Global Research

Earlier this week the European Commission’s attorney Bernhard Schima told the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) the US-EU Safe Harbor framework does not work.

The framework process supposedly protects personal data. In 2013, however, it was discovered the NSA and its British counterpart — the GCHQ, short for Government Communications Headquarters — had siphoned off data transfers by tapping directly into under sea cable networks.

In fact, according to a lawyer representing the Austrian government before the CJEU, Safe Harbor is better suited for pirates than the protection of data of EU citizens. In other words, the system was designed to be hijacked by the NSA and GCHQ.

“You might consider closing your Facebook account if you have one,” Schima told attorney-general Yves Bot at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

Edward Snowden had earlier revealed that the NSA’s notorious PRISM program had provided access to a number of US tech companies and social media services, including Facebook.

Facebook, Apple and Google have argued they had no idea the NSA was illegally vacuuming up customer data. Last year, however, Rajesh De, the NSA’s general counsel, said the companies knew about the practice.

In 2009, Mark Zuckerberg told the world Facebook is in essence a platform for harvesting data and conducting surveillance.

“People have really gotten comfortable sharing more information and different kinds,” he told an audience at the 2009 Crunchies Awards ceremonies in San Francisco. Zuckerberg said “sharing” data — that is, surrendering private data to the government and corporations — has become the “social norm.”

In 2007, Matt Greenop documented Facebook’s indirect connection to the CIA and the military industrial and now surveillance complex:

Facebook’s first round of venture capital funding ($500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome ‘The Diversity Myth’, he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.

The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company’s key areas of expertise are in “data mining technologies”.

Breyer also served on the board of R&D firm BBN Technologies, which was one of those companies responsible for the rise of the internet.

Dr Anita Jones joined the firm, which included Gilman Louie. She had also served on the In-Q-Tel’s board, and had been director of Defense Research and Engineering for the US Department of Defense.

“Facebook may as well be called Stasibook,” I noted in 2012 when the corporation rolled out its IPO. “It is the most effective surveillance tool the world has ever known. Nearly a billion people love to be not so secretly data-mined, every chat and friend connection tucked into super-computer data reservoirs at the NSA.”

“The scientific dictatorship has done a ‘good’ job in brainwashing and manipulating the masses,” writesSandeep Parwaga. “Don’t be fooled by the deceit. The mainstream media has been very reluctant to cover the disturbing Google/Facebook ties as it would expose important assets for the Big Brother machine and its secret use to destabilize.”

In a revealing 6 minute 47 second video below, you can observe a brief synopsis of just how toxic GMO chemicals are. But the best part of this post, contributed by The Corbett Report, is the footage of Dr. Patrick Moore, a known GMO supporting lobbyist when asked to drink a glass full of glyphosate. Check it out below.

Patrick Moore owns a company that tells numerous corporations how to “green” their products and is known for promoting the greatness of glyphosate. He has even said, “you can drink a whole quart of it and it won’t hurt you.”

A French film-maker just released a clip of Moore on camera and what he says about the chemical is more than shocking. You simply have to check it out for yourself. You can skip to about 5 minutes into the video.

 “There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” — Elie Wiesel

What do you say, we all send Moore numerous quarts of glyphosate to drink? Cheers to the biotech industry.

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Recently, scientists took a huge leap forward in developing a radically new form of immunization. Researchers from the Scripps Research Institute reported in February that they had successfully used a new form of gene therapy to induce monkeys to produce an antibody that deactivates HIV.

This new therapy is fundamentally different from vaccination, which consists of introducing small amounts of infectious material into the body to induce it to produce its own antibodies. In immunoprophylaxis by gene transfer (IGT), scientists instead hope to modify the DNA of patients to enable them to produce entirely new antibodies.

“The reality is we are touching third rails, and so it’s going to take some explanation,” said David Baltimore of the California Institute of Technology, a Nobel Prize recipient, virologist and IGT researcher.

Bypassing the immune system

In IGT, scientists first identify the genes (in humans or other animals) that produce powerful antibodies against hard-to-treat diseases. They then create artificial versions of these genes and insert them into viruses. These viruses are then injected into patient (usually into muscle tissue), where they transfer the genetically engineered DNA to the muscle cells. Although muscle cells normally do not produce antibodies, the viral DNA changes their genetic programming, and the muscles start producing the antibodies.

The first major breakthrough in IGT came in 2009, when Philip R. Johnson of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues announced that they had successfully used the technique to cause monkeys’ muscles to produce antibodies that protected the animals from SIV, a version of HIV that affects nonhuman primates. In 2011, Baltimore and colleagues successfully used IGT to protect mice against injected HIV. In 2014, they were able to use the technique to protect female mice against HIV introduced vaginally.

“We’re going around the immune system, rather than trying to stimulate the immune system,” Baltimore said. “So what we’re doing is pretty fundamentally different from vaccination, although the end result is pretty similar.”

Scientists are also researching the possibility of using IGT to confer resistance to many other diseases that have resisted vaccination, including malaria, respiratory diseases (such as cystic fibrosis, influenza or SARS) and even Ebola.

Many technical hurdles remain before IGT therapies could be widely adopted, however. Michael Farzan, lead author of the recent Scripps study, notes that scientists still need to figure out how to regulate the body’s production of the new antibodies, or shut it off.

“If we really want to see this blossom, we need regulatory ‘off’ switches,” he said.

Designer immune systems on the horizon?

Although scientists and bioethicists claim that IGT is no different than existing gene therapies and is therefore not ethically problematic, they admit that the public may see things differently. The prospect of having one’s DNA modified to fight a disease may not be easily accepted.

As with all gene therapies, IGT also raises concerns about the ethical implications of gene therapies designed to “improve” or “enhance” human beings rather than simply treat medical conditions. Conferring disease immunity arguably straddles the line between these approaches. Injecting viruses that are designed to modify the human genome also carries the risk of potentially severe side effects.

Thus far, gene therapy researchers have mostly limited themselves to what is known as somatic gene therapy, rather than germ line gene therapy. In the former, only non-reproductive DNA is modified, meaning that the modified traits cannot be passed on to future generations. It is widely accepted that germ line gene therapy poses an even more perilous ethical landscape than the gene therapies already under development.

Finally, the prospect of modifying the human genome raises the question, as always, of who would control such technology, and who would get to decide when it would be used.

(Natural News Science)

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.gfmer.ch

http://truthwiki.org/Vaccine_Fanaticism

http://truthwiki.org/Medical_Fascism

http://truthwiki.org/Genetically_modified_cr…

http://truthwiki.org/GMO_Dangers,_opinion

The New York Times Thursday published a prominent opinion piece entitled “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.”

The author was John R. Bolton, a former State Department official and, for a brief period, US ambassador to the United Nations, under the administration of George W. Bush. He became an influential figure in the administration after serving as a lawyer in the Bush campaign’s successful operation to steal the 2000 election by stopping the vote count in Florida.

Bolton, it must be said, has been calling for an immediate military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities—by either Israel or the US, or both—for at least the last seven years. On each occasion, he has warned darkly that unless his prescription for intensive bombing followed by “regime change” was adopted within days, the world would face the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack.

Thursday’s column was no different. “President Obama’s approach on Iran has brought a bad situation to the brink of catastrophe,” Bolton writes. He is referring to the attempt by Washington, together with the other member nations of the UN Security Council plus Germany, to negotiate restrictions on a nuclear program that Iran insists is strictly for civilian purposes in return for easing punishing economic sanctions.

“Even absent palpable proof, like a nuclear test, Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear weapons has long been evident,” according to Bolton. Despite the lack of “palpable proof,” Bolton insists that Iran’s unwillingness to “negotiate away its nuclear program” and the inability of sanctions to “block its building of a broad and deep weapons infrastructure” constitute an “inescapable conclusion.”

He continues:

“The inconvenient truth is that only military action like Israel’s 1981 attack on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor in Iraq or its 2007 destruction of a Syrian reactor, designed and built by North Korea, can accomplish what is required. Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.”

Bolton, who has made an entire career of suppressing “inconvenient truths,” allows that he would prefer an all-out US bombing campaign, but would accept a US-backed attack by Israel.

“The United States could do a thorough job of destruction, but Israel alone can do what’s necessary,” he writes. He adds that this military onslaught must be combined with US efforts “aimed at regime change in Tehran.”

What is involved here is an open appeal for the launching of a war of criminal aggression and incitement of mass murder. The unbridled militarism expressed in Bolton’s column would not be out of place in the writings of Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the first to hang at Nuremberg after his conviction on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role in organizing the Nazi regime’s wars of aggression.

The question arises, why has he been given a forum in the editorial pages of the New York Times, the supposed newspaper of record and erstwhile voice of American liberalism?

The obvious answer is that any differences the Times editorial board—or for that matter the Obama administration—have with Bolton over Iran are of an entirely tactical character. All of them stand by the principle that US imperialism has the unique right to carry out unprovoked “preemptive” war anywhere on the planet where it perceives a potential challenge to its interests.

Not so long ago, Bolton, who personifies this arrogant and criminal policy, and the Times were on the same page politically and on essentially the very same lines he presents in his latest column on Iran.

In 2002, Bolton was Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security and a point man in the Bush administration’s campaign to prepare a war of aggression against Iraq based upon the lies that Saddam Hussein was developing “weapons of mass destruction” and preparing to hand them over to Al Qaeda.

Bolton, described by one of his former colleagues at the State Department as “the quintessential kiss up, kick down kind of guy,” had been an advocate of aggression against Iraq at least since 1998, when he joined other right-wingers in signing an “Open letter to the president” demanding such a war.

In the run-up to war, he played a central role in manufacturing phony evidence of the existence of Iraqi WMD. This included the promotion of the crude forgeries indicating that Iraq was seeking to procure yellowcake (concentrated uranium) from Niger.

During this same period, the Times provided invaluable assistance to this propaganda campaign. Its senior correspondent Judith Miller was working in alliance with administration officials and right-wing think tanks to confirm and embellish upon the lies about WMD. Thomas Friedman, the paper’s chief foreign affairs columnist, was churning out column after column justifying what he readily acknowledged was a “war of choice” against Iraq, justifying it in the name of democracy, human rights and oil.

As the reputed newspaper “of record,” the Times set the tone for the rest of the corporate media, which together worked to overcome popular opposition to a war in the Middle East.

The results are well known. The war claimed the lives of over a million Iraqis, devastated an entire society and threw the whole region into chaos. In the process, some 4,500 US troops lost their lives, tens of thousands more were maimed and wounded and some $2 trillion was expended. A dozen years later, the Obama administration has launched a new war in Iraq, supposedly to halt the advance of ISIS, a force that it effectively backed in the war for regime change in Syria.

No one has ever been held accountable for these war crimes; not Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Bolton and others who conspired to drag the American people into a war of aggression based upon lies. And not the editors of the Times who produced the propaganda that facilitated their conspiracy.

On the other hand, those who oppose war—from Private Chelsea Manning, who exposed war crimes in Iraq, to Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, who was sickened by the atrocities carried out against the people of Afghanistan—are submitted to a media lynching and then given the full measure of “military justice.”

In publishing Bolton’s column, the Times is making sure that it burns no bridges to the most right-wing and sociopathic layers of the American ruling establishment. While it may differ with them now over an imminent bombing of Iran, future US wars—including against Russia or China, where the propaganda mills of the Times are grinding once again—will undoubtedly bring them back into sync.

In a 392-37 vote, the US House on Thursday approved a bill that makes sweeping changes to the Medicare program that provides health insurance to more than 54 million seniors and the disabled. The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act must be approved by the US Senate and signed into law by President Obama, who indicated his support for the measure earlier this week.

The bipartisan bill, drafted by Republican House Speaker John Boehner and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, ties future payments to doctors for Medicare services to “quality of care,” shifting away from traditional fee-for-service payments. And for the first time, the universal Medicare program will institute means testing for higher-income seniors, requiring higher premiums for these individuals to access benefits.

The bill constitutes a historic attack on the Medicare program. Boehner called it the “first real entitlement reform in nearly two decades”—a reference to the assault on welfare launched under the Clinton administration in 1996. “Today is about a problem much bigger than any doc-fix or deadline. It’s about solving our spending problem,” he said.

Pelosi echoed Boehner’s comments, declaring that it had been a “privilege” to work with the House leader, and that she hoped the agreement “will be a model of things to come.”

The coming together of the Republican and Democratic Party leadership behind the overhaul exposes the unanimity within the ruling class on the need for sharp cuts in “entitlement” programs—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

It provides a permanent “fix” to a 1997 law that tied doctors’ Medicare fees to overall economic growth. As overall health care costs have risen sharply, that formula threatened deep reimbursement cuts to doctors, cuts that Congress has blocked with patchwork measures 17 times since 2002.

The House bill will do away with the scheduled payment cut, set to kick in April 1, and replace it with a 0.5 percent yearly raise in payments through 2019. After this, a new payment system based on “quality of care” will be implemented.

Such language has been adopted by Medicare in other frameworks, and is generally measured by readmission rates and similar statistics. In other words, doctors who see more of their patients readmitted will receive cuts in reimbursement. However, readmission is closely correlated with poverty and other social factors, thus cutting spending on health care in lower-income and working class areas.

By disconnecting reimbursements from services provided, doctors will also be incentivized to ration care and cut back on testing—the overarching aim of all the health care “reform” proposals backed by both Democrats and Republicans. The change will result in reduced services for Medicare patients overall and deep spending cuts by the government.

This shift has long been promoted in the private insurance sector. It is also a key goal of the Obama administration, which earlier this year set a goal to tie the vast majority of Medicare payments to programs promoting cost-cutting.

The second main feature of the bill would institute means testing for Medicare recipients, requiring higher-income seniors to pay more toward Medicare premiums for insurance and prescription drug coverage. Initial estimates are that this change would result in Medicare savings of around $30 billion over the next decade.

Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike are well aware that this fundamental change opens the floodgates for transforming a program that for the last half-century has provided health care insurance to those over the age of 65, regardless of income, into a poverty program available to only those poorest segments of society. This is seen as a first step in it being starved of funds and ultimately dismantled.

Boehner, salivating at these prospects, commented, “We know we’ve got more serious entitlement reform that’s needed. It shouldn’t take another two decades to do it.” He indicated that the Republicans would continue to push for funding cuts to other federal benefit programs.

Some Congressional Republicans balked at the overall cost of the measure, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates at $214 billion over the next decade. This would be paid for through $141 billion in new spending, with the balance divided between higher monthly premiums for higher-income Medicare recipients and payments by nursing homes and other health care providers.

Boehner and the Republicans see the implementation of means testing—and the subsequent savings for government—as a starting point for future overhauls to Medicare and other federal programs. This particularly applies to Social Security, the universal retirement program enacted in 1935 in the wake of the Great Depression.

Both Medicare and Social Security are not “gifts” by the government, but benefits based on the funds workers pay into these programs for their entire working lives through deductions from their paychecks.

As window dressing, the bill also provides two more years of funding to the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), which serves 8 million low-income children, as well as to the nation’s 1,200 community health centers. While Pelosi and the White House had pushed for four-year extensions for both of these programs, the majority of Congressional Democrats willingly compromised on this issue in order to push through the changes to Medicare.

The bill also includes abortion funding restrictions at community health centers, incorporating components of the so-called Hyde Amendment, which forbids federal funding of abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, or the endangered life of the mother.

Leaders of the House “pro-choice” caucus assured skeptical Senate Democrats that the bill’s language provides no additional abortion restrictions beyond those that already apply. In fact, the Obama administration acceded to these reactionary and unconstitutional restrictions in language in the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Speaking Wednesday on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of his signing into law of what is popularly known as Obamacare, the president indicated his support for the new bipartisan Medicare bill. “I’ve got my pen ready to sign a good bipartisan bill,” he said.

The coinciding of the ACA’s anniversary and the current bipartisan bill is noteworthy. From the start, Obama’s health care overhaul has been aimed at a fundamental restructuring of the health care system, aimed at lowering costs for the government and corporations while slashing health care services for the vast majority of Americans.

Taking its cue from Obamacare, the change in Medicare represented by Pelosi and Boehner’s bill will set an example that can rapidly be extended throughout the health care system. Despite many Congressional Republicans’ vocal opposition to the ACA and vows to see it repealed, they are in agreement with its aim of rationing care and funneling more money to the health care industry.

Although the bill faces some opposition in the Senate, it is expected to pass, either before Congress leaves for spring recess today or on its return in two weeks. If it does not pass before the recess, Congress will likely pass a temporary fix to the Medicare payments to doctors.

British writer Harold Pinter declared in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

“We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice” [22].

1990-2011 Iraqi deaths from US Alliance violence (1.7 million) or violently-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) total 4.6 million and one can in 2015 paraphrase this great humanitarian: “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? 4.6 million? More than enough, I would have thought.”

Unfortunately the International Criminal Court (ICC) as currently operating is a politically complicit entity  that strictly confines its war crimes attention to war criminals that the US Alliance doesn’t like.  (for discussion see “The Politics of Genocide” by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson [23, 24]).

The ICC has repeatedly ignored complaints over the Iraqi Genocide (e.g. [25, 26] and that means the world must accept recourse to eminent international people’s tribunals to assess the war crimes of the US Alliance in Iraq and elsewhere.

US state terrorism, UK state terrorism, French state terrorism, Apartheid Israeli state terrorism among others have variously combined over the last 25 years to destroy Iraq as a united, sovereign, modern state.

In the face of endless war against Iraq and an ongoing Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide, what can decent people do?

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent people must

(a) circumvent the lying and ignoring by the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-subverted Mainstream media [27] by resolutely attempting to inform everyone they can about the Iraqi Genocide, and

(b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) – of the kind successfully applied against Apartheid South Africa and currently being applied against Israel. This would apply to all people, politicians, parties, companies, corporations and countries involved in the Iraqi Genocide and the Zionist-promoted Muslim Holocaust and Genocide of which it is a part [28]. History ignored yields history repeated. We cannot walk by on the other side

Those with consciences recently marked the 12th anniversary on 19 March 2015 of the illegal and war criminal US, UK and Australian invasion of Iraq in 2003 that was based on false assertions of Iraqi possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was conducted in the absence of UN sanction or Iraqi threat to the invading nations, and led to 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from violently-imposed deprivation (1.2 million).

The West has now commenced its Seventh Iraq War since 1914 in over a century of Western violence in which Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation have totalled 9 million. However Western Mainstream media have resolutely ignored the carnage, this tragically illustrating the adage “History ignored yields history repeated” [1].

Western Mainstream media utterly ignore expert assessments of how many people the US Alliance has killed in Iraq and resolutely ignore the crucial epidemiological concept of non-violent avoidable deaths (excess deaths, avoidable mortality, excess mortality, deaths that should not have happened) associated with war-imposed deprivation (for detailed analysis see [2]).

Thus, by way of example, on the occasion of US withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 the Australian ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the UK BBC) reported that

“The withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead” [3].

In contrast, the US Just Foreign Policy organization estimates, based on the data of expert UK analysts and top US medical epidemiologists, 1.5 million violent deaths in the Iraq War (2003-2011) [4-7] and UN data indicate a further 0.8 million Iraq avoidable deaths from war-imposed deprivation in this period [2]. Violent deaths and avoidable deaths from violently -imposed deprivation in the Gulf War (1990-1991) and Sanctions period (1990-2003) total 0.2 million and 1.2 million, respectively [1].

Accordingly, Iraqi deaths from violence (1.7 million) or war-imposed deprivation (2.9 million) since 1990 total 4.6 million [1].

However Western violation of Iraq commenced with the British invasion in 1914. Assuming excess mortality of Iraqis under British rule or hegemony (1914- 1948) was the same as for Indians under the British (interpolation from available data indicate Indian avoidable death rates in “deaths per 1,000 of population per year” of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950) [8]), one can estimate from Iraqi population data [9] that Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation under British occupation and hegemony from 1914-1950 totalled about 4 million. Thus ignoring Iraqi deaths associated with the US-backed Iraq-Iran War, one can estimate that about 9 million Iraqi deaths from UK or US violence or imposed deprivation in the century after the 1914 invasion of Iraq by Britain, this constituting an Iraqi Holocaust and an Iraqi Genocide as discussed below.

Holocaust is the destruction of a large number of people and 9 million Iraqi deaths from Anglo-American violence or violently-imposed deprivation certainly constitutes an Iraqi Holocaust. The term “holocaust” was first applied to a WW2 atrocity by Jog in 1944 [11] in relation to the “forgotten” man-made Bengal Famine (Bengali Holocaust) in which 6-7 million Indians (many of them Muslims, and hence the term WW2 Muslim Holocaust) were deliberately starved to death by the British in 1942-1945 (Australia was complicit in this atrocity by withholding grain from its huge wartime wheat stores from starving India) [11-14]. The term “holocaust” was subsequently applied to the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million killed, 1 in 6 dying from deprivation according to the recently deceased, pro-Iraq War, and Iraqi Genocide-ignoring British Zionist historian Professor Sir Martin Gilbert [15]), noting that the WW2 Jewish Holocaust was part of a vastly greater WW2 European Holocaust in which 30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies were killed [2].

Genocide is very precisely defined in International Law as “ acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”, as set out by Article 2 of the 1948 UN Genocide Convention:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” [16].

Any argument that the British and Americans did not “intend” to kill 9 million Iraqis is belied by the remorseless slaughter over 101 years interrupted only by the period between the overthrow of the British-installed monarchy in 1958 and the commencement of Sanctions in 1990.

The Anglo-American Iraqi Genocide since 1990 has been associated with 2 million under-5 year old infant deaths comprising 1.2 million (1990-2003) and 0.8 million (2003-2011), 90% avoidable and due to gross violation of Articles 55 and 56 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War which demand that an Occupier must supply their conquered Subjects with food and medical requisites to “the fullest extent of the means available to it” [17]. The Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide was also war criminal mass infanticide and mass paedocide.

The appalling legacy of a quarter of a century of Western violence against Iraq (1990-2015) – for oil, US hegemony and Apartheid Israeli hegemony – is summarized below, with much of the data being found in “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide” [1], “Genocide in Iraq” volumes I and II by Iraqi scholars Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani and reviews of these works [18-21] and noting that about half of the Iraqi population of 30 million are children :

(1). 1.7 million Iraqi violent deaths.

(2). 2.9 million Iraqi avoidable deaths from violently -imposed deprivation.

(3). 2 million under-5 year old Iraqi infant deaths, 90% avoidable and due to gross violation of the Geneva Convention by the US Alliance.

(4). 7,700,000 Iraqi refugees.

(5). 5,000,000 Iraqi orphans.

(6). 3,000,000 Iraqi widows.

(7). 1,000,0000 Iraqis missing.

(8). 4,000 Iraqi women (20% under 18) missing and presumed “trafficked”.

(9). 3.5 million Iraqi children living in dire poverty.

(10). 1.5 million Iraqi children are undernourished.

(11). Iraqi cancer cases in cases per 100,000 people were 40 (1990), 800 (1995) and 1,600 (2005).

(12). 40% of Iraqi professionals have left since 2003.

(13). 34,000 doctors (1990) declined to 16,000 doctors (2008).

(14). More than 2,200 doctors and nurses killed.

(15). The Iraqi health budget dropped from $450 million pa (1980-1991) to $22 million (2002),

(16). Most of Iraqi children are traumatized by war.

(17). From high literacy pre-1990 to 74% illiteracy in 2011.

Iraq has been substantially destroyed as a modern state by US state terrorism, with the participation of its allies including Britain, France, Israel among others. The same state terrorists have been variously involved in the similar destruction of Libya and Syria.  These are unforgivable crimes and the US Alliance war criminals must be brought to account by the world through international law and through application of Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the war criminal Western states responsible for the Iraqi Holocaust and Iraqi Genocide.

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). 

Notes:

[1]. “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ .

[2]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country from Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web : http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/ .

[3]. “US military marks end of its Iraq war”, ABC News, 16 December 2011: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-15/us-military-marks-end-of-its-war-in-iraq/3733982 .

[4]. “Just Foreign Policy”: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq .

[5]. ORB (Opinion Research Business), “January 2008 – Update on Iraqi Casualty Data”, January 2008: http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88 .

[6]. Les Roberts, “Les Roberts: Iraq’s death toll far worse than our leaders admit”, Uruqnet: 14 February 2007: http://www.uruknet.de/?s1=1&p=30670&s2=16 .

[7]. G. Burnham, R. Lafta, S. Doocy and L. Roberts, “Mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: a cross-sectional cluster sample survey”, The Lancet 2006 Oct 21;368(9545):1421-8: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17055943 .

[8]. Gideon Polya, “Economist Mahima Khanna wins Cambridge Prize”, MWC News, 20 November 2011: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/14978-economist-mahima-khanna.html .

[10]. “Iraq Population”: http://www.populstat.info/Asia/iraqc.htm .

[11]. Jog, N.G. (1944), “Churchill’s Blind-Spot: India”, New Book Company, Bombay.

[12]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008, now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/2008/09/jane-austen-and-black-hole-of-british.html .

[13]. Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .

[14]. Madhusree Muckerjee, “Churchill’s Secret War. The British Empire and the ravaging of India during World War II” (Basic Books, New York, 2010).

[15]. Gideon Polya , “UK Zionist Historian Sir Martin Gilbert (1936-2015) Variously Ignored Or Minimized WW2 Bengali Holocaust”, Countercurrents, 19 February, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190215.htm .

[16]. UN Genocide Convention: http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html .

[17]. Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War: https://www.icrc.org/ihl/INTRO/380 .

[18]. “Genocide in Iraq Volume I . The case against the UN Security Council and member states” by Dr Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani (foreword by Professor Joshua Castellino; Clarity Press, Atlanta).

[19]. Gideon Polya ““Genocide in Iraq, The Case Against UN Security Council And Member States”. Book review”, Countercurrents, 8 February, 2013: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya080213.htm .

[20]. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tariq Al-Ani, “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The Obliteration of a Modern State” (Clarity Press, 2015).

[21]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “Genocide in Iraq Volume II. The obliteration of a modern state” By Abdul-Haq Al-Ani & Tariq Al-Ani”, Countercurrents, 15 March 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150315.htm .

[22]. Harold Pinter, “Art, Truth and politics”, Countercurrents, 8 December, 2005: http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-pinter081205.htm .

[23]. Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Politics of Genocide”.

[24]. Gideon Polya, “Book Review: “The Politics Of Genocide” By Edward Herman And David Peterson”, Countercurrents, 05 December, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya051211.htm .

[25]. SEARCH Foundation, “ Australia’s former Prime Minister Howard accused of war crimes before the International Criminal Court in The Hague”, Countercurrents, 7 June 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/searchnew2.pdf .

[26]. “9 January 2010 Formal Complaint by Dr Gideon Polya to the International Criminal Court (ICC) re US Alliance Palestinian, Iraqi, Afghan, Muslim, Aboriginal, Biofuel and Climate Genocides”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/9-january-2010 .

[27]. “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/ .

[28]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ .

Do away with elections? To even think such a thought is treasonous. An election, or should I say a presidential election, is one of the few occasions, or should I say the only occasion, on which we take a genuine interest in government.  We are spectators at a sporting event, a mix of a bullfight, prizefight and a barroom brawl. We get into heated arguments about which team is “better” about who deserves to win, about which gladiator will be the best for the country. There is an uppercut, a right cross, a roundhouse and he or she (not too often) is down for the count. No, he is not out. He is on his knees, struggling to his feet.  The crowd roars.

Or maybe we should think of it like Super Bowl Sunday. The entire nation is brought together around one event. There is salsa and chips. The beer flows. There are roars of approval as ones team scores, long faces and silence when the other team scores. And for a week or two after the game there are long and intricate discussions of why the victor won and the loser obviously should have lost.

Benjamin Barber — Strong Democracy — has a different take. He contrasts the conversational, communitarian, celebratory elements of the democratic process with the act of voting, which he compares to using a public toilet. “We wait in line with a crowd in order to close ourselves up in a compartment where we can relieve ourselves in solitude and privacy of our burden, pull a lever, and then, yielding to the next in line, go silently home.” Russell Brand — Revolution — is more succinct. Voting is referred to as “the infertile dry hump of gestural democracy.”

And yet the right to vote — to stand out in the cold and rain in the dark of night for hours and then learn that the machine isn’t working — is considered a sacred right. It is enshrined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948).  “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections.” It is a right that was hard won.

A Right That Was Hard Won

In the United States, women were denied the #righttovote until 1920 when the 19th amendment to the Constitution was passed. Women began agitating for equal rights in the 1840s. The right to vote took on a life of its own. Its supporters were actively involved in the anti-slavery movement. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested for #voting and, after a much publicized trial, was found guilty. In 1917 over 200 supporters of the National Woman’s Party were arrested while picketing the White House. Some went on a hunger strike while in prison and were force-fed.

In Britain the struggle was even fiercer. Under the leadership of the Women’s Social and Political Union women went on hunger strikes, chained themselves to railings to provoke an arrest, poured chemicals into mailboxes, broke windows in prominent buildings and set fire to unoccupied buildings and occasionally detonated bombs. Like their sisters in the United States they were imprisoned under harsh conditions and force-fed while on hunger strikes. In 1928 the Conservative government passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act giving the vote to all women over the age of 21.

The 15th amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1870, prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Yet most black voters in the South were effectively disenfranchised. There were new state laws requiring poll taxes. There were discriminatory literacy tests, from which white voters were exempt. A system of whites-only primaries and violent intimidation by white groups also suppressed black participation.

A voters’ registration campaign was launched in Selma, Alabama. Faced with stiff opposition the local blacks called in SNCC (Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee). Next to arrive was Dr. Martin Luther King and members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Protests ensued. By the end of February 1965, 3,000 had been arrested. Deacon and activist Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot and killed by a state trooper, spurring further outrage.

There were three marches from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama (the state’s capital), a distance of about fifty miles. The first march of 600 people was nicknamed “Bloody Sunday” after marchers were beaten with billy clubs and tear-gassed by state troopers and a local posse. One woman was beaten unconscious. The second march resulted in a stand off between troopers and marchers. King returned to the church. He was going to seek federal protection for the marchers. That evening a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb. The third march proceeded under the protection of 2,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army and 1,900 members of the Alabama National Guard under federal command.

On March 25, 25,000 people entered the capital city in support of voting rights for blacks. On August 6, The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. It provided for federal oversight of elections in discriminatory jurisdictions, banned literacy tests and similar discriminatory devices, and created legal remedies for people affected by voting discrimination.

Voting in the East

Voting took on special importance in the East, as well. India, a country with an area of well over one millions square miles, peppered with hundreds of thousands of small villages, hidden in jungles, mountains and countryside, held its first general election in 1952 (See Guha, chapter 7). Starting from scratch it had to register 176 million Indians aged twenty-one or more, of whom about 85% could not read or write.

Some 224,000 polling booths were constructed and equipped with 2 million steel ballot boxes, using 8,200 tons of steel. 16,500 clerks were employed to type and collate electorate rolls, requiring about 380,000 reams of paper. One booth in the jungle reported more than 70% voting. A 110-year old man in Madurai propped up on either side by a great-grandson came to vote, as did a ninety-five-year-old woman, hunchbacked and deaf. In remote tribal areas people walked for days through wild jungles to reach their voting booth.

Faced with such spirit and courage and persistence how can one possibly bring into question the role of voting in our societies? Without question the struggle for voting rights was a noble struggle and its achievements go beyond simply casting a ballot. Organizing themselves and vigorously fighting for a political goal gave women and blacks a social and political presence that had been denied them for centuries. In India it was the proudest moment of citizenship for a people in shackles for centuries.

The struggle waged to win the vote set examples for those who wish to engage in political struggle, regardless of the cause. But the vote itself, what it literally meant, what it produced, who it benefited, what its value was to society in political and social terms was not submitted to careful study. And so it is conceivable that many of those who risked their lives to gain the right might now question the wisdom of relying upon such a system for selecting those who govern. Says Russell Brand of suffragette Emily Davison, she “would not be urging the disempowered people of today to vote; she’d be urging them to riot.”

To argue against elections is to examine critically the electoral process itself and to consider in broad terms the kind of world our elected representatives have bequeathed to us. For I believe that much that is troubling about the world we live in can be traced directly to those who govern in our name. And it is the electoral process that has given them the right to do so.
Malfeasance and the Betrayal of Public Trust

OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES HAVE VIOLATED THE CONSTITUTION THEY HAVE SWORN TO DEFEND

Without reading the bill, our elected representatives enacted the “Patriot Act of 2001,” thus laying the foundation for a fascist state. Only one senator, Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), voted against it. The bill —342 pages long — was introduced on October 23 and voted on the following day. By a vote of 357-66 it passed the House of Representatives.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” The “Patriot Act” undoes that constitutional protection.

On December 31, President Barak Obama signed the “The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)” for fiscal year 2012. Subsections 1021–1022 of Title X, Subtitle D, entitled “Counter-Terrorism” authorize the indefinite military detention of persons the President suspects of involvement in terrorism, including U.S. citizens arrested on American soil. Each year congress re-authorizes the NDAA with the “Counter-Terrorism” provision left intact.

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution contain a due process clause. Due process clause acts as a safeguard from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property by the Government outside the sanction of law. The NDAA does away with that constitutional protection.
 
OUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES IGNORE THE COMMON GOOD IN FAVOR OF CORPORATE INTERESTS THAT THREATEN OUR ECOSYSTEM, OUR PERSONAL HEALTH AND THE VERY SURVIVAL OF THE SPECIES

Section 735 of the HR 933 continuing resolution, passed in March, 2013, and signed by President Barack Obama, stripped federal courts of the authority to halt the sale and propagation of genetically modified seeds and crops even if safety tests reveal concerns about their harmful effects.

In 2009, $250 billion was spent on drugs in the United States. Over the 10 years ending in 2012, the 11 largest drug companies took $711.4 billion in profits, $85 billion in 2012, alone.

Medicare is the largest purchaser in the world’s largest drug market. Thanks to “The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act (also called the Medicare Modernization Act or MMA)”, enacted in 2003, by our elected representatives, Medicare was prohibited by law from seeking better prices for the drugs its subscribers needed to stay healthy and alive. Hence, drug dealers charged Americans — elderly Americans — vastly more for the same drug than they charged in other counties. Why? Because our elected representatives said they could.

Our Planet is in ecological free fall. Where will it stop? When will it stop? Is it too late? There is not an issue that is more critical to our survival. We count on our elected representatives to do everything they can to reverse some very dangerous trends. And what do they do? They undo what little safeguards we have and support policies that are designed to make matters many times worse.

The House of Representatives averaged more than one anti-environmental vote for every day the House was in session in 2011.  More than one in five of the legislative roll call votes taken in 2011 – 22% – were votes to undermine environmental protections.

The anti-environment votes cut across a broad array of issues and included 27 votes to block action to address climate change, 77 votes to undermine “Clean Air Act” protections, 28 votes to undermine “Clean Water Act” protections, and 47 votes to weaken protection of public land and coastal waters.

Here is just a small sample of bills passed by the House of Representatives in 2011:

• House Continuing Resolution 34: Drastically cuts funding for environmental protection programs at EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), DOE (Department of Energy), DOI (Department of Interior), and other agencies and eliminates incentives for renewable energy.
• House Resolution 1, Full Year 2011:Blocks agency actions under the “Clean Air Act,” the “Clean Water Act,” and other laws and cuts funding for dozens of environmental protection programs at EPA, DOE, DOI, and other agencies.
• House Resolution 1, Full Year 2011:  Blocks EPA greenhouse gas regulations for major emitters.
• House Resolution. 1, Full Year 2011: Blocks the Klamath Dam Removal and Sedimentation Study necessary to protect endangered species
• House Resolution 1, Full Year 2011: Blocks new EPA water quality standards for Florida waterways
• House Resolution 1, Full Year 2011:Prevents NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) from establishing a Climate Service.
• House Resolution 1, Full Year 2011:Blocks the United States from contributing funds to the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”
• House Resolution 1, Full Year 2011: Blocks EPA from revoking “Clean Water Act” permits based on adverse effects on water, fish,and wildlife

 
IF THIS IS WHAT ELECTIONS ARE GETTING US WE NEED TO DO AWAY WITH ELECTIONS, AND SOON. AS EMMA GOLDMAN POINTED OUT, “IF VOTING CHANGED ANYTHING, THEY’D MAKE IT ILLEGAL.”

Bailouts and sellouts

Certainly one of the most egregious acts of malfeasance by this or any government was what has been euphemistically called the bailout of banks too big to fail. Trillions of dollars were and continue to be transferred to banks to replenish funds that were lost to bad bets.  The “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008” is a law enacted in response to the subprime mortgage crisis. It authorizes the United States Secretary of the Treasury to spend up to $700 billion to purchase distressed assets, especially mortgage-backed securities, and supply cash directly to banks. The real costs could be in the trillions, that is trillions of dollars of taxpayer money handed over to banks by our elected representatives. While banks were knee deep in dollars, residents of California who defaulted on their mortgages were reduced to sleeping in tents.

The scam continues. Now it is called “Quantitative Easing” (read: handout). To carry out QE central banks create money by buying securities, such as government bonds, from banks, with electronic cash that did not exist before. The new money swells the size of bank reserves in the economy by the quantity of assets purchased—hence “quantitative” easing — currently at the rate of $75 billion a quarter.

Taxpayers could be doing plenty of more productive things with their money. The billions could be used to stop layoffs of teachers and firefighters, train laid-off workers for new jobs, or hire people to fix our ailing infrastructure. But taxpayers don’t get to make these decisions. They also don’t get bailed out when the value of their home suddenly plummets, or when they lose their job or retirement funds in an economic maelstrom they did not cause.

The buying and selling of stock by corporate insiders who have access to non-public information that could affect the stock price can be a criminal offense, just ask hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam who recently got 11 years in prison for doing it. But, congressional lawmakers who write the laws the rest of us have to live with, scaled the code to give themselves a pass on insider trading. Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives enjoy a substantially higher return on their stock investments than we do.

Such blatant self-serving exceptionalism could easily induce nausea if not outrage among a citizenry who have to follow the rules as they struggle to make a living. These are our elected representatives, the ones we put in place every time we vote, men and women without a shred of integrity.

This very brief summary of disrespect for the electorate and its vital necessities is but the summit of a mighty mountain of malfeasance and betrayal, most of which is hidden from the public eye. I almost forgot to mention the wars, covert wars around the world, overt wars like the wars in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, wars that never happen, that are never declared, that never end, wars that divert vital resources from our society, wars that kill millions, displace millions, obliterate infrastructure, decimate economies and cultures, wars that the vast majority of us oppose, wars that are bankrolled by our elected representatives to the tune of trillions of dollars a year.

Have we had enough, yet?

Faulty Electoral System:

Vote Fraud and the Two Party System.

Assuming that there are those stubborn few who want to vote despite all of the above, it is certainly reasonable for voters to believe that when they vote the electoral system itself is reasonably reliable and honest, that there is no tilt, that the system isn’t rigged. This belief is a critical factor in establishing the legitimacy of our government and in gaining our allegiance.

In his book, The Ruling Class (1939), Gaetano Mosca, an Italian political scientist, offers some critical insights into the electoral process, insights that are as relevant today as they were when penned some seventy-five years ago.

The fact that a people participates in electoral assemblies does not mean that it directs the government or that the class that is governed chooses its  governors. It means merely that when the electoral function operates under favorable social conditions it is a tool by which certain political forces are enabled to control and limit the activity of other political forces.

In other words, it seems as if we choose and control, but we don’t. As Mosca points out, the deck is always stacked. “When we say that the voters ‘choose’ their representative, we are using a language that is very inexact. The truth is that the representative has himself elected by the voters … that his friends have him elected” (italics in the original). We end up voting for those who are preselected by virtue of their “moral, intellectual and material means to force their will upon others, take the lead over the others and command them.”

Thus, in practice, in popular elections, freedom of choice, “though complete theoretically, necessarily becomes null, not to say ludicrous.” The voter, for his vote to have meaning, ends up having to choose from among a very small number of contenders, the two or three who have a chance of succeeding, “and the only ones who have any chance of succeeding are those whose candidacies are championed by groups, by committees, by organized minorities”(italics in the original).

The relative handful who are selected to speak for the citizenry are rarely, if ever, a random selection. They are rarely, if ever, demographically representative of the population at large. And they are rarely, if ever, open to the wishes of their constituency. Instead, those selected to speak for the citizenry speak not for their constituency but for the organized minorities who put them in power, minorities with certain values in common, “based on considerations of property and taxation, on common material interests, on ties of family, class, religion, sect or political party.”

Thus, the preselected minority speaks for an even narrower minority who sponsored their candidacy based on a specific set of goals at odds with the needs and wishes of the vast majority. Mosca was writing in the 1930s. What would he say if he knew that it now takes millions of dollars to get elected to the House of Representatives, tens of millions to be elected senator or governor, and close to a billion to be elected president and that the much revered and martyred JFK sent bags full of money to capture the West Virginia primary in 1963 (See Anthony Summers below)? He would probably say, “I told you so.”

And if you are bold enough and fool hardy enough to try and run for higher office on an independent ticket you will be confronted with endless legal hurdles placed there by the two major parties that control the electoral process. You will be denied access to televised debates. You will be sidelined in every way conceivable, as was the case with Ralph Nader, or the powers that be will threaten to kill your children if you don’t drop out, as was the case with Ross Perrot.

It was Joseph Stalin who said that it is not who votes that counts but who counts the votes. “Well,” you say, “that was the Soviet Union. This is the United States of America.” True, but the difference isn’t as great as you think. Recall the 2000 presidential election, where there was obvious vote fraud in the state of Florida and a Supreme Court judge denied the citizens of Florida the right to a recount.

And yet we still believe in elections. Says David Van Reybrouck, in Against Elections, “It seems like we have all become electoral fundamentalists. We look down on those who have been elected, but worship elections themselves.” We are disappointed again and again and yet keep coming back for more. We have equated elections with #democracy. Yet when the many select the few at election time, the outcome is #oligarchy by definition.

Elections are out of date, passé, outmoded like the stagecoach and the spinning wheel. They need to be consigned to the dustbin of history. As Reybrouck observes, “The citizen is neither a customer nor a child….The relationship between the government and its constituency is no longer that between a parent and its children, but of adults working together.” If that is the case then we need to institute a form of government where we are “adults working together.” We adults can certainly do a better job than those who are currently in charge. And not only are elections an obstacle to social justice, they are fraudulent to boot.

Votescam and the Little Black Box

In a little known book entitled, Votescam (1996), two brothers, James and Kenneth Collier, undertake to investigate the voting system at an elemental level. Who manufactures the computers and develops the software that collect and transmit the voting data and how are these technical people connected to the politicians running for office? Where there are physical ballots to be counted, who actually does the counting and what is the oversight process? The story begins with the 1988 Republican Primary in New Hampshire and ends in Florida where the brothers run into a stonewall of denial and indifference by government officials and the media as they uncover evidence of vote fraud on a grand scale.

As the Collier brothers tell it, shortly after the JFK assassination the CIA approached the major news agencies — at that time, AP, UPI, CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN — with a deal. You keep your nose out of the assassination and we will give you control over Election Day results.

In other words, the Election Day results were placed in the hands of the major networks, private enterprises, whose primary purpose is entertainment and misinformation. The final election results as reported to the public are not filtered through some government agency, certified as final and valid, and then passed onto the networks. It is the networks themselves that are doing their own certifying. At the timeVotescam was written, they operated under the aegis “News Election Service (NES)”. They had actual physical control of the counting and dissemination of the vote and refused to let the public in on how it all worked.

The ballots themselves are counted, manually or mechanically. Then the totals are recorded on canvas sheets and signed by precinct workers. These raw data are fed into a computer that stores the information and is the source for the tallies that are passed along to us, via the media. Suppose someone wanted to fix the results, what might that look like?

Pollsters go around knocking on doors asking people how they expect to vote. On Election Day they query voters after they have voted and use that as a basis for predicting outcomes. Gallup and Harris are two of the better-known agencies in the United States. They are respected for their integrity and accuracy. Although polls might serve to discourage voters from voting, they have a positive function to play. They are a check against the results that the media feeds us.

For example, in the 1988 Republican primary for President, George H.W. Bush was pitted again Bob Dole. Going into the balloting, polls had Bush losing by eight points. Instead he won by nine. How could the polls be off by a seventeen-point spread?

Bush had promised his campaign manager, John Sununu, Governor of New Hampshire, a computer genius, that if he could “deliver,” he, Sununu, would become White House Chief Staff. Apparently he delivered. Bush won the primary, became President and Sununu got the reward he had been promised.

The Collier brothers decided to turn their investigation of electoral flaws and fixes into a book and were determined to follow a lead wherever it took them. They decided that brother Ken would enter the fray by running for Congress in Miami-Dade County. They were determined to do a low budget, activist, grass roots campaign, with the primary purpose of getting an inside look at how the system worked.

They were bold, took chances, and came up with some interesting facts. On Election Day they watched the results come in over television. They noticed that the computer went down and that when it came back on their tally came back lower than it had been. They discovered that there was a pattern around the country of computers “going down” and coming back up with different results.

They learned that at 7AM a precinct captain opens the back of the voting machine to determine that all counters are set to zero. At the end of the day when the voting is over, the back of the machine is opened again to read the tallies for each candidate. Representatives from each party call out the numbers to precinct workers who then enter them on canvas sheets and affix their signature. The Collier brothers tracked down the canvas sheets for the election they were in and discovered that there were two, not one set of sheets, and that the second set had 4,000 signatures that were forged.

Predicting the vote

Apparently Channel 7 was able to accurately predict forty races with 250 candidates by examining the results from just one voting machine. And they did it in just twenty-four minutes. Channel 4 achieved the same result in just four minutes. How is that possible?

The Collier brothers decided to study other subsequent elections results in Dade county. In the 1970 race for Governor 141,000 votes were cast. If we are to believe the numbers, the exact same number of votes were cast a month later in a runoff. But, that is not likely, since when the losing candidates drop out the vote count drops as well.

For the 1970 race for the House of Representatives, it was projected that there would be a total of 96,499 votes. And, in fact, the actual total was 96,499. The computer appears to have achieved a perfect result. This level of accuracy was replicated in five different races, one for governor, one for senator, three for the House of Representatives.  Does that ever happen? What are the odds?

The Collier brothers tracked down a warehouse in Opa Locka, Florida, a rural backwater municipality where Dade county’s 1,648 voting machines were stored when not in use. They came with a court order to examine the machines. The fellow in charge was friendly and talkative. How can you rig these machines? “Well,” said Frank, “you can place a decal over the counter that reads ‘000,’ when behind those zeroes is the real number 090. Or you can take a razor blade and shave one of these plastic wheels, which then slips ahead by 100 or 200 votes.” Now the brothers had further evidence that the elections were open to tampering.

The “League of Women Voters” is known as a non-partisan civic organization. It was founded in 1920, shortly after women had won the right to vote. Its mission is to aid in voter registration, and educate citizens as to their voting rights. At the time, the League sponsored Presidential debates. It no longer does.

According to Ken and Jim Collier, the League also engages in vote fraud. An informant told the brothers that members of the League were “using little black pencils issued by the election division to punch out new holes in the vote cards” thus creating a new vote or invalidating an existing vote. The League workers were being paid $15 per hour for their services. Yet state and federal law explicitly prohibit any “handling or piercing of the public’s ballots by anyone except the voter.”

The brothers arrived with their video camera and taped the League in action. Indeed the workers were pushing pencils through ballot cards. The floor was covered with chads. They got it on tape. It turns out that the League of Women Voters is at the center of Election Day counting and reporting. Not only do they handle the ballots, in violation of state and federal election law, they actually do the vote reporting. It is the League that supplies the numbers that are then supplied to the public by TV networks.

The Colliers also taped the automatic card counters — ballot multiplexers — in action. Workers would take cards that had already been scanned and scan them again. One vote was thus counted twice. Ballots arrive at the counting center in metal security boxes with intact red security seals. Except some of the seals were broken. One of the workers had a bag filled with new seals. In other words, the box had been tampered with. Yet it would end up with an intact seal at the end of its travels.

According to Jim and Ken Collier, the Miami election supervisor gave the ballots to precinct captains to take home as much as a week in advance of any election. Apparently a good time was had by all punching out a slate of candidates.

Conspiracy of silence

As the Colliers delved deeper into vote tampering and tried to get the news media to report what they had discovered they were repeatedly turned away. There was a conspiracy of silence. As Tim O’Brien of ABC news said to Ken and Jim, “When you’re dealing with the networks, you’re dealing with a shadow government.”

Various conspiracies seem to feed off of each other. Katherine Graham was owner of the Washington Post, one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers at the time Richard Nixon was President.  She also owned a television station in Miami. Nixon had proof that Graham’s TV station was involved in election rigging. Graham learned that Nixon was on her trail and decided that she would undo him before he got to her, hence, according to the Colliers, the Watergate bugging, a federal offense. The FBI and the telephone company had each done three sweeps and discovered that there were no bugs in the DNC headquarters in the Watergate. The Washington Post, Graham’s paper, printed the story anyway, resulting in Nixon’s impeachment, all of which was ignited by Graham’s election shenanigans in her Miami TV station.

In 1964, Louis Harris developed a method for conducting exit polls that would permit pollsters to predict election results before the vote was counted. The networks — ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN — got together and formed another consortium, this time to conduct their own exit polls. At the time of the 1992 primaries, the Colliers once again did their homework and calculated that it would be impossible for the pollsters to achieve the results they claimed they had and for the networks to be offering numbers that were legitimate.

“Since VRS [Voter Research and Surveys] claims that thousands of people were polled in seven states, our math indicates that it was impossible to garner and call that much information back to Chilton Operators [Chilton Research of Radnor PA] and have the results on air at 7:01PM.” (italics in original)

Elections are open to fraud at every step in the process from the counters in the back of the machines that can be covered with decals, the wheel that can be shaved, the canvas tally sheets that can arrive with forged signatures, the League workers who punch holes in ballots and call in the vote, the computer software whose source code is known only to the private company that owns it, the polls producing a level of speed and accuracy that is not humanly possible, that read out sheets handed to TV announcers. All of this is in private hands, subject to the whim of he or she who has the power necessary to dictate the outcome. We, the voters, naively return to the polls again and again participating in a process that has nothing to do with the will of the people whom it is allegedly designed to serve.

On some level we have known for some time that we were being scammed but had no proof and more importantly felt there was nothing we could do to bring about change. And so we participate in a meaningless ritual whose outcome is predetermined, thus validating a system whose sole purpose is to lull us into acquiescence so we will endure the hardships and harshness of the “American Dream.” We are not happy but pretend to be and get angry if anyone suggests that something about our government is foul and needs to be changed.

Quality of Life: Social Decay

We live with the illusion that what our government does in our name is something separate and apart, does not enter into our private lives, penetrate our very souls. And yet it does. In his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness, written at the end of the eighteenth century, English political philosopher William Godwin argues that we need to consider that “politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all.”

According to Godwin, government conduct has intellectual, moral, psychological, and emotional consequences for its citizens—that it, in effect, shapes us and “perhaps it insinuates itself into our personal dispositions, and insensibly communicates its own spirit to our private transactions.” What we consider to be our political education is, in effect, “the modification our ideas received from the form of government under which we live.”

Corrupt governors lead to corruption of the governed. There is a trickle down effect.  As de Tocqueville observes, “they [the governors] in some measure lend the author­ity of the government to the base practices of which they are accused.”

For example, here in New York, we lost St. Vincent’s hospital — one of our finest — to venality and corruption. Ten executives were paid $10 million per year in wages, enjoyed a $278,000 golf outing. In the two years before closing, the hospital paid $17 million for “management consultants,” $3.8 million on “professional fund-raising” and $104 million on unspecified costs. The hospital slid into bankruptcy with an accumulated debt of $1billion, apparently after taking on debt from other hospitals as well. Is this any different from our elected representatives raiding the social security fund and passing along to Lockheed Martin $400 billion for the F 35, a fighter jet that can’t fly? And by the way, like St. Vincent’s hospital, the United States of America is bankrupt. It can’t liquidate its debt.

The story repeats itself. Those in control of some of New York’s most prized cultural institutions, The Art Students League, The Cooper Union, the New York Public Library, corrupted by the lure of millions betray their public trust in the service of real estate interests that threaten to cannibalize our cultural heritage.

One can look to cities around the country and see similar outcomes. Detroit, once the economic center of our country, has been abandoned and sold off. What is left is rubble and a people desperate to have a water supply, health services and food. Had the city been bombed the outcome wouldn’t have been much different. Our elected representatives look the other way. Of what use are they?

Nothing is sacred, absolutely nothing. The philistines are in charge. Our elected representatives who oversee a government where one swindle after another is considered good government. We have created a culture where anything goes and nothing is preserved in the name of the common good.

Morality, such an old fashioned term.

One blushes to introduce the word morality into polite conversation. It is such an old fashioned term, associated, perhaps, with civilizations bygone. How can we possibly be concerned with such niceties when we are under constant threat of terrorism? And shouldn’t we be availing ourselves of torture where necessary to make ourselves safe, and wouldn’t it be irresponsible to act otherwise? Across from Stuyvesant Square, in Manhattan, there is a Friends Meeting House. Over the entrance there is a banner that reads, “Torture Is A Moral Issue.” Apparently Americans need to be reminded.

A generation of Americans marginalized and overpowered by a government that it doesn’t understand and can’t change turns to violence as a source of empowerment. “American Sniper” is a recently released movie that broke all box office records. It is the story of an American solider whose calling in life is killing “towel heads” in Iraq, 160 of them, making him the deadliest sniper in American history.

Chris Kyle, seems to have embraced his career as a serial killer and takes pride in what he is doing for his country. No where in this movie are we made to question that there is anything untoward about killing in general or killing people in their homeland, or that we are an invading army, not a troop of boy scouts removing trash from the side of a highway.

Our elected representatives have created a culture of killing that has been embraced by a large segment of our society, with the President of the United States as one of its principle cheerleaders. He has a kill list that is drawn on by drone operators to cut down victims in countries like Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Sometimes there is “collateral damage.” A wedding party, children, the elderly, a pregnant woman are cut down in the name of democracy.

Killing is what it is all about, killing without regret, killing with pride, killing without consequences. The ICC (International Criminal Court) is a court system that began functioning in 2002. Its purpose is to prosecute those who violate international law by committing genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes. 123 countries signed on. The court sits in the Hague, in the Netherlands.  Our elected representatives chose not to join, thus giving a clear signal that they planned to act outside the law.

And further, in 2002, our elected representatives passed the “American Service Members Protection Act,” nicknamed “The Hague Invasion Act.” This piece of legislation authorizes the use of military force to liberate any American or citizen of a U.S.-allied country being held by the court. Of course, “service members” is a euphemism for figures like George Bush and Dick Cheney who might well be tried and convicted for their violations of international law.

“American Service Members Protection Act” is a confession of guilt. It wouldn’t have been passed if there weren’t real fears of legal consequence for unjustifiable acts of war. But what it reveals more than anything is the thugism of our elected representatives, the shameless devotion to violence, the shameless disavowal of any moral code, the complete lack of honor. “We can kill anyone, anywhere. And if you get in our way, we will kill you.” This is the United States of America in the 21st century.

Chickens come home to roost

It should come as no surprise that local police forces are now military outposts. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security have already shunted $5.1 billion worth of military equipment to local police departments around the country. This equipment includes armored personnel carriers, assault rifles, land-mine detectors, grenade launchers, and 94,000 machine guns.

SWAT teams, in full military regalia, are raiding people’s homes in the middle of the night, often just to search for drugs. People have died. Pets have been shot. Homes have been ravaged. All in the name of keeping us safe. One family in Atlanta was awakened in the middle of the night when officers burst into their home and threw a flashbang grenade into the playpen where a toddler was sleeping. Civilians, — especially black ones — have become target practice.

This is trickle down fascism. What happens at the top happens at the bottom. The top gets to be the top every time we vote in elections and install our elected representatives, the ones who underwrite the fascist state we are living in.

Our electoral system — with a few exceptions — attracts the lowest element in society, raises them to the position of ultimate power, which they then use to enrich themselves and their corporate sweethearts, while simultaneously fleecing us and undermining the very basis for social existence. If national and international law were enforced many of our elected representatives would be led off in handcuffs to spend the last of their days in prison.

Our elected representatives are drawn from amongst those who have no trouble lying and selling out to the highest bidder. Their conduct sets the moral tone for the rest of society. The most degraded use of power is pushed to the front. There is a mass culture that dips ever deeper into a pool of tawdry self-abasement. We owe all of this to the form of government we live under and to its capacity to select the most slavish of men and women to rule over us.

Quiet Despair

What does it mean to live in such a society for those millions of us who care about human life and the fate of the planet? What does it mean to us when we see our neighbors struggling to pay their rent, having lost their pension and their savings to the Wall Street banksters thanks to legislation that our elected representatives put in place? What does it mean to be betrayed again and again by those we put in power, to be lied to again and again? What happens to our identity and self-respect when we know we are allowing the swindle and rapine to continue by acquiescing to the cosa nostra euphemistically referred to as “American Democracy.”

We are made to feel small and powerless. We lack a solid grounding in reality. Reality is something we don’t want to know. It is too frightening, so we kid ourselves into believing that everything is okay. We dare not look into the future. We dread what it might hold. We are cut off from each other. Our fear and insecurity create barriers. Our conversations are trivial and manic. Honest, in depth conversations would take us where we don’t want to go.

We are being crushed by an oppressive government, presided over by the elected representatives we install every time we vote. It would never occur to us that the depression we experience is a consequence of the quiet despair that ensues from a sense of impending disaster and the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies it.

What is it like for our young people starting out in life? How can they have an honest vision of the future that carries some hope with it? They are saddled with student debt from which there is no escape. They are lucky if the degree they worked so hard for will get them a low paying job. What does the future hold for them? Not much, so they drown themselves in a sea of extreme drinking and random sex.

Says, Russell Brand,

“We are living in a zoo, … our collective consciousness, our individual consciousness, has been hijacked by a power structure that needs us to remain atomized and disconnected. We want union, we want connection, we need it the way we need other forms of nutrition, and denied it we delve into the lower impulses for sanctuary.”

The “me” generation is self-centered and blinded to the reality that surrounds them, a reality that is in a state of terminal decay. “Me” is all that is left to hold onto. Here is Russell at his lyrical best.

Is there an emptiness in you as you walk your land, uneasy feet on uneasy streets, uneasy in the bedroom, uneasy even in the mirror, an uneasy creep to uneasy sleep, pulling the bed sheets up close; checking your phone, checking your phone, checking you’re not here all alone to die alone?

These are dark times. We get on with our lives, put on a good face, have a few beers, a few laughs, enjoy some theatre, a good meal, a movie, some music. We do our best to keep ourselves energized, spirited and hopeful about life. But, we spend our days waiting, waiting for a magical savior, waiting for the worst.

By this time I hope you are wondering, “Well, is there no way out? Is there no alternative to the form of government we are enslaved to?”

To which I reply, “Indeed there is. And it is called sortition.”

Sortition

Sortition is another word for lottery, allotment, lot. Drop some names into a hat. Pull one out — without peeking — and that person wins the prize. The appeal of sortition is that it is fair. It establishes a level playing field. Everyone has the same equal opportunity.

In ancient Athens, sortition was used for selecting magistrates — about 1,100 of them — and the Council of 500 or boule, which was responsible for setting the agenda for the Assembly. Magistrates were executive administrators. In Athens they oversaw the grain supply, building projects, trade. The equivalent today might be Parks Commissioner, School Chancellor.

Any Athenian who met citizenship and age requirements could put forward his name a year in advance. If his name was drawn he would serve for one year. Before entering service the candidate was interviewed, just to make sure that there were no glaring deficiencies that might disqualify him from office.

One could argue that those who offered themselves for service might know little or nothing about their particular responsibility. That contingency was addressed by having a committee of several citizens oversee each function, with the assumption that what one person didn’t know another would make up for. Tenure was limited to one year. There were frequent reviews of a magistrate’s performance. If a majority of the review jury felt his performance was inadequate the magistrate was replaced.

The Athenians believed in amateurism. They believed that the average citizen was wise enough and intelligent enough to acquit himself of his duties adequately. Their bigger concern was concentration of power, abuse of power and corruption, which was why they used sortition for selecting magistrates. Only generals and persons responsible for large sums of money were voted into office.

Today, our jury system is based on sortition. It is assumed that a random sampling of the citizenry will result in a jury that will act wisely in forming its judgment. When there are limited places for a certain benefit, for example in a college program, or to run a marathon, names are submitted for sortition. Those whose number is drawn win the prize.

Sortition around the world

Currently there is renewed interest in using sortition, as opposed to elections, as a means of selecting people for government service. There are various proposals afloat. Books and articles are being written. There are movements in several countries to actually put sortition into practice. “Equality by lot” is a blog devoted exclusively to a discussion of sortition, attended mainly by academics. It is a useful resource if one wants to keep up to date about what is happening in the world of sortition.

Recently, in London, a new campaign (see occupydemocracy.net) was launched to demand government by sortition in England. In Mexico, the “National Regeneration Movement (Morena)” will select its candidates for congressional seats by sortition. Louis Laurent, a Belgian MP, is calling for a citizen parliament selected by sortition. Recently there was an article in a Chilean publication advocating sortition. Sortition has been promoted by the Newid Party in Wales (see ordinarypeople.org.uk). David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian historian, has written a book (in Dutch) entitled, Against Elections (see policy-network.net for an excerpt in English) in which he advocates a bi-representative government, half elected, half selected by sortition.

In Australia, the New Democracy Foundation (newdemocracy.com.au) is experimenting with “demarchy,” a form of government based in a network of numerous decision-making groups. Each group deals with a specific function, i.e. transport, land use, parks. Membership of each group is chosen randomly (i.e. by sortition) each year from all those interested in a specific topic.

In Iceland the citizenry, not their representatives, were called upon to write a new constitution. The parliament appointed a constitutional committee of seven to work together with a national assembly comprised of 950 citizens, drawn randomly (sortition) from the national registry, and a constituent assembly where 25 individuals were elected out of a roster of 522 candidates of all backgrounds and political affiliations. Over the course of four months, the committee consulted various experts and ordinary citizens to inform the bill, bringing it to a national referendum in late-2012. Sixty-seven per cent of the electorate voted in favor of the constitutional bill. Yet the political establishment succeeded in defeating its adoption.

What about here in the U. S. of A., the alleged home to democracy, free thought and good government, what can we add to the stew?  Well, just suppose that instead of choosing our candidates for national office by means of primaries and party caucuses we use sortition. What would that be like?

The first thing to understand is that elections in the United States— national as well as local — are under the purview of state governments. Thus there are fifty different election laws with endless variations in definitions and details, the kinds of voting machines, security measures, controls over party organization, financial matters, etc.

The New York State Election Law makes provision for elections in the smallest of localities. In also provides for the election of national office holders.

ARTICLE 12—PRESIDENTIAL ELECTORS AND FEDERAL ELECTED OFFICERS

Title Section

I. Presidential and Vice Presidential Electors 12–100
II. United States Senators 12–200
III. Representatives in Congress 12–300

The federal government has almost no say, though every so often the national government takes a principled stance that is supposed to be applied nation wide to all fifty states. For example, the “Voting Rights Act of 1965” prohibits racial discrimination in voting. But such critical issues as the procedures for designating and nominating individuals for elected office are completely in the hands of each state government.

For example in Iowa, “The term “political party” shall mean a party which, at the last preceding general election, cast for its candidate for president of the United States or for governor, as the case may be, at least two percent of the total vote cast for all candidates for that office at that election.” In New York, “The term ‘‘party’’ means any political organization which at the last preceding election for governor polled at least fifty thousand votes for its candidate for governor.” The Texas Election Law makes repeated reference to “party” but offers no definition.

Smoke and mirrors

If it is our goal to reform our government, i.e. modify the structures that determine the power dynamics, then we must get our fingers into the dough. The place to start is Election Law, state by state.

Article I, Section 1:

No member of this state shall be disfranchised, or deprived of any of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land, or the judgment of his or her peers, except that the legislature may provide that there shall be no primary electionheld to nominate candidates for public office or to elect persons to party positions for any political party or parties in any unit of representation of the state from which such candidates or persons are nominated or elected whenever there is no contest or contests for such nominations or election as may be prescribed by general law.

What the Lord giveth, he taketh back. No one “shall be disfranchised” … except if the “law of the land” says he says he is, or his peers decide so. What meaning can such a “right” possibly have? That the election law prescribes that there shall be no primary elections when offices are not contested gives testimony to the corruption of the system. Uncontested elections are the rule. Why? What is wrong with the system that the same person gets returned to office, again and again?

Article I, Section 8:

All laws creating, regulating or affecting boards or officers charged with the duty of qualifying voters, or of distributing ballots to voters, or of  receiving, recording or counting votes at elections, shall secure equal representation of the two political parties which, at the general election next preceding that for which such boards or officers are to serve, cast the highest and the next highest number of votes. All such boards and officers shall be appointed or elected in such manner, and upon the nomination of such representatives of said parties respectively, as the legislature may direct.

Again, that mind-numbing legalese! Nowhere is there any mention of the fact that our system of elections is under the control of two political parties that are run in secrecy by some of the most venal, power hungry and morally bankrupt men in the country and that these two parties have this country and therefore the world in a death grip that is legitimized by the very election law that fails to even mention their existence.  The words “Democrats” or “Republicans” are never once mentioned.

Article 6 is entitled, “Designation and Nomination of candidates.” Section 6-102 declares, “Party nominations of candidates for the office of elector of president and vice president of the United States, one for each congressional district and two at large, shall be made by the state committee.“ This is simple prose that conceals more than it reveals. For herein is contained the key to our whole system of government, i.e. who gets to be in power and by what means. “Shall be made,” passive construction. Who is/are the agent/s? If we go back to the beginning here is what we learn.

In a nutshell

Article I, Section 104 is called, “Definitions.“ Here we get to the crux of the matter, sort of.

I, 1. “The term ‘political unit’ means the state or any political subdivision thereof or therein.” Clear enough.

I, 2. “The term ‘unit of representation’ means any political unit from which members of any committee or delegates to a party convention shall be elected as provided in this chapter.” Not so clear. You have to go to four years of law school to learn how to write this way. When language is obscure, it is because there is something to hide.

So it appears that a “unit of representation” is a committee, a committee at the county level would mean, I assume, voters who reside in a particular county and have organized themselves for purposes of “representation.” They “represent” their county, but in what context and for what purpose? Or else “unit of representation” can mean “delegates to a party convention.” Party convention is nowhere defined or given an official presence. And further “delegates” is in the plural. In what way does it constitute a “unit” of representation?

I, 3. “The term ‘party’ means any political organization which at the last preceding election for governor polled at least fifty thousand votes for its candidate for governor.” So “party” is a “political organization.” How constituted and under whose aegis, by what authority and for what purpose? No answer to these critical questions.

“Party” is defined by the fact that a certain “political organization” got a certain number of votes in a prior election. A more meaningful definition might read, “A political party is an organization formed for the purpose of gaining power for its members as a means to self-enrichment, and winning a position of influence in government as a means of realizing its particular political ideology.” Obviously this is not the kind of straight shooting one can expect to find in a system whose primary goal is to obscure its true purpose.

I, 6. “The term ‘committee’ means any committee chosen, in accordance with the provisions of this chapter, to represent the members of a party in any political unit.” It would appear that a “committee” is a group of party members representing their party, represent for what purpose?

The whole megillah

I, 7. “The term ‘designation’ means any method in accordance with the provisions of this chapter by which candidates for party nomination for public office or for election to party position may be named for the purpose of any primary election.” Now this is it friends, the whole megillah, the whole nine yards, keg of beer or whatever you choose. The earth turns on its axis or fails to based on how we determine the “designation” of candidates.

Note the critical difference between “designation” and “nomination.” We, the sheeple of New York State, nominate the candidates by voting in primary elections. We determine who will hold office, don’t we? Not! We vote for candidates that are “designated,” i.e. chosen, by others, party bosses, operating in secrecy, using “any method” they choose. The key phrase is “may be named.” Named by whom, under what circumstances?

Thus it is that power brokers with no accountability to any public constituency have the real power, the only power that matters and they are bought and sold by the corporate interests who are hell bent on destroying our habitat for private gain. This is what we want to change.

Those who designate have the real power. All the rest is poppycock, balderdash, falderal. All those specifications, rules and regulations etc. are what is known as smoke and mirrors. The only thing that matters is how candidates are designated, by whom and under what circumstances and for what purpose.

I, 9. “The terms ‘primary’ or ‘primary election’ mean only the mandated election at which enrolled members of a party may vote for the purpose of nominating party candidates and electing party officers.” That is straight forward enough. It is straight forward because it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t hide anything. The hiding has already taken place.

I, 24. “The term ‘major political parties’ means the two parties which polled for their respective candidates for the office of governor the highest and next highest number of votes at the last preceding election for such office.” Another critical definition. Under what circumstance and by whom was it decided that this country should be run by “two” “major political parties?” Why not three, or six?

I, 28. “The term ‘caucus’ shall mean an open meeting held in a political subdivision to nominate the candidates of a political party for public office to be elected in such subdivision at which all the enrolled voters of such party residing in such subdivision are eligible to vote.” Now here I am a bit confused. I thought the primary was the opportunity to nominate candidates. The “caucus” sounds like a means of “designating” rather than “nominating.” Perhaps the key phrase is “political subdivision,” meaning selecting candidates for local office, rather than statewide or national office. I am ready to be corrected.

Article 2 of the New York State Election Law is entitled, “Party Organization.” What is interesting about all of this is that no where in the Election Law that I can find is it ever declared: “State and national government shall be under the control of the two dominant political parties.” It is just assumed. The Election Law describes how the party shall function on the state and local level. It does not allow for the party’s existence, nor does it specifically empower the party to run the country, which it does. All of this is accomplished by slight of hand.

We learn how party committees are to be created, how party positions are to be filled, that parties are to set up rules of governance and procedures for removing a committee member. Section 124 of

Article 2 sets the rules for party names and emblems. We learn that

The name of a party shall be in the English language and shall not include the words ‘‘American’’, ‘‘United States’’, ‘‘National’’, ‘‘New York State’’, ‘‘Empire State’’, or any abbreviation thereof, nor the name or part of the name, or an abbreviation of the name, of an existing party. The emblem chosen may be a star, an animal, an anchor, or any other proper symbol, but may not be the same as or similar to any emblem, insignia, symbol or flag used by any political or governmental body, agency or entity nor any religious emblem, insignia, symbol or flag, nor the portrait of any person, nor the representation of a coin or of the currency of the United States. The name and emblem chosen shall not be similar to or likely to create confusion with the name or emblem of any other existing party or independent body.

Well, there you have it. If you are thinking of setting up a “major political party,” you should be aware that donkey and elephant are already taken and therefor off limits. What about dinosaur, or a viper of some kind?

Change

Change is scary. Not changing is terrifying. The United States, the World, cannot continue on their current trajectory if survival is the goal. Our only hope is government transformation. And it is quite possible. Those who scream the loudest about change being impossible are usually those who have something to lose when change takes place. Change is constant. It is inevitable. The only questions are what change will take place and who will direct it. Russell Brand’s inimitable reply to those who say, “the system is not perfect, but it is the best we can do:” ”It’s fucked,” he says, “and it’s fucking us, and it’s obsolete.”

Politics is about power. Government is people in power. Change who gets into power and how they get there and you have changed government. “The change you speak of is not possible. They are in our way.” It is not they who are in our way. It is we who are in our way. “We are like a swarm of battered spouses,” says Brand, “unable to believe that a better world is out there, because we’re cowering and flinching and reaching out for stinking trinkets.” Once we understand that we are the problem, we are more than half way towards our goal. “Quickly you realize that your job is to negotiate with your own ego.”

As Brand points out, the power elite have complete control.

They own both the teams that are competing, the stadium they play, the grass they play on, and we’re the ball they’re kicking around. They have removed all possibility for reform or redirection within the system; the change must come from us. Our only hope of survival is to overthrow their structures and take our power back.

The good news is that we have found our Archimedean lever that will change who owns what, the lever that will move the earth, and moving the earth is rather easy once you have your lever. Our lever is sortition. Instead of party bosses horse trading away our future, we use sortition. Candidates are designated to run for higher office — President, Vice President, Senate and the House of Representatives — based on random selection, that is to say a system based in political equality, a system free from bullying and corruption. Here is how it would work.

Phase I: Our first intervention will be at the state level. There will be an amendment to the Election Law substituting sortition for party caucus. It can read as follows:

Citizens will be designated to run for higher office — Representative, Senator, Vice President, and President — by means of sortition, overseen by a randomly selected jury of five hundred. Candidates interested in running for these offices will submit their names a year in advance. Juries and submissions will be statewide for Senator and President. Juries and submissions for the House of Representatives will be drawn from their respective, local election districts.

The jury of five hundred will create a standardized application form and vet the submitted applications. Six names will be randomly drawn from the pool of accepted applicants for each office. These selected candidates will be vetted and interviewed by the jury of five hundred. If a majority of the jury deems a candidate unacceptable, his/her name will be withdrawn and there will be a new sortition to determine a replacement. The final six names will constitute the ballot entries for the national election. This sortition process will be repeated at the end of each completed term in office and will be overseen by a new, randomly selected jury.

Well, how does it sound, scary, interesting, challenging, reckless? Randomness might seem a risky way to choose our national leaders. But remember that there will be a jury of five hundred overseeing the process and weeding out those who might be inappropriate. You might argue that this is rank amateurism, which it is. Amateurs, that is to say real people, grounded in social reality, who understand what it means to hold the public trust and honor it, will be a welcome relief from the crooked politicians who have had control over our destiny for the past century or two.

And once the candidates have been designated by sortition, there will be an election. The voters will have a voice. There will be six candidates to choose from. There will be a wider range of choice than our current system provides. Debates and discussions will be more intelligent and substantive. Most of the candidates will be unknown. They will make themselves known by saying something that is of value to the electorate.

Benefits of sortition

There are certain very significant advantages to this way of selecting our candidates. There are no backroom deals, favoring those with allegiance to power and big money. The citizenry at large, in all its diversity, is drawn on as a resource. There would be a dramatic reduction in corruption and corporate influence. Some people would be bought up, most not.

And further, there will be rotation in office. No longer will there be no contest “elections” where the same politicians hold office for decades, build a power base from which to enrich themselves and their buddies at the expense of the common good. There will be a continual turnover of office holders, giving citizens with new ideas and world outlooks a voice in government. Such a selection of representatives will be a lot more likely to take peace and ecology as serious issues in need of rational responses.

Candidates can choose to affiliate themselves with one of the major parties, or they can choose to remain independent. But either way, party influence will be dramatically reduced. And that is a good thing. Political parties as currently constituted are not much different from gangs. And elections are not much difference from gang warfare in suit and tie. There is no tactic that is too low or ruthless. Human life and social welfare are not on the agenda. It is all about power and ascendancy.

Power to the idiots

So why not do away with gang warfare and use sortition to select our candidates for higher office? “Power to the idiots!,” you say. “A capitol full of clowns and cretins,” you say. “We need experts in charge. People who know what they are doing.” “A capitol full of clowns and cretins” is what we now have. The clowns and cretins are leading us into the abyss, destroying resources natural and human, decimating our ecology, killing innocents around the world and are now turning our cities into military playgrounds.

Experts at what? Secrecy, lying, manipulation, self-enrichment, war mongering? Much of the time our elected representatives don’t even read the bills they sign. They have staffers who do that for them. They are expert at getting elected and siphoning public monies to private purpose, not much else.

The primary issue is one of values, not expertise. We need people with values that favor social justice, community living and a vibrant eco-system. We need experts who are experts at being human in the highest sense of that word, who prefer peace to war, who prefer an apple orchard in blossom to a blackened battlefield strewn with corpses. We need people who have nothing to hide, people who speak the truth.

And that is right dear reader, you, I or your next door neighbor might some day become President of the United States. And that is the way it should be. Real people, with real stakes in the game should be in charge, not corporate sponsored celebrity superstars with billion dollar campaign chests. I will not stoop to mention the many embarrassments who have become President. Anyone of us could obviously do better.

We use sortition to run our court system. Jurors are called upon to review complicated matters where life and liberty are on the line. We entrust this important responsibility to a random selection of twelve of our citizenry. Why can’t we use a random selection of 500 of our citizenry to oversee who runs our government? Aristotle believed that each citizen was endowed with civic virtue, the ability to distinguish right from wrong and administer justice. For him the issue was not knowledge, as it was with Socrates, but rather character and judgment.

But our sortition does not change us from an oligarchy into a democracy. Any time we have a few hundred representatives speaking for hundreds of millions, we have oligarchy by definition. However, our new oligarchy will be vastly superior to the one we have. It will be an oligarchy that has a human face to it, an oligarchy that is responsive to its constituency and the common good.
State governments will be willing to come along because the change we speak of is being applied to national elections only, not state and local elections. Sortition will result in a redistribution of power. Power at the center will be weakened, resulting in an increase of power at the local level.

Phase II

After we have become accustomed to selecting our candidates for higher office by sortition, after we have witnessed the benefits of opening the doors to new talent and ideas, after we have witnessed the reduction in corruption and ruthless disregard for the common weal, we might well be in the mood to do away with elections all together. They are a charade, and even under the best of circumstances entail manipulation and deception. Gaining office becomes a goal in itself and one does what one has to get there. Candidates are set up to make promises they can’t keep and voters are set up to believe candidates whom they know are lying.

If we decide to eliminate elections altogether at the national level and rely exclusively on sortition to select our national leaders then we will have to amend the constitution. An amendment may be proposed either by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate or by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures. Once we have a new set of office holders in the capital, where there is a constant rotation in office, and no vested interest in holding onto power, Congress might be amenable to eliminating elections and using sortition for selecting office holders. In the event that there is resistance, there is always the state route to pursue.

This change to our system of governance will not be achieved by badgering some passersby with petitions or by a blitz of TV ads. It will be achieved by a multitude of face to face small group gatherings where people become engaged in an exchange of ideas, have the opportunity to think out loud on critical matters and become involved in the struggle for political justice. People who truly understand what is wrong with the current system and become aware of what can be done to fix it will take action.

In Chapter 11 of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained: The True Meaning of Democracy I discuss the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776. The people of Pennsylvania were unhappy with the way their leaders were responding to political crisis. They gathered by the thousands in the State House courtyard and set up a shadow government that eventually replaced the existing government, thus instituting the most democratic government this country has ever known.

The early phase of the French Revolution offers a similar example. On May 5, 1789, king Louis XVI called a meeting of the Estates-General. Traditionally, the three estates — the clergy, the nobility, and the commons — had met separately. This time the commons insisted that all three meet together and invited the clergy and the nobility to join them. The nobility and the clergy declined, and so the commons (the 99%) met on their own and debated.

The commons continued to meet on their own and by June 17 had given themselves the title “National Assembly” and had begun to draft a constitution. Shut out of their regular meeting place by the king, they met at a new location and took an oath not to adjourn until they had completed their constitution. The king ordered them to abandon the project. With relatively few histrionics, they persisted. Soon they were joined by the clergy, then the nobility. On June 27, Louis himself wrote formally requesting the two upper houses to merge with the lower to form a National Assembly.

After July 9, 1789, the Assembly became known as the National Constituent Assembly and continued in its deliberations despite opposition from the king. As of July 14, 1789, it became the effective government of France. On September 3, 1791, after two years of deliberation, the Assembly adopted France’s first written constitution.

There is no reason why we can’t emulate these important examples from history. It will take a lot of us. If three thousand people think sortition is an interesting idea and let it drop, then obviously nothing new happens. If each of the same three thousand passes it on to five people and those five pass it on to another five, the outcome, according to my online permutation calculator is 242,190,944,550,072,000. I think this number reads 242 quadrillion, 190 trillion, 944 billion, 550 million, 72 thousand. That ought to do it.

P.S. With our new government in place there will be an American Renaissance. We will once again be proud to be American and once again we will be an inspiration to countries around the world hungry for new ideas.

Arthur D. Robbins is the author of, ”PARADISE LOST, PARADISE REGAINED: THE TRUE MEANING OF DEMOCRACY” referred to by Ralph Nader as, “An eye- opening, earth-shaking book . . . a fresh, torrential shower of revealing insights and vibrant lessons . . .” and the e-book based on Part II of ”PARADISE LOST” entitled, ”DEMOCRACY DENIED: THE UNTOLD STORY.” To learn more visit acropolis-newyork.com

Sources

Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy
Russell Brand, Revolution
James and Kenneth Collier, Votescam
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1
William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness
Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi
Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class
David Van Reybrouck, Against Elections

Of Course Israel Was Spying On U.S. Negotiations With Iran

It is – rightfully – front-page news that Israel was caught spying on the closed-door negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

And the Obama administration is particularly outraged that Israel allegedly shared that information with Republican congressmen who want to stop any peaceful deal with Iran.

This is certainly outrageous … but small, in the grand scheme of things.

Why?

Because Israeli spying on America is so rampant that U.S. officials have labeled it “alarming, even terrifying”.

And because the U.S. has only half-heartedly asked Israel to stop … Israel has told the U.S. to pound sand.

As if that isn’t bad enough, the NSA voluntarily shares the raw data it collects on American citizens with Israel.

This includes raw data on U.S. government officials.   This not only raises major privacy concerns for American citizens, but it might mean that Israel is spying on the American Congress and other high-level politicians.

Indeed, leaked NSA documents show that U.S. intelligence officials are concerned that the NSA may be putting Israel’s security needs ahead of America’s.

Moreover, top NSA officials have told Washington’s Blog that mass surveillance by the NSA is really aimed at blackmail. And see this.

Indeed, 5,000 years of history shows that spying on one’s own people is always aimed at crushing dissent.  (Incidentally, opposing unnecessary, costly wars – such as war against Iran – is treated as terrorism and unacceptable dissent.)

But it’s not just Americans … America’s spy apparatus also helps foreign governments – like Israel – crush dissent by citizens in their countries.

Indeed, spying is really a power grab.  As Snowden accurately said:

These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.

The 16th anniversary of NATO’s War on Yugoslavia gives cause to reflect on what American ‘diplomacy’ is really all about.

When some 70 members of the neo-Nazi organization Golden Dawn go on trial sometime this spring, there will be more than street thugs and fascist ideologues in the docket, but a tangled web of influence that is likely to engulf Greece’s police, national security agency, wealthy oligarchs, and mainstream political parties. While Golden Dawn—with its holocaust denial, its swastikas, and Hitler salutes—makes it look like it inhabits the fringe, in fact the organization has roots deep in the heart of Greece’s political culture

Which is precisely what makes it so dangerous.

Golden Dawn’s penchant for violence is what led to the charge that it is a criminal organization. It is accused of several murders, as well as attacks on immigrants, leftists, and trade unionists. Raids have uncoveredweapon caches. Investigators have also turned up information suggesting that the organization is closely tied to wealthy shipping owners, as well as the National Intelligence Service (EYP) and municipal police departments.

Several lawyers associated with two victims of violence by Party members—a 27-year old Pakistani immigrant stabbed to death last year, and an Afghan immigrant stabbed in 2011— charge that a high level EYP official responsible for surveillance of Golden Dawn has links to the organization. The revelations forced Dimos Kouzilos, director of EYP’s third counter-intelligence division, to resign last September.

There were several warning flags about Kouzilos when he was appointed to head the intelligence division by rightwing New Democracy Prime Minister Antonis Samaras. Kouzilos is a relative of a Golden Dawn Parliament member, who is the Party’s connection to the shipping industry. Kouzilos is also close to a group of police officers in Nikea, who are currently under investigation for ties to Golden Dawn. Investigators charge that the Nikea police refused to take complaints from refugees and immigrants beaten by Party members, and the police Chief, Dimitris Giovandis, tipped off Golden Dawn about surveillance of the Party.

In handing over the results of their investigation, the lawyers said the “We believe that this information provides an overview of the long-term penetration ands activities of the Nazi criminal gang with the EYP and the police.” A report by the Office of Internal Investigation documents 130 cases where Golden Dawn worked with police.

It should hardly come as a surprise that there are close ties between the extreme right and Greek security forces. The current left-right split goes back to 1944 when the British tried to drive out the Communist Party—the backbone of the Greek resistance movement against the Nazi occupation. The split eventually led to the 1946-49 civil war when Communists and leftists fought royalists and former German collaborationists for power. However, the West saw the civil war through the eyes of the then budding Cold War, and, at Britain’s request,  the U.S. pitched in on the side of the right to defeat the left. In the process of that intervention—then called the Truman Doctrine—U.S. intelligence services established close ties with the Greek military.

Those ties continued over the years that followed and were tightened once Greece joined NATO in 1952. The charge that the U.S. encouraged the 1967 fascist coup against the Greek government has never been proven, but many of the “colonels” that initiated the overthrow had close ties to the CIA and the U.S. military.

Golden Dawn was founded by some of the key people who ruled during the 1967-74 junta, and Greek dictator Georgios Papadopoulos, the leader of the “colonels” who led the 1967 coup, groomed the Party’s founder and current leader, Nikos Michaloliakos. Papadopoulos was a Nazi collaborator and served with the German “security battalions” that executed 130,000 Greek civilians during WW II. Papadopoulos was trained by the U.S. Army and recruited by the CIA. Indeed, he was the first CIA employee to govern a European country.

Golden Dawn’s adherence to Hitler, the symbols of Nazism, and the“Fuehrer principle”—investing the Party’s leader with absolute authority—is, in part, what has gotten the organization into trouble. According to an investigation by Greek Supreme Court Deputy Prosecutor Haralambos Vourliotis, Golden Dawn is split into two wings, a political wing responsible for the Party’s legal face and an operational wing for “carrying out attacks on those deemed enemies of the party.” Michaloiakos oversees both wings.

Prosecutors will try to demonstrate that attacks and murders are not the actions of individuals who happen to be members of Golden Dawn, because independent actions are a contradiction to the “Fuehrer principle.” Many of the attacks have featured leading members of Golden Dawn and, on occasion, members of Parliament. Indeed, since the leadership and core of the Party were jailed last September, attacks on non-Greeks and leftists have fallen off.

There is a cozy relationship between Golden Dawn and some business people as well, with the Party serving as sort of “Thugs-R-Us” organization. Investigators charge that shortly after two Party MPs visited the shipyards at Piraeus, a Golden Dawn gang attacked Communists who were supporting union workers. Golden Dawn also tried to set up a company union that would have resulted in lower pay and fewer benefits for shipyard workers. In return, shipping ownersdonated 240,000 Euros to Golden Dawn.

Investigators charge that the Party also raises funds through protection rackets, money laundering and blackmail.

Journalist Dimitris Psarras, who has researched and written about Golden Dawn for decades, argues that the Party is successful not because it plays on the economic crisis, but because for years the government—both socialists and conservatives—mainstream parties, and the justice system have turned a blind eye to Golden Dawn’s growing use of force. It was the murder of Greek anti-fascist rapper/poet Pavlos Fyssas that forced the authorities to finally move on the organization. Killing North Africans was one thing, killing a Greek quite another.

Instead of challenging Golden Dawn in the last election, the New Democracy Party railed against “Marxists,” “communists” and—pulling a page from the 1946-49 civil war—“bandits.” Even the center parties, like the Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) and the new Potami Party, condemned both “left and right” as though the two were equivalent.

New Dawn did see its voter base shrink from the 426,025 it won in 2012, to 388,000 in the January election that brought left party Syriza to power. But then New Dawn is less interested in numbers than it is in wielding violence. According to Psarras, the Party’s agenda is “to create a climate of civil war, a divide where people have to choose between leftists and rightists.”

Some of the mainstream parties have eased Golden Dawn’s path by adopting the Party’s attacks on Middle East and African immigrants and Muslims, albeit at a less incendiary level. But, as Psarras points out, “Research in political science has long since showed that wherever conservative European parties adopt elements of far-right rhetoric and policy during pre-election periods, the upshot is the strengthening of the extreme far right parties.”

That certainly was the case in last year’s European Parliamentary elections, when center and right parties in France and Great Britain refused to challenge the racism and Islamophobia of rightwing parties, only to see the latter make strong showings.

According to the Supreme Court’s Vourliotis, Golden Dawn believes that “Those who do not belong to the popular community of the race are subhuman. In this category belong foreign immigrants, Roma, those who disagree with their ideas and even people with mental problems.” The Party dismisses the Holocaust: “There were no crematoria, it’s a lie. Or gas chambers,” Michaloliakos said in a 2012 national TV interview. Some 60,000 members of Greece’s Jewish population were transported and murdered in the death camps during World War II.

The trial is scheduled for April 20 but might delayed. Golden Dawn members, including Michaloliakos and many members of Parliament, were released Mar. 18 released because they can only be held for 18 months in pre-trial detention. The Party, with its ties in the business community and its “wink of the eye” relationship to New Democracy—that mainstream center right party apparently printed Golden Dawn’s election brochures—has considerable resources to fight the charges. New Dawn has hired more than 100 attorneys.

If convicted, New Dawn members could face up to 20 years in prison, but there is not a great deal of faith among the anti-fascist forces in the justice system. The courts have remained mute in the face of Golden Dawn’s increasing use of violence, and some magistrates have been accused of being sympathetic to the organization.

One of the laws the Party is being prosecuted under is Article 187A, which can be a bit tricky. While Golden Dawn is charged with being a criminal organization, murder, assault, and illegal weapons possession, Article 187A kicks in when those crimes take on a political dimension and reach the level of trying to intimidate a group of people or population. But that is a slippery concept, because the prosecution will have to prove “intent.” It gives the defense plenty of gray area to work with, particularly if the defense is well financed and the courts are sympathetic.

Thanasis Kampagiannis of “Jail Golden Dawn” warns that the Party will not vanish on its own.

“Many are under the impression that if we stop talking about Golden Dawn the problem will somehow disappear. That is not the case. The economic crisis has burnished the organization, but there are other causes that have contributed to its existence and prominence, such as the intensification of state repression and the institutionalization of racism by the dominant parties.”

But courts are political entities and respond to popular movements. Anti-fascists are calling on the Greeks and the international community to stay in the streets and demand that New Dawn be brought to justice. Germans missed that opportunity with the Nazi Party and paid a terrible price for it.

Thanks to Kia Mistilis, journalist, photographer and editor, for providing material for this column.

Conn Hallinan can be read atdispatchesfromtheedgeblog.wordpress.com.

Some £600 million in UK aid money courtesy of the taxpayer is helping big business increase its profits in Africa via the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition. In return for receiving aid money and corporate investment, African countries have to change their laws, making it easier for corporations to acquire farmland, control seed supplies and export produce.

Last year, Director of the Global Justice Now Nick Dearden said:

“It’s scandalous that UK aid money is being used to carve up Africa in the interests of big business. This is the exact opposite of what is needed, which is support to small-scale farmers and fairer distribution of land and resources to give African countries more control over their food systems. Africa can produce enough food to feed its people. The problem is that our food system is geared to the luxury tastes of the richest, not the needs of ordinary people. Here the British government is using aid money to make the problem even worse.”

Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria, Benin, Malawi and Senegal are all involved in the New Alliance.

In a January 2015 piece in The Guardian, Dearden continued by saying that development was once regarded as a process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power over resources from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’, involving a revolutionary struggle over the world’s resources. However, the current paradigm is based on the assumption that developing countries need to adopt neo-liberal policies and that public money in the guise of aid should facilitate this. The notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and the concept of poverty depoliticised and separated from structurally embedded power relations.

To see this in action, we need look no further to a conference held on Monday 23 March in London, organised by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). This secretive, invitation-only meeting with aid donors and big seed companies discussed a strategy to make it easier for these companies to sell patented seeds in Africa and thus increase corporate control of seeds.

Farmers have for generations been saving and exchanging seeds among themselves. This has allowed them a certain degree of independence and has enabled them to innovate, maintain biodiversity, adapt seeds to climatic conditions and fend off plant disease. Big seed companies with help from the Gates Foundation, the US government and other aid donors are now discussing ways to increase their market penetration of commercial seeds by displacing farmers own seed systems.

Corporate sold hybrid seeds often produce higher yields when first planted, but the second generation seeds produce low yields and unpredictable crop traits, making them unsuitable for saving and storing. As Heidi Chow from Global Justice Now rightly says, instead of saving seeds from their own crops, farmers who use hybrid seeds become completely dependent on the seed, fertiliser and pesticide companies, which can (and has) in turn result in an agrarian crisis centred on debt, environmental damage and health problems.

The London conference aimed to share findings of a report by Monitor Deloitte on developing the commercial seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa. The report recommends that in countries where farmers are using their own seed saving networks NGOs and aid donors should encourage governments to introduce intellectual property rights for seed breeders and help to persuade farmers to buy commercial, patented seeds rather than relying on their own traditional varieties. The report also suggests that governments should remove regulations so that the seed sector is opened up to the global market.

The guest list comprised corporations, development agencies and aid donors, including Syngenta, the World Bank and the Gates Foundation. It speaks volumes that not one farmer organisation was invited. Farmers have been imbued with the spirit of entrepreneurship for thousands of years. They have been “scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts” who have increasingly been reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry. So who better than to discuss issues concerning agriculture?

But the whole point of such a conference is that the West regards African agriculture as a ‘business opportunity’, albeit wrapped up in warm-sounding notions of ‘feeding Africa’ or ‘lifting millions out of poverty’. The West’s legacy in Africa (and elsewhere) has been to plunge millions into poverty. Enforcing structural reforms to benefit big agribusiness and its unsustainable toxic GMO/petrochemical inputs represents a continuation of the neo-colonialist plundering of Africa. The US has for many decades been using agriculture as a key part of foreign policy to secure global hegemony.

Phil Bereano, food sovereignty campaigner with AGRA Watch and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington says:

“This is an extension of what the Gates Foundation has been doing for several years – working with the US government and agribusiness giants like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s genetic riches for the benefit of outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda realize that such colonialism is no longer in fashion? It’s time to support African farmers’ self-determination.”

Bereano also shows how Western corporations only intend to cherry-pick the most profitable aspects of the food production chain, while leaving the public sector in Africa to pick up the tab for the non-profitable aspects that allow profitability further along the chain.

Giant agritech corporations with their patented seeds and associated chemical inputs are ensuring a shift away from diversified agriculture that guarantees balanced local food production, the protection of people’s livelihoods and agricultural sustainability. African agriculture is being placed in the hands of big agritech for private profit under the pretext of helping the poor. The Gates Foundation has substantial shares in Monsanto. With Monsanto’s active backingfrom the US State Department and the Gates Foundation’s links with USAID, African farmers face a formidable force.

Report after report suggests that support for conventional agriculture, agroecology and local economies is required, especially in the Global South. Instead, Western governments are supporting powerful corporations with taxpayers money whose thrust via the WTO, World Bank and IMF has been to encourage strings-attached loans, monocrop cultivation for export using corporate seeds, the restructuring of economies, the opening of economies to the vagaries of land and commodity speculation and a system of globalised trade rigged in favour of the West.

In this vision for Africa, those farmers who are regarded as having any role to play in all of this are viewed only as passive consumers of corporate seeds and agendas. The future of Africa is once again being decided by rich men in London.

The essence of an unjust society is to continually demand and take from those with the least the little that they have to support their lives and life-goals and add it to the money-value hoards of those who have the power to restructure public life to serve their limitless appetites. So we see a recurrent pattern of struggle across history: those with the least power are forced to fight the hardest just to maintain what little they have.

“1) To Preserve the agreement they made with us linking tuition to funding for all members. This is “tuition indexation.” All we ask is that the university keep to this agreement as they did from 2000-2013. Since 2013, however, they have broken this agreement. We are not asking for anything more than for the university to keep its promise from 2000 and preserve education’s financial accessibility.

“2) Include LGBTQ equity language in our agreements. It is necessary that all members of both our union and academic community have their identities recognized by the university and feel secure and comfortable in their learning and working environment at York University.

“3) Gain a sufficient funding package for Master’s students (unit 3 generally) with which they can pay rent, not go hungry, and hopefully avoid debt.”

At the University of Toronto, the issues are similarly focussed on securing a living salary for graduate assistants trying to work and study in the most expensive city in the country.

Integral Part of Learning

To people outside the university, strikes by graduate students might seem absurd – are they not just there to study and pay their academic dues (so to speak) before they too join the ranks of overpaid blowhards expounding at great breadth and depth about nothing?

Alas, were that only so. The reality is that graduate students perform essential work without which the university could not function and students could not learn at the level they ought to demand from a university education. There could be no essays in large classes without TA’s to mark them, no tutorials to provide more intimate intellectual spaces for more intense discussion of fundamental problems, no labs for science students to hone their experimental skills, no time for faculty to research and make the profoundly important contributions to human understanding that faculty are capable of making.

So what these strikes really come down to is an opposition at the level of value systems. On the one hand, the administration’s opposition to the unions’ demands is rooted in the austerity agenda the Kathleen Wynne government has adopted. As Dave Bush and Doug Nesbitt explain:

“Their approach has usually been different from the frontal assault of the Harris years. The Liberal government, especially under Wynne, has been adept at carrying out austerity by isolating potential struggles. Cuts and tough bargaining are directed against one sector of the public service, while others are temporarily left alone, to suffer under a slow strangulation of funds.”

The agenda is justified by appeal to the combined effects on the Ontario economy of the 2008 recession and cuts to federal transfer payments. What is left unsaid, as Bush and Nesbitt note, is that “the Liberals have repeatedly cut the corporate tax rate, have written off $1.4-billion in owed corporate taxes, and wasted billions on privatized ‘P3’ hospital construction.”

They have also signalled repeatedly, in a series of documents which began with the Drummond Report, that funding for higher education is not going to rise faster than the inflation rate. The slated 1 per cent increases are in fact cuts if inflation is taken into account. Yet, university revenues continue to rise. How? By increasing tuition and ancillary fees for students. That is why tuition indexing is a major target for the York administration – it is a hard limit on how much money can be drained from students’ pockets to fund administrative goals – goals which, across the university system are increasingly determined by unaccountable senior executives coordinating with private business interests to turn the university into a node in a circuit of money-value production.

But of course, I am being alarmist. If we listen to the government’s own agency, the Higher Education Quality Assurance Council (HEQAC), there is only good news for students, educators, and the general public. HEQAC was created by the provincial government with the ostensible task of studying the state of higher education in the province and to make policy recommendations with regard to how to improve “quality.” Yet, if one examines the various documents released over the past three years, one factor becomes evident – the council never defines quality in other than quantitive terms decided by labour markets and economic growth. Its most recent report concludes that:

“Educational institutions … ensure a vibrant and robust quality of life and economy. In every province there’s a positive link between postsecondary education and labour market success, individual earnings, citizen engagement and contributions to the economy.” (p.3)

Note that every metric save the vague term “citizen engagement” links quality of individual life to service to the economy.

This reduction of educational quality to money quantity matters to the present struggle. If education is really about job training, and people are eventually getting jobs, then the educational system is working. No matter that students are graduating with ever larger debts, those who find work are able to pay them down to reasonable levels after three years. In Ontario, the average debt three years after graduation is “only” $8800, according to the report (p.15).

What is not asked by the report is why students in one of the richest parts of the world should graduate with any debt at all. In Nova Scotia, the administration, faculty union and students’ union at Cape Breton University are currently discussing ways to effectively lobby the government to eliminate tuition fees. This alternative is unthinkable to the provincial body selected to monitor the quality of Ontario’s universities, because – and this claim can be verified by reading their reports – their conclusions never contradict whatever policy for higher education the government is telegraphing.

Important Times for Worker-Students

These are not easy times to be on strike. These are not easy times to build the sort of militant, broad-based solidarity needed to make victory more likely. Nevertheless, these are important times for worker-students to be on strike in the university system because worker-students are crucial to the future direction of the institutions. Will universities continue to be not only accessible, but truly educational institutions? By “educational institutions” I mean institutions whose fundamental guiding purpose is the cultivation of intellect and imagination, in all the fields in which human beings are capable of exercising intellect and imagination, for the sake of exposing lacunae, contradictions, and unjustified limitations in existing social, political and scientific institutions, and putting the superior understanding cultivated to work improving the lives and life-conditions of everyone, now and into the open ended future.

Hence, the public significance of the strikes, the core issue that no one in the province can afford to ignore, concerns the future ofpublic university education. Will collectively produced wealth be used to enable students to work and learn free from the burden of wondering how to pay the rent, or will it be siphoned of by tax cuts, leaving students to pay a higher bill for access to institutions whose priorities are less and less determined by academics and students and more by unaccountable owners of money-value wealth? •

Jeff Noonan is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Windsor, in Windsor, Canada. His major publications focus on human nature, the social and political implications of human identity and difference, the normative foundations of democratic society, the ethical foundations of socialism, and the principles of materialist ethics. He maintains a blog at www.jeffnoonan.org where this article first appeared.

An alarming development is that Stephen F. Cohen, the internationally prominent scholar of Russia, is acknowledging that (1:35 on the video) “for the first time in my long life (I began in this field in the 1960s), I think the possibility of war with Russia is real,” and he clearly and unequivocally places all of the blame for it on the U.S. leadership. He calls this “possibly a fateful turning-point in history.” He also says “it could be the beginning of the end of the so-called trans-Atlantic alliance.”

He goes on to say (2:20):

“This problem began in the 1990s, when the Clinton Administration adopted a winner-take-all policy toward post-Soviet Russia … Russia gives, we take. … This policy was adopted by the Clinton Administration but is pursued by every [meaning both] political party, every President, every American Congress, since President Clinton, to President Obama. This meant that the United States was entitled to a sphere or zone of influence as large as it wished, right up to Russia’s borders, and Russia was entitled to no sphere of influence, at all, not even in Georgia, … or in Ukraine (with which Russia had been intermarried for centuries).”

He also speaks clearly about the misrepresentations of Putin by the American Government, and he clearly states (5:25):

“He’s more European than 99% of other Russians.”

Regarding Ukraine (5:45):

“Since November of 2013, Putin has been not aggressive, but reactive, at every stage.”

Regarding, in America, the effective unanimity of allowed scholarly and media opinions to the contrary of the actual facts (and this is the most startling thing of all, so you might want to go straight to it, at 7:05):

“This is an unprecedented situation in American politics. … This is exceedingly dangerous, and this is a failure of American democracy. Why it happened, I am not sure.”

He condemns (7:30)

“this extraordinarily irrational [non] factual demonization of Putin … and this too is hard to explain.”

Europe (8:40):

“Now things have begun to change. Europe is splitting on this.” He acknowledges “Crimea is not coming back [to Ukraine],” and urges “a Ukraine — and this is what the dispute began over — free to trade with Russia and with the West.”

And,

“no membership in NATO for Ukraine. … This has to be in writing. No more oral promises such as they gave to Gorbachev. And it has to be ratified by the United Nations.”

Regarding Obama (13:00):

“I have never seen an American President make such personal remarks about a Russian leader [Putin] in public.”

Regarding the existing Ukrainian Government (14:10):

“This is not a democratic regime. … Unless the West stops supporting Kiev unconditionally, I fear we are drifting toward war with Russia.”

WOW! When even a word-mincer such as he, is stating that the U.S. Government is seeking to conquer Russia, that is news!

He doesn’t even so much as mention the Ukrainian Government’s war to eliminate the residents in the resisting region (Donbass — Ukraine’s far-east). There is still a lot of the ugliness that he covers up: Obama’s having installed these genocidally anti-Russian nazis into power, the IMFs subservience to the Obama regime, the failure of European leaders to state flat-out that this American establishment of a nazi regime in Europe (Ukraine) is disgusting and will receive no cooperation whatsoever from them.

But it’s a lot better than Cohen’s earlier mealy-mouthed statements. And what it shows to all of us is that he is now truly alarmed. Having started out by condemning “American hawks” regarding Ukraine, he has finally come to condemning specifically both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama — two Democratic Party Presidents — and saying that democracy in America might itself already be gone, and that the end of civilization might be the result from all of this.

Which ought to alarm us all.

Things are so scary now, that even he is beginning to come close to saying publicly (to whatever small public the U.S. aristocracy will allow him to be heard) that America’s corruption at the top is threatening the continued existence of civilization.

Implicit in his statements is that there is massive and systematic censorship and warping of the truth on the part of America’s aristocrats.

Regarding the reason why Cohen had not previously been so alarmed and truth-telling about the Ukrainian situation, he provided a hint in this lecture — a lecture to a group of European scholars:

He said (7:55):

“We thought, some of us [Americans] when we got together and talked in 2014, that you would come to our rescue — ‘you’ I mean Europe — … we thought that Europe being part of the same history as Russia, closer to Russia, economically embedded in Russia to an extent that the United States isn’t, would put an end to this crisis. But instead most countries in the EU went along with Washington’s policies.”

In other words: He (and, evidently, his friends) ignored the evidence, such as this and this and this, all of which atrocities Obama supported and his White House was even personally implicated in, which indicated that Obama was hard-charging into conquering Russia, and was using Ukraine as the proxy-state to make it happen, and had used Ukraine’s nazis as his Ukrainian Government’s spearhead, specifically because Ukraine’s nazis fanatically hate Russians and want them dead.

Elsewhere in his talk, Cohen said (12:45) that Obama is “a weak foreign-policy leader.” This is like Hitler-supporter David Irving’s similarly explaining Hitler’s bad decisions by saying that Hitler was a “weak leader who was taken advantage of by his advisors.” Cohen (and presumably also his friends) are like that about Obama: they simply refuse to consider the evidence that the man is evil — they ignore it; they don’t want to see it.

Consequently, with such naivete about power, they were expecting people such as this to block Obama. They shoved responsibility off onto Europeans. In other words: Cohen (and his friends) are blind to the ugliness in their own sty, because they want to be.

Maybe before people like that open their eyes to what’s happening, eveybody will be turned to nuclear char, and so such liberals won’t even need to suffer disillusionment about the world in which they have lived.

Relying upon liberals to protect the world from fascists or even nazis, always fails. But that’s all the aristocracy will even allow onto the field, at all (at least in America). Progressives, people who acknowledge the reality, are portrayed simply as being kooks.

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.

Armed volunteer battalions are pulling in to Kiev, the Vesti newspaper reported on Monday.

“Yesterday, soldiers of a number of battalions were pulled out from the front and are heading for Kiev with arms. There is no information about the purpose of this move,” Vesti said, adding that it might be linked “with the situation around [Dnipropetrovsk Region governor Igor] Kolomoisky.”

Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko said earlier on Monday that none of the Ukrainian governors will not be allowed to have private armies any longer.

Ukrainian Security Service Chief Valentin Nalivaichenko said earlier that some high-placed officials in the Dnipropetrovsk regional administration maintained armed formations that were actually bandit groupings.

The topic of armed groupings in Ukraine has surfaced after armed men from a security company presumably related to Kolomoisky placed the building of Ukrnafta state-owned oil and gas extracting company “under their guard.”

On March 19, Ukrtransnafta’s (another company owned by Igor Kolomoisky) supervisory board dismissed Alexander Lazorko from the post of the company’s board head and appointed Yuri Miroshnik acting chairman of the board. Later reports said that the building of the company was seized by “gunmen led by Kolomoisky.” However, Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said that Kiev’s law enforcement agencies took Uktransnafta’s premises under control.

According to media reports, in April-May 2014 Ukrtransnafta pumped 675,000 tons of process oil from the county’s trunk pipelines without permission of the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy and Coal Mining. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk demanded then that the law enforcement agencies initiate criminal proceedings and prosecute those responsible for illegal siphoning off of oil.

Image: Holocaust survivor Heinz Kounio places a flower on a train wagon during the 72nd anniversary of the first deportation of Jews from Thessaloniki to Auschwitz, in Thessaloniki.(Reuters / Alexandros Avramidis)

Jewish leaders from Greece are seeking over €25 million (US$27 million) in reparations from Germany some seven decades after Hitler forced Jews to pay the transport costs for their passage to concentration camps.

In 1943, an estimated 58,585 Jews boarded trains from Greece’s second-largest city of Thessaloniki to concentration camps in Poland. To add insult to grave injury, the Jews were forced to pay for their train fare, which exceeded 2 million reichsmark – about €25 million today.

David Saltiel, president of the Jewish community of Thessaloniki, said German reparations could finance a Holocaust memorial on the site of the train station from which Jews departed for Poland during World War II.

“We think it’s a big opportunity that if the German government decides they want to help, it would be a very good coincidence that this money goes for this purpose,”

Saltiel told Newsweek.

Some 60,000 Greek Jews – about 75 percent of the country’s Jewish population at the time – perished in the Holocaust, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum and research center. The Nazis deported more than 45,000 from Thessaloniki to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.

The demand by the Greek Jewish community comes at a time when Greece’s new Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, following in the footsteps of other past Greek governments, is also attempting to recover damages from Berlin over 476 million-reichsmark (€6 billion) loan to Nazi Germany.

The occupying Nazis in 1942 forced Greece to deliver them the interest-free loan, valued at 568 million reichsmark (€7.1 billion).

“It’s not a material matter, it’s a moral issue,” Tsipras told reporters on Monday following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel Berlin.

Tsipras also put aside rumors that Greece might seize German property to cover their claims.

“There is no member of this government who has expressed any Greek government intention to take over Germany-owned buildings – this was going around a lot recently, as well as the idea to put an end to the important and great activity of the Goethe institute in Greece,”

Tsipras said. “None of this is true.”

Last week, Greek Jews from Thessaloniki, which had the largest Jewish community in Greece before World War II, remembered the 72nd anniversary of the first wave of Nazi deportations to Auschwitz.

On Friday 13 March tens of thousands of public-sector workers took part in a day of action against proposed cuts, job losses, and welfare cuts. Called by the Northern Ireland Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, it brought public transport, ambulance services and other public services to a standstill.

The trade unions also organized a series of rallies and events, at which members of the public turned out in their thousands to show their solidarity. There were rallies in Belfast, Derry, Newry, Strabane, Omagh, Enniskillen, Coleraine, Magherafelt, Cookstown, Dungannon, and Craigavon.

In Derry the trade unionist Liam Gallagher described the cutting of 20,000 public-sector jobs while claiming that “it won’t have an impact on society” as the “economics of the madhouse.”

Both Sinn Féin and the DUP are now involved in the blame game, to establish who is or is not opposed to this or that aspect of what is called “welfare reform”—for that read “cuts.” On Monday the 9th, Sinn Féin pulled out, withdrawing its support for the budget.

Workers throughout the North of Ireland are angry at Stormont budgets that have cut millions of pounds from public spending; a voluntary redundancy scheme to reduce the civil service by 20,000; and a proposed cut in corporation tax that would see millions shaved off public finances to fund a tax incentive for businesses.

This was a central plank in Sinn Féin’s economic strategy, in the hope of attracting transnational corporations to set up in the North and pay minimal corporation tax, similar to the Republic’s corporation tax system—in other words, to turn the North into a tax haven for corporations and the global rich.

Welfare “reform” has been a major concern and last year threatened the future of power-sharing at Stormont. The five main parties reached broad agreement on a number of issues, including social welfare. Following twelve weeks of talks involving the five parties and the British and Irish governments, the Stormont House Agreement was adopted on 23 December.

Then, on Monday 9 March, Sinn Féin withdrew support for the welfare reform legislation as it was about to go through the Assembly, lodging a petition of concern with the speaker of the Assembly to stop the bill’s passage. What this means is that any vote taken by the members has to have the support of both unionists and nationalists. Proposed legislation will then pass only if it is supported by a weighted majority (60 per cent) of the members voting, including at least 40 per cent each of those designated as nationalist and unionist present and voting.

This means in effect that, provided enough Assembly members from a given community agree, that community can exercise a veto over the Assembly’s decisions.

Implementing the government’s changes to the benefits system is a central plank of the Stormont House Agreement. Sinn Féin are claiming that they had secured a commitment that future hardship payments had been protected, while the DUP have claimed that there had never been an agreement to support future claimants, and that such a system would require another £286 million.

The budget could not have come at a more difficult time for Sinn Féin, coming just before the elections for the British House of Commons in May. There is deep resentment and fear throughout the nationalist community in relation to the welfare reform because of the very high rate of unemployment and high level of poverty experiences by Catholics. Sinn Féin have been getting a lot of criticism at the doors from people who have supported the party until now.

The problem that many in the nationalist community feel is that they have no-one else to vote for. The same applies to the Protestant people, who are locked in a sectarian cul de sac by their political representatives and their history.

The main economic power still remains in the hands of the British state, and its economic and social priorities will determine the outcome. What the people of the North of Ireland need or desire is irrelevant to what is in the interests of the British state.

Workers in the North need to maintain and to build their resistance to these cuts, which can be the basis for building unity across the sectarian divide. Through these struggles more and more workers may come to see the limitations of the triple marginalisation they experience and may begin to look for a new and better way forward.

This will not be a return to the gun and the bomb, nor to marching up and down roads waving flags to mark territory: these shibboleths cannot mask the poverty, hunger and unemployment that lie behind the curtains of shattered homes and broken lives.

What both the day of action by workers and the manoeuvring by local politicians show is that the political settlement and the two institutions imposed on the Irish people by the British state nearly a century ago have been a failure. Neither can meet the needs of the people. We must go beyond these two failed entities if workers are to build a society that serves their interests, north and south.

The ideological framework of neo-liberal economics or neo-liberal capitalism which drives economic globalization at present is fatally flawed in its belief in the freedom of the market, not in the freedom of people. P. R. Sarkar, an Indian thinker who founded the Progressive Utilization Theory or PROUT, identified four inter-related flaws of global capitalism (as cited in Mahesvarananda, 2012, pp. 23-29).

The first fatal flaw is great concentration of wealth in the hands of a few while half of the world languishes in poverty, hunger, and deprivation of basic and higher needs. This is what Chossudovsky (2003) termed as “the globalization of poverty” as the few elite in the business and intergovernmental institutions manipulate economic and financial forces globally which results to poverty of large and widespread sectors of the global population, even in countries considered as economically prosperous like US and China.

The second fatal flaw of global capitalism is that the vast majority of investments are now made in speculation rather than production, which means that wealthy individuals prefer to gamble on ventures that offer the chance to earn big profits quickly such as the stock market, the futures market, real estate, currency trading, derivatives, etc. (Mahesvarananda, 2012). The consequence of this is that only a few new jobs are created while concentrating the wealth of the society in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.

The third fatal flaw is neoliberal capitalism’s encouragement of consumers, businesses, and national governments to buy on credit or to fund so-called “development projects” through debts from international financial institutions, causing consumers and nations to dig themselves into debilitating debt traps.

In addition to causing terrible human suffering due to the concentration of wealth in the hands of the few elites and the ensuing poverty of a great majority of the world’s population, neo-liberalism’s fourth fatal flaw is its tendency to exploit and ignore the natural environment (Maheshvarananda, 2012). By its very nature, capitalism strives for ever-expanding markets, increasing consumption and production on a finite planet with its insatiable drive for profits resulting in corporations wielding their influence, money and power to get around or limit environmental laws and regulations. This results to grave harm both to the planet and to human beings by corporations that exist to gain profits, expand markets, and increase consumption and production without end.

Grave Corporate Culpabilities: Some Examples from Different Parts of the World

Examples from all over the world abound on the grave harm done to health and environment by the operations of multinational corporations which are not premised on environmental sustainability but rather on an insatiable drive for profits and ever-expanding markets through industrial or chemical farming, endless search for markets, and an increasing consumption and production on a finite, fragile planet. On December 3, 1984, a pesticide plant run by Union Carbide leaked about 40 tons of deadly methyl isocyanate gas into the air of Bhopal, India, quickly killing about 4,000 people (Associated Press, December 4, 2014). The poison left lingering effects which raised the death toll to about 15,000 over the next few years, according to government estimates. The effects of the leak of the poisonous gas can be seen thirty years later, according to activists, with thousands of children who were born with brain damage, missing palates and twisted limbs because of their parents’ exposure to the gas or the water contaminated by it. The Indian government says at least 500,000 people were affected all in all.

Another example on a global scale is the fast food industry which is operated with grave disregard for animal welfare, environmental conservation, and human health with its way of mass raisings of chickens, pigs, and cows under very cramped and unkind conditions wherein the animals live so close to each other, stand on their own manures, are fed with feeds mixed with hormones and antibiotics for fast growth and meat production, and are killed without any regard for the animals at all except as commodities and food for human consumption. The documentary Food, Inc. directed by Robert Penner revealed how food production in contemporary times has become so industrialized and monopolized by companies like Tyson and Monsanto in America to the extent of having mechanized food processing such as using disinfectants like ammonium hydroxide to ward off bacteria from beef, the feeding of cows with corn instead of grass for fast meat production, and the engineering of food such that the same ingredients can be found in different products displayed in supermarkets. The end result is unhealthy eating with the same sodium, sugar, and fat content leading to obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol level, and other sicknesses.

But the most glaring example is the recent and current destabilizations of the governments of Middle Eastern countries which are either rich in oil or are socialist in nature. Corporations engaged in the manufacture of war armaments like Halliburton earn great profits with America’s war against Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the destabilizations of once stable countries like Libya, Syria, and now Tunisia. The war on terror is really the war for oil and the spread of global capitalism.

The war for oil and the spread of capitalism is motivated by the rich and powerful nations’ desire for conquest over the rest of the world in order to establish its political and cultural hegemony over the rest of the world. The British documentary film The Age of Stupid showed how battles were waged for different resources such as spices, gold, human slaves, coal, and more recently, for oil. Multinational corporations continue its explorations for more oil even reaching as far as Antartica, gravely threatening the breaking of glaciers and endangering the polar bears, seals, fishes, and penguins in this region. In Nigeria where a multinational oil corporation operates to extract the country’s oil, the people were left in a dire state with their river and fishes contaminated with oil, their communities burned down by the military in connivance with the oil company, and their air polluted by the burning of excess oil into the atmosphere.

The Mining Disasters in the Philippines: Should the People’s Welfare be Subordinate to the Dictates of Neoliberal Economy?

Major tailings dam disasters have occurred in different parts of the Philippines with the liberalization of mining which allowed foreign ownership of large mining projects in the country resulting to the contamination of once pristine river waters and bays and the death of fishes, plants, and other living organisms in these bodies of water. Sometimes, the spillage of the tailings dams resulted to flooding of entire communities with contaminated water leading to sickness, death, or evacuation from their homes and sources of livelihood. The cause-oriented movement known as Alyansa Tigil Mina (Alliance to Stop Mining) has documented, taken photos, and uploaded online the major tailings dam disasters that have occurred in different parts of the Philippines.

In April 6 and July 11, 2007, heavy rainwater washed the clay soil and destroyed the sulphide dam used for extracting copper and nickel resulting to the contamination of waters in Canatuan and Siocon Rivers with mercury and cyanide towards the sea. TVI Pacific Inc., a Canadian company, was the foreign company involved and the Subanons were the indigenous people most affected by this mining project. In October 11 and 31, 2005, in Rapu rapu Island, Albay, the lower tailings facility storage spilled due to heavy rains and in the morning of November 1, 2005, fishes and other marine organisms were found dead at Ungay and Hollowstone Creeks.

Other tailings dam spillage occurred in San Marcelino, Zambales in 2002 when heavy rains caused the collapse of the Bayarong tailings dam resulting to the flooding of low lying villages with mine waste, the evacuation of families, and the contamination of waters in Mapanuepe Lake and Sto. Tomas River. In Sipalay, Negros Occidental, the destruction of a tailings pond caused the inundation of agricultural land up to 1.5 m high in 1982 and the siltation of Sipalay River in 1995. In 1999, the tailings dam from Atlas Consolidated Mining and Development Corporation in Toledo City, Cebu discharged mine waste into Sapangdaku River towards the sea causing fish kill, including the large fishes. Other tailings dam disasters occurred in Placer, Surigao del Norte, Zamboanga del Norte, and Benguet causing contamination of the adjoining rivers, affecting downstream irrigation systems and rice production, fish kills, and blindness of people.

The worst tailings dam disaster in the Philippines occurred in Marinduque in 1993 and 1996. The Marcopper Mining Corporation began mining operations in Marinduque Island in 1969 with Placer Dome, a Canadian company, co-owning 40% of the mining operations. From 1975 to mid-1991, Placer Dome dumped some 200 million tons of mine tailings via surface disposal into Calancan Bay, which hurt the livelihood of fishermen who relied on Calancan Bay for fishing. Not only was waste entering Calancan Bay, but in order to drain rainwater from the mining pit, a tunnel was built from the mine to the Boac River. Marcopper built another dam near Mogpog River since Tapian pit cannot hold all of their mine wastes.

An Environmental Justice Case Study led by Catherine Coumans of the Canada Asia Working Group (2000) described what happened in the following manner:

After the completion of the dam in 1992, villagers started noticing waste flowing into the river as well as the appearance of large quantities of dead fish. Siltation from the waste dump started building up in the Mogpog River increasing the severity of flooding in the rainy season. The seasonal rains in 1993 caused intense flooding and the dam collapsed altogether. Toxic silt and water flowed down the river and into the town, destroying homes and rice fields, and killing animals. Two people lost their lives because of this accident. Three years later, on March 24, 1996, 2-3 million tons of mine waste leaked into the 26- kilometer long Boac River. The plug that sealed the Tapian pit tunnel to the Boac had fractured, releasing mine waste at a rate of 5-10 cubic meters per second. The pit contained around 23 million metric tons of mine waste.

The immediate effects were disastrous. Flash floods isolated villages and one was buried under six feet of floodwater. The channels, as well as the valley floor, were buried under mine tailings. Agricultural fields were inundated, and the drinking water residents relied on was contaminated. Fish, shrimp and other food sources, which are the main livelihood for those who do not work for Marcopper, were immediately killed. The government declared the Boac River dead. Twenty villages out of the 60 had to evacuate their area following the accident. A report released on April 17, 1996 by the Department of Health found nine residents in the area to have zinc levels in their blood more than 200% above safe limits. Water samples found levels of contamination 1,300% above the human tolerable level of .5 microgram per 1/1000 liters of water. Despite these findings, Marcopper held on to the claim that the tailings were non-toxic. Residents also complained of skin irritations and respiratory problems, which could have been caused by the poisonous vapors emitted from tailings.

Marcopper mining operations were closed after this. Placer Dome accepted responsibility for the costs of the clean-up and has spent about $71 million for the Boac River clean up.

GMA news reported that some 20 million metric tons of sediments have flowed into water channels from the Philex tailings pond in Itogon since its drainage tunnel was breached in August 2012. This is ten times more than the volume of mine tailings that spilled out of the Marcopper mine in 1996 in Marinduque, which dumped some two million metric tons of waste into the Boac River and is still considered the worst mining disaster in terms of toxicity. Residents along the 27-kilometer Boac River lost their fishing livelihood and diseases have afflicted the community after the incident.

The Call for an Alternative Economic System

Global capitalism which is premised on the free market system dictated by price signals and increasing consumption and production with incessant aim for profits is fatally flawed, as shown by the arguments and examples of grave harm caused by corporate operations described in the preceding paragraphs. Civil society thinkers like Nicanor Perlas from the Philippines and P.R. Sarkar from India both offer alternative economic systems that are more sound, more humanistic, and more viable for sustainable development. Nicanor Perlas (1997) proposes “associative economics” to refer to a new mode of economic interaction and organization which does not rely on abstract price signals and centralized planning and implementation to control thousands of economic activities. Instead, it relies on face-to-face, human interaction of representatives of the major groups in the economic sphere of society: producers, traders, creditors, and consumers.

Perlas (1997) explained that in the capitalist system, the creativity of the human spirit is chained to the pursuit of profits, wealth, greed and power. In associative economics, “creativity and compassion are consciously willed to create an economics that satisfies true human needs, that fosters transparency, that engenders empowerment and participation, and that creates communities of solidarity and cooperation” (p. 21). The term “associative economics” was first used by Rudolf Steiner in 1917-1918 and is broadened by Perlas to include a range of economic innovations including socially responsible investing, indigenous economics, economic district management system, community supported agriculture, green banks, green consumerism, tekei, and other similar initiatives. Its general framework includes the following criteria:

1) going beyond the price or profit as the determinant of economic behavior;

2) concern not just for economic values but for social, human, and environmental values as well; and

3) attempt to base economic decisions on a discussion or examination of the need and welfare of other actors in the economy and the society at large. In the Philippines, this means passing the People’s Mining Bill which aims for sustainable mining, that accrues gains for the local communities, and that is needs-based rather than dictated by global market forces.

The concept of associate economics is very much similar to the profound concept of progressive utilization theory (PROUT) by P. R. Sarkar of India which takes into consideration universal spiritual values rather than pure materialism that is promoted by the capitalist system. A spiritual perspective “includes respect and gratitude for all beings, and gradually ever-expanding feelings of compassion, altruism, and unconditional love for all” (Mahesvaranda, 2012, p. 47). This is the highest of the human needs, that which goes beyond self-actualization, and which involves “self-transcendence, wisdom and connecting with the sacred, the infinite, to reach states of peace and transcendent happiness” (p. 47).

The goal is to have balanced physical, mental and spiritual realms integrated to create healthy, holistic societies. The urgent task is to “transform the present materialistic society into a spiritually-oriented, global human family” (Maheshvarananda, 2012, p, 48).

Belinda F. Espiritu is an associate professor of communication in the University of the Philippines Cebu and may be contacted through her email address: [email protected].

References:

Associated Press. (2014, December 4). India marks 30^th anniversary of Bhopal gas leak disaster. Cebu Daily News, 17 (296), 24.

Coumans, C. (2000). Environmental justice case study: Marcopper in the Philippines. Retrieved on March 21, 2015 from http://umich.edu/~snre492/Jones/marcopper.htm.

Chossudovsky, M. (2003). The globalization of poverty and the new world order. Canada: Center for Research on Globalization.

GMA News Online. (2012, November 13). Philex spill “biggest mining disaster” in PHL, surpassing Marcopper – DENR. Retrieved on March 21, 2015 from https://ph.news.yahoo.com/philex-spill-biggest-mining-disaster-phl-surpassing-marcopper-130029199.html

Mahesvaranda, D. (2012). After capitalism: Economic democracy in action. Puerto Rico: InnerWorld Publications.

Perlas, N. (1997). Associative economics: Responding to the challenge of elite globalization. Quezon City: Center for Alternative Development Initiatives.

Renowned Angolan Journalist and Author, Rafael Marques de Morais, may be spending jail time for a book he wrote on the “blood diamond trade.” The book, “Blood Diamonds: Corruption and Torture in Angola” put Mr. de Morais in hot water for linking and defaming some military generals and rulers. He will go on trial Tuesday, charged with defamation.

De Morais returned from the UK on Friday, after attending the Index on Censorship awards, to face the charges brought against him by seven generals and their business associates, including the Minister of State and head of the intelligence bureau of the president, General Kopelipa, who he claimed, in the book, were connected to the illegal trade.

The book, released in 2011, made wide reports of allegations of murder, mistreatment of entire communities, and intimidation of those living in the diamond-mining areas of Angola’s Lundas region. The book made reference to the murder of 100 villagers and 500 cases of torture. Mr. de Morais first sued the generals for crimes against humanity, but the general’s counter-sued for £1.1m for defamation.

The generals, including three former joint-chiefs of staff of the armed forces, originally tried to file for charges in Portugal but the judge threw out the claim saying that the author “did not intend to offend, but to inform.”

Mr. de Morais, 43, made the book freely available to read or download in Angola, after it sold out almost immediately in Portugal, where critics claimed that they believed some of the involved parties might have purchased some of the many copies. He plans to distribute more copies during his trial this weekend.

“Whatever the generals decide to do to me this week they will only add more wood to the fire.”

This is not the first run in with Angolan law enforcement that Mr. de Morais has had. Mr. de Morais is a long time critic of the Angolan President José Eduardo de Santos and his family, and was jailed for 43 days, including several days in solitary confinement with no food or water in 1999 after publishing another controversial book on the ruling parties there and another controversial award-winning report on the President’s daughter, the richest woman in Africa, billionairess, Ms. Dos Santos.

When asked about the trial looming overhead, Mr. de Morais remained cheerful.

“Whatever the outcome, the generals and their associates are bound to lose,” he said. “They have all the money, they have all the power. The truth is on my side and the government is not going to get away with it.”

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Is Big Brother Blocking Your Mail?

You send an email to a reporter saying that you’ve got proof of criminal wrongdoing by a government official … or a big bank.  You never receive a response.

Or you send an email to an expert on monetary policy asking if the Federal Reserve’s policies help the rich at the expense of the little guy … or an expert on radiation asking if the Fukushima accident might endanger public health.  You never receive a response.

This might be for any number of perfectly innocent reasons, including:

• Your email ended up in their spam folder
• They’re busy
• They’re not interested enough to write back
• They think you’re a bore or a crank

But there could be another explanation …

By way of background, China has blocked gmail for its citizens.

Yahoo blocked emails relating to the Occupy protests.

Bahrain uses British software that allows the government to frame political activists by creatingmessages from that person that they never typed.  35 other countries use the same software.

Tunisia monitored and blocked the emails of activists, so they were never delivered.  For example:

There is also technical surveillance whereby downloading or adding attachment to an email must go through a central server. Under the pretext of protecting public order and national security, a 1998 post and telecommunications law enables the authorities to intercept and check the content of email messages and in fact electronic surveillance such as filtering of email messages of government opponents have been reported.  Global Voices Advocacy Director and Tunisia Activist Sami Ben Gharbia conducted a test from the Netherlands with two Tunisia-based activists and confirmed by logging to their email accounts from the Netherland that what he sees is not what they receive when they login from Tunisia, and that they cannot access some of the messages they receive.

The Tunisian government used software from Western companies to block emails of political dissidents.

A prominent American political writer said that – if Tunisia is doing it – you can bet that Western countries are, as well.

Indeed, Snowden revealed that the British spy agency GCHQ has developed numerous offensive digital tools, including:

Ability to deny functionality to send/receive email or view material online.

***

Ability to spoof any email address and send email under that identity.

***

Mass delivery of email messaging to support an Information Operations campaign.

The potential for stifling dissent is staggering.

An ex-pharmaceutical sales rep has come clean after fifteen years of being in the drug pushing business. In her powerful book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher, Gwen Olsen explains why she left her lucrative career selling drugs for some of the biggest names in the business – Johnson and Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and Abbott Laboratories. Now she passionately advocates against the pharmaceutical industry, their unethical practices, and the hundreds of thousands of lives they lead to the grave. Gwen’s eyes were opened through a gradual course of tragic events.

“It was an awakening process, a spiritual and consciousness process where I started observing what was happening, what some of the drugs were doing, the misinformation, the disinformation. I was being encouraged to minimize side effects when I talked to doctors. I started to realize that these patients were literally being tortured by the drugs,” states ex pharmaceutical rep Gwen Olsen. “There is no such thing as a safe drug,” she reiterates.

Her book unveils her experience selling pharmaceuticals and the dirty secrets the industry doesn’t want anyone to know. Olsen explains that when drugs hit the market, no one knows even 50 percent of the side effects associated with the drug. Doctors are convinced of the drug’s effectiveness and their patients literally become test subjects or lab rats for the pharmaceutical companies. Olsen even confesses, “We were being trained to misinform people.”

Young woman pushed over the edge by pharmaceutical drug spiral, burns herself alive

For years Gwen Olsen thought she was helping others by selling pharmaceuticals, but in 2004, a family tragedy opened her eyes to the truth.

“My niece was 20 years old, she was attending Indiana University and she was a pre-med student, an extremely intelligent, beautiful woman, and just a beautiful spirit inside and out. She was in a car accident and was prescribed vicodin hydrocodone for the pain, and became addicted.”

The vicodin destroyed her niece’s concentration, leading the young woman to turn to a stimulant drug called ephedrine. The drug helped her stay awake long enough to study for school, but that’s when she had a drug interaction.

“She had a drug interaction and ended up in the hospital, and they tagged her with a bipolar disorder, not a drug toxicity or a reaction to the drugs she was on. They started giving her more antipsychotics and mood stabilizers, and that set her on the road to becoming a mental patient,” said Olsen.

Soon thereafter, the young woman quit going to school as the side effects of the medication took hold. The more she tried to wean herself off, the more violent the side effects became. A dependency had formed in the chemistry of her brain and the twenty-year-old battled a severe depression.

“Gwen’s niece was afraid that the doctors were going to convince the family to have her put back on drugs. That is when she walked into her younger sister’s room and took an angel lamp that was filled with oil, and poured it over herself and ignited it, burning herself alive.”

The realization struck Gwen to the core and she left her career selling pharmaceutical drugs. Now she speaks out against the deception, telling the gripping story of her niece’s suicide.

“It was a promise made to her that I would not let her memory be sullied, and tell people what had happened to her. She would not be remembered as a mentally or genetically defective person, I would not allow that to happen. And I realize that there are thousands and thousands of people out there that need a voice, and I’m serving as that voice,” she says.

“A large number of psychiatrists are dishonest, because I see them giving people drugs that they know are brain damaging therapeutics, that they know do not have positive, long-term outcomes, that they know will not cure anything. They just take a list of symptoms and call it a mental illness or disorder.”

Children are given fake diagnosis left and right and put on mind altering drugs with suicidal side effects. Psychiatrists can diagnose mental illness today without any scientific proof. No blood tests, urine tests, or PET scans are required. The result is millions of children are labeled and stuck on these drugs, trapped in a culture of hopelessness.

“I was so disillusioned, as well as angry, when I found out how much deception, how much misinformation was taking place and how I’d been used in that game. I literally was the one on the frontlines. I was harming people unintentionally, but I was responsible. I carry a burden for that now.”

Watch the interview here:

Pick up Gwen’s book, Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher, here:

Sources:

http://www.amazon.com

https://www.youtube.com

About the author:

Lance Johnson is a passionate researcher, learner, writer, and healer. Lance and his wife invite you to view their line of clean and conscious body care products at www.allnaturalfreespirit.com.

Anti-government protest, November 25, 2014.

It is hard to imagine a greater contra, st than that which is evident in Haiti today. On one hand, we can see the triumphant posturing of the de facto tandem of President Michel Martelly and his new Prime Minister Evans Paul. On the other hand, we witness the pusillanimity of the so-called opposition under the leadership of MOPOD (Patriotic Movement of the Democratic Opposition), the Lavalas Family Political Organization, and the Dessalines’ Children Platform, three rather inconsistent formations which are now prepared to play the game of electoral lottery concocted by the government. Despite its record of lawless behavior and of association with people accused of rape, murder, drug trafficking, and kidnapping, this government is still moving towards elections that will no doubt deliver a society which is even more unjust and corrupt, with the encouragement of those who don’t see anything wrong with that.

In Latin American and the Caribbean, the political regime that governs Haiti is indeed the most backward, most retrograde, most mercenary, and most subject to foreign dictates in the region. Even the New York Times had to recognize this in the article it ran on Mar. 16 headlined “Haitian Leader’s Power Grows as Scandals Swirl.”

Martelly is marching towards a renewal of political actors which bodes ill for the Haitian people. And it is not without reason that he appears to be the most stable president, the most indulged by the exploiting powers, because he is the straw man of the triumvirate of Washington, Paris, and Ottawa. All three presently want to make us hold elections which they can control, to serve their interests.

The main idea behind these elections is to replace some government officials with new ones, to allow the Haitian ruling classes and the imperial forces to better set in place and ensure their smooth domination of a new government which will do their bidding and which will not solve any of the people’s problems.

And it is not without reason that Martelly spoke to the Haitian people, with a triumphant tone,  through a presidential decree that was applauded by the entire political class, with the exception, of course, of a few progressive anti-imperialist parties. According to Martelly’s spokesman Lucien Jura “the president wants all political actors, including those of the opposition, to get on board the electoral train which is definitely under way.” And to reinforce this hypocritical lie, he hastened to add: “the strength of a party is demonstrated through the ballot box.” Isn’t this mocking the opportunistic opposition leaders who will be subject to the same political sleight of hand that we witnessed in the 2010-2011 election?

As proof of this, we have the words of the current president of the Provisional Electoral Council (CEP), and its former General Manager, Pierre Louis Opont. He revealed last week that “the results of the 2010 elections were not the real results. Those that were given to [then CEP President] Gaillot Dorsainvil and others were not published.” What could be clearer?

Shouldn’t such an open admission before political leaders be enough to edify even the most naive? We already know with whom we are dealing and what to expect. Opont, with unusual frankness, invites us to reconcile ourselves with the reality of elections under a United Nations military occupation. There is here a clear warning: Do not expect a democratic exercise; it is the weight of Haitian tradition which wants the electoral outcome to be determined well before the elections themselves, Opont seems to want to tell us.

In any case, these elections, announced to offer the world an image of a stable Haiti and a democratic state, will be nothing more than just another well-executed maneuver by the United Nations occupation forces and Haiti’s guardian powers through their embassies to push us further into the unhappy state of poverty, misery, and chronic underdevelopment. It required the spending of a whopping $53 million, according to electoral advisers, to ensure this lusterless democratic veneer, to establish this hypocrisy that has served once again to deceive the Haitian people and satisfy the greedy appetite of candidates, who are surely salivating at the 500 million gourdes, or $10.61 million, earmarked to finance the campaign of political parties.

No country is too small or too poor to determine its own destiny and organize its own elections with the means at hand. Only Haiti seems to have avoided this conclusion. The Haitian people should pay no attention to these merchants of illusion and of false promises who come whispering to them the same songs, the same refrains, at each election. The dignity and future of the nation, the living conditions of the masses, will never be taken into account in their false speeches. Since Haiti’s birth, there have been many elections, but what has changed for the people? Nothing. With the exception of a very small number of individuals who have succeeded without the people, the fact remains that the vast majority remains as if locked in a prison, afflicted with despair.

Of selection-elections, we have had enough and too much. The so-called opposition parties are preparing to participate in these dishonest games prepared once again by the imperialist powers. By allowing themselves to be duped into this, they will just shove deeper and twist the knife into the gaping wound of the masses, who are being killed little by little.

No to selections-elections! Yes to popular mobilization!

This is a translation of Haïti Liberté’s March 18, 2015 editorial.

Asian stocks fell on Thursday following weak US economic data and a sharp sell-off in US technology shares.

The Nasdaq index fell 2.4% – its biggest drop since April 2014 – to 4,876 on concerns that technology and biotech stocks have become overvalued.

US stocks were also hit by news that durable goods orders fell last month.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 shares index closed 1.4% lower at 19,471.12 while South Korea’s benchmark Kospi shed 1% to 2,022.56.

In Australia, the benchmark S&P/ASX 200 fell 1.6% to close at 5,879.06, marking its biggest fall in more than two weeks.

Chinese stocks bucked the trend, however, with the Shanghai Composite closing up 0.6% at 3,682.10.

But in Hong Kong, the Hang Seng index closed down 0.1% at 24,497.08

Geopolitical risk

Oil prices rose during Asian trade after Saudi Arabia, a major oil exporter, and its allies began airstrikes in Yemen, raising concerns on the disruption of supplies in the Middle East.

Brent crude rose by as much as 5%, approaching $60 (£40) a barrel in Tokyo.

West Texas Intermediate crude futures , the US benchmark, gained about 4% to $51 a barrel.

“With Saudi beginning to bomb targets in Yemen, in an attempt to defuse a coup by Shiite rebels, the geo-political risk quotient in the Middle East has ratcheted higher,” Vishnu Varathan from Mizuho Bank wrote in a report.

“If the strike morphs into a full-blown confrontation involving Iran, then oil will surge alongside gold and the US dollar while US treasury yields may be set for a renewed drop.”

‘Malicious attack’

Shares in Chinese water purification company Ozner Water International rose by more than 14% following a five-week long suspension.

The firm had been accused of making “false and misleading representations” over its profitability by short-seller Glaucus Research last month.

The allegations caused Ozner’s shares to lose a fifth of its value before trading was halted.

On Wednesday, Ozner addressed Glaucus Research’s claims as “unfounded allegations” in a detailed statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

“We will not tolerate what seems to be an outright malicious attack on the company for personal gains which harms the company’s reputation and business prospects,” it said.

Copyright BBC, 2015

Voter suppression plays an important role in keeping Black turnout below that of whites, but does not explain why overall U.S. voter participation is far below most developed countries on the planet. The reason is simple: the rich control both political parties and, as a result, “the U.S. offers the narrowest spectrum of electoral choices in the industrial world.” Voting has relatively little impact on how the country is run.

A key component of the controversial Jade Helm military exercise set to take part in nine U.S. states this summer will involve soldiers operating “undetected amongst civilian populations,” to see if they can infiltrate without being noticed.

The “realistic” military training exercise, which will involve the Green Berets, Navy Seals, and the 82nd Airborne Division, is set to take place from July 15-Sepember 15, but has prompted concerns after Texas and Utah were labeled “hostile” territory in documents related to the exercise.

A Houston Chronicle report reveals that soldiers will attempt to blend in with the local population in an effort to test the effectiveness of infiltration techniques. Residents will be advised to report “suspicious activity” during the exercise.

“They’re going to set up cells of people and test how well they’re able to move around without getting too noticed in the community,” said Roy Boyd, chief deputy with the Victoria County Sheriff’s Office. “They’re testing their abilities to basically blend in with the local environment and not stand out and blow their cover.”

By directly involving unwitting members of the local population, this aspect of the drill contradicts theArmy’s assertion that, “The public can expect nothing much different from their day-to-day activities since much of exercise will be conducted in remote areas.”

Jim Stewart, chief deputy with the Brazos County Sheriff’s Office, told the Chronicle that the designation of Texas as “hostile territory” was merely a way of setting up a role playing exercise under which soldiers operate behind enemy lines.

The Army has failed to specifically address why Texas, Utah and a pocket of southern California were labeled as hostile territories in training documents for the exercise, merely insisting that the drill is designed to prepare troops for foreign occupations and has nothing to do with preparations for martial law.

No less than 17 different Texas cities will see an Army presence as part of the exercise, which will involve, “participants in civilian dress and civilian vehicles, military aircraft, low-altitude airdrops of personnel and weapons with blank rounds, to avert fearful reactions”.

The cities are Bastrop/Smithville, Big Spring, Caddo Lake, Caldwell, Christoval, College Station, Dell City, Eldorado, Goliad, Junction, Leakey, Menard, Mountain Home, San Angelo, San Antonio and Victoria.

News outlets, primarily Infowars, who questioned the nature of the exercise have come under fire from the Army and other mainstream media outlets, with the Chronicle characterizing the reaction as an example of, “ultra-right-wing fears of a government takeover in the Lone Star State”.

Despite assurances that the training is to prepare troops for overseas missions, Army documents in the past have made clear that plans for martial law are in place for within the Continental United States (CONUS).

A leaked 2012 US Army Military Police training manual, entitled “Civil Disturbance Operations,” described how soldiers would be ordered to confiscate firearms and kill American “dissidents.” The manual also revealed that prisoners would be detained in temporary internment camps and “re-educated” to gain a new appreciation of “U.S. policies,” in accordance with U.S. Army FM 3-19.40 Internment/Resettlement Operations.

Jade Helm has also drawn comparisons to a 2012 scenario outlined by retired Army colonel Kevin Benson, in which the U.S. Military is used to crush an insurgent rebellion overseen by Tea Party militia members who take over the city of Darlington, South Carolina.

Image: The Arrowhead Mountain Water Company bottling plant, owned by Swiss conglomerate Nestle, on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Cabazon, Calif. Photo credit: Damian Dovarganes/AP.

The city of Sacramento is in the fourth year of a record drought – yet the Nestlé Corporation continues to bottle city water to sell back to the public at a big profit, local activists charge. 

The Nestlé Water Bottling Plant in Sacramento is the target of a major press conference on Tuesday, March 17, by a water coalition that claims the company is draining up to 80 million gallons of water a year from Sacramento aquifers during the drought.

The coalition, the crunchnestle alliance, says that City Hall has made this use of the water supply possible through a “corporate welfare giveaway,” according to a press advisory.

A coalition of environmentalists, Native Americans and other concerned people announced the press conference will take place at March 17 at 5 p.m. at new Sacramento City Hall, 915 I Street, Sacramento.

The coalition will release details of a protest on Friday, March 20, at the South Sacramento Nestlé plant designed to “shut down” the facility. The coalition is calling on Nestlé to pay rates commensurate with their enormous profit, or voluntarily close down.

“The coalition is protesting Nestlé’s virtually unlimited use of water – up to 80 million gallons a year drawn from local aquifers – while Sacramentans (like other Californians) who use a mere 7 to 10 percent of total water used in the State of California, have had severe restrictions and limitations forced upon them,”

according to the coalition.

“Nestlé pays only 65 cents for each 470 gallons it pumps out of the ground – the same rate as an average residential water user. But the company can turn the area’s water around, and sell it back to Sacramento at mammoth profits,”

the coalition said.

Activists say that Sacramento officials have refused attempts to obtain details of Nestlé’s water used. Coalition members have addressed the Sacramento City Council and requested that Nestle’ either pay a commercial rate under a two tier level, or pay a tax on their profit.

Cracks in the dry bed of the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino, Calif. Photo credit: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP

In October, the coalition released a “White Paper” highlighting predatory water profiteering actions taken by Nestle’ Water Bottling Company in various cities, counties, states and countries. Most of those great “deals” yielded mega profits for Nestle’ at the expense of citizens and taxpayers. Additionally, the environmental impact on many of those areas yielded disastrous results.

Coalition spokesperson Andy Conn said,

“This corporate welfare giveaway is an outrage and warrants a major investigation. For more than five months we have requested data on Nestlé water use. City Hall has not complied with our request, or given any indication that it will. Sacramentans deserve to know how their money is being spent and what they’re getting for it. In this case, they’re getting ripped off.”

For more information about the crunchnestle alliance, contact Andy Conn (530) 906-8077 camphgr55 (at) gmail.com or Bob Saunders (916) 370-8251

Nestlé is currently the leading supplier of the world’s bottled water, including such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino, and has been criticized by activists for human rights violations throughout the world. For example, Food and Water Watch and other organizations blasted Nestlé’s “Human Rights Impact Assessment” in December 2013 as a “public relations stunt.”

“The failure to examine Nestlé’s track record on the human right to water is not surprising given recent statements by its chair Peter Brabeck challenging the human right to water,” said Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director of Food & Water Watch. She noted that the company famously declared at the 2000 World Water Forum in the Netherlands that water should be defined as a need—not as a human right.

“In November 2013, Colombian trade unionist Oscar Lopez Trivino became the fifteenth Nestlé worker to be assassinated by a paramilitary organization while many of his fellow workers were in the midst of a hunger strike protesting the corporation’s refusal to hear their grievances,”

according to the groups.

The press conference and protest will take place just days after Jay Famiglietti, the senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech and a professor of Earth system science at UC Irvine, revealed in an op-ed in the LA Times on March 12 that California has only one year of water supply left in its reservoirs.

“As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.

Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing. California has no contingency plan for a persistent drought like this one (let alone a 20-plus-year mega-drought), except, apparently, staying in emergency mode and praying for rain.”

Meanwhile, Governor Jerry Brown continues to fast-track his Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) to build the peripheral tunnels to ship Sacramento River water to corporate agribusiness, Southern California water agencies, and oil companies conducting fracking operations. The $67 billion plan won’t create one single drop of new water, but it will take vast tracts of Delta farm land out of production under the guise of “habitat restoration” in order to irrigate drainage-impaired soil owned by corporate mega-growers on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

The tunnel plan will also hasten the extinction of Sacramento River Chinook salmon, Central Valley steelhead, Delta and longfin smelt, green sturgeon and other fish species, as well as imperil the salmon and steelhead populations on the Klamath and Trinity rivers. The peripheral tunnels will be good for agribusiness, water privateers, oil companies and the 1 percent, but will be bad for the fish, wildlife, people and environment of California and the public trust.

The Delta smelt may already be extinct in the wild!

In fact, the endangered Delta smelt, once the most abundant fish in the entire Bay Delta Estuary, may already be extinct, according to UC Davis fish biologist and author Peter Moyle, as quoted on Capital Public Radio.

“Prepare for the extinction of the Delta Smelt in the wild,” Moyle told a group of scientists with the Delta Stewardship Council.

According to Capital Public Radio:

“He says the latest state trawl survey found very few fish in areas of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta where smelt normally gather.

‘That trawl survey came up with just six smelt, four females and two males,’ says Moyle. “Normally because they can target smelt, they would have gotten several hundred.’

Moyle says the population of Delta smelt has been declining for the last 30 years but the drought may have pushed the species to the point of no return. If the smelt is officially declared extinct, which could take several years, the declaration could change how water is managed in California.

‘All these biological opinions on Delta smelt that have restricted some of the pumping will have to be changed,’ says Moyle.

But Moyle says pumping water from the Delta to Central and Southern California could still be restricted at certain times because of all the other threatened fish populations.”

The Delta smelt, an indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, reached a new record low population level in 2014, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fall midwater trawl survey that was released in January.

Department staff found a total of only eight smelt at a total of 100 sites sampled each month from September through December

The smelt is considered an indicator species because the 2.0 to 2.8 inch long fish is endemic to the estuary and spends all of its life in the Delta.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) has conducted the Fall Midwater Trawl Survey (FMWT) to index the fall abundance of pelagic (open water) fish, including Delta smelt, striped bass, longfin smelt, threadfin shad and American shad, nearly annually since 1967. The index of each species is a number that indicates a relative population abundance.

Watch Nestle’s CEO declare water “food that should be privatized, and not a human right”:

US and Lithuanian Troops

According to news reports and to this appeal by Kristoferis Voishka, the pro-American government installed in Lithuania is persecuting Lithuanians who dissent from the anti-Russian propaganda that is driving Washington’s NATO puppets to war with Russia.  Unlike their puppet government, Lithuanians understand that war with Russia means that Lithuania on the front line will be utterly destroyed, a result that would not bother Washington in the least, just as Washington is undisturbed when its forces obliterate weddings, funerals, and children’s soccer games.

What is Lithuania?  To Washington it is a nothing.

Kristoferis Voiska runs an alternative Internet news site in LIthuania. Not long ago he interviewed me, and the interview appeared in both LIthuanian newspapers and on his Internet news program in video form.  I found him to be sincere and well informed.  I advised him that interviewing me would bring trouble for him, and he already was aware of that.

As I have said so many times, Americans are the worst informed people on the planet.

They are unaware of the growing momentum toward war with Russia.  The presstitute media throughout Europe, especially in the Baltic states and Poland, is hard at work creating in people’s minds the fear of a Russian invasion.  The orchestrated fear then provides the basis for the American puppet governments to beg troops and tanks and missiles from Washington, and the US military/security complex, counting its profits,  is pleased to comply.

 But what Russia sees is a threat, not a money-making opportunity for the US military/security complex and payoffs to the corrupt Lithuanian and Polish governments, which are increasingly perceived as neo-nazi like the government that Washington bestowed on Ukraine.

 The situation is dangerous, as I keep telling you, a message that some are too weak to accept.

  If you care to show support for Kristoferis and the independent media in Lithuania, send emails to  [email protected]

 In about one week I will be 76 years old.  I was born in 1939 as World War II was unfolding as the direct consequence of the Versailles Treaty that broke every promise President Woodrow Wilson made to Germany in exchange for the end of World War I.

 I remember as a child Cold War nuclear attack drills in elementary school during which we would cower under our school desks.  We were issued dog tags with our blood type just like the dog tags ripped by their comrades off US soldiers killed in the war movies by Germans or Japs (no longer a permissible word) and sent home to the dead GI’s family.

To us it was more romantic than scary.  We loved wearing the dog tags.  I have no idea what happened to mine.  They must be collectors’ items by now.

I have seen a lot.  As kids playing war–in those days you could have toy guns without being shot down by the police who are protecting us–we reveled in America’s World War victories.  We understood, thanks to our parents and grandparents, that the Red Army won the war against Germany, but we Americans beat the heartless Japs.

That was enough. We knew that the US was tough.

I was 14 when the Korean War broke out.  We expected to win, of course, and our expectations, we thought, were proven correct when General MacArthur’s amphibious landings rolled  up the North Korean army.  But what MacArthur and Washington had overlooked is that China and the Soviet Union were not about to accept a US victory.

Before Americans could cheer, the Third World Chinese Army rolled in and pushed the conquerors of Japan back town to the tip of South Korea.  It was a humiliating defeat for American arms.  In his dispute with President Truman about the conduct of the war, MacArthur, America’s most famous general, was removed from command.

Washington accepted defeat in Korea and again in Viet Nam where a 500,000 US force consisting of US Army, Marines, and Special Forces was defeated by a Third World guerrilla  army.

To these defeats we can add Afghanistan and Iraq.  After 14 years of killing, the Taliban controls most of the country.  Jihadist have carved a new state out of parts of Syria and Iraq.  The Middle East reeks of American defeat.  Just like Korea.  Just like Viet Nam.

Despite these facts insouciant Americans and their crazed rulers in Washington imagine that the US is a Uni-Power, the world’s only superpower against whom no country can stand.  Arrogance, ignorance, and hubris are leading the US into conflict with Russia and China, either of which can destroy the US with ease.  And Europe as well.  And the stupid bought-and-paid-for Japanese government, a total non-entity, a disgrace to the Japanese people, a collection of well-paid American puppets.

As Andrew Cockburn has documented, the US military is lost in abstractions and is no longer capable of conducting conventional warfare. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2015/03/24/us-government-us-military-became-murder-inc-paul-craig-roberts/

Any American or NATO army sent to attack Russia will be destroyed almost instantly.  Washington cannot accept the loss of prestige from defeat and would take the war nuclear.  Life on earth would end.

The only conclusion that informed analysis supports is that Washington is the greatest threat to life on earth.  Washington is a greater threat than global warming.  Washington is a greater threat than the exhaustion of mineral energy sources.  Washington is a greater threat than the rise in world and US poverty from Washington’s policy to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

The only possible conclusion is that unless Washington collapses from its economic house of cards or is abandoned by its NATO puppet states, Washington will destroy life on earth.

Washington is the greatest evil that the world has ever faced.  There is no good in  Washington.  Only evil.

En relación con la foto: Por este camino tiene que andar el Vaticano

Esta noticia nos la ofrece RD (1) ,en este 24 de marzo. Se nos informa que el papa mandara para representarle al Secretario general del Vaticano, cardenal Pietro Parolin. Bien conocido en Venezuela como Nuncio apostólico de los anos 2008 hasta su nombramiento en el Vaticano, en 2013, sigue manteniendo buenas relaciones con los principales representantes de la oposición. Gracias a él, varios tuvieron oportunidad de encontrar al papa. Fue el caso, entre otros, del candidato Capriles (2) que perdió en las elecciones presidenciales que gano el candidato Nicolás Maduro. Recién, la esposa del preso Antonio José Ledesma Días, alcalde del municipio de Caracas, logro hacer llegar rápidamente al papa una carta (3) para que intervenga para que se libere a su esposo. En su misiva nota que el papa es simpático a la lucha democrática que lleva por adelante la oposición en Venezolana. 

En lo que me corresponde no veo problema a lo que el país anfitrión del evento invite al papa o a su representante para que participe a la Cumbre de la Organización de los países de América (OEA) al realizarse en Panamá los 10 y 11 de abril. No veo, tampoco, problema para que el Vaticano responde positivamente a esta invitación. Mi preocupación se ubica a un nivel que va mas allá de la presencia del Vaticano a esta Cumbre. Se trata mas bien de la alianza que lleva el Vaticano con Estados Unidos, lo que le quita la independencia que necesita la Iglesia para alzar una vox que sirve tanto al Jesús de Nazaret que a los pobres y humildes que siempre fueron sus privilegiados. No supimos mucho del Pacto secreto que se firmo, en marzo del ano 2014, entre el papa Francisco y el presidente Obama. Un Pacto que deja pensar que va en la misma dirección de un pacto anterior, firmado entre el papa Juan-Pablo II y el presidente Reagan, en junio 1982. De ese sabemos mucho mas ahora. Les invito a leer aquí unas informaciones al respecto.

No puedo olvidar que en la preparación del encuentro de Geneva 2, tratando del conflicto en Siria, el Vaticano y Washington se habían concertados (5) para elaborar una estrategia común, sabiendo, el Vaticano, que Washington era parte del problema. Esta proximidad del Vaticano con los dirigentes de Estados Unidos no ayuda para que el Vaticano se ponga por encima de los intereses de las partes en conflicto. Uno puede notar que cada vez que políticas inaceptables llevadas por adelante por la Administración estadunidense, el Vaticano se calla como si tuviera una mordaza que se lo impidiera. Yo noté, por ejemplo, que relacionado a Ucrania el Vaticano se queda silencioso (6) en cuanto al intervencionismo de Washington.

Por el ejemplo, el Decreto firmado por Obama, considerando a Venezuela como una amenaza a la seguridad nacional de los Estados Unido, abre la puerta a cualquier momento a una intervención militar contra Venezuela. ¿Qué dijeron el papa y el Vaticano al respecto? NADA. ¿Cómo es posible que el papa no haya reclamado de parte de Estados Unidos mas respeto al derecho internacional que protege la independencia y la soberanía de todos los países? Si hay un problema, pertenece a las Naciones Unidad de tomar las disposiciones apropiadas. Mientras que los países de América latina, los organismo regionales como UNASUR, la CELAC, el ALBA y que el pueblo venezolano en su gran mayoría acompañado por cristianos y cristianas alzan la vox (7) para exigir de Obama que retire este Decreto antidemocrático y totalmente al margen del derecho internacional, el Vaticano guarda un silencio que no sabemos si se es un silencio cómplice o un silencio estratégico.

Todo eso me conduce a pensar que en previsión de la Cumbre de la OEA, hay una estrategia YA establecida entre Obama, el Vaticano y la oposición venezolana. Una estrategia sutil en que la intervención del Vaticano permitiera resolver dos problemas: el Decreto de Obama que rechaza el gobierno de Venezuela y el caso de libération de los dos o tres detenidos que reclaman la oposición venezolana y Washington. En la estrategia se trataría de negociar el rechazo del Decreto en cambio de unos presos importantes por la oposición.

Todo eso me hace pensar en lo que sucedió con Cuba y Estados Unidos. La esposa del preso Alan Gross había mandado una carta al papa Francisco para que intervenga para que Cuba libere a su esposo. Por supuesto que el papa mando una linda carta al presidente de Cuba, Raúl Castro para solicitar la liberación de Alan Gross. A la carta del papa contesto el presidente Raúl Castro recordándole que Cuba tenia tres presos detenidos en Estados Unidos desde mas de 16 anos y que un intercambio de presos fuera posible. Así, la intervención del papa salió muy positiva, hasta mas de lo esperado, con la abertura de negociaciones para normalizar las relaciones entre los dos países. El objetivo primero de la intervención del papa Francisco no era tanto la liberación de los tres cubanos presos en Estados Unidos, sino la liberación del norteamericano. Alan Gross.

De mi punto de vista no hay base para negociar el retiro del Decreto en cambio de la liberación de los presos. Y no tiene ningún valor legal. Es algo de fundamentalmente inmoral. En cuanto a los presos la situación es distinta. Fueron detenidos por crimines cometidos de los cuales tienen que responder ante la justicia. Podrán defenderse ante la justicia de Venezuela y conforme a la leyes vigentes en el país. Es posible que la justicia les da la razón como es posible que les declare culpables. No le queda mas al presidente Obama que de anular de completo este Decreto.

Yo sé que el gobierno de Venezuela presento varias demandas para que Estados Unidos devuelven a criminales reclamados por la justicia venezolana. Allí, si se puede tener elementos por negociaciones.

Para concluir, si el Vaticano quiere dejar un mensaje claro de su opción por los pobres y excluidos de la sociedad tendrá una oportunidad única al hacerse el defensor de los procesos democráticos, del respeto de las leyes y constituciones y, sobre todo, promover la participación de los ciudadanos y ciudadanas a los procesos de cambio. En este contexto, saludar de forma especial a todos los países que obran en este sentido. Recordar por fin la lectura y el análisis de su Exhortación apostólica Evangelii Gaudium.

Oscar Fortin
El 24 de marzo 2015
Humanismo en Jesús

(1) http://www.periodistadigital.com/religion/vaticano/2015/03/24/parolin-asistira-a-la-cumbre-de-las-americas-religion-iglesia-panama-secretario-estado-vaticano.shtml
(2) http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/11/07/actualidad/1383782443_081779.html
(3) http://www.abc.es/internacional/20150318/abci-ledezma-vaticano-201503180654.html
(4) http://blogs.periodistadigital.com/humanismo-de-jesus.php/2015/02/28/dos-pactos-secretos-entre-el-vaticano-y-
(5) http://blogs.periodistadigital.com/humanismo-de-jesus.php/2014/02/26/p347436#more347436
(6) http://blogs.periodistadigital.com/humanismo-de-jesus.php/2014/09/06/iporque-el-silencio-del-vaticano-sobre-u
(7) http://blogs.periodistadigital.com/humanismo-de-jesus.php/2015/03/16/-que-dice-el-estado-del-vaticano-del-dec

As Lee Fang writes: The possibility of an Iran nuclear deal depressing weapons sales was raised by Myles Walton, an analyst from Germany’s Deutsche Bank, during a Lockheed earnings call this past January 27. Walton asked Marillyn Hewson, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, if an Iran agreement could “impede what you see as progress in foreign military sales.” Financial industry analysts such as Walton use earnings calls as an opportunity to ask publicly-traded corporations like Lockheed about issues that might harm profitability.

by Mat Rodina

American politicians in particular and European politicians in general are some of the most ignorant fools when the issue comes to anything outside their own borders. When it comes to Russia, it is an engima wrapped in a mystery…but only because, no one has every bothered to try to understand Russians, Russian history  and the Russian world view.

Andrew Cockburn has written a must-read book.  The title is Kill Chain: The Rise Of The High-Tech Assassins.  The title could just as well be: How the US Government and US Military Became Murder, Inc.

In California’s epic drought, wars over water rights continue, while innovative alternatives for increasing the available water supply go untapped.

“It is always a meritorious deed to get hold of a Palestinian’s possessions” The code of Jewish Law revised and updated by Benjamin Netanyahu

            Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election makes him the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history.  His 20% margin of victory (30 Knesset seats to 24 for his nearest opponent) underlines the mass base of his consolidation of power.

            Most critical commentators cite Netanyahu’s racist pronouncements; his rejection of any two state solution and his overt appeal for a mass Jewish voter turnout to counteract the ‘droves of Arab voters’ for his electoral victories.

            There is no question that the majority of Israeli Jewish leaders and parties support Netanyahu’s racist pronouncements and ‘no-state’ solution and joined him in a coalition government.  But the larger issue is the positive mass response to Netanyahu’s call to action.  Nearly three quarters of the electorateturned out (73%) to elect him.  Moreover, Netanyahu has been elected prime minister for four terms:  between 1996-99 and more recently 2009-20.

            What is more, the opposition has not differed from the Netanyahu coalition regime’s Judeo-centric policies and pronouncements.  In other words, ‘racist’ ideology per se is not what drives the Israeli majority to repeatedly support Netanyahu.

Jewish-centered racism is an integral and accepted part of Israel’s political culture.

Social Colonialism and Netanyahu’s Popularity

There is a more fundamental, ongoing material basis which accounts for Netanyahu’s electoral victories and mass appeal: His regime’s aggressive, perpetual and escalating seizure and dispossession of Palestinians land and his massive financing of Israel’s Jewish colonial towns.

In other words, Netanyahu’s appeal is rooted in the large-scale, long-term housing which hundreds of thousands of low and middle income Israeli Jews have obtained via his brutal land-grabbing policy.  The so-called ‘settlers’ are in part armed Israeli Jewish colonists who engage in open theft and defend Netanyahu, because they materially benefit from his policies…  It is not only those who have already colonized Palestinian land grabbed after 1967 – over 650,000 Jews – who vote for Netanyahu, but there are the hundreds of thousands of others in Israel, priced out of the Israeli real estate bubble, who cannot afford comfortable housing and look to the West Bank and Jerusalem for a ‘Jewish solution’ at the expense of the Palestinian inhabitants.

Racism, the foul language directed at Palestinians, which pervades Israeli-Jewish culture (‘Arab scum’ is one of many such common expressions) found expression even among the songs celebrating Netanyahu’s latest electoral victory.  Racism serves to justify the land grabbing.  Can the settler mind even imagine that an ‘inferior people’ should complain about land grabs by the ‘chosen people’?  Modern educated Jewish professionals wax indignant that shepherds and olive farmers should hold back the development of glitzy shopping malls, million dollar community centers (for Jews only, of course), hospitals, sports complexes and high tech industrial parks.

And if they – ‘the Arabs’ – object to their own displacement, all the better:  Their resistance provides an excellent pretext for armed Jewish settler thugs to invade a village, drive out the inhabitant and call in Netanyahu’s bull dozers, as a prelude to establishing an ‘outpost’, first steps to a new Jews only colony!

The key to Netanyahu’s big vote is that he responds favorably and forcefully in favor of new colonies.  The self-styled Israeli Defense (sic) Force (IDF) is dispatched to protect the local vandals and to shoot live ammo at any rock-throwing Palestinian adolescent defending the family patrimony.

Netanyahu acts and speaks for the rapacious Jewish colonial masses.  The opposition criticized Netanyahu on the basis of his neglect of socio-economic issues in Israel, especially, the soaring prices of housing in the major cities.  But they failed to attract many Jewish voters because Netanyahu offers a more attractive alternative solution – the seizure of more Palestinian land and the construction of Jewish homes, instead of fighting powerful Jewish real estate moguls, land speculators and corporate landlords inside Israel.

Extremism at the Service of Jewish Housing is No Vice

For the mass of Israeli Jews, looking for a cheap, easy and government-financed road to comfortable middle class housing, seizing and occupying Palestinian property is a very attractive and viable ‘solution’.

Netanyahu’s ‘final solution’ for the Palestinians – no state – is a guarantee that land, which is seized and housing which is built, will remain under Jewish jurisdiction.  The ‘final solution’ for Palestinians is the housing solution for the Jewish masses.

Under Netanyahu, from 2013 to 2015, two-thirds of new housing construction (for Jews only) has taken place on stolen Palestinian lands.  His regime spends $252 million dollars a year on Jews-only colonies (‘settlements’).  The Netanyahu regime spends $950 for each Jewish colonist in the West Bank, double what is invested for each Jewish Israeli resident in Tel Aviv.  For the most aggressive Jewish colonists, those who destroy the productive olive groves, torch Palestinian homes and who establish ‘settler outposts’, Netanyahu spends $1,483 a year . . . with promises of roads, electricity, schools, swimming pools and air conditioning to come!

Owning the Holy City Secures the Unsavory Vote

Netanyahu’s big vote in Jerusalem can be accounted for by the fact that over 300,000 Jews have been the beneficiaries of land grabs and sparkling high-rise condos in what had been centuries-old Palestinian neighborhoods.

Netanyahu assures the Jerusalem Jews that ‘their city’ is and always will be the capital of Israel, an undivided Jewish city.

Sticking his finger in the eyes of the EU and US officials, who claim otherwise, energizes and emboldens the Jewish voters

Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing is unrelenting:  That is why he is re-elected over and over again.  Israeli colonial settlements grew by over 5% each year from 2009 – 2015.  There is no backtracking with Bibi Netanyahu:  at this rate of ‘erasure’ all of historical Palestine will be Judified by 2050 at the latest!

Herr Netanyahu claims that Israeli Jews must have their  ‘lebensraum’ . . .

Israel and other colonial powers, like England in the 19^th century and Germany in the 20^th century, ‘solve’ their domestic social problems and social unrest by exporting populations across borders.  The attractiveness of this solution is that it preserves the power and privileges of the domestic economic elite and provides an ‘escape valve’ for the local disaffected masses.

Emigration to settler colonies requires violent dispossession of the local inhabitants.  If stiff resistance emerges – the imperial powers resort to genocide; extermination of native peoples by the English, Slavic peoples by the Germans, Palestinian Arabs and other non-Jews by the Israeli Jews.

Long past is the notion that Israeli Jews would solve their social -economic problems via a collectivist economy and popular struggle against Jewish plutocrats.

Today Jewish-Israeli millionaires flourish alongside orthodox, secular, Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Sabra and Russian emigrant colonists.  The former exploitslabor and markets, while the latter dispossesses Palestinians.  Netanyahu has discovered a formula for uniting quarrelsome Jewish parties, leaders and voters and for winning elections.

Moreover, Netanyahu has secured the financial and political backing of numerous overseas Jewish-Zionist billionaires.  He has secured the unconditional support of tens of thousands of middle class Israel-First activists, academics and professionals who operate AIPAC and dozens of similar propaganda mills in Washington and Christian Zionists throughout the US.  Netanyahu’s overseas backers ensure that the US government may grumble and criticize, but will never disrupt Netanyahu’s ‘plan’ of an ethnically pure ‘Greater Israel’ with Jerusalem as its ‘eternal’ capital.  Obama may whine and talk to the press about ‘reconsidering US-Israeli relations’ but he has assured Israel and Netanyahu that military and economic ties will remain intact.

 Conclusion

            Netanyahu has succeeded in setting a colonial agenda for all Israeli-Jewish parties (bar one).

            He has established the fact that competitive elections and opposition political parties are compatible and even facilitate violent colonial expansion.

            He has established the fact that Israel and its people embrace a racist ideology and receive the endorsement of most Western leaders, and mass media and the unconditional support of its overseas fifth column.

            Israel’s project for Palestine, the creation of a single Jewish state, is far more than the demented vision of one man.  It has been taken to heart by the great mass of the Israeli-Jewish people and their overseas supporters.  The victory of Netanyahu and his supporters marks a historic victory for all those regimes and people across the world who believe and fight for an imperial dominated world.

The most extensive land-based study of the Amazon to date reveals it is losing its capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. From a peak of two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year in the 1990s, the net uptake by the forest has halved and is now for the first time being overtaken by fossil fuel emissions in Latin America. 

“One of the most spectacular developments of this period is occurring in Latin America – For the first time in 500 years, Latin America has taken significant steps toward its liberation from imperial domination”. Noam Chomsky, Magisterial Speech at the Forum for Emancipation and Equality, Buenos Aires, March 14, 2015

Introduction

            Numerous prominent progressive US pundits, whose political pronouncements carry great weight in the alternative media, have proclaimed ‘Latin America’s decisive break’ with US domination and have gone on to announce the beginning of a new ‘post-imperial epoch’.

            These claims have little basis in reality to anyone minimally familiar with developments in the region, especially to any observer of the economic and financial foundations and socio-economic class structure of the biggest and most important countries in Latin America.

            What can be scientifically classified as the Anglo-American booby left (AABL) is a taxonomic category characterized by their impressionistic pronouncements based on the rhetorical flourishes of prominent Latin American leaders and their local ideologues.  Needless to say the AABL, speaking ex cathedra, are not troubled by deep structural anomalies, which contradict, their flattering orations about the ‘emancipatory’ accomplishments of their Latin American hosts.  Let it be said that the prestigious reputations, which adorn the invited speakers, does not preclude including them as premier representatives of the AABL.

            Only because the prestigious booby-left systematically ignores basic economic, social and political conditions in Latin America and conflates cyclical and conjunctionalchanges with long-term historic transformations, can they speak of the ‘end of US domination’ and a ‘new era of social emancipation.’ Paraphrasing Marx, we can say that ‘the demagogic rhetoric of center-left Latin American leaders is the opium of the Anglo-American booby-left.’

What Latin American Emancipation?  What Dollar Dependence?

For over a decade, Latin America experienced a period of exceptional growth as commodity prices soared, China’s economy expanded and US bankers and creditors financed Latin American investors.  Center-left, centrist and rightwing regimes benefited from China’s rising demand for agro-mineral commodities.  Regimes across the spectrum diversified their export markets and their source of imports.  With large-scale budget surpluses, center-left and rightwing regimes reduced poverty levels via increased social expenditures, while the elite economic structures, the primacy of private national and foreign capital, remained intact.  Landholding remained concentrated:  No agrarian reform was implemented anywhere, except in Venezuela.

In fact, under center-left presidents, as well as rightist regimes, the areas exploited by agro-business and agro-chemical corporations expanded.  Foreign corporations vastly increased investment and land ownership in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, three of the principal countries cited by the booby-left orators as leading the ‘emancipatory transformation’.  The booby left’s ‘vanguard countries’, supposedly leading the struggle against imperialism and neo-liberalism, played a leading role in co-opting, de-mobilizing, de-radicalizing and even repressing the social movements, which had advanced a radical transformative agenda at the beginning of the 21^st century.  In other words, the AABL is suffering a decade-long amnesia .It confuses an increase in social expenditures, based on the royalties, taxes and loans from imperial MNCs, agro-mineral exporters and banks, with a ‘historic break with the US empire’.

The exuberant emancipatory claims of the AABL totally ignore the fact that Latin America’s growth depended on corporate borrowing, as they sought low US rates, and now have large debts denominated in dollars, and face onerous payments with a stronger dollar.  For the last three years Latin America’s center-left governments have suffered the brunt of the devaluation of their currencies and the outflow of capital.  Increasing disinvestment is also a result of lower commodity prices, slower growth, and, in the case of Brazil, a multi-billion dollar corruption scandal involving the giant public-private petroleum company Petrobras.

Financial dependence on Wall Street, City of London, Swiss, German and Chinese banks and the resultant onerous conditions for debt payments, has led these ‘emancipated’ regimes to adopt  ‘fiscal adjustments’ reversing their social programs.  In other words, the AABL’s claims of a ‘historical’ break with imperial domination lasted less than a decade.  The moderate reforms were based on weak structural foundations, which made them vulnerable to changes in financial and commodity markets.

Brazil’s President Rousseff is pursuing an orthodox neo-liberal agenda – cutting funds for unemployment, pension and poverty programs. Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the entire gamut of ‘emancipatory regimes’ have depended on agro-business elites, rejected agrarian reform and based their ‘growth strategy’ on supply-side incentives to attract foreign capital.

According to the Bolivian Economic Minister Luis Arce, during President Evo Morales’ nine years of ‘emancipatory’ government, capitalists have quadrupled their profits. According to the Argentine Secretary of Economic Policy and Development Planning Axel Kicillof, long-term large-scale joint ventures have been signed granting 145,000 acres to Chevron to exploit its oil reserves via highly contaminating fracking while agro-toxic giant Monsanto secured a lucrative royalty contract on the use of the carcinogenic herbicide Roundup.  Several other foreign agro mineral multinationals are in line for lucrative contracts.

What makes the ‘emancipatory’ rhetoric of the AABL more ridiculous is that some of their leading anti-imperialist countries are highly repressive toward grass-roots liberation movements.  In Ecuador, for example, President Rafael Correa has arrested Indian leaders of CONIAE (the principle indigenous peoples confederation), proposed harsh anti-strike labor legislation and opened nature reserves for exploitation by international petroleum corporations.

The AABL confuses short-term increases in social expenditures, anti-imperial political rhetoric and the diversification of markets, with a ‘historic’ break with US domination.  Worse still, they ignore the fact that the second and third biggest economies and several others have deepened economic ties to the US Empire via bilateral free trade agreements.  Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Panama have embraced free trade.  Moreover, they are charter members of the US-centered Trans Pacific Free Trade group – a direct competitor of MERCOSUR, ALBA, Petro Caribe and other exclusively Latin American economic groupings.

Moreover, the recently elected governments in Uruguay and Brazil are looking toward greater ties with the US and European Union, as China and Latin America’s growth and demand declines.

A decline in the US share of the Latin America market is hardly an expression of Latin America’s emancipatory struggle, especially since it is accompanied by an increase in financial dependency. While neo-liberal regimes like Chile, Peru and Colombia, as well as center-left governments like Brazil, Argentina and Ecuador, have diversified their markets, those decisions are made by agro-mineral exporters and hardly reflect an emancipatory ethos; they have everything to do with the profit motive.  Moreover ‘emancipatory’ Venezuela (leader of Latin American integration) has remained far and away more dependent on a single commodity,oil exports account for 90%of its exports ,and more dependent (80%) on the US market than Colombia, Chile or Peru – with their bilateral free trade agreements.

Conclusion

As a matter of historical accuracy the rise of ‘emancipatory anti-imperialist politics’ reached its high point a decade ago when uprisings, led by unemployed workers, miners, Indian and peasant movements overthrew neo-liberal regimes in Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador.  Fifteen years ago, under the neo-liberal regime of President Henrique Cardoso, the Rural Landless Movement, through a nation-wide land occupation strategy, secured the settlement of 50,000 families a year on expropriated large farms.

Today, under the ‘emancipatory’ regime of Brazil’s so-called Workers’ Party, fewer than 10,000 landless families are land reform beneficiaries.  In Bolivia, 90% of financial aid to agriculture goes to the agro-export elite centered in Santa Cruz while over 60% of the impoverished Indian peasantry receive token support. However their leaders do get invitations to the Presidential Palace to applaud the anti-imperialist speeches of Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera. Visiting AABL notables listen, mesmerized by the Vice President’s exposition of what he pompously dubs a Gramscian reading of Andean Socialism.

The AABL notables are invited by the regimes they proclaim to be ‘emancipatory’ to give ‘magisterial addresses’, while local, better-informed, consequential intellectuals, long committed to the class and anti-imperialist struggle, but who have criticized the phony emancipatory rhetoric, are excluded.

            The world-renowned intellectuals of the AABL are imported by center-left regimes in retreat, to provide an ideological veneer and prop up their declining legitimacy among their own people.  Capitalizing on the AABL’s ignorance and arrogance, the regimes organize costly international forums and flatter their overseas guests, who with gravity and serious demeanor inform their audiences that they are being emancipated. Even they should know that their emancipators are pocketing millions in bribes (Brazil), welcoming US joint military exercises (Colombia, Peru, Uruguay), funding agro-mineral elites at the expense of landless peasants (Bolivia) and implementing fiscal cuts to social programs to pay overseas bankers.

Yesterday, in a vote that largely slid under the radar, the House of Representatives passed a resolution urging Obama to send lethal aid to Ukraine, providing offensive, not just “defensive” weapons to the Ukraine army – the same insolvent, hyperinflating Ukraine which, with a Caa3/CC credit rating, last week started preparations to issue sovereign debt with a US guarantee, in essence making it a part of the United States (something the US previously did as a favor to Egypt before the Muslim Brotherhood puppet regime was swept from power by the local army).

The intelligence services of Israel have allegedly been spying on American officials during their closed-door negotiations with the government of Iran over its nuclear program. The Wall Street Journal said the spy operation forms part of a broader campaign by Tel Aviv to sabotage the talks, which are aimed at bridging the differences between the Islamic Republic and a group of nations that have come to be known as P5+1, representing the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany.

In a leading article published on Monday, the paper said it decided to reveal the existence of the Israeli spying program after interviewing “more than a dozen current and former US and Israeli diplomats, intelligence officials, policy makers and lawmakers”. Ironically, according to The Journal, the administration of US President Barack Obama found out about the Israeli spying after instructing American intelligence agencies to conduct a counterintelligence operation against Tel Aviv, in order to see what they knew about the secret negotiations with Iran. After spying on Israeli government officials, the American agencies concluded that they were in possession of confidential information that could only have been acquired from spying on participants in the negotiations.

According to The Journal, American officials were not surprised by the spying. But they were especially perturbed, said the paper, to find out that the Israeli government proceeded to leak the secret information to American lawmakers opposed to a possible deal with Iran, in order “to undermine US diplomacy”, according to one unnamed senior American official.

Israeli officials told The Journal that Tel Aviv had indeed acquired confidential information about the negotiations, but that they had done so by spying on Iranian, not American, negotiators. Speaking late on Monday, a spokesman for the office of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the American newspaper’s allegations were “utterly false. The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies”, he said, adding that the “false allegations” were “clearly intended to undermine the strong ties between the United States and Israel”.

Following the late January guilty verdicts in the espionage trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, more proof emerged — if any more were needed — that many elite mainstream journalists abhor whistleblowers and think they should go to prison when they divulge classified information.

One would think that a business that has relied on confidential informants for some of the major investigative stories of this and the previous century would applaud whistleblowers who risk everything on behalf of the people’s right to know what its government is doing in the shadows. But looking back at cases over the last five years, we see the unedifying spectacle of some of the nation’s best-known print and broadcast journalists venting their outrage at whistleblowers’ disclosures and expressing their preference for being kept in the dark by the government in the name of national security.

Most recently, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, and an opinion writer for The Economist both weighed in critically against Sterling after his conviction. Pincus also strongly defended the integrity of the Operation Merlin program — details of which Sterling was accused of leaking to New York Times reporter James Risen — and contended that Risen gave an erroneous portrayal of portions of the program in his 2006 book “State of War.” (More about these later.)

Sterling, who has never admitted leaking any classified information, nevertheless with his conviction joined the ranks of those whistleblowers and conduits for whistleblowers who have come under fire from prominent journalists for disclosing classified information to the press — e.g., Wikileaks, Julian Assange, Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning, Edward Snowden, John Kiriakou, and others.

New York Times columnists Thomas Friedman and David Brooks, Washington Post columnists David Ignatius and Richard Cohen, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, NBC’s former Meet the Press host David Gregory, and the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin. These are among the journalistic heavyweights who have in one instance or another come to the defense of the government’s secrecy policies and who have pilloried those making the leaks. And, in the process, they frequently sounded more like government press officers than independent, skeptical watchdogs of the public interest.

Of course, some of these outraged members of press royalty have themselves benefited from “approved” government leaks designed to make the leaking parties look good — the kind of leaks that don’t get prosecuted.

For example, Ignatius, a veteran writer known for his CIA sources and insider information, derided whistleblowers in the aftermath of Snowden’s June 2013 National Security Agency mass surveillance revelations as “malcontents and self-appointed do-gooders who may get security clearances.” He darkly hinted that Snowden “looks these days more like an intelligence defector, seeking haven in a country hostile to the United States, than a whistleblower.”

The ever imaginative Thomas Friedman, in criticizing the NSA leaks, offered up a modern-day version of the Vietnam War’s “we had to bomb the village in order to save it” as the reason to condemn Snowden’s revelations. Read it here.

In Friedman’s telling, Americans must not overly concern themselves about our government spying on citizens and must accept a curtailment of privacy and civil liberties today in order to protect the nation and ward off a repeat of 9-11 — which, if it occurred, would lead to an even more serious crackdown on civil liberties. As he wrote: “…(W)e don’t live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data…under constant judicial review. It’s not ideal. But if one more 9/11-scale attack gets through, the cost to civil liberties will be so much greater.” Yes, a little authoritarianism today will forestall really big authoritarianism down the line.

We have even witnessed some journalists suggesting that Glenn Greenwald be charged with crimes for being the primary reporter of Snowden’s NSA disclosures — most notably, NBC’s David Gregory. (Gregory has snottily referred to Greenwald as someone who “claims that he’s a journalist” — as if true journalists are only those, like Gregory, who always bow to government authority.) In June 2013, two weeks after the Snowden revelations, Gregory asked Greenwald on Meet the Press: “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” See video and read here how Greenwald demolished Gregory.

Over the years, Greenwald, first with Salon and The Guardian and now with The Intercept, has been the most vigilant documenter of the hostility of many in the mainstream press to whistleblowers and their support for secrecy in all matters connected to whatever the government claims involves a national security issue. See, for example, his 2010 column on the reaction of many journalists, politicians and others to the Wikileaks disclosures.

There is also the example of Bill Keller, then executive editor of The New York Times, who famously trashed Julian Assange in the Sunday Times Magazine in early 2011. Although Wikileaks provided a horde of secret documents that the Times used for major news stories, Keller, nevertheless, decided to do a gossipy hit-job on Assange — certainly one of the most peculiar acts of journalistic ingratitude and dumping of one’s source in the modern age.

In Sterling’s case, a January 29 article on the “Democracy in America” blog of The Economist came up with a particularly disturbing headline: “Why locking up leakers makes sense.” It was signed with the initials D.R., per The Economist’s tradition of not disclosing full names in bylines.

The anonymous blogger takes a sort of “I’m-all-right-Jack-f-you” attitude toward whistleblowers in their dealings with reporters. Noting that James Risen was excused by the Justice Department from testifying in the Sterling case after making it clear that he would not name his sources for a botched CIA nuclear-component-designs-for-Iran operation that he described in his 2006 book “State of War,” the Economist article stated:

“The conflict between society’s desire for a vigorous free press that holds government to account and its need for the state to keep secrets from foreign enemies can never be resolved. But Mr. Risen’s reprieve and Mr. Sterling’s conviction could shift the balance in the right direction.”

Let that sink in: A writer for a magazine adjudged in journalistic circles to be a serious, prestigious publication, says it strikes a nice balance to have a whistleblower go to jail. The writer skims over the fact that this reprieve for Risen was the result of a policy only recently adopted by outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder and that today’s policy can change from one administration to the next — or even from one attorney general to another in the same administration. There was no binding precedent set in Risen being let off the hook; there is no guarantee that the next brave reporter who refuses to name a source in a national security case won’t end up in jail. And no guarantee that reporter won’t be indicted as a co-conspirator if an attorney general decides to cross that line.

In this regard, the Obama administration has already indicated that reporters who benefit from classified leaks can be considered partners in an illegal activity, as was divulged in 2013 in the investigation of a 2009 national security leak to Fox News reporter James Rosen. Rosen was described as a co-conspirator in a government investigator’s affidavit seeking a search warrant to obtain Rosen’s personal e-mails in a leaks case involving North Korea’s nuclear weapons testing. Stephen Kim, a State Department official with particular expertise in North Korea’s nuclear program, was subsequently indicted and pleaded guilty in April 2014 to one count under the Espionage Act of divulging classified information to Rosen. Kim’s case marked an especially egregious misuse of the Espionage Act, as reported by Peter Maass in The Intercept here.

Also in the Sterling trial aftermath, Walter Pincus, the Washington Post’s veteran national security reporter, weighed in with the journalistic equivalent of an amicus brief in support of the bizarre CIA scheme — Operation Merlin. The CIA’s plan, as Risen’s “State of War” discloses, was to give flawed nuclear weapons component designs to the Iranians in the hope the supposedly clueless recipients would waste years going down this wrong path. Pincus asserts, as did CIA witnesses at trial, that Operation Merlin — far from being botched and possibly even helpful to the Iranians in their nuclear research, as Risen portrayed it — was really a marvelous success until its cover was blown with the publication of “State of War.” His argument that Risen got it wrong dovetails nicely with the CIA’s effort to rehabilitate what Risen described as “what may have been one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA.”

A May 2013 Politico article stressed Pincus’s closeness to the CIA and that agency’s point of view, quoting Post columnist Dana Milbank as saying: “Walter conveys the sense of what the intelligence community is thinking on any given subject.” Yes, he does.

Even before the Sterling case came to trial, Pincus had displayed animosity toward whistleblowers and some reporters’ dealings with them. He had even said it’s fine for the FBI to get secret warrants to rummage through reporters’ telephone records in investigating leaks, as was the case with six Associated Press reporters and editors. See here and here.

And in the month after Snowden’s June 2013 NSA disclosures, Pincus penned a speculative, innuendo-filled column, the gist of which was what he saw as the sinister possibility that Julian Assange, Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras had all colluded with Snowden to leak secret documents for them to publish. Greenwald challenged Pincus’s piece over much of a two-day period before the Post finally appended multiple corrections to the article that shot down the key “conspiracy” points Pincus had laid out.

Even at this late date, with a record number of at least eight individuals charged by the Obama administration under the 1917 Espionage Act (compared to three such prosecutions for all of Obama’s predecessors combined), many prominent journalists can’t see, or won’t admit, or don’t believe, that an attack on whistleblowers is also an attack on the press and on the First Amendment.

They appear either not to care or to have scant awareness of the chilling effect on the symbiotic relationship between investigative reporters and their sources every time whistleblowers are charged or convicted for crimes that could land them in prison for decades, if not a lifetime.

They also appear to accept at face value the stories spun by the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon or other members of the vast U.S. national security state apparatus. It matters not to them the number of times those agencies have been shown to be liars, whether it be over non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or the extent of the vast surveillance operations directed at American citizens and people worldwide.

Why do these stars of the news media so readily brush off concerns about our dangerous warfare/surveillance state revealed by Snowden, Manning and the others? Why do they cheer on the government’s crackdown on unauthorized leaks and tell us surveillance and the diminishment of our civil liberties is really for our own good in a scary world — rather than side with the Bill of Rights and the handful of other journalists and whistleblowers who expose secrets that people in a free society should have the right to know? Why do they sound as if they are angling for a position on the National Security Council or membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, rather than aspiring to be another I.F. Stone (who lived by the tenet, “all governments lie”) or Edward R. Murrow or Seymour Hersh?

James Risen, of course, “gets” why whistleblowers are vital to investigative reporting and a free press, as he explained to an unsympathetic David Gregory on Meet the Press shortly after Snowden’s disclosures in June 2013. (See cringeworthy video excerpts here of Gregory and correspondent Andrea Mitchell lecturing to one of the premiere investigative reporters of this generation why whistleblowers like Snowden are so dangerous.)

Risen fielded his colleagues’ pro-secrecy, anti-whistleblower comments deftly, pointing out to them the obvious: “The only reason we’ve been having these public debates” over surveillance and civil liberties “and that we’re now sitting here talking about this is because of a series of whistleblowers. That the government has never wanted any of this reported, never wanted any of it disclosed. If it was up to the government over the last ten years, this surveillance infrastructure would have grown enormously with no public debate whatsoever. And so every time we talk about how someone is a traitor for disclosing something, we have to remember the only reason we’re talking about it is because of it.”

Given the co-dependency of confidential sources and journalists, it would be worthwhile to remind mainstream reporters and editors that when it comes to investigative reporting you, too, are a species of whistleblower. And when a whistleblower goes to jail, a part of our press freedom goes to jail, too.

John Hanrahan is a former executive director of The Fund for Investigative Journalism and reporter for The Washington Post, The Washington Star, UPI and other news organizations. He also has extensive experience as a legal investigator. Hanrahan is the author of Government by Contract and co-author of Lost Frontier: The Marketing of Alaska. He has written extensively for NiemanWatchdog.org, a project of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

In the never-never land of how the mainstream U.S. press covers the Ukraine crisis, the appointment last year of thuggish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky to govern one of the country’s eastern provinces was pitched as a democratic “reform” because he was supposedly too rich to bribe, without noting that his wealth had come from plundering the country’s economy.

In other words, the new U.S.-backed “democratic” regime, after overthrowing democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych because he was “corrupt,” was rewarding one of Ukraine’s top thieves by letting him lord over his own province, Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, with the help of his personal army.

Last year, Kolomoisky’s brutal militias, which include neo-Nazi brigades, were praised for their fierce fighting against ethnic Russians from the east who were resisting the removal of their president. But now Kolomoisky, whose financial empire is crumbling as Ukraine’s economy founders, has turned his hired guns against the Ukrainian government led by another oligarch, President Petro Poroshenko.

Last Thursday night, Kolomoisky and his armed men went to Kiev after the government tried to wrest control of the state-owned energy company UkrTransNafta from one of his associates. Kolomoisky and his men raided the company offices to seize and apparently destroy records. As he left the building, he cursed out journalists who had arrived to ask what was going on. He ranted about “Russian saboteurs.”

It was a revealing display of how the corrupt Ukrainian political-economic system works and the nature of the “reformers” whom the U.S. State Department has pushed into positions of power. According to BusinessInsider, the Kiev government tried to smooth Kolomoisky’s ruffled feathers by announcing “that the new company chairman [at UkrTransNafta] would not be carrying out any investigations of its finances.”

Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoisky confronting journalists after he led an armed team in a raid at the government-owned energy company in Kiev on March 19, 2015. (Screen shot from YouTube)

Yet, it remained unclear whether Kolomoisky would be satisfied with what amounts to an offer to let any past thievery go unpunished. But if this promised amnesty wasn’t enough, Kolomoisky appeared ready to use his private army to discourage any accountability.

On Monday, Valentyn Nalyvaychenko, chief of the State Security Service, accused Dnipropetrovsk officials of financing armed gangs and threatening investigators, Bloomberg News reported, while noting that Ukraine has sunk to 142nd place out of 175 countries in Transparency International’s Corruptions Perception Index, the worst in Europe.

The see-no-evil approach to how the current Ukrainian authorities do business relates as well to Ukraine’s new Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko, who appears to have enriched herself at the expense of a $150 million U.S.-taxpayer-financed investment fund for Ukraine.

Jaresko, a former U.S. diplomat who received overnight Ukrainian citizenship in December to become Finance Minister, had been in charge of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund (WNISEF), which became the center of insider-dealing and conflicts of interest, although the U.S. Agency for International Development showed little desire to examine the ethical problems – even after Jaresko’s ex-husband tried to blow the whistle. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Finance Minister’s American ‘Values.’”]

Passing Out the Billions

Jaresko will be in charge of dispensing the $17.5 billion that the International Monetary Fund is allocating to Ukraine, along with billions of dollars more expected from U.S. and European governments.

Regarding Kolomoisky’s claim about “Russian saboteurs,” the government said that was not the case, explaining that the clash resulted from the parliament’s vote last week to reduce Kolomoisky’s authority to run the company from his position as a minority owner. As part of the shakeup, Kolomoisky’s protégé Oleksandr Lazorko was fired as chairman, but he refused to leave and barricaded himself in his office, setting the stage for Kolomoisky’s arrival with armed men.

On Tuesday, the New York Times reported on the dispute but also flashed back to its earlier propagandistic praise of the 52-year-old oligarch, recalling that “Mr. Kolomoisky was one of several oligarchs, considered too rich to bribe, who were appointed to leadership positions in a bid to stabilize Ukraine.”

Kolomoisky also is believed to have purchased influence inside the U.S. government through his behind-the-scenes manipulation of Ukraine’s largest private gas firm, Burisma Holdings. Last year, the shadowy Cyprus-based company appointed Vice President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, to its board of directors. Burisma also lined up well-connected lobbyists, some with ties to Secretary of State John Kerry, including Kerry’s former Senate chief of staff David Leiter, according to lobbying disclosures.

As Time magazine reported,

“Leiter’s involvement in the firm rounds out a power-packed team of politically-connected Americans that also includes a second new board member, Devon Archer, a Democratic bundler and former adviser to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign. Both Archer and Hunter Biden have worked as business partners with Kerry’s son-in-law, Christopher Heinz, the founding partner of Rosemont Capital, a private-equity company.”

According to investigative journalism in Ukraine, the ownership of Burisma has been traced to Privat Bank, which is controlled by Kolomoisky.

So, it appears that Ukraine’s oligarchs who continue to wield enormous power inside the corrupt country are now circling each other over what’s left of the economic spoils and positioning themselves for a share of the international bailouts to come.

As for “democratic reform,” only in the upside-down world of the State Department’s Orwellian “information war” against Russia over Ukraine would imposing a corrupt and brutal oligarch like Kolomoisky as the unelected governor of a defenseless population be considered a positive.

(Early Wednesday morning, President Poroshenko dismissed Kolomoisky from his post as Dnipropetrovsk regional governor.)

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.

Tech giant Apple is not coy about it. They want you to get used to real-time tracking. That’s why they are changing Find My Friends to Track My Friends.

A patent granted to the company on Tuesday by the government describes a process that allows a user of a mobile device to view a visual representation of the movement of a person with another device.

“For example, someone is going for a hike or a trip and wants you to stay informed of his or her whereabouts,” CNet explains. “That person would enable a feature on a mobile device to allow you to see and track in real time the path being taken on your own mobile device or computer. On the flip side, you could also share your route so the two of you can stay abreast of each other’s ongoing location.”

Also on the flipside, this information could be “shared” with the NSA and possibly local police. The mega-surveillance agency already has a number of tracking programs in place — such as “Boundless Informant,” a tool that tracks information across the internet — and police departments are using Stingray and Hailstorm technology to track cell phone calls.

The NSA’s PRISM and associated programs “can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among individuals using them,” former NSA employeeEdward Snowden revealed in 2013. The NSA collects, identifies, sorts and stores at least 11 different types of electronic communications and works tirelessly to tweak and improve its surveillance technology.

Apple’s technology will ultimately enhance this ability. For now, however, it is being sold as nifty way to stay in contact with your friends.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Apple U.S. Patent No. 8,989,773.

“Concerns over privacy and security always arise in any technology such as the one described here. But as Apple points out, the feature would need to be enabled by the person being tracked, so you wouldn’t be able to track people without their permission,” CNet writes.

This concern is irrelevant to the NSA and the government. They already illegally surveils GPS, cellular networks and have the ability to snoop and compromise WiFi networks (the agency can hack WiFi device from eight miles away with Nightstand hardware).

Apple, of course, is primarily interested in gaining market share by offering new and inventive technology attractive to consumers. The obvious dual use capability of Track My Friends and the ease and prevalence of NSA surveillance should however be kept in mind.

Tech pundits may champion Apple’s decision to use a new and powerful encryption method with the release of the iPhone 6, but as usual the NSA is not far behind.

As part of a $79.7 million classified program, the agency is working on a “a cryptologically useful quantum computer” capable of breaking any kind of encryption used to protect banking, medical, business, government records and, more than likely, encryption used on personal electronic devices.

War with Iran Would Be Disastrous

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu and a number of U.S. Congress members warn that peace with Iran would be catastrophic.

Are they right?

We think the mullahs in Iran are bad (we also think fundamentalist Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews are bad). In fact, most Iranians are moderates who don’t like how fundamentalist the mullahs are.

But Iran isn’t the danger the hawks would have you believe …

Let’s look at the facts:

• The U.S. has been claiming for more than 30 years that Iran was on the verge of nuclear capability

• Contrary to widespread claims, there is NO EVIDENCE that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.  Even Israel Israel admits that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear bomb.

• The U.S. FRAMED Iran by giving it fake nuclear drawings

• The former Israeli nuke chief says  that Iran is 10 years away from having a nuclear bomb

• The U.S. helped fund Iran’s nuclear program

• Top American defense officials say that – despite its heated rhetoric (often mistranslated in the U.S.) – Iran is a “rational actor”

• Experts say that Iran poses very little threat to the West or Israel . Top American and Israeli military and intelligence officials say that – even if Iran did build a nuclear bomb – it would not be that dangerous, because Israel and America have so many more nukes. And see this

• Conversely, American military and intelligence chiefs say that attacking Iran would only speed up its development of nuclear weapons, empower its hardliners, and undermine the chance for democratic reform

• Iran has not started a war for at least 188 years (in the Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was the initial aggressor)

• The U.S. armed and supported Iraq after it invaded Iran and engaged in a long, bloody war which included the use of chemical weapons. Here is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein in the 1980’s, several months after Saddam had used chemical weapons in a massacre:

• The CIA admits that the U.S. overthrew the moderate, suit-and-tie-wearing, Democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953. He was overthrown because he had nationalized Iran’s oil, which had previously been controlled by BP and other Western oil companies. As part of that action, the CIA admits that it hired Iranians to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its prime minister

• Hawks in the U.S. government been pushing for another round of regime change in Iran for decades

• The people pushing for war against Iran are the same people who pushed for war against Iraq, and said it would be a “cakewalk”. See this and this

• The U.S. currently funds terrorist groups within Iran

• If the U.S. hadn’t overthrown the moderate Iranian government, the fundamentalist Mullahs would have never taken over. (Moreover, the U.S. has had a large hand in strengthening radical Islam in the Middle East by supporting radicals to fight the Soviets and others)

• On the other hand, the most violent Muslims are Sunnis. America backs the Sunnis in their fight against the Shias. Iran is a Shia country, and 89% of Iranian people are Shia

• And – in a real exhibition of idiocy – mainstream U.S. writers are calling for America to SUPPORT Al Qaeda and ISIS

• Top economists say that war is destroying our economy.  But war is great for the bankers and the defense contractors, and some of the powers-that-be are worried that peace with Iran would be bad for business

• America’s decades-long wars are hurting our national security. A top Pentagon official say we’re no safer – and perhaps less safe – after 13 years of war. Indeed, war only PROMOTED the dramatic expansion of even worse terrorists.

• Never-ending wars are also destroying our freedom. The Founding Fathers warned against standing armies, saying that they destroy freedom. (update). Perversely, our government  treats anti-war sentiment as terrorism.  But peace and international trade is the only way to save our country

Just days after the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer released a report publicly declaring the well-known link between Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide and cancer, the GMO leviathan is already calling on the entire agency to issue a ‘retraction.’

Recently, Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide – the most widely used and best-selling herbicide in the U.S. and one of the world’s most popular weed-killers – has been labeled a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Now Monsanto is fighting that assessment.

As reported by The Lancet:

“In March, 2015, 17 experts from 11 countries met at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC; Lyon, France) to assess the carcinogenicity of the organophosphate pesticides tetrachlorvinphos, parathion, malathion, diazinon, and glyphosate (table). These assessments will be published as volume 112 of the IARC Monographs.”

Instead of deciding to make the product safer, or even delving into the realm of the conclusion from the scientists that Roundup is ‘probably carcinogenic (cancer-causing) to humans,’ Monsanto instead stated that they ‘question’ the assessment.

“We question the quality of the assessment,”the vice president of global regulatory affairs for Monsanto, Philip Miller, stated in an interview.  “The WHO has something to explain.”

I think Monsanto has something to explain. And so do many scientific experts around the globe.

“There are a number of independent, published manuscripts that clearly indicate that glyphosate … can promote cancer and tumor growth,” said Dave Schubert, from the cellular neurobiology laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. “It should be banned.”

Numerous past studies have proposed what most of us have already surmised, that glyphosate – the main ingredient in Monsanto’s RoundUp – is utterly killing us. What’s more – it is causing damage in much smaller servings than the agriculture industry is dishing out in its common GMO and pesticide spraying practices.

With the already existing plethora of research pointing towards Roundup’s dangers, as well as this most recent assessment from the WHO, I think we have reason enough to find a better way to stop weeds.

Additional Sources:

Photo credit: Noah Berger, Bloomberg

SFGate.com

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In a lengthy article published Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reports that Israeli intelligence services spied on the Iran nuclear talks and leaked details to congressional Republicans and Democrats in an effort to block a prospective deal.

Unnamed top White House officials served as the principal source for the article, providing descriptions of the reaction within the highest levels of the Obama administration and the US intelligence apparatus to the Israeli operation. In effect, the Journal article is a further blow struck in the mounting conflict between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government in Israel.

According to the newspaper’s account, US officials consider Israeli spying on all the parties in the Iran nuclear talks—Iran itself, the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia—to be a matter of routine. US intelligence services were engaged in their own spying on Israel and intercepted messages among Israeli officials that showed inside knowledge of the talks that went beyond what the US had shared in briefings of the Israeli government.

What fueled the conflict was the Netanyahu government’s decision to share secret details of the talks with American congressmen, in an effort to foment political opposition to the impending nuclear deal with Iran. According to the Journal:

“The espionage didn’t upset the White House as much as Israel’s sharing of inside information with US lawmakers and others to drain support from a high-stakes deal intended to limit Iran’s nuclear program, current and former officials said.”

Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer, a former Republican congressional aide before becoming an Israeli citizen, began briefing both Democratic and Republican congressmen in late January, supplying secret details such as the number of centrifuges that Iran would be permitted to operate, and what types of advanced equipment it could deploy. He allegedly exaggerated the sanctions relief Iran would receive by as much as a factor of ten, the Journal report said.

A “senior US official briefed on the matter” told the Journal, “It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy.”

The report is a demonstration of the mounting tensions between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government in Israel, and of the sharp divisions within the US ruling elite, in both cases driven by the prospect of a change in US policy towards Iran.

The Obama administration began a secret initiative towards Iran in 2012, with talks held in Oman between State Department officials and senior Iranian officials. The talks intensified after the 2013 election of Hassan Rouhani as president.

Rouhani, a former negotiator in a previous round of arms talks with the imperialist powers, was authorized by Ayatollah Khameini to seek an agreement that would lift the crushing financial and economic sanctions imposed on Iran. These talks have been extended several times and will resume later this week in Switzerland, with a deadline of March 31 for reaching at least a framework agreement.

Netanyahu’s trip to Washington and his March 3 address to a joint session of Congress were an attempt to whip up opposition among both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to a nuclear agreement with Iran. House Speaker John Boehner invited Netanyahu to give the address without notifying the White House, and Obama and other top officials refused to meet with the Israeli leader during his visit.

Israeli officials denounced the Journal report but effectively confirmed it. Defense minister Moshe Yaalon declared that the state of Israel did not spy on the United States or its NATO allies, and had not done so since the arrest of Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli spy in the Pentagon, nearly 30 years ago.

However, foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said the information could be obtained by spying on Iran or other participants in the nuclear talks. “All the information we gathered was from another entity, not the US,” he maintained.

The White House made little secret of its hope that Netanyahu would be defeated in the March 17 election, and Obama and other top officials denounced Netanyahu’s pre-election statements that he opposed any two-state agreement with the Palestinians, as well as his warning against high turnout among Israeli Arab voters.

In remarks to the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, White House chief of staff Denis McDonough deplored Netanyahu’s remarks and said that they could not simply be unsaid, as the Israeli leader attempted to do in the days following his reelection.

Divisions within the US ruling elite over the new Iran policy, which is aimed at reshaping the Middle East and freeing US military forces for operations against Russia, China and other potential antagonists, have reached the point of undermining the constitutional separation of powers between the executive and legislative branch.

In their attempt to derail any treaty with Iran, congressional Republicans have sought to act as a parallel government with their own foreign policy, inviting Netanyahu to address the joint session of Congress, while 47 Republican senators sent an open letter to Ayatollah Khamenei, in an effort to blow up the talks with Obama.

US President Barack Obama announced Tuesday his reversal of a plan to withdraw some 5,000 more troops from Afghanistan. Instead, the present contingent of approximately 10,000 US military personnel will remain in the country until the end of this year.

Obama made the announcement at a joint White House press conference with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. Despite optimistic rhetoric from both Obama and Ghani about the so-called “security transition” and Afghan forces taking “full responsibility” for security throughout the country, underlying the abrupt change in the withdrawal timetable is a steadily deteriorating situation on the ground.

The Taliban and other armed groups opposed to the US puppet regime in Kabul are inflicting heavy losses on the Afghan police and army and regaining control of territories that have been abandoned by the US and other foreign occupation forces, particularly in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand.

Tuesday’s press conference came in the middle of a state visit by Ghani, who was installed as president last year following a disputed and fraud-plagued election to succeed the longstanding US front-man Hamid Karzai. Ghani was accompanied by his former presidential rival, Abdullah Abdullah, who was named to the newly created post of “chief executive officer” under a power-sharing agreement imposed by Washington last September in a bid to forestall clashes between the two camps.

On Monday, the visiting Afghan officials huddled at Camp David with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and other US security officials to discuss the growing military, economic and political crisis of the US client state. On Wednesday, Ghani is scheduled to speak before a joint session of the US Congress.

Following the Camp David sessions, Kerry announced that the US was creating an $800 million aid fund to “create Afghan self-reliance.” This is over and above the $4 billion to $5 billion—roughly triple the Afghan regime’s annual revenues—needed to fund the Afghan security forces.

Obama indicated at the press conference that Washington would continue picking up the tab for these forces until 2017. The US has already spent $65 billion to organize, arm and train the Afghan army and police forces.

The total cost of the nearly 14-year war, the longest in US history, is estimated in the trillions. The war has cost the lives of more than 2,215 Americans and left more than 20,000 wounded. There has been no accurate recording of the number of Afghans killed and wounded, but the number is certainly in the tens if not hundreds of thousands.

While the Obama administration formally declared the “end of US combat operations” in Afghanistan last December, US special operations troops are continuing night raids and other counter-insurgency actions, while US firepower is still being employed to support the Afghan forces.

This is the third revision of the troop drawdown plan first announced by Obama last May. In December, with a larger than anticipated decline in the number of other NATO troops in Afghanistan, the White House announced a postponement of the drawdown of the US force to 9,800. Prior to that change, Obama altered the rules of engagement for US special operations troops, making it clear that they would be used not just to pursue remnants of Al Qaeda, but to attack any forces challenging the regime in Kabul.

While Obama insisted there would be no change in his ultimate goal of pulling out by 2017, when he leaves office, all but 1,000 troops comprising an embassy protection force and military assistance group, the realization of that promise is clearly open to question.

The decision to maintain the present troop levels in Afghanistan through the end of this year has reportedly been under discussion for weeks. It is a response not so much to Ghani’s request, as to the recommendation of the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Campbell.

The most tangible effect of the troop withdrawal suspension will be the retention of American forces at two key bases in the east and south of the country, where the armed insurgency has dealt some of the heaviest blows against Afghan security forces. Attack helicopters and fighter jets operate out of the bases in Kandahar and Jalalabad, providing air cover without which the Afghan National Army faces being routed.

US military commanders have described the level of casualties and desertions experienced by the Afghan security forces as “unsustainable.” While the paper strength of the Afghan forces is 352,000, US officials admit that the real number at present is probably less than 330,000 because of such losses. Civilian casualties, meanwhile, soared by 22 percent last year.

At Tuesday’s press conference, Obama and Ghani engaged in banter about having both obtained degrees from Columbia University and about Ghani pursuing the same field as Obama’s mother, anthropology. US officials have described the new president as more “cooperative” than his predecessor, Karzai, who occasionally denounced US night raids and air strikes that killed Afghan civilians and refused to sign a bilateral security agreement allowing US troops to remain in the country.

Ghani, who spent a quarter of a century out of Afghanistan—including as an official at the World Bank—before being brought back with the US occupation force in 2001, signed the agreement on his first day in office.

US officials have touted Ghani as a technocrat and head of a new government dedicated to carrying out reform and combating corruption. Reality, however, does not rise to the level of this rhetoric.

Nearly six months after taking office, Ghani and Abdullah Abullah have managed to fill only one third of the seats on the Afghan cabinet, and many other senior posts also remain vacant. The paralysis of the regime is the outcome of bitter disputes over positions between the opposing camps that backed the two candidates, including rival Afghan warlords.

Earlier this month, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction reported that as much as half of all recent revenues from the Afghan customs service has been stolen. The customs service accounts for over one third of all Afghan government income.

Sources close to the US military and security apparatus have in recent weeks directly contradicted Obama’s glowing predictions of a successful “security transition.”

Last month, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, delivered the faintest praise for the Afghan security forces, allowing that they “will probably maintain control of most major population centers” for the rest of this year, while warning that without sustained US funding they “will probably not remain a cohesive or viable force.”

Similarly, retired Army Lt. Gen. David Barno, a former senior commander in Afghanistan, warned in an interview with Bloomberg News, “Within six months of [the US withdrawal], it could be game over for the Afghans, especially if the American money doesn’t stay there, too.”

Anthony Cordesman, a former Pentagon official and adviser to the US military, issued a report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies on March 20 warning that the US transition in Afghanistan “may well repeat key previous US failures in Vietnam and Iraq.”

As AFRICOM, the U.S. military command, wraps its tentacles around the continent and jihadist organizations spread mayhem and massacre, Africa sometimes seems to have lost its internal political compass. “In the absence of sustained revolutionary organizing, desperate, confused, oppressed individuals have unfortunately responded to terrorists’ calls to arms.”

The African Union characterized a recent armed attack that killed more than twenty foreign tourists and others at a Tunisian museum as “heinous and cowardly.” A connection between the five gunmen who staged the raid and terrorist groups has not been confirmed, but a link is suspected.

The continuing escalation of terrorist activity is in no way beneficial to Africans, but it is marginally helpful to western countries because it provides a convenient excuse for their military forces to not only maintain, but increase their presence on the continent. While western countries may have some concern about the innocent people harmed by terrorist activities, it is reasonable to believe the real purpose of the build-up of U.S. and European military troops and installations in Africa is to maintain or gain access to oil fields, mines and other natural resources through intimidation, and if necessary, the use of force against anyone who gets in the way.

For those who regard the elimination of foreign military operations from Africa as essential to the continent’s ongoing struggle for genuine independence and liberation, the role and capacity of the African Union in the fight against terrorism is a matter of great concern. This is because it is all too easy for western militaries to say: “If not us, who?” in response to questions about how Africa will deal with its terrorism problem. Many Africans want very much to respond that Africans can and will address this challenge on their own and that the African Union is the most logical organization to take on the task. However, while the continent-wide body has already deployed 7,500 troops to Nigeria to combat Boko Haram, it has expressed frustration about the ineffectiveness of the effort to date. Hopefully, a lesson can be learned from that experience.

Although western countries have relied heavily on the use of military force in their purported war against terrorism, some experts have suggested that the root causes of the proliferation of terrorist activity will not be addressed solely by military means. They point to social, political and economic conditions as factors that account for the success of terrorist organizations in recruiting new members.

Even Emile Nakhleh, a former CIA analyst, explained: “According to public opinion polls in the past decade, Muslims who trend toward radical ideas have identified domestic and foreign factors as drivers of their radicalism. The domestic issues included unemployment, poverty, poor economic conditions, hopelessness, regime repression and corruption, injustice, inequality, and massive violations of human rights against women and minorities.”

Nakhleh goes on to say: “Foreign factors include perceived anti-Islamic policies by the U.S. and other Western powers, continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the suppression of Palestinian human rights and freedoms, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, drone strikes that result in civilian deaths, as well as western lukewarm support of democratic uprisings and coddling of dictatorial regimes.”

With these findings in mind, the African Union will be best served by rejecting any suggestions that terrorist forces will be defeated by solely military means. A more informed, multi-faceted strategy is required. In developing its 2006 “Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy” the United Nations apparently considered some of the underlying causes of terrorist activity. In addition to diplomatic, military and law enforcement approaches, the U.N. plan included measures to address conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism. These measures included: conflict resolution, negotiation and mediation; promotion of dialogue, promotion of tolerance and understanding among cultures and religions; and the eradication of poverty and promotion of sustained economic growth. These are objectives the African Union can strive to accomplish in order to make distressed regions less susceptible to terrorist recruitment, but the economic initiatives in particular would force the African Union to assume a revolutionary posture in order to reclaim the continent’s natural wealth from imperialist forces.

The unemployment, poverty and government corruption in Africa that sustain the growth of terrorism are conditions that can also sustain the growth of legitimate, productive revolution. Because Africa has long yearned for opportunities to rid itself of the oppression and exploitation caused by western imperialism and its home-grown neo-colonial lackeys, it just may be that the success of terrorist recruitment is evidence that there has been a political void that terrorists have filled. In the absence of sustained revolutionary organizing, desperate, confused, oppressed individuals have unfortunately responded to terrorists’ calls to arms. If the African Union is not prepared to step into that void and become the vehicle for efforts to purge the African continent of foreign corporations and other imperialist forces that exploit and oppress, it will fall to other organizations to provide Africans with the legitimate revolutionary alternatives to terrorism that they crave.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney who writes frequently about the U.S. military presence in Africa. He can be contacted at [email protected].

The vigil guards comprise four uniformed officers each standing at a corner of the casket with his head bowed, back turned away and ceremonial sword inverted – led by a senior officer who stands at the head of the casket facing inwards.

SINGAPORE: The Republic’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has been accorded the nation’s highest form of respect: The traditional mounting of the vigil guards during the lying in state period at the Parliament House.

Mr Lee’s coffin was on Wednesday (Mar 25) transported to the Parliament House, and it will lie in state until the State Funeral on Sunday. The vigil guards are in place, and comprise four uniformed officers each standing at a corner of the casket with his head bowed, back turned away and ceremonial sword inverted. They are led by a senior officer who stands at the head of the casket facing inwards.

Alamagordo atomic test, July 15, 1945 (photo: Jack Abbey)

The New York Times‘ longtime nuclear power reporter, Matthew Wald, has announced that he’s been hired as the senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the chief lobbying arm of the nuclear industry. Investigative reporter Karl Grossman wrote a piece a few years ago on the ties between the Times and the nuclear power establishment that go back to the dawn of the Atomic Age.

The model of a journalist being co-opted by the nuclear establishment involves New York Times reporter William L. Laurence. News Zero: The New York Times and The Bomb, by Beverly Deepe Keever, writes of how Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, personally made arrangements with Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger and senior editor Edwin James to have Laurence work for the World War II program to build atomic
bombs.

The Times man would be paid by the government while, under the arrangement, his wife would collect “his regularly weekly salary” from the Times.

“To sell the bomb, the US government needed the Times…and the Times willingly obliged,” writes Keever, professor of journalism at the University of Hawaii.

William L. Lawrence (photo: Arnold Newman/NYT)

Laurence was central to the first major piece of official government media disinformation about nuclear technology. When it came time for a test of a nuclear device, in July 1945, Laurence wrote a press release to “disguise the detonation and resulting radiation,” notes Keever.

The deceptive release stated:

A remotely located ammunition magazine containing a considerable amount of high explosives and pyrotechnics exploded…. Weather conditions affecting the content of gas shells exploded by the blast made it desirable for the Army to evacuate temporarily a few civilians from their homes.

The purported source of the information was given in the release as “the commanding officer of the Alamagordo Army Air Base.”

The atomic device was detonated on July 16, 1945, at the Alamagordo Test Range in New Mexico. It lit up the night sky. The flash “was seen in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Silver City and El Paso,” relates James Kunetka in his book City of Fire.

Meanwhile, the Manhattan Project had “stationed” an intelligence officer, Phil Belcher, at the Associated Press office in Albuquerque, states City of Fire. After AP began receiving calls about “a strange explosion in southern New Mexico,” Belcher presented the Laurence press release to AP, and AP ran it—basically as is. “New Mexico newspapers ran the story” and “it appeared in a number of radio shows,” says City of Fire. “No further word was issued by the Alamagordo Base.”

William Laurence before the bombing of Hiroshima (Wikimedia)

Timesman Laurence didn’t stop with this deception. At the Manhattan Project, he prepared a 10-part series glorifying it, and after the bombs fell on Japan, the Times itself ran the series “on behalf of the government” and distributed it free “to the press nationwide,” notes News Zero. The series hardly mentioned the word radioactivity at all.The Times was chosen by Groves not because of its circulation. “The Times was hardly the nation’s biggest newspaper then terms of circulation,” notes Keever. But “the prestige of the Times was highly significant for the government that was seeking to channel first-time-ever public attitudes about the atomic bombs it was developing.” Of Laurence, she writes, “this major player served as a scribe writing government propaganda.”

Laurence boosted all things nuclear in the years ahead. He would describe nuclear power as “making the dream of the Earth as a Promised Land come true.” This avid belief in nuclear power became the institutional stance of the publication.

The Times, writes Keever, “became little more than a propaganda outlet for the US government.” It

tolerated or aided the US government’s Cold War cover-up that resulted in minimizing or denying the health and environmental effects arising from the use in Japan and later testing of the most destructive weaponry in US history in Pacific Islands once called paradise…. The Times aided the US government in keeping in the dark thousands of US servicemen, production workers and miners, even civil defense officials, Pacific Islanders and others worldwide about the dangers of radiation.

Keever, herself a veteran journalist, says that “from the dawn of the atomic-bomb age, Laurence and the Times almost single-handedly shaped the news of this epoch and helped birth the acceptance of the most destructive force ever created.”

This pro-nuclear stance of the New York Times has continued, with the US paper of record leading US media in recent years in pushing for a “revival” of nuclear power.

And after the nuclear power disaster in Japan, the Times was still at it. It acknowledged in an editorial (3/14/11) that it has “endorsed nuclear power” and went on: “We suspect that, when all the evidence is in from Japan, it will remain a valuable tool.” That said by a long-time tool of the nuclear establishment—theNew York Times.

Karl Grossman is an investigative reporter, a journalism professor at SUNY/Old Westbury and a FAIR associate. A version of this piece appeared on his blog (3/26/11).

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. –George Orwell

The late United States Marine Corps Major GeneralSmedley D. Butler is perhaps most famous for his post-retirement speech titled “War is a Racket.” In the early 1930s, Butler presented the speech on a nationwide tour. It was so popular that he wrote a longer version as a small book that was published in 1935.

Butler points to a variety of examples, mostly from World War I, where industrialists whose operations were subsidized by public funding were able to generate substantial profits essentially from mass human suffering.

The work is divided into five chapters:

1. War is a racket
2. Who makes the profits?
3. Who pays the bills?
4. How to smash this racket!
5. To hell with war!

It contains this summary:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people.

Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

What Butler was candidly describing was later referred to as the “military-industrial complex”by Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned Americans of its existence in his farewell address in 1961:

Butler went on to say…

In the World War [I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious. They just take it. This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few — the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war. The general public shoulders the bill.

And what is this bill?

This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations.

For a great many years, as a soldier, I had a suspicion that war was a racket; not until I retired to civil life did I fully realize it. Now that I see the international war clouds gathering, as they are today, I must face it and speak out.

Butler also exposed the Business Plot, an alleged plan to overthrow the U.S. government. In 1933, Butler told a congressional committee that a group of wealthy industrialist businessmen (including individuals from General Motors, Prescott Bush, grandfather of George Bush Jr., J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefeller dynasty) were planning a military coup to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Butler selected to lead a march of veterans to become dictator, similar to other Fascist regimes at that time. The individuals involved all denied the existence of a plot, and the media ridiculed the allegations, calling them a “gigantic hoax.”

A final report by a special House of Representatives Committee confirmed some of Butler’s testimony.

****

Despite warnings of its existence and imminent expansion, the military-industrial complex (or military-industrial-congressional complex) remains in operation today. It is an iron trianglethat comprises the policy and monetary relationships which exist between legislators, national armed forces, and the arms industry that supports them. These relationships include political contributions, political approval for military spending, lobbying to support bureaucracies, and oversight of the industry.

It is a major reason we are stuck in a perpetual war.

****

In their article titled Companies Profiting the Most From War, Thomas C. Frohlich and Mark Lieberman listed the 10 companies profiting the most from war. To identify them, they examined the companies with the most arms sales based on information from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Arms sales, including advisory, planes, vehicles, and weapons, were defined by sales to military customers as well as contracts to government militaries. Also considered were each company’s 2013 total sales and profits, the total number of employees at the company, as well as nation-level military spending, all provided by SIPRI.

From the article:

U.S. companies still dominate the arms market by a large margin, with six among the top 10 arms sellers. In the top 100 arms-producing companies, 39 are based in the United States, and U.S. companies accounted for more than 58% of total arms sales among the top 100. U.S. company arms sales in the top 10 alone made up 35% of total arms sales among the top 100. By contrast, Western European companies, which make up the rest of the top 10 arms producers, accounted for just 28% of the total top 100 arms sales.

Here are the top 10 war-profiteering companies and their political ties.

10. Thales Group (Paris)
Arm sales 2013: $10.4 billion, profit: $800 million

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $0
LOBBYING: $520,000 (2014), $460,000 (2013) (ranks 614 of 4,065 in 2014)

REVOLVING DOOR: 9 out of 10 Thales Group lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

For a list of bills Thales Group has lobbied, click here.

Chairman Henri Proglio’s salary is rumored to be $436,128 USD.

CEO Patrice Caine’s salary has not been published.

9. Finmeccanica S.p.A. (Italy)
Arm sales 2013: $10.6 billion, profit $100 million

Not only is this company a top war profiteer, it is a huge U.S. political campaign contributor.

From OpenSecrets.org:

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $446,850 (ranks 696 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $1,754,000 (2014), $1,965,500 (2013) (ranks 303 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $342,550 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $18,100
Contributions to parties: $86,200
Contributions to 527 committees: $0
Contributions to outside spending groups: $0

For a list of bills Finmeccanica S.p.A. has lobbied, click here.

Here’s some additional information on this company:

The total of contributions to candidates from Finmeccanica SpA PACs is 24 times larger than contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 21 out of 34 Finmeccanica SpA lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

CEO Mauro Moretti’s “wage packet” is said to be $1.2 million USD.

8. United Technologies (U.S.)
Arm sales 2013: $11.9 billion, profit $5.7 billion

United Technologies might be the lowest ranking of the U.S. companies in this list, but don’t let that fool you.OpenSecrets bestowed the company with the label “heavy hitter”, which means it is “one of the 140 biggest overall donors to federal elections since the 1990 election cycle, as compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $2,105,245 (ranks 124 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $15,738,000 (2014), $13,900,373 (2013) (ranks 13 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $1,769,400 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $199,250
Contributions to parties: $124,470
Contributions to 527 committees: $10,625
Contributions to outside spending groups: $1,500

For a list of bills United Technologies has lobbied, click here.

Here’s some additional information on this company:

The total of contributions to candidates from United Technologies PACs is 19 times larger than contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 52 out of 70 United Technologies lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

24 Congressional members own United Technologies shares (for the list, click here).

CEO Gregory J. Hayes has a reported annual salary of $949,583 and an annual bonus of $1,600,00, for a total annual compensation of $2,549,583.

7. Airbus Group (France/Netherlands)
Arm sales 2013: $15.7 billion, profit $2 billion

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS:  $365,752 (ranks 855 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $3,288,178 (2014), $3,749,750 (2013) (ranks 156 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $259,322 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $83,500
Contributions to parties: $22,930
Contributions to 527 committees: $0
Contributions to outside spending groups: $0

For a list of bills this company has lobbied, click here.

Additional information about Airbus Group:

The total of contributions to candidates from Airbus Group PACs is 4 times largerthan contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 42 out of 57 Airbus Group lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

6. General Dynamics (U.S.)
Arm sales 2013: $18.7 billion, profit $2.4 billion

OpenSecrets labeled this company a “heavy hitter”, which means it is “one of the 140 biggest overall donors to federal elections since the 1990 election cycle, as compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.”

General Dynamics is one of the nation’s top defense contractors, assembling virtually every type of military machinery engaged in modern combat. The company builds warships, nuclear submarines, tanks and combat jets, not to mention the command and control systems that link all of these technologies together. The company has lobbied hard to encourage lawmakers to step up appropriations for the Navy, one of the company’s biggest clients.

It has fought attempts to shrink the nation’s fleet of submarines and warships, thereby helping block Defense Department attempts to shift that money to other facets of the nation’s land and air defenses.

Details:

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $1,974,599 (ranks 140 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $10,720,923 (2014), $11,066,974 (2013) (ranks 27 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $1,405,525 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $401,300
Contributions to parties: $162,974
Contributions to 527 committees: $4,350
Contributions to outside spending groups: $5,450

For a list of bills this company has lobbied, click here.

More information about General Dynamics:

The total of contributions to candidates from General Dynamics PACs is 6 times larger than contributions from individuals.

6 Congressional members own shares in this company (click here for the list).

REVOLVING DOOR: 96 out of 133 General Dynamics lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

CEO Phebe Novakovic earned nearly $19 million in total compensation in fiscal 2014.

5. Northrop Grumman (U.S.)
Arm sales 2013: $20.2 billion, profit $2 billion

We’ve got another heavy hitter here:

Northrop Grumman is the fourth largest defense contractor and the world’s largest builder of naval vessels as of 2010. As a member of the miscellaneous defense industry, Northrop Grumman specializes in aerospace systems, electronic systems, information systems, ship building and technical services.

Northrop Grumman focuses much of its efforts securing government defense contracts and earmarks. During the 2008 election cycle, people and political action committees associated with Northrop Grumman contributed more than $2 million to federal candidates and committees, favoring Democrats slightly.

Details:

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS $4,050,624 (ranks 45 of 16,793)
LOBBYING $10,216,960 (2014), $20,590,000 (2013) (ranks 28 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $2,613,112 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $1,194,560
Contributions to parties: $231,602
Contributions to 527 committees: $6,000
Contributions to outside spending groups: $5,350

For a list of bills this company has lobbied, click here.

More information about Northrop Grumman:

The total of contributions to candidates from Northrop Grumman PACs is 9 times larger than contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 32 out of 49 Northrop Grumman lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

6 Congressional members own shares in this company (for the list, click here).

CEO Wesley G. Bush’s total pay package, including the change in the value of his pension, was $18.6 million in 2013, reports The Washington Post. His salary and stock awards remained steady at about $1.5 million and $8 million, respectively.

4. Raytheon (U.S.)
Arm sales 2013: $29.9 billion, profit $2 billion

OpenSecrets has identified Raytheon as a heavy hitter:

Raytheon is a major American defense contractor that specializes in defense and homeland security technology. As the world’s largest producer of guided missiles, Raytheon specializes in manufacturing defense systems and defense electronics.

A member of the defense electronic industry, Raytheon is most active lobbying on defense, homeland security and federal budget appropriation issues. Until 2008, individuals and political action committees associated with Raytheon had favored Republicans in campaign contribution giving, but after Democrats won both chambers of Congress and the White House, the defense firm favors Democrats, giving 55 percent of campaign contributions to Democrats and 45 percent to Republicans in 2008

Considering that access is needed when securing large government defense contract, it’s of little surprise that Raytheon spends millions of dollars each year lobbying the federal government. Raytheon is the primary manufacturer of Tomahawk cruise missiles, dozens of which have been used by U.S. and British military forces in strikes against targets in Libya during 2011.

Details:

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle:
CONTRIBUTIONS: $3,588,668 (ranks 58 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $6,250,000 (2014), $7,650,000 (2013) (ranks 65 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $2,131,300 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $1,212,783
Contributions to parties: $236,498
Contributions to 527 committees: $6,037
Contributions to outside spending groups: $2,050

For a list of bills Raytheon has lobbied, click here.

More information about this company:

The total of contributions to candidates from Raytheon PACs is 11 times larger than contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 51 out of 67 Raytheon lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

8 Congressional members own shares in this company (click here for a list).

CEO Thomas A. Kennedy made $5,324,743 in total compensation for fiscal 2013.

3. BAE Systems (U.S./United Kingdom)
Arm sales 2013: $26.8 billion, profit $275 million

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $1,360,369 (ranks 210 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $3,920,000 (2014), $4,635,000 (2013) (ranks 124 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $931,389 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $301,750
Contributions to parties: $120,980
Contributions to 527 committees: $5,500
Contributions to outside spending groups: $3,250

For a list of bills BAE Systems has lobbied, click here.

More details:

The total of contributions to candidates from BAE Systems PACs is 9 times largerthan contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 27 out of 36 BAE Systems lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

CEO Ian King’s total annual compensation is $3,826,308.

2. Boeing (U.S.)
Arm sales 2013: $30.7 billion, profit $4.6 billion

Boeing has been labeled a heavy hitter by OpenSecrets:

Boeing is the world’s top manufacturer of commercial airplanes, including well-known aircraft such as the 787 and the 747. The company is also a leading military supplier, making fighter-bombers, transport planes and the Apache helicopter.

Along with rival Lockheed Martin, the company regularly lobbies Congress to win military contracts and increase defense spending. Boeing is a major supporter of free trade, especially in Asia, where it has focused on selling more planes. The company also lobbies on environmental rules and transportation regulations, among other issues.

Boeing is also a large recipient of government loan-guarantees, primarily coming from the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

Details:

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $3,227,934 (ranks 67 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $16,800,000 (2014), $15,230,000 (2013) (ranks 10 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $2,536,149 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $398,276
Contributions to parties: $252,685
Contributions to 527 committees: $33,749
Contributions to outside spending groups: $79,325

For a list of bills Boeing has lobbied, click here.

More information on this company:

The total of contributions to candidates from Boeing PACs is 6 times larger than contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 83 out of 115 Boeing Co lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

17 Congressional members own Boeing shares (click here for the list).

CEO W. James McNerney Jr. made $23,263,562 in total compensation in 2013. Of this total $1,930,000 was received as a salary, $12,920,972 was received as a bonus, $3,763,503 was received in stock options, $3,763,534 was awarded as stock, and $885,553 came from other types of compensation. He earned $23.5 million total in 2014.

1. Lockheed Martin (U.S.)
Arm sales 2013: $35.5 billion, profit $3 billion

As the top war profiteer on this list, it should be no surprise that Lockheed Martin is ranked as a heavy hitter by OpenSecrets:

Lockheed Martin is the nation’s top defense contractor, the brains behind such high-tech military hardware as the F-16 jet fighter and a variety of land and sea missiles. In 2001, the company landed the biggest defense contract in history when it was named the main contractor for the Joint Strike Fighter.

Considering that access is the name of the game when securing such lucrative contracts, it’s no surprise that Lockheed splits its campaign money equally between Democrats and Republicans. All told, NASA and the Defense Department account for roughly 80 percent of the company’s annual sales.

Details:

Profile for 2014 Election Cycle
CONTRIBUTIONS: $4,132,497 (ranks 44 of 16,793)
LOBBYING: $14,581,800 (2014), $14,516,226 (2013) (ranks 16 of 4,065 in 2014)
Contributions to candidates: $3,001,928 (for a list of recipients, click here)
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $897,425
Contributions to parties: $219,086
Contributions to 527 committees: $5,585
Contributions to outside spending groups: $10,373

For a list of bills Lockheed Martin has lobbied, click here.

Additional information about this company:

The total of contributions to candidates from Lockheed Martin PACs is 7 times largerthan contributions from individuals.

REVOLVING DOOR: 69 out of 109 Lockheed Martin lobbyists in 2013-2014 have previously held government jobs.

CEO Marillyn Hewson earned $25.16 million in 2014. Of this total, $1.34 million was base salary, $8.16 million was stock awards, $5.98 million was from incentive plan compensation, $9.41 million was in pension earnings, and other compensation was $238,150.

****

As you can see, many companies and individuals – including politicians – stand to profit greatly from perpetual war.

And we, the taxpayers, are footing the bill.

For a live ticker showing how much we have paid to date in each of the categories above, please visit the National Priorities Project site. You also can use the site’s trade-off tool to see what else those dollars could buy.

****

The full costs of war cannot simply be measured in dollars. It is impossible to place a monetary value on the tremendous loss of life (both military and civilian) caused by perpetual war.

Since 2003, U.S. military deaths in Afghanistan total 2,356. UK military deaths total 453, and there have been 677 coalition military deaths from other countries.

Since 2003, U.S. military deaths in Iraq total 4,489. UK military deaths total 179, and there have been 140 coalition military deaths from other countries.

There have been 136,495 – 154,378 documented civilian deaths that resulted from military intervention in Iraq since 2003.

In Iraq, 1,487 contractor employees have died. 348 journalists have been killed. 448 academics have died.

To view information on 6,840 U.S. service members who have perished in Afghanistan and Iraq, please see Faces of the Fallen.

Deaths don’t only occur in combat. An unusually high percentage of young veterans have died since returning home, many as a result of drug overdose, suicide, and vehicle crashes, reports Costs of War. The suicide rate doubled in the Army during the first decade of the wars among both the deployed and the non-deployed.

In many ways, the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are worse off now than they were before U.S. military invasion. Both countries are considered more authoritarian, more corrupt, and more repressive than they were before.

****

In his piece titled A State of Perpetual War, David A. Love makes a fitting comparison:

In the George Orwell classic 1984, there is a state of perpetual war between the nations of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The enemy in the conflict is ambiguous, and the battlefield exists in an elusive and distant land. The enemy could be Eurasia one day, and Eastasia the next, but that location is really insignificant.

The mission of perpetual war for these superpowers is to justify psychological and physical control over their populations, to keep their people busy, fearful and hateful towards the enemy. The perpetual war also serves as an excuse for a nation’s failings and shortcomings. The economy, the labor force and industry are all centered around war rather than consumer goods. People live a miserable existence with poverty and no hope of improving their standard of living.

Love points out that there are bigger problems we should be concerned about:

…there are many domestic threats that seem to pose a greater risk to national security, including the U.S. economic system itself.

He concludes with:

If we are to have a perpetual war, it must be a war against injustice and deprivation at home and abroad. We need to get our own house in order, rather than demolish and rebuild other nations that did not invite us there. And as far as the so-called terrorism problem is concerned, maybe we should stay out of other folks’ backyards and it will go away.

Indeed, the authorities would like us to believe that “fighting for our freedoms” in lands thousands of miles away is a necessary evil.

In War is a Racket, Butler suggested the following three steps to smash the war racket:

1. We must take the profit out of war.
2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes.

Butler concluded his speech with the following exclamation:

TO HELL WITH WAR!

That seems like an appropriate conclusion here as well.

Additional Resources:

• Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War by James Risen
• Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World by Tom Engelhardt
• National Security and Double Government by Michael J. Glennon
• Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Warfare by Scott Horton
• The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group by Dan Briody
• Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare by Gareth Porter

Lily Dane is a staff writer for The Daily Sheeple, where this article first appeared. Her goal is to help people to “Wake the Flock Up!”

Gold and silver probed their November 2014 lows early last week and finished strong.  From a chart standpoint, they both put in outside reversal weeks to the upside.  I’d like to visit the  current “setup” in gold and silver from several angles and then take a step back and look at them from a very broad view.  

 You will notice the giant movement in sales and even larger shorts put on by the large and small speculators.  The specs dumped over 1 million ounces and went short another 2.25 million ounces.  Totalling these, speculators altered their position by over 3.25 million ounces in just one week.  On the commercials side we saw the opposite.  They bought almost a net 2.6 million ounces and covered almost 700,000 short ounces for a net decrease of short exposure by about 3.3 million ounces.

  I point this out to you for several reasons with a couple of caveats.  The caveats being, COMEX is a playground where the charts are painted with paper brushes, very little metal actually changes hands and the total amount of gold claimed in inventory is less than China and India import in a month …EVERY month.  Another aspect is we don’t really know if these reported numbers are real.  How do we know this?  Because CME group told us so, over a year ago they basically said they cannot verify the numbers and rely on the individual reporting firms for data.  “Imperfect” to say the least.

  These are HUGE moves and their “size” tells me something is happening or going to if the numbers are real.  The sentiment shift has been huge with the specs confirming the negativity in the air.  I know of no other previous time where sentiment for gold and silver have ever been worse, including the major bottoms in 2001 and 2008.  Another reason to point this out is because even though we are not at all time record levels, the specs have not been less “long” nor the commercials less “short” since November of 2013, prior to this I believe was late 2008.

  While on the subject of COMEX, we have also noticed something else very strange.  February which is traditionally a very active delivery month, saw very little delivered even though open contracts just before first notice day were huge and outsized.  March on the other hand is a very small delivery month, yet HUGE amounts of gold have left their vaults in just the first three weeks.  I don’t know how to explain this other than to say, “someone wants or needs the gold”.

  We have also mentioned several times in the past that movements within the COMEX have been showing as “kilo” movements.  Much of what is being reported are “000” weights and divisible by 32.150.  COMEX threw us another curveball on Thursday when they began reporting a new “kilo gold” contract.  I had no idea this was even being contemplated and had not seen any news prior.  What’s quite interesting is in just two days they reported the inflow of close to 700,000 ounces of gold.  ALL of the gold came in as “eligible” and none as “registered”.  The other oddity is the fact the reporting DID show “.xxx” (numbers) as opposed to (“.000”) triple zeroes.  It appears kilo bars are moving within the 100 ounce category on COMEX while ounces are being moved in the kilo category.  COMEX now creating a kilo contract cannot easily be explained, this for me is a head scratcher and would love to hear theories on “why”?

  Switching gears, the biggest topics currently are Greece, Ukraine and the new AIIB bank in Asia.  I plan to write further about the AIIB tomorrow because the U.S. has been outflanked and has folded as even the IMF will now join.  Greece and Ukraine are two hotspots for very different reasons.

  Greece’s continued participation in the Eurozone is now being called a 50-50 proposition by none other than George Soros.  I look at it a little differently and put the odds far higher that Greece will exit unless someone can show me where exactly the money will come from?  Will Germany fold and give in to Greece’s WWII reparations demands?  I don’t know the answer to this but I do know it is THE only source of cash for Greece which comes with no “strings attached”.  By “strings” I mean money that will need to be paid back in the future.  I just do not see any viable way for Greece to remain solvent and stay in the Eurozone.  It is my opinion Greece will fall into Russian (and the East’s) arms.

  Speaking of Russian “arms”, though you may not be hearing much via mainstream media, the West/East saber rattling is frenzied like never before.  The Iranian nuclear talks have broken down and Russia has vowed to protect both Iran and Syria.  This at a time NATO has been sending troops and machinery within spitting distance to Russia’s borders.  There was also some muscle flexing with a test fire of an ICBM over the weekend and the “big ship” are now moving toward the Persian Gulf http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-24/us-moves-big-stick-negotiations-tactic-sends-big-ships-gulf .

  Whether you see it or not, the U.S. has not “isolated” Russia as was the plan.  The U.S. has now succeeded in isolating ourselves, I will talk about this tomorrow.  China has attracted a long list of “charter members” for their international infrastructure banks which includes Britain, Germany, France, Italy and the IMF with Japan and Australia waiting in the wings.  Could our self imposed isolation be any more obvious!?

On March 22nd, I headlined “Why the Western Alliance Is Ending,” and I listed the recent events which indicate that the Western Alliance doesn’t have much longer to go. And, now, it has actually already ended. The handwriting is on the wall, for everyone to see; it’s so out-in-the-open, as of today.

Here is what has just happened (as reported in German Economic News, and translated by me), which virtually brings down the curtains on America’s dominance of the world — a dominance that started when World War II ended in 1945:

March 21: “GEOPOLITICS: Washington nervous: China, Japan and South Korea forge an Alliance.” This news story reports:

“For the first time in three years, the foreign ministers of the three countries met. They agreed on Saturday in Seoul to work towards a summit of their leaders, and to take on problems with the interpretation of history [which have separated them till now]. They also expressed their intention to continue to work for a free trade agreement and for new multi-party talks on North Korea’s controversial nuclear program.”

Here’s the important context of that: The U.S. in WW II conquered Japan, which had invaded China and conquered Korea; but, now, Japan, China and South Korea are moving toward one-another, while China, and indirectly the BRICS group of rising economic powers as a whole — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — are making their move past the previous U.S.-European control of the world. Furthermore, these Asian powers are collectively inviting North Korea to move toward them, and to join this group, which would finally bring an end to the stalemated hostilities between South and North Korea. So: welcome to the 21st Century! (For more details on that, see the terrific news reporting in GEN.)

And, in addition: for these three economic powerhouses to “work for a free trade agreement” that’s outside the orbit of Obama’s secret negotiations for his TPP or Trans-Pacific Partnership with them, may mean that they all will be less likely to accept the trade-deal that he is trying to negotiate collectively with them. So: this three-party ministerial meeting is, in itself, potentially an extremely important historical event. But it is part of this larger and interconnected whole, which is far more important than any trade-deal.

March 20: “General Motors ends Opel production in Russia.” This news story reports yet another sign of the separation between the Western and the Eastern economic blocs, which, yet again, is both a direct and an indirect result of Obama’s sanctions against Russia, and of his Secretary of State John Kerry’s agreement with the king of Saudi Arabia to increase oil production in order to drive down the oil price and thereby starve Russia of its crucial foreign-exchange earnings from Russia’s huge oil-sales. However, countering Obama’s purpose of harming Russia, GM’s Russian production facilities might now be acquired as abandoned assets by Russia’s oligarchs or the Russian state, and produce new models, the profits from which will remain inside Russia and accrue to Russians. In this regard: Reuters headlined on March 19th “Lada maker’s hopes rise as rival flees Russian car market,” and reported that, “Russian carmaker Avtovaz, producer of the … Lada, expects to grab a bigger share of the shrinking domestic market as its international rivals pull back.” That money will stay in Russia, building up Russia’s economy, instead of Germany’s (Opel) and America’s (GM).

March 23: “Volkswagen Drives Back Russian Production.” Germany’s largest car-maker adds yet further to the opportunities for Russia’s investors, and for investors in other BRICS countries (since they’re not participating in Obama’s anti-Russian sanctions).

March 23: “Spain: Protest party, Podemos, comes third in regional election.” “The Socialists won the [Andalusian] election, the Conservatives of Premier Mariano Rajoy clearly lost the election.” The conservative party, and its leader of Spain, Mariano Rajoy, which have been strongly pro-American and have supported America’s fascist anti-Russian coup in Ukraine as much as they thought the Spanish public would tolerate (given that Spain’s public are overwhelmingly anti-fascist after the dismal fascist Franco decades), were trounced in regional elections. Spain’s new socialist party, Podemos, was silent on foreign policy because of Spain’s domestic problems, but will likely be less supportive of America’s anti-Russian war than the conservatives have been — which already has not been very supportive (because Rajoy fears a voter-backlash).

March 23: “France: Sarkozy-bloc ahead, National Front strong, Hollande beaten.” The party of the ‘socialist’ Francois Hollande, who has been as cooperative with Obama’s anti-Russian policies as he can be (given the public’s sentiment against those policies), has been beaten in local elections throughout France, by two politicians who have spoken out strongly against Hollande’s kowtowing to American supremacy and his caving to Obama on Ukraine and Russia (such as by defaulting on the Mistral deal): Nicolas Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen. Nominally, these are ‘right-wing’ politicians, but in this matter they are predominantly against imperialism, they’re progressives here, because the imperialism is being practiced by America against their own country, France; and they are more like Charles DeGaul, who was a French patriot who opposed American domination of French affairs.

Public pressures in Europe are largely behind the breakaway from America of European leaders (the phenomenon which was discussed and documented in my “Why the Western Alliance Is Ending”). However, the signal event isn’t really in Europe; it’s in Asia: “GEOPOLITICS: Washington nervous: China, Japan and South Korea forge an Alliance.” What that indicates, and which is only being supported and reinforced by these European events, is a re-alignment of world-powers, in which, Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s “EurAsian” concept is being endorsed virtually world-wide, except perhaps among the Arabic oil-sheikdoms such as the Saudi, Qatari and Bahraini aristocracies, all of whom are allied with the U.S. aristocracy and crucial to the dollarization of the oil-price and thus of the trading of weapons for oil and gas.

Vladimir Putin’s multipolar world is winning; it’s attracting support from non-fascists in all corners of the globe. Barack Obama’s opposite vision — reflected especially in his often-repeated phrase, in which he refers to the United States as “the one indispensable nation” (meaning that all other nations are “dispensable”) — is the likes of which the world hasn’t even heard, from anyone else, ever since the time of Adolf Hitler’s infamous “Deutschland über alles” in the 1930s and ’40s; and it really means the very same thing, only for a different country: it’s actually nationalism, instead of patriotism; and only a small minority of people, even in today’s nazi Ukraine and in Nazi Germany, have supported it, or sought to impose it. It’s far stronger among aristocrats than among the public.

The shock of the world, to find a President of the United States saying that, and his going so far as to tell America’s military to view America’s economic competitors as being what they will be fighting against, is driving away the publics, and now even the leaders of other nations. For example, Obama told West Point cadets:

“The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.”

He thinks our military should be fighting against nations (such as Russia) that have rising economies. For him, it’s about conquest, and not only about national defense. And he’s obsessed with conquering Russia. Even the aristocrats in most other countries are now backing off from that. He has the support for it, at home, of virtually all members of Congress, but even in the U.S., more than two-thirds oppose it. He has over-reached, so very far, that it’s finally beyond his grasp, and it’s only driving the world faster into the multipolar vision that Russia’s leader, much maligned by the Western press, has been championing for the world’s future: a world of free and independent states, which recognize that for any one of them to benefit at the expense of others is wrong and brings no one any good in the final analysis — much less in the present (justwars such as in Ukraine).

Whatever may happen to Vladimir Putin, his vision has actually taken over the world, and he has made clear that Russia itself (and he himself) has no intention or desire to do so. (He even refuses to accept the rebelling region of the former Ukraine into becoming a part of Russia. He had accepted Crimea only because it’s vital to Russia’s national defense and had been a part of Russia until 1954.) This is remarkable. And his contrast to Obama is also remarkable.

Obama’s arrogance is what’s driving the world away. It has brought about the end of The American Century, in world affairs. It has given entirely new meaning to the old phrase “the ugly American.” In its new meaning, this phrase refers not to the American public (who never really deserved such opprobrium anyway), but clearly to the American aristocracy, the billionaire elite whom Obama and the U.S. Congress actually serve. They are America’s problem, but perhaps they won’t become the world’s, after all. That is what is at stake here: whether an overreaching national aristocracy will succeed in imposing its will upon and against the entire world. Other aristocracies are now deciding: no. They won’t. And that’s today’s big news-story.

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.

London’s Guardian published what US major media won’t touch – a leaked EU report discussing a “vicious cycle of violence…increasingly threatening the viability of the two-state solution.”

It blames collapsed peace talks, settlement construction in “sensitive” Jerusalem areas, Al-Aqsa Mosque provocations, home demolitions and dispossessing Palestinians from their land.

The report is prepared annually by EU nations’ Jerusalem-based heads of mission. It suggests policy measures in light of Israeli actions.

Netanyahu pledged continued settlement construction and no Palestinian state on his watch if reelected.

His post-election statehood flip-flop rings as hollow as all other promises he makes. He’s a serial liar. Nothing he says has credibility.

In defiance of international law, he calls Jerusalem Israel’s exclusive “undivided capital.”

He wants Palestinians entirely excluded – forcefully removed if necessary.

Past EU reports critical of Israel accomplished nothing in the way of policy changes. Don’t bet on anything substantive this time.

The Guardian cited “well-informed European sources” favoring policy changes against Israel in the wake of a potentially more extremist government post-election than before.

They include voluntary guidelines only, not tough measures needed to address longstanding Israeli abuses. Examples include:

“(F)urther and coordinated steps to ensure that consumers in the EU are able to exercise their right to an informed choice in respect to settlement products in conformity with existing EU rules of origin and labeling, including other possible future measures.”

“Possible measures against known violent settlers and those calling for acts of violence as regards immigration regulations in EU member states.”

“Strengthen efforts to raise awareness amongst EU citizens and businesses on the risks related to economic and financial activities in the settlements, including financial transactions, investments, purchases, procurements and services.”

“Advance voluntary guidelines for EU tour operators to prevent support for settlement business in East Jerusalem.”

The Guardian said speculation mounts on whether Washington and EU countries will reassess how they treat Israel.

They’re hard-wired in place. They remain largely constant under all Israeli regimes. All are hardline. None are left-of-center.

The Guardian cited various high-profile violent incidents last year. It failed to explain Palestinians face Kristallnacht conditions daily.

It cited the EU report calling Jerusalem “one of the most emotive and problematic issues” in peace process discussions.

It omitted explaining longstanding peace process hypocrisy – the greatest scam in modern memory. Dead on arrival every time initiated.

The EU report cited “tensions, mistrust and violence which have accompanied developments in the city in the course of the year (at) extremely high levels.”

“These developments are increasingly threatening the viability of the two-state solution and, in turn, risk precipitating further levels of polarisation and violence.”

It said “2014 (was) distinguished by a number of specific, disturbing and often violent developments” – largely Israeli initiated.

It noted failure to address abuses will lead to “further escalation and extreme polarisation.”

“These incidents have occurred against the background of the systematic increase in settlement activity, tensions over the Haram al-Sharif and rising levels of tensions and acts of violence” largely by Israel.

“The expansion of settlements has continued, including in highly sensitive areas, (and was) followed in force by waves of demolitions and evictions.”

“Almost on a daily basis settlers and national religious activists have ascended on to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount under the protection of Israeli forces.”

Abusive security force practices were highlighted – Israeli instigated violence “le(ading) to more than 1,300 arrests (with 40% of he detainees being minors).”

Coverup, denial and whitewash reflect official Israeli policy. A regime spokesman response didn’t surprise.

It lied calling the EU report “so extremely one-sided…that it distorts reality beyond comprehension.”

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. 

by Oscar Ugarteche

IMF: Ukraine will not pay back [part of] its debts to Russia

German Economic News  |  Published: 03/24/15 00:25 clock [Translation, and interspersed notes, by Eric Zuesse.]

In December, a multi-billion-dollar loan [variously stated as $3-$3.5 billion] to Ukraine comes due, which Ukraine had received from Russia. The IMF has provided a new debt plan, however, dictating that existing loans to Ukraine that have an expiration-date are to be subjected to a haircut. Thus, the resource gap of the country totaling $40 billion is to be reduced.

Since the crisis, Ukraine has received several loans from the IMF and the EU [and the U.S.]. These loans must be repaid in a few years from now. However, the financial situation of the country remains vulnerable. Over the next four years overdue loans totaling $15 billion need to be paid [they’re mostly loans from Russia]. Only three billion of them are an old loan Russia that has to be paid in December of this year. The IMF might prevent it [from being repaid in full, even though it has seniority over the new loans that are coming from the West].

The IMF has developed a program for Ukraine, under which the current financial hole is to be filled in the amount $40 billion. The due debts [the senior debt] are part of the plan, and will be restructured, according to the IMF. Exactly how it is to happen, the IMF does not explain. Experts say that the IMF believes that Russia should participate in a haircut. The Financial Times reports [“Bailout projections indicate Ukraine will not repay Russia debt” 5:21 PM, 22 March 2015] that the IMF requires that Russia’s $3.5 billion bond issue be included in the restructuring. Charles Blitzer, a former IMF employee, has informed the FT of this.

However, Blitzer is uncertain how large the haircut will be. “It is up to the Ukrainian authorities to determine the extent and nature of the debt restructuring,” he said. [In other words: the IMF will grant Ukraine the right to determine how much of that $3-3.5B will be repaid to Russia. The Kyiv Post puts it this way: “Kyiv does not intend to fully repay a $3 billion bond owed to Russia this year according to official projections underpinning Ukraine’s new international bailout, say credit experts.”] Government sources close to the matter estimate that there will be a planned debt reduction of 50 percent. “But creditors would rather try to agree on a term extension,” said Blitzer.

Whether all international creditors will accept a haircut, and if so, to what extent, is not yet clear. Last week, Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanow said that Russia still expects that the $3.5B debt will be repaid this December in full. And Franklin Templeton [Funds], the largest bondholder of Ukraine, has brought in Blackstone legal help for debt negotiations.

Last week, the Ukrainian Finance Minister [the American] Natalija Jaresko told the WSJ that so far pledged loans to Ukraine [$40B] will not be enough to bring Ukraine back onto its feet. “The package will stabilize the banking system, but it is not enough to seriously re-stimulate growth,” said Jaresko. “I need more support.” She said that no nation currently pays more to protect the entire world from a nuclear power [Russia] than does Ukraine, and that, “if our partners, for whatever reason, are not able to assist us with defensive military means, then they should provide us more financial assistance [so that we can buy the weapons against Russia ourselves].”

This past Friday, the Ukrainian central bank had to explain why three of Ukraine’s banks were being declared insolvent. The VAB Bank, Astra Bank and the City Commerce Bank are now deprived of their licenses. At the same time, Ukraine is already planning an expansion of military resources. In sum, for the year of 2015, a total of $3.8 billion will be spent on armaments. [This by a country that cannot even pay its bondholders, when all of the new Ukrainian bonds are actually paying only for Ukraine’s war against the residents of its own former Donbass region.]

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.

The Mayor’s Office in Toronto is today occupied by a much slicker operation than it was during the years of dysfunctional, bigoted buffoonery that unfolded under Rob Ford. Mayor John Tory has resumed the drive toward a fully fledged neoliberal city but has the basic political skills to frame his twin agendas of austerity and upscale redevelopment in the language of inclusiveness. He has been sufficiently proficient at this to rapidly create what Michael Laxer has termed an “austerity consensus” supported by the overwhelming majority of the Council, including its left wing.

[photo: John Bonnar]

The agenda of the developers with regard to the central part of Toronto is to complete the creation of an interwoven hive of business, commerce, upscale recreation and high end housing. Standing in the way of this are enduring pockets of housed poverty and a considerable and growing homeless population. Those without housing, very understandably, have tended to gravitate toward the centre of the city and, over many years, shelters and other services have developed in this area. This situation is resented by those working for upscale redevelopment and not only because visible destitution impacts property values and ‘quality of life’ for those with the money to pay for it. It is also the case that the shelters, drop-ins and service agencies that homeless people turn to are located in areas that the forces of gentrification are laying claim to.

The General Manager of Shelter, Support and Housing Administration (SSHA) has submitted an “Infrastructure and Service Improvement Plan for the Emergency Shelter System” to the Community Development and Recreation Committee of City Council. It is a startling plan to remove homeless shelters from the centre of the city on a mind boggling scale. I’ll return the focus shortly to this aspect of the report but, before that, I want to note that it also represents a response by the bureaucracy to the dramatic worsening of the homeless situation, the extreme overcrowding of the shelter system and to community based political action has been taken up on these issues.

Tragic Deaths Force the City to Act

On page 7 of the report we learn that, between January 2011 and January 2015, shelter use in Toronto increased by 11 per cent and there is no reason to think this trend will be reversed in the foreseeable future. In this worsening situation, there has been a longstanding struggle to ensure that the number of available shelter beds is adequate to meet the needs. This has largely focused on demanding that the City’s policy of ensuring a maximum shelter occupancy rate of 90 per cent was actually enforced instead of being wilfully disregarded. At the beginning of this year, four tragic homeless deaths, and community action that was taken in response to them, forced the politicians and the administration to adopt some concrete initiatives that moved toward meeting the policy [see Bullet No. 1077]. Mayor Tory went to some lengths to ensure these measures were put in place. As socially regressive as his regime may be, it is sophisticated enough to understand that street deaths, especially from the cold, are simply too glaring an indictment of how the city is run and that a few million dollars to lower the risk of such tragedies is money well spent.

So, we have a staff report that responds, to some degree, to the need to reduce overcrowding in the shelters but is primarily concerned with clearing the way for the redevelopment agenda. In this, it focuses on three objectives. Firstly, it proposes to remove a portion of long term shelter users and place them in housing. Secondly, it looks at opening additional space and increasing capacity in the system somewhat. Finally, it uses the opportunity to advance a plan to relocate shelter facilities in outlying areas of the city.

The General Manager gives over part of his report to a glowing appraisal of the prospects for “Housing First approaches for long term shelter users.” On page 12, we learn that those who have been in shelters for more than one year “represented 10 per cent of all shelter users in 2014, but used 32 per cent of all shelter beds available.” Given this situation, the administration proposes to try and house some of this portion of the shelter population. Of course, no one is going to suggest that people should have to live their lives as residents of homeless shelters. However, the report is really offering very little when all is said and done. On page 14, a goal of reducing the long term users by 20 per cent by housing them is set out, that would not make a decisive difference if it could be achieved, given the fact that the homeless population is growing so significantly. Moreover, it is necessary to temper enthusiasm around this initiative with a more realistic understanding of how the City’s Street to Homes initiative has actually played out in practice.

On the second point, the report does concern itself with the question of reducing shelter occupancy so as to comply with the 90 per cent policy. However, this objective is not something that will be pursued with any sense of urgency but will, supposedly, be worked out along the way in the process of relocating shelters in outlying areas of the city. Tellingly, the section (page 14) that deals with meeting the “Council-approved 90 per cent occupancy threshold” poses this, not as a policy that must be implemented without delay but simply as a ‘target’. Under community pressure, some measures have been taken and others are proposed, including restoring ‘surge capacity’ by ending the daily reliance on ‘flex beds’ (page 16), but the tone of this report makes clear that bureaucratic foot dragging on occupancy levels remains and will have to be confronted on an ongoing basis.

Massive Relocation

The huge change in the situation that we must now deal with, however, is that all efforts to address the condition of the shelters and their appalling levels of overcrowding will now take place in the context of a drive to relocate them on a massive scale. At the heart of this, will be the infamous “George Street Redevelopment” project. Driven by encroaching gentrification, including and particularly the nearby 46 storey Pace Condo Tower that we have previously targeted and mobilized against, plans have been formulated to permanently remove all but 100 of the 334 emergency men’s shelter beds that are presently provided at Seaton House and the Schoolhouse shelter, which is located next door to it. 170 transitional beds would also be lost. Demolition will begin in 2017 if the plan is implemented (page 17) and, for a three year period, the entire homeless population on the street, all 674 of them, would be relocated.

As serious as this all is, it’s clear that the process of displacement is by no means limited to George Street. On page 17, we are told that “pressure created by a rising real estate market and the need to upgrade existing shelter facilities to better meet clients needs will result in several changes in the shelter system over the next five years.” I’d not be quite as ready as the SSHA bureaucracy to accept that the appetites of the real estate market can be reconciled with ‘clients needs’. What’s clear, though, is that the developer’s wishes are law as far as the City is concerned and, if condos or commercial projects need to be built where homeless people take shelter, the homeless will just have to move on.

The removal process is already upon us. The 124 bed Hope Shelter at McCaul and College Streets is set to close on April 14 and the report confirms that “At least one other shelter will need relocation this year as a result of their leased property being sold. Two other shelters may require relocation due to unsuitable conditions and poor state of repair of facilities” (page 17). Beyond even this, “…over the next few years, a total of six shelters will have to relocate” (not counting the impact of the removals on George Street) (page 17) and it’s clear that any additional space that is opened to meet the need to reduce occupancy levels will not be located in the central area if the developers and the City are able to determine the outcome.

The plan being advanced by SSHA is a total disaster for homeless people in Toronto. It is a reckless adaption to the needs of property owners and developers that simply cannot be allowed to proceed. On page 18, the report seems concerned that “..fifty three per cent of all shelter beds are concentrated in three downtown wards” while twenty one wards have none at all. So, “underserved locations outside of the downtown core should be prioritized for new shelters.” Of course, the outlying portions of the city are also ‘underserved’ when it comes to banking towers and corporate headquarters. There’s a reason why Bay Street isn’t located in Rexdale or that Toronto City Hall isn’t perched on the edge of the Rouge Valley. Equally obviously, people who face destitution tend to congregate in core urban areas to try and survive. Scan this report as thoroughly as you will but you will not see any proposals for how you can possibly meet the survival needs of people you dump outside the city core. Where will you locate drop-ins and support agencies? How will you overcome the fact that people will be left to fend for themselves in parts of the city where distances between service providing facilities are measured in miles instead of blocks?

Social Cleansing

We are dealing with an exercise in social cleansing that would be nothing less than tragic. Four homeless men died in this city during January and the Toronto Homeless Memorial continues to chart an appalling toll of homeless people perishing. Removing people to fend for themselves in the outlying parts of the city would increase the risk of such deaths considerably.

What is even more alarming about this forced relocation plan is that it is the danger that the plug will be pulled on existing facilities before firm arrangements in ‘underserved’ suburbs are even in place. You can just imagine the NIMBY backlash that awaits efforts to place hundreds of homeless people outside of the core. Good luck telling Rob Ford and his neighbours they are going to have a homeless shelter around the corner from them. The grim situation around the Hope Shelter is a sign of things to come. No replacement has been found with three weeks to go to the deadline. The church based Out of the Cold program will wind up for the year just before the Hope closes its door. That some of the men in there have been found housing is not the main question. What about all the other homeless who need the 124 beds that will be taken out of the system if this closing is allowed to happen?

Beginning with the Hope Shelter, we have to resist these closings and the relocation process. We must build the broadest community and union alliance to challenge it and be ready to occupy facilities to prevent them being locked up or take the necessary action to open new space. We must fight to prevent this driving out of homeless people. It is an exercise in reckless social abandonment that will not stop at targeting those forced onto the streets. Those in public housing and other low income tenants will also continue to be slated for removal at an increased pace. This is really about challenging the notion that Toronto should be a City where the investment needs of developers, bankers and business owners get to prevail unchecked. In the weeks ahead, we’ll be developing plans to fight back against this outrage and will be asking for maximum support as we put those plans into effect. Please be ready to show your solidarity with homeless people facing this attack.

John Clarke is an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).