoublespeak.com).

Tom Huckin is a professor emeritus of English and Writing at the University of Utah, specializing in the study of modern propaganda. He has co-authored five books on academic subjects and written some 90 scholarly papers, including a chapter in Propaganda and Rhetoric in Democracy (2016). He is a co-founder of the Salt Lake City chapter of Move to Amend, which aspires to get big money out of our elections. He can be reached at [email protected].

Source

Associated Press (2018) “Hurricane Michael is leaving a path of destruction, but it isn’t done yet.” 10.11.18

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The contrived outrage regarding Putin’s high five with Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman obscures the fact that Russia-Saudi and the Saudi-US relations are completely different.

The US relationship with Saudi Arabia, a longstanding outrage among those who take US foreign policy rhetoric about “human rights” seriously, is widely in question. The slaughter of Jamal Khoshoggi, a journalist associated with the Washington Post, carried out in a particularly brutal manner, was hard to overlook. The fact that the USA sells huge amounts of weapons and purchases huge amounts of oil from a despotic monarchy that still practices public beheadings, while normally overlooked, has suddenly become a widespread topic of debate. The atrocities in Yemen, currently committed by the Kingdom in effort to restore puppet leader Mansour Hadi, are suddenly now up for debate as well, with liberals suddenly being outraged by crimes they previously ignored.

However, those forces that seek to change the conversation, have latched on to clever conversational diversion. Yes, while the US government’s relationship with the Saudi monarchy is one of billions of dollars in weapons sales and contracts with Wall Street’s four supermajor oil monopolists, Russian President Vladimir Putin is being blasted for giving a “high five” to the Saudi Crown Prince at the G20 in Argentina.

The clip has been widely circulated by Russia’s detractors as “proof” that Russia’s relationship is somehow the moral equivalent of the US relationship with the Saudi autocrats. Not only has the short video clip circulated the web, but a confused sketch on the popular US comedy sketch took it to even further, confused levels.

The reality is that Russia’s foreign policy and Saudi foreign policy simply do not coincide. Russia is supporting the Syrian Arab Republic, Saudi Arabia supports those working to violently overthrow it. Russia is friendly with the Islamic Republic of Iran and closely financially tied to it, while Saudi Arabia seeks to isolate Iran and pushes anti-Shia sectarianism among the Muslims of the world.

Yes, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been intensely negotiating in recent months, for very clear reasons. Russia, like Saudi Arabia, is a major oil exporting country. During the years of the Bush administration, the oil prices skyrocketed to some of the highest prices in history, reaching over $110 per barrel. Then, starting in 2014, the oil prices dropped to historic lows, at one point reaching a mere $27 per barrel.

These erratic shifts in the oil markets caused huge problems, not just for Saudi Arabia and Russia, but for the global economy. Brazil saw big problems with Petrobas, its state run oil company. Venezuela suffered the most, with a food crisis and political turmoil. Nigeria faced hardship, as did other oil producing state. Fracking colonies in the barren regions of America such as North Dakota dried up and collapsed. Fracking companies went bust, with the big four supermajors restoring their monopoly significantly.

Saudi Arabia seemed to be working against its own interest, churning oil onto the markets, driving the price down, and bankrupting itself. Regardless, oil prices now seem to be much more stable, not astronomically high and not catastrophically low.

This is mainly due to the huge efforts of Vladimir Putin in negotiating with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Putin and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia have negotiated to keep the prices in a safe, predictable place.

The fact that Putin has been able to maintain a relationship with the Saudis and negotiated with them to keep oil production in order, and work with other OPEC countries to do the same, is not a moral outrage whatsoever.

To equate this with the US propping up, arming, and bankrolling of Saudi Arabia, as a calculated social media campaign has aimed to do, is simply outrageous.

The human lives lost in Yemen, killed with US made weapons, cannot be equated with a friendly hand gesture. Russia has negotiated with Saudi Arabia to keep oil markets secure, while the USA and Britain have propped up a brutal autocracy with links to terrorism.

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Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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VIDEO: Por trás do ataque USA aos smartphones chineses

December 5th, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

Depois de ter imposto pesadas tarifas aduaneiras ​​sobre as mercadorias chinesas atingindo 250 biliões de dólares, o Presidente Trump no G-20, aceitou uma “trégua”, adiando outras medidas imediatas, sobretudo, porque a economia USA está a ser atingida pela retaliação chinesa. Mas, para além dos pretextos comerciais, existem as razões estratégicas.

Sob a pressão do Pentágono e das agências de serviços secretos, os USA proibiram os smartphones e as infraestruturas de telecomunicações da empresa chinesa Huawei, sob a acusação de que podem ser usadas ​​para espionagem e pressionam os aliados para que façam o mesmo. Advertem, sobretudo, a Itália, a Alemanha e o Japão, países com as bases  militares USA mais importantes, e sob perigo de espionagem chinesa estão as mesmas agências de serviços secretos USA que devassaram, durante anos, as comunicações dos aliados – em particular, a Alemanha e a Itália. A Apple americana, em tempos, líder absoluta do sector, foi superada nas vendas pela Huawei (a propriedade desta empresa pertence aos funcionários, na qualidade de accionistas), elevada ao segundo lugar na classificação mundial, atrás da Samsung sulcoreana, o que representa uma tendência geral.

Os Estados Unidos – cuja supremacia económica se baseia artificialmente sobre o dólar, até agora, a principal moeda das reservas monetárias do comércio mundial – estão, cada vez mais, a ser ultrapassados pela China, quer na capacidade, quer na qualidade produtiva. “O Ocidente – escreve o ‘New York Times’ – estava confiante de que a aproximação chinesa não funcionaria. Tiveram só de esperar e ainda estão a aguardar. A China projecta uma vasta rede global de comércio, investimentos e infraestruturas que remodelarão os vínculos financeiros e geopolíticos”. Isto verifica-se, especialmente, mas não só, ao longo da Nova Estrada da Seda, que a China está a concretizar em 70 países da Ásia, Europa e África.

O ‘New York Times’ examinou 600 projectos efectuados pela China em 112 países, entre os quais:

Ø  41 oleodutos e gasodutos;

Ø  199 centrais, sobretudo, hidreléctricas (entre as quais, sete barragens no Camboja que fornecem a metade das necessidades de eletricidade do país);

Ø  203 pontes, estradas e ferrovias, além de vários portos importantes no Paquistão, no Sri Lanka, na Malásia e noutros países.

Tudo isto é considerado em Washington, como uma “agressão aos nossos interesses vitais”, como sublinha o Pentágono na “Estratégia Nacional de Defesa dos Estados Unidos da América, em 2018”. O Pentágono define a China como “competidor estratégico que usa uma economia predatória para intimidar os seus vizinhos”, esquecendo-se da série de guerras conduzidas pelos Estados Unidos e, também contra a China, até 1949, para saquear os países dos seus recursos. Enquanto a China constrói barragens, ferrovias e pontes úteis não só à sua rede comercial, mas também ao desenvolvimento dos países em que são produzidos, nas guerras USA, as barragens, as ferrovias e as pontes, são os primeiros alvos a ser destruídos.

A China é acusada pelo Pentágono de “querer impor a curto prazo, a sua hegemonia na Região do Índico-Pacífico e de querer apanhar de surpresa os Estados Unidos para, no futuro, alcançar a predominânciaglobal”,  em conjunto com a Rússia, acusada de querer “fragmentar a NATO” e “sublevar os processos democráticos, na Crimeia e na Ucrânia Oriental”. Daí o “incidente” no Estreito de Kerch, causado por Kiev sob a direcção do Pentágono, para interromper a reunião Trump-Putin na Cimeira do G-20 (como aconteceu) e fazer entrar a Ucrânia na NATO, da qual já é um membro de facto. A “competição estratégica a longo prazo com a China e com a Rússia” é considerada, pelo Pentágono, como sendo a “ principal prioridade”. Para este fim, “modernizaremos as forças nucleares e reforçaremos a Aliança transatlântica da NATO”.

Por trás da guerra comercial, prepara-se a guerra nuclear.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 04 de Dezembro de 2018

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VIDEO: Dietro l’attacco USA agli smartphone cinesi

December 5th, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

Dopo aver imposto pesanti dazi su merci cinesi per 250 miliardi di dollari, il presidente Trump al G-20 ha accettato una «tregua» posticipando ulteriori misure, soprattutto perché l’economia USA è colpita dalla ritorsione cinese. Ma oltre alle ragioni commerciali ci sono quelle strategiche.

Sotto pressione del Pentagono e delle agenzie di intelligence, gli USA hanno bandito gli smartphone e le infrastrutture di telecomunicazioni della società cinese Huawei, con l’accusa che possono essere usati per spionaggio, e premono sugli alleati perché facciano altrettanto. Ad avvertire soprattutto Italia, Germania e Giappone, paesi con le più importanti basi militari USA, sul pericolo di spionaggio cinese sono le stesse agenzie USA di intelligence che hanno spiato per anni le comunicazioni degli alleati, in particolare Germania e Italia. La statunitense Apple, un tempo leader assoluta del settore, è stata scavalcata come vendite  dalla Huawei (società di proprietà degli impiegati quali azionisti), piazzatasi al secondo posto mondiale dietro la sudcoreana Samsung.  Ciò è emblematico di  una tendenza generale.

Gli Stati uniti – la cui supremazia economica si basa artificiosamente sul dollaro, principale moneta finora delle riserve valutarie e dei commerci mondiali – vengono sempre più scavalcati dalla Cina sia come capacità che come qualità produttiva. «L’Occidente – scrive il New York Times – era sicuro che l’approccio cinese non avrebbe funzionato. Doveva solo aspettare. Sta ancora aspettando. La Cina progetta una vasta rete globale di commerci, investimenti e infrastrutture che rimodelleranno i legami finanziari e geopolitici». Ciò avviene soprattutto, ma non solo,  lungo la Nuova Via della Seta che la Cina sta realizzando attraverso 70 paesi di Asia, Europa e Africa.

Il New York Times ha esaminato 600 progetti realizzati dalla Cina in 112 paesi, tra cui 41 oleodotti e gasdotti; 199 centrali soprattutto idroelettriche (tra cui sette dighe in Cambogia che forniscono la metà del fabbisogno elettrico del paese); 203 ponti, strade e ferrovie, più diversi grandi porti in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia e altri paesi. Tutto questo viene considerato a Washington una «aggressione ai nostri interessi vitali», come sottolinea il Pentagono nella «Strategia di difesa nazionale degli Stati Uniti d’America 2018». Il Pentagono definisce la Cina «competitore strategico che usa una economia predatoria per intimidire i suoi vicini», dimenticando la serie di guerre condotte dagli Stati uniti, anche contro la Cina fino al 1949, per depredare i paesi delle loro risorse. Mentre la Cina costruisce dighe, ferrovie e ponti utili non solo alla sua rete commerciale ma anche allo sviluppo dei paesi in cui vengono realizzati, nelle guerre Usa dighe, ferrovie e ponti sono i primi obiettivi ad essere distrutti.

La Cina viene accusata dal Pentagono di «voler imporre a breve termine la sua egemonia nella Regione Indo-Pacifica e di voler spiazzare gli Stati uniti per conseguire in futuro la preminenza globale», di concerto con la Russia accusata di voler «frantumare la NATO» e «sovvertire i processi democratici in Crimea e Ucraina orientale». Da qui l’«incidente» nello stretto di Kerch, provocato da Kiev sotto regia del Pentagono per far saltare l’incontro Trump-Putin al G-20 (come è avvenuto)  e far entrare l’Ucraina nella NATO, di cui è già membro di fatto. La «competizione strategica a lungo termine con Cina e Russia» è considerata dal Pentagono «principale priorità». A tal fine «modernizzerà le forze nucleari e rafforzerà l’Alleanza trans-atlantica della NATO».

Dietro la guerra commerciale si prepara la guerra nucleare.
il manifesto, 04 dicembre 2018

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Another meeting on the Libyan settlement was held in Palermo, southern Italy, November 12-13. The leaders of the warring factions, EU and UN representatives, as well as the parties concerned, took part in the summit.

After two days of intense talks, the participants agreed to arrange a new conference in Libya by the beginning of the next year. It’s expected the date of the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections would be announced there.

On the one hand, the result of the current meeting on Libya is conditional as the talks in Palermo haven’t brought something specific for the Libyans. Since the politicians meet and seek for the ways of resolving the crisis, the nation continues to suffer from the consequence of foreign intervention and Gaddafi overthrow in 2011.

On the other hand, Libyan National Army (LNA) commander Khalifa Haftar who was in Italy as a private person, met the conference participants on the sidelines. Haftar and Sarraj held an extensive private discussion during the informal talks of Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Tunisian President Beji Qaid Al Sebsi, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and European Council President Donald Tusk. Although the result of the closed meeting is still unknown the very fact speaks volumes.

First, the negotiations on the sidelines of the summit were aimed at searching for the best ways of resolving the Libyan crisis. By participating in the sides demonstrated their desire and commitment to the fast ending of the civil war.

Second, the isolation of Turkey from political accommodation has become one of the most important outcomes of the summit. This step could be inferred from the fact that Turkish Vice-President Fuat Oktay was not invited. Perhaps, this is due to the Haftar’s position, who has repeatedly criticized both Ankara and Doha for supporting the Islamists in Tripoli.

Commenting on the results of the conference United Nations Special Envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame declared the success as all the sides agreed to follow the UN roadmap. The document envisages the amendment to the political arrangement signed in Skhirat, Morocco in 2015, holding a conference bringing together main political forces and civil society organizations, the revision of the Libyan constitution, and the preparation for the presidential and parliamentary elections.

Ways to resolve the conflict

By the way, holding the meeting in Palermo is not enough for the settlement of the Libyan conflict. The leader of the Eastern Libya Haftar and pro-Western politician Sarraj will face many challenges like the disarmament of numerous militias, initiation of the national reconciliation process, and economic recovery.

The first goal for two politicians in coordination is soluble. It is vital for the end of the civil war and the nationwide reconciliation.

Reconciliation is the most challenging component within the Libyan settlement. No one would assist the politicians in this matter. To resolve this issue Haftar and Sarraj will have to make a lot of efforts and spend time as the situation requires establishing a dialogue with various social, ethnic, and tribal groups. Such an approach will accelerate the creation of favourable conditions for holding presidential and parliamentary elections. The formation of new political power in the country will be the key to the economic recovery. There are a lot of opportunities to stabilize the situation in the state. According to media, the size of Gaddafi’s [government] and family assets frozen by Western banks rises to one hundred billion dollars. The leading economists believe these funds will be enough to restore the national economy ruined during the war. No doubt, the United Nations will unfreeze the Libyan assets after the establishment of a strong centralized power in the country.

Thus, despite all the contradictions between the parties to the conflict, the summit in Palermo could give the new impetus to the Libyan settlement. And the meeting of the political opponents represented by Haftar and Sarraj could become the first step towards consolidation and restoration of Libyan society.

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Iran: A Rumor of War. Such an Attack would be a “Leap into Darkness”

December 5th, 2018 by Dispatches from the Edge

Want another thing to keep you up at night?

Consider a conversation between long-time Middle East reporter Reese Erlich and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, Jr. on the people currently directing the Trump administration’s policy toward Iran. Commenting on National Security Advisor John Bolton’s defense of the invasion of Iraq, Freeman says

“The neoconservative group think their good ideas were poorly implemented in Iraq,” and that the lesson of the 2003 invasion that killed upwards of 500,000 people and destabilized an entire region is, “If at first you don’t succeed, do the same thing again somewhere else.”

That “somewhere else” is Iran, and Bolton is one of the leading voices calling for confronting the Teheran regime and squeezing Iran through draconian sanctions “until the pips squeak.” Since sanctions are unlikely to have much effect—they didn’t work on North Korea, have had little effect on Russia and failed to produce regime change in Cuba—the next logical step, Erlich suggests, is a military attack on Iran.

Such an attack would be a leap into darkness, since most Americans—and their government in particular—are virtually clueless about the country we seem bound to go to war with. Throwing a little light on that darkness is a major reason Erlich wrote the book. For over 18 years he has reported on Iran, talking with important government figures and everyday people and writing articles on the country that increasingly looks to be our next little war. Except it will be anything but “little.”

History matters when it comes to life and death decisions like war, but unfortunately, one of the mainstream media’s glaring deficiencies is its lack of interest in the subject. If newspapers like the New York Times had bothered to read Rudyard Kipling on Afghanistan or T.E. Lawrence on the British occupation of Iraq, the editors might have had second thoughts about supporting the Bush administration’s invasions of those countries. Of course, this was not just the result of wearing historical blinders. As Erlich points out, the mainstream media almost always follows in the wake of American foreign policy, more cheerleader than watchdog.

But if that media learned anything from the disasters in Central Asia and the Middle East, it is not apparent when it comes to its reporting on Iran. Most Americans think that country is run by mad mullahs who hate the U.S. and is—in the words of President Donald Trump— a “terrorist nation.” Americans don’t hold that image of Iran by accident, but because that is the way the country is represented in the media.

The fact that the U.S. government (along with some help from the British) overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, and backed Saddam Hussein’s attack on Iran in 1980 that resulted in over a million casualties has vanished down the memory hole.

One of the book’s strong points is its careful unraveling of US-Iranian relations, setting the record straight on things like the development of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. While the Shah was in power, Washington pushed nuclear power plants on Iran, including nuclear fuel enrichment technology, even though the Americans were aware that it could lead to weapon development. Indeed, that is exactly how India produced its first nuclear weapon back in 1974.

Erlich also analyzes everything from class structure to Iran’s complex ethnicities and explains how the Islamic Republic functions politically and economically. While he is a long-time critic of US foreign policy, Erlich is no admirer of Iran’s political institutions. Iran is far more democratic than the absolute monarchies of the Persian Gulf—with which the Washington is closely allied—but it is hardly a democracy.

“Iran is ruled by a reactionary, dictatorial clique that oppresses its own people,” he writes, “however, that does not make Iran a threat to Americans.” What Teheran does threaten “are the interests of the political, military and corporate elite who run the United States.” On a number of occasions Iran has made peace overtures to the U.S., all of which have been rejected.

Iran is a country with a very long history, and its people have a strong sense of nationalism, even if much of the population is not overly fond of Iran’s top-down political system and clerical interference in everyday life. The idea that the Iranian people will rise up and overthrow their government because of sanctions or in the event of a military attack on the government is, according to Erlich, pure illusion.

The Iran Agenda Today covers a lot of ground without bogging down in a overly detailed accounts of several millennia of history. It certainly provides enough historical context to conclude that an attack on Iran—which would likely also involve Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and possibly Israel—would unleash regional chaos with international repercussions.

Such a war would be mainly an air war—not even the Trump administration is crazy enough to contemplate a ground invasion of a vast country filled with 80 million people—and would certainly inflict enormous damage. But to what end? Iran will never surrender and its people would rally to the defense of their country. Teheran is also perfectly capable of striking back using unconventional means. Oil prices would spike, and countries that continue to do business with Iran—China, Russia, Turkey and India for starters—would see their growth rates take a hit. No European country would support such a war.

Of course creating chaos is what the Trump administration excels at, and in the short run Iran would suffer a grievous wound. But Teheran would weather the blow and Americans would be in yet another forever war, this time with a far more formidable foe than Pushtin tribes in Afghanistan or jihadists in Iraq.

Mr. Bolton, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman may get their war, but war is a deeply uncertain business. As Prussian Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke, one of the founders of modern warfare, once noted,

“No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

Erlich, a Peabody Award winner and the author of five books, has written a timely analysis of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis Iran and why, if our country continues on its current path, we—and the world—are headed into a long, dark tunnel.

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Isn’t Amerika great? I mean, look at the world of (so called) television journalism. The more these characters ‘lay down’ for the masters of empire, the more they get compensated.

Let’s look at what transpired in March 2003 via our infamous ‘boob tube’. Before we get to that motley crew, we did  have one of the unique and authentic (for those times) television news talk journalists, Phil Donahue and his daily show. His producer at the time, Jeff Cohen (of Fairness and Accuracy in Media), told this interviewer (on my internet radio show) that NBC, owned at the time by General Electric (a war industry corporation), gave him his ‘marching orders’ as to the show’s lineup of guests.

“We were covering, that winter, the run-up to a possible invasion of Iraq. I was told to make sure that for every guest on Phil’s show that was against the invasion etc, I needed to have two guests on in favor of the Bush/Cheney agenda.”

What finally happened was that before the ‘day of infamy’, the March 19th attack on Iraq, the Donahue show was cancelled… due to what they said were ‘low ratings’. Cohen contests that as being false (duh, like ‘False News’ folks?).

Flashback to the actual invasion of Iraq on March 19th 2003.

This writer was actively following the events leading up to it each and every evening. I actually was able to get a Canadian news channel on C-Span to get a more ‘level headed’ account of it all. Well, on that fateful morning, when I turned on the boob tube to either CNN or MSNBC, I saw the infamous ‘Shock and Awe’ bombing campaign going on.

I cried! And then I could see some of the ‘War Whores’ come to life before my very eyes.

You had Aaron Brown and Lester Holt giving out the government line about the merits of what our nation was doing… which in reality was nothing short of a premeditated attack on a sovereign nation.

They, along with most of their compatriots, wore those flag pins on their lapels as they cheerlead the assault on Iraq’s infrastructure and people. Little Katie Couric of NBC actually walked through the halls of her network exclaiming “Marines Rock!” You had Geraldo Rivera, whoring himself for Fox News, being embedded with our troops and reporting as if he was in France right after D-Day. All whores, every single one of them!

What happened to these fine and professional journalists after all the smoke cleared?

Well, as the years went by good old ‘Lester the Lapdog’ became a top NBC news anchor, so revered that he actually moderated a 2016 presidential debate.

Little Katie Couric went from NBC to CBS to ABC from 2003 through 2014… earning millions! She even got her own daytime talk show.. produced by that great ‘progressive corporation’ Disney.

Geraldo Rivera, who this writer used to enjoy on 1970s ABC local news in NYC doing great investigative pieces, stayed with FOX for years after, and then became a talk show host on both radio and the boob tube. Oh, and Aaron Brown, another cheerleader for the (both illegal and immoral) invasion and occupation of Iraq, actually became Professor Aaron Brown of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State U (2007- 2014).

So much for integrity. One wonders if any of the ‘War Whores’ ever actually faced those same cameras years later to say ‘Mea Culpa’ for being a whore for the empire?

Methinks not. Oh, the only rationale that most of our media and political whores who backed the lies and disinformation have done is to say ‘Well, the info was incorrect about WMDs in Iraq and we were misled by those with good intentions.’ Yeah, and I have this bridge in Brooklyn…..

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].

Since it was uploaded to YouTube just ten weeks ago, Michael Oswald’s seminal documentary film on Britain and its tax haven empire has gained over 1,000,000 views. “The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire” documents how British elites created a network of tax havens after World War II and the lengths they take today to preserve it – exemplified in a chilling scene where a Jersey police officer harasses and interrupts the filmmakers’ interview with a tax haven whistleblower. Based on Nick Shaxson’s best-selling book Treasure Islands: The Men Who Stole the World, the film delivers a sobering account of Britain’s role in corrupting the global economy.

The documentary is available for free on YouTube in EnglishFrenchGermanItalian and Spanish. Subtitles are available in French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic, Korean, Hungarian, English, Turkish and Portuguese.

Director Michael Oswald said about his inspiration for the film

I realized that there was an interesting, coherent and self-contained story that had not been told, the story of Britain’s transformation from a colonial power to a financial power, and the myriad and obscure financial structures created by City of London financial interests that lie at the heart of this transformation.”  (read more here.)

Tax Justice Network’s John Christensen, who co-produced The Spider’s Web, traces his interest in the subject back to the late-1970s when he and various colleagues started to look at London’s role as a global tax haven:

We had no doubt that the City of London was a major player in the process of looting poorer countries of their wealth and in protecting Britain’s secrecy jurisdiction satellites from political attempts – at the United Nations, for example – to rectify the policy and regulatory flaws that enabled capital flight and tax dodging on such an immense scale.” (read more here)

Made on an astonishingly small budget, The Spider’s Web has been acclaimed by reviewers.  Here is a sample of what they’ve said:

Forget anything by John Le Carre, this is a real political drama which is more thrilling than anything seen in Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy.
– Filmotomy

Framed with strong images of the City of London, tax havens and set to a haunting original soundtrack, The Spider’s Web is a film all ordinary, tax-paying citizens should watch.”
– Modern Times Review

The Spider’s Web gives an excellent overview of the scale of the global tax dodging problem and its corrosive effects on democracy.”

Open Democracy

This film is not a thriller. There are no crimes, murders, war or rape. But it deals with the consequences of such acts, metaphorical or real, and you need a strong constitution to watch it, if you care about the state of capital. It is calm, professional and accurate, like a hitman should be. I can’t recommend it enough.”
– Mr Ethicalwhistleblower

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On November 16th, the Washington Post headlined that “CIA concludes Saudi crown prince ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination” and reported that “The CIA’s assessment, in which officials have said they have high confidence, is the most definitive to date linking [Crown Prince] Mohammed [bin Salman] to the [murder] operation.”

Then, after almost a full week of silence on that, US President Trump, on November 22nd, denied that the CIA had come to any conclusion, at all, about whether Saudi Crown Prince Salman had ordered the murder of Khashoggi: Trump said

“They did not come to a conclusion. They have feelings certain ways. I have the report… They have not concluded. I don’t know if anyone’s going to be able to conclude that the Crown Prince did it.”

Congressional Democrats promptly responded to the President’s statement, by repeating what the Washington Post had said, and telling CNN,

“The CIA concluded that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia was directly involved in the assassination of Khashoggi. They did it with high confidence, which is the highest level of accuracy that they will vouch for.”

America’s voting public believe whomever they want to believe, which is almost always the politicians and newsmedia that the given individual votes for and obtains news from. In such a country, objective reality is hard to find, because the crucial evidence is hidden from the public. For example, the CIA’s report on the Khashoggi murder is hidden from the public. Neither the Government nor the press trust the public enough to allow the public to see anything of the actual report itself. So, voters can only go by whatever prejudices they have. Therefore, in America, prejudices reign, and it happens because the Government and the press don’t trust the public enough to present the actual evidence to them. Either a person trusts the Government, or the person doesn’t.

But what is “the Government,” in such a case as this? Is it the WP-alleged assertion of what “the CIA” supposedly said, or is it instead the US President, who says that the CIA didn’t assert any such thing? And, if you don’t trust what one side, in such a case, calls “the Government,” then it’s easy for that side to label you “unpatriotic,” even if you happen to be a patriot asserting the truth, and “the Government” happens to be the actual traitor against its own public, such as the US Government itself has been proven to be (and not only about such matters as 2003’s “WMD in Iraq”, in which the US Government was clearly traitorous).

When the Washington Post, on November 22ndreported Trump’s comments about the CIA’s report, the newspaper didn’t even include Trump’s denial, which was quoted here, but instead gave only fluff from Trump, such as “I hate the crime, I hate the coverup. I will tell you this: The crown prince hates it more than I do, and they have vehemently denied it.” That newspaper merely paraphrased Trump, didn’t actually quote him, about the important parts of the President’s statement there. The newspaper opened its ‘news’-report with “President Trump on Thursday contradicted the CIA’s assessment that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.”

But there was only that one-word paraphrase (“contradicted”). That’s all there was, in the entire thousand-word ‘news’-report, none of his actual statements about the CIA’s report on the killing of Khashoggi.

Reporters like this should be fired, but they won’t be if the purpose of hiring and retaining them is to hide the actual evidence from the public, by providing only paraphrases (in this case, a mere one-word paraphrase) for the crucial parts, instead of presenting the actual evidence itself (by quoting it directly).

The WP excluded anything like Trump’s statement that “They did not come to a conclusion. They have feelings certain ways. I have the report … They have not concluded. I don’t know if anyone’s going to be able to conclude that the Crown Prince did it.” Instead, their mere paraphrase of that, alleging that Trump “contradicted the CIA’s assessment” didn’t present either a quotation from the CIA’s report, or a quotation from the President, much less (as would have been required in an authentic news-report on an alleged contradiction, such as this) both, so as to allow subscribers to judge for themselves whether or not the President had ‘contradicted’ what the CIA’s report had actually said. In other words: that was a fake ‘news’-report in the Washington Post; it presented no credible news, but only evidence-less fluff, about this important matter.

‘News’-media such as that are part of a political culture that’s based not on science — a society in which individuals make public-affairs judgments on their own, on the basis of the actual evidence being presented to them — but that’s based instead purely on faith. It’s a religious (or faith-based) political culture, not a scientific one. That’s to say: judgments are based on whatever the individual’s prejudice happens to be. Judgments by the public are not based on the evidence, because the evidence is actually being hidden from the public. Obviously, there is no accountability — it’s not even possible to have accountability in such a political culture, because the evidence is being hidden from voters.

On the night of Friday, November 23rd, Trump — his Administation — released the long-awaited “Fourth National Climate Assessment” from a panel of 300 climatologists, and it calculated, for example, that Phoenix, Arizona, during 1976-2005, averaged around 80 days per year above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and that if we do everything possible to minimize fossil-fuels-usage, that average will be around 125 such days annually between 2070 and 2100, but otherwise it will be around 150 days annually, which is almost twice as many sizzling days per year as compared with the period 1976-2005.

Screengrab from CNN

On Monday, November 26th, CNN headlined “Donald Trump buried a climate change report because ‘I don’t believe it’” and reported that,

“‘I don’t believe it,’ Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he had read ‘some’ of the report. It’s a report which had been “produced by 13 agencies within the Trump administration — the result of Congress, in the 1980s, mandating that this sort of report be submitted every four years as a sort of reference point for lawmakers and legislators.”

This news-report from CNN was real, not fake like the Washington Post’s was on the Khashoggi matter, and it linked to the evidence, including to the actual study itself, and to Trump’s statement that he doesn’t believe it.

Here, then, is an actual example of authentic news-reporting, which is credit-worthy and not simply to be taken on mere trust (like the Washington Post’s ‘news’ about Trump’s ‘contradicting’ his own CIA’s report).

But will Trump’s voters still have faith in him, despite his clear divergence from the professionals on climatology, the scientists who are experts in these types of matters? Obviously, such a President (one who rejects the overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion on a scientific topic) is an actual crackpot; but will his voters believe him simply because they want to believe him — because they’re people of faith and he here happens to be peddling their particular belief — because they’re not people of science? Then how can democracy even function, with such a public? Only authoritarianism (a faith-based regime) can function, in such a country as this.

On November 26th, the most Trumpian ‘news’-medium of all, Breitbart, didn’t even report Trump’s “I don’t believe it,” but did include, on November 26th, a November 25th ‘news’-article bannered “Experts on Climate Change Assessment: ‘Every Conclusion of This Latest Government Report Is False’”, which opened:

The federal government’s Fourth National Climate Assessment, released on Friday, has gained praise from leftists and left-wing environmental groups as a dire warning of the coming death and destruction in the United States if we don’t stop global warming.

But critics of the report, including scientists, have slammed it as “exaggeration,” bad science and even said its conclusions are “false.”

“This latest climate report is just more of the same – except for even greater exaggeration, worse science, and added interference in the political process by unelected, self-serving bureaucrats,” Tim Huelskamp, president of the Heartland Institute said in statements released by the free-market think tank following the report’s release…

Nothing was said there about the Heartland Institute’s being funded by far-right billionaires including many who own or are heavily invested in oil and gas corporations. These people have a financial stake in downplaying the environmental threat that’s posed by their products. Very few climatologists are members of that particular propaganda-operation. It’s fake, as an ‘authority’ about anything. Clearly, Trump represents those fossil-fuels corporate owners, not the public — not even the voters who had voted for him. All Americans have a real stake in the truth about the global-warming issue. All people everywhere do.

Is an authentic democracy possible in such a country as this, where it’s so easy for liars to win and keep public offices?

All that the liars have to do is to pump to the public the deceits that the billionaires they serve want them to pump. The politicians who do that will be the ones who are in serious contention to become winners, because their political campaigns will receive all the funding that’s needed in order for them to be in serious contention. The politicians who are honest won’t be among the ones who are in serious contention — it’ll be like America’s Government actually is.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

Featured image is from SCF

In 1979, Canada’s postal union (CUPW) bargained and bargained with the employer. Eventually, having exhausted all possibilities, it made the decision, supported by a huge majority of its voting members, that its members would no longer provide their services on the basis of the existing terms and conditions of the now expired collective agreement. Workers had determined, democratically, not to sell their labour power on those terms. In a liberal democracy, they had every right to take such a decision. Only a slave society would deny them this right.

The government of Canada decided otherwise. Unlike the union it did not consult its constituency. It enacted legislation to order the postal union and its workers to call off the strike, to sort and deliver the mail. They would be paid the amounts they were entitled to under the old agreement until an arbitrator would impose some other ones on them. The leadership of the union was legislatively instructed to tell its members that the strike was no longer legal, no longer legitimate. They were told what to say; they were told to say that they had not led their members properly and that their democratic practices were not worth a tinker’s cuss.

Jean-Claude Parrot, a union leader with principles, said he could not do that. He was prosecuted for this act of defiance, for this insistence on his right of belief, of his right to think and speak as he chose. The prosecution opened its case as follows: “The sole question for this court is: Who runs this country – the government or the unions?” Parrot was convicted and spent three months in jail. The workers were forced to go back to work on properly rejected terms and conditions. While the jailing of a trade union leader is rare today, forcing workers to work on terms and conditions they do not want to accept is a norm in this freedom-loving country.

The justification for such oppression is based on a big lie. This lie is that Canada is a liberal democracy.

Forced Back-to-Work

A properly elected government has plenary powers to act on its free, and freely-participating citizens, to act on their behalf to ensure the welfare of the polity. In doing so it may take away some of the rights of the people, such as freedom to speak, assemble, associate, as long as the government can persuade a court that it is curtailing these rights by introducing measures that are reasonably compatible with the tenets of a free and democratic society. Forcing workers to accept terms of employment they were legally entitled to reject is considered to be compatible with our basic democratic principles as long as the government is reasonable in its belief that it is coercing workers to serve the public good. Over and over, back-to-work legislation is justified on the basis that the otherwise legal goals of workers may harm the public good. A government charged with looking after the general welfare of the nation is entitled to say that it has no option but to act to save the public from harm.

This November, we heard this bombastic, worker-hurting, claim again. Photos of allegedly mail-laden trucks in depots (shades of Colin Powell and his visuals of Saddam Hussein’s weapon-laden trucks) are said to be evidence of how selfish workers are creating chaos and intolerable hardship. This cannot be tolerated. After all, workers merely want a better deal for themselves, heedless of society’s needs. It is true that, abiding by the legal rules which allow workers to use collective economic action to pursue their claims, postal workers conducted some rotating strikes to pressure the employer to be more pliable. This is what free collectivebargaining is designed to permit. But, once again, our government felt that it just had to override the workers’ rights, rights that had been won after long political struggles. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, his flunkies and the mainstream media repeatedly told us that the workers’ self-serving rotating strikes were anti-social and could not be allowed to inconvenience the innocent, particularly small businesses whose selfish needs required protection. So, our liberal democratic government said: “Back to work, you greedy, intransigent, anti-public welfare unionists!”

Then General Motors (GM) announced that it was no longer satisfied with its market conditions. It exercised its right to take its property and run. It is going to close four North American plants. Oshawa is one of those. Now this will do the public a lot of harm. I know this because the same people who attack postal workers are telling me this. Trudeau, his flunkies and the mainstream media are in agreement. Stories about how expectations will not be met, how sad loyal workers are to lose jobs of which they had been proud, how many families would be pushed into poverty, how much incidental harm would be inflicted, filled our television screens and newspapers. Everyone expressed anxiety and indignation at the anti-social, self-serving, behaviour, by General Motors. Premier Doug Ford said he was distressed. Prime Minister Trudeau said he was very distressed. Andrea Horwath was seen hugging upset workers at the stricken plant. All said they would do their best to help the hurt people. No one said they would order the anti-social, public harm-doing General Motors back to work.

The big lie is in the open.

Liberal Capitalist Democracy

We are not a liberal democracy but a liberal capitalist democracy and the most important part of that phrase is ‘capitalist’. It is the capitalists who set the limits of liberalism’s and democracy’s scope.

In a capitalist society, the owners of the means of production are only technically subject to governmental power. More often than not, government acts as the inferior party in the relationship between private power and elected government. Hence the chasm between the caterwauling and lamentations about the GM Oshawa decision and the lack of any decisive response to the flexing of General Motors’ muscles. The sacrosanct nature of private property gives capitalists enormous political sway over governments that depend for their legitimacy and survival on the deployment of private capital to generate overall welfare. It is conventional wisdom that, even to suggest that the owners of wealth owe any of us an obligation to invest, and keep invested, some of that wealth, offends the basic sense of justice embedded in our liberal democracy. ‘Sensible’ people, political parties, and most unions recite a catechism. It would lead – understandably and rightly – to instant withdrawal of all capitalists from our economy and then where would we be? There it is.

Self-seeking activities by workers who produce all the wealth may be fettered, especially when it suits capital to have this done. It makes sense to lower a minimum wage, dilute a health and safety regulation, make unemployment benefits more difficult to get, smash unions and their capacities to collectivize workers’ bargaining powers, but it makes no sense to inhibit capital if it can be avoided. Indeed, we are to be grateful to capitalists for even thinking about investing their wealth. We should entice them to do so; we should cajole them; we should subsidize them. They are to be treated differently, specially, they are to be privileged. This does not jibe with a liberal democracy, but it fits a political liberal capitalist democracy in which ‘capitalist’ imbues the phrase with its real meaning.

We all know these things and still do nothing. The proof is in the eating of the pudding.

Government Generosity

In 2009, General Motors had fallen on hard times. It suspended the payment of all its debts. Its creditors were about to be left empty-handed; its workers faced a bleak future. The Barack Obama administration stepped-in. It bought 60.8 million shares for around $50-billion. In other words, it gave GM the sort of bail-out it had given those pernicious banksters who brought us the subprime mortgage and other frauds. Obama, however, asked that everybody at GM help out. By everybody, he meant workers. Concessions were imposed on the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and workers as healthcare and pension obligations were downloaded and newly hired workers would not be offered the deals automobile workers had won after many quite heroic struggles. Canada, of course, obliged GM as well, purchasing some of its shares, filling GM’s coffers. In due course, by 2015, the governments of Canada and Ontario sold their shares back for circa $4-billion, through banks like Goldman Sachs who made a handy profit on those transactions (and, to digress, when Obama bailed out the banks, Goldman Sachs was given a slice of those monies by being declared an eligible bank literally hours before the bail-out was announced).

For a moment, governments had a realistic capacity to direct a huge automobile company to serve the workers and consumers better than a for-profit corporation would ever do. This was never perceived to be a realistic notion. In a liberal capitalist democracy we are in the business to serve capital, not the working class.

The bail-out worked and GM enjoyed 15 quarters of profits, realizing $20-billion in net income. This made some people very happy. It was not the tax-payers. The guesstimate is that the Obama administration sold its equity in GM at a loss approximating $10-billion. But investors were very happy. Dividends to shareholders were increased. In March of this year, the financial papers reported that a hedge fund manager with a large stake in GM was urging it to buy back its shares on the market. Once shares are bought back, share prices rise as there are now less claims on the corporation’s assets and profits. Incumbent shareholders such as the hedge fund in question and, usually, the executives who make the decision to buy back shares, make out like bandits.

All this government generosity should have made GM grateful to government. But no.

In 2016 they were back at the beggars’ table (or, more accurately, the blackmailers’ table). They told the Canadian and Ontario governments that things were tough and the Oshawa plant needed help to stay modern and viable. More money was dumped into the bottomless GM pot. And now, barely two years later, having made promises to governments and workers that they would share in the expected bounty, they tell us that, “sorry, we can get a better deal elsewhere.” And we are dismayed. But surely not surprised?

We do this all the time. On the same day that the Oshawa debacle hit our media, it was announced that the government of Ontario was providing Maple Leaf Foods with $34.5-million to help it to set up a plant in London, Ontario, to off-set the shutting of plants elsewhere. The federal government will add to this largesse by promising to help poor Maple Leaf Foods out with $29-million of our monies. And, recently, we went through the unseemly exercise of trying to bribe Amazon, a noted exploiter of workers and of our porous tax raising systems, to put their headquarters here rather than in some other misguided and begging city (luckily we lost). And the Institute for Policy Studies reported in 2018 that the most subsidized corporations pay their executives far more than do other less successful mendicant corporations. Thus, in 2017, there was a fuss when it was revealed that Bombardier’s executives had improved their remuneration by $32.6-million just when the federal government had given it a loan of $372.5-million and Quebec had chipped-in with $1-billion of its tax-payers’ money.

They take. We give. They promise. They do not honour their promises. They threaten and menace to legally withhold their wealth. They hold us to ransom. We give in. All too often, we save capitalists the trouble of putting us to the sword. We anticipate their demands and just make them offers. Workers seek to legally withhold their only wealth, their labour power. We (and who precisely is this ‘we’?) do not give in. We force them to accept terms that they have already legally refused. We will not allow them to hold society to ransom. We will not allow them to be anti-social. This happens to suit the capitalist agenda – a coincidence, no doubt. To clarify: if the undelivered mail was such a crisis, why did the government of Canada not tell Canada Post to give workers what they were demanding? I am sure workers would have taken those trucks out of the depots. But that would have set a bad example: employers might be forced to do things for the general good and then where would a capitalist society be?! We rather beg the owners of the means of production (who hide behind corporations) to think about acting as if they were socially responsible.

It Takes Two Classes to Wage War

We practise the politics of compromise and indignation. We accept that there is no alternative to capitalist domination. They wage class war on us. They insist in passing on the costs of making profits onto workers and their communities. We talk about retraining dispossessed workers, to sustain them enough to let them survive while things are done to change the economic base of their communities, and the like. They just take the money and run.

We do not say: “People have profitted from our generosity and are now using those profits to make more profits elsewhere while not sharing any of it with us. It is thievery.” We do not say: “This kind of economy is a fraud and is run for rapacious thieves and they should be made to pay.” No, that would involve us in engaging in class warfare and everyone knows that this goes against the very assumptions of a liberal democracy. We have internalized the big lie, namely that we have a liberal democracy, rather than a liberal democracy subjugated to the capitalist project. Oshawa provides an opportunity to re-consider.

Freeze all the profits made by shareholders in General Motors who have been enjoying the fruits of hand-outs given on the basis of promises that have been deliberately dishonoured, again and again. Note here that it may be technically difficult but note that it is a logical demand. We do it when it suits the government’s and the dominant class’ political agendas. We freeze the assets of Iranians, Venezuelans, Russians, etc., when we want to protect foreigners who have allegedly been victimized by these supposed wrongdoers. Some capitalists (not ours) will not be protected. Why not go after those GM folk who have profitted at Canadians’ expense? When General Motors made its long-planned announcement of the impending closures (one of the many lies told included the suggestion that these closures were not long in the planning!), the value of General Motors went up by a giddy 4.8%. The costs were going to go down and the accumulated assets that included the many hand-out monies would be worth even more than before. Investors saw a golden chance to make money. Our workers’ deliberately engineered misery is the source of new riches for the already rich.

Demand that General Motors’ Canadian assets become ours. Not only have we contributed to their accumulation, General Motors has acted anti-socially and no longer deserve to have its property protected, no more so than a blackmailer or one who obtains property by false pretences is allowed to keep his ill-gotten gains.

Public or worker ownership of the plant should be the way to go, using the considerable technology, equipment and honed skills of the workers to be put to the production of socially necessary goods, for instance, public transit infrastructure.

These and more elaborated and detailed like demands should be fashioned. It is the nature of the demands, not their immediate feasibility, that will matter. They will be an announcement that business as usual is not to be tolerated. It is harmful to our health and well-being. It privileges power and fraud. Such demands, demands for regime change, may help raise consciousness about the lies we tell each other, lies that serve capitalists rather than the working class. The demands should be articulated by workers, their unions, progressive allies and wannabe leftist political parties and actors. Oshawa has provided an opportunity to ask: “Whose side are you on?”

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Harry Glasbeek is a Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. His latest books are Class Privilege: How law shelters shareholders and coddles capitalism (2107) and the follow-up, Capitalism: a crime story (2018) both published by Between the Lines, Toronto.

All images in this article are from The Bullet

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Israel Expropriates Almost 70 Acres of Catholic Church Property

December 5th, 2018 by Middle East Monitor

Israel’s occupation authorities expropriated almost 70 acres of Palestinian land in the Jordan Valley and West Bank on Tuesday, Shehab news agency has reported. The land is owned by the Roman Catholic Church — the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem — in the villages of Bardala and Tayaseer near the West Bank city of Tubas and in the Jordan Valley respectively.

Palestinians residents living on the property fear that this expropriation is the forerunner to their expulsion for “security reasons”, a euphemism used by Israel to ethnically cleanse the land prior to the expansion of illegal settlements.

The expansion of Israeli settlements always starts with such measures. It is one way that Israel uses to empty the land of the indigenous Palestinian population. [including both Muslims and Christians]

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Featured image: An Orthodox Church in Jerusalem’s old city on 16 September 2013 [Saeed Qaq//Apaimages]

While Ecuador is expected to extradite Assange to the US, John Kiriakou, a “reluctant whistleblower” considered the first US intelligence officer to reveal information about the American intelligence community’s use of torture techniques, comments the WikiLeaks’ founder case in the following talk with renowned journalist Edu Montesanti

“The only thing that can save Julian Assange is jury nullification,” says whistleblower John Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee based in Virginia, in an exclusive talk to this reporter.

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U.S. Justice Department is acting behind the scenes to have Assange extradited from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, and prosecuted in the U.S. Criminal charges against WikiLeaks’ founder were accidentally revealed in early November, when Assange’s name was found on the court filing of an unrelated case, suggesting that prosecutors had copied a boilerplate text and forgotten to change the defendant’s name.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, urging a judge to keep the matter sealed, wrote that

“due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.”

Later, Dwyer wrote the charges would “need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested.”

It is much likely that the Australian journalist, who in March 2017 released an archive of documents detailing the C.I.A.’s hacking operations known as the Vault 7 leak, is being accused by American prosecutors of violating the 1917 Espionage Act.

The Engineer Joshua A. Schulte, 29, of New York, had been the main suspect of providing WikiLeaks the documents revealing the sensitive CIA cybertools, has been accused by prosecutors of repeatedly violating the Espionage Act.

“Technically, jury nullification is illegal. That’s when a jury acquits, not because the defendant is innocent, but because the law itself is wrong. The Espionage Act is wrong. Julian Assange is a journalist. He should never have been charged with a crime, in the first place,” says Kiriakou, the first U.S. official who dered to speak out, in December of 2007, against George Bush’s torture program and remained 30 months in prison for that, from 2013 to 2015.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also calls the Espionage Act “a fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional law.” Kiriakou says he has argued over the years that “the Espionage Act is so overly broad as to be unconstitutional, although it has not been challenged to the Supreme Court.”

‘Investigating ME!?’: Mockery of Democracy

“A senior [C.I.A.] officer in the Counterterrorism Center asked me if I wanted to be ‘trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques.’ (…) I declined. I said that I had a moral and ethical problem with torture and that — the judgment of the Justice Department notwithstanding — I thought it was illegal”, reported Kiriakou last March to The Washington Post.

Author of three books and one of the protagonists of James Spione’s documentary Silenced, in which John Kiriakou said that after his denouncements, “I realized they are investigating ME!?”.  John’s and Assange’s case have deep similarities not only for causing a reaction in their favor from people who represent a moral reserve, all over the world. “U.S. deeply flawed democracy”, as Kiriakou told this reporter in October 2016, is once again acting against free speech and justice, pillars of a real democracy.

While Kiriakou’s revelations – not sufficiently echoed by the mainstream media – have not changed anything in U.S. “policy”, inside the country and abroad as the Washington regime continue committing heinous war crimes, crimes against humanity and against the U.S. Constitution itself – under the mainstream media’s deafening silence -, the State criminals denounced by Assange intend to prosecute him: in the name of democracy and justice.

In his first public speech as C.I.A. director early last year, Mike Pompeo slammed WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” adding that “we can no longer allow Assange and his colleagues the latitude to use free speech values against us. Use free speech values against us”? So the First Amendment of the American Constitution is only valid while not contradicting the local establishment interests. In the U.S., there is clearly a historical limit to “democracy”.

Not an Espionage Act

Kiriakou predicts that the U.S. government will argue that Assange did exactly what the 1917 Espionage Act describes as espionage, that is, “[P]roviding national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it.”

The American whistleblower observes that “the issue here is that it is highly unusual, unprecedented even for a foreign national – Assange is Australian – to be charged with espionage when he did not steal the information. Assange was simply provided the information, which he then made public.” Kiriakou points out that Assange says that he was just a journalist doing his job: “No administration has ever charged a journalist with espionage for doing his job.”

Jesselyn Radack, Director of the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program and one of Kiriakou’s attorneys, wrote in a 2014 op-ed entitled Why Edward Snowden Wouldn’t Get a Fair Trial: “First Amendment arguments have failed, largely because they would criminalize the journalism made possible by the ‘leaks.’ The motive and intent of the whistleblower are irrelevant. And there is no whistleblower defense, meaning the public value of the material disclosed does not matter at all.”

Despotism in U.S. Judiciary

Another serious obstacle that Assange would face is Judge Leonie Brinkema, according to the former C.I.A. agent. Brinkema handled his case, as well as C.I.A. whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling’s, and has also reserved the Edward Snowden case for herself. “Brinkema is a hanging judge,” regrets Kiriakou.

“Brinkema gave me literally no chance to defend myself. At one point, while approaching trial, my attorneys filed 70 motions, asking that 70 classified documents be declassified so that I could use them to defend myself. I had no defense without them. We blocked off three days for the hearings. When we got to the courtroom, Brinkema said, ‘Let me save everybody a lot of time. I’m going to deny all 70 of these motions. You don’t need any of this information to be declassified.’ The entire process took a minute. On the way out of the courtroom, I asked my lead attorney what had just happened. ‘We just lost the case. That’s what happened. Now we talk about a plea.’

He describes the sad end of that court, when Judge Brinkema told him to rise pointing her finger at him, and saying, “Mr. Kiriakou, I hate this plea. If I could, I would give you ten years.” John Kiriakou labels her comments as “inappropriate, but that’s Brinkema. That’s who she is.”

Declared War against Humanity

Barry J. Pollack, one of Assange’s attorneys, said when the name of WikiLeaks’ founder was found on the court filing of an unrelated case:

“The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take. The only thing more irresponsible than charging a person for publishing truthful information would be to put in a public filing information that clearly was not intended for the public and without any notice to Mr. Assange. Obviously, I have no idea if he has actually been charged or for what, but the notion that the federal criminal charges could be brought based on the publication of truthful information is an incredibly dangerous precedent to set.”

US Attorney General Jeff Sessions has said prosecuting Assange is a “priority” for him. There are some in the West fully convinced that Assange deserves to be tried, and thrown in jail for “threatening” US national security and “undermining” its so-called democratic processes – the system Assange himself, in a bitter irony, has proven to be a total lie. Former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and former Vice President Joe Biden have called him a “terrorist”, as Assange’s job, delivering information of a high public interest, is a revolutionary antidote against fake news and dark politics, which is served by the people rather than serving the people.

All this, while more and more bitter truth Julian Assange brings to light are a clear message that the so-called West democracy must be submitted to a radical transparency process. WikiLeaks lets no doubt, Vault 7 is the last example, that intelligence services all over the world, starting by the terrorist C.I.A., must be stopped as demanded by President John Kennedy, as a non-democratic tool just to preserve the power of a minority though coercion.

According to US lawyer and civil liberties advocate Ben Wizner at the American Civil Liberties Union:

“Any prosecution of Mr. Assange for WikiLeaks’ publishing operations would be unprecedented and unconstitutional, and would open the door to criminal investigations of other news organizations”.

The mainstream media must be blamed by an Assange condemnation and by this total distortion of scenarios as it not only has never pressured these criminals of the Washington regime to break into smartphones, computers and internet-connected televisions anywhere in the world, and even to make it look like those hacks were done by another intelligence service. Also, the mainstream media never deeply covered Assange’s information in general, never gave WikiLeaks the seriousness it is worthy. On the contrary, has little by little forgotten the organization.

So who judges the CIA?

Who protects people from being hacked?

Another bitter irony is that a likely Assange condemnation will endanger the very foundations of the free press, the press, especially the Western media which claims to be free but never gave Assange the attention his job deserves – as the media inaction speaks about itself, he also has proved through documents all these years, that the corporate media is not free, at all.

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The announcement that the UAE and India signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly invest in Africa will see Dubai greatly assisting New Delhi in its grand strategy of “multi-aligning” against China there, though Russia could play a stabilizing role by “balancing” many of the various actors engaged in this modern-day “Scramble for Africa”.

“Scramble For Africa”

The modern-day “Scramble for Africa” has been ongoing for quite a while, but it had hitherto mostly been between the US and China until the past year or so, with these two Great Powers encroaching in their own ways in the continental-wide “sphere of influence” that France has historically staked out as its own. Since then, America’s GCC allies – chief among them the UAE – have established themselves as the diplomatic kingpins in the strategic Horn of Africa region, coming on the heels of their Turkish competitor’s comprehensive strategic push all throughout the landmass. Concurrent with this, Russia surreptitiously returned to the continent via the unlikely route of its UN-approved military assistance mission in the Central African Republic, while the US’ Indian and Japanese allies have attempted to expand their reach in this part of the world through the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” (AAGC).

Consolidating The American “Camp”

While this many independently moving parts might make it seem like the “scramble” for Africa’s resources, markets, and strategic location is utterly chaotic and at risk of causing a kinetic conflict between the various player s involved, the fact of the matter is that a stabilizing convergence of sorts is presently ongoing whereby a vague system of “bipolarity” is poised to set in across the continent, albeit one where Russia could play a crucial role in “balancing” between both “camps”. This “consolidation process” was indirectly set into motion once the GCC and the Indo-Japanese members of the anti-China “Quad” began to actively probe opportunities in Africa, which aligned with the tacit strategic desire of the US to involve as many of its allies as possible there as it seeks to eventually assemble an economic coalition to challenge China’s dominant presence.

The announcement that the UAE and India just signed a memorandum of understanding to jointly invest in Africa is the first tangible step to formally linking together the US’ disparate allies, with the possibility now emerging of the UAE – and by extension, the entire GCC – becoming part of the AAGC. It would be natural for the US to endorse this union at a convenient time in the future and ‘bless’ it with support through the so-called “BUILD Act”, as well as encourage France to jump on board this emerging multilateral “containment” platform by providing investment and security services given its historic hegemony in the continent. The reasons why the UAE is siding with India’s AAGC and not China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) in Africa are manifold, but they basically boil down to three main ones.

Building The Two “Blocs”

The first is that the UAE is a solid American ally that’s positioning itself to replace its “big brother” Saudi Arabia as the GCC hegemon, so it has an interest in cooperating with the US’ grand strategic schemes anywhere in the world. Secondly, there are concerns – whether legitimate or not – that CPEC’s Gwadar terminal port might one day overshadow Dubai and make it economically redundant, hence the most immediate self-interested motivation that the Emirates has to “multi-align” against BRI in Africa. And thirdly, as an added incentive (not that it actually needed one), the UAE will never forget how Pakistan refused to become militarily involved in the War on Yemen, which deprived the coalition of the country’s world-class anti-insurgency experience that could have been a game-changer and averted the current quagmire that’s draining the GCC’s blood, treasure, and international reputation.

Bearing all of these considerations in mind, it’s a no-brainer why the UAE wanted to partner with India instead of China in Africa and therefore catalyze the US’ envisaged “consolidation process” there, which could have far-reaching long-term ramifications as the New Cold War heats up and this continental theater becomes all the more important. The natural response would be for China to facilitate its Pakistani partner’s entrance into this competition by helping it transform its Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC) between Gwadar and several BRI-built (or -linked) East African ports into multilateral economic partnerships, with Islamabad then reaching out to its Ankara ally to include Turkey into this developing win-win framework. Only through such a means can China stand any chance at sustainably competing with its American-aligned rivals given the intensifying infowar being waged against its investments in Africa.

Russia’s “Balancing” Role In Midwifing A “Renaissance 2.0”

Accepting that the American-backed “bloc” is much further along to fruition than the Chinese one, but that these two “camps” are nevertheless in the midst of forming in Africa, it’s relevant to discuss the role that Russia could play in all of this. As it stands, Russia is endeavoring to become the 21st-century’s supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia, to which end it’s clinching a variety of strategic partnerships with competing pairs of countries, which pertinently includes the GCC & Turkey, India & Pakistan, and Japan & China. Russia’s uniquely neutral position enables it to conceivably serve as a bridge for bringing together these rival states, seeing as how it’s the common denominator between them. In principle, Russia could join both the AAGC and BRI”s African initiatives as an equal strategic partner, though provided that certain criteria are first met in order to allow this to happen.

For example, Russia needs to sign a peace treaty with Japan before formally joining the AAGC in the future, though this could greatly be facilitated by courting Japanese investments in the Far East and then advancing the proposal for a so-called “Northern Islands Socio-Economic Condominium” over the Kuril Islands, Sakhalin, and Hokkaido. Concerning the Chinese angle, Russia is proving its worth as a no-nonsense security provider in Africa capable of exporting its “mercenary”-driven “Democratic Security” model all throughout the continent and especially in BRI partner states, thereby fulfilling the demand that Beijing has for ensuring that Washington’s Hybrid Warschemes don’t offset its investment projects there.  If Russia can succeed in simultaneously joining the AAGC and BRI through these means, then it could encourage the “China-India-Plus-One” model to be applied all across Africa in linking these two global initiatives, sidelining the US and France, and midwifing a “Renaissance 2.0”.

Concluding Thoughts

The UAE’s decision to team up with India and develop third-party African states is a major move that’s bound to have an enormous impact on the course of the New Cold War in the continent, especially in regards to catalyzing the consolidation of a larger American-aligned anti-Chinese “containment” “camp” there. This might actually be more of a stabilizing development than a destabilizing one, however, so long as China seizes the moment to assemble its own economic coalition with Pakistan and Turkey, therefore creating a bipolar system of sorts for managing African affairs. Russia’s role in all of this is to “balance” between the two “blocs” in order to broker the ultimate convergence between them, one that would take advantage of its strategic partnerships with each party apart from the US and France in order to create a sustainable win-win platform for incorporating Africa into the emerging Multipolar World Order.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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

The Film the Israel Lobby Does Not Want You to See

December 5th, 2018 by Chris Hedges

The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.

The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.

“Imagine if China was doing this, if Iran was doing this, if Russia was doing this?” Ali Abunimah, the author of “The Battle for Justice in Palestine” and co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, says in the film. “There would be uproar. You would have Congress going off to them. You would have hearings.”

Those of us who denounce and expose the Israeli crimes committed against Palestinians are intimately familiar with the sordid and nefarious tactics of the Israel lobby. The power of the film series is that in dealing with the reporter—a young Oxford postgraduate, James Anthony Kleinfeld, who goes by the name Tony in the film and poses as a pro-Israel student—major figures within the Israel lobby candidly explain and expose their massive covert campaign in the United States. There is no plausible deniability. And this is why Israel worked so hard to stop the film from being broadcast.

Clayton Swisher, who directed the series, wrote in the liberal Jewish newspaper The Forward that leaders from the Israel lobby met with the state of Qatar’s registered agent and lobbyist, a former aide to U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz named Nick Muzin, to “see if he could use his ties with the Qataris to stop the airing.” Qatar funds Al-Jazeera. Muzin told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that “he was discussing the issue with the Qataris and didn’t think the film would broadcast in the near future.” An anonymous source told Haaretz that “the Qatari emir himself helped make the decision” to spike the film.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates severed ties with Qatar in June 2017 and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the Persian Gulf state. They accuse Doha of supporting terrorism and radical Islamist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. The four states have issued a list of demands for re-establishing ties that include Qatar’s shutting down Al-Jazeera, along with severing relations with Iran. Qatar has appealed to the United States to intercede and has, as part of this effort, reached out to the powerful Israel lobby in the United States for support. American Jewish leaders, including the former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, have met with the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and have discussed with him what they describe as the network’s “anti-Semitism.” It is widely believed the series was sacrificed by Qatar in an effort to placate the Israel lobby and get its support for an end to the sanctions, although the blockade remains in force.

Episode 1

The series exposes how Israeli intelligence services monitor American critics of Israel and feeds real-time information about them to American Jewish organizations.

“We are for example in the process of creating a comprehensive picture of the campuses,” Brig. Gen. Sima Vaknin-Gil, director general of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, tells a gathering of pro-Israel activists in the film. “If you want to defeat a phenomenon you must have the upper hand in terms of information and knowledge.”

The Israeli government operates Israel Cyber Shield, a civil intelligence unit that collects and analyzes BDS activities and coordinates attacks against the BDS movement.

“We are giving them data—for example, one day Sima’s deputy is sending me a photo. Just a photo on Whatsapp,” Sagi Balasha, who was CEO of the Israeli-American Council from 2011 to 2015, says when speaking on an Israeli-American Council panel. “It’s written ‘Boycott Israel’ on the billboard.”

He shows a picture of a roadside billboard that reads: “BOYCOTT ISRAEL UNTIL PALESTINIANS HAVE EQUAL RIGHTS. StopFundingApartheid.org.”

“In a few hours our systems and analysts could find the exact organization, people, and even their names, and where they live,” says Balasha, who now works with cyber-intelligence organizations that target BDS activists. “We gave it back to the ministry, and I have no idea what they did with this. But the fact is, three days later there were no billboards.”

“We use all sorts of technology,” Jacob Baime, the executive director of the Israel on Campus Coalition, says in the film. “We use corporate-level, enterprise-grade social media intelligence software. Almost all of this happens on social media, so we have custom algorithms and formulae that acquire this stuff immediately.”

“Generally, within about 30 seconds or less of one of these things popping up on campus, whether it’s a Facebook event, whether it’s the right kind of mention on Twitter, the system picks it up,” says Baime. “It goes into a queue and alerts our researchers and they evaluate it. They tag it, and if it rises to a certain level, we issue early-warning alerts to our partners.”

Those recruited by the Israel lobby, including the undercover Al-Jazeera reporter in the documentary, are sent to training sessions such as Fuel the Truth. The film records a session in which trainees watch a video of Palestinian children as the narrator says, “Children are taught in UNRWA [United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees] Palestinian schools to hate Jews.” The trainees are told that scenes of devastation in Gaza are, in fact, misrepresented images disseminated by critics from Syria or Iraq. They are instructed in role-playing workshops how to brand all those who criticize Israeli policies as anti-Semites, members of a hate group or self-hating Jews.

The reporter is placed in the so-called war room run by The Israel Project, known as TIP, which monitors American media for stories on Israel and the Palestinians. The goal is “neutralizing undesired narratives.”

“We develop relationships … ,” David Hazony, the managing director of The Israel Project, says about how to influence journalists. “A lot of alcohol to get them to trust us. We’re basically messaging on the following—BDS is essentially a kind of a hate group targeting Israel. They’re anti-peace. We try not to even use the terms because it builds their brand. We just refer to boycotters. The goal is to actually make things happen. And to figure out what are the means of communication to do that.”

The BDS movement, which I support, was formed in 2005. It is an attempt by Palestinian civil rights groups to build a nonviolent international movement to boycott Israel, divest from Israeli companies and eventually impose sanctions—as was done against apartheid South Africa—until basic Palestinian rights under international law are achieved. While the movement has not gained traction financially in the United States, with most colleges and universities refusing to divest, it has been very effective at illuminating the injustices committed against Palestinians by Israel and severely eroded Israel’s credibility and support in the U.S. This ongoing shift in public opinion terrifies Israel, which has poured tremendous resources into crushing the BDS movement.

“Government ministers attacked me in person,” Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the BDS movement, says in the film. “One of them threatening BDS leaders with targeted civil assassination. Others threatened to revoke my permanent residency [in Israel], along other threats.”

“We suffered from intense denial-of-service attacks, hacking attacks on our website,” Barghouti says. “Israel decided to go on cyber warfare against BDS. Publicly, they said, ‘We shall spy on BDS individuals and networks, especially in the West.’ We have not heard a peep from any Western government complaining that Israel is admitting that it will spy on your citizens. Imagine Iran saying it will spy on British or American citizens. Just imagine what could happen.”

“So, like nobody really knows what we’re doing,” says Julia Reifkind, who was director of community affairs at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. “But mainly it’s been a lot of research, like monitoring BDS things and reporting it back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Like making sure everyone knows what’s going on. They need a lot of research done and stuff like that. When they talk about it in the Knesset, we’ve usually contributed to what the background information is. I’m not going to campuses. It’s more about connecting organizations and I guess campuses, providing resources and strategy if students need it.”

“I write a report and give it to my boss, who translates it,” Reifkind says. “It’s really weird. We don’t talk to them on the phone or email. There’s a special server that’s really secure that I don’t have access to because I’m an American. You have to have clearance to access the server. It’s called Cables. It’s not even the same [word translated] in Hebrew, it’s like literally ‘Cables.’ I’ve seen it. It looks really bizarre. So, I write reports that my boss translates into the cables and sends them. Then they’ll send something back. Then he’ll translate it and tell me what I need to do.”

“Is the Israeli Embassy trying to leverage faculty?” Tony, the undercover reporter, asks her.

“Yeah,” she says. “We are working with several faculty advocacy groups that kind of train faculty, and so we are helping them a little bit with funding, connections, bringing them to speak, having them to speak to diplomats and people at the MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] that need this information. So, I want to be that resource to show students what we’re doing, to see what you’re doing, here’s some information if you need anything at all. We can connect you. Just kind of be that person there for you.”

Reifkind was president of the pro-Israel group at the University of California at Davis and worked closely with the Israel lobby to attempt to crush the BDS movement on campus, especially after Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) brought a divestment motion to the student senate.

“We knew they were going to win because the entire student senate was all pro-BDS,” she says. “They ran for that purpose and won for that purpose. We have been pushed out of student government for months.”

Reifkind and a few supporters went to the senate meeting where the vote was scheduled.

“We have been ignored and disrespected year after year, but we have never been silenced,” she tells the student gathering. “We are a beacon of peace and inclusion on a campus plagued by anti-Semitism.”

“The intolerance that spawned this [divestment] resolution is the same kind of intolerance that spawned anti-Semitic movements throughout history,” she shouts.

She and her handful of supporters walk out, an action they had agreed on in advance and then carefully filmed.

The passing of the BDS motion at UC Davis set the gears of the Israel lobby and the Israeli government in motion.

“That day all of us released like 50 op-eds in major news sources so that when people made a hashtag, like a whole thing trending, so when people opened their Facebooks it wouldn’t be them celebrating their victory,” Reifkind says in the film. “It would be us sharing our stories. Once it blew up, then random people like The Huffington Post contacted me and was like, “Do you have anything to say?” And I was like, ‘Conveniently, I wrote an op-ed two weeks ago just in case.’ ”

Israel and its surrogates in the United States used their considerable resources to carry out vicious and anonymous personal attacks against the campus BDS activists at UC Davis, calling them “terrorists” and “Hamas sympathizers” who support Sharia on campus. The lobby also skillfully framed the narrative in the national media, claiming falsely that the pro-Israel students were forced out of the meeting room.

“Pro-Israel students were taunted by pro-Hamas students after an anti-Israel vote passed on campus,” says an announcer on Fox News as a caption underneath video reads, “RUNNING RAMPANT: UC Davis Plagued by Anti-Semitic Feelings.” “And right after the vote passed, a student senator posted this on Facebook, ‘Hamas and Sharia law have taken over UC Davis. Brb [be right back] crying over the resilience.’ ”

Shortly after the vote, Jewish students said they found two swastikas painted on their fraternity house in Davis. The media, tipped off, was at the fraternity house almost immediately. The BDS activists were blamed for the graffiti.

The film shows a CBS 13 news clip.

Television reporter: “Pro-Israel students said they feared recent events would lead to this.”

UC Davis male student: “This has been sort of a bad week to be Jewish on campus.”

Television reporter: “After years of heated meetings, the student body passed a resolution Thursday, urging UC Davis to end any affiliation with companies that support Israel.”

Episode 2

Another UC Davis male student, speaking in front of one of the swastikas: “So, this is not out of the blue. We’re pretty sure this is directly related.”

StandWithUs helped us a little bit in terms of actual research on the speech,” Reifkind says in referring to her comments before the student senate. “They gave us some legal research type stuff. I’m always biased and want to work with AIPAC. They kind of helped, more like mold support. And David Projecthelped us a little bit. It was more help like gaining contacts in the media world. I guess we needed money to pay for someone to film the speech. We had a Davis Faculty for Israel group, and they were hugely helpful to us. Some of them were retired lawyers, they’d write legal documents for us. They knew the administration. They were tenured. They had pull.”

“After looking back on everything, I feel a little creepy because of what happened after the vote,” says Marcelle Obeid, the president of Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis. “People who were affiliated with the [pro-Palestinian] group were just smeared and had to deal with these very personal crises—the world calling us terrorists, the world thinking that we were this spiteful hate group. It’s pretty unequivocal how organized they were, how brutal and ruthless that narrative was, and how it affected us.”

The Electronic Intifada’s Abunimah says,

“There’s an intensive effort by Israel and pro-Israel groups to get governments, universities, legislative bodies to adopt a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel and its state ideology, Zionism.”

“They have created this perverse definition of anti-Semitism where calling for everyone in Palestine and Israel to have equal rights is somehow an attack on Jews,” he says. “They’re trying to get this pushed into official definitions. This has been a key goal of the Brandeis Center so they can go after people who are advocating for equality and bring them up on charges that they’re actually anti-Semitic bigots.”

Kenneth Marcus, founding president of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, confirms this stance in the film and is shown saying:

“You have to show that they’re racist hate groups, that they are using intimidation to get funded, and to consistently portray them that way.”

But despite its campaign, Israel is acutely aware that it is losing the public relations war, especially among the young.

“The polling isn’t good,” David Brog, executive director of the Maccabee Task Force, which combats BDS on American campuses, says in the film. “And all of you probably know that if you look at the polls, the younger you get on the demographic scales, the lower support for Israel is. … It seems to be achieving its goals. I think it threatens future American support for Israel. Younger people are leaving college less sympathetic to Israel than when they entered.”

And many of these young people are Jewish, finding their identity and meaning in values that Israel refuses to uphold.

“The work that Jewish Voice for Peace does is grounded in Jewish tradition, the most basic Jewish and human values that every single person has inherent worth and dignity and should be treated with respect,” Rabbi Joseph Berman says in the film. “We then see what’s happening to Palestinians, the occupation, the displacement, the inequality, and say we need to end these things.”

But while Israel may be losing in the court of public opinion, it tightly embraces elected officials in the United States, where legalized bribery is institutionalized.

“Does the war of ideas matter?” asks Eric Gallagher, who was a director at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I know that getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what AIPAC just did. That’s what I’m proud to have been a part of for so long. My job was basically to convince students that participating in the war of ideas on campuses is actually a distraction. You can hold up signs and have rallies on campus, but the Congress gets $3.1 billion a year for Israel. Everything AIPAC does is focused on influencing Congress. Congress is where you have leverage. So, you can’t influence the president of the United States directly, but the Congress can.”

“What the lobby is all about is to make sure that Israel gets special treatment from the United States, forever,” John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and co-author of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” says in the film.

Mearsheimer says,

“What AIPAC does is it makes sure that money is funneled your way if you’re seen as pro-Israel, and it will go to significant lengths to make sure that you stay in office if you continue to be staunchly pro-Israel.”

“What happens is Jeff [Talpins] meets with congressmen in the backroom, tells them exactly what his goals are,” David Ochs, founder of HaLev, says of the pro-Israeli hedge fund manager Jeff Talpins and how politicians receive sums of as much as $200,000 from the Israel lobby. “And by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million. Basically, they hand an envelope with 20 credit cards and say, ‘You can swipe each of these credit card for $1,000 each.’ ”

“If you wander off the reservation and become critical of Israel, you not only will not get money, AIPAC will go to great lengths to find someone who will run against you,” Mearsheimer says. “And support that person very generously. The end result is you’re likely to lose your seat in Congress.”

“They have questionnaires,” recalls former U.S. Rep. Jim Moran, a Democrat from northern Virginia who was in the House from 1991 to 2015. Moran, who opposed the 2002 congressional resolution to invade Iraq, became a target for the Israel lobby, which pushed hard for the war. “Anyone running for Congress is required [by the lobby] to fill out a questionnaire. And they [AIPAC] evaluate the depth of your commitment to Israel on the basis of [those questions]. And then you have an interview with local people. If you get AIPAC support, then more often than not you’re going to win.”

“There was a conservative rabbi in my district who was assigned to me, I assume, by AIPAC,” Moran says. “He warned me that if I voiced my views about the Israeli lobby that my career would be over, and implied that it would be done through the Post. Sure enough, The Washington Post editorialized brutally. Everyone ganged up.”

There is a screen shot of a Washington Post headline: “Sorry, Mr. Moran, You’re Not Fit For Public Office.”

Character assassination is a common tactic used by the Israel lobby against its critics. Bill Mullen, a professor of American studies at Purdue University, has been a campaigner for the BDS movement for years. His wife was sent a link to a website containing a letter addressed to her.

“It was a Sunday,” he says. “I was in the kitchen. My partner was in the living room with my daughter. Came in with her laptop and said, ‘You’ve got to see this.’ This letter, reported to be by a former student, said she had been sexually harassed by me. She had found other students at Purdue who have had the same experience. And she was writing this letter to tell their story. Within a very short time, within about 48 hours, we were able to establish that these multiple sites that were attacking me had been taken out [created] almost at the same time. And that they were clearly the work of the same people. One of the accounts said, in the process of supposedly putting my hand on her, I invited her to a Palestine organizational meeting. Well, I thought, ‘You’re sort of putting your cards on the table there,’ whoever you are.”

“With the anti-Israel people, what we found has been most effective, in the last year, you do the opposition research,” says Baime, the Israel on Campus Coalition official. “Put up an anonymous website. Then put up targeted Facebook ads. Every few hours you drip out a new piece of opposition research, it’s psychological warfare. It drives them crazy. They either shut down or they spend time investigating it and responding to it, which is time they can’t spend attacking Israel. That’s incredibly effective.”

“It was really an attempt, by people who didn’t know us, ‘Maybe I can destroy this marriage at the very least,’ ” Purdue’s Mullen says. “ ‘Maybe I can cause them horrendous, personal suffering.’ The same letter purporting to me harassment, sent to my wife, used the name of our daughter. I think that was the worst moment. We thought, ‘These people will do anything. They’re capable of doing anything.’ ”

Perhaps the film’s greatest investigative coup is the unwitting disclosure by Eric Gallagher at The Israel Project that the hedge fund manager Adam Milstein is “the guy who funds” the anonymous Canary Mission website. The website provides the names, backgrounds and photos of students, professors, invited speakers and organizations that are allegedly tied to terrorism and anti-Semitism through their support for Palestinian rights.

“There’s a guy named who you might want to meet,” Gallagher says to Tony about Adam Milstein. “He’s a convicted felon. That’s a bad way to describe him. He’s a real estate mogul. When I was working with him at AIPAC, I was literally emailing back and forth with him while he was in jail. He’s loaded. He’s close to half a billion dollars.”

Milstein was convicted of tax evasion and sent to prison for three months in 2009. The Israeli-American Council, which he leads, funds numerous pro-Israel organizations: Milstein also sits on the boards of AIPAC, StandWithUs and the Israel on Campus Coalition. He is close to billionaire casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the wealthiest donor to the pro-Israel lobby and the largest donor to the Trump campaign.

The promotional video for the Canary Mission, played in the film, says: “A few years later, these individuals are applying for jobs in your companies … ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”

“It was shattering to me because I had to look for a job, I had to start my life,” Obeid from UC Davis says. “And now I had this website smearing my name before I even got a chance to make a name for myself.”

“Somebody did contact my employer and asked for me to be fired based on my pro-Palestine activism,” says Summer Award, who campaigned at the University of Tennessee for Palestinian equal rights. “They said if they continued to employ me, their values are anti-Semitic. It can be really scary at first. I was mostly harassed via Twitter. They were tweeting me every two or three days. They take screen shots, even way back to my Facebook pictures that don’t even look like me anymore. Just digging and digging through my online presence.”

Israel’s moral bankruptcy is powerfully exposed in one of the last scenes in the film. Tony joins an “astroturf” protest organized by the Hoover Institution. Those in the protest have been paid to travel on a bus to George Mason University to disrupt a conference of Students for Justice in Palestine. They are coached by Lerman Mazar, the StandWithUs director of legal affairs, in what to shout.

“If you do happen to speak with any reporters just stay on message,” Mazar tells her lackluster protesters. “And what is the message? SJP is a ….”

“Hate group,” the protesters answer feebly.

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Chris Hedges is a Truthdig columnist, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a New York Times best-selling author, a professor in the college degree program offered to New Jersey state prisoners by Rutgers University, and an ordained Presbyterian minister.

Featured image is from Mr. Fish/Truthdig

Government forces have eliminated more than 270 ISIS members as well as seized a large amount of weapons and munition, including 12 TOW anti-tank guided missiles, in the province of al-Suwayda since middle November, Oleg Makarevich, a spokesman for the command of the Russian task force in Syria, announced on December 3.

“The terrorists had been there for a long time, flocking to the area for several months. Among them were militants who were able to leave Yarmouk and Damascus in advance and also arrived from al-Tanf. Another difficulty was that tanks and heavy artillery have very limited maneuverability there, while the militants had many grenade launchers, anti-tank missiles and 82mm mortars,” the spokesman stated.

380km2 in eastern al-Suwayda was declared fully liberated from ISIS by the Syrian state media on November 17. Despite this, according to local sources, some number of ISIS cells still hide in the desert area south of al-Safa. Furthermore, a large presence of ISIS can observed in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert. Therefore, claims of some pro-government sources that the terrorist group was fully eliminated on the western bank of the Euphrates are premature.

The US-controlled zone of al-Tanf is being actively used by ISIS terrorists as a safe haven to hide from Syrian Army attacks and to re-locate its forces in eastern Syria. While it exists, it’s not likely that ISIS cells could be fully wiped out in this part of the country.

From its side, the US-led coalition is contributing every possible effort to prevent any security operations of the Syrian Army near the al-Tanf zone. On December 2, the coalition shelled Syrian Army positions near the al-Ghurab mount at the border with Iraq. The US-led force reportedly employed M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) deployed at the al-Tanaf base.

The formal reason of the attack is unknown but US forces had repeatedly attacked Syrian Army units pursuing terrorists in the area on the edge of the so-called security zone near al-Tanf.

On December 3, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) released a statement claiming that 11 Turkish-backed militants had been killed by the group in two fresh attacks in the Syrian area of Afrin.

On December 2, a YPG unit attacked a Jaysh al-Islam patrol in the village of Dermishmishe, near Afrin city. 5 Jaysh al-Islam members were reportedly killed and 3 others were wounded in the attack. Their vehicle was also destroyed.

On the same day, YPG fighters destroyed a military vehicle stationed at the headquarters of Ahrar al-Sham in the town of Jinderese. 6 Turkish-backed militants were killed and 8 others were wounded, according to the YPG report.

YPG attacks in Afrin will likely continue until the Turkish military and its proxies establish an effective security network in this part of Turkish-occupied Syria. However, a widely known incompetence and corruption within Turkish-backed militant groups delay and in some case even sabotage these Ankara-led efforts.

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I was involved in pro-peace, anti-war, anti-US Imperialism efforts during the most hideous years of the Reagan/Bush administrations (from 1980 – 1992) that resulted in the deaths and sufferings of millions of innocent people in virtually every South and Central American nation you can think of.

As I remember the many innocent – often “disappeared” – war-refugees who suffered, starved and died at the hands of my war-profiteering national leaders, I am unable to shed any tears for the guilty ones, even if they are now dead or dying, for they were war-mongers that never apologized for their misdeeds. They were members beholden to Wall Street and War Street whose intentions made them responsible for brutal massacres, assassinations, torturing, mass killings, starvation and the impoverishment of millions of innocents that wanted to live in peace  in their homeland that had been targeted for exploitation by my once-beloved homeland.

When our past history of US-inflicted economic and military cruelty is forgotten (or never learned in the first place, as is the case of our current president), our people and politicians can’t make the connections between

  • 1) America’s Wall Street and War Street exploitation of the rest of the world and
  • 2) the current global crises of Big Business-induced global warming, Wall Street-induced economic disparities/oppression/refugees and War Street’s perpetual wars that have been going all over the planet since the Reagan/Bush administrations went into deep debt by lavishing trillions of dollars on America’s military, nuclear weapons and its conventional arsenals.

I know that many of my readers also grew tired of the endless accolades for ex-president George Herbert Walker Bush (US President # 41) who died last Friday. Having to endure listening to the repetitive accounts of the small handful of good and decent things that he was given credit for made me turn off the radio and TV for most of the last 5 days. One such accolade that was particularly undeserved was his signing – not authoring or proposing or even politicking for – the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

There are many points that need to be made when powerful US leaders die, especially presidents. But the accolades need to be balanced with what are often unwelcome truths. And, in my opinion, that balance needs to be applied particularly to those leaders that have been legitimately accused of being guilty of crimes against the peace, international war crimes or war-profiteering.

Therefore, presidents and other national leaders that have been war-mongers, serial liars, sociopaths, narcissists, megalomaniacs, greed-heads or simply traitors to democratic ideals are particularly deserving of scorn – not accolades – even if they are recently deceased.

I recall cringing as I listened to the endless accolades given to pro-war presidents like Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the lead-up to their funerals. And I know that I will have to think twice before I mourn the inevitable deaths of our living but unrepentant, war-mongering presidents and their advisors (everyone since Carter?).

If I had been aware years ago, I also wouldn’t have mourned the deaths of the many evil-doers that were behind the fascist “Business Plot” to overthrow Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1934 (see details in the two articles at the end of this piece).

One of the “Business Plot” coup-plotters was banker Prescott Bush, the father of George H W Bush and grandfather of George W Bush. None of Prescott Bush’s progeny have been willing to talk about Prescott’s traitorous deeds.

At the time of the plot, Prescott Bush was deeply involved in the business of the Hamburg-America Lines (co-owned by industrialists from both pro-Hitler Germany and pro-Hitler America). Bush was also involved in the ascendance of Adolf Hitler to his becoming dictator in 1933. Prescott Bush was slated to be the liaison between the coup-plotting group and Hitler’s new regime. The defeat of the Democrat FDR in his runs for re-election were important goals. The attempt to defeat FDR in the 1940 re-election campaign was actually heavily-funded by Nazi Germany. (A reminder of the alleged Russian involvement in defeating Hillary Clinton.)

Prescott Bush became an FDR-hating Republican US Senator from Connecticut who must have been privately ambivalent about going to war against his old allies in Germany. Another irony is that Prescott’s son George H W Bush became a World War II war hero – albeit in the Pacific war against Japan.

For a good source of information on the Bush family, including the “Business Plot” against FDR, read Russ Baker’s book: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put It in the White House, and What Their Influence Means for America

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Some of the Unmentionables in George H W Bush’s Legacy

I’m certain that many of us aware of the many omissions concerning the legacy of George H W Bush. I list some of them below:

1) Bush 41’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990;

2) his nefarious actions while he was CIA chief in Gerald Ford’s administration;

3) his role in the US support of the uncountable South and Central American dictatorships during the Reagan administration;

4) the illegal invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause!);

5) starting the un-provoked Persian Gulf War;

6) his Christmas Eve pardoning of former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, Elliot Abrams and four other government officials that were involved in the Iran-Contra affair;

7) his complicity in the thousands of corpses that rotted on the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991; 8) his playing the “race card” in the use of Willie Horton in the Dukakis campaign;

9) Bush 41 and the CIA’s role in the Contra War-era’s flooding of the US with crack cocaine that facilitated the epidemic that has persisted to this day;

10) his appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court;

11) the intentional targeting of the air-raid shelter in Baghdad that killed over 400 Iraqi civilians; and

12) a host of other items. Just google Bush plus:

  1. a) Operation Black Eagle;
  2. b) Oliver North;
  3. c) El Salvador;
  4. d) Nicaragua;
  5. e) Honduras;
  6. f) Felix Rodriguez;
  7. g) etc, etc,

Oh, and there was also no mention of 13) his admitted groping of at least 8 young women – acts that brought down in disgrace many of his contemporaries.

(NOTE: The Iran-Contra affair, referred to above, was an illegal action that Bush was involved in when he was VP under Reagan. It was likewise never mentioned by any mainstream media outlet that I heard this week. Because of US congressional laws prohibiting the continued use of US taxpayer dollars to fund the right-wing Contra “rebels” that were fighting against various left-leaning nations in Central America, the Reagan/Bush administration secretly and illegally raised the money to keep the Contra’s terrorist operations going by selling missiles to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages. They then used the illicit money from those weapons sales to illegally fund the Contras in Nicaragua, Honduras and surrounding areas, an action which was forbidden by Congress. Oliver North was one of the point men in the illegal operation.)

In the 101stCongress (during the first 2 years of Bush 41’s presidency), Democrats had sizable majorities of 55/45 in the Senate and 251/183 in the House of Representatives. It was during that time that the Exxon-Valdez Oil Spill occurred.  The Big Oilman Bush surely collaborated in the mishandling, the cover-up and the failure to punish Exxon justly.

The capture, imprisonment (in a US prison!) and silencing of one of Bush 41’s many military dictator buddies, Panama’s Manuel Noriega. Military strongman Noriega was a CIA intelligence asset and paid informant during the time when Bush 41 was CIA Director (1976 – 1977), which was just one more motivating factor in the deceptively labeled “Operation Just Cause”.

Another major motivation for the Panama invasion – during which uncounted numbers of innocent Panamanian civilians were killed by the US troops – was the fact that both Wall Street and War Street had been upset with President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 treaty with Panama. That treaty promised to gradually relinquish US control over the Canal Zone and gradually eliminate US military bases by the year 2000. The Bush invasion ultimately didn’t reverse the treaty as probably intended, and all US military installations were eventually handed over to Panama in late 1999 – much to the dissatisfaction of powerful economic and military elites.

Operation Just Cause was not authorized by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress. But there was a lot of progressive legislation that came to Bush’s Oval Office desk for his signature during his term, and he had little choice but to sign most of it. (See a partial list of the legislation here).

Image result for The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

The Plot to Seize the White House

For much more on the attempted “Business Plot”, see Jules Archer’s 2015 book entitled The Plot to Seize the White House: The Shocking TRUE Story of the Conspiracy to Overthrow FDR

Here is a brief synopsis of the book provided by the publisher, Skyhorse Publishing:

“Many people might not know that in 1933, a group of wealthy industrialists—working closely with groups like the KKK and the American Liberty League—planned to overthrow the U.S. government and run FDR out of office in a fascist coup. Readers will learn of their plan to turn unhappy war veterans into American “brown shirts,” depose FDR, and stop the New Deal. They asked Medal of Honor recipient and Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler to work with them and become the “first American Caesar.” Fortunately, Butler was a true patriot. Instead of working for the fascist coup, he revealed the plot to journalists and to Congress.

“Archer writes a compelling account of a plot that would have turned FDR into a fascist puppet, threatened American democracy and changed the course of history. This book not only reveals the truth behind this shocking episode in history, but also tells the story of the man whose courage and bravery prevented it from happening.”

The remainder of this article supports the arguments above.

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Corporate America’s Love Affair with Fascism

Posted March 6, 2010 here

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not who makes the laws.” — Mayer Amschel Rothschild

“What we have in America and Europe today are Fascist Bankocracies. Big Business and Big Banks have made slaves of us all and they know exactly what they are doing. The love affair between the big business elite and fascism has a long and storied history. Many people in high places have financed and supported fascist regimes. They’ve even tried to implement one in America via Coup. It is my belief as well as the belief of many others on ATS that a backdoor has already taken place and is in power right now.

“Big Business and big bankers believe Fascism to be the perfect example of government. People are nothing more than labor, sheeple to feed their machine of war and greed. Don’t believe me? Below I will link to several articles on the subject that are historical FACT. The point of this thread is to show people that the business elite and wall st banking elite of this nation and many other western nations are FASCISTS.” – From www.abovetopsecret.com

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Wall Street Millionaires Plotted to Overthrow President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

When FDR messed with their money, they began engineering a coup

By Matt Reimann – Aug 11, 2017

Posted here

President Franklin Roosevelt made an enemy of the richest Americans with remarkable haste. By his first term, his heavily progressive New Deal taxes and the suspension of the gold standard inspired vocal opponents within the highest echelons of industry. Among them was an irate William Randolph Hearst,who filmed a message decrying the “impudent” and “despotic” new tax code. Yet of all of Roosevelt’s powerful enemies, perhaps none were more formidable, or incensed, than those who considered throwing him out of office by way of a fascist military coup.

It is impossible to say exactly how close the Business Plot — also called the White House Coup and Wall Street Putsch — came to over-throwing the president. Nearly all we know about the plot is the result of an investigation conducted by the House McCormack-Dickstein Committee in November, 1934. Its chief whistleblower was one Major General Smedley Butler, a respected and tenured military leader with a talent for rallying support to his side. His part in the story began on July 1, 1933, the day he met with two members of the American Legion who had ties to Wall Street heavies.

At the time, Butler was enjoying the boost of a positive public profile, as a result of his enthusiastic advocacy for veterans. American Legionmembers Bill Doyle and Gerald MacGuire wanted to harness this when they asked Butler to appear at the Legion convention in Chicago, as part of a campaign to undermine the body’s leadership. Butler was sympathetic: He had long known of the Legion’s capacity for ignoring its members.

In a second meeting, MacGuire, a $150-a-week bond salesman for the financier Grayson M. P. Murphy, proposed Butler bring along a few hundred veterans for support, and showed him bank statements amounting to $106,000, to pay for their travel expenses. A skeptical Butler surmised that no coalition of veterans could have gathered those funds. Adding to his bemusement was the speech they wanted him to deliver. It lacked populist, pro-veteran rhetoric, and read heavily as a screed in favor of the gold standard, a policy which President Roosevelt had suspended about a month earlier.

The gold standard, as Butler’s subsequent research would uncover, was a major concern for the country’s wealthiest citizens. Bankers especially did not want to be paid back on their gold-backed loans with cheaper, ever-inflating paper. Keynesian economics be damned: To the capital interests of the country, a break from gold meant ravaging the nation’s wealth and savings.

Atthis point, Butler knew MacGuire was taking orders from someone, and requested to speak up the chain of command. It was then he met with Robert Sterling Clark, whose net worth of $30 million owed much to a recent inheritance from the Singer sewing machine fortune. Butler remembered Clark as a “millionaire lieutenant,” from when they served together during the Boxer Rebellion. Clark was blunt about his concerns. He and his associates hoped Butler would encourage support within the Legion and perhaps the country for the reinstatement of the gold standard. “I am willing to spend half of the 30 million to save the other half,” Clark confessed. As Butler suspected, this appeared less and less to be about veterans’ interests.

Clark also bankrolled MacGuire’s seven-month trip abroad in December of 1933, in which the bond salesman was to survey the transforming political tides of Europe. He observed the ascending Nazis. He appreciated the Italian Fascists and their symbiotic relationship with the country’s powerful business interests. But MacGuire’s ultimate model ended up being a right-wing nationalist league in France called the Croix-de-Feu, which had managed to summon 150,000 supporters, many of whom were veterans.

Gerald MacGuire was a portly, sweaty man, and made a habit of talking to Butler about his concerns with frustrating vagueness and equivocation. But after his trip, he brought Butler up to speed and came forward with an even larger proposal. Yes, MacGuire admitted, it was true that the money came from a coalition of concerned captains of industry. At the moment, they had invested $3 million in the project, and MacGuire estimated he could raise $300 million need be. What he wanted, he told Butler, was for the major general to assemble a paramilitary force of some 500,000 veterans, and to use them to throw President Roosevelt out of office.

MacGuire informed Butler that the press would soon make an announcement about the league of businessmen fatigued by the president’s reckless economic reforms. They planned to plant stories about Roosevelt’s ill health and expected the president to comply with orders from his fellow patricians to hand over the highest seat of government. He would be permitted a ceremonial position while Butler and his allies steered the country in the proper direction.

An astounded Butler debated where to turn first and decided to enlist a liberal Philadelphia paper to verify the details of his outlandish story. The paper sent their star reporter Paul Comly French who feigned anti-Roosevelt sympathies to interview MacGuire, who was candid about his views and details of the plot. He mentioned that the Remington arms manufacturerswould supply the army, thanks to a working relationship with the DuPonts. “We need a Fascist government in this country,” he told the reporter, “to save the nation from the communists who want to tear it down and wreck all that we have built in America. The only men who have the patriotism to do it are the soldiers and Smedley Butler is the ideal leader. He could organize a million men overnight.”

Now that he had a second witness, Butler brought his story to the Feds. The committee began hearings on November 20, 1934. “To be perfectly fair to Mr. MacGuire,” Butler said, “He didn’t seem bloodthirsty. He felt that such a show of force in Washington would probably result in a peaceful overthrow of government.” French corroborated Butler’s testimony. Gerald MacGuire, however, denied everything but that the Legion solicited Butler’s support for the gold standard.

Ina few days, the story hit the news cycle. “$3,000,000 Bid for Fascist Army Bared,” read one headline. Much of the press found the story risible. “Details are lacking to lend verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative,” wrote the New York Times. “The whole story sounds like a gigantic hoax … It does not merit serious discussion.”

Those implicated agreed. Banker Grayson M.P. Murphy called it a “damned lie” and said he wasn’t “able to stop laughing” at the thought he, a prominent citizen and veteran of the Spanish-American War would attempt such treason. Thomas Lamont, a Wall Street banker implicated, called it “perfect moonshine. Too unutterably ridiculous to comment upon.”

Shortly before the committee hearings, in September of 1934, the newly formed American Liberty League—made up of leaders and captains of industry opposed to the president “fomenting class hatred” and his handling of the Depression—released a statement. Among its members were the DuPonts, S.B. Colgate,Sewell Avery, John Raskob, Alfred P. Sloan, and former secretary of State Elihu Root. Butler noticed Robert Sterling Clark’s name on the list, as well as Grayson M. P. Murphy, Gerald MacGuire’s boss.

Also implicated in the plot was Al Smith,former New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee, as well as Prescott Bush, a banker, future Connecticut senator, and father to George H. W. Bush and grandfather to George W. Bush.

Of these wealthy and prominent people, none was called for testimony, and none was punished.

Butler went on to rise in public profile, championing populism and pacifism with his 1935 book, War Is a Racket, but for the beneficial publicity, the committee as well as French agree that he was telling truth. And only recently has the public learned of a letter to
Congress sent from an official at the company building the Hoover Dam, in which the writer warned of a plot by the “American Fascist Veterans Association” to overthrow the president.

What remains for many historians to debate is how wide the gap was in this scheme between contemplation and fruition. Butler’s whistleblowing certainly stopped it short, but one wonders if nothing else would have brought down such a complicated and inauspicious plan. Still, as historian Sally Denton points out, “The Fascist plot which General Butler exposed did not get very far, but that plot had in it three elements which make successful wars and revolutions: men, guns, and money.”

In the 1930s, Germany and Italy proved that no form of government should be taken for granted. At this exigent time in America — brought forth by the Depression, a destabilized world, and a transformative president — the rich doubled down on what they always do: protecting their own.

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Dr. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of all life on earth.  Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

“Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.  The desolation lies there, not in the facts.” – John Berger, “A Man with Tousled Hair” in The Shape of a Pocket

A few days ago, as I stepped into my pants to start the day as is my habit, I happened to notice the label at the waist band.  It read “Gap,” and the sight of this word sent my mind spinning into a whirling contemplation of this void that lies at the center of life today, a subject that has disturbed me for a long time.

I had earlier that morning made the mistake of checking the news headlines on the computer.  This too is a habit that I no doubt share with millions of other people. It is a dastardly habit no sane person should inflict on oneself.  To rise from one’s night dreams and step into a litany of hyperbolic headlines shouting doom and gloom at every turn is to inject oneself with a poisonous drug before the sap of life has a chance to rise in one’s veins and one’s imagination might give birth to new possibilities.

Standing in my pants, I felt as though I were hovering over Berger’s enormous empty space, and if I didn’t wake up, I would tumble endlessly away.  Thoreau’s words floated up:

“To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”

So I stepped over the hole at my feet and tried to shake the monotonous clatter of the monstrous media’s messages from my mind. In my vertiginous state I dared not look in a mirror.  So many of the media’s lying words that I had already ingested with coffee seemed to float around and within me in an unreality disconnected from the actual world, even the world they were ostensibly reporting on.

I too had written many words about the drastic condition of our world today, thinking somehow my words, different from the corporate media’s, could move the world by pulling back the curtain that the powerful have created through clichés to conceal the sordid reality they have made of this beautiful earth.  Yet the presentation of facts seemed to make no difference.  Very little, if anything, made a difference.  Most of those who read my words more or less already agreed with me. And many, even friends and family, just ignored them, anticipating that they would disturb them.  And the mainstream publications shunned them like the plague.

Between my desire for a changed world and the world that seemed to change only for the worse lay the desolation Berger identified.

Many people feel it, I know, especially dissidents who fight in various ways against the powerful.  But we prefer not to go there, to see what it consists of and how we may transmute it into acts and words that might make a difference. We prefer to make believe we are making a difference by repeating ad nauseum the same prefabricated responses, usually directly political, to the atrocities committed daily. We are caught in what Czeslaw Milosz, writing in a different context, called “ontological anemia” – “among this illness’s symptoms is the nothingness sucking from the center in.”  We try and try but seem to devour ourselves by repeating the same approaches, as if all the slaves know is what their masters have taught them.  Milosz knew this because he was an artist and a spiritual seeker, not just a political analyst, and also had personal experience with the totalitarian mindset that is descending on the West.

The twists of history can make one’s head spin.

In writing about Vincent Van Gogh, whose hunger for reality drove him to produce works of achingly loving beauty, John Berger, the quixotic Marxist, writes:

Reality, however one interprets it, lies behind a screen of clichés.  Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facilitate its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power.  Reality is inimical to those with power.

Yet while Van Gogh sought reality by breaking the mold, the rich and powerful have devoured the results of his efforts and have transposed them into commodities.  Last year, his painting, Laboureur Dans Un Champ, painted from an asylum where he had committed himself, sold for $ 81.3 million at Christie’s after a frenetic auction.

A humble peasant working in a field becomes a trophy for the rich, who keep the working man slaving away.  Words and deeds are turned upside down on desolation row where

Between the windows of the sea where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row (Dylan)

We need to think again. Imagine!  Today we are caught in a void of clichés and in the clutches of rapacious elites.  Only acts of creative imagination will free us from their clutches.

I look to my right and on a shelf I see a vividly painted Matryoshka doll.  It startles me into the thought that like Matryoshka dolls, so many of our personal habits that deaden us to imagining a way across the gap to a better world are nestled within social habits of thought, speech, and action. We are so often encased like tiny cloned dolls in the social clichés that make us smaller versions of the powers that we say we oppose but which we mimic.  We are carved and painted in their likeness, and caught in the habit of reacting to them in ways that reinforce their control.

We must disrupt our routines.  We must find new ways, not to just respond, but to take the initiative.  When we react according to habits, although we may not realize it, we are being controlled and not in control.  Habits, like the word’s etymology reveals, may reassure us that we have, hold or possess a position of strength from which we can move the world in our direction, but the only Archimedean lever and fulcrum capable of that is inspiration.

That involves a new way of seeing, not vertiginous but visionary.

I think I’ll change my pants.

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Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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The Saudi Dilemma: To Cut or Not to Cut Production

December 5th, 2018 by Irina Slav

To cut and push up prices or not to cut and preserve market share, this is the question that Saudi Arabia is facing ahead of this year’s December OPEC meeting. It seems like just yesterday when OPEC met in 2016 and decided to cut production by 1.8 million barrels daily, including from Russia, to reverse the free fall of oil prices. At the time, it worked because everyone was desperate. Now, many OPEC members are both desperate while not yet recovered from the 2014 blow. Saudi Arabia is not an exception.

A recent report from Capital Economics said Saudi Arabia has its problems but it could withstand lower oil prices without feeling too much of a pinch.

“Even if [Brent] prices fall further to $40-$50 a barrel, immediate balance of payments strains are unlikely to emerge,” the report said, with its authors adding the Kingdom would be able to finance its trade deficit from its foreign exchange reserves “for at least a decade.”

This suggestion is not universally accepted. Reuters’ John Kemp this week offered a different perspective in his regular column on oil, noting Saudi Arabia’s foreign exchange reserves currently stand at US$500 billion, down from nearly US$750 billion in 2014 when the oil prices slumped under the weight of U.S. shale oil. At the same time, Saudi Arabia is in a major push to diversify its revenue streams and has committed a lot of money to it.

Also, Kemp wrote,

“The kingdom probably needs to keep several hundred billion dollars’ worth of reserve assets on hand to maintain confidence in its fixed exchange-rate peg to the U.S. dollar and prevent a run on the currency.”

It’s a classic rock and a hard place situation for the Saudis. On the one hand, they could continue pumping at the current record rate or close to it, pressuring prices further, which is what they did in 2014. That strategy hurt U.S. shale substantially, but the attempted assault did not go quite as planned. Now, it will once again hurt U.S. shale, but again, it won’t beat the resilience of the US shale patch.  That much should have become clear in the past three years.

On the other hand, Saudi Arabia could start cutting, but it will need to convince all other OPEC members to join the cuts and, more importantly, Russia. Reuters earlier today reported, quoting unnamed sources, that Russia had “accepted the need to cut production” and prices immediately jumped, once again highlighting how important the Russia-Saudi Arabia cooperation has become for oil markets, if it even needs highlighting.

For now, it seems like a cut is the more likely outcome. In spite of reservations expressed by Nigeria and Libya, if Saudi Arabia managed to convince everyone to cut amid the major tensions with Iran ahead of the U.S. sanctions, then it could probably convince them again, if only on the grounds that if they don’t start cutting all will suffer.

Kemp agrees.

“Saudi Arabia cannot afford another slump in oil prices,” he warns. “It needs to keep revenues high to help its economy climb out of recession and finance ambitious social and economic transformation programs.”

Yet the Kingdom is preparing. Kpler reported this week loadings of Saudi crude since the start of November had reached new highs of 8.14 million bpd, which was 770,000 bpd more than the average daily loadings rate for October and much higher than the last 2018 high of 7.766 million bpd booked for June. The bulk of the increase comes from China, with shipments in that direction up by more than half a million barrels daily in November from October. Production is also at record highs, like Russia’s was ahead of the first cuts in 2016. Perhaps we are seeing a lesson learned there or perhaps the Kingdom is out of options besides cutting.

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Irina is a writer for the U.S.-based Divergente LLC consulting firm with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

Brexit: Theresa May Goes Greek!

December 5th, 2018 by Brett Redmayne-Titley

Regularly presidents, prime ministers, congresspersons and parliamentarians worldwide negate the democratic will of their nation’s voters by refusing to support legitimate election results. Strangely, their treasonous actions continue without serious reprisal or punishment by the voter. This emboldens them. The reality of votes cast and “democracy”past does not does bode well for the people of the United Kingdom, their future as a nation or their hopeful return to sovereignty once called, “Brexit.”

While the name has not changed; the definition certainly has.

It has become all too easy for democracy to be turned on its head and popular nationalist mandates, referenda and elections negated via instant political hypocrisy by leaders who show their true colours only after the public vote. So it has been within the two-and-a-half year unraveling of the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 that saw the subsequent negotiations now provide the Brexit voter with only three possibilities. All are a loss for Britain.

Image result for grexit

One possibility, Brexit, is the result of Prime Minister, Theresa May’s negotiations- the “deal”- and currently exists in name only. Like the PM herself, the original concept of Brexit may soon lay in the dust of an upcoming UK Parliament floor vote in exactly the same manner as the failed attempt by the Greeks barely three years ago. One must remember that Greece on June 27, 2015 once voted to leave the EU as well and to renegotiate its EU existence as well in their own “Grexit” referendum. Thanks to their own set of underhanded and treasonous politicians, this did not go well for Greece. Looking at the Greek result, and understanding divisive UK Conservative Party control that exists in the hearts of PMs on both sides of the House of Commons, this new parliamentary vote is not looking good for Britain.

The Fleeting Illusion of Election Night Victory.

Similar to Greece, the current state of Brexit leaves it now before the parliament – not the voters- as a poor Hobson’s choice. In a week, this faux- Brexit as it is currently- the spawn of an utter, and possibly deliberate, failure in the negotiations- will be decided. Here in the UK blame can be laid at the feet of just one national politician, who, like Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, first appeared to their desperate country dressed in the mantle of “Hope”and “Change.” Too quickly Tsipras was stripped bare, following  Syriza’s staggering 2015 national election victory and his subsequent tepid and inept attempt to renegotiate with Brussels about its destructive debt structure and leave the EU. His public disrobing then- like that of UK Prime Minister Theresa May via her “deal”– would thus reveal the life-long scars of their true national allegiance gnawed into their backs by the lust of their masters in Brussels.

On Dec. 11, 2018, the most historic vote in modern UK history will take place. At stake is Britain. Like Greece, the whispered coercions to UK Parliament members by the arrogant likes of European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker and President of the European Council Donald Tusk and their EU members have begun. These are the men who have already beaten back the democratic attempts of Greece and Catalonia while affecting recent populist socialist movements in national elections in Italy and in Spain.

The farcical justifications from UK politicians have begun anew, trying desperately to convince Britons that this failure of negotiations and political will is actually good for them, their futures and for the UK. These de rigueur protestations are growing louder day-by-day as the public is told again and again, “This is the best we can do.”

Is it?

As must be remembered, David Cameron, a Tory, called for the national Brexit vote in order, not to free the UK from the clutches of EU unelected dominance, but instead to further certify and strengthen the Conservative Party’s ongoing destruction of the UK’s social services, privatization of national assets, privatization of Britain’s healthcare system (the NHS), and increased austerity for UK families. All this, while an increasingly impoverished Britain saw their parliament approve tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, benefit reductions for workers, increased retirement age, and more funding for US/Israeli inspired wars under diktat from Brussels via Washington.

Ironically, like a cluster bomb of white phosphorous over a Syrian village, Cameron’s Brexit vote blew up spectacularly in his face. Two decades of ongoing political submission to the EU by the Cons and “new”labour had them arrogantly misreading the minds of the UK voter.

So on that incredible night, it happened. Prime Minister David Cameron… the Cons… New Labour…The Lib- Dems… and even the UK Labour Party itself, were shocked to their core when the unthinkable nightmare that could never happen, did happen. Brexit had passed by popular vote!

David Cameron has been in hiding ever since.

After Brexit passed the same set of naïve UK voters assumed, strangely, that Brexit would be finalized in their national interest as advertised. This belief had failed to read Article 50– the provisos for leaving the EU- since, as much as it was mentioned, it was very rarely linked or referenced by a quotation in any of the media punditry. However, an article published four days after the night Brexit passed, “ A Brexit Lesson In Greek: Hopes and Votes Dashed on Parliamentary Floors,” provided anyone thus reading  Article 50, which is only eight pages long and double-spaced, the info to see clearly that this never before used EU by-law would be the only route to a UK exit. Further, Article 50 showed that Brussels would control the outcome of exit negotiations along with the other twenty-seven member nationsand that effectively Ms May and her Tories would be playing this game using the EU’s ball and rules, while going one-on-twenty-seven during the negotiations.

In the aftermath of Brexit, the real game began in earnest. The stakes: bigger than ever.

Forgotten are the hypocritical defections of political expediency that saw Boris Johnson and then Home Secretary Theresa May who were, until that very moment, both vociferously and very publicly against the intent of Brexit. Suddenly they claimed to be pro- Brexit in their quest to sleep in Cameron’s now vacant bed at No. 10 Downing Street. Boris strategically dropped out to hopefully see, Ms May, fall on her sword- a bit sooner.

So, the plucky PM was left to convince the UK public, daily, as the negotiations moved on, that “Brexit means Brexit!” A UK media that is as pro-EU as their PM chimed in to help her sell distortions of proffered success at the negotiating table, while the rise of “old” Labour, directed by Jeremy Corbyn, exposed her “soft” Brexit negotiations for the litany of failures that ultimately equaled the “deal” that was strangely still called “Brexit.”

Too few, however, examined this reality once these political Chameleons changed their colours just as soon as the very first results shockingly came in from Manchester in the wee hours of the morning on that seemingly hopeful night so long ago: June 23, 2016. For thus would begin a quiet, years-long defection of many more MPs than merely these two opportunists.

What the British people also failed to realize was that they and their Brexit victory would also be faced with additional adversaries beyond the EU members: those from within their own government. From newly appointed PM May to Boris Johnson, from the Conservative Party to the New Labour sellouts within the Labour Party and the Friends of Israel, the quiet internal political movement against Brexit began. As the House of Lords picked up their phones, too, for very quiet private chats within House of Commons, their minions in the British press began their work as well.

The Kingdom’s New Waterloo?

Two weeks ago, Ms May announced the details of her very much anticipated “deal.” This was the culmination of her “tough” negotiating style with the European Union negotiators on Brexit.

The definition of pro-Brexit supporters in Ms May’s Conservative Party has amounted to two possible choices in result: the “hard Brexit” which completely severs ties with the EU. This would separate British law from European law on topics ranging from trade to migration to product regulation. The other strategy, a “soft Brexit,” would maintain some of these ties without a complete separation from the EU’s common market.

The details that Ms May released on Wednesday are without a doubt a very soft Brexit- one that pays no homage to the original vote. This is because the deal has a provision that would still keep the UK in the EU Customs Union (the system setting common trade rules for all EU members) indefinitely. This is an outrageous inclusion and betrayal of a real Brexit by Ms May since this one topic was the most contentious in the debate during the ongoing negotiations because the Customs Union is the tie to the EU that the original Brexit vote specifically sought to terminate.

Worse, this deal would have the UK parliament forfeit its current direct rights to EU law and courts in the advent of problems within the Customs Union after the deal. However, Britains are supposed to believe the protestations, now, that the EU will promise to provide smooth sailing from now on.

The issue of the “Back-stop” has Ireland furious as well. This is designed to avoid a crisis over Northern Ireland, which is part of the UK but wants to retain an open border with neighboring EU member Ireland. Imposing border controls between Ireland and Northern Ireland could threaten the Good Friday Agreement, the deal that ended serious violence in Northern Ireland in 1999. Unlike, Ms May, Ireland does not trust the EU. Due to the Back Stop and the Customs Union, the EU will be able to force its will on the UK, as France has already said it will do over fishing rights, but the UK will not be able to cry foul, because Ms May will have given up the nation’s EU commercial rights of any kind over grievances.

Ms May’s failure was so obvious that cabinet defections– new ones- began immediately including Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab, who said, he cannot in good conscience” support the deal. His was followedbyWork and Pensions secretary, Esther McVey, who added,

“We have gone from no deal is better than a bad deal, to any deal is better than no deal.”

When, on Thursday, PM May went to Parliament to defend her deal, she was met by howls of laughter as she attempted to show confidence before the whole House of Commons when defending her indefensible deal. Next, Tory Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has grandstanded throughout as  an MP from the hard Brexit camp, submitted a letter of no confidence in May’s leadership — which may see her soon join David Cameron in hiding.

As it stands before parliament next Tues., the choice is a Hard Brexit “No” vote or “Yes” to Ms May’s excuses for this deal. This choice also amounts to whether she will see her hand the keys to No. 10 over to the nightmare of Brussels, Jeremy Corby.

Yes or no, both, at this minute, are being sold as the only two choices, with EU President Junker helping this coercion by insisting that there will be no new negotiations and “this deal is the ‘best deal for Britain,” and that,

“This is the only deal possible. So, if the House (of Commons) says no, we would have no deal.”

Both sides predict gloom and doom for Britain, and here, they may both be correct. This all the more highlights the failure and the treason of Ms May’s deal.

The last option is a new Brexit referendum. After a successful “No” vote. “The prospects of a second referendum have advanced considerably,” wrote the ultra-conservative Financial Times’s Robert Shrimsley, who added.

“Parliament will not stomach a no-deal exit. So the hardliners risk provoking the crisis that kills their dream, by smoothing the path to a second referendum.” 

This, of course, ignores Junker’s threats against further negotiations and the very questionable outcome from the voters who are tired of elections and this Brexit but will likely, then, have a new leader in the Commons.

As it stands, only one possible outcome, the “Hard Brexit,” is in keeping with the spirit of the Brexit that was voted for long ago. But if the fate of Greece is followed by EU vengeance on the UK in retribution, the Brits will be hit hard, fast and often. Considering the Tories, not surprisingly, have no plan for this, the pound will likely dive and prices soar in Venezuela style fashion. The deal, however, is a clear victory for the EUP and a new referendum as no guaranteed result except to continue to fracture Britain with yet another vote.  All choices, if these are choices, are very bad for Britain.

The question that should be most important to all British citizens, the one that must draw their attention to this Brexit finale, is no longer: “Brexit: ‘Yes?’or ‘No?’” The question must now be:

           “How many UK politicians will, a week from Wednesday, sell their vote, their soul and their country to EU?”

Their vote will answer this. The British people are in the hands of their politicians; the same collective UK cadre that has, for the past two decades, routinely beholden the UK to an unelected EU central body of monetary, military and sovereign control.

What could go wrong? 

The Eight Hundred Pound Corbyn in the Room.

Throughout the negotiations, there has at all times been a specter looming in the back of the minds of the Brexit negotiators and particularly in the black souls of Junker and Tusk. Arguably there is a much bigger reason for the failed Brexit negotiations and the final desperate measures of Ms May and her ilk to pass their “deal.” This reason, a voice of reason long discounted like the UK people themselves, now stands larger than ever. One diminutive little man. He stands for what they do not. This politician is pro-UK, pro-worker, pro-Labour, pro- NHS, pro-union, and pro- Palestine. He is also anti-privatization, anti- EU, anti-war, anti-nuclear war, anti-global warming. Worse, he is a devote socialist and a Jew…  a Jew who publicly holds Israel accountable for its crimes!

Yes. Behind all that has gone on with destroying Brexit, there is another nightmare, one that is the Kryptonite that Brussels is terrified of to its marrow. His name is Jeremy Corbyn.

However, Brussels is not scared of just the man himself nor his ideals and sincerity to his cause. No. What EU and EUP politicians, those that support all things Zionist, fear the most is his leadership: Unapologetic, populist, socialist, leadership. That is rising.

Corbyn is what the United Kingdom once was fifty years ago. During that too-long forgotten time, the workers and their vote forced political will in favour of their country and their families. Politicians feared their vote and Britain slowly reversed the social degradation that was the legacy of the industrial revolution and the engines of capitalism and capitalists run amuck. Corbyn is, and always has been, Old Labour; not the bastardized form that slowly infected parliament under the moniker of “New”Labour over the past twenty years. What hucksters like Tony Blair and the Labour Party elite were, in fact, offering as “new” was really just a quasi Conservative Party light platform that slowly morphed over the years into what the Conservative Party had once been itself under Thatcher and John Major. This left the British voter with the choices of only the Tories or the Conservative Party subsets such as the ineffective Lib-Dems, plus a few non-influential nationalist parties like DUP in Ireland and Plaid Cymru in Wales.

Hence, election-after-election, voters continued to see their country gutted by virtue of their own vote due to a lack of true choice or opposition candidates. The ongoing results were privatization, social service cuts, and imposed austerity on the UK majority that saw UK poverty levels skyrocket, as shown by last week’ scathing UN report. Instead, Britain became a haven for the wealthy and their massive tax dodging schemes- as shown by the Panama Papers- as poverty increased under more and more White Hall approved austerity. All pro- EU factions of all UK parties within the Parliament, however, were universal in their excuses and false justifications for their ongoing gutting of what remained of British socialism… election-after-election.

Except one.

Corbyn is real Labour. He is an unabashed supporter of, and a throwback to, a time when the UK was an economic powerhouse, but also had enough for everyone- by law! By all accounts and his consistent thirty-five-year track record as an MP, he is genuine. Minimized by his Labour colleagues and the UK press during decades of Labour Party decline, he has now emerged as the voice of reason, a champion of the worker, formidable in debate with his Tory adversaries and unflappable under the torrent of daily media and cross-bench White Hall criticism.

Few remember, as they should, that Corbyn, as leader of the Labour Party, has already survived a very contentious attempt by his own party members and the Friends of Israel to oust him as the leader. His success against this coup strongly shows that he has very powerful and connected political interests behind him: those which have spearheaded his ascent and believe in socialist reforms. They and Corbyn understand the true state and direction of current Britain; about this Brexit deal and about Ms May’s faux negotiations and her treason. They don’t like any of it.

To the troika (EU Commission, EU Central Bank and IMF) Corbyn is a much bigger threat than the failed attempts at sovereignty in Catalonia, Italy, Spain, Greece or Britain. Corbyn may prove to be- if he becomes PM- real leadership: leadership worth following. His sincere path to a return to an old-time Labour platform that returns control to the UK worker rather than elite and the powerful business interests is anathema to the capitalist forces ruling the EU. His consistent leadership reminds his growing group of followers, both in Britain and worldwide, of the good old days when the people did matter to their government and when there was enough for everyone- by law! He is a very dangerous man; for his is a message, not just for the UK but one being heard as a rallying cry in many capitalist dominated countries worldwide.

If Corbyn comes to power, his will- finally– be the first successful attempt at the return to a socialist Britain; the first non- military defeat for the EU and Capitalist forces worldwide. If he becomes PM, which seems increasingly likely, Corbyn’s example will be closely followed by other socialist national leaders in their own countries- sincerely or not (see: Bernie Sanders) –  where the 1% have all the wealth, all the services and all the control over an increasingly impoverished world. Anti-populist forces like the EU have so far globally stopped all forms of democratic expression including those elections that were –temporarily – successful, such as Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Honduras, and Ukraine. So, Brexit and Corbyn must be defeated.

While Brexit might be the unintended spark for a desperate world to watch glow, it is Corbyn who holds in his palm a very large box of matches.

The Mathematics of Treason: Tithing for Politicians.

PM May will not be going quietly. With her Prime Minister-ship, Brexit, EU control over the UK, Tory Control over parliament, and certification of the national rise of socialism at stake, her job is to cajole and lie-again- to an election weary Britain, one that has already suffered the distortions of the Scottish independence referendum (SNP), the ill-fated Brexit referendum, and then a national election- the one that saw May and her Cons club cling to power only by buying Irish DUP support for UK 1.5 Billion pounds. All this in thirty-three months.

The cycle has begun anew.

This time the stakes could not be higher. Ms May has already shown her desperation by offering bribes in the form of peerages to PM’s willing to vacate their current public anti-deal opposition. This week, Downing Street announced that John Hayes, a former MP and Transport Minister, who proclaims to be a staunch Euro-sceptic, would suddenly become Sir John in a rare honor. Earlier this week furious young Tory MPs claimed that now older Euro-sceptics had refused to put in the No Confidence letters against Theresa May because they were hoping for a peerage of their own Thus, Best for Britain champion Virendra Sharma said,

“It seems like Downing Street will do anything to get their bad Brexit deal through.”

But it is Prime Minister Theresa May’s words that Britons should take notice of, particularly two all revealing sentences, that together show the strange mind and divisive, if not delusional, rational used to pass this bad deal. Beyond the oft-debunked claim by the PM that,  “Brexit is Brexit,” she would now, this week, have the MPs and the British public believe that:

“This is the best deal we could get,” and, “We have to follow the will of the voter and pass [this] Brexit.”

The arrogance of these two statements is as incongruent as it is revealing.

Here, Ms. May would actually have the original Brexit voter believe that she has done such a good job negotiating this deal that her current Brexit- which it is not – must now be passed by parliament in order to honor the will of the Brexit voter- which it does not: the same voters that  would never have voted for Brexit in the form she has turned it into. Such is the delusion and arrogance of Ms May.

Ridiculous?  Maybe not.

Ms May must rely on getting her votes this time from parliament, not the people.  She needs 326 votes. Here lies the real threat to Britain.

There are 650 seats in House of Common so 326 is the magic majority. In terms of purported party loyalty, the Cons sit with 315 seats and an only coalition majority. But Labour’s opposition and 257 seats are fractured at best between true labour and faux labour members. The Scottish National Party is third with 35 followed by the Liberal-Democrats with 9. The remainder of 31 seats is split between nationalist parties like Ian Pasley’s Irish DUP, (10 seats) which have come out against the deal publicly, but has already shown it can be bought for the right price (1.5 Billion pounds), as in the last election of 2016.

The UK public must fear the Cons continued allegiance to Brussels. Yes, many have expressed outrage and insisted that they will not vote for this deal. However, with the Cons not having yet been successfully punished at the polls, it is surely a matter of time before the first defector- after a very lengthy and public set of excuses and self-serving rationale- joins the many other existing Tory yes votes. When that happens the floodgates will open and the defections will pour in for their just rewards to come. So, it is safe to assume that the Cons numbers will swell in support by the time of next Wednesday’s vote.

While Corbyn tries to hold ranks in order to achieve the Trifecta of defeating the deal, Ms May’s political future and becoming PM in one blow, there is, however, no chance of party unity on this vote. Like the Cons, it is just a matter of time and the next few days before the first public Labour defections and excuses- likely the same ones- “force” that slippery slope towards UK sovereignty to get suddenly steeper.

It is not likely that the minor parties will vote for the deal as they are ultra-nationalist, such as Plaid Cymru, since a ”yes” vote will see their platforms as utter hypocrisy and therefore doomed. If PM May and here supporters win, it will be the Conservative Party that will be convicted of the crime.

Ms May and the EU can start the count with a firm 90 seats, however. When it comes to UK parliamentary hypocrisy, the leader by far is the self-proclaimed Friends of Israel who are indeed just that. While voting for all things Israel and demonizing all reasonable and factual discussion of Britain’s burgeoning war machine or Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza so, they really hate Corbyn. It is fair to say that most will do as they are told and sell out Britain to central control and Zionist EU interests.

At this juncture, with a final parliamentary vote only days away, it should behoove the British voter to also look more closely at the failed attempt by Greece to leave the EU and the politicians then, who, in a matter of weeks, also turned tail on their country to also answer a call from Brussels.  Brexit, as it stands now before Parliament, is a terrible deal:  a deal that is worse than staying in the EU and a deal that will certainly punish the UK- as was the final result in Greece- for its attempt at sovereignty and populist democratic will. For all this, just like in Greece, is anathema to Brussels and just like in Greece the evil of Brussels does not just stop resistance; it puts it down and then punishes such indiscretions economically and brutally afterwards. Such it is today in Greece, as Alex Tsipras, PM in name only, goes hat in hand selling his countries airports, beaches, islands  and infrastructure for pennies on the Euro merely to service existing loans from Brussels in order to beg for more.

Greece was not a case study in leadership. It was a case study in political treason. Will it be repeated this coming Tuesday!

Regardless of the eventual total, what should be a very easy defeat for this treasonous “deal” being sold as a Brexit fait accompli, like Greece, the final tally may well be a disastrous defeat for Britain. It is likely that all of the UK will be following the final total of the vote. However, the total they should be counting is that of those MPs that turn on them and their country in the lead-up to Tuesday. For, if this deal is passed, it is these faces who must be remembered as the men and women who decided to thumb their nose at the British people and their country. And this they will surely do unless public pressure and outrage- which has not shown itself in decades- is made obvious to them all. Now.

Count Down to Tuesday…

The UK’s Telegraph reports 100 Tory MPs have now indicated they will vote the deal down in Parliament. But will they… after the days to come?

After Sunday’s EU unanimous vote, Ms May strangely offered to debate her deal for the first time, with Jeremy Corbyn. However, at the same time as the whole of Britain pricked-up their ears at this exciting news, Ms May backed out. Likely because she knows every one of her excuses will be cannon fodder for the Labour leader- and his rise in power.

The Express Newspaper polled3154 British adults about their opinion on the latest Brexit developments and no one is happy. Four in ten (42 per cent) of Britons oppose the deal, whilst only 19 per cent are in favor of it.

The remaining 39 per cent answered, “don’t know”. Here, the UK media has done its job via disinformation, thus giving the confidence to those PMs who do vote for the deal, that all will eventually be forgotten, regardless, by the next election.

Three of the many events from recent days should tell the UK voter just how important a real Brexit, one that does extricate Britain from EU control, really is and illustrate how much Brussels is worried about the outcome of this vote.

One: EU Parliament passed Theresa May’s deal in 38 minutes.

Nothing spells winning at the negotiating table like enthusiasm from only one side and this was the message on Sunday. With the last sticking point being the centuries-long contention between Spain and the UK regarding Gibraltar- one so explosive that the UK keeps a large military presence there today- PM May rolled over quickly on that too, leading Conservative MP, Andrew Bridgen to say,

“It appears that there is no-one the prime minister will not betray to achieve her sell-out deal.”

It is safe to that Junker, Tusk and their twenty-seven EU brethren members understood the UK Prime Minister’s negotiating style in exactly the same way.

38 minutes?  Guess who won these negotiations?

Two: Italy.

Down south, this past week in Italy the newly elected Italian government, led by populist Prime Minister, Giuseppe Conte, and ethno-centrist Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, released their proposed annual national budget. Within twenty-four hours, the EU, Tusk and Junker stated clearly that they were not satisfied with Italy’s sovereign decision on how to spend its own national coffers. The EU demanded that Italy revise the budget to suit their unelected whims.

Three: Greece.

Britains  should consider this arbitrary bullying of Italy and of the UK. Then they should consider the sad EU imposed current condition of Greece. Next, they might dwell on the failed outcomes of previous elections within the nearby EU nations, and how similar movements were defeated in their nation as well. Last, they must pay closest of attention to what is actually in the souls of their own politicians and what they truly support.

If not these examples, then the UK citizens would do well to look at the state of subjugation, austerity and further poverty in all these countries and their own: the same countries who also saw, so recently, their hopes so quickly destroyed- like Brexit– by the false-flag allegiance of their elected politicians.

Then, Britons can collectively bend over-like their politicians- and begin to get used to taking it… themselves!

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 150 in-depth articles over the past seven years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, KXL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out and many more. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

It is attrition, suffocation and contortion.  While Theresa May’s Brexit program, weak, compromising and cobbled as it is, endures that bit longer, her opponents from within and without government have been essentially undercutting her on various fronts. 

Foppish and solutions-free Boris Johnson does so from the perspective that the May program as it has been agreed to with the EU so far is a case of Britannia surrendering to the wickedness of the Continent.  He prefers, according to Sir Roger Gale, “the grievance to the solution”.

In the Commons, Johnson persisted with his motif of imprisonment and punishment for the sceptred isle: that the bureaucrats across the channel were cooking up a terrible fate for Britain were the backstop not to be removed from any arrangement.

“They will keep us in permanent captivity as a momento mori, as a reminder to the world of what happens to all those who try to leave the EU.”

Britain would be hostage to Spanish claims on Gibraltar, the French purloining of its fish and bankers, and German pressing for concessions on the free movement of EU nationals.

Opposition parties assail the prime minister from the perspective that the entire campaign for Brexit, and government behaviour since, has been a tissue of irresponsibility and lying.  They are often not sure which, but they are chancing it.  Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn is, however, playing a double game. Being himself sympathetic with the Leavers, he can only, as of this time, trash the Chequers proposals with indignant scrutiny.  Before his fellow parliamentarians, Corbyn insisted that May’s plan would cause a severe case of economic shrinkage: some 4 percent, precipitating the loss of £100 billion over the course of fifteen years. 

What exercised the House of Commons on this occasion most, however, was a historical incident of singular rarity.  Members from Labour and the DUP were permitted by Speaker John Bercow to submit an emergency motion to find the government in contempt.  The motion carried.

The May government had not done itself any favours in that regard, equipping opponents with the bombs to duly situate under their chairs.  As if channelling her former self as home minister, the secretive May refused to release the full legal advice behind the Brexit deal that may yet be doomed.  A circulating rumour (for much, in these shadows, remains rumour), is the fear that the backstop might keep Northern Ireland in the EU customs union indefinitely. 

The government defence proved to be stock standard and would, in most instances, have worked: to release such a report would expose vulnerabilities in negotiating positions ahead of further talks with the EU, thereby rewarding the very individuals deemed enemies by many in parliament.  Besides, argued transport secretary Chris Grayling, himself a former lord chancellor, it remained “a central part of the principles of our legal system that the advice provided from a lawyer to their client is treated as confidential.”

Such is the dire, panicked state of British politics at the moment than even old principles of legal propriety, including that of professional privilege, should be seen to be broken in the higher national interest.  Parliament, as the people’s arbiter, must be informed, and not releasing the attorney general’s legal advice failed to comply, according to the parties behind the contempt motion, with the Commons resolution of November 13.  That resolution stemmed from the principle that legal advice on the Brexit deal would be published in its entirety. 

Attempt to placate opponents were duly made. The first was the release by the government of an overview on Monday covering the gist of the attorney general’s legal advice.  Then came the appearance of Attorney General Geoffrey Cox in the Chamber. He expressed a willingness to answer questions put to him, but this proved a minor sedative to the proceedings.  A three-line whip, deployed by Conservative MPs in an effort to shield the government, also failed.

Cox’s responses conceded various government weaknesses in their negotiations with the EU.  He would have preferred, for instance, “a unilateral right of termination” over the Northern Ireland backstop.  Additionally, he would have also liked to see “a clause that would have allowed us to exit if negotiations had irretrievably broken down.”  But such frankness was to no avail, and Andrea Leadsom, the Commons leader, was compelled to accede to the wishes of the opponents, with the full advice set to be published on Wednesday.

Contempt matters are ancient things, the sort referred to a privileges committee.  But the focus here will be less seeking sanction against any relevant minister, including Cox, than the vote on December 11 in a house that is already faltering.  The government, surmised shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer, “has lost its majority and the respect of the house”.  At this point, the deal in this form will be scuppered, leaving a drawing board bereft of options.  Those filling the void will do so with a formula so repetitive it has become traditional: extol the scenario of total collapse, or embrace the fiction a world outside Europe that can act as appropriate replacement for British trade and power. 

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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]

Friba (*), representante da Associação Revolucionária das Mulheres do Afeganistão (RAWA, na sigla em inglês), fala na entrevista a seguir sobre o processo de paz em seu país, e a cobertura midiática global destes 17 anos da Guerra do Afeganistão. “Esses diálogos de paz são, mais que tudo, parte da propaganda dos EUA a fim de enganar o mundo e o povo afegão”, diz a afegã, defensora dos direitos humanos quem ainda traz sérias denúncias sobre crimes de guerra e de lesa-humanidade.

Edu Montesanti: A RAWA opõe-se fortemente a qualquer negociação entre os EUA, o governo afegão e o Taliban. Esta possibilidade torna-se ainda mais irrealista, para não dizer hipócrita, levando-se em consideração que agora o Estado Islamita (ISIS) também aterroriza seu país. O que você acha deste processo de paz afegão?

Friba: As negociações de paz com o Taleban são algo completamente sem sentido, hipócritas e simplesmente ridículas. Temos os talibans de um lado, criminosos de mentalidade medieval, do outro lado o regime fantoche composto pelos irmãos ideológicos do Taliban, e o terceiro ator, os EUA, criadores de ambos. Tal acordo de paz não resultará em paz, mas no cumprimento dos desejos dos EUA. O único resultado certo desse acordo de paz é que intensificará a guerra, a insegurança, a corrupção, a máfia e a multiplicação das misérias do nosso povo.

Os crimes do Taliban são bem conhecidos de todo o mundo, suas leis da Idade da Pedra e a opressão contra as mulheres sob seu regime brutal já foram amplamente exibidos em todo o mundo. Na última década, esses assassinos derramaram o sangue de milhares de pessoas inocentes através de atentados suicidas, e outros tipos de atentados à bomba.

Enquanto essas lembranças ainda estão fortemente presentes nas mentes de nossas mulheres e homens, e as feridas ainda sangram, esses criminosos estão sendo convidados a juntar-se ao governo para completar o círculo de criminosos fundamentalistas e mercenários no poder. Como os criminosos que já estão presentes no governo, os talibans também desfrutam de total impunidade e não enfrentam processos pelos crimes selvagens contra o nosso povo.

A mera menção dessas conversas de paz está derramando sal nas feridas de nosso sofrido povo. Assim como o acordo de paz alcançado com o assassino Gulbuddin Hekmatyar no ano passado, foi mais um golpe para o povo devastado pela guerra no Afeganistão. Um criminoso que matou milhares de pessoas inocentes durante a Guerra Civil afegã, assassinou dezenas de intelectuais e costumava jogar ácido no rosto das mulheres que eram vistas em público, quando ele era estudante universitário, pisoteou os túmulos das suas vítimas em direção aos braços dos EUA e de Ashraf Ghani [presidente do Afeganistão].

Os ocupantes dos EUA deram ao seu garoto de olhos azuis e agente de longa-data, imunidade contra processos judiciais e retiraram seu nome da lista negra da ONU, para que ele pudesse se juntar aos companheiros traidores e criminosos neste governo fantoche.

Esses diálogos de paz são, mais que tudo, parte da propaganda dos EUA a fim de enganar o mundo e o povo afegão. Se os EUA quisessem um acordo de paz, teriam resolvido esse problema com facilidade porque são os próprios criadores e defensores desses criminosos.

O Paquistão, pai adotivo do Taliban, também está sob comando dos EUA, e teria garantido a aprovação do acordo de paz. Mas os EUA não querem esse acordo de paz, porque o Taliban é sua justificativa para empreender a guerra no Afeganistão, e os EUA precisam urgentemente continuar ocupando nosso país.

Qualquer acordo de paz alcançado sem a participação do povo, especialmente das mulheres do Afeganistão, não tem sentido assim como a democracia e as eleições no Afeganistão são apenas uma fachada. Ganhos obtidos sem a verdadeira luta do povo são apenas mudanças impostas por invasores estrangeiros ou governos fantoches, e essas mudanças podem ser tão facilmente revertidas quanto são implementadas.

Edu Montesanti: Enquanto Donald Trump manifesta desejos de abandonar o Afeganistão, o que você pode dizer sobre a cobertura midiática destes 17 anos de ocupação do regime de Washington, e sua denominada “luta contra o terror”?

Friba: Apesar do anúncio da chamada nova estratégia de Washington, há tantas coisas que não sabemos sobre a criminosa Guerra Afegã dos EUA, devido à falta de transparência e às mentiras descaradas contadas pelo exército dos EUA nos últimos dezessete anos.

Desde o encobrimento de crimes hediondos, que vão de massacres e torturas à assistência a criminosos fundamentalistas, até a mentira sobre o efetivo número de tropas e empreiteiros privados no país, os EUA continuamente enganaram o mundo e sua própria nação sobre a realidade da Guerra Afegã

O Afeganistão mal recebe qualquer cobertura midiática, mas quando raramente isso ocorre os crimes das forças dos EUA nunca são mostrados, assim como a insegurança e a instabilidade do nosso país e a devastadora situação das mulheres e das pessoas, não recebem nenhuma atenção.

Graças à mentirosa máquina de propaganda dos EUA baseada em Goebbels [Paul Joseph Goebbels, ministro de Propaganda da Alemanha Nazista entre 1933 e 1945, que dizia que “uma mentira contada mil vezes torna-se verdade”], os EUA conseguiram escapar impunes de grande parte das suas atividades criminosas, não apenas na Guerra do Afeganistão como igualmente em guerras no Iraque, na Líbia e na Síria, mentindo ao seu povo. A própria sustentação das atuais guerras dos EUA baseou-se em alegações falsas ou exageradas de uma mídia histérica, que espalhou medo entre as pessoas para justificar as invasões e ocupações dos EUA em outros países.

Naturalmente, a devastação de nosso país, política, social e economicamente, é o resultado direto dessa ocupação e dominação. Nosso povo tem provado a guerra neocolonial de 17 anos dos EUA, e os desastres que ela causa. Insegurança, guerra, assassinatos, tortura, violência contra as mulheres, pobreza, máfia, corrupção, desemprego, crise de refugiados, aumento do consumo de drogas, estão todos presentes na ocupação norte-americana sobre nosso povo.

Esta realidade tem cobertura zero em todo o mundo, e é doloroso constatar como as pessoas têm uma imagem distorcida da guerra criminosa dos EUA no Afeganistão e em outros países. Os cidadãos dos EUA e do Ocidente não têm a imagem verdadeira das guerras dos EUA para tomar decisões adequadas, esclarecidas sobre elas. Eles devem enxergar além da cobertura predominante, e descobrir a realidade da Guerra Afegã e de outras cruzadas lideradas pelos EUA.

Eles devem saber que o imposto que pagam é usado por seus governos para promover objetivos imperialistas, no Afeganistão e em outros países devastados pela guerra, e que suas mãos estão encharcadas do sangue do nosso povo inocente. Eles devem saber que os EUA, embora afirmem liderar uma “Guerra ao Terror” no exterior, estão realmente alimentando terroristas e grupos terroristas para alcançar seus próprios objetivos.

Devem saber que, embora Washingon afirme ser o portador da tocha dos direitos humanos, seu governo tem cometido alguns dos crimes mais sangrentos em suas guerras, e forneceu apoio aos violadores locais de direitos humanos e criminosos de guerra nesses países.

Edu Montesanti: E o que se pode dizer da mídia afegã?

Friba: A mídia afegã, que cresceu rapidamente desde a invasão dos EUA em 2001, também tem a mesma política de encobrir e deixar passar os crimes e os planos malignos dos EUA no Afeganistão, em vez de expô-los.

Edu Montesanti: Temos visto no Brasil o avanço de muitos movimentos de origem e aspecto obscuro, com evidências de que são financiados pelos EUA para atingir seus objetivos no país sul-americano, nenhuma novidade na historia da região e do próprio mundo. Na realidade, trata-se de padrão mundial atualmente, a denominada Revolução Colorida idealizada pelo estadunidense Gene Sharp e aplicada em Tunísia, Egito, Síria, Venezuela, Brazil, Ucrânia entre outros países, tentada por Washington sem sucesso também em Cuba, recentemente. Conversei com alguns estudantes afegãos nos EUA, especialmente uma universitaria cujo primeiro nome era Noor, que concedeu entrevistas para a grande mídia norte-americana, com um aspecto muito estranho e muito semelhante à juventude reacionária brasileira: por exemplo, esta Noor smplesmente defendeu, e raivosamente, a Guerra do Afeganistão. Quanto o regime de Washington tem influenciado a juventude afegã?

Friba: Infelizmente, esses agentes educados e treinados nos Estados Unidos aumentaram no Afeganistão, e continuam aumentando com bolsas de estudos como o Programa Fulbright e o Chevening – este segundo é britânico, mas tem os mesmos objetivos [O Reino Unido tem atuado intimamente com os EUA no processo de influencia, espionagem, imbecilização, dominação e exploração global, enfim, o velho e maldito imperialismo].

Garotas como a Noor fazem parte dos planos futuros dos EUA, para que possam continuar ocupando confortavelmente nosso país com o apoio de um Estado traidor, que inclui jovens como Noor.

Essas pessoas e movimentos não são, de fato, afiliados ao governo nem a nenhum outro movimento ou partido reacionário.

Edu Montesanti: Que mensagem você gostaria de enviar ao mundo, para terminar esta entrevista?

Friba: A RAWA sempre afirmou que a solidariedade das pessoas que amam a liberdade e a paz no mundo, é muito importante para fortalecer a luta de nossos povos em casa.

Essas pessoas precisam pressionar seus governos para mudar essa política de invasão e ocupação, e ficar ao lado das pessoas que são vítimas dessas guerras.

Essas sangrentas guerras também têm um forte impacto sobre as pessoas do Ocidente, como o aumento de ataques terroristas perpetrados por simpatizantes do ISIS em toda a Europa e Estados Unidos, sendo portanto vital, mais que nunca hoje, dar as mãos para aniquilar esse vírus mortal.

(*) Dado que a RAWA atua clandestinamente no Afeganistão, ameaçada pelos senhores da guerra locais e pelos talibãs, Friba é um pseudônimo. Nenhuma membro da RAWA menciona publicamente o nome real, nem mostra o rosto. 

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The recent death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi has helped shed more attention on the Saudi war of aggression in Yemen. According to the UN up to 14 million people are at risk of starvation in Yemen. Yet the American and British governments, who have the ability to stop the Saudi war machine in its tracks, continue the sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners. 

Corporate politicians try and defend the military actions of the Saudi led coalition in Yemen by sheer unadulterated lies. UK Foreign Office Minister Alistair Burt in a debate in the House of Commons blithely stated that the Saudi led coalition had not breached any international law.*

Yet evidence of war crimes in Yemen abound. Save The Children, which is feeding starving people in Yemen, has recently released figures showing that the Saudi instigated war in Yemen has caused the deaths of 85,000 children over the last four years.

Tamer Kirolos, Save The Children’s Director in Yemen, has recently said:

“We are horrified that some 85,000 children in Yemen may have died because of extreme hunger since the war began. For every child killed by bombs and bullets, dozens are starving to death and it’s entirely preventable.’’

The air, sea and land blockade of Yemen that the Saudi and UAE led coalition imposed a year ago has been a key factor in creating the conditions for mass starvation in Yemen. However, that is only part of the  story.

In Yemen the Saudi and UAE led coalition has systematically set out to destroy the resources of farmers, herders and fishers alongside the deliberate targeting of food processing, storage, transport and water irrigation.

This falls under the UN definition of genocidal acts. The UN Office Of The Special Advisor On The prevention Of Genocide has an analysis framework that comprises eight categories of factors that it uses to determine whether there may be a risk of genocide in a situation. One of the categories that falls under the category of “Genocidal Acts’ is the deliberate destruction of the food infrastructure:

“Less obvious methods of destruction, such as the deliberate deprivation of resources needed for the group’s physical survival and which are available to the rest of the population, such as clean water, food and medical services.’’

The Saudi led coalition, unable to achieve any decisive breakthroughs on the battlefield against the Houthi opposition, has resorted to the mass bombing of Yemen’s food infrastructure to try and bring about victory in their illegal war.

A new report by Professor Martha Mundy, The Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War: Aerial bombardment and food war, provides a very detailed analysis of the bombing campaigns carried out by the Saudi led coalition in Yemen. This provides clear evidence of the genocidal nature of the military campaign that is supported by the American and British governments. Martha Mundy explains:

“If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanaʿaʾ.”

In the first phase of the war, March to August 2015,  the Saudi coalition focused its bombing primarily upon military targets. However, once their superior fire power failed to crush the Houthi resistance the Saudi led coalition then moved into the realm of deliberate war crimes in the hope of bringing about victory on the battlefield. Professor Mundy, drawing upon data from a wide variety of Yemeni sources, states that the pattern of Saudi bombing moved very early on from military to civilian targets:

“From August 2015 there appears a shift from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, schools, cultural monuments, clinics and hospitals, and houses, fields and flocks.’’

The map below illustrates the systematic way that the Saudi coalition has set out to destroy Yemen’s food infrastructure in every region of the country.

Alongside the bombing of fields and flocks of animals the Saudi led coalition has deliberately targeted the irrigation system of Yemen in an attempt to destroy the agriculture of the country.

The attacks upon the irrigation system has led to severe shortages of water for farmers whose food production has seen massive declines as a consequence. The Tihama region of Yemen, once known as the breadbasket of the country, has seen a devastating collapse of agriculture. Professor Mundy’s report gives figures for 2017, before the Saudi led siege of the port of Hudadaya made the situation even more catastrophic:

  • 51% fall in the amount of land under cultivation
  • 43% of people go hungry every night
  • crop yields per hectare have declined between 21-60%

Professor Mundy notes the complicity of the US and UK in these war crimes. She states categorically that the Saudi targeting of the irrigation works, provided by the Tihma Development Agency has been facilitated by its Western partners:

“It is inconceivable that the US (and UK) military advisors who give target intelligence to the Coalition did not know the location/s and purpose of the Tihama Development Authority.’’

The other aspect of Yemen’s food infrastructure that the Saudi coalition has systematically targetted is its fishing industry. These attacks have inflicted severe damage upon fishing ports all along Yemen’s Red Sea coast. They have destroyed over 220 fishing boats which has led to a 50% fall in fish catches. The map below illustrates the attacks upon fisherman. 

The US and UK along with France are well known for being the major arms sellers to the Saudi coalition  and for protecting its more well known war crimes from diplomatic censure. Less well known is their support for the Saudi coalitions economic war against Yemen, a major cause of starvation, and the deliberate destruction of Yemen’s water and food infrastructure.

Professor Mundy’s report, which draws upon a variety of Yemeni sources, adds to the  growing body of evidence  that reveals how Saudi Arabia and its allies are committing acts of genocide in Yemen. This is with the active complicity of America and its UK ally.

This evidence of the deliberate destruction of the food infrastructure of Yemen, which is designed to create the conditions for mass starvation, is a clear act of genocide. As such, it is the responsibility of ordinary people across the world to pressure their governments into taking action against this genocide.

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*The Saudi Embassy in London was contacted on numeorous occasions for a comment about the issues raised in this article. Not surprisingly, it failed to provide any comment.

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A former consul and first secretary at the Ecuadorian embassy in London has put the final nail in the coffin of credibility for The Guardian, refuting the paper’s fantastical and wholly unsupported claim that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in 2013, 2015 and the spring of 2016 – a charge vehemently denied by all parties involved. 

Fidel Narváez – who worked at Ecuador’s London embassy from 2010 – 2018 has told The Canary that The Guardian‘s claim is entirely falseThe Canary has also reviewed a copy of correspondence between the Guardian and Narváez in which he makes a formal complaint accusing the paper of fabricating an earlier story about a Kremlin plot to smuggle Assange to Russia. 

Both WikiLeaks and Manafort have said they plan to sue The Guardian over the publication, with Manafort slamming the report as “totally false and deliberately libellous.”

Narváez – initially consul and then first secretary at the embassy, told the Canary that to his knowledge, Manafort never visited the embassy while he was employed there. What’s more, his account supports points made by The Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald about visitation rights at the embassy.

It is impossible for any visitor to enter the embassy without going through very strict protocols and leaving a clear record: obtaining written approval from the ambassador, registering with security personnel, and leaving a copy of ID. The embassy is the most surveilled on Earth; not only are there cameras positioned on neighbouring buildings recording every visitor, but inside the building every movement is recorded with CCTV cameras, 24/7. In fact, security personnel have always spied on Julian and his visitors. It is simply not possible that Manafort visited the embassy.

The Guardian responded to Narváez’s comments, stating:

“This story relied on a number of sources. We put these allegations to both Paul Manafort and Julian Assange’s representatives prior to publication. Neither responded to deny the visits taking place. We have since updated the story to reflect their denials.”

This answer is counter to a statement made by Manafort following the story’s publication, in which he said “We are considering all legal options against the Guardian who proceeded with this story even after being notified by my representatives that it was false.”Furthermore, Manafort’s passport stamps also refute the Guardian‘s reporting, after the Washington Times reported that Manafort’s three passports reveal just two visits to England in 2010 and 2012, which support his categorical denial of the “totally false and deliberately libelous” report in The Guardian, which said that Manafort visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy – ostensibly to coordinate on the WikiLeaks release of Hillary Clinton’s emails.

WikiLeaks, meanwhile, bet The Guardian “a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange.” 

No word on whether they’ve taken the organization up on its offer.

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Featured image is from Zero Hedge

Football: Combat as Spectator Sport

December 4th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

Football is the modern-day equivalent of violent chariot races in ancient Rome, the most popular “sport” at the time, mano a mano, no holds barred.

Extreme violence defines modern-day US and Canadian football, especially at the professional level – what television doesn’t show, what major media don’t discuss, including longterm physical damage to many players.

Some experience disabling injuries, others traumatic head ones caused by concussions. Powerful bodies smashing into each other disrupt normal brain functioning, affecting learning, thinking and other cognitive abilities.

Affected players are at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.

Short-term fame and fortune are poor compensation for spending later years dependent on others for care – a deplorable state.

Mike Boryla is a former Philadelphia Eagles Pro Bowl quarterback in the 1970s – now passionately opposed to the sport he excelled in.

His Disappearing Quarterback one-man 75-minute autobiographical play on why he walked away from the game he loved is a scathing account of how it brutalizes players.

He finished law school he left to play pro football, later became a lawyer and mortgage banker. He suffered three concussions during his playing days, euphemistically called getting “dinged.”

Since retiring from the game, he saw former teammates and other NFL players suffer from the longterm effects of serious injuries.

Boryla left the game after five years in the NFL to avoid debilitating injuries many others sustain, including disabling ones and shortened lifespans.

A 2013 Harvard University study showed on average former NFL players die nearly 20 years younger than the US average for men.

The study examined the effects of repetitive brain traumas, torn knee and other ligaments, other serious injuries, post-career arthritic joints, along with damage from longterm acute pain and chronic use of potent painkillers.

It’s not a pretty picture, serious health issues far more commonplace than most people outside the game realize.

Many former players struggle with debilitating joint pain, requiring longterm use of powerful painkillers to control.

“(P)rofessional football players in both the United States and Canada have life expectancies in the mid-to late-50s,’’ Harvard researchers explained.

How much pay is enough to risk life and limb on the gridiron? How much is a 20-year shorter lifespan on average worth? How much is enough to compensate for longterm pain and/or disability?

In the 1960s, Philosophy Professor Emeritus John McMurtry played professional football in Canada. In 1971, he wrote a scathing indictment of the sport, titled “Kill ‘Em! Crush ‘Em! Eat ‘Em Raw,” saying:

Football “is a sport in which body wreckage is one of the leading conventions…(B)ody shattering is the very point of football.”

Football lingo is the language of combat.

“Players and fans alike revel in the spectacle of a combatant felled into semiconsciousness, ‘blindsided,’ ‘clothes-lined’ or ‘decapitated.’ “

Crowds roar when players are “smeared,” “knocked silly,” “creamed,” “nailed,” “broken in two,” or even “crucified,” the more violent, the more fans love it, mindless of how destructive to human bodies.

McMurtry had torn knee ligaments at age-13, explaining that “injuries came faster and harder. Broken nose (three times), broken jaw…ripped knee ligaments again.”

“Torn ligaments in one ankle and a fracture in the other…Repeated rib fractures and cartilage tears…More dislocations of the left shoulder than I can remember.”

“Occasional broken or dislocated fingers and toes. Chronically hurt lower back…Separated right shoulder (needled with morphine for the games). And so on.”

“The last pro game I played…I had a recently dislocated left shoulder, a more recently wrenched right shoulder and a chronic pain center in one leg.”

“I was so tied up with soreness I couldn’t drive my car to the airport. But it never occurred to me or anyone else that I miss a play as a corner linebacker.”

“By the end of my football career, I had learned that physical injury -giving it and taking it – is the real currency of the sport. And that in the final analysis the ‘winner’ is the man who can hit to kill even if only half his limbs are working.”

Football is combat by other means, “a warrior game with a warrior ethos…smash and be smashed.”

McMurtry left pro-football in 1962. An academic career teaching philosophy followed.

In June 2001, he was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) by his peers for outstanding contributions to the study of humanities and social sciences.

Professional and college football may be more violent today than decades earlier – players bigger, perhaps stronger and faster.

The game is big business at both levels, culminating for the pros on Super Bowl Sunday annually.

It’s the most over-hyped entertainment spectacle of the year, audience size far exceeding Oscar night.

Players come and go. Profits for wealthy owners continue. The human wreckage from America’s game goes largely unreported and unnoticed.

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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.

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What Foreign Threats?

December 4th, 2018 by Philip Giraldi

One of the local Washington television stations was doing a typical early morning honoring our soldiers schtick just before Thanksgiving. In it soldiers stationed far from home were treated to videolinks so they could talk to their families and everyone could nod happily and wish themselves a wonderful holiday. Not really listening, I became interested when I half heard that the soldier being interviewed was spending his Thanksgiving in Ukraine.

It occurred to me that the soldier just might have committed a security faux pas by revealing where he was, but I also recalled that there have been joint military maneuvers as well as some kind of training mission going on in the country, teaching the Ukrainian Army how to use the shiny new sophisticated weapons that the United States was providing it with to defend against “Russian aggression.”

Ukraine is only one part of the world where the Trump Administration has expanded the mission of democracy promotion, only in Kiev the reality is more like faux democracy promotion since Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko is clearly exploiting a situation that he himself provoked. He envisions setting himself up as a victim of Moscow to aid in his attempts to establish his own power through a security relationship with Washington. That in turn will help his bid for reelection in March 2019 elections, in which his poll numbers are currently running embarrassingly low largely due to the widescale corruption in his government. Poroshenko has already done much to silence the press in his county while the developing crisis with Russia has enabled him to declare martial law in the eastern parts of the country where he is most poorly regarded. If it all works out, he hopes to win the election and subsequently, it is widely believed, he will move to expand his own executive authority.

There also has to be some consideration the encounter with the Russians on the Kerch Strait was contrived by Poroshenko with the assistance of a gaggle of American neoconservative and Israeli advisers who have been actively engaged with the Ukrainian government for the past several years. The timing was good for Poroshenko for his own domestic political reasons but it was also an opportunity for the neocons warmongers that surround Trump and proliferate inside the Beltway to scuttle any possible meeting between a vulnerable Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G20 gathering in Argentina.

The defection of Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, together with the assumption that a lot of anti-Trump dirt will be spilled soon, means that the American president had to be even more cautious than ever in any dealings with Moscow and all he needed was a nod of approval from National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to cancel the encounter. A heads-of-state meeting might not have solved anything but it certainly would be better than the current drift towards a new cold war. If the United States has only one vitally important relationship anywhere it is with Russia as the two countries are ready, able and apparently willing to destroy the world under the aegis of self-defense.

Given the anti-Russian hysteria prevailing in the U.S. and the ability of the neocons to switch on the media, it should come as no surprise that the Russian-Ukrainian incident immediately generated calls from the press and politicians for the White House to get tough with the Kremlin. It is important to note that the United States has no actual national interest in getting involved in a war between Russia and Ukraine if that should come about. The two Eastern European countries are neighbors and have a long history of both friendship and hostility but the only thing clear about the conflict is that it is up to them to sort things out and no amount of sanctions and jawing by concerned congressmen will change that fact.

Other Eastern European nations that similarly have problems with Russia should also be considered provocateurs as they seek to create tension to bind the United States more closely to them through the NATO alliance. The reality is that today’s Russian Federation is not the Soviet Union and it neither aspires to nor can afford hegemony over its former allies. What it has made very clear that it does want is a modus vivendiwhere Russia itself is not being threatened by the West.

Recent military maneuvers in Poland and Lithuania and the stationing of new missiles in Eastern Europe do indeed pose a genuine threat to Moscow as it places NATO forces on top of Russia’s border. When Russia reacts to incursions by NATO warships and planes right along its borders, it is accused of acting aggressively. One wonders how the U.S. government would respond if a Russian aircraft carrier were to take up position off the eastern seaboard and were to begin staging reconnaissance flights. Or if the Russian army were to begin military exercises with the Cubans? Does anyone today remember the Bay of Pigs?

When it comes to international conflicts context is everything. Seeing the incident between Russia and Ukraine in Manichean terms as an example of Moscow’s aggressive instincts is satisfying in some circles, but it does not in any way reflect the reality on the ground. Internal politics of the two countries combined with deliberate fabrications that are expected to generate a certain response operate together to create a largely false narrative for both international and domestic consumption. Unfortunately, narratives have consequences: in this case, the sacrifice of the possibly beneficial meeting between Trump and Putin.

The same dynamic works vis-à-vis Washington’s other enemy du jour Iran. In the case of Russia, useless “friend” Ukraine is pulling the strings while regarding Iran it is conniving Israel and Saudi Arabia. Iran has been accused of being the world’s leading sponsor of terror, of destabilizing the Middle East, and of having a secret nuclear weapon program that will be used to attack Israel and Europe. None of those assertions are true. The terrorism tag comes from the country’s relationship with Hezbollah, which is only a terrorist group insofar as it is hostile to Israel and pledged to resist any future Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Washington and Israel have pushed the terrorism label for Hezbollah, but most Europeans have begun to disregard the designation since the group has become a part of the Lebanese government.

And regarding destabilizing the Middle East, that has largely been the end result of actions undertaken by the United States, Israel and the Saudis, while the alleged Persian nuclear weapons program is a fantasy. If someone in the U.S. national security apparatus had any brains the United States would work to improve relations with Iran real soon as the Iranians would in the long run quite likely prove to be better friends than those rascals who are currently running around using that label.

And there are other friends in unlikely places. Beleaguered British Prime Minister Theresa May is wailing loudly against a Trump threat to reveal classified documents relating to Russiagate. The real problem is that the documents apparently don’t expose anything done by the Russians. Rather, they seem to appear to reveal a plot by the British intelligence and security services working in collusion with then CIA Director John Brennan to subvert the course of the 2016 election in favor of the Deep State and Establishment favorite Hillary Clinton. How did that one work out?

So how about it? Teenagers who get in trouble often have to ditch their bad friends to turn their lives around. There is still a chance for the United States if we keep our distance from the bad friends we have been nurturing all around the world, friends who have been convincing us to make poor choices. Get rid of the ties the bind to the Saudis, Israelis, Ukrainians, Poles, and yes, even the British. Deal fairly with all nations and treat everyone the same, but bear in mind that there are only two relationships that really matter – Russia and China. Make a serious effort to avoid a war by learning how to get along with those two nations and America might actually survive to celebrate a tricentennial in 2076.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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George H.W. Bush’s Complicity in the 1991 “Highway of Death” Massacre.

By Joyce Chediac, December 04, 2018

When George H.W. Bush was president he ordered the massacre of Iraqi soldiers after the ceasefire in 1991, and after he had promised them safe passage out of Kuwait.

George H. W. Bush: “October Surprise” Denials, Iran Contra

By Robert Parry, December 04, 2018

“Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, something known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, wrote Robert Parry on 4/6/2016

Les Gilets Jaunes – A Bright Yellow Sign of Distress

By Diana Johnstone, December 04, 2018

Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over.

A US-China Trade War ‘Armistice’? Trump Blinks and Retreats at G-20

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, December 04, 2018

The first reports emerging from the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires today, December 2, 2018, are that Trump and Xi have agreed to put their trade war on hold, a kind of ‘trade war armistice’, at least for the next 90 days.

Israel’s New War of Attrition on Jerusalem’s Palestinians

By Jonathan Cook, December 04, 2018

Israel has never hidden its ambition to seize control of East Jerusalem, Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967 and then annexed, as a way of preventing a viable Palestinian state from emerging.

The Bin Ladens and the Bushes: On 9/11 George Herbert W. Bush Meets Osama’s Brother Shafiq bin Laden

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 03, 2018

Lest we forget, one day before the 9/11 attacks [as well as on the morning of 9/11, the dad of the sitting President of the United States of America, George Herbert Walker Bush was meeting none other than Shafiq bin Laden, the brother of the alleged terror mastermind Osama bin Laden.

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After a week of insisting that a meeting with Putin on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in Argentina was going to happen, President Trump at the last minute sent out a Tweet explaining that due to a Russia/Ukraine dispute in the Sea of Azov he would no longer be willing to meet his Russian counterpart.

According to Trump, the meeting had to be cancelled because the Russians seized three Ukrainian naval vessels in Russian waters that refused to follow instructions from the Russian military. But as Pat Buchanan wrote in a recent column: how is this little dispute thousands of miles away any of our business?

Unfortunately it is “our business” because of President Obama’s foolish idea to overthrow a democratically-elected, pro-Russia government in Ukraine in favor of what his Administration believed would be a “pro-Western” and “pro-NATO” replacement. In short, the Obama Administration did openly to Ukraine what his Democratic Party claims without proof the Russians did to the United States: meddled in a vote.

US interventionism in Ukraine led to the 2014 coup and many dead Ukrainians. Crimea’s majority-Russian population held a referendum and decided to re-join Russia rather than remain in a “pro-West” Ukraine that immediately began discriminating against them. Why would anyone object to people opting out of abusive relationships?

What is most disappointing about President Trump’s foreign policy is that it didn’t have to be this way. He ran on a platform of America first, ending foreign wars, NATO skepticism, and better relations with Russia. Americans voted for this policy. He had a mandate, a rejection of Obama’s destructive interventionism.

But he lost his nerve.

Instead of being the president who ships lethal weapons to the Ukrainian regime, instead of being the president who insists that Crimea remain in Ukraine, instead of being the president who continues policies the American people clearly rejected at the ballot box, Trump could have blamed the Ukraine/Russia mess on the failed Obama foreign policy and charted a very different course. What flag flies over Crimea is none of our business. We are not the policemen of the world and candidate Trump seemed to have understood that.

But now Trump’s in a trap. He was foolish enough to believe that Beltway foreign policy “experts” have a clue about what really is American national interest. Just this week he told the Washington Post, in response to three US soldiers being killed by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, that he has to keep US troops fighting in the longest war in US history because the “experts” tell him there is no alternative.

He said,

“virtually every expert that I have and speak to say if we don’t go there, they’re going to be fighting over here. And I’ve heard it over and over again.”

That is the same bunkum the neocons sold us as they lied us into Iraq! We’ve got to fight Saddam over there or he’d soon be in our streets. These “experts” are worthless, yet for some reason President Trump cannot break free of them.

Well here’s some unsolicited advice to the president: Listen to the people who elected you, who are tired of the US as the world’s police force. Let Ukraine and Russia work out their own problems. Give all your “experts” a pink slip and start over with a real pro-American foreign policy: non-interventionism.

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Trump Administration to Auction Off 900,000 Acres for Fracking in Nevada

December 4th, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity

The Trump administration plans to auction more than 900,000 acres for oil and gas extraction on the doorstep of Nevada’s only national park and other protected public lands. It would be the largest single lease sale of public lands in the lower 48 states in at least a decade.

“The Trump administration is doubling down on its reckless ‘drill-anywhere’ strategy,” said Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Nevadans cherish our national park and wildlife refuges. It’s disgusting that Trump officials are willing to permanently defile these spectacular places to appease the oil industry.”

The Bureau of Land Management lease sale, scheduled for March 12, 2019, will auction off public land next to Great Basin National Park and Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, an internationally known migratory waterfowl stopover cherished by birders and hunters.

One parcel comes within a half-mile of South Ruby Lake, where a spill of fracking fluids or a well failure could contaminate one of the Great Basin’s most vibrant aquatic ecosystems.

Great Basin National Park has been designated an International Dark Sky Park in recognition of its remoteness. The area surrounding the park is undisturbed except for a few multigenerational ranches.

The plan threatens imperiled wildlife, including greater sage grouse, since the massive lease sale includes hundreds of thousands of acres of important grouse habitat. The sale also covers tens of thousands of acres of designated critical habitat for the federally protected desert tortoise and parcels adjacent to springs harboring rare native fish, including the threatened Railroad Valley springfish.

“Every time the BLM invites the oil and gas industry to drill and frack sage-grouse habitat, the grouse moves closer to extinction,” said Kelly Fuller, energy and mining campaign director for Western Watersheds Project. “The BLM needs to stop leasing sage-grouse habitat, period.”

The BLM deferred roughly 400,000 acres of sage-grouse habitat from an October auction to the March sale in response to a federal court order, stemming from a lawsuit filed by the Center, Western Watersheds and Advocates for the West.

“The BLM is doing the absolute minimum to claim it’s complying with the court order,” Donnelly said. “Meanwhile the agency is rushing ahead with the illegal action that prompted the lawsuit in the first place, offering massive swaths of critical sage-grouse habitat in violation of its own plans to protect the bird.”

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Featured image: Ruby Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

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India is sending several messages by bragging about its alleged ability to track one of its “frenemy’s” submarines in the “Indian Ocean”, though the timing of this announcement might inadvertently raise further suspicions in Russia about its South Asian partner’s true long-term strategic intentions.

Sputnik reported that Indian Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba just disclosed during a press conference on Monday that his country had secretly tracked a Chinese submarine in the “Indian Ocean” in October, which sent several important messages irrespective if his claims are true or not:

The “Indian Ocean” Is Hegemonically Regarded By India As Its “Backyard”

India considers one of the world’s largest bodies of water to be exclusively within its “sphere of influence”, giving it the self-proclaimed “right” to supposedly track foreign submarines that traverse through the tens of millions of square miles of international waters here in a thinly disguised hegemonic message meant to convey its aspirations as a rising Great Power.

India’s American Ally Might Have Lent A Helping Hand

Supposing that a Chinese submarine did indeed enter the “Indian Ocean” during October and was tracked the entire time, it’s very likely that India was able to do this only through the help of its new American ally via the working channels between their two militaries that were recently established through the Communications, Compatibility and Security Agreement (COMCASA) that was finally agreed to in early September.

New Delhi’s Naval Capabilities Are Much Better Than Previously Thought

Considering that the “Indian Ocean Region” is expected to become the geostrategic center of gravity in the New Cold War, India has an interest in deceptively portraying its naval capabilities as being much better than previously thought, both in order to “deter” China but also to prove its military-strategic “value” to the US in the face of rising skepticism at home about its role in this alliance.

The BJP Isn’t “Going Soft” On China Ahead Of General Elections Next May

Practically every domestic and international political development concerning India nowadays must be seen through the prism of next May’s general elections, meaning that the ruling BJP is also signaling to its supporters that it isn’t “going soft” on China despite the faux ‘rapprochement’ that it’s partaking in with its “frenemy” as part of a deal for both of them to increase their respective negotiating leverage vis-à-vis the US.

India Doesn’t Care How Russia Interprets Its Statement

It says a lot that India would make this announcement just days after Admiral Lanba returned from Russia and at the same time as his country’s Eurasian partner is holding joint naval drills with Pakistan, strongly suggesting that New Delhi doesn’t care how Moscow interprets the pro-American and anti-Chinese messages that it conveyed because India sees itself as much closer to the US than Russia in the military-strategic sense.

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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 is from India Today

On November 30th, Khalid al-Mahamid, a prominent figure of the Syrian opposition, revealed that there is “an international agreement” to eliminate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Idlib. Al-Mahamid is known as the godfather of the reconciliation process which took place in southern Syria in 2018. The UAE-based businessman reportedly persuaded thousands of former FSA fighters in the governorates of Daraa and al-Quneitra to join the ranks of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) 5th Assault Corps.

On the same day, a military source told SF that units of the Syrian Arab Army’s (SAA) 4th Armored Division were redeployed from the northern al-Suwayda countryside to frontlines in the northern Lattakia countryside and the northwestern Hama countryside.

On December 1st, the SAA deployed additional units of the 5th Assault Corps and the Republican Guard in several positions around Aleppo, pro-government sources reported. A video showed several T-72 battle tanks and BMP-1 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) heading towards advanced positions west of Aleppo.

Syria’s SANA news agency reported that the SAA tracked militant movements in the southern parts of Latimineh city and conducted concentrated strikes on them while they were attempting to infiltrate the military posts around al-Zalaqiyat village.

Furthermore, an army unit in the area surrounding al-Hamamiyat village shelled another group of militants while they were attempting to infiltrate from the surroundings of al-Jaisat and Tal al-Sakhir.

In Deir Ezzor, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) efforts against ISIS are also on-going with mixed success. On November 30th, the SDF Media center reported that Abu Awayd, a close aide of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was captured.

The SDF also announced that its forces evacuated dozens of civilians from the ISIS-held pocket in the middle Euphrates River Valley during a successful special operation.

Last weekend, SDF claimed that they repelled an attack by ISIS on positions in eastern Deir Ezzor. US-led coalition warplanes supported SDF fighters during the clashes and conducted 34 airstrikes on positions, vehicles and gatherings of ISIS. Reportedly 33 militants were killed as a result of the clashes.

During the last week, ISIS carried out several attacks on the SDF confirming by actions that the terrorist group is still relatively strong on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River in this part of Syria.

Fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), SDF’s core, launched a hit and run attack on positions of the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) in the town of Ablah, near Aleppo.

On November 30th, the Iraqi National Intelligence Service (INIS) reported that its agents had arrested Jamal Khalil Taha Znad Mashhadani, another prominent commander of ISIS during a special operation in Baghdad. On December 9th, 2017 Iraq announced the defeat of ISIS in the country. However, since then there have been continuous operations to hunt commanders and remaining ISIS elements and sleeper cells in the country.

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Ignored by French President Emmanuel Macron, distorted by the media, courted by the Right, snubbed by the Left, the self-organized mass movement known as the Yellow Vests (Mouvement des gilets jaunes) is seriously challenging the political and economic order in France.

In Paris, on the morning of Saturday December 1st, as thousands of self-organized Yellow Vest protestors attempted to gather to express their grievances on the Champs-Elysées at a planned, peaceful demonstration, French CRS riot police in Paris attacked them savagely with tear-gas, flash-bombs and water-canons. By the end of the day, cars were burning near the Arc de Triomphe, and all of Paris was in chaos as groups of would-be peaceful marchers, joined by the usual casseurs (smashers) spread throughout the capital, expressing their anger at the system and calling for the resignation of President Macron.

This militarized state over-reaction to a peaceful mass demonstration breaks with a long tradition of tolerance for muscled demonstrations by rowdy angry farmers and militant labour unions. A tolerance Macron, in speeches, has blamed for the failure of previous governments to pass needed pro-business counter-reforms. Predictably, Macron (who must have ordered Saturday morning’s unprovoked, violent attacks on unarmed demonstrators arriving early for the planned march) blamed the victims:

“What happened today in Paris has nothing to do with the peaceful expression of legitimate anger,” he said on Saturday. “Nothing justifies attacking the security forces, vandalizing businesses, either private or public ones, or that passers-by or journalists are threatened, or the Arc de Triomphe defaced.”

Meanwhile, throughout the French provinces, at least 75,000 Yellow Vest protesters (police estimate) were blocking highway entrances, intersections, and shopping centers all day – all with minimal violence and apparent general approval (80% according to recent polls).

Why France’s ‘Silent Majority’ Is Mad as Hell

Like all the spontaneous mass uprisings that dot French history going back to Feudal times, the Yellow Vest revolt was initially provoked by taxes. In this case, the straw that broke the camel’s back was Macron’s decision to increase taxes on gas and diesel fuel, which affect ordinary working and lower-middle class French people dependent on their cars to earn a living. The rebels, donning the yellow breakdown-safety vests they are required to keep in their cars by the government, have been on the warpath for three weeks now. Spurning all political parties, the Yellow Vests got organized on social media and acted locally. The broadcast media, although highly critical, spread the news nationally, and the Yellow Vest movement spread across France, blocking intersections, filtering motorists, and gathering to demonstrate, more and more numerous and militant, on successive Saturdays.

Why Saturdays?: “I can’t go on strike,” explains one woman. “I’m raising three kids alone. My job, that’s all I have left. Coming on Saturdays is the only way for me to show my anger.” Women workers – receptionists, hostesses, nurses-aids, teachers – are present in unusually large numbers in these crowds, and they are angry about a lot more than the tax on diesel.

To begin with, inequality: Like U.S. President Donald Trump, Emmanuel Macron has showered corporations and millionaires with huge tax cuts, creating a hole in the budget which he has compensated by cuts in public services (hospitals, schools, transit, police) and by tax increases for ordinary people (up to 40% of their income), large numbers of whom are struggling hard to make ends meet and going into debt. “We’re hungry and we’re fed up,” said Jessica Monnier, 28, who works in a watch factory in the French Alps. She earns €970 a month, and said: “Once I pay my bills, I don’t have enough to eat. We’re just hungry, that’s all.”

This anger has been building since last Spring, the 50th anniversary of the 1968 worker-student uprising, but was frustrated when Macron won the stand-off with labour over his neoliberal, pro-business counter-reforms. This labour defeat was facilitated by the leadership of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) and other unions, played the same negative role in the 1968 sell-out to Charles de Gaulle. A half-century later the French union leaders, eager to keep their place at the political table (and on the government payroll), avoided a major confrontation, met with the government behind the scenes, and only went through the motions of carrying out strikes, spreading them over months and tiring out the workers [see my “French Labour’s Historical Defeat”].

Macron is also hated for his truly monarchical arrogance, ruling alone like Louis XIV, imposing his will by decrees, ignoring his opponents and patronizing the common people in a pedantic style that humiliates and enrages them. By dismissing the Yellow Vests, haughtily refusing to address their issues, and then violently repressing them despite their popularity, Macron has revealed the vast gap between his authoritarian, neoliberal regime and the mass of the French population. The French elected him in 2017, in the run-off following the first round collapse of the traditional parties of the Left and the Right. Macron was a stop-gap to prevent the election of Marine Le Pen of the extreme-right, openly racist National Front. He has no real mandate and no political party behind him, despite an unorganized parliamentary majority.

This Saturday, the demonstrators were heard booing the TV network people on Place de la Concorde, furious at being been presented as deliberate vandals, calling the press “Usurpers.” “We wanted to come and demonstrate calmly,” said one fifty-ish Yellow Vest interviewed by Médiapart. “I came by train, I had my ID card in my pocket. They threw so much tear-gas at us that we ran like rabbits.” He then held out a rubber cartridge. “They even fired Flash-balls at us” he added as two nearby women nodded. “Who are the Vandals?”

Another would-be demonstrator, Franck, from nearby Seine-et-Marne, added: “We came to the Champs-Elysées this morning and when we tried to approach the entry-points, we were immediately inundated with tear-gas, 300 meters before the check-points.” Furious, he spits out “Macron gasses his own people like Bashar al-Assad!”

Marité, a retiree from the suburbs, kept repeating over and over: “I confess before the CGT that I voted for Macron, and beg your forgiveness.” She has worked for 42 years, her husband for 44; together their retirement comes to $3,200 a month and their anger is deep. A woman named Morgane hisses through clenched teeth a phrase heard all over France since the beginning of the movement: “Marie-Antoinette was living high off the hog just before the Revolution also. And they cut off her head.”1

What was remarkable at this Saturday’s chaotic mass outbreak in the streets of Paris was the fortuitous convergence of the Yellow Vests with previously scheduled demonstrations organized by the CGT and other unions as well as the feminist #MoiAussi (#MeToo) movement, and the LGBT movement. So happenstance created the first real dialogue between members of these disparate movements which took place under clouds of tear-gas as the various demonstrators, driven away from the Champs-Elysées area by the police, wandered through the half-empty streets.

A start: Angry French people waited all Spring for the promised “convergence” of the various unions of students and workers united against Macron’s reactionary anti-reforms which the leaders never organized, leaving the different groups of strikers isolated.

Popular Risings, Elite Contempt

The French popular classes have long historical memories, and seem unaffected by the postmodern scholarly denigration of the 1789 French Revolution and its successors as useless explosions of popular violence which inevitably led to bloody dictatorships. Morgane knows all she needs to know about the guillotine. According to Gérard Noiriel, author of a monumental history of France ‘from below,’ “The Yellow Vests who block highways and refuse to be coopted by political parties have taken up, in confused form, the tradition of the Sans-culottes of 1792-93, the citizen-combatants of February 1848, the Communards of 1870-71 and the anarcho-syndicalists of the Banquet Years.”

Indeed, these traditions go back much earlier, to the Feudal period, with its periodic uprisings of peasants burning landlord’s chateaux and urban rioters taking over towns. What changed in late 18th Century France was the development of roads and mail service, that enabled revolutionary Committees of Correspondence to coordinate and organize discontent on a national level. Today, Internet social networks and network news play the same role in real time.

Like today’s Yellow Vest rebellion, all these historical uprisings were initially about excessive unfair taxes, like the Tithe of 10% (imposed by the wealthy Catholic Church on the poor), the royal Gabelle tax on salt (necessary for life and preserving foodstuffs) and the Corvée (days of free labour owed to the noble landlord, the Church and the government). Although violent, these spontaneous, self-organized risings eventually led to the democratic republic, the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, free secular education, etc. (all under threat today).

The other common denominator between the Yellow Vests and historical popular movements is the near-universal contempt with which they were (are) treated by France’s elite classes: the royalty, the nobility, the upper clergy, official academic historians, and today the media and the leadership of the unions and Left parties, who have joined the establishment and are an integral part of what the French call the “political class.”

Class Prejudice

Not so much has changed since the Old Regime. Then, the nobles derisively referred to any peasant as “Jacques Bonhomme” (Jack Goodfellow), and to their violent uprisings as “Jacqueries.” Around 1360 the revered French chronicler Jean Froissart reported: “These evil folk assembled together without a leader and without arms were stealing and burning everything and killing without pity and without merci, like rabid dogs. And they made a king among them who was the worst of the bad; and this king they called Jacques Bonhomme.”

In fact, says Noiriel, the archives show the peasants selected as their spokesman one Guillaume Carle, known to be “a good thinker and a good talker.”

Similarly, for three weeks the government, the media, and even the Left (parties and unions) have been attempting to present the Yellow Vests as red-necks and/or vandals, while reducing their generalized anger to the issue of gas taxes. On one TV broadcast, the reporter kept trying to get the Yellow Vest being interviewed to say she was rebelling against taxes, but the woman kept repeating over and over: “Fed up to the ass-hole,” “We’ve had it up to the ass,” “Everything.”2

The organized Left has shown little sympathy for this, self-organized, autonomous (albeit amorphous) uprising of desperate and angry lower middle class people who, out of long experience, reject domination by union and party leaders. Plus, they live in places no one has heard of and sing the Marseillaise (originally a revolutionary song, but who remembers). More, the color “Yellow” used to stand for “scab unions.” So the unions and Left parties, as usual embroiled in infighting among each other, instead of supporting the Yellow Vests’ struggle against Macron and offering leadership by example, left the field open to the Right. Le Pen’s people (also embroiled in internal squabbles) attempted to manipulate the movement and made little headway, as did belatedly Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

France in Crisis?

Hegemonic Balance Sheet:

An autocratic President without a party or a mandate. Crowds calling for him to resign. A desperate lower class population angry over growing economic inequality in a rich country and government indifference to their plight. A class of organized civil servants and unionized workers still licking their wounds and paying their bills after failing to block the President’s counter-reforms last Spring.

Traditional parties – Left (Socialists, etc.) and Right (Gaullists etc.) – that have alternated in power since the end of WWII diminished and eclipsed. The parties of the far Left (Mélenchon, various Trotskyists, etc.) and the far Right (the former National Front) are too preoccupied with internal fights to play any significant role.

Powerful, effective mass media dominated by the interests of big business but viewed with suspicion by more and more of the population.

A brand-new “leaderless” spontaneous mass movement connected by social media, “finding its way by walking,” more or less consciously embedded in a long history of rebellions and struggle, finding its natural leaders (“good thinkers, good talkers” like old Guillaume Carle), putting forth its own ideas for the reorganization of society.

Here are the two latest proposals coming from the Yellow Vests and borrowed from the history the 18th Century French revolution. First, a call for a kind of democratic constituent assembly. Second, the creation of Cahiers de doléances (Grievance Notebooks) like the ones in 1788 listing all the people’s complaints and proposed remedies. Both great ideas. We can only hope that given the hollowness of the hegemony of the French political class, the convenience of social media for self-organization, and the desperate desire for dignity and participatory democracy incarnated in this latest historical uprising, something good may come of it.

Meanwhile, here are excerpts from the 2018 Yellow Vest Grievance list3:

  • No one left homeless.
  • End the austerity policy. Cancel the interest on illegitimate debt. Don’t tax the poor to pay it back, find the €85-billion of fiscal fraud uncollected.
  • Create a true integration policy, with French language, history and civics courses for immigrants.
  • Minimum salary €1500 per month.
  • Privilege city and village centers. Stop building huge shopping centers.
  • More progressive income tax rates.
  • Big companies like McDonald’s, Google, Amazon and Carrefour should pay big taxes, and little artisans low taxes. •

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Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labour struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center in 1997). He maintains a blog at richardgreeman.org.

Notes

  1. Quotations translated from Les «gilets jaunes» débordent dans les rues de Paris.
  2. «on en a ras le cul», «ras le cul», «ras le bol généralisé” BFM-TV, Nov.17, reported in Les gilets jaunes et les «lecons de l’histoire».
  3. Great long list.

All images in this article are from The Bullet

Working for the Man… Not the Masses. The Corporate Predators

December 4th, 2018 by Philip A Farruggio

In 1973 I was still a somewhat naive college senior ready to face the business world. My major had been in Speech and Theater, with a minor in Sociology. As the year was ending and the new one upon us, I was engaged to be married and needed to find secure employment. Graduation was really just a formality… I needed a steady income. My present job was as a commissioned telephone salesman working in what had been labeled a ‘boiler room operation’. We sold office supplies over the phone, using the infamous ‘going out of business, 40% off’ pitch. I was actually very good at this rap, but the weekly returns were too inconsistent. So, with the urging from my parents and my fiancée, out came the Sunday Times want ads. Not too many jobs in recreation, as the ’73 recession hit hard on most programs for youth. What could I do?

The ad said ‘Management trainee, college degree necessary, no experience needed’. I called the place, The ****Linen Corporation, and got an interview. Their plant was in downtown Brooklyn, maybe a 30 minute commute from home. After I finished all the paperwork the sales manager interviewed me for maybe just 20 minutes. He was Italian American like myself, wore a suit that was too tight for his expanding paunch, and had this ( pardon the French) greasy look to him. Basically, what he said to me should have signaled all that I would really  need to know about this company: “Listen kid, the way it works is that the more you save the company, the more you can earn… period!” He told me of my duties, which were basically to ‘Hold the whip over all the workers and drivers’. Then, he walked me into the GM’s office to meet him. This guy, a bit older than the sales manager at maybe fifty years of age, gave me the once over and repeated what the other guy had said. He then told the sales manager to give me a tour of the facility.

When we walked into the tremendous area of the plant where the linens were washed and dried, I thought I was back in the days of the plantations. Here we were, two white guys strolling into a two tiered area, hot as hell (and this was mid January) and noisy enough to force us to shout in order to hear each other. The giant plant was filled with all black faces, with the women wearing outfits that looked like Aunt Jemima from the pancake box. The men all wore white pants and tops, and when we arrived there it seemed like all I could see was a myriad of ‘the whites of eyes’ peering at me. Everything seemed to just stop for perhaps 30 seconds. I felt like I was the new overseer at a plantation in the  colonial South. The sales manager shouted into my ear “You gotta keep an eye on these birds or they’ll goof off every chance kid”. He then took me back to his office for my work instructions.

The next morning I was to report to the giant garage area to meet up with the delivery drivers. I was to spend one full day on the road with a driver, and then repeat this the next day with another driver… until I went through the lot of them. In the AM, very early, maybe at 6 o’clock, I showed up at the garage area, and man was it frigid cold in there. The driver’s foreman greeted me and introduced me to the first guy to take me out with him. We got going and I mean this truck was so old it must have had arthritis!

The heater wasn’t working too well, and the ride was like a jeep in the jungle! The driver was pleasant, chain smoking one ciggie after another. He had the Bronx territory so we were able to chat for awhile. I learned that the union was what they called a ‘Sweetheart union’ whereupon the union officials were basically ‘in the pocket’ of the corporation. This guy pulled no punches. We began making stops, and man there were so many of them. These were bakeries, butcher shops, food stores and restaurants mostly. He told me I could wait in the truck, but I needed to see how things went. After all, in reality I was his boss, yes? At the first stop, which was a bakery, the driver greeted the owner with a few funny hellos about the frigid weather. Then, the ‘mad scramble’ began. After dropping off the fresh linens, he had to search the premises for the old, dirty ones. I mean, they were everywhere! “Is this the way it always is?” I asked him. He nodded as we went down the basement stairs. I really got nervous when I could sense that something down those steps was fixed on me. “Don’t get too scared kid, those rats are as scared of us as we are of them. They won’t hurt ya” as he laughed.

One day on that job was enough for me. I went home and didn’t show up the next day. What really hurt me was the fact that those workers didn’t have the luxury that I still had. I lived at home and could move on whereas many of these folks couldn’t. Those black faces in that plant were mostly uneducated and unskilled folks from the Caribbean and the only jobs they could secure were similar to this shit. The drivers, going by the two or three I had met, were not educated men, and thus another shitty driving job would be the same. The workers in the plant had NO union at all, and I already was alerted to the driver’s lot. Sadly, forty five years later nothing has changed, perhaps for the worst! A Neo feudalistic society is what the corporate predators want… and still get!!

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected]

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In August two Belfast journalists were arrested in dawn raids involving up to 100 police officers for exposing state protection of the perpetrators of a notorious sectarian massacre. This Thursday they will speak at a special screening of their documentary in defence of press freedom, writes Barry McCaffrey

***

We didn’t know it at the time, but at 7am on August 31, my colleague Trevor Birney and I were both about to feel the full angry retribution of a state who had not taken kindly to our documentary No Stone Unturned.

Released in 2017, the film had revealed evidence that loyalist gunmen, who massacred six unarmed men as they sat in a quiet little village pub watching football in June 1994, had been protected from prosecution by police.

Why arrest journalists?

This wasn’t Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan or South America — it was sleepy, suburban Belfast.

For Birney’s eight-year-old daughter Freya it should have been her first day back at school.

She should have been telling her friends all about her summer adventures.

Instead she was left shaking and sobbing as armed police took part in co-ordinated dawn raids on both our homes and Birney’s film and television company offices.

We were both forced to undress and wash in front of armed police before being arrested and hauled off in front of families and neighbours who could only have been imagining what heinous “crimes” we must have committed.

Laptops, telephones, documents and materials that had clearly nothing to do with the documentary were being scooped up and taken away without any questions of relevance.

Freya’s pink mobile telephone was one of the items seized by police. Another daughter had homework on a pen drive seized. All supposed evidence in this alleged “crime.” Three months on, nothing has been returned.

Meanwhile at our offices, more police officers were going through every desk and computer, removing note books belonging to our colleagues and sucking every piece of data from our main server.

Police technicians fed on the main computer for a full 12 hours before they removed every scintilla of information, regardless of the fact that the vast majority of the data had no relevance to what they were supposedly searching for.

Thousands of hours of interviews and notes relating to investigations which had nothing to do with No Stone Unturned were seized despite the protests of our colleagues.

These materials involve highly sensitive and confidential documents relating to investigations all across the world.

Only a tiny percentage of it relates to No Stone Unturned.

Before we’d even been finger-printed and had our mugshots taken, police had released a press statement claiming that they were investigating a complaint from the Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland (PONI) that documents had been stolen from PONI offices in Belfast.

The statement said the documents were covered by the Official Secrets Act.

The only problem is that the Police Ombudsman never made a complaint — and has now said so publicly.

What is this all about and why do we now find ourselves looking at potential prison sentences? You may well ask!

No Stone Unturned (2017)

We both worked with the Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on No Stone Unturned. It told the story of the 1994 massacre of six Catholic men at a pub in the village of Loughinisland, deep in the heart of rural County Down.

The men were watching Ireland beating Italy in the World Cup on a battered television in the bar when a gunman armed with an assault rifle burst in and opened fire.

No-one had ever been charged with the killings and the Police Ombudsman in Belfast, Dr Michael Maguire, concluded in a 2016 report that police had colluded with the loyalist killers.

In 2011, a document into the Loughinisland murder investigation had been leaked to us. It was a draft report into the massacre. It named the chief suspects and outlined significant failings in the murder investigation.

Once No Stone Unturned premiered in London in October 2017, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) apparently became concerned that the document, and the highly damaging information it contained, had found its way into the public domain.

They were so concerned, they launched a fresh investigation — just not into the massacre and the unsolved deaths of six innocent men.

Instead, the PSNI called in Durham Constabulary to examine how the documents came to be in the film. The relatives of the murdered men were horrified.

On the day of our arrests, Durham Police told the press that the arrests were the result of a complaint from the Police Ombudsman.

Maguire’s report into Loughinisland and his damning conclusions had played a pivotal role in our documentary.

The Police Ombudsman’s office had been set up after the Good Friday Agreement to investigate complaints relating to police officers.

It wasn’t designed to investigate the so-called dirty war, but in Northern Ireland’s complicated world of politics and policing that’s what a huge amount of its resources has been dedicated to do.

PONI continues to deal with a huge number of complaints from relatives believing police colluded with loyalist and republican terrorists.

Once he’d seen No Stone Unturned, Maguire had alerted police that our film named four suspects. His office has no ability to take an assessment of any increased risk to the suspects, so by telling police he was advising the force best placed to decide.

Critically, he didn’t make any complaint about the documents we used in the film.

So why did Durham Constabulary say they were called in on the back of a complaint?

We don’t know the answer because the PSNI won’t comment on the case, ironically citing our arrests as the reason they’re unable to explain what has been going on.

Durham Police have told journalists that their investigation had “a definite and clear starting point.” Whatever that start point is, Maguire insists it wasn’t a complaint from him.

On the day of our arrests we were taken to a high-security Belfast police station and held for 14 hours in cells normally set aside for terror suspects.

We were kept apart, spending countless hours in separate cells with the only human interaction being when we were taken out to be questioned throughout the day.

At no time during that questioning were the names of the victims ever mentioned — Barney Green (87), Dan McCreanor (59), Adrian Rogan (34), Patsy O’Hare (35), Malcolm Jenkinson (52), Eamon Byrne (39).

We didn’t know it at the time, but the Loughinisland families, whose case we were supposed to be highlighting, were instead holding a vigil for us at the site of the massacre.

Unwittingly, we had become the latest victims in a very dark story of how Northern Ireland chooses to deal with its past.

We were released on police bail shortly before 9pm that night. Three months on we’re still living under those same police bail conditions.

We have to ask police permission any time we want to leave the jurisdiction, even for family birthdays in the Republic of Ireland. We were ordered to hand ourselves in for further police questioning on November 30.

The support we’ve received from our journalistic colleagues in Belfast, Dublin and abroad has been immense. The NUJ has led the way from the moment we were arrested — campaigning and raising awareness of our case in the UK, Ireland and across the world.

We believe that the police actions are an act of intimidation designed to send a chill down the spines of any other journalists seeking to unearth the truth about Northern Ireland’s dark and dirty past.

We believe that the PSNI and Durham are trying to distract from the police failures to not only bring to justice the killers responsible for the deaths of six innocent men but the high-level cover-up that has gone on for over 24 years.

In Belfast, they’re coming after the journalists, but as one of our colleagues has said: they cannot arrest the truth.

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Barry McCaffrey is senior reporter for The Detail.

Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey, will be in London for a public screening of the documentary on Thursday December 6 7pm at the NUJ’s Headland House, Grays Inn Road, London WC1X 9NB. Tickets for the event can be bought online via Eventbrite – mstar.link/NoStoneUnturned.

Featured image: The scene in the Loughinisland village pub in 1994 after the paramilitary murder of six Catholic men (Source: Morning Star)

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First published by Consortium News on April 6, 2016

“Deny everything,” British traitor Kim Philby said, explaining how the powerful can bluff past their crimes, something known to George H.W. Bush when he denied charges of his own near treason in the October Surprise case, wrote Robert Parry on 4/6/2016

A recently discovered lecture by the late British traitor Kim Philby contains a lesson that may help explain how George H.W. Bush could bluff and bluster his way past mounting evidence that he and other Republicans conspired in 1980 to block release of 52 U.S. hostages in Iran and thus ensure Ronald Reagan’s election, an alleged gambit that bordered on treason itself.

In a speech in East Berlin in 1981 – just aired by the BBC – the Soviet double-agent Philby explained that for someone like himself born into what he called “the ruling class of the British Empire,” it was easy to simply “deny everything.” When evidence was presented against him, he simply had to keep his nerve and assert that it was all bogus. With his powerful connections, he knew that few would dare challenge him.

“Because I was born into the British governing class, because I knew a lot of people of an influential standing, I knew that they [his colleagues in Britain’s MI-6 spy agency] would never get too tough with me,” Philby told members of East Germany’s Stasi. “They’d never try to beat me up or knock me around, because if they had been proved wrong afterwards, I could have made a tremendous scandal.”

That’s why growing evidence and deepening suspicions of Philby’s treachery slid by while he continued spying for the Soviet Union. He finally disappeared in January 1961 and popped up several months later in Moscow, where he lived until his death in 1988.

Image on the right: British double-agent Philby, who spied for the Soviet Union and fled to Moscow in 1961.

Though the circumstances are obviously quite different, Philby’s recognition that his patrician birth and his powerful connections gave him extraordinary protections could apply to George H.W. Bush and his forceful denials of any role in the Iran-Contra scandal – he falsely claimed to be “out of the loop” – and also the October Surprise issue, whether the Reagan-Bush dealings with Iran began in 1980 with the obstruction of President Jimmy Carter’s negotiations to free 52 U.S. Embassy hostages seized by Iranian radicals on Nov. 4, 1979.

Carter’s failure to secure the hostages’ release before the U.S. election, which fell exactly one year later, doomed his reelection chances and cleared the way for Reagan and the Republicans to gain control of both the White House and the Senate. The hostages were only released after Reagan was sworn in as President on Jan. 20, 1981, and as Bush became Vice President.

We now know that soon after the Reagan-Bush inauguration, clandestine U.S.-approved arms shipments were making their way to Iran through Israel. An Argentine plane carrying one of the shipments crashed in July 1981 but the incriminating circumstances were covered up by Reagan’s State Department, according to then-Assistant Secretary of State for the Middle East Nicholas Veliotes, who traced the origins of the arms deal back to the 1980 campaign.

This hard-to-believe reality – that the tough-guy Reagan-Bush administration was secretly shipping weapons to Iran after Tehran’s mullahs had humiliated the United States with the hostage crisis – remained a topic for only occasional Washington rumors until November 1986 when a Beirut newspaper published the first article describing another clandestine shipment. That story soon expanded into the Iran-Contra Affair because some of the arm sales profits were diverted to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contra rebels.

For Bush, the emergence of this damaging scandal, which could have denied him his own shot at the White House, was time to test out his ability to “deny everything.” So, he denied knowing that the White House had been secretly running a Contra resupply operation in defiance of Congress, even though his office and top aides were in the middle of everything. Regarding the Iran arms deals, Bush insisted publicly he was “out of the loop.”

Behind closed doors where he ran the risk of perjury charges, Bush was more forthcoming. For instance, in non-public testimony to the FBI and the Iran-Contra prosecutor, “Bush acknowledged that he was regularly informed of events connected with the Iran arms sales.” [See Special Prosecutor’s Final Iran-Contra Report, p. 473]

But Bush’s public “out of the loop” storyline, more or less, held up going into the 1988 presidential election. The one time when he was directly challenged with detailed Iran-Contra questions was in a live, on-air confrontation with CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Jan. 25, 1988.

Instead of engaging in a straightforward discussion, Bush went on the offensive, lashing out at Rather for allegedly ambushing him with unexpected questions. Bush also recalled an embarrassing episode when Rather left his anchor chair vacant not anticipating the end of a tennis match which was preempting the news.

“How would you like it if I judged your career by those seven minutes when you walked off the set in New York?” Bush asked testily. “How would you like that?”

Fitting with Philby’s observation, Bush’s bluster won the day. Much of the elite U.S. media, including Newsweek where I was working at the time, sided with Bush and slammed Rather for his sometimes forceful questioning of the patrician Bush.

Having put Rather in his place and having put the Iran-Contra issue to rest – at least as far as the 1988 campaign was concerned – Bush went on to win the presidency. But the history still threatened to catch up with him.

October Surprise Mystery

The October Surprise case of 1980 was something of a prequel to the Iran-Contra Affair. It preceded the Iran-Contra events but surfaced publicly in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra disclosures. This earlier phase slowly came to light when it became clear that the U.S.-approved arms sales to Iran did not begin in 1985, as the official Iran-Contra story claimed, but years earlier, very soon after Reagan and Bush took office.

Also, in the wake of the Iran-Contra Affair, more and more witnesses surfaced describing this earlier phase of the scandal, eventually totaling about two dozen, including former Assistant Secretary of State Veliotes; former senior Iranian officials, such as President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr and Defense Minister Ahmad Madani; and intelligence operatives, such as Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe and a CIA-Iranian agent Jamshid Hashemi. Many of these witnesses were cited in a PBS documentary that I co-wrote in April 1991, entitled “The Election Held Hostage.”

After the documentary aired – and amid growing public interest – pressure built on Congress to open a new inquiry into this prequel, but President Bush made clear that his reaction would be to “deny everything.”

On May 3, 1991, at a White House press availability, Bush was asked about reports that he had traveled to Paris in October 1980 to personally seal the deal on having the 52 hostages released only after the election – as Israeli intelligence officer Ben-Menashe had described.

“Was I ever in Paris in October 1980?” a clearly annoyed Bush responded, repeating the question through pursed lips. “Definitely, definitely, no.”

Bush returned to the October Surprise topic five days later, his anger still clearly visible:

“I can only say categorically that the allegations about me are grossly untrue, factually incorrect, bald-faced lies.”

Yet, despite Bush’s anger – and despite “debunking” attacks on the October Surprise story from the neoconservative New Republic and my then-former employers at Newsweek – the House and Senate each started investigations, albeit somewhat half-heartedly and with inadequate resources.

Image below: President George H. W. Bush addresses the nation on Jan. 16,1991, to discuss the launch of Operation Desert Storm.

Still, the congressional October Surprise inquiries sent Bush’s White House into panic mode. The President, who was expecting to coast to reelection in 1992, saw the October Surprise issue – along with the continued Iran-Contra investigation by special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh – as threats to his retention of power.

By fall 1991, the Bush administration was pulling together documents from various federal agencies that might be relevant to the October Surprise inquiry. The idea was to concentrate the records in the hands of a few trusted officials in Washington. As part of that process, the White House was informed that there appeared to be confirmation of a key October Surprise allegation.

In a “memorandum for record” dated Nov. 4, 1991, Associate White House Counsel Paul Beach Jr. wrote that one document that had been unearthed was a record of Reagan’s campaign director William J. Casey traveling to Madrid, Spain, a potentially key corroboration of Jamshid Hashemi’s claim that Casey had met with senior Iranian emissary Mehdi Karrubi in Madrid in late July and again in mid-August 1980.

The U.S. Embassy in Madrid’s confirmation of Casey’s trip had gone to State Department legal adviser Edwin D. Williamson, who was responsible for assembling the State Department documents, according to the memo. Williamson passed on word to Beach, who wrote that Williamson said that among the State Department “material potentially relevant to the October Surprise allegations [was] a cable from the Madrid embassy indicating that Bill Casey was in town, for purposes unknown.”

The significance of this confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid can hardly be overstated. The influential October Surprise debunking stories – ballyhooed on the covers of Newsweek and The New Republic – hinged on their joint misreading of some attendance records at a London historical conference which they claimed proved Casey was there and thus could not have traveled to Madrid. That meant, according to the two magazines, that the CIA’s Iranian agent Jamshid Hashemi was lying about arranging Casey’s two meetings with Karrubi in Madrid.

In their double-barreled shoot-down of the October Surprise story, Newsweek and The New Republic created a Washington “group think,” which held that the October Surprise case was just a baseless “conspiracy theory.” But the two magazines were wrong.

I already knew that their analyses of the London attendance records were inaccurate. They also failed to interview key participants at the conference, including historian Robert Dallek who had looked for Casey and confirmed to me that Casey had skipped the key morning session on July 28, 1980.

But 1991 was pre-Internet, so it was next to impossible to counter the false reporting of Newsweek and The New Republic, especially given the powerful conventional wisdom that had taken shape against the October Surprise story.

Not wanting to shake that “group think,” Bush’s White House withheld news of the Williamson-Beach discovery of evidence of Casey’s trip to Madrid. That information was neither shared with the public nor the congressional investigators. Instead, a well-designed cover-up was organized and implemented.

The Cover-up Takes Shape

On Nov. 6, 1991, two days after the Beach memo, Beach’s boss, White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray, convened an inter-agency strategy session and explained the need to contain the congressional investigation into the October Surprise case. The explicit goal was to ensure the scandal would not hurt President Bush’s reelection hopes in 1992.

At the meeting, Gray laid out how to thwart the October Surprise inquiry, which was seen as a dangerous expansion of the Iran-Contra investigation where some of prosecutor Walsh’s investigators also were coming to suspect that the origins of the Reagan-Bush contacts with Iran traced back to the 1980 campaign.

The prospect that the two sets of allegations would merge into a single narrative represented a grave threat to George H.W. Bush’s political future. As assistant White House counsel Ronald vonLembke, put it, the White House goal in 1991 was to “kill/spike this story.” To achieve that result, the Republicans coordinated the counter-offensive through Gray’s office under the supervision of associate counsel Janet Rehnquist, the daughter of the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

Image on the right: Gray (oregonlive.com)

Gray explained the stakes at the White House strategy session. “Whatever form they ultimately take, the House and Senate ‘October Surprise’ investigations, like Iran-Contra, will involve interagency concerns and be of special interest to the President,” Gray declared, according to minutes. [Emphasis in original.]

Among “touchstones” cited by Gray were “No Surprises to the White House, and Maintain Ability to Respond to Leaks in Real Time. This is Partisan.” White House “talking points” on the October Surprise investigation urged restricting the inquiry to 1979-80 and imposing strict time limits for issuing any findings, the document said.

In other words, just as the Reagan administration had insisted on walling off the Iran-Contra investigation to a period from 1984-86, the Bush administration wanted to seal off the October Surprise investigation to 1979-80. That would ensure that the public would not see the two seemingly separate scandals as one truly ugly affair.

Meanwhile, as Bush’s White House frustrated the congressional inquiries with foot-dragging, slow-rolling and other obstructions, President Bush would occasionally lash out with invective against the October Surprise suspicions.

In late spring 1992, Bush raised the October Surprise issue at two news conferences, bringing the topic up himself. On June 4, 1992, Bush snapped at a reporter who asked whether an independent counsel was needed to investigate the administration’s pre-Persian Gulf War courtship of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

“I wonder whether they’re going to use the same prosecutors that are trying out there to see whether I was in Paris in 1980,” the clearly peeved President responded. “I mean, where are we going with the taxpayers’ money in this political year? I was not in Paris, and we did nothing illegal or wrong here” on Iraq.

At another news conference at the world environmental summit in Brazil, Bush brought up the October Surprise case again, calling the congressional inquiries “a witchhunt” and demanding that Congress clear him of having traveled to Paris.

Taking their cue from the President, House Republicans threatened to block continued funding for the inquiry unless the Democrats agreed that Bush had not gone to Paris. Although Bush’s alibi for the key weekend of Oct. 18-19, 1980, was shaky, with details from his Secret Service logs withheld and with supposedly corroborating witnesses contradicting each other, the Democrats agreed to give Bush what he wanted.

After letting Bush off the hook on Paris, the inquiry stumbled along inconclusively with the White House withholding key documents and keeping some key witnesses, such as Bush’s former national security adviser Donald Gregg, out of reach.

Perhaps more importantly, the Casey-Madrid information from Beach’s memo was never shared with Congress, according to House Task Force Chairman Lee Hamilton, who I interviewed about the missing material in 2013.

Whatever interest Congress had in the October Surprise case faded even more after Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton. There was a palpable sense around Official Washington that it would be wrong to pile on the defeated President. The thinking was that Bush (and Reagan) should be allowed to ride off into the sunset with their legacies intact.

So, even as more incriminating evidence arrived at the House task force in December 1992 and in January 1993 – including testimony from French intelligence chief Alexander deMarenches’s biographer confirming the Paris meeting and a report from Russia’s duma revealing that Soviet intelligence had monitored the Republican-Iranian contacts in 1980 – it was all cast aside. The task force simply decided there was “no credible evidence” to support the October Surprise allegations.

Trusting the Suspect

Beyond the disinclination of Hamilton and his investigators to aggressively pursue important leads, they operated with the naïve notion that President Bush, who was a prime suspect in the October Surprise case, would compile and turn over evidence that would prove his guilt and seal his political fate. Power at that level simply doesn’t work that way.

Image below: Casey

After discovering the Beach memo, I emailed a copy to Hamilton and discussed it with him by phone. The retired Indiana Democratic congressman responded that his task force was never informed that the White House had confirmation of Casey’s trip to Madrid.

“We found no evidence to confirm Casey’s trip to Madrid,” Hamilton told me. “The [Bush-41] White House did not notify us that he did make the trip. Should they have passed that on to us? They should have because they knew we were interested in that.”

Asked if knowledge that Casey had traveled to Madrid might have changed the task force’s dismissive October Surprise conclusion, Hamilton said yes, because the question of the Madrid trip was key to the task force’s investigation.

“If the White House knew that Casey was there, they certainly should have shared it with us,” Hamilton said. Hamilton added that “you have to rely on people” in authority to comply with information requests.

Therein, of course, lay the failure of the October Surprise investigation. Hamilton and his team were counting on President Bush and his team to bring all the evidence together in one place and then share it with Congress, when they were more likely to burn it.

Indeed, by having Bush’s White House gather together all the hard evidence that might have proved that Bush and Reagan engaged in an operation that bordered on treason, Hamilton’s investigation may have made it impossible for the historical mystery ever to be solved. There is a good chance that whatever documentary evidence there might have been doesn’t exist anymore.

After discovering the Beach memo, I contacted both Beach and Williamson, who insisted that they had no memory of the Casey-to-Madrid records. I also talked with Boyden Gray, who told me that he had no involvement in the October Surprise inquiry, although I had the minutes to the Nov. 6, 1991 meeting where he rallied Bush’s team to contain the investigation.

I also filed a Freedom of Information Act request to have the records of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid searched for the relevant cable or other documents regarding Casey’s trip, but the State Department said nothing could be found.

So, the question becomes: Did Bush’s loyal team collect all the raw documents in one place, not so they could be delivered to Congress, but rather so they could be removed from the historical record permanently, thus buttressing for all time the angry denials of George H.W. Bush?

Surely, someone as skilled in using power and influence as former President Bush (the elder) would need no advice from Kim Philby about how to use privilege and connections to shield one’s guilt. That, after all, is the sort of thing that comes naturally to those who are born to the right families, attend the right schools and belong to the right secret societies.

George H.W. Bush came from the bosom of the American ruling class at a time when it was rising to become the most intimidating force on earth. He was the grandson of a powerful Wall Street banker, the son of an influential senator, and a director of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Along the way, he attended Yale and belonged to Skull and Bones.)

Indeed, Poppy Bush could probably have given Kim Philby lessons on how to brush off suspicions and cover up wrongdoing. Still, Philby’s insight into how the powerful and well-connected can frustrate the investigations and questions of lesser citizens is worth recalling: “Deny everything.”

[To watch a video interview with Robert Parry discussing this article, click here.]

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The late investigative reporter Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. His last book, America’s Stolen Narrative, can be obtained in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

All images in this article are from Consortiumnews

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Les Gilets Jaunes – A Bright Yellow Sign of Distress

December 4th, 2018 by Diana Johnstone

Every automobile in France is supposed to be equipped with a yellow vest. This is so that in case of accident or breakdown on a highway, the driver can put it on to ensure visibility and avoid getting run over.

So the idea of wearing your yellow vest to demonstrate against unpopular government measures caught on quickly.  The costume was at hand and didn’t have to be provided by Soros for some more or less manufactured “color revolution”.  The symbolism was fitting: in case of socio-economic emergency, show that you don’t want to be run over.

As everybody knows, what set off the protest movement was yet another rise in gasoline taxes. But it was immediately clear that much more was involved. The gasoline tax was the last straw in a long series of measures favoring the rich at the expense of the majority of the population. That is why the movement achieved almost instant popularity and support

The Voices of the People

The Yellow Vests held their first demonstrations on Saturday, November 17, on the Champs-Elysées in Paris.  It was totally unlike the usual trade union demonstrations, well organized to march down the boulevard between the Place de la République and the Place de la Bastille, or the other way around, carrying banners and listening to speeches from leaders at the end.  The Gilets Jaunes just came, with no organization, no leaders to tell them where to go or to harangue the crowd.  They were just there, in the yellow vests, angry and ready to explain their anger to any sympathetic listener.

Briefly, the message was this: we can’t make ends meet. The cost of living keeps going up, and our incomes keep going down.  We just can’t take it any more.  The government must stop, think and change course.

Image result for protest in france

Source: NDTV.com

But so far, the reaction of the government was to send police to spray torrents of tear gas on the crowd, apparently to keep the people at a distance from the nearby Presidential residence, the Elysee Palace. President Macron was somewhere else, apparently considering himself above and beyond it all.

But those who were listening could learn a lot about the state of France today. Especially in the small towns and rural areas, where many protesters came from. Things are much worse than officials and media in Paris have let on.

There were young women who were working seven days a week and despaired of having enough money to feed and clothe their children.

People were angry but ready to explain very clearly the economic issues.

Colette, age 83, doesn’t own a car, but explained to whoever would listen that the steep raise of gasoline prices would also hurt people who don’t drive, by affecting prices of food and other necessities. She had done the calculations and figured it would cost a retired person 80 euros per month.

“Macron didn’t run on the promise to freeze pensions”, recalled a Yellow Vest, but that is what he has done, along with increasing solidarity taxes on pensioners.

A significant and recurring complaint concerned the matter of health care.  France has long had the best public health program in the world, but this is being steadily undermined to meet the primary need of capital: profit.  In the past few years, there has been a growing government campaign to encourage, and finally to oblige people to subscribe to a “mutuelle”, that is, a private health insurance, ostensibly to fill “the gaps” not covered by France’s universal health coverage. The “gaps” can be the 15% that is not covered for ordinary illnesses (grave illnesses are covered 100%), or for medicines taken off the “covered” list, or for dental work, among other things.  The “gaps” to fill keep expanding, along with the cost of subscribing to the mutuelle.  In reality, this program, sold to the public as modernizing improvement, is a gradual move toward privatization of health care.  It is a sneaky method of opening the whole field of public health to international financial capital investment.  This gambit has not fooled ordinary people and is high on the list of complaints by the Gilets Jaunes.

The degradation of care in the public hospitals is another complaint. There are fewer and fewer hospitals in rural areas, and one must “wait long enough to die” emergency rooms. Those who can afford it are turning to private hospitals.  But most can’t. Nurses are overworked and underpaid. When one hears what nurses have to endure, one is reminded that this is indeed a noble profession.

In all this I was reminded of a young woman we met at a public picnic in southwestern France last summer.  She cares for elderly people who live at home alone in rural areas, driving from one to another, to feed them, bathe them, offer a moment of cheerful company and understanding.  She loves her vocation, loves helping old people, although it barely allows her to make a living.  She will be among those who will have to pay more to get from one patient to the next.

People pay taxes willingly when they are getting something for it.  But not when the things they are used to are being taken away. The tax evaders are the super-rich and the big corporations with their batteries of lawyers and safe havens, or intruders like Amazon and Google, but ordinary French people have been relatively disciplined in paying taxes in return for excellent public services: optimum health care, first class public transport, rapid and efficient postal service, free university education. But all that is under assault from the reign of financial capital called “neo-liberalism” here.  In rural areas, more and more post offices, schools and hospitals are shut down, unprofitable train service is discontinued as “free competition” is introduced following European Union directives – measures which oblige people to drive their cars more than ever.   Especially when huge shopping centers drain small towns of their traditional shops.

Incoherent Energy Policies

And the tax announced by the government – an additional 6.6 cents per liter for diesel and an additional 2.9 centers per liter of gasoline – are only the first steps in a series of planned increases over the next years.  The measures are supposed to incite people to drive less or even better, to scrap their old vehicles and buy nice new electric cars.

More and more “governance” is an exercise in social engineering by technocrats who know what is best. This particular exercise goes directly opposite to an earlier government measure of social engineering which used economic incitements to get people to buy cars running on diesel. Now the government has changed its mind. Over half of personal vehicles still run on diesel, although the percentage has been dropping.  Now their owners are told to go buy an electric car instead.  But people living on the edge simply can’t afford the switch.

Besides, the energy policy is incoherent.  In theory, the “green” economy includes shutting down France’s many nuclear power plants.  Without them, where would the electricity come from to run the electric cars? And nuclear power is “clean”, no CO2.  So what is going on? People wonder.

The most promising alternative sources of energy in France are the strong tides along northern coasts.  But last July, the Tidal Energies project on the Normandy coast was suddenly dropped because it wasn’t profitable – not enough customers.  This is symptomatic of what is wrong with the current government.  Major new industrial projects are almost never profitable at first, which is why they need government support and subsidies to get going, with a view to the future.  Such projects were supported under de Gaulle, raising France to the status of major industrial power, and providing unprecedented prosperity for the population as a whole.  But the Macron government is not investing in the future nor doing anything to preserve industries that remain.  The key French energy corporation Alstom was sold to General Electric under his watch.

Image result for protest in france

Source: Archy news nety

Indeed, it is perfectly hypocritical to call the French gas tax an “ecotax” since the returns from a genuine ecotax would be invested to develop clean energies – such as tidal power plants.  Rather, the benefits are earmarked to balance the budget, that is, to serve the government debt.  The Macronian gas tax is just another austerity measure – along with cutting back public services and “selling the family jewels”, that is, selling potential money-makers like Alstom, port facilities and the Paris airports.

The Government Misses the Point

Initial government responses showed that they weren’t listening. They dipped into their pool of clichés to denigrate something they didn’t want to bother to understand.

President Macron’s first reaction was to guilt-trip the protesters by invoking the globalists’ most powerful argument for imposing unpopular measures: global warming. Whatever small complaints people may have, he indicated, that is nothing compared to the future of the planet.

This did not impress people who, yes, have heard all about climate change and care as much as anyone for the environment, but who are obliged to retort: “I’m more worried about the end of the month than about the end of the world.”

After the second Yellow Vest Saturday, November 25, which saw more demonstrators and more tear gas, the Minister in charge of the budget, Gérard Darmanin, declared that what had demonstrated on the Champs-Elysée was “la peste brune”, the brown plague, meaning fascists. (For those who enjoy excoriating the French as racist, it should be noted that Darmanin is of Algerian working class origins).  This remark caused an uproar of indignation that revealed just how great is public sympathy for the movement – over 70% approval by latest polls, even after uncontrolled vandalism.  Macron’s Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, was obliged to declare that government communication had been badly managed.  Of course, that is the familiar technocratic excuse: we are always right, but it is all a matter of our “communication”, not of the facts on the ground.

Maybe I have missed something, but of the many interviews I have listened to, I have not heard one word that would fall into the categories of “far right”, much less “fascism” – or even that indicated any particular preference in regard to political parties.  These people are wholly concerned with concrete practical issues. Not a whiff of ideology – remarkable in Paris!

Some people ignorant of French history and eager to exhibit their leftist purism have suggested that the Yellow Vests are dangerously nationalistic because they occasionally wave French flags and sing La Marseillaise. That simply means that they are French.  Historically, the French left is patriotic, especially when it is revolting against the aristocrats and the rich or during the Nazi Occupation[i].  It is just a way of saying, We are the people, we do the work, and you must listen to our grievances. To be a bad thing, “nationalism” must be aggressive toward other nations.  This movement is not attacking anybody, it is strictly staying home.

The Weakness of Macron

The Yellow Vests have made clear to the whole world that Emmanuel Macron was an artificial product sold to the electorate by an extraordinary media campaign.

Macron was the rabbit magically pulled out of a top hat, sponsored by what must be called the French oligarchy.  After catching the eye of established king-maker Jacques Attali, the young Macron was given a stint at the Rothschild bank where he could quickly gain a small fortune, ensuring his class loyalty to his sponsors.  Media saturation and the scare campaign against “fascist” Marine LePen (who moreover flubbed her major debate) put Macron in office. He had met his wife when she was teaching his theater class, and now he gets to play President.

The mission assigned to him by his sponsors was clear.  He must carry through more vigorously the “reforms” (austerity measures) already undertaken by previous governments, which had often dawdled at hastening the decline of the social State.

And beyond that, Macron was supposed to “save Europe”. Saving Europe means saving the European Union from the quagmire in which it finds itself.

This is why cutting expenses and balancing the budget is his obsession. Because that’s what he was chosen to do by the oligarchy that sponsored his candidacy. He was chosen by the financial oligarchy above all to save the European Union from threatening disintegration caused by the euro.  The treaties establishing the EU and above all the common currency, the euro, have created an imbalance between member states that is unsustainable.  The irony is that previous French governments, starting with Mitterrand, are largely responsible for this state of affairs. In a desperate and technically ill-examined effort to keep newly unified Germany from becoming the dominant power in Europe, the French insisted on binding Germany to France by a common currency.  Reluctantly, the Germans agreed to the euro – but only on German terms. The result is that Germany has become the unwilling creditor of equally unwilling EU member states, Italy, Spain, Portugal and of course, ruined Greece. The financial gap between Germany and its southern neighbors keeps expanding, which causes ill will on all sides.

Germany doesn’t want to share economic power with states it considers irresponsible spendthrifts.  So Macron’s mission is to show Germany that France, despite its flagging economy, is “responsible”, by squeezing the population in order to pay interest on the debt. Macron’s idea is that the politicians in Berlin and the bankers in Frankfurt will be so impressed that they will turn around and say, well done Emmanuel, we are ready to throw our wealth into a common pot for the benefit of all 27 Member States.  And that is why Macron will stop at nothing to balance the budget, to make the Germans love him.

So far, the Macron magic is not working on the Germans, and it’s driving his own people into the streets.

Or are they his own people?  Does Macron really care about his run of the mill compatriots who just work for a living?  The consensus is that he does not.

Macron is losing the support both of the people in the streets and the oligarchs who sponsored him.  He is not getting the job done.

Macron’s rabbit-out-of-the hat political ascension leaves him with little legitimacy, once the glow of glossy magazine covers wears off.  With help from his friends, Macron invented his own party, La République en Marche, which doesn’t mean much of anything but suggested action.  He peopled his party with individuals from “civil society”, often medium entrepreneurs with no political experience, plus a few defectors from either the Socialist or the Republican Parties, to occupy the most important government posts.

The only well-known recruit from “civil society” was the popular environmental activist, Nicolas Hulot, who was given the post of Minister of Environment, but who abruptly resigned in a radio announcement last August, citing frustration.

Macron’s strongest supporter from the political class was Gérard Collomb, Socialist Mayor of Lyons, who was given the top cabinet post of Minister of Interior, in charge of national police.  But shortly after Hulot left, Collomb said he was leaving too, to go back to Lyons. Macron entreated him to stay on, but on October 3, Collomb went ahead and resigned, with a stunning statement referring to “immense problems” facing his successor.  In the “difficult neighborhoods” in the suburbs of major cities, he said, the situation is “very much degraded : it’s the law of the jungle that rules, drug dealers and radical Islamists have taken the place of the Republic.”  Such suburbs need to be “reconquered”.

After such a job description, Macron was at a loss to recruit a new Interior Minister.  He groped around and came up with a crony he had chosen to head his party, ex-Socialist Christophe Castaner.  With a degree in criminology, Castaner’s main experience qualifying him to head the national police is his close connection, back in his youth in the 1970s, with a Marseilles Mafioso, apparently due to his penchant for playing poker and drinking whiskey in illegal dens.

Saturday, November 17, demonstrators were peaceful, but resented the heavy teargas attacks.  Saturday November 25, things got a big rougher, and on Saturday December 1st, all hell broke loose.  With no leaders and no service d’ordre (militants assigned to protect the demonstrators from attacks, provocations and infiltration), it was inevitable that casseurs(smashers) got into the act and started smashing things, looting shops and setting fires to trash cans, cars and even buildings.  Not only in Paris, but all over France: from Marseilles to Brest, from Toulouse to Strasbourg.  In the remote town of Puy en Velay, known for its chapel perched on a rock and its traditional lace-making, the Prefecture (national government authority) was set on fire.  Tourist arrivals are cancelled and fancy restaurants are empty and department stores fear for their Christmas windows. The economic damages are enormous.

And yet, support for the Yellow Vests remains high, probably because people are able to distinguish between those grieved citizens and the vandals who love to wreak destruction for its own sake.

On Monday, there were suddenly fresh riots in the troubled suburbs that Collomb warned about as he retreated to Lyons.  This was a new front for the national police, whose representatives let it be known that all this was getting to be much too much for them to cope with. Announcing a state of emergency is not likely to solve anything.

Macron is a bubble that has burst.  The legitimacy of his authority is very much in question.  Yet he was elected in 2017 for a five year term, and his party holds a large majority in parliament that makes his destitution almost impossible.

So what next?  Despite having been sidelined by Macron’s electoral victory in 2017, politicians of all hews are trying to recuperate the movement – but discreetly, because the Gilets Jaunes have made clear their distrust of all politicians.  This is not a movement that seeks to take power.  It simply seeks redress of its grievances. The government should have listened in the first place, accepted discussions and compromise.  This gets more difficult as time goes on, but nothing is impossible.

For some two or three hundred years, people one could call “left” hoped that popular movements would lead to changes for the better.  Today, many leftists seem terrified of popular movements for change, convinced “populism” must lead to “fascism”.  This attitude is one of many factors indicating that the changes ahead will not be led by the left as it exists today.  Those who fear change will not be there to help make it happen.  But change is inevitable and it need not be for the worse.

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Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at [email protected].  Diana Johnstone is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization  (CRG). 

Note

[i]  The exception was the student uprising of May 1968, which was not a revolt of the poor but a revolt in a time of prosperity in favor of greater personal freedom: “it is forbidden to forbid”. The May ’68 generation has turned out to be the most anti-French generation in history, for reasons that can’t be dealt with here. To some extent, the Yellow Vests mark a return of the people after half a century of scorn from the liberal intelligentsia.

This morning I read online the current problems Benjamin Netanyahu is having within the Knesset and within his own political party,

“Now, Netanyahu’s once stable coalition is hanging by a thread, with the support of only 61 members in the Knesset.   This means that the coalition’s once comfortable majority is now dependent on a single MK. One wrong move and Netanyahu could find himself forced into snap elections, a choice that, at least for now, he dreads. [“Netanyahu’s Predicament: The Era of Easy Wars is over.” Ramzy Baroud.  Palestine Chronicle, November 28, 2018.]

How appropriate, as after reading Bibi – The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu by Anshell Pfeffer, it is very much in line with how the rest of his political career has progressed – hanging on by a thread, short elections cycles, scandals of different sorts orbiting around him, coalition partners deserting him.  Nothing new.

Pfeffer’s work is an interesting read on Israeli political history, restricted in its comments about the Palestinian situation or concepts about Palestine, except for a noteworthy ongoing reiteration on Palestine that I will explore later.  It has some faults with certain narrative aspects of its history – again more later – but overall it appears to be a fairly complete analysis of Netanyahu’s life and times.

Unfortunately it starts with one of those faults, the idea that “before then [1929] the Arabs living there had not factored into Zionist thinking.”   Except that it had, and one of the critical political ideologues/philosophers of early Zionism, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who plays an important role in the political ideas of Netanyahu and throughout this history, recognized both the existence of the Arabs and the need for force for Jewish settlement:

The Arabs loved their country as much as the Jews did. Instinctively, they understood Zionist aspirations very well, and their decision to resist them was only natural ….. There was no misunderstanding between Jew and Arab, but a natural conflict. …. No Agreement was possible with the Palestinian Arab; they would accept Zionism only when they found themselves up against an ‘iron wall,’ when they realize they had no alternative but to accept Jewish settlement. [from Haaretz, 1923]

Different stories

From there it gets narrowly political, and relates a story not only of Netanyahu but of much of Israeli politics.  It tells the history of the long political battle between Mapai/Labour (the secular socialist side) and Likud (the Revisionist or Jabotinsky side) .  It tells of the earlier history of Benzion Netanyahu and his life and career considerably spent in the U.S. with that influence bearing on Benjamin.  In the early stages it tells more about Netanyahu’s brother Yoni, whom Benjamin idolized with “reverence”, and about whom a mythological heroic figure was created.  It also tells the story in part of Ben Gurion and his conflicts within Israeli politics.

In sum, the politics of Israel seem not much different than that of other countries, one full of political infighting, crossovers, corruption, double dealings, recriminations and attacks – and above all, it is a story of power hungry elites.

It is centred on the story of Netanyahu of course, but he is a minor figure through much of the early history, seemingly out of place in Israel and very comfortable in the U.S., uncomfortable with people in general, but becoming a master of manipulation.

Bibi

Netanyahu spent a considerable amount of his time in childhood and early adolescence living in the United States.  His education from the U.S., both in his youth and later as a young adult, proved highly influential, and he seemed more comfortable in the U.S. than in Israel.  It is where he first encountered how the media influenced politics, how it could be used to manipulate populations on a large scale and without worrying about facts as much as ideology.  One of his prime ideological influences was Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead,

Rand’s muscular blend of capitalism and individualism appealed to Netanyahu and has influenced his political and economic thinking ever since.

He was not interested in people, but power, wanting to change Israel from its socialist somewhat accommodating intentions towards peace to a competitive capitalist and militarily powerful country.  Pfeffer variously describes him as egotistical, arrogant, averse to making concessions, and disdainful of others, ready to use whomever as was required to reach his goals.

The U.S. influence is writ large in everything Netanyahu does.  He uses U.S. political ideas in the sense of cultivating a fear factor based on racism, spreading it through modern technology, and relying on a base that supported him pretty much regardless of his misdeeds and failures. His base, the people he knew who would support him through thick and thin, are the far right wing, ideologues of the settler community and their many small but influential political parties that often carried the balance of power in his favour.  In spite of being a secular Jew, he used the religious right to augment his hold on power, offering cabinet positions in return for support.

One of his strongest supporters, among the many from the United States, is Sheldon Adelson, a U.S. billionaire businessman.  Adelson spent $93 million while operating an Israeli newspaper designed with the purpose of supporting Netanyahu’s political career, and spending twice that amount for publicity during critical election times.   Netanyahu never achieved a full majority government, using the right wing parties to support him in the Knesset, using the fear factor, racism, and modern media to hang on to his base, and using the usual bagful of political promises to gain power.  The economy in a statistical sense did thrive under his leadership, but as with all governments that apply capitalist austerity – tax cuts, social benefit cuts, firings, privatizations, and deregulation of finances – poverty and inequality increased significantly.

Fault lines

As mentioned earlier, there are some historical narrative faults scattered through the history. While they do not change what is mostly an insider political history (with the U.S. being considered part and parcel of Israel’s history) they need to be addressed as it is a soft way of reiterating the overall Israeli narrative concerning their interactions with the Palestinians.

Pfeffer does admit that the 1948 war “results were much more devastating” for the Palestinian population than the Israelis,

Around two-thirds of that community, some 750,000 people, had fled their houses at the advice of the Arab leaders, for fear of the fighting and Jewish reprisals, or had been forcibly banished by the new Israeli army.

That needs to be looked at in reverse order.  “Forcibly banished” is an understatement as what occurred were genocidal murders and demolitions of whole villages using bulldozers and dynamite. Following that, yes, word spread, the fear spread that similar actions could and would be repeated as IDF forces moved from village to village, eventually removing from the landscape about 500 Palestinian villages.

Another small point is snuck by the reader while discussing the pre 1967 situation where tensions had risen “with Syria over attempts by Israeli farmers to work on land in contested areas of the demilitarized zone.”  “Contested” is the preferred word used by the Israelis to describe land the colonial settler society wanted to use for itself at the exclusion of the Arabs; for the Arabs it was not contested, but “occupied”.

A bigger fault line emerges with the actual 1967 Six Day War.  Pfeffer admits that the war started with a pre-emptive attack on the Egyptian military but he also adds,

But Israel had half planned, half-blundered into the war. Now it would approach a long military occupation of another nation in the same manner.

To give credit, the author does recognize that there is a “long military occupation of another nation”, but it is an undefined statement especially as to what would constitute a Palestinian ‘nation’.  The original point about half-planned and half-blundered is simply not true.

Current historical readings show clearly that the generals and military had clear plans and clear knowledge about the status of the opposing Arab armies and knew they could win readily if they struck preemptively.  At the other end of the war, the Israelis imposed martial law on the occupied territories (not contested) with plans developed over a period of years before the war began. [ see Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.One World Publications, Oxford, England, 2006, and The Biggest Prison on Earth – A History of the Occupied Territories. Ilan Pappe. Oneworld Publications, London, 2018.  Also see, Miko Peled’s The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in Palestine.Just World Books, Washington, DC, 2012.]

In 2006, Hamas won the civic elections held in Palestinian territory for a new Palestinian Authority government. In what was considered at the time to be a very fair election free of outside meddling or internal corruption, Hamas won the majority of positions.  This was not the correct result for the Israelis and was quickly condemned by Canada, the U.S., and other countries who withdrew financial support from the Palestinians in an attempt to have them change the situation.  Pfeffer says, without mentioning the election results nor the reaction to it,

In June 2007, Hamas launched a coup in Gaza, ousting the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.

This is taken completely out of context as Pfeffer places it within the dismantling of settlements with “no arrangement…put in place to help alleviate the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza.”  While he does not say that one action resulted in the other, his context strongly implies it.  In truth, Fatah attempted to take control of Gaza with their coup attempt, supported by Israel and the U.S., as a consequence of the election results favoring Hamas.  Hamas was effectively silenced in the West Bank, but they managed to defeat the Fatah led coup in Gaza.    It is only one line in the book, but it carries a whole load of misinformation and narrative twisting along with it.

Bibi’s faultines

In conclusion, Pfeffer does not see much hope in a Netanyahu government.

Netanyahu’s Israel is living on borrowed time….the occupation of another nation, nearly of equal size, is eroding Israeli democracy and human rights at an alarming rate.  Netanyahu has no plans to deal with that erosion, save for stoking racism and fear.

Perhaps the word “revealing” should be used instead of “eroding” as Israel, now a declared Jewish state is not a democracy.  Any country living as an apartheid state, with discriminatory laws against half its population, a population under a rather brutal military occupation, cannot be considered in any way, shape, or form to be democratic.  Certainly the fear factor is still there, but it is mostly directed at Iran rather than at neighbouring Arab countries, perhaps as most of them, apart from Syria, have acquiesced to Israel’s’ presence and actions in the Middle East.

This leads to Netanyahu’s biggest faultline – fear of Iran, or fear of Palestinians. His ranting against Iran is well known, from his sadly infantile rant at the UN with his kindergarten bomb drawing to his speech to his adoring sycophantic U.S. admirers in Congress (without Obama’s presence or invitation).  Throughout this book Pfeffer quotes him frequently as indicating that the Palestinians are not the problem, they are a “diversion”.   The conflict “is not about the Palestinians, borders, or refugees….It rises from an implacable Arab and Muslim hatred toward the West, and Israel is the West’s outpost in the Middle East.”

The latter quote is Pfeffer’s words, revealing Netanyahu’s position but also identifying a century long truth from early Churchill, Balfour and the British government that Israel is indeed an outpost of the west, an idea similarly held by U.S. counterpartners.

But back to Bibi.  While meeting with Obama in 2009, “the Palestinian issue was a distraction from the real threat [Iran], not just to Israel, but to the entire world.”  This is a rather highly inflated fear factor, but it certainly works on most of the U.S. mainstream.  Fortunately Obama was able to reach a nuclear energy/control deal with Iran through the working group with Russia and the European powers.

Then comes the “aha” moment to Netanyahu’s bluster on Iran,

…the focus on Iran significantly reduced the pressure on Netanyahu to make concessions to the Palestinians.

Ever since Oslo, the ability to talk, and talk some more, to create distractions with some pretty little war somewhere all played into keeping the mainstream entertained as to Israel’s good intentions all the while they continued their military occupation, ramped up the apartheid system, and continued with their slow ethnic cleansing.

It has to be obvious to Netanyahu and any other Israeli politician that keeping the Palestinian narrative out of the western mainstream press was a paramount concern for their control and take over of all Palestinian lands.   Thus the Arab states became the problem – their non democratic governments and their hatred of the west and its freedoms.

But as a corollary, if Israel had actually done something, actually accomplished something towards establishing a peaceful settlement with Palestinians, be it two states, one state, or a binational state, then the Arab states would no longer be hostile towards Israel (except perhaps for the occupied Golan Heights of Syria).   But even as the governments of those Arab states are even now generally accepting of the existence of Israel and some are de facto allies, the need for an enemy, the ‘other’, has to go somewhere, and thus Iran.

Without Iran, without an ‘other’, Netanyahu would have no one to use his fear mongering and racism against, forcing him to then address the Palestinians as the fear factor, but then only drawing more attention to the manner in which Israel occupies and controls their territory.

A readable history

From Jabotinsky’s recognition of the Palestinians resisting Jewish occupation to the rantings of Netanyahu against Iran, the racism and fear factor have been a constant in Israeli political life.  It has become stronger under Netanyahu’s leadership and his adoption of the U.S. manner of politicking.  It has become stronger as Israel clearly demonstrates a high degree of ownership of the U.S. state.  Pfeffer’s conclusion, after Netanyahu loses power, sometime soon if current Knesset actions play out fully, is that his “ultimate legacy will not be a more secure nation, but a deeply fractured Israeli society living behind walls.”

Regardless of the faultline criticisms, Bibi is well worth the read, if only to see that the Israel government is as elitist, corrupt, manipulative, and filled with power hungry people as much as any other state.  I am not sure if Pfeffer’s one off faulted comments are due to his believing in the full Israeli narrative or are part of a softening of the narrative on his part in order to make the book more publishable, but they do not take away from the political story.  The personal story defines the man as an egotistical, vain, and insecure person. The political story is thought provoking and interesting, covering much of Israel’s internal history during The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The first reports emerging from the G20 meeting in Buenos Aires today, December 2, 2018, are that Trump and Xi have agreed to put their trade war on hold, a kind of ‘trade war armistice’, at least for the next 90 days.

Trump entered into his meeting this past weekend with China’s president, Xi, having imposed $50 billion in tariffs at 25% on China goods imports last July, to which another $200 billion was added thereafter. Tariffs on the $200 billion were set at 10%, but were scheduled to rise to 25% on January 1, 2019. Before the US November elections, Trump further threatened to add a further $267 billion if China continued to refuse to meet with the US. But China didn’t take the bait. Trump’s strategy was transparent. His plan was to lure China into negotiations before the US elections so he could act tough for his political base before the US elections. China refused to be sucked in and refused to come to Washington to be played by Trump. Instead, it agreed to meet at the G20 gathering this weekend, at a more neutral setting and after the US elections.

In the lead up to this weekend’s G20 US-China meeting, Trump sent conflicting signals to the Chinese. On the one hand, Trump praised China’s president Xi personally, while announcing the existing 10% tariff hikes on the $200 billion would rise to 25% next January 2019 and that another $267 billion would follow if China did not meet with him. Meanwhile, China’s counter tariffs on US imports were levied at 25% for its first $50 billion tariffs and set at only 10% on the additional $60 billion on US goods.

However, to date the US-China trade dispute is more like a trade skirmish than a trade war. The initial first $50 billion in tariffs levied by both US and China this past July have been selective. Most have not yet had a significant impact on their respective economies thus far after only four months in 2018. But in 2019 that $50 billion would start to have an impact. Moreover, the $200 billion additional US tariffs, levied at only 10%, have been largely offset by a roughly equivalent 10% decline in the value of China’s currency, the Yuan.

A rise in $200 billion US tariffs, from 10% to 25%, in 2019 would have an impact, however, in 2019. The likely response by China would be to raise its second $60 billion tariffs on US imports by an equal amount, from current 10% to 25%. That could very well mark the start of a true US-China trade war.

China could also add more non-tariff barriers, or slow its purchase of US Treasury bonds, or block approval of mergers of US companies globally with operations in China, or encourage boycotts of US goods in China, or allow its currency to devalue well below the current 10% decline. These are measures that are typical of true trade wars, but which have not been employed as yet by China or the US. Sparring with tariffs are just initial moves, especially when tariff rates are relatively low, selectively applied, and not fully implemented yet.

While the US and China were clearly on the brink of a bona fide trade war, but until the G20 meeting they had not quite taken that last step. Nor is it likely now that they will. The Trump-Xi meeting at the G20 represents a kind of a trade policy ‘rubicon’ which neither has crossed as yet. If the initial reports coming out of the G20 meeting are accurate, then Trump and Xi have so far continued to decide not to cross the river of no return with regard to a war over trade.

The question is why now the apparent ‘armistice’ in the trade war? Why, after months of threats and warnings aimed at China, has Trump decided to back down? For that’s exactly what the agreements with China at the G20 represent: Trump has backed off, making concessions, while the Chinese have only reiterated proposals they publicly offered over the course of the last six months.

The reasons for the Trump retreat lay in the significant changes in economic conditions since last spring. At the time Trump launched his ‘trade war’ last March 2018 the US economy was accelerating due to multi-trillion dollar tax cuts for investors and corporations; the global economy still appeared to be growing nicely; US profits were rising 20%-25% and stock markets booming; and the Fed, the central bank, was still relatively early in its scheduled interest rate hikes. But that’s all changed as of year end 2018.

With growing indications that the global economy is slowing—with another recession in Japan and German and Europe economies contracting and weakening facing the UK Brexit and Italian bank problems—the US and global stock markets in recent months had begun to retreat noticeably. Early signs since October of US economic slowdown in 2019 have begun to emerge, especially in construction and autos. Japan is in recession. Germany’s economy is contracting, with Europe not far behind facing imminent crises as well in the UK’s Brexit next March and growing debt refinancing problems in Italian, Greek and other Euro banks. And more emerging market economies continue to slip into recession.

Faced with these looming economic realities, as well as growing political pressure at home, Trump eagerly sought the meeting with Xi at the G20 gathering despite continued and intensifying in-fighting between the factions on his US trade negotiating team.

Those factions and divisions among the US elite concerning trade center around three issues: first, access by US bankers and multinational corporations to China markets, especially getting China to allow a 51% or more ownership of US corporate operations in China; second, China increasing its purchases of US exports, especially agricultural and energy products; and third, most important, China agreeing to slow its development of nextgen technologies like cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and 5G wireless—which has assumed the codename in the US of ‘intellectual property’.

Anti-China hardliners—Robert Lighthizer, US office of trade director, Peter Navarro, special advisor on trade, and John Bolton, long time anti-China hawk and national security adviser to Trump—all of whom are closely allied with the Pentagon, military industrial US corporations, and intelligence agencies—have all preferred a trade war with China to achieve US technology objectives. They have been engaged in an internal US faction fight since last April with the two other US factions—i.e. the bankers and multinational corporations whose priority objectives have been to get open markets and majority ownership rights for US businesses, especially banks, in China; and US heartland agricultural and manufacturing exporters, who represent Trump’s red state political base, who want a return and an expansion of China purchases of US exports.

Since this past summer, the Lighthizer-Navarro-Bolton faction have clearly had Trump’s ear and have prevailed ensuring technology transfer is at the top of the list of US trade negotiations priorities. However, with the recent weakening of the US stock markets, indications of economic slowdown coming, and growing US business concerns of a bona fide US-China trade war deepening in 2019, Trump has shifted his position toward a softer line in trade negotiations with China, apparently retreating closer to positions of the other two factions in US-China trade negotiations. That softer line is evident in the G20 meeting tentative agreements announced by Trump and Xi.

Put another way, facing the shift to a bona fide trade war in 2019—in the midst of a slowing global and US economy and a likely steeper correction in US stocks and financial markets—Trump met Xi at the G20 and ‘blinked’, as they say.

That Trump clearly retreated is undeniable in the content of the G20 announcement following his meeting with Xi. Of course a Trump retreat is not the likely ‘spin’ it will be given in the US corporate media this coming week. The agreements will be characterized as a mutual ‘pause’ of some sort in what appeared as an inevitable trade war commencing January 2019.

But a consideration of the substance of the verbal agreement between Trump and Xi released this past weekend shows that Trump clearly backed off while Xi simply reiterated what the China team has already offered Trump and had already put on the table the last several months.

Here’s what was agreed in broad principle, at least according to early reports:

  • Trump agreed not to allow the scheduled January 1, 2019 increase in US tariffs on $200 billion of imports from China to rise, from the current 10% tariff rate to the 25%.
  • Trump agreed not to move forward with his threat of another $267 billion tariffs on.

These represent two clear concessions by Trump and amount to reversals of prior US positions. What about China’s response? Unlike Trump, there was no clear retreat from previous positions, i.e. concessions.

  • China agreed to increase US purchases of agriculture goods (actually a restoration of prior levels) “immediately”, in order to ease the US trade deficit with China and boost US farmers and agribusiness. But China had already publicly offered to buy a further $100 billion in previous months. The joint communique coming out of the meeting only indicates to increase US purchases ‘in accordance with the needs of its domestic market’. The $100 billion is thus more a restoration of previous levels of China purchases of US agricultural and manufacturing exports.
  • China agreed to open its markets to US banks and businesses further. But it had already also announced earlier this year it would allow 51% foreign ownership, and suggested it could even go to 100% in coming years. So this too was an ‘offer’ it had already made to the US this past summer.

What about the key tech transfer issue that has split the US elite and the US trade team? That primary demand of the US hard liners, which seemed paramount in preceding months, has been tabled for future discussion. Both US and China have only agreed to discussions for the next 90 days “with respect to forced technology transfers” and related issues. (Reuters report by Roberta Rampton and Michael Martina, 12/2/18, 1:23pm ET). So no agreement on technology. Just a mutual face-saver to meet again and agree “to further exchanges at appropriate times”.

Meanwhile, Trump retreats from raising tariff rates from 10% to 25% and agrees to drop threatening another $267 billion, while Xi simply restates prior offers about more purchases agricultural goods and more US banker access to China markets.

If China’s objective of the Buenos Aires meeting was to get Trump to halt imposing higher and more tariffs—while conceding nothing except further talks on the technology issue—in that objective China has clearly succeeded. Trump will no doubt spin the additional agricultural purchases and more market access as China ‘concessions’. But these were already conceded before the parties met in Buenos Aires.

In contrast, if Trump’s primary objective, driven by his anti-China hard line US faction, was to get China to slow nextgen technology development and tech transfer, and concede on intellectual property issues, then Trump has clearly retreated at the G20.

Nor is it likely, at the end of the 90 day hiatus early next March 2019, that Trump and the hard-liners faction bargaining position will be any stronger. The 90 day ‘armistice’ in the emerging US-China trade war might even result in Trump back-peddling further should economic and political conditions worsen appreciably in the interim.

If the global and US economies continue to weaken and slow, which is highly likely, pressure by the other two US trade factions—the one demanding an agreement with China based on more access to China markets and the other demanding settlement so long as China agrees to more purchase of US goods—will only be stronger.

Political developments related to Trump’s business relations in the US and with Russian Oligarchs eventually forthcoming by the Mueller investigation will also likely weaken Trump’s position with regard to resuming a hard line on further tariffs on China. Japan’s recession may also have deepened further by then. Germany’s current economic contraction may have spread to the rest of Europe, which is also facing a confluence of additional problems involving the UK Brexit and the Italian bank problems next spring 2019.

Since 2008 US economic GDP growth has typically slowed dramatically in the winter quarter, and the first quarter 2019 US GDP is likely to again slow significantly from 2018 GDP growth rates. That will be especially the case if the US central bank, the Fed, continues its interest rate hikes into 2019, which appears likely to do at least through next spring. Trump may also have to focus more on saving his recent US-Mexico-Canada trade deal in Congress. All the above will almost certainly provoke a further decline in US stock and other financial markets as investors grow even more uneasy with Trump policies and increase pressure on Trump to postpone further tariffs on China trade.

More US banker-multinational corporate access to China and more China purchase of US farm goods could supersede US hardline anti-China faction demands for China concessions on tech transfer and nextgen military technology development.

More market access and more China purchases would be easy to ‘spin’ as huge gains by the Trump administration. They’ll just keep talking about technology, while cutting off China companies’ access to mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures in the US and in other US allies’ economies.

Should that occur, the US-China so-called ‘trade war’ will prove as phony as have prior Trump threats to tear up NAFTA, or to fundamentally remake the South Korean-US free trade treaty, or to impose 25% tariffs on German autos and European imports, or Trump’s steel tariffs which are riddled with more than 3000 tariff exemptions. While Trump talked tough, all have turned out to be ‘softball’ trade deals granted by the US.

Having ‘blinked’ after meeting with Xi at the G20 strongly suggests Trump’s potential trade war with China has peaked and will now deflate over time. And should the more serious economic and political developments noted above also materialize in 2019, the deflation and slow retreat may look more like an implosion and a rout.

Trump’s incessant bragging about his great skills and acumen in negotiating ‘deals’ will be revealed as so much egoistic bombast and exaggeration. And forthcoming economic developments and political events in 2019 may unravel more than just Trump’s phony trade offensive launched last spring.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Jack Rasmus.

Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump’, by Clarity Press, 2019, and ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression, Clarity Press, August 2017. He hosts the Alternative Visions radio show on the Progressive Radio Network and blogs at jackrasmus.com. His twitter handle is @drjackrasmus

The Nobel Peace Prize in Support of War

December 4th, 2018 by Terje Maloy

On December 10, the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony will be held in Oslo, the capital of Norway. This analysis will try to look at how the prize fits into the bigger picture, but first, some general background is appropriate:

Norway is a member of NATO and has close ties to the United States and Great Britain. The political, economic and bureaucratic elites are firmly integrated in transatlantic networks, a nexus of economic connections, think tanks, international institutions, media and a thousand other ties that bind. They tend to identify with the liberal wing of the empire, (i.e. the Democrats, not the Republicans), but will work with any US administration. The members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee are selected by the Norwegian parliament, and the Committee is nominally independent.

Despite being considered – and where the population considers itself – a ‘peace nation’, there are few countries that have eagerly joined more wars than Norway, from the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, Afghanistan 2001, the occupation of Iraq, Mali, Libya 2011 and the ongoing occupation of Syria. Norway spends large sums of money supporting the joint Western effort to control the rest of the world through comprador intermediaries in non-governmental organizations.

This analysis will discuss some (overlapping) points about the Nobel Peace Prize:

  1. The prize reinforces certain grand narratives, the most important one being We are the good, and thus have the right to decide the fate of the rest of the world.
  2. It creates symbols for regime change operations. It beatifies modern day ‘good natives’ complaining about cruel treatment and pleading for the West to do something to liberate them (but are often remarkably unable to see Western abuses).
  3. It reinforces general reasons to start wars, by making specific themes very important at the same time they are being used to justify military action.
  4. It reinforces the narrative that enemy fights with illegal and cruel weapons. The focus on chemical weapons, as opposed to napalm or sanctions, is one example.
  5. It sanctifies peace treaties that are more like unilateral surrenders, advantageous to Western imperialism and capitalist interests.
  6. For a bunch of peaceful people, the prize winners are remarkably eager for war and bloody interventions
  7. Some other points + Conclusion

1. We are the good, and thus have the right to decide the fate of the rest of the world.

640px-Jagland_and_Obama

(Photo: / White House, Samantha Appleton /Public Domain)

 

The Nobel Peace Prize gets its prestige and press coverage because it reinforces several big narratives. If it should deviate too much from what the powerful want, it would be ignored. Of prime importance is the notion that we are the good, and we have a monopoly on interpreting reality and to decide what is important. (‘We’ in this context being people in the West, and by extension their governments and leaders). During the Cold War, the prize had a similar function. It would be interesting to take a closer look at it, but for practical purposes this analysis will mostly be limited the last 30 years. Once you start to notice certain basic themes, they are rather obvious. To put it pointedly, the Nobel Peace Prize tries to aid regime changes to achieve the Empire’s aims where it is possible to avoid direct war, but it will aid in confirming the narrative that our troops are good guys. 

This explains why Western leaders so often get the prize. The point is creating an impression that there exists a more humane possibility within our current unjust world system. When they receive it, what they have actually done is not an issue. Hence the award to people like Jimmy Carter (winner 2002); as president he instigated several bloody covert interventions in Central-America, Africa and of course the Islamist fighters in Afghanistan, but has since then opposed direct US wars; or Al Gore (winner 2007), who when he was vice president didn’t shy away from using the military as a foreign policy tool (see part 7). The prize to Barack Obama (winner 2009) can be placed here.

But the main use of the prize is to create support in Western liberal opinion for interventions that would otherwise be naked imperialistic aggressions.

2. A focus for regime change operations

Where a Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to a dissident of a non-western country, the CIA or the Pentagon (see point 3) often has a task force working on cracking the exact same country.

They winners have varying degrees of internal appeal in the targeted country, but the main purpose in choosing these people is not to boost their standing internally, but to justify attempts at regime change to Western liberal public opinion. Without the focus on these martyrs, these operations would look suspiciously like old style colonial domination.

Hence the beatification of Aung San Suu Kyi (winner 1991) coincided with a concerted campaign to get control over a recalcitrant, but very strategic country. Suu Kyi is in many ways typical of the people the Committee prefers. She is a known entity, having conspicuously strong personal connections to the former colonial power – Oxford educated, married to a British citizen, her children are British citizens, etc. Signaling in which direction her political compass was oriented, she asked the world to use the old colonial name Burma instead of Myanmar.  She asked for harsh measures against her own country (for its own good) fitting hand in glove with the US strategy actually used. In fact, all means would be permissible to use against this regime imprisoning a modern day saint.

The Nobel Prize to Suu Kyi played an invaluable role in creating huge support, especially on the liberal left, for the draconian economic sanctions against an otherwise fairly obscure country. And maybe many of her Western supporters actually did believe that the US and UK could fund her with large sums of money and create entire NGO-networks for her with the expressed goal of subverting a sovereign nation’s government, and her intentions to still be pure and progressive.

Myanmar is immensely rich in natural resources and is positioned between China and the Indian Ocean, and China and India. Any significant land connection between these two 21st century great powers would have to go through Myanmar to avoid the Himalayas. It is also of great Chinese interest as a transit country to the Indian Ocean. Therefore, the country was targeted with a multi-approach regime change operation.

A massive press campaign was arranged over several decades, a plethora of NGO financed, whilst «former» CIA-agents now turned missionaries were working with the ethnic guerilla forces to create military pressure. In the usual attempt to concentrate all opposition into a joint force, extreme right wing religious fanatics became the spearhead in this campaign. The sanctions imposed on Myanmar, precluded any economic development and doomed the population to a life of crushing poverty.

One could interpret the recent calls to take the prize back from Suu Kuy as disappointed buyers not getting what they paid for.

We can go forward to 2010, when a Chinese citizen, Liu Xiaobo, won the prize. There were no surprises for what future was envisaged for China:

“It took Hong Kong 100 years to become what it is. Given the size of China, certainly it would need 300 years of colonisation for it to become like what Hong Kong is today. I even doubt whether 300 years would be enough.”

The lines between creating justification for a covert regime change operation and next step, a direct war, is blurry. But when required, the Prize Committee can step in to keep the focus of world opinion on the right narrative.

3. Creating reasons for war: Women’s rights

1200px-Remise_du_Prix_Sakharov_à_Malala_Yousafzai_Strasbourg_20_novembre_2013_01.jpg

Malala Yoysafzai receives the Sakharov price (Source: Claude Truong-Ngoc / Wikimedia Commons)

In 2003, just after the blitzkrieg on Iraq and at the very height of the George Bush’s talk of continuing the offensive to a few more countries, the committee chose to give the prize to Shirin Ebadi. By beatifying an Iranian at that time, the committee very well knew that they increased the danger of war.

Ebadi is a champion of women’s rights, a recurrent theme in NATO’s efforts to justify their wars. We know that targeting women in the West with this type of messaging has been a major effort for the organization for a long time. By giving the prize to her, they in effect created support in Western (female) public opinion for a war/regime change that would kill an untold number of Iranian women and destroy the lives of the rest, a repeat on a larger scale of what happened in Iraq.

The 2018 prize went to the fight against sexual violence in war. This happens to coincide with the very image NATO wants to promote of itself – who can forget Angelina Jolie and NATO’s General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg writing a joint article in 2017 titled “Why NATO Must Defend Women’s Rights,” where they point out that “NATO has the responsibility and opportunity to be a leading protector of women’s rights” and “can become the global military leader in how to prevent and respond to sexual violence in conflict”. How convenient that the Nobel Committee shares the same view.

A more analytic approach would point out such facts that US/NATO-interventions have made the situation for women infinitely worse in places such as Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan. An intervention to topple the legal government in Syria would certainly have created the same result.

In addition, a bit broader view would point out how allegedly stopping sexual violence against women has justified many wars of aggression. The stereotypes of cruel foreigners have not advanced noticeably from depictions of swarthy Spaniards groping blonde women in the Spanish-American war, to the claim that Gaddafi was handing out Viagra to mercenaries to rape women, as Susan Rice, the US Permanent Representative at UN told the Security Council. Amnesty International, later reported it had “not found any evidence or a single victim of rape or a doctor who knew about somebody being raped.”

Other notorious examples of how this has been used in war propaganda include Serbian rape camps during the Yugoslav wars. Allegations of mass rape were a key element of NATO’s propaganda campaign during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. Clare Short, Britain’s international development secretary, claimed that the rapes were “deliberately performed in front of children, fathers and brothers.” After the war was over, there were some retractions, including from the Washington Post, which reported that “Western accusations that there were Serb-run rape camps […] all proved to be false.”

Malala Yousafzai (winner 2014), the young Pakistani girl who became a symbol of the war against the Taliban, is another figure that fits this pattern. The indefinite occupation of Afghanistan is, among plenty of other vicarious reasons, justified by improving women’s rights. This overlooks the fact that no improvement can be made under a government installed with the help of foreign bayonets. The situation for Afghan women has not improved since the occupation, but then again, the claim was only meant to created support for the war in public opinion.

The importance of creating the perception of fighting for women’s rights has long been realized in military circles.

cia report

An internal CIA-document from 2010 (a few years before Malala received the prize from the Nobel Institute for her struggle against the Taliban), published by WikiLeaks, discusses how to best market the war in Afghanistan, To show how similar the Nobel Committee and the military/intelligence apparatus think, it is worth quoting the following passage:

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.

4. The enemy fights with illegal and inhumane weapons, and it is imperative to stop them

By highlighting certain themes, in this case ‘illegal weapons’, they reinforce the narrative in Western public opinion that certain things are very urgent and real problems, when in fact they are of relatively minor significance.

Poison gas is a clear example. The OPCW won the prize in 2013. Given the general situation in the Middle East, several million dead in Iraq after the US invasion and at least 400.000 dead in the covert invasion of Syria, gas is a minor factor, and even if we take the frequent claims of ‘gas massacres’ at face value (which of course we shouldn’t), is only responsible for an infinitesimal fraction of these dead.

But to reinforce a false narrative, this focus has been invaluable. The prize creates acceptance for the narrative that gas is a uniquely important and evil weapon, where it is fully justified to do anything necessary, including attacking countries, to stop the possible use of it. At the moment of writing this, Nov 24, 2018, the US just accused Iran of hiding a chemical weapons program.

Some weapons that are killing far more people in far more gruesome ways than poison gas, like napalm, would never be put on this list. And we could compare gas to sanctions, the West’s favorite and most effective weapon of mass destruction, killing the weakest, the sick, children and old people slowly, while destroying entire peoples’ right to a decent life. No other or weapon of mass destruction has killed as many people since WW2.

5. Sanctifying peace treaties that are negotiated surrenders to western interests

640px-Flickr_-_Government_Press_Office_(GPO)_-_THE_NOBEL_PEACE_PRIZE_LAUREATES_FOR_1994_IN_OSLO.

Yasser Arafat receives the prize in 1994, together with Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin CC BY-SA 3.0 File:Flickr – Government Press Office (GPO)

 

The most noticeably feature when the prize goes to creators of peace treaties, is that the treaties are more like a negotiated surrender than a just peace.

Colombia’s president Juan Manuel Santos (winner 2016) received the prize for victoriously having put the finishing touches to a long US-led counter-insurgency campaign against leftist guerilla forces. Now the reactionary oligarchy has a safe grip on the country, and can continue their neoliberal agenda, which isn’t that different from the old reactionary order. The death squads murdering leftist and human rights activist continue their activities with impunity.

The country had an extremely tarnished image in human rights issues and needed a quick touch-up to make it palatable. The most conspicuous thing the 2016-award is that the president got the prize just before Colombia became a global partner of NATO. The planning of the PR-requirements for this to happen smoothly must have been already well under way when the prize winner was decided. Remember the prize is directed at Western public opinion, and has little to do with an actual just peace in Colombia.

Yasser Arafat (co-winner 1993) got the price so he would be tied to a peace plan with a chimerical two-state solution the Israeli side had no intention of honoring. The peace offer didn’t even include a stop in constructions of Israeli settlements. No clearer signal of Israeli intentions could have been given. This is a continuation of the joint prize to Sadat and Begin in 1978, for the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, where Israel succeeded in making a separate peace with the biggest Arab country, and could thereafter concentrate on consolidating its grip on the West Bank.

While Nelson Mandela (co-winner 1994) undoubtedly was a worthy winner, the transition deal the ANC negotiated for South Africa only transferred formal political power, and left unjust economic power structures intact. The assets of multinational companies were guaranteed, and the neoliberal policies implied in the deal doomed the large majority of the population to continued poverty.

Michail Gorbachev (winner 1990) got the prize for a unilateral and wholesale surrender of every Soviet position, both economic and political; he didn’t even keep them as bargaining cards. Trusting Western oral promises, this naiveté is unprecedented in a leader of a great power. His bad decisions made a managed transition to a mixed system impossible and abandoned the former socialist states to Western looting and a social collapse they still haven’t recovered from. No wonder he still is so popular in the West that gave him the medal as a sign of appreciation.

Finnish Martti Ahtisaari got the prize in 2008, «for his efforts on several continents and over more than three decades, to resolve international conflicts». This is very true. Left out is what should be added to the sentence, to resolve international conflicts – as a total Western victory. Ahtisaari is directly linked to the creation of the NATO-protectorate of Kosovo. By 1999, NATO had decided to splinter Yugoslavia one more time. A 78 day aerial bombing campaign had little effect, so they sent in the diplomats. It was suggested that an envoy from a ‘neutral’ country would be more efficient. Here is how Ahtisaari handled the situation, telling the Serbs what ‘we’ would do (my emphasis):

Ahtisaari opened the meeting by declaring, “We are not here to discuss or negotiate,” […]. Ahtisaari says that Milosevic asked about the possibility of modifying the plan, to which he replied, “No. This is the best that Viktor and I have managed to do. You have to agree to it in every part.” [..] As Milosevic listened to the reading of the text, he realized that the “Russians and the Europeans had put us in the hands of the British and the Americans.” Milosevic took the papers and asked, “What will happen if I do not sign?” In answer,Ahtisaari made a gesture on the table,” and then moved aside the flower centerpiece. Then Ahtisaari said, “Belgrade will be like this table. We will immediately begin carpet-bombing Belgrade.” Repeating the gesture of sweeping the table, Ahtisaari threatened, “This is what we will do to Belgrade.” A moment of silence passed, and then he added, “There will be half a million dead within a week.”

The Serbians signed the treaty.

6. Not a peaceful very bunch of people

USMarineTankinBaghdad

US Marine Corps tank in Baghdad, 2003 (Photo: USMC/ Public Domain)

For recipients of a peace prize, a remarkable number of them support wars.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a war of aggression under the trumped up pretext of disarming Iraq of Weapons of mass destruction. It was a blatant breach of both international law and the United Nations Charter. What did the Nobel Prize Winners think of it?

Here we have Elie Wiesel (winner 1986) “I now know I was wrong, but better that than to have stood idly by”.

Jose Ramos-Horta (winner 1996) claimed approvingly that  the only truly effective means of pressure on the Iraqi dictator [is] the threat of the use of force.

 Liu Xiaobo (winner 2010) was clear, the «decision by President Bush is right!». But then again, Liu had the remarkable opinion that «the major wars that the US became involved in are all ethically defensible,» including the wars in Afghanistan and Vietnam.

Former vice president Al Gore (winner 2009) had argued aggressively in favor of war in Iraq in 1991 and 1998, Bosnia in 1995 and Kosovo in 1998, and believed the 2003 Iraq war was legal based on earlier UN resolutions.

The Cold War winner Lech Walesa (1983) was an opponent of the invasion, but at least heknew where to put the blame; It’s not the United States that is to blame for the war, but rather the EU, and in particular Germany and France. They knew the war was coming and they failed to prevent it.»

The Dalai Lama (winner 1989) was wily enough to hedge his bets, but decidedly did not condemn the war: «it’s too early to say, right or wrong», He also supported the US/NATO military intervention in Afghanistan and the attack on Yugoslavia.

There is a similar level of support among prize winners for a direct intervention in the ‘civil’ war in Syria, an US/NATO regime change plan on the drawing board for at least 10years before it started. The push for a no-fly zone in Syria on a Libyan model, which could then be used as a fig leaf for a full-scale assault, was immense for several years. What did the Nobel Prize winners think of this possibility?

(Keep in mind that the ‘action’ they call for, can only be either an aerial bombing or ground troops.)

Kailash Satyarthi (winner 2014) did not say anything about the fact that it was the 3 Western powers on the Security Council which started this war by spending billions of dollar arming and financing armed Islamist gangs. Stopping this support would seem to be the obvious way to stop the war, but instead we get: «The UN Security Council (UNSC) has the military power to bring this unceasing genocide to a halt. »

His co-winner Malala Yousafzai with seems to have envisaged a similar future for Syria as for Afghanistan, a Western intervention: «When I look at Syria, I see the Rwandan genocide. When I read the desperate words of Bana Alabed in Aleppo, I see Anne Frank in Amsterdam. …..We must act. The international community must do everything they can to end to this inhumane war»

This was echoed by former UN-leader Kofi Annan (winner 2001). Defining Aleppo as only the small part of the city occupied by Islamist gangs, he called for ‘action’. How this ‘action’ would differ from what he describes, is not clear: «The assault on Aleppo is an assault on the whole world. When hospitals, schools and homes are bombed indiscriminately, killing and maiming hundreds of innocent children, these are acts that constitute an attack on our shared, fundamental human values. Our collective cry for action must be heard, and acted upon, by all those engaged in this dreadful war. »

This wish was supported by Medecins sans Frontiers, recipient of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. It was the first to report the alleged gas attack in Ghouta on 21. August 2013, which the Obama-administration wanted to use as a pretext for a military assault. As it admitted, the MSF’s decision to issue a press release on the incident—which had not taken place in an MSF hospital, but in its “silent partner” facilities in rebel-controlled areas—was highly political.

MSF was well aware that their announcement of chemical weapons use would be immediately seized upon by the US to claim that Syrian President Assad had crossed a red line, and to start a bombing campaign.

The organization was here true to its roots, as the civilian part in the French military/intelligence effort to support an independent state in the oil producing parts of Nigeria, in the Biafran war of independence in 1967-1970.

Amnesty International, (winner 1977) was not much better, with its call for unspecified ‘action’: The international community’s catastrophic failure to take concrete action to protect the people of Syria has allowed parties to the conflict, most notably the Syrian government, to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with complete impunity, often with assistance of outside powers, particularly Russia…. he international community had said ‘never again’ after the government devastated Eastern Aleppo with similar unlawful tactics. But here we are again.”

Anyway, Amnesty has a soft spot for endless NATO-interventions. In 2012, after 11 years of dismal occupation, the organization paid for advertising posters in the US applauding NATO’s actions in Afghanistan — “Keep the progress going”, purportedly doing something for women’s rights.

Tawakkol Abdel-Salam Karman is a Yemeni journalist and human rights activist that won the price in 2009 wanted ‘protection’, writing: Instead of protecting residents in Aleppo from brutalities of Russia, Iran and Bashar Al Assad’s regime, the world tended to mediate to provide safe corridors for the displacement of civilians,” adding, “these also are partners in crime.”

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos (2016) voiced support for the missile attacks on Syria in March 2018.

Such bellicosity (or just as often, coy bellicosity) is nothing new in the type of people selected as winners. Henry Kissinger (winner 1973) was the most infamous war hawk to win the prize during the Cold War, but long as it was the right side doing the fighting, plenty of others identified with this one sided world view. We can recognize all the themes mentioned above in Michael Parenti’s description of the 1975 Peace Prize winner:

Andrei Sakharov was a darling of the U.S. press, a Soviet dissident who regularly sang praises to corporate capitalism. Sakharov lambasted the U.S. peace movement for its opposition to the Vietnam War. He accused the Soviets of being the sole culprits behind the arms race and he supported every U.S. armed intervention abroad as a defense of democracy. Hailed in the west as a «human rights advocate,» Sakharov never had an unkind word for the horrific human rights violations perpetrated by the fascist regimes of faithful U.S. client states, including Pinochet’s Chile and Suharto’s Indonesia, and he aimed snide remarks at the «peaceniks» who did. He regularly attacked those in the West who opposed U.S. repressive military interventions abroad.

7. Some other points + Conclusion

You don’t have to be an prop for US/NATO power projection to win the prize, but it helps.

The prize was originally intended to be given to the person who has done most to foster peace between nations. In a subtle twist, in many cases it has changed to banning aspects of warfare, barely ever addressing war itself. Broaching such as subject honestly would be impossible without addressing the elephant in the room, US/Western imperialism. The award has had many winners who are variants of this year’s theme, sexual violence in war (which also touches on point 3, the NATO-narrative of defense of women). The focus here is on a more civilized form of war, not abolishing war as such as a means of settling disputes.

No one (apart from some military brass) is actually pro-landmines, but the Peace prize to the Campaign Against Land Mines in 1997 coincided with the increased Western interventions in places where these weapons would be a hindrance to the success of the occupation It was not in the interest of NATO forces to have their opponents using these ‘poor man’s weapons’, creating the casualties so feared by the military in modern wars, which again might increase opposition at home to war. The coalition suffered most of their casualties from IEDs, a sort of land mine, in Iraq, while having limited use of mines themselves.

There is a certain unpredictability as to who the prize will be awarded to, making it not as obvious beholden to the immediate needs of the powerful, even though the long term trend is clear. For example, there has been no Russian winner for quite a while now, and the White Helmets have not yet got the award, maybe as they are too obviously only a PR-front.

When Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, he said that the prize ‘is for Western writers or Eastern rebels’. On a similar note, we might say that the Nobel Peace Prize is for Western elites or Eastern rebels.

That the selection of winners conforms to US views does not mean that there is a direct influence, although some recommendations to the Committee probably weigh heavier than others. Rather this pattern is a sign of how well socialized the Norwegian Nobel Committee members are in the transatlantic world view, where ‘our’ requirements override any genuine wish for peace.

This article was first published on Midt i Fleisen

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Barack Obama, speaking to the Baker Institute, made sure the audience of wealthy Texans, many in the oil business, gave him credit for making the United States a world leader for oil and gas production. He said, “American energy production . . .went up every year I was president. And . . . suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer, that was me, people,” eliciting cheers. 

Throughout this century, even though the climate science was clear, presidential leadership has escalated the dependence on oil and gas, built infrastructure for pipelines and compressor stations, encouraged fracking in the US and around the world and prevented a global response to reducing carbon gas emissions.

This dereliction of consistent misleadership has put the planet on a dangerous path of climate crisis. In a just world, the political and corporate leadership of the United States would be held accountable. As it is, leadership for confronting the climate crisis must come from the people, not from political leaders.

Obama’s Sordid History of Undermining the Climate

Obama’s legacy confuses some people because, unlike President Trump, he did not deny climate change and, unlike President Bush, he did not come from the oil industry. But in reality, Obama watered down global climate agreements and grew oil and gas output and infrastructure in the United States.

As a newly elected president, Obama came to the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 with the goal of weakening the agreement so there would be no internationally enforced reductions of climate gases. Ban Ki-moon, the UN general secretary, warned leaders that they held in their hands “the future of this entire humanity.”

NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that the US monitored communications between countries before the summit, and planned to spy on the negotiations during the conference. The NSA knew of China’s efforts to line up its negotiating position with India. Chinese negotiators entered the talks willing to undertake mandatory emissions cuts, but needed other major countries in the the developing world to agree. The US developed a strategy to stop China, indeed to make them the villain.

As the Copenhagen meeting was progressing, Obama, who had already “won” a Nobel Peace prize and was a political star as the first black president, flew to the meeting with Secretary of State Clinton. Obama and Clinton crashed a meeting of Chinese, Indian, South African and Brazilian leaders who were trying to agree on enforceable standards. The US made sure their agreement would not threaten US oil interests.

As a result of Obama’s intervention, the accord set no target for concluding a binding international treaty, leaving the implementation of its provisions uncertain and fueling criticism that it was more of a sham than a breakthrough. US intervention stopped a collective agreement among nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by 2050, which was included in earlier drafts. Obama also successfully prevented adequate US funding for climate justice policies for poorer countries and scuttled the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed on in 1992.

Obama undermined the UN climate process and became known as “the man who killed Copenhagen,” said Greenpeace US head Phil Radford. Bill McKibbon said:

“The president has wrecked the UN and he’s wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it’s at the expense of everything progressives have held dear.”

At the time, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that world emissions need to peak by 2015 to give any chance of avoiding a 2ºC rise.

Obama declared a phony negotiating victory for the climate in Copenhagen and went on to make sure the Paris Accords also contained no enforceable standards, making it an inadequate treaty for the climate crisis. Climate scientist James Hansen called the Paris agreement a “fraud” of “worthless words.”

Domestically, after running against “drill baby drill” Republicans, Obama governed in the era where fracking became widespread, off-shore drilling increased and massive oil and gas infrastructure were put in place. In 2012, Obama said,

“We’ve opened up new areas for exploration. We’ve quadrupled the number of operating rigs to a record high. We’ve added enough new oil and gas pipeline to circle the Earth and then some.”

Obama fast-tracked the approval process for oil and gas infrastructure at a time when scientists were saying we should build no more carbon-polluting infrastructure. While he delayed portions of the high profile Trans-Canada pipeline, his administration approved the equivalent of ten Keystone pipelines.

Under Obama, while there was a decline of 37% in coal production, gas production vastly increased by 34% due to fracking. Obama presided over the highest gas production in history and crude oil production rose by 88%, the fastest rate in the 150-year history of the U.S. oil industry. On the positive side, his tenure was also timed with big increases in solar and wind energy. Obama also deserves credit for putting in place fuel economy and emissions standards for cars.

Obama’s bragging about increasing US oil and gas production at the Baker Institute came shortly after the dire October IPCC report, which warned the world has 12 years to put in place a radical transformation of the energy economy to prevent climate catastrophe, and the November 23rd release of the 4th National Climate Assessment, which warned of the serious impacts of the climate crisis in the United States. In this environment, Obama took credit for this crisis situation that will kill hundreds of thousands, cause mass migration and trillions of dollars in damage.

From Pinterest

Bush-Cheney Climate Deniers Of The Oil Industry

Despite the above, Obama’s presidency looks good in comparison to the George W. Bush administration, which denied climate science. and was marinated in oil with deep oil connections. Climate scientists were kept out of meetings to develop energy policy while the oil and gas industry worked closely with the administration.

President Bush was in the oil industry for more than two decades and came from an oil family. His investors included the bin Laden family and other members of Saudi Arabia’s oil-wealthy elite. Bush called the Saudi ambassador, Bandar bin Sultan Al Saud, “Bandar Bush” because he was so close to the Bush family.

Vice President Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, one of the world’s largest providers of products and services to the oil industry. Cheney developed energy policy in secret meetings with the oil industry. He fought to the Supreme Court keep information about those meetings secret from the public.

National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice was a director of Chevron and Secretary of Commerce Don Evans was head of an independent oil company in Colorado. Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay was George W. Bush’s most generous campaign contributor. Bush received more campaign contributions from oil companies than any other administration in history.

The Bush administration ignored climate change for eight years, wasting precious time. Bush invaded and occupied Iraq in what was a disastrous war for oil domination. In 2008, President Bush’s last year in office, the US produced 1.06 billion metric tons of coal — an all-time high.

From Change.org

Trump Takes Climate Denialism and Climate Destruction To New Levels

As bad as previous presidents have been, President Trump’s climate denial policies have reached a new low for presidential misleadership.

When the recent National Climate Assessment revealed that global warming is causing ongoing and lasting economic damage, President Trump denied the findings of the 13 federal agencies who wrote it. Trump said, “I don’t believe it,” while noting he has “very high levels of intelligence,” and had his political appointees and press secretary attack the report.

Trump appointed the former CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., Rex Tillerson, as Secretary of State and appointed other  industry supporters, e.g., Rick Perry at the Department of Energy, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, now replaced by industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler. Trumps’s policy is “Energy dominance,” the expansion of coal and oil production as well as the weakening of environmental regulations, including those that address climate change.

Trump pulled out of the climate agreement,  boosted oil and gas drilling on public lands,  opened sensitive areas to oil drilling,  leased nearly 80 million acres of federal waters off the Gulf of Mexico for drilling, repealed Obama’s fuel economy and emissions standards for cars and repealed rules, saving polluting industries billions of dollars in regulatory costs.

From People’s Climate March,in April 2017 from Orlando Rising.

Climate Justice From the Bottom Up

The science on climate has been known since 1990 when the first international agreements to combat climate change were negotiated. Since then, the science has only become stronger. We must not produce any more gas-fueled cars or build any new power plants or buildings of any kind unless they are replacing old ones or are carbon-neutral. When we build a factory, power plant, house, automobile or anything else that uses energy, we are committing to using energy through that structure for up to 40 years, depending on its lifespan.

This century has shown that facing up to the challenges of climate change will not come from the top of the US political system, which is polluted by the oil and gas industry as well as investors who profit from carbon pollution. Change is going to come from the bottom up.

Recently, we have seen how activity from below can impact political reality. The Green New Deal, developed in 2007 by Green Party activists, is now being taken on by Democrats. Establishment Democrats and Republicans will fight it, but it is making its way onto the agenda and will become reality if people keep mobilizing for it.

The Extinction Rebellion, started in the United Kingdom, is growing around the world. And there is now a call to build towards a general strike in September with actions throughout the year, beginning on January 15. Follow #EarthStrike.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

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The Ugly Canadian has shown his elite-supporting, poor-bashing repressive face in Haiti.

Ottawa is backing the repression of anti-corruption protests and Justin Trudeau is continuing Canada’s staunch support for that country’s reactionary elite.

Over the past three months there have been numerous protests demanding accountability for public funds. Billions of dollars from Petrocaribe, a discounted oil program set up by Venezuela in 2006, was pilfered under former President Michel Martelly, an ally of current leader Jovenel Moise.After having forced out the prime minister in the summer over an effort to eliminate fuel subsidies, protesters are calling for the removal of Moise, who assumed the presidency through voter  suppression and electoral fraud.

According to the Western media, a dozen protesters have been killed since a huge demonstration on October 17. But, at least seven were killed that day, two more at a funeral for those seven and pictures on social media suggest the police have killed many more.

Ottawa is supporting the unpopular government and repressive police.While a general strike paralyzed the capital on Friday, Canadian Ambassador André Frenette met Prime Minister Jean Henry Céant with other diplomats to “express their support to the government.” Through the “Core Group” Ottawa has blamed the protesters for Canadian trained and financed police firing on them. The Canada, US, France, Spain, EU, UN and OAS “Group of Friends of Haiti” published a statement on Thursday criticizing the protesters and backing the government. It read,

the group recalls that acts of violence seeking to provoke the resignation of legitimate authorities have no place in the democratic process. The Core Group welcomes the Executive’s commitment to continue the dialogue and calls for an inclusive dialogue between all the actors of the national life to get out of the crisis that the country is going through.” (translation)

In a similar release at the start of the month these “Friends of Haiti” noted:

The group praises the professionalism demonstrated by the National Police of Haiti as a whole on this occasion to guarantee freedom of expression while preserving public order. While new demonstrations are announced, the Core Group also expresses its firm rejection of any violence perpetrated on the sidelines of demonstrations. The members of the group recall the democratic legitimacy of the government of Haiti and elected institutions and that in a democracy, change must be through the ballot box and not by violence.”

But, in late 2010/early-2011 the Stephen Harper Conservatives intervened aggressively to help extreme right-wing candidate Michel Martelly become president. Six years earlier Trudeau’s Liberal predecessor, Paul Martin, played an important role in violently ousting Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government. For two years after the February 29, 2004, overthrow of Haitian democracy, a Canada-financed, trained and overseen police force terrorized Port-au-Prince’s slums with Canadian diplomatic and (for half a year) military backing.

Since that time Ottawa has taken the lead in strengthening the repressive arm of the Haitian state (in 1995 Aristide disbanded the army created during the 1915-34 US occupation). Much to the delight of the country’s über class-conscious elite, over the past decade and a half Canada has ploughed over $100 million into the Haitian police and prison system.

Since his appointment as ambassador last fall Frenette has attended a half dozen Haitian police events. In April Frenette tweeted,

it is an honour to represent Canada at the Commissaires Graduation Ceremony of the National Police Academy. Canada has long stood with the HNP to ensure the safety of Haitians and we are very proud of it.”

The previous October Frenette noted,

“very proud to participate today in the Canadian Armed Forces Ballistic Platelet Donation to the Haitian National Police.”

Canada also supports the Haitian police through the UN mission. RCMP officer Serge Therriault currently leads the 1,200-person police component of the Mission des Nations unies pour l’appui à la Justice en Haïti. For most of the past 14 years a Canadian has been in charge of the UN police contingent in Haiti and officers from this country have staffed its upper echelons.

Canada is once again supporting the violent suppression of the popular will in Haiti. Justin Trudeau has taken off his progressive mask to reveal what is inside: The Ugly Canadian.

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Yves Engler is the co-author, with Antony Fenton, of Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority. His latest book is Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada

Czech president Milos Zeman offered Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-nationalist government a fillip during his visit to Israel last week. He inaugurated a cultural and trade centre, Czech House, just outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls.

At the opening, he expressed hope it would serve as a precursor to his country relocating its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. If so, the Czech Republic would become the first European state to follow US President Donald Trump’s lead in moving the US embassy in May.

It is this kind of endorsement that, of late, has emboldened Mr Netanyahu’s government, the Israeli courts, Jerusalem officials and settler organisations to step up their combined assault on Palestinians in the Old City and its surrounding neighbourhoods.

Israel has never hidden its ambition to seize control of East Jerusalem, Palestinian territory it occupied in 1967 and then annexed, as a way of preventing a viable Palestinian state from emerging.

Israel immediately began building an arc of Jewish settlements on Jerusalem’s eastern flank to seal off its Palestinian residents from their political hinterland, the West Bank.

More than a decade ago, it consolidated its domination with a mammoth concrete wall that cut through East Jerusalem. The aim was to seal off densely populated Palestinian neighbourhoods on the far side, ensuring the most prized and vulnerable areas – the Old City and its environs – could be more easily colonised, or “Judaised”, as Israel terms it.

This area, the heart of Jerusalem, is where magnificent holy places such as the Al Aqsa mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are to be found.

Under cover of the 1967 war, Israel ethnically cleansed many hundreds of Palestinians living near the Western Wall, a retaining wall of the elevated Al Aqsa compound that is venerated in Judaism. Since then, Israeli leaders have grown ever hungrier for control of the compound itself, which they believe is built over two long-lost Jewish temples.

Israel has forced the compound’s Muslim authorities to allow Jews to visit in record numbers, even though most wish to see the mosque replaced with a third Jewish temple. Meanwhile, Israel has severely limited the numbers of Palestinians who can reach the holy site.

Until now, Israel had mostly moved with stealth, making changes gradually so they rarely risked inflaming the Arab world or provoking western reaction. But after Mr Trump’s embassy move, a new Israeli confidence is tangible.

On four fronts, Israel has demonstrated its assertive new mood. First, with the help of ever-more compliant Israeli courts, it has intensified efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in the Old City and just outside its historic walls.

Last month, the supreme court handed down a ruling that sanctions the eviction of 700 Palestinians from Silwan, a dense neighbourhood on a hillside below Al Aqsa. Ateret Cohanim, a settler organisation backed by government-subsidised armed guards, is now poised to take over the centre of Silwan.

It will mean more Israeli security and police protecting the settler population and more city officials enforcing prejudicial planning rules against Palestinians. The inevitable protests will justify more arrests of Palestinians, including children. This is how bureacratic ethnic cleansing works.

The supreme court also rejected an appeal against a Palestinian family’s eviction from Sheikh Jarrah, another key neighbourhood near the Old City. The decision opens the way to expelling dozens more families.

B’Tselem, an Israeli rights group, characterised these rulings as “sanctioning the broadest move to dispossess Palestinians since 1967”.

At the same time, Israel’s parliament approved a law to accelerate the settler takeover.

Over many years, Israel created a series of national parks around the Old City on the pretext of preserving “green areas”. Some hem in Palestinian neighbourhoods to stop their expansion while others were declared on the land of existing Palestinian homes to justify expelling the occupants.

Now the parliament has reversed course. The new law, drafted by another settler group, Elad, will allow house-building in national parks, but only for Jews.

Elad’s immediate aim is to bolster the settler presence in Silwan, where it has overseen a national park next to Al Aqsa. Archaeology has been co-opted to supposedly prove the area was once ruled by King David while thousands of years of subsequent history, most especially the current Palestinian presence, are erased.

Elad’s activities include excavating under Palestinian homes, weakening their foundations.

A massive new Jewish history-themed visitor centre will dominate Silwan’s entrance. Completing the project is a $55 million cable car, designed to carry thousands of tourists an hour over Silwan and other neighbourhoods, rendering the Palestinian inhabitants invisible as visitors are delivered effortlessly to the Western Wall without ever having to encounter them.

The settlers have their own underhand methods. With the authorities’ connivance, they have forged documents to seize Palestinian homes closest to Al Aqsa. In other cases, the settlers have recruited Arab collaborators to dupe other Palestinians into selling their homes.

Once they gain a foothold, the settlers typically turn the appropriated home into an armed compound. Noise blares out into the early hours, Palestinian neighbours are subjected to regular police raids and excrement is left in their doorways.

After the recent sale to settlers of a home strategically located in the Old City’s Muslim quarter, the Palestinian Authority set up a commission of inquiry to investigate. But the PA is near-powerless to stop this looting after Israel passed a law in 1995 denying it any role in Jerusalem.

The same measure is now being vigorously enforced against the few residents trying to stop the settler banditry.

Adnan Ghaith, Jerusalem’s governor and a Silwan resident, was arrested last week for a second time and banned from entering the West Bank and meeting PA officials. Adnan Husseini, the Palestinian minister for Jerusalem, is under a six-month travel ban by Israel.

Last week dozens of Palestinians were arrested in Jerusalem, accused of working for the PA to stop house sales to the settlers.

It is a quiet campaign of attrition, designed to wear down Jerusalem’s Palestinian residents. The hope is that they will eventually despair and relocate to the city’s distant suburbs outside the wall or into the West Bank.

What Palestinians in Jerusalem urgently need is a reason for hope – and a clear signal that other countries will not join the US in abandoning them.

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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.

Featured image is from Haaretz

No French Revolution in America

December 4th, 2018 by Kurt Nimmo

More than 80% of the people of France—ordinary working people, not the professional bureaucrate class—support the “gilets jaunes,” the yellow vests in the street protesting against the globalist policies of Emmanuel Macron, defender of the mega-wealthy and upholder of EU progressivism. 

The establishment media in the US and Europe are focusing on the violence of the protests—including vandalism of the Arc de Triomphe (which is a monument to war and French colonialism)—and underplaying the political and economic complaints central to the demonstrations. 

It is a decentralized movement sans leaders (who can be picked off or compromised) in direct opposition to the agenda of the global elite: carbon taxes in response to “climate change” (as if additional parasitical fleecing of the public can modify weather), preferential treatment of financial class interests, unchecked and irrational immigration practices threatening the long-standing cultural customs of western civilization, an eroding economy, growing poverty and unemployment. 

No doubt much of the violence is the work of agent provocateurs in addition to dim-witted “anarchists,” who are nothing of the sort. Lobbing billiard balls and cobblestones at police, torching an art museum, vandalizing national monuments, and destroying private property provide a suitable pretext to impose yet another “state of emergency”—France is renowned for its pouvoirs exceptionnels, that is to say its “exceptional powers,” in other words the state using its monopoly of violence to address serious political and social issues. 

Article 16 of the French Constitution is a hangover from France’s colonialist past, specifically its disastrous war in Algeria. It allows the government to declare a state of emergency during an état de siège, never mind the siege is the result of policies imposed by the state and the ruling class. 

After attending the globalist G20 soirée in Buenos Aires, Macron paraded along the Champs-Élysée to witness first-hand the vandalism. Following this public display of pomp and photo-op, Macron declared yet another state of emergency will be declared in response to public support for the yellow vests, the vast majority nonviolent. 

Spokesman Benjamin Griveaux said the president is willing to talk to the yellow vests. He stressed, however, there will be no backing down from his “green agenda,” that is to say further taxing the French people (soon to rival Belgium and Germany in the art of  confiscation) and ensuring more unemployment, poverty, and social stress—exacerbated by unchecked third world immigration—that will ultimately tear France apart. 

As soon as Trump is out of the way, Democrats and globalist friendly Republicans will impose similar green taxation and regulation on the American people. However, there is a distinct difference between grumpy French and indolent Americans. The former will go into the street and make their demands known, while the latter are too busy binge watching Netflix to be bothered. 

In America, protest and outrage are now stage managed by the state and promoted by a corporate media. The economy and endless war do not figure into these protests orchestrated by faux leftists. Instead, these foundation lubricated activists are moved to outrage and occasional violence by the color of skin, the preference of gender (real, manufactured, and imagined), and a litany of exaggerated and invented victimization. 

I say faux leftists because today’s SJW dimwits have little in common with old school Marxists and socialists. They were primarily focused on “historical materialism,” the means of production, the plight of the proletariat, and class consciousness. 

Now? Marxism has become “cultural,” that is to say based on what’s between your legs, the color of your skin (this used to be rightfully called racism), and the “human right” to force one group of people to pay for the care and lifestyle of others (including sexual mutilation and abortion). This has led to calls for authoritarianism and violence against the “privileged”—not the banksters and the ruling elite, mind you, but white men in general. This absurdity is megaphoned 24/7 by the corporate media. 

No, there will not be a French Revolution in America. The people here are well-indoctrinated, dumbed-down by “public education,” fed lies and fantasies (the Russians are coming, Trump is the New Hitler), and other distractions, including a decadent in-your-face “entertainment” industry feeding on perversity, violence (while calling for disarmament), promotion of homosexuality, and the normalization of vulgarity. 

Certainly, when the Everything Bubble bursts and misery is rampant, Americans may go into the street, but it will be too late. Meanwhile, many shake their heads at those crazy French, outraged over the economic strip-mining of their country and the globalist mandates of the European Union. 

This will be wiped away, however, by the next episode of Game of Thrones or the Walking Dead.

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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.

Featured image: Fuel tax protestors in France (Source: WSWS)

George H. Walker Bush: Cold War Ends and New World Orders

December 4th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The death of certain political figures, notably those of a vast imperium, is bound to provoke less criticism or critical insight than soul searching pursuits.  With the US in the mauling clutches of Donald J. Trump, the nightmare that was supposedly never to happen, nostalgia prevails in establishment circles.  What ever happened to traditional duplicity and dynasty politicians, with their sanctimonious call upon the good Sky God benefactor and the messianic mission?  The US Republic, even as it was being emptied of its worth during their tenure, could at least be assured of predictable corruption.  Decay, yes, but on their controlled terms.   

The death of the forty-first president, George H.W. Bush was a fine reminder of that point, a man of standing and missions who could be said, by Time, to be a creature of Aristotle’s “practical wisdom”.  A “natural born leader” was he, one “comfortable with dissenting views” and skillful in his employ of “strong advisers”.

The New York Times, with ceremonial hat tilting, saw Bush as “part of a new generation of Republicans” and was “often referred to as the most successful one-term president”.  The recipe for this success, according to such commentary, seems to have been written in foreign rather than domestic fields.  He is seen as a masterful juggler, “handling” the collapse of the Soviet Union and ensuring “the liberation of Eastern Europe”.  As the Cold War curtain was drawn, Bush, reprising his role as a Second World War naval aviator, remained calm.

Bush’s passing is a reminder about a particular moment of history.  The Soviet Union packed up in disarray, its own imperium unfolding as based closed and forces left.  This left the way, dangerously, for an uncontained hegemon.  The United States became Prometheus unbound, even if its power was initially advertised under the broader umbrella of a “New World Order”.

Bush gave an inkling of what this order would look like in his address to a joint session of Congress on September 11, 1990.  “The crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward a historic period of cooperation.”

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, having invaded Kuwait in August 1990 after reading mixed signals from Washington, had presented an alibi and pretext for principled aggression, done so, artificially, under the blanket of international norms.  Bush made the spurious claim that the Iraqi invasion had been prompted “without provocation or warning,” ignoring the July assurance given to Saddam by US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, that Washington had “no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.”  He saw, in Baghdad’s efforts, a stretched historical analogy. “As was the case in the 1930’s, we see in Saddam Hussein an aggressive dictator threatening his neighbours.”

Crucial to this was a condescending hand to the Soviet Union: that it be welcomed “back into the world order”. (Had it been absent for the duration?)  Such language was couched in the confidence of an imperial leadership convinced that the barbarians had been subjugated and would, if not exactly lend their support, avoid any effort to sabotage Project USA.

These shaky norms were defended by a coalition, assembled in January 1991, disproportionate in its scope involving two dozen countries, but it lent itself to the dangerous illusion that the US should, and could, become a post-Cold War policeman equipped with discriminatory wisdom and fine acumen.  New World Orders, when invoked, tend to be preludes to further conflict.  President Woodrow Wilson, vainly obsessed with the League of Nations, did much to aspire to a moral structure that had, within its own foundation, ruination and despoliation.  As Europe recoiled in 1919 from self-inflicted slaughter, a second world war was in gestation.

In that very suggestion that a country might be central to remaking a global system came the defective nature of US foreign policy and its messianic, delivering strain: an empire seen in the context of duty and shouldering a heavy burden to make a world safe for something or rather.  (Democracy less than money and  hustling.)  Expelling Saddam from Kuwait was a false advertisement for future collective security, a concept that had been doomed in the aftermath of the First World War.

The 1991 mission also came with an unhealthy sense that the Vietnam syndrome had been purged, rendering US military interventions somehow free of original sin.  Morally inspired giants could intervene in foreign conflicts at will without lasting and dangerous consequence.  Father Bush thereby begot the failings of Bush Junior in a Middle East repeat in 2003 that continues to shake the region in paroxysms of sectarian rage.

No figure can be considered in splendid isolation.  Bush was Ronald Reagan’s vice-president for eight years, much of it featuring a president prone to astrological advice (quite literally) and amnesiac episodes.  He also took a leaf out of the latter’s book of deception over the arms-for-hostages deal, professing ignorance about it in 1987.  It is one of the few points that his biographer, Jon Meacham, finds fault with him over.  Then came the supply side economics that remains a perennial disease of US economics: you coddle and favour the wealthy through sugary tax cuts, increase public debt and slash public funding.

If the beasts of relativity were to be consulted, Bush Sr could be seen as better in value than certain US presidents, but only marginally.  He, after all, presided over the motor of hubris that did lead the US into a lengthy sunset even as it hectored the rest of the world.  In evaluating his own son’s exploits, he was guarded and concerned about the turn of power after September 11, 2001. He was particularly concerned of the neoconservative hardliners.  “I don’t like what he did,” reflected Bush on former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, “and think it hurt the president, having his iron-ass view of everything”.  In the annals of empire, the two Bushes, separated by a Clinton, remain more consistent than the hair splitters would wish.

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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]

There has been another defenestration of a television-based political commentator for touching the only real electrified third rail remaining in reporting what passes for the news. Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor of Media Studies and Urban Education, who is a regular political commentator on CNN, was fired for what he said in a speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which took place last Wednesday at the United Nations. Hill called for a “free Palestine from river to the sea,” which CNN considered grounds for terminating his contract.

As ever, the Israelis were quick to jump on the bandwagon with their New York Consul General Dani Dayan denouncing Hill as a “racist, a bigot, [and] an anti-Semite.” He noted that Hill is under contract both with Temple University and CNN, implying that he should be punished by being fired, and called the remarks “appalling.” To no avail, Hill responded

“I support Palestinian freedom. I support Palestinian self-determination. I am deeply critical of Israeli policy and practice. I do not support anti-Semitism, killing Jewish people, or any of the other things attributed to my speech.”

Hill was fired by CNN within 24 hours. The message is clear. You can criticize Christianity, Muslims, white males, Donald Trump and the American government at will and you can even criticize blacks or sexual alphabet soups if you are clever in how you do it, but never, never go after Jews or Israel even indirectly if you want to keep your job. One recalls the fate of Rick Sanchez, a CNN anchor who was fired in September 2010 one day after he complained about how Jon Stewart and others in the Jewish mafia that runs the media treat Hispanics, saying

“Yeah, very powerless people. He’s such a minority. I mean, you know, please. What—are you kidding? I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?

Sanchez was forced to publicly grovel for his “inartful” comments and even had to write a letter of apology to the monstrous Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).  Far worse, he also had to endure two hours of counseling with “America’s rabbi” Shmuley Boteach. Sanchez subsequently drifted through low level jobs for a number of years, but he is now a news anchor with RT America.

Also in 2010, Octavia Nasr, a Lebanese-American journalist who had been CNN’s Senior Editor for Mideast Affairs for over 20 years was immediately fired after she tweeted “sad to hear of the passing” of Lebanese cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlalah. Fadlalah’s only crime was that he had been demonized by Israel and the neocons as a “spiritual mentor” of Hezbollah. Nasr’s only crime is that she granted the admittedly controversial dead man some respect.

To be sure, CNN is pro-Israeli in its reporting and, more important, in terms of choosing what not to report. Its lead political anchor is Wolf Blitzer, a former American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) employee, who speaks Hebrew and has lived in Israel. Like most major American mainstream media outlets, CNN has numerous Jewish employees working to select, edit and produce the news stories that actually air, well placed to manage what does finally go out to the public.

Reports critical of Israel or Jews are not welcome anywhere in the U.S. national media, which is why Israel gets away with slaughtering unarmed Gazans using army snipers. I note a recent bizarre though interesting story that appeared in the British media and was not picked up by the U.S. mainstream at all. The story detailed how the leadership of the European Jewish Congress is seeking the insertion of “warning messages” in both Christian and Muslim holy texts. In a document entitled “An End to Antisemitism,” which was released last week, it was recommended that “Translations of the New Testament, the Qur’an and other Christian or Muslim literatures need marginal glosses, and introductions that emphasize continuity with Jewish heritage of both Christianity and Islam and warn readers about antisemitic passages in them. While some efforts have been made in this direction in the case of Christianity, these efforts need to be extended and made consistent in both religions.” One wonders when the same body will be recommending that the nastier bits of the Torah and Talmud be “glossed” to deal with the numerous slaughters of conquered peoples as well as slurs on Jesus Christ and assertions that Jews have`1 the right to treat non-Jews as no better than livestock?

Some in the media might argue that the same set of rules about not offending one’s religious beliefs would apply to all religions, not just to Judaism, but it is difficult to find evidence of any even handedness, particularly when Islam is being discussed by commentators who are completely ignorant of the tenets of the religion.  Nor are there any apparent limits in making ridiculous statements on CNN if one is disparaging Arabs, most particularly if they are Palestinians. CNN paid commentator former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum has claimed absurdly that Palestinians do not even exist, which many Israelis believe, without any admonishment. Consider the outrage if he were to say that Jewish Israelis do not exist, which may actually be much closer to the truth according to some geneticists.

And what about when a Jew is attacking Christians? Far from there being any consequences, there is a demonstrable double standard as Christian beliefs appear to be fair game in some circles. Dana Jacobson currently co-anchor for the weekend edition of CBS national morning news experienced an apparently alcohol driven meltdown at a sports roast that she was helping emcee in January 2008 when she was working for ESPN.

Belting down vodka and cursing “like a sailor,” Jacobson went after Catholics in particular and said “Fuck Notre Dame,” “Fuck touchdown Jesus” and “Fuck Jesus” a number of times before she was hauled off the stage. Her after-the-fact apology consisted of written concession that she had demonstrated a “poor lack of judgment.” And her punishment by ESPN also demonstrated a “lack of judgment” when the company spokesman Josh Krulewitz reported that “Her actions and comments were inappropriate and we’ve dealt with it.” Dealing with it apparently consisted of a one-week suspension.

Any company operating in the United States should be able to dismiss an employee for any reason or for no reason, but anything even mildly critical of Jewish collective behavior or Israel is severely punished immediately. Professor Marc Lamont Hill said nothing wrong. On the contrary, he said something badly needed and which should have been accepted by CNN if it were really a global communications network dedicated to the truth and, one might add, to justice. Instead it was more of the same old, same old. If you criticize Israel don’t let the door hit you in the ass as you leave the building.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from AHT

Ukraine matters. It’s territory is Europe’s largest after Russia’s. It borders seven countries in Europe’s heartland – Belarus, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Russia.

It shares a strategically important 1,500-long land and sea border with the Russian Federation.

The country is resource rich. Zbigniew Brzezinski once said

“without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.”

Separately, he said if Russia reunites with Ukraine, it’ll be a Eurasian powerhouse. If Ukraine allies with Western Europe, Moscow will be significantly weakened geopolitically.

The Obama regime’s February 2014 coup d’etat replaced democratic governance in Kiev with Nazi-infested tyranny. Political crisis continues to grip the continent since that time, flashpoint conditions risking East/West confrontation.

Obama bears full responsibility for what happened.  Neocon Victoria Nuland was his point person involved in staging the coup, its aim to border Russia with a hostile menace to its security.

Brussels shares blame for what happened, partnering with Washington’s coup. Britain, France, Germany and other EU countries virtually always go along with its imperial agenda, even when harming their own interests, operating as a virtual US colony.

Washington stops at nothing to advance its imperium. Replacing independent governments with subservient pro-Western ones is longstanding US policy – by color revolutions or naked aggression.

US-installed putschists in Kiev represent mob rule. Puppet president Poroshenko and others surrounding him are societal misfits, waging war against their own people, risking war with Russia over staged provocations like Black Sea/Kerch Strait incident – likely planned and orchestrated in Washington and London.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman minced no words, saying the following:

“After Poroshenko said that Russia is allegedly planning to seize Mariupol and Berdyansk, I can say, putting his own pronouncements in other words, that it is Russia that protects Europe from barbarism, tyranny, terrorism, aggression and militarism looming large over our continent,” adding:

“It is due to the current Kiev regime that the present-day Ukraine is characterized by the frenzy of extremists and paramilitary groups, warfare against own people, propaganda and manipulation as a key tool of governance, provocations as a foreign policy concept, rampant corruption, intimidation of journalists and overall control over the mass media, nationalism as a national idea, dictation of law enforcement agencies, the lack of mechanisms of public control, and erosion of power institutions.”

Former German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel blasted Kiev’s war party, saying

“we by no means should allow Ukraine to drag us into” war with Russia. Earlier, “Ukraine tried to do so.”

He slammed Poroshenko for urging NATO to send warships to the Black Sea in response to the Kerch Strait incident, along with closing international ports to Russian ships coming from the Sea of Azov, adding:

“The only way out of this completely hopeless conflict is to establish a truce, achieve heavy weapons withdrawal from both sides and then take the first step towards lifting (illegal, unacceptable) sanctions” on Russia.’’

France, Germany and other EU countries rejected Poroshenko’s call for tougher sanctions on Moscow over the Kerch Strait incident – what US and UK hardliners support.

Trump regime neocon hardliners urged EU nations to get tougher on Russia over the incident. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Europe should review support for the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project that “helps the Russian government.”

She called for increased EU toughness against Russia, saying the US “has taken a very strong position in…support of Ukraine. We would like other countries to do more as well.”

On December 10, EU foreign ministers will discuss the Kerch Strait provocation. EU leaders are expected to extend existing illegal sanctions on Russia.

Theresa May regime’s spokesman James Slack turned truth on its head, calling the incident

“further evidence of Russia’s destabilizing behavior in the region and its ongoing violation of Ukrainian territorial integrity. Russia must not be allowed to use force to exert greater pressure on Ukraine.”

Sergey Lavrov explained that documents found aboard the seized Ukrainian vessels showed their crew provocateurs “did everything to fulfill an order, the text of which was found when our border guards boarded these gunboats.”

Kiev ordered the vessels “to secretly enter the neutral waters without any pilots and notifications and break under the Crimean Bridge through the Kerch Strait to Azov.”

The order showed the incompetence, arrogance, and militancy of Poroshenko and his cronies – Russia clearly able to monitor navigation of foreign vessels near and in its waters, able to act swiftly against anything potentially dangerous to its security, precisely what happened.

Putin explained what he told Trump at the G20, saying

“I answered his questions about this incident in the Black Sea. He has his own position. I have my own position. We each stuck to our own views, but in any case I informed him about our perspective on this incident.”

What happened was a “planned provocation,” he stressed. Captured Kiev documents prove it.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Putin gave an exhaustive explanation of the Black Sea border incident, illustrating it clearly. He even drew a map” – explaining the provocation to Germany’s Angela Merkel.

Separately, Poroshenko lied claiming Russia intends to seize Ukrainian territory.

Fallout from the likely US/UK planned, Kiev implemented, Kerch Strait provocation continues.

With US/UK neocon extremists supporting Ukraine’s fascist regime against Russia, anything is possible ahead – even unthinkable war in Europe’s heartland.

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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.

President Putin’s been accused by the West of being many things, but ironically enough, it’s former President George H. W. Bush who embodied many of them.

The passing of former President George H. W. Bush over the weekend prompted a lot of reflection about the influence that he had on America’s role in the immediate post-Cold War era. Notorious for literally proclaiming the “New World Order”, Bush Sr. also has the ignoble distinction of being one of the US’ few one-term presidents, dramatically losing then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the 1992 election. More interestingly for most foreign observers, however, is that Bush Sr. literally embodied much of what Russian President Vladimir Putin is accused of being, even if the Western Mainstream Media will never recognize this paradoxical reality:

“Deep State” Prodigy

The West loves to fearmonger about President Putin’s intentions by endlessly reminding their audience of the Russian leader’s time in the KGB and later as the head of Russia’s FSB, though Bush Sr.’s decades-long experience rising through the ranks of the CIA to eventually lead it and then go on to being America’s Vice-President and later President is usually overlooked in favor of pretending that it was the voters and not the US’ permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) that pave his path to power.

Backstabbed By His Own

Another common myth is that President Putin apparently has to watch his back out of fear of being backstabbed by his own “deep state” that’s apparently plotting his ouster (with the most recent variation of this narrative being that they’re ‘provoked’ by the US’ sanctions regime), though it was actually Bush Sr. who was betrayed by his own after some of them broke ranks with the American leader to support his presidential opponent in 1992, forever reshaping domestic politics and indelibly altering the course of the “New World Order”.

International Bully

President Putin is commonly cast by the Western Mainstream Media as the world’s worst international bully after Crimea’s reunification with Russia was deliberately misportrayed as an “aggressive annexation”, though Bush Sr. isn’t held anywhere near those same ‘standards’ after invading Panama in 1989 and then eventually launching the First Gulf War against Iraq, the legacy of which still impacts regional politics today and was in hindsight partially carried out as a sign of force to the rest of the world during the USSR’s rapid decline from superpower status.

Civilian Slaughterer

Along the same token, President Putin is wrongfully held accountable by many decision makers in the West for the downing of MH17 over Eastern Ukraine in July 2014 on the unproven basis that he allegedly dispatched BUK anti-air missiles to the local rebels that are blamed for shooting it down, though those same leaders have ‘conveniently’ forgotten that Bush Sr. was Vice President of the US when his country’s navy “accidentally” shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf.

Untrustworthy

US Defense Secretary James Mattis recently insulted President Putin by declaring him ‘untrustworthy’ on the supposed basis that the Russian leader “rips up international agreements”, yet Bush Sr. is being held up as a man of honesty unheard of in American politics since the time of “Honest Abe” even though he allegedly broke his promise to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev about not expanding NATO beyond the border of reunified Germany, an act of duplicity that set into motion far-reaching consequences that continue to destabilize Europe today.

It may sound strange to countenance, but George H. W. Bush embodied much of what President Putin is accused of being by his Western Mainstream Media enemies just like the latter represents a lot of what the former is said to have been in terms of the positive spin being put on his legacy.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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

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British Hunters Bring Home Elephant Ivory

December 4th, 2018 by Brendan Montague

British trophy hunters brought home two tonnes of elephant tusks from Africa over the past decade, new figures show.

Nearly 400 ‘trophies’ from the world’s most endangered animals have been brought into Britain by hunters in recent years.

A motion calling for an urgent ban on trophy imports has now won the support of MPs from the Conservatives, Labour, Lib Dem, SNP, Plaid Cymru, Green Party, and Democratic Unionist Party.

Risk of extinction 

The Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting said UN figures showed that the most popular trophies for UK hunters included elephants, lions, leopards and rhinoceroses – all of which are included in Appendix I of CITES, the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species. Appendix I animals are considered to be at greatest risk of extinction.

Other Appendix I animals killed by British trophy hunters include cheetahs, Nile crocodiles, zebras and caracals.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, criticised the loophole in CITES which currently allows trophy hunters to kill the world’s most endangered animals.

“I’m totally opposed to trophy hunting and to the importing of animals that have been killed for trophy hunting. CITES needs to include trophy hunting because we have to protect animals that are facing extinction,“ he said.

Bill Oddie, the Conservationist and broadcaster, said trophy hunting was putting increasing pressure on vulnerable wildlife.

He added:

“When you’ve got a scattered, dwindling population, the loss of a handful of animals doesn’t just cause a ripple effect – it can be like a tsunami wave.

“Trophy hunting has always been senseless cruelty. Letting people kill them because they think it’s entertaining is just insane, especially when you’re talking about wildlife with such a vulnerable status”.

International action

Zac Goldsmith is one of a number of leading Conservatives calling for a ban, and has now tabled a motion in Parliament which has won cross-party support.

He said:

“I find it amazing that anyone would take any kind of pleasure from shooting one of these magnificent creatures – elephants, lions, even rhinos. It makes no sense to me at all at any level.“

Sir Ed Davey MP, the former Lib Dem minister, called for new laws to be introduced.

He said claims by trophy hunters that the ‘sport’ helped fund wildlife conservation and poverty eradication programmes were deliberately misleading.

“Trophy hunting should be banned across the world, and that ban should be enforced very strongly,” he argued.

“It’s completely wrong that we’re allowing people to kill animals, particularly endangered species. The argument that it’s good for local communities is completely bogus. The money goes to the rich people, and we could actually help communities far better by promoting nature tourism.”

Caroline Lucas, the Green Party MP, said the government had failed to follow through on a 2015 promise to ban lion trophy imports.

She pointed to the examples of Australia, France and the Netherlands where trophy imports have been banned:

“Our government is supposed to be doing something about this. They pledged to make a start by banning the imports of lion trophies.

“But even on this they haven’t implemented it. Every year there’s an average of 242 animal trophies coming back into the UK We’re calling on the government to step up to follow the lead from other countries who have banned all trophy hunting imports.”

Hunting expeditions

Eduardo Gonçalves, from the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting, said the public would be shocked to learn both that British trophy hunters were deliberately killing endangered animals and bringing in elephant tusks, and that the law allowed them to do it.

He said:

“Over the last decade, UK hunters have brought home over 2500 trophies, of which nearly 400 were from some of the most endangered species on the planet.

“UK hunters have killed literally hundreds of elephants, hippos, leopards, zebras and lions – and then brought home their trophies and body parts for show.

“As well as tusks and mounted trophies, U.K. hunters bring home ‘souvenirs’ from their elephant-hunting expeditions that include trunks, feet, ears and tails.”

Uncontrolled slaughter 

Gonçalves accused the trophy hunting industry of deliberately encouraging the large-scale killing of rare wildlife.

“The Safari Club International ‘Global Hunting Award’ challenges hunters to kill a minimum of 12 species in Africa. Their ‘Cats of the World’ prize is handed to those who kill a lion, leopard, cheetah, jaguar, cougar and several other big cats.

“Its other awards include the infamous ‘Africa 29’ which is given to hunters who kill no fewer than 29 different wildlife species. This is grotesque, uncontrolled slaughter on a massive scale, and it’s pushing threatened species to the brink of extinction”.

He added that the loopholes in wildlife protection laws were being exploited by poachers posing as trophy hunters.

“Many people think the hunting of endangered wildlife is banned. In fact trophy hunters are exempted from CITES. It’s an extraordinary loophole that poachers are taking advantage of. Around 300 rhino horns are known to have been exported by phony trophy hunters between 2009-2014 alone.

“The government wants to be seen as a global leader on wildlife and animal welfare. If it’s serious about this, it should commit to an immediate ban on imports. This is an area where Michael Gove will find there is strong public support for decisive action.”

For the SNP, Tommy Sheppard MP said:

“It’s disgraceful in the modern age that we allow people to indulge in the slaughter of wild animals purely for entertainment.”

Ben Lake MP (Plaid Cymru) added:

“I find it abhorrent that anyone would consider killing animals for sport and then to mount them above their mantelpieces as some sort of trophy. I want to see it completely banned. The U.K. as a leading nation can make an important contribution to bringing a global ban.”

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Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist. This article is based on a press release from the Campaign to Ban Trophy Hunting

Featured image is from The Ecologist

Qatar: We’re Quitting OPEC in 2019

December 4th, 2018 by Middle East Eye

Qatar said on Monday it was quitting OPEC from January to focus on its gas ambitions, taking a swipe at the group’s de facto leader Saudi Arabia and marring Gulf efforts to show unity before this week’s meeting of exporters to tackle an oil price slide.

Doha, one of OPEC’s smallest oil producers but the world’s biggest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter, is embroiled in a protracted diplomatic row with Saudi Arabia and some other Arab states.

Qatar said its decision was not driven by politics but, in an apparent swipe at Riyadh, Minister of State for Energy Affairs Saad al-Kaabi said:

“We are not saying we are going to get out of the oil business but it is controlled by an organisation managed by a country.”

He did not name the nation.

Al-Kaabi told a news conference that Doha’s decision “was communicated to OPEC” but said Qatar would attend the group’s meeting on Thursday and Friday, and would abide by its commitments.

He said Doha would focus on its gas potential because it was not practical for Qatar “to put efforts and resources and time in an organisation that we are a very small player in and I don’t have a say in what happens”.

Delegates at OPEC, which has 15 members including Qatar, sought to play down the impact. But losing a long-standing member undermines a bid to show a united front before a meeting that is expected to back a supply cut to shore up crude prices that have lost almost 30 percent since an October peak.

“They are not a big producer, but have played a big part in its (OPEC) history,” one OPEC source said.

It highlights the growing dominance over policymaking in the oil market of Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United States, the top world’s three oil producers, which together account for almost a third of global output.

Riyadh and Moscow have been increasingly deciding output policies together, under pressure from US President Donald Trump on OPEC to bring down prices. Benchmark Brent is trading at around $62 a barrel, down from more than $86 in October.

“It could signal a historic turning point of the organisation towards Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United States,” said Algeria’s former energy minister and OPEC chairman, Chakib Khelil, commenting on Qatar’s move.

He said Doha’s exit would have a “psychological impact” because of the row with Riyadh and could prove “an example to be followed by other members in the wake of unilateral decisions of Saudi Arabia in the recent past”.

‘A strategy decision’

Qatar, which Al-Kaabi said had been a member of OPEC for 57 years, has oil output of just 600,000 barrels per day (bpd), compared with Saudi Arabia’s 11 million bpd.

But Doha is an influential player in the global LNG market with annual production of 77 million tonnes per year, based on its huge reserves of the fuel in the Gulf.

OPEC members Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and fellow Arab states Bahrain and Egypt, have imposed a political and economic boycott on Qatar since June 2017, accusing it of supporting terrorism. Doha denies the charges and says the boycott aims to impinge on its sovereignty.

Qatar’s announcement comes ahead of a GCC summit scheduled for 9 December. The last GCC summit – and the first held after three Gulf countries cut ties with Qatar and blockaded it – ended after 15 minutes.

Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar’s former prime minister who remains a powerful figure in the country, called the nation’s withdrawal from OPEC a “wise decision”.

“This organisation has become useless and adds nothing to us,” he tweeted. “They are used only for purposes that are detrimental to our national interest.”

Al-Kaabi, who is heading Qatar’s OPEC delegation, said the decision was not political but related to the country’s long-term strategy and plans to develop its gas industry and increase LNG output to 110 million tonnes by 2024.

“A lot of people will politicise it,” Al-Kaabi said. “I assure you this purely was a decision on what’s right for Qatar long term. It’s a strategy decision.”

Oil surged about 5 percent on Monday after the United States and China agreed to a 90-day truce in their trade war, but prices remain well off October’s peak.

Asked if Qatar’s withdrawal would complicate OPEC’s decision this week, a non-Gulf OPEC source said:

“Not really, even if it’s a regrettable and sad decision from one of our member countries.”

Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultancy Energy Aspects, said Qatar’s withdrawal “doesn’t affect OPEC’s ability to influence as Qatar was a very small player”.

Al-Kaabi said Qatar Petroleum planned to build the Middle East’s largest ethane cracker – an industrial plant which converts gas into ethylene, a which is used in plastics and other synthetic oil byproducts.

He said Qatar would still look to expand its oil investments abroad and would “make a big splash in the oil and gas business”.

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On the evening of Friday, November 30, Hezbollah’s war media broadcasted this video addressed to Israel and subtitled in Hebrew, in response to recent Israeli military exercises simulating an aggression against southern Lebanon, an escalation of violations of Lebanese airspace –from which aggressions against Syria are usually carried out– by Israeli drones, and new threats to assassinate Hezbollah Secretary General. The statement in the video is excerpted from the latest speech by Hassan Nasrallah on November 10, 2018, and the footage shows in particular the precise coordinates of Israeli military bases that would be targeted in case of aggression. Let us remind that Hezbollah’s policy is to target exclusively the military, and to hit the colonies and cities of the enemy only in response to the ongoing Israeli aggression against Lebanese civilians. The civilian/military ratio of the victims of the 2006 war was 1/10 on the Israeli side, and 10/1 on the Lebanese side, a striking proof of the fact that Israel strikes civilians above all, and that Hezbollah favors military targets.

Despite the August 2006 ceasefire, Lebanon and Israel remain in a state of war, and if direct clashes have ceased, information & psychological warfare continue to rage, as are indirect clashes in Syria or even Yemen, where Israeli planes are directly involved in the conflict. At a time when the Gulf countries are openly engaging in the normalization policy of relations with Israel, when yet another futile attempt to strangle Iran economically is at work, and where MBS is touring North Africa to promote Israel’s peace agreement with Israel, Hezbollah recalls that its hostility to Israel remains irreducible, demonstrating its solidarity with the Resistance in Gaza that has recently scored a new victory, which foreshadows a real disaster in the event of a confrontation with such a powerful actor as Hezbollah. Hassan Nasrallah has several times announced as imminent the Great War to Liberate Palestine, in which the extended Resistance Axis (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Iraq and Yemen) would participate.

This video made headlines in Israel Friday night and throughout the weekend, and senior military officials of the Zionist entity reacted to it. In accordance with its policy of anti-Nasrallah censorship, Youtube immediately deleted this video broadcast, among others, by Al-Manar (French) and Sputnik (English) for alledgedly “violating Youtube’s Terms of Service”, but Israeli media like Ynet were able to broadcast it on the platform without fear of censorship –proof that the content itself has no valid reason to be censored according to the Youtube’s Terms of Service. Only sources that are a priori favorable to Hezbollah are tirelessly hunted down by IDF cyber-soldiers and deleted.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Resistance News Unfiltered.

The full quote by Porfirio Díaz is: “Poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.” Mexican President Díaz (1876-1880 and 1884-1911) got it at least half right. Mexico has suffered in the shadow of the Colossus of the North, but Mexico is not poor. Mexico is rich in many ways, yet it also has been impoverished. And Mexico has been greatly underappreciated by North Americans.

Mexico is bucking an international right-wing tide, shifting its government from right to left-of-center with the presidential inauguration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) on December 1. Speaking for international capital, The Economist is worried. The other 99% of humanity is hopeful. A cautionary history of this trice conquered land follows.

Pre-Colombian Mexico and the First Conquest

Prior to Europeans “discovering” the New World, Mexico was home to many great civilizations, which thrived for nearly four millennia: Aztec, Huastec, Izapa, Maya, Mixtec, Olmec, Purépecha, Teotihuacan, Toltec, Totonac, and Zapotec. History and Headlines rates the “10 great historical civilizations,” naming the Olmecs and Aztecs alongside the Romans, Persians, and Egyptians.

The popular image of the Aztec depicts savage men in loin clothes and feathers on top of stone pyramids making human sacrifices. But let’s put that into historical context. Historian James Cockcroft tells us that at the same time the barbarians in the New World were assuaging their pagan gods with human blood, more people met their end burned at the stake as “witches” by the civilized Europeans in the name of Jesus. Christian femicide is a forgotten legacy.

European contact in 1519 brought Christianity and disease to the then flourishing Mexican civilizations. While the Europeans and the indigenous Americans were roughly on the par technologically, the Europeans were far more adept at war and to them went victory and the spoils.

Geographer Jared Diamond estimates that 90% of the Native American population was obliterated by measles, small pox, flu, and the like for which the Europeans had developed relative immunities. Mexico did not regain its 1519 population until 1940, taking over 400 years to recover.

Although the official language of Mexico is now Spanish and Mexico is the most populous Spanish speaking nation in the world, it is also home to the largest number of actively spoken indigenous languages in North America.

The Second Conquest of Mexico

The first conquest of Mexico was by the Spanish conquistadores. The second was by the Yankees and has received far less acknowledgment.

Mexico won its independence from Spain in the period 1810-21 and with it slavery was abolished, though not entirely until 1829. It wasn’t until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was issued followed by the Thirteenth Amendment two years later, that formal slavery was abolished in the US. However, sharecropping and Jim Crow laws continued to preserve the “peculiar institution” in the “land of the free.”

The Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819 established the border between the former Spanish colonial territories and the former British colony, now the US.

By 1836, the Republic of Texas succeeded from Mexico and was annexed to the US in 1845. The following year, the Mexican-American War was provoked by the US as a war of conquest.

Two years later, Mexico was forced to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceding nearly half its national territory. The US gained what would become parts or all of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New MexicoWyoming, and Colorado. The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 added southern Arizona and New Mexico to the spoils of war.

In all, 55% of Mexico, over half of her sovereign territory, was taken from Mexico by the ever-expanding Colossus of the North. No wonder our Chicanx compatriots remind us “we did not cross the border, the border crossed us.”

Alta California

Gold had been discovered at Sutter’s Mill just a few days before the treaty was signed, which transferred Alta (upper) California from Mexico to the US. The discovery of gold was unknown to the signatories at the time.

Alta California was to become the Golden State. With a $2.7 trillion economy, the state now boasts the world’s fifth largest economy, larger than Mexico’s $2.4 trillion gross domestic product (GDP). Were Alta California to rejoin Mexico, the new union’s GDP would be surpassed only by the mega-economies of China, US, India, and Japan.

The constitution for Alta California was drafted in both Spanish and English. Despite having a bilingual constitution, the Alta California voters passed the English-only Proposition 227 in 1998. Then in 2016, the voters passed Proposition 57, which repealed the more egregious English-only provisions of the earlier proposition.

The repeal of the English-only proposition reflected an influx of non-English speakers into the state. Alta California is today a truly multi-ethnic state with 43% of its inhabitants speaking a language other than English at home. The largest ethnic group is again Hispanic-Latinx, comprising 39% of the population and outnumbering what the Census Bureau calls “white alone.”

The Mexican Revolution

The bully to the north became revolution-adverse after concluding its own revolution. When Haiti won its independence from France in 1804, the US joined Napoleon’s empire to force the fledgling Haitian nation to pay debilitating reparations for freeing itself from slavery.

Nevertheless, the Mexican Revolution of 1910-20 was able to slip by. In those days the US empire was not as capable at multitasking as it is now and was preoccupied by World War I.

The Mexican Revolution stands in the pantheon of great 20th century revolutions, pioneering the way for Russia (1917), China (1949), Vietnam (1975), and the many Third World liberation struggles of the last century.

As the first of the major 20th-century revolutions, the Mexican Revolution guaranteed labor rights, nationalized subsoil rights, secularized the state and curbed the power of the Roman Catholic Church, and gave inalienable land rights to indigenous communities. Women’s rights were advanced, and women fought as soldiers and even commanders in General Emilio Zapata’s revolutionary army. Many of these gains have since been eroded.

The Revolution Institutionalized

After the tumultuous revolutionary period, politics in Mexico became consolidated under the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party). This single corporatist party brought together political factions representing the peasantry, labor, and urban professionals. As the revolutionary period receded, the PRI became politically centrist.

The one-party rule of the PRI was finally ended with the successful presidential election in 2000 of Coca-Cola executive Vincente Fox of the PAN (National Action Party). The PAN won the subsequent presidential election as well. The PAN is a right-of-center Christian democratic party. It has strong backing among northern Mexican agri-business and international corporations and has a conservative social agenda.

The current Mexican president, Peña Nieto, is a member of the PRI. As the PRI moved to the right, more liberal forces within split in 1986 and formed the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). The main stronghold of the PRD has been Mexico City and among organized labor.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador was the PRD standard bearer in the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections. His losses in both elections are widely believed to be due to fraud.

NAFTA – the Third Conquest of Mexico

The third conquest of Mexico was by North American finance capital came in the form of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and similar neoliberal arrangements. Neither free nor restricted to trade (e.g., it includes military cooperation), this stealth conquest facilitated the repatriation of foreign investment profits and the further integration of Mexico into the US economy.

NAFTA was ratified in 1994 among Mexico, the US, and Canada. The agreement remains controversial in the constituent counties. The Zapatistas in southern Mexico specifically chose the initiation date of their on-going rebellion to coincide with the day NAFTA started, presciently predicting the deleterious effects NAFTA would have.

By 2014, as many as a million US workers had lost their jobs due to NAFTA, which also had the effect of depressing wages.

NAFTA ended many Mexican government supports for agriculture, while encouraging the entry of US and Canadian agricultural products. Consequently, peasant and most family farm agriculture in Mexico are less economically viable. The result has been a massive internal migration from the countryside into Mexican cities and an external emigration of people forced off the land to the US.

Neoliberalism’s Winners and Losers

A decade or two before the imposition of NAFTA, Mexico had appeared poised to transform from a developing to a developed country. New oil reserves had been discovered and a boom seemed imminent. Then instead of continuing a development model, Mexico bowed to international financial pressure and switched to a neoliberal model of deregulation and privatization.

Rather than lifting Mexico’s economy through its deeper integration with the US economy, as NAFTA’s proponents promised, Mexico has fallen even further behind. After NAFTA and the neoliberal “reforms,” poverty went up in Mexico while per capita economic growth lagged compared to the rest of Latin America.

Instead of wages becoming like those in the US, working wages became competitive with Guatemala. Mexico took its place in the international market economy as an export platform for low-wage maquiladoras, factories owned by foreigners and exporting to a foreign market.

Despite great national wealth, 46% of Mexicans live below the poverty line. The per capita income of Mexico is a third of the US, making the shared border the most income-unequal border in the world.

Neoliberalism has also had its winners. The government telephone monopoly Telmex was privatized in 1990, bought up by Carlos Slim Helú who became the richest man not only in Mexico but in the entire world by 2010. His ranking has now slipped to seventh, though he is still the top tycoon in Mexico owning 40% of the listings on the Mexican stock exchange. His net worth is equivalent to 6% of Mexico’s GDP, which is greater than the entire GDP of neighboring Guatemala and four times that of Nicaragua.

With a new strata of billionaires and deepening poverty, both spawned by neoliberalism, Mexico is among the more income unequal nations, with a Gini Index of 48.2. Carlos Slim and eight other international fat cats now have more wealth than half the world’s population.

Contemporary Mexico

Yet today Mexico as a nation is rich in many ways.

In terms of biodiversity, Mexico is way under-recognized. Mexico ranks fourth or fifth in the world, scoring high for the number of reptiles, birds, mammals, and plants. The much more celebrated Costa Rica in comparison doesn’t make the top ten in any of these categories, although it has a far better public relations apparatus. Mexico encompasses vast rainforests, dry forests, mountains, deserts, and the second largest coral reef in the world.

In terms of conservation, Mexico has been a world leader in the protection of whales. Commercial whaling was banned in 1954. In contrast, the last US whaling station in the San Francisco Bay was closed in 1971, followed the next year by passage of the Mammal Protection Act. The world’s first whale refuge was established in 1972 by the Mexican government. In 2002, Mexico again exercised world leadership in designating all its territorial waters and Economic Exclusion Zones as whale refuges.

Culinarily, Mexico’s cocina is considered among the great cuisines of the world; a lot more than taco trucks and cheap burrito stands. Amongst Mexico’s contributions to the world’s larder are avocado, chocolate, guava, tomatovanilla, many varieties of beans and chiles, and most notably corn, which is now the world’s most important staple food.

Mexico has the most UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the hemisphere. The three most influential modern muralists are the Mexicans Diego RiveraJosé Clemente Orozco, and David Siqueiros.

With 7.6 billion bbl of proven reserves, Mexico is a major crude oil producer. Ranking 12th in the world, it outproduces Nigeria, Qatar, and Libya.

Mexico’s economy ranks 11th in the world, placing it second in Latin America after Brazil. Mexico’s GDP is greater than that of Italy or Spain and just below France and the UK, making it one of the world’s economic powerhouses.

The 2018 Election

Left-of-center Andrés Manuel López Obrador ran for the Mexican presidency on July 1. Having broken from the PRD, this third run was the charm as he won decisively. Morena, his newly formed party, swept the national and state legislatures.

Mayor-elect of Mexico City, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, is also part of the winning coalition. She is the first woman and first Jew to be elected to the post. She is a scientist and was a joint winner of the 2007 Noble Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

After decades of right-wing governments in Mexico, López Obrador is being sworn in on December 1. The popular sectors in Mexico are expectant that corruption, inequality, and other long-festering economic injustices will be addressed.

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Roger Harris is the immediate past president of the Task Force on the Americas (http://taskforceamericas.org/), a 32-year-old human rights organization, and is active with the Campaign to End US-Canadian Sanctions Against Venezuela (https://tinyurl.com/yd4ptxkx).

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