Global Research

When I decided to become a cartographer, I didn’t just want to make pretty and useful maps. I became a cartographer to make maps that change the world for the better. Right now, no situation needs this kind of map more than the current drama unfolding around the Dakota Access Oil Pipeline’s crossing of the Missouri River.

Thousands of Native Americans and their allies have gathered on unceded Sioux land delimited by the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie to try and stand in the way of the “black snake” that could poison the Standing Rock Reservation’s water supply. Many have noted that the pipeline corridor was repositioned from its original route north of Bismarck after white citizens spoke up against the threat a spill would pose to their drinking water ― a threat duly recognized by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Yet the Corps failed its federal mandate for meaningful consultationwith the Standing Rock Tribe before signing off on a route that moved the pipeline to their doorstep.

This is not to say that the good citizens of Bismarck and Mandan were wrong to protest. What’s wrong with the picture above isn’t the routing of the pipeline. What’s wrong is that the pipeline project exists to begin with. Some say it’s a good alternative to dangerous oil-by-rail shipments of Bakken crude. Those are bad too. We don’t need more fossil fuels making it to market to be burned and burn up the planet in turn (I am typing this in Wisconsin as the temperature nears 70 on the first of November). We do all need clean water. As the Sioux say, mni wiconi (”water is life”).

To keep to its construction schedule, the pipeline company, Energy Transfer Partners, has met nonviolent water protectors with private security guards using attack dogs in a scene reminiscent of 1963 Birmingham. It has worked hand-in-glove with law enforcement and the National Guard to create a militarized response straight out of apartheid South Africa or occupied Ireland. It has locked up hundreds of protesters in wire cages like those used early on at Guantanamo Bay. Those on the ground fear something like another Kent State, yet they keep coming, and the worldwide solidarity has gone viral.

There was one other better map of the project that I found and was partially inspired by ― a relatively simple yet powerful map by Jordan Engle (with help from Dakota Wind) published by The Decolonial Atlas. It uses the indigenous placenames for key waterways and sites in the vicinity of the Sacred Stones Camp (translations are on the blog post linked to above). It is oriented to the south, challenging the typical viewpoint of Western maps. This map has truly not gotten the attention it deserves.

 

My geographer hero Zoltan Grossman once declared, “The side with the best maps wins.” The pipeline company has an army backed by state power to do its bidding. The water has its scrappy protectors. It’s time we put the latter on the map.

Aurora: Western “Culture” is Wrecking Entire Continents… “How the Empire Operates”

By Andre Vltchek, November 04 2016

Parliamentary supremacy in British law and politics is akin to the fetish of the union in the United States. Challenge it at your peril; question it to your misfortune.  The point was tested, with rumbling consequences, by the May government in its latest Brexit stumble dealing with Britain’s painful and at times confused response to exiting the European Union.

The way Theresa May’s government has respected that referendum result so far is open to question. Behind closed doors, it has promised various versions of what it might do, when in truth, it may well not know what it is doing at all.  Terms such as “hard Brexit” and “soft Brexit” change hands with meal like regularity; positions are foggily unclear.  The only matter sovereign at this point is solid confusion.

This confusion was even more confounded by the antics of the High Court, which suggested in it judgment of November 3 that Prime Minister May’s approach to the nature of Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty had demonstrated significant error.

Parliament, in other words, had to be involved in triggering the operative functions of Article 50, which involves a two-year process for departure.  The executive would have to duly comply with those wishes.

According to Lord Chief Justice John Thomas, “The most fundamental rule of the UK’s constitution is that parliament is sovereign and can make and unmake any law it chooses.”  Hardly heretical, given that the Brexiteer group had always insisted that UK sovereignty had been imperilled by the bureaucrats in Brussels.

The government statement was stubborn but in its own way an expression of frustration at what had been the most traditional of readings of Parliamentary supremacy.  “The country voted to leave the European Union in a referendum approved by Act of Parliament.  And the Government determined to respect the result of the referendum.”

Not that the government won’t – it will just have to do so through the very legislature it has decided to hoodwink. In bringing the Brexit process before Parliament, the May play book will be brought to light.The reaction from the Leavers was furious. The Daily Mail, in sinister fashion, suggested that the judges were, as its headline went, “Enemies of the people.” Photos of these touted criminals were also published, suggesting a near vigilante call to arms.

As ever, the paper’s editors decided to wade into the issue about what was meant by those good people of Britain when they decided leaving the EU was a good idea. The “people” had effectively lost out to a court which had sided “against [their] interests”.  Had the battle against the wicked court system within the European Union been for nothing?

An image here that emerges is that of nativism burning wildly before the cliquish designs of the elite.  Such a judgment, it was hyperbolically argued, stoked the flames of dissatisfaction “not just in Britain and Europe, but also among Donald Trump’s supporters in America – that western public life is becoming a conspiracy of tightly knit, self-serving Establishment elites against the public.”

The Daily Express event went so far as to urge the British public to rush to the barricades to “fight, fight, fight”. Those humble court darlings were misfits who had purposely engineered a roadblock to prevent Brexit by including Parliament in the whole rotten business.  An eccentric reading of the ruling if ever there was one.

The European authorities are not going to go easy on what is regarded as audacious mischief making by the British populists to damage the European project. But that populist voice took the form of a vote which must, in the annals of that country’s electoral history, be respected.

Suspicion, however, abounds as to how this timetable of exit is to be performed, and such Murdoch papers as the Sunsuspect foul play amongst the conservatives.  Everyone is in need of someone to crucify.

Yet the populists, ever the bullies in the playground, were the first ones to jump ship after the vote in the name of sovereignty. Nigel Farage, having done the damage, fled to the United States to enthusiastically embrace Donald Trump’s campaign to claim that Britain had reclaimed itself.  Only the often oafish Boris Johnson was brought, most probably by compulsion, into the ministry.

Perhaps the most useful aspect to this entire affair, apart from the predictable anger on the part of the government at the intrusive rulings of courts it would rather not listen to (even their own), is the understanding of the populists.  Behind the Brexit campaign – less than the vote itself – was a despotic snigger, a sense that unaccountable power might not be such a bad thing.

As Alex Massie noted with understandable derision, “People who shouted for months about the urgent need to restore parliamentary sovereignty now reacted in horror to the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty.”[1] The populists had effectively ambushed themselves.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Notes

[1] http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2016/11/unhinged-backlash-high-courts-brexit-ruling/

 

When the “end of history”, meaning the establishment of a permanent Western hegemony over the entire international system, was proclaimed in the early 1990s, it was not yet obvious how the pursuit of said hegemony would evolve over the succeeding decades. The “velvet” expansion of the 1990s into the post-Soviet vacuum gave way to the “iron fist” for which the 9/11 terror strikes provided the excuse and which meant invading whichever country Washington desired. However, the “iron fist” efforts in the post-9/11 world demonstrated West’s weakness , as sustaining operations in Iraq and Afghanistan proved too much for NATO.  This failure ushered the post-“post-9/11″ world, and the “Arab Spring” became the first, though far from the only, demonstration of the evolved Western strategy which fuses the earlier approaches.

The “velvet” aspect is still there: Western entities claim they are promoting “universal human values” which, evidently, is the end that justifies all means and which automatically means it is impossible to commit war crimes in its pursuit.

Also, by implication, anyone who stands in the West’s way operates under the presumption of guilt. In order to promote said “universal values”, the West identifies, creates, or even invents a political movement which, although it consists of corrupt opportunists and outright criminals, ostensibly stands for “universal values”. This entity then receives overwhelmingly positive media coverage, to the point of referring to any police or military response to the violence it perpetrates as “war crimes”, in order to shape the public opinion in favor of limited military intervention in the form of airstrikes and a small number of special operations troops. Then one merely needs an excuse, a small incident, an insignificant act of violence by the target country’s law enforcement of the kind that happen in the US in a daily basis, in order to start beating the war drums against the “blood-soaked regime.” This approach was pioneered in Bosnia and Kosovo, the early exceptions to the “velvet” policy, but was then shelved in the post-9/11 era when it seemed that West’s aims could be achieved through more direct–and brutal–means, only to be resurrected by the Obama Administration and applied in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine with only minor variations.

But the “universal values” rhetoric is only camouflage aimed at securing the support of the liberal wing of the elite and obscuring the real aim of the aggression, the seizure of key national assets, be it petroleum or, in the case of Ukraine, farmland to bolster the fortunes of dominant sectors of Western economies, including finance and energy, and to preserve the fading Western hegemony. It is also evident Western powers are in an informal but very close alliance with the highly repressive governments of Gulf Arab states, which also stood to gain from eliminating the political competition posed by Libya’s government and from building pipelines to Europe over the corpse of the Syrian state. This alignment was made necessary by the West’s need for “boots on the ground” which can accomplish that which airpower alone cannot, with ISIS, Al-Nusra, Free Syrian Army, and other such formations being a NATO-trained and NATO-equipped force which can be sent where NATO soldiers can’t go, due to the domestic opposition such a move would provoke.

The insights into the finances of the various Clinton “foundations” provided by Wikileaks clearly show the inner workings of this alliance.

The leaks also illustrate the key aspect of this alliance, namely the secretive and conspiratorial machinations of a small group of influential actors, as opposed to the broad elite consensus that existed during the Cold War. Nevertheless, this small group of conspirators on three continents now amounts to a de-facto Washington-Brussels-Riyadh axis. It is a relatively recent creation, dating to only the beginning of the Obama Administration. It did not exist during the George W. Bush Administration: Saudi Arabia was aghast at the idea of toppling the Sunni rule in Iraq, and the EU was mostly opposed to invading Iraq. Which made the EU’s embrace of regime change in Syria, Libya, and Ukraine all the more startling, though not entirely surprising.  Just as the US foreign policies are driven by the fear of being eclipsed by rising or recovering powers like China or Russia, the 2008 crisis bared the EU’s weakness and thus provided an incentive for EU hardliners engage in reckless policies in the hopes of staving off its collapse.

Is the game worth the candle? Considering the shrillness of the pro-war propaganda in both the US and the EU today, to the point of risking World War 3,  the imagined benefits of regime changes must have been enormous. Stamping out the last truly sovereign states of the Middle East would have strengthened the West’s claim on global hegemony. The failures Ukraine and in Syria, and ultimately also in Libya,  therefore place Western powers face-to-face with the prospect of historic decline.

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There is no doubt that the forthcoming US Presidential elections are perhaps the most controversial ones in the US history. This has nothing of course to do with the various personal ‘scandals’ supposedly marring the two candidates, i.e. the emails scandal vs. the sexual utterances that are incompatible with the political correctness imposed by the ideology of globalization. These are obvious diversions created by the system itself in order to disorient the American victims of globalization from the real issues of these elections.

In fact, if we talk about real politics rather than politicking, the personalities of the two candidates matter little, as both are ‘products of the system’ and in this sense one could argue that there is no real difference between them. Yet, there is a crucial difference between these two candidates, which was not present in previous post war candidates, who were simply ‘products of the system’ distinguished only by their differences as regards usually minor aspects of economic policies, i.e. more liberal/neoliberal or, alternatively, more state interventionist measures.

Yet, none of these candidates ever questioned the very fundamentals of a system, which eventually––helped by the post war US hegemony–– led to the emergence of a new phenomenon: the multinational corporations. This marked the rise of the New World Order (NWO) of neoliberal globalization, as well as the emergence of a Transnational Elite that informally runs it, with the help of the transnational economic and political-military institutions that the same elites created, such as the IMF, WB, WTO and NATO). These fundamentals may well be summarized by what is called euphemistically ‘the four “freedoms”’, i.e. the free movement of goods and services, as well as of capital and labor. This is what the US elections (and the Brexit referendum before that) is all about.

The real differences between Clinton and Trump

Hillary Clinton is in fact a typical ‘product of the system’, who was systematically promoted by it, exactly in order to carry out faithfully the demands of the elites in the implementation of these “freedoms” and what they imply both at the domestic but also the foreign and geopolitical levels. She is well known for her criminal role in the massacre of the Libyan people and her infamous exclamation “we came, we saw, he died”, referring to the brutal lynching of Muammar Gaddafi, the Nasserite leader of the Libyan national liberation movement, at the hands of the Libyan ‘revolutionaries.’ That is, at the hands of the barbaric terrorists, who were funded by the Transnational Elite and supported by the State Department, which she headed at the time. It is the same kind of ‘revolutionaries’ who today are employed in Syria (some of them moved from Libya to Syria immediately they finished the ‘job’ there), with the same aim for regime change.

On the other hand, Donald Trump, although a product of the same system himself, he is a self-made product of it, who managed to become a candidate for the highest post of the Transnational Elite without any direct or indirect  assistance by it and its institutions (mass media, economic, political, academic, and cultural institutions). No wonder he has been the target of an unprecedented attack by all of these elites and institutions. In other words, he was savagely attacked by them, not because he is a revolutionary of some kind, but simply because he is not as controllable by the elites, as all previous US presidents––not to mention the Clintons (husband and wife) who have been executive assistants of the elites, par excellence. Hillary is therefore the perfect candidate to carry out their criminal plans (the first woman candidate and a perfectly controllable ambitious politician), exactly as Obama was before a similar perfect candidate (the first black candidate––a privileged black of course––and a perfectly controllable ambitious politician).

So the main problem for the elites with Trump is that he is an ‘unknown quantity’ –the biggest, for the elites, crime. Particularly so as his professed policies firmly put him within the rising world movement against globalization, which already gave us Brexit, that is, a genuine revolution of the victims of globalization in the UK, and the consequent counter revolution. At the same time, in the USA, because of the much higher stakes involved, the counter revolution began even before any corresponding revolution there! This, despite the fact that Trump had drawn mass support and won elections and public opinion not just because he is a ‘populist demagogue’ (as they claim) but because, as even a prominent member of the globalist ‘Left’ admitted,^[1] he rejected the free trade agreements which allowed multinationals to exploit labor all over the world. Furthermore, domestically, he questioned the uncontrolled importation of cheap immigrant labor, called for large-scale public investment, opposed the new cold war with Russia and China, and rejected US support for NATO’s military build-up in Europe and intervention in Syria, North Africa and Afghanistan. Similarly, as even a columnist of the flagship of the globalist ‘Left’ recently stressed––after expressing first his dislike for Trump and Farage––the assumptions that globalists (he calls them ‘free traders’) make about the beneficial effects of free trade are wrong and as the latest transatlantic deal (CETA, the deal between Canada and EU) shows, globalisation is all about protecting big business – from the public. And then, he went on:

For decades, presidents and prime ministers, policymakers and pundits have told voters there is only one direction of travel: free trade. Now comes Brexit and Donald Trump – and the horrible suspicion that the public won’t buy it any more. And the elites don’t know what to do, apart from keep insisting the public listen.[2]

Globalization : the class issue of our era

As I am going to show here briefly, globalization is a class issue. In fact, the class issue of the globalization era. It is common knowledge nowadays that the globalization process has already led to an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth, which several studies have confirmed. Thus, as regards, first, the US concentration of income, according to Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz:

 Large segments of the population in advanced countries have not been doing well: in the US, the bottom 90% has endured income stagnation for a third of a century. Median income for full-time male workers is actually lower in real (inflation-adjusted) terms than it was 42 years ago. At the bottom, real wages are comparable to their level 60 years ago.^[3]

Also, as regards the concentration of wealth as a result of globalization, a recent study has shown that in the last five years or so, the wealth of a circle of billionaires consisting of 388 people has risen by 44 per cent, (or half a trillion dollars), while the wealth of the poorest fell by 41 per cent, (more than a trillion), the result being that the richest 62 people in the world are worth the same as half the world population! [4]

The social consequences of the huge inequality created by globalization, even in the USA, the country that played a leading role in promoting the opening and liberalization of markets throughout the post-war period, are well known. Thus, a very recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association implicitly showed that the more a country is integrated into the NWO the greater the negative impact on health and life expectancy. The result is that, as average life expectancy in developing nations continues to rise, life spans in parts of America are getting shorter. This has reached the point where the poorest American men, at the age of 40, have a life expectancy comparable to the average 40-year-old man in Pakistan and Sudan! Rightly, therefore, Dr Deaton, a professor of economics at Stanford University, noted that the “infamous 1 per cent is not only richer” they have also “ten to 15 more years to enjoy their richly funded lives,” with their life expectancy being better than the average for any nation on earth.^[5]

No wonder that, following the victory of Brexit and the fact that one of the two presidential candidates in the forthcoming US elections has adopted many of the demands of the victims of globalization, the Transnational elites have been terrified by this rapid rise of the anti-globalization movement. Particularly so as it is not anymore just the neo-nationalist movements in East Europe (such as those in Hungary and Poland) which challenge globalization. Thus, following Brexit, the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany party (AFD) came second, ahead of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s CDU, in regional elections held in September, while similar parties and movements in Italy, France, Austria and the Netherlands have also seen a huge rise in their popularity.

This could explain the recent concerted attack against the rising new anti-globalization movement by some of the prominent members of the Transnational elite, such as the head of the IMF, the president of the European Central Bank and the president of the European Council.^[6] All of them suddenly discovered the gross inequality in the distribution of income and wealth as a result of globalization and blamed the political elites for not taking enough measures on boosting support for low income workers and reducing inequality. Yet, they are fully aware of the fact that any such measures are impossible, in an environment of open and liberalized markets. This is because any such measures, if they are designed to be as effective as present circumstances demand, they are bound to affect negatively competitiveness––the foundation of globalization itself. Not surprisingly, the arch-gatekeeper of globalization, the EU Commission President, immediately came out to ‘restore order’ and declare that the recipe for combating growing discontent in Europe was “more union” including a military headquarters “to co-ordinate efforts towards creating a common military force”. No wonder Le Pen, the leader of the French neonationalist movement, was prompted to ask, in an obvious insinuation that the new EU army will in effect be used to smash any popular revolts against globalization and the EU: “What is the EU protecting us from — are you protecting us against prosperity?”^[7]

It is therefore clear that this binary strategy (i.e. the ‘good cop’ strategy of improving the image of globalization and the ‘bad cop’ strategy of force to impose ‘law and order’) are going to define the response of the Transnational Elite in the future to the emerging revolt of the victims of globalization. Yet, the disquiet of globalists cannot anymore be hidden, as it happened in their latest big family reunion in New York.^[8] Therefore, neo-nationalism is basically a movement that arose out of the effects of globalization, particularly the liberalization of labor markets, so that labor could become more competitive.

However, the globalization process has already had not only devastating economic and social consequences on the majority of the world population, but has also resulted in tremendous changes at the political and the cultural levels, in the past three decades or so. Furthermore, it has led to a series of major wars by the Transnational Elite in its attempt to integrate any country resisting integration into the New World Order (NWO) defined by neoliberal globalization (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria). In fact, an election victory for Hillary, the blindly obedient organ of the Transnational Elite, could well lead to a new and potentially more serious crisis than the 1962 missile crisis, given her support for the most dangerous policies on Syria, advocated by the same criminal elements of the same elite that led to the present catastrophe in the Middle East.

The bankruptcy of the globalist ‘Left” and the rise of neo-nationalism

In view of the above, It was almost farcical to see that a prominent role in the present front against the victims of globalization in the USA is played by its globalist ‘Left’, that is the Left which is integrated into the NWO and does not question globalization and its institutions. This, on top of course of the entire political establishment (from Obama to George W. Bush) and also the whole economic establishment, the press corps, and the social media,[9] (let alone the CIA!)[10]––all playing a vital role in this reactionary front. Thus, from Bernie Sanders, the ‘socialist’ candidate and Nation to the self-declared “anarchist” Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert’s Znet, as well as many others, all declared their (‘reluctant’) support for the criminal candidate of the Trasnational Elite. No wonder that even Slavoj Žižek, one of the protagonists of the world globalist ‘Left,’ seemed worried about this “Stalinist” image of the ‘Left,’ presenting a total consensus in favor of Clinton: “from Bernie Sanders supporters, to what remains of the Occupy movement, from big business to trade unions, from army veterans to LGBT+ and ecologists…something that even the worst kind of one-party systems have never achieved.[11] Clearly, for this politically and theoretically bankrupt American ‘Left’, the fact that the working class (for which supposedly they fight) fully supports Trump is irrelevant. Alternatively, for these ‘libertarians’, workers are ignorant enough, so that they have to be ‘educated’ by these enlightened people about whom to vote for! In fact, however, the blue collar ex workers of the American motor industry, for instance, who are determined to vote for Trump[12], know better than the Left intellectuals, academics and others who, mostly are beneficiaries of globalization.

Yet, there is little doubt anymore that it was the intellectual failure of the Left to grasp the real significance of a new systemic phenomenon, (i.e. the rise of the Transnational Corporation that has led to the emergence of the globalization era) and its consequent political bankruptcy, which were the ultimate causes of the rise of a neo-nationalist movement in Europe. This is a very different kind of movement than the old aggressive nationalist movement. It is a movement that is embraced by most of the victims of globalization all over the world, but particularly in Europe, mainly by the working class that used to support the Left, whilst the latter has effectively embraced not just economic globalization but also political, ideological and cultural globalization and has therefore been fully integrated into the New World Order. In fact, today, following the successful emasculation of the antisystemic movement against globalization, thanks mainly to the activities of the globalist ‘Left’, as well as of the World Social Forum[13] and the various Foundations funding it, the neo-nationalist movement is the only political force left to fight against globalization in general and the EU in particular.

It is therefore clear that the neo-nationalist parties, which are all under attack by the Transnational Elite, constitute cases of movements that simply filled the huge gap left by the globalist ‘Left’, which, instead of placing itself in the front line of all those peoples fighting globalization and the phasing out of their economic and national sovereignty,^[14] indirectly promoted globalization itself, using arguments based on an anachronistic internationalism, developed a hundred years ago or so. As a result, the neo-nationalist parties are embraced today by most of the victims of globalization all over Europe, particularly the working class which used to support the Left,^[15] whilst the latter has effectively embraced all aspects of globalization (economic, political, ideological and cultural) and has been fully integrated into the NWO––a defining moment in its present intellectual and political bankruptcy.  Similarly, in the USA, where it is Donald Trump’s campaign which expresses these neo-nationalist trends, we may see a new revolution similar to the Brexit revolution, albeit much more important given the hegemonic role that USA still plays in the world.

The Brexit revolution and Trump

Despite the obvious differences between the Brexit revolution and the movement for Trump, which arise also from the fact that the former was a referendum whereas the latter is an election, what matters most are the similarities between them, as both reflect different instances of the same world revolutionary phenomenon.

Thus, the Brexit revolution, far from being an isolated incident, related ––as some globalists argued in order to defame it–– to the ideological paraphernalia of old British imperialism, reflects, in fact, a world revolutionary phenomenon. In fact, it was the IMF itself that lately came out in recognizing the revolutionary character of Brexit –– of course, in order to express the Transnational Elite’s panic about it and draw the appropriate conclusions. Thus, as The Times described the statement by Maurice Obstfeld, the IMF’s chief economist on recent world economic developments:

Brexit may be the start of a growing revolt against globalization and technological advance in the developed world that threatens to depress living standards, the International Monetary Fund has warned. Persistently weak growth is unleashing “negative economic and political forces” that are fuelling protectionism in Britain, the rest of Europe and the US, according to the IMF, and governments need to respond before the problem gets worse.[16]

Furthermore, as I will try to show briefly here, Brexit was very much a popular ‘revolution’, as the entire movement was a movement ‘from below’, i.e. from the victims of globalization themselves. The main factor which created a movement ‘from below’ for Brexit was the growing realization by the British people that its national and economic sovereignty has been decisively eroded within the EU, forcing the elites, albeit reluctantly, to accept the demand for a referendum. This realization was inevitable if one takes into account that Britons, who used to live in one of the strongest nation-states in the world, have now been reduced to spectators, forced to watch, powerless, the effective destruction of their industrial base, in the very place where industrialization was born. In fact, this was a referendum in which an unprecedented number of voters took part, and in which well over a million more people voted for change than for the status quo on UK’s membership of the EU.

Two important characteristics of the referendum were usually minimized by the Transnational Elite’s media: first, the geographical pattern of the vote, which is particularly revealing as regards the class nature of Brexit and, second, the age pattern of the vote, which is very much related to the ideological and cultural aspects of globalization.

As regards first, the geographical pattern of the vote, the way in which people voted was a clear indication of the fact that this was a ‘revolution from below’ of the victims of globalization. Thus, the only region in England to vote for Remain was London, while the Brexit victory was overwhelming in the deprived areas of England, where the victims of globalization live, i.e. the victims of the criminal de-industrialization process imposed by the multinational corporations, which they moved en masse to the Chinese and Indian labor ‘paradises’––exactly as they have been doing in the USA in the last three decades or so.  That is, to the places offering multinationals not only a very disciplined work force that is paid survival wages, but also all the tax concessions possible, in order to induce them to invest and create a pseudo kind of development

Also, as far as the age distribution of the Brexit vote was concerned, the most significant exception to the voting pattern described above was among those under the age of 24, where the Remain vote was 75 percent in favor.[17] In fact, Bremain was supported by an apolitical youth — the perfect subject for manipulation by the elites and its media (including social media) — who are brainwashed by ideological and cultural globalization. Thus, it has been estimated that while there was a turnout of 82% among those aged 55 and over, barely a third of the 18-24 age group managed to cast their vote. But those youngsters who did bother to vote were fanatical opponents of Brexit, who as soon as the referendum result was announced, began demonstrating against it with the direct or indirect support of the local elites, as well as of the Transnational Elite (George Soros, the well-known ‘master of ceremonies’ of pink revolutions of every kind, played a leading role on this).[18] Yet, when these youngsters were asked to explain their fanatical support for the EU, they were usually at a loss to justify their stand![19] No wonder the Hillary camp has been very keen to persuade (usually a-political) youngsters to vote.

The counter revolution in Britain and the USA

As one could expect, the Brexit revolution has led to a fierce counter revolution in Britain by the globalist establishment (which now includes the Labor Party), that I described in The New World Order in Action. This counter revolution was manifested both at the economic and the political levels.

At the economic level, the Transnational economic elite and its institutions (IMF, OECD, the Bank of England etc.), as well as various think tanks, economists, academics, Nobelists and so on, came out before the referendum with a ‘Project Fear’ aiming to portray the doomsday that supposedly was going to follow a Brexit decision. Yet, the latest news give a very different economic picture than the doomsday predicted by the prophets of doom. Data from the Office for National Statistics for the third quarter, the first full quarter since the referendum in June, showed that the Treasury was wrong to suggest that the economy would collapse into recession after a vote to leave. Instead, Britain’s economy has defied expectations of an immediate post-Brexit crash, by growing 0.5 per cent in the three months to September, a stronger rate than the start of the year.[20] The only significant economic impact of Brexit so far was on the value of sterling––something that was to be expected given the role that speculators such as George Soros had played in the past, when he became multimillionaire by simply speculating against the British currency. Today, Soros’s role is to try to reverse at all cost Brexit. Thus, as soon as the result of the referendum was announced Soros declared: “Britain eventually may or may not be relatively better off than other countries by leaving the EU, but its economy and people stand to suffer significantly in the short-to medium term.”[21]

At the political level, the globalist establishment in Britain had used every possible means so far either to revert the result of the referendum, which politically is extremely difficult, given the massive participation and support for Brexit by the victims of globalization, or at least to water down the meaning of it to render it meaningless––what they call euphemistically, a “soft Brexit”. This counter revolution culminated today with the British High Court decision aiming, in effect, to water down any future Brexit decision, according to the elites’ wishes. So, Britain, the famous ‘mother of parliamentarianism’ has been reduced in the globalization era to the level where a few High Court Judges, with the help of parliamentarians under the control of the economic elites, are able to challenge the popular will which was expressed directly and massively.

Finally, one common characteristic of the British and US counter revolutions is the exploitation of the immigration issue in order to smear Brexiteers, as well as supporters of Trump, as anti-immigrants, if not racists. Although of course such elements may well exist within the neo-nationalist antiglobalization movement in Britain, Europe and the USA, yet the vast numbers of the victims of globalization who support this huge movement mostly consist of workers and ex-workers, who used to be supporters of the Left, before the latter was integrated into the NWO. It is therefore hard to believe that all these people have suddenly abandoned the ideals of the Left and moved to the Right. In fact it can be shown that it was the Left that moved to the Right, as far as the issue of entry into the EU clearly showed (see New World Order in Action).

The exploitation of the immigration issue was intensified  particularly in the last few years when the ideology of open borders was massively promoted by the media of the Transnational Elite, accompanied by a mass, supposedly humanist, campaign to save the refugees. That is, the mass of dislocated people who were of course created in the first place by the Transnational Elite itself, through its wars in the Middle East! Needless to add that ‘open borders’ –– the policy promoted by Soros, the Transnational Elite, Varoufakis and the likes –– in fact exploits an old libertarian ideal, completely distorting its essence in the process.

Open borders is meaningful only in a democratic world order where the peoples of the world are really self-determined, controlling themselves the productive resources at their disposal, including human resources. That is, a world with no exploitation and no inequality, where it is peoples themselves that determine how best to meet the needs they decide to satisfy, through social control of some sort (e.g. through an economic democracy as I described it elsewhere)[22] rather than through the anarchy of the markets. Clearly, the world we live in today is exactly the opposite of this kind of ideal world and those fighting for open borders are in fact the elites and their associates aiming to maximize their profits through the free movement between countries, not only of capital and commodities, but of cheap labor as well. The inevitable effect is the equalization ‘to the bottom’ of the real value of wages and salaries (their ‘cost of production’) all over the world.

This is therefore the essence of the economic side of immigration and not the pseudo-humanist black propaganda about helping the masses of refugees and the victims of globalization. Particularly so, when both the former and the latter are simply the byproducts of political and economic globalization respectively. Clearly, it was the unprecedented economic violence of the NWO (initiated by the opening and liberalization of markets) as well as the military violence (unleashed by the wars of the Transnational Elite in the globalization era) that created the billions of the victims of globalization and the millions of refugees respectively. In other words, the successful attempt by the Transnational Elite to convert an economic consequence of globalization, and the economic and military violence it implies, into a (supposedly) humanitarian refugee problem and an issue of satisfying the libertarian principle of ‘open borders’, is perhaps its greatest deception of humanity today and one of the great deceptions of all times. What is even worse is the general acceptability of this deception by almost every country in the world which has been integrated into the NWO.

It is the same deception which is used extensively by the elites, with the full support of the globalist “Left”, in order to smear the new antiglobalization movement (which at present is expressed almost solely by the neonationalist movement) as anti-immigrant , if not racist. Therefore, the need for the creation of a radical antiglobalization movement, which would unite the growing millions of the victims of globalization, irrespective of Left and Right labels, with the aim to fight for economic and national sovereignty, ––as the necessary (though not the sufficient) condition for a real systemic change––is more imperative today than ever.-

 This article is based on the author’s new book under the title The New World Order in Action: Globalization, The Brexit Revolution and the “Left”, (Progressive Press, November 2016) https://www.amazon.com/World-Order-Action-Vol-Globalization/dp/1615779353/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1478292192&sr=8-1&keywords=Takis+Fotopoulos

Takis Fotopoulos is a political philosopher and economist who founded the inclusive democracy movement. He is noted for his synthesis of the classical democracy with the libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (which succeeded Democracy & Nature). He was previously (1969 1989) Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of North London. In his seminal work Towards An Inclusive Democracy (London & New York: Cassell, 1997), which has been translated into French, German, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Chinese, the foundations of the inclusive democracy project were set. He is also the author of over 2,000 articles in British, American and Greek books, journals, magazines and newspapers, several of which have been translated into over twenty languages

 Notes

“Down here, a smaller version of this, $800,000 similar slush fund has landed a sitting Congressman, an African-American lady who has been in Congress for about twenty plus years, running for re-election this year, she faces 357 years in our federal prisons for $800,000, a smaller, shorter-lived set of fraud. This is a big scandal!“

-Charles Ortel on the Clinton Foundation’s misappropriation of funds. (From this week’s interview.)

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FBI Director James Comey’s 11^th hour bomb-shell announcing an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails seems to have compromised what was believed to be an easy victory for the former First Lady in the lead-up to Tuesday’s elections.

Wikileaks has disclosed evidence that while Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and aides like Huma Abedin. used unencrypted computers on a private server to conduct secret business and then did their best to cover up and destroy evidence of that activity.

There is considerable conjecture about what was in those emails that could have been so incriminating, or dangerous, that they would have forced Comey’s hand so close to election day.

Nevertheless, there is already plenty of documentation in the public record indicative of criminal behaviour proximate to Ms. Clinton that deserves scrutiny before Americans go to the ballot box. That record is the focus of this week’s installment of the Global Research News Hour.

Charles Ortel is a private financial investor, writer and former Wall Street banker. In 2007 he became a whistle-blower and was instrumental in bringing down General Electric after revealing GE’s fraudulently overvaluing its stock by many billions of dollars to mislead its investors. Ortel has been scrutinizing the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation since February of 2015. His research reveals a pattern of massive fraud through questionable and illegal practices which have enriched the Clintons at the expense of the good works that the Foundation was purportedly set up to perform. Ortel is our guest in the first half hour.

Debbie Lusignan, better known by her social media handle “Sane Progressive” started documenting evidence of election fraud during the race for the Democratic nomination. She has likewise monitored the race for President and is disclosing a lot of information ignored by the press, pertinent to the real political aspirations of the American people. Debbie makes her debut on the program to elaborate on what she’s discovered.

Finally, Glen Ford, commentator and executive editor of Black Agenda Report, joins us near the end of the hour to explain why the Clintons have been successful in appealing to Black Americans in spite of a record in office hostile to that population.

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

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What is so remarkable and troubling about the presentation we’ve heard today is that what Russia really wants from the U.N. is credit. Congratulations, Russia, you’ve stopped, for a couple days, from using incendiary weapons. Thank you for not using cluster bombs in civilian areas. Thank you for staying the hand of brutality with regard to bunker buster weapons. You don’t get congratulations and get credit for not committing war crimes for a day or a week.Samantha Power, US ambassador to the UN, October 26, 2016

Samantha Power is the face of American diplomacy at the UN, where she gives ardent voice to American hypocrisy, deceit, intellectual dishonesty, and mockery of the rest of the world. Appalling as her performance has been, her portrayal is accurate, right down to her denial-laden confidence in American exceptionalism.

Samantha Power, the Grand HIgh Witch US ambassador to the UN

Power’s comment above came in the midst of a discussion of the carnage in Syria, a discussion without substance or pity, without a care for ending the killing. Her tone and content were in sharp, ugly contrast to the report of UN aid chief Stephen O’Brien addressing the Security Council about the layered wars in Syria that began with peaceful protests early in 2011:

Each month, I have come before you and presented an ever-worsening record of destruction and atrocity, grimly cataloguing the systematic destruction of a country and its people. While my job is to relay to you the facts, I cannot help but be incandescent with rage. Month after month, worse and worse, and nothing is actually happening to stop the war, stop the suffering.

Stephen O’Brien is “incandescent with rage” at the outrage that is Syria, and the perhaps greater outrage of inaction by the Security Council as a body as well as its individual states. O’Brien bears witness to destruction and atrocity that the council cannot stop and to which its member states contribute. They do not express rage, incandescent or otherwise; they express the snide posturing of politics and tactical advantage.

Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Federation’s ambassador to the UN, said O’Brien had delivered a sermon, not an objective report. Churkin said that the Russian Federation continued to negotiate with armed groups, continued to deliver humanitarian aid by the ton, and continued the eight-day-old bombing pause. Churkin said Aleppo was worse because the Al Nusra Front had not yet fulfilled its promise to separate from more moderate opposition forces. Churkin said that negotiation demands were constantly changing, that fighters used civilians as human shields, that a political solution should remain the first priority, and that New Zealand should be thanked for working to build a consensus among the members to end the fighting.

The American response is as heartbreaking as ever:

Samantha Power responded to the Russian assertion of facts not with rebuttal, but with sarcasm, mockery, and pettiness. Hers is an essentially ad hominem response that allows no credit for a bombing halt of any duration. And no wonder. Power speaks for a country that bombs others more or less at will for as long as it likes. The US has bombed Afghanistan without serious surcease since 2001, and Iraq almost as long. The US continues to participate in the Saudi Arabian coalition’s relentless bombing of Yemen’s hospitals, schools, and funerals, taking part in war crimes as part of a criminal war.

Mockingly, the ambassador from the country of military shock and awe acts as if her hands are clean from decades of devastation visited upon the region. Power acts as if the US aerial destruction brought to bear on defenseless tribes in Afghanistan and Pakistan or defenseless urban civilians in Syria, Iraq and Yemen had never happened. Power has nothing to say about American use of depleted uranium weapons that leave their targets – both people and the land – as radioactive threats to human health for generations.

The US/Saudi assault on Yemen uses cluster bombs in civilian areas, but Samantha Power has no sarcastic objection to that. The US manufactures cluster bombs – banned by most of the rest of the world – to sell to the Saudis to use in civilian areas in Yemen. The US had no hesitation using bunker-busting bombs in laying waste to Iraq.

Beyond her heavy-handed mockery, Power offered nothing useful. She might have admitted the constant pattern of American war crimes, especially since 2001, whether torture, kidnapping, imprisonment at dark sites, drone strikes, or any of the other horrific acts of American policy throughout the Middle East since World War II. Being the United States means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how sorry your human rights record, no matter how sorry your fidelity to international law, and worst of all in the world of power politics, no matter how sorry your actual accomplishments are. No matter how monstrous American behavior becomes, Samantha Power is paid to praise it as the necessary actions of the world’s indispensible nation.

In 2008, when Samantha Power was part of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, she famously called Hillary Clinton a “monster.” So does it take one to know one?

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

America’s privileged class never had things better. For the vast majority of others, hard times keep getting harder.

Commenting on Friday’s Labor Department jobs report, Trump was right calling the numbers “phony.”

America’s economy is weak, he said earlier, burdened by widespread poverty, high unemployment and underemployment, downward mobility and crushing national debt.

“Our country is in deep trouble.” Trump correctly explained millions of good, high-paying jobs disappeared, sent overseas to low-wage countries.

Most jobs created are rotten ones – part-time, low-pay, poor-or-no benefits ones. Most workers need two or three to survive. Half of the nation’s households are impoverished or bordering it – one missed paycheck from homelessness, hunger and despair.

According to economist John Williams, “Main Street USA is not happy.” Real unemployment is 23%, not the phony 4.9% reported, excluding millions unable to find work so they stopped looking, becoming nonpersons in the process as far as the Labor Department is concerned.

Real inflation is 9.1%. Phony numbers hide reality. Social Security recipients are cheated – this year no increase in benefits over 2015, next year the one announced is too minuscule to matter.

Insurers are raising Obamacare premiums by double-digits next year – on average 25%, in some states much higher, with fewer provider choices and reduced benefits in some cases, putting proper healthcare increasingly out-of-reach for millions without incurring onerous debt.

“Manufacturing never recovered from its pre-recession peak,” said Williams. “Third quarter GDP growth of 2.9% was not credible.”

“Underlying economic reality remains far from recovery and expansion. Headline GDP remained massively inconsistent with recession seen in freight traffic, petroleum usage, corporate revenues, construction, industrial production, broad employment indicators,” housing starts and other economic data.

Fed governors “redefin(ed) economic normalcy” to reflect non-recovery, America’s privileged benefitting, not most others, struggling through protracted Main Street Depression conditions likely to worsen.

Williams explained the incumbent party lost the race for the White House every time since 1932 when annual real disposable income growth was below 2.9%. In Q II 2016, it was 1.8%.

NYT reinvented reality ignored all of the above. On November 4, its editors bashed Trump for truth-telling about the dismal state of America’s economy, citing phony government figures, concealing the deplorable state of things for most people.

“Trump…presumably believes…his best shot at the White House is to insist that the economy is in terrible shape and that he alone can fix it,” said Times editors. When he disagrees with reported data, “he calls them ‘phony numbers.’ “

The Times is part of the state-sponsored conspiracy concealing dismal reality from the public. America’s economy was thirdworldized, increasingly resembling a banana republic, combining neoliberal harshness with police state repression.

With shameless understatement, Times editors said “economic recovery has not touched every American equally.” They failed to explain the vast majority was left out.

Costs of essentials to survive keep rising. Incomes fail to keep pace, so the standard of living for most Americans keeps falling.

Will Trump fix things? He’ll try unsuccessfully without majority congressional support. What about Hillary? She’s beholden to Wall Street, war profiteers and other corporate predators.

Harder than ever hard times are likely if she succeeds Obama. Her promises otherwise were Big Lies. Times editors conceal ugly truths in boosting her candidacy instead of responsibly opposing it.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

 

In reality, since even before Syria’s conflict began unfolding in 2011, the United States had been planning for the nation’s division and destruction through the use of militant proxies allied to Al Qaeda since as early as 2007. Like Libya, Syria was meant to be swiftly overwhelmed by covert terrorism and military operations backed by the West and its regional allies, as well as a torrent of psychological, economic, and even cyber warfare.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in a now prophetic 2007 article titled, “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?,” would reveal (emphasis added):

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

However, with Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi’s stubborn defense against NATO-backed militants and direct NATO airstrikes in 2011, time was bought for the Syrian state to move past the initial shock and awe of American designs and strike an operational pace that has since allowed it to weather, even overcome the worst of this proxy conquest.

And since then, US policymakers have searched for “alternatives” to achieve their goals in Syria, without overtly revealing the fact that since even before “day 1,” the US has banked its entire strategy on the use of Al Qaeda and other designated terrorist organizations for the overthrow of the Syrian government and the division of the Syrian state.

Indeed, US Institute for Peace (USIP) vice president of Applied Research on Conflict Steven Heydemann in the New York Times would write in an article titled, “You Don’t Need a No-Fly Zone to Pressure Russia in Syria,” that:This includes the current US-designed, Turkish-led incursion into northern Syria to create what US policymakers have been calling a “buffer zone” since at least as early as 2012, as well as a plan to designate the northern Syrian city of Idlib the new, “internationally recognized” capital of Syria.

The most effective diplomatic means for the United States to regain leverage in Syria is for Washington to lead an international effort to undermine the Assad government’s claims and recognize a different government as the legitimate representative of the Syrian people.

The best candidate for recognition is the little-known Syrian Interim Government, or S.I.G. Unlike many other opposition groups, which are based in Turkey, the S.I.G. is based inside Syria, with offices in Idlib and scattered throughout opposition-held territory.

The problem with Heydemann’s proposal is the same problem that has plagued the entirety of US policy toward Syria, the essential but unobtainable requirement of covering up the opposition’s obvious ties to Al Qaeda.

Idlib is Al Qaeda Central  

It is in Idlib that the US itself admits it has been regularly targeting senior leaders of Al Qaeda. The most recent was revealed on November 2, with the US State Department’s own propaganda channel, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in an article titled, “Pentagon Says It Killed Senior Al-Qaeda Leader,” admitting:

A U.S. drone strike in Syria killed a senior Al-Qaeda leader who once had ties to Osama bin Laden, the Pentagon said on November 2. 

The October 17 strike near Idlib killed Haydar Kirkan, who “was intent on plotting and carrying out attacks against the West,” Pentagon spokesman Captain Jeff Davis said.

And early last month, the US would admit that yet another terrorist leader was targeted and allegedly killed – also in Idlib, Syria. The Business Insider in an article titled, “Egyptian al Qaeda leader killed by US drone strike in Idlib, Syria,” would reveal:

Syria’s militant Jabhat Fateh al Sham, formerly the Nusra Front, said on Monday that Egyptian cleric Abu al Faraj al Masri, a prominent member of the militant group, had been killed in a strike by the U.S.-led coalition.

In addition to the Pentagon finding Idlib to be a seemingly “target rich environment” for Al Qaeda leaders, the Western media itself has – over the years – admitted that Idlib is perhaps second only to Al Raqqa in terms of serving as a nexus for Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

The Wall Street Journal in a 2015 article titled, “Assad Loses Final Idlib Stronghold to Al Qaeda-led Insurgents,” would report:

After a two-year siege, al Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria and other insurgents on Wednesday captured the one remaining Syrian army air base in Idlib, a development that activists said effectively expelled the last of President Bashar al-Assad’s military from the northwestern province. 

The Wall Street Journal article also admits the similarities between Idlib and the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS) controlled city of Al Raqqa, claiming:

This makes Idlib the second of Syria’s 14 provinces to slip completely from Syrian army control. Earlier this year, militant groups captured the provincial capital, also called Idlib, as well as other towns and villages. 

The province of Raqqa fell to Islamic State extremists last year, after IS militants captured its provincial capital, also called Raqqa, in January 2014. Islamic State group has since declared the city as the seat of its caliphate, which spans a third of both Syria and Iraq.

USIP’s Steven Heydemann in his NYT op-ed is essentially calling on the West to recognize a city in a region completely overrun by Al Qaeda as the new “capital” of Syria and recognize an obscure, irrelevant puppet as Syria’s legitimate leader despite not only his impotent “Syrian Interim Government” holding no control over any section of Syria, including Idlib itself, but the reality that even Al Qaeda and ISIS combined still control only a fraction of Syria’s population.

US to Make Al Qaeda Capital in Syria, Syria’s Capital?

Over 60% of the Syrian population lives in government controlled territory, with this number rising monthly as security operations to restore order across the country continue to garner success, particularly in Aleppo. This includes control over most of Syria’s largest cities, including Damascus itself, most of Aleppo, Homs, Latakia, Hama, Tartus, and Daraa.

Heydemann’s plan – like all US “plans” before it – at face value and amid its more intricate details contradict the US’ own rationale for becoming involved in Syria in the first place. Handing a nation over to an unpopular, illegitimate minority in no shape, form, or way constitutes “democracy” – even the strained definitions used by the West to describe it. With Heydemann’s “Syrian Interim Government” existing in the very center of Al Qaeda’s operations in Syria, no plan to date has so transparently attempted to protect and preserve designated terrorist organizations operating in Syria.Idlib, on the other hand, doesn’t rank even among Syria’s top ten most populated cities – making plans to designate it a de facto capital all the more transparently absurd.

Considering the second part of Heydemann’s plan includes a revised version of a US-initiated no-fly zone, US assets would literally be used in Syria to protect Al Qaeda’s de facto capital in Idlib from Syrian or Russian attacks.

To foil America’s “Plan C” in Syria – which in reality is simply a revised version of its original plan all along – media platforms operating beyond the influence of Western special interests much educate the public regarding the true nature of Idlib, who really runs it, and what the implications are of arbitrarily designating it and the terrorists that are occupying it the “legitimate government of Syria.”

By doing this, not only will the US continue to struggle to sell its floundering policies to the public, it will further reveal the truth about US intentions in Syria, stretching back to 2007 when journalists even then attempted to raise the alarm over the West’s use of Al Qaeda a proxy force to divide and destroy nations the world over.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

HEBRON, OCCUPIED WEST BANK — Mofid Sharabati shifted uncomfortably on the edge of his bed, having offered all other available seats to the cadre of journalists sprawled across his tiny living room. He waited patiently while his company ate shawarma wraps, still warm after being hand-delivered from a local establishment up the road. He eyed his 10-year-old son Marwan paternally as he dashed back and forth, tiny hands diligently disposing of tin foil and used food wrappers as people finished their meals.

After a few moments, one of the journalists asked Sharabati to describe life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

We live in fear 24 hours a day.

“We live in fear 24 hours a day,” he immediately said, speaking through a translator. Marwan, now sitting next to him, nodded in agreement. He stared at his feet, fidgeting with the ends of his oversized basketball jersey.

The room of journalists sat quietly for a second, unsure of what to ask next.

Sharabati and his family live in Hebron, the largest city in the occupied West Bank and home to around 200,000 Palestinians. I visited Sharabati’s tiny second-story apartment in mid-October as part of a delegation of journalists traveling with the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a left-of-center organization based in Washington, D.C. that seeks a “just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” through advocacy and education efforts — including highlighting the Palestinian cause.

A journalist holds aloft a sound bomb, used to disperse demonstrators in Hebron. CREDIT: Jack jenkins

Our trip coincided with a rash of violence that has raged across Israel-Palestine over the past two months, resulting in the deaths of 11 Israelis and more than 58 Palestinians, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Much has been written about the various causes of the fighting, during which Palestinians are frequently shot dead, often after attacking Israeli soldiers and citizens, usually with knives. Some argue the attackers, many of whom are teenagers or even children, are inspired by anti-Israeli messages shared on social media, or religious militants such as ISIS who have endorsed the stabbings. Others — including many of the attackers themselves — say they are responding to perceived efforts by Jewish activistsand the Israeli government to erode Muslim control of the Al-Aqsa mosque in East Jerusalem, the third holiest site in Islam.

But as analysts furiously debate the immediate catalyst for the attacks, there has been less focus on another factor that — while perhaps not the spark that lit the latest blaze — undoubtedly created the conditions for tension in the first place: Israel’s longstanding occupation of the West Bank territories, including the construction of settlements the United Nations deems illegal and whose legitimacy the United States government rejects.

Sharabati and his family offered me a glimpse into life under this occupation, detailing the trials endured by many Palestinians who are all too often literally caught in the crossfire. ThinkProgress could not independently verify all aspects of Sharabati’s story, but his account closely matches numerous reports of Palestinian life published by groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.

The checkpoint

Even within the notoriously tense West Bank, Hebron is a uniquely combustible city. Located roughly 45 minutes south of Jerusalem, violence between Israelis and Palestinians has erupted numerous times over the years — even before the the establishment of the state of Israel. Locals say this is largely due to the presence of Israeli settlements, which are considered invasive by Palestinians but vociferously defended by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the settlers themselves, who insist they have every right to be there. Clashes between the two camps have been recurrent, including the horrific slaughter of 67 Jewish civilians in 1929, after which most Jews abandoned Hebron for several years. When settlers returned in 1967, nets were installedin the town’s Old City to keep Israeli settlers from tossing stones and garbage onto Palestinians as they passed below.

Things reached a breaking point in 1994, when an American-born Israeli settler massacred 29 Muslim worshippers at a shrine known to Jews as the Tomb of the Patriarchs and to Muslims as the Ibrahimi Mosque. The increasingly volatile situation was then addressed in 1997, when officials signed an agreement to partition the city into two sections: “H1,” to be controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), and “H2,” to be controlled by Israel.

A checkpoint in Hebron. CREDIT: Jack jenkins

The imperfect results were on full display just down the street from Sharabati’s home, where a checkpoint divides a Palestinian-controlled section of the city from an Israeli-controlled area. Sharabati and his brother greeted me and other journalists on the Palestinian side of the heavily-armed barrier, surrounded by curiosity seekers who stopped to observe the arrival of yet another group of journalists. Hundreds of Hebron residents strolled past as we exited our vehicle, chattering in Arabic while shopping and eating in the heart of the thriving city.

Yet the crowds steered clear of the nearby concrete blocks that marked the entrance to the checkpoint. Israeli sound bombs and empty tear gas canisters littered the pavement in front of a looming, fence-covered military installation, the refuse of efforts by IDF soldiers to dispel various protests that have sprung up during the recent unrest.

At the direction of our guide, we passed through the checkpoint one at time, a standard procedure made all the more unsettling in the wake of recent stabbings. A trio of heavily armed IDF soldiers greeted us on the other side, weapons out, as a fourth watched us from above. After they let us pass, an eerily deserted street opened up before us, a far cry from the teaming masses we left behind a few moments before.

As our party walked down the empty Shuhada Street towards Sharabati’s abode — flanked all the while by two soldiers — the translator explained that the emptiness was due to the city’s bizarre system of subdivisions, where various roads and sections are restricted to Palestinians. Sharabati and his children, for instance, live on the Israeli side of the checkpoint, where only Palestinians with homes can enter if they have explicit permission from the Israeli army. Other areas ban Palestinian businesses, and some forbid them from even walking down the street.

A former IDF member — speaking as part of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects testimonies of ex-soldiers — would later tell me that the military has a name for these roads: “sterile streets.”

CREDIT: Source: B’Tselem

The draconian measures are justified by the Israeli government as necessary to ensure security; Sharabati and other Palestinian Hebron residents have few, if any, options for protest. Although their land is occupied by the Israeli government, the Palestinians living in the West Bank are not citizens of Israel, and the residents living anywhere other than East Jerusalem are not afforded the ability to apply for citizenship — even if they marry an Israeli. Instead, they are subject to an entirely different legal system: Palestinians operate under military law, where many rights and privileges standard for an Israeli — such as seeing a judge within 24 hours of being arrested — are not guaranteed. Although they can vote for leaders of the PA, they cannot vote in elections for the Israeli government, which ultimately controls many facets of their daily life.

Most Palestinians who used to live on Sharabati’s street have abandoned their homes, citing harassment from Israeli settlers and soldiers. Sharabati made similar claims, noting that sometimes soldiers “throw rocks at us.”

Yet despite these difficulties, he refuses to move.

“This has been my family’s home for 150 years,” he said, defiantly.

Punished for bearing witness

The decision to stay in their ancestral home in Hebron has not made life easy for Sharabati, or the others who live in his house. Every member of his family could recount troubling run-ins with authorities and nearby settlers. Sharabati handed journalists x-rays of his back, showing a series of pins used to repair his broken spine after he reportedly tried to defend his home from an invasion of settlers and members of the IDF. His brother’s visibly injured eye, he said, was misshapen during the same altercation.

Even his son Marwan, who struggled to reach the hat rack to put away a scarf during our visit, was reportedly detained by police in October for several hours. His alleged crime: holding a stone.

  

A barrier pierced by bullets used to kill a Palestinian woman in late September. CREDIT: Jack Jenkins

When the family isn’t the victim of violence, it is often a witness to it.

At least three different Palestinians were gunned down near their home during the recent surge of knife attacks, all of which showcase longstanding tensions among area groups. One occurred in a neighboring section of the city on October 17, when an Israeli soldier opened fire after being stabbed by 18-year-old Palestinian Tarek Ziad Natsha. The local settler population reportedly blocked the ambulance tasked with carrying the wounded attacker to the hospital, but were eventually dispersed by police, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Natsha died in the hospital. The soldier survived.

Meanwhile, two other shooting incidents near Sharabati’s home are being investigated as examples of unnecessary use of force. The first occurred on September 22, when a woman named Hadeel al-Hashlamoun was shot and killed by soldiers for allegedly threatening them with a knife. At least two bystanders disputed this account, and many pointed out that she was behind a barricade when they opened fire. Bullet holes from the encounter — clearly piercing through the barrier — are still visible when passing through the checkpoint, raising questions as to whether she presented an imminent threat. A report from Amnesty International has since declared her death unnecessary, classifying it as an “extrajudicial execution.”

Fadel Mohammed al-Qawasameh’s blood still stains the street outside Sharabati’s home. CREDIT: Jack Jenkins 

It was the second shooting in less than a month, however, that left a lasting impression on the Sharabati family. On October 17, Fadel Mohammed al-Qawasameh, an 18-year-old resident of Hebron, was gunned down by an Israeli settler immediately outside the family’s house, again for allegedly trying to stab someone. But as the boy lay dying, a video was shot from Sharabati’s window that appears to show officials placing something next to the dying body. Local Palestinians cited this as proof that the soldiers planted evidence, and the clip quickly went viral.

The response from the IDF was swift. When the military learned of the tape, Sharabati said they raided his home, a common occurrence for Palestinians living under military rule. He said they then confiscated his camera and laptop, broke them, and arrested his brother — supposedly for emailing the video to others.

“This is the life we live every day,” he said. “We live in fear they could come back into our home at any time. There is always someone awake.”

Meanwhile, al-Qawasameh’s blood still stains the pavement just feet from the family’s doorstep. They walk by it every day.

Jack Jenkins

Senior Religion Reporter at ThinkProgress. Player of harmonica and ukulele. Tips: [email protected]

This interview was filmed in the Embassy of Ecuador in London – where Julian Assange is a political refugee –  and broadcast on November 5, 2016

(transcript)

John Pilger: 

What’s the significance of the FBI’s intervention in these last days of the U.S. election campaign, in the case against Hillary Clinton?

Julian Assange:

If you look at the history of the FBI, it has become effectively America’s political police. The FBI demonstrated this by taking down the former head of the CIA [General David Petraeus] over classified information given to his mistress. Almost no-one is untouchable.  The FBI is always trying to demonstrate that no-one can resist us.  But Hillary Clinton very conspicuously resisted the FBI’s investigation, so there’s anger within the FBI because it made the FBI look weak.  We’ve published about 33,000 of Clinton’s emails when she was Secretary of State.  They come from a batch of just over 60,000 emails, [of which] Clinton has kept about half – 30,000 — to herself, and we’ve published about half.

Then there are the Podesta emails we’ve been publishing.  [John] Podesta is Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign manager, so there’s a thread that runs through all these emails; there are quite a lot of pay-for-play, as they call it, giving access in exchange for money to states, individuals and corporations. [These emails are] combined with the cover up of the Hillary Clinton emails when she was Secretary of State, [which] has led to an environment where the pressure on the FBI increases.

John Pilger:

The Clinton campaign has said that Russia is behind all of this, that Russia has manipulated the campaign and is the source for WikiLeaks and its emails.

Julian Assange:

The Clinton camp has been able to project that kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria: that Russia is responsible for everything.  Hilary Clinton stated multiple times, falsely, that seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies had assessed that Russia was the source of our publications. That is false; we can say that the Russian government is not the source.

WikiLeaks has been publishing for ten years, and in those ten years, we have published ten million documents, several thousand individual publications, several thousand different sources, and we have never got it wrong.

 
John Pilger:

The emails that give evidence of access for money and how Hillary Clinton herself benefited from this and how she is benefitting politically, are quite extraordinary. I’m thinking of  when the Qatari representative was given five minutes with Bill Clinton for a million dollar cheque.

Julian Assange:

And twelve million dollars from Morocco …

John Pilger:

Twelve million from Morocco yeah.

Julian Assange:

For Hillary Clinton to attend [a party].

John Pilger:

In terms of the foreign policy of the United States, that’s where the emails are most revealing, where they show the direct connection between Hillary Clinton and the foundation of jihadism, of ISIL, in the Middle East.  Can you talk about how the emails demonstrate the connection between those who are meant to be fighting the jihadists of ISIL, are actually those who have helped create it.

Julian Assange:

There’s an early 2014 email from Hillary Clinton, not so long after she left the State Department, to her campaign manager John Podesta that states ISIL is funded by the governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Now this is the most significant email in the whole collection, and perhaps because Saudi and Qatari money is spread all over the Clinton Foundation.  Even the U.S. government agrees that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIL, or ISIS. But the dodge has always been that, well it’s just some rogue Princes, using their cut of the oil money to do whatever they like, but actually the government disapproves.

But that email says that no, it is the governments of Saudi and  Qatar that have been funding ISIS.

 John Pilger:

The Saudis, the Qataris, the Moroccans, the Bahrainis, particularly the Saudis and the Qataris, are giving all this money to the Clinton Foundation while Hilary Clinton is Secretary of State and the State Department is approving massive arms sales, particularly to Saudi Arabia.

Julian Assange:

Under Hillary Clinton, the world’s largest ever arms deal was made with Saudi Arabia, [worth] more than $80 billion.  In fact, during her tenure as Secretary of State, total arms exports from the United States in terms of the dollar value, doubled.

John Pilger:

Of course the consequence of that is that the notorious terrorist group called ISIl or ISIS is created largely with money from the very people who are giving money to the Clinton Foundation.

Julian Assange:

Yes.

 John Pilger:

That’s extraordinary.

Julian Assange:

I actually feel quite sorry for Hillary Clinton as a person because I see someone who is eaten alive by their ambitions,  tormented literally to the point where they become sick; they faint as a result of [the reaction] to their ambitions. She represents a whole network of people and a network of relationships with particular states.  The question is how does Hilary Clinton fit in this broader network?  She’s a centralising cog. You’ve got a lot of different gears in operation from the big banks like Goldman Sachs and major elements of Wall Street, and Intelligence and people in the State Department and the Saudis.

She’s the centraliser that inter-connects all these different cogs.  She’s the smooth central representation of all that, and ‘all that’ is more or less what is in power now in the United States. It’s what we call the establishment or the DC consensus. One of the more significant Podesta emails that we released was about how the Obama cabinet was formed and how half the Obama cabinet was basically nominated by a representative from City Bank. This is quite amazing.

John Pilger:

Didn’t Citybank supply a list …. ?

Julian Assange:

Yes.

John Pilger:

 … which turned out to be most of the Obama cabinet.

Julian Assange:

Yes.

John Pilger:

So Wall Street decides the cabinet of the President of the United States?

Julian Assange:

If you were following the Obama campaign back then, closely, you could see it had become very close to banking interests.

Julian Assange:

So I think you can’t properly understand Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy without understanding Saudi Arabia.  The connections with Saudi Arabia are so intimate.

John Pilger:

Why was she so demonstrably enthusiastic about the destruction of Libya?  Can you talk a little about just what the emails have told us, told you about what happened there, because Libya is such a source for so much of the mayhem now in Syria, the ISIL jihadism and so on, and it was almost Hillary Clinton’s invasion.  What do the emails tell us about that?

Julian Assange:

Libya, more than anyone else’s war, was Hillary Clinton’s war. Barak Obama initially opposed it. Who was the person championing it?  Hillary Clinton.  That’s documented throughout her emails. She had put her favoured agent, Sidney Blumenthal, on to that; there’s more than 1700 emails out of the thirty three thousand Hillary Clinton emails that we’ve published, just about Libya. It’s not that Libya has cheap oil. She perceived the removal of Gaddafi and the overthrow of the Libyan state — something that she would use in her run-up to the general election for President.

So in late 2011 there is an internal document called the Libya Tick Tock that was produced for Hillary Clinton, and it’s the chronological description of how she was the central figure in the destruction of the Libyan state, which resulted in around 40,000 deaths within Libya; jihadists moved in, ISIS moved in, leading to the European refugee and migrant crisis.

Not only did you have people fleeing Libya, people fleeing Syria, the destabilisation of other African countries as a result of arms flows, but the Libyan state itself err was no longer able to control the movement of people through it. Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa — previously people fleeing those problems didn’t end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi:  ‘What do these Europeans think they’re doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There’s going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe, and this is exactly what happened.

John Pilger:

You get complaints from people saying, ‘What is WikiLeaks doing?  Are they trying to put Trump in the Whitehouse?’

Julian Assange:

My answer is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that?  Because he’s had every establishment off side; Trump doesn’t have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if you can call them an establishment, but banks, intelligence [agencies], arms companies… big foreign money … are all united behind Hillary Clinton, and the media as well, media owners and even journalists themselves.

John Pilger:

There is the accusation that WikiLeaks is in league with the Russians. Some people say, ‘Well, why doesn’t WikiLeaks investigate and publish emails on Russia?’

Julian Assange:

We have published about 800,000 documents of various kinds that relate to Russia. Most of those are critical; and a great many books have come out of our publications about Russia, most of which are critical. Our [Russia]documents have gone on to be used in quite a number of court cases: refugee cases of people fleeing some kind of claimed political persecution in Russia, which they use our documents to back up.

John Pilger:

Do you yourself take a view of the U.S. election?  Do you have a preference for Clinton or Trump?

Julian Assange:

[Let’s talk about] Donald Trump. What does he represent in the American mind and in the European mind?  He represents American white trash, [which Hillary Clinton called] ‘deplorable and irredeemable’.  It means from an establishment or educated cosmopolitan, urbane perspective, these people are like the red necks, and you can never deal with them.  Because he so clearly — through his words and actions and the type of people that turn up at his rallies — represents people who are not the middle, not the upper middle educated class, there is a fear of seeming to be associated in any way with them, a social fear that lowers the class status of anyone who can be accused of somehow assisting Trump in any way, including any criticism of Hillary Clinton. If you look at how the middle class gains its economic and social power, that makes absolute sense.

John Pilger:

I’d like to talk about Ecuador, the small country that has given you refuge and [political asylum] in this embassy in London.  Now Ecuador has cut off the internet from here where we’re doing this interview, in the Embassy, for the clearly obvious reason that they are concerned about appearing to intervene in the U.S. election campaign.  Can you talk about why they would take that action and your own views on Ecuador’s support for you?

Julian Assange:

Let’s let go back four years.  I made an asylum application to Ecuador in this embassy, because of the U.S. extradition case, and the result was that after a month, I was successful in my asylum application. The embassy since then has been surrounded by police: quite an expensive police operation which the British government admits to spending more than £12.6 million. They admitted that over a year ago.  Now there’s undercover police and there are robot surveillance cameras of various kinds — so that there has been quite a serious conflict right here in the heart of London between Ecuador, a country of sixteen million people, and the United Kingdom, and the Americans who have been helping on the side.  So that was a brave and principled thing for Ecuador to do. Now we have the U.S. election [campaign], the Ecuadorian election is in February next year, and you have the White House feeling the political heat as a result of the true information that we have been publishing.

WikiLeaks does not publish from the jurisdiction of Ecuador, from this embassy or in the territory of Ecuador; we publish from France, we publish from, from Germany, we publish from The Netherlands and from a number of other countries, so that the attempted squeeze on WikiLeaks is through my refugee status; and this is, this is really intolerable. [It means] that [they] are trying to get at a publishing organisation; [they] try and prevent it from publishing true information that is of intense interest to the American people and others about an election.

John Pilger:

Tell us what would happen if you walked out of this embassy.

Julian Assange:

I would be immediately arrested by the British police and I would then be extradited either immediately to the United States or to Sweden. In Sweden I am not charged, I have already been previously cleared [by the Senior Stockholm Prosecutor Eva Finne]. We were not certain exactly what would happen there, but then we know that the Swedish government has refused to say that they will not extradite me to the United States we know they have extradited 100 per cent of people whom the U.S. has requested since at least 2000.  So over the last fifteen years, every single person the U.S. has tried to extradite from Sweden has been extradited, and they refuse to provide a guarantee [that won’t happen].

John Pilger:

People often ask me how you cope with the isolation in here.

Julian Assange:

Look, one of the best attributes of human beings is that they’re adaptable; one of the worst attributes of human beings is they are adaptable.  They adapt and start to tolerate abuses, they adapt to being involved themselves in abuses, they adapt to adversity and they continue on. So in my situation, frankly, I’m a bit institutionalised — this [the embassy] is the world .. it’s visually the world [for me].

John Pilger:

It’s the world without sunlight, for one thing, isn’t it?

Julian Assange:

It’s the world without sunlight, but I haven’t seen sunlight in so long, I don’t remember it.

John Pilger:

Yes.

Julian Assange:

So , yes, you adapt.  The one real irritant is that my young children — they also adapt. They adapt to being without their father. That’s a hard, hard adaption which they didn’t ask for.

 John Pilger:

Do you worry about them?

Julian Assange:

Yes, I worry about them; I worry about their mother.

John Pilger:

Some people would say, ‘Well, why don’t you end it and simply walk out the door and allow yourself to be extradited to Sweden?’

Julian Assange:

The U.N. [the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention] has looked into this whole situation. They spent eighteen months in formal, adversarial litigation. [So it’s] me and the U.N. verses Sweden and the U.K.  Who’s right?  The U.N. made a conclusion that I am being arbitrarily detained illegally, deprived of my freedom and that what has occurred has not occurred within the laws that the United Kingdom and Sweden, and that [those countries] must obey. It is an illegal abuse.  It is the United Nations formally asking, ‘What’s going on here?  What is your legal explanation for this? [Assange] says that you should recognise his asylum.’ [And here is]

Sweden formally writing back to the United Nations to say, ‘No, we’re not going to [recognise the UN ruling], so leaving open their ability to extradite.

I just find it absolutely amazing that the narrative about this situation is not put out publically in the press, because it doesn’t suit the Western establishment narrative — that yes, the West has political prisoners, it’s a reality, it’s not just me, there’s a bunch of other people as well.  The West has political prisoners. Of course, no state accepts [that it should call] the people it is imprisoning or detaining for political reasons, political prisoners. They don’t call them political prisoners in China, they don’t call them political prisoners in Azerbaijan and they don’t call them political prisoners in the United States, U.K. or Sweden; it is absolutely intolerable to have that kind of self-perception.

Julian Assange:

Here we have a case, the Swedish case, where I have never been charged with a crime, where I have already been cleared [by the Stockholm prosecutor] and found to be innocent, where the woman herself said that the police made it up, where the United Nations formally said the whole thing is illegal, where the State of Ecuador also investigated and found that I should be given asylum.  Those are the facts, but what is the rhetoric?

John Pilger:

Yes, it’s different.

Julian Assange:

The rhetoric is pretending, constantly pretending that I have been charged with a crime, and never mentioning that I have been already previously cleared, never mentioning that the woman herself says that the police made it up.

[The rhetoric] is trying to avoid [the truth that ] the U.N. formally found that the whole thing is illegal, never even mentioning that Ecuador made a formal assessment through its formal processes and found that yes, I am subject to persecution by the United States. 

To support Julian Assange, go to: https://justice4assange.com/donate.html

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton made the following statement regarding the State Department’s release of 74 additional emails recovered by the FBI in its investigation of former Secretary of State Clinton’s use of a non-state.gov email system. Included in the new documents was an email in which Clinton forwarded classified information to her daughter, Chelsea, at the unsecure email address [email protected]. Before releasing the heavily redacted email to Judicial Watch, the State Department marked it “B1.4(b)” and “B1.4(d),” indicating that it contained “Foreign Government Information’ and “Foreign relations or foreign activities of the US including confidential sources.” The State Department also misleadingly labeled the email with the term “near duplicate.”

No wonder Hillary Clinton deleted this email. Her sharing classified information with her daughter shows criminal disregard for national security.

The State Department has been producing documents in accordance with a September 23, 2016, court order issued by Judge Boasberg, who ordered the Department of State to begin processing at least 1,050 pages of Hillary Clinton emails recovered by the FBI and provide Judicial Watch all non-exempt documents before November 4.  State Department confirmed in September that the FBI had discovered nearly 15,000 new Clinton emails as a result of Judicial Watch’s litigation seeking all of Clinton’s work-related emails (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:15-cv-00687)).

Hillary Clinton has repeatedly stated that she believes that the 55,000 pages of documents she turned over to the State Department in December 2014 included all of her work-related emails.  In response to a court order in other Judicial Watch litigation, she declared under penalty of perjury that she had “directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or are potentially federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done.”  This new email find is also at odds with her official campaign statement suggesting all “work or potentially work-related emails” were provided to the State Department.

A hearing will be held Monday, November 7, 2016, regarding Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking emails sent or received by Clinton in her official capacity during her tenure as Secretary of State. The timeframe for this request is February 2, 2009, to January 31, 2013.

“Hillary Clinton: Wall Street’s Losing Horse? Constitutional Crisis? What’s the End Game?” is discussed;

Who is behind Wikileaks;

FBI Director James Comey responding to a crisis;

WSJ reports Clinton bribery of number two man at the FBI; dissent within ruling powers including the armed forces and intelligence agencies;

Next US presidency will be a dysfunctional one which might lead eventually to a situation of martial law; 

Unfolding political impasse;  rising geopolitical tensions abroad;

The possibility of nuclear WWIII;

Potential suspension of constitutional governance; Hillary Clinton’s extensive criminal record will haunt her. 

 

The power above the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the US Attorney General, and, above that person, the US President.

That’s whom the FBI actually serves — not the US public.

This is the reason why the FBI is having such internal tensions and dissensions over the investigation of Hillary Clinton: Not only is she the current President’s ardently preferred and designated successor — and overwhelmingly supported also by America’s aristocracy and endorsed by the aristocracy’s press — but the top leadership of the FBI have terms-in-office that (unlike, for example, the term of the US Attorney General) do not end with the installation of the next President; and these people will therefore be serving, quite possibly, the very same person whom they are now ‘investigating’.

This is the reason why James Comey, the FBI’s Director, let Clinton totally off the hook on July 5th, when he declined to present the case to a grand jury: he and the rest of the FBI’s top management violated three basic principles of trying white-collar-crime cases when a prosecutor is serious about wanting to prosecute and obtain a conviction against a person — he (and they) wanted to keep their jobs, not be fighting their boss and their likely future boss.

If America were an authentic democracy, there would be a way for the FBI to serve the public even when the US President doesn’t want it to. According to the only scientific study that has ever been done of the matter, the US federal government is a dictatorship not a democracy. This was reluctantly reported by the researchers, whose own careers are dependent upon the aristocracy which they were finding actually controls that government. They found that the US, at the federal level, is not a democracy but an «oligarchy», by which the researchers were referring to an «economic elite», America’s billionaires and centi-millionaires who control America’s international corporations and the ‘charities’ (such as think tanks) that are dependent upon them — including many that directly affect US politics, such as the think tanks or other way-stations for former US government employees to become hired by private firms.

The authors of the only empirical scientific research-study that has been done of whether the United States is a democracy, or instead a dictatorship, excluded the very term «aristocracy» (or «collective dictatorship» such as an «economic elite» is if that «elite» actually is in control of the given nation’s government) from their article. They did this so as for the meaning not to be clear to the US public. In any country in the modern world where an aristocracy exists, aristocrats nowadays try to hide their power, not (like in former eras) display their power by crowns and other public symbols of ‘the nobility’. The closest the study’s authors came to using that term, «aristocracy», was their only sentence that employed the pejorative term for an aristocracy, «oligarchy». That obscure lone sentence was: «Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of ‘Oligarchy,’ in which the wealthiest citizens — even in a ‘civil oligarchy’ like the United States — dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth and income protection.11″

Their 11th footnote made clear that they were referring here to the book Oligarchy, by Jeffrey A. Winters, which stated the ‘theory’ that this article had actually just confirmed in the American case. Their article mentioned the book — and the «oligarchy» — only in this one footnote, so that the authors of the article (whose own careers are dependent upon America’s ‘oligarchs’) won’t be able to be accused by oligarchs (or in any way thought by their own financial benefactors — America’s aristocrats) to have called the US an «oligarchy» (a collective dictatorship by the few super-rich and their agents). To apply either term — «aristocracy» or «oligarchy» — to one’s own country, is now viewed as negative, an insult to the country’s controlling elite. Neither scholars nor scholarly publishers wish to insult the people who ultimately are their top funders.

This article was written in the standard unnecessarily obscurantist style of social ‘scientists’ who want to be comprehensible only to their peers and not to the general public. Doing it this way is safer for them, because it makes extremely unlikely that their own benefactors would retaliate, against them or else against the institutions that hire them, by withdrawing their continued financial and promotional support (such as by no longer having them invited onto CNN as an «expert»). (This type of fear prevents theory in the social ‘sciences’ from being strictly based upon the given field’s empirical findings: it’s not authentically scientific. The physical sciences are far less corrupt, far more scientific. The biological sciences are in-between.)

One particular reason why the authors never called the people who control the US government an «aristocracy», is that everyone knows that the Founders of the US were opposed to, and were engaged in overthrowing, the existing aristocracy, which happened to be British, and that they even banned forever in the US the use of aristocratic titles, such as «Lord» or «Sir.» Consequently, within the US, the only term that the aristocrats consider acceptable to refer to aristocrats, is «oligarchs», which always refers only to aristocrats in foreign countries, and so is considered safe by the aristocrats’ writers (including scholars and political pundits) to use.

Everyone knows: in accord with the clear intention of America’s Founders, the US should eliminate from its citizenry any aristocrat (any self-enclosed and legally immune group that holds power over the government), but Americans naturally accept the existence of «oligarchs» in other countries (and «good-riddance to them there»), typically the ones in countries US foreign policy opposes and often overthrows by means of coup or outright military invasion (any form of conquest, such as in 2003 Iraq, or 2011 Libya). It’s fine to refer to other countries’ aristocracies as ‘oligarchies’, because any such foreign aristocracy can therefore be declared to be bad and ‘deserving’ of overthrow.

Thus, any aristocracy that is opposed to America’s aristocracy (especially one that’s opposed to being controlled by the US aristocracy), and which wants to be controlling instead their own independent nation, can acceptably be overthrown by coup (such as Ukraine 2014 was) or invasion (such as Libya 2011 was). Thus, calling a foreign aristocracy an «oligarchy» is supportive of, not opposed to, the US aristocracy — and, so, «oligarchy» is the term the authors used (on that one occasion, and they never used the prohibited term «aristocracy»).

Nonetheless, despite the cultural ban on describing the US as an «aristocracy», the authors were — as obscurely as they were able — proving that the US is an aristocracy, no authentic democracy at all. Or, again, as they said it in their least-obscurantist phrasing of it:

Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite Americans — though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set of policy cases — is probably less consistent with the relevant preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.

‘Greater’ than what? They didn’t say. That’s because what they were saying (as obscurely as possible) is that it’s probably ‘greater’ than is shown in the data that was publicly available to them, and upon which data their clear finding is that the US is an aristocracy, no democracy at all. Or, as they also put it: “Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis.» But, actually, «Economic Elite Domination theories» (virtually all of which come down to positing an aristocracy that consists of the billionaires — and centi-millionaires — and their corporations, and their think tanks, and their lobbyists, etc.) did phenomenally well, in their findings, not just ‘rather well’ — they simply can’t safely say this. Saying it is samizdat, in the US dictatorship.

They were allowed to prove it, but not to say it. So, that’s what they did. They didn’t want to «upset the applecart» from which they themselves are feeding.

The simplest (but no less accurate) way of stating their finding is: the US, at least during the period the researchers probed, which was 1981-2002, was an aristocracy, no democracy at all. The US, in other words, was (even prior to the infamous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which is making the aristocracy even more concentrated among even fewer people) a country of men (and women — that’s to say, of individuals) not of laws; it’s a dictatorship, in short; it is not a country «of laws, not of men». America’s Founders have finally lost. The country has been taken over by an aristocracy.

And one of those «men» now, is actually Hillary Clinton, even though she is no longer officially holding governmental power. They know she soon might be. That’s why, the FBI cannot really, and seriously, investigate her.

It’s not for legal reasons at all. It’s because of whom she is. In fact, purely on the basis of US laws, she clearly ought to be in prison. Any honest lawyer, inside or outside the FBI, has long known this, because the actual case against her is ‘slam-dunk’, even though the FBI has refused to investigate it and has limited its ‘investigation’ only to peripheral ‘national security’ issues. (The #2 person at FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, right below Director James Comey, specified this limitation to his ‘investigators’. They simply weren’t allowed to investigate her, except on the hardest-to-prove crimes that she probably but not definitely did also do. The slam-dunks were just off-limits to them. McCabe’s wife’s political campaign had received $675,000 from the PAC of Terry McAuliffe, a close friend of the Clintons, who chaired Hillary’s 2008 Presidential campaign. And, even on the harder-to-prove matters, which FBI Director Comey declined on July 5th to pursue, they stood a strong chance of winning, if only Comey hadn’t prevented their moving forward to try — but those issues are tangential to the basic case against her, anyway.)

There are at least six federal criminal laws which accurately and unquestionably describe even what Ms. Clinton has now publicly admitted having done by her privatized email system, and intent isn’t even mentioned in most of them nor necessary in order for her to be convicted — the actions themselves convict her, and the only relevance that intent might have, regarding any of these laws, would be in determining how long her prison sentence would be.

I have already presented the texts of these six laws (and you can see the sentences for each one, right there), and any reader can easily recognize that each one of them describes, unambiguously without any doubt, what she now admits having done. Most of these crimes don’t require any intent in order to convict (and the ones that do require intent are only «knowingly … conceals», or else «with the intent to impair the object’s … use in an official proceeding», both of which «intents» would be easy to prove on the basis of what has already been made public — but others of these laws don’t require even that); and none of them requires any classified information to have been involved, at all. It’s just not an issue in these laws. Thus, conviction under them is far easier. If a prosecutor is really seeking to convict someone, he’ll be aiming to get indictments on the easiest-to-prove charges, first. That also presents for the prosecutor the strongest position in the event of an eventual plea-bargain. As Alan Dershowitz said, commenting on one famous prosecution: «They also wanted a slam-dunk case. They wanted the strongest possible case.» Comey simply didn’t; he wanted the hardest-to-convict case. His presentation was a brazen hoax. That’s all.

That’s the real scandal, and nobody (other than I) has been writing about it as what it is — a hoax. But what it shows is that maybe the only way that Clinton will be able to avoid going to prison is by her going to the White House. Either she gets a term in the White House, or else she gets a (much longer) term in prison — or else our government is so thoroughly corrupt that she remains free as a private citizen and still above the law, even though not serving as a federal official.

Even if she is convicted only on these six slam-dunk statutes (and on none other, including not on the ones that Comey was referring to when he said on July 5th that, «Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information, our judgment is that no reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case»), she could be sentenced to a maximum of 73 years in prison (73 = 5 + 5 + 20 + 20 + 3 + 10 + 10). Adding on others she might also have committed (such as the ones that Comey was referring to, all of which pertain only to the handling of classified information), would mean that her term in prison might be lengthier still, but what’s important in the email case isn’t that; it’s to convict her on, essentially, theft and/or destruction of US government documents by means of transferring them into her private email and/or smashing hard drives. No one, not even a US federal official, can legally do that, and those six laws are specifically against it.

Motive is important in Ms. Clinton’s email case, because motive tells us why she was trying to hide from historians and from the public her operations as the US Secretary of State: was it because she didn’t want them to know that she was selling to the Sauds and her other friends the US State Department’s policies in return for their million-dollar-plus donations to the Clinton Foundation, and maybe even selling to them (and/or their cronies) US government contracts, or why? However, those are questions regarding other crimes that she might have been perpetrating while in public office, not the crimes of her privatized email operation itself; and those other crimes (whatever they might have been) would have been explored only after an indictment on the slam-dunks, and for further possible prosecutions, if President Obama’s people were serious about investigating her. They weren’t. Clearly, this is selective ‘justice’. That’s the type of ‘justice’ an aristocracy imposes.

Why, then, did Comey finally switch to re-open the Clinton case?

It wasn’t merely the discovery of some of her previously unknown emails on the computer of Anthony Wiener, husband to Hillary’s closest aide Huma Abedin. As Politico on October 28th reported, «Another former Justice official said Comey’s letter [announcing the re-opening of Hillary’s case] could be part of an effort on his part to quiet internal FBI critics who viewed him as burying the Clinton probe for political reasons. ‘He’s come under a lot of criticism from his own people for how he’s handled this. He’s trying to gain back some of their respect,’ former Justice Department spokeswoman Emily Pierce said. ‘His ability to do what he does largely depends on the respect within his own ranks.’»

Joachim Hagopian at Global Research headlined on October 30th, «The Real Reasons Why FBI Director James Comey Reopened the Hillary Email Investigation», and reported:

Former federal attorney for the District of Columbia Joe diGenova spelled it all out in a WMAL radio interview last Friday just hours after the news was released that Comey had sent a letter informing Congress that the case is being reopened. DiGenova said that with an open revolt brewing inside the FBI, Comey was forced to go public on Friday with reopening the investigation. … Finally, diGenova dropped one more bombshell in Friday’s interview. An inside source has revealed to him that the laptops belonging to key Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, both wrongly granted immunity, were not destroyed after all as previously reported, but have been secretly kept intact by investigating FBI agents refusing to destroy incriminating evidence as part of the in-house whitewash.

In other words: Comey was between a rock (the resignation-letters piling up on his desk from subordinates who felt that no person should be above the law) and a hard place (his ability to stay on at the FBI and not have a scandal against himself bleed out to the public from down below). The US wasn’t yet that kind of dictatorship — one which could withstand such a public disclosure. In order for it to become one, the aristocracy’s control would have needed to be even stronger than it yet is.

Also on the 30th, Ed Klein in Britain’s Daily Mail bannered:

EXCLUSIVE: Resignation letters piling up from disaffected FBI agents, his wife urging him to admit he was wrong: Why Director Comey jumped at the chance to reopen Hillary investigation

James Comey revived the investigation of Clinton’s email server as he could no longer resist mounting pressure by mutinous agents, sources say

The atmosphere at the FBI has been toxic ever since Jim [Comey] announced last July that he wouldn’t recommend an indictment against Hillary

He told his wife that he was depressed by the stack of resignation letters piling up on his desk from disaffected agents.

So, does this now mean that, finally, the FBI will bring before a grand jury the evidence that Hillary Clinton blatantly violated those six federal criminal laws against stealing and/or trying to destroy federal documents?

There has never — at least since 1981 — been so severe a test of the extent to which this nation is (as those researches found it to have unquestionably been between 1981 and 2002) an «oligarchy». However, a serious criminal prosecution of Ms. Clinton would potentially start an unwinding of this dictatorship.

The present writer will make no prediction. However, obviously, the results of the election on November 8th will certainly have an enormous impact upon the outcome. Since I think that anyone but a complete fool can recognize this much, I’m confident enough to assert it — a conditional about the future.

This is an unabridged English version of an interview with author Arnold August with Punto Final (Chile) in Spanish.  

Let us talk about Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion (the most important aspects and/or conclusions of the book, and how did the idea emerge to write it, etc.).

THE GENESIS OF THE BOOK

The idea for this book arose from my previous experience writing Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections (1999), which concentrated on the electoral process in Cuba. The goal at the time was to respond to the disinformation that there are no elections on the island. In order to write the text, I carried out my research on the spot. I attended every step of the electoral process, from the municipalities to the national Parliament. For the most part of this more than one-and-a-half-year investigation, I lived in the family home of a municipal delegate to the People’s Power. Being embedded in this way vastly deepened my approach to understanding the process from within and, along with my photos, allowed me to provide readers with a lively narrative. This work in Havana and in a rural area took place from September 1997 to February 1998. I was only one of two non-Cubans to have had access to the entire electoral process. This unforgettable professional experience resulted in the first book, in 1999. It was published in English and subsequently very well received through my conferences in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. You can imagine that, especially in the U.S., it raised many eyebrows. In that country, the preconceived view that there are simply no elections in Cuba is very ingrained. Nonetheless, in general, the book developed a following while also providing me with crucial input to further evaluate my analysis. Today, people in the U.S. still comment to me about that publication. However, despite the positive reception, I did notice that the U.S.-centric notion of democracy and elections lingers on, even with some people on the left.

Thus, the idea to write another book began to emerge. In the following years, I further studied democracy and elections in other countries (especially in the U.S. and Venezuela). This was interrupted by the need to study what I call “democracy in motion from the bottom up” in the U.S. (the Occupy movement), the Egyptian Revolution against the U.S.-backed military regime and the Indignados (outraged) in Spain against the two-party system domination. With these unexpected, but welcomed, new events (despite their drawbacks and weaknesses) and with input from readers in the U.S. on the first book, I began to orient myself toward a new approach. It would include an analysis of democracy as a concept, taking into account the above-mentioned experiences, evaluated by critically analyzing U.S.-centrism, especially as it pertains to democracy. The goal was to strongly put forward the view that the U.S. approach to “democracy” is not the only one.

I am certain that Punto Final readers can appreciate a profound critique of U.S.-centric notions on democracy because of the bitter 1973 experience in Chile and other bloody U.S. interventions in the region in the name of, among other pretexts, “democracy.” Furthermore, there was a need to analyze in detail the real inner workings of elections and “democracy” in the U.S. based on an approach that is unique and therefore necessary. To deepen the concept, democracy is explored with a review of the participatory democracy experiences in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. In addition, there was a need for the Cuban approach to be illuminated through a more critical approach, in contrast to the previous book, so as not to idealize the Cuban political system. I also decided to investigate the actual functioning of the state in Cuba at the municipal and parliamentary levels after the elections, something that I did not do in the previous book.

To conclude my response to your question as to how the idea came about to write my latest book, I consider the publication to be a culmination of my active struggle and political thinking since my university days in Montreal in the 1960s. This involved a loathing of U.S. imperialism while fully supporting the peoples of the Third World against colonialism and imperialism. Thus, the plan for the book was emerging as my virtual political testament. It was published in English in 2013 and in Spanish in 2015.

AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: NEITHER THE MODEL NOR A “BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY”

“Not a bourgeois democracy?” readers may ask – and rightly so. Of course, it is a “bourgeois democracy”; however, the first important aspect of my book is the analysis of how democracy and elections in Cuba’s neighbour, the U.S., really works. Thus, I am not in favour of the popular yet superficial conception that dismisses American “democracy” as bourgeois and the election campaigns as being a farce or a show. It is the easy way out. This approach avoids scientifically and painstakingly analyzing the inner workings of the system. How the system really operates from the point of view of the grass roots, rather than the stifling straitjacketed vision delimited by the spectacular rivalry of two parties, is bypassed. As will be discussed below, some commentators who relieve their conscience by accusing the U.S. of being a “bourgeois democracy” and a “show” have ended up supporting Clinton against Trump while remaining, consciously or not, oblivious to what is actually happening at the base in the U.S.

My approach is based on an original case study of the Obama phenomenon as a natural outgrowth of the American political system since the seventeenth century. How can one analyze the political process? The role of money in U.S. politics is well known to the extent that this phenomenon has taken its place in the American international public domain. It is no secret to anyone. The same applies to the notorious corruption in the political system and the cut-throat unprincipled competition between the two main parties. To concentrate on these features is to fall victim to the U.S.’s very own concept of their process. Harping on the issues presents no real challenge to the status quo. The money, corruption and competition are not the main characteristics. Thus, to be attracted to these attributes is to fall into the trap of the U.S.-centric view of their elections as its concept remains within the box delimited by the U.S. establishment. In contrast, I examine the process from the point of view of the base, rather than from the top. The only real issue at this time is the dead end of the “lesser of two evils” option or, rather, the non-option of having to choose one of two evils.

CONCLUSION: POLITICAL OPPORTUNISM AND CO-OPTATION

The first aspect of the book that I want to highlight, “American democracy,” one conclusion reached through my Obama case study is that all presidential elections, including the current one, are based on two features.

First, there is the insatiable individual political opportunism of a presidential hopeful. Second, as a precondition to being nominated and eventually elected, this person must firmly have demonstrated the capacity to co-opt sections of the electorate. This talent, linked to being endowed with personal characteristics (e.g., being black or a woman) must be sufficiently evident to the ruling circles not only to win enough votes, but to also effectively co-opt after the elections. The overall goal of the establishment is to avoid a revolt against the system by the people, first and foremost by African-Americans, who are traditionally the most left-wing and revolutionary force in that country. During the course of the electoral campaign, based supposedly on the capitalist motto of the “invisible hand of the free market” as applied to politics, at a certain moment the majority of the U.S. ruling class makes their choice. Following this, the “invisible fist” interferes in the “invisible hand of the free market” by taking action to assure the victory of their preferred candidate. In the case of Obama, at the point when Obama fully reassured the ruling circles (as fully documented in my book) that he was their man, immense funds flowed into the Obama coffers from the military, health insurance corporations and pharmaceutical companies, not to mention Wall Street. This support was fully backed by the majority of the main printed news media (in reality, part of that same corporate elite) as well as university student publications endorsing Obama.

In the 2006–08 period, the U.S. ruling circles were facing a major credibility gap domestically in the face of African-American resentment and anger as well as internationally in the wake of the Bush era. In terms of foreign affairs, Latin America’s growing left-wing movement, fomented by the Bolivarian Revolution, was of particular concern to important political figures who supported Obama in the 2006–08 period. The concern about all of the domestic and international credibility gaps indicated that Obama came in handy. He was not an innocent bystander, since he consciously flashed the right signals to the ruling elite. The decision to support Obama was surely the correct decision carried out by the ruling circle, as one can easily imagine how woeful the situation would have been for U.S. interests if John McCain/Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney/Paul Ryan would have won.

CONCLUSION: REJECTION OF THE “LESSER OF TWO EVILS” IS ALWAYS THE MAIN ISSUE

This brings us to the second conclusion in this section. The corporate media and their two main parties use the election campaign to promote the two-party system as the only choice. This goal is sacred, since its objective is to suffocate any burgeoning struggle for a left-wing progressive alternative. As a corollary, the U.S. implicitly or explicitly promotes “lesser evilism,” as it is very well known in U.S. progressive circles. The logic is that even if electors hate both parties and their respective candidates, they should vote for the “lesser evil.” As I was writing my book, I came across an analysis by Black Agenda Report, a website based in the U.S. They wrote that Obama is not the “lesser of two evils,” but the more effective of two evils in administrating the program of the U.S. ruling circles.

Let us take foreign policy to elaborate how “lesser evilism” operates. In the text, I provide the example of Honduras: Obama, the new face of imperialism, successfully carried out the coup d’état in 2009 soon after being elected for his first term in 2008. He was directly involved with Hillary Clinton in executing it, profiting from the illusion being propagated about a new U.S. diplomatic foreign policy combined with Obama deftly using verbal subterfuge as no McCain/Palin team in the White House could have done. The Honduran resistance was, of course, in a very difficult position from the beginning. However, the White House bought valuable time for itself in the international arena. It drew out the suspense by falsely claiming that Washington opposed the coup. Some governments in Latin America were also infected by illusions about Obama, thus depriving the heroic Honduran resistance with the regional support it so badly needed. Then came the Paraguay parliamentary coup. The book also shows the hand of Obama immediately after the April 14, 2013 Venezuelan Presidential elections in order to destabilize the country. Obama was interfering in Venezuela right up to 2015, when the Spanish edition of the book was published. There was resistance in the region, but it perhaps would have been far stronger if it had not been contained to a certain extent by U.S. imperialism’s new Obama approach.

DOMESTIC SCENE: CO-OPTING AND PACIFYING AFRICAN-AMERICANS

The most important of Obama’s legacies has been his relative capacity to co-opt some sympathy from African-Americans, who were feeling assured with a black person in the White House. As documented in my publication, his overture to blacks was skilfully written into both of his books (2004 and 2006) and two important 2012 campaign speeches dedicated to the race issue. While feigning empathy for blacks, he also sent the appropriate buzzwords to assure the ruling elite what they wanted to hear: the U.S. is a “post-racial society,” that there is not a white America, a black America or a Latino America, but the United States of America. This startling illusion could only be uttered by the first African-American president as “proof” that the American Dream is more alive than ever. It is as if to say, “Look at me, I made it!” – conveniently overlooking the fact that his relatively privileged upbringing leaves the vast majority of African-Americans in the dust, to deal with poverty, discrimination and the racist violent state. Obama jumped into the White House on the trampoline of unbridled individual opportunism. His image, as documented in my book, was carefully groomed by a white Chicago political consultant who specialized in getting blacks elected to positions with already five victories to his credit at the time. Obama sat on the hairdresser’s chair gleefully allowing the master to shape and camouflage his image to satisfy the needs of the ruling circles. This came in handy, for example, at the very beginning of the second Obama mandate in 2012, when young Trayvon Martin was assassinated by an armed vigilante in Florida. Obama went on TV to openly use the race card to try and co-opt the outrage among blacks and pacify them and their many allies.

This approach was combined with the subtle pursuit of impunity. For example, since the publication of the book, Obama’s Department of Justice cleared the killer of Trayvon Martin and let him free. This de facto institutionalized impunity gave the green light to more police killings, as the world is aware. Obama is the worst phenomenon to ever happen to African-Americans. For example, he and Hillary Clinton used the outrage of black mothers whose sons or daughter were killed by police to speak at the July democratic convention in support of Obama’s heir Hillary Clinton rather than supporting the Black Lives Matter in the streets in front of the convention venue. One of the mothers was Trayvon Martin’s. We can thus ask the question: would this have happened if the president were a Republican? No. This seemingly paradoxical situation goes to the very heart of the dead-end nature of “lesser evilism.”

The U.S. oligarchy repeats the refrain of U.S. exceptionalism. Well, I agree with them on one aspect only: the U.S. is the only country in the West (i.e., North America and Europe) that is based today on a racist violent state as a vestige of slavery. Thus, the U.S. is indeed an exception in this sense. No analyst or political force in the U.S., or internationally, can ignore this historical fact. The Obama legacy of co-opting and pacifying African-Americans, combined with impunity to police violence, is now carrying on into the Clinton campaign. She will win the presidency for one of the same reasons that catapulted Obama into power: Obama was called upon by the majority in the ruling circles to co-opt – or at least neutralize – African-Americans.

Therefore, the most important repercussion of “lesser evilism” consists of feverishly delaying forever the struggle at the base by boxing people into the dead-end of voting for one of the lesser of two evils. This perpetual postponement thus blinds the people to the need for revolutionary struggle with the goal of people’s power combined with voting for an alternative on the left of the two-party system.

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN MUCH OF THE LATIN AMERICAN PRESS?

To answer this question, allow me to fast-forward to the current situation in the presidential election campaign, as I feel that readers should be aware of one regrettable phenomenon. As I work on this interview, I observe that in the U.S. there is very wide opposition from the left-wing and progressives. I am referring to the Green Party ticket, whichhas managed to take off after Bernie Sanders supported Clinton’s Democratic presidential nomination. The ticket is now composed of presidential nominee Dr. Jill Stein and Ajamu Baraka for Vice President. The latter is a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report, mentioned above, as well as to Counter Punch, one of the most important alternative websites in the U.S. that stands against the two-party system. As recently as August 18, 2016, Baraka said in an interview that he aims to continue the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, two of the most important historic revolutionaries among progressive Afro-Americans.

This growing coalition also includes the Black Lives Matter movement, which some commentators in the U.S. say is becoming increasingly socialist. The flow can be observed on the streets via the many thousands of Twitter accounts, hundreds of serious alternative websites in turn supported by thousands of journalists, and self-financed alternative TV and radio programs.

The argument that voting for the Green Party ticket is futile because it cannot win in 2016 does not take into the account the current movement at the base and its future. Once the 2016 elections are over, will the grass-roots motion continue in the streets to put forward its demands, expose the two-party system for what it is and elevate the slogan of People’s Power to a prominent position? Will this groundswell and the further imploding of the two-party system open the path for the left-wing alternative possible gaining more headway? These and other questions should be available to all peoples who are interested in what is unfolding in the U.S.

Unfortunately, in much of the progressive or left-wing press in Latin America and the Caribbean, there are virtually no reports or analysis from this point of view of progressive opposition at the grass roots to the lesser of two evils. It seems that the few exceptions consist of revolutionary blogs, such as in Cuba. I am familiar with these blogs on the island; however, there are surely other progressive blogs in other Latin American countries. Thus, an important part of the mainstream progressive press deals with the situation within the confines of the two competing parties. They more often than not provide a slightly modified version of the U.S. establishment’s views but rendered in Spanish or Portuguese. In this context, the balance is often tipped in favour of Clinton. However, this optic is also to the detriment of the opposition from the left and progressive forces in the U.S. I am in no way suggesting that the foreign press take a stand on the U.S. elections. However, the way the trend is presently developing is de facto taking a stand in favour of the two-party system status quo. Morphing into the U.S. narrative is detrimental to the opposition that is developing at this time as never before. Yet, this censorship is keeping much of the Latin American population in the dark.

The alternative reporting and analysis in the U.S. is almost exclusively in English, but this is no excuse. In contrast, in my case and that of others, in order to investigate the Cuban political system, I do so in Spanish, in Cuba at both the official local and national levels and especially at the grass-roots level. For those Latin American journalists who cannot go to the U.S., this is no reason for not capturing what is really happening in the U.S. beyond the superficial reports and analyses that censor opposition to the two-party system. I personally do not travel to the U.S. very often either, but the many thousands of daily tweets and hundreds of stories in the alternative media and TV at the base tell the whole story to anyone who masters the English language. There have been so many decades of opposing U.S. imperialism in the south. Encouragingly, for the first time in decades, there is presently an awakening in the U.S. itself against the interventionist American Eagle that coincides with the electoral process. While this just and burgeoning antithesis to U.S. official domestic and foreign policy is not as radical as some (myself included) might hope for, it is opposed to the deadly U.S. imperialist war machine, the absolute rule of the oligarchy, the racist state violence, Trans-Pacific Partnership (or TPP, whose opposition to which Hillary Clinton plays lip service while everyone knows that she will push it through) and the violation of the Palestinian people’s human rights – all of which both Clinton and Trump are part.

Many other examples highlight the contradiction between the status quo parties and the opposition. Allow me to provide you with one that could not be more vivid for the peoples south of the Rio Bravo. As all readers are aware, Obama and Hillary Clinton were responsible for the coup d’état in Honduras, the resulting regime and thus the assassination of activist Berta Cáceres. Berta was in the streets of Philadelphia in July in the company of the progressive opposition protesting the Democratic convention. In stark contrast, Obama, Clinton and their seemingly endless line of military spokespeople and sycophants were busy further consolidating the Democratic party of war and foreign interference. This was carried out through an almost unprecedented four-day spectacle, beating the war drums for stepped-up militarization, aggression, wars and international interference. This dangerous direction serves to pave the way for increased interference in Latin America. All this was staged live in almost 24 hours of TV coverage during four days on CNN to the frightening tune of American chauvinism, which paled in comparison to the Trump Republican convention the previous week. It seems to me that any effective progressive contention of this two-party oligarchy deserves the full attention of the left-wing media in the south.

*Arnold August, a Canadian journalist and lecturer, is the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections and, more recently, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion. Cuba’s neighbours under consideration are, on the one hand the U.S. and on the other hand, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Arnold can be followed on Twitter @Arnold_August and FaceBook

 

At first sight, compassion appears to loom large in ‘mainstream’ politics and media. When the American and British governments target countries like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, ‘compassion’ is always at or near the top of the agenda.

Time and again, the cry from the political system is: ‘We Must Do Something!’ ‘We’ must save Afghan women from the ‘Medieval’ Taliban. ‘We’ must save Kuwaiti new-borns flung from their incubators by Iraqi stormtroopers. ‘We’ must save Iraqi civilians from Saddam’s shredding machines. ‘We’ must save civilians in Kosovo from Milosevic’s ‘final solution’.

As for the suffering civilians of Aleppo in Syria, hard-right MPs like Andrew Mitchell demand, not merely that ‘we’ save them, not merely that ‘we’ engage in war to save them, but that ‘we’ must confront Russia, shoot down their planes if necessary, and risk actual thermonuclear war – complete self-destruction – to save them:

‘If that means confronting Russian air power defensively, on behalf of the innocent people on the ground who we are trying to protect, then we should do that.’

State-corporate propaganda is full of ‘shoulds’, all rooted in ‘our’ alleged ‘responsibility to protect’. Why ‘us’? Why not Sweden or Iceland? Because ‘we’ care. ‘We’ just care more.

A key task of the corporate media is to pretend this is something more than a charade. The truth is hinted at in BBC political programmes that open with jovial, bombastic, comical music, as if introducing some kind of music hall farce. The cast is currently led by foreign secretary Boris Johnson, a P.G. Wodehouse character reimagined by Stephen King. After chuckling about how ‘There is no other country that comes close to [Britain’s] record of beligerence’ in invading or conquering 178 out of 200 countries existing today, Johnson opined:

‘As our American friends instinctively understand, it is the existence of strong and well-resourced British Armed Forces that gives this country the ability to express and affirm our values overseas: of freedom, democracy, tolerance, pluralism.’

As Johnson doubtless understands, this was a near-exact reversal of the truth. He noted in 2014 of the 2003 Iraq invasion:

‘It looks to me as though the Americans were motivated by a general strategic desire to control one of the biggest oil exporters in the world…’

If politicians are clearly bluffers, corporate journalists are selected because they powerfully echo and enhance the alleged need for compassionate ‘intervention’. The likes of David Aaronovitch, Nick Cohen, John Rentoul, Jonathan Freedland and Oliver Kamm earn their salaries by appearing to tear their hair out in outrage at the crimes of official enemies and at the ‘useful idiocy’ of the perennial, naysaying ‘leftists’. Aaronovitch of The Times has supported just about every opportunity to wage war, whether under Labour or the Tories, for decades. In March 1999, in an article titled, ‘It’s because we’re rich that we must impose peace for others,’ Aaronovitch commented:

‘Given a choice, do we really think that the suffering civilians of Sierra Leone would object to a military presence by the British?’ (Aaronovitch, The Independent, March 25, 1999)

In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the United States, he wrote of Afghanistan:

‘For a fair-minded progressive the call should not be Stop the War. That slogan is now irrelevant and harmful. The requirement is surely to win the peace…

‘So on Sunday, instead of listening to the same old tired stuff about cowboys with rockets and selective horror stories from Mazar; instead of marching along with mouth open and ears closed (however comforting that can be); instead of indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge, why not do something that might help the people of Afghanistan?’ (Aaronovitch, ‘Stop trying to stop the war, Start trying to win the peace,’ The Independent, November 16, 2001)

The message is always the same: we understand you’re sincere, but sometimes you have to drop your reflexive ‘anti-Americanism’, drop your blinkered adherence to ‘principled opposition’ and live in the real world. You can’t just sit on your hands, you can’t just righteously preach – you have to act!

This is the shtick of the corporate warmonger and it is repeated over and over again. It appears to be the key function that determines whether a commentator is granted job-for-life privileges at newspapers like the Guardian, The Times and Telegraph.

But the point is that compassion – the kind rooted in an understanding that all suffering is equal, the kind that feels even more responsibility for suffering caused by our own government – is not partial, it does not defer to power. It doesn’t fall silent when ‘we’ are committing crimes. Quite the reverse.

The order also applies to a Trump adviser who has organized poll-watching activities.

In a surprise ruling, a US district judge in Ohio issued a restraining order against Donald Trump’s campaign to prevent anyone working on the campaign from harassing and intimidating voters at the polls on Tuesday.

The order came after a two-hour hearing in which the judge pressed Trump’s lawyer to justify the candidate’s inflammatory rhetoric about voter fraud. It also applies to close Trump adviser Roger Stone, who has organized poll-watching activities, and the “officers, agents, servants, and employees” of Trump and Stone.

Voter fraud has been a popular theme among Republicans this year, from Trump to state Republican leaders who cite fraud as a reason to make it more difficult to vote. But as Friday’s ruling shows, it’s a lot easier to warn about fraud on the campaign trail than in front of a judge.

The restraining order is the result of a lawsuit filed by the Ohio Democratic Party against Trump, Stone, and the Ohio Republican Party. The suit asked the court to declare it illegal to intimidate voters at the polls. Similar suits have been filed in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan. The Ohio complaintlaid out a long history of remarks by Trump and his running mate, Mike Pence, encouraging supporters to watch the polls. (For example, Trump told a crowd in Akron, Ohio, “And when I say ‘watch,’ you know what I’m talking about right? You know what I’m talking about.”) The order also covers Stone, after the complaint detailed efforts by his group, Stop the Steal, to recruit poll watchers and conduct exit polls on Election Day, among other activities. The complaint cited provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 that prohibit voter intimidation.

Here’s the order:

Civil rights lawyer Subodh Chandra was in the courtroom and tweeted throughout the hearing. Here’s what he observed:

 A few weeks ago, the US government agreed to give Israel $38 billion dollars, the largest military funding package the U.S. has given any nation.  This $38 billion in military and other type of Aid will be used to imprison the Palestinians of Gaza, and continue Israel’s military occupation, and imposition of an apartheid state, upon the Palestinian people.

This money will be used in the training fields of Israeli military, which are in Gaza, where military experiments are done, using US military weaponry, by the Israeli Occupation Forces.  The U.S. military and government is complicit in the crimes against the people of Gaza and the Palestinian occupied territory by the use of military hardware given by USA and by the training that Israelis give to Americans and USA gives to Israel.  It is also estimated that some 70% of European humanitarian aid to Palestine ends up in Israeli pockets.

Gaza continues to suffer from the continuing Israeli blockade, naval and land, and this 25-mile-long tiny strip, 5 miles wide, with l.9 million people, living in it, is a brutal blockade and Israel controls everything including electricity, food, etc.

Indeed, everything that comes into Gaza comes through Israeli hands.  Gaza’s only airport was completely destroyed in 2002 by Israeli jets and ground forces.  Egypt continues to be a part of this blockade as they have blocked Gaza’s southern border; and Egypt continues to receive USA military funding.  Medical authorities have reported that the time for operations in Gaza now goes up to 2025 as so many are awaiting health care, and the increasing issues around food, water, sewage, electricity, all of these mounting problems have led the U.N. to declare in their latest Report, that by the year 2020 Gaza will be uninhabitable.  What hope is there for the Palestinians of Gaza, the vast majority of whom are young people?

In order to give hope to the people of Gaza by showing solidarity and support the Women’s Boat to Gaza sailed in September 2016. Also we sailed in order to challenge this illegal and immoral blockade and occupation of Palestine by Israel, and draw international attention to the fact that under Geneva Conventions it is illegal to punish civilians, which is what Israeli government policies continues to do.

The Women’s Boat to Gaza set sail from the Spanish Port city of Barcelona (Barcelona is twinned with Gaza) in mid- September 2016.  The three legs of the trip were 1715 miles from Barcelona to Ajaccio, Corsica, France and then down to Messina in Sicily, Italy.  It was hoped to have two boats but when one developed engine trouble in Barcelona, the other 50’ sailing boat, Zaytouna-Oliva, continued alone.  At all Ports the women were greeted and hosted by mayors, officials, and supporters of the Free Palestine Movement.   Over 40 women from around the world flew to Messina in hopes of being able to sail to Gaza.

I joined the boat in Messina, and was grateful to be chosen as one of the 13 women from thirteen countries, being finally chosen to sail to Gaza.   It was sad for those of us sailing to leave behind so many wonderful women due to not enough boats to sail, but it is hoped the Palestinian Coalition will be able to get more sailings to accommodate those wishing to go on a future occasion.   The 13 chosen participants included Ann Wright, (boat leader) the captain and two crew, two Al Jazeera journalists, and women from USA, Ireland, Russia, UK, Spain, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden/Chile, Malaysia, South Africa, Australia, and Algeria.

The third leg of the journey from Messina to Gaza was almost 1000 miles and a nine-day journey.  On 29^th September 2016, we set sail from Messina, Sicily, after a wonderful reception from the mayor, the Muslim community, and many Palestinian friends in Messina.

The first few days sailing the weather was rough and many of us were seasick, but several days into the journey we had got our sea-legs and busied ourselves helping with the tasks to be done such as cooking, reporting, night watches with the crew, etc.  We shared our stories and held nonviolence training.   It was a wonderful experience getting to know the women whose courage was inspiring. Their love for the Palestinian people and their freedom was very deep.  Unfortunately, some 400 miles from Messina, with some 600 miles to go, we had problems with the boats rigging.  An appeal to friends in Crete resulted in a boatful of people coming out to meet us, bringing many gifts of food, and four men to fix the rigging!  This was for me one of the most moving experiences of the journey, and it proved yet again, the magnificence of the human spirit. Around 20 men and women answered our call for help and came to our aid, and all for the people of Gaza.  After the men fixed our boat rigging, we passed greetings to our rescuers from Crete and sailed in a happy and hope filled mood towards Gaza.

On Wednesday 5^th October, we were contacted by the Israeli navy by phone.  A few hours earlier all communications via our own phones were cut off.  The Israeli navy communicator told Captain Madeleine that we were nearing the 20-mile military Israeli security zone and were breaking Israeli law.  They said if we did not turn back or agree to be escorted to Ashdod, they would confiscate our boat and take us to Israel.

However, we kept sailing towards Gaza.   We saw several Navy military ships on the horizon.  At 6 p.m., a Zodiac boat came alongside our boat.  There were 30 Israeli sailors including Israeli women sailors who were the first to come on board our boat.  They were not in combat gear.  They wore baseball caps, and long sleeved jerseys.  In 2010,   I had been on the Rachel Corrie Irish/Malaysian boat, which was part of the Freedom Flotilla and when we were boarded by Israeli sailors, they were in combat gear, with rifles, and sniffer dogs, and we were handcuffed and forcibly taken to Israel.  I was surprised when this different approach was used to confiscate our boat ,the Zaytouna.  In 2010, on the Mavi Marmara, the Israelis murdered nine people, and subsequently a 10th person died as 50 people were wounded.  Therefore, the treatment of our women’s boat to Gaza participants was very different from what happened on previous ones where I had travelled.

On the Zaytouna, when the Israeli navy sailors confiscated our boat, took us under protest against our will to Israel, arrested, held us for several days without contact with our families, and deported us for ten years, it was all completely illegal under international law. However, it is sad to report that no governments or international bodies have taken up our case for being hijacked, and again the Israeli government has been allowed to break international laws.

All the women were deeply saddened as we knew many people in Gaza were preparing for our visit, and yet again Israel was denying our entry into Gaza. So as we watched the coastline of Gaza in complete darkness and then the coastline of Israel fully lit up against the night sky, we were again witnessing the injustice and unfairness of the Israeli policies against the Palestinians.  With this experience, many of us committed in our hearts to continue our support for the Palestinian people’s ongoing work to break the blockade and end the occupation. We also saw just off the coast of Gaza two huge gas rigs fully lit up and whose gas is piped to Israel. Yet Gaza has only a few hours of light, as Israeli bombings have destroyed most of its electricity and sewage infrastructures.

When we reached Ashdod, Israel, after six hours sailing, we were processed by Israeli security and searched, taken to Prison and released two days later.   All the women on board the Zaytouna, now have a ten-year deportation order. As this is my 4^th time being given a 10-year deportation order, it will be 40 years before I can return to Israel or get into Palestine.  This thought reminds me that there are over 7 million Palestinian people who cannot return to their country, and this is why it is so important to campaign for the right to return for the Palestinian people.

I would like to thank the Freedom Flotilla Coalition who gave us the opportunity to participate on the journey to Gaza.  Their work of joining in solidarity with the people of Gaza is so important and I thank them for all they do.

To the Palestinian people of Gaza, please keep your hopes high and believe that freedom and peace will come. Thank you for your perseverance and ongoing inspiration to us all.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com.

The Syrian army and the National Defense Forces (NDF) advanced along the Aleppo-Hama highway and seized the two hills – Tell Bazam and Tell Masin – north of the recently liberated town of Souran. S

trategically, this offensive may allow the army and the NDF to flank the militant-controlled areas with the center in Latamanah.

This strategy could lead to a success if the government forces are able to advance further to the north and to take control of Morek.

The government forces continued military operations in Western Ghouta, targeting Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian al-Qaeda branch) and its allies in the town of Khan al-Sheih. Earlier this week, the government forces made an attempt to make an agreement with the militants to allow them to withdraw from the city to the province of Idlib. However, this idea resulted in a failure and led to further escalation in the area. Yesterday, the army and the NDF seized a key farms northeast of Khan al-Sheih and deployed in a striking distance from the militant stronghold.

The army’s Tiger Forces, the Desert Hawks Brigade and Hezbollah successfully repelled a fiercest attack by the al-Nusra-led militant alliance, Jaish al-Fatah, in western Aleppo on November 3. Both sides suffered some casualties and Jaish al-Fatah used at least 2 car bombs in an attepmt to break the government forces’ defenses. Pro-militant sources report that the ‘opposition’ has destroyed some 4 units of military equipment belonging to the army. At least 1 infantry fighting vehicle and 1 battle tank belonging to Jaish al-Fatah weredestroyed. On November 4, the humanitarian took place in the city. However, firefights are ongoing.

The ISIS-linked media outlet Amaq released a footage of an explosion of Russian Mi-35 multi-role combat helicopter near the village of Huwaysis, northwest of Palmyra. the Mi-35 was delivering a humanitarian aid in the area when it was downed because of a technical failure. ISIS militants targeted the landing site with an anti-tank guided missile. The incident took place on November 3. The Mi-35’s crew (2 men) survived the incident and returned safely to the Russian Khmeimim Airbase in the province of Latakia.

Russia’s state-of-the-art frigate Admiral Grigorovich, armed with Caliber missiles, set off to the Mediterranean Sea from the port of Sevastopol on November 3. The frigate will join the Russian naval task force off the coast of Syria.

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America hasn’t experienced a terrorist attack in modern memory. Innocent patsies were wrongfully blamed for officially announced ones, and others allegedly foiled – 9/11 the mother of all false flags.

Would Hillary or Trump benefit from a pre-election incident, proclaimed a terrorist attack? CBS News cited unnamed sources, saying “US intelligence has alerted joint terrorism task forces (about) al Qaeda (perhaps) planning attacks in three states (believed to be New York, Texas and Virginia) for” November 7 – the day before US elections.

According to an unnamed senior FBI official, “(t)he counterterrorism and homeland security communities remain vigilant and well-postured to defend against attacks here in the United States.”

The FBI, working with our federal, state and local counterparts, shares and assesses intelligence on a daily basis and will continue to work closely with law enforcement and intelligence community partners to identify and disrupt any potential threat to public safety.

Fact: Al Qaeda is a US creation, supported in Syria and other countries where its fighters are deployed – unlikely to bite the hand feeding it.

CBS reported phony scare-tactic information supplied by Washington sources. If an incident occurs, it’ll be state-sponsored, an American tradition.

In the wake of last June’s Orlando false flag, followed by incidents in New York, New Jersey and Minnesota, Trump blamed Obama, saying:

“We’ve been weak. Our country’s been weak. We’re letting people in by the thousands, the tens of thousands. I’ve been saying we’ve gotta stop it. Hillary Clinton wants to increase” the refugee numbers Obama let in.

Hillary said

“I’m the only candidate in this race who’s been part of the hard decisions to take terrorists off the battlefield. The kinds of rhetoric and language that Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.”

So who’ll benefit or be disadvantaged by a pre-election false flag [alleged threat or actual event] hours before polls open?

Neither most likely, unless power brokers, at the 11th hour, decided they erred in choosing Hillary, cut a deal with Trump assuring he’ll support their agenda, and intend anointing him Obama’s successor by electoral-rigging if necessary.

It’s unlikely to go this way. But given America’s deplorable state, anything is possible with an important reminder. So-called US democracy serves its privileged few alone.

No matter who holds top executive, congressional and judicial posts, the dirty system continues – each administration and its supporting caste exceeding the ruthlessness of its predecessors since the neoliberal 90s during the two-term Bill and Hillary co-presidency, America’s most notorious crime family.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

 

A queen of chaos should not throw stones in a glass house

Hillary Clinton’s fears concerning her rival candidate appear to be justified. At present she seems to be the most likely future president, and there is good reason for asking the question – Is Mrs. Clinton throwing stones in a glass house when she viciously attacks Donald Trump? Her efforts as Secretary of State are among the most warmongering in America’s modern history. Should she become president, it seems highly unlikely that we would ever see the dawn of world peace.

Should Hillary Clinton become the next U.S. president, the possibility of continuing wars in the world appears to be dangerously real. We must closely examine the candidates’ willingness and ability to create a better world. Under which one of the two candidates does world peace seem to be the most likely outcome?

Last year, political analyst, Diana Johnstone, published her book “Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton”.  The purpose of the book was to warn the world of the consequences if Clinton were to be elected president.

Four months ago (June, 2016) Hillary Clinton gave an important speech on U.S. national security. In this speech, she warned us of Donald Trump as being – “the most dangerous candidate for US presidency ever seen”. She portrayed Trump as a liar with bizarre and dangerous ideas, a person who very easily (by mistake?) could start a nuclear war. Electing Trump for president would, according to Hillary Clinton, be like “playing roulette” with our future.

Hillary Clinton’s fears appear to be justified. As in the current situation she seems to be the most likely presidential candidate, the following question must be asked:  Is Clinton throwing stones in a glass house when she attacks Donald Trump as a warmonger? Judge for yourselves.

Her deals and efforts as Secretary of State of the US government have been among the most militaristic in U.S. modern history. During her term in office when Hillary Clinton was politically active, there was hardly a single war in which she was not eager to participate. During the past two decades she has actively supported all the U.S. war adventures – e.g. her husband’s bombing of Yugoslavia and Kosovo in the late 1990s, the illegal war against Iraq (2003) and supporting Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 2006.

During the 2008 presidential election, Hillary Clinton threatened Iran (80 million people) with a “total obliteration” should Iran attack Israel.

During Obama’s presidency, she unreservedly supported the U.S. bombing of seven mostly Muslim countries – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Iraq and Syria.

Mrs. Clinton managed to convince President Obama and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to enter into war with Libya – a war that ultimately led to the devastation of that country, including the cruel execution of Muammar Gaddafi after brutal torture. Hillary Clinton  commented on this occasion with a laugh – “We came, we saw, he died!”

Clinton fully supported the coup in Honduras (2009); she further supported Israel during the Gaza wars of 2009 and 2014 and the illegal coup in Ukraine in 2014.

Violation of the US Constitution:

Hillary Clinton always unreservedly supported Obama in the U.S. drone warfare.

Hillary Clinton has supported Obama’s policy of impunity for torturers during GW Bush’s presidency.

Hillary Clinton has used her own private emailer in her correspondence with foreign politicians and military and in exchange for services.

Hillary Clinton has used the family’s private foundation (the Clinton Foundation) for the Pay for Play scheme that rendered political favors to highly dubious dictators and business dealers in exchange for huge sums of money to the Clinton Foundation.

Hillary Clinton supports U.S. emergency legislation – such as “The Patriot Act”, which was rushed into law in the wake of 9/11.  It allows widespread indiscriminate eavesdropping and the support of military tribunals and indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects, even for life.

Hillary Clinton has supported mass surveillance of ordinary people, including UN officials and politicians of friendly countries. This amounts to constitutional violations which were disclosed by Edward Snowden.

Questionable financial links and support:

Hillary Clinton is the prime Candidate for the military-industrial complex. She enjoys full support from the Republican Party’s most hawkish representatives – such as former Vice President Dick Cheney and Assistant Secretary of State for Europe, Victoria Nuland.

Let us take a look at the Clinton Foundation. Where do the 2 billion $ emanate from? Contributions in abundance come from various corporate and financial sources, from “dictatorships” in the Middle East such as Saudi Arabia. Henry Kissinger, who engineered the military coup in Chile on President Nixon’s direct orders, supported the military coup in Argentina and Indonesia’s invasion of Timor, now works as her close friend and mentor.

War creates chaos and chaos creates refugees. 

A large number of countries have been devastated. We are facing a refugee situation which the West can no longer handle. The risks of a major war between NATO countries and Russia have increased dramatically. The probability of Sweden becoming a primary target in such a conflict has also increased (by the host country agreement, etc.).

US  being armed to the teeth, especially in nuclear weapons, NATO military bases encircling Russia and repeatedly organizing coups d’état on Russia’s doorstep, provocative military exercises and the demonization of Putin – all this gives Russia a good reason to believe that US / NATO is preparing for war.

The fact that Russia resorts to counter measures should not be difficult to understand. The combination of US and NATO provocation and their non-stop propaganda makes for a small incident easily turning into a major disaster.

The situation today resembles the one which prevailed just before the outbreak of the First World War. The great powers were then too heavily armed and ready to attack following the slightest incident.

The thought of an American president provoking a nuclear war would be the ultimate nightmare. Which one of the presidential candidates do we hope will win – that is now the question!

Written by three Swedish MDs active in the peace movement.

Leif Elinder
Martin Gelin
Anders Romelsjö

Translation by Siv O’Neall

The most colonized and exploited continent in the history of the world is once more the center of global competition, albeit this time the form of rivalry between the Great Powers has taken on a much more nuanced, though no less intense, form.

The US, France, and their unipolar allies want to retain Africa as their exclusive labor, market, and resource reserve for the foreseeable future, both out of their own material self-interest and with the added strategic benefit of depriving China and others of its economic fruits. Contrarily, China wants to integrate the world’sfastest growing economies and populations into the unfolding multipolar world order and give them a fair chance at succeeding in the global system. The contrast between the West’s neo-colonialism and China’s liberating sovereignty couldn’t be more crisp, and it’s this opposition of diametrically opposed global strategies and development models that sets the stage for the grand proxy battle between the US and China over Africa.

Just as much as China needs Africa in order to maintain its steady growth rates into the foreseeable future and ensure its domestic stability, so too does the US want to ‘poach’ Africa from China in order to offset the structural sustainability of its number one rival’s global leadership. The nature of the African-wide proxy conflict is that China is ardently working to finance, construct, and connect various infrastructural projects to one another in order to create a supraregional web of intermodal transport corridors that could then perfectly complement the maritime portion of the One Belt One Road (“New Silk Road”) global vision, while the US is trying with equal fervor to seize control of key nodes along these transnational routes as well as strategically disrupt crucial portions in order to increase China’s dependence on the unipolar-influenced areas. As the ultimate last resort, however, the US, the “world island” in all the manners that it can be strategically understood as, will pull out all the stops and unleash a ‘scorched earth’ trail of Hybrid War destruction in its wake while it strategically retreats back to its self-sufficient “Fortress North America” as the final coup de grace in the African proxy war against China.

More than likely, it won’t ever get to that dramatic of an absolute point whereby the US fully retreats from Africa or totally destroys the continent with Hybrid War, but realistically speaking, there’ll likely be a blended development of scenarios that takes place in this heated theater of competition over the coming decades that integrates elements of both extremes. China will predictably succeed in spearheading several ultra-strategic New Silk Road development corridors in Africa, while the US will probably sabotage a few others and unleash a handful of Hybrid Wars to keep the existing ways indefinitely at bay from fully actualizing their envisioned geo-economic potential.

There’s no surefire way to know with absolutely certainty what the future will bring, but it’s possible to acquire an educated expectation about the structural and systemic manner in which the identified group of states will be targeted by US-provoked Hybrid Wars. Even accounting for the possibility that some of the forthcoming examined scenarios might be “naturally occurring” in that they require little if any external pressure to instigate, there’s still a strong likelihood that at least some of the investigated possibilities will eventually occur to varying extents and that the geopolitical repercussions will indisputably impact quite negatively on China and the larger multipolar world’s grand position in the New Cold War.

This section of the book is organized in such a manner that Part I will describe Africa’s overall geopolitical situation, highlighting the influence of hegemonic and institutional regionalism (sometimes overlapping, other times not) over the continent’s affairs in order to clearly illustrate the preexisting advantages and obstacles to China’s New Silk Road vision. The subsequent chapters of the African Hybrid War research will then comprehensively examine the five separate categories of states and their pertinent neighbors that the author has already identified as being relevantly incorporated into the immediate thesis. To remind the reader about what was described in Part III of the book’s Introduction and to expand upon the earlier presented paradigmatic map in a more structurally detailed manner, the following cartographic revision will be henceforth used as the point of reference in guiding the research beyond Part I:

Key

* Green – Horn of Africa

* Yellow – East Africa/East African Federation

* Blue – Central-Southern Africa

* Black – Failed State Belt

* Red – Lake Chad Region

* Hashed/Thatched Lines – countries that will inevitably become involved in the targeted category states’ Hybrid War destabilization, whether as an aggressive actor, a passive victim, or a blended mix thereof.

Schematic Observations

A few comments need to be stated about the above map before commencing Part I of the African Hybrid War research:

Southern African Cone:

Firstly, while it’s conceptually possible for all states in Africa (or anywhere in the world, for that matter) to be afflicted by Hybrid War, keeping in accordance with the axiom that this method of warfare is more often than not applied in disrupting multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects and/or seizing control of them, it can be surmised that the ones which could most radically revolutionize the continent’s geopolitical and geo-economic would be most actively targeted and consequently receive the highest likelihood of some sort of Hybrid War destabilization in the coming future. All of this will be described in detail in Part I, but for now it’s enough to know that the identified states lay along the paths of China’s presently constructed Silk Road routes or most probable forthcoming projects that it could pursue in achieving its grand strategic ends.

It should be clarified at this point that the Southern African Cone was not included in the above model because its economic corridors are relatively well-established and have already been utilized for some time by all sorts of Great Powers, the West obviously included. Furthermore, concerning Namibia and Botswana’s global connectivity via South Africa, and to an extent, even Zimbabwe and Mozambique’s as well, this mostly deals with the one-way transport of natural resources and less so with each respective state’s labor and market potential. While each of these countries have a given role that they play vis-à-vis the Chinese economy, none of them except for South Africa (the hub through which most of their exports, barring Mozambique’s, pass) is integral enough to be targeted by their own Hybrid War.

Theoretically speaking, disruptions in the regional periphery around South Africa could have a strategic effect in putting pressure on the country’s multipolar leadership and pave the way for a regime change scenario, but given the rotten nature of corrupt South African politics, it’s more expected that traditional ‘soft coup’ means such as constitutional technicalities and simple Color Revolutions (i.e. the anti-Rousseff coup in Brazil) would be used in this instance. Additionally, the resources of the population-sparse countries of Namibia and Botswana and the general market and labor potential of South Africa are already pretty much integrated into the larger global economy, so there are many existing unipolar stakeholders that would also be adversely affected by a severe disruption in or around their common point of African access. The same can’t be said so much about Zimbabwe and Mozambique, the former rich in minerals such as diamonds and platinum while the latter is poised to become one of the world’s largest LNG exporters, so it’s entirely possible that they may be targeted sometime in the future. But even so, it would be less in connection with China’s multipolar transnational connective infrastructure projects than with their own individual standalone potentials in their respective fields, thus strategically differentiating them from the other countries included in the present study (although that is not to say that Hybrid War techniques would not be used – they probably would to a large extent).

Insular Importance:

In relation to the above, the insular countries of Africa were also not included in the continental overview, although they too play an important role in its evolving geopolitical paradigm. Nevertheless, because they’re island nations, they’re not directly connected to anything else besides the high seas, so although they may have valuable transit node status for China as an integral component of its Sea Lines of Communication, they’re not as directly affected by the region-stretching Hybrid War study that was commenced for the mainland. Nevertheless, because each of them could play a pivotal role in influencing continental affairs if properly utilized by a partnering Great Power, it’s worthwhile to very concisely comment on how they fit into the larger strategic equation that will be described throughout this work:

* Yellow – Canary Islands (Spain): This legacy holding allows Madrid to exert influence near the coasts of Morocco and Western Sahara, both thought to be rich with fish and possible energy resources.

* Green – Cabo Verde (formerly Cape Verde prior to late-2013): The former Portuguese colony connects the North and South Atlantic and offers a strategic position near the mouth of the Senegal River, as well as being positioned along an important oceanic route that the US and EU must take to access West Africa.

* Blue – São Tomé and Príncipe: Another former Portuguese colony, this one is crucially located in the hydrocarbon-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea and in close proximity to the shoreline of Africa’s largest economy, Nigeria.

* Violet – Comoros and the French overseas department of Mayotte: These two locations are almost on top of northern Mozambique’s LNG-prospected Rovuma Basin and thus near what will likely become a major energy exporting area in the near future.

* Orange – Seychelles: The former UK-colonized island chain lies along the route of approach that India and China must take in accessing the burgeoning East African marketplace, and it’s for this strategically competitive reason that New Delhi has proactively sought to build a naval base and position some of its military units there in order to “contain” China.

* Unmarked – Mauritius and the French island of Reunion: These two insular areas are not directly relevant to Africa’s mainland geopolitical order, although they do acquire significance vis-à-vis Madagascar and the US-controlled Indian Ocean bastion of Diego Garcia.

Transregional Conflict Overspill:

One of the most striking aspects of the reference map is that it clearly delineates the geopolitical fault lines where Hybrid War conflicts could easily become transregional:

Out of all of the areas designated by the map, it’s most probable that the uncontrollably violent processes in the Failed State Belt of the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan would be the ones to spread to other parts of Africa, at least as regards the continent’s conflicts that are presently ongoing (and not accounting for those that have yet to possibly erupt). In particular, CAR’s chaos could result in a refugee and militant overspill to Cameroon and Chad, possibly leading to these respective Christian- and Muslim-led governments supporting their own confessional sides in the country’s unresolved civil war. The misleading “Clash of Civilizations” narrative that would assuredly be purposely pushed by the Western mainstream media will be discussed later on when addressing the Failed State Belt, but at this moment it’s useful just to be aware of the transregional “infection” potential that the CAR has in affecting  the Lake Chad region. Additionally, the country’s domestic difficulties could also spread southward into the northern reaches of the Central-Southern state of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), representing a dual destabilization threat emanating from the CAR.

South Sudan can do something similar to the CAR in relation to the northern part of the DRC, but possibly even to the Horn of Africa state of Ethiopia and the East African state of Uganda as well. Tellingly, these latter two states are actively involved in the conflict resolution process in South Sudan and are jostling against one another for influence there in order to carve out defensive buffers (but also markets, of course) to protect themselves from this scenario. It should go without saying that South Sudan was only brought into existence because it was forcibly severed from Sudan proper over a three-decade-long civil war period, and the dynamic of anti-Khartoum action hasn’t stopped since Juba gained its independence in 2011. Therefore, South Sudan represents an even larger asymmetrical regional threat than CAR does, and their combined destabilization potential explains why they’re both categorized together as part of the Failed State Belt.

If their respective conflicts somehow merged into a transnational conflagration, then that would represent a large-scale Hybrid War threat in the geographic heart of Africa, but the closest this has henceforth come has been the over-exaggerated threat of Joseph Kony. With reference to the Failed State Belt’s Hybrid War vulnerabilities and the transregionalization that its internal conflicts pose, it’s little wonder then that the US exploited the mystique around this warlord in order to deploy a limited but very strategic contingent of its special forces to Uganda, South Sudan, DRC, and CAR. Almost as an afterthought but drawing on the tangent of transregional conflict overlap, it’s topically pertinent to recall the Darfur Conflict and how this essentially was a proxy competition between the Lake Chad regional state of Chad and the extended Failed State Belt and somewhat Gulf-influenced state of Sudan. It’s no longer as relevant of a geopolitical item as it once was during the mid-2000s, but it nevertheless still has the potential to re-erupt in the future, especially if the externally directed Sudanese dissolution process speeds up and makes headway in the states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan.

Lastly, there’s the realistic possibility that the US’ attempts to instigate a Hybrid War in Burundi could set off a chain reaction of destabilization in the eastern DRC, Rwanda (and by extent, possibly up to Uganda), and western Tanzania, thereby making this geographically tiny state a disproportionately large trigger in upsetting the regional balance. Although there’s not yet an active conflict in Burundi anywhere on par with the scale of what’s been raging in the CAR and South Sudan over the past couple of years, this doesn’t mean that one can’t quickly develop if the entire state collapses under Hybrid War pressure, and this disturbing scenario will certainly be explored more at length later on in the work.

Mapping out the expected transregional conflict overspill zones in Africa, one can unmistakably see that it’s the entire Upper-Central (Failed State Belt) and the eastern portion of the Central-Southern zones of Africa that are most at risk of this destructive process unfolding. Accordingly, this realization leads one to conclude that the DRC and the areas immediately abutting it provide the most fertile ground for the transnationalization of domestic conflicts, which somewhat (but not totally) explains why the Second Congo War eventually came to involve states located far away from the actual battlespace and be nicknamed “Africa’s World War”. To put it another way, the Hybrid War vulnerabilities of the identified area combined with its obvious geostrategic centrality to the African continent makes it doubly capable of sucking countless states into a literal Black Hole of Chaos that could easily become the ultimate proxy war climax between the US and China.

To be continued…

Andrew Korybko is the American political commentator currently working for the Sputnik agency. He is the author of the monograph “Hybrid Wars: The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change” (2015). This text will be included into his forthcoming book on the theory of Hybrid Warfare.

PREVIOUS CHAPTERS:

Hybrid Wars 1. The Law Of Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Wars 2. Testing the Theory – Syria & Ukraine

Hybrid Wars 3. Predicting Next Hybrid Wars

Hybrid Wars 4. In the Greater Heartland

Hybrid Wars 5. Breaking the Balkans

Hybrid Wars 6. Trick To Containing China

Hybrid Wars 7. How The US Could Manufacture A Mess In Myanmar

The election was set up to be stolen from Trump. That was the purpose of the polls rigged by overweighting Hillary supporters in the samples. After weeks of hearing poll results that Hillary was in the lead, the public would discount a theft claim. Electronic voting makes elections easy to steal, and I have posted explanations by election fraud experts of how it is done.

Clearly the Oligarchy does not want Donald Trump in the White House as they are unsure that they could control him, and Hillary is their agent.

With the reopening of the FBI investigation of Hillary and related scandals exploding all around her, election theft is not only more risky but also less likely to serve the Oligarchy’s own interests.

Image as well as money is part of Oligarchic power. The image of America takes a big hit if the American people elect a president who is currently under felony investigation.

Moreover, a President Hillary would be under investigation for years. With so much spotlight on her, she would not be able to serve the Oligarchy’s interests. She would be worthless to them, and, indeed, investigations that unearthed various connections between Hillary and oligarchs could damage the oligarchs.

In other words, for the Oligarchy Hillary has moved from an asset to a liability.

A Hillary presidency could put our country into chaos.

I doubt the oligarchs are sufficiently stupid to think that once she is sworn in, Hillary can fire FBI Director Comey and shut down the investigation. The last president that tried that was Richard Nixon, and look where that got him.

Moreover, the Republicans in the House and Senate would not stand for it. House Committee on oversight and Government Reform chairman Jason Chaffetz has already declared Hillary to be “a target-rich environment. Even before we get to day one, we’ve got two years worth of material already lined up.” House Speaker Paul Ryan said investigation will follow the evidence.

If you were an oligarch, would you want your agent under this kind of scrutiny? If you were Hillary, would you want to be under this kind of pressure?

What happens if the FBI recommends the indictment of the president? Even insouciant Americans would see the cover-up if the attorney general refused to prosecute the case. Americans would lose all confidence in the government. Chaos would rule. Chaos can be revolutionary, and that is not good for oligarchs.

Moreover, if reports can be believed, salacious scandals appear to be waiting their time on stage. For example, last May Fox News reported:

“Former President Bill Clinton was a much more frequent flyer on a registered sex offender’s infamous jet than previously reported, with flight logs showing the former president taking at least 26 trips aboard the “Lolita Express” — even apparently ditching his Secret Service detail for at least five of the flights, according to records obtained by FoxNews.com.

“Clinton’s presence aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s Boeing 727 on 11 occasions has been reported, but flight logs show the number is more than double that, and trips between 2001 and 2003 included extended junkets around the world with Epstein and fellow passengers identified on manifests by their initials or first names, including “Tatiana.” The tricked-out jet earned its Nabakov-inspired nickname because it was reportedly outfitted with a bed where passengers had group sex with young girls.”

Fox News reports that Epstein served time in prison for “solicitation and procurement of minors for prostitution. He allegedly had a team of traffickers who procured girls as young as 12 to service his friends on ‘Orgy Island,’ an estate on Epstein’s 72-acre island, called Little St. James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.”

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/05/13/flight-logs-show-bill-clinton-flew-on-sex-offenders-jet-much-more-than-previously-known.html 

Some Internet sites, the credibility of which is unknown to me, have linked Hillary to these flights.

http://truepundit.com/breaking-bombshell-nypd-blows-whistle-on-new-hillary-emails-money-laundering-sex-crimes-with-children-child-exploitation-pay-to-play-perjury/

This kind of behavior seems reckless even for Bill and Hillary, who are accustomed to getting away with everything. Nevertheless, if you are an oligarch already worried about the reopened Hillary email case and additional FBI investigations, such as the one into the Clinton Foundation, and concerned about what else might emerge from the 650,000 emails on former US Rep. Weiner’s computer and the NYPD pedophile investigation, putting Hillary in the Oval Office doesn’t look like a good decision.

At this point, I would think that the Oligarchy would prefer to steal the election for Trump, instead of from him, rather than allow insouciant Americans to destroy America’s reputation by choosing a person under felony investigations for president of the United States.

Being the “exceptional nation” takes on new meaning when there is a criminal at the helm.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

U.S. Elections “November Chaos”: What You’re Not Being Told

By James Corbett and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, November 04 2016

Corrupt Clinton Crime Cartel Along with Hillary’s Presidential Hopes Are Crumbling…

By Joachim Hagopian, November 03 2016

October 28, 2016 marks the official launch of Zerocash (“Zcash,” “ZEC”), a new cryptocurrency that has received tremendous attention from the Bitcoin community. The technology is named for its zero-identity function of shielding transactions on its blockchain, or digital ledger. “Zerocash is a new protocol that provides a privacy-preserving version of Bitcoin (or a similar currency),” its developers explain. “[I]n Zerocash, users may pay one another directly, via payment transactions that reveal neither the origin, destination, or amount of the payment.”

The enthusiasm surrounding the coin is demonstrated in the recent price for Zerocash futures contracts, representing one unit and valued against the price of one Bitcoin (BTC). Between September 15th and October 26th the price surged almost 1,300%—from a low of $18 (0.027 BTC) to a high of $261 (0.379 BTC).

Upon its October 28 debut the price of one Zcash briefly spiked above $1,000,000 (one million USD) on some exchanges, while eventually settling back to below $6,000 per coin.

The high valuation and scarcity is at least partly influenced by the novel way Zcash is being introduced. The cryptocurrency will not be initially available to investors for over-the-counter purchases and can only be obtained in gradually increasing increments over a month-long period through “mining,” or digital production by those with the necessary computer equipment and technological expertise.

An additional reason for the building excitement around Zcash is that its development team consists of notable computer scientists at University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Tel Aviv University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A lesser-acknowledged aspect of the Zerocash phenomenon, however, is how the currency’s development has been financially backed in part by some of the world’s most powerful corporate and government deep state actors, including Amazon, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research, and the Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology. The entire list of funders is as follows:

*Amazon.com 

*Broadcom Foundation

*Tel Aviv University Authentication Initiative

*Center for Science of Information (CSoI), an NSF Science and Technology Center

*Check Point Institute for Information Security

*U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

*Air Force Research Laboratory

*European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme

*Israeli Centers of Research Excellence I-CORE program

*Israeli Ministry of Science and Technology

*The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust

*Office of Naval Research

*Simons Foundation

*Skolkovo Foundation 

Libertarians especially, with their philosophical antipathy toward state monopoly that central banking epitomizes have been among the most vigorous supporters of cryptocurrency development and use. This is accentuated by the fact that traditional markets for “hard money” investment such as precious metals are likewise subject to heavy manipulation by the same or allied central banking outlets.

Yet one would be hard-pressed to come up with a greater illustration of centralized state power than the array of interests listed above. Indeed, the involvement of such actors in developing the “next Bitcoin” should be recognized vis-a-vis the Western financial community’s continued advocacy for the drastic reduction of conventional central bank-issued currency from circulation (i.e. here, here, here, here and here).

In theory Zerocash differs from Bitcion in that it represents a bolstered technology for anonymous transactions veiled from third party scrutiny. According to the mechanics such transactions may be viewed and recorded by the specific parties who obtains proper authorization. What if a Trojan Horse capability could be engineered into the currency that might later be utilized by lettered agencies?

This is the greatest fear of those who rightly question the loss of tangible exchange. Further, such a development would defeat ZeroCash’s desirability and purpose. By dismissing the possibility of such a feature Zcash users implicitly rely on the integrity of the developers themselves, most of whom are junior faculty or graduate students whose research, as noted, is at least partly funded by such deep state actors.

Many Bitcoin enthusiasts regard cryptocurrencies as a sort of deus ex machina against the state. Along these lines, Zerocash’s institutional and scholarly veneer cloaks the more complex grant-generating interests lurking in the shadows.

Recently even strong advocates of Bitcoin have pondered if the financial medium may have been developed with direct or indirect participation of the intelligence community. In the case of Zcash there can be no doubt of such deep state interest and involvement, which is of no small concern as the world moves toward a seemingly inevitable “cashless society.”

As implicações do 11/9 possuem contradições e evidências de sobra que apontam para execução interna, isto é, que norte-americanos em posições de poder foram responsáveis pela realização dos ataques, o que, diante de inúmeras evidências, é o mais plausível enquanto Bush e Obama fizeram de tudo para impedir uma investigação independente instada por pesquisadores locais e familiares de vítimas. Para o atual ocupante da Casa Branca, “é contraproducente olhar para trás”, gerando profunda indignação a familiares de vítimas e pesquisadores da tragédia.A denominada Comissão do 11/9 foi, desde o início, programada para defender o governo de Washington. Sofreu diversas interferências de altos escalões da política conforme Ryan observa: “A Comissão do 11/9 não conseguiu responder 70% das perguntas colocadas pelas famílias do 11/9, responsáveis por dirigir a criação da Comissão. Também é importante perceber que um esboço do que viria a se tornar o Relatório da Comissão do 11/9 foi produzido antes do início da investigação. O esboço foi mantido em sigilo do pessoal da Comissão, e parece ter determinado o seu resultado. Além disso, a Comissão alegou repetidas vezes, 63 vezes para ser exato, que não encontrou nenhuma evidência relacionada a muitos dos aspectos mais importantes dos crimes. Esses fatos sugerem que a Comissão nunca teve nenhuma intenção de revelar a verdade sobre o 9/11”.Diversos físicos e arquitetos norte-americanos, reunidos na organização Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth(AE911Truth), observam que as Torres Gêmeas e o World Trade Center 7 (WTC7) ruíram à velocidade de queda livre, o que só seria possível através de implosão controlada. Embora a prefeitura de Nova Iorque, a mando de Bush, tenha removido imediatamente os resquícios dos edifícios que deveriam servir como investigação, alguns transeuntes conseguiram levaram consigo partes dos escombros que acabaram nas mãos dos AE911Truth. Através de minuciosa investigação, foram constatados componentes de explosivos, mais especificamente dinamites em partes dos edifícios destruídos supostamente pelo choque dos aviões, em tese sequestrados por muçulmanos radicais. “Quem colocou os explosivos nos edifícios do World Trade Center?”, questiona Ryan. “Quem foi convidado à reunião de eliminação de explosivos/terrorismo no World Trade Center 7 na manhã de 11 de setembro de 2001, e qual foi a ordem do dia? A segunda questão refere-se a uma reunião convocada por Larry Silverstein e pelo Serviço Secreto no edifício 7 do World Trade Center na manhã de 11/9. Unidades de eliminação de explosivos provenientes de instalações militares dos EUA haviam sido convidadas para a reunião. Foi apenas mais uma incrível coincidência? Precisamos saber mais sobre isso”.Especificamente sobre a queda do WTC7, há o fato surpreendente – para dizer o mínimo – que ele ruiu sem ter sido chocado por nenhum avião. “Foi ao chão por implosão controlada? Ou pelo fogo como o NIST [ National Institute of Standards and Technology] alega?”, questiona Ganser lembrando que mesmo o NIST admite nos dias de hoje que o WTC7 levou poucos alguns segundos para cair. “Isso significa que durante esses segundos,o edifício sofreu resistência zero, resistência absolutamente nenhuma. No entanto, havia 81 colunas sustentando o edifício. Desta maneira, isso é muito estranho”, observa Ganser.Outra pergunta entre as inúmeras sem resposta envolvendo os ataques do 11/9, diz respeito ao tempo que os aviões sobrevoaram o espaço norte-americano: por até uma hora. Especialmente um deles, em direção ao Pentágono, local considerado o mais seguro do mundo, sem ter sido interceptado pelo sistema de segurança aérea que, pela primeira e única vez na história do país, falhou inexplicavelmente diante de uma operação que levaria, no máximo, um minuto para que jatos interceptadores iniciassem o processo de detenção dos aviões. Houve diversos discursos oficiais desencontrados na tentativa de explicar o que realmente aconteceu com a defesa aérea norte-americana naquele dia, um substituindo o outro, todos impossíveis de serem sustentados. No caso particular da Standard Operating Procedures (Procedimentos Operacionais Padrão, responsáveis por garantir respostas de emergência através dos jatos) estavam simplesmente suspensos em 11 de setembro de 2001 – primeira e única vez na história dos Estados Unidos.

“Muitas vezes as pessoas entendem mal, pensando que os transpônderes dos aviões sequestrados foram todos desligados, e que os aviões não poderiam ter sido rastreados. Esta afirmação não reconhece que as autoridades haviam rastreado aviões que traficavam drogas via radar por muitos anos. Mais importante, o voo 175 não desligou o transponder. Este foi o segundo avião que atingiu o World Trade Center e seu transponder esteve ligado durante todo o tempo em que os defensores de ar o assistiam na tela. Por isso, eles sabiam que estava fora da rota. Voou sequestrado por 20 minutos após o primeiro avião ter atingido o World Trade Center, cerca de 45 minutos após o primeiro sequestro, fato sabido das lideranças da Administração Federal de Aviação”, precisa Ryan, quem também questiona: “Na medida em que o piloto automático avança, é interessante notar que, de acordo com o estudo oficial da trajetória de voo, o piloto automático do voo 77 [que atingiu o Pentágono] ficou ligado enquanto o avião era sequestrado, e ao longo de sua volta de 180 graus de volta para Washington. Parece que a volta a Washington foi parte do caminho do voo programado, ou o piloto automático foi comandado instantaneamente”.

Outra contradição diz respeito aos supostos sequestradores dos quatro aviões, que segundo a versão oficial eram 19: seis deles, denunciados no mesmo dia pelo Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, polícia federal e secreta dos Estados Unidos), apareceram dias depois vivos em diferentes partes do mundo, denunciando não serem terroristas, possuindo os mesmos dados e a mesma fisionomia das alegadas pelos oficiais norte-americanos. Sobre isso, Ryan lamenta a ausência de investigação por parte do FBI, quem até hoje mantém os seis na lista de sequestradores do 11/9. “Os relatórios de que os homens acusados ainda estavam vivos não foram investigados pelo FBI, nem pela Comissão do 11/9. Mesmo o novo diretor do FBI, Robert Mueller, expressou publicamente dúvidas sobre a identidade dos sequestradores.

Questionado sobre a hipótese de execução interna, Ryan afirma: “É difícil discordar considerando que as pessoas fora dos Estados Unidos não poderiam ter feito o que precisava ser feito [a fim de atingir e derrubar as Torres Gêmeas e o Pentágono]. Por exemplo, apenas norte-americanos poderiam ter levado a rede de comando dos país a falhar, e apenas norte-americanos poderiam ter desativado as defesas aéreas. Em outro sentido, o 11/9 continua sendo uma ‘execução interna’ pela qual muitos norte-americanos não vão sequer atentar à evidência dos crimes. As barreiras psicológicas são muito grandes”.

Para Kiriakou, “o 11 de Setembro foi, é claro, a pior falha de inteligência da história dos Estados Unidos. A CIA nunca poderá mudar isso”. Ryan mostra-se pessimista que a verdade seja encontrada, e que justiça seja feita: “Nenhum dos presidenciáveis [Clinton e Trump] vai fazer nada para desafiar a versão oficial do 11/9. Se o fizessem, nunca ouviríamos nada sobre eles na mídia corporativa”.

“Follow the money.” That telling phrase, which has come to summarize the Watergate scandal, has been a part of the lexicon since 1976. It’s shorthand for political corruption: At what point do “contributions” become bribes, “constituent services” turn into quid pro quos and “charities” become slush funds?

Ronald Reagan was severely criticized in 1989 when, after he left office, he was paid $2 million for a couple of speeches in Japan. “The founding fathers would have been stunned that an occupant of the highest office in this land turned it into bucks,” sniffed a Columbia professor. 

So what would Washington and Jefferson make of Hillary Rodham Clinton? Mandatory financial disclosures released this month show that, in just the two years from April 2013 to March 2015, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state collected $21,667,000 in “speaking fees,” not to mention the cool $5 mil she corralled as an advance for her 2014 flop book, “Hard Choices.”

Throw in the additional $26,630,000 her ex-president husband hoovered up in personal-appearance “honoraria,” and the nation can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the former first couple — who, according to Hillary, were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001 with some of the furniture in tow — can finally make ends meet.

No wonder Donald Trump calls her “crooked Hillary.”

A look at Mrs. Clinton’s speaking venues and the whopping sums she’s received since she left State gives us an indication who’s desperate for a place at the trough — and whom another Clinton administration might favor.

To Read the Full Article on the the New York Post click here 

 

Here’s how much Hillary Clinton was paid for her 2013-2015 speeches:

• 4/18/2013, Morgan Stanley, Washington, DC: $225,000
• 4/24/2013, Deutsche Bank, Washington, DC: $225,000
• 4/24/2013, National Multi Housing Council, Dallas, Texas: $225,000
• 4/30/2013, Fidelity Investments, Naples, Fla.: $225,000
• 5/8/2013, Gap Inc., San Francisco, Calif.: $225,000
• 5/14/2013, Apollo Management Holdings LP, New York, NY: $225,000
• 5/16/2013, Itau BBA USA Securities, New York, NY: $225,000
• 5/21/2013, Vexizon Communications Inc., Washington, DC: $225,000
• 5/29/2013, Sanford C. Bernstein and Co. LLC, New York, NY: $225,000
• 6/4/2013, The Goldman Sachs Group, Palmetto Bluffs, SC: $225,000
• 6/6/2013, Spencer Stuart, New York, NY: $225,000
• 6/16/2013, Society for Human Resource Management, Chicago, Ill.: $285,000
• 6/17/2013, Economic Club of Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids, Mich.: $225,000
• 6/20/2013, Boston Consulting Group Inc., Boston, Mass.: $225,000
• 6/20/2013, Let’s Talk Entertainment Inc., Toronto, Canada: $250,000
• 6/24/2013, American Jewish University, Universal City, Calif.: $225,000
• 6/24/2013, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Company LP, Palos Verdes, Calif.:$225,000
• 7/11/2013, UBS Wealth Management, New York, NY: $225,000
• 8/7/2013, Global Business Travel Association, San Diego, Calif.: $225,000
• 8/12/2013, National Association of Chain Drug Stores, Las Vegas, Nev.: $225,000
• 9/18/2013, American Society for Clinical Pathology, Chicago, Ill.: $225,000
• 9/19/2013, American Society of Travel Agents Inc., Miami, Fla.: $225,000
• 10/4/2013, Long Island Association, Long Island, NY: $225,000
• 10/15/2013, National Association of Convenience Stores, Atlanta, Ga.: $265,000
• 10/23/2013, SAP Global Marketing Inc., New York, NY: $225,000
• 10/24/2013, Accenture, New York, NY: $225,000
• 10/24/2013, The Goldman Sachs Group, New York, NY: $225,000
• 10/27/2013, Beth El Synagogue, Minneapolis, Minn.: $225,000
• 10/28/2013, Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, Chicago, Ill.: $400,000
• 10/29/2013, The Goldman Sachs Group, Tuscon, Ariz.: $225,000
• 11/4/2013, Mase Productions Inc., Orlando, Fla.: $225,000
• 11/4/2013, London Drugs Ltd., Mississauga, Canada: $225,000
• 11/6/2013, Beaumont Health System, Troy, Mich.: $305,000
• 11/7/2013, Golden Tree Asset Management, New York, NY: $275,000
• 11/9/2013, National Association of Realtors, San Francisco, Calif.: $225,000
• 11/13/2013, Mediacorp Canada Inc., Toronto, Canada: $225,000
• 11/13/2013, Bank of America, Bluffton, SC: $225,000
• 11/14/2013, CB Richard Ellis Inc., New York, NY: $250,000
• 11/18/2013, CIIE Group, Naples, Fla.: $225,000
• 11/18/2013, Press Ganey, Orlando, Fla.: $225,000
• 11/21/2013, U.S. Green Building Council, Philadelphia, Pa.: $225,000
• 01/06/2014, GE, Boca Raton, Fla.: $225,500
• 01/27/2014, National Automobile Dealers Association, New Orleans, La.:$325,500
• 01/27/2014, Premier Health Alliance, Miami, Fla.: $225,500
• 02/06/2014, Salesforce.com, Las Vegas, Nev.: $225,500
• 02/17/2014, Novo Nordisk A/S, Mexico City, Mexico: $125,000
• 02/26/2014, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Orlando, Fla.: $225,500
• 02/27/2014, A&E Television Networks, New York, NY: $280,000
• 03/04/2014, Association of Corporate Counsel – Southern California, Los Angeles, Calif.: $225,500
• 03/05/2014, The Vancouver Board of Trade, Vancouver, Canada: $275,500
• 03/06/2014, tinePublic Inc., Calgary, Canada: $225,500
• 03/13/2014, Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, Orlando, Fla.:$225,500
• 03/13/2014, Drug Chemical and Associated Technologies, New York, NY:$250,000
• 03/18/2014, Xerox Corporation, New York, NY: $225,000
• 03/18/2014, Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, Montreal, Canada:$275,000
• 03/24/2014, Academic Partnerships, Dallas, Texas: $225,500
• 04/08/2014, Market° Inc., San Francisco, Calif.: $225,500
• 04/08/2014, World Affairs Council, Portland, Ore.: $250,500
• 04/10/2014, Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries Inc., Las Vegas, Nev.:$225,500
• 04/10/2014, Lees Talk Entertainment, San Jose, Calif.: $265,000
• 04/11/2014, California Medical Association (via satellite), San Diego, Calif.:$100,000
• 05/06/2014, National Council for Behavioral Healthcare, Washington, DC:$225,500
• 06/02/2014, International Deli-Dairy-Bakery Association, Denver, Colo.: $225,500
• 06/02/2014, Lees Talk Entertainment, Denver, Colo.: $265,000
• 06/10/2014, United Fresh Produce Association, Chicago, Ill.: $225,000
• 06/16/2014, tinePublic Inc., Toronto, Canada: $150,000
• 06/18/2014, tinePublic Inc., Edmonton, Canada: $100,000
• 06/20/2014, Innovation Arts and Entertainment, Austin, Texas: $150,000
• 06/25/2014, Biotechnology Industry Organization, San Diego, Calif.: $335,000
• 06/25/2014, Innovation Arts and Entertainment, San Francisco, Calif.: $150,000
• 06/26/2014, GTCR, Chicago, Ill.: $280,000
• 07/22/2014, Knewton Inc., San Francisco, Calif.: $225,500
• 07/26/2014, Ameriprise, Boston, Mass.: $225,500
• 07/29/2014, Coming Inc., Coming, NY: $225,500
• 08/28/2014, Nexenta Systems Inc., San Francisco, Calif.: $300,000
• 08/28/2014, Cisco, Las Vegas, Nev.: $325,000
• 09/04/2014, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP, San Diego, Calif.: $225,500
• 09/15/2014, Caridovascular Research Foundation, Washington, DC: $275,000
• 10/02/2014, Commercial Real Estate Women Network, Miami Beach, Fla.:$225,500
• 10/06/2014, Canada 2020, Ottawa, Canada: $215,500
• 10/07/2014, Deutsche Bank AG, New York, NY: $280,000
• 10/08/2014, Advanced Medical Technology Association (AdvaMed), Chicago, Ill.:$265,000
• 10/13/2014, Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, Colorado Springs, Colo.:$225,500
• 10/14/2014, Salesforce.com, San Francisco, Calif.: $225,500
• 10/14/2014, Qualcomm Incorporated, San Diego, Calif.: $335,000
• 12/04/2014, Massachusetts Conference for Women, Boston, Mass.: $205,500
• 01/21/2015, tinePublic Inc., Winnipeg, Canada: $262,000
• 01/21/2015, tinePublic Inc., Saskatoon, Canada: $262,500
• 01/22/2015, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Whistler, Canada: $150,000
• 02/24/2015, Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women, Santa Clara, Calif.:$225,500
• 03/11/2015, eBay Inc., San Jose, Calif.: $315,000
• 03/19/2015, American Camping Association, Atlantic City, NJ: $260,000

Total: $21,667,000

Why are they lying? Everything is being done to convince the public that Russia wants war; that it has annexed Ukraine; that it will attack Western Europe; that it will crush the Baltic states and Poland in its advance; that it’s committing war crimes in Syria; that Assad is a dictator and a butcher; that he has met peaceful demands for reform with brutal repression; that those fighting Assad are moderate rebels; that he is dropping barrel bombs on civilians. 

Why are they lying?

Because the people don’t want war: they want jobs and bread.

They will not agree to murder people who have done them no harm.  They will consent to war if told they are under attack or that the war will save other people from genocide, rape, or other gross violations of human rights. The people are not interested in world domination, but the elite are. The people are, therefore, the enemy within. They must be persuaded to support the elite’s plan by perverting their decency. They must be made to cringe in fear. They must be made to believe that war—any war—will be defensive.

This is the tactic of terrorists: terrorizing the population to obtain political ends.

Hillary Clinton is lying: a no-fly zone in Syria will not “save lives.” 

In her last presidential debate, Clinton said that she wants a no-fly zone in Syria because it will “save lives”:

“I’m going to continue to push for a no-fly zone and safe havens within Syria, not only to help protect the Syrians and prevent the constant outflow of refugees, but to, frankly, gain some leverage on both the Syrian government and the Russians.”

The “leverage” she is seeking is Russian roulette with the planet. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dunford (image right), noted in response that a no-fly zone in Syria might trigger a war with Russia, a nuclear power. Neither does she believe that a no-fly zone will save lives.  In a closed-door speech to Goldman Sachs in 2013, Clinton said:

“To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk—you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians.”

She knows what is at stake with a no-fly zone in Syria, and yet she tells us the opposite of what she knows will happen. In other words, she’s lying.

What has changed Clinton’s mind since 2013?

In 2013, there was no need to risk nuclear war over Syria. The so-called Free Syrian Army and assorted rebel groups were doing just fine in their offensive. In 2013, Syria stood alone, apart from some Iranian assistance. Until 2015, the Assad government was on its last breath, in retreat from the provinces of Raqqa, Aleppo, Hama, Idlib, and Latakia. By September 2015, the generous financial, military, and operational support by the United States, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to the  “anti-Syrian coalition”– Islamic State, the Jabbat al-Nusra, the “Free Syrian Army”–was paying great dividends in advancing the destabilization of the Assad government. Soon, it could be expected that the symbolic head of Assad would sit on a silver platter in the White House, along with other colonial trophies.

The humanitarian consequences for Syrians, however, were catastrophic. Fleeing the terror of a Syria in the clutches of cutthroat mercenary armies, refugees flooded Turkey, Jordan, Greece, and other countries, becoming human barter between Turkey and the European Union.  The EU paid Turkey two billion euro to keep within its borders this human avalanche of “collateral damage.”

That was the situation in September of 2015, when Russia, invited by the legitimate Syrian government, legitimately intervened in Syria with aircraft, support personnel, military advisors and equipment.  In a year of Russian efforts to establish a premise for a peaceful solution in Syria by eliminating the militant rabble the Western chorus of “Assad must go” has mutated into a furious hiss of impotent rage. No one expects Assad to go now, unless the US comes up with a strategy to reverse the losses the Russian intervention has inflicted.

Enter Hillary’s reversal on the no-fly zone, which now, contrary to her judgment in 2013, will “save lives.”

What is a no-fly zone?

A no-fly zone is a coercive appropriation of the partial airspace of a sovereign country. It is the arbitrary creation of a demilitarized zone in the sky to prevent belligerent powers from flying in that air space. In Syria, the “belligerent power,” ironically, would be the internationally recognized legitimate Syrian government and its legitimate ally, Russia.

According to former UN Secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali (image left), in an interview with John Pilger, a no-fly zone is illegal under international law.  No-fly zones are post-Soviet inventions. The measure was never proposed, used, or authorized to this day by the UN Security Council until the Soviet Union virtually dissolved. This restraint was exercised by the US for the excellent reason that no such aggression on a sovereign state would have been tolerated without massive fuss at the UN Security Council and a bad rap for the US. There have been only three instances of a no-fly zone so far, all in the wake of the disappearance of the USSR: Iraq (1991-2003), Bosnia (1993-95), and Libya (2011), all initiated on the hypocritical pretense of “saving lives.”

What is Plan B?

In one word: escalation. Apart from partitioning the air space of Syria, Plan B would provide for supplying, through Qatar or Saudi Arabia, man-portable air defense systems to the “moderate opposition,” including if it is acknowledged that the “moderate opposition” has allied itself openly with the al-Nusra front. Plan B has not been approved, but the media has floated a series of reports throughout October as being under consideration.

On October 28, the New York Times published an astonishing conclusion about an aspect of the Obama administration’s strategy in Syria, though gently and benevolently worded. The Times indicated that it was being felt that Obama had insufficiently armed the “moderate opposition,” so that in Aleppo it had “no choice” but to partner with al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly al-Nusra) to fight off Putin and Assad.  At the same time, Reuters noted that the Obama administration had formerly considered arming the “moderates” with anti-air missiles but was constrained by the fear that such weapons would fall in the hands of ”extremists.”

Such reports suggest, rather boldly, I think, that “former restraint” might have to give way to greater support for the “moderate” militants, including if they partner with “extremists.” Thus, we arrive at a point of utter bewilderment in which we verify the absurdity of launching a War on Terror to end up fighting a War with Terror.

Oppose US imperialism

It is good and proper that we should denounce Hillary Clinton for her vile record of regime change (in Honduras), crime of aggression (Libya), threats to Russia and China, corruption, illegality, and abuse of power. She’s clearly unfit to be president of any decent country that calls itself democratic.

However, fixating on her individual agency lets the policy off the hook. The US is not yet a banana republic, in which the patriarch of some rich landowning family becomes the patriarch-autocrat of a country. An intricate network of powerful interests, which determine the policy, rules the US, frantic to maintain global economic and military dominance. This ruling class selects the candidate who will best carry out the policy. Hillary Clinton will be the servant of the interests of the ruling class of which she is a member. She will be their president.

So it’s the policy that must be opposed, and this policy is imperialist.

We must develop a principled opposition to this policy, without prevarications. The task falls on the left, but it cannot be a left divided by relativist consideration of “evil” on all sides. However we may feel about the morality of governments in Russia, China, Syria, Iran, etc., one thing is clear: they did not launch a war on Iraq, opening the door to all the crimes that followed from that original crime. It is time to decide whether we want to live with things as they are or change them. And we must begin by changing them at home.

Cerca de 800 milhões de pessoas passam fome em todo o Mundo, a maioria delas nos países ditos «em desenvolvimento». Ora nesses países, todos os anos, 250 mil milhões de euros de receitas fiscais desaparecem nos paraísos fiscais, ou seja, 6 vezes a quantia anualmente necessária para vencer a fome daqui até 2025.1

«Calcula-se que 85 % a 90 % destes haveres [fundos privados colocados em paraísos fiscais] pertencem a menos de 10 milhões de pessoas – ou seja, 0,014 % da população mundial –, e que pelo menos um terço desses haveres pertencem às 100 000 famílias mais ricas do mundo, pesando cada uma delas pelo menos 30 milhões de dólares».2Não restam dúvidas: é aos mais afortunados que faz proveito a redução das receitas fiscais por fraude, as quais perpetuam e agravam as desigualdades.

A razão levaria a pensar que os mais ricos, que gozam dos benefícios das suas sociedades, deveriam contribuir para uma redistribuição em proveito dos mais pobres, por via dos impostos sobre os benefícios dessas sociedades. Ora a mais-valia extraída graças à exploração da força de trabalho evapora-se em territórios paradisíacos para a oligarquia que governa e legisla. Trata-se de um roubo organizado em grande escala – ilegítimo e não conforme à ideia de desenvolvimento humano – duma riqueza que pertence àquelas e àqueles que a criaram com o seu trabalho e que deveria financiar os serviços públicos. De facto, o imposto sobre os rendimentos que escapa ao fisco e por isso não é redistribuído para o bem comum permite ao capitalista optimizar a mais-valia extraída pelo trabalho e procurar meios de a privatizar na sua totalidade.

A fraude entrava o desenvolvimento

A fraude e a evasão fiscal, praticadas nomeadamente pelas multinacionais com a ajuda das grandes firmas de auditoria (os famosos «Big four»: Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG et Price Water House Coopers), são um verdadeiro flagelo que entrava o real desenvolvimento das populações empobrecidas por essas práticas. Esta hemorragia de capitais impede a construção de hospitais e a contratação de médicos com salários decentes; o equipamento de escolas na medida necessária e o recrutamento de professores, afim de diminuir o número de alunos por turma; a implantação de redes de água potável, etc.

Para o período de 2008-2012, a Global Financial Integrity calcula que, em 31 países em desenvolvimento, as saídas ilícitas de fundos foram superiores às despesas públicas de saúde e que, em 35 países em desenvolvimento, foram superiores às despesas públicas de ensino3. No seu relatório Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2004-2013, a mesma organização verificou que os países ditos em desenvolvimento e as economias emergentes perderam 7800 mil milhões de dólares (7 002 450 000 000 euros) nos fluxos financeiros ilícitos de 2004 a 2013, com saídas ilícitas progressivamente mais elevadas, aumentando a um ritmo médio de 6,5 % ao ano – quase duas vezes maior que o ritmo de crescimento do PIB mundial!

Crescimento das desigualdades

Grande parte das necessidades gritantes, indispensáveis ao avanço de um desenvolvimento real, foram abandonadas em proveito duma oligarquia que não pára de enriquecer. O programa das Nações Unidas para o Desenvolvimento (PNUD) indica que 8 % da população mundial mais rica embolsa metade dos rendimentos totais, indo a outra metade para os restantes 92 %4. As riquezas concentradas nas mãos dos 1 % mais ricos passaram de 44 % das riquezas mundiais em 2010 para 48 % em 2014. No espaço de 20 anos, as desigualdades de rendimento aumentaram nos países em desenvolvimento.5

A fraude fiscal tem de ser levada a sério e merece uma justiça que castigue os culpados. É ela um dos factores que entrava o desenvolvimento dos países empobrecidos e agrava o «sistema da dívida». No seu relatório, o perito independente encarregado de estudar a dívida na ONU, M. Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky, insiste na necessidade de combater os fluxos financeiros considerados ilícitos, que «contribuem para a acumulação de uma dívida insustentável, pois a insuficiência das receitas públicas pode levar os governos a recorrerem a empréstimos externos». Os fluxos ilícitos de capitais privam assim o Estado da possibilidade de financiar actividades indispensáveis à eliminação da pobreza e à satisfação dos direitos económicos, sociais, culturais, civis e políticos.

No seguimento deste relatório foi aprovada no Conselho dos Direitos Humanos da ONU uma resolução sobre a evasão fiscal e sobre a necessidade de devolver os haveres desviados dos países ditos «em desenvolvimento». Nesta votação, ocorrida a 24/03/2016, nem um só país europeu votou a seu favor. Bélgica, França, Alemanha, Holanda, Suíça, Reino Unido, Portugal, Albânia, Eslovénia, Letónia, Geórgia, República da Coreia, ex-República jugoslava da Macedónia, México e Panamá abstiveram-se.

Jerome Duval

 

1.«Ao todo, o montante das fugas de recursos para o desenvolvimento, que leva em conta, além das receitas fiscais perdidas, os ganhos que poderiam ser feitos por meio dos investimentos em falta, ronda entre os 250 mil milhões e os 300 mil milhões de dólares por ano.» Ver A. Cobham, «UNCTAD study on corporate tax in developing countries», Unacounted.org (2015). Ver também a petição em linha.

2.Ver Étude finale sur les flux financiers illicites da ONU, p. 6, disponível em francês no site da ONU.

3.Ver J. Spanjers e H. Foss, «Illicit financial flows and development indices: 2008-2012», Global Financial Integrity, p. 30-33 (2015).

4.Ver PNUD, «Humanity Divided: Confronting Inequality in Developing Countries», p. xi do texto inglês (New York, 2013).

5.Ver «Wealth: having it all and wanting more», relatório temático da Oxfam, p. 2, 3 e 7 (2015).

Fontes e referências:

Artigo de opinião publicado em 1/09/2016 em Politis.fr

L’évasion fiscale, délit de riches aux dépens des pauvres

Tradução: Rui Viana Pereira, cadpp.org

En los países en vías de desarrollo, al menos 250.000 millones de euros de ingresos fiscales desaparecen cada año en los paraísos fiscales, es decir, seis veces el importe anual necesario para luchar y vencer el hambre hasta 2025.

 Foto : CC – Flickr – 2014 – William Murphy

After reports emerged alleging that the US may be tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) over war crimes in Afghanistan, Radio Sputnik host Brian Becker discussed the possibility of such a scenario with international criminal lawyer Christopher Black.

Black, who is on the list of counsel at the ICC, told Loud & Clear that the initial report by Foreign Policy, suggesting Washington’s actions in Afghanistan may be investigated, appeared at a tough time for the organization. Prior to the publication three African nations — South Africa, Gambia and Burundi — withdrew from ICC over its alleged bias toward the continent.

Listen to Christopher Black:  “ICC Opens Afghanistan War Crimes Investigation: Could the U.S. Actually be Tried?” on Spreaker.

“It’s something to reestablish [ICC’s] prestige and credibility, because it’s in a state of collapse at the moment,” Black commented on the occasion, adding that there’s little evidence that the US will actually appear before court.

Citing the ICC report from the last year, Black stressed that potential inquiry into Afghanistan’s war crimes will be referred to every party involved in the conflict, including the Taliban, Afghan government and other forces. But it won’t concern the states that investigate the purported war crimes on their own, he added.

“[The report] says that the US has disciplinary procedures set up. People are being investigated [by US courts] and [ICC] may have to assess whether it is a serious investigation on that. Because the ICC won’t charge a country with war crimes if its own internal procedures are in place and they are pursuing people who commit crimes.”

In case of Afghanistan, Washington largely justifies its actions in the country, Black said.

“They said they made that attack, aggression against Afghanistan, in order to go after the Taliban government, which was ‘harboring Osama bin Laden’,” he said. “But remember the history, the Taliban said ‘we do have bin Laden here and will hand him over if you present evidence of his crimes.’ All they received was bombs.”

Moreover, Black highlighted, the US is not a member of ICC and has its federal protection act in place that prevents American personnel and officials from being charged by international courts, which means it’s unlikely the ICC will ever charge any American with war crimes.

“I don’t see them [US] accepting anything from the ICC, if it had an independent prosecutor,” Black said, adding that the ICC, under its two prosecutors, has done nothing to deal with war crimes committed by NATO forces in Libya or Yugoslavia.

The ICC ultimately is a tool for extension of American power worldwide Black explained, adding that Washington controls the prosecution staff in the ICC, “by placing its personnel in key positions or by persons that can control key positions.”

“The NATO tribunals have three purposes: to demonize governments that they want to crush, to cover-up their role in those wars and to make sure those people will never come back to governments. And the rest is propaganda.”

Since its establishment in 2003, it has opened 10 investigations and has found guilty 39 people, all from Africa.

“The US and its Western allies are using the ICC to go after who are standing their way, But they do not go for people [Uganda’s President Yoweri] Museveni who commit war crimes on the daily basis all over the Congo. Their client-leaders are left away and the rest are targeted,” he said.

The cozy relationship between Goldman Sachs and the Clintons has reached dizzying new heights in recent years, giving the Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton an immensely influential partner on Wall Street.

As the public and most of the mainstream media is still processing the political bombshell concerning the newly reopened FBI probe into the Hillary Clinton’s email server case – the global investment banking firm Goldman Sachs quietly endorsed the Democratic presidential candidate this past week.

The financial ties that bind the Clintons and Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs are nothing new, but never before have the connections been so exposed. Let’s take a trip down collusion lane to review some of the more questionable examples of their political and financial merger formed long ago…

‘MONEY CHANGERS’ – Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs are inextricably linked to the Clinton’s and The Clinton Foundation. (Photo illustration 21WIRE)

The Clintons & Goldman Sachs 

While campaigning for his first term in the White House, former president Bill Clinton received an enormous amount of support from Washington insider lobbyists and investment banking firms on Wall Street.

At the top of the pile sat Goldman Sachs…

In 1992, the LA Times reported that presidential nominee Bill Clinton,”received the largest share of his financial support–at least $2.6 million–from lawyers and lobbyists,” and that Clinton also received additional support from “…big securities firms such as Goldman, Sachs & Co. in New York and Stephens Inc. in his hometown of Little Rock, Ark. In fact, Goldman Sachs employees and their family members were responsible for the biggest contributions from a single firm: $98,700.”

For decades the Clintons have remained close allies to the banking behemoth Goldman Sachs and in the process, a mutually beneficial relationship has taken hold, something that even the NY Times admits:

Over 20-plus years, Goldman provided the Clintons with some of their most influential advisers, millions of dollars in campaign contributions and speaking fees, and financial support for the family foundation’s charitable programs.

By now, there should be little doubt that the Clinton political machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wall Street banking cartel. Their relationship was built over three decades.

The real watershed moment came here…

BLANK CHECK: Bill Clinton laughs with Wall Street elites after signing the Financial Services Modernization Act in 1999.

‘Key to the Kingdom’

In one of the most significant financial rulings in the modern era, the Clinton presidency gave big banks like Goldman Sachs the skeleton key to the kingdom by deregulating the investment banking system almost entirely.

The Clinton/Goldman Sachs/Wall Street partnership was fully forged after the removal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which banking luminaries cynically named the “Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999″ officially titled the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.  The original Glass-Steagall was a depression-age four-part provision under the Bank Act of 1933 that strictly prohibited securities activities that could be harmful to investors – the same sort of rogue speculating and paper fiat fraud which triggered the Great Depression (1929-1941). In fact, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which repealed Glass-Steagall, opened the door for the ‘shadow banking’ realm outside of regulatory oversight which led to a much higher trading risk, as banks became more interlinked.

Simply put: Clinton’s repeal of Glass-Steagell removed the firewall between speculative investment banking and regular high street retail and consumer banking – which exposed everyone to toxic, subprime ponzi schemes and fake paper products being pushed around the globe by the banking elite – which ultimately causing the global economy to crash in 2008. All that can be laid at the feet of one William Jefferson Clinton. And Hillary still claims that, “My husband did so well with the economy.” Really?

In a cross-posted article featured at Huffington Post, Nomi Prins underscored the complicit nature of Wall Street and Washington after the removal of tighter bank regulations under the Clinton administration during the 1990’s:

To grasp the dangers that the Big Six banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley) presently pose to the financial stability of our nation and the world, you need to understand their history in Washington, starting with the Clinton years of the 1990s. Alliances established then (not exclusively with Democrats, since bankers are bipartisan by nature) enabled these firms to become as politically powerful as they are today and to exert that power over an unprecedented amount of capital. Rest assured of one thing: their past and present CEOs will prove as critical in backing a Hillary Clinton presidency as they were in enabling her husband’s years in office.

Prins herself was a former managing director at Goldman Sachs, senior managing director at Bear Stearns, as well as having worked as a senior strategist at the now defunct investment banking firm Lehman Brothers. Following the financial crash in 2007-2008, Prins blew the whistle on the banking world in a book entitled “It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts, and Backroom Deals from Washington to Wall Street.”

Prins has become an advocate for the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act since departing from the investment banking world.

The media outlet Common Dreams described the merger between Citicorp and Travelers Group (becoming Citigroup), which was dubbed the ‘Citi-Travelers Act’ on Capitol Hill. It was a conglomeration that went hand in hand with the Clinton administration’s influence on banking deregulation marked by the repeal of Glass-Steagall:

Then, in 1998, in an act of corporate civil disobedience, Citicorp and Travelers Groupannounced they were merging. Such a combination of banking and insurance companies was illegal under the Bank Holding Company Act, but was excused due to a loophole that provided a two-year review period of proposed mergers. The merger was premised on the expectation that Glass-Steagall would be repealed. Citigroup’s co-chairs Sandy Weill and John Reed led a swarm of industry executives and lobbyists who trammeled the halls of Congress to make sure a deal was cut.

At the time, it was the largest financial merger even though it was technically illegal, as stated by the former Bankers of America CEO Kenneth Guenther. In 1999, after “12 attempts in 25 years,”Congress passed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which led to the repeal of Glass-Steagall.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall was pushed heavily by Citigroup’s co-CEO Sanford Weill and lobbyist Roger Levy and according to a report by The Nation:

They laid out more than $290 million for lobbying in 1998, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and donated more than $150 million in the 1997–98 election cycle—a figure sure to be topped in 1999–2000.

How much of those contributions made their way to the Clinton family and what kind of impact did this have after they left the White House?

In 2005, Bill Clinton was paid over half a million for speaking at three private Goldman events.

In 2013, after stepping down from her position as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton gave a total of three paid speeches at Goldman Sachs events to the tune of $675,000 dollars, in which one attendee said “she sounded more like a Goldman Sachs managing director,” according to a quote obtained by Politico. Indeed, Clinton gave a glowing speech to the Goldman gang and in the process, as Wikileaks released in early October, the Democratic nominee believes in “both a public and a private position” on Wall Street reform and that it is an “oversimplification” to suggest that investment banking led to the most recent financial crisis.

That Clinton leak provided another window into the much protected alliance between finance and politics, but it’s only the tip of a much larger iceberg.

In 2015, the Washington Post reported that “Hillary Rodham Clinton and former president Bill Clinton earned in excess of $25 million for delivering 104 speeches since the beginning of 2014, a huge infusion to their net worth as she was readying for a presidential bid.”

‘ANOINTED’: Chelsea Clinton with Goldman Sachs-backed hedge funder Marc Mezvinsky.

The Clinton family is chock-full of banking connections, as Chelsea Clinton ‘joined’ the Avenue Capital Group, which according to reports is a “…$12 billion hedge fund whose founder has contributed to many Democratic Party campaigns.” Chelsea is married to Marc Mezvinsky, a former investment banker for Goldman Sachs. Chelsea’s tenure at Avenue Capital Group was from 2006-2008 just prior to Hillary Clinton’s run for president in 2008. Since then Chelsea has risen to vice chairman inside the Clinton Foundation.

Marc Mezvinsky was forced to close one of his hedge funds recently, Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, after had the fund lost most of its initial investor funds of $25 million – after blowing the money on secondhand junk Greek bank stocks and toxic government debt.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…

As it turns out, Marc is the son of troubled former Congressman Ed Mezvinsky – another close friend of Team Clinton.

Politico reports on one of Ed Mezvinsky’s financial controversies in 1999:

In the waning days of Clinton’s presidency, federal prosecutors and the FBI were bearing down on former Rep. Ed Mezvinsky (D-Iowa), who had fallen for a series of Ponzi schemes and pulled in nearly $10 million money from other investors to cover his losses.

Continuing, Politico outlined new information concerning a pardon request sent by from Ed Mezvinsky’s wife to then President Bill Clinton:

…records released last week by the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock and obtained by POLITICO show Mezvinsky and his then-wife — ex-Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky (D-Pa.) — pleaded with the former president for a presidential pardon to head off the looming federal case.

In 2016, the Daily Mail reported the following:

Chelsea Clinton’s husband and his partners have suffered a huge loss after trying to bet on the revival of the Greek economy, and are now being forced to shut down one of their hedge funds.

Marc Mezvinsky, 38, and his partners, former Goldman Sachs colleagues Bennett Grau and Mark Mallon, raised $25million from investors to buy up bank stocks and debt from the struggling nation.

That fund however has lost 90 percent of its value, investors with direct knowledge of the situation told The New York Times, and will now be closed.

‘THE INSIDERS’ – A ground-breaking ceremony at Goldman Sachs headquarters in Manhattan in 2005. Hillary Clinton is joined by Michael Bloomberg, Lloyd Blankfein (current Goldman Sachs CEO), Former Goldman Sachs CEO Henry Paulson. (Image Source: ilovemyfreedom)

The NY Times further outlined the long-held Clinton/Goldman connection just two years before the 2007-2008 financial crisis:

The Clintons’ relationships with Wall Street deepened in the 2000s, when Mr. Clinton set up his foundation in Harlem and Mrs. Clinton was elected to the Senate from New York. That brought her in close touch with the big Wall Street firms, a source of jobs and tax revenue for New York — and a leading source of campaign funds for Mrs. Clinton. During her years in Congress, employees of Goldman donated in excess of $234,000 to Mrs. Clinton, more than those of any other company except Citigroup, accordingto the Center for Responsive Politics.

Along with other New York politicians, Mrs. Clinton worked to obtain federal tax breaks to resuscitate Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and those breaks helped Goldman build its new, roughly $2 billion headquarters. When it broke ground in 2005, Mrs. Clinton and other New York officials were on-site.

‘HOW TO MONETIZE INFLUENCE’ – Lloyd Blankfein at a Clinton Global Initiative event with Hillary Clinton. (Image Source: sputniknews)

The Wall Street Racket

To understand who powers the Clinton Foundation’s billion dollar RICO influence-peddling slush fund, you need to understand how money is laundered between Wall Street and Washington DC.

Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Citigroup and many others were all ordered to pay millions for misleading investors after the 2008 crash, then in April of 2016, Goldman was ordered to settle a federal and state probe for $5 Billion dollars. CNBC reported the following:

Em um país com alicerces democráticos frágeis, para dizer o mínimo, um auto-denominado Observatório da Imprensa (OI) não poderia ser dirigido por ninguém mais senão ele, quen retrata perfeitamente a “democracia” tupiniquim: Alberto Dines, declarado sionista que promoveu o golpe cívico-militar-midiático-empresarial de 1964 no Brasil (fato não confessado pelo dito-cujo, mas documentado). E não poderia ser sustentado por outra organização senão a tal de Ford Foundation, bem-conhecida ONG de fachada da CIA.

Semanalmente publicando no sítio do OI de dezembro de 2012 a março de 2014, este autor praticava contra-informação em relação à mídia oligárquica e se diferenciava de Dines por apontar diversos desvios midiáticos como defesa dos interesses dos que a sustentam, isto é, dos políticos e do alto empresariado além do próprio imperialismo norte-americano, e não como meros “equívocos jornalísticos” por inaptidão ou afã de publicar, padrão mantido precariamente pelo “observador midiático do Brasil”, amigo íntimo e admirador de personagens como Roberto Civita, proprietário da famigerada editora Abril, já falecido.

Em meados de 2013 no OI, este autor ousou “observar o observador” alegando que ninguém estava acima do bem e do mal, e por isso mesmo nem da crítica: afinal, se observávamos semanalmente a tudo e a todos, por que não sermos igualmente observados? Pois a observação crítica deu-se quando Dines, tentando desviar a atenção da gravidade da espionagem globalmente descomedida do regime de Washington revelada por Edward Snowden, especialmente contra o Brasil (mais espionado do mundo então), alegou que a indignação de determinados setores nacionais (incluindo a deste autor) devia-se a ressentimento contra os Estados Unidos, “motor da política deste país há tantas décadas”, segundo o “crítico” de jornalismo.

Obviamente, a intolerância crônica contra demagogia e puxa-saquismo sofrida por este autor acabou gerando mal-estar naquele meio que não preza nem nunca prezou pela liberdade de expressão e pela verdade dos fatos. Alguns meses depois, acabou insustentável a permanência deste autor ali.

Leis de Imprensa, Pesadelo do Oligopólio Midiático e de Seus Financiadores

Plínio Lopes, estudante de Jornalismo, analisou (muito bem) a forma sensacionalista do “jornalismo” policial que, muitas vezes, fere gravemente a garantia constitucional da presunção da inocência, expõe inocentes ou suspeitos ainda não julgados, gerando assim mais ódio e violência.

Tudo isso é correto até que Lopes conclui que o “jornalismo” policial precisa se reinventar. O que as medíocres faculdades de Jornalismo – indústrias do diploma elitistas e formadoras de idiotas por excelência – e Dines jamais colocam em questão, seguidos pelo discípulo de turno, é que o jornalismo brasileiro em geral precisa, como em qualquer Estado democrático ao redor do mundo, de regulação, isto é, obedecer leis de Imprensa que no País inexistem, embora estejam previstas no artigo 220 da Constituição Federal.

No Brasil, as cinco principais emissoras de TV controlam, direta ou indiretamente, 274 redes (65% do total). Só a rede Globo controla 61,5% de TVs UHF; 40,7% dos jornais; 31,8% de TVs VHF; 30,1% das emissoras de rádio AM e 28% das FM.

A revista britânica The Economist, altamente conservadora, afirmou em 2014 que a concentração de audiência no Brasil é absurda, sugerindo que a então presidente Dilma deveria regular a Imprensa local, fazendo comparações com a mídia dos Estados Unidos – país fortemente liberal do ponto de vista econômico – a fi de constatar e quanto a mídia brasileira é anti-democrática.

Já em 2013, a ONG Repórteres Sem Fronteiras (RSF) pontuou que, no Brasil, “dez principais grupos econômicos, de origem familiar, continuam repartindo o mercado da comunicação de massa”, observando ainda que o monopólio midiático no País parece “pouco modificado, 30 anos após a ditadura militar (1964-1985)”, definindo-o como o “país dos 30 Bersluconis”, referindo-se ao magnata da mídia e ex-primeiro ministro italiano.

Porém, amedrontados com o fato de que seus lucros possam ser diminuídos, os proprietários dos grandes meios de comunicação tupiniquins, através de seus jornalistas-fantasia, vendem a ideia que Leis de Imprensa imporiam uma ditadura da informação ao País: mais uma completa inversão de papéis da mídia de manipulação e embaralhamento do entendimento coletivo.

Liberdade de Expressão e Direitos Humanos

O Pacto Internacional de Direitos Civis e Políticos, também em seu artigo 19, prevê: “Toda pessoa terá o direito à liberdade de expressão; esse direito incluirá a liberdade de procurar, receber e difundir informações e ideias de qualquer natureza, independentemente de considerações de fronteiras, verbalmente ou por escrito, de forma impressa ou artística, ou por qualquer meio de sua escolha”.

No âmbito das Américas, a Convenção Americana de Direitos Humanos, conhecida como Pacto de San José da Costa Rica e assinada pelos membros da Organização dos Estados Americanos (OEA), declara no artigo 13 que “toda pessoa tem o direito à liberdade de pensamento e de expressão. Esse direito inclui a liberdade de procurar, receber e difundir informações e ideias de qualquer natureza, sem considerações de fronteiras, verbalmente ou por escrito, ou em forma impressa ou artística, ou por qualquer meio de sua escolha”.

Mas não se deve ingenuamente esperar que, no sistema capitalista que visa o lucro, as empresas de mídia voluntária e altruisticamente esqueçam os índices de audiência e se reinventem, movidas pelo amor ao ofício e à vida.

A presidente Dilma foi derrubada do cargo não apenas inconstitucionalmente, como também de maneira muito baixa por seus encargados mais próximos (como Michel Temer), sem espaço para apresentar sua versão dos fatos no mesmo oligopólio midiático que sempre se recusou a regular, sob o pífio e oportunista argumento de que a sociedade possui controle remoto (como se houvesse pluralidade; tanto não há nem nunca houve, que ela caiu sem poder fazer sua voz chegar à maioria da sociedade), e o sítio que se intitula fiscal da Imprensa, jamais contraria os interesses mesquinhos, justamente, da grande mídia oligárquica de imbecilização em massa.

Sem democratização da mídia não haverá, jamais, jornalismo minimamente ético no Brasil, a liberdade de expressão continuará seriamente comprometida no Brasil e, consequentemente já que mídia é primordial na concepção de valores e ideias e na influência de comportamentos, a própria democracia e o senso cidadão seguirão da mesma maneira, paupérrimos no País. E sem essa discussão, as mais diversas análises terminarão, na essência, vazias, efêmeras, uma série de palavras jogadas ao vento.

Edu Montesanti

The United States has one party, the Permanent Ruling Party.  Some call one branch the “Democrats”, some call the other branch the “Republicans”.  While there are surface differences, both wings of the Party support the same things:  permanent war; Israel; illegal migration; hatred of Arabs and Muslims.  Neither arm criticizes a huge military budget or the vast sums spent on the various intelligence services, whose main job seems to be spying on American citizens. 

Indeed, political discourse in the US seems focused on politically immaterial, nonsensical things, such as homosexual marriage or use of “Transgender Toilet Wars”.  Race and Sex, of all possible kinds and variations, have great currency in this conversation.  As the Israeli musician, Gilad Atzmon, said, the American Left does not concentrate on significant matters like war, peace, or unemployment.

Whenever outsiders attempt to create a second party (or, even, a third), the “Lame-Stream” Media pillory them as extremists, “spoilers”, or crackpots.  The few corporations which control most of radio, television, and the national newspapers preach the stability of the “two” political parties and allege that additional groups would weaken the nation, just as they have done in other countries.  None ever examined the hard questions which Ross Perot and Ralph Nader had previously posed in their bids for president.

Today, less than a week before the US general election, the media (and the body politic) are obsessed with Hillary Clinton’s charges that Russia is supposedly manipulating the American voting system or that Donald Trump holds deplorable views on women, migrants, and Muslims.  Not one word is printed or spoken about voter claims that the politicians do not represent them but, rather, special interests.  People cling to their party beliefs:  Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong (or the reverse).

One contact in heavily-Democratic Montana noted that the working-class there does not ever question the national candidate’s credentials.  Others, elsewhere, believe that the straight Republican ticket is the path to salvation.

Reality, does not, apparently, intrude anywhere.

Hillary Clinton’s backers repeat the canard that Donald Trump is in league with Russia.  They assert they are right because the US intelligence services say so–without proof.  They claim that Donald Trump is unfit to be president because George Bush, pere et fils, say so, as do their administrations’ former officials.  But there’s never a thought as to what the Bush family and their appointees have done to South and Southwest Asia, the Balkans, North Africa, and Latin America.

There’s nary a word about the questionable activities of the Clinton Foundation, buying and selling favors and entrée to decision-makers.  No media outlet examines Hillary Clinton’s role in the destruction of Libya or Syria, or, her influence on her husband to bomb Yugoslavia. 

To the US media, the American-sponsored coup in the Ukraine, with input from Hillary and Clintonista Victoria Nuland, never happened. And we’ve all forgotten Hillary’s sway in the Waco, Texas massacre.  The continuing email scandal leads to the bigger story of the true role and function of the Clinton Foundation, now being outed as a money-laundering operation.  Credible rumors emanating from the FBI indicate a deep split within that agency.  Dedicated agents in many field offices have gathered evidence against the Clinton Foundation.  Yet, they are reputedly struggling with high-level officials seeking to protect that organization from any investigation.

The plot thickens with the addition of Andrew McCabe, FBI Deputy Director, receiving a campaign donation from the Clinton Foundation for his wife’s political campaign activities.  (This came just after his appointment in January 2016 when the FBI probe of Hillary Clinton he was heading heated up. This predated Bill Clinton’s peculiar meeting with Attorney General Lynch on her private plane about their grandchildren.)  The email case is back on track after new evidence emerged from the seizure of Huma Abedin’s former husband’s computer.  (He, Anthony Weiner, had been under investigation for online pedophilia.)  Some of the 650,000 emails found were related to the separate FBI search for Clinton’s missing emails.

Donald Trump does and says outrageous and often disgusting things.  His coarse, rude remarks about women and some opponents go beyond “locker room talk”.  He wants strict controls on Muslim immigrants, he thinks “open borders” encourage racism, and so on.  These enable his opponents to castigate him as a “loose cannon”. Trump doesn’t seem able to articulate a coherent plan to improve the American economy, end the “forever war”, or rein in military spending or the intelligence services.  He does not recognize that the United States is behind al-Qaeda, ISIL, ISIS, IS, or D’aish.  Yet, he wants to fight it/them ferociously.

Besides stories about underhanded business deals involving the Republican candidate,  there is also a separate lawsuit now filed against Trump.  He is seen as being connected to an investigation of  Jeffrey Epstein for pedophilia.  Epstein had been a procurer for the elites and engaged in blackmail in connection therewith.

But Trump is right about one thing:  election fraud in the United States.

More and more examples of the “traditional” form of ballot-box tampering are appearing.  In Harrisonburg, Virginia, students recently re-registered dead people as voters.  (In 1960, corpses in Chicago gave John F. Kennedy Illinois’ Electoral College ballots and the presidency.)  A former intelligence officer and State Department official stated that when he was voting early in Florida, a woman was caught at the polling place attempting to cast a second ballot.  In explanation, he heard her say that an “ethnic website” had urged her to do that.  (And, given the increasing outcry against US States attempting to require voter identification, there’s likely more electoral hanky-panky going on.  After all, you even need ID to get a book out of the library in America.)

But now, there’s a new form of election tampering.

In the past, when Ross Perot and Ralph Nader sought the presidency, the mass media tagged them as “spoilers”, out of step with the mainstream.  Now, there is a concerted attack on Donald Trump as an “outsider”, unbeholden to traditional interests.  The assault on Trump is far more intense and concentrated than the batterings given the other two as they campaigned outside the pale.  The D.C. newspaper, the Washington Post, has, likely, gone beyond its efforts to get Richard Nixon out of office.  Then, in the midst of Watergate, the paper had a negative article about  Nixon on the front page almost every day until his resignation.  Now, the Post devotes entire pages to virulently unfavorable pieces on Trump while sanitizing the dirt on Clinton.  TV and radio follow suit.

If the journal prints anything unfavorable about Clinton, it’s only because another organization had been carrying it.  “Conspiracy theorists” might term this brainwashing without using soap.  Certainly, as Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels said:  “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And what does Herr Goebbels’ statement have to do with the future of the US?  And why will everyone lose, no matter who wins the election?

We’ll continue to get more of what we have now:  war, inflated military and intelligence service budgets, and renewed focus on irrelevant and immaterial things.  Clinton’s hostility towards Russia, Syria, and Iran, plus her blind support for and deference to Israel does not bode well for America’s future.  Trump’s lack of intellectual vigor, his tendency toward erratic behavior, and vow to smash ISIL mean no real change for the better.  Worse, the bureaucracy, which supports the status quo, will likely operate from the shadows as the de facto government of the United States.

Whatever happens, either candidate could well be indicted as part of an investigation or lawsuit already underway that would make Watergate and Iran-Contra pale by comparison.

And moving to Mars is not a current option.

Well, here we are: at the bottom of the barrel under forty feet of slag. In a few days’ time, we’ll know our fate: the five-alarm fire of Trump Rule (oh, how those police unions are chomping at the bit!) or the Clinton Age of Hyper-War (oh, how those neocons are chomping at the bit!). In either case, the entrenched coagulation of corporate interests and war profiteers that have strangled the peace, prosperity and prospects of the American people will not be budged an inch.

The change that people are so desperately hungry for — so hungry that that some of them might well elect an Establishment insider whose sinister clowning makes him appear to be a ‘rebel’ — will not come. Thus their bitterness will grow deeper, more sour, erupting more and more often in physical violence: from militarized police against protestors, from Trump-empowered racists (if he wins or loses), from extremist militias, from angry, maddened people on every side. And of course there will be more — much more — of the horrific, never-ending, globe-spanning violence of the bipartisan Terror War that churns on and on, no matter who is sitting temporarily in the White House.

There’s no use in pretending that’s not what we face. But there’s also no use in pretending that this situation is somehow sui generis, some terribly unlucky conflation of unforeseen circumstances coming together at this particular time. It is in fact the culmination and embodiment of the deliberate choices of the most powerful forces in society: the choices to enrich themselves beyond all reason and extend their military and economic dominance over the earth.

It doesn’t matter that many if not most of the practitioners and functionaries of this system “believe” in its rightness.

It doesn’t matter that brutal neoliberal nostrums and extremist imperial notions have become religious dogmas for those who see themselves as the “meritocracy.” It doesn’t matter if the leaders and factotums genuinely believe in the “exceptionalism” they preach or if they are cynical power-seekers. It doesn’t matter if they actually believe their rapacious financial machinations are reflections of the “natural law” of the “the market” that will eventually benefit all, or if they know themselves to be what they really are: ugly souls disfigured by greed. The end result has been the same: a long series of deliberate choices by a bipartisan elite that have hollowed out the lives and communities and futures of millions of Americans, and created a living hell of war, ruin and hatred over much of the earth.

This is a system that has delegitimized itself, a system that has undermined its own institutions. Through its own actions, it has rotted out the foundations of trust and reason which once upheld it.

Some might say, “Oh, but there’s been a decades-long, concentrated effort by right-wing billionaires and corporate forces to foment ideological and religious extremism to undermine the legitimacy of secular government, which might restrict their profiteering or let more people have a share in power.”

And that’s true.

But it’s been accompanied at every step by the collusion and cowardice of the putative opposition. The so-called New Democrats, exemplified by the Clintons, jettisoned concern for the common good to embrace “centrist” and “technocratic” policies: i.e., to adopt the neoliberal dogma that unbridled pursuit of private profit by a connected elites will somehow, someday, lead to general prosperity. The idea that the party should fight to improve the lives of ordinary people in the here and now, to fight for their quality of life in a genuine, substantive way, came to be seen as old-hat, a quaint and fusty notion of has-beens and dreamers who didn’t understand the way the world really worked. A true, savvy “moderate” knows you must compromise every ideal, show yourself to be a willing and avid servant of the monied interests and the militarists, in order to gain power so you can … make a few cosmetic changes around the edges, a few little social improvements here and there (but only — of course! — in “partnership” with private interests), but never, ever challenge the system at its core.

This is the only deal in town: outright, unvarnished right-wing rule, or simpering, cowardly “moderate” management of a violent, rapacious system. That’s been the choice on offer since 1976. That’s the choice on offer today. The only difference is that the system has metastasized to a monstrous degree over the years: lacking any genuine opposition, the system has grown more violent, more rapacious.

Establishment collusion — and Democratic cowardice — finally and completely degraded and delegitimized the American electoral process 16 years ago, when the Supreme Court — with two members who had direct family ties to the Bush campaign — stopped a recount that would have resulted in the actual winner of the election to take office. This outrageous action was accepted by every single organ and institution of the American system. (With the momentary exception of the Black Congressional Caucus, whose members tried, in vain, to get a single Democratic senator to challenge the result.) Instead, Americans were encouraged to applaud the fact that power had changed hands “without tanks in the street.” That is, we were to celebrate that an actual coup d’etat had taken place before our eyes without the slightest show of resistance.

Once in place, the coup regime — staffed at the highest levels by extremists who a year before had publicly called for a vast militarization of American policy and society, even if the public had to be “galvanized” by “a new Pearl Harbor” — led the nation into a disastrous war based on false pretenses, a vast crime that not only killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people but has led directly to unbridled turmoil, extremism, conflict and corruption around the world. The elite-supported coup regime instituted torture programs and death squads, and launched an orgy of war profiteering unprecedented in world history. The regime then presided over the worst economic collapse in generations.

Not a single member of the regime was ever tried — or even investigated, at even the most preliminary level — for a single crime committed during its time in power. There were no high-profile Congressional investigations into the hideous carnage and ruin and instability they wrought; not even a “Chilcot Commission” into the origins of the war, as the UK belatedly launched. Instead the regime’s leaders and top factotums were heaped with honors and wealth. Today their endorsement is eagerly sought — and gained — by the “progressive” Democratic candidate for president.

In 2008, the desperate electorate turned to a figure presented to them as an outsider who would at last bring real change. He had the trappings of difference — a black man with a Muslim name, who spoke eloquently of peace and social justice, who most people thought was far to the left but voted for him anyway. But Barack Obama was of course a meritocratic “centrist” to his core. Riding an enormous wave of popularity, and a strong Congressional majority, he proceeded to … bail out Wall Street fraudsters and finaglers with tax money and create a health care system based on the plan of a rightwing think-tank that prioritized corporate profit — and probably killed the chance for a genuinely public health care system for generations, if not for good.

He also doubled down on the Terror War, expanding it to more countries, extended Bush’s death squads, helped destroy nations like Libya and Yemen (thus spawning more chaos and terror), expanded illegal surveillance of the populace (and the world) to an extent beyond the wildest dreams of the Stasi or KGB. And after saving Big Money from itself and securing the guaranteed profits of the healthcare-insurance corporate complex, he spent most of his time on the domestic front trying to strike a “grand bargain” with Republicans to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Again, all hopes of any real change were thwarted. So now the nation swings from being ready to embrace a perceived leftist to the brink of voting in a bellicose rightist as it seeks the genuine change no one will give them. Of course, after the scorched-earth tactics of bipartisan neoliberalism and the inevitable moral degradation and brutalization that comes from year after year after year of vicious aggressive war, the choice for Trump is more nihilistic. It’s as if people believe positive change is no longer possible — so let’s tear everything down and see what happens. (This is the actual, open philosophy of the Breitbart gang, who are now directing Trump’s campaign.)

Even if Clinton wins, this nihilism will still be rampant. And given that she happily embodies the bipartisan Establishment now roundly despised on all sides for its many depredations, the nihilism will grow even worse — especially as she has given no indication whatsoever that she will even try to make substantive changes in the neoliberal-militarist system that is strangling us. Quite the contrary.

So yes, this has been a campaign like no other — but mostly because it has brought the systematic decay of the Republic into the sharpest possible relief, and has shown, more clearly than before, that the neoliberal-militarist ascendency offers no hope for a better life, a better world; indeed, that it offers nothing at all — except more violence, more bitterness, more ruin, more degradation for us all.

 

Chris Floyd is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. His blog, Empire Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.

You say “European cultural institutions”, and what should come immediately to mind are lavish concerts, avant-garde art exhibitions, high quality language courses and benevolent scholarships for talented cash-strapped local students.

It is all so noble, so civilized!

Or, is it really? Think twice!

I wrote my short novel, “Aurora”, after studying the activities of various Western ‘cultural institutions’, in virtually all the continents of the Planet. I encountered their heads; I interacted with the ‘beneficiaries’ of various funding schemes, and I managed to get ‘behind the scenes’.

What I discovered was shocking: these shiny ‘temples of culture’ in the middle of so many devastated and miserable cities worldwide (devastated by Western imperialism and by its closest allies – the shameless local elites), are actually extremely closely linked to Western intelligence organizations. They are directly involved in the neo-colonialist project, which is implemented virtually on all continents of the world, by North America, Europe and Japan.

‘Culture’ is used to re-educate and to indoctrinate mainly the children of the local elites. Funding and grants are put to work where threats and killing were applied before. How does it work? It is actually all quite simple: rebellious, socially-oriented and anti-imperialist local artists and thinkers are now shamelessly bought and corrupted. Their egos are played on with great skill. Trips abroad for ‘young and talented artists’ are arranged, funding dispersed, scholarships offered.

Carrots are too tasty, most would say, ‘irresistible’. Seals of approval from the Empire are ready to stamp those blank pages of the lives of still young, unrecognized but angry and sharp young artists and intellectuals from those poor, colonized countries. It is so easy to betray! It is so easy to bend.

Some, very few countries are almost incorruptible, like Cuba. But Cuba is a unique country. And it is intensively demonized by the Western propaganda. “Patria no se vende!” they say there, or in translation “One does not sell Fatherland!” But one, unfortunately, does, almost everywhere else in the world: from Indonesia to Turkey, from Kenya to India.

*

“Aurora” opens in a small cafe in an ancient city in Indonesia (which is not called Indonesia). Hans, the German head of an unnamed cultural institute is talking to his local ‘disciples’. He loves his life here: all the respect he gets, those countless women he is sexually possessing and humiliating, the lavish lifestyle he is allowed to lead.

A woman enters; a beautiful woman, a proud woman, an artist, a woman who was born here but who left, many years ago, for far away Venezuela. Her name is Aurora. Her husband is Orozco, a renowned revolutionary painter. Aurora’s sister was killed in this country, because she refused to give up her revolutionary art. She was kidnapped, tortured, raped, and then murdered. Hans, the head of a European cultural organization, was involved.

Aurora confronts Hans, and in reality, the entire European culture of plunder and colonialism.

And that night she is joined, she is supported, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, or more precisely, by his merry ghost, who is thoroughly disgusted of being used as one of the symbols of the ‘culture’ which destroyed him personally, which destroyed the very essence of the arts, and which has been in fact destroying, for centuries, this entire Planet.

*

When I recently shared the plot of “Aurora” with a local ‘independent’ filmmaker in Khartoum, Sudan, he first listened attentively, and then with horror, and in the end he made a hasty dash towards the door. He escaped, not even trying to hide his distress. Later I was told that he is fully funded by Western ‘cultural institutions’.

After reading it, my African comrades, several leading anti-imperialist fighters, immediately endorsed the book, claiming that it addressed some of the essential problems their continent is facing.

The cultural destruction the Empire is spreading is similar everywhere: in Africa, Asia and in Latin America.

I wrote “Aurora” as a work of art, as fiction. But I also wrote it as a J’accuse, as a detailed study of cultural imperialism.

My dream is that it would be read by millions of young thinkers and artists, on all continents, that it would help them to understand how the Empire operates, and how filthy and disgraceful betrayal is.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are revolutionary novel “Aurora” and two bestselling works of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”. View his other books here. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Al-Mayadeen. After having lived in Latin America, Africa and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter.

President Bashar al-Assad asserted that the United States and its Western allies are to blame for the failure of the latest ceasefire, because terrorism and terrorists are for them a card they want to play on the Syrian arena.

In an interview given to the Serbian newspaper Politika, President al-Assad said that Russia is very serious and very determined to continue fighting the terrorists, while the Americans base their politics on a different value as they use the terrorists as a card to play the political game to serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world.

President al-Assad pointed out that Western countries wanted to use the humanitarian mask in order to have an excuse to intervene more in Syria, either militarily or by supporting the terrorists.

Emphasis added by Global Research Editor (M.Ch)

Following is the full text of the interview:

Question 1: Mr. President, why has the latest Syria ceasefire failed? Who is to blame for that?

President Assad: Actually, the West, mainly the United States, has made that pressure regarding the ceasefire, and they always ask for ceasefire only when the terrorists are in a bad situation, not for the civilians. And they try to use those ceasefires in order to support the terrorists, bring them logistic support, armament, money, everything, in order to re-attack and to become stronger again. When it didn’t work, they ask the terrorists to make it fail or to start attacking again. So, who’s to blame? It’s the United States and its allies, the Western countries, because for them, terrorists and terrorism are a card they want to play on the Syrian arena, it’s not a value, they’re not against terrorists. For them, supporting the terrorists is a war of attrition against Syria, against Iran, against Russia, that’s how they look at it. That’s why not only this ceasefire; every attempt regarding ceasefire or political moving or political initiative, every failure of these things, the United States was to be blamed.

Question 2: But which country is supporting terrorism? Saudi Arabia? Qatar?

President Assad: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey…

Journalist: Turkey?

President Assad: Because they came through Turkey with the support of the government, direct support from the government.

Journalist: Directly?

President Assad: Direct support from the government, of course.

Journalist: With money or with armament?

President Assad: Let’s say, the endorsement, the greenlight, first. Second, the American coalition, which is called “international coalition,” which is an American. They could see ISIS using our oil fields and carrying the oil through the barrel trucks to Turkey under their drones…

Journalist: This is the Syrian oil?

President Assad: In Syria, from Syria to Turkey, under the supervision of their satellites and drones, without doing anything, till the Russians intervened and started attacking ISIS convoys and ISIS positions and strongholds. This is where ISIS started to shrink. So, the West gave the greenlight to those countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and actually those countries, those governments are puppets; puppets to the West, puppets to the United States, they work as puppets, and the terrorists in Syria are their proxy, the proxy of those countries and proxy of the West and the United States.

Question 3: But money for marketing this oil, who has the money? Turkey?

President Assad: In partnership between ISIS and Turkey. Part of the money goes to ISIS because this is how they can make recruitment and pay salaries to their fighters. That’s why ISIS was growing before the Russian intervention, it was expanding in Syria and in Iraq. And part of the money is going to the Turkish government officials, mainly Erdogan himself and his family.

Journalist: Erdogan himself?

President Assad: Of course, of course. They were directly involved in this trade with ISIS.

Question 4: Mr. President, do you believe the Russians and Americans can ever agree over Syria? Can Russia and the USA be partners in the war against terrorists in Syria?

President Assad: We hope, but in reality, no, for a simple reason: because the Russians based their politics on values, beside their interest. The values are that they adopt the international law, they fight terrorism, and the interest that if you have terrorists prevailing in our region, that will affect not only our region but Europe, Russia, and the rest of the world. So, the Russians are very serious and very determined to continue fighting the terrorists, while the Americans based their politics on a different value, completely different value, their value is that “we can use the terrorists.” I mean the Americans, they wanted to use the terrorists as a card to play the political game to serve their own interests at the expense of the interests of other countries in the world.

Question 5: The situation about bombing the Syrian Army near the airport in Deir Ezzor… How did the American air attack on the Syrian Army happen? Was it a coincidence or not?

President Assad: It was premeditated attack by the American forces, because ISIS was shrinking because of the Syrian and Russian and Iranian cooperation against ISIS, and because al-Nusra which is Al Qaeda-affiliated group had been defeated in many areas in Syria, so the Americans wanted to undermine the position of the Syrian Army; they attacked our army in Deir Ezzor. It wasn’t by coincidence because the raid continued more than one hour, and they came many times.

Journalist: One hour?

President Assad: More than one hour. There were many raids by the Americans and their allies against the Syrian position. At the same time, they attacked a very big area; they didn’t attack a building to say “we made a mistake.” They attacked three big hills, not other groups neighboring these hills, and only ISIS existed in Deir Ezzor. There is no… what they called it “moderate opposition.” So, it was a premeditated attack in order to allow ISIS to take that position, and ISIS attacked those hills, and took those hills right away in less than one hour after the attack.

Journalist: ISIS attacking Syrian position after American…?

President Assad: Less than one hour, in less than one hour, ISIS attacked those hills. It means that ISIS gathered their forces to attack those hills. How did ISIS know that the Americans would attack that Syrian position? It means they were ready, they were prepared. This is an explicit and stark proof that the Americans are supporting ISIS and using it as a card to change the balance according to their political agenda.

Journalist: And after that, America said sorry, huh?

President Assad: They said they regret, they didn’t say sorry. [laughs]

Question 6: Mr. President, who is responsible for the attack on the Red Cross convoy near Aleppo, and what weapons were used for the destruction of the Red Cross convoy?

President Assad: Definitely the terrorist groups in Aleppo, because those are the ones who had an interest. When we announced the truce in Aleppo, they refused it. They said “no, we don’t want a truce.” They refused to have any convoys coming to eastern Aleppo, and that was public, it’s not our propaganda, it’s not our announcement, they announced it. And there was a demonstration by those militants to refuse that convoy. So, they have interest in attacking that convoy, we don’t have. It wasn’t in an area where you have Syrian troops, and at the same time there were no Syrian or Russian airplanes flying in that area anyway. But it was used as part of the propaganda, as part of the narrative against Syria in the West; that we attacked this humanitarian convoy, because the whole war now in Syria, according to the Western propaganda, is taking the shape of humanitarian war. This is the Western mask now; they wanted to use the humanitarian mask in order to have an excuse to intervene more in Syria, and when I say intervene it means militarily or by supporting the terrorists.

Journalist: This is like the situation in former Yugoslavia, in the war in Yugoslavia, also in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the war in Kosovo, humanitarian problems.

President Assad: It’s a different era, maybe, a different shape, but the same core, what happened in your country, and what’s happening now in our country.

Question 7: And the Western propaganda spoke about the problem of using the chemical weapons and the barrel bombs.

President Assad: The same, to show that you have a black-and-white picture; very very bad guy against very very good guy. It’s like the narrative of George W. Bush during the war on Iraq and on Afghanistan. So, they wanted to use those headlines or those terms in their narrative in order to provoke the emotions of the public opinion in their countries. This is where the public opinion would support them if they wanted to interfere, either directly through military attacks, or through supporting their proxies that are the terrorists in our region.

Question 8: I see the news in the last days, the Amnesty International condemned a terrorist group for using the chlorine, the chemical weapons in Aleppo.

President Assad: In Aleppo, exactly, that happened a few days ago, and actually, regardless of these chemical attacks, we announced yesterday that the terrorists killed during the last three days more than 80 innocent civilians in Aleppo, and wounded more than 300. You don’t read anything about them in the Western mainstream media. You don’t see it, you don’t hear about it, there’s nothing about them. They only single out some pictures and some incidents in the area under the control of the terrorists just to use them for their political agenda in order to condemn and to blame the Syrian government, not because they are worried about the Syrians; they don’t care about our children, or about innocents, and about civilization, about infrastructure. They don’t care about it; they are destroying it. But actually, they only care about using everything that would serve their vested interests.

Question 9: And now, your army… you are the supreme commander of Syrian military forces. Your army now has not any chemical weapons?

President Assad: No, we don’t. Since 2013, we gave up our arsenals. Now, no we don’t have. But before that, we have never used it. I mean, when you talk about chemical weapons used by the government, it means you are talking about thousands of casualties in one place in a very short time. We never had this kind of incidents; just allegations in the Western media.

Question 10: Mr. President, when do you think the Syrian war will end?

President Assad: When? I always say less than one year is enough for you to solve your internal problem, because it is not very complicated internally. It’s becoming more complex only when you have more interfering by foreign powers. When those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we can solve it as Syrians in a few months, in less than one year. That’s very simple, we can, but providing that there’s no outside interference. Of course, that looks not realistic, because everybody knows that the United States wanted to undermine the position of Russia as a great power in the world, including in Syria. Saudi Arabia has been looking how to destroy Iran for years now, and Syria could be one of the places where they can achieve that, according to their way of thinking. But if we say that we could achieve that situation where all those foreign powers leave Syria alone, we don’t have a problem in solving our problem.

How? First of all, by stopping the support of the terrorists by external countries like the regional ones like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and by the West, of course, mainly the United States. When you stop supporting terrorists in Syria, it won’t be difficult at all to solve our problem.

Question 11: Mr. President, is it true that Syria is the last socialistic country in the Arab world?

President Assad: Today, yes. I don’t know about the future, how is it going to be. We are socialist, but of course not the closed type.

Journalist: Humane socialism, because your government is supporting the education with the subvention, like the Swedish-type socialism.

President Assad: I don’t know a lot about the Swedish-type, but let’s say that in Syria, we have an open economy, but at the same time we have a strong public sector, and that public sector played a very important role in the resilience of the Syrian society and the government during the war. Without that public sector, the situation would have been much more difficult. So, we’re still socialist, and I think the war proved that the socialism system is very important for any country, taking into consideration that I’m talking about the open socialism, that could allow the freedom of the public sector to play a vital role in building the country.

Question 12: And your big companies… this is the state companies or private companies?

President Assad: We have both. But usually in such a situation, the public sector always plays the most important part. As you know, the private sector could feel the danger more and could suffer more and in some areas could quit the whole arena, the economic arena, because of the insecurity. So, that’s why you have to depend in such a situation more on the public sector, but still the private sector in Syria plays a very important part beside the public.

Question 13: And you have very very tolerance atmosphere with other churches, Christians, Muslims, and…

President Assad: It’s not tolerance, actually; they are part of this society. Without all different colors of the society – Christians, Muslims, and the different sects and ethnicities – you won’t have Syria. So, every Syrian citizen should feel fully free in practicing his rituals, his traditions, his beliefs. He should be free in order to have a stable country. Otherwise you won’t have Syria as a stable country. But I wouldn’t call it tolerance. Tolerance means like we accept something against our will; no, Muslims and Christians lived together for centuries in Syria, and they integrate in their life on daily basis, they don’t live in ghettos.

Question 14: No separate schools for Muslims, for Christians, young people, no?

President Assad: No, no. You have some schools that belong to the church, but they are full of Muslims and vice versa. So, you don’t have, no. We don’t allow any segregation of religions and ethnicities in Syria, that would be very dangerous, but naturally, without the interference of the government, people would like to live with each other in every school, in every place, in every NGO, in the government, that is the natural… That’s why Syria is secular by nature, not by the government. The Syrian society has been secular throughout history.

Question 15: And, Mr. President, it’s been one year since Russian air forces took part in the Syrian war, how much has Russia helped you?

President Assad: Let’s talk about the reality. Before the Russian interference, ISIS was expanding, as I said. When they started interfering, ISIS and al-Nusra and the other Al Qaeda affiliated groups started shrinking. So, this is the reality. Why? Of course, because it’s a great power and they have great army and they have great firepower that could support the Syrian Army in its war. The other side of the same story is that when a great country, a great power, like Russia, intervene against the terrorists, in coordination with the troops on the ground, and in our case, it’s the Syrian Army, of course you’re going to achieve concrete results, while if you talk about the American alliance, which is not serious anyway, but at the same time they don’t have allies on the ground, they cannot achieve anything. So, the Russian power was very important beside their political weight on the international arena, in both ways they could change the situation, and they were very important for Syria in defeating the terrorists in different areas on the Syrian arena or battlefield.

Question 16: Is the Syrian society divided by the war today?

President Assad: Actually, it’s more homogenous than before the war. That could be surprising for many observers because the war is a very deep and important lesson for every Syrian. Many Syrians before the war didn’t tell the difference between being fanatic and being extremist, between being extremist and being terrorist. Those borders weren’t clear for many, because of the war, because of the destruction, because of the heavy price that affected every Syrian, many Syrians learned the lesson and now they know that the only way to protect the country and to preserve the country is to be homogenous, to live with each other, to integrate, to accept, to love each other. That’s why I think the effect of the war, in spite of all the bad aspects of any war like this war, but this aspect was positive for the Syrian society. So, I’m not worried about the structure of the Syrian society after the war. I think it’s going to be healthier.

Question 17: And a question about the American presidential elections; who would you like to win in USA presidential elections, Trump or Hillary?

President Assad: I think in most of the world, the debate about this election is who’s better, Clinton is better or Trump. In Syria, the discussion is who’s worse, not who’s better. So, no one of them, I think, would be good for us, let’s say, this is first. Second, from our experience with the American officials and politicians in general, don’t take them at their word, they’re not honest. Whatever they say, don’t believe them. If they say good word or bad word, if they were very aggressive or very peaceful, don’t believe them. It depends on the lobbies, on the influence of different political movements in their country, after the election that’s what is going to define their policy at that time. So, we don’t have to waste our time listening to their rhetoric now. It’s just rubbish. Wait for their policies and see, but we don’t see any good signs that the United States is going to change dramatically its policy toward what’s happening in the world, let’s say, to be fair, or to obey the international law, or to care about the United Nation’s Charter. There’s no sign that we are going to see that in the near future. So, it’s not about who’s going to be President; the difference will be very minimal, each one of them is going to be allowed to leave his own fingerprint, just personal fingerprint, but doesn’t mean change of policies. That’s why we don’t pin our hopes, we don’t waste our time with it.

Question 18: Mr. President, the last question: The relation between Serbia and Syria, do you have any message for people in Serbia?

President Assad: I think we didn’t do what we have to do on both sides in order to make this relation in a better position, before the war. Of course, the war will leave its effects on the relation between every two countries, that would be understandable, but we have to plan for the next time because your country suffered from external aggression that led to the division of Yugoslavia and I think the people are still paying the price of that war. Second, the war in your country has been portrayed in the same way; as a humanitarian war where the West wanted to intervene in order to protect a certain community against the aggressors form the other community. So, many people in the world believe that story, the same in Syria; they use the same mask, the humanitarian mask.

Actually, the West doesn’t care about your people, they don’t care about our people, they don’t care about anyone in this world, they only care about their own vested interest. So, I think we have the same lessons, may be a different area, we are talking about two decades’ difference, maybe different headlines, but actually the content is the same. That’s why I think we need to build more relations in every aspect; cultural, economy, politics, in order to strengthen our position, each country in his region.

Question 19: But Syrian government, you and Syria’s state, supporting Serbia in the problem of the Kosovo?

President Assad: We did, we did, although the Turks wanted to use their influence for Kosovo, in Kosovo’s favor, but we refused. That was before the war, that was seven or eight years ago, and we refused, in spite of the good relations with Turkey at that time. We supported Serbia.

Journalist: Mr. President, thank you for the interview, thank you for your time.

President Assad: Not at all. Thank you for coming to Damascus.

Clinton and her supporters have tried to blame Russia for hacking her emails and making them a focus in this election.

In reality, it’s likely that American intelligence and defense workers are the source for at least some of the leaks.

The Guardian reports today:

Deep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI, multiple bureau sources have told the Guardian, spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign just days before the election.

***

The currently serving FBI agent said Clinton is “the antichrist personified to a large swath of FBI personnel,” and that “the reason why they’re leaking is they’re pro-Trump.”

***

The leaks have not exclusively cast aspersions on Clinton. Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, is the subject of what is said to be a preliminary FBI inquiry into his business dealings in Russia. Manafort has denied any wrongdoing.

Moreover, Clinton supporters have claimed that the emails found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop are only duplicates of emails the FBI has previously seen.

However, CBS News reports:

The FBI has found emails related to Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state on the laptop belonging to the estranged husband of Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner, according to a U.S. official.

These emails, CBS News’ Andres Triay reports, are not duplicates of emails found on Secretary Clinton’s private server.

***

 “These emails have never been seen before”

Over 2,500 militants have been killed and wounded in western Aleppo since the start of Al-Nusra-led attempt to break the government forces’ defenses in the area on October 28, according to sources in the Syrian military. Considering that the total striking force deployed by Jaish al-Fatah coalition for the operation was about 5,000 fighters, it’s clear why the militant coalition failed to achieve its military goals.

An infighting allegedly started between Harakat Nour al-Din al-Zenki  and Fastaqim Kama Umirt militant groupsin Salaheddine and Al-Ansari Mashhad areas in Aleppo city on November 2.  Nour al-Din al-Zenki   stormed Fastaqim Kama Umirt checkpoints and arrested dozens of Fastaqim Kama fighters including their commander ‘Istakem kma Oumrt’. At least 1 militant was reported dead and 25 injured as result of the clashes.

The conflict among ‘moderate rebels’ reportedly appeared because Fastaqim Kama Umirt was considering a possibility to leave Aleppo through corridors set up by the Syrian and Russian military.

The Russian general staff has announced that President Vladimir Putin had ordered a humanitarian pause in Aleppo from 9am to 7pm on November 4.

“Considering that our American colleagues were unable to separate the opposition from terrorists, we are addressing all militant leaders directly, urging them to cease hostilities and leave Aleppo with their arms,” General Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the Russian General Staff said, adding that “Two corridors will be opened, from which Syrian troops and weapons would be pulled back.” Six additional corridors will be opened for civilians.

A group of Egyptian officers allegedly arrived in Syria on November 1 in order to learn from Russian military advisers that are embedded with government troops at the battle against terrorists across the country. The development took place amid the ongoing expansion of military cooperation between Russia and Egypt. In October 2016, Russian airborne troops arrived Egypt to participate in a joint military drill with the host country. The drill was codenamed “Defenders of Friendship 2016”.

Whether the information originated from hacked e-mails and computer files or Freedom of Information Act requests, the revelations about the political and business activities of Hillary and Bill Clinton and their cronies hearken back to another era, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the crime spree of another unscrupulous couple: bank robbery desperados Bonnie and Clyde.

Aside from Hillary Clinton running her own lucrative «off-the-books» foreign policy via her private email servers and e-mail chain of associates and flunkies, it was her and her husband’s joint Clinton Foundation and Teneo Capital operations that scream out the word «corruption.» The servers were merely a mechanism by which the Clintons ran their own «pay-to-play» racketeering operation, something that would have been the envy of a contemporary of Bonnie and Clyde, Chicago crime boss Al Capone.

Teneo, which runs a hedge fund operation and a «private intelligence» service jam-packed with former Central Intelligence Agency operatives, is where Mrs. Clinton’s «gal pal» and aide Huma Abedin worked simultaneously to her government employment with the State Department. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s probe of 650,000 emails found on the laptop computer of disgraced former New York Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner, the estranged husband of Abedin, is but the proverbial tip of the iceberg. While FBI agents pore through Abedin’s emails that were discovered on the laptop and looking Mrs. Clinton’s emails that were either not destroyed by her aides or which were never accounted for, the real story is the FBI’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Teneo.

Five FBI field offices are investigating the racketeering of the foundation and the foreign connections of Teneo. The offices include New York; Los Angeles; Washington, D.C.; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Miami. Little Rock is the home of the Clinton Foundation, while New York is the home base of Teneo. The addition of the Miami field office to the Clinton probe is significant. One of Teneo Intelligence’s many global offices is located in Bogota, Colombia. A secretive Colombian private equity fund, «Fondo Acceso», financed by Mexican mega-billionaire Carlos Slim and Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra, is run out of the Clinton Foundation’s Bogota office. Tracking the money being fed into the Clinton Foundation may include proceeds from the illegal narcotics traffic in Colombia and other nearby countries. The Bogota activities of the Clinton Foundation, «Fondo Acceso», which ironically means «Access Fund», and Teneo appear to be concentrated in the Chico Business Park in the Colombian capital. Therefore, the involvement of the Miami office, in investigating Clinton Foundation funding, including the major donations from Slim and Giustra, makes a world of sense.

Teneo was co-founded by longtime Bill Clinton associate Doug Band, who served in Clinton’s White House Counsel’s Office and later as Clinton’s chief aide in the Clinton Foundation and its associated Clinton Global Initiative. Band’s brother is Bill Clinton’s medical doctor who accompanies the ex-president on foreign trips. Doug Band was the point person who lobbied the incoming Barack Obama administration in 2008 to appoint Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State ensured that there was little separation between her department, the Clinton Foundation and Global Initiative, and Teneo. Abedin served as Mrs. Clinton’s «transition team» leader as the Secretary of State left the department to launch her presidential candidacy after the November 2012 election. From that time on, Mrs. Clinton, Abedin, Doug Band, Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta, and others engaged in an email flurry to 1) ensure that the files in the private servers were either scrubbed or sanitized; 2) to officially sever all links between them and the Clinton Foundation and Teneo; and 3) to paint a picture for the public that all was well and legal with Mrs. Clinton’s term as America’s chief foreign policy executive. Unfortunately, the entire Clinton team has been exposed with the publication of emails from Mrs. Clinton’s swearing in as Secretary of State in 2009 to after she launched her campaign for the White House in 2013.

The picture painted by the emails is one of modern-day gangsters milking everything they possibly could out of supposed public service.

The FBI’s New York field office is also likely looking at Teneo’s dealings with other Clinton allies. It was Teneo that advised former New Jersey Democratic Governor Jon Corzine’s MF Global investment firm as it was collapsing amid charges of major fraud by Corzine, a Clinton loyalist. It is also known as Mrs. Clinton communicated with President Obama over her private server and that Obama used a pseudonym. Obama lied to the American people when he stated that he first learned of the existence of Mrs. Clinton’s server from news media reports. There is little wonder why Obama has refused to condemn FBI director James Comey for re-launching his probe of the Clinton emails, based on the discovery of the additional traffic on Weiner’s laptop. Presidents who dug themselves deep into scandals by lying about «what they knew and when they knew it» helped sink the administration of Richard Nixon and almost cost Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton their presidencies. Obama was wise not to interfere in the FBI’s many criminal cases now building up like a tidal wave against Mrs. Clinton.

The many Clinton scandals also involve the illegal shipment of U.S.- and foreign-manufactured weapons to jihadist rebels in Libya and Syria against U.S. law. When Clinton and Abedin oversaw the jihadist rebellions in both countries, the U.S. was subject to imposing a United Nations arms embargo directed against both civil war theaters. The sudden decision on October 5, 2016, by the Justice Department to drop all charges against the State Department-licensed Turi Defense Group of Arizona and its owner, Marc Turi, for violating U.S. law by shipping unregistered weapons to Libyan rebels, some of which were transferred to Syrian rebels by the CIA station in Benghazi, indicates that Attorney General Loretta Lynch wanted the Turi case to disappear before the November 8th election.

The federal trial of Turi and his company was due to begin on November 8th. The indictment of Turi was brought in the U.S. Court for the District of Arizona in Phoenix. Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International Airport was the scene of an impromptu and highly-questionable tarmac meeting between Bill Clinton and Attorney General Lynch on June 27, 2016. Turi claims that approval for the secret weapons shipments to Libya and onward to Syria were personally approved by Mrs. Clinton and had a green light from the CIA. Any new email or other evidence that Mrs. Clinton authorized illegal weapons shipments to jihadist terrorists would have required the FBI to broaden its investigation of both Hillary and Bill Clinton, as well as Lynch. Mrs. Clinton may have violated federal law by permitting the shipment of weapons to belligerent parties in Libya and Syria; Mr. Clinton may have obstructed justice in talking to the Attorney General; and Lynch may have violated her oath of office in misusing her position as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer in furtherance of a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.

The Clinton scandal, in many ways, resembles the Iran-Contra episode more than it does Watergate. In Watergate, the cover-up by Nixon and his cronies, in many respects, was worse than the original crimes. In Iran-Contra, the arms and drugs smuggling crimes were equal to the cover-up, including the criminal role of then-Vice President George H. W. Bush in the entire affair. With the Clintons’ «E-mailgate», shipping U.S. weapons to terrorists and accepting foreign campaign donations from dodgy regimes in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Qatar are every bit as bad as the obvious ensuing cover-up by Hillary Clinton and her and her husband’s cronies.

If these many cases are what the FBI and its offices in Washington, New York, Little Rock, Los Angeles, Miami, and possibly Phoenix, are now looking at, the FBI director had every right and a constitutional responsibility to inform Congress and the voting public. And FBI director Comey has every right not to tip off to the Clinton gang what he and the bureau may have on them, evidence demanded now by Mrs. Clinton and her supporters. This evidence may become material to the impeachment of Mrs. Clinton from the office of president of the United States should she be elected on November 8th.

On November 2, Fox News anchor Bret Baier said two sources, reportedly with “intimate knowledge” of the FBI’s Clinton Foundation probe, indicated one or more indictments are likely ahead – claiming “a lot of evidence.”

Whether Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton are vulnerable remains to be seen.The FBI’s White Collar Crime Division is handling the investigation, with lots of indictable evidence aside from what WikiLeaks revealed.

According to one unnamed source, “(t)here is an avalanche of new information coming in every day.” FBI agents are “actively and aggressively pursuing this case,” conducting extensive interviews.

According to Baier, barring obstruction, one or more indictments are likely. Ongoing for around a year, Attorney General Loretta Lynch reportedly tried shutting the probe down.

Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe refused, calling it a “validly predicted investigation.” Senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller issued a statement, saying:

“Today’s reports that the FBI has an open investigation into the Clinton Foundation shows the true extent of the corrupt Clinton cash machine.”

“Even more concerning than that is the fact that the Obama Department of Justice is refusing to allow an overt investigation until after the election.”

“Not only is it completely disqualifying for a candidate for president to be facing two separate FBI investigations less than a week before the election, but the fact that the Obama Administration is so blatantly trying to tip the scales of justice toward Clinton should give every American pause.”

On November 2, the Wall Street Journal said “(a)gents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the (Clinton) foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called ‘Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.’

Days ahead of November 8, little more is likely to come out until after Obama’s successor is known. If Hillary, as seems likely, it’ll be the first time a president-elect, shortly to be inaugurated, will be facing multiple investigations for criminal wrongdoing, subject to possible indictment.

What does that say about America’s political system too debauched to fix.

Wednesday on my blog site, I posted images of Richard Nixon and Hillary Clinton – with attribution to others for posting it on my Facebook page. It states the following:

Nixon: I deleted 18 minutes of recordings and had to resign as president.

Hillary: I deleted 30,000 e-mails and I’m running for president.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Liberating Syria depends on winning the battle for Aleppo. It continues raging, government forces inflicting heavy losses on US-supported terrorists.

According to Fars News, citing RT International’s Arabic service, (s)ources close to the terrorist groups admitted” taking up to 2,500 casualties – dead or wounded fighters in the last six days alone.

“The Great Epic Operation was the largest offensive of terrorists” against government troops since Obama’s war began in March 2011.

Their fighters haven’t “advanced in the 3,000-Unit Housing Complex and Housing Project 1070.” Government and allied forces repelled their attacks.

Senior Syrian MP Mohammad Jalal Darvish praised the heroic efforts of Iranian military advisors and Hezbollah forces for helping Syria’s military prevent a catastrophic outcome in Aleppo.

At the same time, he called Russia’s humanitarian pause “unjustifiable because…delay could lead to (disaster) in” the city. So far, it’s been averted.

On Tuesday, Putin press secretary Dmitry Peskov said Russia won’t continue its moratorium if eastern Aleppo terrorists continue attacking residential areas, humanitarian corridors, while holding civilians hostage as human shields.

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russian aerial operations helped liberate over 4,600 square miles of Syrian territory since September 30, 2015, adding “(t)he residents of nearly 900 settlements joined the peace process.”

On the same day, Russian General Staff of the Armed Forces chief Gen. Valery Gerasimov explained all attempts by terrorists “to break through in the city of Aleppo” failed.

Their fighters “suffered heavy losses of manpower, weaponry and military equipment. They have no chance to escape from the city.”

Two corridors are available for them to leave safely if they cease fighting. One leads to the Syrian/Turkish border, the other to the Idlib countryside.

In a blunt statement, Gerasimov said “(t)aking into account that our American colleagues (sic) are incapable of separating the opposition from terrorists, we appeal to all the leaders of armed groups directly to stop combat actions and leave Aleppo with their arms.”

Terrorists have a choice. Leave Aleppo or face continued heavy attacks until their ranks are decimated. Moscow and Damascus intend liberating the city entirely.

A previous article discussed a possible Putin November surprise, citing Moscow State University Political Science Professor/co-chairman of the National Strategic Council of Russia Sergei Markov.

He believes a decisive battle to liberate Aleppo looms, maybe coinciding with US elections next week. He calls it Putin’s “blow to (Obama) before (his January) departure.”

If elected US president, Trump said “we could find common ground with Russia in the fight against ISIS.”

“My Administration will aggressively pursue joint and coalition military operations to crush and destroy ISIS, international cooperation to cut off their funding, expanded intelligence sharing, and cyber warfare to disrupt and disable their propaganda and recruiting.”

Hillary intends escalating war in Syria, using ISIS and other terrorist groups to oust Assad – risking direct confrontation with Russia.

She “advocate(s) a no-fly zone and safe zones.” Implementing them “require(s) us to go to war with Syria and Russia,” US Joint Chiefs Chairman General Joseph Dunford told Senate Armed Services Committee members in September.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Just days before the US presidential election, the German government-aligned think tank German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) published a paper entitled “Even without Trump much will change.” It calls for a more aggressive German and European foreign policy, which, “regardless of the election result,” is prepared to impose its economic and geopolitical interests with greater independence from, and if necessary against Washington.

The candidacy of Republican Donald Trump makes “clear that […] a US policy is possible that would demand from Germany more independent action than in the past,” according to the author of the paper and the leader of the America research group, Johannes Thimm. The possibility of Trump entering the White House compels “German politicians to ask themselves difficult questions.”

Trump’s rise to prominence has provoked considerable trepidation within broad sections of the ruling elite in Germany and internationally.

“With Trump as president […] there would be a high degree of uncertainty about US foreign policy,” the paper stated. Germany could “certainly not rely on Trump’s unpredictability or extreme positions being ‘discarded,’ either through advisory staff, the cabinet, the military or Congress.”

But even with an election victory for Democrat Hillary Clinton, “corresponding strategic considerations [would be] necessary,” and Germany would “do well not to take the easy way out of wait and see.” Instead, Berlin should, “regardless of the election result, consider how the Transatlantic relationship and the future world order are to be organised.”

In line with the article written for Foreign Affairs in June by German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democrats), the SWP paper calls into question the claim of the US to global leadership. In the section “A strategic America policy,” it states, “the balance sheet of American engagement in the world [is …] mixed at best.” Among other things, “the US policy” – such as the “invasion of Iraq in 2003” or the “ongoing Saudi Arabian intervention in Yemen” – is “simply counter-productive for a stable order.”

“If similar types of situations arise in the future,” the paper states provocatively, “it would be important for Germany (possibly with Europe) to take a clear position and adopt its own estimation at an early stage.” Even though options are limited, “Germany and Europe [should] not leave the area of planning the political order to the US alone.”

Concretely, this means, among other things, “to question the view, based on the self-portrayal of the US as exceptional, that American interests are per se global interests.” It is also necessary “to consider how to respond if US behaviour is, from Germany’s standpoint, counter-productive.” In this, “good transatlantic relations” should not be “an end in themselves and [placed] before other considerations,” otherwise, one would be robbing oneself of the “possibility of acting strategically.”

It continues, “Without the willingness to argue with the US government … many options for exerting influence [are] excluded from the outset.”

Nobody should underestimate the historical, political and military implications of such statements. Two years ago, the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) warned:

“At present, Washington is pursuing these objectives with the collaboration of the other major imperialist powers. However, there is no permanent coincidence of interests among them. German imperialism, which fought two wars with the US in the 20th century, is reviving its imperial ambitions.”

At the beginning of this year, the ICFI wrote in its statement Socialism and the Fight Against War:

“Seventy years after the fall of Hitler’s Third Reich, the German ruling class is once again demanding that its state assert itself as the unquestioned overlord of Europe and as a world power. In the face of deeply felt anti-war sentiments within the German population, Berlin is deploying military force to assert its interests in the Middle East and Africa. It is pouring money into rearmament, while apologetics for the crimes of the Nazi regime are being advanced across the political establishment, media and academia, with the aim of justifying the revival of German imperialist ambitions.”

The SWP played a central role in this revival from the outset. In 2013, it organised a project involving 50 leading politicians from all parliamentary parties, journalists, academics and military and business representatives to elaborate a strategy for the return of German militarism. At the end of the discussions, the paper “New Power–New Responsibilities. Elements of a German foreign and security policy for a world in turmoil” was produced, which formed the basis of Steinmeier”s and President Gauck’s imperialistic speeches at the Munich Security Conference in 2014 and the army’s 2016 white paper.

The German ruling elite is now using the deepening international crisis in the wake of the Brexit vote and the political chaos in the US to press ahead with its great power ambitions. In a current essay entitled “Europe is the solution,” Steinmeier writes, “We must grant ourselves the concrete instruments necessary for a joint foreign [EU] policy.” This includes “practical capabilities: for joint situation analysis, financial instruments for stabilisation and crisis prevention, and ultimately joint military capacities, such as joint command structures or maritime task forces.”

These, according to Steinmeier, are “the concrete steps we now face.” Then, “the creation of a European army [should] be discussed … when we have proven that Europe can do it better than any national state alone.” This would be the significance of a red-red-green (Social Democrats (SPD), Left Party and Greens) federal government! It would have the task in foreign policy of pressing ahead with the return of German militarism behind phrases about “responsibility,” “humanity” and “human rights,” while at the same time developing an independent German foreign policy increasingly at odds with that of the United States.

The BBC World Service was founded by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and funded by them directly for six decades, until a cosmetic change last year. Its specific purpose is to spread British values and the British view of the world abroad. It specifically, on its dozens of different national services, gives an opportunity to dissident voices who cannot get on their mainstream media. The Americans spend hundreds of millions annually on outfits like RFE/RL to do the same. Yet when the Russians do precisely the same thing on a much smaller scale, for example by enabling you to listen to me, this is portrayed as evil propaganda.

Fortunately we have the Henry Jackson Society to defend you from it. The Henry Jackson Society, supported by Liam Fox, Jim Murphy and pretty well every other right wing enthusiast you can name, is of course a great believer in free markets. And its sense of the market has detected that its old product of a constant stream of Islamophobia is becoming dated, and currently buyers want Russophobia. Whatever your phobia, the Henry Jackson Society will have some to sell you, so here we have their new Manual of Russophobia.

Written by Dr Andrew Foxall, Director of the Henry Jackson Society’s so-called Centre for Russian Studies, has by brilliant research exposed the fact that Jeremy Corbyn, Seumas Milne, Tommy Sheridan and Colin Fox have all appeared on Russia Today television. And that a tiny group of left wingers I have never heard of once met in a pub with some Russian nationalists from the Ukraine. Funniest of all is the contention that CND is funded by the Russians.

Given that the Henry Jackson Society is, and always has been, financed by CIA money laundered through American New World Order supporting private foundations, this is rather amusing. This pathetically thin hate manual is now on the desk of every Conservative and New Labour Progress Group MP.

It is of course no coincidence that the overt security service operations operate in close co-ordination with the supposedly covert ones. The same day that the Henry Jackson Society paper was released, the head of MI5 gave an interview to the Guardian about the Russian threat. The Russians are not just coming, they are here! You can’t see them because they are inside your laptop, where the Russian government apparently want to steal all your secrets. Our security services don’t like the competition. That is their job.

Apparently the Russians are out to steal Britain’s industrial secrets, like how the Nissan Qasghqai is built or how the Chinese and French build Hinkley Point. I hope they don’t get the blueprints of the new Dyson. Andrew Parker has of course to work hard as MI5 to find a new enemy. While he has yet again repeated the ludicrous claim that there are 3,000 Islamic terrorists in the UK, he must realise people will query the low productivity of these terrorists when it comes to killing anybody.

Russophobia has of course peaked in the US with Clinton’s claims that it is Russia which is revealing her gross corruption and all her opponents are servants of Russia. She wants to face down Russia in Syria, in order to give it to the Islamic terrorists of whom Andrew Parker worries we have 3,000 in the UK. Clinton’s claims of Russian involvement in hacking her entourage are totally unfounded, hence the lack of evidence. I am however surprised there have been no serious attempts to fabricate some.

Who benefits from this ratcheting up of anti-Russian rhetoric to hotter than cold war levels? Why the armaments and security industries, of course. Expect more donations to politicians and their foundations, and more pesky corruption investigations to be dropped by prosecuting authorities.

The truth is that Russia is not our enemy. There is no chance that Russia will attack the UK or US. It has never happened and it never will. Nor is it remotely likely that Russia will attack any EU member state. The only thing that can make such a contingency even a 0.1% possibility, is the continuing gross anti-Russian rhetoric and propaganda and continued forward stationing of NATO assets. History from WWI to the Gulf shows that military build-up can in itself cause conflict.

The danger to the world is us.

Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was a British Ambassador from August 2002 to October 2004. Murray complained to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in November 2002, 2003 and in June 2004 that intelligence linking the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan to al-Qaeda was unreliable, immoral and illegal, as it was thought to have been obtained through torture. For that the British government sacked him.

Here is the reason why we are currently even closer to a civilization-ending nuclear war than was the case during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962:

During the Cold War, the two sides agreed that any war between the capitalist side and the communist side would escalate to nuclear war between the US and the USSR and constitute Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D.).

Therefore, because of this mutual acceptance of M.A.D., hot war did not develop during that entire period, from 1945 till the Soviet Union dissolved and ended its military alliance the Warsaw Pact, both of which ended in 1991. Throughout that 45-year period, called «the Cold War», there was no hot war between the two nuclear superpowers, because both sides believed that any hot war would end in M.A.D. — mutual annihilation, and the end of civilization.

It would end that way because any hot war between the two sides would terminate either in one side surrendering to the other, or else in at least one of the two sides (presumably to be started by the one that’s on the brink of defeat in the traditional hot war) nuclear-attacking the other (as being its only alternative to defeat). In other words, M.A.D. recognized and accepted the fact that for a nuclear power to attack a nuclear power with non-nuclear weaponry will almost certainly provoke a nuclear war at the moment when one of the two is losing (or about to lose) the conventional conflict to the other. Nuclear weapons are weapons of last resort, but they exist in order to prevent defeat. That is what they exist for. If Japan had had deliverable nuclear weapons, then the end of World War II would have been considerably delayed. Japan would have lost because it had no allies, but the end of WW II would have been very different than it was.

Only M.A.D. avoided the Cold War becoming a hot war.

But M.A.D. is not just a physical reality but equally importantly a mutually-shared belief-system, a belief-system that becomes no longer operative if one of the two sides switches to believe that a way exists actually to win a nuclear war — in other words, to believe that conquest of a nuclear power by another nuclear power is a real possibility. During the years prior to 2006, there was an increasing though unspoken belief at the top of the US aristocracy (the people who control the US government — or at least have controlled it since 1981), that the United States would be able to win a nuclear war against Russia; and, suddenly, in 2006, the belief was published, and virtually no one who possessed power or influence challenged it; and, from that time forward, M.A.D. was ended on the American side, and nuclear weapons became, in the US, strategized within a new framework (called «nuclear primacy»,) — the framework of nuclear weapons as constituting the ultimate weapons of conquest by the US government.

After 1991, when the Warsaw Pact no longer existed, the US military alliance NATO invited into its membership all of the former states of the USSR except Russia (thereby indicating NATO’s continuing hostility toward that particular nation and the fraudulence of NATO’s peace with it), and also invited in all of the USSR’s former Warsaw Pact allies, and so NATO (a now clearly anti-Russian, no longer at all anti-communist, alliance) has come to extend right up to Russia’s own borders — something that the US had refused to allow the USSR to do to the US in 1962, when the Soviet dictator Khrushchev wanted to place nuclear missiles in Cuba just 90 miles from America’s border.

In the new era during which the US government and its allies believe that nuclear primacy is about to be achieved, the framework in which the use of ‘nuclear primacy’ would be ‘justified’ is that, as soon as such ‘primacy’ is believed to have been obtained (such as by means of anti-ballistic missiles having been installed that would supposedly annihilate Russia’s nuclear arsenal before their warheads could even be released to retaliate against the US-and-allied nuclear invasion), the US side’s ‘defensive’ traditional-weapons invasion of Russia is being defeated by the Russians, and so the only way available to prevent the defeat of the US-and-allied forces is by the use of nuclear weapons (the ‘taking-advantage’ of America’s ‘nuclear primacy’). That’s how the nuclear attack would be ’justified’, as a ‘necessary defensive response’ against Russia.

Consequently, in the current US-NATO operation on and near Russia’s borders, the Alliance is starting the buildup of its traditional invasion forces. This includes even some US allies that are not in NATO. The supposed ‘justification’ for this amassing of invasion-forces on Russia’s borders is to ‘defend’ against ‘Russia’s aggression’ when (in March 2014 just weeks after the bloody US coup in Ukraine) Russia enabled the residents of Crimea to rejoin Crimea as part of Russia, of which Crimea had been until the Soviet dictator Khrushchev arbitrarily transferred Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. That disagreement about Crimea is the supposed root-cause for NATO’s involvement, even though Ukraine still is not (and previously did not want to be) a member of the NATO alliance. Anyway: this is the rationalization for NATO’s buildup toward what could become WW III.

Ever since 19 February 2016, the US has been storing tanks and artillery, sufficient «to support 15,000 Marines», in undisclosed «confidential», Norwegian caves. Norway has a 200-mile border with Russia. CNN’s news-report on that was accompanied by a video headlined «Russia Reveals Aggressive Military Plans». It reported that Russia’s (democratically elected, though not mentioned as such) President, Vladimir Putin, was moving troops and weapons toward Norway’s border. (How would the US respond if Russia were to be storing invasion-equipment and troops in Mexico near the US border? Would the US be moving troops and weapons near the Mexican border to protect against an invasion of America; and, if so, then how accurate would it be if Russia’s media then headlined «America Reveals Aggressive Military Plans»? Hitler’s Germany used those sorts of media-tactics, but this time Obama’s America is doing that.) Marine Corps Times headlined on October 24th, «More than 300 Marines heading to Norway in January».

US President Barack Obama means business: he’s getting things set up for Hillary Clinton to finish as his successor. This kind of boldness exceeds anything during the Cold War.

America, and its greatly expanded NATO, thus now surrounds Russia not just with its tanks etc., but with its missiles and bombers, on and near Russia’s borders, and so the flight-time from launch to the nuclear-bombing (if the ground-invasion of Russia encounters defeat) will be less than ten minutes, sometimes even less than the time for Russia to get its own missiles launched in retaliation against ours; and so a US blitz nuclear attack against Russia could conceivably be an entirely one-sided war. Here is how that scenario — the end of physical M.A.D. — has actually become the objective sought by the US government (and the necessary backstory for America’s war-drills on Russia’s borders):

In 2006, the US aristocracy published in the journal Foreign Affairs, from their Council on Foreign Relations, the first article which said that the US goal should no longer be a continuation of M.A.D., but instead «The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy», by which the US aristocracy meant the rise of America’s ability to win a nuclear war against Russia. It established this stunning goal merely by saying that such an objective could be achieved and that it should be achieved, and by the article’s being published by the US aristocracy itself (the people who control this country), and by furthermore the US aristocracy not condemning and rejecting and repudiating it but simply letting that article stand with little to no public discussion (and no public debate) about it, much less with the chorus of public condemnations of it in the US press, such as would have happened if America were a democracy — but this nation no longer is a democracy, it has become an aristocracy, and this aristocracy had now published the «Nuclear Primacy», article. (By contrast, in the obscure journal China Security was published in the Autumn 2006 issue the main critique against it, «The Fallacy of Nuclear Primacy». That article had no impact.)

The Foreign Affairs article even was so bold as to assert that «US leaders have always aspired to this goal», (nuclear primacy) — a wild and unsupported allegation that’s not much different from alleging that not only George W. Bush but all US Presidents after World War II were aspiring to have the ability to conquer Russia (and the authors were asserting that only now was this supposedly terrific ability coming within reach). It was explicit about G.W. Bush’s having this desire:

«The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with the United States’ declared policy of expanding its global dominance. The Bush administration’s 2002 National Security Strategy explicitly states that the United States aims to establish military primacy.»

That allegation was tragically true, which is one of the reasons why Bush (like his father, who actually started the determined policy to achieve nuclear primacy) was so dangerous and harmful a President. His invasion of Iraq was merely a sympton of that deeper disease.

And, so, this article about «The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy», and «The End of», M.A.D., was now — since it was published by the CFR and not rejected by any influential group — accepted within the US as a goal, «Nuclear Primacy», which the US government could and should strive for. That idea, of a winnable nuclear war (winnable by the US, of course), was no longer heretical, no longer viewed as repugnant. In fact, this article had been introduced and accepted by Harvard University simultaneously in its longer form and simultaneously published by their scholarly journal International Security, which is the leading (it’s the world’s most influential) scholarly journal dealing with that subject, and its title there was «The End of MAD?». (The periods are customarily removed from the acronym «M.A.D.», perhaps in order to associate the M.A.D. concept with the pejorative term, insanity.

So — at least in the United States — the termination of M.A.D. has always had a favorable ring to it, even before that goal became effectively US policy, which it has been at least ever since 2006.) And no one was saying that Harvard and its journal and the CFR were the ones who were at all «mad», or anything similar, such as «insane.» The aristocracy’s stamp of approval upon the concept of nuclear primacy was clear, from at least 2006 on. Although M.A.D. continued as regards Russia’s side, it no longer remained operative thinking on America’s side. That’s now clear, and this is Russia’s predicament — and the world’s (because a nuclear war involving even just one of the two nuclear superpowers would destroy the world).

US President Barack Obama is putting the goal of nuclear primacy into place, starting with implementation of Ronald Reagan’s proposed «Star Wars», Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) defense system, now called the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) system, and technically called by the name of its current embodiment: Lockheed Martin’s, Boeing’s, and Raytheon’s, Aegis Ashore system, which Obama first made operational in Romania on 12 May 2016. It’s designed so as to enable a surprise nuclear attack against Russia in which any missiles that Russia might be able to launch in retaliation will supposedly (if the system works 100%) be annihilated during their launch-phase. Officially, however, its purpose is to defend Europe from being attacked by Iranian missiles. Any public US admission that this ‘defensive’ system is actually preparation for a blitz US nuclear assault on Russia is obviously out of the question. And, obviously, Russians know that Obama is lying and that this is preparation by the US for a blitz nuclear attack against Russia. The West’s ‘news’ media might be such ‘fools’ as not to be aware of that fact, but Putin has made quite clear that he is not, and he is preparing Russia to deal with it.

Obama’s action here was made possible by US President George W. Bush’s 2002 unilateral termination of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty with Russia’s predecessor, the Soviet Union. Bush rushed forward with Reagan’s «Star Wars», program even despite there having been no successful tests of the necessary technology: the existing technology consistently failed but Bush decided to invest $53 billion of US taxpayers’ money in it. Bush in 2004 received British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s participation and provisioning of locations and facilities to implement the plan, and Bush was also pressing both Poland and the Czech Republic to allow the US to position ABMs there.

Obama came into office criticizing the ABM plan and pretending not to be hostile toward Russia. He deceived Vladimir Putin into thinking that Obama sincerely wanted to pursue peace and cooperation with Russia. As soon as Obama became re-elected, his verbal smiling teeth immediately became actual glaring fangs. Then, soon after his regime overthrew in a bloody February 2014 coup the Moscow-friendly democratically elected President of Ukraine, bordering Russia, Russia started in the summer of 2014 to ignore the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, because for Washington the next step (beyond Ukraine) clearly now would be Moscow and so all bets were off. The installation of the Aegis Ashore in Romania likewise violates that Treaty, which is one important reason why Obama lies to say that all of the Aegis Ashore facilities will be targeted against Iran — and maybe also North Korea — but never against Russia.

The full Aegis Ashore system, which will require several such sites, is not yet operational. NATO’s PR-arm the Atlantic Council, has mentioned among the Aegis Ashore’s benefits, that for the next such site, in Poland, «Poland announced in late April that it would buy eight Patriot missile batteries from Virginia-based Raytheon Co. in a deal that could generate at least $2.5 billion in US export content». The US government officials and their friends who have invested in Raytheon and the other ‘defense’ firms did not need to be informed of this by any PR person. They already knew of it from more reliable sources, and perhaps they even have invested in nuclear bunkers for themselves and their friends and their friends’ friends. Lots of money is changing hands during this build-up.

Also in 2006, later in that year, specifically on 18 November 2006, was published at Global Research, which is an independent Canadian online international site dealing with geostrategy, a superb summary of the connection that this plan has to America’s string of invasions in the Middle East. It’s titled «Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a ‘New Middle East’», by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, who explains:

It should be noted that in his book, «The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperatives», Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US National Security Advisor, alluded to the modern Middle East as a control lever of an area he, Brzezinski, calls the Eurasian Balkans. The Eurasian Balkans consists of the Caucasus (Georgia, the Republic of Azerbaijan, and Armenia) and Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan) and to some extent both Iran and Turkey. Iran and Turkey both form the northernmost tiers of the Middle East (excluding the Caucasus4) that edge into Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Map of the «New Middle East»

A relatively unknown map of the Middle East, NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, and Pakistan has been circulating around strategic, governmental, NATO, policy and military circles since mid-2006. It has been casually allowed to surface in public, maybe in an attempt to build consensus and to slowly prepare the general public for possible, maybe even cataclysmic, changes in the Middle East. This is a map of a redrawn and restructured Middle East identified as the «New Middle East».

MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST

Note: The following map was prepared by Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters. It was published in the Armed Forces Journal in June 2006, Peters is a retired colonel of the US National War Academy. (Map Copyright Lieutenant-Colonel Ralph Peters 2006).

Although the map does not officially reflect Pentagon doctrine, it has been used in a training program at NATO’s Defense College for senior military officers. This map, as well as other similar maps, has most probably been used at the National War Academy as well as in military planning circles.

Brzezinski’s advocacy of «American Primacy», fits perfectly with the aristocracy’s support of «Nuclear Primacy», and appeared eight years before it. His 1998 book was seminal also in many other ways. And, as that Nazemroaya article made clear, Brzezinski’s plan was already being put into effect by the US government, even before 2006.

However, the person who actually made the seminal decision behind all of this, the decision to conquer Russia, was US President George Herbert Walker Bush, on the night of 24 February 1990, just before the Soviet Union ended. He was the person who decided that after the USSR and its Warsaw Pact terminated, NATO would continue that cold war until Russia has been surrounded by US allies, who are Russia’s enemies, when Russia will ultimately either surrender or else be destroyed by the US and its friends.

Even if Russia assumes that any such nuclear war would be M.A.D., the government of the US no longer does. That’sRussia’s predicament — and the world’s.

However, military planners in the US and its vassal nations, do not include in their calculations the world: the impacts that such nuclear winter and all the rest will have if their dream of ‘nuclear primacy’ amounts to anything more than merely the vicious hoax that it is. This fact, of their ignoring the world, is scandalous — against our military planners. They are so obsessed with ‘victory’, that they are willing to participate in this false and potentially mega-catastrophic dream, of ‘nuclear primacy’.

Unless and until nuclear weapons are totally eliminated (which might never happen), their constructive function, of preventing WW III, must continue, not end as a result of ‘nuclear primacy’ and other such lies and delusions. However, the ‘news’ media, especially in ‘The West’, are not pointing out those lies and distortions, but instead reinforcing them.

If there is to be a WW III, it will end the world. That is the key fact, which is ignored by ‘The West’s’ military planners”.

NATO needs to end now, just as the Warsaw Pact did in 1991 — when an indecent, oligarchic, ‘The West’ continued the Cold War despite the Warsaw Pact’s end, and now is making it hot.

Is Putin Planning a November Surprise in Aleppo? Coinciding with US Elections?

By Stephen Lendman, November 03 2016

Last Friday just 11 days prior to the November 8^th election, FBI Director James Comey dropped the bombshell of the entire election year, stating that he is reopening the Clinton internet server investigation over new “pertinent” emails found on disgraced ex-Congressman Anthony Weiner’s laptop.

Weiner is the husband of Hillary’s 20-year top aide and deputy campaign manager Huma Abedin. And as of Sunday evening, the Department of Justice and FBI obtained the warrant necessary to begin analyzing 650,000 emails (according to the Wall Street Journal) discovered by the FBI on Weiner’s laptop in the course of a separate investigation involving Weiner’s alleged sexting with a fifteen year old minor.

So nearly four months after James Comey announced to the world back in early July that the FBI investigation was closed and that he would not seek an indictment against Hillary Clinton for violating any federal laws, now suddenly a tectonic shift has taken place and for the Clinton crime family, the dirt may finally be hitting the fan.

As a result, humanity might be spared from a World War III project which was part of her election campaign, that would virtually be a done deal should Hillary become president. She’s all but promised war against Russia, China and Iran, including military retaliation against any hacking nations.

Back on October 3^rd the FBI seized Weiner’s laptop, iPhone and iPad, only to stumble upon a huge cache of emails stored on his laptop belonging to Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin. It was then determined that incoming emails from Hillary Clinton as well as Huma’s outgoing emails to her boss were found. The next logical questions are why did the FBI investigating team sit on it waiting over three weeks until last Thursday October 26^th to finally bring this enormously significant matter to Comey’s attention?… especially since an open revolt against Comey had been festering for months after he’d “cleared” Hillary of any criminal wrongdoing? And then it’s been reported that without a warrant the FBI couldn’t even begin reading the emails until it was finally obtained on Sunday October 30^th.

So we’re supposed to believe that virtually the entire month of October goes by and no action’s been taken to gain legal access to investigating the thousands of “pertinent” emails, nor apparently were any of them read by the FBI for near an entire month. So how did they determine that they were even pertinent if they never read any? These are sound questions that the FBI needs to adequately address. Perhaps the biggest question is why no action would be taken by the FBI until less than two weeks prior to the election?

Upon purchase of the laptop in question, Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner were likely living together but not yet married, since emails shared between Huma and Hillary during her entire four years as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 have been reported to be stored on Weiner’s laptop and the couple didn’t marry until 2010. Initially both likely shared the same device, establishing email accounts on the new laptop. That would explain how Huma and Hillary’s entire four years of shared email would remain on what would become his laptop. That could be one likely scenario of how Huma’s entire email exchange with Hillary during her years in the Obama cabinet came to be stored on Weiner’s laptop. When Huma used her own laptop, all her electronic communications with Hillary continued collecting on her email account that remained on his laptop.

An interesting observation in one of Abedin’s 2009 emails she received from Hillary that Huma archived to her personal email account that wound up on Weiner’s laptop was several pages long and all of it was totally redacted on her personal email account. This indicates the likelihood that it was yet more confidential material that was stored on yet another unprotected server, providing substantial credence to Comey’s claim that “pertinent” emails belonging to Abedin ended up on Weiner’s laptop.

Huma Abedin swore under oath that she had already turned in all her devices containing all State Department email but apparently she omitted the truth of Weiner’s laptop based on her June testimony in response to a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch. Abedin in Feb 2013 also signed another sworn statement that she turned in all her electronic devices to the State Department. It turns out that she made a practice of never deleting her inbox emails on all her devices and this may be have provided the window for the FBI to find more “pertinent” evidence relevant to the Hillary case. Huma’s lame response to the question of how the relevant emails ended up on her pervert hubby’s computer was “I don’t know.”

A New York Post article dated September 22^nd reports that NYPD had attained a search warrant in response to charges that Weiner had been sexting a fifteen year old girl in North Carolina. Originally it was the New York City police that raided Weiner’s home and confiscated his electronic devices. According to undisclosed sources within the New York Police Department, they were the first to find Abedin’s treasure trove of Huma-Hillary emails. The anonymous police insiders report that the “pertinent” emails that Comey referred to on Friday were filed under the heading “life insurance.” The NYPD sources state that after two weeks the FBI took possession of the Weiner devices.

New information is coming to the surface now that confirms Weiner’s “life insurance policy” is a trove exposing the criminality of how Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to fleece America to foreign interests money laundered through the Clinton Foundation. Through all the months of released emails this is already known and well documented.  Weiner’s laptop allegedly also exposes the child pedophile ring of the international elite, from top level politicians both in and out of office, high-up government officials, top ranking military officers to top media and entertainment figures, prominent judges…

Though this evildoing’s involving powerful personalities has been around a long time,  documented increasingly in recent years, but because it exposes those who essentially are running the world at their worst, the NYPD Victims Unit that originally passed it onto superiors within their department and on up to the New York City FBI offices, they’ve been in a quandary on how to proceed, afraid that full disclosure of depravity amongst the most powerful risks both recrimination as well as a complete breakdown of governmental functioning at all levels, from local to global. And this predatory operation is massive and totally international.

Repercussions of exposing the gravity of how pervasive this criminality is currently, and the power that these predators still possess, obviously explain why NYPD sat on Weiner’s laptop for nearly two weeks before the FBI sat on it for almost a month before a warrant Sunday night finally took effect to authorize law enforcement to start delving into this ugly mess.

The powers-that-shouldn’t-be anywhere but behind bars will do its best to ensure that this scandalous truth does not spread beyond the confines of internet alternative news sites that can be labeled and written off as fringe tin foil hat havens. Undaunted, I covered this sordid topic more than a year and a half ago entitled “Power, Pedophilia and the US Government.” By disseminating this ugly shocking reality as far and wide as possible, perhaps we citizens of the world can insist that justice be done and these subhuman creatures be tried, convicted and punished for their ungodly sins.

Once the FBI was holding such explosive evidence as of the 3^rd of October, elements within the NYPD began placing growing pressures on the FBI to follow up with the warrant to begin taking stock of all these recently discovered bombshell documents that will bring down all the Clintons, Bushes and Obamas of this world including their puppet masters.

Wanting to protect Hillary, himself by both eliminating and withholding evidence, Obama and his Justice Department in turn put the squeeze on Comey and the FBI to not pursue the thousands of Abedin-Clinton emails on the Weiner laptop, emphasizing DOJ policy not to disclose information so close to election time. But threats to go public coming from those in open rebellion within the Bureau as well as those within the NYPD forced Comey’s hand to reopen the criminal investigation. All the Justice Department could do was through its own Office of Professional Responsibility, file a formal complaint against Comey for interfering with the election.

When Comey broke the news last Friday, Huma and Hillary were flying from Westchester, New York on their way to Iowa. Their entourage landed in Des Moines still unaware of the breaking story. During Clinton’s first speaking engagement, she made no mention of the renewed FBI probe. But later that day Hillary held a brief press conference demanding that Comey make public whatever “goods” he may have on her, of course knowing that’s impossible since the DOJ had been stonewalling against the warrant and then the task of sorting through thousands of emails in less than two weeks is virtually impossible.

At the end of Hillary’s brief press conference responding to Friday’s FBI twist, Fox correspondent Jennifer Griffin asked

“Are you worried this could sink your campaign, Secretary Clinton?”

As Hillary walked away from the podium, she responded by jerking her head back and letting out another one of her manic cackles. Just knowing her campaign is imploding because of a pedophile’s laptop escapades must be making life miserable for all her terrified lackeys. Speaking of her staff, in a related side note, they’ve sunk to a new low, resorting to photoshopping campaign photos in desperation to prove that an audience is even bothering to still show up at Clinton appearances.

Used to operating in damage control mode as a seasoned scandal-holic, Hillary immediately began mobilizing her political allies and powerful cronies to launch an immediate counterattack against Comey. Among the first of the Hillary puppets to initiate an attack hitting the media echo chamber on CNN with Wolf Blitzer was Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan who threw out the familiar Democratic Party rallying cry that this may be the Russians subversively plotting with the FBI to ruin the US election outcome.

Next in line came the top Democratic Senator Harry Reid insisting that Comey may have broken the law, citing the Hatch Act which prohibits FBI officials from influencing elections. He stuck with the party line, raising a so called double standard with the trumped up Trump-Russian ties interfering in the election while poor Hillary is once again being unfairly singled out and raked over the coals.

Meanwhile, Huma has quietly slipped back to working behind the scenes in New York, out of site and laying low while Hillary moved on from Iowa to campaigning in Florida. The senior aide’s lawyers are set to meet with the FBI and DOJ but the FBI said they have not yet been in contact with Abedin’s attorneys.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Goodlatte asked Comey after his July decision if Hillary would be held accountable for perjuring herself in the Benghazi Congressional hearings since Comey alluded to her discrepant statements in FBI interviews. With the latest development, Goodlatte is re-asking Comey again if perjury charges are in the works.

Even super liberal newspapers like Chicago Tribune came up with the next day headline (10/29) that “Democrats should ask Clinton to step aside.” Those emails on Weiner’s device have to be beyond pertinent but downright incriminating for Comey to withstand the minefield crossfire of reopening the investigation. Tribune article author John Kass put it this way:

FBI director James Comey‘s announcement about the renewed Clinton email investigation is the bombshell in the presidential campaign. That he announced this so close to Election Day should tell every thinking person that what the FBI is looking at is extremely serious.

Former FBI Assistant Director Ron Hosko who worked with Comey prior to retirement stated in a telephone interview on Fox television that no way would Comey reopen the case if there wasn’t enough information to lead to an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Judge Anthony Napolitano also said that he’s “100% certain” that the FBI has enough evidence to indict her, adding “the evidence is overwhelming, and the FBI know a lot more about it than I do.”

NSA whistleblower Bill Binney who several decades ago uncovered the Soviet command structure was asked about Comey reopening the Clinton case:

They must have something significant for the FBI to reopen the investigation.  Plus I think Comey had to inform Congress of his incomplete testimony to them or else he could be charged with perjury to Congress and impeached.

At this point voting for Hillary Clinton poses a heavy liability and burden on our embattled nation as she could potentially be the first elected president to enter office under federal investigation, and subject to leaving office soon through impeachment and imprisonment.

Faulty voting machines have just now been linked to the Clinton Foundation. Out of the Clinton “conflict of interest” playbook comes the Texas voting machine glitches made by a company that’s a subsidiary of The McCarthy Group, which as the largest owner of US voting machines in 2007 gave $200,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Already during the first early voting week, voters in two Texas cities witnessed their votes cast for Trump preprogrammed to flip as votes for Hillary.

It’s recently come to light that high powered Clinton friends, among them Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe who himself is under investigation for crooked fundraising, through Clinton Super PAC’s gave up to a million dollars to a pediatrician wife with no political experience running for a state senate seat. This in itself is unheard of drawing that amount of high roller cash for a relatively minor state candidate.

But when such a sizeable fiscal investment is donated to the wife of the soon to be appointed FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe whose job is to oversee the subsequent FBI probe into Clinton emails, suddenly a foul stench of kickback corruption that’s always permeated the political lives of the Clintons goes far to explain why Hillary was able to emerge from that first FBI investigation unscathed last July.

Even Obama is jumping ship after news broke on Friday of the reopened case against Hillary. Check out all dozen of his Hillary campaign appearances that were cancelled just hours later. And this is the same lying president that said he never knew Hillary was using an unsecured private server yet exchanged email with her on it using a pseudonym.

The Washington Post/ABC News poll, two MSM diehard Clinton supporters, on October 23^rd had their crooked Hillary leading Trump by a 50 to 38 margin. What a difference a week makes when more damaging WikiLeaksemails and Comey’s bombshell last Friday get dumped. On Saturday the day after, Hillary and Trump are suddenly locked in a 46 to 45 dead heat race.

Add to the fact that Hillary cheated throughout the year given unfair advantage in all three presidential debates, already knowing the questions, assisted by earphone feedback and transmitting secret cues to the moderators. The DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was caught rigging the primaries for Hillary against Sanders and tossed out in disgrace only to assume a key position in the Clinton campaign. And now her DNC replacementDonna Brazile was exposed for slipping questions to the cheater at all the Democratic debates. Everything with Hillary is rigged, staged and false.

Throughout this election cycle today’s mainstream media has constantly been outed as a partner-in-crime, all fervent Hillary supporters confirming that there is no free choice or fair elections in this country.

A study recently reviewing 588 news stories on the three commercial networks CBS, ABC and NBC shows that 91% of their media coverage is hostile and biased against Trump, spinning pro-Hillary propaganda. From the get-go this has been an in-our-face, fixed election demonstrating the diabolical power and control of the Clinton cabal and her globalist backers. Like all institutions in America, our political system has morphed into a state of decadent decay and rancid corruption, hijacked by unlimited amounts of big money from Super PAC donors bribing politicians to serve their oligarch masters while betraying both the Constitution and the citizen voters.

Since October 7^th, 35,000 hacked emails belonging to the Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta have been released on WikiLeaks while more accounts of pervasive election and voter fraud spring up daily in multiple states, documenting the most widespread criminal corruption in US political history with another 15,000 leaked emails still to come before November 8^th. Then add last Friday’s biggest bombshell of the year, and Hillary’s numbers will continue to plummet. The long run for the Clinton cabal is finally over. Indictments, trials and imprisonment lay ahead for all the major players in the Bush-Clinton-Obama regimes’ reign of terror. It’s time for the American citizens to take back their hijacked nation from those bent on destroying it.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In recent years he has focused on his writing, becoming an alternative media journalist. His blog site is at http://empireexposed.blogspot.co.id/

The longer this soap opera drags on, it’s becoming more and more evident that the Russian government did not ‘hack’ into the DNC, and Moscow is not feeding John Podesta’s emails to Wikileaks. 

For those who are deeply invested in this now official conspiracy theory, this might be a hard pill to swallow. 

The White House and the Hillary Clinton campaign are now married to the idea that ‘Putin is hacking the US elections.’

In response, the President is weighing his options – tougher economic sanctions, revoking diplomatic status to Russian envoys in the US, or even deploying his newly developed ‘malicious cyber-activity’ tools.

Even VP Joe Biden wants in on the action, threatening Moscow by saying,”We’re sending a message. We have the capacity to do it.”

It seems that where ever you turn nowadays, someone in Washington is issuing a threat against Russia. Are US-Russian relations really that bad, or does this trend have more to do with the defense industry and power struggles within the US?

What was previously a stance reserved for right-wing neoconservative hawks and Cold War hold-outs has now infected America’s left-wing, and is a firm plank in the Democratic Party platform, as evidenced by Hillary Clinton’s constant anti-Russian rhetoric throughout this 2016 election cycle. Along with the White House, Clinton has now transformed the Democrats into the vanguard of Washington’s new anti-Russia movement.

On July 27th, Josh Rogin from the Washington Post wrote, “The Clinton campaign has decided to escalate its rhetoric on Russia. After Trump suggested Wednesday that if Russia had indeed hacked Clinton’s private email server it should release the emails, the Clinton campaign sent out its Democratic surrogates to bash Russia and Trump in a manner traditionally reserved for Republicans.”

Anyone who was paying attention back then knew this ‘Russian hack’ talking point was purely political, but then again, who’s really paying attention these days? Certainly not the US media.

You can trace the genesis of the Democratic Party’s hardcore anti-Russian strategy back to when President Vladimir Putin made a mild passing remark about Donald Trump’s GOP primary success. From that point on, Trump’s political opponents saw this as an open target. In their words, ‘comparing one dictator to another.’

Never one to pass up an opportunity to score cheap political points, President Obama got in on the act, intensifying the Trump-Putin narrative to the level of bromance. “If you’ve made a career out of idealizing Ronald Reagan, then where were you when your own party’s nominee for president was kissing up to Vladimir Putin?” said Obama on Oct 20th at a Clinton rally in Miami.

Backed by the Obama White House, Clinton and the media felt they had a green light to keep pressing ahead with blaming Russia – not only for the controversial DNC leaks, but also for hacking into US election systems in Arizona – a charge devoid of any evidence other than innuendo and speculation. The media’s coverage on this issue was deceptive from the onset. In a leading news release, entitled,“Russian hackers targeted Arizona election system,” we can see how after the cock-sure headline, the first paragraph would always sound definitive:

Hackers targeted voter registration systems in Illinois and Arizona, and the FBI alerted Arizona officials in June that Russians were behind the assault on the election system in that state.

But then by the time you advanced down the story, the report would quickly retreat into a zone of uncertainty:

The bureau described the threat as “credible” and significant, “an eight on a scale of one to 10,” Matt Roberts, a spokesman for Arizona Secretary of State Michele Reagan (R), said Monday. As a result, Reagan shut down the state’s voter registration system for nearly a week.

And then, down to almost nothing…

It turned out that the hackers had not compromised the state system or even any county system. They had, however, stolen the username and password of a single election official in Gila County.

At no point was any evidence ever given. Only ambiguous statements like, “Cyber security officials agree that this looks very much like a Russian government-directed hack.”

Are American politicians so callous as to tempt geopolitical conflict in order to further their short-term political ambitions? Better yet, has American political life really arrived in such a dark cul de sac (translated in French: ‘bottom of the bag’) where politicians in power are so insecure as to make-up and propagate wild international conspiracy theories – in the middle a national election cycle? It’s a very depressing prospect, and yet, this is exactly what we are seeing in this 2016 Presidential Election.

Behind Clinton’s wild hyperbolic rants about the Kremlin and Wikileaks, you will find the White House… 

On October 7th, the Obama Administration formally accused the Russian government of stealing emails from the Democratic National Committee and other high-profile individuals including Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta – giving them to Wikileaks.

Soon, there was a queue of ‘national security’ politicians eager to hitch a ride on this bandwagon. Senator Ben Sasse (NE-R), a member of the Homeland Security Committee spouted out, “Russia must face serious consequences. Moscow orchestrated these hacks because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin believes Soviet-style aggression is worth it. The United States must upend Putin’s calculus with a strong diplomatic, political, ­cyber and economic response.”

According to a Washington Post report by technology editor, Ellen Nakashima, the only ‘evidence’ that seems to be available on this story is a corporate analysis of the alleged ‘Russian government hacks’ – provided by a US cyber security company called Crowdstrike. No actual specifics are given, so we are meant to take private firm Crowdstrike’s word for it.

IMAGE: Crowdstrike cyber security.

The Post’s Nakashima then added:

The administration also blamed Moscow for the hack of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the subsequent leak of private email addresses and cellphone numbers of Democratic lawmakers.

An online persona calling himself Guccifer 2.0 has claimed responsibility for posting the material. Those sites and that persona are “consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts,” the joint statement said. “… We believe, based on the scope and sensitivity of these efforts, that only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities.

Moscow’s press secretary’s reply: “This is some sort of nonsense,” said Dmitry Peskov.

Despite the constant repetition by Democrat media surrogates, and as CNN’s Maria Cardona said last night, no US national intelligence agency has really “confirmed” that Russia was behind the email hacks – and still no evidence, other than speculative guesswork, has been presented.

Likewise, US intelligence agencies have never actually said definitively on record that “Russia did it,” thus, leaving the door open to walk-back the accusation at a later date. Standard Washington procedure of ambiguity. This little detail doesn’t seem to matter in this hyperbolic political climate though. It seems that the White House, Hillary Clinton and media operatives like Cardona – are quite happy living in what John Kerry recent dubbed as a ‘parallel universe.’

Still, during the final Presidential debate, Hillary Clinton proudly crowed how “17 US intelligence agencies” aka the “Intelligence Community” – all agreed that Russia did it. 

The announcement, albeit vague, actually originated from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

We have 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin, and they are designed to influence our election,” said Clinton. “I find that deeply disturbing.

What’s even more disturbing is the fact that Clinton is lying in front of a national audience. The highest levels of the Kremlin? Here are Clinton’s ’17 agencies’:

Air Force Intelligence, Army Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Coast Guard Intelligence, Defense Intelligence Agency, Energy Department, Homeland Security Department, State Department, Treasury Department, Drug Enforcement Administration, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Marine Corps Intelligence, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, National Security Agency, Navy Intelligence and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

What does the Coast Guard Intelligence, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration know about John Podesta’s emails? Answer: nothing.

The exact same thing happened following Wikileaks first trove of DNC emails back in July 2016. The US government issued a vague accusatory statement, but would not actually name the culprit. Some might call that propaganda.

In both instances, the Obama Administration refused to present any evidence. Translated: there was no evidence. If there had been, the White House would have been shouting from the rooftops and using it as leverage to apply muscle in the UN over Washington’s  flagging efforts in Syria. Both Obama Administration announcements were nothing more than dog whistles for Democrats and “journalists” working for hopelessly partisan outlets like New York Times and CNN – none of whom have bothered to press the White House for one ounce of evidence pertaining to the Party’s decree that “Russian is hacking the US election process.”

Under partisan pressure from senior Democrat Senator Harry Reid, the FBI also initiated another investigation into “people linked to the Trump team with Russia.” Reid was unset about the DNC hacks and the Podesta emails and demanded the FBI do something about the Trump campaign. To date, the FBI haven’t come up with anything.

To be fair, Hillary would have every reason to believe that the Kremlin is behind the hack – because her staff read it to her from the campaign’s daily intelligence briefings, presumably, supplied from the US government’s much vaunted Intelligence Community. Of course, that’s the same Intelligence Community that briefed George W Bush about Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program, and who also briefed Colin Powell about Iraq’s imaginary “Winnebagos of Death” aka mobile anthrax labs disguised as senior double-wide camper vans. So, of course, they would know if Putin directed the DNC leaks and Podesta email hacks.

For those us who are skeptical of the great oxymoron known as ‘Washington Intelligence,’ I can almost hear the mainstream rebuttal now, “No, that was Iraq, that was Bush. We’re not like that. No, this time it’s different. This time we are sure the Russians did it!”

In 2014, Obama claimed that Kim’s notorious “Bureau 121” hacked into Sony Pictures. 

This isn’t the first time that President Obama has cried wolf on a foreign ‘hack’ and then tried to sell it for political purposes. Back in December 2014, Obama claimed that North Korea had hacked Sony Pictures in Hollywood. Pentagon-CIA media proxy CNN quickly chimed in to support Washington’s conspiracy theory, floating a colorful story that Kim Jing-Un had deployed a secret underground hacking unit called ‘Bureau 121.’ Just like with today’s “Russian Hack” theory, no member of the mainstream press dared to question the White House’s ridiculous North Korean claim, and like the ‘Russian Hack’ claims, the only source cited for Sony hack was analysis provided by US firm Crowdstrike.

Jumping the Shark

After their Democratic Party Convention on July 27th, the Clinton campaign machine put all of its chips on their Putin narrative.

Soon after, a cadre of top Clinton national security surrogates then accused Trump of emboldening Russia in their evil plot to “destabilize and dominate the West.”  Tom Donilon, a former national security adviser then accused Russia of ‘interfering’ with elections all over Europe and then accused Trump is helping Russia directly. At that point, they were in too deep to turn back.

Clinton spin doctors Josh Schwerin and Michael Fallon would stoop even lower by accusing RT of having possession of the Podesta emails even before Wikileaks did. Their only ‘evidence’ seemed to be Twitter posts by RT News which Clinton held up as ‘proof’ that the Kremlin was front-running Wikileaks email dumps. The Clinton braintrust failed to note that the Podesta emails were posted on Wikileaks own website well before RT News had tweeted about them. At that point it became obvious that the Clinton campaign was panicking and hysterically grabbing for any excuse they could get their hands on. We then watched, as one RT reporter after another dismantled the Clinton campaign’s desperate claims. It was embarrassing.

They could not face the uncomfortable fact that it was WikiLeaks head Julian Assange who chose the timing of the release of the DNC and Podesta emails. Rather than attack Assange himself, who happens to be popular with millennials (the very group Clinton struggles to connect with), her operatives opted to target Russia and Trump instead. Either way, the political strategy here is clear – to shoot the messenger. The Clinton campaign is stuck in permanent rear-guard mode, because based on the content of both the DNC Leaks, Wikileaks files, and Project Veritas video – their own Democratic Party has been discredited and exposed as a corrupt political organization. Their other big problem is that despite all the outrage from Democrats and their mainstream media surrogates, none of the leaked content has been challenged on the basis of its authenticity. The results speak for themselves.

The initial DNC leak of 20,000 emails resulted in the resignation of DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. They revealed the unthinkable: the Democratic National Committee actively worked to undermine the Presidential campaign of Bernie Sandersin favor of the establishment choice in Hillary Clinton. Sanders never had a chance. Honest commentators called this an affront to the democratic process, while party insiders and Clinton supporters pretended to be aloof as if it never happened.

To prove this point, both President Obama and Hillary Clinton then gave Wasserman-Schultz a glowing endorsement on the way out. “For the last eight years, Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz has had my back. This afternoon, I called her to let her know that I am grateful,” said Obama. Not surprisingly, Clinton thanked Wasserman Schultz, presumably for helping to knock her only competitor Sanders out of the Democrat primary race. “I am grateful to Debbie for getting the Democratic Party to this year’s historic convention in Philadelphia, and I know that this week’s events will be a success thanks to her hard work and leadership,” said Clinton. The party had sold its soul to devil and no one seemed to care too much about it. Party Meltdown Wasserman Schultz’s replacement didn’t fair much better. DNC Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile was installed to serve as interim chair through the remainder election, but Brazile was soon skewered by subsequent Wikileaks batches – showing how, on more than one occasion, she fed debate questions obtained from corrupt mainstream media operatives – straight to Hillary Clinton.

A March 12 email exchange shows Brazile stating that she received a town hall question from Roland Martin, a TV One host who co-moderated a March 13 town hall with CNN’s Jake Tapper. A March 5 email shows that she shared a question with Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta and communications director Jennifer Palmieri that was to be asked in a March 6 debate hosted by CNN in Flint, Mich. (Source: Daily Caller)

Brazile’s audacious fraud also helped contribute to her party’s planned sabotage of Democrat challenger Bernie Sanders. Watch Brazile go into full meltdown when confronted here

: .

Completely corrupt and still, Brazile even had to temerity to deny doing it when pressed on FOX News last week. Brazile’s reputation is so bad now that even CNN has severed ties with her – and that’s saying a lot. In addition, it was also revealed how CNN’s head political commentator, Gloria Borger, was named by Podesta as one of a shortlist of ‘journalists’ the Clinton campaign would “work with” to gain favorable coverage. You’d think that CNN would have dropped Borger after this was revealed, but no. Amazingly, Borger is still leading CNN’s election coverage. Clearly, CNN cannot be trusted to police itself when it comes to matters of outright collusion with Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party.

Worse Than Watergate

Perhaps a bigger scandal which the Obama White House and Clinton campaign operatives would like to bury – is the FBI’s investigation into the Clinton Foundation. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal confirmed the existence of an internal feud between the FBI and the Justice Department, over whether or not to pursue an investigation into Clinton issue:

Some investigators grew frustrated, viewing FBI leadership as uninterested in probing the charity, these people said. Others involved disagreed sharply, defending FBI bosses and saying Mr. McCabe in particular was caught between an increasingly acrimonious fight for control between the Justice Department and FBI agents pursuing the Clinton Foundation case. It isn’t unusual for field agents to favor a more aggressive approach than supervisors and prosecutors think is merited. But the internal debates about the Clinton Foundation show the high stakes when such disagreements occur surrounding someone who is running for president.

There’s more. It was also revealed last week how Jill McCabe, the wife of FBI Deputy Director,Andrew McCabe, received $467,500 in campaign funds in late 2015 for her Virginia State Senate run. This unusually large donation came via a political action committee run by Virginia Gov.Terry McAuliffe – a Clinton Foundation board member. After the funds were donated, Andrew McCabe was then put in charge of the Clinton Email case. In normal times, this one scandal would be bigger than Watergate, but these are not normal times.

So why is Washington going all out to deflect to Russia, and cover-up the Clinton scandals, and the Wikileaks document dumps? One reason is because the Clinton email issue goes all the way to the top – to the President himself.

What 21WIRE reported on Oct 21st is how President Obama lied when first confronted about whether or not he knew about the existence of Hillary’s unauthorized private server. Obama told CBS News on March 7, 2015 that he only found out about Clinton’s server “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.” The President’s lie was confirmed when newly released FBI documents showed that:

Obama used a pseudonym [[email protected]] when communicating with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by email, and at least one of those emails ended up on Clinton’s private email server.

So, not only did Obama lie on national TV, but he also broke strict White House security protocols by carelessly exchanging private emails “off grid” with Hillary Clinton on a unsecured and unauthorized mail server –  maybe to avoid the same scrutiny one would have on a government system. Who knows why he did it.

Sure, he’s not the first US President to lie, but like, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, Obama just joined that exclusive liars club – caught out lying to the American people.

On top of this, any communications made by the President of the United States are de factolabeled as “born classified.”  The same goes for any State Department communications with other foreign ministers.

COVER-UP: John Podesta and Huma Abedin on the Hillary campaign jet (Image: ABC News)

It should be well known by now after watching both Attorney Generals Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch in action – that the Obama Justice Department (DOJ) is one of the most politicized in history. Bear that in mind when looking at the latest leg of the Hillary Email case.

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey set the election alight after announcing that the FBI would be reopening the Clinton email case – currently examining 650,000 emails found while investigating a laptop belonging to former US Congressman Anthony Weiner (estranged husband of top Clinton aid and long-time confidant Huma Abedin) who was snared in a ‘sexting’ scandal, allegedly involving a underaged female. So which DOJ person is in charge of this investigation? None other than Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik. Who is Kadzik?  Zero Hedgereports:

Oh yes. Recall our post from last week, “Clinton Campaign Chair Had Dinner With Top DOJ Official One Day After Hillary’s Benghazi Hearing” in which we reported that John Podesta had dinner with one of the highest ranked DOJ officials the very day after Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi testimony? It was Peter Kadzik.

Oh, and if that wasn’t good enough, Kadzik was also Podesta’s lawyer back in 1998 when Ken Starr was investigating Podesta over his role in helping Bill Clinton intern/mistress Monica Lewinsky land a job at the United Nations. The two were described as ‘best friends.’ FOX Newsconfirms:

“Fantastic lawyer. Kept me out of jail,” Podesta wrote on Sept. 8, 2008 to Obama aide Cassandra Butts, according to emails hacked from Podesta’s Gmail account and posted by WikiLeaks.

To call the Clinton circle incestuous would be an understatement, and on the whole, Americans are sick of it.

Russia – The Party Scapegoat

Former Democratic Party leader Howard Dean was so incensed about the FBI reopening the case, he accused the FBI director of being in league with Russia, Tweeting: “Ironically Comey put himself on the same side as Putin.”

Another veteran party operative and lifetime Clinton defender, James Carville, was so upset by the FBI announcement that he accused “the KGB” working with Republicans to “hijack the election” during his wild rant on MSNBC. “I think this an outrage and I think the fact that the KGB is involved in this election is an outrage and I think the American people ought to take their democracy back regardless of what the press wants to do and the excuses they want to make for Comey. That’s what I think,” said Carville. Maybe someone can remind Carville that there is no KGB, and that the Soviet Union actually dissolved in 1991.

These are just a few scandals surrounding the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign, along with the many exposés revealed through Wikileaks, and the Podesta email batches. Those are actual scandals with real tangible evidence – unlike the ‘Russians hacking the DNC and John Podesta and passing those to Wikileaks.’  Suffice to say, the Democratic Party machine has already demonstrated that it is prepared to say anything in order to deflect and divert attention away from the damning Wikileaks material, and also blame Donald Trump in the process. It should be obvious by now that in their desperation to push a highly comprised Hillary Clinton over the finish line on November 8th, the Washington establishment has concocted the story that ‘Putin is trying to influence our electoral process in the US.’ They’ve tried to lay this at the feet of Donald Trump, who Obama and Clinton claim has some secret special relationship with Vladimir Putin. The liberal mainstream media have made a meal out of this talking point, and anti-Russian war hawks on the Republican side love it too. For the White House and the Clinton campaign this seemed like the ultimate clean sweep – a perfectdouble entendre.

The geopolitical strategy behind this move was twofold. First, this non event would be used to advance immediate calls for  sanctions against Russia. Secondly, the US could continue to lean on Russia in the UN over Syria. Previously, 21WIRE reported how Washington’s State Dept and UN delegations, led by the dynamic trio of John Kerry, Samantha Power, and John Kirby, already lied when levelling charges against Russia for war crimes in Aleppo, and again while accusing Russia and Syria of conducting an airstrike on a UN Aid Convoy in Syria. As we have already shown – that raid was most likely a ground attack carried out of US-backed ‘rebels’ Al Nusra Front, or Nour al-Din al-Zenki. With so much at stake geopolitically, why would Washington lie about a potential World War III trigger event? If they are prepared to lie about this, what else are they prepared to lie about?

The demonization of all things Russian has definitely accelerated since late 2013 when the US engineered a coup d’etat in Kiev, Ukraine. Ever since that it’s been a go-to talking point for ginning-up and new transaltlantic arms race, as with Republican war hawks – and a convenient scapegoat for any politician requiring misdirection, like Clinton and the Democrats. When the new year rang in 2015, the newly appointed head of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors, Andrew Lack, announced the new challenges facing America’s own state-run media arm that includes U.S. overseas propaganda assets including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and Radio Free Asia. Lack said,

“We are facing a number of challenges from entities like Russia Today which is out there pushing a point of view, the Islamic State in the Middle East and groups like Boko Haram,”

He was forced to resign shortly after that. What’s clear is that when it comes to all things Russian, there is an established pattern of compulsive lying by this US Administration. The list is too long to chronicle here, although ‘Russian-backed Rebles Shootting Down MH17,’ and ‘Assad Regime Sarin Attack in Damascus in 2013‘ certainly comes to mind. That said, it’s hard to imagine a lie as egregious and potentially destructive than one which accuses the Russia government, a world nuclear power and member of the UNSC, of ‘Hacking Into the US Electoral Process.’ When you examine history however, what you will find is plenty of evidence documenting exactly how the US government and the CIA have altered and flipped 100 foreign elections throughout history, the attempted assassination of over 50 foreign leaders. Knowing all this, one might find it hard to take seriously Washington’s claims that Putin and Trump are trying manipulate the 2016 Election On Oct 9, 2016, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov laid it all on the table:

We have witnessed a fundamental change of circumstances when it comes to the aggressive Russophobia that now lies at the heart of U.S. policy towards Russia. It’s not just a rhetorical Russophobia, but aggressive steps that really hurt our national interests and pose a threat to our security.

Self-serving, career political operatives in Washington are playing a dangerous game. History will mark this as one of the biggest political follies of the Obama-Clinton era. Knowing what we now know about the NSA and its ability to hack and grab any email or text message from anyone, anywhere – if Washington really wanted to know where the hacks came from, maybe they could start there. Far be it from anyone in Washington or the media to ever adopt that line of inquiry. Still, we’re waiting for the emergence of an adult in the room in Washington – before it’s too late.

Comey’s October Surprise turned Democrat allies into enemies and Republican adversaries into supporters – the way things work in Washington.

On Wednesday, Obama weighed in, turning on his FBI director, a highly unusual act, rebuking his October surprise, saying:

“There is a norm that when we are investigating. We don’t operate on innuendo. We don’t operate on incomplete information. We don’t operate on leaks. We operate based on concrete decisions that are made.”

Without mentioning Comey by name, it’s clear whom he meant, wanting nothing about Hillary’s criminal wrongdoing made public.

“I trust her,” Obama said. “I know her. And I wouldn’t be supporting her if I didn’t have absolute confidence in her integrity.”

He and his former secretary of state are unindicted war crimes and pathological liars, both belonging in prison doing hard time, unsuited for any public office.

Claiming Comey violated longstanding agency policy flies in the face of its purported mandate to:

1. Protect America from terrorist attacks.

2. Protect it from foreign intelligence operations and espionage.

3. Protect it against cyberattacks and high-technology crimes.

4. Combat public corruption at all levels.

5. Protect civil rights.

6. Combat transnational/national criminal organizations and enterprises.

7. Combat major white-collar crime.

8. Combat significant violent crime.

9. Support federal, state, local and international partners.

10. Upgrade technology to successfully perform the agency’s mission.

In fact, its primary mission is protecting the interests of wealth, power and privilege from beneficial social change – consistently committing human and civil rights violations unaccountably.

Since J. Edgar Hoover’s days, the FBI illegally targeted political dissidents, communists, anti-war, human and civil rights activists, social reformers, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, among other individuals and groups.

Its tactics include mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of electronic communications, breaking and entering, spreading misinformation and assassinations, among other dirty tricks.

Hillary committed numerous high crimes as first lady, US senator, secretary of state, and presidential aspirant conspiratorially with husband Bill. Comey whitewashed her email wrongdoing in July, instead of doing his job responsibly.

I’ve said before, after failing to hold her accountable so far, it’s hard imagining him changing tactics ahead – whether or not she succeeds Obama.

Criticizing him has nothing to do with diverging from FBI protocol, everything to do with an 11th hour announcement, potentially damaging Hillary’s campaign – the possibility, though remote, of turning near-certain victory into defeat.

If she loses the popular vote, winning by an Electoral College majority and Trump cries foul, there could be blood in the streets.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Aunque ya pasaron más de ocho años desde la quiebra de Lehman Brothers, la economía mundial sigue padeciendo graves problemas estructurales. No solamente el mundo no consigue superar el bajo crecimiento, sino todavía peor, el endeudamiento ha crecido de forma explosiva en los años recientes. Los países industrializados, como Estados Unidos, Alemania y Francia, han visto incrementadas sus deudas exponencialmente; y también los países emergentes, como Brasil y China. Es indudable, si el nivel de endeudamiento sigue creciendo, más temprano que tarde seremos testigos del estallido de otra crisis financiera.

En los últimos años, el endeudamiento ha venido aumentando de forma explosiva. Según las estimaciones realizadas por el Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI), la deuda global del sector no financiero —incluye a los gobiernos, los hogares y las empresas no financieras— supera ya los 150 billones de dólares; un volumen que representa el 225% del Producto Interno Bruto (PIB) mundial. De este gran total, aproximadamente 100 billones de dólares corresponden a deudas que han sido adquiridas por las empresas privadas y las familias; el resto es endeudamiento público.

Las economías industrializadas se encuentran, a mi modo de ver, en la situación más crítica. Además de que sus tasas de crecimiento son demasiado bajas, sus niveles de endeudamiento, tanto público como privado, han venido incrementándose a un ritmo sin precedentes. El principal problema de todo ello es que, frente a un alto nivel de endeudamiento, las empresas y las familias se ven obligadas a destinar una proporción creciente de sus ingresos a la liquidación de sus deudas, con lo cual los recursos que serían canalizados a realizar inversiones y consumir se reducen dramáticamente.

Una vez llegados a este punto, se corre el riesgo de que la adquisición de deudas más grandes dificulte llevar adelante el proceso de desapalancamiento (‘deleveraging’) y, con ello, se termine por socavar la expansión de la economía productiva y la generación de empleo; un círculo vicioso que bien puede generar nuevas burbujas financieras y, de un momento a otro, provocar un desenlace violento. Por otra parte, si se toma en cuenta que, actualmente, las tasas de inflación están por debajo de 2 % (en términos anuales) en casi todos los países industrializados, no resulta una idea descabellada pensar que una espiral combinada de deuda y deflación (caída de precios) sea hoy una amenaza latente.

El otro gran problema, como he sostenido en ocasiones anteriores, es que la artillería de la banca central para combatir bien sea una recesión, bien sea una crisis financiera, está prácticamente agotada. En estos momentos, las tasas de interés de referencia se encuentran muy cercanas a cero en la mayoría de los países industrializados; por lo tanto, su margen de maniobra para disminuir aún más el costo del crédito interbancario a un día es casi nulo. De acuerdo con los cálculos de Bank of America Merrill Lynch, desde que estalló la crisis de 2008 los bancos centrales del mundo han reducido más de 600 veces las tasas de interés de referencia; adicionalmente, han realizado inyecciones de liquidez, de manera conjunta, por más de 18 billones de dólares, apunta Bloomberg.

A mi juicio, si la debacle de la economía mundial se profundiza, los bancos centrales de los países industrializados tomarán acciones mucho más arriesgadas; por ejemplo, a través de la utilización de herramientas ya conocidas. La Reserva Federal (FED) de Estados Unidos bien podría relanzar su programa de compras de bonos del Tesoro e, incluso, comenzar a adquirir otro tipo de títulos financieros, ya no solamente aquellos que están sustentados en hipotecas (‘mortgage-backed securities’); mientras, el Banco Central Europeo (BCE) y el Banco de Japón podrían incrementar de nuevo el volumen de sus compras de activos.

Cabe destacar además que hay varios países que ya pusieron en marcha otras acciones de política monetaria: la reducción de las tasas de depósito a territorio negativo. El objetivo es disuadir a los bancos comerciales de depositar su exceso de dinero en efectivo en los bancos centrales y, con ello, se animen a otorgar crédito a las actividades productivas. Sin embargo, hasta el momento los resultados de esta medida son decepcionantes.

La imposición de tasas de depósito negativas no ha funcionado conforme lo previsto. Es más, todo apunta a que solamente ha agudizado la crisis de rentabilidad de las entidades bancarias. En la actualidad, más de 10 billones de dólares de deuda son negociados con rendimientos negativos, según los datos del Banco de Pagos Internacionales (BIS, por sus siglas en inglés), situación que está dificultando la obtención de beneficios entre los bancos, las cajas de seguros y los fondos de pensiones.

Por su parte, las economías emergentes tampoco están exentas de riesgos pues, aunque el endeudamiento público se encuentra en niveles manejables, a diferencia de las economías industrializadas, los volúmenes de deuda privada registran ya una dimensión colosal: las corporaciones que llevan a cabo sus operaciones en países como Brasil han realizado grandes emisiones de deuda denominada en dólares.

En el caso de China, considerada una economía emergente de importancia sistémica, muchas empresas se han venido financiando a través de centros financieros extraterritoriales (OFC, por sus siglas en inglés) en los años recientes. De acuerdo con la Organización para Cooperación y el Desarrollo Económicos (OCDE), la deuda privada en China representa más del 150 % del PIB. A esto se añade que no ha resultado nada sencillo para el Gobierno chino resolver los problemas de exceso de capacidad en varios sectores de la economía; especialmente, en aquellos que siguen fuertemente apalancados.

Sin lugar a dudas, el endeudamiento excesivo se ha convertido en un peligroso lastre para la economía mundial. No obstante, más allá de que una deuda elevada constituya un obstáculo para la expansión de una economía de forma sostenida, la más grande amenaza es que, en algún momento, este nuevo ciclo de sobreendeudamiento termine por detonar otra crisis financiera de alcance mundial.

 

Noyola Ariel Rodriguez : Economista egresado de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).

 

The Chinese government has achieved a great deal in terms of modernizing and increasing the capabilities of its armed forces in the past two decades and they are quickly obtaining parity with their counterparts in the West. China has made great strides along the long road to rebuild its military, so that it can compete and excel in the modern battlespace.

Much has been written about the fledgling PLAN aircraft carrier program. With one conventional aircraft carrier in service, the Liaoning, and a second carrier being built, China has obviously made the commitment to acquire at least a small aircraft carrier strike capability.

Another important development, perhaps less sensational and headline catching than aircraft carriers, is the growth and modernization of the amphibious capabilities of both the PLA and PLAN. Chinese military strategists realize that naval power, including naval aviation, can project power and can also provide China with the more subtle, yet very effective means of naval power presence in the region. The presence of Chinese naval power in the region can be leveraged to influence advantage in political struggles with its neighbors. Neither naval presence, nor naval power and naval air power can take (or retake) and hold ground, and thus China has decided that a modern and capable amphibious force of sufficient size is a necessary component of its overall maritime strategy.  It is significant that this force has doubled in size over the past five years and has been equipped with new, high-tech weaponry and the beginnings of a viable sealift component that can carry it to battle.

The beginnings of the Chinese interest in amphibious warfare dates back to the Korean War and the Peoples Republic of China’s efforts to defeat the Kuomintang in the 1950s. In 1953, the PLA established the PLA Marine Corps (PLAMC). Although comprising of two brigades of approximately 6,000 officers and men, the PLAMC have undergone a continuous transformation since the Taiwan Strait Crises of the 1990s. The force has been equipped with China’s most modern and capable small arms and equipment, and utilizes the new generation of ZBD05/ZBD2000 amphibious assault vehicles. In some ways modeled on the USMC, the PLAMC marines are highly trained in all forms of modern warfighting. They are considered a vital component of China’s rapid reaction forces, and are thus highly mobile and kept on a heightened state of readiness.

The current force structure of the PLAMC is of two brigades, the 1st Marine Brigade and 164th Marine Brigade. Each brigade consists of one armored regiment and two marine battalions and various support elements. The PLAMC relies on the high speed of its ZBD05/2000 series vehicles to carry them from offshore amphibious platforms such as the Type 071 LPD. The ZBD05 is the world’s fastest armored amphibious assault vehicle, capable of a top speed of 45kph (27mph) in the water. In addition, PLA marines are skilled in air assault operations, small boat assaults and underwater diving operations.

 Although the PLAMC represents a very potent amphibious assault and rapid reaction force, the Chinese political and military leadership realized years ago, that the force is too small to respond to multiple threats across the full scope of China’s maritime boundaries, nor large enough to mount a successful invasion of Taiwan. A viable power projection capability in the form of amphibious assault and air assault forces is seen as essential in protecting the nation’s interests in Africa, the Indian Ocean, South China Sea and East China Sea, especially as it is confronted by U.S. attempts to contain it.

Starting in 2014, the Chinese high command decided to expand the two established Amphibious Mechanized Infantry Divisions (AMID) to four. The 1st and 86th AMIDs are based in the Nanjing Military Region (Eastern Command), and the 123rd and 124th AMIDs are based in the Guangzhou Military Region (Southern Command). Each division is comparable to a mechanized infantry division in size and establishment. The expansion of the AMIDs gives the PLA a greater amphibious capability that might be required in the near future in deterring regional challenges to Chinese territorial claims in both the South and East China Seas, and providing a viable response to violations of its territorial integrity.

None of China’s potential adversaries in the region, other than the United States Navy, have a comparable amphibious warfare force. When combined with the PLAMC, the AMIDS give Chinese diplomacy a very robust practical demonstration of force. Regularly held amphibious exercises showcasing the growing aptitude of these forces only reinforce this reality. Perhaps the most obvious challenges facing the marines and AMIDs, and a major shortcoming that is in the process of remedy, is the lack of heavy sealift capability to transport these units over long sea voyages and within striking range of their theoretical targets.

 

US Democratic presidential nominee Clinton on different occasions during her election campaign pledged to increase the US influence in the Middle Eastern region, to create safe zones inside Syria, increase pressure on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and boost support to the armed opposition.

“Clinton is disquieting because [US President Barack] Obama had taken lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan failures. Clinton knows it too… but she seems to be thinking in simplistic terms of religious identities and ethnicities to define her foreign policy. So I fear she could destabilize Egypt and try to favor a federal solution for Syria… which is a seed for endless wars between groups,” Dhuicq said.

During her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton voted for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and supported the idea of arming and training Syrian rebels in 2012. She was also a vocal supporter of operation in Afghanistan in 2009.

Clinton, who seems to favor use of force based on the list of her foreign policy priorities that imply possible use of US military, is much more dangerous to the world’s peace and security than her Republican rival Donald Trump, Alexander Neu, a member of the German parliamentary committee on defense told Sputnik.

“In my opinion, Clinton might be much more dangerous for the world peace and security than Trump. But both candidates are a mirror of the American society,” Neu said.

According to Clinton’s campaign website, in order to maintain the US military posture, provide national security and country’s influence abroad, the US army could be potentially involved in deterring Iran’s nuclear aspirations, defeating Daesh, countering China’s cybersecurity threat and containing Russian “aggression.”

The US presidential election is set for November 8 with Clinton and Trump being two major contenders for the presidency.

As the U.S. elections come to close, the newly-elected President of the United States will run one of the most dangerous empires in human history. Regardless of whatever comes out of the FBI investigation concerning Hillary Clinton’s‘Classified’ email scandal, she will most likely not go to prison, at least anytime soon.

Clinton is backed by Wall Street bankers, media moguls, Oligarchs and other powerful special interests. The Democratic National Convention (DNC) and Hillary’s political machine will steal the elections, one way or another. There are already cases of voter fraud in several states.

Forget Jill Stein of the Green Party (who is the best candidate by far) and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. The American population and the world will watch the elections on November 8th, so who will win? That is not certain. But what is certain, the most reasonable candidate (Jill Stein) does not have a chance and forget about Gary Johnson who is obviously clueless about world events when he was asked on the mainstream-media (MSM) about the situation in Syria concerning Aleppo and he responded with “What is Aleppo?. He’s finished. Jill Stein is the anti-war, anti-establishment candidate since former congressman from Texas, Ron Paul who stood for peace, economic fairness and freedom. At this point, I will not go further into Stein’s struggling campaign; unfortunately she has lost the election. In a corporate controlled two-party system, Stein or Johnson never had a chance.

USA Today published a story on Oct 23, 2016 titled ‘Iran leader blasts Trump, Clinton, says candidates are ‘bad’ and ‘worse’ on what Iran’s President said about both U.S candidates “The choice between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is one between “bad or worse,” Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said during a rally Sunday in Iran.” I agree with Rouhani’s assessment.

The U.S. elections with the two most despised candidates in history are almost coming to an end (Finally!). The battle between Hillary Clinton, the Wall Street backed-Neoconservative warmonger who is one of the most corrupt politicians in modern times vs. Donald Trump, the narcissist and semi-fascistic businessman turned- politician will soon be over. Trump does have some good domestic policies such as rewriting current free trade agreements that have proved disastrous for the U.S. Canadian and Mexican economies, lowering taxes for individuals, small businesses and corporations and the elimination of Obamacare which is costly for the average working family. One of his foreign policies is to make peace with Russia to fight U.S. backed terrorists. However, Donald Trump has absolutely bad policies on several other issues.

First, Trump wants to strengthen the American Military which means the budget for defense spending will either stay intact or increase, so the Military-Industrial Complex remains. Trump fully supports Israel; in fact he loves Israel. It’s all about protecting Israel’s policies in the Middle East whether it’s against the Palestinians or the Iranians (who Trump disagrees with the Iran-Nuclear Deal and says “it was a bad deal”) because he is a business man who knows how to make good deals, right? At Trump’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) speech earlier this year, he made it clear that protecting Israel will be his priority in the Middle East:

I have been in business a long time. I know deal-making. And let me tell you, this deal is catastrophic for America, for Israel and for the whole of the Middle East. The problem here is fundamental. We’ve rewarded the world’s leading state sponsor of terror with $150 billion, and we received absolutely nothing in return. I’ve studied this issue in great detail, I would say actually greater by far than anybody else. Believe me. Oh, believe me. And it’s a bad deal.

The biggest concern with the deal is not necessarily that Iran is going to violate it because already, you know, as you know, it has, the bigger problem is that they can keep the terms and still get the bomb by simply running out the clock. And of course, they’ll keep the billions and billions of dollars that we so stupidly and foolishly gave them.

The deal doesn’t even require Iran to dismantle its military nuclear capability. Yes, it places limits on its military nuclear program for only a certain number of years, but when those restrictions expire, Iran will have an industrial-sized, military nuclear capability ready to go and with zero provision for delay, no matter how bad Iran’s behavior is. Terrible, terrible situation that we are all placed in and especially Israel. When I’m president, I will adopt a strategy that focuses on three things when it comes to Iran. First, we will stand up to Iran’s aggressive push to destabilize and dominate the region

What kind of relationship would Trump have with the Iranian government? It is also fair too question Trump on what kind of relationship he would also have with leaders of Latin America nations who are not subservient to Washington, in particular Cuba and Venezuela. Will Trump follow Washington’s long-standing policy of “regime change” in Latin America? According to the Telesur news network:

U.S. Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has been labeled a fascist and a racist due to oppressive and draconian proposed policies, has said if he wins the presidential election he would support opposition groups in Cuba and Venezuela against what he called the “oppression of the Castro and Maduro regimes.”

“With a victory in November everything will change, that change includes standing in solidarity with the suffering of the people of Cuba and Venezuela against the oppression of the Castro and Maduro regimes,” Trump said referring to Cuban President Raul Castro and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro

Trump also supports a nationwide “Stop and Frisk” policy to supposedly lower the crime rates in urban cities. It reminds me of Nazi Germany’s “Papers Please!” As bad as Trump is, Hillary Clinton is worst. She can raise tensions with China that can lead to a possible war (read ‘America’s Pacific Century’ by Hillary Clinton published by Foreign Policy Magazine). She is a supporter of Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” that is primarily based on trade deals with China’s neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region which expands U.S. military strategic alliances to encircle China and Russia. Hillary will also raise tensions with Russia that can lead to a nuclear war. Hillary Clinton also said “If I’m President, We Will Attack Iran… We would be Able to Totally Obliterate Them” (Read Stephen Lendman’s ‘Hillary Clinton: “If I’m President, We Will Attack Iran… We would be Able to Totally Obliterate Them” on Global Research). A possible attack on Iran will also be back on the table with a Clinton presidency.

Not only Hillary is a pro-war candidate, she is pro-Wall Street (Goldman Sachs fully supports her candidacy), pro-GMO, pro-Big Pharma, pro-brainwashing in the U.S. public schools and pro-Israel. Clinton has a close relationship with the oppressive Gulf State monarchies (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.) and she is for open borders which follows the principals of the New World Order.

Clinton is the establishment’s choice, the elections will be rigged and Donald Trump knows it. The elections are in the bag for Clinton. Of course that can change, anything is possible including a Trump victory but it seems that it is an unlikely scenario so far. The establishment hates Trump because he is not one of them, he does not have the “blue blood”. Clinton is the chosen candidate. But with that said, it will not be the end of the line for Donald Trump.

Coming soon, The Trump News Network?

Rumors have it that if Trump loses the election comes this November 8th; he will create a news network to battle the MSM he clearly despises. Trump loves the spotlight, it is obviously clear that Trump is narcissistic, he loves the publicity. It would be interesting if he decided to start a media empire that would rival CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the BBC. The Atlantic followed up with the rumors with a story titled ‘Donald J. Trump’s Television Future’ indicating that Trump is heading towards that direction:

But Trump’s fame and the fanatical devotion of his fanbase are both an order of magnitude greater than Beck’s, suggesting his celebrity could translate into millions of paid television subscribers. Even one million Trump TV subscribers paying $150 a year (or about $12 a month) for a television, radio, and website product would mean $150 million in the first year. That would probably be enough to lure Hannity at a discount and other conservative fixtures like Laura Ingraham to Trump’s stable. For premium subscriptions—say, $200 or $300 a year—Trump could promise free tickets to Trump national tours, discounts to Trump merchandise and hotels, and even dubious products like online real-estate lessons. After all, Trump was desperate to merchandise his likeness and surname before the election, and with a built-in audience of about 60 million voters and hundreds of thousands of national rally attendees, he is once again poised to capitalize on his name

Trump has been consistently demonized by the MSM on every level. In some cases, he has even been turned into a mockery on various American television shows. The media bias is relentless in their attacks against Trump, while the focus on Clinton has been minuscule. On August 15th, Breitbart.com published a story on Trump’s campaign against the MSM:

Donald Trump is campaigning against the “dishonest and totally biased” media, asking supporters to fill out a survey about how they think the press has been covering Trump’s campaign.

“It’s time to hold the media accountable for trying to rig this election against us,” Trump’s email, which was sent out Monday morning, reads. “Please take the Mainstream Media Accountability Survey right now and help me spread the truth about our movement.”

The email continues: “All too often I’m asked about a “poll” put out by a liberal organization that says the American people disagree with our common-sense reforms to fix our country. Well…with your help today, the next time I’m being interviewed, I will have my own poll that shows that the American people disagree with the dishonest media!

The report also published Trump’s Twitter message criticizing the MSM for protecting Hillary Clinton “I am not only fighting Crooked Hillary, I am fighting the dishonest and corrupt media and her government protection process. People get it!” His words say it all. If he loses the election, he can possibly start a new media empire that would rival the MSM. Would I agree with most of the content on the Trump news network? I will say, most likely not. I might agree on a few things, but definitely not everything. It will be interesting to see what his media empire would consist of. One thing is for sure, it would keep the MSM up at night. If Donald Trump were to develop a news media channel and a website to fight the MSM lies, it would be another nail in the coffin for news media outlets like CNN or what Trump himself calls the Clinton News Network.

If Trump loses, he still wins. If he decided to create his own news network, it will go head to head with the MSM. Now that might be something worth watching since Trump is a popular figure, whether you love him or hate him, the people will be curious to see what he says or what he does against the MSM, and that will bring him the viewership he needs. If Hillary Clinton loses the election, a Trump presidency would allow Justice Department to press charges and attempt to incarcerate Hillary for the crimes she had committed regarding the 30,000 deleted emails. Will Trump keep that promise? We don’t know, because after all he is “unpredictable.”

On October 18, Putin halted Russian aerial operations against eastern Aleppo terrorists – while continuing to provide Syrian forces with intelligence and logistical support.

After several days of fierce fighting, terrorists failed to break through government forces encircling them. They remain trapped under siege, able to leave safely through Russian established humanitarian corridors if they cease fighting.

So far they refuse, holding thousands of area residents hostage as human shields – perhaps mobilizing for another offensive.

Syrian forces strengthened their ranks. Elite Tiger troops, Liwa Suqour al-Sahra Special Forces and Desert Hawks commandos are involved, aided by attack helicopters, missile systems, and sophisticated Russian-made T90 tanks – in place to repel further terrorist attacks.

A Russian naval battle group led by the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, carrying Su-33 warplanes and Ka-31 attack helicopters, will arrive near Syria’s coast by Friday. Three Russian submarines armed with cruise missiles reportedly are accompanying it.

On Tuesday, reports from Aleppo indicated Syrian forces blocked US-supported terrorists from reaching Al-Bab in northeastern Aleppo. Several villages north of the city were liberated. Heavy clashes continue around the 1070 Apartment Project and elsewhere.

According to Syrian army al-Mahavir Battalion commander Mohannad Haaj, Washington OK’d use of toxic chemicals (believed to be chlorine gas), delivered by shelling civilians and government forces in parts of Aleppo they control – so far one reported death and dozens hospitalized.

Moscow State University Political Science Professor/co-chairman of the National Strategic Council of Russia Sergei Markov believes a decisive battle to liberate Aleppo looms, saying:

“I think that the Russian, Iranian and Syrian foreign ministers…discussed the…issue during their recent meeting in Moscow. I believe that the operations to regain Aleppo will kick off on November 7 or 8 before Obama leaves power, and it will be a blow to the US president by Vladimir Putin before (his) departure.”

An unnamed Western intelligence source believes Russia is “on the brink of a major military assault on Aleppo.”

If so, expect resumption of aerial operations, suspended for 16 days – a November surprise, coinciding with American elections when US public attention awaits their results.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].
His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html
Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

The headline read “Lithuania issues updated Russian invasion advice booklets”. This author’s thoughts immediately returned to a “duck and cover” film they showed us in El Paso, Texas when I was in the 2nd grade. These pesky Russians, simply will not give up in their quest for world domination! But wait, wait just one minute…

What do Lithuania and the rest of Europe have that Russians need so desperately? What natural or human resource is deposited in Europe to the west of the Dnieper River, which is so valuable Vladimir Putin would risk annihilation over it? Before you are done reading this report you will understand completely the unmistakable truth of our times, Russia needs nothing from Europe or the west, except to be left alone. Read on and discover the truth of détente today, and how Russia’s real mission is enslaving all of Europe! (or not)

The answer to the question is, “nothing”. Russia has never needed anything but Russia to survive and thrive. The biggest country in the world, also possesses the most vast natural resources. On this point there are two facets worth examining. First, Russia’s development before Vladimir Putin was drastically curtailed by western influences, and especially during and just after the first Cold War. Second, while most consider the fall of the Soviet Union a bitter defeat for Russia, being loosed from the shackles of dependent satellite states actually strengthened Russia’s core economy. To put things bluntly, the United States did not exactly “win” the Cold War. As shocking as this may be, the reality is here.

Historically speaking, Russia has almost always been the target of conquest. This history (not revisionist ones) teaches us the Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Patriotic War of 1812, ended in utter defeat. Of the 680,000 soldiers who entered Russia with the Grande Armée, only 27,000 lived to tell stories of the bitter Russian winter. Then, in the Russo-Persian Wars, and in the Russo-Turkish Wars, both the Persians, and Ottoman Empires, lost and lost some more to Imperial Russia, during the last great expansion of the motherland. Interestingly, Russia actually assisted nations now aligned against her in these wars, as Czar Alexander I helped free Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Armenia, Greece and Moldova from the Ottoman Turks. Today NATO covets many of these lands as military partners clearly pitted against Putin’s Russia. To continue…

Next the Crimea War in between October 1853 to March 1856 must jog us into sensibility here, if not for the utter failures of Russia’s enemies; France, Great Britain, the Ottomans and Sardinia, then for the irony of religious conflict. In this invasion of Russia’s sphere, it was Roman Catholicism versus Eastern Orthodoxy that was at the crux of the conflict. Today these old religious differences play a role too, but I’ll get to that in the summary (please remember). Even though Russia officially lost this war technically, in the end Orthodoxy was reinforced. However, the Treaty of Paris and Russia’s failure to secure a victory paved the way for the great conflicts to come, in the end the so-called “Eastern Question” was not (and is not) resolved. Today we still see and feel the reverberations of discord left after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Then World War I saw the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria were pitted against Russia, Great Britain, France and the other allied powers. The German’s narrowly avoided the total invasion of East Prussia by the Russians, and there was a deadlock afterward in the east and west. The unresolved issues of WW I, led to the ultra-nationalism in Europe and World War II. It was during this “Great Patriotic War” that the most powerful armies the world has seen gathered on the field in Russia. The Nazis and their allies made the greatest gains on Russian territory since Genghis Khan and the Monguls, but were eventually crushed. After the war, the western Allies relinquished to the Soviet Union the most hard hit and devastatingly poor satellite nations in Europe to rebuild and support.

At least this is a meaningful way for grasping the points I make today. The nations of the so-called Warsaw Pact actually represent an unbelievable achievement in cooperation, considering the relative position of West Germany and the war torn nations under western influence. It’s important to remember, the Soviet Union, and Russia proper, were utterly destroyed to the west of Moscow and Stalingrad. The nations of Eastern Europe left in the USSR’s sphere after the war were crushed by the war. Though western historians’ vilification of the Soviets control of Poland and others of these nations is not without cause, the burden and impact for Russians has never been weighed. The US, Britain, and to a lesser degree France, were all left to rebuild West Germany, but compared to the task laid before the Soviets, those nations bore nothing at all. West Germany rebuilt itself with loans from the London and New York bankers, Italy and other nations in this sphere faired far better than Eastern Europe, and the Cold War taxed the Soviets most severely.

While it can be argued Soviet rule was harsh and cruel for millions of people, many argue today that life under communism was better than the austerity we see now in Romania and elsewhere. This notwithstanding, it’s fair to say America and the NATO allies (pre-1991) were always in a more advantageous situation than their Soviet (particularly Russian) counterparts. This brings me to a final point, that of natural and human resources, and just what Russia really needs from Europe. Let me break this all down for you simply.

The most common commodities Russia currently imports from Europe are: machines Russians could make as easily, cars Russian production could produce, textiles, food products currently hurt by sanctions, and tennis shoes. Furthermore, the sanctions imposed on Russia by western nations have actually helped the Russians to fill voids in their GDP by making it necessary to replace foreign commodities. Put bluntly, Europe is more or less run out of natural or even manufactured resources Russians could ever want for, while Putin’s administration has dramatically expanded his country’s already massive self sufficiency. Taking over Lithuania and other Baltic states is a zero sum proposition for the Russians. The Eurozone is broke, overall unemployment is above 10%, while Russia maintains a 5% unemployment rate that is going down as Putin ramps up manufacturing. Get this, government bond yields in the Eurozone are in the negative at -0.38% yield at last count. Conversely (amazingly) even with the attack on the ruble and economic sanctions, while fighting an air war against ISIL in Syria, Russia’s 10 year bond yields are currently at 10.52%. Hello!

The current European Union debt is running at about €12.5 trillion euro. The US is rapidly approaching $20 trillion. Russia owes about $150 billion in US dollars and that is all. Let me emphasize this, Russia owes less than Greece does, less than Austria, less than Belgium, and less than Sweden too. Put another way, every German owed over €20,000 euro because of their government’s borrowing and bad decisions, while each Russian citizen only owes $1,000 US dollars (or 800 euro bucks maybe). Every Italian man-woman-and child owes about $40,000 dollars, and every Russian owes 1/40th of that!!! Italy should pray that Russia invades soon, and Spain should too.

Lithuania, at the behest of NATO, has updated its civil defense booklet telling citizens what to do in the event of a Russian invasion. The citizens there are pretty well off compared to the average European citizen, each only owing about €4,000 euro when they are born. But considering the tiny country’s miniscule ability to enhance life for most Russians, even should workers there be turned into slave labor, the likelihood Putin covets their limestone or quartz resources, since Russia is one of the world’s leading producers of anything Lithuania has. The same goes for the rest of Europe as well. Russia is the top producer of gold, 1st or 2nd in natural gas and oil, 3rd in coal, and 1st in iron, tin, lead and wood. By now my point should have sunken in abundantly. If Russia were to invade anywhere in Europe, Russians would be sharing their wealth with the future poor of the world. China and Southeast Asia took manufacturing, Russia and the BRICS have three fourths of the world’s remaining resources, and Russians own per capita, more real wealth than any people on Earth. Europe has banks and failed social-capitalistic service centers, how in hell could Putin justify invading this place?

In 1991 the Russians rid themselves of an Eastern Europe propagandized into believing the good old USA would ride in and deliver paradise! Radio Free Europe still operates to convince Poles and Romanians of the BIG RED MENNACE. NATO is in “job security mode”, and a quest to masquerade as defenders of the faithful. The real logic of true life though, it betrays the insane reason of Cold War dinosaurs. Washington and London think tanks are operating on decayed brain cells. Russia could care less, should care less than to even fantasize about a Russian speaking Paris. Putin does not need the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, St. Petersburg is overflowing with art. The average Russian does not fly off to London to hear Big Ben, they head to Greece or Italy to lie under the warm Mediterranean sun. Not even Ukraine is so coveted as to provoke Putin to invade, or else Kiev would surely be under the Russian flag now. Crimea turned homeward, because NATO can never have Russia’s biggest warm water port. And the rest of this ludicrous “invasion” fairytale is just justification, to try and hide the death throes of a Euro, a dollar, and a pound.

There’s food for your imperialistic thoughts Lithuanians. If I am wrong, you’ll be slaving away making Russian shoes no matter what.

Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

If Ukraine becomes a flashpoint for World War III with Russia, the American people might rue the day that their government pressed for the 2014 overthrow of Ukraine’s allegedly corrupt (though elected) president in favor of a coup regime led by Ukrainian lawmakers who now report amassing, on average, more than $1 million each, much of it as cash.

The New York Times, which served as virtually a press agent for the coup in February 2014, took note of this apparent corruption among the U.S.-favored post-coup officials, albeit deep inside a story that itself was deep inside the newspaper (page A8). The lead angle was a bemused observation that Ukraine’s officialdom lacked faith in the country’s own banks (thus explaining why so much cash).

Yet, Ukraine is a country beset by widespread poverty, made worse by the post-coup neoliberal “reforms” slashing pensions, making old people work longer and reducing heating subsidies for common citizens. The average Ukrainian salary is only $214 a month.

So, an inquiring mind might wonder how – in the face of all that hardship – the post-coup officials did so well for themselves, but Times’ correspondent Andrew E. Kramer treads lightly on the possibility that these officials were at least as corrupt, if not more so, than the elected government that the U.S. helped overthrow. Elected President Viktor Yanukovych had been excoriated for a lavish lifestyle because he had a sauna in his residence.

Kramer’s article on Wednesday tried to explain the bundles of cash as a sign that “many of the lawmakers and officials responsible for inspiring public trust in Ukraine’s economic and banking institutions have little faith that their own wealth would be safe in the country’s banks, according to recently mandated financial disclosures. …

“Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, for example, declared over one million dollars in savings in cash — $870,000 and 460,000 euros — apparently shunning Ukraine’s ever-wobbly banking system. The top official in charge of the country’s banks, Valeriya Gontareva, who is responsible for stabilizing the national currency, the hryvnia, maintains most of her money in American dollars — $1.8 million.

“A tally of the declarations filed by most of Parliament’s 450 members compiled by one analyst, Andriy Gerus, found that the lawmakers collectively held $482 million in ‘monetary assets,’ of which $36 million was kept as cold, hard cash. …

“Some politicians seem to have approached the declaration as a sort of amnesty, revealing everything they have earned from decades of crooked dealings, in an effort to come clean. … One minister reported a wine collection with bottles worth thousands of dollars each. Another official declared ownership of a church. Yet another claimed a ticket to outer space with Virgin Galactic. …

“Another theory making the rounds in Kiev — where people generally acknowledge the inventive, venal genius of their politicians — suggests that the public servants are padding their declarations,” so they can hide future bribes within their reported cash holdings and thus offer plausible excuses for luxury cars and expensive jewelry.

Accessing More Money

Ironically, passage of the law requiring the disclosures of what appears to be widespread corruption among Kiev’s officials unlocked millions of euros in new aid money from the European Union that then flowed to the same apparently corrupt officials.

However, because the Ukraine “regime change” in 2014 was partly orchestrated by U.S. and E.U. officials around the propaganda theme that elected President Yanukovych was corrupt – he had that sauna, after all – the continued corruption in the post-coup regime has been a rarely acknowledged, inconvenient truth. Indeed, some business people operating in Ukraine have complained that the corruption has grown worse since Yanukovych was overthrown.

Yet, only occasionally has that reality been allowed to peek through in the mainstream U.S. media, which prefers to deny that any “coup” occurred, to blame Russia for all of Ukraine’s problems, and to praise the post-coup “reforms” which targeted pensions, heating subsidies and other social programs for average citizens.

One of the rare deviations from the happy talk appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 1, 2016, observing that “most Ukrainians say the revolution’s promise to replace rule by thieves with the rule of law has fallen short and the government acknowledges that there is still much to be done.”

Actually, the numbers suggested something even worse. More and more Ukrainians rated corruption as a major problem facing the nation, including a majority of 53 percent in September 2015, up from 28 percent in September 2014, according to polls by International Foundation for Electoral Systems.

So, as the hard lives of most Ukrainians got harder, the elites continued to skim off whatever cream was left, including access to billions of dollars in the West’s foreign assistance that has kept the economy afloat.

There was, for instance, the case of Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who was regarded by many pundits as the face of Ukraine’s reform before departing last April after losing out in a power struggle.

Yet, Jaresko was hardly a paragon of reform. Prior to getting instant Ukrainian citizenship and becoming Finance Minister in December 2014, she was a former U.S. diplomat who had been entrusted to run a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-funded program to help jump-start an investment economy in Ukraine and Moldova.

Jaresko’s compensation was capped at $150,000 a year, a salary that many Americans – let alone Ukrainians – would envy, but it was not enough for her. So, she engaged in a variety of maneuvers to evade the cap and enrich herself by claiming millions of dollars in bonuses and fees.

Ultimately, Jaresko was collecting more than $2 million a year after she shifted management of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF) to her own private company, Horizon Capital, and arranged to get lucrative bonuses when selling off investments, even as the overall WNISEF fund was losing money, according to official records.

For instance, Jaresko collected $1.77 million in bonuses in 2013, according to a WNISEF filing with the Internal Revenue Service. In her financial disclosure forms with the Ukrainian government, she reported earning $2.66 million in 2013 and $2.05 million in 2014, thus amassing a sizeable personal fortune while investing U.S. taxpayers’ money supposedly to benefit the Ukrainian people.

It didn’t matter that WNISEF continued to hemorrhage money, shrinking from its original $150 million to $89.8 million in the 2013 tax year, according to the IRS filing. WNISEF reported that the bonuses to Jaresko and other corporate officers were based on “successful” exits from some investments even if the overall fund was losing money.

Though Jaresko’s enrichment schemes were documented by IRS and other official filings, the mainstream U.S. media turned a blind eye to this history, all the better to pretend that Ukraine’s “reform” process was in good hands. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Ukraine’s Finance Minister Got Rich.”]

Biden’s Appeal

Worried about the continued corruption, Vice President Joe Biden, who took a personal interest in Ukraine, lectured Ukraine’s parliament on the need to end cronyism.

But Biden had his own Ukraine cronyism problem because three months after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Yanukovych government Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings, appointed his son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors.

Burisma a shadowy Cyprus-based company also lined up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

As Time magazine reported, “Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.”

According to investigative journalism inside Ukraine, the ownership of Burisma has been traced to Privat Bank, controlled by the thuggish billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky, who was appointed by the U.S.-backed “reform” regime to be governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a south-central province of Ukraine (though Kolomoisky was eventually ousted from that post in a power struggle over control of UkrTransNafta, Ukraine’s state-owned oil pipeline operator).

In a speech to Ukraine’s parliament in December 2015, Biden hailed the sacrifice of the 100 or so protesters who died during the Maidan putsch in February 2014, which ousted Yanukovych, referring to the dead by their laudatory name “The Heavenly Hundred.”

But Biden made no heavenly references to the estimated 10,000 people, mostly ethnic Russians, who have been slaughtered in the U.S.-encouraged “Anti-Terror Operation” waged by the coup regime against eastern Ukrainians who resisted Yanukovych’s violent ouster. Nor did Biden take note that some of the Heavenly Hundred were street fighters for neo-Nazi and other far-right nationalist organizations.

But after making his sugary references to The Heavenly Hundred, Biden delivered his bitter medicine, an appeal for the parliament to continue implementing International Monetary Fund “reforms,” including demands that old people work longer into their old age.

Biden said, “For Ukraine to continue to make progress and to keep the support of the international community you have to do more, as well. The big part of moving forward with your IMF program — it requires difficult reforms. And they are difficult.

“Let me say parenthetically here, all the experts from our State Department and all the think tanks, and they come and tell you, that you know what you should do is you should deal with pensions. You should deal with — as if it’s easy to do. Hell, we’re having trouble in America dealing with it. We’re having trouble. To vote to raise the pension age is to write your political obituary in many places.

“Don’t misunderstand that those of us who serve in other democratic institutions don’t understand how hard the conditions are, how difficult it is to cast some of the votes to meet the obligations committed to under the IMF. It requires sacrifices that might not be politically expedient or popular. But they’re critical to putting Ukraine on the path to a future that is economically secure. And I urge you to stay the course as hard as it is. Ukraine needs a budget that’s consistent with your IMF commitments.”

However, as tough as it might have been for Ukraine’s parliament to slash pensions, reduce heating subsidies and force the elderly to work longer, that political sacrifice did not appear to extend to the officials making financial sacrifices themselves.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

This week could well be remembered as South Africa’s most important political inflection point since the September 2008 ousting of sitting President Thabo Mbeki by his own party, the African National Congress (ANC). His main tormenter then was Jacob Zuma, who – following a brief handover period – has ruled the country in an increasingly dubious manner since May 2009.

But several contradictions have exploded in Zuma’s face. Political opponents from across the spectrum, radical university students and his own party’s establishment smell the blood, as Zuma’s fabled patronage system is now in the spotlight, apparently in tatters.

Zuma just suffered two major legal defeats: a fumbled state attack on Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan which was humiliatingly withdrawn by an incompetent prosecutor on Monday following a national outcry; and Wednesday’s release of the public protector’s State of Capture report on the Zuma family’s corrupt relationships, a report the president and two cabinet colleagues unsuccessfully attempt to quash.

Zuma loses his political grip while liberals and radicals gain momentum

While Zuma tried delay tactics, rumblings at the base have grown louder. The leftist Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party and the centre-right Democratic Alliance (DA) both held anti-Zuma marches in the capital city Pretoria on Wednesday, with the former’s leader Julius Malema clearly distancing himself from a third event – a ‘Save South Africa’ meeting at the nearby Anglican cathedral with scores of notables from civil society and big business.

Malema told a crowd of many thousands, “A CEO will speak at that small church there, not Church Square. Let them speak there. Small churches are for CEOs. Only the EFF has the potential to collapse the ANC.” The threat of EFF activists marching to occupy Zuma’s offices at Pretoria’s Union Buildings offices was deflected by police, but the red-shirted marchers took over much of the capital city’s central business district.

Prior to the 355-page State of Capture report, Malema’s deputy Floyd Shivambu had written the most thorough analysis of the Gupta brothers’ influence, and the EFF regularly refers to the network of state and Gupta cronies as the ‘Zuptas.’ The Gupta influence includes mass media (a newspaper and TV network), mining (especially exceptionally controversial links to the Eskom parastatal and its top manager) and provincial ANC leaders.

As a former guerrilla fighter with no formal education, Zuma, 74, is a genius at maintaining not only talk-left walk-right ideological flexibility, but also membership loyalty within his Zulu ethnic group and the country’s eastern and northern provinces (KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, Free State, North West and Limpopo). Although in August municipal elections it lost 8% of the vote compared to the 2011 vote, the ANC won handily in most of these areas.

But for the first time since liberation, the ANC surrendered rule of the economic heartland of Johannesburg, Pretoria and the fifth largest city of Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth) to what is sure to be a fleeting right-left alliance of DA and EFF. The second city, Cape Town, has been run by the DA since 2006, while third-largest Durban is safely pro-Zuma. Huge ANC patronage power dissipated with the loss of the three metro areas.

Zuma himself is also being battered again by 783 corruption charges relating to bribery in a late 1990s French military deal. The infamous arms deal unravelled the ANC’s liberation mystique even during Nelson Mandela’s 1994-99 rule. As a result of a colleague’s jailing on the same charges, Zuma was fired as Mbeki’s Deputy President in 2005. He then won acquittal in a high-profile 2006 rape case. The (HIV+) victim – daughter of a former ANC guerrilla who was a close family friend of Zuma, Fezikile Kuzwayo – died in Durban last month, again reviving memories of his misogyny. Zuma, who has had four wives and more than twenty children, claimed during the trial, “in Zulu culture, you don’t just leave a woman,” a stance Kuzwayo eloquently rebutted as she was forced into exile for several years by Zuma’s manic supporters.

Until now, Zuma has kept dissident tendencies within the ANC’s big political tent, in part by using divide-and-conquer patronage skilfully. But the day of reckoning is here because the Gupta family – three immigrant Indian brothers who became ostentatious tycoons over the past two decades – have been winning massive state deals and using alleged bribes to get even wealthier, as revealed in State of Capture.

For example, the respected Deputy Finance Minister Mcebisi Jonas accused the Guptas of offering him $45 million a year ago, if he agreed to become finance minister in an informal putsch, because his then boss Nhlanhla Nene had balked at airplane and nuclear deals favourable to Zuma’s retinue. After Jonas forcefully declined, the subsequent firing of Nene and offer of the job to a political ingénue – Des van Rooyen – left the country shocked last December. Within four days, amidst a panicked currency crash, a business uprising led by three white bankers forced Zuma to shift the hapless Van Rooyen over to the local government ministry and replace him with Gordhan, who had served in the same job to corporate applause from 2009-14.

But throughout 2016, Gordhan’s stance became increasingly untenable, thanks to the economic downturn and repeated attempts by Zuma allies to prosecute him for what appear to be either nonsensical claims or relatively trivial misdeeds in his prior role in the tax authority. As the country barely dodged a recession, Gordhan’s 2016 budgetary manoeuvres were also complicated by rising popular dissent – especially university students who demanded around $2 billion in new funding to achieve “free, decolonised, quality higher education” in the #FeesMustFall campaign, as well as angry black communities denied decent levels of municipal services – and threats of a junk bond rating downgrade.

Credit rating threats and student demands

That junk rating has long been threatened by the local managers of three agencies: Moody’s, Fitch and Standard&Poor’s. But while Gordhan goes to great lengths to appease them and the financiers they front for, the three agencies are so often so spectacularly wrong (eg. with AAA ratings for Lehman Brothers bank and IAG insurance in 2008), and so apparently biased towards the prejudices of Western banks, that in Goa last month, the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) economic alliance pledged to introduce their own. The neoliberal financial elites in the BRICS machinery ensured, however, that the wording for such an agency’s mandate emphasised “market-oriented,” so as with the BRICS New Development Bank and Contingent Reserve Arrangement, there would logically be no difference with existing institutions. And as with Brazil and Russia which were also given junk status recently, South Africa pays a 9% interest rate on its now dangerously high $135 billion foreign debt, which indicates that the markets already de factoconsider South Africa to have junk status.

With those three agencies firmly in mind, on October 25, Gordan revealed his latest budget in parliament. At the time, 16 of the country’s 25 universities had been forced by student protesters to temporarily close down, in the activists’ attempt to raise national pressure on the government. Though valiant, and though 600 students were arrested and around $80 million in damage done by protesters to their campuses, neither Zuma nor Gordhan gave in.

On October 25, several thousand furious university students met Gordhan for a talk at parliament’s gates before the budget speech, but after being attacked by police, began violently protesting throughout central Cape Town. They were then heartbroken by Gordhan’s decision to offer only $420 million in new funds, following more than a year of intense social debate and student protest, in the wake of a legacy of university underfunding by Gordhan’s predecessor, the famous neoliberal Trevor Manuel who now works for Rothschild. And they were infuriated by yet another heavy-handed police clampdown.

But the students should not have been surprised. Gordhan did after all signal divide-and-rule budget politics during a New York interview amidst his last investor road-show, on October 5: “We have a solution which will meet the needs of the poor students, and the so called missing middle as well, and it’s important that students who understand the calculations, who understand the trade-offs that we need between student fees being subsidised on the one hand, and housing and welfare and health and other issues being paid for on the other hand, that they should be part of a constructive conversation.”

Across South Africa, #FeesMustFall had rejected that ‘solution’ when it was proposed by Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande – who also leads the SA Communist Party – two weeks earlier. They well understand that state subsidies provided 50% of university income in 2000, but steadily fell to 40% today, with students covering the bulk of the shortfall.

On October 25, Gordhan again told them to borrow more – he offered $670 million – in order to pay for their undergraduate education. The National Student Financial Aid Scheme’s extremely low repayment rates ($1.5 billion out of $1.8 billion in outstanding debt remains uncollected) reflects how that strategy is working. Adding household debt is usually only a short-term salve, as demonstrated by the ratio of South African borrowers whom the National Credit Regulator deems ‘credit impaired’: still in the unsustainable region of 45%, barely lower than the 2008 high.

Importantly, a report by Nzimande’s 2012-13 commission on fees-free education was covered up until its findings were leaked in 2015. Nzimande’s spokesperson Khaye Nkwanyana had explained, “It is a public document, but due to the nature of the report, we decided not to make it public. Obviously we would have been setting the Finance Minister [Gordhan] up against the public if that decision and report was released.”

Gordhan’s neoliberal bias

The choices Gordhan made last month necessarily set him against the public. For example, his February budget provided a mere 3.5% nominal increase to foster care providers (who play a vital role given the catastrophic AIDS orphan rate) and a 6.1% rise for mothers of many millions of Child Support Grant recipients. While old-age pensions are not increasing, the extra $0.75/month he offered to the latter – up to a tokenistic $27/month – brings the child grant’s overall increase this year to 7.5%.

However, inflation for poor people will likely exceed 10%, due to a 15% rise in basic food costs, Eskom’s 9.4% electricity price increase and higher transport expenses. Reflecting the gap between Pretoria’s conscience and society’s hunger, the poverty rate (for food and necessities) is now an excruciating 63%. But South Africa has the fifth lowest social spending rate among the 40 largest economies (half that of Russia and Brazil).

Instead of targeting social spending, Gordhan could instead have referenced the $17.3 billion in annual overcharging within Treasury’s $45 billion procurement budget. Treasury’s lead procurement official Kenneth Brown recently acknowledged, “without adding a cent, the government can increase its output by 30-40%. That is where the real leakage in the system actually is.

Why has such fiscal wastage continued for so long? Gordhan himself admits that Treasury remains confounded by systematic ANC “rent-seeking. It means every time I want to do something, I say it is part of transformation. But in the meantime, it means giving contracts to my pals in closets.” (The “I” and “my” refer to the Zupta faction.)

But there are also other pals in other closets, who normally cheer on Treasury neoliberalism: the 1% of rich South Africans who have had an exceptional run since the early 1990s, according to a World Bank reportreleased last month. Post-apartheid economic policies raised their income share from 10-12% of total income (excluding capital gains) in 1990-94 to 18-20% since 2009, nearly unprecedented in the world.

These are also the (mostly) men who take assets abroad illicitly. For in addition to around $11 billion in net profit, dividend and interest payments that leave the country – the main reason South Africa’s current account deficit often reaches a dangerous 5% of GDP – there is $21 billion in annual average ‘Illicit Financial Flows’ (as counted by Global Financial Integrity over the past decade).

This threat continues unless Treasury and the Reserve Bank counter it by tightening exchange controls. They won’t. Apparently without any state regulatory friction, blatant tax dodging occurs at the biggest platinum companies, especially Lonmin with its Bermuda “marketing” arm, De Beers with its $2.8 billion in diamond misinvoicing over seven years, and MTN’s cellphone profit diversions to Mauritius from several African countries.

Society’s challenge

A strong, committed Finance Minister would attack such depravities, so as to find funding needed to eliminate society’s deprivations. Since Gordhan has failed, will society now ask what rearrangement of the balance of forces is required to finally construct a democratic, developmental state? The first stage of that (liberal) revolution is upon us: confronting the Zuma faction’s corrupt nexus of politicians, parastatal agency managers and public-private pilfering partners. The patronage apparatus may fall slowly, because Zuma will challenge the State of Capture” findings and a sluggish official commission will only then be appointed to investigate more of the details.

But for the next stage, the ongoing prolific protests by opposition parties, university students, communities and labour, remains on the horizon as the political dust refuses to settle. The period ahead will not only clarify whether the liberals and their allies fighting on behalf of Gordhan and the anti-corruption cause can defeat the master of nationalist survival politics, Zuma. Just as importantly, we will learn what pressures from below can be mobilised to generate non-violent regime change in the interests of a post-Zupta, post-neoliberal budget next time Gordhan presents to parliament, in February 2017.

Patrick Bond is professor of political economy at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg; the third edition of his book Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa was published by Pluto Press in 2014. 

We’ve repeatedly shown that it’s much more likely that American insiders – not Russian hackers – leaked the Clinton emails.

Today, the NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information, who served as the senior technical director within the agency, who managed six thousand NSA employees, the 36-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency and the NSA’s best-ever analyst and code-breaker, who mapped out the Soviet command-and-control structure before anyone else knew how, and so predicted Soviet invasions before they happened (“in the 1970s, he decrypted the Soviet Union’s command system, which provided the US and its allies with real-time surveillance of all Soviet troop movements and Russian atomic weapons”) – told Washington’s Blog:

My vote all along has been on an insider passing all these emails to Wikileaks.

If it were the Russians, NSA would have a trace route to them and not equivocate on who did it.  It’s like using “Trace Route” to map the path of all the packets on the network.  In the program Treasuremap NSA has hundreds of trace route programs embedded in switches in Europe and hundreds more around the world.  So, this set-up should have detected where the packets went and when they went there.

Binney has previously explained to us that a Russian hack would have looked very different, and that he thought the hack may have been conducted by an NSA employee who was upset at Clinton’s careless handling of America’s most sensitive intelligence.

The former intelligence analyst, British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, and chancellor of the University of Dundee (Craig Murray) – who is close friends with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange – said he knows with 100% certainty that the Russians aren’t behind the leaks.

Murray said today:

“The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at all. I discovered what the source was when I attended [a] whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow.”

Prominent investment advisor and economic forecaster Martin Armstrong writes today:

All our indications from behind the curtain are suggesting that there are many within the “intelligence” sector and “law enforcement” sector who are deeply troubled with the Clintons. They are trying to release documents and info to stop the Clinton Inc. Machine. That’s all we can say on this topic right now. Suffice it to say, there is a real internal battle going on in Washington.

And the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under numerous administrations – both Democratic and Republican – (Steve Pieczenik ) said recently that a group of officers from various U.S. intelligence and military agencies have staged a “counter-coup” to save America from corruption, and are the source of the leaked emails:

Interesting times, indeed …

With only six days remaining in the US election campaign, both of the major capitalist parties are preparing for a situation where the November 8 vote fails to resolve the bitter struggle over control of the White House. With polls showing a tightening contest following the unprecedented intervention of the FBI, whose announcement of a renewed probe of Clinton emails was calculated to damage the Clinton campaign, it is increasingly likely that the contest could be determined by the outcome in a single state, such as occurred in 2000 with Florida and in 2004 with Ohio.

Clinton’s lead had already begun to shrink prior to the FBI intervention, particularly after the government announced that Obamacare premiums would rise by an average of 25 percent in 2017.

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her Republican opponent Donald Trump are mobilizing thousands of lawyers for deployment on Election Day to battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Ohio in anticipation of widespread efforts either to block voters from going to the polls or to disrupt the counting of the ballots they cast.

On Sunday, the state Democratic parties in Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Arizona filed preemptive lawsuits against the Trump campaign and state Republican parties charging a “coordinated campaign of vigilante voter intimidation” that violates the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

The suits targeted bogus “exit polling” and “citizen journalist” activities sponsored by Republican operatives, in violation of a 1982 court order that binds the Republican National Committee not to authorize or carry out “ballot security” campaigns aimed at voter suppression. The order forbids challenging individual voters either as they arrive at the polls or when they cast ballots, except as authorized by a federal judge.

Citing Trump’s call for his supporters to invade polling stations in the city of Philadelphia, where the large African-American population is expected to vote for Clinton by huge margins, the Pennsylvania suit claimed that “the conspiracy to harass and threaten voters on Election Day has already resulted in acts that threaten the voting rights of registered Pennsylvania voters.”

In Newark, New Jersey, US District Court Judge John Vazquez issued an order Tuesday giving the Republican National Committee 24 hours to provide details of agreements with the Trump campaign on efforts to prevent alleged “vote fraud” at the polls on Election Day.

Trump has regularly denounced what he calls a “rigged election,” referring to get-out-the-vote drives in low-income, minority and student neighborhoods, and has declared that he would not necessarily concede the election result if he loses. In the last debate with Clinton, Trump said he would “keep you in suspense” on that question. The Trump campaign web site urges volunteers to sign up as election observers to “help me stop Crooked Hillary Clinton from rigging this election.”

The 2016 election is the first presidential campaign to be conducted after the 2013 Supreme Court decision in Shelby v. Holder that struck down key enforcement provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on the grounds that racial discrimination was no longer a significant factor in denying access to the polls.

This decision opened the door to Republican-controlled state governments enacting measures deliberately targeting African-Americans and other groups believed more likely to vote for Democratic candidates. A series of court decisions this year have blocked such efforts in North Carolina, Texas, Wisconsin and several other states.

As the final week of the campaign began, Trump and Clinton continued to trade allegations of criminal activity in the wake of the letter from FBI Director James Comey to eight congressional committees Friday announcing new “investigative steps” in the probe of Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state from 2009 to 2013. This amounted to reviving an investigation that has been dormant since July, when Comey declared that there was no basis for bringing criminal charges against Clinton over mishandling classified information on her private server.

The letter was purportedly triggered by the FBI’s acquisition of the laptop belonging to former Congressman Anthony Weiner, husband of longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin. FBI agents found emails that “appear to be pertinent” to the Clinton probe, Comey said in his letter, although he acknowledged that since the emails had not been examined, there was no way of knowing whether they were “significant.”

Given this uncertainty, Comey’s public declaration to Congress only 11 days before the election was an unprecedented political intervention by one of the principal agencies of the military-intelligence apparatus. Its only foreseeable consequence—and its purpose—was to damage the Clinton campaign and bolster Trump, who had been trailing in most polls.

The brazenly political character of the FBI intervention was confirmed on Monday, when the agency released 129 pages of documents from its closed investigation into Bill Clinton’s controversial 2001 pardon of fugitive billionaire Marc Rich. Nearly half of the pages of documents are completely redacted and there is little new information, making the decision to release the material eight days before the presidential election even more dubious. The conclusion of the investigation—that there was insufficient evidence to warrant prosecution—was omitted. Then on Tuesday, the FBI sent out a Twitter notice calling attention to the release of the documents.

The Trump campaign immediately seized on the Comey letter, with Trump himself drawing the most sweeping conclusions, declaring the email scandal to be “worse than Watergate.” In a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan on Monday, he warned that if Clinton were to take office, her administration would be crippled from the outset. “Nothing is going to get done,” he said. “Her election would mire our government and our country in a constitutional crisis that we cannot afford.”

The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial Tuesday, drew the same conclusion, declaring, “This is terrible for those institutions, for confidence in government, and for Mrs. Clinton’s ability to govern if she does win next Tuesday’s election. These events mean she could enter the Oval Office under criminal investigation…and Congress investigating these compromised investigations.”

The Democratic Party has adopted the same tack towards Trump, denouncing his campaign as semi-criminal and characterizing a future Trump administration as illegitimate. Its chosen avenue for mudslinging and scandalmongering is the completely unsupported allegation that Trump is being backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Both the Clinton campaign and congressional Democrats have denounced Comey for making public the renewed inquiry into Clinton’s emails while keeping under wraps FBI inquiries into supposed ties between Trump and Russia.

CNBC reported Monday that Comey had initially opposed the release on October 7 of a finding by US intelligence agencies that the Russian government was responsible for a hacking attack on the email servers of the Democratic National Committee. The cable channel reported that the FBI chief had opposed the move on the grounds that it was too close to Election Day. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook immediately contrasted this to Comey’s decision to send the letter to Congress about Clinton’s emails on October 28, saying, “It is impossible to view this as anything less than a blatant double standard.”

A barrage of anti-Russia, anti-Trump propaganda has been unleashed by pro-Clinton media outlets, including the New York Times, Slate, NBC News and Mother Jones magazine, all suggesting that Trump had secret connections either to Alfa Bank in Moscow, Russian intelligence or Russian oligarchs through his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Not one of the reports cited named sources.