Cease Fire Rejected. Turkey Doesn’t Consider Al Qaeda as a Terrorist Group. Erdogan Sends More Troops into Idlib

March 9th, 2020 by Arabi Souri

The latest agreement of ceasefire between the Russian President and the Turkish madman Erdogan explicitly excludes combating terrorists. Erdogan doesn’t consider al-Qaeda as a terrorist group, he invested heavily in this organization especially in Syria and lately in Libya.

A Turkish column of troops entered the Syrian Idlib province on the second day of the ceasefire through Kfar Lucin, some sources reported another Turkish forces column crossed the borders into Idlib, while the Turkish-sponsored Nusra Front (al-Qaeda Levant) declared their rejection of the ceasefire and the agreement.

Erdogan instead of separating the radical head-choppers of al-Qaeda from the moderate head-choppers of al-Qaeda as per his own commitment he obliged himself to in September 2018, he beefed up those terrorists in numbers and gears, both types of them, supplied them with advanced weapons, and when they were defeated despite this support he merged the Turkish Army soldiers within the ranks of these terrorists hoping the Turkish soldiers would serve as human shields to save the terrorists, and that is exactly what resulted in the killing of dozens (29, 38, 62, or most likely 109 depending on the source) of them by the Syrian Arab Army who were bombing the gathering of al-Qaeda terrorists on 27th of February, last month.

The killing of their soldiers, the al-Qaeda human shields, was used by the Turks as a justification to attack the Syrian Arab Army units and their allies in Syria to allow al-Qaeda terrorists regain the territories they lost, momentarily, using the Russian strange stand down which left the SAA without the agreed air cover, yet Erdogan instead of only licking the bone offered by President Putin, he actually ate the bone and wanted more which resulted in increased escalation with the SAA and the IRGC issued their chilling warning to the TSK (inseparable Turkish Army and al-Qaeda).

Twenty violations of the ceasefire regime were recorded by the Russian Reconciliation Center in Hmeimim, 19 by the Turks; the Nusra Front rejection of the ceasefire agreement and increase of the Turkish human shields soldiers into Idlib, all are signals of a coming showdown unless someone cuts the tree under the Turkish madman and allow him the free fall he needs and hopefully a bang to his head would wake him up or allow someone smarter to take over in Turkey and save what could be saved in that country before it’s too late and hundreds more of their troops get sardined and sent back in boxes, or whatever is left of them. The SAA is more than determined to clean the country to the last inch from the terrorists and their supporters.

On the other side and where Erdogan forces lost the battles, the Aleppo – Damascus M5 Artery returned to life and hundreds of vehicles took the chance to travel using the once backbone of the Syrian economy and social life, it saves them 3 hours of driving when they had to take side roads to avoid the targeting by the Turkish-sponsored terrorists of al-Qaeda and its affiliates.

The 6 kilometers both sides of the Aleppo – Latakia M4 artery is in the works as per Russian sources, after a week they are supposed to start patrolling this highway jointly with Turkish patrols to ensure the implementation of the second article of the latest ceasefire agreement. This is a more serious test for the Turkish ability to meet their commitments, the terrorists are cornered near Zawya Mountain not far from the M4, and under the threat of their shelling using the advanced weapons they received from NATO member state Turkey.

Russian Military Police in Syria - Archive

Russian Military Police in Syria – Archive

Will Erdogan get a new chance after this when, not if, the truce is seriously breached? Nobody knows what he offered President Putin in their 3 hours closed meeting before joined by the delegations of both countries in their last summit, and nobody will be able to understand what is there left to offer by the Turkish madman.

We reported earlier from our sources within the Turkish top brass about a brewing military coup, Erdogan is aware of this as well, he’s racing time to achieve anything to regain some popularity among the Turks, nobody envies him on any front.

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The History of Socialism and Social Democracy. SYRIZA’s Betrayal of Greece Is a Spectre Haunting the Left

March 9th, 2020 by Max Parry

‘Super Tuesday’ in the 2020 presidential election season is over and Senator Bernie Sanders’s time as the unlikely frontrunner for the Democratic nomination may have stopped just as quick as it began. Despite an unprecedented smear campaign coordinated by the party leadership and corporate media against him, the self-described “democratic socialist” not only managed to single-handedly de-stigmatize the latter as a dirty word in U.S. politics but at one point seemed like he had improbably overtaken former Vice President Joe Biden as the favorite to be the party nominee.

Suddenly, the scenario of a brokered convention with a repeat of the ‘superdelegate’ scheme determining the outcome seems more likely. Regardless of whether he beats the odds, no one can deny the significance of Sanders’s movement in taking the relatively progressive first step of returning “socialism” from exile to everyday U.S. politics which was once an inconceivable prospect. Unfortunately, a consequence is that now his idea of an ‘alternative’ to capitalism has been made synonymous with the word in the minds of Americans, regardless of its qualifications.

So far, Bernie has purposefully avoided discussing socialism in broader conceptual terms or as a social philosophy while persistently narrowing the discussion to issues of economic disparity, free higher education or a national healthcare system. In fact, Sanders’s own supporters are the ones who often push the acceptable parameters of the dialogue to bigger questions and take his movement to places he is unwilling, likely because his candidacy filled the void of the political space left vacant following the suppression of the Occupy Wall Street phenomena. For example, some of his devotees may define socialism as the ‘equal distribution of wealth’ or even the ‘collective ownership of the means of production.’ However, Bernie and his followers both equally avoid providing any philosophical basis to their ideas and usually reduce it to abstractions of moral principles or human rights.

The most vigorous elucidation of socialism and its historical development from material conditions rather than ideals can be found in Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program, a letter written in 1875 by the German philosopher to the early incarnation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in which he scathingly attacked the SPD for drafting a more moderate platform at its congress. Just four years earlier, the short-lived Paris Commune in France had been brutally repressed and the German counterparts of the Communards appeared to be making concessions in the wake of its failure. In the address, Marx contends that socialism is a transitional phase between capitalism and communism where vestigial elements of the free market are mixed with state ownership of the productive forces. According to Marx, socialism does not develop on its own but “emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”

While socialism might be an improvement, it still bears the stigma of capitalism because it is based on the idea that people will receive equal compensation determined by their individual contribution to the economy. Marx argues that even though profiting from the exploitation of the labor of others through private ownership of the means of production may decline, the exchange of labor itself as a commodity replicates the logic of the free market in that it still leaves workers under the dominion of what they produce if their earnings are equivalent to their labor. Since workers inherently have varying degrees of mental and physical ability, the primary source of economic inequality is left in place. Hence, Marx’s conclusion that human liberation can only be achieved once labor is transformed from a means of subsistence to freedom from necessity in a communist society, or “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” In the same document, it is made clear what role the state must play in this post-revolutionary but intermediary stage:

“Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. There corresponds to this also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Many on the left today, particularly social democrats, try to separate Marx’s words about the role of the state from the Bolsheviks who later expanded upon the working class seizure of power by revolutionary means and put it into practice in the Russian Revolution of 1917. However, Marx did consider the United States one of a handful of countries where a peaceful transition to socialism was a remote possibility, at least during his own lifetime.

The same SPD that Marx convinced to abandon its reformist platform for a more radical line would turn their backs on the working class decades later when it endorsed the imperialist carnage of World War I and collaborated with proto-fascists. In 1912, the SPD rose to prominence after it was elected to the majority of seats in the Reichstag, but once in power its duplicitous leadership voted to support the war effort despite the Second International’s vehement opposition to militarism and imperialism.

Those within the SPD who protested the party’s pro-war stance were expelled which brought an end to the Second International, most notably Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemberg who would go on to found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). After the war’s conclusion which resulted in a German defeat and the abolition of its imperial monarchy, mass social unrest and general strikes led to the Spartacist Uprising in the unsuccessful German Revolution of 1918–1919 which was violently crushed by the right-wing Freikorps paramilitary units under orders from SPD leader and German President, Friedrich Ebert. Liebknecht and Luxemburg were summarily executed in the crackdown and became forever revered martyrs in the international socialist movement.

The SPD would once again betray the German people during the Weimar Republic in the lead-up to the Second World War, rebuffing the KPD’s efforts to organize a coalition against fascism which sealed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, as Michael Parenti described in Blackshirts and Reds:

“True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile, a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.”

Social democracy’s consistent impediment of the seizure of power by the working class led to its branding as the “moderate wing of fascism” by the Comintern. By the time the Third International and the social democratic Labor and Socialist International (LSI) finally cooperated to form a Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War, it was undermined by the disruptions of Trotskyists and anarchists which cleared the way for Franco’s victory. Today, social democrats who are embarrassed by these unpleasant facts try to sweep their own tainted history under the rug, ironically the same ideologues who are always eager to cite the ‘purges’ of the Stalin era to discredit communism. A 2017 article exonerating the SPD in Jacobin Magazine, the flagship publication of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is a perfect example of such lies by omission.

Bernie Sanders is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history, but a significant amount of the grassroots basis for his recent success has come from his backing by the DSA whose own rank-and-file increased by the tens of thousands during his 2016 candidacy and continued following Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton. This culminated in the election of two DSA members to Congress, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY) and Rashida Tlaib (MI), in the 2018 mid-terms. The DSA has historical roots in the Socialist Party of America (SPA), having been established by former chairman Michael Harrington, best known as the author of the classic 1962 study, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, which is widely credited as an inspiration for the welfare state legislation of the Great Society under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration. However, in stark contrast with the SPA and its founder, Eugene V. Debs — whom Sanders idolizes and even once made a film about — Harrington advocated for reforming the Democratic Party from within over building a third party.

Sanders might style himself as a “socialist”, but many have noted his actual campaign policies are closer to the New Deal reforms of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration during the Great Depression. A more accurate comparison than Eugene Debs would be with the appointed Vice President during Roosevelt’s third term, Henry A. Wallace, who has been written out of history ever since the Southern reactionary wing of the Democratic Party convinced FDR to replace him on the 1944 ticket with Harry S. Truman. The progressive Wallace had been Secretary of Agriculture during Roosevelt’s first two terms and was a big supporter of his domestic program. After his one-term removal, Wallace served as commerce secretary until Truman succeeded Roosevelt and fired him in 1946 for giving a speech advocating peace and cooperation with the Soviet Union which contradicted Truman’s foreign policy that kick-started the Cold War. Wallace ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1948 but his campaign was sunk by red-baiting, reminiscent of the recent bogus claims of “Russian meddling” to assist Sanders’s presidential bid. Yet even Wallace was much further to the left than Bernie is today, particularly on foreign policy. As Congressman of Vermont in 1999, Sanders notably voted to authorize the use of military force against Serbia, resulting in one of his campaign staffers quitting in protest and an end to his friendship with the previously cited Parenti.

As for his socialist credentials, all one has to do is look at the model Bernie consistently invokes as an example whenever pressed to define “democratic socialism” in the Nordic model which today scarcely resembles what it once was prior to the mysterious assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. Scandinavian countries like Sweden and Denmark may have high taxes on the wealthy and a strong social safety net while a large percentage of the workforce is unionized and employed in the public sector — a more “humane” form of capitalism — but these gains came from class struggle, not from the top down.

Similarly in the U.S., the financial regulations and public programs during the Roosevelt administration were not enacted out of the goodness of FDR’s heart but because he was a pragmatic politician and member of the ruling class who understood that it was the only way to save American capitalism from itself and prevent workers, then well organized in a strong coalition of labor unions with socialists and communists, from becoming militant. Reforms such as those under the New Deal were enacted so they could be repealed later, as we see now with Social Security and Medicare increasingly under threat. If Sanders were to be elected but his policies obstructed, it would be because no such alliance behind him yet exists.

On the other hand, recent history shows that not even a united front and mass organization can ensure the democratic wishes of workers as Greece learned in 2015 after the electoral victory of the inappropriately named ‘Coalition of the Radical Left ’ — abbreviated SYRIZA — which completely double-crossed its constituency and the Greek working class once in power. When the Great Recession hit in 2008, Greece was impacted more than any other country in the Eurozone during the economic downturn and underwent a decline which exceeded that of the Great Depression in the United States as the longest of any modern capitalist country. However, like all debt run up by capitalist governments, Greece’s bankruptcy was created by the irreconcilable contradiction of the state being torn between its constituents in the masses of people and the rich and corporations who both want to pay as low in taxes as possible, an incompatibility which forces elected political leaders to borrow excessively instead of taxing the former which give them votes or the latter which gives them money.

Like the United States, many European countries saw their productive power slowly outsourced to the developing world in recent decades where bigger profits could be made and labor was cheaper while wages and living standards in the imperial core stagnated, though the process was slower in Europe because of social democracy. For the financial sector and predatory creditors, this made for a whole new market of consumer debt to invest in and a bonanza of speculative trading. That is, until 2008 when the speculations finally crashed after consumer credit reached its limit. On the brink of failure, the so-called leaders of industry and champions of private enterprise in the banking sector begged European governments to save them from collapse. Unfortunately for Greece, it’s small, poor economy was already heavily in debt and unattractive to lenders, therefore unable to borrow without paying high interest rates.

At the time of Greece’s debt crisis, European governments were already besieged by their respective banks in the form of bailouts. When the German and French banks turned out to be the biggest creditors of the Greek government, the prospect of Greece defaulting meant that the German and French governments could not provide financial assistance to their corresponding banks a second time without then-President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, committing political suicide. Therefore, the European Union’s political “solution” was to make Greece the whipping boy for the financial crisis by using the pooled collective money of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund— widely referred to as the ‘troika’ — to make a series of bailout loans to Greece so it could pay off the French and German banks, but which imposed draconian austerity measures and neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ onto its economy.

The troika’s ‘structural adjustment programs’ resulted in hundreds of thousands of state sector jobs lost and the minimum wage reduced by more than 20% while much of the energy, utilities and transit sectors underwent mass privatization. Greek workers saw their taxes raised just as pensions and benefits were cut, bonuses capped, and salaries frozen at the same time government spending on health and education was slashed. As many economists predicted, the spending reductions during the downturn only worsened the crisis. However, just as we have seen throughout the EU and the U.S. since the global financial meltdown, a silver lining to the crisis in Greece was an expansion of the political spectrum and Overton Window. By 2014, the far right Golden Dawn party suddenly became the third largest group from Greece in the European Parliament, but still far behind the first-place SYRIZA, founded in 2004 as a broad alliance of the country’s left-wing parties, sans the Greek Communist Party (KKE).

In the beginning of 2015, SYRIZA rode into office in a snap election, picking up half of the Hellenic Parliament seats on its campaign promise of rejecting austerity. After failing to reach an agreement with the troika, a referendum was held to decide on whether the country should accept the bailout terms and the result was a solid 61% pulling the lever against the country’s colonization by the EU and ‘reforms’ of the international creditors, a vote which also effectively signaled that the Greek people were willing to exit the Eurozone. Despite pledging to let the electorate decide the country’s future, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA stabbed the Greek working class in the back and ignored the outcome of the referendum, totally capitulating to the demands of the private banking corporatocracy. Much of the pseudo-left had pinned their naive hopes on SYRIZA, but the truth is that the warning signs were there from the very beginning, starting with Tsipras’s questionable decision to appoint economist Yanis Varoufakis as Finance Minister, a figure who had several conflicts of interest with the institutions he was assigned to stand up to.

Varoufakis was tapped to negotiate with the troika in spite of his open ties to the neoliberal Brookings Institute, a D.C. establishment think tank funded by a cabal of billionaires and the Qatari government, as well as his previous work as an advisor to the centre-left PASOK government of George Papandreou which preceded SYRIZA and initially ushered in the austerity. The “rock star economist” jumped ship after less than six months from his ministerial post on the stated reason it was evident the SYRIZA-led government was caving in to the troika, yet Varoufakis himself had already sold Greece down the river when he led the negotiations to extend its loan agreement with the IMF that was due to expire in his first month in office. Varoufakis could have used the prospect of a potential Grexit from the Eurozone as leverage and refused to negotiate, but instead fully surrendered to the troika’s bribery. When SYRIZA later fully embraced austerity, it was only a continuation of the process he set in motion while his resignation was motivated by self-interest in maintaining his radical facade.

Allowing the IMF to make a killing off Greece’s debt was just the first breach of faith. By the time Tsipras was voted out four years later, the SYRIZA-led government had made military deals with Israel, sold arms to Saudi Arabia during its genocidal war on Yemen, provided NATO with its territory for the use of military bases and naval presence, and paved the way for the latter to accede the renamed North Macedonia as a member state. Meanwhile, Varoufakis has since been busy lending his ‘expertise’ to left candidates in other countries. After the UK Labour Party’s resounding defeat in the 2019 general elections, many rightly faulted Jeremy Corbyn’s reversal of his decision to support the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum after he was convinced by the party establishment to change his longtime Euroskepticism. Unsurprisingly, another figure who had advised him to do the same was none other than the former Greek finance minister, who has also since partnered with Bernie Sanders to launch a “Progressive International.”

The 2019 UK general election was really a second Brexit referendum, where the electorate justifiably expressed their disgust at the Labour Party’s contempt for democracy and neutering of Corbyn. Once upon a time it was Labour who stood against the de-industrialization foisted onto Britain by the neoliberal imperialist EU and the offshoring of its manufacturing jobs to Germany and the global south. Corbyn should have listened to the words of past Labour leaders like Tony Benn who opposed the European project and its unelected bureaucracy as a violation of British sovereignty and democracy, not charlatans like Mr. Varoufakis. Worst of all is that the “left” is now disparaging the entirety of the working class as bigots and reducing the Leave vote to a reaction against the migrant crisis, as if Greece’s bailout referendum never occurred. Like the Yellow Vest protests in France, Corbyn’s loss was a sign that the opposition to globalization by the working class is still in good condition but has no authentic left to represent it.

If Bernie meets the same fate, a real vanguard should be prepared to take the reins.

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International Court Approves Probe of US War Crimes in Afghanistan

March 9th, 2020 by Bill Van Auken

An appellate panel of the International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled Thursday that an investigation leading to the potential prosecution of US officials for war crimes during Washington’s nearly two-decade-old war in Afghanistan can move forward.

Fatou Bensouda, the court’s Gambian-born chief prosecutor, whose US visa was revoked for her pursuit of the probe, praised Thursday’s ruling, stating, “Today is an important day for the cause of justice in Afghanistan.”

The ruling overturned a decision by ICC pretrial judges last year that a case involving crimes by the US and its puppet regime in Afghanistan “would not serve the interests of justice” because of the abject refusal of Washington and Kabul to cooperate. This decision was taken in the context of US threats of retaliation against the court, including economic sanctions and even the arrest of its members if the investigation was allowed to move forward.

The appeals judges ruled that last year’s decision was in contradiction to the ICC’s own statutes, holding that “It is for the prosecutor to determine whether there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation.” The appeals judges said that the pretrial panel had no business deciding whether the case served the “interests of justice,” but only whether there were grounds to believe that crimes had been committed and that they fell under the court’s jurisdiction.

The investigation is one of the first to be launched against a major imperialist power by the ICC, whose prosecutions have largely been limited to crimes committed by regimes and leaders in impoverished African countries. A preliminary investigation has also been launched into war crimes carried out by British forces in the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. Unlike the US, the UK is a signatory to the agreement establishing the international court.

The ICC’s prosecutors first opened a preliminary probe into crimes against humanity and war crimes in Afghanistan nearly 14 years ago.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo responded to Thursday’s ruling with the bellicose threats that have been the trademark of Washington toward the ICC since its founding by a decision of the United Nations in 2002. Describing the investigation as a “political vendetta” by an “unaccountable political institution masquerading as a legal body,” the secretary of state vowed that Washington would “take all necessary measures to protect our citizens from this renegade, unlawful so-called court.”

He characterized the ICC appeals judges’ ruling as “reckless” because it was issued after Washington had signed a so-called “peace deal” with the Taliban five days earlier. That agreement has already begun to unravel, with the US military carrying out air strikes against the Taliban after the Islamist movement launched multiple attacks on forces of Afghanistan’s US-backed puppet regime. The unstated assumption in Pompeo’s remarks is that “peace” in Afghanistan can be achieved only based on a cover-up of Washington’s crimes.

Asked whether the Trump administration would retaliate against the court, the secretary of state said that measures would be announced within “a couple of weeks about the path that we’re going to take to ensure that we protect American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, our intelligence warriors, the diplomats that have worked for the State Department over the years to ensure that the ICC doesn’t impose… pressure on them in a way that doesn’t reflect the noble nature of the undertakings of every one of those Americans.”

The concern in Washington is not for the troops, but rather that the real authors of the crimes in Afghanistan will someday be held to account: the presidents and their cabinets along with the top generals, the leading politicians of both major parties, the big business interests that supported the war and the media pundits who promoted it.

Pompeo went on to insist, “We have a solid system here in the United States. When there’s wrongdoing by an American, we have a process by which that is redressed.” The character of this “solid system” was made clear last year with Trump’s pardon of convicted war criminals, including two US Army officers convicted and jailed for illegal killings in Afghanistan.

The ICC prosecutor Bensouda requested the investigation of war crimes in 2017, saying there was evidence that US military and intelligence agencies had “committed acts of torture, cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity, rape and sexual violence” against detainees in Afghanistan.

In its ruling Thursday, the ICC Appeals Chamber declared it “appropriate to amend the appealed decision to the effect that the prosecutor is authorized to commence an investigation into alleged crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan since May 1, 2003, as well as other alleged crimes that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan.”

The prosecutor has already indicated that this extension of the investigation involves the “nexus” between the torture centers set up at Bagram Air Base and other US installations in Afghanistan to so-called “black sites” run by the CIA in countries like Poland, Lithuania and Romania. It could as well link to the infamous Abu Ghraib detention and torture facility in Iraq, where US military interrogators were sent after torturing prisoners in Afghanistan. It could also potentially encompass the drone assassinations and massacres of thousands carried out by successive US administrations in neighboring Pakistan.

The war crimes carried out by US imperialism since it invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 are innumerable. They began at the outset with massacres of unarmed detainees, including hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners of war who were asphyxiated and shot to death in sealed metal shipping containers after the siege of Kunduz.

Among the most infamous crimes were those exposed in an investigation into a so-called “Kill Team” formed by a unit of the US Army’s 5th Stryker Brigade sent into Kandahar Province as part of the Obama administration’s 2009–2010 “surge,” which brought the number of troops in Afghanistan to roughly 100,000. As members of the team themselves acknowledged—and documented in grisly photographs—they set out to systematically murder civilians and mutilate their bodies, taking fingers and pieces of skulls as trophies.

They lured one of their victims, a 15-year-old boy named Gul Mudin, toward them before throwing a grenade at him and repeatedly shooting him at close range. After bringing his father to identify the body, they took turns posing and playing with the corpse, before cutting off one of the boy’s fingers. Members of the team also described throwing candy from their Stryker armored vehicle while driving through villages and then shooting children who ran to pick it up.

US soldier with the body of 15-year-old Gul Mudin.

While the Pentagon sought to pass off these atrocities as the work of a few “bad apples,” the killings were known to their commanders and other units that participated in similar acts. They were the product of a criminal colonial occupation in which troops were taught to regard the entire civilian population as potential enemies and less than human.

The number of Afghans killed in the conflict is estimated at over 175,000, with many more indirect victims of the war’s destruction. Nearly 2,400 US troops have been killed, along with tens of thousands more wounded. US crimes include indiscriminate air strikes that wiped out wedding parties, village meetings and hospital patients and staff.

Among the most extensive exposures of US war crimes were those contained in the so-called “Afghan War Diaries,” some 91,000 documents given by the courageous US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks in 2010. In retaliation, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is now imprisoned in the UK facing extradition to the US on Espionage Act charges that carry a 175-year prison sentence, or worse. For her part, Manning is being held in indefinite detention in a US federal detention center in Virginia for refusing to testify against Assange.

Washington’s virulent hostility to any international investigation into its crimes was clear as soon as the ICC was founded in 2002. The Bush administration repudiated it from the outset, and the US Congress followed suit through its passage by an overwhelming bipartisan majority of a law protecting all US personnel from “criminal prosecution by an international criminal court to which the United States is not a party.” The same year, Bush issued a memorandum declaring that the US would not be bound by the Geneva Conventions in its war in Afghanistan.

US officials have sardonically referred to the anti-ICC law passed by Congress as the “Hague Invasion Authorization Act,” as it provides for the use of military force to free any US citizens facing charges before the ICC, which sits in The Hague, Netherlands.

The US reaction to the ICC’s Afghanistan investigation is an explicit repudiation of international law and the abandonment of any pretense that Washington is guided by anything other than the predatory interests of US imperialism. On this, the Trump administration and its ostensible opponents in the Democratic Party are agreed. Their unconditional defense of the war crimes carried out in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere is a warning to the working class that far greater crimes are being prepared as US imperialism prepares for “great power” conflicts.

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New Putin-Erdogan Deal Is Sugar-coating the Turks’ Surrender

March 9th, 2020 by Scott Ritter

This week’s meeting between Presidents Putin and Erdogan in Moscow was cast as preventing a war between Russia and Turkey in Syria. War, however, was never on the horizon. Putin called Erdogan’s bluff, and the Turk folded.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, accompanied by their respective senior national security advisers, met in Moscow on March 5. The purpose of this emergency summit was to negotiate the terms of a ceasefire that would bring an end to heavy fighting in Syria’s Idlib province that threatened to draw their two nations into direct military conflict. After more than six hours of meeting, a new agreement, packaged as an “additional protocol” to the “Memorandum on Stabilization of the Situation in the De-escalation Area as of September 17, 2018” (better known as the “Sochi Agreement”), was agreed to by both parties.

A sputtering offensive

Over the course of a week, from February 27 through March 5, Syria’s Idlib province transitioned from being ground zero for a war between the Syrian army and allied forces, and heavily armed groups opposed to the rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad, into a geopolitical powder keg that threatened to pull the Turkish and Russian militaries into direct conflict with one another. On March 1, Turkey, following up on threats previously made by President Erdogan to drive the Syrian Army and its allies back to the line of demarcation set forth in the original Sochi Agreement, unleashed a major offensive, dubbed “Operation Spring Shield” and involving thousands of Turkish troops fighting alongside anti-Assad formations.

This operation soon fizzled; not only was the Turkish advance halted in its tracks, but the Syrian Army, supported by Hezbollah and pro-Iranian militias, were able to recapture much of the territory lost in the earlier fighting. Faced with the choice of either escalating further and directly confronting Russian forces, or facing defeat on the battlefield, Erdogan instead flew to Moscow.

The new additional protocol, which entered into effect at midnight Moscow time on Friday, March 6, represents a strategic defeat for Erdogan and the Turkish military which, as NATO’s second-largest standing armed force, equipped and trained to the highest Western standards, should have been more than a match for a rag-tag Syrian Army, worn down after nine years of non-stop combat. The Syrian armed forces, together with its allies, however, fought the Turks to a standstill. Moreover, the anti-Assad fighters that had been trained and equipped by the Turks proved to be a disappointment on the battlefield.

One of the major reasons behind the Turkish failure was the fact that Russia controlled the air space over Idlib, denying the Turks the use of aircraft, helicopters and (except for a single 48-hour period) drones, while apparently using their own aircraft, together with the Syrian Air Force, to pummel both the Turkish military and their allied anti-Assad forces (though neither side has officially confirmed the Russians bombing the Turks – that would be a disaster for the talks). In the end, the anti-Assad fighters were compelled to take shelter within so-called ‘Observation posts’– heavily fortified Turkish garrisons established under the Sochi Agreement, intermingling with Turkish forces to protect themselves from further attack. Operation Spring Shield turned out to be a resounding defeat for the Turks and their allies.

Problems talking doesn’t solve

Under the terms of the original Sochi Agreement, the Turkish military was supposed to oversee the removal of heavily armed anti-Assad forces, including Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a designated terrorist organization, from so-called ‘de-escalation zones.’ The failure to accomplish this task, coupled with continued attacks against Syrian positions by HTS fighters, prompted the Syrian Army’s attack in Idlib. The additional protocol negotiated this week in Moscow “reaffirms” the Turkish and Russian “dedication” to “combat all forms of terrorism” and to “eliminate all terrorist groups in Syria”.

How this will be implemented is not spelled out in the additional protocol, indeed, given the fact that the majority of the anti-Assad forces that have sought refuge in the Turkish observation posts are HTS fighters that had, just a week before, been provided arms and vehicles to carry out attacks coordinated with the Turkish Army, the practicalities of implementation appear non-existent.

The agreement also focuses on another critical, yet unfulfilled, aspect of the original Sochi agreement – the guarantee of safe passage along the strategic M4 and M5 highway corridors connecting the city of Aleppo with Latakia (M4) and Damascus (M5). The inability and/or unwillingness on the part of the Turks to follow through with this provision was the major impetus behind the current Syrian offensive in Idlib. Indeed, the Syrian Army was able to gain full control of the M5 highway and was in the process of doing the same for the M4 highway when the Moscow agreement brought an end to the fighting.

Under the terms of the additional protocol, the new zones of de-escalation will be defined by the frontlines as they currently exist, securing the hard-won advances made by the Syrian Army and embarrassing Erdogan, who had promised to drive the Syrians back to the positions as they existed at the time of the original Sochi Agreement. Moreover, the M4 highway will now be buffered by a 12-kilometer security zone (Six kilometers on each side), and will be jointly patrolled by Turkey and Russia, guaranteeing secure passage for commercial vehicle traffic. These patrols will begin on March 15, which means the Turks have ten days to oversee the evacuation of anti-Assad forces from this corridor–in effect, pushing them back north of the M4 highway, which was the goal of the Syrian offensive to begin with.

Back in line, but for how long?

While couched as a ceasefire agreement, the additional protocol produced by the Moscow summit between Putin and Erdogan on Thursday is a thinly disguised instrument of surrender. The Syrian government got everything it was looking for by launching its offensive, and the Turks and their anti-Assad allies were left licking their wounds in a much-reduced Idlib pocket. Beyond preventing direct conflict between Turkey and Russia, the additional protocol achieves little that changes the situation on the ground. Turkey is still faced with the task of disarming the HTS fighters it currently embraces as allies, and the humanitarian crisis triggered by hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by the earlier fighting remains. In many ways, the additional protocol, like its antecedent, the Sochi Agreement, is an arrangement designed to fail, because by succeeding it only perpetuates an unsustainable reality that will only be resolved when the totality of Syrian territory is restored to the control of the Syrian government.

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Julian Assange: The Power of Truth

March 9th, 2020 by Massoud Nayeri

Julian Assange – an innocent journalist/publisher – is being constantly strip-searched, handcuffed and confined either in an iron cell in the infamous Belmarsh prison or in a glass cage during his show trial. The aim is to make Assange feel and look powerless. Ironically the news of the torture and weakened body of Julian Assange and his unfair trial has generated a tremendous political movement for his freedom.

Today this movement is a global movement and is rising to the level of the international campaign which saved Nelson Mandela’s life in preventing the death sentence and ultimately making his freedom possible. Although Assange is in isolation and confined in a tiny cell, certainly he is not alone. A few yards from his prison, there are people of all walks of life; artists, intellectuals, workers, youth and democratic-minded people who proudly hold their signs up high in defense of Julian Assange. Today, the line of justice for Assange has crossed the UK borders and has reached the four corners of the world. The power of truth is frightening the shameful authorities in London, Washington, and Canberra!

Is it possible to see Julian Assange unchained and FREE? The legendary Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg believes that without whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and publishers like Julian Assange “we would not have a democracy”, and in their defense, he says: “It is now up to us to make sure that the First Amendment is preserved.” The great Roger Waters clearly points out that: “The ruling class,… the corporate world, the rich people, the people who run everything, the people who tell [U.K. Prime Minister] Boris Johnson and Donald Trump what to do” are responsible for the imprisonment of Julian Assange.

He tirelessly campaigns for Assange’s freedom because he believes he is “representing the thoughts of ordinary people who believe in the law, freedom, and the freedom of the press and free speech.”

Professor Noam Chomsky emphasizes that “Assange in courageously upholding political beliefs … performed an enormous service to all those in the world who treasure the values of freedom and democracy.”

John Shipton, Assange’s father, logically and rightly so is concerned that his son’s extradition to the U.S. is nothing but a “death sentence”.

Nils Melzer, the UN Special Rapporteur on torture has stated: “My most urgent concern is that, in the United States, Mr. Assange would be exposed to a real risk of serious violations of his human rights, including his freedom of expression, his right to a fair trial and the prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Makia Freeman, the truth-telling researcher in his article on the Global Research site; “Freedom of the Press on Trial: 10 Reasons Why Assange Is Lawfully in the Right”* covers the key issues about Assange case which makes it a credible and informative source of information for the democratic-minded people who want to join the movement to FREE ASSANGE.

 

Today, there is a long list of prominent people who have made Assange’s freedom campaign uniquely strong. However, it is the ordinary people who are moving the campaign forward inch by inch, day by day. In the different demonstrations, the simple and creative hand-made signs in defense of Assange reflect the power of truth.

Today, the old unfounded accusations and plots by the police and media against Assange incontrovertibly have failed. People indeed understand that Julian Assange not only did not commit any crime, on the contrary, but he has exposed American war crimes! People have concluded that the treatment of Julian Assange is a miscarriage of justice; his confinement in a maximum-security prison under very harsh conditions is inhumane and unnecessary.

Therefore today ordinary people more than ever understand that the trial of Assange is an attempt to crush independent journalism, freedom of the press and at the same time to punish Assange as an individual, sending a signal to all courageous journalists.

Join the global movement to FREE JULIAN ASSANGE and block his extradition to the U.S. now; he is innocent!

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

All images in this article are from the author

The Criminality of the Democratic Party. DNC Maneuvers to Derail Bernie Sanders

March 9th, 2020 by Donald Monaco

The utter and complete corruption of the Democratic Party is on full display as the DNC desperately maneuvers to derail the insurgent candidacy of Bernie Sanders by denying him a majority of delegates to the July convention in Minneapolis.  Winning a mere plurality of votes in primary elections will deny Sanders a first ballot nomination and allow the DNC to use their super-delegates to support the conventional candidate, Joe Biden, on a second ballot.

Hillary Clinton and the DNC already conspired to successfully deny Sanders the nomination in 2016.  The mere fact that the party installed super-delegates after the factious anti-war candidacy of George McGovern in 1972 should sufficiently illustrate the party hierarchy’s contempt for democracy.

The opposition of the political establishment to the Sanders’ campaign stems from its programmatic support for a rabid neoliberal agenda against the Senator’s proposed New Deal liberal reforms.  The Democrats have been moving to the right in American politics for the past three decades and have no desire to reverse course.

Beginning with the Clinton presidency and continuing throughout the Obama regime, the Democratic Party initiated a new Cold War with Russia, imposed neoliberal economics globally, abandoned class politics for identity politics, deregulated the financial industry and the media, bailed out Wall Street at the expense of main street and presided along with the Republicans, over the greatest transfer of wealth to the top 1% of the population in American history.

Nevertheless, the Democratic Party is viewed by many of its supporters as a ‘lesser evil’ than the Republicans. Furthermore, in this election season, Trump and the Republicans are so terrible, the thinking goes, that anybody the Democrats nominate will be a better president than the orange billionaire.

Prior to evaluating these assumptions, a little lesson in political history is in order.  To begin, it is important to identify the class nature of the Democratic Party and to illustrate its principal functions in American and international affairs.

The Democratic Party is one of the two partner parties of American capitalism.  As with the Republicans, it is primarily financed by the corporate rich and represents their class interests.  The policies it implements are cohered within a vast policy formulation network of foundations, think tanks and policy discussion groups that have been set up for the purpose of legitimizing the policy choices of the corporate community and its military industrial security complex.

Since the Great Depression, one of the major functions of the Democratic Party has been to diffuse popular discontent by advocating concessionary policies in times of social unrest.

Exaggerated wealth concentration and financial speculation during the 1920’s led straight away to the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  Worker militancy, mass industry wide unionization, sit-down strikes, secondary boycotts, factory occupations and pitched battles with the police brought Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal of 1935 along with the Wagner Act, the Magna Carta of the labor movement that same year.

Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, Jr

Institutional racism, legal segregation, violent social repression, urban ghettoization and systemic police brutality resulted in the emergence of a civil rights movement and black liberation struggle that organized bus boycotts, sit-ins, civil disobedience, pickets, urban rebellions, armed self-defense and a mass march on Washington that produced Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, Fair Housing Act of 1968 and War on Poverty in 1965.

A genocidal war in Vietnam, a compulsory military draft and staggering American casualties in that war generated an anti-war movement whose tactics included the burning of draft cards, mass marches on the Pentagon, campus rebellion, student strikes and a radical resistance that involved the bombing of government targets undertaken in solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people.  These struggles brought forth the anti-war candidacies of Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.  Their entry into the presidential race of 1968 led to the decision of the war’s chief proponent, Lyndon Johnson, not to seek a second term as president.  Johnson’s decision signaled the beginning of the end of U.S. involvement in the war as his successor, Richard Nixon, was compelled to promise an end to the war so he could secure his election victory over Johnson’s Vice-President and war advocate, Hubert Humphrey.  Nixon subsequently began troop withdraws and ‘Vietnamization” of a conflict that was subsequently abandoned along with the military draft in 1973.

In short, the Democrats operate as the shock absorber of American capitalism whose main function is to diffuse, absorb and co-opt social opposition and political dissent during times of upheaval caused by economic and social crisis.

A corollary function of the Democratic Party is to periodically impose domestic political repression on various sectors of the American population that refuse to be co-opted in defense of a persistently rapacious capitalistic and virulently racist social order.  In this respect, the Democrats alternate with the Republicans when it becomes necessary to quash incipient rebellion.

Woodrow Wilson’s administration produced the Sedition Act of 1917, Espionage Act of 1918 and Palmer Raids of 1919, 1920 initiating the first Red Scare; Franklin D. Roosevelt initiated FBI investigations of the Communist Party for domestic subversion in 1936 and ordered the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942;

Harry Truman mandated loyalty oaths, signed the National Security Act creating the National Security Council and the CIA, signed the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act and began the second Red Scare in 1947;

John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson continued the murderous FBI COINTELPRO program begun in 1956 during their tenure in office from 1961-1968; Johnson declared a ‘War on Crime’ in 1965 integrating the federal government with local law enforcement;

Bill Clinton’s administration produced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 resulting in the exponential growth of mass incarceration, a militarized police force, accelerated executions on death row and the evisceration of civil liberties;

Clinton’s Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno organized the deadly ATF/FBI/military raid on the compound of Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas in 1993;

Barak Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act in 2012, section 1021 of which effectively terminated habeas corpus, defended the NSA’s Prism program of mass surveillance in 2013 and used the Espionage Act to indict whistleblowers from 2010-2012; the majority of Congressional Democrats supported the Patriot Act from 2001-2020 further eroding civil liberties.

Internationally, the Democrats along with their Republican cohorts have conducted wars, instigated covert interventions and imposed political repression in countries around the world as part of their defense of global capitalism and corporate hegemony under the pretexts of fighting communism, interdicting terrorism and making the world safe for democracy and human rights.

Wilson invaded Haiti in 1915 and brought the United States into World War I in 1916; FDR entered World War II in 1941;

Truman dropped Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, intervened in Greece thus beginning the Cold War in 1947, recognized Israel in 1948 and started the Korean War in 1950;

Kennedy unleashed the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose in Cuba along with implementing the doctrine of counter-insurgency in Asia and Latin America in 1961;

Johnson backed a coup d’état in Brazil in 1964, escalated the Vietnam War and invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965; Carter endorsed the CIA’s Operation Cyclone that armed the Islamic Mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and supported repressive governments in Zaire, Angola, East Timor, Guatemala and El Salvador from 1977-1980;

Clinton enforced sanctions on Iraq from 1993-2001 killing one and a half million Iraqi civilians, bombed Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998 and bombed Yugoslavia in 1999;

Obama presided over coup d’états in Honduras in 2009 and Ukraine in 2014, bombed Libya in 2011, waged proxy war in Syria in 2012, imposed sanctions on Russia in 2014 and conducted drone warfare across the Middle East and North Africa.

A cursory examination of the foregoing political history reveals that the Democratic Party, no less so than its Republican counterpart, represents the interests of the American corporate plutocracy not the American people.

The idea that the Democrats are a ‘lesser evil’ is pure fiction.  The belief that a ‘political revolution’ can be waged from within the Democratic Party is an illusion.

The Democrats are a party of criminals.  They are a war party.  They serve Wall Street.  A vote for the Democrats is a vote for American imperialism, an empire that has committed crimes against humanity too vast to comprehend.

Likewise for the Republicans.  The American political class should not be supported or respected.  It should be imprisoned.  But that would take a genuine ‘political revolution’ to accomplish.

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Donald Monaco is a political analyst who lives in Brooklyn, New York.  He received his Master’s Degree in Education from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1979 and was radicalized by the Vietnam War.  He writes from an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist perspective.  His recent book is titled, The Politics ofTerrorism, and is available at amazon.com

Ceasefire in Syria: Dead on Arrival?

March 9th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Ceasefire in Syria’s Idlib province is more illusion than reality.

At best, principles Putin and Erdogan agreed on last Thursday abated fighting short-term without halting it or preventing a flareup like all previous times when ceasefires were declared throughout years of war in Syria.

After nine years of Obama regime-launched aggression, now Trump’s war, resolution is nowhere in prospect because of bipartisan US support for regime change.

Endless US-led NATO et al war on the Syrian Arab Republic is all about replacing its legitimate government with pro-Western puppet rule, along with isolating Iran regionally — aiming to topple its government.

For Turkey’s Erdogan, it’s all about annexing northern Syrian territory, especially its oil producing areas.

For Israel, it’s all about eliminating a rival state to advance its regional dominance aims as Washington’s Middle East junior partner.

Russian support is crucial for Syria to survive as a nation-state in its present form.

Press TV quoted Syrian UN envoy Bashar al-Jaafar’s remarks to the Arabic-language Elnashra online news service, saying:

“I can confirm that Syrian leadership besides Syrian people will not allow Erdogan or anyone else to repeat in Idlib what happened in Alexandretta.”

In July 1939, weeks before WW II began, Turkish forces seized the Syrian territory, transforming it into Ankara’s Hatay province.

Jaafari called Erdogan Turkey’s Netanyahu, describing them both as “occupiers and aggressive,” adding:

“What we care about in Syria is the elimination of terrorism and the establishment of full control and sovereignty over Syrian soil.”

“If Erdogan listens to the voice of wisdom, puts an end to his support for terrorism, refrains from destructive interference in Syria and stops wasting the blood of forces of his aggressive and occupying army, this will serve peace and stability of all peoples of the region, including the neighboring Turkish nation.”

If his cross-border aggression continues, “nothing will prevent us from continuing our war against terrorism and all those who support, arm, finance, and use it for political gains.”

Time and again, Erdogan breached what he agreed to with Russia in Astana and Sochi — proving he can never be trusted.

Instead of opposing regional terrorism, he actively supports it, using jihadists to advance his imperial aims, operating like the US, NATO and Israel.

Al Jaafari: “(T)he number of terrorists, especially foreigners, increased in Idlib, and instead of withdrawing all tanks, rocket launchers and mortars from the demilitarized zone by October 10, 2018, thousands of (Turkish) soldiers plus heavy military hardware were deployed inside the Syrian territory.”

“We never expected Erdogan to honor his pledges, because this simply means the end of his reckless adventures in Syria, and an end to his political and military interventions in other countries.”

No reasons exist to believe he’ll turn a page for restoration of peace and stability in Syria, what he hasn’t done throughout nine years of war.

Idlib is the last Western/Turkish/Israeli/Saudi supported terrorist stronghold in Syria.

It’s liberating struggle depends on eliminating its scourge in the province and wherever else it may emerge in the country.

It depends on ending foreign occupation by US and Turkish forces.

War continues in Idlib and elsewhere in Syria despite what Putin and Erdogan agreed on last week.

On Saturday, Russia’s reconciliation center in Syria said the following:

No cessation of hostilities agreed to by Putin and Erdogan in Moscow has been achieved. Fighting abated but continues.

Syrian and Russian forces are committed to eliminate the threat of terrorism in Idlib and throughout the Syrian Arab Republic.

“Over the last 24 hours, the Russian party of the Russia-Turkey Commission on violations of the Joint Agreement has registered 19 cases of firing in the provinces of: Idlib-3, Latakia-7, Aleppo-9.”

“The Turkish side has registered 1 cases of ceasefire violations in in the provinces of Idlib-1.”

According to Russia’s Avia.Pro publication on Saturday,

“(t)wo  Russian military aircraft in the sky over the province of Idlib prevented a Turkish F-16 fighter from shooting down the Syrian fighter-bomber Su-22, which carried out attacks on terrorist positions.”

“Thanks to Russian aircraft, the Turkish combat fighter not only did not dare to enter Syrian airspace, but also underwent an unexpected attack.”

A state of undeclared war by Erdogan exists on Syria, more incidents like the above highly likely ahead.

Russian support for Damascus is key to checking US and Turkish revanchist aims in Syria.

Supported by the West, Turkey, Israel and the Saudis, the terrorist threat to Syrian sovereignty continues.

Following principles agreed on by Putin and Erdogan last week, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the US created and supported al-Nusra offshoot from al-Qaeda by another name, said the following:

“(C)easefire is nothing new…(I)ts  days will not pass until there is another betrayal against the revolution…”

“This agreement is marred by obscurity and floating platitudes that allow for the Russian occupier to make use of it for new aggression.”

“We thank the Turkish government for clearly standing with and supporting the Syrian revolution.”

“(T)here is no victory for our revolution without continuing the struggle against our enemy however much it costs.”

(T)here is no security or peace in Syria except by removing” its government.

On Saturday, Iran’s Fars News reported the death of a senior IRGC military advisor in Palmyra, Syria, the second death of an Iranian military official in Syria since late February.

Ceasefire in Idlib province exists in name only, Turkish claims of no violations more illusion than reality.

It just a matter of time before an invented pretext by the US, Turkey, and/or one of their imperial partners unjustifiably justifies escalated fighting.

What happened before numerous is highly likely to repeat again.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Conservation Groups Argue in Federal Court That Trump’s Keystone XL Pipeline Approval Was Illegal

March 9th, 2020 by Center For Biological Diversity

Conservation, environmental and landowner groups argued in federal court in Montana today that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wrongly permitted the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline to be constructed through hundreds of rivers, streams and wetlands and failed to evaluate the project’s impacts, a violation of bedrock U.S. environmental laws.

U.S. District Judge Brian Morris heard oral arguments in the lawsuit filed in July 2019 by Northern Plains Resource Council, Bold Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Friends of the Earth against the Army Corps of Engineers. The case centers on the agency’s approval of Keystone XL under its insufficient “Nationwide Permit 12” process, under which the Corps avoided the transparent and comprehensive review normally required for major projects.

The groups argue that this approval violates the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, and urged the court to require the Corps to conduct additional environmental review of the effects of pipelines like Keystone XL on local waterways, lands, wildlife, communities and the climate.

The hearing comes as the tar sands industry faces questions about its very future. TC Energy made the stark admission at its latest quarterly meeting that the company is not ready to commit to a final investment decision yet on Keystone XL.

Other projects, including the recently canceled Teck Resources tar sands mine “megaproject,” are also struggling to move forward in the face of climate considerations, indigenous-led opposition, and heightened scrutiny by analysts and investors after $90 billion in tar sands projects have been shelved over the past five years.

Late last year, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana ruled that the Trump administration violated several environmental laws by issuing a cross-border permit for Keystone XL without adequately evaluating critical information on the pipeline’s environmental impacts, including tar sands oil spills and climate change.

Although Trump effectively circumvented that ruling by issuing a new permit in March, the fact remains that the federal government has yet to fully evaluate the pipeline’s harmful environmental effects, as required by law.

“Farmers and ranchers in Nebraska stake their livelihoods and our food supply on clean water, and the Trump administration’s illegal blanket approval of water crossings for a risky tar sands export pipeline puts that all at grave risk,” said Jane Kleeb, president of Bold Alliance. “TC Energy’s recent admission that its ‘not ready to commit’ to moving forward on KXL combined with the flight of investors from Canada’s tar sands should be evidence enough that this boondoggle of a project will see no reward, and is all risk to clean water, wildlife, and climate.

“The fact that TC Energy itself now refuses to commit to Keystone XL speaks volumes on how flawed and unnecessary the project really is,” said Eric Glitzenstein, the Center for Biological Diversity’s litigation director. “The Trump administration’s so-called ‘streamlined’ permitting process is a desperate farce designed to shield an impending environmental disaster from scrutiny. It is also blatantly illegal and the court cannot allow it to proceed.”

“TC Energy has made it clear time and again that they can’t be trusted not to spill their dirty tar sands into our water, and yet the Trump administration is trying to give them a free pass to build Keystone XL through hundreds of waterways without even considering the risks to clean water and wildlife,” said Sierra Club Senior Attorney Doug Hayes. “We cannot allow this reckless and illegal approval process to stand.”

“Pumping some of the world’s dirtiest and most dangerous oil products through our backyards is excessively dangerous,” said Marcie Keever, legal director at Friends of the Earth. “At a moment when TC Energy is second-guessing their investment, the Trump administration continues to push for this unnecessary and hazardous project. We hope the court will ensure that the Army Corps of Engineers performs a proper environmental review.”

“The proposed Keystone XL tar sands pipeline has never been in our national interest,” said Cecilia Segal, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The recent financial news and skittishness from TC Energy to commit to the project confirms that. We’ll keep fighting to protect our nation’s wildlife, water, communities, and climate from this disastrous and dirty pipeline until we stop it, once and for all.”

“We are confident the court will again see the Trump administration’s efforts for what they are: another illegal attempt to force a dangerous, Canadian tar sands pipeline through Montana ignoring threats to hundreds of waterways vital to our farmers, ranchers, and tribal communities,” said Dena Hoff, a Glendive, Mont., farmer and member of Northern Plains Resource Council. “TC Energy has repeatedly harmed rural communities, including with their 383,000 gallon spill only weeks ago in neighboring North Dakota’s wetlands. Our communities can’t afford the risks KXL poses to our irreplaceable resources.”

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Video: Syrian Army Win Battle Against Erdogan Forces in Idlib, but War Is Far from Over

March 8th, 2020 by South Front

The first days of March broke the dreams of the Turkish political and military leadership of a swift victory over the Syrian Armed Forces. Operation Spring Shield failed to achieve the goal officially declared by top Turkish officials – to push the Syrian Army back from territories liberated in Idlib since September 2018, when Moscow and Ankara reached so-called Sochi agreements. The deal was intended to separate terrorists from moderate rebels, create a 30km deep demilitarized zone and de-escalate the situation in Greater Idlib in general. These agreements have never been fully implemented because Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other al-Qaeda-linked groups did not withdraw from the demarked demilitarized zone and did not separate from these mysterious moderate rebels that reportedly existed somewhere in Idlib.

This led to the resumption of active anti-terrorist actions by the Syrian Army supported by Russia and Iran, the liberation of thousands of km2 from radicals, and the deployment of Syrian troops within striking distance of Idlib city. Ankara saw the existence of the militant-held enclave in Greater Idlib as an important tool of its policy towards Syria considered its possible destruction a vital threat to its own interests and responded with a large-scale military operation against the Damascus government.

Since its start, Turkish forces have victoriously captured Nayrab village and a few other nearby positions. At one point, they also entered the town of Saraqib on the M5 highway, but were then forced to retreat after they were counter-attacked by the Syrian Army. Later, units of the Russian Military Police deployed there.

The Nayrab success came amid major setbacks of the Turkish-led forces in southern Idlib. Syrian forces captured over a dozen settlements and repelled Turkish attempts to recapture the town of Kafr Nabul. The Turkish-led attack on positions of the Syrian Army in western Aleppo also ended with no results after the Syrian Army took back Sheikh Aqil and the nearby hilltop that it had lost to Turkish-led forces for a day.

Summing up, the Syrian Army defeated Turkish-led forces in an open battle, kept control over key positions along the M5 highway, and set conditions for further advances south of the M4 highway.

According to Syrian state media, in the period from December 15, 2019 to March 5, 2020 government forces liberated 215 settlements spread across 1,600km2. During the same period, 6,100 terrorists were eliminated, 2550 others were wounded, and 615 vehicles belonging to Turkish-backed militant groups were destroyed. The report also claimed that 100 ‘Turkish’ pieces of military equipment were eliminated. These numbers as well as those provided by the Turkish side about supposed Syrian Army casualties are highly overestimated. As of the evening of March 5, the Turkish Defense Ministry claimed that its forces had ‘neutralized’ 3,322 Syrian soldiers, shot down 3 warplanes, 8 helicopters, 3 UAVs, destroyed 155 battle tanks, 103 artillery pieces and rocket launchers, 8 air defense systems, 15 anti-tank weapons, 4 mortars, 157 various military vehicles and 10 weapon depots.

Turkey and Syria should make at least a bit softer claims if they want to make these claims look more reliable. Regardless of the provided numbers, the situation on the frontline speaks for itself. The March 5 visit of Turkish President Recep Erdogan to Moscow came amid another large-scale attack of Turkish-led forces on Saraqib. This attack, however, was repelled.

The Russian and Turkish presidents negotiated a new deal to de-escalate tensions in Idlib. It includes the following:

  • The cessation of all hostilities along the existing line of contact from midnight on March 6th;
  • Russia and Turkey will create a six-kilometer-deep security corridor both north and south of the M4 highway;
  • Russia and Turkey agreed to begin joint patrols on March 15th along the M-4 highway in Syria;
  • All previous agreements remain in effect. Terrorists are excluded from the ceasefire.

This agreement has several important implications:

  • Turkey in fact confirmed that it had lost its small war on Syria and officially accepted all the gains made by the Syrian Army since September 2018;
  • The Syrian Army kept control of the M5 highway and significantly improved its military position in the region;
  • The agreed buffer zone, along the M4 highway, is located inside the militant-held area. It can only be created and joint patrols launched if radical militants are removed from this sector. If militants are not removed, this will create conditions for another operation in the area, fully within the framework of the agreement signed by Turkey;
  • Both Turkey and Russia declared that they support a political solution to the conflict. However, a political solution is not possible as long as terrorist groups are present in the area. This creates conditions for further tensions and escalations.

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Putin Saves Erdogan from Himself

March 8th, 2020 by Pepe Escobar

At the start of their discussion marathon in Moscow on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with arguably the most extraordinary diplomatic gambit of the young 21st century.

Putin said:

“At the beginning of our meeting, I would like to once again express my sincere condolences over the death of your servicemen in Syria. Unfortunately, as I have already told you during our phone call, nobody, including Syrian troops, had known their whereabouts.”

This is how a true world leader tells a regional leader, to his face, to please refrain from positioning his forces as jihadi supporters – incognito, in the middle of an explosive theater of war.

The Putin-Erdogan face-to-face discussion, with only interpreters allowed in the room, lasted three hours, before another hour with the respective delegations. In the end, it all came down to Putin selling an elegant way for Erdogan to save face – in the form of, what else, yet another ceasefire in Idlib, which started at midnight on Thursday, signed in Turkish, Russian and English – “all texts having equal legal force.”

Additionally, on March 15, joint Turkish-Russian patrolling will start along the M4 highway – implying endless mutating strands of al-Qaeda in Syria won’t be allowed to retake it.

If this all looks like déjà vu, that’s because it is. Quite a few official photos of the Moscow meeting prominently feature Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu – the other two heavyweights in the room apart from both Presidents. In the wake of Putin, Lavrov and Shoigu must have read the riot act to Erdogan in no uncertain terms. That’s enough: now behave, please – or else face dire consequences.

The second Ataturk

A predictable feature of the new ceasefire is that both Moscow and Ankara – part of the Astana peace process, alongside Tehran – remain committed to maintaining the “territorial integrity and sovereignty” of Syria. Once again, there’s no guarantee that Erdogan will abide.

It’s crucial to recap the basics. Turkey is deep in financial crisis. Ankara needs cash – badly. The lira is collapsing. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) is losing elections. Former prime minister and party leader Ahmet Davutoglu – who conceptualized neo-Ottomanism – has left the party and is carving his own political niche. The AKP is mired in an internal crisis.

Erdogan’s response has been to go on the offensive. That’s how he re-establishes his aura. Combine Idlib with his maritime pretensions around Cyprus and blackmail pressure on the EU via the inundation of Lesbos in Greece with refugees, and we have Erdogan’s trademark modus operandi in full swing.

In theory, the new ceasefire will force Erdogan to finally abandon all those myriad al Nusra/ISIS metastases – what the West calls “moderate rebels,” duly weaponized by Ankara. This is an absolute red line for Moscow – and also for Damascus. There will be no territory left behind for jihadis. Iraq is another story: ISIS is still lurking around Kirkuk and Mosul.

No NATO fanatic will ever admit it, but once again it was Russia that just prevented the threatened “Muslim invasion” of Europe advertised by Erdogan. Yet there was never any invasion in the first place, only a few thousand economic migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sahel, not Syrians. There are no “one million” Syrian refugees on the verge of entering the EU.

The EU, proverbially, will keep blabbering. Brussels and most capitals still have not understood that Bashar al-Assad has been fighting al Nusra/ISIS all along. They simply don’t understand the correlation of forces on the ground. Their fallback position is always the scratched CD of “European values.” No wonder the EU is a secondary actor in the whole Syrian tragedy.

I received excellent feedback from progressive Turkish analysts as I attempted to connect Erdogan Khan’s motivations with Turkey’s history and the empires of he steppes.

Their argument, essentially, is that Erdogan is an internationalist, but in Islamic terms only. Since 2000 he has managed to create a climate of denying ancient Turkish nationalist motives. He does use Turkishness, but as one analyst stresses, “he has nothing to do with ancient Turks. He’s an Ikhwani. He doesn’t care about Kurds either, as long as they are his ‘good Islamists.’”

Another analyst points out that, “in modern Turkey, being ‘Turkish’ is not related to race, because most Turkish people are Anatolian, a mixed population.”

So, in a nutshell, what Erdogan cares about is Idlib, Aleppo, Damascus, Mecca and not Southwest Asia or Central Asia. He wants to be “the second Ataturk.” Yet nobody except Islamists sees him this way – and “sometimes he shows his anger because of this. His only aim is to beat Ataturk and create an Islamic opposite of Ataturk.” And creating that anti-Ataturk would be via neo-Ottomanism.

Crack independent historian Dr Can Erimtan, whom I had the pleasure to meet when he still lived in Istanbul (he’s now in self-exile), offers a sweeping Eurasianist background to Erdogan’s dreams. Well, Vladimir Putin has just offered the second Ataturk some breathing room. All bets are off on whether the new ceasefire will metastasize into a funeral pyre.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from en.kremlin.ru

Trump Regime Blocks UN Security Council Support for Syria Ceasefire Already Breached

March 8th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

The US under both right wings of its war party wants endless conflict, instability, and chaos continuing in all its war theaters — peace considered detrimental to its imperial ambitions.

On Friday, the Trump regime blocked a Security Council statement, expressing support for cessation of hostilities in Idlib province Syria agreed to by Russia and Turkey on Thursday in Moscow.

Commenting on Friday’s session, Russia’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia said his government sought Security Council support for what Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed on with regard to halting hostilities in Idlib.

“(I)t was not possible because of the position of one delegation,” he said.

Asked which one, he said it’s “not appropriate to say the name. Do some guessing.” None needed.

The US is the main obstacle to world peace and stability along with its junior imperial partners — notably key NATO countries, Israel, the Saudis and Turkey under Erdogan in the Middle East.

Nebenzia expressed hope that what was agreed on Thursday in Moscow would hold — “provided that all parties maintain their commitments to the Additional Protocol,” he stressed.

It states the following:

Cessation of hostilities in Idlib to begin after midnight March 6.

Establishment of a 6-km-wide security corridor to the north and south along both sides of the M4 highway by March 15.

Russia and Turkey to jointly patrol the strategic M4 highway to begin March 15.

The Additional Protocol became effective on signing by Russia and Turkey Thursday.

Both countries agreed to support Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity.

They agreed “to combat all forms of terrorism, and to eliminate all terrorist groups in Syria as designated by the UNSC, while agreeing that targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure cannot be justified under any pretext.”

No military solution to years of war was agreed on.

“(I)t can only be resolved through Syrian-led and Syrian-owned, UN facilitated political process in line with the UNSCR 2254 (Dec. 2015).”

It calls for cessation of hostilities and diplomatic settlement to the long-running conflict.

Mandating all parties to the conflict cease hostilities, it urges all UN member states to support efforts for restoring peace and stability to Syria.

The Russia/Turkey agreement also calls for “prevent(ing) further deterioration of the humanitarian situation, protection of civilians, and ensuring humanitarian assistance to all Syrians in need without preconditions and discrimination, as well as prevention of displacement of people and facilitation of safe  and voluntary return of refugees and internally displaced persons to their original places of residence in Syria.”

For now, the Russia/Turkey agreement prevented possible direct confrontation between forces of both countries in Syria.

It failed to stop hostilities on the ground. According to Reuters, at least 15 people were killed in clashes between jihadists and Syrian forces on Friday — hours after ceasefire took effect.

According to Russian reconciliation center in Syria head Admiral Oleg Zhuralev, “(s)ix shelling (incidents) have been registered since the beginning of ceasefire at midnight on 6 March.”

AMN News reported that armed drones unsuccessfully attempted to attack Russia’s Khmeimim airbase in Syria Friday night.

Separately, jihadists attacked Syrian forces in and around the strategic city of Saraqib — controlled by government troops.

The above incidents and others breached the tenuous ceasefire. Like numerous earlier ones, it failed straightaway.

Fighting in Idlib continues sporadically. It’s likely just a matter of time before it escalates to pre-Friday levels between jihadists and Syrian/Russian forces.

Many thousands of heavily armed US, NATO, Turkish, Israeli, Saudi supported jihadists remain in Idlib.

Their presence and continued attacks against government forces prevents restoration of peace and stability to the province.

So do occupying Turkish forces and Erdogan’s annexation aims.

The same goes for US occupation of northern and southern Syrian territory, including control over Syrian oil producing areas.

Restoration of peace and stability in Syria requires elimination of illegal foreign occupation and defeat of jihadist fighters.

Russia’s agreement with Turkey failed to resolve these issues.

As long as the US rejects restoration of peace and stability to Syria, wanting Assad replaced by pro-Western puppet rule, conflict resolution will remain unattainable.

Despite Russia’s good faith efforts, that’s the disturbing reality of where things stand in Syria today.

Endless conflict continues with no prospect for near-term resolution.

A Final Comment

Ignoring multiple incidents of violence in Idlib following Thursday’s Russia/Turkey agreement in Moscow, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar pretended they didn’t happen, saying:

“From the moment the ceasefire agreement in Idlib entered into force, there have been no cases of violation thereof until now.”

“We are closely monitoring the situation and in case of attacks on our observation posts will immediately respond.”

Ahead of Thursday’s Moscow meeting, so-called Turkish observation posts have been used as platforms for Erdogan-supported jihadists to attack Syrian forces, civilians, and Russia’s Khmeimim airbase.”

Are they still used for this purpose? Russian satellite imagery will discover if this is the case.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Clinton and Sanders. “Nobody Likes Him” Says Hillary

March 8th, 2020 by Robert Fantina

Former First Lady, New York State Senator, Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton continues to criticize Vermont senator Bernie Sanders whenever the opportunity to do so presents itself. ‘Nobody likes him’, says she, despite the millions of people who voted for him in the current primary season alone. ‘No one wants to work with him’, she proclaims despite high-profile endorsements from prominent members of Congress. And she blames her electoral defeat in 2016, when the odious Donald Trump was elected, at least in part to Sanders’ delayed endorsement of her.

We will elucidate some facts for the hapless Clinton.

  • The Democratic National Committee (DNC) in 2016 was anything but democratic, for two main reasons. 1. It ‘leaked’ useful information to the Clinton campaign that it withheld from the Sanders campaign; when this was exposed, it resulted in the resignation of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (Florida) as chair of the DNC. And 2, the ‘super-delegates’ were not bound by primary votes; they could, and did, vote to nominate whoever they chose, regardless of the wishes of the people of the state they represented.
  • Clinton never met a war she didn’t like. For example, despite all evidence indicating that Iraq had no involvement in the attacks of September 11, 2001, and United Nations inspectors combing the country and finding no trace of the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that then President George Bush and his corrupt Secretary of State, Colin Powell, told the world were threatening the very existence of the United States, she voted to give Bush broad powers to wage war.
  • Clinton is also the darling of the very rich; her campaign, unlike that of Sanders, was funded by the super-wealthy, many of whom benefited during her work as secretary of state, by donating to the Clinton foundation. Conflict of interest, anyone?
  • Zionism doesn’t sit well with the rank and file. Clinton said that Syria must be destroyed to protect Israel, and she supports without reservation the brutal, apartheid Israeli regime. This shows her complete disdain for international law and human rights. That alone should disqualify her from public office.

Pundits have said that the current battle for the Democratic nomination is a fight for the soul of the party. It seems it lost its soul some time ago, but that is a topic for another essay. Clinton must revel in the fact that former vice president Joe Biden did surprising well in the Super Tuesday primaries. He, like she, is happy with the status quo: benefits for the rich, with an occasional bone thrown to the poor and middle class. And the Democratic establishment would prefer to see another four years of Donald Trump, rather than rocking their status-quo boat.

And what of Biden’s endorsements? Establishment representatives (this writer uses that term only as a title; elected officials in the U.S. seldom ‘represent’ the people who elect them), and former representatives, including former Texas Representative Beto O’Rourke, Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar and former South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, all former rivals for the nomination, all Zionists, all elitists, have climbed upon his bandwagon. Even billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has endorsed him.

Sanders endorsements include the wildly popular Alexandra Ocasio-Cortex of New York and Illan Omar of Minnesota, among many others. These are not people beholden to wealthy corporations. They represent the people who voted for them. They do not take the positions the corporate elite wants. But the best way to get elected and re-elected in the United States is to bow to the corporate masters. Clinton is a world-wide champion in doing so. Sanders? Not so much.

The bitterness to which Clinton clings is understandable. She lost the presidential election to a dishonest, misogynist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic reality television performer. It is no wonder she will lash out at Sanders, who was her chief rival for the nomination in 2016, and anyone else who might get in her line of fire. One would think that almost anyone could have defeated Trump, but Clinton couldn’t do it. And because of the way the Democratic Party cooked the books to assure Clinton’s coronation, the U.S. now has a conservative Supreme Court; children in cages at the Mexican border; a plan to establish Palestine as a series of Bantustans; a shrinking middle class, and the threat of war with Iran. In addition, U.S. citizens are told by their president, when white-supremacists are confronted by counter-protesters, that there are ‘good people’ on all sides; that national security operations are wrong when they say that Russia interfered in the U.S. election of 2016, and that they are also wrong in assigning blame to Saudi Prince Mohammad Bin Salman for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

Some things under Trump would be no different under Clinton. Support for terrorists in Syria, Venezuela, Palestine and Iraq would continue. CIA overthrows of governments would not end, and people would still be tortured by the United States government and military in Guantanamo and various rendition sites around the world. International law would only need to be followed by nations that are not U.S. allies, and U.S. alliances would be based on power and profits. The already grotesquely-bloated military budget would continue to grow.

What would a Joe Biden presidency bring? Change? Hardly! He has said that he loves the racist Israeli Prime Minister, supports war over diplomacy and is nearly as beholden to special interests as Clinton (it would be difficult to match her status in that category).

Would a Sanders presidency bring change?

While many of his proposals would need to be watered down (sadly) to get through Congress, we could at least hope for better and less expensive medical care for everyone; an end to unlimited, no-questions-asked foreign aid to Israel; affordable college tuition and some relief from the crippling student debt so many citizens carry. Taxes on the very rich might possibly increase, and the so-called ‘safety net’ for the poor, which most presidents are happy to shred to finance military expense increases, might actually be strengthened.

But let us not be too optimistic; the Democratic Party is democratic in name only (similar to elected ‘representatives’ being representative in name only), so Sanders’ road to the nomination is littered with the Party’s schemes to keep it from him. Who are the little people to decide who the nominee should be? Such decisions are better left to the power-brokers, those who hobnob with corporate titans, military leaders and foreign dictators. What does the ‘common’ man or woman, working daily or attending school, struggling to make a life for him/herself and his/her family, know about it? They need to attend to their own business: paying taxes so those in charge can stay exactly where they are.

It has been said that if nothing changes, nothing changes. Welcome to the United States.

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Crimes in Afghanistan: Fatou Bensouda’s Investigative Mission

March 8th, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

It seemed an unlikely prospect.  The International Criminal Court has tended to find itself accused of chasing up the inhumane rogues of Africa rather than those from any other continent.  It has also been accused of having an overly burdensome machinery and lethargy more caught up with procedure than substance.  Critics fearing a behemoth snatching soldiers from the armed forces of various states could rest easy, at least in part.

Law tends to be a manifestation of power and international law, in particular, tends to be a manifestation of consensus.  And the powerful rarely give their consent in matters of trying crimes against humanity when it comes to their own citizens.  Qualifications and exemptions abound, often cited with a certain sneer.

This explains the sheer fury and curiosity caused by the decision of the ICC’s Appeals Chamber on March 5 authorising Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda to proceed with an investigation into alleged crimes committed in Afghanistan from 2003.  The interest was not merely in the commission of crimes by any one force: the Taliban and various “armed groups”, members of the Afghan armed forces and “alleged crimes by the US Forces and the CIA” featured.  But the actions of US and Afghan forces was bound to arouse much interest, given a UN report alleging more killings in the first three months of 2019 than attributed to the Taliban.  (The figures, respectively, were 227 civilians killed by insurgent groups and 305 deaths caused by Afghan and international forces.)

The initial decision of the Pre-Trial Chamber II (April 12 2019) had gone against the Prosecutor’s efforts that had commenced in November 2017.  While the pre-trial chamber accepted that the brief established a reasonable basis to consider crimes that fell within the jurisdiction of the ICC, time had elapsed since the preliminary examination in 2006 and the evolving political scene in Afghanistan.

As ever, the jurisdiction of war crimes and crimes against humanity is a political thing: to authorise such an investigation, in the words of the 2019 media release, would have diverted “valuable resources prioritizing activities that would have better chances to succeed.”  Nor had cooperation with the Prosecutor been forthcoming in Afghanistan itself.  It was a decision that caused a fair share of consternation among human rights critics and activists.  One question kept being asked: Had the ICC folded before pressure from the Trump administration?

The argument of pressure was a hard one to dispel.  In 2019, the Trump administration announced that it would revoke or deny visas to any members of the ICC connected with investigating alleged war crimes by US personnel in Afghanistan.  That body, charged US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was “attacking America’s rule of law,” an interesting formulation suggesting how partial that rule can be for a certain country.

Despite this backdrop of intimidation, the Appeals Chamber had a change of heart.  According to presiding judge Piotr Hofmański, “The prosecutor is authorised to commence an investigation into alleged crimes committed on the territory of Afghanistan since May 1, 2003, as well as other alleged crimes that have a nexus to the armed conflict in Afghanistan.”  The pre-trial chamber had erred in identifying “additional considerations” as to whether the prosecutor could proceed with the investigation.  It was not for the body to consider “the interests of justice” as part of that authorisation, merely whether there was “a reasonable factual basis to proceed with an investigation, in the sense of whether crimes have been committed, and whether potential cases(s) arising from such an investigation appear to fall within the Court’s jurisdiction.”

Pompeo was sufficiently incensed by the decision to call the ruling a “truly breathtaking action by an unaccountable, political institution masquerading as a legal body.”  He also had the prospects of peace on his mind, considering the ruling disruptive given that it came “just days after the United States signed a historic peace deal on Afghanistan.”

Resistance against the ICC from the United States is far from new.  Henry Kissinger feared it, and said so, suggesting it would preside in thuggish majesty and impunity citing universal jurisdiction as its basis of operation.  His views were rebuked by former Nuremberg war crimes prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz.  “The innocent,” he remarked pointedly, “need not fear the rule of law.”

But fear and loathing for the ICC has been a recurrent theme.  In 2018, then national security adviser John R. Bolton, famed for his opposition to international institutions, insisted that the US would not “cooperate with the ICC.  We will provide no assistance to the ICC.  And we certainly will not join the ICC.  We let the ICC die on its own.”

Such a view sits in that particularly odd canon of US political thinking that dismisses aspects of international law – notably those involving breaches of human rights – as matters of convenience and sentiment.  Such a view holds that Washington’s enemies deserve trial and punishment at the hands of international law; alleged offences by US forces should be a matter of US jurisdiction.

It also bucks the idea put forth by US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in November 1945 that international tribunals are not products “of abstract speculations nor … created to vindicate legalistic theories.”  Jackson’s enunciated views would see US officials participate, extensively, in the creation of tribunals in the Balkans and Rwanda.  Indeed, as Ferencz observed in 2001, numerous former presidents of the American Society of International Law and the American Bar Association acknowledged that “it would be in the best interests of the United States and its military personnel of the United States to accept” such a body.

While it is hard to see the US surrendering any soldiers for trial before judges of the ICC, the very acceptance that it has jurisdiction to investigate alleged crimes committed by such personnel enlarges its traditional and cautious scope.  International law has seen a turn up for the books.

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

Globalization and Women’s Rights: Economic Restructuring, Women’s Experiences and Responses to “Neoliberal Shocks”

March 8th, 2020 by Tina Renier

There is a critical nexus between colonial development and economic re-structuring processes in the Third world whereby globalization is an ideological weapon that extends imperial control over ex-colonies through persistent poverty and underdevelopment.

Globalization is also an external war that is waged against women’s bodies, rights, autonomies and livelihood through the continuation of  dispossession and violence. It must be emphasized that the concepts of violence and dispossession are not limited to seen, forceful, physical activities that are exerted towards less powerful groups by more dominant groups but the concepts are also unseen and institutionalized into socio-cultural, economic and political spaces.

The international political economy becomes a site for external imposition of Western standards to civilize and modernize economies of Global South through consistent emphasis on financialization, marketization and quantification of success in measures such as gross domestic product (GDP). As a result of these extensive forms of ‘civilization’ methods, women in Global South remain in the position of chattels (‘properties’) that are tied and subdued by multiple patriarchies in the sequence of: father, husband, employer, nation-state, local capitalists, private investors, development institutions and development planners, men within resistance movements and Western women.

Women’s secondary status had remained tightly embedded in society’s social and economic fabrics. This reinforced patriarchal, gender ideologies about women’s expectations, justified dispossession and displacement and inequitable, power relationships. Gosh’s astute observation that gender discrimination tends to be interconnected with others forms of social and economic disparity. This holds true to the fact that financial crisis forces women in informal and care sectors of employment in which their labour is unremunerated and unrecorded in national statistics. While the formal or better-paid sectors of employment are reserved for the occupation of men.

The deliberate distinction between ‘formal’ vs. ‘informal’ employment and ‘men’s’ vs. ‘women’s’ labour sets the foreground for a constant struggle between privilege and disadvantage. This is seen where  women’s labour is invisible and unpaid because it is seen as natural extension of their physiology while men’s labour attracts profit because it is seen as more valuable to the success of the capitalist economy (Mies, 1986).  The capitalist economy is an archenemy of women’s upward mobility and independence because the market is allowed to determine the price of labour and the assignment of people to jobs that are based on socially constructed norms and expectations. Similar to the proposition of Gosh on women’s unpaid labour, Ehrenreich, Russell-Hocschild and Elson highlighted that national statistics do not take into account women’s employment in the informal sectors neither do they capture the burdens of additional responsibilities and obligations indirectly and directly caused by financial crisis and structural adjustment programs.

Financial crisis and structural adjustment programs are instruments of violence that work in collaboration with nation states to re-direct the attention from strong social policy to financial policy because profit is more important than people’s well-being and sense of self-worth. Additionally, access to social services are not seen as inalienable human rights in which citizens, especially vulnerable populations, are entitled to but rather ambitious public policy goals to be achieved by developing states (Vasciannie, 2005). Under  neo-liberal globalization, rights are privatized commodities that are owned by a debt ridden, third world state and the controllers of wealth and production in the global economy.

Numbers are also used to conceal their personal and collective realities of instability, suffering and misery. Quantification is a top-down strategy of measurement that is used to present an illusionary version of a nation-state’s success because it fails to answer the following questions: who benefits from success? is success equitable? at whose expense is success achieved? Thus, women are not integrated in development with the intention for them to be equally valuable stakeholders as men but to be victimized and to remain at the bottom of the social class, gender and race pyramids as servants to systems and structures that are against their interests. Thus, the personal is not just political, it is also economic (Scott, 1984).

It is against this background that Chant argues that women end up working for development instead of development working for them because the notion of empowerment denies the fact the women in the non-Western world possess the potential to define empowerment on their own terms. Projects and programs are bestowed upon women in the Global South under the banners of ‘empowerment and gender equality’ to fight against high incidences of poverty. These projects address women’s access and enablement to various spaces but they still do not transform the existing power relations that propagate violence and women’s marginalized position. The existing power relations will not be effectively addressed either, because development planners and Western institutions rely on the logic of the market to support their vested interests. The goal of international development is never about serving ‘womankind’ through good will but maintaining the status quo. Hence, the persistent poverty among women in the developing world is not a ‘natural’ process but a condition that is politically and socially engineered.

Image result for Return to Hansala

The issue of the political engineering of poverty among third world women who are single mothers in third world have been addressed by Ehrenreich and Elson. The scholars note that the financial crisis have contributed to the significant decline in incomes, standard of living and the traditional male headed households in the Third world. As a result, women are forced to maintain households by seeking jobs in the care and informal economy in first world countries, amidst men who have abdicated their responsibilities.

Women are expected to be suitable alternatives to men by  providing compensations for their absence or failures. They are also expected to meet multiple demands and obligations in order to be crowned the titles “good daughter, mother and or wife”.  Femininity is a performance of morality in which women who comply with the strict regulatory norms of submissiveness and docility are rewarded while those who deviate are chastised. Chant discusses this subject matter in her cross-country case studies.  She coined the term ‘feminization of responsibility’ in attempt to revise the ‘ feminization of poverty’ thesis. This theme was also evident in the movie, ‘Return to Hansala’ where the female protagonist was chastised for her brother’s death and she tried to convince her father that she is a good daughter and good Muslim woman.

The identity of third world women becomes more complex when they migrate from their countries of origin to the first world. Their precarious connection with middle or upper class Western women transforms sub-ordination from gender issue to an issue of race, social class and sexuality. Western women and non-western women are not fighting in the struggle for the same type of equality and empowerment because the issue of oppression affects them differently. Their goals are also different. While upper or middle class, Western women seek to break the glass ceilings in well paid, male-dominated jobs, non-Western women are being employed in unpaid or underpaid jobs that still cannot help to meet their personal or family needs. Western women are critical components in the preservation of global, hegemonic masculinity because their victory in the employment sphere comes as a result of epitomizing the liberal goal of the ‘self-optimizing’ individual. They also actively or indirectly engage in the process of ‘othering’ non-western women in sectors that they no longer can or choose to occupy. While household patriarchy in the third world has declined, public patriarchy has remained tightly embedded into the social, economic, cultural and political fabrics of transnational borders.

Elson in another academic article provided the example of the Korean government requesting women to become supportive wives to their husbands in the context of the financial crisis in 1997/8 but men were not expected to provide reciprocal support. This reinforces cultural beliefs about the roles and expectations of men and women in Korean society. It also illustrates how gender ideologies and power dictates an unequal relationship of privilege and advantage for men vs. sub-ordination and disadvantage for women on the global stage. Masculinity and femininity are not equal, socially constructed dimensions and therefore, institutions are put in place to perpetuate the unequal expectations and treatment of men and women.

Nevertheless, women in the Global South are not passive victims to violence, dispossession and exploitation. Women are active in their defense of re-claiming the stolen possessions from ‘mother nature’ through resistance and collective organizing. Both Desmarais and Lind employ participatory approach to development research to examine the collective organizing and mobilization strategies of women who were attempting to survive amidst the turmoil of structural adjustment programs and trade liberalization. Trade liberalization has more severe negative effects on developing countries because they have weak social service sectors to compensate those who have not benefitted from their participation in the exchange of goods and services. Free trade also destroys incubator industries in developing countries that require state protection. Global free trade is a winner takes all system (Chang, 2008).

Although rural women were among the poorest and most affected by global restructuring processes, there were still silenced by men within the La Via Campensina resistance movement. This illustrates that while women were experiencing the violence of neo-liberal policies imposed by the state, they were also confronted by internal challenges of male domination and power struggles. The issue of patriarchy presents a gridlock situation for women in and outside the resistance movement but women used collective organizing and their personal experiences as counter methods to articulate an alternative model on food security. Here, women are subverting the feminine connotation assigned to nature in order to reclaim their ownership of the land. The land was stolen, previously through conquest and colonization but now through, privatization and environmental degradation by multi-national corporations and investors.

Lind explored, how the women in Quito, Ecuador also subvert the conventional expectations of nurturance by transforming them into strategies of resilience and survival to hold themselves, communities and households together. ‘Mothering the crisis’ is about women in the Global South exhibiting strength, endurance and presence in the context of instability, absence of male support and compensation systems because the only compensation women have is, unity among themselves. Nevertheless, the greatest obstacle of addressing the power structures that contribute gender equality remains unchallenged because their local struggles were aligned to an access and enablement model.

Criticisms

“Crisis has a negative impact on physical security on women through increased proclivity to gender-based violence and domestic violence as men look for outlets for their anger and frustration.”- Gosh

Criticism: Is this a plausible reason for the increasing incidences of women’s proclivity towards domestic violence and other forms of gender based violence? This is a problematic argument because it performs the role of equating male violence towards women as a simple action that is motivated by anger and frustration. Violence towards women by men is an action that stems from private and public patriarchy in which there are specific expectations that are associated with masculinity and femininity across cultures and other social institutions. Masculinity is associated with violence in which men are expected to assert their dominance and ownership of a particular space through hostilic relations towards less dominant groups of persons, especially women. This can be supported by a variety of case studies in cross-cultures that unearth the underlying assumptions that guide the surge of domestic violence and other forms of gender-based violence towards women. Additionally, the argument defeats the purpose of examining the influence of power in ascribing advantage to men and sub-ordination of women at the household and public levels.

“There is a strong movement for the cancellation of debt to poor countries and the re-building of a kind of development aid that supports human development”- Elson

Criticism: While Elson shared examples of countries that are attempting to re-shape the development landscape by merging strong social policy with financial policy, she fails to acknowledge that the movement that is pushing for the cancellation of debt to poor countries is led by Western institutions, developed nations and neo-liberal ideologues such as economist, Jeffrey Sachs (Wilson, 2008). Whether international capitalism presents itself as shock therapy in the form of structural adjustment programs or it is more reformed in the form of human development, the fact still remains that such a framework will not be truly beneficial to developing countries and their vulnerable populations, particularly women. An agenda becomes beneficial when there is active participation and power within developing countries and their vulnerable populations to shape an alternative destiny and the workability of this suggestion, is rare with only few exceptions.

“The feminization of poverty thesis must be re-constructed through a multi-dimensional and gendered approach”- Chant

Criticism: Chant provided an excellent analysis and critique of the feminization of poverty thesis. She also provided new directions for future discussion on the topic through the findings in her cross-country case studies.  However, her recommendations answered ‘what to do?’ but not ‘how to implement the recommendations?’ The recommendation does address the broader, political problem of gender inequality but the practical steps to achieve this recommendation were not explored. This reflects a major gap in third world feminist theorizing where there is strength in the internal critique of Western hegemony and development but there are grave limitations to formulate or re-construct the alternative that is being proposed.

“Affluent career women earn their status not through leisure”- Ehrenreich and Hochschild

Criticism: If not through leisure, how then do affluent women earn their status? This argument needs to be substantiated by explanation. The article did not evaluate first world women’s social position in relation to patriarchy and how this sets the stage for class and gender privileges.

“To what extent do their broader social struggles contribute to broader social change and changes in their own lives?”- Lind

Response: If local struggles in Quito, Ecuador were aligned to the objectives of the Women in Development framework, it therefore means that the problem of access to material needs were addressed. This might contribute to marginal changes depending on women’s social status before and after the financial crisis. However, the local struggles cannot contribute to broader social change because the framework in which the local struggles operates in; does not address structural issues. The structural issues are more difficult to address because the material needs of the oppressed group (women) has to be met before they can be engaged in the broader political struggle.

Women have been grossly affected by financial crises, structural adjustment programs and global re-structuring processes in the Global South. Despite their resistance and collective organizing efforts, the power structures that dictate gender injustices and inequalities remain unchallenged.

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Sources

Chang, H. J. (2008). Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury Press.

Martinez-Salazar, E. (1999). From Poisonous Colonialism to Toxic Globalization. pp.100-107 in Barndt, D. (1999). Women working in NAFTA food chain: Women, Food and Globalization.Toronto, Ontario: Second Story Press.

Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and Accumulation and World Scale. Colonization and Housewifization. London: Zed Books. pp. 55-74.

Scott, H. (1984). Working your way to the bottom: The Feminization of Poverty. London: Pandora Press.

Vasciannie, S. (2005).  Caribbean perspectives on human rights. Organization of American States. Retrieved from http://www.oas.org/es/sla/ddi/docs/publicaciones_digital_XXXII_curso_derecho_internacional_2005_Stephen_Vasciannie.pdf

Visvanathan, N. (2011). Women, Gender and Development Reader. London: Zed Books. Chapters 2, 21, 24, 40 and 42.

Wilson, J. (2008).Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid. London: Verso.

International Women’s Day: Syria says YES to Women, and NO to Wahhabis

March 8th, 2020 by Prof. Tim Anderson

Image. Prof. Tim Anderson

First published by GR on March 8, 2016

On International Women’s Day – The Syrian Arab Republic – the only genuinely pluralist nation in the region – was the first country in the Middle East and North African region (MENA) to give women the vote (1949, 1953) and the second after Lebanon to allow women to stand for election (1953). Syria was the first to have a woman elected to parliament (1973).

Syria has by far the highest level of paid maternity leave in the MENA region – a minimum of 17 weeks paid leave, 100% paid by employers. Employers must also pay a minimum of 6 weeks paternity leave, also at 100%. Although one of the poorer MENA countries, the Syrian Arab Republic has a maternal mortality rate (per 1000,000 live births) of 46 in 2008, well below the MENA average (91); that is linked to skilled assistance at birth much higher than average (93% Syria / 79% MENA). In overall HDI-GNI, which measures effective use of resources for human development,

Syria is way out in front, on 29. All other MENA countries (except Libya, data not available) have negative figures, meaning their income is not well transferred into human development (education and health). In Syria, life expectancy and infant mortality are better than its income levels would suggest, inequality is lower than average and ‘women’s health adjusted life expectancy’ is the best in the MENA region (Sources: UNDP 2014; UN Women 2011).

160119-DirtyWarCover-Print.jpg

The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance, by Tim Anderson

The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. This book tries to tell its story while rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, ethical principle and the search for independent evidence.

Title: The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance

Author: Tim Anderson

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

Special Price: $15.00

Click the image above to order.

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Video: Turkish Drones Falling in Idlib. ‘Moderate Rebels’ Gas Themselves by Mistake

March 7th, 2020 by South Front

Early on March 5, the Israeli Air Force carried out a series of airstrikes on targets in the Syrian provinces of Homs and Quneitra. According to the Syrian military, the attack was conducted from Lebanese airspace at 00:30 local time. Israeli warplanes used two civilian flights of Qatar Airways as a cover for their strikes. The Syrian side claimed that it had intercepted all the hostile missiles. However, ground explosions were reported in Quneitra. Therefore, at least some of them in fact did hit their targets.

The previous Israeli strikes on Syria took place on March 2 and February 23. On March 2, an Israeli attack helicopter destroyed a vehicle in the province of Quneitra after Israeli troops in the Golan Heights had reportedly come under sniper fire. On February 23 Israeli warplanes targeted positions of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad group in Damascus.

‘Entirely by chance’ the increase of Israeli military actions in Syria came amid the escalation of the Syrian-Turkish conflict in Idlib.

On March 4, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkistan Islamic Party and other al-Qaeda-linked groups supported by the Turkish Army made another attempt to recapture the town of Saraqib, located on the M4-M5 highways crossroad, from the Syrian Army. Despite the intense artillery and air support from Turkey, al-Qaeda members failed to achieve their goal.

Supporters of the 25th Special Forces Division and Hezbollah deployed there claim that Turkish-led forces suffered notable losses in the clashes but provide no particular numbers. Video evidence from the ground confirms that pro-government forces recaptured a T-90 battle tank that they had lost earlier in the same area.

Syrian troops also entered the village of Afis north of Saraqib but failed to fully secure it. The village remains contested. If Turkish-led forces keep control over it, they will be able to carry out attacks on vehicles moving via the M5 highway from Saraqib to Aleppo.

Earlier on the same day, 2 Turkish soldiers were killed and 6 others were injured in Syrian Army artillery fire in eastern Idlib. In response, the Turkish military tried to shoot down a Syrian Su-22 warplane bombing al-Qaeda positions west of Saraqib. Turkish supporters claim that an anti-air missile was launched by an F-16 fighter jet. However, most likely this was a MANPAD launched from one of Turkey’s so-called ‘observation posts’ in the area. During the past weeks, Turkish soldiers were repeatedly spotted launching MANPADs at Syrian and Russian aircraft. The Russian Defense Ministry officially says that Turkish observation posts have merged with terrorist bases and have been used to carry out attacks on government-controlled areas. Nonetheless, Turkish soldiers surrounded by the Syrian Army continue enjoying safety and receiving supplies. This is another demonstration of the fact that modern conflicts often take strange forms.

Setbacks in southern and eastern Idlib forced Turkey and its proxies to shift the focus of their military efforts. Late on March 4, Turkish-backed al-Qaeda forces attacked positions of the Syrian Army in western Aleppo. By the morning of March 5, they had captured the village of al-Sheikh ‘Aqil and al-Rraqim Hilltop. The control over these positions will allow them to shell the western suburb of Aleppo city more effectively.

Since the start of Turkish military actions in Idlib in February, the Syrian military had shot down 13 Turkish military UAVs, pro-government sources claim. According to them, this number includes 7 Bayraktar TB2 and TAI Anka combat drones. It should be noted that only a part of these claims has been confirmed  by visual evidence.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants tried to stage a chemical provocation in eastern Idlib, but poisoned themselves, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on March 4. According to the report, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham members were planning to stage the incident on March 2nd during the Syrian Army advance in the western part of Saraqib by blowing up canisters with a chemical substance, but a canister leak caused casualties among the militants themselves.

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Some Emerging Truths About Ukraine and the Crash of Malaysian Airlines MH17

March 6th, 2020 by James ONeill

On 17 July 2014 a Malaysian Airlines flight was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down over Ukrainian territory with the loss of all passengers and crew. The majority of the passengers were Dutch citizens, although there were significant other nationals represented, including in particular Australian citizens and residents.

The Ukrainian territory over which the tragedy occurred was the centre of fighting between its largely Russian speaking inhabitants and Kiev government forces, acting on the instructions of the Kiev government that had earlier that year seized power in an American financed coup.

An international group of countries set up an investigation into the crash. An early indicator that the investigation was likely to be less than objective came from its membership: the Netherlands, Australia, Belgium and Ukraine. As the countries suffering the largest casualties, the presence of The Netherlands and Australia was understandable.

There was no obvious reason for including Belgium, although that countries position as NATO headquarters provides at least one clue. Why Ukraine was included was also a puzzle. On the then known facts, or at least what was thought to be the facts, Ukraine was at the very least a prime suspect in the shooting down. The exclusion of Malaysia, the plane’s owner and operator, who also lost citizens, was at the time inexplicable. The reasons only became known much later. Malaysia refused to be a party to an extraordinary agreement between the other four nations that gave an effective veto to the Ukrainians against any adverse findings.

Contrary to basic principles of investigation, the quartet of countries immediately blamed Russia, alleging that a Russian missile has been fired at the plane, causing its destruction and the death of all on board. Not then and never since has any remotely plausible argument been advanced as to what possible motive Russia could have for shooting down the civilian airliner of a friendly country.

In the now more thanfive- and one-half years since the tragedy, the original blame game has not ceased. A new report has recently been released however, that has shed considerable light on what really happened. This report follows earlier revelations from the Malaysians that they had sent a team to the Ukraine to recover the plane’s black boxes, managing to do so with the assistance of local rebels fighting the Ukrainian government forces.

Had the Malaysians not been successful, establishing the truth of what happened would have been much more difficult. Thanks also to the efforts of an independent Dutch group, a great deal more information has become available, none of which casts the original quartet of countries in a favourable light.

The conduct of the inquiry, the evidence that was established and then suppressed by the original investigators, the allegations repeated without question in the western media, and the manifestly false allegations have now been revealed in a major study by an independent Dutch group led by the investigative journalist Max van der Werff. Their results can be read on the website.

That this report, with its devastating revelations, has not been reported in the western mainstream media confirms that rather than being an inquiry into the truth about a tragedy, the investigation always had as a primary objective, to blame Russia.

It will be recalled that the allegations against Russia hinge on the alleged presence of a Russian missile system in the crash location on the relevant date. This allegation was actively promoted by the notorious mouthpiece of the United Kingdom security services who publishes under the nom de plume Bellingcat.

Bellingcat was a major promoter of the version of events that a Russian missile crew had crossed the border from Russia into Ukraine, and then fired its missile with the devastating consequences of destroying the aircraft and killing all its passengers and crew, and then returning across the border back into Russia.

Bellingcat published some photographs of the Russian missile system, and the western mainstream media duly reported the allegations that the photographs were of the offending missile system, without the least bit of fact checking, either with local citizens who would have witnessed the alleged movements of such a conspicuous weapon system, or any verifiable military records. It is now known that local eye witnesses were interviewed by the Dutch investigators.

Those eye witnesses referred to seeing Ukrainian fighter jets operating in the sky at the relevant time.  This directly contradicted the Ukrainian government claim that none of their fighter jets were operational on that day. Such an obvious and easily disproven lie raises questions about what else the Ukrainians may be lying about.

As might be expected, the Dutch Military Intelligence Service carried out its investigation into the circumstances surrounding the crash. Their investigation produced a report that has been leaked to the van der Werff investigation team. That data shows quite clearly that at the material time the flight path of MH 17 was outside the operational range of both Ukrainian and Russian missile systems.

The report of the Dutch military investigation team (MIVD) quoted by van der Werff confirms that there were no Russian BUK missiles or radar systems in Ukraine on or about 17 July 2014.  The Dutch report further confirmed that no BUK missiles were detected as having been fired on that day.  Nor had anything been fired from the Russian side of the border.

This information was consistent with data obtained by two Australian investigators, Shaun Ellis and Timothy Johns, conducting an inquiry under the code name “Operation Arkanella”. None of these findings, which clearly contradict the allegations of Russian responsibility, have ever been published in the western mainstream media.  It raises the obvious question of why the lie of Russian complicity in the tragedy has been raised and maintained ever since, when it is clearly contradicted by the evidence the Dutch-Australian investigations discovered.

The known Russian missile systems were in proximity to substantial population centres. There were no reports in any format of any missiles being fired on the relevant day. This conclusion is clearly reported in the official report of the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service. Their report clearly states: “it becomes apparent that flight MH 17 was flying beyond the range of all identified and operational Ukrainian and Russian locations where 9K37m1Buk M1 Systems were deployed.” Again, it raises the obvious question: how is this information reconciled with the propaganda attack on Russia, then and ever since?

This report was published on 21 September 2016, i.e. more than three years ago. Not a word of it has been published by the western media who persist in their “blame Russia” version despite having no verifiable evidence let alone motive, to sustain such an allegation.

If we are able to exclude a missile as the cause of MH 17’s demise, that inevitably leaves only either an accident (which may be emphatically excluded) or intervention by fighter aircraft. Even the Ukrainians and their Western allies have never alleged that a Russian fighter jet was involved.

Rather, the Ukrainian government has always maintained that none of its military aircraft were flying at the time. This claim has long been disputed by civilians living in the area who have given repeated accounts of the activity of Ukrainian fighter jets in the area at the relevant time.

The area where the shooting down of MH17 occurred was an active war zone. It is known that both United States and Russian satellites were in stationary orbit over the region at the relevant time.  It raises the obvious question as to why these data have not been released.  One can understand the US reluctance as the data would disclose the complicity of their ally Ukraine in the tragedy. It is less clear why the Russian authorities have not released their data. The evidence after all is in their favour.

What the satellite data would show is exactly what was established by the Dutch and Australian investigators at the time.  That is, MH17 was shot down by Ukrainian fighter jets.

Van der Werff’s report includes the transcript of an interview with one such keywitness,a Brigadier of the Dutch Police. That witness gave detailed evidence as to the activities of Ukrainian fighter jets in the area at the relevant time on the day of the tragedy. Again, this clearly refutes the Ukrainian claims.

When one adds together the known facts revealed in the Dutch documents as well as other sources, certain irresistible inferences can be drawn. The most obvious is that MH 17 was shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet. That single fact, from which so much else followed, has never been reported in the mainstream media despite it being the irresistible inference drawn by Dutch investigators more than three years ago.

That the suppression of the truth has been a major factor in the anti-Russian campaign waged by the Netherlands, Australia and Ukraine is obvious. That the lies, obfuscations and misinformation should be perpetrated by the mainstream media is a sad commentary on the deplorable state of affairs that media has now sunk to.

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James O’Neill, an Australian-based Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from NEO

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Former Nobel Peace Prize Nominates Morales for 2020 Distinction

March 6th, 2020 by Telesur

“It is an honor for me to inform you that I have nominated comrade Evo Morales Ayma for the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 2020,” the Argentinian Adolfo Perez Esquivel announced on his Twitter account.

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The Argentinian activist and human rights defender Adolfo Perez Esquivel announced Tuesday that he nominated the former Bolivian president, Evo Morales, for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize.

Perez received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1980 thanks to his commitment to defending democracy and human rights against the region’s military dictatorships.

“It is an honor for me to inform you that I have nominated comrade Evo Morales Ayma for the Nobel Peace Prize for the year 2020,” the Argentinian announced on his Twitter account.

In his letter to the Committee, Perez said he proposed the award for “a social leader, the first Indigenous president of Latin America, who managed to implement successful programs to fight poverty, inequality and peace.”

“The model of a country with equality, social justice and sovereignty that Evo led must be recognized internationally,” he said.

“Evo is also a symbol of resistance against the new Operation Condor (about repressive coordination among militaries in South America in the 1970s led by the United States) that today carries out military, media and judicial coups to outlaw political parties and candidates who achieve high intention of vote because they implement sovereign policies in favor of the people,” he stressed.

Morales resigned from the Presidency of Bolivia in the midst of the social upheaval that resulted from the allegations of possible electoral fraud in the Oct. 2019 elections,  which were supported by an audit report by the Organization of American States (OAS).

However, a recent investigation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and published in the Washington Post stated that there is no statistical evidence to justify the alleged fraud asserted by the OAS that led the country to the political crisis in which it is currently immersed.

The Norwegian Nobel committee accepts all proposals before the deadline of Jan. 31 submitted by one of the thousands of individuals with the ability to launch a candidacy. Among those qualified to do so are parliamentarians and ministers from all countries, former winners, some university professors, or current or former members of the committee.

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Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher (2020)

March 6th, 2020 by Eric Walberg

First, Diana Johnstone’s memoir is a classic, and will be read and quoted as long as we keep struggling for peace and justice. It is one of the great personal accounts of the anguished decline of our uncivilization, both a riveting eye-witness account of many of the horrors and perfidies, and a primer for students of history and all those struggling to not only dismantle the beast, but to prepare us for what follows it.

Read it and weep. And smile at the follies. And shout ‘Yes!’ as light bulbs flash in your mind.

Johnstone’s concern in Circle in the Darkness is not so much ‘the lived experience of the transitory nature’ of things but ‘especially of the moral environment.’

She was blessed to to begin at the beginning of the end. At the empire’s undisputed zenith under FDR. And though not a card-carrying anything religious or left wing, she grabbed that blessing and stoked and nurtured it, creating her life, her jobs, a single mother raising a daughter in Minnesota and then France, seeing through the cant everywhere and using her only weapon, the pen, to expose it.

It is a frightening, unremittingly gruesome, Dantesque journey, but Johnstone’s steady moral compass sees us through and is uplifting.

One of her first memories is seeing the Minerva of Peace mosaic by Elihu Vedder (1896) in the Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, DC, with its very unpeaceful message: Minerva’s peace and prosperity is attained only through warfare.

Diana Johnstone (right)

Nike, a representation of Victory, similar to those erected by ancient Greeks to commemorate their success in battle, stands next to Minerva. I doubt that 3-yr-old Diana would have been able to articulate this message, but it hit me: this was a sign from beyond, be it from God or whatever. This little lady was fated to wrestle with the forces of war and peace till the day she dies.

So I thought: And what was happening in America in the 1890s to inspire Vedder (and Diana)?

1890: Wounded Knee Massacre in South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho join the Union.

1893: severe economic depression, as well as several strikes in the industrial workforce.

The decade saw much of the development of the automobile.This decade was also part of the Gilded Age, a phrase coined by Mark Twain, when the super rich were even more super, and the rest were super poor.

The Philippine Revolution began in 1896, ceded to US in 1898. The Provisional Government of Hawaii sent armed militia against the lepers in the Leprosy Colony of Kalawao. The template for Minerva’s  ‘peace through war’.

Hey, isn’t that today’s empire? Just more of the same?

History comes to life in Johnstone’s  reflections, which cover almost a century, from  the depths of the Depression and the rise of FDR to the sputtering loose canon of Trump, with America looking in many ways like the mess it was when Johnstone was born.

But it is not mass unemployment that is the chief cause of the malaise today. Keynes and a massive state sector combine with Eisenhower’s ‘military industrial complex’ more or less ‘solved’ that. The problem is deeper. It is the same uneducated nation, steeped in ‘enemies’, for the past century, anti-communism, writ large despite the demise of communism. The fear of yet another world war, environmental armaggedon, capitalism blind to its fatal flaws. And Americans too, blind and ignorant of foreign affairs, always fearful of the ‘other’, willing to leave world affairs in the hands of officials, who presumably know better.

Johnstone has spent most of her life abroad, in France, the rare foreign correspondent (she created a job as foreign correspondent for In These Times) who has free rein to explore a story, and a mission from the left wing ITT, to cover socialist/ communist politics in Europe, bringing her to meet with and cover the careers of remarkable people such as Olaf Palme and Willy Brandt, and to reflect on the demise of the old guard communists such as Marchais and Berlinguer and the embrace of social democracy by the heirs of Lenin and Stalin, so-called Eurocommunism, which abandons any thought of revolution, relegating it to oblivion.

Circle in the Darkness is almost an encyclopedia of the landmark events, which Johnstone covered as both journalist, participant, friend and enemy. Her calm passion for justice motivates her throughout her very ‘lived life’, someone for Socrates to admire, like Johnstone, crucified for his unflinching honesty. Though she may not have stopped the Vietnam war (‘the Viet Cong did that’), she created ways to help, inventing first a Community Contact outreach program to knock on doors to talk about Vietnam with the Minnesotan public.

Then she invented ‘people’s diplomacy’, organizing a group of 30 widely diverse Americans to go with her to her already beloved Paris in 1970 to meet with the South Vietnamese provisional government and the North Vietnamese, hoping to take the message of peace back to the US.

Johnstone loves her subject, whatever it may be, and her description of some of the colourful participants (and some tragic fates) is delightful and arresting.

The vegetable farmer George Panayotoff was especially active in speaking to every meeting he could find, often together with Robert Nienkerk, a private detective. Nienkerk was truly amazing. He could speak to the most conservative groups, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and with his Mr. America necktie, short haircut and straightforward manner, win them over.[1]

But, like most genuine efforts in the quest for peace, they were met by a deafening silence from the mainstream media (International Herald Tribune: It’s only a local story. Go to your home town for a human interest piece.) The Cold War Deep State had taken the US empire’s foreign affairs off the table, made it ‘bipartisan’, which with the rise of the powerful Israeli lobby, made the empire a US-Israeli empire, even more a captive of Eisenhower’s nemesis, the military industrial complex.

Speaking of arresting, her own arrest in Paris at a Vietnam rally during the chaotic summer of ‘68 was the essence of civilization. She explained to the French policeman when they reached the police station that she had to pick up her daughter from school, and he let her go. She realized he was against the Vietnam war, as were virtually all the French, and admired her courage.

There is much of interest both to historians and activists. Johnstone is a master of cutting to the quick, Occam’s razor. Most world events are so complex, assassinations in particular, that they remain a matter of conjecture. But she was on the spot for such events as the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981, and the ‘successful’ one of Olaf Palme, and followed the ‘investigations’.

Agca, a truly crazy Turk, was already in the sites of authorities, a ‘grey wolf’ fascist, who reveled in his act, claiming first

he was ordered to kill the Pope by the Turkish mafia, then by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, even by Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Secretary of State of the Vatican. Nobody took any of that seriously. But almost a year and a half later, in his Italian cell, he came up with a new story, which unlike all the others was widely welcomed as a “confession” of the truth: he had shot the Pope on instructions from Bulgarian agents, acting on orders from the Kremlin … later proclaiming himself to be Jesus Christ. But he had every reason to go along with the Bulgarian Connection story. He could be assured that it would guarantee comfortable prison conditions. It made him a media star. And shifting the blame to the communist Warsaw Pact enemy.

Perfect for the US and its ‘NATO allies who had internalized the need for US protection, whether from Russia or from their own domestic left.’

Useful to Agca, keeping him amused and famous. It was useful to the Italian right in its relentless effort to destroy the Italian Communist Party. It was useful to the American war party, … useful to the Vatican, not only as anti-communist propaganda, but also as the occasion to enact a characteristically Christian morality play, in which the Pope pardons a repentant Agca in his cell. Nor could leaders of Turkey, a NATO ally, mind having blame shifted to Bulgarians. The one who had no reward was the hapless Bulgarian travel agent, Sergei Antonov, who spent over three years in prison before being acquitted, a broken man. it illustrated how easy it was to build a major international political scandal out of a “confession” methodically extracted by intelligence agents from a convicted pathological killer and sold to the public by mass media. It is all too easy to tell the American public wild tales about “the rest of the world,” about which their school system has taught them little.[1]

I’m ashamed to say, if you had asked me before Circle about JPII’s almost assassination, I would have said, ‘Supposedly a Bulgarian assassin.’ Our brains work ‘Last in, first out.’ It is sooo hard to stay ahead of the game.

This legacy of the Nazis was also behind the assassination of Palme. The pompous New York Times investigation took months (and lots of moola), and turned up nothing. But plucky Diana, on a shoestring, went to Lund University to learn of the independent investigation by historian Wilhelm Agrell, who dismissed attempts to pin it on Kurds or South Africa. ‘He settled on the ‘patriotic’ motive: the explanation that Palme was eliminated by elements within Swedish security or armed forces that considered him a threat to the nation.’

In the 1930s, Swedish fascists in the military supported Hitler, Sweden remained neutral, useful to Germany in its occupation of anti-fascist Norway, and that legacy remained. The Germans were replaced by the Americans after the war, with the common enemy, the Soviet Union, still in place.

Palme was hated by the right, especially the military, who were becoming irrelevant to Palme’s vision of Sweden as a haven of peace, a friend to (peace loving) Soviet Union. His assassination, done from within, could be kept under raps, unsolved, but attributable to nasty apartheid South Africa, which certainly loathed Palme too. Agrell, a prominent expert on Swedish military doctrine and (from 1990) a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of War Sciences, and his claim disappeared from view, mentioned, it seems, only by Diana at ITT. Agrell’s wikipedia page makes no mention of what surely is his ‘finest moment’. How the mighty have fallen.

I could go on with many more beautifully written, barbed Occam’s razors, but I will end on some morsels of inspiration of my own, courtesy of Johnstone. Diana disclaims labels, but her analysis is Marxist in the best sense of the word, not the eurocommunist, ‘cultural Marxist’ which neoliberalism produced as a distraction from the remorseless destruction of all that’s good, which capitalism thrives on.

This is the subtext of Star Wars ‘Doomsday Machine’ (1967), where Kirk destroys the alien robot planet-eater, left behind by warring civilizations but still roaming the universe in search of planets to destroy and eat, long after its ‘masters’ have killed each other and the machine has eaten up their planet. To kill the beast, Kirk feeds it a tasty H-bomb, a version of Earth’s very own quaint 20th century doomsday bomb, ‘the first time it has been used constructively.’ The Doomsday Machine, of course, is capitalism/ imperialism, and its avatar today US-Israel, seizing whole nations, eating up the Earth’s treasures, a doomsday machine to kill us all.

My other ‘morsel’ recalls The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (1993), where author Benjamin Ginsberg, concerned with an Israel already out of control in 1990, argued that for their own purposes, rulers often  were happy to accommodate Jews in exchange for their services, resulting in “the rise to great power by Jewish elites, but creating conditions for their subsequent fall.” They made alliances “responsible for the construction of some of the most powerful states of the Mediterranean and European worlds, including the Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Ottoman empires.” This led to the paradoxical situation where some Jews were ministers or viziers while the majority of them were oppressed and rebels, a foretaste of the twentieth century Great Games.[2]

Johnstone witnessed three examples of these latter day ‘viziers’ during the 1980s:

  • adviser to Sartre (Benny Lévy, a Maoist in ‘68),
  • adviser to Mitterand (Attali),
  • destroyer from within of the Green Party of France (Cohn-Bendit).

Sartre’s friends were appalled when an attractive young Svengali (Levy) mesmerized him as he lay dying, inducting him into Kabbalah mysteries. Levy himself had shifted from Maoism to Judaism, or ‘from Mao to Moses’, i.e., fill the spiritual gap of dying atheist Sartre with harmless Jewish mysticism, ignoring the Zionist monster at work in the real world.

Unelected Attali wormed his way into President Mitterand’s private circle and convinced him to abandon his socialism and quest for detente, for neoliberalism and more anticommunism.

In December 2014 the daily Libération opened its article on Attali with the rhetorical question, “And what if it turns out that Jacques Attali, 71, is the real President of France?” This thought was inspired by the fact that at that very time, Attali was guiding his protégé, Emmanuel Macron, through his first big political job as Minister of Economy in the Socialist Government of François Hollande, designing laws to reduce worker rights.[3]

Gadfly Cohn-Bendit (with his fellow traitor Fischer of the German Greens) gutted the Greens of their quest for peace and disarmament, so dear to Johnstone’s (and my) heart, in favour of R2P, their crowning achievement, the 1990s the destruction of Yugoslavia.

Johnstone’s crowning achievement is undoubtedly Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, Nato, and Western Delusions (2003), which sifts through the bombed-out rubble of poor Yugoslavia, revealing the real story, the real culprits. In the fine tradition of western media, she faced screaming silence, unable to get the message into the mainstream. I wondered at her passionate devotion to this particular cause, but after reading Circle, I understand. At the tender age of 19, she was able to join a pre-Peace Corps (SPAN, the Student Project for Amity among Nations) visit to Belgrade, just months after the death of Stalin in 1953. Serbia circa 1953 was simple but civilized, full of spirit, building a new society.

My own such experience, studying Russian in Moscow in 1979, had the same impact on me, and accounts for my own struggle to save at least the ‘memory of memories’ of that lived reality so different, faulty but in many ways, far superior, to what US-Israel has left behind after our Doomsday Machine ate up that tasty morsel.

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Notes

[1] Johnstone Circle in the Darkness: Memoir of a World Watcher, Clarity Press, 2020, 94, 191.

[2] Eric Walberg, Canada Israel Nexus, Clarity Press, 2017, 66.

[3] Johnstone, op.cit., 160.

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Another Farcical Ceasefire in Syria

March 6th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

Time and again, ceasefires agreed to on Syria were breached straightaway by US/NATO/Turkish supported terrorists.

Is this time different? Will belligerent Trump and Erdogan regimes turn a page for restoration of peace and stability in Syria?

Will they renounce years of support for anti-government jihadists, cease arming and providing them with other material support?

Will they respect Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity, along with the rule of law — what they’ve never done before since Obama regime aggression on the Syrian Arab Republic was launched in March 2011, forever war continuing to this day, no end of it in prospect?

Will a Cinderella scenario emerge at midnight local time Friday — the illusion of agreed on ceasefire in Idlib turning into a pumpkin, no fairy godmother to save the day, no happily ever after end game?

In 2019 alone, Putin and Erdogan met eight times to discuss endless war in Syria — accomplishing nothing.

Turkish aggression escalated this year against government forces to prevent them from liberating Idlib province, their own sovereign territory — infested with jihadists supported by the Trump and Erdogan regimes.

On Thursday, Putin and Erdogan announced the following points agreed on:

Ceasefire in Idlib will begin one minute past midnight Friday morning. Hold the cheers!

Russia and Turkey will jointly patrol the strategic M4 highway in the province.

A six-km-wide buffer zone will be established along both sides of the M4 highway by March 15.

Russia and Turkey affirmed support for Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Their leaders pledged to help Syrian refugees return to their home areas and address their humanitarian needs.

They agreed that conflict resolution cannot be achieved militarily.

A new line of contact was established to include areas liberated by Syrian forces.

Both leaders agreed that it’s for Syrians alone to determine the country’s future, free from foreign interference.

Are Moscow and Ankara on the same page for what lies ahead, or will agreed on principles vanish in the mist of day like after all previous ceasefire agreements?

Russia and Syria observed what was agreed on before, not jihadists supported by the US, NATO and Turkey.

Will Thursday’s agreement succeed despite the failure of earlier ceasefires?

US regime change aims in Syria remain hard-wired. The same goes for Erdogan’s revanchist ambitions.

If past is prologue, what’s most likely, Russia’s best efforts will fail like every time before since 2012 Geneva peace talks.

As long as the US wants Syria transformed into a vassal state and Erdogan wants northern parts of the country annexed, endless war without resolution is likely ahead.

It’s been this way for nine years. Nothing in prospect suggests a dramatic turnaround toward conflict resolution (in Idlib or in Syria overall) following Thursday talks in Moscow.

Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, and Damascus are allied for restoration of peace and stability in Syria, supporting the country’s sovereign independence and territorial integrity.

The US, NATO, Turkey, Israel, and the Saudis oppose all of the above, attaining them not possible as long as this dichotomy exists.

Throughout the post-WW II era, especially post-9/11, the US has been uncompromising in pursuit of its imperial agenda — wanting control over planet earth, its resources and populations, wanting all sovereign independent countries transformed into client states.

Nothing on Thursday in Moscow changed this dire state of things, including in Syria.

It’s Obama’s war, now Trump’s, NATO, Turkey, Israel and the Saudis allied with US aims as junior partners in pursuit of their own interests.

The prospect for conflict resolution in Idlib or Syria overall is virtually nil any time soon.

In the cold light of day, principles agreed on between Russia and Turkey in Moscow will likely dissolve like many times before — unjustifiably justified by falsely blaming Damascus like countless earlier times.

At the same time, Bashar al-Assad may have gained some breathing room for rearming and regrouping Syrian forces to prepare for the next flareup in fighting.

Based on how things evolved before, it’s virtually certain to come, maybe much sooner than expected.

Furthermore, as long as US and Turkish forces illegally occupy Syrian territory, a state of war will exist — exacerbated by their support for jihadists as proxy troops.

I respect Russia’s good faith conflict resolution efforts.

The problem is they’re not reciprocated by nations allied against Syria — Erdogan’s Turkey very much one of them.

Another major problem is that many thousands of heavily armed jihadists remain in Idlib. Liberating the province requires their elimination by combat or diplomatic means.

The latter way never worked, the former most likely needed, war to continue with no end of it in prospect.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Boris Johnson Accused of Covering Up “Bullying Allegations”

March 6th, 2020 by Johanna Ross

‘The Home Secretary is doing an outstanding job’: Boris Johnson’s repeated response to the allegations of bullying by Priti Patel across three different government departments in recent times. At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn asked if Johnson was even aware of some of the allegations regarding Patel’s conduct, and if so, why did he appoint her?

The resignation of Sir Phillip Rutnam, as Home Office permanent secretary on Saturday, a man with 33 years’ service, was a sure sign something was not right in Patel’s department. Rutman is now suing the Home Office for constructive, unfair dismissal as he accuses Patel of being involved in ‘a vicious and orchestrated briefing campaign’ against him.

It emerged on Wednesday that Priti Patel is also facing allegations dating back to her time as International Development Secretary, which she resigned from back in 2017 over an unauthorised trip to Israel. The BBC reported that during her time there she was ‘humiliating civil servants in front of others, of putting heavy pressure in emails and of creating a general sense that “everyone is hopeless”.’

Prior to that position, Patel was employment minister, during which time she has been accused of bullying an official in the Department for Work and Pensions who subsequently received a payout of £25,000 after a suicide attempt. Jeremy Corbyn said at PMQs that if the allegations were indeed true, that ‘this suggests a shocking and unacceptable pattern of behaviour across three government departments – on each occasion, tens of thousands of pounds of hard-earned taxpayers’ money has been spaffed up the wall to buy their silence.” The opposition leader also called for an independent enquiry.  According to The Guardian newspaper, Westminster sources say the Conservative party was warned about the bullying allegations when Patel was in the DWP, before she was promoted to Home Office minister, but it failed to take any action.

So how has Patel survived? Clearly, it is in part due to her loyalty to Johnson. This tough Brexiteer has stuck by Boris Johnson, just as he said he would be ‘sticking by Patel the other day. A staunch admirer of Margaret Thatcher; Patel’s Britain-first, anti-immigration stance has been just what Johnson has been looking for in a Home Secretary. Never mind the fact that her parents themselves were immigrants, and under her rules would not have been granted entry to Britain. Indeed her latest advert on the new immigration rules – which will take effect – in 2021 is quite frankly disgusting. It boasts allowing entry to only the ‘best and brightest’ – as if being highly qualified on paper suddenly makes you a better, more worthy human being.

The scandal over the Home Secretary has just been one of many indications of a somewhat unhealthy setup at Number 10. Only a few weeks ago the Chancellor for the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, resigned, after rejecting Number 10’s instructions to sack an advisor. Javid stated that ‘no self-respecting minister could have accepted such a condition. His resignation came on the back of rumours of a rift between him and Boris Johnson’s controversial advisor Dominic Cummings. A later statement delivered in the House of Commons hinted at such discord as Javid said Johnson’s plans to bring the PM’s office and the Treasury closer together were a threat to the ‘national interest’. Indeed it has been suggested in The Express that Javid’s resignation ‘brilliantly represents Cummings’ Treasury masterplan – as in 2014 the Brexit guru had already made his intentions to reform the cabinet and to “break the power of the Treasury” clear’.

If anything, Johnson is a survivor. Having survived the Brexit election, to lead the country out of the EU; having survived allegations of racism and sexual harassment; having survived criticism over his lack of leadership during last month’s floods and claims of him being a ‘part-time Prime Minister’; it seems the blonde buffoon is indefatigable. And it has set a precedent for others in his team. One quite honestly gets the impression that the Johnson cabinet could almost get away with anything now. Even the investigation into Priti Patel will be an internal one, rather than an independent one, and led by Michael Gove, who has already come out to vehemently defend the Home Secretary – so how unbiased is that likely to be?

The real test for the Johnson cabinet now will be, however, in the form of something utterly intangible; a completely new phenomenon which rivals any terrorist threat or military adversary: coronavirus. Sweeping across Europe now, it will not only pressurize our health services but will impact every aspect of our daily lives. Our economy is also likely to suffer, they say on a par with the last economic crash in 2008. The competence of the current government, therefore, could not be faced with a better test.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johana Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Сoronavirus May be a Product of US ‘Biological Attack’ Aimed at Iran and China, IRGC Chief Claims

March 6th, 2020 by RT News

The US сould be the prime culprit behind Covid-2019 outbreak that hit China and then Iran, head of its elite Revolutionary Guards claimed, threatening that the virus will eventually be turned against those who unleashed it.

“It is possible that this virus is a product of a biological attack by America which initially spread to China and then to Iran and the rest of the world,” Hossein Salami said on Thursday.

He vowed that Iran would “fight” the virus and cautioned that the illness “will return” to the United States, if Washington was indeed responsible for the outbreak.

Though such conspiracy theories have been circulating for a while, there’s still no official proof it could be true.

The Head of Iran’s Civil Defense Organization, General Gholam Reza Jalali, said earlier on Tuesday that media fear-mongering over the new corornavirus in the country bolsters claims that the virus is a biological attack on China and Iran. He said that some reports indicate that it could be a hostile state, but added that his suspicion requires laboratorial investigation and a study of the virus genome.

Iran has been one of the countries hit hardest by Covid-19 outside of mainland China where it originated. As of Thursday, the Islamic Republic has reported 3,513 confirmed cases and 107 deaths attributed to the virus. Some 15 of those who have succumbed to the coronavirus died in the last 24 hours, according to Iran’s Health Minister Saeed Namaki.

The country has shuttered all schools and universities until the end of the country’s calendar year on March 20 in an effort to stop the spread of the virus.

On Tuesday, state media announced that the head of Iran’s emergency medical services was being treated for coronavirus. Numerous high-level Iranian officials have fallen ill to the virus. Recently, 23 lawmakers tested positive for the illness in the Islamic Republic.

Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a member of a council that advises the supreme leader, died after falling sick from the disease. His death follows those of two other high-profile Iranians who contracted the virus – a former ambassador and a newly-elected member of parliament.

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Joe Biden in 2020 Duplicates Hillary Clinton in 2016

March 6th, 2020 by Eric Zuesse

Hillary Clinton, of course, received the Democratic Party nomination in 2016 and was widely expected to beat Trump but she lost to him (though she won California by 4,269,978 in the popular vote, and so beat Trump by 2,864,974 in the nationwide popular vote, while she lost all other states by 1,405,002 votes, and so she would have been California’s President if she had won, but the rest of the nation wouldn’t have been happy). 

Among the top reasons why Democrats in primaries and caucuses voted for Clinton was that they thought she would have a higher likelihood of beating the Republican nominee than Sanders did. This was the impression that the Democratic National Committee spread, and the Party’s voters believed in it. However, by the time when Election Day rolled around, the passion that Republicans felt for their nominee, Trump, was much stronger than was the passion that Democrats felt for their nominee, Clinton.

During the Democratic primaries, polls were showing that the Democrats who were voting for Sanders to become their Party’s nominee were far more passionate in their support of him than was the case regarding the Democrats who were voting for Clinton to become the Democratic nominee.

And nobody questions that Trump was the passion-candidate in the Republican Party’s primaries and caucuses.

On 1 May 2017, McClatchy newspapers headlined “Democrats say they now know exactly why Clinton lost” and reported that, 

A select group of top Democratic Party strategists have used new data about last year’s presidential election to reach a startling conclusion about why Hillary Clinton lost. Now they just need to persuade the rest of the party they’re right.

Many Democrats have a shorthand explanation for Clinton’s defeat: Her base didn’t turn out, Donald Trump’s did and the difference was too much to overcome.

But new information shows that Clinton had a much bigger problem with voters who had supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but backed Trump four years later.

Those Obama-Trump voters, in fact, effectively accounted for more than two-thirds of the reason Clinton lost, according to Matt Canter, a senior vice president of the Democratic political firm Global Strategy Group. In his group’s analysis, about 70 percent of Clinton’s failure to reach Obama’s vote total in 2012 was because she lost these voters. …

Although Clinton has blamed her loss on Putin, and on Sanders — and perhaps if Biden wins the nomination he will likewise blame Putin and Sanders if he subsequently loses to Trump — the passion factor is actually much stronger an influence on whom the winner of an electoral contest will be than losing candidates wish to admit or publicly acknowledge; and it could turn out to be the case in 2020, just the same as it did in 2016.

On 24 August 2017, NPR bannered “Here’s How Many Bernie Sanders Supporters Ultimately Voted For Trump” and reported that, “12 percent of people who voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries voted for President Trump in the general election. That is according to the data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES) — a massive election survey of around 50,000 people.”

That study was done for CCES by Brian Shaffner of Tufts and Harvard Universities, who also reported that:

WI: 9% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.

MI: 8% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.

PA: 16% of Sanders voters voted for Trump.

Shaffner failed, however, to mention that Sanders beat Clinton in Wisconsin and won 570,192 votes in the Democratic primary there, and that Trump beat Clinton there by 22,748 votes, and that 9% of Sanders’s voters having voted for Trump there constituted 51,317 Sanders-Trump voters, and that this was 2.26 times as high as was Trump’s 22,747-vote victory-margin in Wisconsin, and, consequently: Sanders’s voters who voted for Trump were 2.26 times Trump’s victory-margin against Clinton there; so, clearly, Trump became President because of the huge number of Sanders voters who voted for Trump against Clinton. And it was the same thing that happened in each of the other two crucial states that Trump won in 2016.

Sanders likewise beat Clinton in Michigan and won 598,943 votes in the Democratic primary there, and Trump beat Clinton there by 10,704 votes, and 8% of Sanders voters having voted for Trump there constituted 47,915 Sanders-Trump voters, and this was 4.47 times as high as was Trump’s victory-margin in Michigan, so that Sanders’s voters who voted for Trump were 4.47 times Trump’s victory-margin against Clinton there.

Similarly, though Clinton beat Sanders in Pennsylvania, where Sanders won 731,881 votes in the Democratic primary, Trump beat Clinton there by 44,292 votes, and 16% of Sanders voters having voted for Trump there constituted 117,101 Sanders-Trump voters, and this was 2.64 times as high as Trump’s victory-margin in Pennsylvania, so that Sanders’s voters who voted for Trump were 2.64 times Trump’s victory-margin against Clinton there.

Of course, virtually all of the primary voters for Sanders would have been voting against Trump if Sanders had been the Democratic National Committee’s choice as the nominee instead of Clinton, whom they chose instead. By contrast, almost none of Clinton’s voters in the primaries would have voted against Clinton and for Trump in the final election (though some of them would have voted third-party or not at all — just as happened with Clinton’s actually being the Democratic nominee). Sanders would have overwhelmingly beaten Trump according to all of the nationally-polled match-ups — by far larger margins in a Sanders-Trump contest than Clinton was shown likely to in a Trump-Clinton contest. The DNC basically chose the overwhelmingly weaker nominee (and sometimes they even did it blatantly), and so they lost to Trump instead of to have their billionaire donors lose to Sanders and to the American public by Sanders becoming the nominee and then the President. Keeping the support from their billionaire donors was the DNC’s top priority, in 2016. Of course, America’s voting public generally don’t know that both the DNC and the RNC are far more committed to keeping the support from their billionaire donors than they are committed to winning elections.

This is why those voters pay close heed to what their Party’s leaders say about which candidates are ‘electable’ and which ones aren’t. The voters don’t understand how politics actually works, in today’s America — they think that winning the current general election is a Party official’s top priority. They think that Party professionals are professionals at selecting winners, but instead Party professionals are professionals at pleasing their Party’s billionaires. If a voter wants to please him or her self instead of please a group of billionaires, that voter ought to vote for whomever that voter thinks would best serve that voter and not serve any group of billionaires 

As the Huffington Post reported on March 4th, the day after Joe Biden’s huge Super-Tuesday win, “‘Voters liked both candidates but clearly consolidated around the one they saw as most electable,’ said Jared Leopold, who was the communications director for the Democratic Governors’ Association during the race.

‘The intraparty ideological fight pales in comparison to the thirst to beat Donald Trump and his buddies.’”

Those people’s top concern is to please the few individuals who fund their careers.

Winning the current electoral contest isn’t actually their #1 concern, though voters think it is.

The Party professionals have a longer-term, personally career-oriented, goal in mind — pleasing their bosses’ bosses.

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

Selected Articles: The Pentagon’s “Ides of March 2020”: Best Month to Go to War?

March 6th, 2020 by Global Research News

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Afghanistan: Imagine There’s No Future

By Daniel Lazare, March 06, 2020

Little, if anything, about the peace agreement signed last weekend in Qatar makes sense. It calls for a phased, fourteen-month withdrawal of 12,000 US troops in exchange for what the New York Times called “vague” commitments on the Taliban’s part to protect the civil liberties, the very idea of which is ludicrous. It requires the Taliban to combat Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups operations even though Taliban military commander Sirajuddin Haqqani heads a subgroup known as the Haqqani Network that is itself on the State Department’s list of officially proscribed terrorist organizations.

Why Is the US Apparently Not Testing for the COVID-19 Coronavirus?

By Larry Romanoff, March 06, 2020

The CDC produced a series of test kits that produced wildly random results, positive or negative, followed by instructions to discard the test kits as unreliable. (1) Several U.S. states said the new coronavirus test kits did not work, while others said they were totally unreliable. (2) New York City reported the government-issued tests are faulty and “cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate result”. Those faulty kits were also shipped all over the world, but to my knowledge the CDC have relayed that information to no one outside the US.

Coronavirus: Remember the “Fake” 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu Pandemic: Manipulating the Data to Justify a Worldwide Public Health Emergency

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 06, 2020

There wer 150 confirmed cases outside China, when the decision was taken. 6 in the United States, 3 in Canada, 2 in the UK, etc.

150 confirmed cases over a population of 6.4 billion (World population of 7.8 billion minus China’s 1-4 billion). What is a risk of being infected? Virtually zero.

That does not constitute a justification for launching a Worldwide fear campaign. In recent developments, the number of confirmed cases has increased particularly in South Korea, Iran and Italy.

The Pentagon’s “Ides of March 2020”: Best Month to Go to War?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 05, 2020

There are ongoing military threats against a large number of countries including, Russia, China, Venezuela, Iran, North Korea. Is a US-NATO sponsored war contemplated for the Ides of March 2020?

In recent developments, US-NATO have deployed 37,000 troops to the Russian border in the context of their latest war games entitled “Defender Europe 2020”. “The scale of NATO’s provocative military exercise underscores how far advanced the preparations for war are 75 years after the end of World War II”

Coronavirus and “Pandemic Pantries”. Fear Campaign Triggers Stockpiling of Emergency Supplies

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 05, 2020

Fears of imminent apocalypse tend to be midwives to absurdity.  The stockpiling fever that has gripped various populaces in response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has taken various forms.  “Pandemic pantries” are becoming the norm, suggesting that hoarding in the crisis tends to be a precursor to petty crime.

Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China?

By Philip Giraldi, March 05, 2020

The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.

Defender 2020: Largest Mobilisation of NATO Troops Against Russia in 25 Years

By Markus Salzmann, March 05, 2020

The largest deployment of troops across the Atlantic in 25 years entered its main phase last weekend within the framework of the Defender Europe 2020 exercise. The scale of NATO’s provocative military exercise underscores how far advanced the preparations for war are 75 years after the end of World War II.

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The Despicable USA – Theater of Dystopia. A Nation Run by Gangsters

March 6th, 2020 by S. Brian Willson

“Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? Only the Shadow knows.”– opening line in “The Shadow” radio show from 1930 to 1954. It became a pop culture icon.

The Trump impeachment process that began in late September 2019 continued the ugly, visible spectacle for those choosing to see the historic dark shadow of US culture and its pretend politics. Politicians from both major political parties, and the corporate media, take the pretend-society extremely seriously – integrity of the Constitution is at stake, the rule of law must be preserved, etc! Oh my god! And how the Democrats are obsessed with demonizing Russia and Putin, ushering in another earth-threatening Cold-Hot War. What?!

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us.” –US author Stephen King.

Going after a member of an internal political rival relating to Ukraine matters to achieve political gain is apparently considered impolite, and therefore impeachable. But how easily and intentionally the Democrats forget their grossly illegal 2014 coup under Obama, overthrowing Ukraine’s democratically elected president, utilizing $5 billion to assure an anti-Russian, pro-Western government, protected by Nazi-oriented security forces. (Azov Battalion image right)

In contrast, serious US criminal, unlawful, and unconstitutional behaviors occurred during the 135-day period of the impeachment process, September 24, 2019 to February 5, 2020 without notice or concern. For example, in that period alone there were an estimated 2,025 drones striking terror in at least seven countries – inflicting death sentences from the air with missiles traveling faster than the speed of sound. US policy declares any person killed in those strikes as “enemy killed in action” (EKIA), and anyone who appears to be male over the age of 16 is a legitimate target.[1] The obvious result: the criminal murder, maiming, and displacement of countless human beings worth as much as we are. Can we viscerally understand this?

I know a bit of the fear experiencing being targeted by incoming aerial missiles. In 1969, during the US criminal war, I was in servitude as night security commander of an airbase which, at the time, was the most mortared of the ten 7th Air Force installations in Viet Nam.[2] On high anxiety alert all night long, with heavily armed security personnel ringing the perimeter, I found myself shallow breathing to enable increased capacity to hear slight movements – rustling in water or vegetation off the perimeter, or be prepared for incoming, or ground sapper attacks. I was able to call in aerial fire and illumination support within 2 minutes if needed. We had the advantage of a rotating anti-mortar radar unit (when the generator was working), which issued a siren when incoming was detected, warning us to take cover, or scrambling to a bunker if one was nearby. But, imagine daily living in any one of seven countries thousands of miles from the US not knowing when you will be annihilated from the air by a drone missile? Due process? Have any Congresspersons experienced anything like this? Do they care? So what? Do they know anything about the victims, even if they asked? In Viet Nam we constantly manufactured “enemies” and killed them when in fact they were innocent civilians. That lie continued for 30 years with 6 million murdered. Can you grasp this? I repeat, can you grasp the grotesque immorality and evil?

Author standing next to Binh Thuy anti-mortar radar unit, 1969.

These continuing egregious, lawless crimes around the globe result in the murder, maiming, and displacement of countless human beings in a number of countries. But these crimes are immune from impeachment because they enjoy overwhelming bi-partisan support. Additionally, the President has severely curtailed important life-preserving domestic programs and environmental protections designed to save the health and lives of US citizens, while the Congress yawns.

The obscene, insane annual $1.25 Trillion bi-partisan military intelligence budget, that includes 17 separate intelligence agencies, pre-empts development of any serious social and physical infrastructure.[3] And, such policy endangers everybody at home and abroad. Who really is the enemy of the US? What is clear is that the US is at war with the world.

The President and Congress are captives to the military-industrial-Wall Street-banking-media bribing complex which provides the underpinning for the US oligarchic economy. The US has 200,000 troops in 177 countries, including use of special forces, with the bulk of active duty personnel located at 800 major overseas military bases in 70 countries.[4] Countries cannot even demand that US troops leave their country as Iraq recently discovered. Can you imagine foreign countries quartering their military troops at various locations inside the United States? Really? The Pentagon also operates 170 golf courses for the enjoyment of military stationed in the US and around the world.[5] And there are over one million active duty troops at hundreds of military bases within the United States. The National Security State in fact is in charge, as John F. Kennedy learned in 1963. The bi-partisan banality supporting atrocious, imperial policies is disgusting beyond comprehension – immoral and inhumane. People dying, moaning, maimed. So what?

Our political system is not broken. The current ugly, obvious campaign by the Democratic establishment and corporate media to stop Bernie Sander’s Presidential campaign at any cost is a live case study of the rigged nature of the political system. Sanders is not even a radical, just a politician who genuinely wants to introduce social fairness into the corrupt system, one fixed in its racist, classist, sexist historical patterns, with cybernetics to boot. A massive system of bribery by the oligarchic war making and financing scheme, controls who the (s)elected leaders are, what laws they write and pass, and which laws to apply or not, and when. The US process of selecting governing representatives is rigged with inordinate amounts of money and ego to assure the prevailing political economy wins, virtually every time – manufactured consent at home, manufactured dissent in US targeted countries. The corporate media controls the narrative such that people’s minds are full of the cabal’s script – deceptions, untruths, and lots of omissions. Voting itself is no longer even trusted.

A Nation Run by Gangsters of the Worst Kind; Do What?

There have been nearly continuous wars by our Eurocentric ancestors against others since the early 1600s, continuing after the formation of the Republic in 1789 to the present. Our behavior toward others has often been cruel and sadistic, perhaps a product of its super narcissism. But, nonetheless, we consider ourselves “democratic” and “exceptional”, but the question is whether as a culture we are exceptionally fair and respectful, or exceptionally demonic and imperial?

At Trump’s State of the Union address the President identified specially invited guest Juan Guido as the “legitimate President of Venezuela”. Democrats and Republicans arose with standing applause. More disgust. In January 2019, Guido, a relatively unknown legislator, was called on the phone by US Vice-President, Mike Pence, and told that he was the US-chosen President of oil-rich Venezuela, as part of a US-supported a regime change effort. This is bizarre, since the Venezuelans had already democratically elected Nicolas Maduro three times as their President, who was following in the footsteps of exceedingly popular Hugo Chavez. Chavez had unexpectedly died in 2013 at age 58, with some evidence suggesting he had been poisoned.  So far the majority of the Venezuelan have supported Maduro, much to the disappointment of the US and Guaido. Thus, the criminal policy of bi-partisan regime change remains popular, despite violating international law and the US Constitution, Article VI, Section 2. We live in a mafiosa oligarchy, still basking in its exceptionalism. So what?

The US drone assassination of Iranian General Qasah Moleimani January 3, 2020 while on a peace mission in Iraq was an act of war that could have led to major war if the Iranians had not exercised restraint. Grotesque murder of an Iranian leader. So what?

The overthrow of popular and democratically elected President Evo Morales in Bolivia on November 10, 2019 was facilitated with millions of US dollars and technical and social media assistance. Overthrowing democracy. Congress didn’t even blink. So what?

What about the thousands of children who have been separated by US Immigration officials from their parents at the US-Mexican border and placed in filthy cages located at numerous concentration camps around the US, some run by private companies? Crimes against humanity?

People’s lives have been severely and deleteriously destroyed in countries like Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico due to unfairly imposed US trade policies, or repressive neoliberal governments created and/or sustained by the US – militarily, economically, propaganda-wise – that have left millions terrorized and destitute. A bi-partisan Congress supports these destructive policies. Cruel, more crimes against humanity. So what?

What about the innocent citizens being murdered and maimed in the eight countries the US is regularly bombing – Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somali, Niger, and sometimes Syria? Trump merely continues policies of Bush and Obama, as Congress yawns and routinely funds the war-making companies? War crimes, despite the Congress claiming that the National Defense Authorization Act provides them legal cover. The Constitution requires Congressional Declarations of War. More people dying, moaning, maimed. So what?

What about the innocents being terrified in any one of 130 or 140 of the world’s countries as their homes are bashed down by paramilitary, called US Special Forces, and subsequently cellphone-targeted for routine drone assassination because US intelligence arrogantly and hypocritically identified them as terrorists and placed them on the President’s regular kill list? War crimes? Again, these are continuation of Bush and Obama policies as the Congress yawns and shops. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents terrorized, killed, tortured, maimed. So what?

What about the President’s actions to unilaterally abrogate important historical bilateral agreements that were designed to decrease the dangers of nuclear war, thus endangering the whole world? Except, I presume, the Mafioso Congress feels immune from any danger or severe consequences from their sanctity of gangsterism. So what?

Who cares? Certainly not the 1 per cent. And certainly not the majority of our 535 (s)elected representatives who are bribed and devoted to their 1 percent donors. But the majority of people lose every time as long as they continue to abide by the oligarch’s rules. As Chris Hedges continually preaches, the only hope is for massive civil disobedience in the streets making business as usual impossible. The stakes are really high – our dignified survival.

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Brian Willson is a Viet Nam veteran and trained lawyer. He has visited a number of countries examining the effects of US policy. He wrote a psychohistorical memoir, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson(PM Press, 2011), and in 2018 wrote Don’t Thank Me for my Service: My Viet Nam Awakening to the Long History of US Lies(Clarity Press). He is featured in a 2016 documentary, Paying the Price for Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson, and others in the Peace Movement, (Bo Boudart Productions). His web essays: brianwillson.com. He can be reached at [email protected].  

Brian Willson is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Notes

[1] Elise Swain and Jon Schwartz, “Merry Christmas, America! Let’s Remember the Children Who Live in Fear of Our Killer Drones”, The Intercept, December 25, 2019.

[2] Roger P. Fox, Air Base Defense in the Republic of Vietnam, 1961-1973 (Wash., DC: Office of Air History, USAF, 1979), see data for Binh Thuy.

[3] William D. Hartung and Mandy Smithberger, “Boondoggle: Inc. Making Sense of the $1.25 Trillion National Security State Budget”, Tomdispatch.com, January 30, 2020.

[4] Jeff Desjardins, “Nearly 200,000 US troops are currently deployed around the world — here’s where”, Business Insider, citing Visual Capitalist data, Mar 20, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/us-military-personnel-deployments-by-country-2017-3

[5] David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2015), 4.

Israel Pharmaceutical Firms Test Medicines on Palestinian Prisoners

March 6th, 2020 by Middle East Monitor

This was originally crossposted in 2019.

Israeli Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian revealed yesterday that the Israeli occupation authorities issues permits to large pharmaceutical firms to carry out tests on Palestinian and Arab prisoners, Felesteen.ps reported.

The Hebrew University lecturer also revealed that the Israeli military firms are testing weapons on Palestinian children and carry out these tests in the Palestinian neighbourhoods of occupied Jerusalem.

Speaking in Columbia University in New York City, Shalhoub-Kevorkian said that she collected the data while carrying out a research project for the Hebrew University.

“Palestinian spaces are laboratories,” she said. “The invention of products and services of state-sponsored security corporations are fueled by long-term curfews and Palestinian oppression by the Israeli army.”

In her talk, entitled “Disturbing Spaces – Violent Technologies in Palestinian Jerusalem”, the professor added:

“They check for which bombs to use, gas bombs or stink bombs. Whether to put plastic sacks or cloth sacks. To beat us with their rifles or to kick us with boots.”

Last week, Israeli authorities refused to hand over the body of Fares Baroud, who passed away inside Israeli prisons after suffering from a number of diseases. His family fear that he could have been used for such tests and Israel is afraid this could be revealed through forensic investigations.

5,000 tests on prisoners

In July 1997, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported remarks for Dalia Itzik, chairman of a parliamentary committee, acknowledged that the Israeli Ministry of Health had given pharmaceutical firms permits to test their new drugs of inmates, noting that 5,000 tests had already been carried out.

Robrecht Vanderbeeken, the cultural secretary of Belgium’s ACOD trade union, warned in August 2018 the population of the Gaza Strip is being “starved to death, poisoned, and children are kidnapped and murdered for their organs.”

This follows previous warnings from Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations Riyad Mansour who said the bodies of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces “were returned with missing corneas and other organs, further confirming past reports about organ harvesting by the occupying power.”

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Featured image: Palestinian activists take part in a protest in solidarity with Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons [Source: Almanar News English/Twitter]

Afghanistan: Imagine There’s No Future

March 6th, 2020 by Daniel Lazare

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine it’s Sept. 12, 2001, and America is in deep shock over the destruction of the World Trade Center the previous day. George W. Bush goes on national TV and declares:

“Now is not the time to lose our heads. Like Pearl Harbor, the death of thousands of innocent people in Lower Manhattan is a crime that will live in infamy. But our response must be carefully calibrated. With that in mind, we are sending teams of commandos to Afghanistan with the sole purpose of apprehending Osama bin Laden and his top henchmen. Once they’re arrested – and, mark my words, they will be – we will bring them to New York to stand trial just a few yards from where their despicable act of mass murder occurred. We have no quarrel with the people of Afghanistan. But we will have no dealings with the Taliban government as long as it harbors despicable terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. We are confident that our allies will do the same.”

The result of such a well-calibrated response would have been no war in Afghanistan, no prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, and almost certainly no war in Iraq either. Without earlier conflicts to pave the way, intervention in Libya, Syria, and Yemen would have all proved more difficult. Countless deaths would have been avoided and entire societies spared.

But it was not to be. The Bush administration was in no mood for calibration after 9/11, only brute revenge. It didn’t want to put Bin Laden on trial because of the stories he might tell about Al Qaeda’s ties to the CIA, the Saudi royal family, and others. It was more interested in going after Saddam Hussein because Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had somehow gotten it into his head that the Iraqi leader was ultimately responsible. It therefore decided to invade Afghanistan (a) because it wanted to show it could and (b) because it needed a stepping stone to an invasion of Iraq that would eliminate a bothersome rival in the Persian Gulf.

So it went to war. Nearly twenty years later, we’re living with the consequences in the form of a conflict that has cost $2 trillion and taken the lives of nearly 2,400 Americans and at least half a million Afghans, yet which continues with no exit in sight and can only get worse. And Donald Trump’s phony Taliban peace deal is proof.

Little, if anything, about the peace agreement signed last weekend in Qatar makes sense. It calls for a phased, fourteen-month withdrawal of 12,000 US troops in exchange for what the New York Times called “vague” commitments on the Taliban’s part to protect the civil liberties, the very idea of which is ludicrous. It requires the Taliban to combat Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups operations even though Taliban military commander Sirajuddin Haqqani heads a subgroup known as the Haqqani Network that is itself on the State Department’s list of officially proscribed terrorist organizations.

It calls on the Taliban to release a thousand prisoners of war in exchange for five thousand Taliban fighters held by the Afghan government even though negotiators never contacted the Afghan government to see if it would go along. And it somehow imagines that the Taliban will do Trump’s bidding from here on out even though a Taliban spokesman announced a day earlier that an accord would mark “the defeat of the arrogance of the White House in the face of the white turban.” A group that brags about defeating Trump one day is not likely to prove very cooperative the next.

Which is why the agreement has fallen apart in record time. The day after it was inked, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani confirmed that a prisoner exchange was out of the question. Two days later, the Taliban retaliated by launching 43 attacks against Afghan government forces. A day after that, the US responded by bombing Taliban positions in Helmand province, a longtime stronghold in southern Afghanistan.

This was after Trump spent 35 minutes on the phone with a Taliban leader named Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and declared, “The relationship is very good that I have with the mullah.” If this is a good relationship, one can only wonder what a bad one would be like.

Why won’t the Taliban go along? The chief reason, as an ex-CIA officer named Douglas London pointed out in a recent New York Times op-ed, is because it knows it’s winning. “The Taliban has successfully challenged the government for control of rural areas, and by doing so, the roads necessary to resupply major urban areas,” he wrote. “And while the government in Kabul can claim support from a greater percentage of the overall population – mainly people in the major cities – the Taliban continues to extend the territory over which it rules.”

It knows that time is on its side, in other words, and that negotiations are a pointless distraction. London, moreover, noted out that it’s not clear the group could enforce a peace even if it wanted to. Since it’s more “diverse, decentralized, and factionalized” than generally realized, leaders will have a hard time convincing the rank-and-file to hold their fire against the hated Americans, while persuaded local fighters to turn their guns on Al Qaeda will be even worse. Why shoot down fellow Muslims if the only beneficiary is the US?

The very idea of a negotiated settlement is a pipedream, and the insurgents know it. Taliban attacks rose some six percent last year while ground operations by the Afghan government military simultaneously fell, a clear indication of which way the win is blowing. US bombings are running at record levels. But since civilian casualties are doing the same, the result is to create more enemies than the American military can possibly kill off.

Then there’s Kabul where things are going from bad to worse. Ashraf Ghani is feuding with his chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, who claims to have won last month’s presidential election and is threatening to set up his own parallel government if his rival doesn’t step down. The same holds true in the military, where morale is plummeting among soldiers forced to man isolated outposts that the Taliban can seemingly attack at will.

“Police and soldiers are stuck in their bases,” a district council head in western Afghanistan told the New York Times. “The Taliban are killing security forces easily, but no one pays attention.” While elite special forces sometimes go on the offensive, the effect is like tossing a pebble into the sea. “They come here, kill some people and arrest some, and that’s it,” one district governor observed. “When they leave, the Taliban come back.”

We’ve seen it all before in Vietnam, Algeria, Somalia, and whatnot. Hence, it was all so predictable. The “Afghan Model,” as the Bush administration initial strategy is now known, rested on a combination of CIA and Special Forces teams, precision airpower, and local “rent-a-militias” that were willing to play along with the US in exchange for military and financial support. It proved devastatingly effective in scattering the Taliban and seizing control of major cities. But conquering a vast and thinly-populated country like Afghanistan is one thing and holding onto it year and year out is quite another – and in their rush to accomplish the first, “Vulcans” like Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney vastly underestimated the cost and difficulty of the second.

As a result, the US threw itself into a war that it can’t possibly win – and for no good reason, too. The result can only grow more and more painful as the White House searches desperately for a way out, only to find that all exits are blocked. Hopefully, there will be a helicopter waiting on the roof, but no one can be sure.

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Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He writes a weekly column for Antiwar.com. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related matters at Daniellazare.com.

Coronavirus and “Pandemic Pantries”. Fear Campaign Triggers Stockpiling of Emergency Supplies

March 5th, 2020 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

Fears of imminent apocalypse tend to be midwives to absurdity.  The stockpiling fever that has gripped various populaces in response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has taken various forms.  “Pandemic pantries” are becoming the norm, suggesting that hoarding in the crisis tends to be a precursor to petty crime.

In the United Sates, the price of hand sanitizers has risen by 73 percent in dollar value since February 22.  A Nielsen report on these trends reads glumly: “Consumers around the world are actively stockpiling emergency supplies as concerns grow that the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) could become a worldwide pandemic.”  But the focus of such purchases lies beyond such supplies, including “basic foodstuffs, including canned goods, flour, sugar and bottled water.”  Non-food essentials also feature in buying behaviour, including first aid-kits.

One item has risen in prominence in the purchasing schedule.  A visit to various shopping outlets in Australia – at least in cities – will greet the customer with shelves emptied of toilet paper.  The phenomenon struck the BBC as amusing enough to run an image of a toilet roll emptied of paper with the question: “Does this strike fear into your heart?”

Australia’s chief medical officer, Dr Brendan Murphy, did his bit, albeit a touch officiously, by suggesting that such empty lavatory rolls were not to be feared.  “We are trying to reassure people,” he told Australian parliamentarians, “that removing all the lavatory paper from the shelves of supermarkets probably isn’t a proportionate or sensible thing to do at this time.”

This fevered rush prompted a veteran journalist of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to issue a curt reminder.

“Most, if not all, toilet paper is made in Australia.  It is NOT imported,” tweeted a grumpy Michael Rowland.  “The manufacturers are ramping up production to replenish shelves stripped bare by panic buying.  Australia will not run out of toilet paper.  So everybody can calm down.”

Not quite everybody.  On social media, the viral nature of COVID-19 trends alongside that other viral spread: the hashtag.  These include #toiletpapergate, #toiletpapercrisis and, as of today, #toiletpaperemergency.  Limits on the number of rolls have been imposed in some supermarket chains.  Woolworths has capped the limit at four to, in the words of a spokesman, ensure “more customers have access to the products”. The limit would “help shore up stock levels as suppliers ramp up local production and deliveries in response to higher than usual demand.”

One contributor to a Facebook group page made her feelings clear about the whole business.  “So I just went to Woolies (in Perth),” wrote a troubled Amy Bainbridge on Mums Who Budget & Save, “and found there’s a 4 packlimit on toilet paper during this ‘shortage’.  Our store only had a few 4 roll Kleenex $7 packs which I had to succumb to due to 6 kids!”  An Aldi Mums Facebook group was filled with indignation.  “Panic buying causes hysteria,” observed one furious contributor.  “People who really need these products won’t be able to get them because of this madness.”

As tempting as it would be to see Australians as being idiosyncratic in this regard, other countries affected by COVID-19 have also gone on the toilet paper purchase spree.  Over the weekend, shoppers descended upon Costco, WinCo and Fred Meyer in Oregon on hearing word that COVID-19 cases had been found in the Portland area.  For David Dunstan, manager of Tigard WinCo foods the purchasing patterns seemed odd.  “Honestly – they’re just stocking up, preparing for the end of the world.”

In Japan, toilets for customers are replete with threatening language promising to punish the paper pinchers.  Restrooms have been closed.  The country had descended, wrote a hyperbolic correspondent for the Financial Times, “into Lord of the Flies-style depravity.”  A country proud of its chatty, multi-functional toilets, the envy of the world, is taking a battering in image.  The authorities, from Prime Minister Shinzo Abe down, are not deemed credible.  “On this matter,” went the view of one shopper as noted by the FT, “we cannot trust Abe.  He says Japan is self-sufficient in toilet paper, but anyone can see the shops are empty.”

In Hong Kong, toilet paper larceny has made a very public appearance.  Three masked men took some HK$1,600 worth of toilet paper last month – some 600 rolls in 50 packets in Mong Kok. “This is a senseless act,” a grave spokeswoman for the Wellcome store chain explained to journalists, “and we are shocked.”  The fact that the items were toilet paper would not necessarily lead to a lenient appraisal of the court. “Whether it is money or toilet paper being robbed,” opined barrister Albert Luk Wai, “that’s not the most important consideration by the court.”

Be it heists, panic buying, the emergence of pandemic pantries, the coronavirus phenomenon is itself becoming merely a part of various other outbreaks.  “Consumers’ irrational behaviour,” Allen Adamson of New York University’s Stern School of Business tells us tritely, “will certainly do more damage than reality will.”  The reaction to COVID-19 threatens a slowing economic growth, disrupting supply chains and perpetrating a shortage of necessaries.  But most disturbing of all, it has nourished the undergrowth of suspicion against fellow human and the authorities.

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

Who Made Coronavirus? Was It the U.S., Israel or China?

March 5th, 2020 by Philip Giraldi

The most commonly reported mainstream media account of the creation of the Coronavirus suggests that it was derived from an animal borne microorganism found in a wild bat that was consumed by an ethnic Chinese resident of Wuhan. But there appears to be some evidence to dispute that in that adjacent provinces in China, where wild bats are more numerous, have not experienced major outbreaks of the disease. Because of that and other factors, there has also been considerable speculation that the Coronavirus did not occur naturally through mutation but rather was produced in a laboratory, possibly as a biological warfare agent.

Several reports suggest that there are components of the virus that are related to HIV that could not have occurred naturally. If it is correct that the virus had either been developed or even produced to be weaponized it would further suggest that its escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology Lab and into the animal and human population could have been accidental. Technicians who work in such environments are aware that “leaks” from laboratories occur frequently.

There is, of course and inevitably, another theory. There has been some speculation that as the Trump Administration has been constantly raising the issue of growing Chinese global competitiveness as a direct threat to American national security and economic dominance, it might be possible that Washington has created and unleashed the virus in a bid to bring Beijing’s growing economy and military might down a few notches. It is, to be sure, hard to believe that even the Trump White House would do something so reckless, but there are precedents for that type of behavior. In 2005-9 the American and Israeli governments secretly developed a computer virus called Stuxnet, which was intended to damage the control and operating systems of Iranian computers being used in that country’s nuclear research program. Admittedly Stuxnet was intended to damage computers, not to infect or kill human beings, but concerns that it would propagate and move to infect computers outside Iran proved to be accurate as it spread to thousands of PCs outside Iran, in countries as far flung as China, Germany, Kazakhstan and Indonesia.

Inevitably there is an Israeli story that just might shed some light on what has been going on in China. Scientists at Israel’s Galilee Research Institute are now claiming that they will have a vaccine against coronavirus in a few weeks which will be ready for distribution and use within 90 days. The institute is claiming that it has been engaged in four years of research on avian coronavirus funded by Israel’s Ministries of Science & Technology and Agriculture. They are claiming that the virus is similar to the version that has infected humans, which has led to breakthroughs in development through genetic manipulation, but some scientists are skeptical that a new vaccine could be produced so quickly to prevent a virus that existed only recently. They also have warned that even if a vaccine is developed it would normally have to be tested for side effects, a process that normally takes over a year and includes using it on infected humans.

If one even considers it possible that the United States had a hand in creating the coronavirus at what remains of its once extensive biological weapons research center in Ft Detrick Maryland, it is very likely that Israel was a partner in the project. Helping to develop the virus would also explain how Israeli scientists have been able to claim success at creating a vaccine so quickly, possibly because the virus and a treatment for it were developed simultaneously.

In any event, there are definite political ramifications to the appearance of the coronavirus, and not only in China. In the United States President Donald Trump is already being blamed for lying about the virus and there are various scenarios in mainstream publications speculating over the possible impact on the election in 2020. If the economy sinks together with the stock market, it will reflect badly on Trump whether or not he is actually at fault. If containment and treatment of the disease itself in the United States does not go well, there could also be a considerable backlash, particularly as the Democrats have been promoting improving health care. One pundit argues, however, that disease and a sinking economy will not matter as long as there is a turnaround before the election, but a lot can happen in the next eight months.

And then there is the national security/foreign policy issue as seen from both Jerusalem and Washington. It is difficult to explain why coronavirus has hit one country in particular other than China very severely. That country is Iran, the often-cited enemy of both the U.S. and Israel. The number of Iran’s coronavirus cases continues to increase, with more positive tests confirmed among government officials last Saturday. There were 205 new coronavirus cases, bringing the government claimed total to 593 with 43 fatalities, though unofficial hospital reports suggest that the deaths are actually well over 100. That’s the highest number of deaths from the virus outside of China.

No less than five Iranian Members of Parliament have also tested positive amid a growing number of officials that have contracted the disease. Iran’s vice president Masoumeh Ebtekar and deputy health minister Iraj Harirchi had also previously been confirmed with the virus.

The usual suspects in the United States are delighted to learn of the Iranian deaths. Mark Dubowitz, Executive Director of the Washington-based but Israeli government connected Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) boasted on twitterTuesday that “Coronavirus has done what American economic sanctions could not: shut down non-oil exports.” An Iranian government spokesman responded that “It’s shameful and downright inhuman to cheer for a deadly Virus to spread – and enjoy seeing people suffer for it…” Dubowitz followed up with an additional taunt, that Tehran has “spread terrorism” in the Middle East and “now it’s spreading the coronavirus.”

So, you have your choice. Coronavirus occurred naturally, or it came out of a lab in China itself or even from Israel or the United States. If one suspects Israel and/or the United States, the intent clearly would have been to create a biological weapon that would damage two nations that have been designated as enemies. But the coronavirus cannot be contained easily and it is clear that many thousands of people will die from it. Unfortunately, as with Stuxnet, once the genie is out of the bottled it is devilishly hard to induce it to go back in.

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

Will Policy of Destabilizing Latin American Countries Help Trump to be Re-Elected?

March 5th, 2020 by Paul Antonopoulos

As the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election campaign heats up, there is every chance that Donald Trump can become a one-term president as the popularity of Bernie Sanders increases despite the sabotage within his own Democrat Party against him. There still remains a strong possibility that Sanders can become the next president sitting in the White House. Sanders continues to grow mass appeal, with former Trump White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon even conceding last month that the Democrat candidate is a “populist,” even if it is different to that of Trump’s. Sanders appeals to the impoverished by directing the frustrations of Middle America to the ultrarich who are fighting tooth and nail to bring the U.S. to Western standards by providing free education and healthcare. This is in contrasts to Trump’s populism which redirects anger of Middle America’s increasing impoverishment to the so-called immigrant “invasion” coming from Latin America.

One of Trump’s main platforms for his seemingly ‘unlikely’ election win, as many so-called experts thought of it back in 2016, was to build a wall traversing the border between the U.S. and Mexico to make it even more difficult for illegal immigrants to enter the North American country. All the slurs and accusations of racism were not able to subdue Trump’s fever as many in Middle America believed they finally found a candidate that spoke their language, addressed their issues and provided a solution to the so-called problem of illegal immigrants “invading” their country. Trump of course knows that illegal immigrants are not the reason for the U.S. problems of de-industrialization, lack of job opportunities, unaffordability and poverty – but it was this rhetoric that projected him into what was an unexpected win for the presidency against Hillary Clinton.

With Sanders speaking of a new populism, not based on a so-called invasion from immigrants, but actually addressing the real issues of the U.S. political and economic system, it is likely that Trump will resort back to the fear of Latin American illegal immigrants to project him to the presidency. This of course may not be necessary in the likely case that the Democrats ignore the popularity of Sanders to go for a Hillary Clinton-like hack and establishment pawn like Joe Biden who will prove unpopular against Trump. None-the-less, Trump will not take chances and will begin using the refugee card, frightening U.S. voters with the threat of new flows coming from Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, Mexico and other countries.

Meanwhile the world’s focus right now is on the Greek-Turkish border where tens of thousands of illegal immigrants are trying to enter Greece on the orders of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a high level of international solidarity going to the European country. However, there are stark differences between the migration crisis between the U.S. and Greece. Greece is an impoverished post-colonial country that was under Turkish occupation for over 400 years and does not have the means to support such large numbers.

Nor is Greece the reason for this migrant crisis as it had not invaded Afghanistan, where the majority of illegal migrants come from despite the incorrect reporting that they are Syrian, nor did Greece invade or apply economic sanctions on Pakistan, Iran, North Africa and Syria where the other illegal migrants are from. In the case of Latin America though, the U.S. is the key country in destabilizing the region and therefore has a responsibility to attend to the refugees that itself created. Although many in Middle America are impoverished, this is a result of their own leaderships economic policies, and rather the U.S. is the world’s richest country and has the means and capabilities of dealing with Latin American migrants it creates.

Non-the-less, as the so-called “invasion” of illegal immigrants has drastically decreased, Trump will be wanting to desperately destabilize Latin American countries to create an atmosphere of fear in the U.S. ahead of the presidential election to show voters that he is their only and sole defender whom they must elect in order to secure their future and safety. It worked in 2016 and he will be betting for it to work again later this year. Trump has already mentioned he has some kind of intentions of doing this during an address to the Latino Coalition Legislative Summit only yesterday.

“We’re with Venezuela all the way, and we’re doing a lot, and we have a lot planned,” said Trump, adding that

“the tragedy in Venezuela is a reminder that socialism and communism bring misery and heartache everywhere they’re tried,” prompting a cry of “gracias” from a member of the audience.

Trump has consistently applied devastating sanctions on Venezuela in an effort to force the removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and in support of wannabe president Juan Guaidó.

However, these sanctions have had such a devastating effect on the Venezuelan economy that it has prompted many people from the country to seek a better life in the U.S. Trump has not hidden away from the fact that he has “a lot planned” for Venezuela, which only guarantees further misery in the country. Unlike Greece, the U.S. prompts illegal migration by destroying the very countries that these people come from. Not only does this destruction serve U.S. corporate interests in these countries, it will also serve Trump’s re-election campaign as there is a strong likelihood that a new immigration crisis will appear at the borders between Mexico and the U.S.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Trump’s Other “Phony Deal of the Century” Unravelling. “Peace with the Taliban”

March 5th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

The Trump regime’s so-called deal with the Taliban is intended to facilitate future talks with the US and its puppet regime in Kabul. 

It has nothing to do with assuring peace and stability to the war-torn country, nothing to do with ending US occupation — nothing to do with giving Afghanistan back to the Afghans, free from US control of their territory.

It’s not a peace or ceasefire deal. The so-called “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” is subterfuge — guaranteeing nothing to its long-suffering people because the US doesn’t operate this way, serving its own geopolitical interests by controlling and exploiting other nations.

The US came to Afghanistan to stay, permanent occupation planned, the same plan in all its war theaters, waged to transform nations into vassal states — ruled by installed puppet regimes subservient to US interests.

The Kabul regime was uninvolved in US/Taliban talks with no say on the signing document that included a prisoner swap.

When US-installed president Ashraf Ghani objected, saying he “made no commitment to free 5,000 Taliban prisoners” as part of a prisoner swap a day after the agreement was signed in Doha, Qatar, fighting resumed.

A separate so-called Joint Declaration between the US and its Kabul puppet regime makes no mention of numbers of prisoners to be exchanged, saying the following:

“To create the conditions for reaching a political settlement and achieving a permanent, sustainable ceasefire, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan will participate in a US-facilitated discussion with Taliban representatives on confidence-building measures, to include determining the feasibility of releasing significant numbers of prisoners on both sides.”

Failure to release about 5,000 Taliban prisoners as stipulated in the US agreement with its representatives could unravel the deal before the ink is dry.

On March 10, intra-Afghan dialogue is supposed to discuss prisoner swap arrangements. Ghani objected saying “(i)t is not the authority of the (US) to decide. (It’s) only a facilitator.”

On March 3, Trump spoke with Taliban leaders in Doha. A day later, Pentagon warplanes terror-bombed Taliban fighters in Nahr-e Saraj.

Reportedly their fighters killed 30 Afghan forces and four civilians in areas they control.

Before the February 29 Doha signing ceremony, the Taliban and Trump regime agreed to a week-long cessation of fighting.

Breached by resumption of violence, the fragile deal is unravelling much faster than anticipated.

It calls for reducing numbers of US and allied forces in the country in the coming months, withdrawing entirely in 14 months, including abandonment of Pentagon bases that cost billions of dollars to build and maintain.

It affirmed a phony US commitment to aid Afghan security forces prevent ISIS, al-Qaeda, and likeminded jihadist groups from operating in Afghanistan — groups the US created, supports, and deploys to combat theaters as proxy troops.

It permits continued Pentagon military operations with consent of the Afghan government on the phony pretext of combatting terrorism as necessary.

It prohibits use of force by the US and allied countries “against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan or intervening in its domestic affairs” — how the US operates time and again against targeted nations to control them.

Terms of so-called agreements the US signed with the Taliban and Kabul puppet regime aren’t in sync with each other.

Taliban officials won’t deal with the Kabul regime unless a prisoner swap agreed to with the US is fulfilled, what Ghani objects to.

Further complicating things is the disputed September 2019 presidential election Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah both claim to have won — the Trump regime yet to recognize one figure over the other.

Resumed fighting between Taliban fighters and government forces may continue as long as terms agreed to in Doha aren’t fulfilled.

In response, the Pentagon said it’ll “defend Afghan forces” by attacking Taliban positions.

The US/Taliban agreement doesn’t obligate its fighters to cease combatting government forces.

Trump wants concluded whatever will help his reelection campaign.

Claiming an end to over 18 years of war in Afghanistan and bringing home US troops in whatever numbers could help his chances even if conflict is far from resolved.

A resumption of fighting on the ground along with Pentagon terror-bombing of Taliban controlled areas could unravel the Doha deal altogether.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The Legacy of Michael Bloomberg’s Muslim Surveillance Programme

March 5th, 2020 by Azad Essa

When Asad Dandia received a friend request on Facebook, he didn’t think much of it. 

The college student was active with a religious-based charity, so it was common for people to reach out on the social media platform and offer to donate food and money.

Dandia and the man also had several friends in common. So when he read a message requesting advice on how to become a better, practising Muslim, he willingly responded.

Over the next few months, the two became friends. Dandia even invited him to his family home, where he met his parents and ate with them.

Once, he even spent the night.

But what Dandia didn’t realise was that the man hadn’t reached out to better himself, make new friends or help the community. He would later confess that he was paid $1000 a month to spy on Dandia for the New York Police Department.

The informant, it later turned out, was part of a wide network of infiltrators working at the behest of then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office – monitoring and surveilling the Muslim community in New York City and New Jersey.

“We were rattled and we were shaken,” Dandia, now a graduate student at Columbia University, told Middle East Eye.

Bloomberg was mayor of New York City between 2002-2013, during which he presided over the much-maligned stop-and-frisk policy – which targeted African Americans and Latinos – and the surveillance of Muslims.

Like Dandia, hundreds of thousands of Muslims from New York and New Jersey are still coming to terms with Bloomberg’s discriminatory practises that left a legacy of distrust between communities and contempt for the police.

Dandia subsequently received help from the City University of New York Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility (CLEAR) project and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and he joined a class-action suit against the city for unlawful surveillance.

Bloomberg’s short-lived run for the White House has left those impacted by his policies troubled, wondering how he could have even been considered as a Democratic presidential nominee.

Would-be militants

Under his direction as mayor, the NYPD’s Demographics Unit – built with the help of the CIA – secretly mapped the Muslim community, sending informants to mosques to watch religious sermons, to cafes to listen in on conversations and even on white water rafting trips to look for would-be militants.

Not only did the programme that began after September 11 unlawfully target one community, it failed to provide a single criminal lead, internal audits of the NYPD have revealed.

Ayisha Irfan, a New Yorker who studied at Brooklyn College in the mid-2000s, remembers being told as an 18-year-old to “watch what you say and who you trust because there are police informants at the university”.

The fear of being watched meant that Muslim youth were forced to avoid congregating, participating in social or civic life, and inevitably, avoiding each other.

“When it all began to come out following the Associated Press expose, we found benign details of our college lives in government documents,” Irfan says.

“They even wrote down that a group of Muslims go to Dunkin Donuts after Jumah (Friday prayers).”

While Bloomberg has apologised for the stop and frisk policy that targeted mostly black and brown people, he has since doubled down on the surveillance programme, arguing “that it was just after 9/11 and everyone was petrified of another terrorist attack”.

Current New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is one of the few establishment politicians to criticise the programme, recently calling it a “failure”.

“As the person who ended Bloomberg’s racist and counterproductive Muslim surveillance programme, I will tell you what he won’t. It actually made us less safe,” said de Blasio.

“It bred resentment and distrust, just when we most needed to bring our police and our Muslim community together.”

The legacy of surveillance

In the Astoria neighbourhood of Queens, a New York City borough with a thriving Arab and Muslim population, Zohran Mamdani says the impact of Bloomberg’s surveillance policies still persist.

He recalled how the police would note down the time boys gathered at the local park to play soccer.

“We had the Demographics Unit go up and down Steinway Street surveilling Muslims, whether they were in barbershops, grocery stores, cafes, hookah bars, masjids; it doesn’t matter where we were.

“If there was even one Muslim in an area, it was considered cause for suspicion,” Mamdani, who is a candidate for New York State Assembly, told MEE.

“This is the kind of legacy the people have had to live with, [the idea] that we should not build any type of collective because the response of the state will be to both surveil and imprison us.”

Bloomberg has repeatedly downplayed the scale and impact of the surveillance policy of his administration.

In an interview with PBS in late February, Bloomberg said his office had “sent some officers into some mosques to listen to the sermon that the imam gave. The courts ruled it was exactly within the law and that’s the kind of thing we should be doing.”

He has also doubled down on justifying the singling out of the Muslim community.

“All of the people came from the same place and all that came were from a place they happened to be one religion. And if they’d been another religion, we would’ve done the same thing,” he added.

But no court has ever ruled the programme legal; several lawsuits were filed against New York City’s programme.

In the Raza v. City of New York class-action suit, which Dandia joined, the final settlement approved by the court in March 2017 “established a number of reforms designed to protect New York Muslims and others from discriminatory and unjustified surveillance”.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a national civil rights organisation, described Bloomberg’s assertions as a “fantasy”.

“What happened in New York City was a massive civil rights breach that caused lasting harm to countless innocent American Muslims. Mayor Bloomberg needs to correct the record immediately,” Khera said.

Muslim community has failed to organise itself

In Harlem, the northern half of Manhattan, many black Muslims have had to endure both the stop and frisk policy that targeted African Americans and Latinos, as well as the surveillance of Muslims.

Imam Al-Hajj Talib Abdur-Rashid, from the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood Inc, in Harlem, says that the Muslim community failed to organise itself and exact a political consequence for Bloomberg’s policies.

“Any other group who had been treated in that way, they would have exacted a political consequence for his statements.”

Abdur-Rashid argued that as someone running for president, Bloomberg’s refusal to apologise or make amends for the surveillance programme said a lot about the place of Muslims in the imagination of presidential candidates.

“Obviously, he doesn’t see this as a liability because Muslims are still seen across the US with suspicion,” he says.

Ayiesha Irfan agrees. “Apparently a million Muslims placed on an unlawful, secret surveillance programme, and weaponising the biggest police force in the country against Muslim does not merit even an apology,” she says.

Dandia says he is not interested in a half-hearted apology. He wants reparations.

“Now that Bloomberg is out of the race, he ought to reflect over the enormous harm he has caused to communities of colour during his time as mayor of New York, and he must offer material reparations to all those he harmed.

“He is one of the richest men on the planet. He is more than capable of doing that. He should also meet with Muslims and ask them: how can I serve you?” he said.

“However, Bloomberg endorsing Biden shows that he is not committed to any structural change or reparations, and prefers the same establishment politics that he benefited from at our expense.”

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Selected Articles: Turkey at War with Syria

March 5th, 2020 by Global Research News

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Empires of the Steppes Fuel Erdogan Khan’s Dreams

By Pepe Escobar, March 05, 2020

The latest installment of the interminable Syria tragedy could be interpreted as Greece barely blocking a European “invasion” by Syrian refugees. The invasion was threatened by President Erdogan even as he refused the EU’s puny “offer you can refuse” bribe of only one billion euros.

Well, it’s more complicated than that. What Erdogan is in fact weaponizing is mostly economic migrants – from Afghanistan to the Sahel – and not Syrian refugees.

Erdogan Tells Putin: “We’re in Idlib to Protect the People There.”

By Eric Zuesse, March 05, 2020

According to Middle East Eye, on Saturday February 29th, reporting under their headline “Erdogan asks Putin to stand aside as Ankara deals with Syrian government forces”, Erdogan said in Istanbul that on Friday the 28th he had told Putin (presumably by phone or some other remote means) that, “We did not go there [into Syria’s Idlib Province] because we were invited by” Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad; but instead, “We went there because we were invited by the people of [Idlib Province of] Syria. We don’t intend to leave before the people of Syria say ‘okay, this is done’.” Thus, “Erdogan said he asked Putin to leave Turkey ‘to do what is necessary’ with the Syrian government.”

Video: Syrian Armed Forces Teach ‘2nd Strongest NATO Army’ Painful Lesson in Idlib

By South Front, March 04, 2020

Units of the Russian Military Police entered the town of Saraqib in eastern Idlib following the second liberation of the town from al-Qaeda terrorists and Turkish forces. According to the Russian military, the deployment took place at 5:00pm local time on March 2 and was intended to provide security and allow traffic through the M4 and M5 highways. In fact, the Russians came to put an end to Turkish attempts to capture the town and cut off the M5 highway in this area.

Turkey in Syria: Down a Blind Alley in an Unwinnable War?

By Tony Cartalucci, March 03, 2020

Fighting in northern Syria has escalated as Syrian forces retake the last remaining bastions of foreign-funded militants and encircle, cut-off, and in some cases catch in the crossfire their Turkish backers.

Turkey had been making some promising steps in the right direction since Washington’s disastrous proxy regime-change war in Syria began unraveling – yet it still maintains a problematic position inside Syrian territory, backing what are unequivocally terrorists and obstructing Syria’s sovereign right to recover and restore order within its own borders.

Turkey Asks NATO to Join Its War Against Syria and Russia

By Eric Zuesse, March 02, 2020

The spokesperson for the Islamist party of Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has called upon all of NATO to go to war against Syria for Syria’s having killed dozens of Turkey’s troops in order for Syria to defeat Turkey’s invasion and military occupation of Syria’s Idlib Province, which borders on Turkey. Going to war against Syria would mean going to war also against Russia, which is in Syria to protect Syria’s sovereignty over its own territory.

Turkey Sacrifices Their Own Troops to Protect Al-Qaeda?

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, March 02, 2020

After 33 Turkish troops were killed in a Syrian army offensive on February 27 amidst the current Russia-backed campaign to liberate Idlib, Erdogan responded by laying the blame entirely on Russia and Syria – successfully avoiding all mention of the uncomfortable fact that Turkey has been protecting radical terror networks not only in Idlib but across Syria as a whole for years.

During this time, Islamist forces within Turkey favorable to Assad’s overthrow have been attempting to play a complex game of geopolitics for which they are totally unqualified.

Turkey and Syria Are at War Without a Declaration of War

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 02, 2020

Although Turkey has supported anti-Syrian government forces, especially terrorist organizations  like ISIS and the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra and Turkistan Islamic Party, since the very beginning of the Syrian War in 2011, no declaration of war has ever been announced between the two neighboring countries. Russia became militarily involved in 2015 and its intervention saw the quick defeat of ISIS and the recovery of large swathes of the country back into Syrian government control, as well as a partnership emerging with Turkey to discuss the Syrian crisis.

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The Skripal Case – Two Years On

March 5th, 2020 by OffGuardian

It’s been two years to the day since disgraced former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, were allegedly found on a park bench in Salisbury, near unconscious and apparently very unwell.

A lot has been said about the unanswered questions revolving around the incident. But perhaps the best of way of demonstrating the peculiarity of the alleged situation is to simply relate, in full, the “official version”.

Here it is:

  • Sergei Skripal, a Russian military intelligence officer, was found guilty of spying for the UK in 2006, and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
  • In 2010 he was released and traded to the United Kingdom as part of a spy swap. Having settled in the UK Sergei lived a quiet and comfortable life of retirement, so far as we know
  • Eight years later, in early 2018, with a Presidential election looming and just weeks before Russia was due to host the FIFA World Cup, Vladimir Putin decided to assassinate him for as yet obscure reasons.
  • The GU, Russia’s military intelligence unit, dispatched two of their elite officers, who proceeded to fly direct from Moscow under aliases they had allegedly already employed and using Russian passports.
  • These alleged assassins carried with them two perfume bottles full of “Novichok”, allegedly one of the deadliest nerve agents ever devised. This would be enough to kill around 800,000 people.
  • On arriving in the UK these highly-trained covert agents book a hotel with a CCTV camera on the front door, and the next day, March 3, they travel to Salisbury by train, allegedly to recon the area, then return to London. They are apparently observed by CCTV camera’s the entire time.
  • The day following, March 4, they again travel to Salisbury, this time the master assassins walk to Skripal’s house and somehow “smear” the liquidNovichok on the handle of his front door.
  • No eye-witness, photograph or piece of CCTV footage has ever been made publicly available to show either of these two men anywhere in the area of Sergei Skripal’s house.
  • The whereabouts of the opened bottle of poison have never been established.
  • Having applied the poison, the two highly trained assassins do two things before returning to London. 1) They drop their second, unopened, bottle of novichok (presumably enough to kill approx 400,000 people) in a charity donation bin, rather than destroying it or taking it back to Russia. 2) They stop by an antiques store to browse.
  • The two assassins leave the country that afternoon, flying direct to Moscow, without knowing if their alleged target is dead, and again making no effort to conceal their origins.
  • Despite both handling the poison, and somehow carrying enough of it back to contaminate their hotel room, neither of the men – nor any of the staff, train passengers or passersby who come into contact with them – ever become sick, even though only 0.2mg of Novichok is an allegedly lethal dose.
  • Later that afternoon, Sergei and Yulia Skripal are found “almost unconscious”on a park bench in Salisbury town centre. It is claimed this was due to contact with the Novichok smeared on Sergei’s door handle, though reports originally stated neither he nor his daughter had returned to the house, and the timing seems to make it unlikely they did
  • The person who found them was the most senior nurse in the British Army (likely in the area as part of Toxic Dagger, the British Military’s landmark chemical weapons training exercise which began Feb 20th and ran on until March 12th).
  • The nurse and her family administer “emergency aid” to the two alleged poisoning victims. Neither she nor anyone else on the scene, nor any of the first responders, ever experience any symptoms of nerve agent poisoning. Neither do any of the other people the Skripal’s came into contact with that day.
  • DS Nick Bailey, a CID officer is in contact with the Skripals or their home at this time and subsequently becomes ill. It has never been stated how exactly he was exposed. It was initially reported he was a first responder to the scene, but that story was changed and it was later claimed he visited the Skripal hpouse. Despite the alleged lethality of novichok in even very minute doses, Bailey is fit to return home after 18 days.
  • Porton Down, the British government’s chemical weapons research centre, is brought in to help identify what chemical – if any – the Skripals/Bailey were exposed to.
  • Within a month they release a statement claiming the poison was “a novichok like agent”, but that they could not pinpoint its origin. How they were able to test for a (at the time) theoretical chemical without having a sample to test against, has never been explained.
  • Porton Down is 8 minutes away from Salisbury by car.
  • Nearly four months later, in late June of 2018, Charlie Rowley finds the unopened perfume bottle a full of novichok (whether he bought it from a charity shop or found it in a bin is unclear, both stories have been reported). Upon using the perfume Rowley’s partner, Dawn Sturgess, falls ill. Later that day Rowley also falls ill. Sturgess dies in hospital two weeks later. But Rowley survives. Making him the fourth person in this narrative to survive exposure to an agent lethal in doses as small as 0.2mg.
  • Sergei Skripal and Julia both recovered and allegedly chose to live secluded lives. Sergei has not appeared in public at all since allegedly being found on that park bench. Yulia made one brief press statement. Their current whereabouts are totally unknown. Their family in Russia have apparently been denied all access to them. DS Bailey was initially also keen to maintain his privacy but has subsequently given at least one interview some while after the event.

This is the UK government’s version of what happened. Unvarnished and unsatirised. None of it is disputed, exaggerated or speculative.

If you can see any unanswered questions, logical gaps or peculiar coincidences…you are likely a Russian bot.

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The Brexit Fallout Gathers Pace

March 5th, 2020 by True Publica

The news of Britain’s economic and political well-being just gets worse and worse as each week parades by. There simply isn’t any Brexit sunlight at the end of any tunnel to bring us news of renewed prosperity and optimism. Project fear is now project reality. Leaving aside the collapse of inward investment, the worst productivity in over 100 years, an emphatic fall in the currency and other solid economic indicators that Brexit is causing real problems to our future – there’s some more news out – and to be fair, it’s just the same old stuff.

NHS

Mass resignations after the Brexit vote have compounded health staffing shortages. Nearly 13,000 EU nationals have left the NHS since the Brexit referendum, including well over 5,000 nurses. Recent figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council show that the number of nurses arriving from the EU dropped by 87% from 2016-17 to 2017-18. It’s simply not possible to overstate what a disaster this is turning out to be.

And, as the NHS emerges slowly out of its now normal annual crisis of the winter months, it hardly needs saying that an epidemic will not be coped with, no matter what the government says. Appeals by the government for retired doctors to step forward to help combat the Coronavirus crisis is not only desperate, it jeopardises their own health – you know, being in the highest mortality group of the virus and all that.

Heavens above

British attempts to rival the European’s Galileo satellite navigation system – hailed as a symbol of post-Brexit independence – has fallen flat on its face after a series of disagreements over the costly space project.

The government had intended to rival the EU’s Galileo system, which will have 24 satellites orbiting the earth to serve satellite navigation systems, as well as high-level encryption services for public service authorities and the military.

One of Johnson’s first acts in office was to back the proposals. “Let’s get going now on our own position navigation and timing satellite and earth observation systems – UK assets orbiting in space with all the long-term strategic and commercial benefits for this country,” he said.

However, space industry insiders have been claiming that there was little understanding of what was actually involved and the Financial Times reports that the costs have risen from approximately £3 billion to £5 billion.

“The problem is that this programme was launched in the political environment of Brexit, but there has been no discussion among stakeholders about what the requirement is,” one space industry expert said.

Work harder

A Tory MP has called for the government to review the EU’s working time directive after Brexit to fill labour expected shortages.

Appearing on the BBC’s Politics South West programme, the Conservative MP for North Cornwall was asked about how the government will solve the problem of shortage of workers once the Brexit transition period ends and the new points-based immigration system is introduced.

Mann admitted that the impact Priti Patel’s proposals will have on the workforce is “one of the biggest challenges has at the moment”. Mann went on to explain how the problem could be solved – “I genuinely think we need to have a serious think looking at the working time directive.” It was then pointed out by the host that these laws were there to protect vulnerable people from excessive hours. Ahh, well, there is that.

Peugeot to sue the government

Peugeot could demand compensation from the British government to keep its Vauxhall factory in Ellesmere Port open in the event of a bad Brexit deal, its chief executive has said.

Carlos Tavares, the head of Peugeot’s owner, PSA, said the carmaker’s European workers should not be forced to bear the costs of “customs barriers” between the UK and the EU when the transition period finishes at the end of the year.

The Ellesmere Port factory in Cheshire, employs about 1,000 people and all of their jobs are now on the line.

Far-right resurgence now mainstream

Brexit is causing far-right views on immigration and identity to be drawn into the mainstream, a report has warned this week.

Research by Hope Not Hate found that Britain’s departure from the EU has fuelled discussions of loyalty, elitism and patriotism, “drawing people who might have otherwise have been attracted to the far right back into the mainstream right”.

“The blurring of these boundaries has seen mainstream politicians and commentators using language and rhetoric that was previously found only on the far right [and] seen anti-Muslim prejudice, demeaning rhetoric on migrants and refugees and notions of a ‘cultural war’ against social liberalism increasingly being adopted,” the group’s annual report said.

British retailers

This week, the Retail Gazette confirmed that British retailers have to act in order to save their businesses. Multiple threats to retailers as a direct result of Brexit come from additional paperwork, increased delivery times, currency fluctuations, tariffs and what they see as their biggest problem – staffing.

“Retail is one of the many sectors that relies disproportionately on international employees, the majority of whom are from the EU and who have previously been able to enter the UK without any visa or requirement for particular qualifications or measurable skills,” said Shara Pledger, an associate at Latitude Law.

“This isn’t to say this workforce isn’t skilled, just that the government doesn’t treat it as such.” Pledger went on to warn that – “The government’s points-based immigration system is set to have a significant impact on the retail industry.”

Forms, forms and more forms

Also, this week comes the news that the government now face having to hire and train up 50,000 people in the next six months to process Brexit paperwork for border operations.

But experts have warned it will be a challenge to train enough people in time to be competent in the complexity of customs declarations and the second layer of red tape involving entry and exit declaration forms that are mandatory for trading with the EU.

The Road Haulage Association has warned that the number of declaration forms for tariffs alone will rocket from the current 50m a year to 200-250m a year.

In addition, the exit and entry forms introduced after the 9/11 terror attack in New York to ensure safety on ferries and planes will involve another 100-125m forms being processed every year.

And the extra taxpayer cash required for that – just £1.5billion – each and every year.

UN -“post-Brexit exports could fall by $32 billion“

Potential losses under a “no-deal” Brexit from tariffs are estimated at between $11.4 billion and $16 billion of current exports – and the new study says ‘Non-Tariff Measures’ would double those losses.

The study also projects that even if a “standard” free trade agreement were to be signed by the parties, the UK’s exports could still drop by nine per cent, a cost of $32bn.

This is because standard trade deals normally focus on reducing or eliminating tariffs rather than NTMs and Britain has already indicated it will diverge from the EU in terms of regulation.

As the EU market accounts for 46 per cent of the UK’s exports, a no-deal Brexit would deal a major blow to the UK’s economy, according to the study by the Geneva-based agency.

Too few cooks spoil the…

EU citizens make up about a quarter of the 3 million workers in Britain’s hospitality industry, the country’s fourth-biggest employer, according to a KPMG report just out. In London, about 75% of waiting staff and 25% of chefs are from the EU.

Since the Brexit vote, annual immigration from within continental Europe has fallen by more than half.

In response, the Home Office said – “Employers will need to join our mission to level-up skills and economic growth across the whole UK so that we deliver a high-skill, high-wage and highly productive economy.” No-one understands what that means in the hospitality industry when the shortage is so great with no-one to replace the losses. Paying upwards of £26,000 to a waiter might sound good news to waiter’s but not having any restaurants to work in might prove problematic if they all go bust.

Mark Jones, the chief executive of Carluccio’s which runs a chain of Italian restaurants, said he is “hugely disappointed” by the proposed immigration changes. Jones said more than two-thirds of his employees currently come from the EU.

But, but…

Blue passports can be obtained from next month. Embattled Home Secretary, Priti Patel – still clinging on to her job by the tips of her talons said: “Leaving the European Union gave us a unique opportunity to restore our national identity and forge a new path in the world.”

So, we rejected a British manufacturer and went for a European-designed, polish printed version where the profits are routed through Denmark to the bank of a munitions manufacturer in Paris. Daily Express readers were incandescent with rage over this and are demanding the passports are made in old Blighty. In fact, 96 per cent of them in their own poll conducted by the newspaper to their own readers agreed-  according to a completely unbiased journalist.

One devastated reader said – “For the love of mercy, absolutely, how can we be a sovereign nation and NOT produce our own passports!!?? HOW?”

The British company that lost out has now made operational cuts of £20million as the news saw its share price plunge. Soon afterwards, the CEO Martin Sutherland, said there would need to be a big shakeup including a reorganisation of the workforce and then promptly resigned.

Oh and don’t mention the words – ‘farmers’ or ‘fishermen’ – because the government just confirmed this week that they mean nothing to the UK and will be sacrificed in trade negotiations.

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Defender 2020: Largest Mobilisation of NATO Troops Against Russia in 25 Years

March 5th, 2020 by Markus Salzmann

The largest deployment of troops across the Atlantic in 25 years entered its main phase last weekend within the framework of the Defender Europe 2020 exercise. The scale of NATO’s provocative military exercise underscores how far advanced the preparations for war are 75 years after the end of World War II.

The United States and 18 other countries are deploying large contingents of troops from America and Western Europe to the Russian border within a short period of time. In total, around 37,000 soldiers are participating in the exercise, which is to continue until June. Their objective is Poland and the Baltic states.

The freight ship Endurance docked in Bremerhaven last week together with four other vessels carrying US tanks and other heavy military equipment. The US alone is deploying 20,000 troops and their armaments to Europe.

Stand-alone infrastructure is being established to facilitate the troop movements. The German army has established a central transport control centre, set up tent camps on military training grounds, and deployed mobile refuelling stations. Although the kilometres-long convoys are generally on the move during the night, they are causing significant disruption to transport.

The German army has remained silent on the cost of the exercise. Referring to sources in the army, the Tagesspiegel newspaper estimates that the cost will be €2.5 million in Germany alone. “This needs analysis by the parts of the armed forces involved based on the deployment of equipment and personnel, accommodation, and the provision of infrastructure. Additionally, further costs could arise,” wrote the Tagesspiegel .

A spokesman for the US military stated that the countries involved would invest in military infrastructure. As an example, he referred to Lithuania, which like Germany is investing in the expansion of its railway network for heavy cargo.

Of the 37,000 soldiers from 19 countries involved in the exercise, more than half, 20,000, come from the United States. 4,000 German soldiers are taking part. In addition, police units are protecting the transportation of materials. Alongside around 33,000 vehicles and containers, some 450 tanks will deploy to the Russian border. Over 100 rail transportation trips will take place. Overall, the troops will move through seven countries and use 14 airports and ports.

Germany is the main hub of the exercise. In the first phase, which runs until April, American weaponry and military equipment will be deployed in Germany, Belgium, and Poland. In stage two, which will run partially in parallel until May, troops will be deployed through Germany to Poland. In the final phase prior to the main exercise all remaining troops will be deployed from Germany to Poland and the Baltic states. The final exercise will take place in Bergen on the Lüneburger moors, Germany, at the end of May, before the withdrawal of all forces is completed by the end of July.

The manoeuvre builds on military exercises held well into the 1990s in Western Europe, some of which involved up to 130,000 troops. Now, for the first time, such a large-scale exercise is being carried out right up to the Russian border and on former Soviet territory.

The manoeuvre is designed to send a message of deterrence, according to the German and US militaries. Lt. Gen. Martin Schelleis commented on this, “The reality is that Russia, with its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, provoked this development. But Russia is not the pretext for the exercise; military capacity can only be rebuilt and maintained over an extended period of time.”

NATO’s European supreme commander Gen. Tod. D. Wolters described the exercise as a “platform to strengthen the readiness and interoperability of allied forces.”

Like the Sabre Strike exercise in Lithuania in 2017 and Trident Juncture in 2018, the current manoeuvre aims to test the capacity to rapidly deploy combat-ready troops and equipment to the Russian border, before the “alliance case” is put to the test in a series of combat simulations.

The advanced character of the preparations for war with Russia was underscored last week when US Defence Secretary Mark Esper participated in a war game at the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska, during which the firing of nuclear weapons against Russia was simulated.

The US military stated that the war game involved an unexpected incident in Europe during which a war is being waged on Russia, and Russia decides to fire a small-scale nuclear weapon on a location in NATO territory.

Two exercises will take place in Latvia on the border with Russia during the early part of this year. A Swift Response Training involving Latvian and international troops will run between April and May. Military units from the United States, Britain, Italy, and Spain will practice aerial manoeuvres in case of a sudden threat.

However, it is not only the Trump administration that is speaking the language of war. Germany and the European powers are attempting to emerge militarily from the shadow of the United States.

This applies above all to Germany. In his speech at the recent Munich Security Conference, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier complained that Russia had annexed Crimea without any regard for international law. Moscow “used military force and the violent redrawing of borders on the European continent as legitimate policy options.”

“Observing is insufficient,” declared Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defence minister, who spoke in Munich on the topic of “Defending the West.” On this issue, she stated her “full agreement” with French President Emmanuel Macron, who called at the Munich Security Conference for a more independent European military policy. The Europeans must not simply “describe their weaknesses, comment on the actions of others or complain about them, but also conduct much more strategic dialogue in Europe and do something concrete for our security.” Germany in particular is “obliged to develop a greater capacity to act and a willingness to take action.”

All political parties in Germany support this drive to war. The formerly pacifist Greens are no exception to this. With their typical demagogy, they have sought to turn events on their head and present the current NATO exercise as a contribution to disarmament. Green party defence spokesman Tobias Lindner stated that one successful outcome of the exercise would be that a permanent stationing of more US troops in Germany and Europe would not be required.

Russia, which was given the assurance 30 years ago when Germany was reunified that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe and certainly not onto former Soviet territory, has responded with alarm to the latest provocation. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov remarked, “Of course we will respond. We can’t ignore developments that cause us concern. But we will respond in a way that does not create any unnecessary risk.”

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Featured image: U.S. Marines run to firing positions during live-fire training in Jordan [Credit: Marine Corps, Staff Sgt. Dengrier M. Baez]

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Arms Firms Swarm Decision Makers

March 5th, 2020 by Yves Engler

More politically dependent than almost all other industries, arms manufacturers play for keeps in the nation’s capital. They target ads and events sponsorships at decision makers while hiring insiders and military stars to lobby on their behalf.

Activist and academic Tamara Lorincz recently posted a photo of an F35 ad in a bus shelter in front of Parliament Hill. US weapons giant Lockheed Martin is pushing hard to win a $19 billion contract to supply the Canadian air force with a fleet of new fighter jets.

To gain a share of the public funds on offer arms companies target ads at political and military leaders, promoting their products in washrooms and bus shelters where Department of National Defence (DND) and Canadian Forces (CF) officials congregate. Rideau Institute founder Steven Staples pointed out that “you can’t walk around in Ottawa without tripping over some arms dealer on Spark Street.”

Arms sellers also sponsor talks and exhibits attended by Ottawa insiders. They promote their brand at the Canadian War Museum, Gatineau-Ottawa airshow, Ottawa Chamber of Commerce, Conference of Defense Associations, etc.

Beyond promoting their wares in the nation’s capital, companies advertise aggressively in publications read by Ottawa insiders such as iPolitics, Ottawa Business Journal and Hill Times. “Today’s Morning Brief is brought to you by Canada’s Combat Ship Team,” noted a regular iPolitics ad. “Lockheed Martin Canada is leading a team of BAE Systems, CAE, L3 Technologies, MDA and Ultra Electronics to deliver the Royal Canadian Navy’s future fleet of surface combatants.” Their ads also foot much of the bill for journals read by military officials such as the Canadian Defence Review, Canadian Naval Review and Esprit de Corps.

Arms companies’ constantly lobby MPs and DND officials. In a “12-Month Lobbying Activity Search” of the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada Lockheed Martin, CAE, Bombardier, General Dynamics, Raytheon, BAE, Boeing and Airbus Defence were listed dozens of times. Lockheed Martin’s name alone appeared 40 times in a recent search.

To facilitate access to government officials, international arms makers maintain offices in Ottawa. Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Airbus, United Technologies, Rayethon, etc. all have offices in Canada’s capital and most of them are a few blocks from Parliament.

A sales pitch carries more weight when it comes from a friend, CF “star” or experienced veteran. As a result, arms companies contract former CF and DND leaders to lobby on their behalf. Long-time Project Ploughshares campaigner Kenneth Epps explains: “there are many cases of government officials who, very early after retiring, become lobbyists or advocates of certain types of equipment or representatives of particular companies. They come from government and know the ins and outs of how government decisions are made, who in government to contact and what arguments might be useful to advocate for certain types of equipment.”

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In October 2017 Lockheed Martin contracted retired Air Force commander Andre Deschamps to lobby for military contracts while Irving Shipbuilding hired former vice-admiral James King to push for Arctic and offshore patrol ship contracts. In 1983 three leading DND bureaucrats set up CFN Consultants. A late 1980s CFN brochure highlighted its “in-depth knowledge of Canadian government and military requirements, military specifications, contracting procedures and associated budgetary considerations.” Headquartered two blocks from Parliament, CFN Consultants remains dominated by retired military leaders.

But contracting former CF/DND as lobbyists is a half measure. Some arms firms offer executive positions to retired CF leaders. In 2013 former deputy commander at NORAD and commander of NATO forces in Libya, Charles Bouchard was appointed “country lead for Lockheed Martin Canada” in a bid to convince Ottawa to purchase its F-35 jets. Four years later L3 Technologies appointed Major General Richard Foster to oversee its Canadian business. The press release announcing its hiring of the former commander of the RCAF and deputy commander of the Joint Operations Command highlighted “his extensive military experience and work with foreign governments.” In 2012 former Navy commodore Kelly Williams became General Dynamics Canada’s senior director of strategy and government relations while three weeks after Lieutenant-General Andrew Leslie retired as Chief of Transformation for the CF, CGI Group appointed him to lead an Ottawa-based business unit seeking to “serve the Canadian Forces around the globe.”

It’s not only CF leaders who use their public sector careers as a springboard to lucrative arms industry positions. Weapons makers often hire top bureaucrats who were formerly responsible for arms procurement. Two weeks after stepping down as a deputy minister of defence in 2017 — after years of procurement work — John Turner was appointed vice president of operations at arms contractor PAL Aerospace. In 2011 CGI Group hired 12-year DND veteran Ken Taylor as vice-president of cyber security in Canada. A CGI Group press release noted: “In his new role, Ken will work closely with both government and commercial clients as part of the newly formed Canadian Defence, Public Safety and Intelligence business unit under the leadership of Lieutenant-General (retired) Andrew Leslie.” (Leslie was later Justin Trudeau’s Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs.)

The CF-leader-to-arms-executive pipeline is important to the upper echelon of the military. In 2008 columnist Don Martin pointed out that “dozens of retired officers pocket salaries they could never have dreamed of as soldiers.”

The prospect of a lucrative post-retirement industry position increases the likelihood that CF leaders identify the military’s interests with arms makers. The ‘rent a general’ pipeline strengthens interest in expensive new weaponry and opposition to arms control measures. Since many Canadian weapons companies are branch plants of US firms, lucrative post-retirement positions also increase CF leaders’ support of the US military-industrial complex.

To weaken militarism, it is imperative to reduce the financial benefits sloshing around the system. Senior CF and DND officials should be restricted from lobbying for at least five years after leaving the public service and other measures ought to be adopted to weaken the link between the military hierarchy and arms firms.

In the meantime, activists in Ottawa should follow Lorincz’ lead and ‘correct’ arms industry ads. She posted a sign on top of the Lockheed Martin ad outside Parliament noting, “F35 Climate Disaster: Green Jobs Not War Jobs!”

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Ending the Myth that Trump Is Ending the Wars

March 5th, 2020 by Khury Petersen-Smith

There was this moment during the State of the Union Address that I can’t stop thinking about.

When President Trump spoke to army wife Amy Wiliams during his speech and told her he’d arranged her husband’s return home from Afghanistan as a “special surprise,” it was difficult to watch.

Sgt. Townsend Williams then descended the stairs to reunite with his family after seven months of deployment. Congress cheered. A military family’s reunion — with its complicated feelings that are typically handled in private or on a base — was used for an applause line.

That gimmick was the only glimpse many Americans will get of the human reality of our wars overseas. There is no such window into the lives or suffering of people in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, or beyond.

That’s unacceptable. And so is the myth that Trump is actually ending the wars.

The U.S. has reached a deal with the Taliban to remove 3,400 of the 12,000 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, with the pledge to withdraw more if certain conditions are met. That’s a long overdue first step, as U.S. officials are finally recognizing the war is a disaster and are negotiating an exit.

But taking a step back reveals a bigger picture in which, from West Africa to Central Asia, Trump is expanding and deepening the War on Terror — and making it deadlier.

Far from ending the wars, U.S. airstrikes in Somalia and Syria have skyrocketed under Trump, leading to more civilian casualties in both countries. In Somalia, the forces U.S. operations are supposedly targeting have not been defeated after 18 years of war. It received little coverage in the U.S., but the first week of this year saw a truck bombing in Mogadishu that killed more than 80 people.

Everywhere, ordinary people, people just like us except they happen to live in other countries, pay the price of these wars. Last year saw over 10,000 Afghan civilian casualties — the sixth year in a row to reach those grim heights.

And don’t forget, 2020 opened with Trump bringing the U.S. to the brink of a potentially catastrophic war with Iran. And he continues to escalate punishing sanctions on the country, devastating women, children, the elderly, and other vulnerable people.

Trump is not ending wars, but preparing for more war. Over the past year, he has deployed 14,000 more troops in the Middle East — beyond the tens of thousands already there.

If this seems surprising, it’s in part because the problem has been bipartisan. Indeed, many congressional Democrats have actually supported these escalations.

In December, 188 House Democrats joined Republicans in passing a nearly $740 billion military budget that continues the wars. They passed the budget after abandoning anti-war measures put forward by California Representative Barbara Lee and the precious few others trying to rein in the wars.

It’s worth remembering that State of the Union visual, of Congress rising in unison and joining the president in applause for his stunt with the Williams family. Because there has been nearly that level of consensus year after year in funding, and expanding, the wars.

Ending them will not be easy. Too many powerful interests — from weapons manufacturers to politicians — are too invested. But ending the wars begins with rejecting the idea that real opposition will come from inside the White House.

As with so many other issues — like when Trump first enacted the Muslim Ban and people flocked to airports nationwide in protest, or the outpouring against caging children at the border — those of us who oppose the wars need to raise our voices, and make the leaders follow.

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Khury Petersen-Smith is the Michael Ratner Middle East Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

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Bloomberg Quits Race for the White House

March 5th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

On Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported the following:

“Michael Bloomberg plans to stay in the presidential race until after the results of Super Tuesday primaries are counted, his campaign manager said, rejecting calls from (Dem) officials (that he) drop out and make way for Joe Biden,” adding:

He “dismissed suggestions that he drop out,” stressing that “no one will secure the nomination before the (July) convention.”

Money can’t buy everything — no matter how much is spent trying.

Bloomberg did poorly the first time he appeared on the ballot in 14 Super Tuesday states, winning only the American Samoa caucus, despite a spending blitzkrieg — over $500 million of his own money to try buying the White House, more on advertising than all other Dem aspirants combined.

While winning small numbers of delegates on Tuesday, he finished no better than third in all mainland contests.

Asked if he would reassess things late Tuesday, his campaign manager Kevin Sheekey said while taking stock of where things stand “after every election” goes on, Bloomberg looks forward to competing in upcoming primaries.

Citing an unnamed aide, Bloomberg News reported that his “campaign would look at the results but that the intent is to continue competing,” adding:

“Bloomberg himself brushed off questions earlier Tuesday about whether he would drop out of the race.”

When asked, he said “I’m in it to win it.” A day later, he dropped out, saying the following:

“I’ve always believed that defeating Donald Trump starts with uniting behind the candidate with the best shot to do it.”

“After yesterday’s vote, it is clear that candidate is my friend and a great American (sic), Joe Biden.

“I’ve known Joe for a very long time. I know his decency, his honesty, and his commitment to the issues that are so important to our country – including gun safety, health care, climate change, and good jobs (sic).”

He ignored Biden’s longstanding support for dirty business as usual — pro-war, pro-business, anti-populist, anti-social justice, anti-governance serving all Americans equitably positions throughout his public life for nearly half a century.

No political candidate in US history ever spent more for less results than Bloomberg in his presidential bid.

Instead of spending over $500 million on self-aggrandizement, likely tens of millions more to come for an elaborate infrastructure remaining in place.

It includes numerous staff members he pledged to pay through the November elections to support the Dem nominee.

Imagine the good his spending could have accomplished if used for this purpose.

How much healthcare for needy households and higher education for students to avoid debt bondage could he have bought with money thrown away on self-promotion?

How many homeless could he have funded shelter for? How many food insecure families could he have aided?

He could have funded a significant pro-peace, equity and justice campaign, the power of his wealth perhaps able to make a difference.

He entered the race to become Dem standard bearer, believing Biden was weak and beatable.

He bet wrong. Dem party bosses support the former vice president. Super Tuesday results proved it.

He believed money could buy the Dem nomination and White House by spending enough.

Yet he dropped out early in the race badly beaten. His record as New York City mayor left him vulnerable, including his racist stop-and-risk policy.

Black and Latino males were disproportionately targeted. In 2002 when he became mayor, the NYPD made about 97,000 annual stop and frisk searches.

At the end of his tenure in 2013, it was over 700,000, a policy Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas denounced in Terry v. Ohio (1968), a dissenting view, saying:

Absent probable cause, “(w)e  hold today that the police have greater authority to make a ‘seizure’ and conduct a ‘search’ than a judge has to authorize such action. We have said precisely the opposite over and over again.”

“To give the police greater power than a magistrate is to take a long step down the totalitarian path.”

“Perhaps such a step is desirable to cope with modern forms of lawlessness.”

“But if it is taken, it should be the deliberate choice of the people through a constitutional amendment.”

Throughout the US, Blacks and Latinos are racially profiled and otherwise abused by law enforcement.

The New York State’s ACLU earlier denounced NYPD stop-and-frisk practices, saying:

“The Department’s own reports on its stop-and-frisk activity confirm what many people in communities of color across the city have long known: The police are stopping hundreds of thousands of law abiding New Yorkers every year, and the vast majority are black and Latino.”

Multi-billionaire Bloomberg long ago lost touch with ordinary people who struggle daily to get by.

Dozens of women sued him for sexual harassment and discriminatory practices. He boasted about his womanizing exploits, including in an autobiography.

Now out of the race for the White House, he’s helping Joe Biden become Dem standard bearer and will aid his campaign against Trump if nominated.

Based on Super Tuesday results, the 2020 race for Dems looks like a repeat of 2016 — assuring Hillary’s nomination then, Biden the apparent choice of Dem party bosses to face Trump in November.

A Final Comment

Is Warren next to drop out? According to the Hill and other media, she’ll meet with staff to assess her position in the race after doing poorly so far, winning no states.

Through Super Tuesday, she won an estimated 50 delegates, noticeably finishing behind Biden and Sanders in Massachusetts, her home state.

Following her Feb. 29 loss in South Carolina, her campaign manager Roger Lau said the following:

“Our internal projections continue to show Elizabeth winning delegates in nearly every state in play on Super Tuesday, and in a strong position to earn a sizable delegate haul coming out of the night.”

After things didn’t turn out as expected, Lau said the team is “obviously disappointed. (Warren is) going to take time right now to think through the right way to continue this fight.”

An internal campaign memo quoted by the Boston Herald was wrong, saying she was “poised to finish in the top two in over half of Super Tuesday states (eight of 14), in the top three in all of them, and is on pace to pick up at-large statewide delegates in all but one.”

She finished third or fourth in Super Tuesday contests, meeting the 15% threshold to win delegates in only 5 of 14 states — doing no better in earlier races.

Is it just a matter of days before she bows out, leaving Biden and Sanders in the race to be Dem standard bearer against Trump in November?

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Flickr

The Illusion of Democracy in America

March 5th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

When US elections are held for high office and key congressional posts, party bosses in cahoots with monied interests decide things, not voters.

It works the same way every time, Super Tuesday results in 14 states the latest example.

According to pre-election polls, Sanders was heavily favored to trounce Biden in most states, especially delegate-rich California and Texas.

Tuesday results turned out otherwise. In three presidential campaigns (1988, 2008, and currently) longtime establishment figure Biden never won a primary election until South Carolina last Saturday.

It came after poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, his campaign close to collapsing.

How was it possible to dramatically turn things around overnight, turning near-defeat to frontrunner status in a few days?

The post-Super Tuesday delegate count has him with 566 to Sanders’ 501, Warren virtually out of contention with 61, and Tulsi Gabbard with one.

The rest of the Dem starting field dropped out, Bloomberg the latest. Is Warren next?

A Wednesday NewsOne report said the following:

“Elizabeth Warren has reportedly decided to suspend her campaign to be president. It wasn’t a question if, but when and how…”

“After such a poor showing during this early primary season, the decision to call it quits was likely not much of a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to politics.”

“What may have been a surprise…was the additional report that Warren’s team was colluding with Bernie Sanders to make a dual announcement of ending her campaign along with endorsing his.”

On the same day, the Washington Post reported the following:

“Top surrogates and allies of Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are discussing ways for their two camps to unite and push a common liberal agenda, with the expectation that Warren is likely to leave the presidential campaign soon, according to two people familiar with the talks.”

“Warren associates and the camp of former vice president Joe Biden also had talks about a potential endorsement if she drops out, according to two people familiar with the conversations,” adding:

“(C)onverations…are in an early phase,” nothing official so far. Warren’s “associates…say she is now looking for the best way to step aside…no certainty she will endorse Sanders or anyone else.”

He and Warren reportedly spoke by phone Wednesday, Sanders saying:

“She has not made any decisions as of this point. It is important for all of us, certainly me…to respect the time and the space she needs to make a decision.”

Given how poorly she’s done so far, polls for upcoming primaries largely showing no improvement, it’s likely just a matter of when she drops out and whether she’ll endorse Sanders, Biden, or neither aspirant.

Most polls conducted in February through early March showed Sanders leading Biden, other candidates way behind, according to Real Clear Politics.

It suggests that election meddling turned things around for the former vice president, a figure considered “safe,” Sanders not “safe” enough — despite going along to get along most often, his rhetoric and voting record world’s apart.

How else could he have been elected and reelected to the House and Senate since 1990?

True blue anti-war/progressive Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney overcame huge obstacles to serve six terms as Georgia’s 4th district representative (12 years) — before defeated by the power of Big Money, notably from the Israel lobby for her support of long-suffering Palestinians, her opposition to Israeli apartheid.

Rarely ever does someone of her stature serve in Congress, almost never for the duration of her tenure.

What could transform the US into a model society if figures like her got elected in large numbers is prevented by manipulating the process to block it.

That’s the American way — hypocrisy, autocracy, and plutocracy from inception, not democracy.

No rule of the people ever existed – governance of, by, and for the privileged few alone at the expense of most others under one-party rule with two right, sharing power by taking turns.

American exceptionalism, moral superiority, and the indispensable state are pure fantasy.

The nation’s founders empowered its privilege class to rule – democracy the way it should be an anathema notion throughout US history, at home and abroad, wanting it eliminated wherever it exists.

Each US electoral cycle, names and faces change. Dirty business as usual remains in place, dark forces retaining power — their interests alone served, never the public welfare.

Managed news misinformation and disinformation created a truth emergency gone unaddressed – voters unable to make informed choices from major media coverage.

Democracy in America is for the privileged few alone at the expense of most others, billions of dollars spent each election cycle insuring it.

Digital age technology makes outcomes easier to control. Easily manipulated corporate controlled electronic machines vote, not citizens.

It’s why losers can become winners. Was Super Tuesday the latest example? Results diverging from pre-election polls suggest it.

Fantasy democracy over the real thing is why around half the US electorate abstains most often in presidential year voting, larger numbers in midterm elections.

Voter disenfranchisement is rife, independent candidates shut out of the system, unable to compete on a level playing field.

If elections transformed swords into plowshares and changed things to serve all Americans equitably, they’d be banned.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Trump’s Afghanistan Deal Prioritizes Bragging Rights Over Lasting Peace

March 5th, 2020 by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

It’s true that the Trump administration signed a “peace deal” with the Taliban — something that eluded both George W. Bush and Barack Obama — but a closer look at the agreement reveals it to be riddled with conditions that are fraught with obstacles.

The terms of the deal suggest that Trump is more interested in boasting that he’s fulfilling his campaign promise to bring the troops home than he is committed to achieving real peace in Afghanistan. This fact has also been noted by Trump’s former national security aides, some of whom have said that the president “is far less interested in an actual Afghan peace” than in claiming he is making good on his vow to withdraw the U.S. troops.

The agreement announced on February 29 should not rightly be called a “peace deal,” Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) said in a statement. Although the agreement “is a step forward,” Lee noted, “It leaves thousands of troops in Afghanistan and lacks the critical investments in peacebuilding, human-centered development, or governance reform needed to rebuild Afghan society.”

Afghan women activists Mary Akrami, Sahar Halaimzai and Rahela Sidiqi criticized the agreement and the process leading to it in USA Today: “Afghan women and representatives from civil society and other minority groups should have been at the table for the U.S.-Taliban talks that led to this agreement, but we were not.”

Trump’s “Agreement for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan” sets forth a plan for withdrawing all foreign forces from Afghanistan, a mutual release of prisoners, Taliban prevention of attacks against U.S. and allied forces from Afghan soil, and negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government. Although it claims to be “a comprehensive peace agreement,” as Lee points out, “this so-called ‘peace deal’ is anything but.”

Withdrawal Timeline for All Foreign Forces

The agreement establishes a timeline for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan. It says the “United States is committed to withdraw from Afghanistan all military forces of the United States, its allies and Coalition partners, including all non-diplomatic civilian personnel, private security contractors, trainers, advisors, and supporting service personnel” no later than 14 months after the agreement is announced.

Within the first 135 days, the U.S., allies and the Coalition will reduce the number of forces to 8,600 and withdraw all forces from five military bases. The remaining 8,600 forces (the same number that remained when Obama left office) is “the minimum number of Special Operations forces, intelligence officers and support and security personnel that the Pentagon and C.I.A. believe are necessary to hold the capital, Kabul” and fight the Islamic State, David Sanger wrote in The New York Times.

Apparently, the U.S. wants “to keep intelligence operatives on the ground fighting Isis and al-Qaida,” The Guardian reports. While the CIA won’t increase its presence in Afghanistan, it will remove its personnel “more slowly than the military,” according to sourcesquoted by the The New York Times.

The U.S., allies and Coalition will withdraw “all remaining forces from Afghanistan” by the end of the remaining nine and a half months.

But, Sanger cites reports of “a series of not-so-secret annexes to the agreement that allow both Special Operations forces and the C.I.A. to retain a presence in the country.”

Negotiations Between Taliban and Afghan Government

The Taliban will begin “intra-Afghan negotiations with Afghan sides on March 10, 2020.”

But since the contested election between Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, it is unclear with whom the Taliban will be negotiating. On February 18, the Independent Election Commission declared Ghani the winner. Abdullah disagrees and is threatening to form a parallel government.

The agreement, which was announced after a seven-day “reduction in violence,” requires “dialogue and negotiations” about “a permanent and comprehensive ceasefire.”

Meanwhile, the carnage continues.

Mutual Prisoner Release

The U.S. commits to work on a plan to “expeditiously release combat and political prisoners” by March 10. The Afghan government would release up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban would release up to 1,000 prisoners they are holding. The goal of “the relevant sides,” facilitated by the United States, is to release “all the remaining prisoners” within the ensuing three months.

But since the Afghan government was not part of the pre-agreement negotiations, it did not agree to the release. In fact, Ghani said on March 1 that he does not intend to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners by the March 31 date for initiation of negotiations with the Taliban.

The Taliban won’t come to the negotiating table unless the prisoners in Afghan custody are released.

Taliban Agrees to Prevent Attacks Against U.S. From Afghan Soil

According to the agreement, the “Taliban will not allow any of its members, other individuals or groups, including al-Qa’ida,” to use Afghan soil “to threaten the security of the United States and its allies.” The Taliban will also instruct members of the Taliban “not to cooperate with groups of individuals threatening the security of the United States and its allies.”

Furthermore, the Taliban “will prevent any group or individual in Afghanistan” from threatening U.S. and allies’ security and will block them from training, recruiting and fundraising.

The Taliban also commits that the prisoners it releases won’t pose a threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies. In addition, the Taliban commits to complying with international migration law so that people who are granted asylum don’t pose a threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies. And the Taliban won’t issue passports, visas, travel permits or other legal documents for entry to Afghanistan to anyone who poses a threat to the security of the U.S. and its allies.

But it is unclear whether the Taliban is capable of preventing terrorist groups from launching attacks from Afghan territory. “We will not allow our land to be used against any country including the U.S.,” Suhail Shaheen, spokesman for the Taliban’s Qatar office, told The Washington Post, “but I am talking about the area where we have control.”

Indeed, as Douglas London, Georgetown University adjunct professor and former senior CIA officer, wrote in The New York Times, the Taliban is “diverse, decentralized and factionalized,” which leaves enforcement of the agreement in doubt. The Taliban “has historically been controlled by regional warlords with no enduring loyalty to any particular ideology, leader or cause,” London noted. Moreover, members of the Taliban’s negotiating team are “largely disconnected from and disrespected by the Taliban’s senior leadership.”

U.S. Review of Sanctions Against Taliban

The United States will conduct a review of its sanctions against the Taliban “with the goal of removing these sanctions by August 27, 2020.” These include a freeze on financial assets and an arms embargo against the Taliban.

When negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government commence, the U.S. “will start diplomatic engagement” with other Security Council members and Afghanistan to remove the Taliban from the sanctions list.

U.S. Commits to Refrain From Threat or Use of Force Against Afghanistan

In a provision confirming their obligations under the United Nations Charter, the U.S. and its allies “will refrain from the threat or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Afghanistan or intervening in its domestic affairs.”

The U.S. will “seek economic cooperation for reconstruction” from the new Afghan government during their negotiations and “will not intervene in [Afghanistan’s] internal affairs.”

Finally, the United States will ask the Security Council to endorse this agreement.

After 18 Years and Loss of Blood and Treasure, U.S. Hands Afghanistan Back to Taliban

Bush illegally launched “Operation Enduring Freedom” in October 2001, in retaliation for the September 11 terrorist attacks. After 18 years, tens of thousands killed and more than $2 trillion spent, the U.S. government is returning Afghanistan to the Taliban.

“United States went to war against the Taliban, and then almost two decades later, handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban,” Vijay Prashad, foreign policy expert and director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, noted ironically.

More than 100,000 Afghan civilians and over 58,000 Afghan security forces have been killed. About 2,400 U.S. servicemembers have been killed and 20,000 wounded in the United States’s longest war.

After a 10-year preliminary examination, International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda found a “reasonable basis” to believe that U.S. military and CIA forces committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, including torture, in Afghanistan.

The ICC Pre-Trial Chamber agreed with Bensouda but refused to open a formal investigation, citing doubt about whether it could secure “meaningful cooperation from relevant authorities” which limited the “prospects for a successful investigation.” Bensouda appealed the ruling.

On March 5, the ICC Appeals Chamber will issue a judgment affirming or reversing the Pre-Trial Chamber’s refusal to initiate an investigation.

Meanwhile, the Taliban control or claim to control almost half of Afghanistan’s districts, “more territory . . . than at any point since 2001,” according to the Pentagon.

Robert Malley, president of the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan that the reason the Taliban “got so much out of the deal” is that “after two decades, the U.S. has failed to win an unwinnable war.”

Nevertheless, The Washington Post’s explosive report titled “The Afghanistan Papers” reveals that the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations all lied routinely about U.S. success in the war.

In his op-ed in The Times, London opines that Trump’s special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, who negotiated the so-called peace deal for the United States, only wants the agreement to survive until the fall election. London wrote that Khalilzad has his sights set on being appointed secretary of state in a second Trump administration.

If the deal falls apart, Trump has threatened to “go back with a force that no one’s ever seen.”

In the meantime, Trump, whose overwhelming motive is to be reelected, can claim bragging rights about securing a “peace deal” with the Taliban.

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Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

Banana America: The Fix Is in! “US Politics These Last 48 Hours, …Bernie vs. Biden”

March 5th, 2020 by Philip A Farruggio

This writer has watched countless boxing matches over the years, and has seen how in many instances ‘The Fix is in’. The powers that be want a certain prospect to move up the ranks, they ‘Fix’ it. With boxing all you needed was two judges and maybe the referee, and wallah, your guy wins. It was on  March 13th 1963, when heavyweight prospect Cassius Clay fought journeyman fighter Doug Jones at Madison Square Garden. My dad and I watched it on I believe video tape (not sure of that) and we both felt that Jones won the fight. Clay (soon to be Muhammad Ali) got the decision and went on to fight Sonny Liston for the championship. Well, what just transpired in politics these past 48 hours was right up there with any good old FIX.

Go back to the South Carolina Democratic Presidential debate. Bloomberg calls Bernie Sanders a ‘Communist’ and rails how Sanders will never defeat Trump. Meanwhile, the (so called) moderates, Mayor Pete and Amy Klobuchar, are going after ‘Mr. Supreme Moderate’, Lunchbox Joe Biden, for not being as moderate as them. So what happens? The powerful National Democratic Neo Con Party powerbrokers make sure that the black elected officials and pastors in South Carolina (and elsewhere- the Dems have lots of Afro American politicians and pastors in their pocket)  push their constituents to get behind Biden.

The LIE  they tell is that ‘Sanders cannot defeat Trump’, and Lunchbox Joe can. After all, wasn’t he VP under their hero Obama? I mean, look at all Obama did for black folks. He did virtually nothing as white cops were shooting to kill unarmed blacks. He made a few speeches but did not get the full power of this government to come down hard on police forces that turned a blind eye to it all. Ditto for Obama, and thus VP Biden, for not using their power to stop union busting nationwide. Oh yes, even though too few Amerikans, black or white or yellow and brown, even care enough about this crazy militarism on steroids, it was under Obama (and VP Biden) that we had the highest military spending ever!! Check it out.

So, Biden, scarred by increasingly lower poll numbers, wins big in South Carolina (those politicos and pastors did a great job with their fear card of Sanders VS. Trump). Now here is where the ‘Fix’ shows itself to be exposed under any sort of ‘Light of Truth’. One day before the Big Tuesday primaries Buttigieg and Klobuchar decide to drop out of the race and throw their support for Biden. ‘Amy for Amerika’ even flies out to Texas to attend a Biden rally… The day before Big Tuesday! And last night he did win Texas by a small margin. Think of that for a minute. If Buttigieg and Klobuchar waited until Big Tuesday was over, where they both were on the ballots in all those states, anyone with even ‘half a brain’ knows that many of the votes Biden secured last night would have instead gone to the two of them! Translated: Biden would NOT have won in Texas, Minnesota, Mass. and probably elsewhere. In California, with the largest by far delegate prize, as I write this Sanders is ahead but not by the larger margin expected. Why, well once again, all those so called moderate Democrats who maybe favored Buttigieg or Klobuchar, voted for their ‘Third option’ Biden. Starting to get it folks? Fighter Doug Jones, who passed away in 2017, is probably laughing up in heaven… maybe Muhammad Ali is up there doing the same.

Let’s face it, Trump and his cabal are THE Worst group of predatory capitalists ever in office. This writer, who walked away from the Democrats decades ago, lives in what they like to call a ‘Major Swing State’, Florida. Seeing how the rise of a Neo Fascist white supremacist mindset has been sheltered and even nurtured by this current regime running our nation, I changed my political affiliation from Green Party to Democrat so as to vote for Sanders in our upcoming primary here. I, against my own political understanding as a true Socialist (which Bernie is unfortunately NOT), will honor my vow and vote Democrat (for the LAST TIME I assure you) in November to thwart this craziness a bit. Having a Biden as the choice is so tough for me, but… the ‘Evil of two lessers’ is the one currently in the White House. Biden as president will be but a band-aid on this major wound of our Military Industrial Empire. Yet, if you study history correctly you would know what transpired in Germany, circa 1930-33. The Nazi Party could have been stopped from obtaining power if the Social Democrats and the Communist Party would have formed a coalition. Together, they had the number of votes to thwart Hitler. In this Amerikan Empire of 2020 the same rings true for me.

Remember what happened in 2004? Well, Howard Dean was the absolute frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. He wasn’t as ‘Left Wing’ as Sanders but, in that political climate Dean was much more, as they like to label things, progressive than the others running. John Kerry was flopping in the polls and in the debates.

The empire’s mainstream media even labeled him as such. Kerry was, like Biden less than a week ago, toast. So, Dean does well in the Iowa caucuses and gives a stirring ‘Rah Rah’ speech at a rally that evening. The media picks up on it as if Dean was a madman! They play the bit over and over and before you know it Howard Dean is labeled as a nutcase! Kerry survives and loses to Bush Jr in a highly suspicious election. So much so, just for the meat of this column, that on election eve, I watched pundit Dick Morris as an analyst on one of the networks. Morris was known as a ‘King of Polling’ and helped Bill Clinton win the presidency. He had, by 2004, turned into a bit of a Neo Con ideologue. Either way, he sat there and said early on that the ‘ Exit polls’ in Ohio were showing that Kerry was way ahead. “The exit polls are highly accurate” Morris stated. When, a few hours later it showed that Bush would win Ohio, Morris said “Something smells!” He knew what we all know happens, as it did in 2000 in Florida, that ‘The fix is in’.

Here is my conspiracy theory: The empire that controls both political parties did not want Sanders to be the nominee. Perhaps he would have lost to Trump (as Biden surely will), but more importantly to this Military Industrial Empire, his mere presence on that stage would be detrimental to them.

Why? Well, think of all those working stiffs out there who are getting ****** by both parties for generations. To repeatedly hear the options of how this republic could choose to level this outrageous playing field is not what they want heard. On top of that, and most important, is the influence that Sanders, an old style FDR Democrat, is having on the ‘under 30 year olds’ of this nation. Even in defeat Sanders would galvanize that mindset of  those great young folks for future battles with empire, as Martin Luther King Jr. laid out through peaceful and aggressive non cooperation. The masters who run the Democratic Party will get their ‘Paper Tiger’ in Biden. Or, they will, through a brokered convention, with their 500 Super Delegates, choose someone like Elizabeth Warren… or maybe, as the great essayist Edward Curtin has said since last October, the return of a rejuvenated Hillary Clinton. No kidding.

Finally, what will happen if and when (sadly) they push Sanders out, regardless of what ‘Loyal Soldier’ Bernie will do to help this corrupt party? I will predict this: Many of his young supporters, and millions of those who never choose to vote, seeing through this continual scam, will stay away again in November. Of course, with all the skeletons in Biden’s closet, it will be easy for the carnival barker Trump to defeat him anyway. In defense of his own sabotaged  candidacy here is what the Sanders’ campaign should be doing from now until the convention:

  • In ads for Bernie show the tape of how in 1991 Senator Joe Biden attacked Anita Hill, a black woman of conscience, during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. That should resonate with ALL those Afro American women who voted for Biden yesterday.
  • Play the tape of ranking member of the Judiciary Committee Senator Joe Biden questioning Alberto Gonzales in January of 2005 at his confirmation hearing for Attorney General. Gonzales, at that time, was already outed by journalist Sy Hersh as having ‘ signed off’ on the Protocols for torture that circumvented the Geneva Accords, which were written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo (interesting how Bybee later on became a federal judge, and Yoo a professor at of all places, U of Cal at Berkeley). In his encounter with Gonzales, Biden actually said ” I like ya, and I’m probably going to vote for ya… ” which of course he did, caring NOT for what our government was doing to those detainees at Gitmo and Baghram.

Oh what tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected]

U.S. Economy Heads Towards Recession as Its Central Bank Takes Panic Measures to Protect Financial Markets

March 5th, 2020 by Dr. Leon Tressell

Global stock markets have experienced roller-coaster levels of volatility over the last two weeks due to fears that the coronavirus is going to seriously impact the global economy.

On Tuesday the US Federal Reserve panicked and introduced a 0.5% cut in interest rates. The last time it carried out such an emergency measure was in late 2007 which failed to avert the stock market crash of 2008.

This panic measure failed to reassure financial markets with the major Wall Street indexes from the Dow Jones to the S&P recording major falls.

Financial analyst Wolf Richter has observed:

“By the stock market’s reaction today to the Fed’s shock-and-awe surprise 50-basis point rate cut – it should have caused stocks to soar, but caused them to plunge nearly 3% instead – it would seem that another such shock-and-awe event signals even more panic inside the Fed, and who knows how the stock market might react when it sees the Fed panicking.’’

Over the last 10 days over $4 trillion in value has been wiped from US stock markets.

On the same day as the emergency rate cut the US Federal Reserve injected a record $120 billion into the short term debt market (repo).

Economist Steve St Angelo of the S RS Roco report has commented on the significance of these developments:

“Clearly, there is something SERIOUSLY WRONG in the Financial markets for the Fed to being injected $120 billion, the most since it started its Rep operations last September.

I believe investors and the market have no idea just how bad this Global Contagion will be like over the next 2-4 weeks… and longer. As I stated, don’t be surprised to see the Dow Jones Index lose 40-50% from its peak over the next month. Traders and Wall Street are going to get destroyed, and there is little they can do about it.’’

Over the next few weeks we can expect further emergency measures from the US Federal Reserve and Congress. Media reports suggest that the US Congress is preparing a $9 billion spending package to help offset the impact of the coronavirus on the American economy.

All of these measures smacked of panic. We shouldn’t forget that Jerome Powell, the chair of the US Federal reserve bank, keeps insisting that the fundamentals of America’s economy are sound and strong. Yet the measures he has introduced remind one strongly of the measures carried out by the Fed late 2007 on the verge of the great financial crisis.

We could add to this tale of woe regarding the world’s largest economy.

The latest IHS Markit flash for the U.S. revealed that output had contracted across the American economy during February.

Key findings from the PMI (Purchasing Managers Index) figures reveal that there was a contraction in business activity driven by notable declines in the service sector. New orders for private sector businesses fell for the first time since records were first collected in 2009.

  • Flash U.S. Composite Output Index at 49.6 (53.3 in January) which is a 76-month low.
  • Flash U.S. Services Business Activity Index at 49.4 (53.4 in January) which is a 76-month low.
  • Flash U.S. Manufacturing PMI at 50.8 (51.9 in January) which is a 6-month low.
  • Flash U.S. Manufacturing Output Index at 50.6 (52.4 in January) which is a 7-month low.

Commenting on the significance of the flash PMI data, Chris Williamson, Chief Business Economist at IHS Markit, said:

“With the exception of the government-shutdown of 2013, US business activity contracted for the first time since the global financial crisis in February. Weakness was primarily seen in the service sector, where the first drop in activity for four years was reported, but manufacturing production also ground almost to a halt due to a near-stalling of orders.

“Total new orders fell for the first time in over a decade. The deterioration in was in part linked to the coronavirus outbreak, manifesting itself in weakened demand across sectors such as travel and tourism, as well as via falling exports and supply chain disruptions. However, companies also reported increased caution in respect to spending due to worries about a wider economic slowdown and uncertainty ahead of the presidential election later this year.

“The survey data are consistent with GDP growth slowing from just above 2% in January to a crawl of just 0.6% in February.’’

As Steve St. Angelo has noted the global contagion and its impact are only just beginning. Over the next few weeks and months expect a flurry of emergency measures by central banks and governments across the world as economic data goes from bad to worse.

In 2008 the global economy was saved from a deep depression by the massive stimulus measures carried out by the world’s two most powerful nations i.e. the US Federal Reserve spending trillions to bail out banks across the world and the Chinese government spending over $500 billion on a gigantic infrastructure programme that stimulated the global economy.

The combined measures of global central banks since the great recession of 2008 have served to drive global debt to over $250 trillion. This unprecedented level of debt, which can never be repaid, will only be added to by global central banks and governments over the next period.

Creating yet more debt is not going to solve problems of the global economy, which is afflicted by historic levels of wealth inequality, and has seen a gigantic wealth transfer from the 90% to the top 10% of the world’s population.

The growing problems of the world’s largest economy indicate the current business cycle, which is the longest on record, is rotten ripe for an economic contraction. The next recession is likely to be on a scale that is much worse than that seen during the 2008 crisis. It is likely to drive the American Empire into even more aggressive actions towards its rivals and competitors on the economic and geopolitical stage.

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Empires of the Steppes Fuel Erdogan Khan’s Dreams

March 5th, 2020 by Pepe Escobar

The latest installment of the interminable Syria tragedy could be interpreted as Greece barely blocking a European “invasion” by Syrian refugees. The invasion was threatened by President Erdogan even as he refused the EU’s puny “offer you can refuse” bribe of only one billion euros.

Well, it’s more complicated than that. What Erdogan is in fact weaponizing is mostly economic migrants – from Afghanistan to the Sahel – and not Syrian refugees.

Informed observers in Brussels know that interlocking mafias – Iraqi, Afghan, Egyptian, Tunisian, Moroccan – have been active for quite a long time smuggling everyone and his neighbor from the Sahel via Turkey, as the Greek route towards the EU Holy Grail is much safer than the Central Mediterranean.

The EU sending a last-minute emissary to Ankara will yield no new facts on the ground – even as some in Brussels, in bad faith, continue to carp that the one million “refugees” trying to leave Idlib could double and that, if Turkey does not open its borders with Syria, there will be a “massacre.”

Those in Brussels spinning the “Turkey as victim” scenario list three conditions for a possible solution. The first is a ceasefire – which in fact already exists, via the Sochi agreement, and was not respected by Ankara. The second is a “political process” – which, once again, does exist: the Astana process involving Russia, Turkey and Iran. And the third is “humanitarian aid” – a euphemism that means, in fact, a NATO intervention of the Libya “humanitarian imperialism” kind.

As it stands, two facts are inescapable. Number one: the Greek military don’t have what it takes to resist, in practice, Ankara’s weaponizing of the so-called “refugees.”

Number two is the kind of stuff that makes NATO fanatics recoil in horror: Since the Ottoman siege of Vienna, this is the first time in four centuries that a “Muslim invasion” of Europe is being prevented by, who else, Russia.

Fed up with sultan

This past Sunday, Ankara launched yet another Pentagon-style military adventure, baptized as Spring Shield. All decisions are centralized by a triumvirate: Erdogan, Defense Minister Hulusi Akar and the head of MIT (Turkish intel) Hakan Fidan. John Helmer has memorably called them the SUV (Sultan and the Ugly Viziers).

Behlul Ozkan, from the University of Marmara, a respected Kemalist scholar, frames the whole tragedy as having been played since the 1980s, now back on the stage on a much larger scale since the start of the so-called Syrian chapter of the Arab Spring in 2011.

Ozkan charges Erdogan with creating “conquering troops out of five unlikely fundamentalist groups” and “naming the armed groups after Ottoman sultans,” claiming they are a sort of national salvation army. But this time, argues Ozkan, the results are much worse – from millions of refugees to the terrible destruction in Syria, and “the emergence of our political and military structures affecting national security in a dangerous way.”

To say that the Russian General Staff are absolutely fed up with the SUV’s shenanigans is the ultimate understatement. That’s the background for the meeting this Thursday in Moscow between Putin and Erdogan. Methodically, the Russians are disrupting Turk operations to an unsustainable level – ranging from renewed air cover to the Syrian Arab Army to electronic countermeasures totally smashing all Turkish drones.

Russian diplomatic sources confirm that no one in Moscow believes any word, promise or cajoling emanating from Erdogan anymore. So it’s useless to ask him to respect the Sochi agreement. Imagine a Sun Tzu-style meeting with the Russian side displaying the very picture of self-restraint while scrutinizing Erdogan on how much he is willing to suffer before desisting from his Idlib adventure.

Those non-nonsense proto-Mongols

What ghosts from the past evolve in Erdogan’s unconscious? Let history be our guide – and let’s go for a ride among the empires of the steppes.

In the 5th century, the Juan Juan people, proto-Mongols as much as their cousins the White Huns (who lived in today’s Afghanistan), were the first to give their princes the title of khan – afterwards used by the Turks as well as the Mongols.

A vast Eurasian Turco-Mongol linguistic spectrum – studied in detail by crack French experts such as J.P. Roux – evolved via conquering migrations, more or less ephemeral imperial states, and aggregating diverse ethnic groups around rival Turkish or Mongol dynasties. We can talk about an Eurasian Turk space from Central Asia to the Mediterranean for no less than a millennium and a half – but only, crucially, for 900 years in Asia Minor (today’s Anatolia).

These were highly hierarchical and militarized societies, unstable, but still capable, given the right conditions, such as the emergence of a charismatic personality, to engage in a strong collective project of building political constructions. So the charismatic Erdogan Khan mindset is not much different from what happened centuries ago.

The first form of this socio-cultural tradition appeared even before the conversion to Islam – which happened after the battle of Talas in 751, won by the Arabs against the Chinese.  But most of all it all crystallized around Central Asia from the 10th and 11thcenturies onwards.

Unlike Greece in the Aegean, unlike India or Han China, there was never a central focus in terms of a cultural berth or supreme identity organizing this process. Today this role in Turkey is played by Anatolia – but that’s a 20th century phenomenon.

What history has shown is an east-west Eurasian axis across the steppes, from Central Asia to Anatolia, through which nomad tribes, Turk and Turkmen, then the Ottoman Turks, migrated and progressed, as conquerors, between the 7th and the 17th centuries: a whole millennium building an array of sultanates, emirates and empires. No wonder the Turkish president pictures himself as Erdogan Khan or Sultan Erdogan.

“Idlib is mine”

So there is a link between the turcophone tribes of Central Asia from the 5th and 6thcenturies and the current Turkish nation. From the 6th to the 11th centuries they were set up as a confederation of big tribes. Then, going southwest, they founded states. Chinese sources document the first turkut (Turkish empires) as eastern Turks in Mongolia and western Turks in Turkestan.

They were followed by more or less ephemeral empires of the steppes such as the Uighurs in the 8th century (who, by the way, were originally Buddhists). It’s interesting that this original past of the Turks in Central Asia, before Islam, was somewhat elevated to mythic status by the Kemalists.

This universe was always enriched by outside elements – such as Arab-Persian Islam and its institutions inherited from the Sassanids,  as well as the Byzantine empire, whose structural elements were adapted by the Ottomans. The end of the Ottoman empire and multiple convulsions (the Balkan wars, WWI, the Greek-Turkish war) ended up with a Turkish nation-state whose sanctuary is Asia Minor (or Anatolia) and eastern Thrace, conformed into a national territory that’s exclusively Turk and denies every minority presence that is non-Sunni and non-turcophone.

Evidently that’s not enough for Erdogan Khan.

Even Hatay province, which joined Turkey in 1939, is not enough. Home to the historic Antioch and Alexandretta, Hatay was then re-baptized as Antakya and Iskenderun.

Under the Treaty of Lausanne, Hatay was included in the French mandate of Syria and Lebanon. The Turkish version is that Hatay declared its independence in 1938 – when Ataturk was still alive – and then decided to join Turkey. The Syrian version is that Hatay was acquired via a rigged referendum ordered by France to bypass the Treaty of Lausanne.

Erdogan Khan has proclaimed, “Idlib is mine.” Syria and Russia are responding, “No, it’s not.” Those were the days, when turcophone empires of the steppes could just advance and capture their prey.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Video: Turkish Forces Are on ‘Tactical Retreat’. Syrian Army Recaptures More Territory in Eastern and Southern Idlib

March 5th, 2020 by South Front

Erdogan’s forces continue their bloody battle for peace and prosperity for al-Qaeda groups in the Syrian region of Greater Idlib.

On March 3, Turkey shot down an L-39 warplane of the Syrian Air Force in eastern Idlib. The warplane, which was carrying out strikes on al-Qaeda militants, crashed near the town of Maarat al-Numan. One of the ejected pilots landed in the militant-held area and was killed. On the same day, Turkish media released videos showing drone strikes on the Syrian Army convoy supposedly moving near Maarat al-Numan and the destruction of an alleged Pantsir air defense system of the Syrian Air Defense Forces near Saraqib.

Additionally, a large Turkish military column consisting of M113 and ACV-15 armoured vehicles, Leopard 2A4 battle tanks and ALTIGNAN air defense systems entered Batbu village in the northern part of Idlib. Pro-Turkish sources also claimed that the Turkish military will soon deploy Hisar air defense systems to the region in order to put an end to the constant aggression of the Syrian and Russian air power against peaceful al-Qaeda members and their Turkish supporters. Thus far, al-Qaeda members and the Turkish Army are on a ‘tactical retreat’.

In eastern Idlib, Erdogan’s forces lost the villages of Jawbas, Tarnaba, Dadikh and Kafr Battikh west of Saraqib. Units of the Syrian Army also advanced on the town of Afirs aiming to fully secure the M4-M5 crossroad area. In southern Idlib, the Syrians cleared the villages Kafr Mus, Kawkabah, Amqiyah and Fulayfil of Turkish-led forces. On top of this, the Syrian military shot down 3 Turkish combat UAVs. One of them, the Bayraktar TB2 crashed near Saraqib. According to pro-government sources over 150 militants were killed or injured in recent clashes with the Syrian Army. Taking into account the scale of the ground clashes, this number is likely overestimated.

However, such claims are a weak shadow of the statements of the Turkish Defense Ministry which is ‘neutralizing’ thousands of Syrian soldiers and hundreds of pieces of military equipment in its statements on a regular basis.

On the morning of March 3, the Turkish military claimed that that during the past 24 hours Turkish-led forces had destroyed a warplane, a UAV, 6 battle tanks, 5 howitzers and artillery pieces, 2 air defense systems, 3 armored combat vehicles, 5 armed pickups, 6 military vehicles and an ammunition depot belonging to Syrian forces. The defense ministry also claimed that 327 Syrian soldiers were “neutralized” during the same period.

On the evening of the same day, when Erdogan’s forces withdrew from another batch of positions, a Turkish soldier was killed and 9 others were injured, so the defense ministry made another Twitter offensive to compensate the setbacks. It said that 299 Syrian soldiers were ‘neutralized’, and 9 battle tanks, 8 artillery pieces and rocket systems and 2 military vehicles were recently destroyed. Thus, the Turkish-claimed number of “neutralized” Syrian soldiers since the start of Operation Piece Spring just reached 3,183.  It doesn’t matter if the Turkish military announces that its forces have destroyed a Syrian carrier strike group ‘Al-Assad’ near Tartus or shot down a dozen Russian-supplied Su-50 fighter jets or even neutralized a detachment of Iranian Rembos, the result will be same –the invincible Turkish forces make no gains on the ground.

Meanwhile, Moscow once again announced that Russia is not planning to cease anti-terrorist efforts in the Idlib region and called Turkish claims about ‘millions’ of refugees fleeing the Syrian anti-terrorist operation in Idlib fake.

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Breaking: Terrorists Attempt Chemical Attack in Idlib

March 5th, 2020 by Miri Wood

Breaking news from Russian Ministry of Defense: A 15-member terrorist group tried to explode ammunition containing chemical substances in vicinity of Saraqib in Idlib countryside.

Yesterday, Syria News wrote that “The possibility of another chemical hoax continues to loom.”

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab visited Turkey to voice support of  Erdogan’s war crimes against Syria; Ambassador Kelly Craft again breached the UN Charter in her support of these same anti-Syria war crimes.

Details to follow.

UPDATE from SANA:

“Russian Defense Ministry said Wednesday that Turkish regime-backed terrorist groups tried to detonate ammunition contain chemical materials near Saraqeb city in Idleb countryside in an attempt to hinder the advance of the Syrian Arab army and to accuse it later of using the chemical weapons.

“The Russian Coordination Center said in a statement that a 15-member terrorist group tried in March /2/ to explode explosive devices near containers that filled with chemical substances with the aim at hindering the advance of the Syrian Arab Army in the western neighborhoods of Saraqeb city and to accuse later the Syrian Army of using chemical weapons.

“The statement pointed out that terrorists failed to tighten the closure of one of the containers which caused the leakage of chemical materials and they have been exposed to severe chemical poisoning and they failed to explode the explosive devices and to carry out their provocative operation.

“It affirmed that the Ministry possesses “irrefutable evidence” that prove the reality that this chemical accident took place, asserting that the Ministry intends to publish those evidence soon.

“The Russian Defense Ministry has stressed repeatedly the existence of laboratories to prepare chemical substances for Turkish regime-backed terrorist organizations in Idleb, asserting that those labs were managed by specialists who received training in Europe and those weapons will be used to carry out fabricated chemical attacks against the civilians to accuse the Syrian State.”

The timing of the planned chemical atrocity conveniently coincided with the American ‘diplomats’ breaching the UN Charter.

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Featured image is from Syria News

US Complains as Cambodia Pivots Toward China

March 5th, 2020 by Joseph Thomas

US State Department-funded front “Radio Free Asia” (RFA) recently complained about plans to proceed with joint Chinese-Cambodian military exercises despite the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.

According to Khmer Times, this year’s joint exercises will include up to 200 Chinese personnel and over 2,000 personnel from Cambodia. According to the article the exercises will also include “the use of tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery, mortar and helicopter gun ships.”

Cambodia has dismissed concerns over holding the exercises amid the outbreak noting the relatively small impact the virus’ spread has had on the nation. Additionally, it is unlikely China will not exercise extreme caution when selecting and screening military personnel sent to participate in the exercises later this year.

The citing of the virus is merely the US taking a political shot at both China and Cambodia and by doing so reminding both nations of the importance of establishing significant and enduring alternatives to the current but waning US-led “international order.”

US Complains About Growing Chinese-Cambodian Ties 

In an RFA article titled, “Joint Cambodia-China ‘Golden Dragon’ Military Drills to Proceed, Despite Threat of Coronavirus,” the US front complained:

Cambodia and China have no plans to cancel their fourth annual joint “Golden Dragon” military exercise later this month, despite the threat of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), Cambodia’s Minister of Defense Tea Banh said Monday.

The article also openly complained about declining Western-Cambodian ties and how they reflected China’s growing influence in the region. RFA would claim:

This year’s exercises mark an expansion over those in 2019, when 250 Chinese and 2,500 Cambodian military personnel took part in drills over 15 days at the Chum Kiri Military Shooting Range Training Field in Chum Kiri district.

They were the third and largest joint Cambodia-China military drills to be held on Cambodian soil since Cambodia’s Defense Ministry abruptly suspended annual “Angkor Sentinel” joint exercises with the U.S. military and abandoned counter-terrorism training exercises with the Australian military in 2017.

Joint exercises with Western nations were never reestablished after 2017, a sign of Washington’s terminal decline in the region.

Washington’s More of the Same Didn’t and Won’t Work 

Rather than addressing Cambodia’s concerns over overreaching Western influence, meddling and subversion within Cambodia’s internal political affairs, the West (and the US in particular) has instead doubled down on meddling.

This too was mentioned in the RFA article, which claimed:

Meanwhile, Western influence in Cambodia is on the decline amid criticism of Hun Sen and the CPP over restrictions on democracy in the lead up to and aftermath of the ballot.

The U.S. has since announced visa bans on individuals seen as limiting democracy in the country, as part of a series of measures aimed at pressuring Cambodia to reverse course, and the European Union in mid-February announced plans to suspend tariff-free access to its market under the “Everything But Arms” (EBA) scheme for around one-fifth of Cambodia’s exports, citing rollbacks on human rights. 

In reality, there has been no “rollback on human rights” in Cambodia, but merely a crackdown on openly Western-backed and funded sedition in the form of political opposition parties, many of which are literally run out of Washington D.C. and led by political figures hiding abroad from criminal charges and jail sentences.

It is a pattern repeated all across Southeast Asia and beyond, where the US and its European partners use a combination of economic and political coercion to manipulate and control developing nations, but a pattern that has worn thin among the nations targeted.

Targeted nations have increasingly taken advantage of emerging multipolarism and the ability to build alternative ties with nations like China and Russia who not only provide an alternative to Western ties and access to markets, but are increasingly providing better opportunities than the West can, even under the most ideal conditions.

While the West’s brand of meddling will continue to have an impact on Cambodia, Cambodia and other nations in the region are increasingly establishing permanent alternatives in a process that will ultimately and likewise permanently render Western tactics impotent and the shareholders wielding them increasingly isolated.

Growing political, economic and military ties between China and Cambodia are permanently replacing US primacy over the region. Unless the US finds a more constructive and honest way of engaging with the region, this process will continue, and amid this process, contributing to a much wider, global decline of US power and influence.

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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Erdogan Tells Putin: “We’re in Idlib to Protect the People There.”

March 5th, 2020 by Eric Zuesse

On Thursday, March 5th, Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan meets privately with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, so as to arrange a face-saving way for Erdogan finally to end his attempted theft of Syria’s Idlib Province away from Syria — his attempt to seize it for Turkey.

According to Middle East Eye, on Saturday February 29th, reporting under their headline “Erdogan asks Putin to stand aside as Ankara deals with Syrian government forces”, Erdogan said in Istanbul that on Friday the 28th he had told Putin (presumably by phone or some other remote means) that, “We did not go there [into Syria’s Idlib Province] because we were invited by” Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad; but instead, “We went there because we were invited by the people of [Idlib Province of] Syria. We don’t intend to leave before the people of Syria say ‘okay, this is done’.” Thus, “Erdogan said he asked Putin to leave Turkey ‘to do what is necessary’ with the Syrian government.”

In other words: the people in Idlib — the only province in Syria where the percentage of the residents in a 2013 British poll of all Syrians showed less than 12% saying they “support the Assad Government” (12% having been the percentage of people who said that in Raqqah Province, which was then controlled by ISIS, and which showed as being the second-to-most-pro-jihadist Syrian province) — want Turkey’s protection, and therefore Turkey will remain in control over Idlib Province of Syria until “this [protection of the residents there] is done,” which will be never. That was Erdogan’s argument: he will keep Idlib because the vast majority of the people there are jihadists or at least admire jihadists. Only 4% of the people sampled in Idlib said they “support the Assad Government.” Only one-third as many supported Syria’s Government as did in the ISIS-controlled province, which had the second-lowest percentage of its residents supporting Syria’s Government. This same British polling organization found in 2014 that 70% of the people sampled in Idlib said that Al Qaeda in Syria, called “Nusra Front,” had a “Completely positive influence” (35%) or else a “Somewhat positive influence” (35%), and that the second-highest on that was Raqqah, at 66%.”
So: on both measures, Idlib was the most pro-jihadist province in all of Syria. And Erdogan wants it to become part of Turkey so as “to protect the people there.”
Between 2014 and now, uncounted hundreds of thousands of fighters who were being led by the Nusra Front and armed by the U.S. coalition and funded by the Sauds (the U.S. and its allies call these fighters ‘rebels’ as if those are like America’s own 1776 rebels against the British Crown and for democracy), fled into Idlib Province after having been defeated elsewhere in Syria; so that the percentage today in Idlib who respect the Nusra Front would probably be significantly higher than 2013’s 70%.
Of course, not everyone who now lives in Idlib is led by Al Qaeda, but even before Idlib became the collection-area and refuge for Al Qaeda followers, that figure was 70%; and, so, if Turkey is to protect them (as NATO member Turkey wants to do), instead of to annihilate the 70%+ of people there who either are jihadists or else are admirers of jihadists, then Idlib will be a virtually permanent festering hotbed for what Al Qaeda represents, which is a fundamentalist-Sunni, intensely anti-Shia, takeover of the entire world. However, Russia, Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah, are all intensely opposed to that fundamentalist-Sunni goal. The U.S. and its allies (including especially America’s ally the Saud family who own Saudi Arabia) support that jihadist goal, but seem not to have accepted Erdogan’s request of their help to go to war against Russia in order to assist Turkey to seize Idlib for it to become a permanent part of Turkey.
According to Erdogan’s own account of what his argument was to Putin, Erdogan — (the leader of) a NATO (or anti-Russian military alliance) member — is telling (the leader of Russia) Putin to, as that headline says, “stand aside as Ankara deals with Syrian government forces.” 
Obviously, Putin would never willingly do any such thing, but as I headlined on February 29th, “Turkey Asks NATO to Join Its War Against Syria and Russia”, and therefore what Erdogan told Putin (unless he is lying about that) is in keeping with this intention, to compel Russia to comply with the dictates of the U.S. Government and of its allies. Is it a realistic expectation, though, that the U.S. Government and its allies will continue to protect Al Qaeda in Syria, as they have been doing till now? I don’t think so; and here is why:
The anonymous geostrategic genius who blogs as “Moon of Alabama” headlined on February 28th, “Syria — Deadly Bomb Strike Warns Turkey To End Its Escapades”, and this is only the latest in his series of articles arguing that Erdogan has maneuvered himself into a position from which a checkmate can no longer be avoided. He concludes the article with “NATO and the U.S. have both rejected to get involved in the Idleb [sp.] affair. Turkey is on its own and Erdogan will have to be careful. He is not only losing in Syria but also in Libya and he can not risk to further upset Russia because the Turkish economy depends on it.”
If that is true, however, then ultimately Turkey will need to expel NATO from Incirlik Air Base, and quit NATO altogether.
My own opinion, from all of this (for what it’s worth), is that Erdogan doesn’t yet see far enough ahead to recognize that there’s no way possible to avoid checkmate, but he soon will.
This also is the opinion of both The Saker, on March 2nd, and Tom Luongo, on March 4th. However, if U.S. President Donald Trump decides to back Erdogan’s attempted theft of Idlib from Syria, then World War III will be likely. That’s perhaps the main reason why that is not expected to happen, especially during a U.S. Presidential election year.

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

The Missing Narratives in the Debate on “Medicare for All”

March 5th, 2020 by Richard Gale

The onslaught of misinformation from the corporatist wings of both political parties and media biases against universal healthcare are obviously confusing the electorate. This is seemingly evident in this week’s Super Tuesday with Joe Biden winning the majority of the states.  This confusion leaves citizens bewildered about how they will pay their bills unless a fundamental overhaul of medical insurance is undertaken. More important, what will happen when you are diagnosed with a serious illness and are not fully covered? What are your chances of joining the ranks of the 530,000 families that file bankruptcy annually for medical reasons? 

According to a study published last year by the American Journal of Public Health, 66.5% of bankruptcies are medically-related. In the past, it was rare for people to go bankrupt because they did not have accessible medical care. There was a time in the US when medicine carried a higher standard of ethics. The Hippocratic Oath was respected and no one was denied medical care because they could not afford it.  But that was in the past. Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which Biden continues to believe is a successful piece of legislation, has done little to mitigate the increasing financial burden on individuals and families. In fact, quality of healthcare has steadily declined.

Now with the threats of a coronavirus pandemic, we are learning that we may need to pay for diagnostic testing and very likely treatments. If you are returning to the country from overseas, you may be forced to pay for the time in quarantine even if you test negative for the virus.  And it is certain that the pharmaceutical industry will attempt to capitalize on this pending disaster.

The Democrat Party’s full throttle assault to undermine the legitimacy of Bernie Sanders’ campaign is being orchestrated by the insurance and medical industrial complex, which has bought unbridled biased coverage across the media waves. The goal is to effectively sustain Obama’s failed healthcare efforts. After listening to dozens of commentators on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and the pseudo-health journalists at the New York Times, one would think that Bernie is only offering free stuff to everyone and at enormous cost to tax payers.  Therefore to remove Medicare for All from the national dialogue before the November presidential election, the neoliberal forces are uniting behind Biden.

No one truly knows how much a national universal program would cost. Forecasts for a 10-year period range roughly between $13 trillion and $48 trillion. One thing is certain. The math is simple. It would be extremely expensive and for it to succeed dramatic infrastructural changes would need to be made throughout the entire system.  That conversation is long overdue.

However, perhaps this is the wrong argument because it is based upon the Democratic Party’s deep seated cognitive dissonance to protect the vested interests of Wall Street’s financial community, Biden’s allegiance to the credit industry, the military industrial complex, and the pharmaceutical and agro-chemical industries. In effect, the entirety of corporate America and the deep state, its lobbyists and oligarchic billionaires, and their sounding board in the mainstream media, are on one side of the scale while the urgent humanitarian medical needs of average citizens are on the other.  All that weighs on the side of Bernie are the educated adults, unionists, working people, and those who understand climate change and the need for a comprehensive and equitable healthcare system. And after Super Tuesday’s disturbing results, it might not look good for the revolution that must take place across the nation.

In part, it may be Sanders’ campaign’s miscasting the argument that has failed to win over moderate Democrats. Therefore what do we need?

First, Medicare for All is doable and affordable. In fact, it can potentially save $1.7 trillion a year by removing from the equation unnecessary and unconscionable profit to private insurance providers and the large mega-hospital networks.  There is no reason for having so many levels of bureaucracy between direct medical care and the patient. Every industry directly involved in providing treatment and care would continue to profit. But it would be a reasonable profit. Instead we have a medical industry that is excessively greedy and eager to take advantage of loopholes in order to milk the system for whatever it is worth.

The problem is that we can have Medicare for All only after we seriously look at what it costs to treat a patient and make efforts to reduce the exorbitant waste that has been programmed into our current system. How is it that a hospital can charge $787 for an adult and $393 for a child for a one dollar bag of intravenous saline solution, plus an additional $127 to administer it? Americans spend more on prescription medications than any other developed nation, as drug prices can soar ten times the rate of inflation.  Daraprim, for example, which is prescribed to fight one of the world’s most common parasitical infections that causes toxoplasmosis, can cost $45,000 per month, or $750 for a single pill that costs $13.50 to manufacture.

Based upon earlier figures between 2012-2015, about $2.6 trillion can be saved by removing bureaucratic waste. This includes $275 billion on private insurance paperwork, $55.6 billion on liability, $471 billion for insurance billing, $140 billion for medical fraud (2016), $210 billion for unnecessary medical testing, and $190 billion for wasteful administrative services.  Back in 2016, the British Medical Journal reported that medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US.  As a result over $1 trillion is spent on avoidable medical errors.

Universal healthcare will not break the economy. What is breaking the economy is our current broken medical system.  Universal, quality care is easily within reach but only after the health of the population is given preference over the healthcare system’s vulture capitalism. Then Americans will no longer have to worry about bankruptcy, which further contributes to the stresses associated with ill health, because they cannot afford the treatments or medications without putting themselves and their family into perpetual debt.

Second, providing universal healthcare does not guarantee that patients will receive quality care. If we are truly honest with ourselves and ask whether the US has the best medical care available, the answer should be a resounding no.  American emergency medicine is exemplary. However, chronic care for treating heart disease, cancer, diabetes, pain management and neurological conditions has been a dismal failure. More physicians need to be brought into the system without the anxiety of paying off enormous school debt and being forced to work to exhaustion.  Bernie would be wise to make medical education free in return for young doctors committing themselves to charging reasonable fees if they wish to remain within the system. If a doctor prefers to gouge patients, that is their right to do outside of the national system.

Finally, the US lags far behind in a implementing a national preventative program. Very little is being done to prevent diseases shown to be directly related to life-style, diet and toxic conditions in our environment.  A viable prevention program would begin by supporting and mandating holistic health programs in our schools beginning with grade school. Why does offering school courses in “How to be Healthy” seem absurd when it has been shown repeatedly in the scientific literature and efforts in other advanced nations to avoid preventable illnesses and further reduce avoidable medical costs? But in order to launch a comprehensive preventative program at a national scale, only respected educated health consumers should be in charge. Entities representing private corporate interests should be prohibited since they are responsible for the medical disasters that now demand for universal healthcare.  If Obamacare and the current corporate medical establishment were truly effective, there would be no discussion about Medicare for All.

Yes, universal healthcare will be expensive and cost trillions. But how many trillions will it save when all else is considered for how many lives will be saved and how healthier the nation would be if comprehensive measures were taken to prevent disease in the first place.

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

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

Coronavirus: What the Western Media Doesn’t Tell You: High Recovery Rates in China

March 4th, 2020 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Western media hype: Fear and panic, disruption of the global economy. That makes the headlines.

But not a word is mentioned that the COVID-19 pandemic in China is under control: people are being treated in hospitals and they are recovering. 

On February 28, China reported 36,157 out of a total of 78,961 reported cases as having recovered.

China has reported (March 1st) a 52.1 percent recovery rate, which signifies that more than half of the patients (confirmed cases) have been discharged from the hospitals. And the Chinese hospitals (which are very strict) will not release them if they are still infected or could transmit the COVID-19 coronavirus.

What this means is that the number of “reported infected cases” in China (out of total of 80 304 cases) (WHO data, March 3, 2020) has fallen to less than 40,000. But that does not make the headlines. 

If this trend continues in the following weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic in China will be resolved.

When the WHO declared a Global Pandemic on January 30th: THERE WERE ONLY 150 Confirmed Cases outside China (6,4 billion population)

UDPATE  (March 5, 2020). According to  Mi Feng, a spokesperson for the National Health Commission (NHC), (press conference on March 4 (Beijing time).  

The cure rate, i.e. proportion of patients who have recovered from COVID-19  is as follows:

  1. The city of Wuhan:  50.2%
  2. Other places in Hubei Province: 76.8%
  3.  Chinese provinces (excluding Hubei): 87.3 %

By Tuesday, March 3, a total of 49,856 patients have recovered from COVID-19 and were discharged from hospitals in China.

What this means that the total number of  “confirmed infected cases” in China is 30,448.

Namely 80,304 minus 49856 = 30,448  (80 304 is the total number on confirmed cases in China (WHO data, March 3, 2020)

The 10,566 confirmed cases outside China (WHO data, see below) also include the cases of patients who have recovered and who have been released from hospital. But we do no have data on recoveries. And the Western media has not taken the trouble to  differentiate between the total number of “confirmed cases” (which includes people who have recovered and have been released from the hospital) and “confirmed cases with infection”.

With regard to China, according to Xinhua (March 1)

The recovery rate of COVID-19 patients in Chinese mainland continues to rise as the favorable effects of the prevention and control measures and medical treatment become obvious, said Chinese authorities.

The proportion of Chinese patients who recovered from the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and were discharged from hospitals continued to rise in the past week to reach 52.1 percent, a health official said on Sunday (March 1)

The following data on COVID-19 was confirmed on March 3 by the WHO

SITUATION IN NUMBERS total and new cases in last 24 hours

Globally

90 870 confirmed (1922 new)

.

China

80 304 confirmed (130 new) 2946 deaths (31 new)

Outside of China

10 566 confirmed (1792 new) 72 countries (8 new)

166 deaths (38 new)

WHO, data for March 3, 2020 released on March 4

Total coronavirus confirmed cases tops 94,000. Breakdown by country excluding Mainland China (John Hopkins, March 4, 2020)

The largest number of cases outside China is South Korea.

South Korea: 5,621

Italy: 2,502
Iran: 2,922
Others: 706
Japan: 304
Germany: 244
Spain: 193
Singapore: 110
France: 212
Hong Kong: 102
U.S.: 128

 

 

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The Informational War that Got Us to Where We Are

March 4th, 2020 by True Publica

Every day of your life there is an informational war going on. You are not really aware of it – that’s the point. Its purpose is to distort the narrative and swing the political direction of a country to favour those who can afford to fund it. Here is just one small story that demonstrates the scale of aggression being waged against democracy. It very often starts in America and ends up on your mobile phone, laptop, newspaper, TV and so on.

You may have read recently that a major Republican donor has purchased a stake in Twitter and is reportedly seeking to oust its chief executive, Jack Dorsey. It was Bloomberg News that first reported that Elliott Management has taken a “sizable stake” and “and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Dorsey”.

Paul Singer, the billionaire founder of Elliott Management, is a Republican mega-donor who originally opposed Donald Trump during the real-estate magnate’s run for the presidential nomination but has since come onside.

Recently, Twitter made headlines last October when it announced a ban on political advertising. Its use and potential manipulation by politicians of all stripes, from Trump to Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg, remains a source of fierce contention.

News of the Elliott stake saw Twitter’s share price rise on Friday, during general market slides in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak.

Elliott Management is an activist investor, which means it regularly pushes for change in companies in which it buys shares.

Singer has even taken on whole countries: in 2016, after a relentless campaign, he secured a partial repayment of debts by Argentina, arising from its financial collapse in the early 2000s.

Meanwhile…

Within two years of Brexit, amid the problems it brought to the country, Singer’s Elliott Management Corp started targeting U.K. companies, outstripping the number of public campaigns by locally based funds. It turned out that sixty per cent of the British-based companies that have been publicly subjected to activist demands were targeted by investors that aren’t headquartered in the U.K., according to researcher Activist Insight. That compares to an average of 38 per cent annually for the previous five years. And Singer was significant in this.

And it’s not as if Singer has simply seen an opportunity, he’s the type that creates them. Hundreds of millions of dollars are given through Singer’s foundation to Conservative right-wing think tanks and front charities that campaign ruthlessly for deregulation and lower taxes.

Singer, described as a “passionate defender of the 1%”, has emerged as a major force in the Republican party in recent years but has been under the radar in Britain. Of course, like any vulture capitalist, it is in Singer’s interests to see the pound sterling fall, share prices and asset prices fall as a direct result of Brexit. And to ensure Brexit stays on track, Singer is the biggest donor to an organisation called ‘America Rising’.

America Rising is now taking aim at potential 2020 Democrat presidential candidates including Elizabeth Warren, Andrew Cuomo and Bernie Sanders, with the aim of attaching negative ‘narratives’ to opponents early in the campaign cycle. It uses ‘trackers’ to follow target Democrats around, filming their public appearances in a bid to catch them saying something that could be used now, or in the future, to undermine, or embarrass them as they head towards elections.

America Rising is now in the UK. It originally registered their London affiliate with Companies House as ‘UK Rising’, aligning it with the political attack fund they co-founded rather than their commercial lobbying firm, Definers Public Affairs (UK Rising underwent a name change to UK Policy Group in May last year).

Employees in the London branch were being trained up in these skills by their American counterparts over a year ago. UK Policy Group similarly promises to provide ‘dossiers’ on ‘targets’ that provide ‘comprehensive, detailed analysis’ of an opponent’s record, background and views, information which, they say, can be used to shape stories in the media. UK Policy Group has said that its services will be aimed at private sector clients.

UK Policy Group’s all-male leadership team isn’t from the commercial world though but appears instead to be drawn almost exclusively from the Conservative Party, including some with a background in opposition research.

All these links, billionaires, think tanks, front charities, social media and the attack dog organisations in oppositional research are all linked. Their purpose is the weaponisation of information in elections – an informational war if you like, for the explicit purpose of defining a political opponent in the eyes of voters, increasing their ‘negatives’, depressing their support, and driving away potential voters.  It might not be illegal, but whichever you look at it, it is immoral and undemocratic. The other problem here is that unlimited sums of money can be thrown at these campaigns without breaching electoral funding guidelines. It’s called dark money and by far, the majority of it comes from people or organisations who oppose democracy and the rule of law.

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Trump Taps Former Chemical Industry Shill to Lead Consumer Product Safety Commission

March 4th, 2020 by EWG

President Trump intends to nominate a former top chemical industry executive, who at the Environmental Protection Agency has led the rollback of important chemical safety regulations, to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission, according to an announcement issued last night by the White House.

EWG once dubbed Nancy Beck “the scariest Trump appointee you’ve never heard of.” Beck is currently the principal deputy administrator of EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

Before joining the administration, Beck was an executive at the American Chemistry Council, the powerful lobby group for the chemical industry. The National Academy of Sciences once called her proposed approach to chemical safety “fundamentally flawed.”

As senior director for regulatory science for the chemical lobby, Beck consistently fought for weaker chemical safety laws. Since her appointment, she has significantly weakened proposed rules to assess chemical safety in favor of the chemical industry and has fundamentally changed the way the EPA approves new chemicals before they come on the market to favor the interests of the industry she once worked for.

“Nancy Beck is just about the last person who should be in charge of safeguarding the American people from dangerous consumer products,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Her track record, both in and out of government, is riddled with disregard for the risks that toxic chemicals in consumer goods pose to human health. Once again, we see the president appointing someone who will work to subvert the mission of the agency she would head.”

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Venezuela Responds with Principled Conviction to the US’ Desperate Attempts at Regime Change

March 4th, 2020 by Nino Pagliccia

The continued effort to overthrow President Maduro does not seem to produce the intended results for the perpetrators, but rather sends signals of desperation. The regime change plotters may be wishing to achieve what they did in Bolivia. But that is not likely to happen anytime soon. That must cause some political frustration in Washington and of course more resistance in Caracas.

We can summarise the main tenets of US foreign policy for regime change as to reject any progressive sovereign and independent government that challenges the capitalist and imperialist ideology of the US, by simply labelling it as a threat to its national security, in order to secure, gain control and exploit the rich natural resources of that country on behalf of US corporations no matter where they are.

The US has failed in Venezuela at least since the unsuccessful coup against Hugo Chavez in 2002. And even more dramatically since January last year when Washington zeroed in on the previously unknown Juan Guaidó as their candidate for the virtual government of their choice.

Washington miserable failure is not due to lack of trying.

Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Jorge Arreaza (image on the right) on February 25 reported at the 43rd session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva – of which Venezuela is a member for the third time – that “since 2014, more than 300 unilateral measures have been taken by the United States to affect the functioning of the economy and undermine the human rights of the Venezuelan people.” He also referred to other research that establishes the death toll by US sanctions at 40,000 Venezuelans.

The unilateral coercive measures not only impact Venezuelan assets and people, but they also exert a full economic and financial blockade that prevents Venezuela to access financial and trade markets for essential imports like medicine and food. Perhaps more critically they have an extra territorial component by threatening or forcing other countries to comply with US coercive measures. This is when the term “coercive measures” becomes more descriptive to Venezuelans as opposed to “sanctions” that by definition are “provisions of a law enacting a penalty for disobedience or a reward for obedience” where “law” is a foreign law.

The consistent US drive in its aggression since the beginning of 2019 is to entirely crush Venezuela’s oil sector, the main source of revenues for the country. Just last February 18 the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) targeted Russia by blocking “all property and interests in property of [Russian subsidiary] Rosneft Trading S.A. and [its chairman] Didier Casimiro that are in the United States or in the possession or control of U.S. persons”. Rosneft is associated with the Venezuelan oil company PDVSA and is the largest receiver of Venezuelan oil.

According to Reuters, US Special Representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams declared that Washington will “push harder on the Venezuelan oil sector.” The US Treasury Department first levied financial sanctions against PDVSA in August 2017. Abrams went further suggesting the international policing role of the US watching possible ship-to-ship or company-to-company transfers of Venezuelan oil, “We are going to follow up with the companies that are engaged in this and we are going to sanction them.” He made it clear that the second largest receiver of Venezuelan oil, the China National Petroleum Corp, will not be ignored.

Caracas, Moscow as well as Beijing consistently continue to reject US unilateral coercive measures. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has also being reported to express his opposition to the US “sanctions” against Russian state oil company Rosneft for trading with Venezuela: “We oppose any interference in the internal affairs of other countries, just as we are against unilateral sanctions and extraterritorial jurisdiction.”

However, despite last October visit to India by Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez to enhance bilateral cooperation, India has made a different choice. Two Indian oil companies have announced that they will comply with US threats of “sanctions” declared by President Trump in a press conference during his visit to India in late February. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s pro-Trump pivot may well be a political move that may reveal Modi’s pathetic attempt to please Trump. Modi’s ultimate intentions may well be to distract the international opinion from his abysmal Hindu supremacist policy by preventing the #US from using that against him if he did not comply to US demands.

More significantly, countering India’s about face, is the failure of the “Lima Group” meeting in Ottawa last February 20. The meeting of an undeclared number of foreign ministers was met by protests of Canadians, and this author addressed an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with relevant political questions about Canada’s intervention in Venezuelan affairs.

The “Lima Group” only managed to produce a bland statement where the strongest threat was “In the coming days and weeks, representatives of the Lima Group will participate in an intensive period of international efforts and consultation with all countries interested in the restoration of democracy in Venezuela.” That they have being doing now for two and half years and is expected to continue with no predictable successful outcome. By far what stood out in the statement is the absence of any reference to the unelected “interim president” Juan Guaidó.

The urgency to overthrow Maduro is not founded on re-establishing “democracy” and the “rule of law” in Venezuela but rather on the “danger” of “normalising the situation”, as Peruvian Minister of Foreign Affairs Gustavo Meza Cuadra, who participated in the “Lima Group” meeting, stated in a press conference in Lima. This is urgency masking desperation.

The sheer power of the US coercive measures is obviously having a quantifiable stunning impact on the growth of the economy and on the well-being of the general population, but that is not sufficient to deter resolved Venezuelans to preserve their sovereignty and what they have achieved in more than twenty years of establishing a fully autonomous State. To what appears to be a step up of US threats against Venezuela the Venezuelan government has also stepped up its resistance.

In contrast to the desperate actions for regime change by the US and its accomplices, Venezuela acts with the strength of principled conviction and optimism.

To the threats of a US military invasion and a naval blockade, and in the face of crippling “sanctions” as an act of war, Venezuela responds with military exercises in a display of unique civic-military coordination.

Maduro declared recently, “We have to consider that we have constantly lived in a war economy.” In fact, we can add that this is a Hybrid War that relies on disinformation, on smear campaigns, and on a virtual army of financiers and the might of the US dollar. As a response to this challenge Maduro is aiming to increase oil production and to this end he has appointed a “commission to overhaul the country’s oil industry”. More broadly, Venezuela is also reviving an additional “army” called “Productive Army Workers” as an “unconventional army for an unconventional war”. This group of about 2,300 workers have the objective of helping reactivate the national productive apparatus by refurbishing factories, machinery and equipment in a recovery process across the country so that they may start producing again.

Perhaps the most visible action at the international level has been the filing of a lawsuit at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Holland, by the Venezuelan government to investigate the actions of the US government over the use of “sanctions”. A 60-page supporting document describes unilateral coercive measures as a “crime against humanity” and equates them to “weapons of mass destruction.” They are considered by many to be illegal under UN, OAS and US Law. Although the US is no longer a member of the ICC, the lawsuit will make a clear statement internationally.

With the kind of background described above that includes a domestic environment akin to a country under siege only seen in war situations, Venezuela prepares for yet another election. Legislative elections are scheduled to take place in December of this year with the participation of various opposition parties. Only Guaidó has taken the position of the US government and the “Lima Group” of not participating unless a transition government is formed leading to presidential elections…like in Bolivia. But we need to ask, do foreign governments decide about elections in Venezuela?

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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and freelance writer based in Vancouver. He is a retired researcher from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who follows and writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is the editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” (2014). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Threat of a Nuclear War Between the US and Russia Is Now at Its Greatest Since 1983

March 4th, 2020 by Scott Ritter

When the Commander of NATO says he is a fan of flexible first strike at the same time that NATO is flexing its military muscle on Russia’s border, the risk of inadvertent nuclear war is real.

US Air Force Gen. Tod D Wolters told the Senate this week he “is a fan of flexible first strike” regarding NATO’s nuclear weapons, thereby exposing the fatal fallacy of the alliance’s embrace of American nuclear deterrence policy.

It was one of the most remarkable yet underreported exchanges in recent Senate history. Earlier this week, during the testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee of General Tod Wolters, the commander of US European Command and, concurrently, as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe (SACEUR) also the military head of all NATO armed forces, General Wolters engaged in a short yet informative exchange with Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican from the state of Nebraska. 

Following some initial questions and answers focused on the alignment of NATO’s military strategy with the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the US, which codified what Wolters called “the malign influence on behalf of Russia” toward European security, Senator Fischer asked about the growing recognition on the part of NATO of the important role of US nuclear deterrence in keeping the peace. “We all understand that our deterrent, the TRIAD, is the bedrock of the security of this country,” Fischer noted. “Can you tell us about what you are hearing…from our NATO partners about this deterrent?”

Wolters responded by linking the deterrence provided to Europe by the US nuclear TRIAD with the peace enjoyed on the European continent over the past seven decades. Fischer asked if the US nuclear umbrella was “vital in the freedom of NATO members”; Wolters agreed. Remarkably, Wolters linked the role of nuclear deterrence with the NATO missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere outside the European continent. NATO’s mission, he said, was to “proliferate deterrence to the max extent practical to achieve greater peace.”

Then came the piece de resistance of the hearing. “What are your views, Sir,” Senator Fischer asked, “of adopting a so-called no-first-use policy. Do you believe that that would strengthen deterrence?”

General Wolters’ response was straight to the point. “Senator, I’m a fan of flexible first use policy.”

Under any circumstance, the public embrace of a “flexible first strike” policy regarding nuclear weapons employment by the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe should generate widespread attention. When seen in the context of the recent deployment by the US of a low-yield nuclear warhead on submarine-launched ballistic missiles carried onboard a Trident submarine, however, Wolters’ statement is downright explosive. Add to the mix the fact the US recently carried out a wargame where the US Secretary of Defense practiced the procedures for launching this very same “low yield” weapon against a Russian target during simulated combat between Russia and NATO in Europe, and the reaction should be off the charts. And yet there has been deafening silence from both the European and US press on this topic.

There is, however, one party that paid attention to what General Wolters had to say–Russia. In a statement to the press on February 25–the same date as General Wolters’ testimony, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister stated that “We note with concern that Washington’s new doctrinal guidelines considerably lower the threshold of nuclear weapons use.” Lavrov added that this doctrine had to be viewed in the light “of the persistent deployment of US nuclear weapons on the territory of some NATO allies and the continued practice of the so-called joint nuclear missions.”

Rather than embracing a policy of “flexible first strike”, Lavrov suggested that the US work with Russia to re-confirm “the Gorbachev-Reagan formula, which says that there can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be unleashed.” This proposal was made 18 months ago, Lavrov noted, and yet the US has failed to respond.

Complicating matters further are the ‘Defender 2020’ NATO military exercises underway in Europe, involving tens of thousands of US troops in one of the largest training operations since the end of the Cold War. The fact that these exercises are taking place at a time when the issue of US nuclear weapons and NATO’s doctrine regarding their employment against Russia is being actively tracked by senior Russian authorities only highlights the danger posed.

On February 6, General Valery Gerasimov, the Russian Chief of Staff, met with General Wolters to discuss ‘Defender 2020’ and concurrent Russian military exercises to be held nearby to deconflict their respective operations and avoid any unforeseen incidents. This meeting, however, was held prior to the reports about a US/NATO nuclear wargame targeting Russian forces going public, and prior to General Wolters’ statement about “flexible first use” of NATO nuclear weapons.

In light of these events, General Gerasimov met with French General Fançois Lecointre, the Chief of the Defense Staff, to express Russia’s concerns over NATO’s military moves near the Russian border, especially the Defender 2020 exercise which was, General Gerasimov noted, “held on the basis of anti-Russian scenarios and envisage training for offensive operations.”

General Gerasimov’s concerns cannot be viewed in isolation, but rather must be considered in the overall historical context of NATO-Russian relations. Back in 1983, the then-Soviet Union was extremely concerned about a series of realistic NATO exercises, known as ‘Able Archer ‘83,’ which in many ways mimicked the modern-day Defender 2020 in both scope and scale. Like Defender 2020, Able Archer ‘83 saw the deployment of tens of thousands of US forces into Europe, where they assumed an offensive posture, before transitioning into a command post exercise involving the employment of NATO nuclear weapons against a Soviet target.

So concerned was Moscow about these exercises, and the possibility that NATO might use them as a cover for an attack against Soviet forces in East Germany, that the Soviet nuclear forces were placed on high alert. Historians have since observed that the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR was at that time the highest it had been since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.

US and NATO officials would do well to recall the danger to European and world security posed by the “Able Archer ‘83” exercise and the potential for Soviet miscalculations when assessing the concerns expressed by General Gerasimov today. The unprecedented concentration of offensive NATO military power on Russia’s border, coupled with the cavalier public embrace by General Wolters of a “flexible first strike” nuclear posture by NATO, has more than replicated the threat model presented by Able Archer ’83. In this context, it would not be a stretch to conclude that the threat of nuclear war between the US and Russia is the highest it has been since Able Archer ’83.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer. He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

Selected Articles: From Monroe to Trump. US Sponsored Military Coups in Latin America

March 4th, 2020 by Global Research News

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

 

If, like us, this is a future you wish to avoid, please help sustain Global Research’s activities by making a donation or taking out a membership now!

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Video: Syrian Armed Forces Teach ‘2nd Strongest NATO Army’ Painful Lesson in Idlib

By South Front, March 04, 2020

Units of the Russian Military Police entered the town of Saraqib in eastern Idlib following the second liberation of the town from al-Qaeda terrorists and Turkish forces. According to the Russian military, the deployment took place at 5:00pm local time on March 2 and was intended to provide security and allow traffic through the M4 and M5 highways. In fact, the Russians came to put an end to Turkish attempts to capture the town and cut off the M5 highway in this area.

From Monroe to Trump. US Sponsored Military Coups in Latin America

By Elson Concepción Pérez, March 04, 2020

The latest threat to Venezuela of a possible military intervention, the recent coup in Bolivia under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS), the tightening of the blockade of Cuba, destabilization in Nicaragua, and open interference in the internal affairs of countries in the region, where democratic governments have set the standards for development and sovereignty, do not come as a surprise.

The US-Taliban ‘Peace Deal’? Imperial State Criminality and Terrorism, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and “Restorative Justice”

By Junaid S. Ahmad, March 03, 2020

The US/NATO war and occupation of Afghanistan offers a glaring case of what US Senator Fulbright (yes, the one who started the Fulbright program of scholarships and exchanges) called the ‘arrogance of power’ (of his country), his book being of the same title. The wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, with a war machine on steroids, invading and occupying for nearly two decades one of the poorest countries on the planet – and one which had already undergone two decades of uninterrupted internecine war in the prior two decades.

Keep It Simple and Question: Propaganda, Technology, and Coronavirus COVID-19

By Edward Curtin, March 03, 2020

Two of the major problems the world faces – world destruction with nuclear weapons and the poisoning of the earth’s ecology and atmosphere – are the result of the marriage of science and technique that has given birth to the technological “babies” (Little Boy and Fat Man) that were used by the U.S. to massacre hundreds of thousands of Japanese and now threaten to incinerate everyone, and the chemical and toxic inventions that have despoiled the earth, air, and water and continue to kill people worldwide through America’s endless war-making and industrial applications.

Turkey in Syria: Down a Blind Alley in an Unwinnable War?

By Tony Cartalucci, March 03, 2020

Turkey had been making some promising steps in the right direction since Washington’s disastrous proxy regime-change war in Syria began unraveling – yet it still maintains a problematic position inside Syrian territory, backing what are unequivocally terrorists and obstructing Syria’s sovereign right to recover and restore order within its own borders.

The latest and most dangerous manifestation of this untenable policy is the increasingly frequent and fierce clashes between Turkish forces occupying Syrian territory and Syrian forces themselves moving deeper into the northern Syrian governorate of Idlib.

Neoliberal Globalization Is Pushing Humanity “Towards the Edge”

By Shane Quinn, March 03, 2020

There have been a number of harmful consequences as a result of the neoliberal era, which emerged in the late 1970s, taking off during the tenures of Ronald Reagan (US president, 1981-1989) and Margaret Thatcher (British prime minister, 1979-1990). There has been an explosion of private power, splintering of societies, destabilization of the financial system, and so on.

Neoliberal globalization has been an important factor too in political parties shifting further to the right, and succumbing to the power of increasingly dominant multinational corporations. This is most notable in America where the Republican Party (or organization) has moved so far off the spectrum that traditional republicans from previous decades would hardly recognize it today.

Why Are Stocks Crashing?

By Mike Whitney, March 03, 2020

Uncertainty. It’s impossible for investors to gauge the economic impact of the rapidly-spreading coronavirus or its effect on stock prices. Investors buy stocks with the expectation that their investment will grow over time. In periods of crisis, when the environment becomes unfamiliar and opaque, expectations are crushed under the weigh of uncertainty. When expectations dampen, investors sell.

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The Myth of Moderate Nuclear War

March 4th, 2020 by Brian Cloughley

There are many influential supporters of nuclear war, and some of these contend that the use of ‘low-yield’ and/or short-range weapons is practicable without the possibility of escalation to all-out Armageddon. In a way their argument is comparable to that of the band of starry-eyed optimists who thought, apparently seriously, that there could be such a beast as a ‘moderate rebel’.

In October 2013 the Washington Post reported that “The CIA is expanding a clandestine effort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, US-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war,” and the US Congress gave approval to then President Barack Obama’s plan for training and arming moderate Syrian rebels to fight against Islamic State extremists. The belief that there could be any grouping of insurgents that could be described as “moderate rebels” is bizarre and it would be fascinating to know how Washington’s planners classify such people. It obviously didn’t dawn on them that any person who uses weapons illegally in a rebellion could not be defined as being moderate. And how moderate is moderate? Perhaps a moderate rebel could be equipped with US weapons that kill only extremists? Or are they allowed to kill only five children a month? The entire notion was absurd, and predictably the scheme collapsed, after expenditure of vast amounts of US taxpayers’ money.

And even vaster amounts of money are being spent on developing and producing what might be classed as moderate nuclear weapons, in that they don’t have the zillion-bang punch of most of its existing 4,000 plus warheads. It is apparently widely believed in Washington that if a nuclear weapon is (comparatively) small, then it’s less dangerous than a big nuclear weapon.

In January 2019 the Guardian reported that

“the Trump administration has argued the development of a low-yield weapon would make nuclear war less likely, by giving the US a more flexible deterrent. It would counter any enemy (particularly Russian) perception that the US would balk at using its own fearsome arsenal in response to a limited nuclear attack because its missiles were all in the hundreds of kilotons range and ‘too big to use’, because they would cause untold civilian casualties.”

In fact, the nuclear war envisaged in that scenario would be a global catastrophe — as would all nuclear wars, because there’s no way, no means whatever, of limiting escalation. Once a nuclear weapon has exploded and killed people, the nuclear-armed nation to which these people belonged is going to take massive action. There is no alternative, because no government is just going to sit there and try to start talking with an enemy that has taken the ultimate leap in warfare.

It is widely imagined — by many nuclear planners in the sub-continent, for example — that use of a tactical, a battlefield-deployed, nuclear weapon will in some fashion persuade the opponent (India or Pakistan) that there is no need to employ higher-capability weapons, or, in other words, longer range missiles delivering massive warheads. These people think that the other side will evaluate the situation calmly and dispassionately and come to the conclusion that at most it should itself reply with a similar weapon. But such a scenario supposes that there is good intelligence about the effects of the weapon that has exploded, most probably within the opponent’s sovereign territory. This is verging on the impossible.

War is confusing in the extreme, and tactical planning can be extremely complex. But there is no precedent for nuclear war, and nobody — nobody — knows for certain what reactions will be to such a situation in or near any nation. The US 2018 Nuclear Posture Review stated that low-yield weapons “help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely”. But do the possible opponents of the United States agree with that? How could they do so?

The reaction by any nuclear-armed state to what is confirmed as a nuclear attack will have to be swift. It cannot be guaranteed, for example, that the first attack will not represent a series. It will, by definition, be decisive, because the world will then be a tiny step from doomsday. The US nuclear review is optimistic that “flexibility” will by some means limit a nuclear exchange, or even persuade the nuked-nation that there should be no riposte, which is an intriguing hypothesis.

As pointed out by Lawfare, “the review calls for modification to ‘a small number of existing submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) warheads’ to provide a low-yield option.

It also calls for further exploration of low-yield options, arguing that expanding these options will ‘help ensure that potential adversaries perceive no possible advantage in limited nuclear escalation, making nuclear employment less likely.’ This is intended to address the argument that adversaries might think the United States, out of concern for collateral damage, would hesitate to employ a high-yield nuclear weapon in response to a ‘lower level’ conflict, in which an adversary used a low-yield nuclear device. The review argues that expanding low-yield options is ‘important for the preservation of credible deterrence,’ especially when it comes to smaller-scale regional conflicts.”

“Credible deterrence” is a favourite catch-phrase of the believers in limited nuclear war, but its credibility is suspect. Former US defence secretary William Perry said last year that he wasn’t so much worried about the vast number of warheads in the world as he was by open proposals that these weapons are “usable”. It’s right back to the Cold War and he emphasises that “The belief that there might be tactical advantage using nuclear weapons – which I haven’t heard being openly discussed in the United States or in Russia for a good many years – is happening now in those countries which I think is extremely distressing.” But the perturbing thing is that while it is certainly being discussed in Moscow, it’s verging on doctrine in Washington.

In late February US Defence Secretary Esper was reported as having taken part in a “classified military drill in which Russia and the United States traded nuclear strikes.” The Pentagon stated that “The scenario included a European contingency where you’re conducting a war with Russia and Russia decides to use a low-yield, limited nuclear weapon against a site on NATO territory.” The US response was to fire back with what was called a “limited response.”

First of all, the notion that Russia would take the first step to nuclear war is completely baseless, and there is no evidence that this could ever be contemplated. But ever if it were to be so, it cannot be imagined for an instant that Washington would indulge in moderate nuclear warfare in riposte. These self-justifying wargames are dangerous. And they bring Armageddon ever closer.

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Brian Cloughley is a British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan.

What’s Going on with the Arctic ‘Doomsday’ Seed Vault?

March 4th, 2020 by F. William Engdahl

Against the backdrop of the spreading fear about a global coronavirus pandemic, an event has slipped largely under the radar at a spot so removed from the rest of the world that most are unaware of its existence. The Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault on Spitsbergen Island north of the Arctic Circle just received an additional major shipment of plant variety seeds for its special storage. What makes this entire seed bank enterprise suspicious at the very least is the list of financial sponsors behind the global project.

On February 25 more than 60,000 new seed varieties were placed in the Svalbard vault, the largest deposit of seeds since it opened. This brings the total of seed types to over one million since the vault was first opened for deposits in early 2008.

The latest seed deposits include onions from Brazil, guar beans from central Asia, corn seeds sacred to the Cherokee nation and wildflowers from a meadow at Prince Charles’s home in the UK (sic). The Svalbard vault is on the island that is legally part of Norway since a 1925 treaty.

The Norwegian government put up much of the money for the construction of the facility whose backers declared it was able to withstand a nuclear bomb blast. The only problem was planners did not make the structure, built into a mountain side, waterproof and the entrance flooded amid heavy rains in 2016, necessitating a major € 20 million of repairs and upgrade which were just completed, some four years later. Notably, as Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg pointed out during the recent seed-greeting ceremony, the year 2020 is slated as the year by which countries should have safeguarded genetic diversity of crops to meet the UN goal of “eliminating hunger by 2030.” The year 2030 is when the UN IPCC predicts catastrophic climate change barring a radical action from the world, as well as the key benchmark year for the UN’s Malthusian Agenda2030.

The publicly-stated argument for the major seed bank project is supposedly as a safe backup for the numerous national seed bank collections in event they are destroyed in war as in Syria or Iraq, or by natural disaster or other calamity. The Svalbard vault has been called the “Noah’s ark of seeds,” there should a “global catastrophe” occur, to allow a theoretical restart to world agriculture. OK. Interesting. Who would decide how to distribute those seeds in event of such a catastrophe is not addressed.

What is notable is the list of those backing this highly unusual public-private partnership.

Crop Trust?

The seed bank and acquisition of the seeds is managed by an entity known as the Crop Trust, officially known as the Global Crop Diversity Trust, now based in Bonn, Germany. On its website Crop Trust makes the modest claim that their “sole mission is to ensure humanity conserves and makes available the world’s crop diversity for future food security.”

It has an impressive list of financial sponsors which it calls the Donors’ Council. Among the most eye-catching they name Bayer Crop Science, which now incorporates Monsanto; DuPont Pioneer Hi-Bred; Syngenta AG, now owned by ChemChina. These are the world’s largest purveyors of GMO patented seeds and the paired agrichemicals such as Roundup with glyphosate. China’s now state-owned Syngenta is the world’s largest supplier of crop chemicals.

In addition, Crop Trust Donors include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the major donor to initiate the Trust in 2004 with the FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and CGIAR, acting through Bioversity International.

Gates Foundation is joined at Crop Trust by the Rockefeller Foundation, the ones who first financed the creation of GMO biotechnology beginning in the 1970’s at their International Rice Research Institute, where they spent millions trying to develop the colossal failure called Vitamin A-enhanced Golden Rice. CGIAR, set up in 1972 by the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation to spread their Green Revolution agribusiness model, controls most of the private seed banks from the Philippines to Syria to Kenya. In all, these present seed banks hold more than six and a half million seed varieties, almost two million of which are ‘distinct.’ Svalbard’s Doomsday Vault has a capacity to house four and a half million different seeds.

At the time the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault opened in 2008 the chairman of the Crop Trust was Canadian Margaret Catley-Carlson. Catley-Carlson was also president until 1999 of the New York-based Population Council, John D. Rockefeller III ’s population reduction organization, set up in 1952 to advance the Rockefeller family’s eugenics program under the cover of promoting “family planning,” birth control devices, sterilization and “population control” in developing countries. Catley-Carlson also sat on the board of the Syngenta Foundation.

De-Population Council

Being President of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council is no minor deal. In the 1990’s the UN’s World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tetanus, a sickness arising from such things as stepping on a rusty nail. The vaccine was not given to men or boys, despite the fact they are presumably equally as liable to step on rusty nails as women.

Because of that curious anomaly, Comité Pro Vida de Mexico, a Roman Catholic lay organization, became suspicious and had vaccine samples tested. The tests revealed that the Tetanus vaccine being spread by the WHO– only to women of child-bearing age– contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.

It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller’s Population Council, the World Bank (home to CGIAR), and the United States’ National Institutes of Health had been involved in a 20-year-long project begun in 1972 to develop the concealed abortion vaccine with a tetanus carrier for WHO. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault, donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine.

Is it just coincidence that the same Gates Foundation is backing the organization responsible for maintaining the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault at the same time Gates is emerging as a major authority on the danger of the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic? In an article he wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine, Gates stated that the designated COVID19, “has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about.”

A virtually inaccessible seed vault under the control of some of the world’s foremost advocates of eugenics and population reduction is definitely remarkable. With more than a million of the irreplaceable seed heritage of the world locked inside the Svalbard Seed Vault, could this be a way for GMO agribusiness giants like Bayer-Monsanto or Syngenta to illegally gain access to those seeds in a time of global crisis? It sounds very far-fetched, yet there are far-fetched goings on in our world. We could say, “He who controls the world’s crop seeds, controls the world.”

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Electoral Dirty Tricks in Play on Super Tuesday?

March 4th, 2020 by Stephen Lendman

How is it possible for a Dem presidential aspirant ahead in most Super Tuesday states (according to polls), including California and Texas, to lose overall to a challenger?

The latest pre-Super Tuesday polls showed Sanders leading Biden by wide margins in California and Texas with 416 and 228 pledged delegates respectively — according to Real Clear Politics from an average of polls.

They showed Sanders ahead in Virginia, Massachusetts, Maine, Colorado, Utah, and Vermont, his home state.

Sanders was projected to win eight of 14 Super Tuesday states. He won four — California, Vermont, Colorado and Utah, losing Texas to Biden despite a near-9 point lead, according to polls.

Results so far show Biden winning nine states — Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Minnesota, Massachusetts (where he trailed Sanders and Warren in polls), and Texas.

A total of 1,357 Dem delegates were up for grabs in Super Tuesday states, 34% of total elected ones — nearly half the Tuesday total from California and Texas.

After teetering on the edge of elimination from poor showings in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, Biden emerged from Super Tuesday as the Dem frontrunner.

He has 453 elected delegates. Sanders trails with 382, followed by Warren with 50 and Bloomberg with 44.

The only candidate worthy of popular support, Tulsi Gabbard, an anti-war/progressive champion, is virtually eliminated from the race with one delegate.

In her home state Massachusetts, Warren finished third behind Biden and Sanders.

Despite her poor Super Tuesday showing, she vowed not to quit, saying: “I am in this fight.”

Virtually too far behind in the delegate count to catch up, polls in upcoming primaries showing her trailing badly, is she in it for Biden over Sanders in return for favors promised her?

Earlier calling herself “capitalist to the bone,” she’s part of the dirty system, not against it, shown by her voting record, most often along party lines, including for what benefits corporate America and the US imperial agenda.

Time and again she defends the indefensible. Like other undemocratic Dems and Republicans, she considers naked aggression humanitarian intervention and democracy building.

During Israel’s preemptive 2014 Gaza war, she supported what demanded condemnation, falsely blaming Hamas for Netanyahu regime high crimes.

She’s militantly hostile toward Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and other nations on the US target list for regime change.

She falsely accused Russia of “belligeren(ce),” falsely claimed China “weaponized its economy.” She supports illegal US sanctions (economic terrorism) on Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and other targeted nations.

She’s an Obama clone with a gender difference, never a people’s champion.

If she favored progressive politics over dirty business as usual, she’d drop out of the race and endorse Sanders over Biden and Bloomberg — because she’s too far behind in the delegate count to catch up.

Vowing not to quit suggests she supports continuity over peace, equity, justice and the rule of law.

Did Dem party bosses manipulate things for Biden to win big on Super Tuesday?

Did they urge Warren to stay in the race to draw support from voters likely to back Sanders if she drops out?

Will key upcoming primaries be rigged for Biden, a figure assuring continuity — even though Sanders as Dem standard bearer would be more likely to defeat Trump in November?

Do Dem party bosses prefer DJT over Sanders — even though the Vermont senator votes along party lines most often?

US electoral dirty tricks are longstanding. Super Tuesday results suggests they were in play to elevate Biden in the delegate count over Sanders.

Is more of the same likely in upcoming primary contests?

Americans get the best “democracy” monied interests can buy — democracy for privileged few alone, governance of, by and for everyone equitably ruled out throughout US history.

That’s the disturbing reality in the current race for the White House — aspirants considered “safe” alone allowed to win.

*

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Coronavirus: una falsa pandemia? Chi c’è dietro questo? Destabilizzazione economica, sociale e geopolitica globale

March 4th, 2020 by Prof Michel Chossudovsky

La campagna pubblicitaria e di disinformazione sulla diffusione del nuovo coronavirus COVID-19 ha creato un clima di paura e incertezza in tutto il mondo da quando l’OMS l’ha dichiarata un’emergenza medica della sanità pubblica internazionale il 30 gennaio.

La campagna della paura è in corso, creando panico e incertezza. I governi nazionali e l’OMS stanno ingannando il pubblico.

” Circa 84.000 persone in almeno 56 paesi sono state contagiate e circa 2.900 sono morte ” , ha dichiarato il New York Times. Quello che il giornale non menziona è che il 98% delle infezioni si trova nella Cina continentale. Ci sono meno di 5.000 casi confermati al di fuori della Cina (OMS, 28 febbraio 2020).

Al momento, non esiste una vera pandemia al di fuori della Cina continentale. I numeri parlano da soli.

Al momento in cui scrivo, il numero di “casi confermati” negli Stati Uniti è di 64 .
Il numero è minimo, ma i media stanno diffondendo il panico.
Vi sono tuttavia 15 milioni di casi di influenza negli Stati Uniti .

L’ultimo rapporto di sorveglianza FluView del Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) degli Stati Uniti indica che il 18 gennaio 2020 ci sono stati 15 milioni di casi di influenza, 140.000 ricoveri e 8.200 morti in questa stagione influenzale negli Stati Uniti (enfasi aggiunta ).

Dati pandemici COVID-19

Il 28 febbraio 2020, l’Organizzazione mondiale della sanità (OMS) ha riportato 83.652 casi confermati di COVID-19, inclusi 78.961 nella Cina continentale. Fuori dalla Cina c’erano 4.691 (OMS, 28 febbraio 2020, ).

L’OMS ha anche riportato 2.791 morti, di cui solo 67 al di fuori della Cina continentale .

Queste cifre confermano che la pandemia è principalmente limitata alla Cina continentale.

Inoltre, i dati recenti tendono a dimostrare che l’epidemia in Cina è sotto controllo. Il 21 febbraio 2020, la National Health Commission della Repubblica popolare cinese ha riferito che 36.157 pazienti sono stati dichiarati guariti e dimessi dall’ospedale (vedere la tabella sotto).

Rapporti cinesi confermano che le persone hanno ricevuto un trattamento e si stanno riprendendo dall’infezione virale. Anche il numero di pazienti infetti sta diminuendo.

Secondo la National Pharmaceutical Administration of China, gli ospedali usano il farmaco antivirale Favilavir ” per curare il coronavirus con effetti collaterali minimi “.

Diamo un’occhiata ai numeri:

La popolazione mondiale è di circa 7,8 miliardi di personeLa popolazione cinese è di circa 1,4 miliardi di persone.

La popolazione mondiale meno la Cina è di circa 6,4 miliardi di persone.4.691 casi confermati e 67 decessi segnalati (al di fuori della Cina) su una popolazione di 6,4 miliardi non costituiscono una pandemia. 4.691 / 6.400.000.000 = 0,00000073 = 0.000073%

Negli Stati Uniti, 64 casi su una popolazione di circa 330 milioni non costituiscono una pandemia. (dati del 28 febbraio): 64 / 330.000.000.

Perché propaganda Razzismo contro persone di origine cinese

È stata lanciata una campagna deliberata contro la Cina ed è in atto un’ondata di sentimento razzista nei confronti di persone di origine cinese, in gran parte promossa dai media occidentali, ma anche da agenzie governative (vedi sotto).

Guerra economica contro la Cina

La strategia degli Stati Uniti è quella di utilizzare COVID-19 per isolare la Cina, nonostante il fatto che l’economia statunitense si basi fortemente sulle importazioni cinesi.

La disorganizzazione a breve termine dell’economia cinese è in gran parte dovuta alla chiusura (temporanea) dei circuiti commerciali e di trasporto.

L’emergenza per la salute pubblica dichiarata dall’OMS si unisce alla disinformazione dei media e al divieto di voli in Cina.

Panico a Wall Street

La disinformazione dei media ha assunto un’altra dimensione causando il panico sui mercati azionari.
La paura del coronavirus ha portato a una caduta dei mercati finanziari in tutto il mondo.

Epidemia di coronavirus: l’OMS dichiara un’emergenza globale “falsa” per la salute pubblica

Secondo i rapporti, il valore dei mercati azionari mondiali è crollato di circa $ 6 trilioni. Questo calo è stato finora dell’ordine del “15% o più”.Ciò provoca ingenti perdite nei risparmi personali (cioè nella media americani), oltre a fallimenti personali e fallimenti aziendali.

È anche un vantaggio per gli speculatori istituzionali, in particolare per gli hedge fund aziendali. La debacle finanziaria ha portato a grandi trasferimenti di ricchezza monetaria nelle tasche di una manciata di istituzioni finanziarie.

Il fatto più ironico è che gli analisti collegano casualmente il crollo dei mercati alla diffusione del virus, quando negli Stati Uniti ci sono solo 64 casi confermati.

” Non sorprende che i mercati stiano calando … il virus è cresciuto così tanto …”

Potremmo “prevedere” il crollo finanziario di febbraio?
Sarebbe ingenuo credere che la crisi finanziaria fosse dovuta solo alle forze di mercato che hanno reagito spontaneamente alla diffusione di COVID-19. Il mercato è già stato attentamente manipolato da potenti attori che utilizzano strumenti speculativi nei mercati dei derivati, compresa la “vendita allo scoperto”.

L’obiettivo non detto è la concentrazione della ricchezza. Fu un vero vantaggio finanziario per gli “addetti ai lavori” che sapevano in anticipo cosa avrebbe portato alla decisione dell’OMS di dichiarare un’emergenza di sanità pubblica di interesse internazionale il 30 gennaio.

La pandemia COVID-19 (nCoV-2019) era nota in anticipo? Quali sono le probabili ripercussioni?
Il 18 ottobre 2019, il Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security di Baltimora ha intrapreso un esercizio di simulazione accuratamente realizzato di un’epidemia di coronavirus chiamata nCoV-2019.

Nell’esercizio chiamato Event 201 Simulation of a Coronavirus Pandemic , abbiamo “simulato” un calo del mercato azionario del 15%. Non è stato “pianificato” secondo gli organizzatori e gli sponsor dell’evento, la Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation e il World Economic Forum.

Una esercitazione pandemica globale

Schermata, 201 Un esercizio pandemico globale

La simulazione effettuata in ottobre chiamata nCoV-2019 è avvenuta appena due mesi prima della comparsa di COVID-19.

La simulazione della pandemia di John Hopkins ha simulato un calo del mercato azionario del “15% o più” (video, sezione 0.0 – 1’2 “), che corrisponde in gran parte al calo che ha avuto luogo alla fine di febbraio 2020.

Molti aspetti di questo “esercizio di simulazione” corrispondono effettivamente a ciò che è realmente accaduto quando il Direttore Generale dell’OMS ha dichiarato un’emergenza di sanità pubblica di interesse internazionale il 30 gennaio 2020.
Quello che deve essere compreso è che coloro che hanno sponsorizzato il “esercizio di simulazione” del John Hopkins Center sono potenti e competenti nelle aree della “salute globale” (B. e M. Gates Foundation) e “L’economia mondiale” (GEF).

Va anche notato che l’OMS ha inizialmente adottato un acronimo simile (per indicare il coronavirus) a quello del John Hopkins Center Pandemic Simulation Exercise (nCoV-2019) prima di cambiarlo in COVID-19 .

Corruzione e ruolo dell’OMS

Che motivato il direttore generale dell’OMS, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , a dichiarare che la Ncov-2019 è una “emergenza sanitaria pubblica di rilevanza internazionale” il 30 gennaio, quando l’epidemia era in gran parte confinato alla Cina continentale?

Tutto suggerisce che il direttore generale dell’OMS Tedros abbia servito gli interessi di potenti partner delle grandi corporations.

Secondo F. William Engdahl , Tedros ha legami di vecchia data con la Clinton e la Clinton Foundation. È anche strettamente legato alla Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Insieme al World Economic Forum di Davos, la Gates Foundation ha sponsorizzato il “esercizio di simulazione” di John Hopkins nCoV-2019.

Come ministro della sanità, Tedros ha anche presieduto il Fondo globale per la lotta contro l’AIDS, la tubercolosi e la malaria, di cui la Fondazione Gates è stata cofondatrice. Il Fondo globale è stato rovinato da scandali di frode e corruzione.

” Durante la campagna triennale di Tedros per ottenere il suo posto presso l’OMS, è stato accusato di nascondere tre grandi epidemie di colera mentre era il Ministro della Salute dell’Etiopia, falsificando i casi “acuta diarrea acquosa” (un sintomo di colera), per ridurre al miniUna massiccia campagna di sviluppo del vaccino è stata ordinata dal direttore generale dell’OMS Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Molte aziende farmaceutiche ci stanno già lavorando.

A questo proposito, è importante ricordare la frode dell’OMS durante il mandato del suo predecessore, la dott.ssa Margaret Chan , che ha detto questo sulla pandemia di influenza suina H1N1 nel 2009:

” I produttori di vaccini possono produrre nella migliore delle ipotesi 4,9 miliardi di vaccini contro l’influenza all’anno. ( Margaret Chan, direttore esecutivo dell’Organizzazione mondiale della sanità , citato da Reuters il 21 luglio 2009, sottolinea che è stato aggiunto).

Non vi è stata alcuna pandemia di H1N1 nel 2009. È stato una frode fare soldi, come rivelato dal Parlamento europeo.

Le multinazionali del farmaco si preparano al grande business dei vaccini per il Covid-19

Qual è il prossimo passo nella pandemia di COVID-19? È una falsa o una vera pandemia?

  • La propaganda contro la Cina non è finita.
  • Né la “paura della pandemia” è al di fuori della Cina, nonostante il numero veramente basso di “casi confermati”.
  • La crisi finanziaria continua, supportata dalla disinformazione dei media e dalle interferenze finanziarie.
  • Se non vengono ripristinati i normali rapporti commerciali (e di trasporto) tra Stati Uniti e Cina, la consegna dei beni di consumo “Made in China” esportati negli Stati Uniti verrà messa a repentaglio.
  • Questa situazione potrebbe innescare una grave crisi nel commercio al dettaglio negli Stati Uniti, dove i beni “Made in China” costituiscono una parte significativa del consumo mensile delle famiglie.
  • Dal punto di vista della salute pubblica, le prospettive di eliminare COVID-19 in Cina sono favorevoli. I progressi sono già stati segnalati.
  • Nel resto del mondo (dove ci sono stati circa 3.000 casi confermati il ​​28 febbraio 2020), la pandemia di COVID-19 continua, insieme alla propaganda per un programma di vaccinazione globale.
  • Senza una campagna di paura combinata con notizie false, COVID-19 non avrebbe fatto notizia.
  • Da un punto di vista medico, è indicata la vaccinazione globale?
  • 43,3% dei “casi confermati” in Cina è ora considerato “recuperato” (vedi grafico sopra). I rapporti occidentali non fanno distinzione tra “casi confermati” e “casi confermati infetti”. Sono gli ultimi casi che sono rilevanti. La tendenza è verso una ripresa e una diminuzione dei “casi infetti confermati”.

La massiccia campagna di vaccinazione dell’OMS (menzionata sopra) è stata debitamente confermata dal suo direttore generale, il dott. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus , il 28 febbraio:

” … Più di 20 vaccini sono in fase di sviluppo in tutto il mondo e numerosi prodotti terapeutici sono in fase di sperimentazione clinica, i cui primi risultati sono attesi in” poche settimane “. (enfasi aggiunta)

Va da sé che questa decisione dell’OMS costituisce un’altra manna per i cinque principali produttori di vaccini: Glaxo SmithKline, Novartis, Merck & Co., Sanofi e Pfizer, che controllano l’85% del mercato dei vaccini. Secondo CNBC: (enfasi aggiunta)

Queste aziende sono entrate nella corsa per combattere il coronavirus mortale e stanno lavorando a programmi per creare vaccini o farmaci … Sanofi sta collaborando con il governo degli Stati Uniti per sviluppare un vaccino contro il nuovo virus , sperando che il suo lavoro sul l’epidemia di SARS del 2003 accelererà il processo. Nel 2019, Merck ha guadagnato $ 8,4 miliardi di entrate dal mercato dei vaccini, un segmento in crescita a un tasso annuo del 9% dal 2010, secondo Bernstein .

Glaxo SmithKline ha annunciato questo mese la sua partnership con la Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations [CEPI] per un programma di vaccinazione … CEPI è stato lanciato al World Economic Forum 2017.

È interessante notare che il CEPI, lanciato a Davos nel 2017, è supportato dalla Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, dal Wellcome Trust (una fondazione umanitaria britannica multimiliardaria) e dal World Economic Forum. I governi di Norvegia e India sono membri e il loro ruolo è principalmente quello di finanziare CEPI.

Cronologia

18 ottobre 2019 : la B. e M. Gates Foundation e il World Economic Forum sono partner della pandemia “simulazione di esercitazione” a nCoV-2019 condotta dal John Hopkins Center for Health Security nell’ottobre 2019.

31 dicembre 2019 : la Cina avvisa l’OMS della scoperta di numerosi casi di “polmonite insolita” a Wuhan, nella provincia di Hubei.

7 gennaio 2020 : funzionari cinesi affermano di aver identificato un nuovo virus. L’OMS nomina il nuovo virus 2019-nCoV ( esattamente lo stesso nome del virus che era l’oggetto dell’esercizio di simulazione del John Hopkins Center, tranne il posizionamento della data).

24-25 gennaio 2020 : Vertice di Davos sotto l’egida del CEPI, che è anche il frutto di una partnership tra il World Economic Forum e la Gates Foundation, durante la quale viene annunciato lo sviluppo di un vaccino contro il nCoV 2019 (2 settimane dopo l’annuncio del 7 gennaio 2020 e appena una settimana prima della dichiarazione di emergenza sanitaria pubblica di portata internazionale da parte dell’OMS).

30 gennaio 2020 : il direttore dell’OMS dichiara una “emergenza sanitaria pubblica di rilevanza internazionale”.

Ora è stata lanciata una campagna di vaccinazione per fermare COVID-19 sotto l’egida di CEPI in collaborazione con GlaxoSmithKline .

Conclusione

COVID-19 (alias nCoV-2019) rappresenta un tesoro del valore di miliardi di dollari per le grandi aziende farmaceutiche. Ma contribuisce anche a far precipitare l’umanità in un pericoloso processo di destabilizzazione economica, sociale e geopolitica.

Michel Chossudovsky 

 

fonte inglese :

COVID-19 Coronavirus: A Fake Pandemic? Who’s Behind It? Global Economic, Social and Geopolitical Destabilization

 

fonte francese :

Coronavirus COVID-19: Une fausse pandémie? Qui est derrière cela? Déstabilisation économique, sociale et géopolitique mondiale

Tradotto da Daniel per Mondialisation.ca

 

Tradotto in Italiano da Luciano Lago per Controinformazione.info

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Super Tuesday & the Irrevocable Split in the Democratic Party

March 4th, 2020 by Dr. Jack Rasmus

As the voting this evening, March 3, comes in from the fourteen states conducting Democrat Party primaries already the ‘takeaways’ are evident.

The first is that the last minute dropping out of the primary race by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar—and their immediate endorsement of Joe Biden—has had its obvious strategic effect. Their votes clearly went to Biden. That was perhaps most evident in Klobuchar’s state, Minnesota, where Sanders was expected to win.

The Buttigieg-Klobuchar Maneuver

Both Buttigieg and Klobuchar entered the race, one might argue in retrospect, to test how far they could drag potential voters from Sanders. Buttigieg the youth and the gay vote. Klobuchar the female vote. Neither were able to chip away much, if any, of Sanders’ support. So when it was clear they had little chance of doing so, they quickly dropped out right before the Super Tuesday primaries and threw their endorsement, organizational support (and their financial backers’ funding?) to Biden.

If anyone believes their decisions were isolated and unrelated individual acts that had nothing to do with encouragement by the Democratic Party leadership, including Obama, Pelosi, Shumer and their own moneybag financiers, then they are deluding themselves. The timing, coordinated exits, and endorsements of Biden were not merely coincidental. Having done their ‘party duty’, they now will no doubt now be nicely rewarded in their future careers by the party’s organization and campaign contributors.

But you didn’t hear much of this kind of analysis if you listened to MSNBC, CNN, or the other media mouthpieces of the establishment, centrist leadership of the party. Why anyone continues to refer to the Democratic Party as ‘liberal’ or even as an independent party, is amazing. More accurately, it should be understood as the ‘globalist wing of the Corporate Party of America’. The other wing of the Corporate Party of America is the Republican. Correct that, today better called the ‘Trumpublican’ party. The policies of either wing of the Corporate Party of America for the past 40 years have been very similar and no less pro-business.

Warren Loses Massachusetts & Her Days Are Numbered

A second obvious takeaway from today’s Super Tuesday event is that Elizabeth Warren failed to win even her home state, Massachusetts, which went to Biden. Warren’s so-called progressive votes would have gone almost totally to Sanders, had she too dropped out. That would have easily given Sanders Massachusetts over Biden. Warren clearly has taken votes away from Sanders, not only in Massachusetts but everywhere on Super Tuesday.

To sum up in part then: Buttigieg-Klobuchar drop out and shift their centrist endorsements, support and votes to Biden; Warren stays in and diverts progressive votes from Sanders. Does anyone think this is all coincidental?

My prediction is that Warren will eventually drop out, but not before the Sanders-Biden contest concludes in the key swing states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and a couple potential others. The dilution of Sanders’ progressive support full potential will have been achieved.

Biden Sweeps the South: So What!

A third takeaway is that Biden swept the southern states on Super Tuesday. No doubt about it. As in South Carolina, once again his vote margin was delivered by the over-35 black vote. The Democratic Party is so weak in the southern states that black voters comprise the largest plurality of their voting population in most of the states of the South. Older black voters went for Biden, while younger often went for Sanders. But the youth black vote was only a small percentage compared to the older black vote, typically around only 15% of the total black vote. Older black voters in the South tend to vote based on recommendations of their churches, community organizations, and black political leaders. In contrast, younger blacks are increasingly independent. But there weren’t as many of their numbers to offset, let alone overtake, the older black votes going to Biden. The youth black vote is there. But the Sanders organization still has much to do to organize, register, and turnout black youth to vote, and especially in the South.

Biden’s sweep of the South is largely irrelevant, however. These are states that Trump and the Republicans have solidly wrapped up. Decades of gerrymandering, voter suppression, and control of state legislatures and governorships in these states means no Democrat candidate, Sanders or Biden, is going to swing any of the ‘red states’ into the Democrat camp in the November 2020 election.

Thus Biden’s victories in the primaries in these states signifies nothing of import for the general election in November. But the party’s media wing make it sound like some great achievement that show Joe will sweep the South in the November election against Trump. Dream on.

The liberal, establishment media all night Tuesday have been hyping the story that Biden won in Virginia, in Tennessee, Arkansas and didn’t even show up to campaign there or spend money on TV ads. Doesn’t that show how strong a candidate Joe is, they echoed as if reading from the same tv monitor? No, it shows the Democrats are so weak in those states that the party organization’s recommendations mostly determine the outcomes.

Bloomberg’s New Choice: Fortune vs. Ego

What about Bloomberg? After spending more than $500 million of his own money (more than $70 million in California alone), he managed to gain voter support only in the mid-teens. Typically around 15% or so. Reportedly his own campaign manager has now urged him to drop out. Whether he does so will depend on whether he values more his ego or his dwindling fortune. He’s looks now more like the addicted gambler, chasing his money at the crap table or racetrack. IF one were to guess, however, it would be in favor of his ego. He could still accumulate enough votes of delegates to be a broker at the party’s convention.

The Party’s Geographical-Generational Class Divide

Another takeaway is the Super Tuesday, 14-state contest shows the Democrat Party is divided geographically, as well as generationally and along class lines.

Sanders wins big in the west and northern New England. Biden in the South. But the most important geographically area—the area that will determine the electoral college outcome and thus the election—is yet to be contested. That’s the ‘swing states’ regional arc from Pennsylvania to Michigan to Wisconsin (and maybe a few ‘outliers’ like Arizona). As in 2016, that’s where the general presidential election will be determined. My guess is that Warren will stay in to continue to split the progressive vote there, to Sanders’ disadvantage, and drop out after. Bloomberg, on the other hand, may be convinced to drop out just before those primaries. Should he do so his votes will largely go to Biden. That will all but ensure Biden wins most of the delegates there, although that’s not foreordained either.

Sanders’ won big in the west, where the ‘older black voter’ factor and the Warren ‘split the progressive vote’ factor have not been significant. An interesting contest was the Texas vote. Sanders was slated to win by a small margin. However, the party establishment threw everything into Texas, including the political kitchen sink, as they say. They even got that once thought of left liberal, Beto O’Rourke, to endorse and stump for Biden. Like Buttigieg and Klobuchar, he too will no doubt be nicely rewarded by the party apparatus down the road for his next career political move. The lesson: beware of progressive sounding young political careerists on the make.

Movement vs. Party Apparatchiki

Sanders has rallied the youth vote, the Latino vote (youth and older), young black and other minorities, women and local unions to his banner. It’s a movement that’s growing. It hasn’t yet peaked. The question is will it peak sooner, or perhaps after the 2020 election cycle? In the west, the older crowd of voters still went for Biden. But unlike in the South, the youth vote-minority vote turnout in the west swamped the older voters. The movement there has arrived! Sanders’ movement more than offset Biden’s party apparatus. And the west, unlike the South, must be won by the Democratic Party in order to offset the electoral vote advantage of Trump and Republicans in their ‘red state’ bastions. It is futile strategy to try to retake the ‘red state’ South out from under Trump. Too late. Past Democratic Party timidity and meekness confronting voter suppression and gerrymandering has all but rendered that extremely unlikely. Better solidify the West, New England, maybe Atlantic States and win the swing states. But the latter will also take a movement. And without Sanders, the Democrats have none.

So Sanders wins the west, New England, and the youth-Latino vote. Biden wins the South-older black vote. But the most important regional contest is yet to come: the swing states voting. That is determinative. And that will take more than Democrat leaders’ tired old strategies. And even tired old, same-o, same-o nominees.

When to Release the ‘Kraken’?

Sanders might have a fighting chance if the party’s nomination were determined by winning a simple majority of 1,991 delegates by means of winning caucuses and primaries. But it isn’t. The Democratic party leaders and financiers have made sure that their ‘ace in the hole’, should they need it, is their control over the 500+ so-called special delegates at their July nominating convention. The majority of these are Democrat members of Congress—representatives and Senators. And they will vote as the party recommends, with few exceptions. So even if Sanders wins in a sweep of the ‘swing states’ primaries coming up, even if he is far and away the holder of the largest plurality of delegates from the primaries, he will still be deprived of the party’s nomination in July at the convention, I predict, when the party leaders ‘release the Kraken’ (an ancient Norse sea-monster) of the 500 special delegates to vote for the party leaders’ favorite boy. And guess who that’ll be?

Why Biden Can’t Beat Trump

A final takeaway from Super Tuesday primaries is this: Biden’s win of the South is irrelevant, as was said. He can’t deliver those states’ electoral votes in the general election. Obama and the Democrats already lost that race back in 2010, when Obama’s failed economic recovery of Main St. resulted in an historic sweep by Republicans of the House & Senate, state governorships and state legislatures in dozens of ‘red states’ in 2010 and 2012-14. Gerrymandering and escalating voter suppression followed Republican capture of the red states. That now ensure that these states stay ‘red’. Second point: if Biden gets the nomination, Sanders movement supporters will not vote for him. They will stay home. The Democrats could lose several western states in that case, as well as the South. It then won’t matter if they win one or more northern ‘swing states’. Party leaders think all they have to do is hold the party together, convince everyone there’s no other choice but to vote for Biden (or Bloomberg). And just ‘turn’ the 70 electoral votes in the swing states that determined the electoral college win in 2016 for Trump. One must also add the strong likelihood that Trump will eat Biden’s lunch, as they say, in the TV debates before the general November election. Finally, one cannot discount Trump and Republican last minute dirty tricks. At the top of that list will be an ‘October Surprise’ in the week before the November election, in which something dramatic associated with Biden’s connection to the Ukraine—whether true or not—will be revealed by ‘Trumpublican’ dirty tricksters. The Democrat Party establishment will not be able to respond in time to negate the effect of the revelation.

The Party’s Coming Irrevocable Split

In short, a badly split Democrat Party, should Sanders be cheated out of the nomination (again), will undermine it during the last stage of the general election in November; Biden will almost certainly come off badly in the TV debates; and the ‘Trumpublican’ practice of winning by any means necessary, even if it means destroying what’s left of American Democracy, will together result in another failed strategy and attempt by the Democratic Party leadership to defeat Donald Trump.

Biden is not ‘more electable’ than Sanders (who by the way leads Trump in scores of independent polls). Biden’s electability is a gross myth peddled by the Democrat establishment’s media mouthpieces. Biden is maybe the least electable. Even Bloomberg would stand a better chance. (But then, there’s really little difference between Bloomberg and Trump, except for the latter’s foul mouth, bad manners, nasty tweets, and predilection to run roughshod over the US Constitution. Otherwise they’re both billionaires who in the end support billionaires).

So it seems the Democratic Party is at a real crossroads: Its corporate friendly leadership is doing all they can to maneuver on multiple fronts to deny Sanders the party’s nomination. Not just primary campaign maneuvers, convention delegate maneuvers, pushing fake messages like Sanders isn’t electable, or would lose ‘down ballot’ seats in Congress, and red-baiting Sanders’ FDR-like reforms (it’s not a revolution folks), labeling Sanders a radical ‘socialist’ (i.e. a Republican theme by the way), and raising trial balloons by some of the party’s major fundraisers who are declaring they would vote for Trump if Sanders were the nominee. (What they really mean is they would vote to keep the big investor tax cuts Trump gave them rather than let Sanders take their tax cut largesse away!).

The party’s leaders and strategists are so intent on denying Sanders the nomination that they would risk splitting the party and driving youth of all kind out of the party. If so, it could very well mean the beginning of the end of the Democratic party come November, a process by the way that would accelerate if Biden then loses the election.

Biden would be a replicant of Obama in terms of policy, albeit a tired and uninspiring version of the latter. But the outcome would be the same as under Obama for millennials, GenXers, and now GenZers. No solutions to their crises in employment, low pay, crunching student debt, unaffordable health care and cost of education, lack of decent housing, racial discrimination, indignation of the growing obscenity of super wealth accumulation by the few as they struggle for basics, and fear of a climate crisis out of control for them and their children. For the apparent generational divide within the Democratic Party is one and the same an economic divide—i.e. a matter of class.

It is unfortunate that Democrat leaders are so myopic they only see the coming general election with blinders on. Deny Sanders and they split the party, not just in November but after; allow Sanders as nominee and they give up their corporate-funded control of the party, its programs, and its policies they’ve had since 1992 with Bill Clinton. So they are talking themselves into the fiction that, even if they deny the nomination to Sanders, his supporters and movement will have ‘no where else to go’ but to fall in line behind Biden. But they do have somewhere to go: they’ll sit home. And then they’ll perhaps go out and organize a party independent of today’s Democratic Party.

Joe Biden’s nomination will not only mean failure to defeat Trump, but may mean an irrevocable split in the party itself.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Jack Rasmus.

Dr. Rasmus is author of the recently published book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, January, 2020. He blogs at jackrasmus.com. His website is http://kyklosproductions.comand twitter handle, @drjackrasmus, He hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio Network out of New York. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.