Global Research

As a member of a delegation documenting NATO war crimes in 1999, I visited Nish, the third largest city in Yugoslavia. NATO attacked this appealing old city on forty occasions, destroying approximately 120 buildings and damaging more than 3,400.

On the night of our second stop in Nish, we attended a meeting with university professor Jovan Zlatich. During the NATO war, Dr. Zlatich served as commander of the city’s Civil Defense Headquarters. In his discussion of the bombardment of Nish, he focused particular attention on the use of cluster bombs. Nish had the misfortune of being the target of several CBU-87/B cluster bombs, a weapon designed to open at a predetermined height and release 202 bomblets. These smaller bombs burst in a furious repeating series of explosions, spraying thousands of pieces of shrapnel over a wide area. Cluster bombs are anti-personnel weapons. While causing relatively minor damage to structures, they inflict frightful damage on human beings.

According to Dr. Miodrag Lazich of the surgical department at Nish University Hospital,

“Cluster bombs cause enormous pain. A person standing a meter or two away from the cluster bomb gets the so-called air-blast injuries, coming from a powerful air wave. The body remains mostly intact while internal organs like liver, brains or lungs are imploded inside. Parts of the exploding bombs cause severe injuries to people standing 15 to 20 meters away, ripping apart their limbs or hitting them in the stomach or head.”

The starting speed of the explosive charge in a cluster bomb is more than three times that of a bullet fired from an automatic rifle. Consequently, as shrapnel strikes its victim, the combined kinetic energy and explosive power is capable of causing a wound up to thirty times the size of the fragment itself. Because the bomblets are dispersed, they can cover an area as large as three football fields with their deadly rain.

Dr. Zlatich showed us photographs of his city’s cluster bomb victims. We viewed page after page of civilians lying in pools of blood, and then – much worse, pre-autopsy photographs. What cluster bombs do to soft human flesh is beyond anything that can be imagined, and an anguished silence fell over the room as Dr. Zlatich flipped through the photos. Viewing such scenes was unbearable. Finally, Dr. Zlatich looked up at us and softly said, “Western democracy.”

We had the opportunity to visit these sites. On three separate occasions, we walked down Anete Andrejevich Street and talked with residents. It was on this street at shortly after 11:30 AM on May 7 that cluster bombs fell. At one end of Anete Andrejevich Street is a marketplace, and on the day of the bombing the area was busy with shoppers. The street was narrow, lined with buildings that were old and charming. Evidence of the attack was unmistakable. Almost every house was pockmarked, and shrapnel had gouged hundreds of holes in the walls of the more heavily damaged homes. There was no place for pedestrians to hide on that day. One parked car had not moved since the day of the bombing. It was still there, riddled with punctures and resting on flattened tires, its windows covered with plastic. Memorials to the victims were posted at the spots where they had been killed.

Home on Anete Andrejevich Street, pockmarked by cluster bomb fragments. Photo: Gregory Elich.

As cluster bombs descended on this neighborhood, a violent and rapidly repeating series of explosions sounded as the bomblets sprayed razor-sharp shrapnel by the thousands. Seventy-three-year-old Smilja Djurich was inside her home when the attack came. “It went blat-blat-blat,” she recalled. “I didn’t know where I was. I was completely stunned. If I had been in the street, I would have been dead. When it began, we rushed to the cellar. People were screaming afterwards.” She sobbed as she told a reporter, “I survived World War II, but I haven’t seen anything like this.”

A young man was killed near her doorstep, sliced to pieces and lying in a pool of blood. Nearby, an elderly woman, her forehead pierced by shrapnel, was stretched out in the street, a bag of carrots beside her. Zhivorad Ilich was selling onions and eggs on a cardboard box that served as a makeshift stall when flying metal killed him. Slavica Dinich explained how she managed to survive. “We ducked for cover under the bed. One bomb fell through the roof of the upper floor of our house.”

Bozidar Panich reported, “I was in my garden when I heard something crack.” He saw smoke rising from the street. “Then I looked at the sky above and saw a small parachute with a yellow grenade descending toward me. Instinctively, I threw myself to the ground and covered my head with my hands. The bomb landed and exploded beside me so that everything shook. I remember that I was all covered with soil. I ran out into the street to look for my son, who had gone out minutes earlier. On the street, it was chaos. The dead and wounded were lying all over the place…People were crying out for help, in shock, and the cars and roofs of houses were burning.”

At the corner of Jelene Dimitrijevich and Shumatovachka Streets, a memorial for Ljiljana Spasich was posted on a brick wall at the place where she was killed while walking home from the market. Only 26 years-old and seven months pregnant, she was just one month away from completing her fifth and final year at medical school. She had planned her life well, expecting to give birth shortly after graduation. But NATO had other plans for her, and an exploding cluster bomb canister killed both her and her unborn baby.

Memorial to Ljiljana Spasich, posted at the spot where she was killed.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

Accompanying Spasich on that day was her mother-in-law, Simeunka Spasich, who recalled, “We were 300-400 meters from our apartment and some 100 meters from the market when we heard planes. Suddenly, bombs were falling all around us. It was terrible. Explosions, smoke, leaves, branches…I felt a blow on my head, and blood leaking. Then I fainted. Several times I regained consciousness. I looked around me and realized that I was lying in the street, my right leg was broken as well as my right arm. People around me were dead or injured. It was terrible. Right next to me I saw my daughter-in-law Ljiljana, who was lying motionless. She was dead. At that moment, I thought her to be alive, but later they told me she had been killed on the spot, and the child could not have been saved.”

When the ambulance picked up Spasich, she lapsed back into unconsciousness. “I finally gained consciousness at the Military Medical Academy in Belgrade. My left leg was amputated below the knee, and my right hand was seriously injured. I could not move it. I was told that I would have to endure several operations more…My son, who came to visit me, told me that they did not believe I would stay alive, since my intestines had spilled.”

Two memorials to Pordani Seklich were posted on the front door window of the restaurant where she was employed as a waitress. She was in the kitchen when whizzing shrapnel tore through the roof and killed her where she stood. Our hotel, located across the Nishava, overlooked the neighborhood around Anete Andrejevich Street, and we had walked extensively throughout the area. It was an entirely residential neighborhood, with nothing that could be construed as a military target.

Only ten minutes after the cluster bombing of the marketplace neighborhood, a NATO warplane dropped an incendiary cluster bomb on the parking lot of the Clinical Center. A ball of fire engulfed the parking lot, igniting cars and sending thick clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky. Several homes on the adjacent block were damaged. Shrapnel by the hundreds shot through the hospital, causing the roof over the classroom to collapse. It was the everyday routine for staff to meet in the classroom at noon to discuss the war while eating lunch. Had the attack come twenty minutes later, all would have perished. In one room alone, over ninety holes from bomb fragments were counted.

Parking lot of Clinical Center, target of incendiary cluster bomb.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

The incendiary effect of the bomb brought to mind Djakovica, where NATO attacked a column of Albanian refugees who were returning to their homes in Kosovo. According to a wartime report in Jane’s Defence Weekly, the Pentagon was anxious to introduce the newly developed CBU-97 cluster bomb. This weapon was designed to spray shrapnel heated to an intense temperature and ignite everything within its blast radius. The charred remains of the automobiles in the parking lot indicated that this was probably the weapon used at the Clinical Center. Djakovica was another site that served as a testing ground for the CBU-97, where it proved a rousing success, killing 73 civilians and dismembering and incinerating most of them beyond recognition. Survivors of that attack scattered and sought cover in nearby homes. NATO pilots, spotting this, launched missiles on the houses, adding to the death toll.

The photographs I saw of the victims were horrifying. We were later to talk with Albanians in Belgrade who served in the Yugoslav government or held prominent positions in the society. One of them mentioned his anger over the slaughter at Djakovica, as well as other instances where NATO warplanes killed his fellow Albanians. “The man who could command NATO to bomb people is not human. He is an animal. After the bombing of Djakovica, I saw decapitated bodies. I have pictures of that. It is horrible, terrible. I saw people without arms, without feet.”

Office building of So Produkt, a distributor of salt products.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

The state-owned DIN cigarette factory in Nish was one of Yugoslavia’s largest manufacturing facilities, employing 2,500 workers. It was bombed on four occasions. The factory’s deputy managing director, Milovoje Apostolovich, told us that cluster bombs were among the munitions dropped on DIN. Workers found two cluster bomb fragments with messages scrawled on them: “Do you still want to be Serbs?” and “Run faster.” Apostolovich estimated damage to his factory at $35 million. A cigarette factory clearly lacked military utility. The only reason DIN was attacked was because it was the largest employer in Nish. We strolled through the factory’s grounds. A cruise missile had completely flattened the tobacco storehouse. Two of the larger buildings were substantially demolished. Merely to clear away the rubble would be an imposing task. Many of the smaller buildings had also sustained substantial damage. Bricklayers were busily rebuilding the canteen. Across the lane, the façade of the large financial and computer center bore the marks of a cluster bomb, with hundreds of gouged holes spread across its face.

Reconstruction continued at the state-owned DIN until it was made fit for privatization by a new Western-friendly government, as 1,400 employees were thrown out of work. In October 2003, DIN was purchased by Philip Morris, which six years later eliminated a third of the remaining workforce, terming those it laid off as “technological surplus.”

Several requests were filed by various parties with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) to investigate NATO war crimes, including the cluster bombing of Nish. Established at the behest of the United States, from which it received the bulk of its funding, the ICTY was not an entirely disinterested party. Compelled to deflect persistent complaints about NATO actions, the ICTY Prosecutor’s Office formed a committee it authorized to conduct an “investigation” to determine if there was a basis for legal action against NATO.

Not surprisingly, the Prosecutor’s committee found no basis to charge NATO for any of its actions. In regard to the cluster bombing of Nish, it correctly pointed out that there is no treaty prohibiting or restricting the use of cluster bombs. The Prosecutor’s office added that it indicted Serbian Krajina leader Milan Martich for launching a cluster bomb missile at Zagreb because it “was not designed to hit military targets but to terrorize the civilians of Zagreb.” NATO cluster bombs, evidently by their inherent nature, cannot be so characterized. “There is no indication cluster bombs were used in such a fashion by NATO,” the Prosecutor’s report asserts. The Office “should not commence an investigation into the use of cluster bombs as such by NATO.”

Bridge over the Nishava River.  Photo: Gregory Elich.

The report goes on to explain that military commanders are obliged to “do everything practicable to verify that the objectives to be attacked are military objectives,” and to refrain from striking purely civilian targets. Against all evidence, the Prosecutor’s Office claimed that most of NATO’s targets were “clearly military objectives,” and “military objectives are often located in densely populated areas.”

The evidence for arriving at that determination was clear, according to the Prosecutor’s Office. “It has tended to assume that the NATO and NATO countries’ press statements are generally reliable and that explanations have been honestly given,” despite the fact that when it asked NATO about specific incidents, replies were vague and “failed to address the specific incidents.” Only one conclusion was possible: “On the basis of the information reviewed, however, the committee is of the opinion that neither an in-depth investigation related to the bombing campaign as a whole nor investigations related to specific incidents are justified.”

Try telling Ljiljana Spasich’s widowed husband that his wife and unborn baby were legitimate military targets.

Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute. He is a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language.

Saudi Arabia announced on Tuesday it was ending a month-long campaign of air strikes “Decisive Storm” in Yemen.

According to the Saudi-led coalition spokesman, all goals set by the “Decisive Storm” have been achieved. These included the destruction of ballistic missiles the Houthis had taken control of. At least 944 people have been killed and 3,487 injured during the month-long conflict in Yemen, World Health Organization reported Tuesday.

The Washington-backed, Saudi-led campaign is now switching into a new phase codenamed “Restoring Hope”. The Saudi Defense Ministry says it is going to focus on anti-terrorism, security and finding a political solution to the crisis. But this does not mean a ceasefire will be declared. Saudi spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed Asseri stated that the bombing operation will resume if it is deemed necessary. Thus, talking about the political resolution doesn’t involve the real aim on it. Furthermore, footage from Sanaa and reports from Aden showed that the coalition bombing and shelling continued overnight. It showed how diplomacy works throughout where United States and its allies are involved. The statements mean nothing, if they were expressed by U.S. and Co. Meantime Yemen is repeating the fate of Iraq, Syria and Libya which were destroyed and thrown into the perpetual wars too.

Oil prices extended declines after the Saudi announcement. Brent crude dropped 0.71 percent to $61.45 per barrel at 6:51 GMT today. It had risen more than $6 a barrel since the start of the Saudi-led bombing in March. Withal, the price of West Texas Intermediate crude dropped 1.24 percent to $55.91 per barrel.

The Saudis accuse the rebels of being tools of Iran, a claim viewed skeptically by many experts. Moreover, in this approach we can find the idea that Saudi Arabia is the tool of United States to hide own intervention into oil-rich region. Also, western media have forgotten that Saudi-backed President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi isn’t so legitimate like they want to show. Hadi resigned on January 22, 2015. 1 month before US-backed coalition started military company in Yemen.

The U.S. is beefing up naval presence in the region. On Monday, the US Navy sent two warships to Yemeni waters to conduct ‘maritime security operations’. The Pentagon said in a statement on Monday that the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and its escort cruiser USS Normandy have transited from the Persian Gulf to the Arabian Sea on April 19. It cited the “current instability in Yemen” as the reason for the move. A Saudi-led coalition has already imposed a naval blockade around the country, in addition to its bombing campaign, as it seeks to fight back against Shia Houthi rebels.

Introduction to McDonald “The wired seas of Asia”.

While most recently mainstream discussion of peace and security in Asia has focussed on the rise of China and its consequences, a little noticed arms race that has been underway since the end of the Cold War involves many more countries than China. According to Desmond Ball, one of its most constant analysts, this began with widespread modernization of armed forces after the end of the Cold War, but has moved on to continuous systematic increases in military capacity in most countries in the region. Action-reaction patterns of competitive armament cycles are evident, and most disturbingly, there are few bilateral or regional political institutions to dampen these negative feedback cycles. For Ball, the most important areas where this kind of action-action momentum can be seen, are major naval capabilities; long-range ballistic and cruise missiles, and missile defence systems; electronic warfare systems; and information warfare (IW) and cyber-warfare capabilities.¹

Those naval capabilities include submarines, and their counterpart, the electronic technologies of anti-submarine warfare. Submarine builders are busy in Asia at the moment. India is building six new nuclear attack submarines, and China is selling Pakistan eight diesel/electric submarines. South Korea has established a consolidated submarine command to manage its Harpoon-equipped missile diesel-electric fleet of nine German-designed Type 209 submarines, and will have five more by 2019. Russian builders handed over a Yasen-class nuclear attack sub and a Borey-class SSBN last year, and four more nuclear boats have been laid down in Archangelsk’s shipyards, some of which will go into the modernization of the Pacific fleet. And China’s nuclear attack submarines now pass through the Malacca Straits to Indian Ocean patrols. India, meanwhile, in addition to its expanding nuclear fleet, has approached Japan to buy six of its big, 4,600 tonne Soryu-class diesel-electric submarines with its air independent propulsion system.² In the largest of the non-nuclear plans in the region, albeit with a policy process not notable for either strategic rationality or transparency, Australia is making final decisions on buying or building 12 large submarines – most likely Japanese Soryu-class submarines, or smaller European submarines.³

Consequently, anti-submarine warfare planners are busier still, particularly those in China, and in America’s East and Southeast Asian allied countries. Like Soviet submarines before them, Chinese submarines attempting to reach the protection of the deep waters of the mid-Pacific must run the gauntlet of the American-dominated choke points between the island chains that reach from the Kurils through Japan and the Ryukyus and the Philippines and Indonesia. In a complex set of regional maritime environments for the perennial contest between submarines and their surface, air and undersea hunters, the current clear US and allied naval dominance, including in anti-submarine warfare, will be increasingly tested in coming decades, with consequent implications for long-term submarine-building plans.⁴

The critical wider context for these armaments dynamics is of course the complex relationship between the United States and China, and the fateful question of its future possible directions, in the short term, and especially in the longer term. Despite American power transition narratives of inevitable military conflict between established and revisionist powers, there are choices to be made, with alternative possible futures. But at present, one of the most dismaying aspects of much US v. China thinking in Washington and its regional allied capitals is talk, often in a blasé or insouciant way, of the near-term possibility of war between the US and China, with a matching chorus in China itself.

The veteran Australian journalist Hamish Macdonald here examines the strategic consequences of one aspect of these naval arms races in Japan’s development, together with the United States, of a remarkably extensive and powerful system of underwater electronic surveillance capacities based on Desmond Ball’s and my study The Tools of Owatatsumi: Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and Defence. Together with Robert Ayson, Ball subsequently closely examined the question ‘Can a Sino-Japanese war be controlled?’, reviewing the widespread, indeed barely questioned, assumption that such a conflict, for example over the East China Sea territorial disputes, can be contained to a ‘limited war’.⁵

Examining in detail both technical and political aspects of such a confrontation, including the vulnerability to attack of Japan’s potent undersea surveillance capacities that we documented, Ball and Ayson concluded that in the relationship between Japan and China:

there seems to be minimal political understanding of, or commitment to, avoiding escalation…These political obstacles increase the pressure created by military considerations that encourage swift escalation, to the point at which even nuclear options seem attractive…The subsequent involvement of the United States could lead to Asia’s first serious war involving nuclear-armed states. And we have no precedent to suggest how dangerous that would become.

Notes

¹ Desmond Ball, “Asia’s Naval Arms Race: Myth or Reality? 25th Asia-Pacific Roundtable”, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 29 May – 1 June 2011.

² Jeremy Page, “China’s Submarines Add Nuclear-Strike Capability, Altering Strategic Balance”, Deep Threat, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2014; David Tweed, “Xi’s submarine sale raises Indian Ocean nuclear clash”, Bloomberg, 17 April 2015; Trude Pettersen, “Four nuclear submarines under construction in Russia’s Far North”, Barents Observer, Alaska Dispatch News, 18 February 2015; Zachary Keck, “China’s Worst Nightmare? Japan May Sell India Six Stealth Submarines”, The Buzz, The National Interest, 29 January 2015; Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “Watch out, China: India is building 6 nuclear attack submarines”, The Buzz, The National Interest, 18 February 2015; Zachary Keck, “Silent but Deadly: Korea’s Scary Submarine Arms Race”, The Buzz, The National Interest, 13 February 2015; and Yoo Kyong Chang and Erik Slavin , “South Korea Establishes Submarine Command”,Stars and Stripes, 23 February 2015.

³ Richard Tanter, “The $40 billion submarine pathway to Australian strategic confusion”, Nautilus Institute, NAPSNet Policy Forum, 20 April 2015.

⁴ Owen R. Cote Jr., “Assessing the undersea balance between the U.S. and China”, MIT Security Studies Program, SSP Working Papers, February, 2011; Paul Dibb, “Maneuvers make waves but in truth Chinese navy is a paper tiger”, The Australian, 7 March 2014; and Desmond Ball and Richard Tanter, The Tools of Owatatsumi: Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and Defence, ANU Press, 2015.

⁵ Desmond Ball and Richard Tanter, The Tools of Owatatsumi: Japan’s Ocean Surveillance and Defence, ANU Press, 2015; and Robert Ayson and Desmond Ball, “Can a Sino-Japanese War Be Controlled?”, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, (2014) Vol. 56, No. 6, pp. 135-166.

While it looks like China has the US and Japan on the defensive in pushing its maritime claims and expanding its maritime power, a closer look suggests the two powers have the Chinese cornered.

It’s about “humanitarian civil aid”, Australia’s Defence Department would have us believe about Exercise Balikatan which began in and around the Philippines on April 20. And indeed about 70 army engineers were duly sent to work on projects in Filipino villages on Luzon and Palawan when Australia joined the militaries of the United States and the Philippines for 10 days of exercises.

Practising for “natural disasters” has become something of a cover story, it seems, for what is going on in the tightening network of American alliances in the Western Pacific since Barack Obama announced the annual rotation of a US Marine Corps task force through Darwin in November 2011 as a part of a strategic “pivot” or “rebalancing” to Asia.

Photo 1. AP-3C Orion

But if it were just about cleaning up after cyclones, it is unlikely Canberra would be sending along one of the Royal Australian Air Force’s AP-3C Orions to Exercise Balikatan as well as the engineers. Bristling with electronic, infra-red and magnetic sensors, acoustic buoys to drop, and on-board computing power, the aircraft is one of the world’s most advanced aerial platforms for detecting hostile ships and submarines and vacuuming up local communications.

In fact, the sea and air elements of Balikatan play out close to where Chinese dredgers have been frantically pumping sand onto coral reefs in the Spratley Islands, also claimed by the Philippines and other Southeast Asian states. The Filipinos themselves say the exercise will “increase our capability to defend our country from external aggression”.

The exercise comes just after the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington institution close to the thinking in the Pentagon, published before and after satellite pictures of the Chinese reclamation work in the Spratly Islands, and the visiting chief of the US Navy’s Pacific fleet, Admiral Harry Harris, told a Canberra audience about the “Great Wall of Sand” China was building in the disputed islands far out from its coast, studded with ports and airstrips to intensify control over the South China Sea.

Photo 2 Chinese reclamation in Spratly Islands

Meanwhile Chinese ships and aircraft continue regular incursions around the Japanese-controlled Senkaku islands to the north of Taiwan, to assert claims of historical ownership. As recently as last year, Chinese fighter jets have jostled American patrol planes in the area.

With all this Chinese aggression, or “assertiveness” as it’s often more diplomatically put, you might be forgiven for thinking that the naval and air wings of the People’s Liberation Army have the Americans and Japanese on the back foot, unwilling to risk a clash that the Chinese seem all too ready to escalate.

But a new study by two Australian experts suggests it is the Chinese who are cornered. Desmond Ball, the Australian National University nuclear strategist and analyst of electronic spy craft, and Richard Tanter, an expert on Northeast Asian security and nuclear issues at Melbourne University and the Nautilus Institute, suggest Japan and the US have China’s forces surrounded by trip wires.

Their book The Tools of Owatatsumi (the name refers to the sea god protecting Japan in ancient legend), details the networks of undersea hydrophones and magnetic anomaly detectors which, combined with data collected by ground stations, patrol aircraft and low-orbit satellites, make it virtually impossible for Chinese ships and submarines to break out into the wider ocean undetected.

The tripwire around the Chinese navy extends across the Tsushima Strait between Japan and Korea, and from Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu down past Taiwan to the Philippines. When first revealed, in a little-noticed article by Taiwan military intelligence official Liao Wen-chung in 2005, it was described as a “Fish Hook Undersea Defence Line”.

Photo 3 US ‘fish hook’ undersea defense line map

Controversially, the curve of the hook stretches across the Java Sea from Kalimantan to Java, across the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, and from the northern tip of Sumatra along the eastern side of India’s Andaman and Nicobar island chain. Unlike the northern stretches around Japan and Taiwan where the network involves close Japanese and American collaboration, these extensions into Southeast Asia would be largely American installed and operated.

Indonesia and India, both historic adherents of non-alignment despite recent warming to the US in the face of rising Chinese power, would be loath to admit allowing the Americans to wire up their nearby waters, and would be perhaps even more embarrassed to learn that it had been done without their permission or knowledge.

Ball himself is not sure whether these Southeast Asian sections of the line consist of fixed acoustic surveillance arrays in the manner of the long northern sections from Tsushima down past the Philippines. “I would expect the more southern segments to have been fully surveyed and prepared for expeditious deployment of other elements of the integrated undersea surveillance system in contingent circumstances,” he says.

These include towed-arrays trailing behind surface ships and small acoustic sensors that can be scattered across the seabed unobtrusively at short notice in a program called the Advanced Deployable System.

“Outward movement of the Chinese subsbasedat Hainan would be very closely monitored, whether they headed south or north,” Ball said.

Information sharing between the US and Japan joins the undersea defence line up, effectively drawing a tight arc around Southeast Asia, from the Bay of Bengal to Japan. China can’t move in or out of this net without being spotted by the potential hunters.

It is with all this in mind that one might reconsider the purpose of the US-led Exercise Balikatan in the Philippines –and the presence of weapons platforms like the RAAF’s AP-3C Orion. It is for fishing inside the net.

The undersea system has not gone unnoticed by the Chinese. Their surveillance ships have sailed close to the Japanese shore stations where data from the arrays is processed. In 2006, Japan arrested for espionage a naval petty officer at its Tsushima Island anti-submarine base: he had made eight trips to Shanghai and been compromised by a relationship with a hostess from a karaoke bar. Swarms of Chinese fishing boats, sometimes called a “maritime militia”, have jostled American semi-civilian survey ships like the Impeccable that sail close to Chinese submarine bases in Hainan and elsewhere towing long sonar arrays to map local waters and record acoustic signatures of Chinese vessels.

In July 2013, Chinese newspapers reported that Japan and the US had built “very large underwater monitoring systems” north and south of Taiwan, and that large numbers of hydrophones had been installed “in Chinese waters” close to Chinese submarine bases.

More recently China has raised the alarm at the commissioning of Japan’s largest post-1945 warship, the helicopter-carrier Izumo, which could be modified to carry the jump-jet version of the F-35 strike fighter, and at the Abe government’s floating of the idea of extending Japan’s air and sea patrols into the South China Sea.

“The underwater approaches to Japan are now guarded by the most advanced submarine detection system in the world,” Ball and Tanter write. In addition, the “Fish Hook” ensures that Chinese submarines are unable to move undetected from either the East China Sea or the South China Sea into the Pacific Ocean. “It suggests that even without recourse to the overwhelming US assets, Japan would be ascendant in any postulated submarine engagement with China,” they said.

While this leaves the Chinese able to reinforce their positions in the South China Sea against the weaker regional claimants to territory – Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, the Philippines and Taiwan as the alternative China – it might suggest a comfortable level of conventional deterrence held by Japan and reduce the prospect of war between East Asia’s two biggest powers and in Australia’s case, its two biggest trading partners.

However, it raises two uncomfortable conclusions. One is that the US and Japan now have more reason than ever to discourage Taiwan from re-unifying with the Chinese mainland, because it would irreparably break the tripwire. Taiwan’s presidential election next January could see the Chinese nationalist party (Kuomintang, or KMT) lose power to an opposition DPP that has previously flirted with declaring independence and would at the very least back peddle on the KMT’s efforts to integrate Taiwan’s economy with that of the mainland. This would be another blow to China’s recent soft line of economic and people-to-people ties, encouraging Communist Party and PLA hardliners to think of sudden strikes.

The other, raised by Ball and Tanter, is the risk of uncontrolled escalation of clashes at sea or in the air. Japan’s superiority relies on these electronic surveillance facilities. While China might try jamming them, their isolated locations might tempt China into commando operations or strikes with guided weapons.

This vulnerability brings pressures to escalate any clash – on Japan to take out Chinese naval forces before the ability to track them is lost, on China to take out the shore stations first. Some facilities, such as the Japanese naval data processing centre at White Beach, Okinawa, “might be regarded as sufficiently important to warrant pre-emptive nuclear attack,” they write.

The US could not avoid entanglement, Ball and Tanter say. Aside from its treaty obligations to Japan, its own surveillance systems are co-located with Japan’s and the northern sections of the “Fish Hook” are as vital to US interests as those of Japan.

“The US Navy could not abide its degradation,” Ball and Tanter said. “At a minimum it would be compelled to attempt to destroy any Chinese missile-carrying submarines while aware of their locations, before they are able to pass through a broken ‘Fish Hook’ line and come within firing range of the continental United States.”

This is the standoff that Australia’s defence forces are eagerly equipping themselves to join. Current procurements include a doubling of the submarine fleet to 12, with a new generation of large conventional submarines. The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has made little secret of his wish for those submarines to be derivatives of Japan’s new Soryu-class boats. In addition there are three Aegis-radar equipped air warfare destroyers that the US Navy would like to integrate into theatre missile defence cover. Two new amphibious ships each capable of transporting a battalion of troops for landing by helicopter and boat seem vastly in excess of smaller capabilities required for interventions in likely trouble spots in the South Pacific. The air force is gaining F-35s, Poseidon patrol aircraft, and drones.

The Australian forces are becoming a model for the kind of “interoperability” being pushed on allies and friendly nations around Asia, which veteran diplomats like John McCarthy, a former Australian ambassador to Washington, Tokyo, Jakarta and New Delhi, fret could lead to “automatic” involvement in conflicts that don’t directly affect Australian interests.

Hamish Macdonald is a former foreign editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and regional editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is now world editor of the Australian weekly The Saturday Paper where the original version of this article appeared.

For many decades, mainstream social scientists, mostly conservative, have argued that political commitments and scientific research are incompatible.  Against this current of opinion, others, mostly politically engaged social scientists, have argued that scientific research and political commitment are not contradictory.

In this essay I will argue in favor of the latter position by demonstrating that scientific work is embedded in a socio-political universe, which its practioners can deny but cannot avoid.  I will further suggest that the social scientist who is not aware of the social determinants of their work, are likely to fall prey to the least rigorous procedures in their work – the unquestioning of their assumptions, which direct the objectives and consequences of their research.

We will proceed by addressing the relationship between social scientific work and political commitment and examining the political-institutional universe in which social scientific research occurs.  We will recall the historical experience of social science research centers and, in particular, the relationship between social science and its financial sponsors as well as the beneficiaries of its work.

We will further pursue the positive advantages, which political commitments provide, especially in questioning previously ignored subject matter and established assumptions.

We will start by raising several basic questions about scientific work in a class society:  in particular, how the rules of logical analysis and historical and empirical method are applied to the research objectives established by the ruling elites.

Social Scientific Research and Socio-political Context

Scientific work has its rules of investigation regarding the collection of data, its analytic procedures, the formulation of hypotheses and logic for reaching conclusions.  However, the research objective, the subject matter studied, the questions of ‘knowledge for what?’ and ‘for whom?’ are not inherent in the scientific method. Scientists do not automatically shed their class identity once they begin scientific endeavor.  Their class or social identity and ambitions, their   professional aspirations and their economic interests all deeply influence what they study and who benefits from their knowledge.

Social scientific methods are the tools used to produce knowledge for particular social and political actors, whether they are incumbent political and economic elites or opposition classes and other non-elite groups.

The Historical Origins of Elite Influenced Social Science

After World War II, wealthy business elites and capitalist governments in the United States and Western Europe established and funded numerous research foundations carefully selecting the functionaries to lead them.  They chose intellectuals who shared their perspectives and could be counted on to promote studies and academics compatible with their imperial and class interests.  As a result of the interlocking of business and state interests, these foundations and academic research centers published books , articles and journals and held conferences and seminars, which justified US overseas military and economic expansion while ignoring the destructive consequences of these policies on targeted countries and people.  Thousands of publications, funded by millions of dollars in research grants, argued that ‘the West was a bastion of pluralistic democracy’, while failing to acknowledge, let alone document, the growth of a world-wide hierarchical imperialist order.

An army of scholars and researchers invented euphemistic language to disguise imperialism.  For example, leading social scientists spoke and wrote of  ‘world leadership’, a concept implying consensual acceptance based on persuasion, instead of describing the reality of ‘imperial dominance’, which more accurately defines the universal use of force, violence and exploitation of national wealth.  The term, ‘free markets’, served to mask the historical tendency toward the concentration and monopolization of financial power.  The ‘free world” obfuscated the aggressive and oppressive authoritarian regimes allied with Euro-US powers.  Numerous other euphemistic concepts, designed to justify imperial expansion, were elevated to scientific status and considered ‘value free’.

The transformation of social science into an ideological weapon of the ruling class reflected the institutional basis and political commitments of the researchers.  The ‘benign behavior’ of post-World War 2  US empire-building, became the operating assumption guiding scientific research.  Moreover, leading academics became gatekeepers and watchdogs enforcing the new political orthodoxy by claiming that critical research, which spoke for non-elite constituencies, was non-scientific, ideological and politicized.  However, academics, who consulted with the Pentagon or were involved in revolving-door relationships with multi-national corporations, were exempted from any similar scholarly opprobrium:  they were simply viewed as ‘consultants’ whose ‘normal’ extracurricular activities were divorced from their scientific academic work.

In contrast, scholars whose research was directed at documenting the structure of power and to guiding political action by social movements were condemned as ‘biased’, ‘political’ and unsuitable for any academic career.

In other words, academic authorities replicated the social repression of the ruling class in society, within the walls of academia.  Their principle ideological weapon was to counterpose ‘objectivity’ to ‘values’.  More specifically, they would argue that ‘true social science’ is ‘value free’ even as their published research was largely directed at furthering the power, profits and privileges of the incumbent power holders.

‘Objective Academics’:  the Manufacture of Euphemism and the Rise of Neo-Liberalism

During the last two decades, as the class and national liberation struggles intensified and popular consciousness rose in opposition to neoliberalism, one of the key functions of the academic servants of the dominant classes has been to elaborate concepts and language that cloak the harsh class-anchored realities, which provoke popular resistance.

A number of euphemisms, which were originally elaborated by leading social scientists, have become common currency in the world beyond the ivory tower and have been embraced by the heads of international financial institutions, editorialists, political pundits and beyond.

Twenty-five years ago, the concept ‘reform’ referred to progressive changes: less inequality, greater social welfare, increased popular participation and more limitations on capitalist exploitation of labor.  Since then, contemporary social scientists (especially economists) use the term, ‘reform’, to describe regressive changes, such as deregulation of capital, especially the privatization of public enterprises, health and educational institutions.  In other words, mainstream academics transformed the concept of ‘reform’ into a private profitmaking business.  ‘Reform’ has come to mean the reversal of all the working-class advances won over the previous century of popular struggle.  ‘Reform’ is promoted by neo-liberal ideologues, preaching the virtues of unregulated capitalism.  Their claim that ‘efficiency’ requires lowering ‘costs’, in fact means the elimination of  any regulation over consumer quality, work safety and labor rights.

Their notion of ‘efficiency’ fails to recognize that economies, which minimize workplace safety, or lower the quality of consumer goods (especially food) and depress wages, are inefficient from the point of view of maximizing the general welfare of the country.  ‘Efficiency’ is confined by orthodox economists to the narrow class needs and profit interests of a thin layer of the population.  They ignore the historical fact that the original assumption of classical economics was to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number.

The concept of ‘structural adjustment’ is another regressive euphemism, which has circulated widely among mainstream neoliberal social scientists.

For many decades prior to the neo-liberal ascendancy, the concept of ‘structural changes’ meant the transformation of property relations in which the strategic heights of the economy were nationalized, income was re-distributed and agrarian reforms were implemented.  This ‘classical conception of structural change’ was converted by mainstream neoliberals into its polar opposite:  the new target of ‘structural change’ was public property, the object was to privatize by selling lucrative public enterprises to private conglomerates for the lowest price.  Under the new rule of neo-liberal policymakers, ‘structural adjustment’ led to cuts in taxing profits  of the rich and increases in regressive wage and consumer taxes on workers and the middle class.  Under neoliberalism,  ‘structural adjustments’ involve the re-concentration of wealth and property.

The scope and depth of changes, envisioned by neoliberal economists, far exceed a simple ‘adjustment’ of the existing welfare state; they involve the large scale, long-term transformation of living standards and working conditions.  ‘Adjustment’ is another euphemism designed by academics to camouflage the further concentration of plutocratic wealth, property and power.

The concept ‘labor flexibility’ has gained acceptance by orthodox social scientists despite its class-anchored bias.  The concept’s operational meaning is to maximize the power of the capitalist class to set work hours and freely fire workers for any reason, minimizing or eliminating notice and severance.  The term ‘flexibility’ is another euphemism for unrestrained capitalist control over workers.  The corollary is that labor has lost job security and protection from arbitrary dismissal.  The negative connotations are obscured by the social scientist’s manipulation of language on behalf of the capitalist class:  the operational meaning of ‘labor flexibility’ is ‘capitalist rigidity’.

Our fourth example of the class bias of mainstream neoliberal social science is the concept of ‘market economy’.  The diffuse meaning of ‘market’ fails to specify several essential characteristics:  These include the mode of production where market transactions take place; the size and scope of the principle actors (buyers and sellers); and the relationships between the producers and consumers, bankers (creditors) and manufacturers (debtors).

‘Markets’ have always existed under slave, feudal, mercantile and capitalist economies.  Moreover, in contemporary states, small scale local farmers’ markets, co-operative producers and consumer markets ‘co-exist’ and are subsumed within national and international markets.  The ‘actors’ vary from small-scale fruit and vegetable growers, fisher folk and artisan markets to markets dominated by multi-billion dollar conglomerates.  The relations within markets vary between ‘relatively’ free, competitive local markets and massive international markets dominated by the ten largest ‘monopoly’ conglomerates.  Today in the United States, international banks and other financial institutions exert vast influence over all large-scale market activity.

By amalgamating all the different and disparate ‘markets’ under the generic term ‘market economies’, social scientists perform a vital ideological function of obscuring the concentration of power and wealth of oligarchical capitalist institutions and the role that financial institutions play in determining the role of the state in promoting and protecting power.

The Question of Political Commitment and Objectivity Reconsidered

By critically examining a few of the major concepts that guide orthodox social science researchers, we have exposed how their political commitments to the capitalist system and its leading classes inform their objectives and analysis, direct their research and guide their policy recommendations.

Once their political commitments define the research ‘problem’ to be studied and establish the conceptual framework, they apply ‘empirical’, historical and mathematical methods to collect and organize the data. They then apply logical procedures to ‘reach their conclusions’.   On this flawed basis they present their work as ‘value-free’ social science.  The only ‘accepted criticism’ is confined to those who operate within the conceptual parameters and assumptions of the mainstream academics.

Who Benefits from Social Science Research?

In the 150 years since its ‘establishment’ in the universities and research centers, the funders and gatekeepers of the profession, including the editors of professional and academic journals, have heavily influenced mainstream social scientists.  This has been especially true during ‘normal’ periods of economic growth, political stability and successful imperialist wars.  However, deep economic crisis, prolonged losing wars and social upheavals inevitably make their impact on the world of social science.  Fissures and dissent among scientists grow in direct proportion to the ‘breakdown’ of the established order:  The dominant academic paradigm is shown to be out of touch with the everyday life of the academics and as well as the public.  Crisis and the accompanying national, class, racial and gender mass movements present challenges to the dominant academic paradigms.  In the beginning, a minority,  mostly students and younger scholars form a vanguard of iconoclasts via their critiques, exposing the hidden political biases embedded in the work of leading social scientists.

For example, the critics point out that the pursuit of ‘stability’, ‘prosperity’, ‘social cohesion’ and ‘managed change’ are ideological goals, dictated by and for the preservation of the dominant classes faced with societal breakdown, widespread immiseration and deepening social changes.

What would begin as a minority movement critiquing the ‘value free’ claims of the mainstream, becomes a majority movement, openly embracing a value informed social science oriented toward furthering the struggle of popular movements.  This happens through committed social scientists, whose work criticizes the structures of power, and propose alternative economic institutions and class, national, racial and gender relations.

Economic crisis, imperial defeats and rising social struggles are reflected in a polarization within the academic world:  between students and younger academics linked to the mass struggles and the established foundation/state-linked senior faculty.

Having lost ideological hegemony, the elite gatekeepers resort to repression: Denying tenure to critics and suspending or expelling students on the basis of spurious charges that political activism and research directed toward mass struggle are incompatible with scientific work.  The emerging academic rebels counter by exposing the elites’ hypocrisy – their political activities, commitments and consultancies with corporate and state institutions.

Movements outside academia and critical academics and students within the institutions point to the enormous gap between the elites declared ‘defense of “universal values’ and the narrow elite class, imperial and race interests that they serve and depend upon.

For example, elite academic claims of defending democracy through US intervention, coups and wars are belied by the majoritarian resistance movements in opposition to, as well as the oligarchies and military juntas in support of, the intervention.  The elite academics, faced with these empirical and historical facts, resort to several ideological subterfuges to remain ‘loyal’ to their principles:  They can admit the facts but claim they are ‘exceptions to the rule’ – amounting to temporary and local aberrations. Some academic elites, faced with the contradiction between their embrace of the ‘democratic hypothesis’ and the authoritarian- imperialist reality, denounce the ‘tyranny of the majority’ and exalt the minority, as the true carriers of ‘democratic values’.  In this case ‘values’ are superimposed over the quest for economic enrichment and military expansion; ‘values’ are converted into disembodied entities, which have no operative meaning, nor can they explain profoundly authoritarian practices.

Finally and most frequently, elite academics, faced with overwhelming facts contrary to their assumptions, refuse to acknowledge the critiques of their critics.  They simply avoid public debate by claiming they are not ‘political people’ . . . but reserve their right to castigate and punish their adversaries, behind closed doors, via administrative measures.  If they can’t defeat their critics intellectually or scientifically, they use their enormous administrative powers to fire or censure them, cut their salaries and research budgets and thus…. ‘end the debate’.

With these elite options in mind and given that their power resides in their administrative prerogatives, critical academics, oriented to popular movements, need to engage in coalition building inside and outside of academia.  First they must build broad alliances with local and national academic solidarity movements defending freedom of expression and opposing repression; secondly they must engage in research supporting popular movements.  Any successful coalition must be inclusive among critical academics, students, university workers and the parents of students capable of paralyzing the university and negotiating with the academic – administrative power elite.  Finally, they have to strengthen and build political coalitions with social movements outside of academia, especially with groups with which academic researchers have established working relations.These include neighborhood groups, tenant unions, trade unions, farmers’ and ecology movements and community organizations fighting urban evictions, which will ally with academic struggles on the basis of prior working relations and mutual solidarity. When academics only show up to ask for popular support in their time of distress effective social mobilization is unlikely to evolve.

The ‘inside and outside’ strategy will succeed if it strikes quickly with large-scale support.  These alliances can go forward through immediate victories even if they are small scale:  small victories build big movements.

Conclusion

Academic freedom to conduct scientific research for and with popular, national, democratic and socialist movements is not merely an academic issue.  To deny this research and to expel these academics creates larger political consequences.  Rigorous studies can play a major role in aiding movements in arguing, fighting and negotiating in favor of their rights and interests.  Likewise, critical academics, whose studies are disconnected from popular practice, end -up publishing inconsequential treatises and narratives.  Such social scientists adopt an exotic and obtuse vocabulary, which is accessible only those initiated into an academic cult.  The elite tolerates this exotic type of critical academic because they do not pose any threat to the dominant elite’s paradigm or administrative power.

For the serious critical academic, in answering the question of ‘knowledge for whom?’: they would do well to follow Karl Marx’s wise adage, ‘The object of philosophy is not only to study the world but to change it.’

The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the world’s 15th richest human, but it was already promoting the interests of the wealthy when it was owned by mere multi-millionaires.

The Washington Post has established itself over many decades as a major mouthpiece of elite opinion. Its editorial pages argue strongly for the interests of the wealthy, with scarcely concealed contempt for people who have to work for a living. (They do support alms for the poor, hence they are OK with programs like food stamps and TANF.)

This attitude has been shown many times over the years, but perhaps never more clearly than in its editorial on the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, where it fumed about auto workers who earned $56,650 a year. By contrast, it was an ardent supporter of the Wall Street bailout, which was largely about helping people who make this much money in a day.

In fact, the Post helped to conceal one of the major scams that was used to pass the bailout: the claim that the commercial paper market was shutting down. When people were saying that the economy was at the edge of collapse following the Lehman bankruptcy, the commercial paper market was the most immediate issue.

Many large profitable companies (e.g., Verizon or Boeing) were dependent on issuing commercial paper to meet their monthly bills such as payroll, utility bills and payments to suppliers. If these companies could not get the credit needed to make these payments, the economy really would collapse. What most of the country, and almost certainly most members of Congress, did not know at the time the bailout was approved was that Ben Bernanke and the Fed single-handedly had the ability to support the commercial paper market.

The weekend after Congress approved the TARP, Bernanke announced the creation of the Commercial Paper Funding Facility. Congress would have had a much more informed debate about whether it wanted to save Wall Street if it knew the Fed had this power before it voted, but folks like the Washington Post editorial board didn’t want any delays before the Wall Street folks got the money.

The Post, like the rest of the elite, has consistently had the same “make them eat it” attitude towards trade deals. When the Democratic presidential candidates criticized NAFTA back in 2007, the Post had a lead editorial singing the praises of NAFTA. After going through the supposed benefits for the United States, it told readers that NAFTA had been great for Mexico, causing its GDP to quadruple since 1987. According to the IMF, the actual increase was just 83 percent over this period, making Mexico the worst performer of any major country in Latin America.

In this vein of making things up to push trade deals, there was a letter signed by 13 former Democratic governors that touted the 1.8 million jobs created by the increase in exports since 2009. (They tell us they have seen these workers first-hand.) The governors ignored the jobs lost to the much larger growth in imports over the last five years. This is is the sort of nonsense the elites are using to push the fast-track authority that will be needed to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Is the Washington Post arguing it will be easier to make a rule against currency manipulation after China joins the TPP as opposed to before?

The Post made another contribution to the TPP cause in an editorial this morning. It complained about those who argue that rules on currency values should be included in the deal:

The problem is that it’s very difficult to establish precisely, much less in a legally binding multinational agreement, “correct” valuations of major currencies or the precise intent behind any particular policy that affects currency values. Both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Japan have adopted quantitative easing in recent years, mainly to fight deflation and revive domestic demand, but the effects have spilled over onto their currencies. Do the congressional opponents of fast track think both central banks were manipulators?

The worst alleged currency manipulator, China, isn’t even a party to TPP, and it probably wouldn’t seek to join the treaty for years.

This is another round of the Barbie Doll “currency values are hard” story. As with every issue in the trade deal (check out the rules on patents), there can be complications, but the basic story is pretty damn simple. It is not hard for people other than Washington Post editors to distinguish between a central bank buying its own country’s bonds (quantitative easing) and buying other countries’ bonds (currency manipulation). The latter is also accompanied by large trade surpluses, which are another good tell-tale sign for the economically literate. Fred Bergsten, the very pro-trade former president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has written extensively on this issue, as have many others.

It is not clear what China not currently being a party to the deal is supposed to mean. The explicit intention is to incorporate China into the TPP at some future date. If currency rules are not included now, is the Post‘s argument that it will be easier to get them included after China has joined?

An overvalued dollar is bad news for US manufacturing workers but good news for companies like Walmart. (cc photo: Sleestakk)

Of course, an over-valued dollar is a problem that does not affect everyone equally. It means a loss of manufacturing jobs and a trade deficit. The gap in demand from a trade deficit is very difficult to fill from domestic sources, especially when you have folks like the Washington Post editors going nuts over budget deficits. In other words, a trade deficit due to an over-valued dollar likely means higher unemployment and lower wages, since most workers will have less bargaining power.

However, an over-valued dollar is good news for businesses like Walmart who have low-cost supply chains in the developing world, and companies like GE who have outsourced much of their production. It’s also good news for businesses that would rather not have to compete to get workers with higher wages. And it is good news for people with lots of money who like to travel overseas. For these reasons, it is not surprising that the Post is not concerned about setting currency rules.

It is also worth noting a wonderfully wrong inference in the Post editorial. It tells readers:

The foes of fast track deserve to lose on the merits, but they might be interested to know that they also appear to be out of step with public opinion. A recent Gallup poll shows that 58 percent of Americans “view foreign trade as an opportunity for economic growth through increased US exports,” while only 33 percent see it as “a threat to the economy from foreign imports.’”

As critics note, TPP has less to do with trade than it does with strengthening protections for corporations like copyrights and patents.

Of course, TPP is not mostly about trade; it is about putting in place a pro-business regulatory structure. Stronger patent and copyright protections (yes, that is “protection,” as in “protectionism”) are likely to lead to high prices for drugs and other items, both here and abroad. The latter are likely to crowd out the other exports that the Gallop poll responders identified as job creators.

If the Post wants to present evidence on public attitudes to TPP, it should tell us the results of a poll asking about a trade deal that was negotiated primarily by business interests to impose a more business-friendly structure of regulation on the United States and its trading partners. The question should include the fact that the deal will set up an extra-judicial legal process to enforce these rules. If the polls shows 58 percent support for this TPP-type deal, honestly described, it will undoubtedly have a very big impact on Post readers and the debate more generally.

Following his overthrow in a July 2013 military coup, his unlawful detention, and a secret political trial, Egypt’s ousted president Mohamed Mursi was sentenced to 20 years in prison Tuesday on trumped-up charges of ordering the arrest and torture of protesters outside the presidential palace in December 2012.

He and his co-defendants were acquitted on more serious charges of murder and possessing ammunition, which are punishable by death.

Sentenced along with Mursi were 12 other defendants who received 20 years in prison, and two who received 10. Like Mursi, they were all connected to the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and its political arm, the Freedom and Justice Party, which have been banned by the military junta headed by Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and branded as terrorist organizations.

Many of Mursi’s supporters and human rights groups had anticipated the court imposing either the death penalty or life in prison. The sentencing came on the heels of death sentences handed down Monday by an Egyptian court against 22 Muslim Brotherhood members on charges of attacking a police station in the Kerdasa district near Cairo in 2013. Ten days earlier, another court sentenced Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie to be executed on allegations of planning attacks against the state.

A senior spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Soudan, denounced the trial, conviction and sentencing of Mursi and the others as a “political farce.”

“The verdict is 100 percent a political verdict,” he told Al Jazeera. “Mursi, his advisers and supporters who are accused in this case were victims … police and army officials watched as the opposition attacked the presidential palace.”

The charges in the trial stemmed from a December 2012 incident in which opponents of the Muslim Brotherhood government marched on the Ittihadiya presidential palace in the eastern Cairo suburb of Heliopolis, where they were attacked by Mursi supporters. Security forces refused to take any action to halt the fighting, which included an exchange of rocks, Molotov cocktails and shotgun fire.

While 11 people were killed in the clashes, eight of them were Muslim Brotherhood supporters. The trial, however, dealt only with the deaths of one reporter, Hosseini Abu Deif, and two anti-Mursi protesters.

The selective and political character of this prosecution—no one is being charged for the killing of the Muslim Brotherhood supporters—is obvious. It is all the more glaring since draconian sentences are being imposed for the deaths of three people in which there is no evidence linking the deaths to the ousted president and his aides, while the former dictator Hosni Mubarak has been allowed to walk free after presiding over the killing of close to 900 protesters during the revolutionary uprising of January-February 2011.

This bloodletting was surpassed by the al-Sisi regime itself, which killed at least 1,000 demonstrators opposing the anti-Mursi coup in Cairo’s Rabaa Square and many hundred more elsewhere. Like Mubarak, Egypt’s current dictator has faced no retribution for these killings.

The human rights group Amnesty International charged that the verdict against Mursi stood as an indictment of Egypt’s legal system. “This verdict shatters any remaining illusion of independence and impartiality in Egypt’s criminal justice system,” said Hassiba Hadj Saharaoui, Amnesty’s deputy Middle East and North Africa director. “Any semblance of a fair trial was jeopardized from the outset by a string of irregularities in the judicial process and his arbitrary, incommunicado detention.”

Amnesty charged that the illegality of the proceedings against Mursi began with his July 2013 ouster, following which he was imprisoned under “conditions that amounted to enforced disappearance.” He was denied his right to be charged within 24 hours of his arrest and to challenge the charges. He was questioned without a lawyer present and denied the right to consult with a defense team until after his trial—held in secret—had begun. All of these actions are fundamental violations of due process and the Egyptian constitution, Amnesty said.

Mursi still faces further trials on fabricated charges of plotting terrorist acts in collaboration with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas, and of espionage for supposedly leaking state secrets to Qatar. He is also charged with breaking out of prison during the 2011 uprising against Mubarak, as well as insulting the judiciary.

Al Jazeera quoted the Egyptian journalist Yehia Ghanem as saying that the al-Sisi junta was using the prosecution of Mursi to send a message that it will tolerate no political opposition. “The whole thing was calculated politically from the start. It sends a message to Egyptians and the rest of the world that there’s no future for any civil rule,” Ghanem said.

Above all, these sham trials and draconian punishments are meant to intimidate the population and thwart a renewal of the revolutionary upsurge of the Egyptian working class that brought down Mubarak four years ago.

The Obama administration on Tuesday issued a mealy-mouthed declaration of “concern” over the conviction of Mursi and the 14 others. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Washington would “review the basis” for the court’s decision and was “concerned by these sentences.”

“All Egyptians are entitled to equal and fair treatment before the law,” she added.

This is unmitigated hypocrisy. Before Mursi’s sentencing, a total of 1,212 Egyptians had been sentenced to death in mass trials just since the start of 2014, while tens of thousands languish in Egyptian jails.

None of this has stopped the Obama administration from providing unconditional support to the Egyptian military regime, with Obama personally phoning al-Sisi at the end of last month to announce that the White House had lifted its partial “executive hold” on the provision of military aid following the 2013 coup.

The upshot of this decision was the funneling of advanced US weaponry to the Egyptian security forces, including $600 million worth of Hellfire II missiles, 20 Harpoon missiles, 12 F-16 fighter jets and 125 M1A1 Abrams main battle tank “upgrade kits.”

Obama assured the dictator that Washington’s $1.3 billion in annual military aid to the Egyptian junta would continue unabated.

The Obama administration is fully complicit in the bloody wave of repression in Egypt. Behind its cynical “human rights” posturing, it supports the Egyptian military regime as both a bastion against revolution within Egypt and an instrument for counterrevolutionary interventions elsewhere in the region, from Libya to Yemen.

Mumia before and after diabetes crisis.

The so-called War on Terror and the national security state did not emerge full-blown from the rubble of 9/11. Both are products of previous waves of police repression, mainly targeting Black radicals. “The FBI’s counter insurgency war on the Black Panther Party chapters and leaders like Mumia established for local police departments a direct link to Washington’s war and surveillance arsenal.”

Political Prisoner and journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal has been subjected to over three decades of torture from the US prison gulag. His political imprisonment has placed his life in serious danger, this time not from state execution but instead from extra-legal medical neglect. The prison state has continuously failed in its efforts to murder Mumia through official means and has thus decided to refuse the former Black Panther adequate medical treatment for diabetes. Meanwhile, Boston residents of all classes await the verdict of whether the alleged “Boston bomber” Dzokhar Tsarnaev will receive the death penalty or life in prison. The event that faithful day remains shrouded in questions , but most of the city has accepted the dominant narrative put forth by the FBI and Boston Police Department. The War on Terror that produced the “Boston Bombing” and Mumia’s struggle against the prison state are intimately connected. For Mumia to live with freedom and dignity, the US imperial order behind the War on Terror must die.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s existence as a political prisoner has been repressed by the establishment, while the War on Terror is a household name in the US. This is because the War on Terror serves the objectives of imperialism and Mumia does not. Mumia joined the Black Panther Party at fifteen and served as the Philadelphia Chapter’s Ministry of Information. He used his talents in journalism in service of Black people both in the BPP and after. This landed him on J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTEPRO list of Black liberation fighters to watch and suppress. In 1978, Mumia covered the Philadelphia police department’s siege on the MOVE Organization. His critical investigation of the Philly PD’s role in repressing MOVE led to his ouster from the journalism industry. In 1982, Mumia was framed for the murder of police officer Daniel Faulkner and sentenced to death.

The context of Mumia’s imprisonment is at the essence of US imperialism’s War on Terror, which could be better named its war of terror. In the film Manufacturing Guilt, Mumia’s frame-up is blatantly exposed through court documents and investigations. Yet, Mumia has lived much of his life in prison, mostly in solitary confinement. What explains this injustice and how does it relate to the current War on Terror? In Still Black, Still Strong, Dhoruba Bin-Wahad explains how the FBI’s counter insurgency war on the Black Panther Party chapters and leaders like Mumia established for local police departments a direct link to Washington’s war and surveillance arsenal. Washington’s war on Black liberation fighters precipitated the first SWAT team operation in 1969 and the FBI’s declaration that the Black Panther Party was the “greatest threat to the internal security” of the US. The war on Black freedom that jailed Mumia created the technical capacity for the War on Terror.

The recent bombing of the 2013 marathon, and 9/11 before that, created the conditions for a massive expansion of the surveillance state and police state throughout the US mainland. The hundreds of illegally detained prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the increased surveillance of Muslims and Black people in the US, and the massive spy program instituted by the Patriot Act and similar legislation are daily reminders of US imperialism’s ever expanding repressive apparatus. Internationally, the US led War on Terror interventions have caused the loss of life of millions of people in the Middle East and Africa alongside the thousands more from US aerial drone strikes and proxy war. All of this has been justified as necessary to “counter” the so-called threat of “terrorism.”

Mumia’s story, one shared by numerous US political prisoners sentenced to die in the cages of the prison state, contains in it the seeds that sprouted the rise of the massive War on Terror. Russell Maroon Shoatz, Oscar Lopez Rivera, Leonard Peltier and scores more faced trumped up charges from the state as part of US imperialism’s counter insurgency war on dissent generally and the Black liberation movement in particular. This war has been expanded to meet the needs of US imperialism, which in its current form has produced a potentially explosive situation domestically and globally. The sharpening contradictions of never-ending war and increasing poverty and privatization wouldn’t last long if the counter insurgency war on Mumia and the Panthers hadn’t provided the blueprints and technical support for the mass expansion of the War on Terror’s primary tools: war and surveillance state.

Mumia Abu-Jamal and the rest of the Empire’s political prisoners are caught in the cross hairs of US imperialism’s war of survival. Not only has the material basis of the counter insurgency war that murdered and imprisoned the Black liberation movement grown, but so too has the racist logic behind the repression. The War on Terror’s racist logic has permeated so deeply into the minds of the US public that the mere questioning of the agenda’s blatant deceit is subject to dismissal or defense by most people living in the US mainland. These conditions have left political prisoners with few fighters on the outside pressuring their release. The War on Terror has attempted to erase the memory of political prisoners by reframing the racist justifications for political imprisonment as common sense in what George Jackson called the “Amerikan mind.”

So, even though the justification for each and every War on Terror intervention or policy since 2001 are dubious at best, the fear of the Muslim/Arab terrorist rekindles the same fear in white America that the Black liberation movement ignited over four decades ago. The Black Panther Party and their partners in struggle were deemed criminal in every way and many were falsely charged with the murder of police officers, the highest form of offense in the eyes of white America. The War on Terror built off this strategy by throwing the Muslim community into the racist war on the oppressed as a means to control the dissent of the entire population. That the US imperial machinery is complicit in, and a sponsor of, jihadist terror and proxy war matters as little as the innocence of political prisoners when it comes to preserving the Empire and criminalizing all resistance to its rule.

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s life needs to be saved by any means necessary, but fighting to free him based on his criminal case alone won’t develop the movement we need. One of the primary obstacles to building a concrete movement for the freedom of political prisoners is the privileging of innocence over a movement that links political prisoners to the repression of the imperial state. But Mumia’s innocence teaches us the real purpose of political imprisonment. The War on Terror is a consolidation of the forces that were built by imperialism to suppress the revolutionary ideas of Mumia Abu-Jamal. What we need is a reexamination of those ideas in the service of the freedom of all political prisoners. By studying the War on Terror and the repression of the Black Liberation movement from which it grew, it becomes increasingly clear that imperialism must die for Mumia to truly live.

Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at [email protected] and FIST can be reached at [email protected].

“Rescue boats?  I’d use gunships to stop migrants.”  And so, the fantastically venal contributor to Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun Katie Hopkins adds her bit to the migration debate in Europe.  “Make no mistake, these migrants are like cockroaches.  They might look a bit like Bob Geldorf’s Ethiopia circa 1984.”

The loss of almost a thousand EU-bound migrants off the Italian island of Lampedusa over the weekend provoked various reactions, and showed that such humans were not, in fact, durable cockroaches at all.  It shocked the humanitarians (“A mass grave is being created in the Mediterranean,” claimed Loris De Filippi, Italian president of Médicins Sans Frontières); it excited the security-minded; and it confused the grey bureaucrats.

A statement from the European Commission insisted that a new migration policy would be embraced mid-May: “What we need is immediate actions to prevent further loss of life as well as a comprehensive approach to managing migration better in all its aspects.”  Last year, a critical German President Joachim Gauck suggested that, “A common European refugee policy should ensure that every refugee can make use of his rights: not to be rejected without being heard and to receive protection from prosecution.”[1]

A common policy is exactly what Europe does not have.  Morgan Johansson, the Swedish Minister for Justice and Migration, argues that, “More EU countries must take responsibility for the refugee situation.”  But countries bearing the brunt of receiving such vast numbers of human cargo are also going cold – in Italy alone 170,100 refugees arrived in 2014.  Countries under the false impression they do have a refugee problem, such as Britain, insist on providing mere peanuts to the EU border agency Frontex.  The British Home Office has been conspicuously silent on the deaths at sea.

The humanitarian incentive is not popular.  While the language of generosity is being encouraged in some quarters, the language of action suggests closing the EU’s external borders.  Like drugs to an addict, expanding the scope of rescue missions is deemed an encouragement.  Italy, to take one example, scrapped its Mare Nostrum search-and-rescue program last year, seeing as other European countries failed to contribute to the running costs of $9.7 million-a-month.  Its replacement, Triton, is a far more limited compromise, and fails to serve its protective functions.

Shades of respectable racism and prejudice are filtering into the foreign policy matrix. While some EU officials insist on the wisdom and humanity of search and rescue, others focus on drawbridges and repulsions.  The populists are insinuating themselves into the establishment, and their message is proving popular.

The one thing that is not being considered is the dramatic idea of liberalised borders.  For Adam Davidson, writing more broadly on debunking the “myth of the job-stealing immigrant”, few “are calling for the thing that basic economic analysis shows would benefit nearly all of us: radically open borders.”[2]  Instead, there are trenchant calls to target the trafficking phenomenon, with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi deeming it a “plague in our continent”.  The human factor is thereby ignored, while “business models” become targets of directed policy.

There are some who do concede that this tragedy has its roots in various sources.  Migrants and “blowback” are inseparable features of the growing problem, accelerated because of a crippled, and very much failed Libyan state.  Deposing Gaddafi gave birth to a broader catastrophe.  In such an environment, the trafficking business has thrived.

Officials in Canberra are beaming with pride that they have hit upon the perfect solution.  It entails systematic cruelty and smugness from a government that can boast of little else: turning back the boats.  Commentators in Europe, notably British ones, have noted Australia’s “naval ‘ring of steel’.”[3] “It’s time to get Australian,” barked Hopkins.  “Australians are like British people, but with balls of steel, can-do brains, tiny hearts and whacking great gunships.”

For historian Michael Burleigh, nothing, however miserable, comes close to the watery deaths.  Rent poor islands and dump human cargo in processing centres.  Tow them back.  Buy boats from developing countries to facilitate that task.  Make promises of never settling them in Australia.

For retired Australian Major General Jim Molan, borders “can be controlled to the benefit of all, and there is a moral obligation to control them.”[4]  That is the attitude of reductionist processes entailing the fantasy of imposing order on chaos, a formalised queue that is simply a form of population control.  And it smacks of false moral propriety, ignoring international conventions such as the Refugee Convention and the Convention on the Rights of the Child.  “The human tragedy is immense and is worsened by Europe’s refusal to learn from its own mistakes and from the efforts of others who have handled similar problems.”

This is not quite gun boats, but it might as well be.  Asylum seekers heading for Australia are reconveyed to Indonesia.  In some instances, asylum seekers have been kept at sea and given impromptu “processing”.  And all of this doesn’t so much suggest the targeting of people traffickers, who continue to conduct their dastardly trade, as it does the embrace of alternative routes.  Fortresses simply encourage dangerous rerouting.  This “feral” flow, as Hopkins would like to term it, will dictate its natural course, even if the grave’s occupants continue to grow.

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

Notes:

[1] http://www.euractiv.com/sections/social-europe-jobs/german-president-attacks-eu-refugee-policy-303219
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/29/magazine/debunking-the-myth-of-the-job-stealing-immigrant.html?_r=5
[3] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3048032/We-reclaim-Europe-s-borders-stop-tragedies-repeating-MICHAEL-BURLEIGH.html
[4] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/immigration/europe-needs-an-asylum-solution-jim-molan/story-fn9hm1gu-1227312738365

Australia has again declared war on its Indigenous people, reminiscent of the brutality that brought universal condemnation on apartheid South Africa.  Aboriginal people are to be driven from homelands where their communities have lived for thousands of years. In Western Australia, where mining companies make billion dollar profits exploiting Aboriginal land, the state government says it can no longer afford to “support” the homelands.

Vulnerable populations, already denied the basic services most Australians take for granted, are on notice of dispossession without consultation, and eviction at gunpoint. Yet again, Aboriginal leaders have warned of “a new generation of displaced people” and “cultural genocide”.

Genocide is a word Australians hate to hear. Genocide happens in other countries, not the “lucky” society that per capita is the second richest on earth. When “act of genocide” was used in the 1997 landmark report Bringing Them Home, which revealed that thousands of Indigenous children had been stolen from their communities by white institutions and systematically abused, a campaign of denial was launched by a far-right clique around the then prime minister John Howard. It included those who called themselves the Galatians Group, then Quadrant, then the Bennelong Society; the Murdoch press was their voice.

The Stolen Generation was exaggerated, they said, if it had happened at all. Colonial Australia was a benign place; there were no massacres. The First Australians were victims of their own cultural inferiority, or they were noble savages. Suitable euphemisms were deployed.

The government of the current prime minister, Tony Abbott, a conservative zealot, has revived this assault on a people who represent Australia’s singular uniqueness. Soon after coming to office, Abbott’s government cut $534 million in indigenous social programmes, including $160 million from the indigenous health budget and $13.4 million from indigenous legal aid.

In the 2014 report Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage Key Indicators, the devastation is clear. The number of Aboriginal people hospitalised for self-harm has leapt, as have suicides among those as young as eleven. The indicators show a people impoverished, traumatised and abandoned. Read the classic expose of apartheid South Africa, The Discarded People by Cosmas Desmond, who told me he could write a similar account of Australia.

Having insulted indigenous Australians by declaring (at a G20 breakfast for David Cameron) that there was “nothing but bush” before the white man, Abbott announced that his government would no longer honour the longstanding commitment to Aboriginal homelands. He sneered, “It’s not the job of the taxpayers to subsidise lifestyle choices.”

The weapon used by Abbott and his redneck state and territorial counterparts is dispossession by abuse and propaganda, coercion and blackmail, such as his demand for a 99-year leasehold of Indigenous land in the Northern Territory in return for basic services: a land grab in all but name. The Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Nigel Scullion, refutes this, claiming “this is about communities and what communities want”. In fact, there has been no real consultation, only the co-option of a few.

Both conservative and Labor governments have already withdrawn the national jobs programme, CDEP, from the homelands, ending opportunities for employment, and prohibited investment in infrastructure: housing, generators, sanitation. The saving is peanuts.

The reason is an extreme doctrine that evokes the punitive campaigns of the early 20th century “chief protector of Aborigines”, such as the fanatic A.O. Neville who decreed that the first Australians “assimilate” to extinction. Influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis, Queensland’s “protection acts” were a model for South African apartheid. Today, the same dogma and racism are threaded through anthropology, politics, the bureaucracy and the media.  “We are civilised, they are not,” wrote the acclaimed Australian historian Russel Ward two generations ago.  The spirit is unchanged.

Having reported on Aboriginal communities since the 1960s, I have watched a seasonal routine whereby the Australian elite interrupts its “normal” mistreatment and neglect of the people of the First Nations, and attacks them outright. This happens when an election approaches, or a prime minister’s ratings are low. Kicking the blackfella is deemed popular, although grabbing minerals-rich land by stealth serves a more prosaic purpose. Driving people into the fringe slums of “economic hub towns” satisfies the social engineering urges of racists.

The last frontal attack was in 2007 when Prime Minister Howard sent the army into Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to “rescue children” who, said his minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Mal Brough, were being abused by paedophile gangs in “unthinkable numbers”.

Known as “the intervention”, the media played a vital role. In 2006, the national TV current affairs programme, the ABC’s Lateline, broadcast a sensational interview with a man whose face was concealed. Described as a “youth worker” who had lived in the Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu, he made a series of lurid allegations. Subsequently exposed as a senior government official who reported directly to the minister, his claims were discredited by the Australian Crime Commission, the Northern Territory Police and a damning report by child medical specialists. The community received no apology.

The 2007 “intervention” allowed the federal government to destroy many of the vestiges of self-determination in the Northern Territory, the only part of Australia where Aboriginal people had won federally-legislated land rights. Here, they had administered their homelands in ways with the dignity of self-determination and connection to land and culture and, as Amnesty reported, a 40 per cent lower mortality rate.

It is this “traditional life” that is anathema to a parasitic white industry of civil servants, contractors, lawyers and consultants that controls and often profits from Aboriginal Australia, if indirectly through the corporate structures imposed on Indigenous organisations. The homelands are seen as a threat, for they express a communalism at odds with the neo-conservatism that rules Australia. It is as if the enduring existence of a people who have survived and resisted more than two colonial centuries of massacre and theft remains a spectre on white Australia: a reminder of whose land this really is.

The current political attack was launched in the richest state, Western Australia. Last October, the state premier, Colin Barnett, announced that his government could not afford the $90 million budget for basic municipal services to 282 homelands: water, power, sanitation, schools, road maintenance, rubbish collection. It was the equivalent of informing the white suburbs of Perth that their lawn sprinklers would no longer sprinkle and their toilets no longer flush; and they had to move; and if they refused, the police would evict them.

Where would the dispossessed go? Where would they live? In six years, Barnett’s government has built few houses for Indigenous people in remote areas. In the Kimberley region, Indigenous homelessness — aside from natural disaster and civil strife — is one of the highest anywhere, in a state renowned for its conspicuous wealth, golf courses and prisons overflowing with impoverished black people. Western Australia jails Aboriginal males at more than eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa. It has one of the highest incarceration rates of juveniles in the world, almost all of them indigenous, including children kept in solitary confinement in adult prisons, with their mothers keeping vigil outside.

In 2013, the former prisons minister, Margaret Quirk, told me that the state was “racking and stacking” Aboriginal prisoners. When I asked what she meant, she said, “It’s warehousing.”

In March, Barnett changed his story.  There was “emerging evidence”, he said, “of appalling mistreatment of little kids” in the homelands.  What evidence? Barnett claimed that   gonorrhoea had been found in children younger than 14, then conceded he did not know if these were in the homelands.  His police commissioner, Karl O’Callaghan, chimed in that child sexual abuse was “rife”. He quoted a 15-year-old study by the Australian Institute of Family Studies. What he failed to say was that the report highlighted poverty as the overwhelming cause of “neglect” and that sexual abuse accounted for less than 10 per cent.

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, a federal agency, recently released a report on what it calls the “Fatal Burden” of Third World disease and trauma borne by Indigenous people “resulting in almost 100,000 years of life lost due to premature death”. This “fatal burden” is the product of extreme poverty imposed in Western Australia, as in the rest of Australia, by the denial of human rights.

In Barnett’s vast rich Western Australia, barely a fraction of mining, oil and gas revenue has benefited communities for which his government has a duty of care. In the town of Roeburne, in the midst of the booming minerals-rich Pilbara, 80 per cent of the indigenous children suffer from an ear infection called otitis media that causes deafness.

In 2011, the Barnett government displayed a brutality in the community of Oombulgurri the other homelands can expect. “First, the government closed the services,” wrote Tammy Solonec of Amnesty International,

“It closed the shop, so people could not buy food and essentials. It closed the clinic, so the sick and the elderly had to move, and the school, so families with children had to leave, or face having their children taken away from them. The police station was the last service to close, then eventually the electricity and water were turned off. Finally, the ten residents who resolutely stayed to the end were forcibly evicted [leaving behind] personal possessions. [Then] the bulldozers rolled into Oombulgurri. The WA government has literally dug a hole and in it buried the rubble of people’s homes and personal belongings.”

In South Australia, the state and federal governments launched a similar attack on the 60 remote Indigenous communities. South Australia has a long-established Aboriginal Lands Trust, so people were able to defend their rights — up to a point. On 12 April, the federal government offered $15 million over five years. That such a miserly sum is considered enough to fund proper services in the great expanse of the state’s homelands is a measure of the value placed on Indigenous lives by white politicians who unhesitatingly spend $28 billion annually on armaments and the military. Haydn Bromley, chair of the Aboriginal Lands Trust told me, “The $15 million doesn’t include most of the homelands, and it will only cover bare essentials — power, water. Community development? Infrastructure? Forget it.”

The current distraction from these national dirty secrets is the approaching “celebrations” of the centenary of an Edwardian military disaster at Gallipoli in 1915 when 8,709 Australian and 2,779 New Zealand troops — the Anzacs — were sent to their death in a futile assault on a beach in Turkey. In recent years, governments in Canberra have promoted this imperial waste of life as an historical deity to mask the militarism that underpins Australia’s role as America’s “deputy sheriff” in the Pacific.

In bookshops, “Australian non-fiction” shelves are full of opportunistic tomes about wartime derring-do, heroes and jingoism. Suddenly, Aboriginal people who fought for the white man are fashionable, whereas those who fought against the white man in defence of their own country, Australia, are unfashionable. Indeed, they are officially non-people. The Australian War Memorial refuses to recognise their remarkable resistance to the British invasion. In a country littered with Anzac memorials, not one official memorial stands for the thousands of native Australians who fought and fell defending their homeland.

This is part of the “great Australian silence”, as W.E.H. Stanner in 1968 called his lecture in which he described a “cult of forgetfulness on a national scale”. He was referring to the Indigenous people. Today, the silence is ubiquitous. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales currently has an exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, in which the timeline of this ancient country begins, incredibly, with Captain Cook.

The same silence covers another enduring, epic resistance. Extraordinary demonstrations of Indigenous women protesting the removal of their children and grandchildren by he state, some of them at gunpoint, are ignored by journalists and patronised by politicians.  More Indigenous children are being wrenched from their homes and communities today than during the worst years of the Stolen Generation. A record 15,000 are presently detained “in care”; many are given to white families and will never return to their communities.

Last year, the West Australian Police Minister, Liza Harvey, attended a screening in Perth of my film, Utopia, which documented the racism and thuggery of police towards black Australians, and the multiple deaths of young Aboriginal men in custody. The minister cried.

On her watch, 50 City of Perth armed police raided an Indigenous homeless camp at Matagarup, and drove off mostly elderly women and young mothers with children.  The people in the camp described themselves as “refugees … seeking safety in our own country”. They called for the help of the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees.

Australian politicians are nervous of the United Nations. Abbott’s response has been abuse. When Professor James Anaya, the UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous People, described the racism of the “intervention” , Abbott told him to, “get a life” and “not listen to the old victim brigade”.

The planned closure of Indigenous homelands breaches Article 5 of the International Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP). Australia is committed to “provide effective mechanisms for prevention of, and redress for … any action which has the aim of dispossessing [Indigenous people] of their lands, territories or resources”. The Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights is blunt. “Forced evictions” are against the law.

An international  momentum is building. In 2013, Pope Francis urged the world to act against racism and on behalf of “indigenous people who are increasingly isolated and abandoned”. It was South Africa’s defiance of such a basic principle of human rights that ignited the international opprobrium and campaign that brought down apartheid. Australia beware

www.johnpilger.com

In a strong and surprising action, the World Health Organization (WHO) made it crystal clear that researchers have an ethical mandate to publish all clinical trial results, regardless of their outcomes. This extends to past trials as well as future, and is the latest move in the battle for full disclosure.

According to its Statement on Public Disclosure of Clinical Trials Results, the WHO is calling for:

• Results from clinical trials to be publicly reported within 12 months of the trial’s end

• Results from previously unpublished trials to be made public

• Calls on organizations and governments to implement measures to achieve this

The action may put a stop to the practice of cherry picking outcomes for public disclosure. An investigation published in March found that during the following 12 months after completion of industry funded trials, only 17% of trial outcomes had been reported.

This number increased to just 41% after five years. Results for the trials funded by the National Institutes of Health produced only 8% disclosure after 12 months, and 38% after five years. It is logical to assume that the results presented to the public were supportive of study hypotheses.

The WHO’s statement comes as welcome news for consumers of medical care, and to the doctors that treat them. It may open the door for informed decision making about procedures and treatments. As it now, people were being blindly prescribed drugs and other treatments that have been the subject of research, but the outcome of that research has been withheld.

Read: Millions Affected as Scientists Hide Medical Test Results

Dr. Ben Goldacre, author and co-founder of the AllTrials campaign, said:

“This is a very positive, clear statement from WHO and it is very welcome. But withheld trials are already in breach of multiple existing codes, declarations, and even laws: delivering change will require more than good intentions. We need individual accountability, from robust public audit. Only this can show us exactly which researchers, companies, institutions, funders and treatments are the best -and the worst – for withheld data. With this individually accountable data we can finally reward good practice, learn from the best performers, and ensure that those withholding information are held fully to account.”  

The WHO’s statement came after hundreds of individuals and organizations called for full disclose of clinical trial results. However, the WHO has no legislative power. It will be the purview of companies, regulators, legislators, and those providing study funding to implement what the WHO is calling for.

Richard Stephens, cancer patient and clinical trial participant, said:

“The call from the WHO for old information to be shared is hugely welcome. Patients who choose to take part in clinical trials believe that by doing so, we are helping other patients in the future. We do not expect the knowledge to be kept secret or the help for others to be denied. It is immoral to recruit patients for clinical trials and then not report or share the results. We hope the call from the WHO will be taken up by everyone who can help uncover hidden information.”  

This is good news, but look for fierce opposition from much of the pharma-medical establishment before any of this becomes confirmed policy.

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This really happened. As crazy as it sounds, Hillary Clinton is trying to repackage her war-torn reputation into a populist spitting image of progressive icon Elizabeth Warren. The New York Times reports that“Mrs. Clinton pointed at the top category and said the economy required a ‘toppling’ of the wealthiest 1 percent, according to several people who were briefed on Mrs. Clinton’s policy discussions.”

The New York Times and Huffington Post didn’t bother asking the questions that should have been asked, with their reporting easily summed up by the opening line in the HuffPo peice: “Hillary Clinton believes that strengthening the middle class and alleviating income inequality will require ‘toppling’ the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, according to a New York Times profile published on Tuesday.” That statement, so far, has gone relatively unquestioned by the corporate media.

But, as we all know, politicians tend to say things when they’re campaigning that differ greatly from what they actually do in real life. Firstly, Hillary Clinton’s stance that the 1% needs to be toppled goes directly against the interests of her biggest financiers. Behold her greatest campaign contributors since 1989 below:

A few familiar faces — Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox (?) — which all happen to fall under the 1% category that Hillary is now claiming to despise. But Wall Street knows the name of the game, it is their game now after all, isn’t it? Politico asked them what they thought about Hillary’s pseudo-populist agenda a few days ago:

Back in Manhattan, the hedge fund managers who’ve long been part of her political and fundraising networks aren’t sweating the putdown and aren’t worrying about their take-home pay just yet.

It’s ‘just politics,’ said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the carried-interest loophole as president, a policy she promoted when she last ran in 2008.

William Cohan at Politico added,

Down on Wall Street they don’t believe it for a minute. While the finance industry does genuinely hate Warren, the big bankers love Clinton, and by and large they badly want her to be president. Many of the rich and powerful in the financial industry—among them, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman, Tom Nides, a powerful vice chairman at Morgan Stanley, and the heads of JPMorganChase and Bank of America—consider Clinton a pragmatic problem-solver not prone to populist rhetoric. To them, she’s someone who gets the idea that we all benefit if Wall Street and American business thrive. What about her forays into fiery rhetoric? They dismiss it quickly as political maneuvers. None of them think she really means her populism.

This must be some kind of inside joke. 

Wall Street knows it’s all politics. They continue funneling money into her campaign knowing that once she gets into office everything will be just fine for the 1%. These superficial, pseudo-populist calls for empowerment of the common working American will fall to the wayside once she’s elected. Hillary Clinton’s campaign is expected to raise $2 billion dollars during her 2016 presidential run. A large portion of that money is expected to come from two of her closest support groups in the private sector: Wall Street and the military-industrial-complex. Not exactly surprising considering her cozy ties to the banking industry and her track record of supporting pretty much every warAmerica has been in since she became a politician.

After the historic outpouring of families to halt the passing of SB277 last Wednesday in California, information has now been made public to further put into question the bill’s credibility.

After passing the Sacramento Health Committee vote, the bill was delayed as committee chair Senator Carol Liu wisely told the bill’s author Richard Pan “If I were you, I would not take a vote today.” At the conclusion of the vote, Liu asked Senator Pan point blank how he wanted to proceed. To this, Pan, appearing to have no power to make the decision, turned to lobbyists Jodi Hicks and Janus Norman for advice. It is telling that, here, the authors Senator Pan and Ben Allen appear to be told what to do and how to do it. Pan is making his decisions based not on the thousands of families that showed up in protest, but from lobbyists. When Richard Pan turns to Hicks and Norman for his orders, it becomes clear that these individuals are the ones behind senate bill 277.

Hicks currently is a founding member of the independent Sacramento lobbying firm DiMare, Brown, Hicks, and Kessler (DBHK). She is also the former chief lobbyist of the California Medical Association (CMA) who Pan, under her direction, was an active member as a lobbyist for doctors before becoming Senator.

The CMA makes no secret about their stance on vaccinations having launched “community immunity” recently pushing for more vaccinated adults. During Pan’s 2014 campaign for Senate, many of his promotional ads featured Hicks’s daughter Seneca in them. The other lobbyist behind the bill is Janus Norman who currently serves as chief lobbyist for the CMA.

Also making an appearance were many of Senator Pan’s 2014 campaign contributors who were among the 53 who voiced support for the bill during the Senate Educational Committee hearing. Representatives from Biocom, Classified Employees of California School Employees, The California Association of Family Physicians, American Academy of Pediatrics and others went on record as “in favor of SB277.”

A last-minute switch was also made before this Wednesday’s vote seeing Senator Huff, who voted “no on SB277” replaced with Senator Sharon Runner. Also, Senator Bill Monning was added who already voted “yes on SB277” at the 6 – 2 Health Committee vote previously.

Jefferey Jaxen is an independent journalist, writer, and researcher. Focusing on personal empowerment and alternative health, his work reveals a sharp eye to capture the moment in these rapidly changing times.  His personal page is located at JeffereyJaxen.com, where this first appeared. 

This article may be re-posted in full with attribution.

Pew notes:

For most of the 1990s and the subsequent decade, a substantial majority of Americans believed it was more important to control gun ownership than to protect gun owners’ rights. But in December 2014, the balance of opinion flipped: For the first time, more Americans say that protecting gun rights is more important than controlling gun ownership, 52% to 46%.

***

Most believe gun ownership – not gun control – makes people safer.

***

Other recent data confirm this pattern. A 2013 Pew Research survey showed that protection is now the top reason gun owners offer for why they choose to own a gun (in 1999, hunting was the top reason). And among the public at large, the latest Gallup survey finds that 63% of Americans now say having a gun in the home makes it a safer place compared with 30% who say it makes a home more dangerous. Fifteen years ago, more said the presence of a gun made a home more dangerous (51%) than safer (35%).

 

Are Americans right that guns help prevent crime?

There are dueling statistics.  Everyone has heard the argument that guns increase murder.

But Boston Magazine notes:

A study from 2007 published in a Harvard University journal … claims that more control over firearms doesn’t necessarily mean their will be a dip in serious crimes.

In an independent research paper titled “Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide?,” first published in Harvard’s Journal of Public Law and Policy, Don B. Kates, a criminologist and constitutional lawyer, and Gary Mauser, Ph.D., a Canadian criminologist and professor at Simon Fraser University, examined the correlation between gun laws and death rates.

***

“International evidence and comparisons have long been offered as proof of the mantra that more guns mean more deaths and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths. Unfortunately, such discussions [have] all too often been afflicted by misconceptions and factual error and focus on comparisons that are unrepresentative,” the researchers wrote in their introduction of their findings.

In the 46-page study, which can be read in its entirety here, Kates and Mauser looked at and compared data from the U.S. and parts of Europe to show that stricter laws don’t mean there is less crime. As an example, when looking at “intentional deaths,” or murder, on an international scope, the U.S. falls behind Russia, Estonia, and four other countries, ranking it seventh.  More specifically, data shows that in Russia, where guns are banned, the murder rate is significantly higher than in the U.S in comparison. “There is a compound assertion that guns are uniquely available in the United States compared with other modern developed nations, which is why the United States has by far the highest murder rate. Though these assertions have been endlessly repeated, [the latter] is, in fact, false and [the former] is substantially so,” the authors point out, based on their research.

Kates and Mauser clarify that they are not suggesting that gun control causes nations to have higher murder rates, rather, they “observed correlations that nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns.”

The study goes on to say:

…the burden of proof rests on the proponents of the more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death mantra, especially since they argue public policy ought to be based on that mantra. To bear that burden would at the very least require showing that a large number of nations with more guns have more death and that nations that have imposed stringent gun controls have achieved substantial reductions in criminal violence (or suicide). But those correlations are not observed when a large number of nations are compared across the world. ***

“If more guns equal more death and fewer guns equal less death, areas within nations with higher gun ownership should in general have more murders than those with less gun ownership in a similar area. But, in fact, the reverse pattern prevails,” the authors wrote.

Professor James Wilson notes:

It’s also important to note that guns play an important role in selfdefense. Estimates differ as to how common this is, but the numbers are not trivial. Somewhere between 100,000 and more than 2 million cases of self-defense occur every year.

There are many compelling cases. In one Mississippi high school, an armed administrator apprehended a school shooter. In a Pennsylvania high school, an armed merchant prevented further deaths.

And see this, this and this.

In any event, even a top liberal Constitutional law expert reluctantly admits  that the right to own a gun is as important a Constitutional right as freedom of speech or religion:

Like many academics, I was happy to blissfully ignore the Second Amendment. It did not fit neatly into my socially liberal agenda.

***

It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right. It is true that the amendment begins with a reference to militias: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Accordingly, it is argued, this amendment protects the right of the militia to bear arms, not the individual.

Yet, if true, the Second Amendment would be effectively declared a defunct provision. The National Guard is not a true militia in the sense of the Second Amendment and, since the District and others believe governments can ban guns entirely, the Second Amendment would be read out of existence.

***

More important, the mere reference to a purpose of the Second Amendment does not alter the fact that an individual right is created. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is stated in the same way as the right to free speech or free press. The statement of a purpose was intended to reaffirm the power of the states and the people against the central government. At the time, many feared the federal government and its national army. Gun ownership was viewed as a deterrent against abuse by the government, which would be less likely to mess with a well-armed populace.

Considering the Framers and their own traditions of hunting and self-defense, it is clear that they would have viewed such ownership as an individual right — consistent with the plain meaning of the amendment.

None of this is easy for someone raised to believe that the Second Amendment was the dividing line between the enlightenment and the dark ages of American culture. Yet, it is time to honestly reconsider this amendment and admit that … here’s the really hard part … the NRA may have been right. This does not mean that Charlton Heston is the new Rosa Parks or that no restrictions can be placed on gun ownership. But it does appear that gun ownership was made a protected right by the Framers and, while we might not celebrate it, it is time that we recognize it.

Indeed, the Founding Fathers’ own words prove Professor Turley right:

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.
– Thomas Jefferson

A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.
– George Washington

(The Constitution preserves) the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation…(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.
–James Madison.

If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government…
– Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist (#28) .

To disarm the people is the best and most effective way to enslave them.
– George Mason

The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.
–Noah Webster, “An Examination into the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (1787) in Pamplets on the Constitution of the United States (P.Ford, 1888)

The Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms.
–Samuel Adams, debates & Proceedings in the Convention of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 86-87.

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.
–Patrick Henry.

Those who beat their swords into plowshares usually end up plowing for those who didn’t.
– Ben Franklin

Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property… Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.
–Thomas Paine

Are we at last brought to such an humiliating and debasing degradation that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms under our own possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?
– Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot, Debates at 386.

The right of the people to keep and bear…arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country…
–James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 (June 8, 1789).

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.
–Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers at 184-B.

[T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or the state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the People.
– Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788.

Believe it or not, even pacifist leaders like Gandhi and the Dalai Lama are opposed to gun control. And scholars say that gun control has racist origins.

US Representative Ed Royce (R, CA) is busy at work destroying the possibility of truth being spoken in the US.  On April 15 at a hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs of which Royce is chairman, Royce made use of two minor presstitutes to help him redefine all who take exception to Washington’s lies as  “threats” who belong to a deranged pro-Russian propaganda cult. http://www.prisonplanet.com/bloggers-compared-to-isis-during-congressional-hearing.html  

Washington’s problem is that whereas Washington controls the print and TV media in the US and its vassal states in Europe, Canada, Australia, Ukraine, and Japan, Washington does not control Internet sites, such as this one, or media, such as RT, of non-vassal states.  Consequently, Washington’s lies are subject to challenge, and as people lose confidence in Western print and TV media because of the propaganda content, Washington’s agendas, which depend on lies, are experiencing rougher sledding.

Truth is bubbling up through Washington’s propaganda.  Confronted with the possibility of a loss of control over every explanation, Hillary Clinton, Ed Royce, and the rest are suddenly complaining that Washington is “losing the information war.” Huge sums of taxpayers’ hard earned money will now be used to combat the truth with lies.

What to do?  How to suppress truth with lies in order to remain in control?  The answer says Andrew Lack, Royce, et alia, is to redefine a truth-teller as a terrorist.  Thus, the comparison of RT and “dissident” Internet bloggers to the Islamist State and the designated terror group, Boko Haram.

Royce expanded the definition of truth-teller to include dissident bloggers, such as Chris Hedges, John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald and the rest of us, who object to the false reality that Washington creates in order to serve undeclared agendas.  For example, if Washington wants to pour profits into the military/security complex in exchange for political campaign contributions, the politicians cannot say that.  Instead, they claim to protect America from a dangerous enemy or from weapons of mass destruction by starting a war.  If politicians want to advance American financial or energy imperialism, they have to do so in the name of “bringing freedom and democracy.”  If the politicians want to prevent the rise of other countries, such as Russia, President Obama has to depict Russia as a threat comparable to the Ebola virus and the Islamist State.

Noam Chomsky summed it up when he said that Washington regards any information that does not repeat Washington’s propaganda to be intolerable.

Washington’s assault on truth as a threat helps to make sense of the gigantic National Security Agency spy system exposed by William Binney and Edward Snowden.  One of the purposes of the spy network is to identify all “dissidents” who challenge Big Brother’s “Truth.”

There is, or will be, a dossier on every “dissident” with all of the dissident’s emails, Internet searches, websites visited, phone calls, purchases, travels.  The vast amount of information on each dissident can be combed for whatever can be taken out of context to make a case against him, if a case is even needed.  Washington has already successfully asserted its power over the Constitution to indefinitely detain without charges and to torture and to murder US citizens.

It was a couple of years ago that Janet Napolitano, head of Homeland Security, said that the department’s focus had shifted from terrorists to domestic extremists.  Lumped into the category of domestic extremists are environmental activists, animal rights activists, anti-war activists which includes disillusioned war veterans, and people who believe in states’ rights, limited government and accountable government.  Consequently, many dissidents, America’s best citizens, will qualify as domestic extremists on several accounts.  Chris Hedges, for example, is an advocate for animals (see  http://www.opednews.com/articles/Choosing-Life-by-Chris-Hedges-Animals_Cattle_Corporate_Dairy-150420-878.html ) as well as concerned about the environment and Washington’s never-ending wars.

The spying and the coming crackdown on “dissidents” might also explain the $385 million federal contract awarded to a subsidiary of Dick Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, to build detention camps in the US.  Few seem to be concerned with who the camps are to detain.  There is no media or congressional investigation. It seems unlikely that the camps are for hurricane or forest fire evacuees.  Concentration camps are usually for people regarded as unreliable.  And as Lack, Royce, et alia, have made clear, unreliable people are those who do not support Washington’s lies.

A perceived need by Washington, and the private power structure that Washington serves, to protect themselves from truth could also be the reason for the very strange military exercises in various of the states to infiltrate, occupy, and round-up “threats” among the civilian population. (see http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-04-16/signs-elites-are-feverishly-preparing-something-big )  Even the presstitute CNN reported that the National Guard troops sent to Ferguson, Missouri, were programmed to view the civilian protesters as “enemy forces” and “adversaries,” and we know that the state and local militarized police are trained to view US citizens as threats.

As far as I can discern, not many Americans, whether Democrat or Republican, liberal, conservative, or super-patriot, educated or not, understand that Washington with the cooperation of its presstitute media has defined truth as a threat.  In Washington’s opinion, truth is a greater threat than Ebola, Russia, China, terrorism, and the Islamic State combined.

A government that cannot survive truth and must resort to stamping out truth is not a government that any country wants.  But such an undesirable government is the government that Clinton-Bush-Cheney-Obama-Hillary-Lack-Royce have given us.

Does it satisfy you? Are you content that in your name and with taxes on your hard-earned and increasingly scarce earnings, Washington in the 21st century has murdered, maimed, and displaced millions of peoples in eight countries, has set America on the path to war with Russia and China, and has declared truth to be an enemy of the state?

On the one hand, Andrei Illarionov of the Koch Brothers’ libertarian Cato Institute says that the first among “the crimes that have been committed or are being committed by the Kremlin — stealing Crimea” can be rectified only by rejecting “Russia’s aggression in Crimea,” which means to replace the current Russian government by “a free democratic state with the rule of law”: i.e., overthrowing it in order to establish that very thing, “a free democratic state with the rule of law.” He says that, “The issue of Crimea’s jurisdiction is within the competence of only one subject of international law — the owner of that territory, namely Ukraine. Only this subject, and no one else, has necessary legal rights to change this territory’s jurisdiction.” And, since Ukraine did not sell  Crimea to Russia, Russia “stole” it from Ukraine. He sees the issue of Crimea as being not an issue of people, but of land: the land-area of Crimea, which Russia “stole” from Ukraine — that Russia stole the land and everything in it and under it and on it, including its residents. 

According to Illarionov, Crimea’s residents are simply human property there. They belong to Ukraine, no matter what they think. Illarionov’s article doesn’t even so much as discuss whether the 16 March 2014 popular vote of Crimeans in which 97% favored to rejoin Russia (which the Soviet dictator had donated from Russia, to Ukraine, in 1954, without even asking anyone in Crimea their opinion of the matter) reflected accurately the public sentiment among Crimeans (it actually did); that question is simply ignored; but Illarionov does say: “The fact that most of the peninsula’s population are ethnic Russians does not matter either.” In other words: the residents of Crimea should be entirely ignored — not only their opinions but the possible reasons for those opinions.

On the other hand, the libertarian Ron Paul ignores the entire question of what the “owner” of the land called Crimea is; and he focuses instead upon the freedom of its people. His concern is about persons, not at all about property. And so he refers to people, not to land. He writes:

“Last week two prominent Ukrainian opposition figures were gunned down in broad daylight. They join as many as ten others who have been killed or committed suicide under suspicious circumstances just this year. These individuals have one important thing in common: they were either part of or friendly with the Yanukovych government, which a US-backed coup overthrew last year. They include members of the Ukrainian parliament and former chief editors of major opposition newspapers.

“While some journalists here in the US have started to notice the strange series of opposition killings in Ukraine, the US government has yet to say a word.”

To call both of these viewpoints ‘libertarian’ is to use the very same label for diametrically opposite political positions, which is to nullify any meaning for that label, on that topic — which topic, in this instance. is whether rights inhere in people, or instead in property. That’s a fundamental difference.

So: Is libertarianism focused on persons, or on property?

In my latest book, Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics, I track the origin of libertarianism; and, here is what I find in that regard: libertarianism goes back to physiocrats, who were personal heroes and inspirations to the supposed founder of classical economic theory, Adam Smith, and their publisher was:

“Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a proponent of the earliest version of classical economics, physiocracy, which said that society is held together by a ‘Natural Order’ (‘physio’=natural, ‘cracy’=rule), instead of by any ‘social contract’ (such as America’s Founders believed: they frequently cited the British King’s violation of the social contract as justifying their own Revolution; libertarianism is thus un-American, even anti-American, at its root). …

“Du Pont published and popularized physiocrats’ works. One such work, which he published serially in 1769-70, was Turgot’s Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth. It listed several reasons for the concentration of wealth in a few, and said that, principally, ‘The difference of knowledge, of activity, and, above all, the thriftiness of some, contrasted with the laziness, inaction, and wastefulness of others, is a fourth source of inequality, and the most powerful one of all.’ Additional causes that he listed for inequality included inheritance from intelligent parents. Another leading physiocrat was Quesnay, who urged the king to model France upon the wise despotism of China. Quesnay’s Le Despotisme de la Chine said that, ‘The ownership of wealth is quite secure in China; we have previously seen that the right of property is extended to slaves or bonded domestics, and throughout the empire children inherit the wealth of their parents and of relatives according to the natural order.’”

The physiocrats created economics as the theory of property (and of the trading in property); but people were in it only to the extent that they were someone’s property — slaves. (Slaves in turn could own other property, but the ultimate owner of even that property was still their master, just as the ultimate owners of a corporation’s assets are its stockholders.) All rights, in their view, are property rights, of one form or another. Adam Smith, likewise, treated slaves as possessing worth only because they are the property of some master. This was the longstanding view of slaves, and (though economists try to ignore that lacuna in microeconomic theory) it is still present and important in economic theory today. (Economic theory is still pre-abolitionist. It was designed to be accetable to slave-masters.)

Ron Paul is not an aristocrat, though with his son Rand Paul, he might have created a dynasty and be therefore a first-generation aristocrat, in the purely dynastic sense.

By contrast, the Koch brothers inherited millions of dollars, ownership of Koch Industries, which Fred Koch had established and which largely built Stalin’s oil refineries, before Fred went on to co-found the rabidly anti-communist John Birch Society, along with Robert W. Welch Jr. (Welch’s Candies), Robert W. Stoddard (Wyman-Gordon Mfg.), and Prof. Revilo P. Oliver. Furthermore (again quoting my book):

“The Birch Society’s magazine, American Opinion, featured on its masthead an Editorial Advisory Committee that included both J. Howard Pew and Ludwig von Mises. The economic program of the Birch Society was strictly ‘Austrian economics’.”

That, too, connects today’s libertarianism with that of its founders, ever since the time of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours and consistently right through his heirs and their American Liberty League.

In the 1930s, the DuPont brothers, and Jasper Crane who married into the DuPont family, created the American Liberty League, which became the model for the Koch brothers’ foundation in 1974 of the Cato Institute and later of the Kochs’ Americans For Prosperity (AFP), which then subsequently created the ’Tea Party’ in 2002. So: Andrei Illarionov’s view is rooted deeper in the history of libertarianiam, and is also more strongly related to the money-base of the Republican Party, than is Ron Paul’s.

The Kochs did not fund the political career of either Ron Paul or Rand Paul. However, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a member of the Bilderberg Steering Committee, donated $2.6 million to Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign, which is probably the biggest donation to the campaign.

On 3 February 2015, Politico bannered, “How Rand Paul bombed at Koch brothers gathering,” and reported that one attendee there said, “People didn’t quite understand where he was coming from.” Moreover: “The next day, when 100 donors participated in an informal straw poll conducted by veteran consultant Frank Luntz, Paul finished dead last. Rubio came in first, followed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.”

These are among the indications that persuade me that, though the Pauls would obviously have liked to have gotten the aristocracy’s support, they never really managed to. The Politico article even says that Rand Paul’s casual manner and style of dress were turn-offs to the Koch brothers and their billionaire friends. However, the Kochs’ friends are mainly from old-line Texas and Midwestern money, largely from energy and financial industries. By contrast, Ron Paul’s chief backer, Peter Thiel, is a California technology entrepreneur, and co-founder of PayPal. He also is first-generation wealth, whereas the Kochs are second-generation wealth, and, really, third-generation wealth if the newspaper publisher who was Fred Koch’s father Harry Koch is counted to have founded that dynasty.

Libertarianism is rooted in the aristocracy, and especially in inherited wealth. The Pauls, with their emphases upon “ending the Fed,” and also opposing the military-industrial complex that supports every empire (and thus the national aristocracy), mix libertarianism with a populist tradition that is at the far-opposite end of the ideological spectrum, basically progressive, not at all conservative (of either the libertarian or any other variety).

Furthermore, Democratic Party aristocrats have been the major investors in the overthrow of Ukraine’s government and the replacement of it by a rabidly anti-Russian racist-fascist or nazi government. So, at the national level, which is Congress and the President, the Democratic Party now supports the world’s only nazi or exterminationist fascist, regime, the people who were put into power by Barack Obama. For example, George Soros is much more actively involved with that venture than the Kochs have been. The American aristocracy is virtually 100% united behind Ukraine’s nazis, and against Russia. (Maybe they want to control Russia’s oil and gas.)

Libertarians’ civil war over Ukraine is a reflection of the difference between libertarianism’s populist base or consumers (which the Pauls rely upon) versus libertrianism’s elite source and manufacturerers (which produced and market the ideology, and so have actually created and politically exploited that base). It’s like the difference between a manufacturer and a consumer. While the Pauls sell to the consumers, the Kochs have been the main manufacturers during the past forty years.

One of the aristocracy’s Republican fronts, “The Foreign Policy Initiative,” produced on 12 February 2015, an article “The Libertarian Civil War Over Ukraine,” which portrays Ron Paul as “regurgitating [Russian] propaganda” on Ukraine. It attacks Paul not from a libertarian perspective, but from a mainstream conservative, nationaliist, one. To judge from the reader comments to it at the Democratic Party site The Daily Beast, which is a liberal front for the aristocracy, that line of propaganda works at ‘both’ ends of American politics, perhaps because a ‘Democratic’ President happens to have done the coup and installed the nazis into power in Ukraine. There is virtual unity regarding the way that American ‘news’ media have been handling the issue of Ukraine. The only differences are in how the policy is being marketed. The Pauls are trying to sell a different policy on the entire Russia matter, but they don’t control the ‘news’ media; and, so, theirs is only a niche market.

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

New satellite imagery shows the extent of China’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea. Fiery Cross Reef could soon serve as a military-grade runway in the middle of the ocean. And despite its own military presence in the region, US officials are in panic.

Dredging sand from the seafloor, the Chinese government has been steadily building artificial landmasses atop sunken reefs in the Spratly Islands archipelago. In part, the islands will be used to bolster emergency response in the region. But Beijing also says the islands will be used as military defense posts, which worries officials in Washington, already concerned about a growing Chinese influence.

Images obtained by IHS Jane’s Defense Weekly from Airbus Defence and Space show just how rapid the island growth has been. With construction beginning only last year, Fiery Cross Reef is now home to China’s first airstrip in the South China Sea. With 503 metered already paved, the runway could be as long as 3,000 meters once completed. That’s long enough to support heavy military transport planes and fighter jets, according to Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Existing People’s Liberation Army Air Force runways on the mainland range in length from 2,700 meters to 4,000 meters.

Satellite imagery also shows that a second 3,000 meter airstrip could be in the works on Subu Reef, another island being built in the archipelago.

Fiery Cross will also host a large seaport on the island’s southwest end. Imagery shows floating crane fortifying sea walls with concrete.

Progress of construction on Fiery Cross Reef © YouTube/Breaking News 2015

For US officials already concerned about the island construction, the existence of runways has reinvigorated those fears.

“The United States has a strong interest in preservation of peace and security in the South China Sea,” a spokesman for the US State Department said, according to Reuters. “We do not believe that large-scale land reclamation with the intent to militarize outposts on disputed land features is consistent with the region’s desire for peace and stability.”

But despite this supposed interested in “peace,” the US military has steadily increased its own presence in the region. In February, the US Navy admitted that it was flying its most advanced spy plane – the P-8A Poseidon – out of the Philippines to monitor the region.

Washington has also organized a series of war exercises with allied nations in the South China Sea. Earlier this month, the US and Indonesia participated in joint military exercises, in a move which was seen by some as a warning against Chinese expansion. Another series of war games conducted between the US and the Philippines will begin next week. Known as the Balikatan, the drills are “designed to increase our capability to defend our country from external aggression,” military spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Cabunoc told Reuters.

While publicly decrying China’s island construction as “aggressive,” US Senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has called on the Obama administration to move more military resources into the Pacific.

Speaking before a seminar in Washington on Thursday, Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to the United States, defended Beijing’s right to install military defenses in its own territory. He said there “should be no illusion that anyone could impose on China unilateral status quo” or “repeatedly violate China’s sovereignty without consequences.”

He also noted that the UN’s Convention on Law of the Sea forbids the United States from conducting “intensive and close-range reconnaissance in other countries’ exclusive economic zone.”

The South China Sea is a hotly debated stretch of water through which nearly $5 trillion in trade passes each year. While China argues that most of the area is its own territory, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Brunei also make overlapping claims.

Damascus, SANA-President Bashar al-Assad gave an interview to France 2 TV.

Following is the full text;

Question 1: Good evening, Mr. President, I’d like to start straight forward. For most French, you are in a very large part responsible for the chaos going on in Syria, because of the brutality of the repression during the last four years. According to you, what is your part of responsibility?

President Assad: Actually, since the first few weeks of the conflict, the terrorists infiltrated the situation in Syria with the support of Western countries and regional countries, and they started attacking the civilians and destroying public places, public properties and private properties, and that’s documented on the internet, by them, not by us. So, our role as government is to defend our society and our citizens. If you want to say what you said is correct after four years, how could a government or president that’s been brutal with his population, killing them, and with the support from the other side of the greatest countries and political powers in the world, with the petrodollars  in our region… how could he withstand for four years? Is it possible to have the support of your public while you are brutal with your public?

Question 2: In the beginning, there were tens of thousands of people in the street. Were they all jihadists?

President Assad: No, definitely not. But the other question is, if in the sixth day of the conflict, the first Syrian policeman was killed… how? By the peaceful demonstration? By the audio waves of the demonstrators? How? He’s been killed by terrorists. Somebody who took a gun and shot that policeman, so he’s a terrorist. It doesn’t matter if he’s a jihadist or not, because he killed a policeman.

Question 3: There were perhaps jihadists or terrorists, but our reporters were there at the beginning and they met a lot of people saying “we want more freedom, more democracy.”  They weren’t terrorists or jihadists.

Every Government Should Support Freedom Under the Constitution

President Assad: Definitely, everybody has the right to ask for his freedom, and every government should support freedom, of course, under the constitution. But does freedom mean to kill the civilians, to kill policemen, to destroy the schools, the hospitals, the electricity, the infrastructure? That’s not owned by the government; it’s owned by the Syrian people. It’s not owned by us, it’s not owned by me. Is that the freedom that you’re talking about?

ISIS Was Created in Iraq in 2006 Under the Supervision of the Americans

Question 4: A lot of analysts and a lot of journalists say that you have helped ISIS to emerge, because it’s an opportunity for you to appear like a shield.

President Assad: But ISIS was created in Iraq in 2006 under the supervision of the Americans. I’m not in Iraq and I wasn’t in Iraq. I wasn’t controlling Iraq. The Americans controlled Iraq, and ISIS came from Iraq to Syria, because chaos is contagious. When you have chaos at your neighborhood, you have to expect it in your area.

Question 5: But the word ISIS at the beginning…

President Assad: Let me continue. Whenever you have chaos in a certain country, this is a fertile soil for the terrorists to come. So, when there is chaos in Syria, ISIS came to Syria. Before ISIS came al-Nusra Front, which is al-Qaeda, and before that you had the Muslim Brotherhood. They all represent the same grassroots for ISIS to come later.

Question 6: So you have no responsibility at all for what happened since the last years in Syria?

President Assad: Normally, things are not absolute. To have no responsibility is not precise, because everybody has a responsibility. We have our own problems in Syria. The government is responsible, every one of us is responsible, every Syrian citizen is responsible, but now I’m talking about what brought ISIS here: the chaos, and your government, the government – or if you want to call it regime – the French regime, as they call us, is responsible for supporting those jihadists that they called moderate opposition.

Question 7: France is supporting a coalition, national Syrian coalition. Are they terrorists?

President Assad: The people who are supported now, who have Western armaments, they became ISIS, they were supported by your state, and by other Western states, by armaments, and that was announced by your Defense Minister. He announced it at the beginning of this year; he said we sent armaments. So, those people you called moderate, in 2012 before the rise of ISIS and before the West acknowledged the existence of al-Qaeda faction which is al-Nusra, they published videos where they eat the heart of a Syrian soldier, where they dismember other victims, and where they behead others. They published it, we didn’t. So, how can you ignore this reality, that they want to publish it, and tell you this is the fact?

Question 8: Let’s talk about the present. It appears that the Syrian army continues to utilize indiscriminate weapons like barrel bombs, which have devastating effects on civilians. Why don’t you change this strategy?

President Assad: We never heard in our army of indiscriminate killing weapons, because no army, including our army, will accept to use weaponry that doesn’t aim, because it will be of no use. You can’t use it, I mean from a military point of view. This is first. Second, when you want to talk about indiscriminate killing, it’s not about the weapon; it’s about the way you use it, and the proof of that is the drones, the American drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, they killed more civilians than terrorists. They are the highest precision weapon in the world. So, it’s not about the kind of bomb. We have regular bombs, regular armaments.

Question 9: You don’t use barrel bombs?

President Assad: What is a barrel bomb? Can you tell me what it is?

Question 10: There are several documents, videos, and photographs like this, where you see a barrel bomb dropped by helicopters. This is Aleppo, this is Hama a few months ago, one year ago. Only Syrian army has helicopters, so what can you answer?

President Assad: This is not proof. These are two pictures of two things. No one can link them to each other.

Question 11: Aleppo, Hama.

President Assad: No, no. This picture that you mentioned here, what is it? I have never seen such a thing in our army. I’m not talking about the helicopters, I’m talking about two pictures. How can you relate between the two?

Question 12: You say it’s a fake? It’s a false document?

President Assad: No, no, it has to be verified, but in our army we only use regular bombs that could be aimed. So, we don’t have any armament that could be shelled indiscriminately. That’s it.

The war in Syria is about winning the hearts of the people, it’s not about killing people

Question 13: But this helicopter, only the Syrian army has helicopters.

President Assad: Yes, of course, I didn’t say we didn’t have helicopters, that we don’t use it. I’m talking about the armaments. They aim to target the terrorists. Why to kill indiscriminately? Why to kill the civilians? The war in Syria is about winning the hearts of the people, it’s not about killing people. If you kill people, you cannot be in your position, as a government, or as president. It’s impossible.

Question 14: What about chemical weapons? You committed two years ago not to use chemical weapons. Did you use chlorine gas in the battle of Idleb last month?

President Assad: No, this is another fake narrative by the Western governments. Why? Because we have two factories of chlorine. One of them is closed for a few years now, it’s not used anyway, and the other one is in the northern part in Syria, which is the most important factory than the first one. It’s on the Turkish border, it’s under the control of the terrorists for two years, and we sent formal documents to the United Nations regarding that factory. They wanted to come and they sent us a formal response, they couldn’t reach it. So, the chlorine in Syria is under the control of the rebels. This is first. Second, this is not a WMD, it’s not a weapon of mass destruction. The regular armaments that we have are more influential than chlorine, so we don’t need it anyway.

Question 15: But there are investigations, you must have seen that, from HRW, about last month in Idleb. Three attacks with chlorine smell, with symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic gas, that is what was concluded this investigation. These three attacks took place in territory controlled by armed opposition groups. HRW, are they liars?

President Assad: We didn’t use it. We don’t need to use it. We have our regular armaments, and we could achieve our goals without it. So, we don’t use it. No, there’s no proof.

Question 16: There are witnesses, there are testimonies of doctors.

President Assad: No, no. We ask, in every allegation regarding the chemical weapons in the past, in the present, we were the party who asked the international institutions to send delegations for investigations. We are, not the opposite, actually. And our soldiers were exposed to sarine gas two years ago, and we invited the United Nations to make investigations. How could we invite them while we are using them? That’s neither true nor reasonable.

Question 17: Are you ready to invite them again, on Idleb?

President Assad: We already did. We always invite. We don’t have a problem with that.

Question 18: Now, an international coalition led by the U.S. is bombing ISIS from the air. Is it a problem for you, or is it help for you?

President Assad: It’s neither, none of them. Because it’s not a problem of course if you attack terrorists, but at the same time, if you’re not serious, you don’t help us.

Question 19: Why not serious?

Question 20: There have been thousands of strikes of coalition in the beginning, but France only is striking in Iraq. Would you like France to join the coalition to strike in Syria?

The Coalition Against Terrorism Cannot be Formed by Countries who Support Terrorists 

President Assad: As I said, they’re not serious anyway. The coalition against terrorism cannot be formed by countries who support the terrorists at the same time, so we don’t care whether they attack it in Syria, or Iraq, or both, as long as they support the same terrorists at the same time. They send weapons to the same terrorists under the title of moderate opposition when Obama said it’s elusive, so the armaments will actually go to whom? To the terrorists. So, this is contradiction. It doesn’t work.

Question 21: You have the same enemy with France: ISIS. There have been attacks in France in January. For that moment, did your intelligence service have contact with French intelligence services?

President Assad: There are some contacts, but there’s no cooperation.

Question 22: What do you mean by contacts?

President Assad: We met with them, we met with some of your security officials, but there’s no cooperation.

Question 23: No exchange of information?

President Assad: No, nothing at all.

Question 24: So, why did you meet them?

President Assad: They came to Syria, we didn’t go to France. They came, maybe for some exchange of information, but when you want to have this kind of cooperation, it’s a two-directions way, so it’s about we help them, they help us. Now, according to the reality that’s related to your politics or to the policy of the French government, we should help them, while they support the terrorists and kill our people, so it doesn’t work.

Question 25: Did France ask for contact with your intelligence services?

President Assad: Yes, we met with them. There was a meeting with them.

Question 26: It was France asking?

President Assad: Yes. We don’t have anything to ask from the French intelligence. We have all the information about the terrorists.

Question 27: There are hundreds of French fighting with ISIS in Syria. Did you arrest some of them? Are there some French people from ISIS now in Syrian jails?

President Assad: No, in the prisons we don’t have any of them, we only have information, because the majority of those jihadists, they come here to fight and to die and to go to Heaven, that’s their ideology. So they’re not ready to go to any prison.

Question 28: So, there are none in jail?

President Assad: No, in jail we don’t have any of them.

Question 29: There are some people nowadays in France, some politicians, some MPs, you have received some of them these last days, they say that it’s time to dialogue with you. What initiative would you be ready to take to convince the others that you can become a partner for dialogue?

President Assad: With them?

Question 30: With France.

President Assad: They have to convince me first, that they don’t support terrorists, that they are not involved in the blood shedding of the Syrian people first. They made the mistake regarding Syria, we didn’t kill any French or European people. We didn’t help terrorists in your country. We didn’t help the Charlie Hebdo. You helped the terrorists, so your country, Western officials, should convince us that they don’t support terrorists. But we are ready for any dialogue, taking into consideration that it’s going to be for the interest of the Syrian citizens.

How Can We Make Dialogue With a Regime That Supports Terrorists In Our Country? 

Question 31: So at this moment, you are not interested in dialogue with France.

President Assad: No, we are always interested in dialogue with anyone, but that is based on the policy. How can we make dialogue with a regime that supports terrorists in our country, and what for? That’s the question. When they change their policy, we’ll be ready to make dialogue, but without that policy, there’s no aim for the dialogue. You don’t make dialogue for the sake of dialogue; you make it in order to reach certain results, and that result for me is for this government to stop supporting the terrorists in my country.

Question 32: So, you would have no message to send to Francois Hollande in the objective of dialogue?

President Assad: I think the main message that should be sent to him is by the French people, and the poll in France will tell you what message Hollande should listen to, which is, as the most unpopular president in the history of France since the 50s, should take care of his population and prevent terrorists from coming to France. For me, as somebody who suffering with his citizens, with the other citizens in Syria, from terrorists, I think the most important message is what you’ve been seeing in France is only the tip of the iceberg. When you talk about terrorism, you have a full mountain under the sea. Be aware of this mountain that will inflict your society.

Question 33: When John Kerry, the United States, said perhaps we will have dialogue with Mr. Bashar Assad, with President Assad, after he came back to another position, but you said ok, these are words, I want acts, I’m ready for dialogue. So, you are ready for dialogue?

France is the Spearhead That Supports Terrorism in Syria 

President Assad: Of course, we are ready. I said we are ready, with every country in this world, including the great powers in the world, including France. But I said dialogue should be based on a certain policy. The spearhead against Syria, the spearhead that supports terrorism in Syria, was first France, second UK, not the US this time. Obama acknowledged that the moderate opposition is illusive.. he said that it is fantasy.

Question 34: He said it’s a phantasm to think that we could arm them and they could win the war, but he didn’t say there were no moderate opposition.

President Assad: Exactly. What’s the meaning of “we could arm them and they couldn’t win the war?” What does it mean? What does fantasy mean? They said they’re going to arm the moderate opposition. Can you tell me what is it, where it is? We don’t see it. We live in Syria, you live in France. I live here, I don’t find it to fight it, if we have to fight it. We don’t find it.

Question 35: You say there are foreign countries, too much foreign countries, involved in the Syria conflict, but without Iranian support, without Hezbollah support, would you be able to fight against terrorism now? I mean, you denounced that foreign countries are involved in Syria, but on your part there is Iranian and Hezbollah support for you.

President Assad: There’s a big difference between intervention and invitation. Every country, every government in the world, every state, has the right to invite any other country or party or organization to help in any domain, while no country has the right to intervene without invitation. So, we invited Hezbollah. We didn’t invite the Iranians, they’re not here, they didn’t send any troops.

Question 36: There are no Iranians here fighting with you?

President Assad: No, no, they don’t fight. We have regular relations with Iran for more than three decades. We have commanders, officers coming and going between the two countries based on the cooperation that existed between us for a long time. This is different from fighting. So, we as a government have the right to have such kind of cooperation, but France and other countries don’t have the right to support anyone within our country. This is a breach of the international law, this is a breach of our sovereignty, this a breach of the values that they’ve been proudly talking about – or allegedly some of them talk about – for decades now, maybe for centuries. One of these values is democracy. Is it democracy to send armaments to terrorists? To support rebels? Do I have the right to support the terrorists of Charlie Hebdo or something similar?

Question 37: You know what the French Prime Minister said recently about you. He said “he’s a butcher.” What’s your response?

President Assad: First of all, let me be frank with you. The statements of the officials in France, no-one is taking them seriously now, for one reason: because France is a satellite somehow to the American policy in the region. It’s not independent, it doesn’t have the weight, it doesn’t have the credibility. This is first. Second, as an official, you always care about the opinion of the population and Syrain citizens. I’m not made in France or any other country. I’m here because of the Syrian citizens, and that’s what you have to take care of.

Question 38: Do you think, one day, you will win this war, and that everybody, everything will go on like before, and Syria will go like before, with nothing changed?

President Assad: No, nothing should be as before, because you make things as before means you didn’t develop, you didn’t learn from the conflict. This conflict has many lessons. We have to learn from the lessons, and we have to make things not like before, but better, and there’s a big difference.

Question 39: And with Bashar Assad ruling Syria?

President Assad: I don’t care about this. I care about what the Syrian people want. If they want Bashar al-Assad, he will stay. If they don’t want him, he has to leave right now. I mean, how can he govern without the support of his public? Can he? He cannot.

Question 40: How can you know that you have the support of your population?

President Assad: First of all, when you don’t have support, they won’t support the army, you will not withstand for four years. How can you withstand without their support?

Question 41: Perhaps they’re scared.

President Assad: They are 23 millions. How can 23 millions be scared of one person, or one intelligence, or one government? That’s not realistic, not rational.

Question 42: You think it’s democracy now in Syria? You think people can really say what they think?

President Assad: No, we were on the way to democracy, it’s a process, it’s a long way. There’s no place you reach it, you say this is democracy. If you want to compare me to the West, to France, and other countries, no, you are much ahead of us, definitely, because of your history and because of many other circumstances and factors. If you want to compare me to your closest friend, Saudi Arabia, of course we are democratic. So, it depends on how you compare me.

Question 43: If you were convinced that leaving the power would mean peace for Syria, would you do it?

President Assad: Without hesitation. If that were the case, without hesitation, I would leave of course. If I’m the reason of conflict in my country, I shouldn’t be here. That’s self-evident.

Question 44: I wanted to show you another photograph. This is Gilles Jacquier. He was a journalist in our channel, France 2. He was killed here in Syria 3 years ago. You had promised an investigation about that to know who killed him. What can you tell us about this investigation today?

President Assad: Regardless of the allegations at that time that we killed him, he was in a residential area under the control of the government, and he was killed by a mortar, not by a bullet, so the self-evident thing is that the government wouldn’t shell itself or the residential area of its supporters by mortars. So, it’s very clear, everybody knows, and many French media at the time acknowledged that he was killed by a mortar that was shelled by what you call the opposition, actually they are terrorists. So, he was definitely killed by them, but if you want to about – are you asking about the investigation?

Question 45: Yes. There has been an investigation? Would you give the result of this investigation you have to prove for French justice?

President Assad: No, we don’t have to prove. We have legal procedures, and whenever we have any crime in Syria, we follow these procedures, like any other country. You have a judicial system in Syria, you have regular procedures; so if you want to know about the details, after this interview you can be referred to the involved or interested institution.

Question 46: And you would ok to give this information to French justice?

President Assad: Of course, we don’t have any problem.

Question 47: If French justice would like to send investigators here, policemen, judge, would you be willing to?

President Assad: That depends on the agreement between the two governments, if you have agreement or, let’s say, a treaty or such a thing, regarding the judicial systems in the two countries and the cooperation between these two systems, we don’t have a problem, but it’s not a political decision.

Question 48: Thank you, Mr. President.

President Assad: Thank you for coming.

The ghastly spectacle of presidential debates on issues overly cooked in the media for decades (Israel and sexual preference, for example) will befall Americans within the blink of an eye. Of course they are not debates but well-rehearsed professional theater with the candidates, media questioners and audiences all acting out their assigned roles, on queue. Who has the appetite for it all? It is a hollow, unreal process and a rather sickening charade unless one is on some measure of hallucinogenic drug or drunk. At the proper stage of hallucination or inebriation the show turns into a sort of Looney Tunes cartoon making the time spent on the theater that is the American presidential election process somewhat tolerable.

A few more hits or swigs are necessary to endure the post-debate commentary on Fox, CNN, CBS, PBS or ABC. Depending on the mind altering substance used, the airhead punditry takes on the persona of the Three Stooges/Tractor Pull announcers. Caked in makeup and attached by wireless earphone to assistants who tell them what to say—the talking heads try to convince the audience that what they saw/heard was not what they saw/heard: In short, they try to spin sense on the nonsense uttered by this and that candidate. The media stooges extol the glorious exceptionalism of democratic style and process of the American presidential election process-and US elections in general—as though no other nation on earth actually holds elections.

Scary Monster

Americans know (or should know) that the presidential candidates–like all US politicians—have brains made of Silly Putty. They are bent and molded by the interests that fund them and, of course, tell them how to think/vote. Yet the American voting public typically runs a fool’s errand every four years with the false notion that “voting matters”. Voters proudly place stickers on ties and lapels stating an in-your-face “I Voted!” as if that is some sort of intellectual badge of courage that matters. But it doesn’t when the Democrats and Republicans are a sort of two-headed Grendel hungry for money and power.

It’s a well fed monster that works on behalf of those political and military leaders who designed the carnage underway in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Afghanistan and seek more. Displaced human beings in those countries seeking a non-violent life and some measure of security to practice their faith (Christian, Sunni, and Shia) have been forced to flee their long-time homes due to war and the reprisals it brings. There are millions of displaced now. They drown at sea, are slaughtered by splinter groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda or by errant air strikes courtesy of US targeting intelligence or US military hardware sold to the likes of Saudi Arabia.

The story in the USA is dismal in its own way: Austerity, local law enforcement gunning down unarmed suspects; the Supreme Court through Citizens United opening the floodgates for corporate cash donations to political candidates; a bankruptcy judge in Detroit, Michigan claiming that clean water is not a “right”; drought in the state of California; one in three US children living in poverty; and the slashing of funding for Social Security and Medicare. These woes do not include the unemployed culled from government statistics, homelessness, or the care and cost of taking care of Americans returning from battlefields the world over. And yet some lunatics in the USA still want to go to war with Iran, Russia and China.

And go figure! The USA is a country with 243 million adults 18 and over, and is indoctrinated from an early age by its educational system to believe, nearly religiously, in an open competitive market, based on an equally competitive democratic/economic system of government. Yet in the current presidential cycle the USA can only produce two viable presidential candidates who just so happen to represent America’s wealthiest and political powerful families: Hillary Clinton (Democrat) and Jeb Bush (Republican). The two families are so close that George W. Bush called Bill Clinton “the brother from another mother.” Both campaigns combined will likely spend $5 billion dollars on a science fiction movie titled The 2016 Presidential Swindle.

Dumb it Down for the People

So how do the policy makers, military leaders, corporate heads, pollsters, pundits and campaign managers see the American public?

Consider Michael Glennon, Tufts University Fletcher School, and author of Double Government, on the intellectual ability of the American public. Turns out the American public mind is one giant mass of Silly Putty! “…the economic and educational realities remain stark [in the USA]. Nearly fifty million Americans—more than 16% of the population and almost 20% of American children—live in poverty. A 2009 federal study estimated that thirty-two million American adults, about one in seven, are unable to read anything more challenging than a children’s picture book and are unable to understand the side effects of medication listed on a pill bottle.

The Council on Foreign Relations reported that the United States has ‘slipped ten spots in both high school and college graduation rates over the past three decades.’ One poll found that nearly 25% of Americans do not know that the United States declared its independence from Great Britain. A 2011 Newsweek survey disclosed that

• 80% did not know who was president during World War I;
• 40% did not know who the United States fought in World War II;
• 29% could not identify the current Vice President of the United States;
• 70% did not know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land;
• 65% did not know what happened at the constitutional convention; 88% could not identify any of the writers of the Federalist Papers;
• 27% did not know that the President is in charge of the Executive Branch; 61% did not know the length of a Senate term;
• 81% could not name one power conferred on the federal government by the Constitution;
• 59% could not name the Speaker of the House; and 63% did not know how many justices are on the Supreme Court.

Far more Americans can name the Three Stooges than any member of the Supreme Court. Other polls have found that 71% of Americans believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons and that 33% believed in 2007 that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. In 2006, at the height of U.S. military involvement in the region, 88% of American 18- to 24- year-olds could not find Afghanistan on a map of Asia, and 63% could not find Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East. Three quarters could not find Iran or Israel, and 70% could not find North Korea. The ‘over-vote’ ballots of several thousand voters—greater in number than the margin of difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore—were rejected in Florida in the 2000 presidential election because voters did not understand that they could vote for only one candidate. There is, accordingly, little need for purposeful deception to induce generalized deference…in contemporary America…President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State Dean Acheson, not renowned for bluntness, let slip his own similar assessment of America’s electorate.

‘If you truly had a democracy and did what the people wanted,’ he said, ‘you’d go wrong every time.’ Acheson’s views were shared by other influential foreign policy experts, as well as government officials; thus emerged America’s ‘efficient’ national security institution.”

Oh well. Who cares? That’s the way it is. It is what it is. It has always been this way. Nothing you can do about it.

“People don’t see clearly unless they want to. Nowadays everyone quietly accepts the inevitable.

Newspapers are no help, they censored themselves little by little until they perfected the art of saying absolutely nothing. Television is monitored by official censors. Even if it weren’t monitored there is nothing on of interest. The news bulletins are completely innocuous…How can anyone believe a word these officials say?” (And Still the Earth, Ignacio De Loyola Brandao, 1985)

The United States is surely becoming a “continent of sorrow.”

John Stanton is a writer living in Virginia. His latest book is Media Trolls, Technology Shamans and Diabolical Political, Economic and Military Leaders available at Amazon. Reach him at [email protected].

The primary author of the Constitution – and later president – James Madison wrote:

The great object [of political parties] should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.

He also said:

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

Nine months before his inauguration as America’s first president, George Washington wrote:

[America] “will not be less advantageous to the happiness of the lowest class of people, because of the equal distribution of property.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote when visiting France:

… unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands, having revenues of from half a million of guineas a year downwards. These employ the flower of the country as servants, some of them having as many as 200 domestics, not labouring. They employ also a great number of manufacturers, and tradesmen, and lastly the class of labouring husbandmen. But after all these comes the most numerous of all the classes, that is, the poor who cannot find work. I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured.

 I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind.The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one.Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation. If we do not the fundamental right to labour the earth returns to the unemployed. It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

Alexander Hamilton argued for widespread ownership of assets, warning in 1782:

Whenever a discretionary power is lodged in any set of men over the property of their neighbors, they will abuse it.

Hamilton argued that a strong middle class was needed to become energetic customers of businesses in the entire economy.

John Adams feared that “monopolies of land” would destroy the nation and that an oligarchy arising out of inequality would manipulate voters, creating “a system of subordination to all… The capricious will of one or a very few” dominating the rest.

Adams wrote that – unless constrained –  “the rich and the proud” would deploy economic and political power that “will destroy all the equality and liberty, with the consent and acclamations of the people themselves.”  He therefore favored “preserving the balance of power on the side of equal liberty and public virtue (by making) … the acquisition of land easy to every member of society.”

When he was elderly,  Adams wrote that the goal of the democratic government was not to help the wealthy and powerful but to achieve “the greatest happiness for the greatest number.”

Moreover:

It wasn’t just James Madison and John Adams. Other be-wigged early presidents of the U.S. and half the crew on Mt. Rushmore — George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — believed that U.S. democracy would work best if citizens had a broad-based ownership stake in the economy. They too feared that extreme property inequality would prevent America from fulfilling its promise.

Why Too Much Inequality Goes Against Conservative Values

More than half of American conservatives think we have too much inequality.  The growing disgust among conservatives towards the runaway inequality in America is rooted in history.

After all, the Founding Fathers fought for freedom from an oppressive central bank which sucked the prosperity out of the economy, but the  Federal Reserve’s policies have created inequality even worse than experienced by slaves in Colonial America in 1774.

The Founding Fathers warned against standing armies, saying that they destroy freedom.   And they warned against financing wars with debt.    But according to Nobel prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, the U.S. debt for the Iraq war could be as high as $5 trillion dollars (or $6 trillion dollarsaccording to a study by Brown University.)

And the Founding Fathers also launched the Revolutionary War because the British government was engaging in crony capitalism (which constituted taxation without representation), instead of letting the colonists have a shot at free market competition. The modern American authorities are doing the same thing.

Likewise, the “father of free market capitalism” – Adam Smith – railed against monopolies, supported regulation of banks and the financial sector … and said that inequality should not be a taboo subject.

The well-known Greek historian Plutarch said 1,900 years ago:

An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

Libertarian champion Ron Paul says that the system is rigged for the rich and against the poor and the middle class:

We’re not calling for redistributing wealth from the rich. After all, Jefferson said:

To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, —the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, & the fruits acquired by it.’

But we do support clawing back ill-gotten gains from criminals under well-established fraud principles:

The government could use existing laws to force ill-gotten gains to be disgorged (see thisand this) [and] fraudulent transfers to be voided …

We’re mainly talking about stopping further redistribution from Main Street to Wall Street.  As Robert Shiller said in 2009:

And it’s not like we want to level income. I’m not saying spread the wealth around, which got Obama in trouble. But I think, I would hope that this would be a time for a national consideration about policies that would focus on restraining any possible furtherincreases in inequality.

For example, if we stop bailing out the Wall Street welfare queens, the big banks would focus more on traditional lending and less on speculative casino gambling.  Indeed, if we break up the big banks, it willincrease the ability of smaller banks to make loans to Main Street, which will level the playing field.

We don’t even have to use government power to break up the banks … if the government just stops propping them up, they’ll collapse on their own. Indeed, many Republicans have pointed out that the big banks would fail on their own if the government stopped bailing them out.

And using current fraud laws would do the trick in prosecuting Wall Street criminality.  These are all solidly conservative principles.

After all, bad government policy is responsible for the medieval, king-and-serf levels of inequality and social mobility which are destroying our economy (and see this).

It is also undermining America’s geopolitical power.

Every conservative (and liberal) should be disgusted by those results.

Postscript: Madison is also reputed to have said:

We are free today substantially but the day will come when our Republic will be an impossibility. It will be impossibility because wealth will be concentrated in the hands of a few. A republic cannot stand upon bayonets, and when that day comes, when the wealth of the nation will be in the hands of a few, then we must rely upon the wisdom of the best elements in the country to readjust the laws of the nation to the changed conditions.

However, the quote has not been authenticated in Madison’s records.

In the night between April 18th and April 19th a boat filled with up to 950 migrants sank in the Mediterranean Sea, 70 miles north of Libya, while trying to reach the southern European border. This was not only the greatest tragedy to date involving migrants in the Mediterranean Sea, it is also the latest in a long series of deaths: around 14,600 from 1993 to November, 2012; 900 in little more than a year from January, 2014 to April, 2015, before this latest tragedy.

In the face of between 700 and 900 deaths, it is difficult to write a series of numbers and data, when anger, sadness, and shame would seem to be a more appropriate response. Yet, the risk of a merely emotional response is that, after a while, these continuous reports about people starved to death, frozen, or drowned on these miserable boats, trying to reach a far off dream of safety and well-being, will end up anaesthetizing us all, to the point that these deaths will become part of our everyday normality. To avoid ending up feeling nothing, then, it is necessary to understand. And the first thing we should understand is that the migrants coming from Africa and the Middle East, running away from wars and extreme poverty, die in the Mediterranean Sea of hunger, thirst, hypothermia, violence, and shipwrecks, but most importantly, they die of the European Union.

The Creation of Frontex

The number of deaths has seen a decisive increase starting from 2003, reaching a peak in 2011: more than 2500 in a single year, to be contrasted with the less than 500 a year between 1993 and 2001. This significant increase is not fortuitous. It is rather the outcome of specific policies implemented by the European Union for the control of immigration. This process started in 2002, when the European Council of Seville began the process of joint management of migration flows. But the decisive steps arrived in 2004, when exiles’ camps were created outside Europe, European governments reached the first agreements about asylum with Libya, and the European Council created Frontex, the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders, which became operational in October 2005.

Among its various tasks, Frontex is responsible for the coordination of operational border security cooperation among EU States, for assisting the training of border guards, and for operationally and technically assisting EU States in moments of increase of migration flows. Bilateral agreements among EU and non-EU States, for example between Mauritania, Senegal and Spain or between Italy and Libya, have not only allowed Frontex to operate directly within the territory of non-EU States, but also those very non-EU States to participate in the various operations for the patrolling of the Mediterranean Sea. It is important to notice that the participation of non-EU states in these bilateral agreements and in the operations of control, repression, and discipline of migration flows have been implicitly bought through import-export contracts or joint ventures offered to them by EU States.

In spite of the European institutions’ and mainstream media’s efforts to present Frontex as an agency that has as one of the main goals the rescue of migrants who try to cross European borders in dangerous circumstances, as a matter of fact Frontex is nothing but the military longa manus of the European Union for patrolling borders, managing camps outside EU borders, and, to put it simply, keep migrants away from Europe or regulate migration flows according to the interests of European labour markets. As a report by Human Rights Watch stresses:

“Although Frontex has insisted it is less ‘actor’ than ‘coordinator,’ it has quickly developed into a powerful actor that plays a key role in enforcing EU immigration policy. The Frontex budget has grown exponentially in recent years, reflecting this development. From €6.2-million in 2004 (just under $9-million (U.S.)), Frontex’s budget grew to more than €88-million (or over $120-million (U.S.)) in 2010.”

Many of Frontex’s joint maritime operations have as their aim preventing boats with migrants from reaching European borders. This not only prevents asylum seekers from having access to procedural rights that apply in EU territory, but also greatly increases the probability of shipwrecks.

Moreover, not only are there no clear mechanisms for investigating the violation of human rights in joint operations or areas of operation in which Frontex is present, but in some cases Frontex directly participated in activities that were clearly violating basic human rights, for example by cooperating with national authorities in transferring migrants to and detaining migrants in detention facilities in conditions that violate international human rights standards.

The enormous increase in shipwrecks and migrants’ deaths in the Mediterranean Sea in the last years is directly related to the implementation of European immigration policies through Frontex. These deaths are no accidents. They are a mass murder.

Cinzia Arruzza is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Her latest book is Dangerous Liaisons: The Marriages and Divorces of Marxism and Feminism, Merlin Press, 2013. This article first appeared on the www.publicseminar.org website.

A newly released ISIS video allegedly depicts some 30 Ethiopians being ‘executed’ in two separate locations in Libya. 

However, one should take note, that this highly produced propaganda video – fails to provide any conclusive, or remotely credible evidence of a crime scene.

The terror installment said to have been carried out by ISIS militants entitled, “Until There Came to Them Clear Evidence,” was reportedly released by Al-Furqan Media, a media arm linked to the notorious Al-Hayat Media Center, the official media outlet for all sanctioned ISIS propaganda.

Once again, we see a terror motion picture which has been produced for dramatic effect, another work of deception – designed to create an emotional response within the viewer, rather than a rational one.

There have already been major questions concerning the validity of the ISIS propaganda videos. Still, they continue to function as a psychological assault on Western audiences, while serving to socially engineer western foreign policy in the process.

Here is another example…

‘SITE on the Scene’ –  SITE Intel broadcasts ISIS propaganda material via social media.

Terror Trickery

On April 19th, it was Reported that a dozen or so Ethiopian men were executed along the beach near the edge of the Mediterranean Sea, while more than a dozen were shot in Southern Libya, but it’s important to remember that the video could have been filmed near almost any clear body of water. Similarly, the desert portion of the ISIS video could have also been filmed at nearly any arid location in the world.

In this latest ISIS propaganda video, quite a few anomalies associated with the production value of the film standout, as there were a number of planned multi-cam shots that would have involved a professional film team, costume designers, props and heavy post-production.

One of the most egregious elements of the staged ‘iconoclastic’ ISIS video, depicts giant-sizedISIS militants escorting their captives to their alleged end. This anomaly is a repeat of the same height discrepancy seen during February’s staged beheadings.

‘ISIS Giants?’ – This screen capture from the latest ISIS video, depicts unusually tall ISIS militants.

The ISIS execution reportedly took place in the Fazzan Province, and later as the desert scene evolves, ISIS members lineup to execute apparent Ethiopian captives at gun point. Although the terror group appears to have fired into the backs of those abducted, when you go frame by frame you see evidence of a heavily edited event. The scene is revealed to have depicted the ‘illusion’ of an execution by firing squad.

Another thing to consider in all of this, is that many of the gruesome images being paraded around by mainstream media, that are most likely used to generate ad revenue, show signs of manipulation, staging and victims whose faces appear almost serene while being executed –something which has been present in every ISIS ‘execution’ production thus far.

As of yet, Ethiopian authorities have been ‘unable’ to confirm if their citizens were killed by ISIS militants in Libya. 

‘Pristine Terror’ – Notice the clean ISIS outfits and the nearly untouched guns on display in this most recent film production.

Problem, Reaction, Solution

The new ISIS video follows a winter season that saw several propaganda videos being pushed by the cloaked group and its social media distributors. The most recent film is the second mass execution said to have taken place in Libya at the hands of the now notorious terror group over the past couple of months.

Since last September, we’ve outlined that the ISIS ‘beheading’ videos were likely fakes, with many filmed against a green screen, including stage props, wardrobe design, voice overs and multi-cam videography. It turns out that at least two of the US major networks – CNN and FOX News finally admitted this in February, after backlash over a video allegedly depicting a torched Jordanian pilot Moaz al-Kasasbeh.

In late January we were told that a “Tripoli branch of ISIS” claimed responsibility after a suspicious shooting attack on the largely empty Corinthia Hotel in the area. The event was synchronized with a car bombing just outside the hotel, according to the SITE Intelligence Group. It seems more and more that this was likely a setup to transplant the ‘ISIS’ narrative inside Libya.

In a report from February at 21WIRE, prior to experts releasing their conclusion about that ISIS video production, I was able to outline many of the film’s irregularities and inconsistencies –proving that the film was indeed heavily orchestrated for maximum effect. 

In late February our assessment of the staged ISIS videos was confirmed. According to Florida-based Terrorism Research and Analysis Consortium, the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians purported to have been decapitated in the video entitled “Signed With Blood: To The Nation Of The Cross,” was ruled to have been ‘staged’ due to the excessive anomalies seen in the dramatic 5 minute film.

While the newest ISIS video appears to depict a shocking escalation of terror, it fails to provide comprehensive evidence of a violent event and therefore should be looked as nothing more than propaganda to gain public support for Western foreign policy objectives – namely the fraudulent proxy campaign in Syria.

Additionally, this latest ISIS event also serves to deflect from the controversial military intervention in Yemen. This is something we’ve been outlining here at 21WIRE over the past month, while most Western media outlets have neglected to discuss Washington’s new proxy.

Here’s another look at an RT news clip from September 2014, where well-known Geopolitical analyst William Engdahl, assesses the deception and alleged roots of ISIS…

I recently flew from Seattle to Seoul, South Korea and thence to Hanoi, to join a two-week tour of Vietnam with VFP—Veterans for Peace. The tour is led by American veterans of the Vietnam War who now live in that country, working to in some way atone for the damage done there during that war.

The Vietnamese are a sweet, friendly, even kindly people, and it is impressive to recall how the western countries have treated them. The French colonized Vietnam in the 1860s and enslaved the Vietnamese people, forcing them to work for the enrichment of France. We have toured the prison that the French built for resistors, which included a guillotine for those who failed to grasp the god-given right of the French to rule over them. When the French tried to regain their ‘Indochina’ colony (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) after WW II, the U.S. supported them (we paid most of the cost of the ‘First Indochina War’), then we invaded and brutalized the Vietnamese for 20 years after the French were defeated (the ‘Second Indochina War’, 1955-1975).

As my plane crossed over the Japanese city of Tokyo on the way into Seoul, I realized that I was retracing a geography that I was familiar with largely from America’s wars. The United States firebombed Tokyo on March 10^th 1945, dropping 2000 tons of incendiary bombs on the wood and paper houses of that city, incinerating 16 square miles and killing an estimated 120,000 citizens in the worst single firestorm in history. U.S. General Curtis LeMay said, ‘It was the biggest firecracker the Japanese had ever seen.’ A few months later, on August 7^th of that year we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing an estimated 75,000 people on that day (150,000 total), and on August 9^th we dropped another on Nagasaki, killing another 40,000 almost instantly (80,000 over time).

An hour later we landed in Seoul, South Korea. The United States divided Korea into north and south in August of 1945, then invaded South Korea on September 8^th 1945 (note that American reports of this event always write that the U.S. marines ‘landed’ in South Korea, minimizing the impact of reality; all cultures interpret events in a manner favorable to themselves) dissolving the new socialist government that had just formed and installing our own man, Syngman Rhee, who had been living in Washington DC for the previous 40 years. This unwarranted and illegal interference led to the Korean War 5 years later, during which North Korea was utterly and completely devastated  by American military power. 3 million North Koreans were killed out of a total population of 9 million—33% of the population. All of the cities and most of the villages, roads, dams and dikes in that country were destroyed, creating a veritable hell on Earth for those millions of peasants. In 1952 General Curtis LeMay noted with evident pleasure that, ‘We have bombed every city twice, and now we are going to pulverize them into stones.

From Seoul I flew into Hanoi where I met the rest of the VFP group. The American bombing of Hanoi in 1965 (Operation Rolling Thunder), 1968 (Operation Linebacker I) and 1972 (Operation Linebacker II) caused massive damage to this ancient city and killed thousands of people.  From Hanoi we traveled to the city of Hue, in central Vietnam; Hue was completely destroyed by U.S. bombing of the city during the 1968 Tet offensive. One reporter, Robert Shaplen wrote at the time, “Nothing I saw during the Korean War, or in the Vietnam War so far has been as terrible, in terms of destruction and despair, as what I saw in Hue.”

Wherever you go, you will find the land, the people, the infrastructure has been at some point bombed by the United States. Remarkably, the United States has been bombing Iraq regularly since 1990 (including during the 13 years of sanctions). Prior to 1990 the United States provided weapons to both Iraq and Iran for their 1980-1988 war. It is now a ruined nation, a failed state. The British first invaded Afghanistan in 1838, then again in 1868 and 1920. The United States took over the job in 1956, when it built an airbase in Kandahar capable of accepting intercontinental bombers. The United States supported the fundamentalist mujahedeen with billions of dollars of weapons in the Afghan war with the Soviets (1979-1987), and has now been at war with and occupying Afghanistan since 2001—14 years. Afghanistan is also a failed state, as is Libya, which we bombed to rubble in 2011, and Syria, which we are currently destroying by supply the weapons of war to various factions.

One begins to perceive a pattern here in terms of how the America relates to the rest of the world: endless bombing of other people, other societies and the Earth itself.  America’s pervasive aggression against others has given rise to the axiom, ‘War is god’s way of teaching geography.’ Who knew where Hue or Pyongyong or Nagasaki or Fallujah were before we destroyed them?

What is the cause of this pathology of pandemic American brutality? We have a case of arrested psychological development on a national scale. Child psychologists Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kolberg found that the moral development of children went through several stages. Young children’s early social behavior is typically driven by a fear of punishment or and related need for obedience. In the second stage of moral development individuals are concerned with the maintenance of law and social order. As they continue to mature people recognize that rules and laws serve social functions and can be altered. Kohlberg in particular identified the highest stage of moral development as one in which individuals live, act, and think according to universal ethical principles that emerge naturally in mature individuals.

Most Americans are trapped in the first stage of moral development, fear of punishment and the need for obedience. Writer Larken Rose notes in his book The Most Dangerous Superstition that, ‘There is a harsh contrast between what we are taught is the purpose of “authority” (to create a peaceful, civilized society) and the real-world results of “authority” in action. Flip through any history book and you will see that most of the injustice and destruction that has occurred throughout the world was not the result of people “breaking the law,” but rather the result of people obeying and enforcing the “laws” of various “governments.” The evils that have been committed in spite of “authority” are trivial compared to the evils that have been committed in the name of “authority…. The belief in “authority,” which includes all belief in “government,” is irrational and self-contradictory; it is contrary to civilization and morality, and constitutes the most dangerous, destructive superstition that has ever existed. Rather than being a force for order and justice, the belief in “authority” is the archenemy of humanity.’

It is only when we come alive to our latent capacity for compassionate intelligence, when we care enough about the destruction of other humans and ecosystems and the widespread ‘killing of hope’ by the American military machine to question and/or reject external authority over our moral and ethical lives, we can each take the next step on our individual journeys towards becoming mature, useful and relevant human beings.

Postscript:

In the abstraction of words we lose track of just what war is.  Here is a reminder of the nature of war, an excerpt from Nick Turse’s recent, well-documented work on the Vietnam war, Kill Everything that Moves. U.S. marines had burst into a thatch hot belonging to a young Vietnamese couple. The young mother, Huong, ‘was dragged to the side of the house. A marine held his hand over her mouth; others pinned her arms and legs to the ground. They tore off her pants, ripped open her shirt, and groped her. Then the gang rape began. First one marine, then another. Five in all. Huong’s sobs elicited more screams of protest from her husband, so the marines began beating him again, after which a burst of gunfire silenced him. Her mother-in-law’s sobs ended after another staccato burst, and her sister-in-law’s after a third. Soon Huong could no longer hear the children. Then came a crack and a blinding flash, followed by searing pain that brought her to the ground. The marines exploded a grenade to make the scene “look good,” then radioed in their results: three dead Viet Cong.’

Dana Visalli is a biologist and organic farmer living in Washington State. He has traveled numerous times to Iraq and Afghanistan to witness the impact of the American war in and occupation of those countries. He can be reached at jdanavisalli(at)gmail.com.

The question of punishing illegal settlements in occupied Palestinian territory was considered separately in Europe and Israel last week, with only superficial differences in the conclusions reached. Israel’s near half-century occupation is in no immediate danger, either at home or abroad.

Some 16 European foreign ministers sent a letter to the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini, calling for the EU to label clearly Israeli products from settlements to alert shoppers to their true provenance.

Yair Lapid, Israel’s former finance minister and widely regarded as a moderate, angrily phoned Ms Mogherini to warn that major European states were calling for a “de facto boycott of Israel”. He described the letter as “a stain” on the EU, adding that Israel’s economy could face “disaster”.

EU foreign ministers were no less persuaded of the punitive nature of their proposal. Labelling settlements goods would, they wrote, be “an important step in the full implementation of EU long-standing policy” and vital to preserving the two-state solution.

In truth, however, the letter simply continues Europe’s feeble and muddle-headed policy in the face of Israel’s intensifying efforts to entrench the occupation.

After years of internal debates, only a small majority of the 27 EU states have been able to agree on the most ineffectual measure imaginable against products made on land and using resources stolen from the occupied Palestinian population.

Labelling might give conscientious consumers useful information to target settlement goods but, in the unlikely event that a significant number of shoppers chose to act, it would barely dent Israel’s economy.

In fact, even if the EU went much further and agreed to enforce a full-fledged boycott of the settlements – something that’s not on its agenda – it would have little more than a psychological impact.

The reason is that, while on the one hand the EU ponders symbolic gestures against the settlements, it actively subsidises the very state that has been expanding the settlements for almost 50 years.

It does so both through a special trade agreement that makes Europe Israel’s largest export market, and by handing over large sums of aid annually to the Palestinian Authority, which maintains order in the occupied territories on Israel’s behalf.

The pressing need for Europe to show some backbone was underscored last week when Israel’s supreme court considered the question of boycotts.

Israeli human rights groups had petitioned the country’s highest court, long considered a lone outpost of moderation, over a controversial law passed four years ago. The law imposes heavy damages on any Israeli individual or organisation that calls for a boycott of either Israel or the settlements.

The Israeli right’s goal in passing the legislation was clear: to silence internal critics of the occupation, especially those who have backed growing international calls for Israel to face BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions). A similar campaign of isolation turned the tide against Apartheid South Africa.

However, by a narrow majority, the court backed the law. Several judges described calls for boycott as “political terror”; one said BDS stood for “bigoted, dishonest, shameful”. Observers were surprised that the court refused to make a distinction between boycotting Israel and the settlements. Effectively, the judges kosher-stamped the occupation, equating a non-violent political protest against the settlements with “terror”.

Lara Friedman of Americans for Peace Now observed that in doing so the court had codified Israel’s “de facto annexation” of the West Bank. In practice, the ruling will bar Israelis from showing any solidarity with Palestinians living under oppression. As the Israeli paper Haaretz noted, lobbying to stop theatre companies and musicians from performing in the large settlement of Ariel, in the heart of the West Bank, is now effectively outlawed with the court’s approval.

Uri Avnery, leader of the small Israeli peace group Gush Shalom, which for many years has called unsuccessfully on the EU to boycott settlement products, claimed at the weekend that the ruling proved the judges were simply “afraid” of the growing power of the right.

Without a supreme court prepared to back basic civil rights like free speech, the Israeli right’s hold is unchallenged. Israeli commentator Gideon Levy lamented on Sunday: “We’re about to get our most nationalist government – and there is no one to stop its laws.”

The court’s ruling only highlighted the EU’s shameful cowardice in failing to confront Israel. It is precisely as Israeli political institutions – from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to the judiciary – make common cause with the settlements that Europe needs to find its voice.

The few Israelis prepared to break out of the domestic consensus and stand up for Palestinian rights to dignity and justice need all the help they can get. Not least they need the solidarity of European governments, which should be joining them in calling for harsh – not paltry – penalties against Israel.

Tony Blair’s position as Middle East envoy is under renewed pressure because of financial links between a telecommunications company and his wife’s foundation.

Exaro can reveal that the Qatari-backed company, Ooredoo, which benefitted from Blair’s lobbying as representative of the Quartet for a mobile-telephone network for the Palestinian market, is a donor to the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women. Ooredoo has also had “partnerships” with Cherie Blair’s foundation in Indonesia and Burma.

The foundation, a registered charity, confirmed that Ooredoo was a donor, but refused to say how much it had paid. In a statement to Exaro, it said: “Ooredoo made a donation to the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women during the 2012-13 financial year.”

“It is not our practice to disclose the size of donations from our supporters.”

It added: “We are extremely grateful to Ooredoo for its support of our work and its commitment to empowering women entrepreneurs.”

Last month, Exaro revealed a letter from Tony Blair that showed how he had prioritised the Palestinian contract as part of his role as Middle East envoy for the Quartet, which is made up of America, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union.

Ooredoo, then known as Qtel, sought the contract for a mobile-telephone network for the Palestinian market. The company was a long-standing client of JP Morgan, the bank where Blair is an advisor reportedly on £2 million a year.

But the former British prime minister says that he did not know about JP Morgan’s link to the Palestinian contract.

The declassified letter of 2009 – published in full by Exaro – was obtained for a new book, ‘Blair Inc’, and shows how the Middle East envoy regarded the project as one of the two most important “key issues” in trying to forge a two-state solution for the Palestinians and Israelis.

He lobbied Israel to allocate the bandwidth for the network, although his spokesman said that the full transfer took until 2011.

Disclosure of the letter added to pressure on Blair to quit as the Quartet’s representative.

Qtel made a donation to the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women in 2012-13.

In February 2013, Cherie Blair was invited to a ceremony at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain to mark Qtel’s rebranding as Ooredoo, Arabic for “I want”. The company’s chairman, Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Saud al-Thani, who last December also became the Qatar Investment Authority’s chief executive, addressed the “invitation-only” event.

Besides a presentation from Cherie Blair, the ceremony also featured the guest appearance of Nasser al-Attiyah, the Qatari Olympic medallist.

Seven months later, Ooredoo and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women announced a new partnership in Burma (or Myanmar) to “extend the benefits of mobile technology to underserved communities and support women’s entrepreneurship”.

They said in a joint statement at the time: “Ooredoo and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women are developing a franchisee model to enable 30,000 women by 2016 to become entrepreneurs by selling prepaid Ooredoo airtime to their communities.”

The statement quoted al-Thani as saying: “Ooredoo and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women have supported thousands of women entrepreneurs in Indonesia, and we shall use that expertise to enrich the lives of people in Myanmar.”

And Cherie Blair added: “Ooredoo understands the value of women’s enterprise development and is doing excellent work internationally for women’s empowerment… I am delighted that my foundation is partnering with Ooredoo to give women the support that they need to become mobile retail agents.”

The partnership, the statement explained, “extends the long-lasting collaboration between the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women and Ooredoo.”

In Indonesia, Cherie Blair’s foundation worked with Ooredoo’s Indosat on developing “Usaha Wanita” (Business Woman), which launched in 2012 “to provide women with entrepreneurial advice through mobile technology”.

In its annual accounts for 2012-13, Cherie Blair’s foundation recorded its thanks for the “generous support” from a range of donors and partners, including “key supporters” such as Ooredoo – and JP Morgan.

Copyright David Henke, Exaro, 2015 

David Hencke is co-author, with Francis Beckett and Nick Kochan, of ‘Blair Inc: The Man Behind the Mask’, published last month.

As negotiations continue between the governments of the United States and Cuba over the normalization of relations, the U.S. State Department has claimed Cuba is willing to discuss the extradition of political refugee Assata Shakur. While it may seem that Cuba would gladly make such a seemingly minor concession in return for the promise of normalized relations, this would greatly underestimate the Cuban government’s commitment to upholding its principles. Shakur need not worry that Cuba will cave for expediency’s sake and send her back to the country she escaped from after being harassed and persecuted for years.

According to The Guardian, a State Department spokesman said Cuba had agreed to discuss fugitives, including Shakur, whose original name was Joanne Chesimard. She was granted political asylum by Cuba in 1984 after escaping from prison in New Jersey five years earlier.

Shakur was convicted in 1977 of first-degree murder in the death of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster. Her conviction came despite the facts presented at trial that her fingerprints were not on any weapon at the scene; her hands had no gun powder residue; and she was shot twice while her arms were raised, which paralyzed her right arm and would have made it impossible to fire a gun.

The murder charge followed years of allegations against Shakur of murder, kidnapping and bank robbery. Between 1973 and 1977 Shakur was brought to criminal trial seven times: three resulted in acquittals, three were dismissed without trial, and one was declared a mistrial. Authorities were desperately throwing any charges they could at Shakur without evidence to back them up, smearing her as a domestic terrorist in an attempt to discredit her political beliefs.

As they had with other groups like Communists, Puerto Rican nationalists, Native American activists and members of the anti-war movement, the FBI targeted Shakur and other members of the Black Panthers for their political affiliations as part of the illegal COINTELPRO surveillance campaign.

In 1979, a seven member delegation from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights visited Shakur in prison and reported that of the victims of COINTELPRO “who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions … one of the worst cases is that of Assata Shakur, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner.”

The UN delegation determined that “she has never on any occasion been punished for any infraction of prison rules which might in any way justify such cruel and unusual punishment.”

In an open letter to the Pope in 1998, Shakur wrote: “I was captured in New Jersey in 1979 after being shot with both arms held in the air, and then shot again from the back. I was left on the ground to die, and when I did not, I was taken to a local hospital where I was threatened, beaten and tortured. In 1977 I was convicted in a trial that can only be described as a legal lynching.”

The State Department represented last week that Cuba was “open to talks” about revoking her refugee status and sending her back to the U.S.

“We see the re-establishment of diplomatic relations and the reopening of an embassy in Havana as the means by which we’ll be able, more effectively, to press the Cuban government on law enforcement issues such as fugitives. And Cuba has agreed to enter into a law-enforcement dialogue with the United States to resolve these cases,” said Jeff Rathke, a State Department spokesman.

The State Department may believe that if they can get Cuban officials to sit down at the table with them, they will simply be able to bully them into handing over Shakur, who was added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List two years ago.

Even though President Obama has announced his intention to remove Cuba from the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism (which they had been added to in 1982 at the same time Iraq was removed), the economic war against Cuba remains firmly in place. The economic sanctions, condemned nearly unanimously as illegal in the United Nations for 23 straight years, are written into laws of Congress such as the Helms-Burton Act and the Cuban Democracy Act.

American officials may assume they can use the embargo, which has cost Cuba more than $1 trillion, as leverage against Cuba to force them to extradite Shakur. Such thinking would be a foolish mistake.

While the Cuban government rightfully wishes for an immediate end to the embargo, there are principles they will not forsake to make it happen. For Cuba, the issue of refugees is a matter of sovereignty. After being a colony of Spain for hundreds of years, then a neo-colony of the United States for more than 60 years more, the value Cuba places on their sovereignty cannot be overstated. Revolutionary leaders such as Fidel and Raúl Castro were, and are, fervent nationalists.

In this context, one should view any demands that Cuba would perceive as an infringement on their sovereignty. The Guardian article states that Cuban officials did not return a call for comment, but Josephina Vidal, Cuba’s head of North American affairs, “recently ruled out any return of political refugees.”

Indeed, just five days after the December 17 announcement that the two countries intended to normalize relations, Vidal was asked specifically if returning fugitives would be on the table in negotiations.

Vidal told the Associated Press that “every nation has a sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted… That’s a legitimate right.” She also said that this had been explained to the U.S. government in the past.

While its possible that this stance could have changed in the last four months, it would be a dramatic break from the words and deeds of the Cuban government since the beginning of the revolution in 1959.

Raúl Castro told the National Assembly of People’s Power in 2013 that while Cuba wants better relations with the U.S. they would not succumb to U.S. demands to change their economy.

“If we really want to move our bilateral relations forward, we’ll have to learn to respect our differences. If not, we’re ready to take another 55 years in the same situation,” he said.

The comments by Vidal and Castro could be interpreted as empty bluster, or as a way to save face while privately planning to sacrifice the principles they publicly profess. But a look at the actions of Cuban politicians and officials since the revolution show they have simply never operated this way.

Most notably, in 1974 Fidel Castro decided to send thousands of Cuban troops to Angola to protect the nascent revolutionary MPLA government from falling to the racist South African army. The South Africans had invaded Angola with a force of about 8,000 soldiers seeking to overthrow the MPLA and install a puppet government friendly to the apartheid regime.

Despite being in the midst of talks with the Ford administration about normalization of relations, Castro decided to carry out the fight against apartheid and for the liberation of Africans who had suffered centuries of colonial domination. Not getting involved in Angola may well have meant an end of the embargo and the omnipresent hostilities against Cuba. Regardless, Castro decided not to turn his back on Angola and leave the MPLA to suffer what would have been an inevitable defeat.

For 15 years, Cuba maintained a military presence in Angola to see their mission through to the end, despite the ire and hostility of successive American administrations. When Jimmy Carter assumed the Presidency he was open to relations with Cuba, but set a precondition of the removal of Cuban troops from Angola.

Historian Piero Gleijeses, author of two comprehensive books on the Cuban intervention in Southern Africa, wrote in an open letter to President Obama last year: “Castro refused to bow to Carter’s demands, which meant that he sacrificed the possibility of normalization with the United States (and the lifting of the embargo) in order to protect Angola from the apartheid regime.”

One could argue that economic conditions are considerably worse in Cuba today than they were 30 years ago, or that the right to grant asylum is not as important to Cuba as fighting apartheid was, so Cuba may not be as willing to directly defy Washington. Both arguments may be true, but in the 1970s and 80s Cuba had been badly victimized by a combination of economic warfare, subversion and terrorism. These severely damaging hostilities may have ended with an agreement with the U.S., but Cuba refused to sacrifice its principles.

Then as now, Cuba would not be intimidated by threats, interference, subversion or sabotage by any country – especially the United States. People like Chris Christie, who The Intercept described as “visibly apoplectic” when talking about Shakur, will have to learn to live with the fact that you cannot always bully someone into surrendering their rights to get what you want.

Matt Peppe writes about politics, U.S. foreign policy and Latin America on his blog. You can follow him on twitter.

This is an outrage!

Sixteen people killed in cold blood by the Mexican Federal Police; unarmed people of an auto-defense movement – in January 2015; just discovered by a team of investigative journalists.

Mexicans well remember the mass killing of 43 Ayotzinapa students of last September, unarmed students of a college that caters to the rural poor, who were protesting the government’s education reform which would make school unaffordable for the poor. Their killing was provoked by the police in connivance with drug cartels.

An outrage – tolerated and even supported as an oppressive action against anybody seeking their rights – by Mexicans highest authorities.

Such oppressive police tactics around the globe are clearly the result of the violent police conduct in the US, either directly by training, or indirectly influenced by their brutal behavior – ‘if the empire can, we can too’.

While he professes the contrary, targeted police killings, allegedly to fight drugs, but with the real purpose of suppressing dissent, has increased drastically since the neoliberal President Peña Nieto took office in 2012.

Mexicans need to know that their police has been trained by the United States of America, the country that screams freedom and liberty at every corner of the globe – lies and deceptions, everywhere one looks; the most abusive and criminal nation in the world; the only rogue nation over the last 100 years, indeed an ‘exceptional nation’, as Obama and his cronies like to think of their country – a government dominated by an elite of hypocrites, supported by an equally murderous media which has prostituted its commitment to truth for lies and falsehoods to the elites of empire.

The criminal behavior of police and military forces throughout the world is the direct or indirect product of the US. They train armies and police in their ‘client’ states to assure oppression whenever there is a chance that people may claim their civil rights. This is what empire does.

The police chief in charge of the squadron that murdered the 16 unarmed protesters in January, as well as the one responsible for the Ayotzinapa  killings, were nominated and are supported by President Enrique Peña Nieto. The President himself was literally implanted by empire, because Peña Nieto would not have been elected by Mexicans, an honest and noble people, other than by fraud – fraud paid for, planned and instigated by Washington. Only a puppet ‘authority’ can tolerate these murderous acts against unarmed people, and only because he knows he has support at the highest level – actually at the level of Washington.

Mexicans – be aware!

Latin Americans all over the Sub-Continent BEWARE!

Look at Europe! – The Old Continent dotted with puppets, with stooges of Washington; non-leaders that are drawing Europe into misery, first with lies; if that doesn’t work, the atrocious boots of NATO will follow, either as an armed direct intervention, or as one instigating a war with Russia which will undoubtedly unfold in -where else – Europe. That would be the third time in 100 years – wars provoked by the Anglo-Saxon empire – and Europe reduced to rubble – to be rebuilt by empire to fuel its economy.

Latin America ! – Don’t follow the path of Europe. Stay your own course.

President Obama is just about discovering that he has ‘neglected’ his ‘backyard’ – and now is doing everything possible to take it back, including by training your sovereign countries’ police and army. Just look at Venezuela, look at the threats- some tacit some direct, but all real – on Bolivia and Ecuador, on Brazil; all hidden as local subversions or disguised as the uncovering of corruption. These activities are the brainchild of nefarious Washington ‘think tanks’ (sic) which are planning to dismantle and destroy the social developments that have taken hold over the last 15-20 years throughout the sub-continent of Latin America and the Caribbean, the only population and societies, other than those of China and Russia, that have resisted the merciless onslaught of empire throughout the world.

Brothers in solidarity, don’t let your achievements, often dearly paid for with blood, be taken away. They are yours to stay! Don’t fall into traps of lies, deceptions and aggression.

Take back your countries where they have been taken over by empire.

Empire will not let go – until and unless it is defeated. And defeated it will be. It is gradually sinking into internal disarray and into international discredit; into an abyss of darkness, from where only ashes will rise.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik News, the Voice of Russia / Ria Novosti, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

The Saudi-led coalition has targeted the Sanaa residence of Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi with airstrikes. Earlier, coalition airstrikes hit the Sanaa International Airport. According to military data, Operation Decisive Storm conducted by the international coalition in Yemen has so far destroyed 1,200 civilian structures including 72 educational institutions as it targets Houthi rebel positions across the country. In turn, Yemen’s military units siding with the Houthi rebels seized the city of Ataq, the capital of the Shabwah Governorate. The Houthis and their military allies ousted supporters of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi from the southeastern oil-rich province.

In recent months Yemen has descended into conflicts between several different groups. The main fight is between forces loyal to the beleaguered President, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, and those allied to Zaidi Shia rebels known as Houthis. Yemen’s security forces have split loyalties, with some units backing Mr Hadi, and others the Houthis. Both Hadi and the Houthis are opposed by al-Qaeda and Islamic State terrorist groups. On March 26, a coalition headed by Saudi Arabia with logistical and intelligence assistance from the US launched a military operation against Houthi rebel positions in Yemen.

According to the UN, the conflict in Yemen has claimed the lives of 364 civilians, including at least 84 children and 25 women since of beginning of the Saudi-led operation there. More than 681 civilians have been injured since March 26. Additionally, the military actions in Yemen have led to the evacuation of foreign citizens. The US evacuated 125 Special Operations advisers from Yemen in March. Nonetheless, US officials haven’t evacuated 3000-4000 American civilians. Somehow, Washington has missed the idea that it must save not only military advisers. Instead, Russian planes evacuated more than 900 civilians, including Russians, Ukrainians, Americans and others. Thus, foreign civilians only have a chance to be saved with help from Russia.

Regional conflicts have evoked different reactions within the international community. For instance, the secretary of the Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev has stated that a comparative analysis of the US and European reactions to the conflicts in Ukraine and Yemen is uncovering «double standards» in interpreting state coups. Further, the military campaign in Yemen has signaled a crisis inside international organizations. «The military interference had not been sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council but had started with consent from the United States,» Patrushev told Izvestia. As such, the US pushed for military action against the Houthi rebels, who fight against al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in the region. The war against terrorism is an important task for the White House only if it doesn’t hamper establishing US-backed regimes in other countries.

The same problems were following Tuesday’s resolution of UN Security Council that envisages introducing sanctions against Houthi rebels in Yemen and banning arms supplies to them. The draft resolution, proposed by Jordan, US and UK, was supported by 14 member-countries. Russia abstained from voting. «The co-sponsors refused to include the requirements insisted upon by Russia addressed to all sides to the conflict to swiftly halt fire and to begin peace talks,» Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin explained the move after the vote. Furthermore, Russia argues that a military solution for Yemen is out of the question. Nevertheless, US-backed International Coalition prefer bombing, not talking.

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Kiev continues intense shelling of Shirokino, Peski, and Gorlovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic. According to the DPR Defense Ministry, pro-Kiev forces opened fire 74 times over the past 24 hours using battle-tanks, mortars, anti-tank guided missiles, grenade launchers and small arms. Furthermore, the Ukrainian military started an offensive in the settlement of Novotoshkovskoe in the Lugansk People’s Republic. During last 24 hours, 3 pro-Kiev fighters were killed and 16 injured.

Self-styled Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko believes UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Mun will help him get the European Union involved in the Ukrainian civil war. Poroshenko’s official website reported he had a call with the UN Secretary-General last night.

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Some of the world’s most powerful civilizations grew up around or near the Mediterranean (meaning Middle of Earth): Egypt, Greece, Rome, Carthage, Venice, Spain…today it is a cemetery for those trying to reach its shores or cross its waters. Ten thousand people have been rescued in recent days, indicating the scale of the problem. This weekend, 700 died. Last week, a further 400.

Saturday night. Just after midnight, between the coast of Libya and the Italian Isle of Lampedusa, a cargo container ship flying the Portuguese flag was called upon by the Italian authorities to go to the aid of a merchant vessel with engine problems. As many of the seven hundred people crammed on board all ran to the side of the vessel to be rescued, it turned over. Only twenty-eight have been plucked from the sea. The remaining six hundred and fifty-plus are dead, the end of the European dream.

Migrants from across Africa

Those aboard came from Sudan, from Central African Republic, from Nigeria, from East, Central and West Africa, many of them terrified for their lives because they would be killed if they stayed at home in ethnic conflicts, or else become the victims of endemic poverty or disease. The only hope at the end of the tunnel? Beg, borrow, scratch together the 1,000 Euro it costs for the trip to cross the sea on a merchant vessel, in many cases totally unprepared for the crossing, run by unscrupulous criminal gangs of human traffickers who become rich at the expense of the misfortune of others.

The Italian coastguard has confirmed that in recent days around ten thousand people have been saved from peril by merchant vessels in the southern Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, Italy, along with Malta and Greece, are the countries most affected by these waves of desperate immigrants, being nearest to the African and Turkish coasts, respectively. They feel isolated and complain that they are left alone to deal with the problem.

Raw figures

And what is the problem? In raw figures, it is estimated that in 2015, between 500,000 and one million migrants will arrive in the European Union, across the Mediterranean Sea. To date in 2015, around 1,600 people have died making this crossing – these figures being the known cases (how many more died in undetected vessels is a mystery). The numbers are increasing. In 2011, 58,000 people tried to enter the EU across the waters, the figure growing to 218,000 in 2014.

Last week, some 150 people were rescued off the Libyan coast, while a further 400 perished.

The general consensus among European governments is that something needs to be done and the first proposal on the table is to send more ships to the southern Mediterranean. This will mean fewer people will die after being sent across the water in vessels which in many cases are not seaworthy and which are usually heavily overladen with their cargo – human beings.

It will do nothing to stem the tide of immigrants fleeing conflicts or looking for work because the countries they came from are destabilized. The answer is not only sending more ships to save them from the seas, it is not only to deal with the criminal gangs trafficking these people – there are so many (one million people equals one billion Euro, at least) that if one trafficking ring is taken out another will appear, as is the case with drugs. The answer is in development of the countries they come from – once again, Development, not Deployment.

This means a serious international response to the sale of weaponry from one side, it means an end to one-way traffic of people and goods from Africa to the West, it means an investment in Africa to create sustainable development, not plunder of its resources. It means setting up the excellent education systems which were funded and organized by the Soviet Union and then destroyed as western countries told the Africans their wonderful boom-and-bust market-based monetarist model was better.

Then look what happened.

On the other hand and from the other side, it means good governance, which means accountability, responsibility and zero corruption, remembering that for every corrupted there is a corruptor.

Those who make the attempt to cross the sea to the Euro-dream and arrive on the Continent end up as detainees in camps and are either sent back or manage to move northwards to Germany, the UK or Sweden where they work illegally until, if ever, they are legalized. Others end up reaching land already dead, where they are buried in mass graves marked with numbers or letters, or else “dead at sea”.

For all those who say it was worth the risk, how many more lie under the waters of the Mediterranean, a cemetery for those whose only crime was to aspire to a better life and happiness? When Europeans were spending centuries civilizing “savages and natives” with the Bible and the bullet, drawing lines on maps and destroying civilizations, nobody gave a thought to what would happen tomorrow.

It is happening today.

Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey has worked as a correspondent, journalist, deputy editor, editor, chief editor, director, project manager, executive director, partner and owner of printed and online daily, weekly, monthly and yearly publications, TV stations and media groups printed, aired and distributed in Angola, Brazil, Cape Verde, East Timor, Guinea-Bissau, Portugal, Mozambique and São Tomé and Principe Isles; the Russian Foreign Ministry publication Dialog and the Cuban Foreign Ministry Official Publications. He has spent the last two decades in humanitarian projects, connecting communities, working to document and catalog disappearing languages, cultures, traditions, working to network with the LGBT communities helping to set up shelters for abused or frightened victims and as Media Partner with UN Women, working to foster the UN Women project to fight against gender violence and to strive for an end to sexism, racism and homophobia. He is also a Media Partner of Humane Society International, fighting for animal rights. ([email protected])

A record, call it a database if you will, featuring 173,132 emails and 30,287 documents specifically relevant to Sony’s US subsidiary Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE).[1]  This is the stash that WikiLeaks has made available for consumers of information.  The material was the subject of the infamous hack that Washington insists came from North Korea, a claim that is still vigorously disputed.

According to Julian Assange, “The archive shows the inner workings of an influential multinational corporation.”  For the publisher, “It is newsworthy and at the centre of a geopolitical conflict.  It belongs in the public domain.  WikiLeaks will ensure it stays there.”  According to his critics, it is merely a trove of gossip that did more to harm privacy than necessarily affirm any earth shattering developments.

Sony has taken to the bastions to protect what it regards as privacy violated.  In words from a spokesperson to theLA Times, “The attackers used the dissemination of stolen information to try to harm SPE and its employees, and now WikiLeaks regrettably is assisting them in that effort.”  Accordingly, the company “vehemently disagree with WikiLeaks’ assertion that this material belongs in the public domain and will continue to fight for the safety, security and privacy our company and its more than 6,000 employees.”[2]

Sony’s retained lawyer Boies Schiller has aggressively attacked WikiLeaks.  “Despite its purported commitment to free speech, WikiLeaks’ conduct rewards a totalitarian regime seeking to silence dissident speech, and imposes incentives on entities such as SPE who depend on trade secrets, confidential information and protection of intellectual property to exercise their First Amendment rights every day.”[3]  SPE are the self-appointed guardians of good secrecy over bad.

Journalists have certainly been trawling the material to see if there is anything of value. There is certainly much in terms of bird feed.  Email correspondence between actress Natalie Portman and Sony Motion Pictures Group Chairwoman Amy Pascal is cited as showing the modest efforts of chat activism over last summer’s conflict between Hamas and Israel.[4]  Pascal had better things to do than dabble in Portman’s moral universe.

Privacy needs to be proportionate to the context of power that is wielded.  Those, be they government officials with power of life and death over individuals, or entities with deep pockets and networks of influence, should be more transparent.  Not so SPE, which sees its operations as necessarily clandestine in an aggressive world of trade secrets and policing.

The wisdom for the technocrats and bureaucrats is the reverse: the more complex society becomes, the more ill-informed the public must be for them to succeed.  Platonic high castes come in to fill the void, offering the paternal guidance.  Accept the secrecy directive – we know best.

It should come as little wonder, then, that Sony Pictures’ CEO Michael Lynton warms a seat on the board of trustees at the RAND corporation.  The military research entity was ever so helpful in advising Sony on managing North Korea’s reaction to the film, The Interview.  Regular invitations from RAND and hosting by Sony of RAND personnel, feature.[5]

The degree of power determines how visible its holder is. That, at least, is the principle.  Sony is not necessarily as important as Assange makes it out to be, but it would be a mistake to assume that the company wields no measure of influence in the corridors of power.  Film and propaganda are intrinsic enterprises of the political mission. Corporations have the front seats at the negotiating tables of Congress and the trade missions.

Discussions and speculations about the role celluloid plays in affecting politics is undeniable.  They tend to exist in the realm of the immeasurable, though their pull on the political process is hard to deny.  British Prime Minister David Cameron, to take one example, did ponder the possible impact of Outlander on the independence reference in Scotland.  Daft, yes, but still worthy to note in email traffic.

Given SPE’s role behind the production of Outlander, executive vice president Keith E. Weaver found himself discussing the agenda for a meeting with Cameron.  (Outlander itself is based upon the novels by the same name by Diana Gabaldon, whose first novel was published 23 years ago.)

“From a Sony Pictures Entertainment perspective,” goes an email by Weaver, “your meeting with Prime Minister Cameron on Monday will likely focus on our overall investment in the UK – with special emphasis on the importance of OUTLANDER (i.e. particularly vis-à-vis the political issues in the UK as Scotland contemplates detachment this Fall).”[6]

Not earth shattering, and more cultural and geopolitical, but nonetheless significant as an agent of influence.  After all, Cameron doesn’t mind traversing low brow cultures if a ballot is at stake.

Some material from the trove is more direct and pungent.  The company, unsurprisingly, has been a keen student of anti-piracy measures.  A document by a Sony employee notes the activities of the Anti-Piracy Group in the company, covering content security, technology, business intelligence, enforcement, PR and education, public policy and commercial policy.[7]

He goes on to outline the strategies taken by the company regarding its business interests, using the language of universal relevance.  What diminishes Sony’s profits, in other words, diminishes everybody’s.

“Our PR approach with international markets is based locally rather than globally.  Our goal is to help grass roots organizations tackle piracy in their own territories.  We offer support, help and guidance to ensure that the issue of privacy is not about the impact of American business alone, but about the impact on everyone’s businesses.”

The stance is well noted in SPE’s  interest regarding contributions to the re-election of Democratic Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo.  The sticking point there was the limit on corporation donations of $5,000.  In an email from Weaver to Pascal, “Thanks to Governor Cuomo, we have a great production incentive environment in NY and a strong piracy advocate that’s actually done more than talk about our problems.”  To that end, efforts were being made to raise the contributions to “50K overall.  This means I need to ask individual senior execs for support, which is not my favourite thing to do.”[8]

Sony gives the impression of a wounded giant, with thousands of employees who have been supposedly assailed by the dark forces of hacking.  When queried, its standard response is that one cannot question a company about material that has been pilfered.  But the other side of the argument – that WikiLeaks has merely unearthed a gossip train rather than a useful information trove – is similarly mistaken.  Secrecy is not an inviolable charter for the powerful.

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

Obama is escalating his war on Yemen. Nine US warships were sent to Yemeni waters. The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and escort cruiser USS Normandy joined seven others.

Reports indicate their mission involves intercepting Iranian ships allegedly carrying weapons for Yemeni Houthis.

Pentagon spokesman Col. Steve Warren lied denying willful US anti-Iranian saber rattling – including from the White House.

Press secretary Josh Earnest claimed “(w)e have seen evidence that the Iranians are supplying weapons and other forms of support to the Houthis in Yemen.”

“That’s the kind of support that will only contribute to greater violence in that country…that’s already been racked by too much violence.”

Fact: Neither Earnest or other US officials offer any credible evidence showing Iran supplying Houthis with weapons or other military aid.

Fact: Plenty of evidence shows Washington sending arms and munitions to Saudis and regional Gulf partners – besides choosing targets to terror-bomb and other military-related assistance.

Fact: Anti-Iranian saber rattling provides more evidence showing Obama has no intention of normalizing relations.

An unnamed administration official said US warships in Yemeni waters give Washington the option to escalate things further at its discretion.

Other vessels involved include two destroyers, two mine-sweepers, and three amphibious ships carrying 2,200 combat-ready marines – besides other regional US warships.

America’s Fifth Fleet is headquartered in Bahrain. It’s responsible for its naval presence in the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Gulf of Aden, parts of the Indian Ocean and connecting waterways.

An unnamed administration official said US warplanes will patrol Yemeni airspace – whether to participate in terror-bombing wasn’t explained.

US warships already shelled Yemeni targets several times. Washington is getting more directly involved in its proxy war.

Overnight terror-bombing continued into its 27th day. Blasts rocked Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. Dozens of civilians were killed, hundreds wounded – many with limbs blown off.

One resident said “(i)t was like the doors of hell opened all of a sudden.” He felt his “house lift up and fall.”

One bomb struck near Iran’s embassy – perhaps sending a message saying the next one won’t miss. Tehran sharply rebuked Riyadh for the incident.

After nearly a month of US-orchestrated/Saudi-led terror-bombing, “things are worsening,” said UN spokesman Adrian Edwards.

“Basic services are on the verge of collapse.” It bears repeating. Obama bears full responsibility.

He’s waged multiple genocidal regional wars throughout his entire tenure. One country after another was ravaged and destroyed.

Endless wars continue. New ones are planned – to eliminate all remaining sovereign independent states.

To give America dominion over planet earth – its resources, markets and populations.

Genocidal slaughter is considered a small price to pay. Rogue states operate this way. None match US ruthlessness.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at[email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Ora che lo Yemen è sotto le bombe per costringerlo ad accettare l’ordine autoritario di USA e Arabia Saudita, è difficile immaginare che la Casa Saud avesse precedentemente agito a favore degli Houthi appoggiando l’idea dell’imamato di Zaidi e sfruttando i gruppi settari per controbilanciare l’influenza della Fratellanza Musulmana nello Yemen, come ha osservato Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, autore e analista geopolitico.

Si chiama «Noble Jump» l’esercitazione Nato svoltasi il 7-9 aprile in Germania, Olanda, Repubblica Ceca e altri otto paesi europei, dove in 48 ore sono stati mobilitati migliaia di uomini della «Forza di punta» ad altissima prontezza operativa, parte della «Forza di risposta» di  30mila uomini. La seconda fase si svolgerà il 9-20 giugno in Polonia, dove saranno dispiegate truppe provenienti da Germania, Olanda, Repubblica Ceca, Norvegia e altri paesi. Si prepara così la «Trident Juncture 2015», l’esercitazione che, dal 28 settembre al 6 novembre, si svolgerà in Italia, Spagna e Portogallo con unità terrestri, aeree e navali e con forze speciali di tutti i paesi Nato. Con  25mila partecipanti, annuncia lo U.S. Army Europe, sarà «la più grande esercitazione Nato dalla caduta del Muro di Berlino», che testerà le capacità della «Forza di risposta», il cui ruolo – ha spiegato un portavoce Nato – è «rispondere a una crisi prima ancora che essa cominci», in altre parole quello della «guerra preventiva». Guiderà l’esercitazione il Jfc Naples, comando Nato (con quartier generale a Lago Patria, Napoli) agli ordini dell’ammiraglio Usa Ferguson, allo stesso tempo comandante delle Forze navali Usa in Europa e delle Forze navali del Comando Africa. Come dichiara il generale Usa Breedlove –  Comandante supremo alleato in Europa (il capo militare della Nato nominato sempre dal Presidente degli Stati uniti) – queste esercitazioni costituiscono «una chiara indicazione che la nostra Alleanza ha la capacità e volontà di rispondere alle emergenti sfide alla sicurezza sui nostri fianchi meridionale e orientale». Cioè ha la capacità e volontà, partendo dalle basi in Europa, di fare altre guerre in Nordafrica/Medioriente (dove si prepara un altro intervento militare in Libia) e nell’Europa orientale. Sul “fianco orientale” la Nato, dopo aver provocato l’esplosione della crisi ucraina, preme sempre più sulla Russia. Al largo della Scozia è in corso (11-24 aprile) la più grande esercitazione aeronavale Nato della serie «Joint Warrior», in funzione anti-Russia, con la partecipazione di oltre 50 navi da guerra e 70 cacciabombardieri di 14 paesi, compreso un gruppo navale sotto comando italiano. Nel Mar Nero, dove in marzo si è svolta una esercitazione Nato cui ha partecipato anche l’Italia, navi da guerra Usa incrociano ai limiti delle acque territoriali russe. Quando un cacciabombardiere russo, disarmato ma attrezzato per la guerra elettronica, ha sorvolato il cacciatorpediniere lanciamissili Donald Cook, il Pentagono ha protestato per «questa azione provocatoria russa che viola i protocolli internazionali». Sono invece legali, per Washington, i droni Usa Global Hawk che sorvolano il Mar Nero e l’Ucraina. Dove è arrivato da Vicenza un convoglio Usa della 173rd Airborne Brigade con armi ed equipaggiamenti per l’operazione «Fearless Guardian»: l’addestramento, per un periodo di sei mesi, di tre battaglioni (di chiara ispirazione nazista) della Guardia nazionale ucraina, effettuato da  circa 300 parà Usa. Cui si aggiungono centinaia di istruttori inviati da Gran Bretagna e Canada.  Ottawa fornisce a Kiev anche immagini ad alta definizione del suo satellite Radarsat-2 per uso militare. E la Germania? Mentre da un lato sembra differenziarsi da Washington trattando con Mosca, dall’altro partecipa alle esercitazioni Nato sotto comando Usa in funzione anti-Russia e, allo stesso scopo, arma la Lituania offrendole anche obici semoventi Panzerhaubitze 2000, che sparano 12 proiettili da 155 mm al minuto con gittata di 30-40 km. Gli stessi usati dalla Germania nella guerra Nato in Afghanistan.

Manlio Dinucci

Image Credits: neontommy, Flickr.

Recent Walmart store closings are not due to plumbing issues or even military exercises as some have speculated.

According to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, the closure of five stores is a response to labor activism at a store in Los Angeles.

The union has filed a claim with the National Labor Relations Board and wants the government to force the corporation to rehire employees laid off during the closings.

“Walmart has targeted this store because the associates have been among the most active associates around the country to improve working conditions,” the union claim states, according to The New York Times.

Walmart, however, is sticking to the plumbing story. “We don’t believe there is a basis for an injunction that would interfere with our efforts to repair the serious plumbing issues at the five stores,” Lorenzo Lopez, a Walmart spokesman, said on Sunday

According to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2014, Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue. In 2012 five million Americans applied for 500,000 Walmart jobs. The company employees 2.2 million people worldwide and has faced numerous lawsuits and labor actions over the years.

During the 2014’s Black Friday, labor unions staged pickets and strikes at 1,600 stores in 49 states. Unions are calling for the company to pay employees $15 per hour.

The government has routinely sided with labor unions. In November 2013 the National Labor Relations Board said it had found that Walmart had pressured employees not to participate in strikes on Black Friday and had illegally disciplined workers who had engaged in strikes.

Despite the complaints of labor unions and liberal critics of Walmart’s labor practices, the store, as the largest private employer in the United States, has dramatically affected unemployment.

“Walmart is found to have substantially lowered the relative unemployment rates of blacks in those counties where it is present, but to have had only a limited impact on relative incomes after the influences of other socio-economic variables were taken into account,” an Oklahoma State University study found.

Ever since the measles outbreak in Disneyland, there has been a determined effort by legislators in California, to repeal the state’s current vaccine exemptions. If they succeed, the only way parents can skip their children’s vaccinations, is if there is an acceptable medical reason. As you can imagine, those who are deeply concerned over the safety and efficacy of vaccines have every reason to fear these developments.

Or do they?

Well, yes and no. No in the sense that I don’t think we are headed towards a future that forces everyone to take the jab, but the answer will likely be yes for folks who don’t have a lot of disposable income. For reasons that I will explain below, you can bet your bottom dollar that there will always be a way to avoid vaccinations for you and your family. However, it’s going to cost you.

For instance, take California’s proposed vaccine law. It doesn’t provide any harsh punishment for failing to vaccinate your children. All it says is that your child can’t attend school without the required vaccines. It doesn’t say anything about homeschooling. If you can afford to hire a personal tutor for your kids, or you make enough money to let your spouse stay home, then you can avoid this altogether.

I suspect this might become a new trend, and it won’t be restricted to the United States. In Australia, the government recently stated that if any family refuses to vaccinate their children, they will be denied medical benefits to the tune of $11,400. For a low-income family that’s a huge hit, but for the upper class that’s just a drop in the bucket.

Mind you, they didn’t say that their children will be taken by the state or their parents will be charged with child endangerment. It’s just going to cost them to keep their kids vaccine free. If these Western governments truly believed that vaccines save lives and avoiding them was dangerous, wouldn’t they be more willing imprison parents for putting their children’s lives in danger? Their half-hearted attempts to stifle vaccine free families, says it all.

Granted, in the future there will be some heavy-handed attempts to hurt families that don’t want to vaccinate. Earlier this year, the Washington Department of Social and Health Services threatened to take away a child because their parents didn’t want to give her a flu vaccine. However, does anyone believe that social services would take away a child from a rich family, with connections and easy access to legal help?

Do you see what I’m getting at here? They will always leave loopholes for the benefit of the elites, but those loopholes will filter out anyone who doesn’t have the cash. To some extent, this situation already exists in America. There are only two states that don’t allow any personal belief or religious exemptions: Mississippi and West Virginia, i.e. two of the poorest states in America. Somehow I doubt that the financial and political elite spend a whole lot of time in those states.

On that note, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the elites don’t vaccinate their children at the same rate as the middle class. Jon Rappoport pointed out last month that in New Mexico, the Los Alamos school district has the highest rate of vaccine exemptions in the state. In all likelihood, these are the children of parents who work for the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

2.3% of kids in Los Alamos public schools don’t get vaccinated. Their parents have received exemptions.

That’s the highest rate of non-vaccination in the state.

We’re talking about parents who work at the US Los Alamos Labs.

People with advanced degrees in science.

People who work for the federal government.

You would think the vaccine rate in that environment would stand at 100%, no questions asked.

What do these people know? Why are they opting out of vaccinations for their kids?

Those are hard questions to answer. Very hard.

Hmm, let’s think. For example, have they done some actual research on their own, and have they decided that vaccines are unsafe and ineffective?

Let’s not forget that in California, private schools have significantly higher rates of vaccine non-compliance than their public school counterparts. There appears to be a large segment of America’s elite that doesn’t want to vaccinate their children. Do they know something the rest of us don’t? And given the power this class wields in our state, federal, and local governments, how much do you want to bet that before California passes this legislation, they will exempt private schools from the law?

By now, some of you might be asking yourselves why they would do this? Why would the poor be forced into this while the rich get a pass? As I mentioned before, this is a growing trend that is international in scope, and the truth of the matter may lie beyond our borders. If this story from Kenya is any indication, then these laws have a truly nefarious purpose behind them.

To me, it looks like these laws have all the trappings of a eugenics agenda. Do you honestly still believe these vaccines are safe?

Delivered by The Daily Sheeple

Contributed by Joshua Krause of The Daily Sheeple.

Joshua Krause is a reporter, writer and researcher at The Daily Sheeple. He was born and raised in the Bay Area and is a freelance writer and author. You can follow Joshua’s reports at Facebook or on his personal Twitter. Joshua’s website is Strange Danger .

On Sunday evening, CBS’s “60 Minutes” presented what was pitched as a thorough examination of the infamous sarin gas attack outside Damascus, Syria, on Aug. 21, 2013, with anchor Scott Pelley asserting that “none of what we found will be omitted here.” But the segment – while filled with emotional scenes of dead and dying Syrians – made little effort to determine who was responsible.

Pelley’s team stuck to the conventional wisdom from the rush-to-judgment “white paper” that the White House issued on Aug. 30, 2013, just nine days after the incident, blaming the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad. But Pelley ignored contrary evidence that has emerged in the 20 months since the attack, including what I’ve been told are dissenting views among U.S. intelligence analysts.

The segment also played games with the chronology of the United Nations inspectors who had been invited to Damascus by Assad to investigate what he claimed were earlier chemical attacks carried out by Syrian rebels, a force dominated by Islamic extremists, including Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the even more brutal Islamic State.

Though Pelley starts the segment by interviewing a Syrian who claimed he witnessed a sarin attack in Moadamiya, a suburb south of Damascus, Pelley leaves out the fact that Moadimiya was the first area examined by the UN inspectors and that their field tests found no evidence of sarin. Nor does Pelley note that UN laboratories also found no sarin or other chemical agents on the one missile that the inspectors recovered from Moadamiya.

Scott Pelley, anchor of CBS Evening News

The two labs did have a dispute over whether trace elements of some chemicals found in Moadamiya might have been degraded sarin. But those disputed positives made no sense because when the UN inspectors went to the eastern suburb of Zamalka two and three days later, their field equipment immediately registered positive for sarin and the two labs confirmed the presence of actual sarin.

So, if the sarin had not degraded in Zamalka, why would it have degraded sooner in Moadamiya? The logical explanation is that there was no sarin associated with the Moadamiya rocket but the UN laboratories were under intense pressure from the United States to come up with something incriminating that would bolster the initial U.S. rush to judgment.

The absence of actual sarin from the rocket that struck Moadamiya also raises questions about the credibility of Pelley’s first witness. Or possibly a conventional rocket assault on the area ruptured some kind of chemical containers that led panicked victims to believe they too were under a chemical attack.

That seemed to be a working hypothesis among some U.S. intelligence analysts even as early as the Aug. 30, 2013 “white paper,” which was called a U.S. “Government Assessment,” an unusual document that seemed to ape the form of a “National Intelligence Estimate,” which would reflect the consensus view of the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies and include analytical dissents.

By going with this new creation – a “Government Assessment,” which was released by the White House press office, not the Office of Director of National Intelligence – the State Department, which was then itching for war with Syria, got to exclude any dissents to the hasty conclusions. But the intelligence analysts managed to embed one dissent as a cutline to a map which was included with the “white paper.”

The cutline read:

“Reports of chemical attacks originating from some locations may reflect the movement of patients exposed in one neighborhood  to field hospitals and medical facilities in the surrounding area. They may also reflect confusion and panic triggered by the ongoing artillery and rocket barrage, and reports of chemical use in other neighborhoods.”

In other words, some U.S. intelligence analysts were already questioning the assumption of a widespread chemical rocket assault on the Damascus suburbs – and the strongest argument for the State Department’s finger-pointing at Assad’s military was the supposedly large number of rockets carrying sarin.

Possible ‘False Flag’

However, if there had been only one sarin-laden rocket, i.e., the one that landed in Zamalka, then the suspicion could shift to a provocation – or “false-flag” attack – carried out by Islamic extremists with the goal of tricking the U.S. military into destroying Assad’s army and essentially opening the gates of Damascus to a victory by Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State.

That was what investigative journalist Seymour Hersh concluded in ground-breaking articles describing the alleged role of Turkish intelligence in assisting these Islamic extremists in securing the necessary materials and expertise to produce a crude form of sarin.

In December 2013, Hersh reported that he found a deep schism within the U.S. intelligence community over how the case was sold to pin the blame on Assad. Hersh wrote that he encountered “intense concern, and on occasion anger” when he interviewed American intelligence and military experts “over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence.”

According to Hersh, “One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote.

“A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.

“The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam. The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy.”

Despite Hersh’s legendary reputation dating back to the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam War and revelations about CIA abuses in the 1970s, his first 5,500-word article — as well as a second article — appeared in the London Review of Books, a placement that suggests the American media’s “group think” blaming the Assad regime remained hostile to any serious dissent on this topic.

Much of the skepticism about the Obama administration’s case on the Syrian sarin attack has been confined to the Internet, including our own Consortiumnews.com. Indeed, Hersh’s article dovetailed with much of what we had reported in August and September of 2013 as we questioned the administration’s certainty that Assad’s regime was responsible.

Our skepticism flew in the face of a “group think” among prominent opinion leaders who joined in the stampede toward war with Syria much as they did in Iraq a decade earlier. War was averted only because President Barack Obama was informed about the intelligence doubts and because Russian President Vladimir Putin helped arrange a compromise in which Assad agreed to surrender his entire chemical weapons arsenal, while still denying any role in the sarin attack.

A Short-Range Rocket

Later, when rocket scientists — Theodore A. Postol, a professor of science, technology and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Richard M. Lloyd, an analyst at the military contractor Tesla Laboratories — analyzed the one home-made, sarin-laden rocket that landed in Zamalka, they concluded that it could have traveled only about two to three kilometers, meaning that it would have been fired from an area controlled by the rebels, not the government.

That finding destroyed a conclusion reached by Human Rights Watch and the New York Times, which vectored the suspected paths of the two rockets — one from Moadamiya and one from Zamalka — to where the two lines intersected at a Syrian military base about 9.5 kilometers from the points of impact. Not only did the vectoring make no sense because only the Zamalka rocket was found to contain sarin but the rocket experts concluded that it couldn’t even fly a third of the way from the military base to where it landed.

After touting its original Assad-did-it claim on the front page on Sept. 17, 2013, the Times snuck its retraction below the fold on page 8 in an article published on Dec. 29, 2013, between the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

But none of these doubts were examined in any way in Pelley’s “60 Minutes” presentation. Instead, Pelley simply pointed the finger at the Syrian government, citing U.S. intelligence. Pelley said:

“The rockets were types used by the Syrian army and they were launched from land held by the dictatorship. U.S. intelligence believes the Syrian army used sarin in frustration after years of shelling and hunger failed to break the rebels.”

Pelley did note one anomaly to the conventional wisdom: Why would Assad have ordered a chemical attack outside Damascus after inviting in a team of UN inspectors to examine another site? Pelley then shrugs off that contradiction while offering no alternative scenario and leaving the clear impression that the attack was carried out by the Syrian government.

When I asked the Office of Director of National Intelligence about the “60 Minutes” segment, spokesperson Kathleen C. Butler responded with this e-mailed response:

“The intelligence community assess[es] with high confidence that the Syrian government carried out the chemical weapons attack against opposition elements in the Damascus suburbs on August 21, 2013. The intelligence community assesses that the scenario in which the opposition executed the attack on August 21 is highly unlikely.”

In a subsequent e-mail, she added that there was “full consensus on the assessment.”  [For more details on the sarin incident, see Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.”]

Clueless over Iraq

Pelley has built a highly successful CBS career by always parroting the official line of the U.S. government no matter how obviously false it is. For instance, in 2008, he conducted an interview with FBI interrogator George Piro who had questioned Iraq’s Saddam Hussein before his execution.

Pelley wondered why Hussein had kept pretending that he had weapons of mass destruction when a simple acknowledgement that they had been destroyed would have spared his country the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

The segment never mentioned the fact that Hussein’s government did disclose that it had eliminated its WMD, including a 12,000-page submission to the UN on Dec. 7, 2002, explaining how its WMD stockpiles had been destroyed. In fall 2002, Hussein’s government also allowed teams of UN inspectors into Iraq and gave them free rein to examine any site of their choosing.

Those inspections only ended in March 2003 when President George W. Bush decided to press ahead with war despite the UN Security Council’s refusal to authorize the invasion and its desire to give the UN inspectors time to finish their work.

But none of that reality was part of the faux history that Pelley delivered to the American public. He preferred the officially sanctioned U.S. account, as embraced by Bush in speech after speech, that Saddam Hussein “chose war” by defying the UN over the WMD issue and by misleading the world into believing that he still possessed these weapons.

In line with Bush’s made-up version of history, Pelley pressed Piro on the question of why Hussein was hiding the fact that Iraq no longer had WMD. Piro said Hussein explained to him that “most of the WMD had been destroyed by the UN inspectors in the ‘90s, and those that hadn’t been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq.”

“So,” Pelley asked, “why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?”

After Piro mentioned Hussein’s lingering fear of neighboring Iran, Pelley felt he was close to an answer to the mystery: “He believed that he couldn’t survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?”

But, still, Pelley puzzled over why Hussein’s continued in his miscalculation. Pelley asked:

“As the U.S. marched toward war and we began massing troops on his border, why didn’t he stop it then? And say, ‘Look, I have no weapons of mass destruction,’ I mean, how could he have wanted his country to be invaded?”

On Sunday, Pelley was reprising that role as the ingénue foreign correspondent trying to decipher the mysterious ways of the Orient.

Just as Pelley couldn’t figure why Hussein had “wanted his country to be invaded” — when no one at “60 Minutes” thought to mention that Hussein and his government had fully disclosed their lack of WMD to save their country from being invaded — Pelley couldn’t fully comprehend why the Assad regime would have launched a sarin gas attack with UN inspectors sitting in Damascus.

The possibility that the attack actually was a provocation by Al-Qaeda or Islamic State extremists — who have demonstrated their lack of compassion for innocents and who had a clear motive for getting the U.S. military to bomb Assad’s army — was something that Pelley couldn’t process. The calculation was too much for him even after last week’s disclosure that Syrian rebels had staged a 2013 kidnapping/rescue of NBC’s correspondent Richard Engel, whose abduction was falsely blamed on Assad’ allies.

Inviting a Massacre

Besides being an example of shallow reporting and shoddy journalism – using highly emotional scenes while failing to seriously investigate who was responsible – the “60 Minutes” episode could also be a prelude to a far worse human rights crime, which could follow the defeat of the Syrian army and a victory by Al-Qaeda or its spin-off, the Islamic State.

Right now, the only effective fighting force holding off that victory – and the very real possibility of a massacre of Christians, Alawites, Shiites and other religious minorities – is the Syrian army. Some of those Syrian Christians, now allied with Assad, are ethnic Armenians whose ancestors fled the Turkish genocide a century ago.

The recent high-profile comment by Pope Francis about the Armenian genocide can be understood in the context of the impending danger to the survivors’ descendants if the head-chopping Islamic State prevails in the Syrian civil war, the possibility that these Sunni extremists backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia might finish the job that the Ottoman Empire began a century ago.

Yet, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the American neocons are still set on the overthrow of the Assad government and continue to pretend that Obama could have averted the Syrian crisis if he had only bombed or invaded Syria several years ago.

The Washington Post’s neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt recited that theme in an op-ed on Monday that made a major point out of the Assad government’s alleged use of something called “barrel bombs” — as if some crude explosive device is somehow less humane than the more sophisticated weapons that were used to slaughter countless innocents by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, Israel in Gaza and Lebanon and now Saudi Arabia in Yemen.

“Obama could have destroyed Assad’s helicopters or given the resistance the weapons to do so,” Hiatt said, arguing the neocon assertion that to have intervened earlier would have somehow prevented the rise of Al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front and the Islamic State. But that is another simplistic argument since there were terrorist elements in the Syrian civil war from the beginning and many of the so-called “moderates” who were trained and armed by the United States have since joined forces with the extremists. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syrian Rebels Embrace Al-Qaeda.”]

The key question for Syria’s future is how can a realistic political settlement be reached between Assad’s government and whatever reasonable opposition remains. But such a complex and difficult solution is not advanced by irresponsible journalism at CBS and the Washington Post.

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). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.

Dr. Tim Mousseau, USC biologist: “The declines have been really dramatic… now we see this really striking drop-off in numbers of birds as well as numbers of species of birds. So both the biodiversity and the abundance are showing dramatic impacts in these areas with higher radiation levels, even as the levels are declining.”University of South Carolina, Apr 15, 2015 (emphasis added): Dwindling bird populations in Fukushima… as several recent papers from University of South Carolina biologist Tim Mousseau and colleagues show, the avian situation there is just getting worse… They recently published a paper in the Journal of Ornithology showing results from the first three years…Many populations were found to have diminished in number as a result of the accident, with several species suffering dramatic declines… What might be most disheartening to the researchers involved, and bird-lovers in general, is how the situation is progressing in Fukushima. Despite the decline in background radiation in the area over these past four years, the deleterious effects of the accident on birds are actually increasing.

CBS News, Apr 16, 2015: Near site of Fukushima disaster, birds still in peril… birds are becoming a rarity around the damaged nuclear site… “There are dramatic reductions in the number of birds”… Mousseau told CBS News. “In terms of barn swallows in Fukushima, there had been hundreds if not thousands in many of these towns where we were working. Now we are seeing a few dozen of them left. It’s just an enormous decline.”… Around Fukushima, Mousseau predicts the worst may not be over… “So now we see this really striking drop-off in numbers of birds as well as numbers of species of birds. So both the biodiversity and the abundance are showing dramatic impacts in these areas with higher radiation levels, even as the levels are declining.” Mousseau said the reason comes down to the long-term impact of the radiation. “It takes multiple generations for the effects of mutations to be expressed…”

Journal of Ornithology, A. Møller, I. Nishiumi and T. Mousseau, March 2015: Cumulative effects of radioactivity from Fukushima on the abundance and biodiversity of birds… overall abundance and  diversity of species on average decreased with increasing levels of background radiation… the relationship became more strongly negative across years… Although there has been great public interest concerning the ecological, genetic and potential health consequences of the Fukushima radiological disaster, basic research to date has been surprisingly limited… Recent seminal studies of butterflies exposed to radioactive contaminants associated with the Fukushima disaster found strong evidence for increased mutation rates, developmental abnormalities and population effects as a direct consequence of exposure to radionuclides… Murase et al. (2015) made an equally compelling case for radiation having a negative impact on reproductive performance in the decline of Japanese goshawks.

Environmental Indicators (Journal), A. Møller and T. Mousseau, 2015: Many species occur both at Chernobyl and Fukushima, allowing a test of similarity in the effect of radiation on abundance….among the 14 species occurring at both sites [the] slope of the relationship between abundance and radiation for the 14 common species was… much stronger at Fukushima… [Since 2011] the effects of radiation on abundance became much more severe.

Watch the researchers bird counting in Fukushima at a “very hot and quiet site”

The annual spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank held in Washington over the weekend comprised the treasurers and central bankers, together with financial experts and analysts, from all the major capitalist economies. However not a single proposal was advanced from this high-level meeting to alleviate, let alone resolve, the mounting problems besetting global capitalism.

The reason is not hard to find. The meetings were dominated by the ongoing disintegration of the very structures of the post-war economic order of which the IMF and the World Bank have constituted two major pillars.

While it was not officially on the agenda, the announcement by China that it had secured the agreement of 57 countries to become founding members of its proposed Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was a hot topic of discussion in the backrooms and corridors, especially at the World Bank.

The IMF and World Bank have been the two most prominent institutions reflecting the economic primacy of the US in the post-war world. But the establishment of the AIIB, and the decision of major economic powers, including Britain, France and Germany, to sign up is an expression of major shifts in the world economy and the position of the US within it.

A New York Times article headlined “At Global Economic Gathering, US Primacy is Seen as Ebbing,” published on the eve of the meetings, captured some of the mood. In an interview with the NYT, Arvind Subramanian, the chief economic advisor to the Indian government, said the US was almost handing over legitimacy to the rising powers. “People can’t be too public about these things, but I would argue this is the single most important issue of these spring meetings.”

The article went on to cite comments made by former treasury secretary and a top adviser in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, Lawrence Summers, that the inability of Washington to prevent key allies from joining the AIIB signalled “the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.”

US treasury secretary Jack Lew disputed the notion that there was any decline in the American position, saying there was a lot of “noise in Washington” and this occasion was no exception “but the United States’ voice is heard quite clearly in gatherings like this.”

It may well be, but talk is cheap. The fact remains that the US is unable to offer any economic measures to boost the global economy in the way that it once could. This is under conditions where, as the main document prepared for the meeting, the IMF’s World Economic Outlook (WEO) drew out, lower growth, and even stagnation, is becoming the “new normal.” The WEO was accompanied by the IMF’s Global Financial Stability report, which showed that far from lessening, financial risks are on the increase.

Those risks are certain to be increased by another major issue that dominated unofficial discussion—the looming prospect that Greece may default on its loans, possibly as early as the middle of next month.

The official mantra within the euro zone is that the financial risks posed by a Greek exit are not as severe as they were in 2012. This is largely because the outcome of the austerity measures imposed under the so-called troika has been to take Greek debt off the hands of the private banks and transfer it to the European Central Bank and the IMF.

In the lead up to the meeting and during its sessions, the IMF and European financial authorities made clear there would be no accession to calls by the Greek government for some relief. In fact, the Financial Times has reported that in private and off-the-record discussions some European government representatives were in favour of pushing Greece out of the euro zone.

The hard line against Greece was laid down by IMF managing director Christine Lagarde. Adopting the tone of a school ma’am lecturing an errant student, she said: “We have been able to express and explain the policy of the IMF in terms of payments delays and give the precedents and history of that to Mr Vourafakis [the Greek finance minister].”

Speaking at a press conference during the Washington talks, ECB president Marion Draghi said the euro zone was much better equipped than it had been in the past to deal with a Greek crisis and sought to downplay the risks of financial contagion.

However, he added: “We are certainly entering into uncharted waters if the crisis were to precipitate, and it is very premature to make any speculation about it.”

Summing up the American position, Lew warned that a crisis in Greece would place a cloud of uncertainty over the European and global economies. “I do not think anyone can predict how markets will respond to dramatic changes in circumstances,” he said. “We have been clear in our conversation with all parties there is an urgent need to come together around a comprehensive approach.”

While the US views the prospect of a European crisis with alarm because of its impact on the American economy it is not able to significantly intervene. That is a measure of its economic decline. Gone are the days when a crisis would see the US convening an international economic summit to hammer out measures to overcome it.

In fact there was considerable discussion over whether US financial policy may contribute to financial instability, when the Federal Reserve begins to increase official interest rates. In 2013, indications that the Fed was moving to wind back its program of asset purchases—quantitative easing—brought a sharp movement of funds out of emerging markets in what was dubbed a “taper tantrum.”

In the lead up to last weekend’s meeting, the director of the IMF’s monetary and capital markets department, José Viñals, warned that there could be a “super taper tantrum” as the Fed moved closer to lifting official rates from their present near-zero level.

“This is going to take place in uncharted territory,” he said. “Markets could be increasingly susceptible to episodes in which liquidity suddenly vanishes and volatility spikes.”

However, despite the warnings of these dangers, nothing emerged from the IMF-World Bank meeting to suggest that financial authorities have any measures to meet them.

The horrific death toll of African and Middle Eastern refugees and migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe is a damning indictment of all the major imperialist powers, and most particularly the United States.

The American president, Barack Obama, and his former secretary of state, Hillary “We came, we saw, he died” Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, have blood up to their elbows. They set the present catastrophe in motion through brutal wars for regime change waged under the hypocritical and discredited banner of “human rights.”

At least three more boats packed with refugees from North Africa and the Middle East were reported to be in distress in the Mediterranean on Monday, with a minimum of 23 more people said to have drowned.

This adds to the many hundreds of people, perhaps 1,400, who have lost their lives over the past week in a desperate bid to escape military violence by the US and its European allies, civil wars stoked by Washington and the European Union, and pervasive poverty exacerbated by the machinations of imperialism in the region.

On Monday, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said distress calls had been received from an inflatable life raft carrying 100 to 150 migrants and a second boat with some 300 people aboard. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said a caller reported that 20 people died when one of the vessels sank in international waters.

In a separate incident, at least three migrants, including a child, died when a boat, apparently coming from Turkey, ran aground off the Greek island of Rhodes. Video footage showed the wooden boat, with people crowded on the deck, heaving in the Aegean Sea just off the island. Eyewitnesses told the local radio station that there were many Syrians, but also people from Eritrea and Somalia.

The latest drownings follow the deaths of close to 950 people on Sunday in the sinking of a refugee boat off of Libya. According to the Italian Coast Guard, the completely overloaded boat capsized about 130 miles off the Libyan coast.

“We were 950 people on board, including 40 to 50 children and 200 women,” a survivor from Bangladesh told the Italian news agency ANSA. Many people were trapped in the hold of the ship and drowned under horrible circumstances. “The smugglers had closed the doors and stopped them leaving,” said the man.

Over 500 more people died the previous week in two separate sinkings of boats attempting to reach Europe across the Mediterranean.

Since the beginning of the year, at least 1,700 people attempting to immigrate to Europe have died in transit, 50 times the number for the same period last year. According to the IOM, the number of people dying in the attempt to reach the shores of Europe rose by more than 500 percent between 2011 and 2014.

Of course, 2011 was the year that the US and its NATO allies, principally France and Britain, launched their war for regime change in Libya, under the fabricated pretext that they were intervening to prevent a massacre by the government of Muammar Gaddafi in the eastern city of Benghazi.

This “humanitarian” mission initiated a six-month US-NATO bombing campaign that killed at least 10 times the number who died in the scattered fighting between government troops and armed rebels that had preceded it. This imperialist intervention, which utilized Islamist militias with ties to Al Qaeda as its proxy ground forces, left Libya descending rapidly into chaos and destruction.

Nearly two million Libyan refugees—more than a quarter of the population—have been forced to flee to Tunisia to escape an unending civil war between rival Islamist militias and two competing governments, one based in Tripoli and the other in the eastern city of Tobruk. According to the web site Libya Body Count, some 3,500 people have been killed just since the beginning of 2014—three years after the US-NATO intervention.

The escalating barbarism in Libya has included mass executions. The latest, made public in a video released Sunday by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), was of some 30 Ethiopian migrants. This follows by less than two months the similar mass beheadings of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians at the hands of ISIS, which has seized Libya’s eastern port city of Derna as well as parts of the city of Sirte.

There were no such mass sectarian murders in Libya before the US-NATO war for regime change, nor for that matter did Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias exist as any more than a marginal force. These elements were promoted, armed and backed by massive airpower after the major imperialist powers decided to topple and murder Gaddafi and carry out a new rape of Libya.

The disastrous consequences of this predatory neocolonial intervention are now undeniable. It is only one in a growing number of imperialist wars and interventions in the oil-rich Middle East and North Africa that have destroyed entire societies and turned millions into refugees. These include the wars in Iraq, Syria and now Yemen, as well as interventions by the imperialist powers or their regional proxies in Mali, Somalia and Sudan.

According to Amnesty International, the escalating conflicts in Africa and the Middle East have “led to the largest refugee disaster since the Second World War.” Amnesty estimates that 57 million people have been forced to flee worldwide in the last year, 6 million more than in 2012.

The American press, led by the New York Times, writes of refugees fleeing poverty and violence in the Middle East and North Africa without so much as mentioning the actions of the United States and its European allies that have caused the humanitarian catastrophe. What is unfolding in the Mediterranean is not a tragedy; it is an imperialist war crime.

The inability — or unwillingness — of both the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority and the Hamas-led administration in Gaza to provide a relatively acceptable example of good governance based on giving ordinary people a say in decisions that affect them means that serious soul-searching is required among those holding leadership positions in Palestine.

The alternative to the Fatah-Hamas rift is not, as both parties argue, new elections for the PA’s presidency and the Palestinian Legislative Council, within the framework of the disastrous Oslo accords.

Rather, it is a form of mass democracy, in which all Palestinian refugees (living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, inside present-day Israel and in the diaspora) can participate by taking common action for broader goals.

Israel must be clearly told that the single demand of Palestinians is for a true, multi-party democracy throughout historic Palestine based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Proposals made by the main Palestinian parties until now have not, unfortunately, been convincing to those living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — one third of the Palestinian people.

Racist solution

The crisis in Yarmouk, the Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, has exposed the PLO and other organizations that claim to speak on behalf of Palestinians as inefficient, incompetent and powerless and — most importantly — unable to come up with a unifying political vision around which the entire Palestinian people can rally.

Such a vision would not coexist with Oslo and its logic of the so-called “two-state solution.” That logic has led to a Jewish state on 78 percent of historic Palestine, Jewish-only settlements on more than 60 per cent of the West Bank and a concentration camp in the Gaza Strip.

This racist solution — camouflaged as the minimum that “both parties” could agree to, regardless of the rights of more than six million refugees living in the diaspora and 1.7 million Palestinians living as third class citizens in Israel — has posed a serious challenge to the so-called Palestinian national program.

This solution has created a bantustan in Palestine — one that the chiefs of the infamous South African “independent homelands” with their Pretoria-based white apartheid masters would have found “reasonable and fair” since it guarantees the ethnonational identities of the parties involved.

What has been totally overlooked is the nature of Israel as a settler-colonial entity that has, like apartheid South Africa, colonized the land and obliterated the basic rights of the indigenous population. But in addition to its institutionalized apartheid policies, Israel has gone on to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, with the complicity of hypocritical Western governments and the UN.

Have Palestinians been abandoned?

Have Palestinians lost hope? Has their leadership abandoned them since 1993, with the signing of the Oslo accords?

Do Yarmouk refugees still think that the PLO is their “sole, legitimate representative?”

Are Palestinians in Gaza, after three massive Israeli attacks in six years, and an ongoing medieval siege, being called on to succumb to Israel and kiss the hands of the so-called international community and its aid organizations which have failed to rebuild a single home of the thousands that were destroyed by Israel seven months ago?

Are Palestinians supposed to go on negotiating with the incoming fascist government of Israel headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, knowing very well that the next Israeli massacre is going to be far worse than the previous ones?

It is time for the Palestinian liberation struggle to adopt tactics that have been successful against racist, settler-colonial ideologies in the American South and South Africa. Without serious intervention from freedom-loving nations, civil society, conscientious people, and internal mass mobilization in South Africa, Nelson Mandela would have died in jail and South Africa would probably still be an apartheid state.

Making Israel helpless

Hence, the only route we, in Palestine, can see to end Zionist atrocities committed against unarmed civilians is in the growing movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

Israel may have one of the world’s strongest armies and be the largest recipient of US military aid, yet it will find itself helpless against the will of ordinary people who have decided to boycott its products and its racist institutions.

No government can force its citizens to buy Israeli goods or its artists to perform in Tel Aviv, the Middle East’s equivalent to Sun City during South Africa’s apartheid era. The Palestinian-led BDS movement, launched in 2005, has continued to grow and has gained unstoppable momentum around the world.

Ordinary Palestinians have realized that a colonized mind cannot and will not liberate Palestine; a decolonization of the Palestinian mind must precede the decolonization of the land.

And that is precisely why the Oslo accords have failed Palestinians. They have kept Palestinian leaders in both the Fatah and Hamas camps trapped behind the façade of false “independence,” “dialogue,” and “coexistence” based on Palestinian subordination to the white, Ashkenazi master.

It is time for the current Fatah and Hamas leaderships to catch up with the people of Palestine who have roundly rejected the Oslo accords and remained steadfast in their determination to regain their lost land. Those who wish to lead Palestinians need to embody this determination and to represent it as the inspiring vision that it is.

It is not a vision of weakness or submission at the negotiating table, but rather an expression of the will of a people who will not rest until they get back what is rightfully theirs.

It is an expression of true democracy.

Haidar Eid is an independent political commentator from the Gaza Strip, Palestine.

Migrant workers in Qatar. Photo courtesy Sherpa

Sherpa, a French NGO, has asked courts to investigate Vinci, a French construction company, for violation of migrant workers rights in Qatar. QDVC, a Vinci subsidiary, has €2.2 billion ($2.3 billion) in infrastructure contracts for the 2022 World Cup soccer tournament including a new subway and an orbital highway.

QDVC is partially owned by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), the government sovereign wealth fund, which in turn owns a block of Vinci’s shares. Some 9,000 workers are employed by the company in Qatar.

The complaint was filed with the public prosecutor of Nanterre, a Parisian suburb, against Vinci’s Construction Grand Projets division. Laetitia Liebert, managing director of Sherpa, says that the organization has obtained signed complaints from as many as 15 workers.

The organization says that the migrants were forced to work an average of 66 hours a week in stifling heat under dangerous conditions. Laborers were housed eight to a room and frequently had their passports taken away so that they could not escape.

“It is modern slavery,” Sandra Cossart, a Sherpa lawyer, told the Associated Press. “Modern slavery does not consist of shackling and whipping workers. It is subtler: the penal code defines a vulnerable population, under the threat of an employer and extreme economical dependency, as having no choice but to accept the deplorable working conditions and therefore renew its contract,” the organization said in an official statement.

Such working conditions are relatively commonplace in the Middle East where migrants make up the majority of the working population – beginning from unskilled jobs like janitorial and food service to upper level management positions. Workers from south and south east Asia often work for a pittance in order to send money home to support their families. Qatar has some of the highest numbers – 94 percent of employees are migrants.

Qatar has recently come under the spotlight because of the frenetic pace of work on vast new construction projects that have been commissioned for the prestigious World Cup soccer tournament in seven years time. Investigations by the Guardian newspaper and Amnesty International have both documented abuses by workers.

The government has had a hard time denying these claims – a report by DLA Piper, an Anglo-American law firm, on behalf of the Qatari government, estimated that between two and three worker die every day on the job in Qatar because of the pace of the summer work at temperatures that soar above 50 Celsius (122 F).

Vinci categorically denies the allegations. “We have repeatedly welcomed unions, international NGOs and journalists onto our building sites,” the company said in a press statement. “They have ascertained that we do more than merely comply with local labour law and respect fundamental rights. All QDVC employees are free to retrieve their passports at any time, and we strictly observe working hours and rest time.”

But if Vinci is found guilty by French courts, Sherpa will have grounds for a lawsuit.

“Under European law, European firms can be sued for serious labor violations in their supply chain abroad,” Nicholas McGeehan of Human Rights Watch told the Associated Press. “Where Qatar and the other Gulf states are concerned, it’s probably more a question of when a European construction firm gets sued rather than if.”

Vinci has announced that it will counter-sue Sherpa for libel but the NGO is unbowed,

“We will not cave in easily to pressure,” Sherpa wrote in a press statement. “Since filing our complaint, many employees of Vinci’s subcontractors who complained about Vinci’s practices have reached out to us expressing their support. One of these employees reported that s/he was also threatened with a defamation suit.”

Meanwhile, almost 5,000 people have signed a petition to urge Christiane Taubira-Delannon, the French minister of justice, to open an investigation into Vinci.

by Countercurrents.org

At least 3.4 million people have been physically or economically displaced by World Bank-backed projects between 2004 and 2013, estimates an investigative report. The true figure is likely higher, because the bank often fails to count or undercounts the number of people affected by its projects.

Nearly all of the 3.4 million displaced people live in Africa or one of three Asian countries: Vietnam, China and India, said the report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), The Huffington Post and more than 20 news organizations. The ICIJ analyzed World Bank records.

For more than three decades, the World Bank has maintained a set of “safeguard” policies that it claims have brought about a more humane and democratic system of economic development. It is claimed that governments that borrow money from the bank can’t force people from their homes without warning. Families evicted to make way for dams, power plants or other big projects must be resettled and their livelihoods restored.

However, the investigation found:

# The World Bank-funded projects forced the displaced people from their homes, taking their land or damaging their livelihoods.

# The World Bank has regularly failed to live up to its own policies for protecting people harmed by projects it finances.

# The World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., have financed governments and companies accused of human rights violations such as rape, murder and torture. In some cases the lenders have continued to bankroll these borrowers after evidence of abuses emerged.

# Ethiopian authorities diverted millions of dollars from a World Bank-supported project to fund a violent campaign of mass evictions.

# From 2009 to 2013, World Bank Group lenders pumped $50 billion into projects graded the highest risk for “irreversible or unprecedented” social or environmental impacts — more than twice as much as the previous five-year span.

More than 50 journalists from 21 countries spent nearly a year documenting the bank’s failure to protect people moved aside in the name of progress. Thousands of World Bank records were analyzed, hundreds of people were interviewed and report were collected from the ground in Albania, Brazil, Ethiopia, Honduras, Ghana, Guatemala, India, Kenya, Kosovo, Nigeria, Peru, Serbia, South Sudan and Uganda.

In these countries and others, the investigation found, the bank’s lapses have hurt slum dwellers, hardscrabble farmers, impoverished fisherfolk, forest dwellers and indigenous groups — leaving them to fight for their homes, their land and their ways of life, sometimes in the face of intimidation and violence.

The report said:

The bank’s commitment is to “do no harm” to people or the environment.

But the World Bank, the globe’s most prestigious development lender, has broken its promise.

Over the past decade, the bank has regularly failed to enforce its rules, with devastating consequences for some of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet.

The investigation found:

The World Bank and IFC have also been boosting support for mega-projects, such as oil pipelines and dams that the lenders acknowledge are most likely to cause “irreversible” social or environmental harm.

The report said:

The World Bank often neglects to properly review projects ahead of time to make sure communities are protected, and frequently has no idea what happens to people after they are removed. In many cases, it has continued to do business with governments that have abused their citizens, sending a signal that borrowers have little to fear if they violate the bank’s rules, according to current and former bank employees.

“There was often no intent on the part of the governments to comply — and there was often no intent on the part of the bank’s management to enforce,” said Navin Rai, a former World Bank official who oversaw the bank’s protections for indigenous peoples from 2000 to 2012. “That was how the game was played.”

In March, after ICIJ and HuffPost informed World Bank officials that the news outlets had found “systemic gaps” in the institution’s protections for displaced families, the bank acknowledged that its oversight has been poor, and promised reforms.

“We took a hard look at ourselves on resettlement and what we found caused me deep concern,” Jim Yong Kim, the World Bank’s president, said in a statement.

Between 2004 and 2013, the World Bank and its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corp., committed to lend $455 billion to bankroll nearly 7,200 projects in developing countries.

Over the same span, people affected by World Bank and IFC investments lodged dozens of complaints with the lenders’ internal review panels, alleging the lenders and their borrowers failed to live up to World Bank and IFC safeguard rules.

Studies show that forced relocations can rip apart kinship networks and increase risks of illness and disease. Resettled populations are more likely to suffer unemployment and hunger, and mortality rates are higher. Cases involving evictions have drawn the most attention, but the most common hardships suffered by people living in the path of World Bank projects involve lost or diminished income.

Following are few cases:

Nigeria

In Lagos, Nigeria, the World Bank’s ombudsman, the Inspection Panel, said bank management “fell short of protecting the poor and vulnerable communities against forceful evictions.” Bank officials should have paid better attention to what was going on in Badia East, the panel said, given Lagos authorities’ long history of bulldozing slums and forcing people from their homes. One year after the evictions, the bank loaned Lagos authorities $200 million to support the state government’s budget.

The World Bank said it was “not a party to the demolition” and that it advised the Lagos government to negotiate with displaced people, leading to compensation for most of those who said they’d been harmed.

India

On India’s northwest coast, members of a historically oppressed Muslim community claim that heated water spewing from a coal-fueled power plant has depleted fish and lobster stocks in the once-fertile gulf where they make their living. The IFC loaned Tata Power, one of India’s largest companies, $450 million to help build the plant.

In India, the IFC’s internal ombudsman found that the lender had breached its policies by not doing enough to protect the large fishing community living in the shadow of the coal power plant it financed on the Gulf of Kutch. With Kim’s approval, IFC’s management rejected many of the ombudsman’s findings and defended the actions of its corporate client.

Albania

In 2007, residents of Jale, a tiny Albanian beach hamlet on the Ionian Sea, found themselves in the path of a coastal cleanup effort backed by a $17.5 million loan from the World Bank. More than a dozen poor families lived in Jale, many in homes with add-ons and extra floors they rented to vacationers.

Albanian authorities had other plans for the seaside. They saw Jale as an ideal spot for a high-end resort to lure tourists to the country. They decided to use the coastal restoration project — which was managed by the son-in-law of Sali Berisha, Albania’s prime minister at the time — as a vehicle for turning the plan into a reality.

Before dawn one April morning, dozens of police officers streamed into the beach community, heading for structures previously identified in photos taken during aerial surveys paid for by the World Bank. The police rousted residents from their beds and forced them from their homes. Demolition crews leveled entire houses or tore down additions that the government said had been put up without proper permits.

Sanie Halilaj cried as work crews pulled down half of the house she had shared with her husband for more than half a century.

“When you lose a loved one, someone consoles you,” the 74-year-old said in a recent interview. “But when you lose your home, there is no consolation.”

In Jale, most residents still haven’t received payment from the government for what they lost, even though the World Bank has covered their legal costs. At the bank, oversight remains weak.

Brazil

In a drought-haunted region of Brazil, farm families pushed aside by another World Bank-backed dam say that their lives haven’t been improved.

Thirty-five families live in a tiny, government-built relocation village called Gameleira, named after the dam and reservoir that forced them to leave their homes along the Mundaú River.

In their old homes, they could take water from wells and the river itself, but the relocation village has no fresh water source. A World Bank report acknowledged a delay in getting water access for the new village, but said the village’s water issues had been solved by late 2012.

The villagers say that’s not true. They are still waiting, four years after they were forced to relocate, for local authorities to keep their promise to build a small pipeline to draw water from the new reservoir to the relocation village. Meanwhile, water from the reservoir is being piped to urban areas.

A well in the village produces salty water and, even with desalination equipment, each family is limited to 36 liters of water a day. Families supplement their supply by buying from commercial vendors, sometimes spending as much as a third of their modest incomes.

These purchases provide them enough water to irrigate small gardens of yuca, beans and corn. If they want to plant cash crops — such as cashews — they have to wait for rain, which hardly ever comes.

“We feel that we are suffering so that people from the city can have water,” 39-year-old Francisco Venílson dos Santos, a farmer and father of four boys and two girls, said. “They abandoned us here.”

In a written statement, the World Bank said it is satisfied the village was provided an adequate supply of water “both in terms of quantity and quality.”

Ethiopia

The mass evictions of the devoutly Christian Anuak people from Ethiopia were enabled by money from the World Bank, former officials say.

In Ethiopia, the World Bank’s Inspection Panel found the bank had violated its own rules by failing to acknowledge an “operational link” between a bank-funded health and education initiative and a mass relocation campaign carried out by the Ethiopian government. In 2011, soldiers carrying out the evictions targeted some villagers for beatings and rapes, killing at least seven.

Peru

Victor Mendoza, the president of a farming co-op near the sprawling Yanacocha gold mine in northern Peru, with his 10-year-old son. The mine, built two decades ago with the financial backing of the International Finance Corp., the private-lending arm of the World Bank, is deeply unpopular in this region. Farmers like Mendoza claim it is polluting their water supply and threatening the health of their families and livestock. Ben Hallman / The Huffington Post

Promise to do “better”

“We must and will do better,” said David Theis, a World Bank spokesman, in response to the reporting team’s questions.

Yet even as it promised reforms to its procedures, the bank has proposed sweeping changes to the policies that underlie them. The bank is now in the middle of a rewrite of its safeguards policy that will set its course for decades to come.

Some current and former World Bank officials warn that the proposed revisions will further undermine the bank’s commitment to protecting the people it was created to serve. The latest draft of the new policy, released in July 2014, would give governments more room to sidestep the bank’s standards and make decisions about whether local populations need protecting, they say.

“I am saddened to see now that pioneering policy achievements of the bank are being dismantled and downgraded,” said Michael Cernea, a former high-ranking bank official who oversaw the bank resettlement protections for nearly two decades. “The poorest and most powerless will pay the price.”

Many bank managers, insiders say, define success by the number of deals they fund. They often push back against requirements that add complications and costs.

Daniel Gross, an anthropologist who worked for the bank for two decades as a consultant and staff member, said in-house safeguards watchdogs have “a place at the table” in debates over how much the bank is required to do to protect people. But amid the push to get projects done, they’re frequently ignored and pressed to “play ball and get along,” he said.

In an internal survey conducted last year by bank auditors, 77 percent of employees responsible for enforcing the institution’s safeguards said they think that management “does not value” their work. The bank released the survey in March, at the same time that it admitted to poor oversight of its resettlement policy.

“Safeguards are irrelevant for managers,” said one staffer who was surveyed for the report.

A 2014 internal World Bank review found that in 60 percent of sampled cases, bank staffers failed to document what happened to people after they were forced from their land or homes.

Seventy percent of the cases sampled in the 2014 report lacked required information about whether anyone had complained and whether complaints were resolved, indicating the bank’s mechanisms for dealing with grievances were “box-checking” exercises that “existed on paper but not in practice,” the in-house reviewers wrote.

These “sizeable gaps in information” indicate “significant potential failures in the bank’s system for dealing with resettlement,” the report said. “The inability to confirm that resettlement has been satisfactorily completed poses a reputational risk for the World Bank.”

Since 2004, World Bank estimates indicate that at least a dozen bank-supported projects physically or economically displaced more than 50,000 people each.

Kim in the system

In July 2012, an unconventional leader took over as the World Bank’s new president. Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American physician known for his work fighting AIDS in Africa, became the first World Bank president whose background wasn’t in finance or politics.

Two decades before, Kim had joined protests in Washington, D.C., calling for the World Bank to be shut down altogether for valuing indicators like economic growth over assistance to poor people.

Human rights advocates and bank staffers working on safeguards hoped that Kim’s appointment would signal a shift toward greater protections for people affected by World Bank projects.

In March, Kim said he was concerned about “major problems” in the bank’s oversight of its resettlement policies. He announced an action plan calling for greater independence for the bank’s safeguards watchdogs and a 15 percent funding boost for safeguards enforcement.

But while Kim and other bank officials have acknowledged general shortcomings, they have consistently denied that the bank shares blame for violent or wrongful evictions carried out by its borrowers.

Kim said that while “we could have done more” to help the evicted communities, the bank was ultimately not at fault.

United Nations human rights officials have written World Bank President Kim to say they’re concerned that the growing ability of borrowers to access other financing has spurred the bank to join a “race to the bottom” and push its standards for protecting people even lower.

In both Ethiopia and India, the World Bank Group declined to direct its clients to fully compensate the affected communities.

In response to complaints about the Badia East evictions in Nigeria, the World Bank embraced a shortcut that fell short of its promise that people affected by projects will be fully compensated for their losses.

Internal emails obtained by ICIJ indicate that by early 2014, the Inspection Panel’s chair, Eimi Watanabe, was already pushing to make sure that the panel would not investigate the World Bank’s role in the case.

“Pl[ease] issue notice soonest before it unravels,” Watanabe wrote on Feb. 6, 2014.

Watanabe’s directive didn’t immediately kill the investigation, but over the following months the panel made it clear that it didn’t want to dig deeper into the World Bank’s actions.

Watanabe did not respond to ICIJ’s questions about the Lagos case.

Copyright Countercurrents.org 2015

“A hegemon is supposed to solve international crises, not cause them.” – Christopher Layne, The American Conservative, May 1, 2010

Nothing upsets those drunk on imperialist virtue than the fact it might end.  Such romances with power do have a use-by-date, going off like old fruit. Eventually, the crippling contradictions will win through in the end. The days of the US empire are numbered – but then again, they always were.

The recent round of spring meetings at the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank flutter with suggestions that American economic power is being shaded, be it by the republic’s own dysfunction, or the emergence of other powers like China.  “People can’t be too public about these things,” argues Arvind Subramanian, chief economic advisor to the Indian government, “but I would argue this is the single most important issue at these spring meetings.”[1]

This would come as a surprise for some.  The various theorists on international theory, many slumming at The Weekly Standard, form the praetorian guard of arm chair defenders of American virtue and power.  Max Boot, writing a piece for the magazine in October 2001, typified this by arguing that the attacks of the previous month were “a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.”[2]

The problem is Barack Obama.  They see the Obama administration as a regime in retreat, which is the theme of Bret Stephens near fictional work.  Indeed, America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming World Disorder already gives its readers two issues to stumble over: that there is an “isolationism” to speak of, and that disorder would be a genuine problem.

The first issue.  For Stephens, the Obama retreat is reflected by the choice made by the president when he “came to office determined to scale down America’s global commitments for the sake of what he likes to call ‘nation building at home’.”[3]  Stephens assiduously ignores the vast, expansive and dangerous robotic reach of American power, typified by remote drone strikes, the backing of proxy regimes and such negotiating endeavours as the Trans-Pacific Partnership.  If only the isolationism argument was true.

President Warren Harding, in 1921, is said to have placed the US on the pathway to isolationism with his anti-League of Nations stance, and the winding down of the post-war military machine.  “Vast expenditure without proper consideration for results,” he warned, “is the inevitable fruit of war.”  Wars, rather than being the efficient earners for a state, were wasteful enterprises. Avoid those security alliances that become, more often than not, stifling and awkward embraces.

Therein was born the myth of American insularity, one of considered geopolitical withdrawal.  Such an assessment would ignore continued US involvement in the international financial system – as indeed, the biggest creditor economy – and its engagement in various international organisations, including, to a limited degree, the League itself.  This was Washington without the fangs.

But Stephens, like his colleagues of that most myopic brand of history – the idea of empire – can see no reason for America to retreat from anything.  Take, for instance, the adventurism in the Middle East.  “There was no strategic or even political requirement to get out of Iraq once we had succeeded in pacifying the country.”

The efforts of such pacification continue to linger in their destructive toll, though armchair militarists get goggle-eyed when it comes to the empirical world.  Conservative columnist George Will was left wondering what the missing factor was in the state building process and came to a simple, if impossible conclusion.  “Iraq is just three people away from democratic success.  Unfortunately, the three are George Washington, James Madison, and John Marshall.”

Then comes the issue of disorder, which takes the contractarian idea that, to achieve order in the international system, deals must be made with hegemons, whether you want to or not.   Stability is something gained by bedding the brute across the ocean, and smaller states need to cosy up to bigger ones with tarted up appeal.

This system of perceived order was deemed a matter of virtue rather than good, old fashioned avarice on the part of the great power.  “By dampening great-power competition and giving Washington the capacity to shape regional balances of power,” argues Stephen M. Walt, “primacy contributed to a more tranquil international environment.”[4]  Tranquillity, however, remains a matter of degree.

Empires do check into the old home, get on the non-solids and eventually die from natural causes.  Yet Stephens is cautious to suggest that, while America is in retreat, it “is not in decline.”  This is in stark contrast to others, like Christopher Lane of the George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University, who sees the US as “increasingly unable to play the hegemon’s assigned role.”

In any case, a power dedicated to causing more mayhem than policing stability doesn’t deserve any titles in the hegemonic department.  The otherwise war loving David Frum had to concede after Obama pushed the US into another conflict in 2011 that, “Three wars is a lot, even for the United States.”  In Layne’s final summation, “The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar.”[5]

When the curtains will be finally drawn on the act that is American empire is not for anybody to say, though the clock ticks with its usual grinding music.  The nature of its power will continue to change, with other powers emerging from the chrysalis.  The question will be whether such a process takes place slowly, or whether the empire ages disgracefully.

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

Originally published at WhoWhatWhy

The 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s murder is one more reminder from the past of a distinctive feature of the American system. This is that some American presidents reach office by assassination, not by election. More importantly, when this happens, a lot of facts are usually going to be left at best unexplained, and often covered up.

Few Americans know, for example, that in 1991 the body of President Zachary Taylor, who died in 1850 after a year in office, was exhumed and found to contain suspicious amounts of arsenic. But the New York Times announced that further analysis showed the amounts of arsenic were no more than what is normally found in the body, confirming that Taylor died a natural death.

Same Junk Science used in JFK Assassination

Wikipedia claims that this is proven by Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, citing an article on the Lab website that is forbidden to the public. Wikipedia does not mention that NAA analysis on the same Isotope Reactor was used four decades ago to analyze the bullets killing John F. Kennedy. (The use of NAA analysis of lead in bullets, once used to bolster the “single bullet theory” of Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt, has since been decisively discredited by other U.S. Government experts at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. In September 2005 the FBI announced that it would no longer rely in criminal cases on the inaccurate evidence produced by comparative bullet lead analysis.)

Even more mysteries surround the assistance provided Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. In a recent article, the Washington Post described Booth as “embittered,” the term used by Psychology Today to “analyze” Lee Harvey Oswald. Other more scholarly studies have argued that Booth was originally plotting not the murder but the abduction of Lincoln, Vice-President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward. This was part of a coherent strategy to throw the determination of the next president into the hands of the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Roger Taney had already shown in the Dred Scott case that he was pro-slavery and sympathetic to the South.

Speculation of a cover-up about Booth has abounded since the time that four of his associates in the crime were swiftly hanged. A benign explanation for the cover-up would be the desire to avoid dealing with the possibility that Booth had been guided or at least assisted in his plotting by the Confederate Secret Service. This was suspected almost immediately when a Vigenère Cipher table (a code used by the South) was discovered among Booth’s effects. At that time a strong need to restore unity to a divided nation would have been an ample motive to present Booth, like Oswald a century later, as an embittered loner.

It is now pretty well established, by historian Thomas Goodrich and others, that Booth had traveled widely to Canada and elsewhere as a spy and courier for the Confederate Secret Service. Other historians have concluded, in the words of David Herbert Donald, that “at least at the lower levels of the Southern secret service, the abduction of the Union President was under consideration.”

Whether Booth was following orders in his activities or was acting on his own is less clear. But it is certain that Booth was able to elude capture for 12 days after the assassination by using safe houses in Virginia along an escape route which the Confederate Secret Service had previously organized.

The cover-up about Booth has long survived any original motive for it. Only in the last half century have we begun to see books like William Tidwell’s Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. Yet from time to time we still continue to hear from authors like Jim Bishop and Bill O’Reilly, who write profitable best-sellers, one arguing that Booth, the other that Oswald, was essentially a loner.

An egregious attempt to present Booth as a loner was that of former CIA Director Allen Dulles, at an early executive session of the Warren Commission on January 16, 1964. Dulles explained that, according to a book he was handing out to members of the Commission, European assassinations were the work of conspiracies—but American assassins acted alone.

Given that two of Booth’s targets, Lincoln and Seward, were attacked almost simultaneously in different parts of the city (Seward was stabbed by Lewis Powell in his bed during the Lincoln assassination), John J. McCloy promptly objected, arguing that “the Lincoln assassination was a plot.” Undeterred, Dulles shot right back: “Yes, but one man was so dominant that it almost wasn’t a plot.” Dulles was using his authority to indicate what he thought the Commission should conclude. Seven months later the Warren Report amply fulfilled his wish and declared that the death of Kennedy was, too, the work of a loner.

Same Old Story—False, Ongoing, and Interconnected

Dulles’s intervention indicates to me that American cover-ups of what I call “deep events”—events about which we are denied the truth—are themselves an on-going and interconnected story. For example: in a special section of the Warren Report, written to discredit “Speculations and Rumors” of a possible conspiracy in JFK’s death, Commission staffer Alfred Goldberg began by noting that:

“Myths have traditionally surrounded the dramatic assassinations of history. The rumors and theories about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln that are still being publicized were for the most part first bruited within months of his death.”

Goldberg is also co-author of Pentagon 9/11 which is, possibly, another example of an ongoing coverup.

Goldberg was quite right in acknowledging the persistence of myths about assassinations. And we will never move beyond myths to a clearer understanding of what took place, who ultimately was responsible, what it meant, and how best to restore democracy to this country, until we fully grasp the role of Allen Dulles and others like  him in sustaining those myths.

I bounced this theory off of Jim Sinclair over the weekend and received a short but very enlightening reply.  He said “The concept is correct.  We have another OTC derivative explosion at hand but no practical way to expand liquidity.  Bad derivatives never die, they just get larger”.   Think about what Jim is saying here, we again have an Autumn of 2008 event triggering …only bigger!  And no way to actually meet the margin calls.  Each episode of QE was used to meet the margin calls and hide the losses.  Each one expanded the risk while pulling more and more collateral out of the system until we reached a tipping point, NOW!

Let me finish with this one point, when this era is looked at in hindsight, “it will all be about counterparty risk”.  Do you know of anything without counterparty risk?  Can you say G O L D?

Using the recent spree of high profile police murders as the latest catalyst, calls to outfit all cops with some sort of body camera are once again reverberating nationally.  But given the staggering amounts of personal data on the American people police agencies are already collecting, the proposals to lend the police one more surveillance device raises significant privacy concerns.

Speaking on the repercussions of the police murder of Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, a former opponent of body cams, recently remarked, “I think it is a game-changer. What you’ll see is a movement now by many more police departments to go to cameras.”

Indeed, the city of North Charleston has already announced plans to equip its entire police force with body cameras.  This comes on the heels of President Obama announcement last December that the federal government would purchase 50,000 body cams for state and local police agencies in response to the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

For their proponents, body cameras promise to provide much needed accountability to the nation’s police agencies and their officers, who continue to gun down Americans at an alarming rate, while still mostly managing to allude prosecution.  And as advocates note, limited study of such police cameras have already yielded seemingly promising results.  In Rialto, California, for instance, a controlled study found a 60% decline in use of force by officers equipped with body cameras. Cops, to no surprise of anyone who has ever sought to film an on-duty officer, are all too cognizant of the power of recorded video (especially, we might add, when such video is in the hands of citizens).

But the anecdotal evidence championed by body camera backers aside, such police cams offer at best a flawed check on police abuse and brutality, and at worst portend a further bolstering of the already dystopian surveillance capabilities of law enforcement agencies.

The Limits of Police Body Cams

To begin with, as should be readily evident, police body cameras only work when officers turn them on. So in the case of the slaying of Walter Scott in South Carolina, even if Officer Michael Slager had been equipped with a body cam, there is no guarantee it would have captured his shooting of Scott; Slager could have simply turned it off.  Indeed, a trial use of body cameras by Denver, Colorado police from June to December of 2014 saw less than half of all encounters involving the use of force actually recorded by camera equipped officers.

(And yet even when police brutality is captured on video and viewed publicly, accountability for officers is hardly guaranteed.  The death of Eric Garner at the hands of New York City cops was, after all, captured on film, but no officers were charged in his death.)

For those police body cams that actually are recording, however, all data collected is often held and stored by the police themselves; that is, the very people the cameras are meant to hold to account.  As the Washington Post reported, “Officials in more than a dozen states—as well as the District [of Columbia]—have proposed restricting access or completely withholding the [body cam] footage from the public.”  D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, as the Post explains, has sought to keep the public from viewing police body cam videos by exempting all such videos from the Freedom of Information Act.

Simply put then, police not only control what body cameras record, but also increasingly what is done with the captured video.

It is also worth considering the fact that devises touted as a way to hold police accountable for their actions are configured not to watch and record the police, but rather to watch us from the perspective of the police.  And as anyone who has come face-to-face with armored clad riot cops during a political protest will no doubt attest, the routine use of cameras trained on protesters by police brings no measure of accountability to the cops.  Police cameras do nothing to stop warrior cops from unleashing their truncheons on peaceful protesters, nor do they do anything to hold them to account afterwards.  In fact, the police deploy such cameras at rallies largely to aid the future prosecution of those they will arrest for the great criminal offense that is political dissent.

Snooping Cops

The far more troubling issue with championing police body cameras as some sort of progressive police reform, though, is that their deployment is part of a larger proliferation of mass surveillance capabilities now allowing domestic law enforcement agencies to sweep up a breathtaking amount of data on American citizens.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, the 560 body cameras currently employed by officers of the Oakland, California police department “results in about five to six terabytes of data every month—equivalent to about 1,250 to 1,500 high-definition movie downloads.”  The data, the Journal continues, “is stored on a department server for two years at a minimum.”

Using the FBI’s Lockheed Martin designed Next Generation Identification system, cops everywhere equipped with body cameras will soon be able to tap into an FBI database containing over 50 million photos in order to utilize facial recognition technology when making routine traffic stops.  It’s difficult to see how the use of body cameras to conduct such fishing expeditions would serve in any way to further police accountability.

The threat to personal privacy posed by police body cams is heightened further when considering the intimate places cops routinely go (e.g. inside one’s apartment or home) and the often compromised state of those visited by police.  As the Los Angeles Times notes, “Video from dashboard cameras in police cars, a more widely used technology, has long been exploited for entertainment purposes. Internet users have posted dash-cam videos of arrests of naked women to YouTube, and TMZ sometimes obtains police videos of athletes and celebrities during minor or embarrassing traffic stops, turning officers into unwitting paparazzi.”

It doesn’t take much imagination to picture huckster entrepreneurs of the near future using any and all police body cam video released to the public (which will undoubtedly be skewed toward those videos portraying officers in a positive light) to piggyback on the already booming online mug shot industry currently dabbling in the lucrative trade of public humiliation and shame.

Body cameras or not, though, police agencies the nation over are already fixing to amass vast swaths of data on no less than our daily movements via the widespread deployment of things like automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), which snap pictures of car license plates in conjunction with date, time, and location.

According to a separate Journal report, the Justice Department is currently using ALPRs strategically placed on major highways, in combination with those routinely used by state and local law enforcement agencies, to maintain a national database to “track in real time the movement of vehicles around the U.S.”  Many of the devices used to feed the database, the paper notes, “also record visual images of drivers and passengers, which are sometimes clear enough for investigators to confirm identities.”

Consider, also, the ability local police agencies already possess to scoop up our electronic communications via devices like “dirtboxes” and “stingrays” (which mimic cellular towers in order to trick all adjacent cell phones into sending their identifying information back to the devices for collection).  This is to say nothing of the “haystack” of personal data the National Security Agency is actively compiling in its search for needles.

Such a rush by law enforcement to deploy all the latest surveillance technologies on the American people quite predictably leaves the collecting agencies awash in more data than could ever possibly be of use.  In fact, such mass surveillance is quite lousy at its purported purpose of predicting and preventing crime or “terrorism.”  As Julia Angwin writes in her book Dragnet Nation, “the flood of data can be overwhelming and confounding to those who are charged with sorting through it to find terrorists.”  “But,” Angwin goes on to add, “ubiquitous, covert surveillance does appear to be very good at repression.”

Police Surveillance as Repression

What the “war on drugs” was for mass incarceration, the “war on terror” has clearly been to domestic surveillance.  So not only are militarized police now sent parading through the streets in their repurposed military vehicles and equipment, they are also increasingly turning to military-styled mass surveillance methods to achieve the very same ends sought by occupying American forces abroad; that is, collective pacification.

As Darwin Bond-Graham and Ali Winston write in a 2014 LA Weekly article on the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of data-intensive “predictive policing”: the “LAPD’s mild-sounding ‘predictive policing’ technique, introduced by former Chief William Bratton [now chief of the NYPD] to anticipate where future crime would hit, is actually a sophisticated system developed not by cops but by the U.S. military, based on ‘insurgent’ activity in Iraq and civilian casualty patterns in Afghanistan.”

Bond-Graham and Winston add: “Records obtained by L.A. Weekly from the U.S. Army Research Office show that UCLA professors Jeff Brantingham and Andrea Bertozzi (anthropology and applied mathematics, respectively) in 2009 told the Army that their predictive techniques ‘will provide the Army with a plethora of new data-intensive predictive algorithms for dealing with insurgents and terrorists abroad.’ In a later update to the Army, after they had begun working with LAPD, they wrote, ‘Terrorist and insurgent activities have a distinct parallel to urban crime.'”

The world, lest we ever forget, is now a battlefield.  But if the American dragnet abroad is, as Alfred McCoy writes, a means of cheaply “projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line,” the domestic dragnet imposed by militarized cops is likewise as much about keeping domestic threats (activists, dissidents, the working class, and poor) in line as imperial rot takes hold within the “homeland” in the form of widening economic inequality and deepening social crisis.

And utilizing mass surveillance as a tool of repression indeed appears the intent of snooping police departments.

Pouring over documents released on the city of Boston’s now suspended ALPR program, ACLU attorney Catherine Crump found that “The Boston Police Department was targeting mostly low income, working class, and Black neighborhoods with their license plate reader program.”  In one case, Crump discovered that “one motorcycle that was recorded stolen in the police department’s system had driven past one fixed plate reader 60 times.”

“This signals to me that our greatest fear is true,” Crump adds.  “While police say, ‘We need this technology because it helps us find stolen cars and criminals,’ we have found they’re also using these tools to collect data about people who they have no reason to believe were involved in any criminal activity.  In Boston, we found that police aren’t using these cameras to respond to hits, they’re sucking up all this data to use potentially down the road for intelligence.”

Are we to believe, then, that the mountains of data to be captured by police body cameras and stored for possibly years by police departments is to be used to hold cops to account? Or is such footage more likely to be kept in secret to further police control over potentially rebellious poor, minority, and working class citizens?

Who gains by entrusting killer cops with policing our privacy?

According to a new leaked European Commission proposal in the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations, EU member state legislative initiatives will have to be vetted for potential impacts on private business interests.

The proposal forms part of a wider plan for so-called “regulatory cooperation”. Civil society groups have already denounced earlier iterations of this plan as being a tool to stop or roll back regulation intended to protect the public interest. The new elements in the leaked proposal expand the problem.

Civil society groups have condemned the “regulatory exchange” plan as an affront to parliamentary democracy. “This is an insult to citizens, elected politicians and democracy itself”, says Max Bank of Lobby Control.

The “regulatory exchange” proposal will force laws drafted by democratically-elected politicians through an extensive screening process. This process will occur throughout the 78 States, not just in Brussels and Washington DC. Laws will be evaluated on whether or not they are compatible with the economic interests of major companies. Responsibility for this screening will lie with the ‘Regulatory cooperation body, a permanent, undemocratic, and unaccountable conclave of European and American technocrats.

“Both the Commission and US authorities will be able to exert undue pressure on governments and politicians under this measure as these powerful players are parachuted into national legislative procedures. The two are also very likely to share the same agenda: upholding the interests of multinationals,” says Kenneth Haar of Corporate Europe Observatory.

“The Commission proposal introduces a system that puts every new environmental, health, labour, and standard at European and member state level at risk. It creates a labyrinth of red tape for regulators, to be paid by the tax payer, that undermines their appetite to adopt legislation in the public interest,” says Paul de Clerck of Friends of the Earth Europe.

Screening under the regulatory exchange plan could take place from before a proposal is formally tabled until it is adopted, and on existing regulations, providing continuous opportunities to weaken and delay regulatory acts. Articles 9 and 11 (texts below) detail how it would work.

“What’s perhaps most scary about this proposal is its potential application to existing regulation – not just paralyzing future legislation but sending us backward,” says David Azoulay at the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL). “Not only will it extend an outrageously burdensome process on future legislation, but any current legislation in the public interest that doesn’t sit well with trade interests on either side of the Atlantic could be subjected to the same process to make it conform to corporate interests.”

Contacts and further information:

Lora Verheecke 00 32 4 86 31 00 34 (FR/EN/ES) [email protected]

Copyright Corporateeurope.org 2015

By John Dalhuisen, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International

The killing of journalist Oles Buzyna on a Kyiv street this week was shocking enough in and of itself.

According to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, the 45-year-old journalist – who was widely known for his pro-Russian views – was gunned down by masked assailants in a drive-by shooting.

But what makes his murder especially chilling is the fact that it is just the latest among a string of suspicious deaths of former allies of Ukraine’s deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych. It came only a day after a member of Ukraine’s political opposition, Oleg Kalashnikov, was also found shot dead in the capital.

This week’s deaths are not alone. Since the end of January, several allies of Ukraine’s deposed former President Viktor Yanukovych have been found dead – many of them in suspicious circumstances.

Oleksandr Peklushenko, a former regional governor, and ex-MP Stanislav Melnyk were also shot. Mykhaylo Chechetov, former deputy chairman of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, allegedly jumped from a window in his 17th-floor flat. Serhiy Valter, a mayor in the south-eastern city of Melitopol, was found hanged, as was Oleksiy Kolesnyk, ex-head of Kharkiv’s regional government. The body of Oleksandr Bordyuh, a former police deputy chief in Melitopol, was found at his home.

This string of deaths has put the Ukrainian authorities in the hot seat.

Police were initially quick to classify many of them as suicides.

It is certainly plausible that some of the deaths were suicides or accidents. However, in the absence of credible investigations, and given the rapid succession of the deaths within the wider context of Ukraine’s political climate at the moment, nobody can rule out that some of them were politically-motivated killings. But by whom? No-one will know without independent, impartial and thorough investigations.

Most of the deaths took place amid mysterious circumstances. Maybe as a recognition of this, the authorities have opened probes into some of the cases. But Amnesty International has yet to see evidence of a credible outcome of any of these.

They must be followed up by prompt, impartial and effective investigations. All such investigations must be credible if Ukraine is to begin to tackle its pervasive lack of accountability for serious human rights violations. A recent Amnesty International report revealed, for example, how virtually nobody has been brought to account for more than 100 killings, and an even greater number of police beatings and ill-treatment, of protesters during the February 2014 EuroMaydan demonstrations.

Beyond the lingering lack of justice for the EuroMaydan deaths, and the more recent spate of deaths of opposition members this year, the organization has also documented a worrying rise in other forms of persecution.

Opposition politicians are facing mob violence, often carried out by groups or individuals affiliated with the right-wing.

Meanwhile, members of the media are suffering harassment at the hands of the authorities. Among them is the journalist and prominent blogger Ruslan Kotsaba – recently named as Amnesty International’s first Ukrainian prisoner of conscience in five years. He could face more than a decade in prison on the charge of “high treason” and for his views on the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Ruslan Kotsaba was arrested on 7 February in Ivano-Frankivsk, 130 km south-east of Lviv, after he posted a video describing the conflict as “the Donbas fratricidal civil war”. He also expressed opposition to military conscription of Ukrainians to take part in the conflict.

After being formally charged on 31 March with “high treason”, he faces up to 15 years in prison, as well as up to an eight-year sentence on a further charge of “hindering the legitimate activities of the armed forces”. Amnesty International has called for his immediate and unconditional release, and we see his treatment as a brazen restriction on the right to freedom of expression.

The freedom to peacefully exercise that right was one of the fundamental rallying cries of the EuroMaydan protesters.

To now deny Yanukovych’s allies or other opposition members that same right – through imprisonment or death, or through lack of an effective investigation – would be the height of hypocrisy. It is also a betrayal of human rights, which must be protected for everyone, regardless of their political stripes.

by GM Watch.org 2015

Findings of new study need confirmation in animal tests

Roundup is an endocrine disruptor and is toxic to human cells in vitro (tested in culture dishes in the laboratory) at levels permitted in drinking water in Australia, a new study has found.

This is the first study to examine the effects of glyphosate and Roundup on progesterone production by human female cells in an in vitro system that models key aspects of reproduction in women.

Glyphosate alone was less toxic to human cells than glyphosate in a Roundup formulation; both glyphosate and Roundup caused cell death which resulted in decreased progesterone levels – a form of hormone/endocrine disruption. Endocrine disruption did not precede the toxicity to cells but occurred after it. The decreases in progesterone concentrations were caused by reduced numbers of viable cells.

A 24h exposure to a concentration of glyphosate (in Roundup) similar to that recommended as an acceptable level for Australian drinking water caused significant toxicity to the cells in vitro, which supports a call for long-term in vivo (in live animals) studies to characterise the toxicity of Roundup.

The possibility that Roundup has endocrine disrupting activity independent of its ability to kill or disable cells needs further study.
—

Endocrine disruption and cytotoxicity of glyphosate and roundup in human JAr cells in vitro

Fiona Young, Dao Ho, Danielle Glynn and Vicki Edwards
Department of Medical Biotechnology, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia
Integr Pharm Toxicol Genotoxicol, 2015 Volume 1(1): 12-19
doi: 10.15761/IPTG.1000104

Abstract

The toxicity of the active molecule in herbicides has been used to determine safe concentrations, because other components are considered inert. Roundup, which contains the active molecule Glyphosate, was described as an endocrine disrupter because non-cytotoxic concentrations inhibited progesterone synthesis in vitro.

GM Watch.org 2015Human chorioplacental JAr cells synthesise progesterone, and increase synthesis when stimulated by chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), or the transduction molecule cAMP.

JAr cells were exposed to two Roundup formulations, and compared with the same concentrations of glyphosate ± cAMP, or ± hCG for 1, 4, 24, 48 or 72h. The surviving viable cells were quantified using an MTT assay, and progesterone was measured in an ELISA. hCG and cAMP stimulated progesterone synthesis by cells in vitro as expected. In contrast to previous reports, JAr cell death preceded decreased progesterone synthesis, and steroidogenesis was unaffected by low, non-cytotoxic concentrations of Roundup or glyphosate. Roundup was more cytotoxic than glyphosate alone; the 24h EC50 was 16mM for glyphosate, but 0.008mM when glyphosate was in a 7.2g/L Roundup formulation. Significant cytotoxicity was caused by glyphosate in Roundup (p<0.01) after 24h, and cytotoxicity was observed in vitro after exposure to a range of concentrations comparable to the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines.

Endocrine disruption effects were secondary to cytotoxicity. Roundup was more cytotoxic than the same concentration of glyphosate alone, indicating that the other constituents of the herbicide are not inert. There is a compelling need to conduct in vivo studies to characterise the toxicity of glyphosate in a Roundup formulation, to facilitate re-evaluation of existing public health guidelines.

Copyright Fiona Young, Dao Ho, Danielle Glynn and Vicki Edwards, Department of Medical Biotechnology, Flinders University, Adelaide, South Australia 2015, GM Watch.org 2015

An F/A-18C Hornet attached to the Golden Warriors of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 87 launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush. (Photo: US Navy)

Conflicts and war across the region, says one analyst, ‘have been an economic boon to those who wipe away crocodile tears with one hand and sign weapons contracts with the other.’

A live radio debate over whether or not vaccines should be mandated was scheduled to air on The Fairness Doctrine with Jennifer Sullivan of WMNF Radio in Tampa, Florida, on April 8, 2015. Both parties — Pediatrician and Mt. Sinai Assistant Professor of Global Health Professor Dr. Annie Sparrow, and U.S. Vaccine Rights Attorney Alan Phillips (this article’s author) — confirmed weeks in advance, but late in the day before the debate, Dr. Sparrow cancelled. The debate took place anyway, with Ms. Sullivan taking Dr. Sparrow’s place by reading pro-vaccine articles from Dr. Sparrow and Hastings Law School Professor Dorit Reiss. You can hear an online archive of the debate, here: (Sound.WMNF.org — the debate show starts about 3 ¹/₂ minutes in). You decide for yourself, but I heard only vague, unsupported assertions from the pro-vaccine side that were soundly refuted by my clear, referenced facts…

Meanwhile, Dr. Sparrow’s cancellation email stated, in reference to her debate opponent:

He is not a doctor, is not a responsible participant in this incredibly important issue, and I prefer not to elevate him by giving him credence or legitimacy on air. This is unfair to the audience. I cannot participate in such a debate.

First, we must identify Dr. Sparrow’s cancellation for what it truly was: a classic information-control technique based on this principle commonly used by those who do not have the facts on their side:

Disparage your opponent to avoid the facts.

This is not an original comment on Dr. Sparrow’s part, it’s the classic reason that vaccine proponents always give for not debating vaccines, regardless of who the opponent is — they don’t want to “dignify” the opposing side. Dr. Sparrow apparently missed the memo prohibiting doctors from openly debating vaccines, and so she initially agreed to debate. In doing so, Dr. Sparrow committed the ultimate pro-vaccine faux pas — she naively agreed to a vaccine debate, and then had to come up with a reason to withdraw when, apparently, one of her peers informed her that they are not allowed to debate vaccines. It doesn’t matter what the opponent’s credentials are, pro-vaccine doctors will never engage in a fair and open debate, for two simple reasons: 1) They can’t win, and 2) medical science has yet to come up with an effective treatment for the more severe cases of kicked-butt-itis. The pro-vaccine position is not about truth; it’s about maintaining a false pretense of public health to further covert agendas that have nothing to do with public health, and you don’t further those agendas by debating vaccines.

Let’s move on to Dr. Sparrow’s specific accusations: Actually, I am a doctor. OK, I’m a juris doctor (lawyer), but my independent vaccine research has been used in medical schools in three countries (Italy, UK and U.S.), was translated and published in several European countries as well as in Russia and China and was published in two homeopathic journals in India. But more importantly, the debate topic (“Should Vaccines Be Mandated?”) is primarily a legal question. Legislators decide who has to get a vaccine and when, and who gets to refuse and how; and a complete understanding of the interpretation and application of laws falls squarely within the scope of legal expertise, not medical. The real question, then, is whether or not Dr. Sparrow, who has no training or expertise in law whatsoever, was qualified to participate in this debate.

The fundamental vaccine questions are, of course, ultimately medical: “Are vaccines safe? Are they effective? Are they necessary?” But the vaccine controversy has a substantial legal component. For example, the Federal Court of Claims lists 140 attorneys in the U.S. who handle vaccine injury and death cases. Medical doctors may testify as expert witnesses in these cases, but the cases are managed by attorneys and adjudicated by Special Masters (judges). Next, vaccines are required by law in all 50 states and U.S. territories, and by the federal government for military members, immigrants and some federal employees; exemptions and waivers are available in all 50 states and U.S. territories, in federal statutes, and in federal EEOC, DOD, and USCIS regulations for employees, military members and immigrants, respectively. A complete understanding of the proper interpretation and application of these laws requires formal legal training and expertise. What is the correct exemption procedure in each instance? Which laws are unconstitutional and why? Who does or doesn’t qualify for any given exemption and why? These are all purely legal questions that require formal legal training and expertise to address fully. So, if either debate participant was not competent to engage in the discussion, it was Dr. Sparrow.

More important than Dr. Sparrow’s lack of legal training, however, is the practical reality that the fundamental issue of the vaccine controversy is political, the underlying corruption of our political system by the pharmaceutical industry. While some aspects of the corruption involve medical and legal details, an understanding of the basics requires neither legal nor medical expertise. Many well-informed lay people with no medical or legal credentials could debate Dr. Sparrow into the ground with one hand tied behind their backs. Indeed, the very fact that Dr. Sparrow initially agreed to debate the matter on the pro-vaccine side reveals that she has no understanding of this most fundamental aspect of the issue. (Or perhaps her cancellation reveals that she understands it all too well?)

Dr. Sparrow hoped, of course, that her cancellation would prevent the debate from happening, to avoid personal embarrassment followed by reprimand from her peers, and to prevent vaccine truths from being spotlighted. But in this instance, the technique backfired. The debate went forward anyway, not only “elevating” me personally, but also exposing the dark side of vaccines. The truth is, pro-vaccine advocates will NEVER participate in a fair and open debate, because that would risk exposing the truth about vaccines to a wider, mainstream audience, and that is not what the ruling pharmaceutical elites want.

When the facts are not on your side, you can’t control public perception in an open debate. You control public perception by ensuring that your communications are always one-sided, and by presenting them in forums that do not allow for rebuttal. And whenever your unsupported propaganda is challenged, you discredit the other side to avoid having to address the facts. We should not respond to these emotional attacks defensively, though, as that may actually reinforce the attacker’s position. Instead, we should respond by calmly pointing out the technique being used: Emotional attack to cover up the lack of any real information. We can defeat emotional attacks by calling the pro-vaccine trolls out on what their attacks truly are:

Shameless attempts to substitute a psychological control technique for real information.

This is what Dr. Sparrow’s cancellation statement was, pure and simple, and it speaks volumes about who she really is. Engaging in an honest, open vaccine debate would risk weakening the pharmaceutical industry’s control of public perception, exposing the false vaccine paradigm. Perhaps it was unprofessional of me to agree to debate Dr. Sparrow, since she is arguably not qualified to debate the issue of vaccine mandates. But truth is more important. And in this instance, the truth prevailed.

Thank you, Jennifer Sullivan and WMNF, for The Fairness Doctrine radio series of open debates, shows of which are consistent with the fundamental American tradition of “free speech,” a tradition that pro-vaccine advocates fear and unethically avoid.
———————-
Attorney Phillips’ primary debate argument with referenced citations:

VaccineRights.com.^[PDF]

Archive of The Fairness Doctrine, April 8, 2015, “Should Vaccines Be Mandated?” debate:

Sound.WMNF.org (the debate show starts about 3 ¹/₂ minutes in).

Alan Phillips, J.D., is the nation’s leading Vaccine Rights Attorney. He advises clients, attorneys, legislators and legislative committees throughout the U.S. concerning vaccines required for newborns, students, employees, military members, immigrants, parents in custody disputes, etc. For more information, see www.vaccinerights.com.

About the author:
Alan Phillips, Vaccine Rights Attorney
[email protected], 1-828-575-2622
Vaccine Rights (www.vaccinerights.com)