Global Research

On Sunday, ahead of the big Tuesday reveal in the White House, US President Donald J. Trump delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the so-called “Deal of the Century” also known as the “Middle East Peace Plan”. The proposal however is absent of any semblance of a realistic deal or a feasible plan to solve Israeli-Palestinian issues as it benefits one side at the expense of the other. Quite frankly, it’s not even worth the ink or paper it was printed on and was rejected by Palestinian leaders before Tuesdays unveiling.

The United Nations rejected the proposal and reiterated that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be solved based on UN resolutions and international law and bilateral agreements based on pre-1967 lines. Trump has ignored the two-state solution adopted by the UN and international community and is proposing his own plan which is heavily influenced and supported by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) a strong lobby group that advocates pro-Israel policies to Congress and the Executive Branch on domestic and international issues.

For the past three year’s President Trump’s Senior Advisor and son-in-law, Jared Kushner has been busy working on the eighty-page document and the accompanying map which graphically demonstrates how Israel will be using this farce of a deal to continue it’s illegal occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

Kushner’s Middle East expertise is limited to his real estate investment projects in Israel which fostered strong family relations with Netanyahu and the twenty-five books he read while preparing for his “peace agreement”.

Trump, Kushner, and Netanyahu never actually intended to create an agreement or deal that could be entered into by the Israeli’s and Palestinians for their mutual benefit instead their supposed “vision for peace, prosperity, and a brighter future for Israeli’s and Palestinians” has an underlining agenda to bolster Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians, theft, murder, annexation and occupation. Netanyahu said that his cabinet would vote on the measure to apply Israeli sovereignty to West Bank settlements and the strategic Jordan valley on Sunday, which could account for 30 percent of the West Bank, occupied territory which Israel seized from Jordan in the 1967 war which Palestinians were planning on using for their future state. However, Netanyahu might encounter some legal complications because the current cabinet is an interim cabinet till the upcoming election.

As happy and proud as Trump and Kushner were on Tuesday while unveiling the “Scam of the Century”, in the White House, there was one man in the room who was beaming with unrestrained glee, Netanyahu referred to Trump’s “Deal of the Century” as the “Opportunity of the Century” and said that Israel will not miss this opportunity. In a room full of Zionists, Evangelicals, and White House Officials, not a single Palestinian political leader, advisor, or otherwise was present, which again speaks to the illegitimacy of this supposed “peace plan”.

Ambassadors from Bahrain, Oman, and the UAE attended and will be paying for the economic portion of the deal, but they represent less 1% of the Arab population and have aligned themselves with Israel and western nations because they share a common enemy, Iran.

Trump said that this was a win-win opportunity for both sides, but clearly this and everything else he has done in the past three years entirely favors Israel while subjugating Palestinians such as but not limited to moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, claiming that the Golan heights belong to Israel, and unilaterally withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) aka Iran Nuclear deal.

Trump’s “Slap of the Century” as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas referred to it, states that Palestinians would have four years to work towards becoming a state, President Trump went on to say that he is asking Palestinians to meet the challenges of peaceful co-existence. This would include disarming Hamas, broadly accepting the Jewish character of the Israeli state and in exchange they would be granted limited autonomy within a Palestinian homeland that consists of multiple non-contiguous enclaves scattered throughout the West Bank and Gaza.  Israel would retain “security” aka control over not only Palestinian enclaves but Palestinian borders, airspace, aquifers, maritime waters, and electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, Israel would be allowed to annex the Jordan valley and Jewish communities in the West Bank. Palestinians would be allowed to select their political leaders but would not have any political rights in Israel. This fraudulent Mideast “peace plan” is a thinly veiled plan for apartheid and increases tensions between the two contentious parties.

The timing of this big reveal is important to note, as it serves as a distraction from the political woes that both Trump and Netanyahu are currently facing. President Trump is currently the subject of an on-going impeachment trial in the Senate and Israel’s Attorney General filed a criminal indictment against Netanyahu on a series of corruption charges.

Not only was this sham of a “peace plan” made without the participation of Palestinians but it defies international law and international precedent on the issue and ignores Palestinian interests.  Without question by declaring Jerusalem Israel’s “undivided” capital, Trump has angered and pushed Palestinians away from coming to any sort of possible resolution to decades of violent conflict. Now Israel has more of a reason to annex major illegal Israeli colonies in occupied West Bank due to this proposal. Not only is the United States promoting the theft, plundering, and illegal annexation of Palestinian land but the Syrian Golan Heights as well.

Disturbing historical parallels have been drawn between Palestinians and the Bantu people of South Africa. Ten territories were designated as quasi-autonomous states for the black African population during the mid to late 20th century and kept under control of the white supremacist state.  The “Steal of the Century” is intended to bring about a similar fate for Palestinians.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

We must not be indifferent when we hear historical lies. We must not be indifferent when the past is distorted for today’s political needs. The ancient people of Palestine have been the documented, majority indigenous demographic of the region for more than 1000 years – a millennium! We must not be indifferent when any minority is discriminated against. Democracy hinges on the rights of minorities to be protected. We must not be indifferent when any government – in this case, the Israeli government – violently infringes on the existing social contract.

For 13 years, the 1.8 million civilian population of Gaza has had to suffer a blockade of essential goods, medicines, food, power and electricity by the Israeli government forces of occupation that have tried to effect an illegal regime change in order to build a Greater Israel. It has failed but the people of Gaza increasingly starve.

Now the Israeli state, armed and supported by an unbalanced, megalomaniac President in the White House, and his family, are intent on the unlawful forced annexation of the occupied Palestinian lands of the West Bank and East Jerusalem – plus the Golan Heights.

We reach out to the world today and ask you to reject the Rape of the Palestinian people by today’s manifestation of American misconceived power.

We ask the world to work together for the future of the next generation, respecting history and inspired by peace, justice, tolerance and partnership.  Future generations will shout: “where was everybody?” Where was the world who could see and hear that and did nothing to save all those hundreds of thousands?  In times like this, when minorities have to feel vulnerable again, we can only pray that people and nations worldwide will stand up for democracy and human rights.

The Second World War did not descend from the sky. There was adequate warning of the catastrophe then to come. But no action was taken and 60 million souls died in France, USSR, Germany, Japan, Britain, Poland, Italy, Austria, Holland, throughout Europe, North Africa and around the world – because good people sat on their hands and did nothing. Don’t let it happen again!

There are huge, hidden, undeclared arsenals of weapons of mass destruction, today, in the Middle East – both nuclear and chemical – just waiting for a corrupt leader to press the button, initiate genocide and contaminate the entire world. Do NOT Be IndIfferent! Use your voice and your influence in your country and in your legislative assembly or Parliament.  The time to act is now!

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: A protester holds a placard as she stands next to Israeli soldiers during a protest against Israeli settlements in Beit Fajjar town south of the West Bank city of Bethlehem December 27, 2014. REUTERS/ Mussa Qawasma

A major victory for Canada’s First Nations has just been won in Ontario. On January 31, the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (SON) overwhelmingly voted down the proposed deep geological repository (DGR) for storage of low- and intermediate-level radioactive nuclear waste next to Lake Huron. The DGR had long been proposed by Ontario Power Generation (OPG), but in 2013 OPG had committed to SON that it would not build the DGR without their support.

As Chief Lester Anoquot of the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation told the press on January 31,

“This vote was a historic milestone and momentous victory for our People. We worked for many years for our right to exercise jurisdiction in our Territory and the free, prior and informed consent of our People to be recognized.” [1]

Out of 1,232 total votes, there were 4 spoiled ballots, 170 yes votes, and 1,058 no votes, indicating that 85% of those casting ballots had said no to a DGR at Bruce Power’s nuclear generating station in Kincardine, Ont.

Dr. Gordon Edwards, a long-time nuclear critic, has advocated a “policy of Rolling Stewardship” by which the wastes would be “constantly monitored and kept in a retrievable condition [above-ground] indefinitely,” as they are now.

According to BeyondNuclear.org, the SON had been offered $150 million by OPG “in exchange for SON agreeing to ‘host’ this DGR” [2] It cannot have been easy for a small First Nation to reject this much money, so the rest of us might consider ways to thank them. After all, there are 40 million people (on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border) who obtain their drinking water from the Great Lakes.

A brief summary of the sordid history of the DGR proposal shows just how much thanks are owed the SON.

Sordid History

In 2001, Bruce Power was hived off from provincial Crown corporation OPG by the Conservative Mike Harris provincial government to become a private power company, leasing the eight Bruce nuclear reactors from OPG under a public-private partnership (P3). Bruce Power’s two major sharehholder-partners have long been TransCanada Corporation (now called TC Energy) and Borealis Infrastructure (the investment arm of the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System – OMERS). The Bruce site’s assets (including the nuclear waste) remain owned by OPG, while Bruce Power gets the profits from selling the nuclear-generated electricity. [3]

In the same year that this P3 was established, the Kincardine City Council approached OPG about hosting a possible long-term nuclear waste facility. OPG’s proposal was to bury low- and intermediate-level nuclear wastes from Ontario nuclear power plants in chambers drilled into limestone 680 metres (2,231 feet) below the surface and under the Bruce nuclear site at Kincardine – 400 metres from Lake Huron. The nuclear waste to be entombed in the DGR would come from the Bruce, Pickering and Darlington nuclear sites in Ontario – currently home to 18 Candu reactors.

After years of controversy, a Canadian federal Joint Review Panel (JRP) approved the DGR in May 2015, accepting testimony that Lake Huron would be large enough to dilute any radioactive pollution that might leak from the DGR. [4] This outrageous “environmental” ruling prompted thousands of people on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border to mobilize, and dozens of communities adopted resolutions against the DGR. Meanwhile, U.S. efforts to engage the International Joint Commission (IJC), which oversees boundary waters’ issues, had gone nowhere.

In 2015, I contacted the IJC’s Public Information Officer Frank Bevacqua, who told me by email that both the Canadian and U.S. federal governments would have to ask the IJC to intervene on the issue. “The IJC does not review proposals for site-specific projects [like the DGR] unless asked to do so by both governments,” he said. [5] Obviously, it was the Canadian federal government that was the hold-out.

Nonetheless, after the Harper government’s JRP approval, subsequent Canadian federal politicians have been reluctant to give final approval to the DGR, perhaps knowing how much that would enrage people and politicians on both sides of the border. In August 2017, then-environment minister Catherine McKenna was the latest to pause the process, “to ensure buy-in from Indigenous people in the area.” [6]

Money Talks (For Some)

In March 2013, an NGO called Stop the Great Lakes Nuclear Dump reported that

“OPG is paying $35.7 million to Saugeen Shores, Huron-Kinross, Arran Elderslie, Brockton [and] Kincardine. All are [municipalities] adjacent to the Bruce Nuclear Power Plant site. Ten and a half million dollars have already been paid even before approval to construct the dump is received.” [7]

Erika Simpson, political science professor at the University of Western Ontario, also noted at the time that the payments to these municipalities will continue for years “so long as they provide their co-operation in support of the environmental approvals and licensing applications…” [8]

In contrast to these municipalities, we now know that the Saugeen Ojibway Nation passed up $150 million from OPG and voted down the DGR. Let’s find ways (including financial) to show our gratitude. The mailing address for Saugeen Ojibway Nation’s Environmental Office is 25 Maadookii Subdivision, Wiarton, Ontario, Canada N0H 2T0.

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Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

Notes

[1] Saugeen Ojibway Nation Environment Office, “Vote Results,” January 31, 2020.

[2] Beyond Nuclear.org, January 30, 2020.

[3] Joyce Nelson, “Nuclear Dump Controversy,” Watershed Sentinel, September 17, 2015.

[4] Joyce Nelson, “Great Lakes Nuclear Waste Dump: The Battle Continues,” Counterpunch, January 15, 2016.

[5] Quoted in ibid.

[6] Colin Perkel, “Indigenous community votes down proposed nuclear waste bunker near Lake Huron,” The Canadian Press, February 1, 2020.

[7] Quoted in Nelson, “Nuclear Dump Controversy,” op. cit.

[8] Quoted in Ibid.

Erdogan lost his mind and sends NATO troops into the Syrian province of Idlib to establish military checkpoints in front of the advancing Syrian Arab Army from the south to protect his defeated and collapsing al-Qaeda terrorists.

Even someone like Trump would stand down in such an event who had to stand down after Iran delivered its first slap and destroyed Ayn Alasad military base east of Iraq housing US troops avenging Trump’s killing of Iran’s top General Qasim Soleimani.

But Erdogan is on a very different level of madness, he has been a faithful servant to the same cult of Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush who indoctrinated him to ‘lead the Greater Israel Project in the region’.

The following report by Mohammad Al-Khodr of the Lebanese-based Al-Mayadeen news channel sheds more light, the video followed by the transcript of the English translation of the video:

Transcript of the English translation of the above video

A Turkish movement on the ground tries to hinder the Syrian army’s advance on the fronts east of Idlib and southern Aleppo.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threats of a full-scale military operation in Idlib, was translated by his army as erecting a military post in Kafr-Ammem, east of Saraqib.

Another attack launched by the Turkish-backed ‘National Army’ on the Tadif axis in eastern Aleppo.

Safwan Korbi, member of the Syrian People’s Assembly for Idlib: I understand the shouting and I understand the noise and I understand the loud voice of Erdogan because the effects of the fall of Idlib and its return to the Syrian state will be disastrous for Erdogan inside Turkey first, especially in the presence of relations that I do not see at its best with Russia.

In western Aleppo, Noureddine Zanki’s militants entered the fronts of adults and Journalists District under Turkish supervision and with the approval of the Hay’at Tahrir Sham (al-Qaeda Levant aka Nusra Front).

Erdogan is pushing jihadist groups in a last-ditch attempt to stop the Syrian army’s surge on expanding fronts that allow militants to maneuver to the Turkish border.

An attempt that proved unsuccessful with the destruction of defense lines established by the militants over a period of 7 years.

Safwan Korbi, member of the Syrian People’s Assembly for Idlib: He will resort to his jihadist banner, which is to use extremist terrorist groups to try to disturb as much as possible the sound and loud advances of the Syrian Arab Army on the outskirts of Idlib province and Aleppo countryside.

The fighting between the Aleppo and Idlib fronts coincides with the large leaps achieved by the Syrian army east of Idlib as part of a broad goal of securing the international road between Aleppo and Damascus through Saraqeb and Ma’rat al-Numan.

It seems to have been resolved in the two dossiers of opening international roads between Aleppo, Damascus, Aleppo, and Latakia and eliminating al-Qaeda linked groups, and what is going on is nothing but the implementation of what was agreed in Sochi in 2018 by firepower after Turkish stalemating and attempting to buy time.

Mohammed al-Khader, Damascus- Al-Mayadeen

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For 1.5 years Erdogan has failed to fulfill any of his commitments he pledged to Russian President Putin within the Sochi and Astana framework, leaving the Syrian Arab Army no choice but to clean the country by force from Erdogan (NATO) sponsored al-Qaeda terrorists.

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Featured image is from Syria News

Pronouncements are one thing, policies another. Ignore what politicians say. Follow only what they do.

The same goes for UN officials, notably the secretary general, installed by the US to serve its interests. 

Most often, current incumbent Antonio Guterres and his predecessors failed to fulfill the mandate they were sworn to uphold:

It’s “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war; to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights; to establish conditions (promoting) justice…equal rights of men and women (in all nations and respect for) international law (and) social progress…to ensure…armed force shall not be used.”

Guterres and most of his predecessor turned a blind eye to the highest of high crimes of war and against humanity committed by the US, NATO, and Israel.

They failed to condemn US human rights abuses and war by other means (economic terrorism) against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba and other countries.

They did nothing to support world peace and stability, nothing for Palestinian rights or other victims of US/NATO/Israeli aggression — operating instead as loyal servants of Western interests.

UN secretaries general aren’t usually made of the kind of mettle that extends beyond their willingness to serve the interests of the dominant country that largely runs the world body — the Security Council an exception because of veto power by its five permanent members.

In most other respects, the UN is largely a wholly owned subsidiary of the nation where it’s been headquartered on Manhattan’s east side since 1952.

No candidate becomes secretary general without passing a US vetting process to assure willingness of body’s top official to support its agenda.

A little wiggle-room is allowed provided it doesn’t exceed the limits of the boss’ tolerance.

Guterres, Ban Ki-moon, Kofi Annan and others were appointed because they agreed to play by US rules — world’s apart from UN Charter principles.

They’re silent about countless millions of post-9/11 casualties alone — because of the US war OF terror, not on it, the human toll mounting daily, the rule of law ignored to pursue its imperial interests.

Guterres earlier criticized Syrian forces instead of supporting their liberating struggle against US aggression.

He’s been largely silent about flagrant US-led breaches of Security Council Res. 2254 — calling for ceasefire and diplomatic resolution of endless (US launched) war in Syria.

He failed to condemn Israeli apartheid viciousness, its illegal militarized occupation, theft of Palestinian land, dispossession of its lawful owners, and oppressive Gaza blockade, suffocating its defenseless people.

Calling Israel a “democratic” state  defied reality on the ground.

Rejecting Trump’s annexation scheme of the century through his spokesman was his latest hollow gesture, saying:

“The position of the United Nations on the two-state solution has been defined, throughout the years, by relevant Security Council and General Assembly resolutions by which the Secretariat is bound,” adding:

“The United Nations remains committed to supporting Palestinians and Israelis in resolving the conflict on the basis of United Nations resolutions, international law, and bilateral agreements and realizing the vision of two States – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders, on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.”

Before the above statement was issued, Guterres ducked a question from a reporter on this issue, not answering and walking away — showing where he really stands, proved by his actions time and again.

He failed to denounce Israel’s racist 2018 Nation-State Law. Enacted into its Basic Law, the equivalent of US constitutional law, it was condemned by Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel director Hassan Jabareen, saying:

It’s “illegitimate as it establishes a colonial regime with distinct apartheid characteristics in that it seeks to maintain a regime in which one ethnic-national group controls an indigenous-national group living in the same territory while advancing ethnic superiority by promoting racist policies in the most basic aspects of life.”

It officially calls Jewish rights “superior” to those of Israeli Arab citizens.

Separately, Adalah said “(n)o country in the world today is defined as a democratic state where the constitutional identity is determined by ethnic affiliation that overrides the principle of equal citizenship.”

Enacting the measure illegitimately enshrined Jewish supremacy over equal rights for Arab citizens into Israeli Basic Law – what apartheid is all about, supported by Guterres for failing to condemn the outrageous law.

Former UN Special Human Rights Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine Richard Falk earlier minced no words, saying:

“Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid in relation to the Palestine people should be taken with the utmost seriousness by all those who affirm human solidarity and care about making visible the long ordeal of a suffering and vulnerable people.”

Article 7(1)(j) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court calls apartheid a “crime against humanity.”

When enacted into Israeli Basic Law, Guterres issued the following unacceptable statement through his spokesman, saying:

“We reaffirm the United Nations’ respect for the sovereignty of states to define their constitutional character while emphasizing the need for all states to adhere to universal human rights principles, including the protection of minority rights” – notions he pays lip service to alone.

In response to repeated Israeli attacks on illegally blockaded Gaza, he shamefully said the following earlier:

“I am gravely concerned over the dangerous escalation of violence in Gaza and southern Israel.”

“It is imperative that all sides urgently step back from the brink of another devastating conflict.”

“I call on Hamas and other Palestinian militants to cease the launching of rockets and incendiary kites and provocations.”

They’re launched in response to Israeli provocations, self-defense permitted under the UN Charter Guterres ignored, tepidly adding at the time:

We urge Israel to “exercise restraint to avoid further inflaming the situation.”

Time and again, Guterres, like most of his predecessors, failed to use his bully pulpit power to challenge, denounce, and demand accountability for high crimes committed by the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial allies.

Palestinians are on their own, resistance against a brutal occupier their only viable option — liberation one day possible but only through longterm struggle.

The alternative is endless subjugation, their fundamental rights denied, their lives threatened, their futures empty.

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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.

Afghanistan is a famous desert for empires, a burial ground which has consumed those in power who thought that extra fortification and trading most might benefit them.  It remains a great, and somewhat savage reminder about those who suffer hubris, overconfidence and eagerness in pursuing their agendas.  But the country has also served another purpose: a repository for the untruths of those who invaded it. 

That said, the normative sense does not always keep pace with the actual; people might well insist that they loathe being lied to but that is no guarantee for altering conduct or votes.  The US citizen has been the recipient of mendacity on the republic’s foreign engagements since President Thomas Jefferson decided to expand its operations against the Barbary pirates in Europe.  There have been deceptions, concoctions and fabrications to either justify an intervention or justify the continuation of US garrisons in foreign theatres.  Cometh the empire, cometh the military presence.

Since US forces were deployed after September 11, 2001 ostensibly to defeat the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the US has lost 2,400 personnel, seen the deaths of over a hundred thousand Afghans and expended, through Congress, $137 billion in reconstruction funds.  Some $1 trillion has been spent in the military effort. A note from the Congressional Research Service from January 31 this year, despite toeing the line, had to concede that, while “most measures of human development have improved […] future prospects of those measures remain mixed in light of a robust Taliban insurgency and continued terrorist activity.”

The Afghanistan Papers, as they have now come to be known, should have stimulated something more than it did.  Run as a set of interviews in the Washington Post in December from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), they are filled vignettes of confusion, incompetence and indifference.  The interviews feature an imperium in a mess, dithering, muddled, and in need of a purpose.  At times, there is an astonishing freshness that only comes with being frank.   

SIGAR, the main oversight body responsible for examining the US operation in Afghanistan, has released nine reports in its “Lessons Learned” series.  The seventh report, for instance, notes “the difficulty of reintegrating ex-combatants during an active insurgency in a fragile state.”  The words of the executive summary are almost brutal in their common sense.  “In Afghanistan, we found that the absence of a comprehensive political settlement or peace agreement was a key factor in the failure of prior reintegration programs targeting Taliban fighters.”

From September 2016 comes another report detailing “Corruption in Conflict”.  Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s words feature prominently.  “The ultimate point of failure of our efforts… wasn’t an insurgency.  It was the weight of endemic corruption.”  The report identified five pertinent grounds that affected the entire effort: the presence of corruption that “undermined the US mission in Afghanistan by fuelling grievances and channelling support to the insurgency”; the direct contribution by the US to corruption; a slowness to recognise the scale of the problem; the trumping of “strong anticorruption actions” in favour of security and political goals and the conspicuous lack of “sustained political commitment” in anticorruption efforts. 

The picture sketched by the Post is one of dysfunction and even deceit in the planning process.  As with any policy that demands many hands and many tiers, the grunts and diggers are bound to have a different view to those seated behind desks either in Kabul or Washington. The SIGAR project also saw criticism from over 400 insiders on the deepening nature of US involvement in a project without success or end.  “With a bluntness rarely expressed in public,” notes the paper, “the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.”

Distant wars fall victim to attention deficit syndrome.  Geography dispels interest.  The enemy is there, away from any reckoning.  Whether a Taliban fighter is killed, or a school girl in Kabul educated, is irrelevant to the purchase of groceries of a shopper in Wisconsin.  Few American voters have a concept of where the country is, seeing any deployment of forces in the most abstract of terms.  The idea that US forces are there is only as relevant as the idea that they might serve some purpose to repel evil and shore up the interests of the country.  Other factors rarely count. 

The budgeting feature behind the war is also a matter that confines it to the periphery.  Being part of “emergency supplementary spending”, the issue rarely finds scope for debate and discussion in the broader issues of Congressional spending.  The US political establishment, in other words, shows little interest in this bit of nastiness in the Middle East.  As an editorial in the Christian Century put it, “The war, in short, has little effect on most Americans’ lives.”

Not even President Donald Trump has been able to arrest this tendency, despite being very much of the view that US forces should be reined back from various theatres of operation.  The objectives of his administration in Afghanistan entail “achieving a peace agreement that ensures Afghan soil is never used again by terrorists against the United States, its allies, or any country that allows American troops to return home.”  Politics is often not only the art of the possible but the vague. 

Besides, he has had impeachment proceedings to battle, a process which has served to draw attention away from the less appealing, let alone competent nature, of US foreign policy when it comes to overthrowing governments and finding suitable substitutes.  On the issue of Afghanistan, Republicans and Democrats are to blame, both united by the strand of shoddiness that characterises imperial engagements that look increasingly doddering in their nature.  Nation building is a near impossible exercise, and remains the exception that proves the rule.   

The default position of US foreign and military policy in its Trump phase, then, is “mowing the lawn”, an expression bequeathed to us by Secretary of Defense Mark Esper.  This entails measures of brutal violence to keep the enemy in check as “every now and then, you have to do these things to stay on top of it so that the threat doesn’t grow, doesn’t resurge.”  A solid retreat, then, from the bricks and mortar of state-building. 

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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]

Featured image is from Washington Post

NTP scientists have decided to follow the science.

In a recent revision to the information it offers the public on cell phone radiation, the National Toxicology Program (NTP) revealed that its scientists are now taking precautions by spending less time on cell phones and, when on a call, increasing the distance between their heads and the phones.

The NTP released the final report on its $30 million animal study that showed “clear evidence”of a link between cell phone radiation and cancer in late 2018. But until now NTP scientists have downplayed the implications of their findings in public statements.

Indeed, John Bucher, the former associate head of the NTP and the leader of the NTP cell phone project, was asked —at each of the three press conferences held at various stages of the release of the NTP results— whether the cancer findings had changed the way he used his cell phone or the advice he gave his family. In the first two instances, he replied no, and in the third —on issuing the final report— he again said no except when “on a conference call for an hour or two.”

That has now changed.

In an email to Microwave News, Bucher confirmed that he is following the precautionary steps offered on the NTP website. In a separate exchange, Michael Wyde, who managed the study and continues to run the follow-up work, wrote that he too is taking these precautions.

They and other NTP scientists are, at present, the only ones working for the U.S. government to publicly endorse precaution to reduce microwave exposure from wireless devices.

CDC Once Endorsed Precaution and Then Backed Away

For a brief time in 2014, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) endorsed precaution. It quickly reversed direction under pressure from the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, better known by its acronym, NCRP.

Up to now, government scientists have left individuals to make their own decisions to take precautions, favoring the phrase, “if people are concerned about their exposure…” That conditional used to be on the NTP website but has now been removed.

The FDA website continues to suggest precautions only for those who are “concerned.”

Here are screenshots of this particular Q&A from the NTP’s FAQs before and after the change.

Before:
After:

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China has been hit by coronavirus as if by a brick over the head; heavily and mercilessly. Instead of help, Beijing has received criticism, even verbal attacks.

In spite of doing tremendous job fighting the epidemy, China is getting almost no tributes for its performance.

Now Bangkok, Jakarta and other regional capital are in panic. After trying to sweep the crises under the carpet in order not to rock their tourist industries which are heavily dependent on annual arrival of the millions of Chinese package tourists, they are trying to introduce coherent health measures. A bit too late, complain their own citizens.  However, the West has no appetite to criticize them. All criticism is reserved, as always, for China.

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No one knows precisely where the present disease really comes from. Chinese doctors (as well as the Russian ones) are working days and nights, trying to find the answers, as well as the cure. But until now, people are still dying.  The mortality rate of the infected patients is very high; some sources say at about 50%. As this article is being written, around 210 have already lost their lives, mainly in China.

In 2013, The Guardian wrote that there were similar cases in Saudi Arabia, where the research was brutally swept under the carpet:

“A doctor in a Saudi hospital was fired for reporting a new, deadly strain of the coronavirus. Now, with half of all confirmed cases ending in death, the World Health Organization has issued a global alert and scientists are preparing for the worst…”

This example exposes an approach so commonly adopted by different nations.

In many countries, similar emergencies are not confronted directly. The governments hope that they will, quietly, go away, until it is often too late to prevent disaster.

My doctor friends in Hong Kong commented on the above-mentioned case:

“That was MERS, and MERS is a corona virus, and so is a common cold. The present virus has not got a name yet, but belongs to the corona virus family, too.”

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China has risen, with zeal and determination. It is confronting deadly disease frontally, as if it would be confronting enemy military battalions. It has been clearly a Communist approach, similar to that which already saved millions of lives in Cuba.

From Szechuan and elsewhere, I began receiving brief but powerful messages, penned by my friends and colleagues; messages reflecting heroic struggle of Chinese nation against the disease:

“China is now introducing the highest level of emergency. Treatment and prevention are the most important political missions.”

“Nobody can now neglect his or her duties… In my city’s education department, they issued an order to postpone school opening day.”

“A factory in Zhejiang province was told to produce 80 million masks in just a few days. In the same time, the government ordered factories and shops not to raise the price of the masks. It also allocated billions of RMBs for preventive measures and products, including paying for trucks and trains distributing the equipment.” 

“Patients infected with this virus get free medical care.”

A young Chinese diplomat, a friend of mine whom I will only identify by her first name – Langqi – here, reported to me from her hometown in Northern China, near Beijing:

“Despite the ineffective response of the Wuhan government at the initial stage, all governments, from central to local, have been doing everything they can to contain the spread of the virus. It is not an easy task, considering the “biggest human migration” happening during the Chinese New Year. It is with immense commitment and voluntary contributions, from doctors, nurses, people working in service and delivery industry, as well as from Wuhan people themselves, that China is able to manage the spread of the virus to its current situation. The responsive measures are also largely backed up by experts, including those who contributed during the SARS epidemic. It can be said that the whole country now is working as a whole to face our common challenge: the coronavirus. The solidarity comes not only from the trust in the government, but also from the identity as part of the community.”

A doctor with whom I work in Hong Kong, re-confirmed, in summary:

“In Wuhan, some officials tried to hide the information at the beginning. But the higher authorities made everything clear and the world appreciates government’s work, afterwards.”

Not all do, of course; unfortunately, not all.

Attacking China (as well as Russia, Iran and other independent nations) is now a sport, or a well-paid profession, or both, for many individuals, particularly those living in the West.

This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

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But many people, particularly those with the first-hand experience, decided to line-up in their support for China:

An Indonesian student Yessy Liana, based in Wuhan, recently sent passionate plea to her native country, which has an on-going tendency to smear everything Chinese, on behalf of its Western masters:

“Today I am in Wuhan City and I want to share the situation where I am now. We all heard about the coronavirus and for those of you who are worried or curious, hopefully this video can give light on the situation.

This is my school canteen, usually closed during winter holidays. But because of the coronavirus, the school reopened the canteen although only on the 1st floor… Because the school wants students to stay in the school and reduce the interaction with the outside.

This is the street in front of the campus. Now in Wuhan, public transportation is not in operation for a while. But private vehicles can go around without a problem. You can see for yourself that… it quieter than usual.

Now we are at one of the Chaoshi (market) that is still open. You can see the stock of food and drinks in this chaoshi are plentiful, and usually those of us who stay in dormitory in Wuhan buy food and drinks here.

Now we are in campus area and in front of us is a campus hospital and it is still open.

The building in front of us is a dormitory for international students. There are basketball courts and also place to play table tennis… 

Now we are at my dormitory. Next to the entrance, there is a security guard who is on duty, and he will check the temperature of all people entering and leaving the dormitory.

For parents and friends who are worried about friends or family in China, please don’t worry because the government here and the school are taking care of us…”

Similar stories are circulating all over social media, uploaded by foreign students and workers who are based in China. They speak about the determination and strength of the state, the Communist Party and the citizens.

Entire factories are ordered to produce protective gear, laboratories are working on developing vaccines and medicine, to fight this latest type of coronavirus. Hospitals are constructed literally overnight.

My friend, a doctor from Hong Kong, has no doubts why the West ignores this dedicated fight of China, against the deadly disease:

“People are accusing China, from everywhere. This means that China is really strong!”

He shared with me an image, with a comment:

“Look at this. A Danish newspaper insults China by using the coronavirus as the stars of the national flag. This has lots of feedback from the citizens of China. The Prime Minister refused to apologize because ‘there is freedom of expression in Denmark’.”

Things are getting wilder and wilder. Attacks are intensifying.

In Hong Kong, rioters are burning shelters intended to host future victims of coronavirus. They are also forcing local government to close all border posts with Mainland China: ferry terminals, bridges. Rail links have already been suspended.

Some in Hong Kong are lamenting, that the rioters have already lost their humanity and compassion. It is Chinese Lunar New Year, after all; beginning of the auspicious Year of Rat. Time when solidarity and kindness should be shown. But that is not what the rioters are paid for to do, by their Western masters.

China is now fighting successfully, but alone. Chinese people are clearly aware of the fact that their entire nation is ‘quarantined’ politically, by the West. Even during such hard times of medical emergencies, there is malicious sarcasm coming from Washington, London and Paris, never an extended hand.

Some publications, including Global Research in Canada, are not excluding a possibility that what we are witnessing could be a Western biological warfare against China.

If they are correct, chances that China will be defeated are truly slim. On 31 January, 2020, RT reported that Chinese scientists made first giant step in their epic battle:

“Scientists in China have reportedly developed an express test which can detect the 2019-nCoV novel coronavirus in under fifteen minutes, in a major breakthrough which will hopefully help stem the tide of infection.

Experts from a tech company based in Wuxi in eastern China’s Jiangsu Province, working with the National Institute for Viral Disease Control and Prevention, developed the rapid nucleic test kit in just ten days, according to the Xinhua news agency.”

China will win the battle against this malicious virus, soon, but the situation will be remembered for many years to come. It has already broken trust, and soon it will negatively influence the way this world is functioning. For years and decades, China have stood alone, smiling and with the extended hand, offering peace and friendship. Many are now wondering whether such unilateral kindness is capable of improving the world.

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Saboteurs Exhibit Appalling Callousness in Times of Crisis

All objective reports coming out of China are praising the country for its determined and successful battle against the new and treacherous disease known as Coronavirus.

The government in Beijing takes no chances. It is studying the situation, allocating massive resources to medical research. It is setting up temporary hospitals and medical centers, informing citizens about the recent developments, while controlling the flow of people in all affected and high-risk areas.

All this is impressive. China is fighting for its own people, and it is trying to minimize the impact on foreign lands. And it is much more effective than what takes place in Western countries during the same or similar national emergencies.

But how is the Chinese government rewarded for its life-saving efforts?

The better prepared China is, the more successfully it gets in fighting the outbreak of the coronavirus epidemic, the louder the critical voices smearing it in the West become, and even in its own territory of Hong Kong.

On January 27, 2020, RT reported shocking occurrences which took place there:

“A small bomb prompted evacuation and temporarily disrupted work at a hospital in Hong Kong. Masked protesters had earlier firebombed a proposed quarantine area for possible coronavirus victims. 

On Sunday, masked anti-government protesters threw a Molotov cocktail at an empty public building, where authorities planned to quarantine people who may have contracted the deadly coronavirus that is currently raging in mainland China.”

These cowardly and selfish acts will only further discredit the rioters, exposing their destructive and selfish spirit.

Instead of showing solidarity and supporting people in dire need of help (as the citizens in Mainland China are doing with great determination), these hooligans are reducing future medical facilities to ashes.

Committing such crimes, the rioters are not “fighting for Hong Kong”; far from it! Needless to say, both people from Mainland China, as well as Hong Kong residents, are travelling back and forth, for family visits, cultural exchanges, tourism and work. Do rioters want, for instance, a local mother and her child who just returned from Wuhan, to die on the streets of Kowloon in agony, with no help? Or even if not a local: would they want an unlucky man or a woman from Mainland China who earlier contracted the disease, to have no place to go and get help?

If this is what they really want, then one has to wonder if there is really any Chinese blood left circulating in their veins, or whether they got converted into compassionless and brutal subjects of Western colonialist masters.

One wants to shout: “Shame! This is Spring Festival time. And Hong Kong is part of one of the oldest, deepest and the most compassionate cultures on Earth! If you do not want to help, at least do not dare to spoil the efforts of those who do.”

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A friend of mine who practices medicine in Hong Kong, wrote to me recently in what appeared to be despair:

“People in the West criticize China, no matter what it does. If it barricades a city they say it has hidden some important information. If it doesn’t do it, they say that Beijing is acting irresponsibly. They smear China either way.”

He lamented about the changes which are taking place in his city:

“I have been working the whole morning in a public hospital. The medical staff are working as usual. But some doctors and nurses threaten to strike, probably for political gains. Many of them take sick leaves. I am so ashamed of them. When we had SARS in 2003, we were not like this. We continued working and even some young doctors died…”

Another Hong Kong-based doctor wrote to me, bitterly, using WeChat:

“…In contrast, doctors in China volunteer to work in Wuhan!”

On 30 January 2020, Reuters reported:

“Trade unions in Hong Kong, including hospital and rail workers, are threatening to go on strike unless the government closes the border with mainland China to stop the spread of a new coronavirus that has sent jitters around the world.

While Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam has ordered the suspension of the high-speed rail service between the city and mainland China from midnight on Thursday and all cross-border ferry services, the unions said it was not enough.”

These occurrences may not be as “spectacular” as the ones in which rioters are burning or beating their fellow citizens in broad daylight – citizens who simply disagree with them.

But what is taking place is enormously significant.

It appears that the rioters have managed to make solidarity totally collapse. Hong Kong has been infiltrated by savage individualism, or call it Western-style selfishness. The manual on how to behave and live one’s life is not printed in black and white, but it can always be guessed: “Let victims collapse in the middle of the street, and if they are ill, cross to the other side. Shelter yourself. Do not show compassion. You are all that really matters.”

This is most likely a result of too many Western flags waving, and of repeating endlessly, “Me-me-me”.

What is certain is that the People’s Republic of China will eventually defeat the coronavirus. It will happen sooner than later. In a few months, or perhaps even weeks, the people on the streets of Beijing and Wuhan will be celebrating yet another great victory. If it doesn’t come to its senses soon, Hong Kong will be left behind. It will feel far from being proud of itself, in fact it will be depressed; depressed and defeated by its own selfishness.

This article was originally published on China Daily Hong Kong

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries, Saving Millions of Lives”, “China and Ecological Cavillation”with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon

On the third of January, after midnight, news about the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani, Brigadier General Hussein pour Jaafari, Colonel Shahroud Muzaffari Nia, Major Hadi Tameri and Captain Wahid Zamaniam reached the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. Officers at the embassy were in contact with the convoy, and suddenly the communication was interrupted. Sardar Soleimani had diplomatic immunity and had been officially asked by the Iraqi government to help in defeating ISIS. Moreover, the convoy was attacked just before an Iraqi checkpoint that knew the Iraqi commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes was in convoy along with his protection team. The news was communicated to Tehran and from it to the house of the Iranian leader of the revolution Sayyed Ali Khamenei.

“We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return”. These verses of the Qoran a believer would pronounce when the death of someone he knows is announced, whether close to him or not. It is a reminder that all humans are mortal. That was the first reaction of Sayyed Khamenei when the news reached him of the death of “a son”. That was Sardar Soleimani’s closeness to Sayyed Khamenei. Soleimani earned the title of “living martyr” due to the many occasions his life was in danger while fighting ISIS and al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria.

Soleimani left Beirut and slept in Syria on the first of January, not far from Damascus airport. On every trip to Syria, he used to hold a meeting with all commanders, after morning prayers and just before the sun rises, for a maximum of two hours. That day he kept all commanders for lunch and allowed them to leave just before sunset. He didn’t stop talking, leaving his instructions for his team of commanders in the Levant. Captain Wahid Zamaniam used to be his inseparable companion. The Major General was greeted by Iranian and Iraqi officers at Baghdad airport when arriving, where a US drone assassinated them.

According to a well-informed source within the “Axis of the Resistance”, when he learned about the assassination, Sayyed Khamenei called for a meeting of his commanders in the first hours following the murder and instructed: “prepare yourself for a strong reply. We shall announce our direct responsibility, so our enemy knows we are challenging it face to face and not in the cowardly way the US killed Soleimani and his companions. Hit the US army hard to break their arrogance in the same theatre they have executed this vile assassination”.

Many scenarios were laid down in front of Sayyed Khamenei. The first choice was Ayn al-Assad, the most significant and most substantial airbase in Iraq, where President Trump landed in what he considered the safest location in Iraq. Iran knows every single detail about the base. Its drones and intelligence were good enough to identify the contents of every hangar and construction.

A plan for a second hit was also prepared against a US base outside Iraq across the Persian Gulf, more powerful and painful than the first objective, in case the US responded to the Ayn al-Assad hit.

A third hit was also organised, much more powerful and destructive than the first two against the most significant US base in the Middle East. This hit aimed to cause many casualties, many more than the US other possible retaliation.

Three plans, three scenarios, all planned to be executed one after the other for three consecutive hits. Sayyed Ali Khamenei approved all these responses so there would be no need for his commanders to ask for his blessing. After that, Sayyed Khamenei instructed his commanders to return to him for further instructions and to declare a general mobilisation of the country where an all-out war would be announced against the US if there were military responses to all the Iranian hits. In this last scenario, Sayyed Khamenei ordered a plan where hundreds of missiles would have been launched simultaneously against all US military bases in the countries surrounding Iran, in the Levant and beyond. All Iran allies in the Middle East would have been involved, and US allies would be directly hit. But this ultimate decision would require the last evaluation by Sayyed Khamenei.

That was a foreseeable scenario that the US President – with his decision to stand down, notwithstanding the human casualties and destruction inflicted on Ayn al-Assad military base – managed to avoid.

“Iran didn’t use any missiles in its silos to hit US targets at Ayn al-Assad. On the contrary, missiles were deployed overtly and prepared for launching two days before under the eyes of US satellites. Messages were flocking to Iran from diplomats asking to refrain from retaliating or at least to soften the response. All requests were turned down. Iran avoided surprising the US; had Iran wanted to surprise the US, missiles would have been launched from its silos with no warning. It was a direct challenge to US hegemony. Moreover, Iran informed the US that the hit was coming, further challenging President Trump and his military apparatus in the Middle East by showing that Iran is not afraid of the consequences”, said the source.

Iran sent its drones over Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and other nearby countries in daylight over US bases. It was a signal that Tehran was prepared for war and an indication of some of the Iranian bank of objectives. The Iranian leadership was ready to go to the point of a no-return if necessary.

No one in Iran accepts to give up the missile programme that has become the pride of the Iranian people and its armed forces. When the US bombed hundreds of Russian contractors in Syria, Deir-Ezzour, who were crossing the Euphrates river to chase ISIS remnants, Russia decided not to respond. No country or army in the Middle East ever challenged the US, notably when the US deployed tens of thousands of troops and effective equipment in the Middle East. Only Iran has directly challenged US hegemony and military power.

The “Axis of Resistance” confirmed the balance of fear and imposed a deterrence policy on the US in the Middle East. Iran overtly challenged the US and declared its responsibility with no fear of the consequences. So far, the US has confirmed at least 64 casualties suffered; some time ago Iran announced that “US casualties were not less than 80.”

President Trump thought he was living a historical moment in his life where he could do anything he wants with no fear of consequences. He believed no country in the world would dare to challenge him. He also advised that Iraq was divided, that no government could contest violation of its sovereignty, and that Iran is no longer tolerated in Mesopotamia. He was most likely informed that the burning of two Iranian consulates was enough to kick Iran out of Iraq. Perhaps he imagined that assassinating Sardar Qassem Soleimani would go unpunished, and he bragged about killing “two for the price of one.” He and his warmonger team also wrongly believed – and I guess still find – that his “maximum pressure” and harsh sanctions would bring Iran onto its knees begging him for mercy. He said he would be waiting by the phone for Iran to call, proving his ignorance of Iran, its mentality, culture, patience, harshness and pride.

The magic turned against the magician and Trump gave Iran a massive gift by allowing it to bomb his army and challenge him face to face. Trump was afraid to announce the number of casualties in the first week. The Pentagon is now releasing a part of the reality every week. The US, not Iran, has shown fear.

“All US military bases have become a threat to the hosting countries in the Middle East. These bases no longer serve to protect these countries but have become perfect targets for Iran in case of war. They provide an overwhelming list of targets for Iran. No place will be safe for US forces in the Middle East if red-lines are crossed, as happened with the assassination of Sardar Soleimani,” said the source.

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“Seventy-five years after the liberation of this place by the Red Army, we should all make this sacred commitment to never forget what happened here. And let us never forget that hatred, discrimination, intolerance have no place in our democracy” – Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, 27 Jan 2020, at Auschwitz 75^th Liberation event, Ekathimerini 27/1/20

Just what does your sacred commitment to never forget “that hatred, discrimination, intolerance have no place in our democracy” mean? Your government has recently removed access to public health care to all new refugee arrivals; you are in the process of building new closed camps on Samos, Lesbos and Chios; you are planning to deport 10,000 people this year; you have done nothing to improve the physical conditions in the Hot Spots; you continue to hold refugees including children in police cells that have been continually and extensively denounced as inhumane; and you are sanctioning a significant militarisation of the seas around the border islands in conjunction with the EU. Did none of this come to mind as you wandered around Auschwitz? Surely your plans for the closed camps with their deliberate bleak design behind the razor wire fences in remote and barren locations which will also contain an even more secure detention area for holding those for deportation shadowed your mind, albeit briefly.

Hatred, discrimination and intolerance all feature centrally in the management of refugees struggling to find a future for themselves in Europe. This indeed is the central message of all the major refugee support groups in Greece which have universally condemned this government’s International Protection Act which came into force in January 2020. This legislation marks a significant hardening of the procedures and practices governing asylum seekers making it to Greece. As far as the refugees are concerned there is nothing positive in the legislation. “This new law expands grounds to detain asylum seekers, increases bureaucratic hurdles to make appeals, and removes previous protections for vulnerable individuals who arrive to the Greek islands. Specifically, all individuals that arrive from Turkey are now prohibited from leaving the islands until their applications are processed, unless geographic restrictions are lifted at the discretion of the authorities. These changes ultimately will lead to an increased population of asylum seekers trapped in Lesvos, [and all the frontier islands including Samos] and an increasing number of people trapped here who have had their asylum claims rejected and face deportation to Turkey” (Legal Centre Lesvos, 22 Jan 2020)

Many of the new procedures increase the need for asylum seekers to have adequate legal support but in the almost total absence of state funded lawyers on the frontier islands there is no chance of this happening. “Under the new law, asylum seekers in the islands’ hot spots have only five days to appeal a first negative decision, within which time they also have to find a lawyer and submit the precise grounds and reasons for this appeal in a memorandum in Greek. Given that there is only one state-appointed lawyer working in Lesvos [and Samos is no different) and that there are not sufficient NGO lawyers available to represent people for appeals, having a memorandum in Greek within five days, will be practically impossible for the vast majority of people seeking asylum” No Rights Zone, p7). Making it even worse are the actual realities of the hot spots where hundreds of desperate people try to access the Asylum Office every day and fail. The Lesvos legal centre gave one example this month of a family with 2 young children who tried for five days to get through the door of the Asylum Office in Moira Camp and only succeeded through a chance meeting with a lawyer. Under the new law failure to turn up for an appointment promises dire consequences including the presumption that their non attendance indicates that they are no longer seeking to continue with their asylum application. An application, which for many refugees has now been significantly further undermined by the Act’s identification of 12 ‘safe’ countries. As all the critics have pointed out the safe country designation will inevitably lead to many asylum rejections as the system now assumes that people from these countries are not deemed to be in need of international protection. In a September 2019 Press Release the Ministry of Citizen Protection argued that ‘the refugee issue –of Syrians and Iraqis –has shifted to a migration issue of Afghans and sub-Saharans’, implying that nationals from these countries cannot have valid asylum claims in an attempt to justify laws that violate international standards and safeguards. “ This assumption is inappropriate since irrespective of the country of origin, international law requires an independent assessment of each individual claim. It is also not supported by the facts: Afghanistan is still a top ‘refugee producing country’ according to UNHCR, with a recognition rate in Greece of over 70 percent during the first ten months of 2019” (No Rights Zone Dec 2019,p.7).

Neither is it re-assuring that the new Act now allows police and army personnel to conduct these first interviews. And to cap that further, the Government has made it a priority to achieve 10,000 deportations to Turkey in 2020. As the Greek Council for Refugees noted in its condemnation of the legislation:

“the Greek State, instead of planning a policy to solve the real problems of the Greek asylum and reception system ……. chooses to handle the existing crisis with regulations that reduce fundamental guarantees of the asylum and reception system and are unilaterally directed towards the increase of returns.” (See this)

In 2019, 74% of the refugees on the frontier islands were assessed as vulnerable. The majority of refugees now are young families. In addition, there are thousands of unaccompanied minors. So many of the refugees here are young; children, infants and teens, the lucky ones being with their parents. Even though the new legislation has been in force only for a few weeks it is clear from what our friends in the camp and elsewhere are telling us that it is frightening them and making an intolerable situation worse. They see and experience all too clearly the shift towards increased harshness and abandonment. They tell us that in the past few weeks there has been a marked increase in stop and searches, especially by plains clothes police. If your papers are not in order you are arrested and detained. They also tell us that more and more people now are getting rejections. Many of the African refugees are now more frightened that they are going to be deported. Last night I was on the phone with a Somalian friend  now in Thessaloniki who told me that he had just heard from Samos where a fellow Somalian who was initially rejected in December 2017 and then appealed, has just been told that his appeal was unsuccessful and that he will be deported. Cruel. There are no other words.

Back on Samos

In the meantime the Greek frontier islands have seen a spate of mobilisations over the past two weeks protesting especially the government’s decision to build new, large, closed hot spots on Chios, Samos and Lesbos and turning the open camps currently on Leros and Kos into closed camps. The protests have been driven largely by the Mayors of Lesbos, Chios and Samos town, all of whom are New Democracy, as is the government. This has been reflected in the attention and time currently accorded the mayors by the Athens government with relevant ministers now regularly coming to the islands in an attempt to appease the mayors. But all the mayors are getting is soothing words and expressions of concern at the ‘undoubted strains’ facing the islanders. In so many ways it is little more than theatre for the mayors must know that EU/Turkey pact of 2016 is sacrosanct and cannot be threatened. It is this agreement which determines the necessity for the camps on the frontier islands. Turkey will only accept deportations from the islands and not the mainland. Consequently there is no chance to deliver on the mayors’ demands that no new closed camps be built and that all refugees be removed leaving only a much smaller operation focused on rapidly transiting new refugee arrivals to the mainland.

Instead, what the government is promising for Samos and the other frontier islands is tighter control over the refugees through the closed camps alongside deepening the militarisation of the borders in an attempt to stop refugee arrivals. In the case of Samos this means the closure of the camp in Samos town and the building and opening of a bigger but closed camp in the middle of nowhere. Big money is being spent and committed and in the past three weeks the Samos media has reported on the order of 15 high speed patrol boats and the tender for a floating plastic barrier of around 2.5 kms length to be trialled in the sea around Lesvos with a view to similar installations to follow in Chios and Samos. According to Nikos Panagiatopoulis, minister of defence, “We will see what deterrent effect this [fence] will have when it is put into practice. But it will be a natural obstacle. If it works, as it did in Evros, I expect it will have some effect….We are trying to find solutions to somehow reduce the flow (Samos Voice 30 Jan 2020). This latest announcement has been widely derided as delusional as “even a child knows you can’t build a fence out in the sea!”. For many on the island it is all too reminiscent of the Zeppelin which was launched with such a fanfare barely a year ago. This too was to be a significant weapon in reducing arrivals. It didn’t. It has gone. But unlike its arrival it departed in silence.

Much of what is now being implemented with the new legislation and being proposed with respect to the use of extensive detention, deportations without due process and the stopping of refugee arrivals is of dubious legality with respect to international law and conventions concerning refugees and asylum seekers. There will be resistance especially in the law courts as so many fundamental principles concerning rights to international protection are under threat. Implementation will almost certainly have to be modified and held back. Combined with the proven incompetence of the Greek state authorities and agencies and sheer lack of capacity to implement the proposals promises chaos with refugees bearing the consequences. For example, “the latest report of the European Court of Auditors highlighted that ‘accelerated procedures’ implemented in Greece have become lengthier and the time between the registration of the asylum seeker and the first asylum decision increased from 236 days in 2016 (7-8 months) to 363 days (nearly a full year) in 2018 “(No Rights Zone, 2019, p.7) In Lesvos earlier this month the introduction of the policy to make refugees renew their papers every 2 weeks as against 4 weeks had to be abandoned simply because they were overwhelmed.

Not surprisingly then there is much scepticism on Samos as to what might happen. Even though the new camp is being built now many refugees and activists here don’t think it will open. Despite notices in the camp posted this past Monday informing that all refugees would be moved, including families and minors in rental accommodation by April 2020, the scepticism remains. The day to day evidence of the relentless neglect of the authorities is overwhelming. And, like the islanders, they no longer believe the promises of government action because they too experience the sheer lack of both numbers and ability across the spectrum from lawyers to social workers; from asylum officers to doctors and translators to make any of the proposals work. It is a long list. But then as one young woman from Kuwait told me the other day, “What can I expect from a government which can’t even provide us with a toilet?”

(It is 7am on Saturday 1^st Feb 2020 and I can see from my room a cargo vessel heading towards Samos harbour full of accommodation containers for the new closed camp. As much as the scepticism over the opening of a new camp is understandable, it would be mistaken not to see that at this point in time there is a much greater sense of urgency and determination in the actions of the Greek government to shift towards even more repressive refugee policies and practices. But will it last?)

Sadly intelligence has not been a notable characteristic of the main public refugee debates on Samos. At this moment we have ranting mayors most notably exemplified by the mayor of Vathi who takes every opportunity to be televised telling the Greek people how awful life is on Samos for the people because of the refugees. It seems that their culture, language and identity are in dire danger. Sadly too many nod their heads even though there is not the slightest danger of this happening but on an island that has and continues to suffer from a collapsed economy and its associated emaciated and inadequate public services, the refugees offer a convenient scapegoat.

Samos mayor George Stantzos ranting at refugees in the central square of Samos town, December 2019

A simple walk through Samos town made vibrant with the presence of young people and children is all that is needed to cut through the mayor’s distortions. It is a walk that makes you think about how a small town like Vathi has come to live alongside up to 7,000 refugees when until recently it was rare ever to see a black or Arab person in the town. It is a walk where you see many smiles. It is a walk where you don’t feel afraid or fearful. Just yesterday I was with a small crowd of local people who were watching 2 young boys, one from the Congo and the other from Syria playing marbles outside the refugee shop, Open Doors. Marbles was once a popular children’s game here it seems as much of the chatter was about how good it was to see the game being played again. Lots of laughter and just one more example from our daily lives here which expose the endless distortions of the mayor and his vociferous supporters.

Samos Town, December 2019

It is not fear but a deep shame that shadows this town. It is an island which saw many flee the Nazi invasion and who ended up living for years in refugee camps in Palestine and Egypt. It is an experience not yet forgotten in many families here. Many islanders understand that what is going on here is both wrong and cruel. And for us, the camp is the tumour of Samos and what makes this beautiful island a dark place. This is what needs to change.

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The Pentagon deployed a new, smaller nuclear warhead aboard the ballistic missile submarine USS Tennessee as it sailed into the Atlantic last month in the midst of the spiraling crisis with Iran. The weapon, known as the W76-2 warhead, has an explosive yield of roughly five kilotons, a third of the destructive power of the “Little Boy” bomb that claimed the lives of some 140,000 people in Hiroshima in 1945.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) revealed the deployment this week, citing unnamed civilian and military figures. It stated that two of the 20 Trident submarine-launched ballistic missiles onboard the USS Tennessee and other subs will be armed with the W76-2 warheads. Each missile can be loaded with as many as eight such warheads, capable of striking multiple targets.

The new weapon has been rolled out with remarkable speed. The Trump administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review called for the development of “a low-yield SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile] warhead to ensure a prompt response option that is able to penetrate adversary defenses” and close “an exploitable ‘gap’ in US regional deterrence capabilities.”

The pretext for the warhead’s deployment was the unsubstantiated claim that Russia is developing similar weapons and has adopted a doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate” or “escalate to win” by utilizing low-yield nuclear weapons, with the expectation that Washington would not retaliate with strategic warheads for fear of initiating an all out thermonuclear war. The Pentagon’s argument has been that a low-yield and rapid reaction ballistic missile is needed to “restore deterrence.”

The report by the FAS strongly suggests, however, that this alleged Russian doctrine is a pretext and that “it is much more likely that the new low-yield weapon is intended to facilitate first-use of nuclear weapons against North Korea or Iran.”

It points out that both the US National Security Strategy and the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) envision the use of nuclear weapons in response to “non-nuclear attacks, and large-scale conventional aggression,” and that the NPR explicitly stated that the W76-2 warhead was designed to “expand the range of credible US options for responding to nuclear or non-nuclear strategic attack.” Washington does not rule out a nuclear strike, including against non-nuclear armed countries like Iran.

The deployment of the USS Tennessee with its new “usable” nuclear warheads came at roughly the same time as President Donald Trump huddled with his top aides on December 29 at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, ordering the criminal drone missile assassination of Gen. Qassem Suleimani, one of Iran’s top officials. The drone killing was carried out at Baghdad’s international airport five days later.

In a report Thursday, NBC News, citing unnamed senior US officials, established that at the same meeting in Florida,

“Trump also authorized the bombing of Iranian ships, missile launchers and air defense systems… Technically, the military can now hit those targets without further presidential authorization, though in practice, it would consult with the White House before any such action.”

The report warned that

“the two sides remain in a dangerous boxer’s clench, in which the smallest miscalculation, some officials believe, could lead to disaster.”

In other words, for all the talk of war having been averted following the act of war and war crime carried out by Washington in the murder of Suleimani, the reality is that the world remains on the knife’s edge of a catastrophic military confrontation, which could rapidly escalate into the first use of nuclear weapons in three-quarters of a century.

The threat against Iran is part of a far broader buildup to global war through which US imperialism is seeking to offset the erosion of its previously hegemonic domination of the global economy by resorting to the criminal use of overwhelming military force.

After securing a $738 billion military budget for 2020 with the support of an overwhelming majority—Democratic and Republican alike—in the US Congress, the Trump administration is now preparing to push through a 20 percent increase in the budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the agency overseeing the buildup of the US nuclear arsenal. This $20 billion budget proposal, made public this week, represents only a fraction of the more than $1 trillion the US is projected to spend on “modernizing” the arsenal over the next three decades—plans that were set into motion under the Democratic administration of Barack Obama, before Trump took office.

Trump is a war criminal. His threats to carry out the “obliteration” of Iran and to rain “fire and fury” upon North Korea are not merely hyperbole. The “usable” nuclear weapons to commit such atrocities have already been placed in his hands.

As the Senate impeachment trial of the US president limps to an ignominious close, it is striking that Trump’s greatest crimes, including acts of war and his threat to drag the world into a nuclear war, feature in no way in the charges against him. On the contrary, the articles of impeachment center on allegations that he withheld lethal military aid to Ukraine and has been insufficiently aggressive in confronting Russia.

This charge is made, as Newsweek pointed out this week, after the Pentagon staged an unprecedented 93 separate military exercises between May and the end of September of last year, all of them simulating or preparing for war against Russia. This includes practice bombing runs less than 500 miles from the Russian border and the steady build-up of ground forces in the three Baltic states and Poland, together with escalating US air deployments described as “bomber assurance” and “theater security” programs.

The drive to war has its source not in the diseased mind of Donald Trump, but rather in the insoluble crisis of global capitalism. There exists no antiwar faction within the US ruling class, including its Democratic representatives, only tactical differences over how US imperialist interests should best be pursued on the global arena.

The struggle against a new imperialist world war and the threat it poses to the survival of humanity can be based only upon the struggles of the working class, which is engaged in a wave of strikes and social upheavals across the planet. These emerging mass struggles must be armed with a socialist and internationalist program to unify workers in the common fight to put an end to the source of war and social inequality, the capitalist system.

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Featured image: First launch of a Trident missile on January 18, 1977 at Cape Canaveral, Florida [Credit: U.S. Navy file photo]

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“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   

Thousands of Palestinians held numerous demonstrations on the first Friday following the announcement of the so-called “Deal of the Century” promoted by the U.S. President Donald Trump.

From Gaza to the West Bank, people protested energetically against what they called “an apartheid proposal” that will not resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In the streets of Aman, the capital of Jordan, the “Deal of the Century Disaster” also generated vehement protests in front of the U.S. embassy, ​​where protesters said Palestine is a religious and historical heritage, which cannot be canceled by agreements among politicians.

In Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, thousands of outraged people took to the streets to denounce that some Arab countries collaborated with the United States and Israel in the elaboration of a plan aimed at depriving Palestinians of their fundamental rights.

Through its “peace proposal”, the U.S. expects other countries to recognize Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, all of which are illegal under international law.

Also, Trump’s idea seeks to prevent the return of Palestinian refugees to currently occupied territories.​​​​​​​

Yesterday violent illegal Israeli settlers kidnapped this little Palestinian boy. They threw him in a lake in occupied Jerusalem.

Today his little body was found.

He is just 7 years old. His name is Qusai. RIP little one ❤#FreePalestine from #ApartheidIsrael pic.twitter.com/hemIMPAhcT

— Sammie 🐝 (@londoncatz1990) January 25, 2020

On Friday, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan whipped some Arab countries for keeping silent about the supposed “Peace plan” and said they betray their own people and all humanity.

“Saudi Arabia is silent. When will you make your voice heard? Oman, Bahrain, same. The Abu Dhabi government applauds. Shame!Shame!,” he said and asked the Christian world to confront the U.S. plan because “Christians are also entitled to Jerusalem.”

The proposal to leave this holy city “to the bloody clutches of Israel is not just oppression for Muslims and Christians who live there. It is also the greatest evil that can be done to humankind. ”

On Wednesday, Erdogan said that Trump’s plan will not serve for peace. Besides legitimizing the Israeli occupation, it does not take into account the rights of the Palestinian population.​​​​​​​

Don’t let them re-write Palestinian history. This is what they forced upon Palestine before proposing their #DealOfTheCenturyDisaster #No4DealOfCentury #NoToTrumpDeal pic.twitter.com/agvLCeI8Hn

— Nabeel Ahmed (@Mr_Frostx) January 29, 2020

The United Nations, together with other international organizations and a significant number of countries, consider East Jerusalem occupied Palestinian territory.

In Dec. 2017, the United Nations General Assembly rejected the U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

Previously, on Aug. 20, 1980, the UN Security Council condemned the attempted annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel, for it was a violation of international law.

Historically, Palestine has aspired to have its capital in East Jerusalem. According to the current US proposal, however, such capital would be located only in a part of East Jerusalem, which would be in the area east and north of the current security barrier.​​​​​​

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Featured image: Palestinian take cover as Israeli forces fire at protesters at the Gaza border on 14 December 2018 [Mohammed Asad/Middle East Monitor]

James Clad, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia, remembers the exact moment, back in 2001, when he learned that the U.S. had invaded Afghanistan. As chance would have it, he was in a meeting with a dozen or so South Asia experts at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It was in early October of 2001,” he recalls, “and word came that U.S. warplanes had attacked three Afghan cities. Well, you could have heard a pin drop. I looked around the room and everyone was studying their shoes. And I thought, ‘well, this isn’t going to work.’ And we all knew it. All of us. This was going to be a morass.”

Clad wasn’t alone in his thinking. In the wake of the December 9 publication of the Afghanistan Papers in the Washington Post, retired CIA officer Robert Grenier, who ran covert operations in support of the 2001 U.S. intervention, reflected on the papers’ key finding – that U.S. officials lied about the 18-year campaign, hiding “unmistakable evidence” that the Afghan war had become unwinnable.

“Frankly, it strikes me as weird that people should only be waking up to this now,” he told me. “The Washington Post series doesn’t convey anything which those who’ve been watching with even moderate attention should long since have understood.”

Which may be why the papers, comprising some 2000-plus pages of interviews with generals, diplomats, aid workers and Afghan officials conducted by SIGAR, the Pentagon’s Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, landed with a thud – “a bombshell that has yet to explode,” as one commenter described it. For good reason: celebrated as a second Pentagon Papers (the 1971 documents that bared the lies of the Vietnam War) the Afghanistan revelations didn’t actually reveal anything that foreign policy officials, or the American people, didn’t already know: that the U.S. was not winning and could not win in Afghanistan, that senior U.S. diplomats and U.S. military commanders knew this soon after the 2001 intervention, that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to build a responsive Afghan government was squandered, misspent, diverted or stolen, and that officials consistently misled the American people about the prospects for victory in the war – promoting optimistic assessments in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

“In news conferences and other public appearances,” the Post report noted, “those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going – and especially when it is going badly – they emphasized how they are making progress.”

Among the most outspoken critics quoted by the papers is retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, who served as the Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama years.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were doing,” Lute told SIGAR officials in an oft-quoted judgment. “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

In truth, the big “reveal” of the Afghanistan Papers came after their release, when most of official Washington reacted to their publication with a collective shrug. Despite this, though not surprisingly, while the State Department and White House remained silent on the revelations, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley rejected the claim that officials had purposely misled the public about the war.

“I know there’s an assertion out there of some sort of coordinated lie over the course of 18 years,” Milley told reporters. “I find that a bit of a stretch. More than a bit of a stretch, I find that a mischaracterization.”

Optimistic reports on the war in Afghanistan, he argued, were “honest assessments” that were “never intended to deceive the Congress or the American people.” While Milley’s response was unusually strident, it was not a surprise for most Pentagon reporters, many of whom knew that senior military officers and Pentagon policy makers were carefully studying proposals that would keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan for at least the next five years – if not longer.

Among these is a paper authored by Michael O’Hanlon, the high profile Foreign Policy Director of Research at the influential Brookings Institution. Entitled “5,000 Troops for 5 Years,” O’Hanlon’s offering was previewed in an op-ed in The Hill in late October, presented formally by Brookings officials on the same day as the Post published the Afghanistan Papers, then circulated to a wider audience in an O’Hanlon-authored op-ed in USA Today on January 3. O’Hanlon provides a less outspoken critique of the Post story than Milley (calling it “badly misleading” and arguing that U.S. officials “have been consistently and publicly realistic about the difficulty of making progress” in the war), while acknowledging the “limits of the possible” in a “beleaguered and weak country.” Even so, O’Hanlon says in taking issue with the Post report, the Afghanistan mission “has not been an abject failure” because, as he argues, the Afghan government  “continues to hold all major and midsize cities” and the U.S. has “not again been attacked by a group that plotted or organized its aggression from within Afghan borders.”

O’Hanlon concedes that while these are modest accomplishments, they are sustainable “at a far lower cost in blood and treasure than before.” Here then, is O’Hanlon’s payoff: “The United States needs a policy that recognizes Afghanistan for what it is – a significant, but not a top-tier, U.S. strategic interest – and builds a plan accordingly. That overall strategy should still seek peace, but its modest military element should be steady and stable, and not set to a calendar. Roughly 5,000 troops for at least five years could be the crude mantra.”

O’Hanlon’s proposal has gained traction among a number of senior military officers who are frustrated with a war that drains military assets and erodes readiness, but who are loathe to concede Afghanistan to the Taliban – an outcome they believe is certain to follow a full U.S. withdrawal. Then too, O’Hanlon confirms, his proposal reflects the thinking of a large swath of Washington’s foreign policy community. “I think I am codifying and encapsulating and distilling the wisdom of a lot of people here, with a couple of my own twists,” he told me in response to a series of questions I posed to him in an email exchange. “I think the chances of something like this [being adopted] are therefore pretty good.”

Indeed, the O’Hanlon proposal seems to have something for everyone: it foregoes the large nation building expenditures that have characterized the U.S. intervention ($7 billion to $8 billion each year – “not trivial, but only 1 percent of the defense budget”), it maintains enough military capacity to check the growth of ISIS or al-Qaeda (the U.S. would maintain “two or three major airfields and hubs of operations” in the country), it allows time for the U.S. to put in place a more effective Afghan military presence (O’Hanlon provides five specific recommendations on how this can be done), it signals the Taliban that the U.S. will not leave the country out of frustration (that they cannot simply “stall for time”), and perhaps most crucially, it gelds the controversy surrounding the conflict by taking it out of public view: “By laying out a plan designed to last for several years,” O’Hanlon writes, “Washington would be avoiding the drama and the huge consumption of policy bandwidth associated with annual Afghanistan policy reviews that have typified the late Obama and early Trump years.” Which is to say:

maintaining a presence in Afghanistan at 5,000 troops (“I’d rather see 5,000 as a rough goal not a formal or legislated ceiling or floor,” O’Hanlon says) over an extended period takes the war off the nation’s front pages – it regularizes the U.S. deployment at an acceptable cost (that’s what sustainable means) and it makes the war in Afghanistan publicly palatable.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. “5,000 Troops for 5 Years” seemingly institutionalizes what then-Afghan commander General David Petraeus called “Afghanistan Good Enough” in August of 2010: “This isn’t to say that there’s any kind of objective of turning Afghanistan into Switzerland in three to five years or less,” he said at the time. “Afghan good enough is good enough.” At the time, any number of pundits predicted that the Petraeus statement would come back to haunt him, but his mantra has been adopted by senior military officers who cite the O’Hanlon paper as a means of, if not exactly winning the Afghanistan war, at least not losing it – if victory isn’t possible, they argue, then “good enough” is next best. Or, as one senior military officer told me, the O’Hanlon proposal recasts the political calculus of Vermont Senator George Aiken on Vietnam, who said that the U.S. should “declare victory and get out.” In this case, the officer said, O’Hanlon is proposing that “the U.S. declare a stalemate and stay in.”     

The O’Hanlon proposal details what has been quietly talked about in military circles for the last decade, but was given credence in a monograph written by retired Army Colonel David Johnson (“Doing What You Know”) published in 2017. Johnson, whose paper circulated widely in Army circles, argues that “good enough” might well be the most appropriate model for fighting counter-insurgencies – a form of warfare that has traditionally been outside of the U.S. military’s “strategic culture.” In these conflicts, what Johnson calls a “least bad outcome” might be all that the U.S. military should expect. In Afghanistan, this means accepting limits to success. “In Afghanistan, what is good enough is a government that can successfully protect itself and take the fight to the Taliban with minimal U.S. support,” Johnson wrote. “Whether the Kabul government is corrupt or not representative is secondary to its ability to prevent Afghanistan from again becoming a terrorist haven. That would be good enough.”

That this model might well be adopted in Afghanistan (and in Iraq), and in any of the other “grey zone” conflicts of the Middle East, is no longer at issue. The model is already in place, while O’Hanlon’s 5000 Troops for 5 Years is fast becoming a reality. But the adoption of the program has come at a price – in  Afghan lives. While the U.S. has continued to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, it has escalated its air campaign against the Taliban (U.S. aircraft dropped 7423 bombs on Afghanistan in 2019 – more than any other year), thereby embracing a strategy that allows U.S. deployments to remain in place, but without the consequent escalation in U.S. casualties. (“More U.S. troops die in training accidents than in Afghanistan so, you know, there’s that,” a senior military officer told me.) Meanwhile, Afghan civilian casualties have spiked, reaching  unprecedented levels in the period of July to September of 2019. That trend is likely to continue.

And so, the results of the Washington Post’s publication of the Afghanistan Papers “bombshell” in December have now come sharply into focus: Afghanistan is off the nation’s front pages, American casualties are “sustainable,” the war continues – and, ironically, the chances for ending it are now even more remote than before the Post published its revelations.

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Featured image: U.S. Army Sgt. Christian Cisineros takes a moment to speak with his interpreter March 17, 2009, while on a dismount patrol mission near Forward Operating Base Baylough in the Zabul Province of Afghanistan. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Adam Mancini/Released)

The heat absorbed in Earth’s oceans reached a new record in 2019, found a recent study published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences. Despite the fact that this has been the case for almost every year over the past decade, this information dominated the news cycle, with some particularly viral headlines noting that the amount of energy accumulating in the oceans is equivalent to detonating five Hiroshima atomic bombs per second, every second over the past 25 years.

While stunning, this isn’t a new analogy. After we published a paper about Earth’s energy accumulation in 2012, my colleagues and I at Skeptical Science created a website called 4Hiroshimas.com that provided a widget that websites can include on their homepages to illustrate the amount of heat accumulating on Earth as compared to the energy in the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The widget also uses other analogies to get the idea across, such as how the amount of heat accumulated compares to the energy in Hurricane Sandy, or 6.0 magnitude earthquakes, or Big Bens full of dynamite, or millions of lightning bolts. Improved ocean heat measurements have since revised the rate of warming upwards from four to five ‘Hiros’ per second. (For the record, as of the writing of this article, our climate has accumulated the equivalent of a total of more than 2.8 billion Hiroshima bombs’ worth of heat since 1998.)

Our team wasn’t the first to use this analogy. In 2010, oceanographer John Lyman compared the rate of ocean warming to atomic bombs, and James Hansen used the Hiroshima atomic bomb analogy in his February 2012 TED talk. One might say that the comparison has come under heat, however. Some criticize the analogy for exploiting or being insensitive to the horrors suffered by the people of Hiroshima. Others have complained that the analogy is imperfect, as all analogies are, by definition.

On the other hand, the use of Hiros has one major upside. Earth and especially its oceans have been accumulating such a vast amount of heat due to human-caused global warming that it’s difficult to comprehend. Most people have little if any sense what 10 zettajoules per year—the amount of heat energy absorbed per year by the Earth—means. That’s why climate communicators have searched for a metric of comparison that the public can grasp. It’s relatively easy to visualize five atomic bombs detonating every second, and consequently comprehend the vast amount of energy being absorbed by the Earth’s climate system.

For those who nevertheless object to the Hiros analogy, perhaps microwaves offer a more palatable comparison. The heat accumulating in Earth’s oceans over the past 25 years is also equivalent to every person now on Earth running 35 standard household microwave ovens nonstop during Justin Bieber’s entire lifetime.

Critically, the rate of global heating is also accelerating. During the prior 25 years (1968–1992), the oceans only warmed at a rate equivalent to one Hiroshima bomb detonation per second, or 7.7 billion people each running 10 microwaves nonstop during that quarter-century period.

The good news: the rate at which we’ve been adding heat to Earth’s climate hasn’t changed much over the past two decades. The bad news: to avoid a potential climate catastrophe, global heating needs to begin declining soon and rapidly, which will require international implementation of numerous ambitious climate policies.

So far, many governments appear more inclined to keep increasing fossil fuel extraction than taking the necessary steps to slow global heating. Political leaders in many countries can implement these destructive policies without fear of losing power because too few people grasp the urgency of the climate crisis. Perhaps visualizing global heating as five atomic bomb detonations per second will help convey that sense of urgency to more people.

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Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist, and author of Climatology versus Pseudoscience.

Featured image: ong-exposure photo of the first atomic bomb test, code-named Trinity, and taken at 5:29:45 a.m. on July 16, 1945.

The already existing tensions in the Black Sea region have heightened because of the Defender-Europe 2020 exercises, which include ten participating states, including the Black Sea state of Romania. Through these U.S.-led exercises, that are mostly aimed against Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave in the Baltics , the U.S.-made MQ-9 Reaper reconnaissance and assault drones, made infamous for being used in the assassination of Iranian Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani earlier this month, were deployed in Romania. 

The presence of the Pentagon’s and CIA’s strategic squadron on the Black Sea and close to Russia does not contribute in any way to maintaining regional security, and rather these offensive weapons that were used in the assassination of high-ranking officials of enemy countries, aims to pressurize Russia further. The deployment of such drones in Romania shows that the former Warsaw Pact country is willingly going beyond its NATO responsibilities by becoming a critical staging point for anti-Russian pressure.

Moscow has mentioned on several occasions that it would consider these assault drones to be the equivalent of medium-range missiles, banned by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Despite this warning, it had done little to influence the decision of Warsaw to permanently host the drones at the Mirosławiec airbase in western Poland.

The Romanian airbase Câmpia Turzii is the host of these offensive weapons. Although in the event of a military conflict in the Black Sea region, Russian anti-aircraft and missile defense units could intercept and destroy unmanned targets, even those in take-off position, this move to host offensive U.S.-made weapons is part of a larger strategy to pressurize, isolate and contain Russia in the Black Sea. Romania is not the only anti-Russian state on the Black Sea – Bulgaria and Turkey are also NATO members, and Ukraine and Georgia are weaponized states with aspirations of joining NATO. The U.S. are effectively leading efforts for a coalition against Russia in the Black Sea, even though it is unlikely that these states have the combined power to challenge Russian naval and aerial dominance in the region.

The U.S. Air Force Command in Europe announced that the MQ-9 Reaper drones will be relocated to Romania until spring to support a series of operations, gathering information, monitoring and air reconnaissance in the Black Sea area. These drones can fly a distance of 6,000 kilometers, a distance that can comfortably cover Moscow, St. Petersburg and even the western fringes of Siberia. This is a dangerous prospect for Russia considering that these drones are capable of not only carrying out assassinations, but can also carry a nuclear warhead. The drones have been used to deadly effect in Iraq and Afghanistan where it has begun replacing piloted F-16 and A-10 flights by the U.S. air force.

The Pentagon has invested $3 million in the construction on a hangar and other sites in Romania for the deadly drones. These facts confirm the existence of long-term plans to use the Câmpia Turzii air base as an aerodrome for sending American drones to strategic targets in Eastern Europe when need be, all with the aim of pressuring Russia.

The Defender-Europe 2020 exercises primarily aims to put pressure on Kaliningrad, but the deployment of these drones has now demonstrated that it is a multipronged exercise against Russia that has expanded the focus of operations. Effectively the Defender-Europe 2020 exercises stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, in a show of force to demonstrate to Russia that any war with NATO will be conducted across two seas and the entirety of its European land border with the exception of perhaps Finland.

This move to turn Romania into a U.S. drone base against Russia has wider aspirations for some leading thinkers in Washington. Moldova, a neighobring Romanian-speaking country, has been identified by the highly influential RAND think tank to become another U.S. military hub on the Black Sea. This identification of Moldova also comes as the U.S. military base network is expanding in Romania with the arrival of 500 U.S. servicemen in order to strengthen the Kogâlniceanu air base. Chisinau has cooperated with NATO allies and partner states for several years through the Partnership for Peace and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council. Moldova also bought weapons in 2018 in accordance to the Alliance’s standards. However, the Moldovan Constitution ensures that the country is a neutral state, and according to the polls, the majority of the population is against NATO membership. Although RAND has identified Moldova to become a hub for the U.S. military, this will unlikely occur, essentially meaning Washington’s policymakers are concentrating on further militarizing Romania against Russia.

Although Romania is consolidating its position in the anti-Russian bloc, the drones do cause a matter of concern, but perhaps not seriously enough as Russia will have confidence in its own air defense capabilities, especially with the famed S-400 missile defense system. This still does not deter the fact that Romania is willingly becoming a hub for the U.S. military to oppose Russia.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Author’s Note

This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics, Issue 003. Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it.  You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.

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 “It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” – Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, 2005

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark?  This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll’s house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people’s lives. This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell’s fantasy world.  So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda.  The result is mass hallucination.

In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA’s murderous coup d’état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country’s military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons. Garrison said:

The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening.  All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated. All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed.  The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted.  Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.

But to live like this is to live in a doll’s house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.

In the doll’s house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory. [i]

Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA’s persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces.  These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R.  No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot free.  That would be a howler!  So too, of course, are the Warren Commission’s fictions about Oswald.

Snowden, Assange, and Manning

If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption,  and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government’s accusations that these three were criminals.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a “liberal” concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment.  He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail).  He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined.   He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment.  He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial.  As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.

Obama and Trump, arch political “enemies,” have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced.  This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening.  It doesn’t matter.  They don’t care, just as they don’t care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d’état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these “non-white” people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long.  Who does care about the truth?  Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the “news” of all those desperate people clamoring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico?  One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone.  It’s called news.

The Sleepwalkers

But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government’s explanation for JFK’s murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll’s house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct. The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don’t concern them. The fates of Hondurans don’t concern them.  The fates of Syrians don’t concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don’t concern them. The fates of America’s victims all around the world don’t concern them.  Indifference reigns.

Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.

That is not the case for most Americans.  When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al.  You can keep counting back.  It is an ugly fact and sad to say.  Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election.  The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing.  It is the American way.

It is true that average Americans have not built the doll’s house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices.  But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works.  The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda.   The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots.  There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.

Denying Existential Freedom

One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee’s revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA.  Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added.  Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have “experts” – social, psychological, and biological “scientists” – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain.  Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hair style, etc.  Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people. Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control.  And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d’état that has rendered them “citizens” of a police state.

We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump — what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world.  Science for idiots.

Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – “for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition”[ii]– articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are “determined” by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control. To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense (en soir, condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets.  One who doesn’t grasp the truth since he doesn’t read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.

The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.

Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.

Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry.  As he correctly notes, the CIA’s MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath.[iii]

Can anyone with an awareness of this history doubt there is a hidden hand behind this development? Once you have convinced people that they are not free in the most profound sense, the rest is child’s play. Convinced that they are puppets, they become puppets to be willingly jerked around.

“He played with me just as I used to play with dolls,” says Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.

Now who would want to get people to believe they were not free?  The answer is obvious given a minute of thought.  It is not just Nora’s husband Torvald.

Perfect examples of the persistence of the long-term, repetitive, impregnating propaganda appear in news headlines constantly.  Here is an egregious example concerning the little understood case of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy.  On Friday, August 30, 2019, Sirhan, who has been in prison for fifty-two years for the murder of RFK that he did not commit, was stabbed by another prisoner. A quick click through the MSM headlines reporting this showed the same words repeated by all the corporate media as they fulfilled their function as CIA stenographers. One example, from CBS News, will suffice: “Robert Kennedy assassin hospitalized after prison stabbing.”[iv]  RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin … all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state. 

Sartre and Bad Faith

Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous.  Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people’s personal lives.  People lie and want to be deceived.  They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth.  They want to be nice (Latin, nescire, not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked.  They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll’s house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith (mauvaise foi):  In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:

In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this ‘lie’ to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government’s and corporate media’s lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.

Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans.  For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem. But it doesn’t take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information.  It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves.  We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.

The problem is the will to know.  But why?  Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference?  Stupidity?  Okay, there is that.  Ignorance? That too.  Willful ignorance, ditto.  Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology?  For certain.  Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.”  Difficult?  No, it’s almost impossible.

But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip.  As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues.  They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn’t be true.  They close down.  This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit.  In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll’s house, except as the murals on the windows flash back their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up.  As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” and they never come: “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?  Those people were a kind of solution.”  Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates.  The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it’s hard for many Americans to believe another story.

The Two-Headed Monster

On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.

On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater “authority,” gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one’s masters.  This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune.  Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to “escape from freedom,” since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death.[v]  There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll’s house.

Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term “conspiracy theory” as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcom X, MLK, and RFK.  All the media echoed the CIA line.  While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian “threat,” the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the “criminals” Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything.  The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.

So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of “the war on terror,” which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM “experts” and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals.  The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times’ editor and Iraq war cheerleader.  Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.

Jacques Ellul on Propaganda

Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population.  He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal.  The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, “He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair.”  But he can’t live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense.  He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events.  He doesn’t so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living.  Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda:

The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a ‘key’ that will permit them to take a position, and even readymade opinions….The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework….the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him.[vi]

Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the “truth.”  But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people’s emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda. In today’s mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith.  Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.

Culpable Ignorance

It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy.  Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda. Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition.  Trump is a liar.  No, Obama is a liar.  And Hillary Clinton.  No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it’s CNN or NBC. And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other.  It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.

In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life.  Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.

But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further.  People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread.  Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease’s statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that “the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time.” [vii]  That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll’s house.

If that is so, then today’s propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War. To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse.  But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: “the compatible left.”  He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on “courting” leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell’s crime-stopand has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.

Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.

Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps.  Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll’s house.  To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.

From Bad to Worse

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century?  Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites?  The answer is obvious. It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter.  The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.  All the while the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.

The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population.  This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.

Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now, The Guardian, etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump.  The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren’t so depraved and slimy.

It surely isn’t the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama’s anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc.  The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals’ paragons of truth.  It’s enough to make your head spin, which is the point.  Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.

This is how the political system works to prevent change.  It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded.  While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll’s house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.

How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama?  They are both puppets dancing to their masters’ tunes – the same masters.  They both front for the empire.

In his excellent book, Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov assiduously documents Obama’s crimes, including his CIA background.[viii] As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, “Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all.” Read the book if you want all the details.  They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable.  But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it?  Of course not.  Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they’ve been had and are living under a president who is Obama’s disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book’s covers.

Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama’s shilling for the warfare state.  His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else.  He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard.  I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle.  If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA’s John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would “get everything it wanted,” and the CIA killed JFK, well, something’s amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.

The doll’s house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.

Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between  events that started with the CIA coup d’état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.

Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not.  The walls are closing in.

Lisa Pease is so right: “The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this.  We can’t fix a problem we can’t even acknowledge exists.”

If we don’t follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come.  There will be no one else to blame.

*

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author’s website here.

Notes

1. Interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney of Parish of Orleans, Louisiana, May 27, 1969 at https://kennedysandking.com/images/pdf/garrison-interview-05-27-1969-trans.pdf
2. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Jacques Ellul, Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 17-18
3. https://steemit.com/news/@zen12/cia-mind-control-morphed-into-pschiatry
4. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sirhan-sirhan-stabbed-robert-f-kennedy-assassin-hospitalized-after-prison-stabbing-2019-08-31/
5. Escape from Freedom, Erich Fromm, Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1941
6. Ellul, op cit., p. 140
7. A Lie Too Big To Fail, Lisa Pease, Feral House, 2018, pp.500-501
8. Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State, Jeremy Kuzmarov, Clarity Press, 2019

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Palestine: Legally Overriding a UN Security Council Veto. In Response to Trump’s Annexation Scheme

By Stephen Lendman, February 03, 2020

In response to the Trump regime’s annexation scheme of the century, Palestinians have binding recourse — in the General Assembly, not the Security Council.

US veto power prevents adoption of a SC resolution that upholds their rights under international law.

By invoking General Assembly Uniting for Peace Resolution 377 (1950), SC actions can be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote of UN member states.

Trump’s “peace deal” for Israel, and it is breathtaking

By Craig Murray, February 03, 2020

I have read through the entire 181 pages of Trump’s “peace deal” for Israel, and it is breathtaking. It is not just that the “solution” it proposes is ludicrously one-sided, it is the entire analysis of the problem to be solved which reads as pure, unadulterated zionist propaganda.

For example, the word “violence” is used repeatedly. But it only ever refers to violence by Arabs. There is not one single mention of violence by Israel against the Palestinians, even though the ratio of killing between Israelis and Palestinians over the last ten years is approximately 80:1 . The only mention of violence against Palestinians at all relates to Kuwaiti expulsion of Palestinian refugees after the first Gulf war.

Palestinians Have Only One Option Left: Stay and Fight

By David Hearst, February 02, 2020

It was the demographic fact that, in that space, there were more Palestinians than Jews. According to 2016 figures from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) that were provided to the Israeli Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee, there were 6.5 million Muslims and 6.44 million Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, although those figures are out of date now. The committee referred to Muslims rather than Palestinians, thus excluding Palestinian Christians.

Coronavirus Has Been Declared a Global Emergency. What’s Happening in China

By Tom Clifford, February 01, 2020

Workers returning to the capital next week after the Chinese new year break face quarantine, regardless of whether they went overseas or stayed in China. Those coming back are being told to stay at their places of residence for at least a week under self-quarantine. China’s State Council, the cabinet, announced on January 27 that the Lunar New Year / Spring Festival holiday will be extended to February 2 across the country; the holiday week was originally from January 24 to January 30. Some companies are telling their employees not to return to work until February 9, to factor in the quarantine period. This may again be extended.

Coronavirus Epidemic: WHO Declares a “Fake” Global Public Health Emergency

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 31, 2020

In the course of the last two weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) had already pointed to a possible Global Public Health crisis in relation to China’s novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) categorized  as a viral pneumonia. The virus outbreak is centred in the city of Wuhan, a city in Eastern China with a population in excess of 11 million.

On 22 January, the members of the WHO Emergency Committee “expressed divergent views on whether this event constitutes a PHEIC or not”.

China’s Coronavirus: A Global Health Emergency is Launched. What are the Facts

By Larry Romanoff, January 31, 2020

While this coronavirus is indeed serious and is causing deaths, one wonders if the responses, especially in the West, are reaching out of control.

Canada, with a population about the same as Shanghai, has so far this flu season had more than 20,000 confirmed cases, 2,200 hospitalisations, and 85 deaths, roughly the same as all of China with the new corona virus at the same time. But there is no panic in Canada about the flu, and United Airlines isn’t cancelling all flights to Canada.

World Health Organisation Officially Declares Coronavirus a “Global Health Emergency”

By James Cogan, January 31, 2020

The World Health Organisation (WHO) yesterday decided to formally declare the outbreak of 2019-nCoV, the new coronavirus first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan, as a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).” The PHEIC classification was only established by WHO in 2005 following the 2002–2003 SARS pandemic. It has been declared on five occasions since, in response to the 2009 Swine Flu, the outbreaks in 2014 of Ebola and polio, the 2016 Zika virus and the 2019 resurgence of Ebola in central Africa.

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A public demonstration took place on Friday morning in front of the offices of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in Los Angeles to demand a halt to the sale of the .ORG domain registry to the private equity firm Ethos Capital for $1.135 billion.

The “SaveDotOrg” protest was organized by a coalition of technology industry organizations and nonprofits that oppose the sale of the .ORG domain because it “could impact millions of individuals and organizations who have a .ORG website, opening the door to potential censorship and price increases on domain registration and renewals.”

The conversion of .ORG into a for-profit enterprise is by definition an attack on public access to news, information and digital media. Among the threats it poses to the nonprofits and other organizations using the .ORG domain are higher domain registration fees, censorship-for-hire schemes, selling browsing data and diminished technical maintenance and support.

As of this writing, 660 organizations, 21,000 people and six members of Congress have endorsed a letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that ICANN—the nonprofit umbrella organization responsible for the internet’s domain name system—stop the planned sale of the .ORG domain by the Public Interest Registry (PIR).

The letter is addressed to Andrew Sullivan, President and CEO of the Internet Society and says, “Non-governmental organizations all over the world rely on the .ORG top-level domain. Decisions affecting .ORG must be made with the consultation of the NGO community, overseen by a trusted community leader. If the Internet Society (ISOC) can no longer be that leader, it should work with the NGO community and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to find an appropriate replacement.”

PIR, also a non-profit organization, was created by the Internet Society in 2002 to manage the .ORG registry. As of 2015, there were 10.5 million domains registered with the .ORG designation. According to surveys of consumers, the public perceives .ORG websites to be more trustworthy and “Respondents were more likely to turn to .ORG websites in a crisis, more likely to post content on .ORG sites and to trust information on a .ORG domain.”

In response to the growing opposition, PIR announced on January 17 that the 30-day review period had been extended to February 17 to allow for “additional information” to be provided “so that ICANN has a full understanding of the Transaction.” However, the PIR statement says that “ICANN is not providing or withholding its consent at this time.”

The .ORG registry is what is known as a top-level internet domain. It is one of seven such domains—the others being .com, .gov, .edu, .mil, .arpa, and .net—that were established in 1985. The domain name system (DNS) was created by internet pioneers to make it easier for users to remember the location of computers on the network. Instead of memorizing their all-numeric IP addresses, users were able to type the second-level domain (WSWS) followed by its top level (.ORG) domain to find the desired resource on the internet.

The sale of the top-level domain was originally announced on November 13. In a press release, the ISOC and PIR said the terms of the deal involve the acquisition of “PIR and all of its assets from the Internet Society” by Ethos Capital. Andrew Sullivan is quoted in the statement saying, “This transaction will provide the Internet Society with an endowment of sustainable funding and the resources to advance our mission on a broader scale as we continue our work to make the Internet more open, accessible and secure—for everyone.”

It is significant that the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization and user of the .ORG domain itself, which was founded in 1992 to provide leadership and establish standards for the functioning of the world’s critical information infrastructure, is now compelled to sell off a significant asset in order to “sustain funding” and “make the Internet more open, accessible and secure.”

A group of 11 executives of major international NGOs—including Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—issued an open letter to ISOC and ICANN from the World Economic Forum in Davos last Wednesday opposing the sale.

Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the ACLU said, “Free expression around the world is increasingly endangered by government and corporate players, which is why we are joining other civil society organizations in making public our concerns over the .org sale. The internet is crucial to the integrity of civil liberties and human rights work, and also the safety of those doing it. The security of civil society should not be entrusted to private equity.”

Ethos Capital was founded in 2019 and appears to have been created for the purpose of purchasing the .ORG registry. The firm’s CEO Erik Brooks, a well-connected Harvard MBA, specializes in “companies in which technology can be used to automate, optimize and transform traditional business models into faster growing, more efficient organizations.”

The purpose of selling to private equity is obviously to transform the previously non-profit PIR into a for-profit organization with investors of the $1 billion expecting a return on their money. When asked who the investors are, Ethos Capital said, “this is a US-based private transaction in which investors and corporate directors have a right to privacy.”

The justifications provided by Sullivan, the Internet Society and his investors for selling are based largely on the fait accompli of the internet’s transformation from an open public resource into a structure dominated by the Silicon Valley tech monopolies.

In response to the mounting criticisms, Nora Abusitta-Ouri, Chief Purpose Officer of Ethos Capital wrote on Wednesday, “nonprofits rely on for-profit businesses every day to achieve their online goals—from registrars to web designers, to Internet providers, to hosting services, and beyond. The Internet was built by for-profit companies with the resources and capabilities to innovate, and we want to make sure that the registrants of .ORG, like every other domain in the world, have the benefit of being served by a company with the ability, desire and resources to innovate and compete on a global scale.”

The concerns of the opponents of the hiving off of .ORG to private equity investment vultures are legitimate. Promises by Ethos Capital that it will keep increases in domain registration fees to 10 percent cannot be trusted. Additionally, there will be pressure to monetize the .ORG assets by collecting browsing activity and tracking visitor demographics, and offering this data up to marketers for lucrative fees. There is nothing to stop the firm from turning this data over to the surveillance state.

It should be expected that the private owners—beholden to powerful financial and political interests—will use their control of the top-level domain for online censorship of websites that are considered objectionable by their stakeholders on Wall Street and in Washington DC.

The backdrop to the .ORG transaction is the ongoing vendetta against WikiLeaks.org and its founder and editor Julian Assange. Assange is currently being held illegally in a London prison, facing proceedings for his extradition to the US on charges of violating the Espionage Act of 1917, for publishing the truth about the crimes of imperialist states and corporations against the public.

Meanwhile, many political parties and organizations—including the World Socialist Web Site and the Socialist Equality Parties throughout the world—use the .ORG domain for their online presence. It can be expected that private control will lead to arbitrary suspensions of domain registration and targeting left-wing and socialist political opponents and critics of corporate and state policy.

As was the case when net neutrality was officially abolished by the FCC in June 2018, the growing public opposition to the privatization of yet another resource of the internet will be run roughshod over. Appeals to the executives of the organizations making the decision to sell the .ORG asset will not stop the process from moving forward and being completed.

The defense of an open internet and its maintenance as a public utility that is available to all requires a mass political struggle against the capitalist system. Only the independent mobilization of the working class—including workers in the internet and tech industries—on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program, can prevent the further conversion of the information infrastructure into private property that is integrated with the police and military-intelligence apparatus.

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Featured image: Protesters outside of the office of ICANN in Los Angeles on Friday (Photo credit-thepublicsradio.com)

The attitude of the US towards Latin peoples has been one of domination, imposition and imperialism. The core of this policy is in the American ideology itself, based on the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th Century, which, enunciating an “America for Americans”, promoted the American expansion towards other lands of the New World. Specifically in South America, external interference in national policies became even more evident with the advent of the military dictatorships of the last century, which, with the shallow excuse of avoiding a “communist threat”, promoted long decades of misery and persecution whose only end had been to preserve the subjugation of those countries to Washington’s commandments during the Cold War.

The process of redemocratization in Latin America was a flawed and vulnerable one. The transition of power witnessed by the exchange of the Armed Forces for civilian politicians represented nothing but the very interests of the same groups that had financed and supported the military’s takeover. In fact, when the American objectives bequeathed to the military were already achieved, they authorized the transition of power, pacifying national policies with the capitulation of the left, which abandoned the armed struggle in favor of the democratic pact.

Since then, outside interference in Latin America has been triggered by the cooptation of parliamentary factions, feeding gigantic networks of corruption that “fight each other” publicly, when, truly, they work for the interests of the same foreign power. This is the case of the reactionary parties and of the groups from the new left – concerned with the “identitarian” agenda of liberalism and omitted in relation to social problems and national sovereignty.

While the theater of public confrontation of these groups is functioning, the American foreign occupation works perfectly, without major challenges and threats. However, any deviation from this reality is understood as an affront and gives room for the resurgence of Washington’s interference. The most recent cases corroborating this fact are the failed attempted coup against the legitimate Bolivarian government in Caracas and the successful coup d’état carried out against Bolivian President Morales, both in the past year.

In general, American attacks on independent peoples of the South have intensified in recent years. This, most likely, is due to the fact that the period before the current one was marked by the growth of the political left, which, although subordinated to the liberal hegemony, acted with an agenda reasonably linked to social struggles, delaying, even if very little, the neoliberal plans. Now, these same countries are facing the extraordinary advance of reactionary rights, with a greater emphasis on Brazil.

A member of the BRICS, Brazil, with all its potential to achieve prestigious status in international order, has been suffering the worst period in its recent history. The rise of Bolsonaro brings with it the worst in the country: the growth of the harmful influence of neo-Pentecostal groups – whose greatest commitment is to the interests of Washington and Tel Aviv; the paramilitary armed militias that control organized crime in the poorest regions of the country, truly acting as a mafia and; the business sector as a whole, with enormous progress in dismantling labor laws and permitting agribusiness, with the legalization of pesticides and the criminal burning of native forests for the formation of pastures for livestock. Brazil is going through one of the worst deindustrialization processes ever witnessed in history.

Argentina recently completed this cycle of reactionary ascension and is now witnessing a return of the “soft left”, with the return of the Kirchner Party. The negative legacy of Fenández. Macri’s will not be wiped out so quickly and the left now in power does not seem committed to the complete break with external interests, but to the perpetuation of the liberal-parliamentary cycle.

The most striking cases, however, are the aforementioned examples of Venezuela and Bolivia, countries victimized by American imperialism. Fundamentally, one must realize how both cases reveal real occurrences of foreign invasion, even if camouflaged with a democratic appearance. Venezuela perceived the opposition’s articulations as a true case of war and managed to gain control over the situation: activated the Bolivarian National Guard, intensified security policies and ignored internal and external opposition pressure. As a result, Maduro remains in power and the coup has become an international joke. On the other hand, Morales did not have the same perspicacity and gave way too much to the opposition, falling and being forced to leave the country and hand it over to the coup d’état.

In Chile, recent political unrest is having a positive effect. The claims against neoliberal Piñera, carried out through violent protests that have already given rise to the State of Emergency, are successful and little by little the government is forced to yield to popular pressure.

Currently, the panorama of South America is terrible. With the exception of Venezuela, which is in an undeniable crisis, all countries are, in one way or another, hostages to American interests, with some under governments that make this reality more explicit – like Brazil – and others under more camouflaged regimes. There is no doubt about the fundamental point that American imperialism has never been as aggressive in South America as it has been in recent years. The reason is simple: in the face of progress in the formation of a multipolar world, the geopolitical north is becoming increasingly reactive.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida is a research fellow in International Law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself the president of Venezuela a year ago but despite multiple coup attempts, he never took power and his support there rapidly disappeared. Now, with his foreign tour concluding, Guaidó’s support is shrinking around the world as well. Rather than looking presidential, he appears clownish. Rather than developing new plans to try to topple President Maduro, he is left without any concrete promises from European governments, which have been more resistant than the United States toward imposing more sanctions despite Guaidó‘s pleading for support.

Despite his failures, according to US law, as long as President Trump recognizes him as the President of Venezuela then the courts will go along with the charade. Such is the situation we will face when we go to trial on February 11 for the charge of “interfering with certain protective functions” by the Trump administration. In the courtroom, Guaido is the president even though outside the courtroom he has never been president. Learn more about the trial and what you can do to support us and our co-defendants at DefendEmbassyProtectors.org.

Protesters greet Guaido in Spain outside of Foreign Ministry, January 22, 2020.

Guaidó Will Return Even Weaker Than When He Left

In his grand finale in the United States this weekend, Guaidó made clear his desire to meet President Trump. There were three opportunities — at Davos, Trump left before Guaidó arrived; in Miami, Trump skipped the Guaidó rally to play golf; and at Mar-a-Lago Guaido was not invited to the super bowl party. Guaidó was a short drive from Mar-a-Lago but President Trump never called him. The Washington Post reported, “the lack of an encounter — even a photo opportunity — could be taken as a sign of Trump’s lack of interest in Venezuela at a time when Guaidó is seeking to keep his crusade against Maduro alive…” The Post also noted that Trump did not show up for Guaidó’s event in Miami, although several politicians including Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Marco Rubio were there.

Geoff Ramsey, director of the Venezuela program at the right-wing anti-Maduro, Washington Organization on Latin America told the Post, “Going to the United States without meeting with Trump is a risk for Guaidó,” adding that not meeting with Trump shows “that for Trump, the issue of Venezuela is not a priority.” Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, which also supports the coup, told the Associated Press, “If Trump does not meet with Guaidó, that would raise serious questions about the administration’s continuing commitment to Venezuela’s interim president.”

Guaidó was in steep decline at home when he left Venezuela, losing the presidency of the National Assembly as even much of the opposition to Maduro now oppose him. His support has primarily emanated from the United States and President Trump. The US has been keeping right-wing governments in Latin America and its western allies from openly giving up on the failed coup. But now with Guaidó losing the visible support of President Trump, it will become more difficult to keep these countries’ support. The feeble shrinking puppet may be on his final tour as a fraudulent “president.”

One year after his self-declared presidency and five failed coup attempts, Guaidó has not been president of Venezuela for one day, or even one minute. Trump’s open coup failed repeatedly because the people of Venezuela support President Maduro and the military are staying loyal to the constitutional government. On January 6, the NY Times summarized the situation with a subheadline: “America threw its might behind Juan Guaidó when he claimed the presidency, a direct challenge to President Nicolás Maduro. A year later, the Trump administration has little to show for its efforts.”

Guaidó’s foreign tour was a last-ditch effort to revive his dwindling coup. He had a brief photo-op with Prime Minister Boris Johnson a few hours before the Parliament voted to leave the EU. Guaido then turned to the fragmenting EU for more photo-ops. He called for more illegal sanctions against Venezuela, which will surely anger the Venezuelan people and further his spiraling political decline.

Latin America is revolting against neoliberalism and paradoxically Guaidó went to the heart of it at the Davos gathering of global oligarchs. Even the pro-coup New York Times gave Guaidó bad reviews. They wrote: “This time last year, Juan Guaidó would have been the toast of Davos. . . But as Mr. Guaidó made the rounds at this year’s gathering of political and business figures — having come to Europe in defiance of a travel ban at home — he seemed like a man whose moment had passed.” The Times reported that “Nicolás Maduro, [is] still firmly entrenched in power.”

Venezuelanalysis reports that at Davos “the opposition leader was set to meet with US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the summit. However, the face-to-face encounter did not materialize…” Mision Verdad summarized it, writing “Guaidó will not bathe in glory but in the wrath of global society and the intrigues that his crash cart tour has left for European leaders.”  Guaidó’s failure at Davos is a “good way to portray the first anniversary of his imaginary government.”

The focus of his trip was on his repeated failures, as the Times reported, “the embattled Venezuelan spent most of his time answering questions about why he had not succeeded in toppling Mr. Maduro.” Guaidó, the Times added, has no new ideas, writing,  “Guaidó struggled to offer fresh ideas for how governments could tighten the pressure on Mr. Maduro. Venezuela is already under heavy sanctions, which have so far failed to dislodge him.”

While the New York Times remains a vehicle of misinformation about Venezuela and President Maduro, they did get this summary correct: “But a year of high-stakes maneuvers by Mr. Guaidó — like trying to persuade the military to turn against the president and trying to bring in much-needed humanitarian aid across the border — failed to bring down Mr. Maduro, who retains firm control of the military and of the country’s resources.”

After Davos, Guaidó went to Spain where Spain’s new left-wing coalition refused to grant the politician an audience with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. Instead, Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya held a brief meeting with him. To add to that insult, Transport Minister José Luis Ábalos met at Madrid’s airport with Venezuela’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, who is banned from stepping into EU territory. In Canada, he had a photo-op with Justin Trudeau but Guaidó showed his amateurish incompetence when he claimed that Cuba should be part of the solution to the political conflict in Venezuela. Officials in both Canada and the United States swiftly rejected this idea.

He concluded his journey in Miami, waiting for President Trump’s phone call — a call that never came.

Guaido protested in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2020 from The Canary

The Failure Of Guaidó Was Evident As Soon As He Declared His False Presidency

For those of us who follow Venezuela closely, the failure of  Guaidó is not a surprise. His self-appointment violated Venezuelan law and it was evident that Maduro legitimately won re-election with widespread public support. The people of Venezuela have a deep understanding of US imperialism and will not give up the independence and sovereignty they have fought so hard for since the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998.

On the anniversary of his self-declaration as president, Supuesto Negado mockingly reported: “Guaidó did not come to his anniversary party… It was expected that January 23 would be considered again the day of freedom, the end of the dictatorship, but no one really celebrated anything. Not a candle, not a piñata. No one remembered it. No one called to congratulate him. No one came to the party.”

Instead, members of the National Assembly danced to celebrate Guaido’s defeat as president of the Assembly and President Maduro spoke at a massive rally in Caracas at the Miraflores Palace saying, “A comedy began on January 23, 2019. A year ago they tried to impose a coup d’etat on our people, and the gringos went out into the world to say this is going to be quick and easy, and a year later we have taught North American and European imperialism a lesson!” He also announced a dialogue with the opposition so that the National Electoral Council can prepare elections for the National Assembly and confidently invited the UN to appoint a delegation of international observers for the parliamentary elections along with Mexico, Argentina, Panama, and the European Union. He urged Trump to give up on “the boob” and said, “if the president of the United States, Donald Trump gets tired of the lies of Mike Pompeo and Elliott Abrams, the Venezuelan government is willing to engage in dialogue.”

Even though Guaidó’s visit to the UK was kept under wraps until Monday 20, he was met by protesters on the 21st at the first stop on his failed European tour. The Canary reports “a protest was organized in London against Guaidó’s visit. Demonstrators called for Guaidó to be “put on trial,” not legitimized by UK government. Jorge Martin, who founded Hands Off Venezuela following the failed 2002 coup said: “This person should be arrested and put on trial in Venezuela for having attempted to overthrow the democratically elected government.”

Wherever he went there were protests. In Brussels, a woman was arrested for hitting Guaidó with cake. In Spain, activists from different social organizations gathered in front of the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Madrid to repudiate the visit of Guaidó with posters that described Guaidó as “clown manufactured by the empire.”  AP reported that protesters referred “to the politician as ‘clown’ and ‘puppet’ of the US.  ‘No to imperialist interference in Venezuela and Latin America,’ read a big banner that also showed support to ‘Venezuela’s people and Nicolás Maduro.’”

In Florida, opponents of the coup published a statement saying, “On the occasion of the visit of US puppet Juan Guaidó to Miami this weekend, the US Hands Off Venezuela South Florida Coalition denounces Washington’s policy of sanctions, currency freezes, and other forms of economic warfare now burdening the people of Venezuela. . . Over the past year, Washington has used Juan Guaidó as a tool in its attempt to replace the elected government of Venezuela.” Even in the stronghold of support for the coup in the US Guaidó only spoke to a crowd of 3,500 announcing his plan to return to Venezuela.

Guaido with Mike Pence, US Vice President.

The US Spends Hundreds of Millions on the Farce Coup

The United States, seeing the incredible riches of Venezuela – oil, gold, diamonds, gas, precious minerals and freshwater – has spent hundreds of millions to put in place their puppet. The corruption of Guaido and the corruption tied to US dollars was one reason he lost control of the National Assembly, which is now investigating US funding.

While Guaidó has been shrinking, Maduro has been growing stronger. Maduro has signed more than 500 bilateral agreements with China that put in place a long-term economic relationship. Russia has provided military, intelligence, and economic support. He has signed new agreements with Iran for medicine, food, energy, and healthcare. Venezuela has met its goal and delivered more than three million social housing units for more than 10 million people. This year economists are predicting the Venezuelan economy will expand and people are seeing the country as a paradox of stability. Some suggested that Maduro was the man of the year for successfully standing up to the Trump coup.

The never-in-power and disappearing Guaido is especially ironic for us as we will be going to trial on February 11 for what Telesur described as “an epic act of resistance in the trial of our times.” The strange thing is the courtroom is likely to be a fictional space where Guaidó is president due to US court decisions that do not allow courts to question foreign policy decisions of the president. It is not clear whether we will get a fair trial, but we are continuing our fight to end US imperialism and for justice for the people of Venezuela. It is time for the US economic war and tragic regime change campaign to end.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from Club Orlov

The United States has become a “force of evil” against the people who want to reform things, renowned director Oliver Stone told former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa during an interview Wednesday in his RT show ‘Conversando con Correa’ (Speaking With Correa).

The conversation started with an overview of Stone’s life and career, before plunging into the subject of politics, the world’s current woes, the role played by the U.S. in global politics and the presidency of Donald Trump.

Midnight Express’s author considers that Trump has done “horrible things” like pulling out of the Paris climate accords and the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. However, he argued that at least, he had the merit to ask why the U.S. needs to fight with Russia, alarming thus the mainstream media who kept on attacking him from the first day.

“It’s all right-wings fighting with right-wings […] Democrats are no better than Republicans,” Stone said, adding that “there is no party in the United States, no democratic voice except third parties that are small, that would say ‘Why are we fighting wars?’”

“Hillary Clinton and her group, and Joe Biden, are just as pro-war as any Republican Dick Cheney.”

In short, the U.S. is “the greatest hypnosis the world has ever seen (…) It sells the same story, again and again, that it is the best country in the world,” the filmmaker claimed adding that all evidence shows the opposite and the U.S. has been responsible for the death of millions of people all around the world, from Iraq to Syria, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, among other countries.

Correa and his guest also evoked the documentary film ‘Al Sur de la Frontera’ (South of the Border) made by Stone, released in 2009, in which the filmmaker interviewed then progressive leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Cuba, and Ecuador.

“[Hugo] Chavez was the base, the nucleus, who introduced me to all the leaders: we went to visit Lula, Nestor Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner, [Fernando] Lugo in Paraguay, and you in Ecuador, and Cuba … And Bolivia … it was an experience that opened my eyes,” Stone said, adding that the documentary was totally ignored by the mainstream media in the U.S.

“I was an enemy,” he said, recalling that he was once invited to the New York Times where journalists asked him how he had come to respect Chavez.

“It was then clear to me: there is no way to win the debate on South America,” he noted, describing events such as those that occurred in Brazil when former President Dilma Rousseff was impeached and Lula imprisoned, as a “comedy.”

Stone concluded that what happened with the Soviet Union will happen to the US.

“Something is going to happen because we have pushed ourselves to the limit, we are completely corrupting history. Unfortunately, because I want my country, we have become a force of evil. A force of evil against people. Against people who want reforms, who want to change things.”

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Featured image: U.S. director Oliver Stone during an interview with former Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa in his RT show. | Photo: RT

A five-alarm fire has broken out in a little known, but critically important area of the financial system where high-quality bonds are swapped for cash. The “repo” market, which is short for repurchase agreements, is part of the nondeposit, shadow banking system that remains largely unregulated despite the fact that it was ground zero in the 2008 financial crisis.

On September 17, 2019, the repo market was whipsawed by a sudden spike in short-term interest rates that rose from the Fed’s target rate of roughly 2% to an eye-popping 10% in a matter of hours. The incident, that put traders into an immediate frenzy, sent the Fed scrambling for the printing presses where it swiftly rolled-off $75 billion to finance additional short-term loans and to add liquidity to a market badly in need of cash. The Fed’s efforts did in fact bring rates back down to the 2% target-range but at great cost to its credibility. Despite repeated assurances that the financial crisis was over, the Fed has resumed pumping $60 billion per month into a market that is liquidity-starved and dangerously out-of-whack. In truth, the only thing preventing another spike in rates followed by an excruciating debt cascade, is the Central Bank’s ability to bury the problem under a mountain of freshly-minted dollar bills. Absent that, another cataclysmic crash would be unavoidable. Check out this excerpt from an article from Wall Street on Parade:

“According to the data made available on the public website of the New York Fed, since September 17, 2019 it has funneled a cumulative total of $6.6 trillion to some of the 24 trading houses on Wall Street that are known as its “primary dealers.” The giant sum has been sluiced to Wall Street in the form of repurchase agreement (repo) loans without any details being provided to the elected representatives in Congress as to which firms are getting the money or what it’s being ultimately used for.” (“Fed repos have plowed $6.6 trillion to Wall Street in 4 months”, Wall Street on Parade)

The Fed is swapping cash for collateral of unknown quality. The public doesn’t know the terms under which these agreements have been made nor do they know whether the banks are concealing their own insolvency as they did following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. What we do know, however, is that the Fed has provided a “cumulative total of $6.6 trillion” at the discounted rate of 1.55% to the most distrusted institutions in America without any congressional oversight, without any independent review of the process, and without the American people having the slightest idea of the risks that are involved in blindly rolling over trillions of dollars of short-term loans to these thoroughly corrupt and totally unreformable financial institutions.

The Fed has no intention of allowing the public to know what’s really going on behind the scenes. Remember, the Fed “battled in court for more than two years to keep the details of its loans a secret from Congress and the American people”, so they’re certainly not going to do an about-face and open up today. No, what they are going to do is push the envelope as far as they can, operate far beyond their legal mandate, and conceal their inappropriate or illegal activity behind an iron wall of obfuscation and denial. Keep in mind, no one knew the extent of the Fed’s lavish handouts until years after the dust had settled. Check it out:

“When the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, the General Accountability Office (GAO), tallied up the cumulative total that the Federal Reserve had secretly sluiced to Wall Street from December 2007 through July 21, 2010, it came to $16.1 trillion. But the GAO did not include all of the programs that came out of the New York Fed. When those other programs are added, the Levy Economics Institute, using the Fed’s own data, arrived at the tally of $19.559 trillion to the Wall Street trading houses and another $10 trillion in central bank liquidity swaps, bringing the bailout figure to over $29 trillion.” (“Fed Repos Have Plowed $6.6 Trillion to Wall Street in Four Months”, Wall Street on Parade)

So “over $29 trillion” was shoveled into the banking system without congressional approval and without the American people having any idea of how they were being finagled. We should probably expect the same underhanded goings on in the current crisis, in fact, that looks to be the case. The Fed is not going to acknowledge what it is doing and the media is not going to publish the details. It’s a conspiracy of silence.

Some readers may remember the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that was created to purchase the “toxic assets” that were supposedly “clogging” the financial system and dragging the Wall Street banks towards insolvency. Originally, that program was rejected by Congress which triggered a panic on Wall Street sending stocks into a steep 700-plus point nosedive. Following that bloodletting, the Fed decided to bypass Congress in the future and, instead, usurp extraordinary powers it was never intended to have. And since the Fed has never been challenged on the matter, it has made the brash assumption that it can meddle in the markets whenever it chooses printing as much money as it likes.

The results of the Fed’s chronic interventions, its uber-accommodative policy, and its perennial low interest rates, are plain to see. Stock and bond prices have gone through the roof soaring to record highs on an almost daily basis. To appreciate the magnitude of this unprecedented 11 year bull market, it helps to know where it all began, that is, with the first round of Quantitative Easing (QE) that was launched in December 2008 when the Fed purchased $600 billion in mortgage-backed securities(MBS) and $100 billion in other debt. Naturally, when hundreds of billions of dollars are pumped into the financial system, prices rise. And rise they did. Take a look at the “highs and lows” of the three main indices since the end of the Great Recession in 2009:

On March 6, 2009, the The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) touched a low of 6,547. Today, (January 28, 2020) the Dow is 28,722 points, more than 4 times higher. On March 9, 2009, the S&P 500 hit a low of 676 points. Today it is 3,276 more than 4 times higher. As for the NASDAQ which dropped to 1,268 on March 9, 2009. Today, the index has climbed to 9,269 nearly 7 times its 2009 value. At the same time, business investment remains at historic lows, personal consumption is flat, wages have stagnated, and the economy is still in the throes of the weakest expansion in the post WW2 era. Bottom line: The stock and bond markets have not thrived because of a strong economy but because the Fed is engaged in the greatest bubble-blowing experiment in history. The $60 billion per month infusions into the repo market just adds more helium to the bubble.

So, what impact have the Fed’s capital injections into the repo market had?

By boosting liquidity and acting as lender of last resort in the daily swapping of cash for collateral, the Fed has been able to calm the markets and keep interest rates where it wants them. But the additional flood of cash has also ignited a stock market rally similar to earlier incidents when the Fed used QE to increase reserves. So, what impact have the Fed’s injections had on stock prices? Check out this clip from market analyst Jim Bianco at Mish Talk:

“There is no such thing as a one-factor model to explain the stock market. Metrics such as the Fed’s balance sheet, repo, etc. cannot explain the stock market’s movements in isolation.

That said, when the Fed injects money, funds generally flow to the best-returning market. During the financial crisis, it was the bond market. Today, as was the case in 1999, it is the stock market….. a big part of this year nearly 30% stock market gain has come on the heels of Fed moves, much like last year’s 20% decline was coincident with the Fed’s hawkish rhetoric.” (“Jim Bianco Says This Is QE, Like Y2K”, Mish Talk)

For more clarity on this point, we turn to a brief clip of an interview with economist David Rosenberg who explains that, when the Fed pumps liquidity into markets, stocks rally.

“This is a liquidity and momentum driven market. It’s been that way for the past four months where the correlation between the S&P 500 and the Fed’s balance sheet has expanded to a 95% relationship. This is a case of a very accommodative Fed policy. The double-digit growth in the money supply is bypassing the real economy and has entered into asset markets broadly, and specifically into equities. So as long as the Fed is in the game priming the monetary pump, shorting stocks is going to be a very dangerous game to play….

The power of the Fed has become so acute that it has replaced the economy as a principle influence over the stock market to the point where there is only a 7% correlation between GDP and the S&P 500. Historically, in any given cycle that relationship was anywhere between 30% and 70%.” (“David Rosenberg Warns “We’re Going To Have Helicopter Money”, Zero Hedge)

The scale of the Fed’s manipulation is truly breathtaking. Stocks are not rising on the strength of the economy, but on the jet-fuel from digitally-generated money produced with the flip of a switch in the basement of the Eccles Building. Has there ever been a bigger fraud perpetrated on the American people?

But what are the downside risks of such an operation?

Once again, Wall Street on Parade helps to answer this question in a recent article. Here’s an excerpt:

“On Monday, a member of the New York Fed’s own Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets, Scott Minerd, published a critique which he headlined as follows: “Global Central Banks Fueling a Ponzi Market,” with this scary subhead: “Ultimately, investors will awaken to the rising tide of defaults and downgrades.”

The thrust of the article is that central banks (which include the New York Fed’s Wall Street money spigot that was launched on September 17, 2019) are creating a Ponzi scheme of liquidity that is hiding the true state of risk in both the stock and bond markets. The implication is that without the Fed’s cheap money flooding markets, interest rates on questionable debt would be much higher, thus providing a red flag for investors. Minerd develops his thesis as follows:

“The disturbing trend is that despite the rally in risk assets in the prior year, the number of defaults rose by approximately 50 percent, according to data compiled by J.P. Morgan. Additionally, the number of distressed exchanges increased by 400 percent.

“This correlates well with our observation that the number of idiosyncratic defaults has been increasing. … However, that day of reckoning when spreads rise is being held off by the flood of central bank liquidity and international investors fleeing negative yields overseas.” (“The Man Who Advises the New York Fed Says It and Other Central Banks Are “Fueling a Ponzi Market” Wall Street on Parade)

Defaults are rising because corporations and financial institutions can no longer roll over the prodigious pile of debt they’ve accumulated in the last few years due to the Fed’s easy money policies. So even though stocks continue to steadily climb higher, the rot at the foundation of the system is becoming more and more apparent. As defaults increase, more liquidity will be sucked from the system, deflationary pressures will build, the economy will stall, and stocks will fall back to earth.

But the greatest threat posed by the Fed’s reckless “repo” policy is not the threat of another giant asset bubble but the possibility that US Treasuries will lose their exalted role as the world’s preeminent “risk free” asset of choice. Keep in mind, that the way the Fed finances these repos, is identical to the way it conducted QE, by buying U.S. Treasury bills and other high-rated securities from the banks for cash. These securities serve as collateral for the underlying loan, and the banks buy them back with interest. This unconventional expansion of the Fed’s balance sheet calls into question the true value of USTs which are increasingly used as a tool for preventing crises. Former Fed governor Kevin Warsh pointed out the pitfalls of the Fed’s strategy in an article in the Wall Street Journal titled “The New Malaise”. Here’s what he said:

“The Fed’s increased presence in the market for long-term Treasury securities also poses nontrivial risks. The Treasury market is special. It plays a unique role in the global financial system. It is a corollary to the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. The prices assigned to Treasury securities–the risk-free rate–are the foundation from which the price of virtually every asset in the world is calculated. As the Fed’s balance sheet expands, it becomes more of a price maker than a price taker in the Treasury market. And if market participants come to doubt these prices–or their reliance on these prices proves fleeting–risk premiums across asset classes and geographies could move unexpectedly. The shock that hit the financial markets in 2008 upon the imminent failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gives some indication of the harm that can be done when assets perceived to be relatively riskless turn out not to be.” (“The New Malaise”, Kevin Warsh, Wall Street Journal.)

With the National Debt hovering at $23 trillion, one would think the Fed would be more cautious in its misuse of USTs to shore up transactions in the repo market. If present trends continue, it’s only a matter of time before foreign central banks trim their stockpiles of USTs and seek a more reliable source of value. Any significant shift away from risk free US debt will send shock-waves through the global economy. It would portend an abrupt changing of the guard and the onset of a new order.

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Featured image is from The Unz Review

As the UK leaves the European Union, Philip Allott (University of Cambridge) reflects on ten occasions when Britain has badly misjudged and mishandled challenges to its hegemony – both internal and external – and traces the cause to the dominance of the executive branch.

An alternative British political history since 1945 could focus on a remarkable series of failures by British governments which have seriously damaged the country. We who have lived through them have tended to regard them as natural and inevitable. They are not.

National humiliation … Suez. A cutaway from The Eagle magazine, November 1956. Image: ausdew. Public domain

Unusually, it is possible to identify the probable cause. After World War One, the executive branch of government found that it had acquired a de facto dominance over the House of Commons, which thereafter became its poodle. Lord Hewart called it ‘the new despotism’ (1929). Lord Hailsham called it ‘elective dictatorship’ (1976).

Liberal democracy, as practice and philosophy, is Britain’s greatest achievement. It is the fruit of a continuous process of constitutional evolution from Anglo-Saxon times, as the country adapted, to use the Darwinian word, to our ever-changing circumstances with an almost miraculous intuitive intelligence. We have not made the mistake made by so many other countries of adopting a written constitution, transient selfie of the distribution of power at the time when it is written. It is time for us to adapt yet again, before it is too late.

It was inevitable that India would become independent soon after World War Two. It was not inevitable that it would do so in a state of chaos whose effects are felt to the present day.

It was inevitable that we would give up our empire, under the pressure not least of the insidious populist doctrine of self-determination preached by a self-interested United States. It was not inevitable that we should do so in such haste in countries often lacking the most basic structures of modern society.

It was inevitable that President Nasser of Egypt would take control of the Suez Canal. It was not inevitable that our government would cause it to be a national humiliation affecting every aspect of our foreign policy for years to come.

It was inevitable that the United States would take over from us as a global imperial power. It was not inevitable that it would do so on such terms as those dictated by the US at Bretton Woods, or that our government would believe the illusion that the ruthless government of the United States is our special friend.

It was inevitable that the war-torn nations of Europe would create a new basis of their co-existence other than diplomacy and war. It was not inevitable that we would join the new European system late, without any enthusiasm and without any plan for playing our part. At that time we had what were probably the best civil service and diplomatic service in the world. We might have played a leading role.

Gross British misgovernment and disdain of Ireland over the course of centuries had made some sort of Irish independence inevitable. Ireland has always been, since earliest times, a source of cultural and personal enrichment for Britain. It was not inevitable that a form of agreement would only be found after years of violence and suffering.

It was inevitable that, sooner or later, we would have to modernise our position in relation to the smaller Arab states bordering the Persian Gulf. It was not inevitable that in 1971 the government would abandon a great achievement of British diplomacy, dating from 1820, leaving the fabulous wealth of the area to the reconstituted states and to global oil and gas corporations.

It was inevitable that, after the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe, a new structure would be created for their relationship with the new Europe. To this day, it is not clear why the government took the lead in a policy of more or less immediate full membership for the ex-Soviet states, leaving the suspicion that they had the vague idea that it would dilute the coherence of the EU of which the UK itself, with amazing tolerance on the part of the other member states, had already made itself into a semi-detached member.

It was inevitable that age-old sentiment in Scotland about its place in the United Kingdom would have to be faced by the British government. It was not inevitable that this would be done in a referendum which did not seek the opinion of the whole population of the United Kingdom. Scotland has contributed an enormous amount to the history, the culture, the social order and the economy of this country, and to the making and managing of the Empire. It was not inevitable but scandalous that its future and the future of the United Kingdom would be made to rest on such a one-off ‘in or out’ basis.

It was inevitable that government would have to respond to gathering opposition to British membership of the European Union. It was a legitimate political decision to consult the British people and to decide to implement the outcome of a referendum. It was not inevitable that implementing those decisions would be carried out in political and diplomatic chaos, profoundly unsettling the future of the country for many years to come.

The remedy for all this misgovernment must be found in restoring the dialectical secret at the heart of Britain’s unique form of liberal democracy, in which government and opposition struggle vigorously and co-operate effectively in the task of good government, with everyday public opinion and occasional general elections always having the last word.

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Philip Allott is Professor Emeritus of International Public Law at Cambridge University, a Fellow of Trinity College, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He was at one time a legal adviser in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

In response to the Trump regime’s annexation scheme of the century, Palestinians have binding recourse — in the General Assembly, not the Security Council.

US veto power prevents adoption of a SC resolution that upholds their rights under international law.

By invoking General Assembly Uniting for Peace Resolution 377 (1950), SC actions can be overridden by a two-thirds majority vote of UN member states.

This step if taken and adopted by the GA cannot be overturned by SC veto.

GA Res. 377 can be invoked immediately by a UN member state at times when SC members fail to act as required to maintain international peace and security.

The State of Palestine exists — on the one hand as a PLO-represented observer state.

More importantly, the PLO  adopted the Palestinian Declaration of Independence on November 15, 1988 — drafted by Law Professor Francis Boyle, its legal advisor at the time.

He explained that Palestinian statehood is “determinative, definitive, and irreversible,” adding:

Palestine satisfies all essential criteria for sovereign independence and full de jure UN membership.

All UN Charter states (including America and Israel) provisionally recognized Palestinian independence in accordance with UN Charter article 80(1) and League Covenant article 22(4).

As the League’s successor, the General Assembly has exclusive legal authority to designate the PLO Palestine’s legitimate representative.

The Palestine National Council (PNC) is the PLO’s legislative body. It’s empowered to proclaim the existence of Palestine.

According to the binding 1925 Palestine Citizenship Order in Council, Palestinians, their children and grandchildren automatically become citizens.

So do diaspora Palestinians.

Those living in Israel, Jordan, and elsewhere have dual nationalities.

Occupied Territory residents remain “protected persons” (under Fourth Geneva) until a final peace settlement is reached.

According to the following characteristics, Palestine qualifies for world community recognition as a de jure UN member state — with all rights and privileges of other world body members:

It’s territory is determinable even though not necessarily fixed, its borders negotiable, the state comprised of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza — where Palestinians have lived for thousands of years, deserving legal recognition of sovereignty over their homeland.

Palestine has a fixed population and functioning government. It supports peace, stability, and cooperative relations with other nations.

It accepts UN Charter provisions and can administer them on their own, along with the ability to establish diplomatic relations with other states.

Palestine fully qualifies for world recognition as a UN member state. If gotten, it can render Trump’s no-peace/peace scheme stillborn.

The General Assembly has sole UN member state admission authority, not the SC.

By invoking GA Res. 377, Palestinians can petition the General Assembly for de jure recognition as a UN member state.

Yet Israeli installed Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas never took this step and is highly unlikely to go this route ahead — why new leadership is essential to pursue fundamental rights Palestinians have been long denied.

Francis Boyle earlier predicted that Palestine “would eventually achieve de jure diplomatic recognition from about 130 states” if its leadership formally seeks it.

He prepared the roadmap for its recognition as a UN member state — by “invok(ing) the UN General Assembly’s Uniting for Peace Resolution…to overcome US vetoes at the Security Council.”

Never taken before, now is the time to go this route in the wake of Trump’s annexation scheme.

Separately I said united under new leadership there’s hope for Palestinians. Divided under traitors in Ramallah serving Israeli interests as its enforcer there’s none.

On Friday, Trump regime UN envoy Kelly Craft warned Palestinians against pursuing their case in the Security Council.

Its UN envoy Riyad Mansour said he’d seek SC support for a draft resolution that counters Trump’s scheme by upholding Palestinian right — a dead-on-arrival initiative.

If followed by invoking GA Res 377, General Assembly UN member states can override the SC veto as explained above.

Mansour said no “Palestinian official will meet with American officials now after they submitted an earthquake, the essence of it the destruction of the national aspirations of the Palestinian people.”

Israel’s UN mission said it’s working to thwart (Palestinian) efforts, and will lead a concerted diplomatic campaign with the US.”

Palestinians have a choice. Invoke GA Res. 377, seeking a two-thirds UN member state majority for their rights or face continued subjugation under Israel’s repressive boot — fully supported by the US and West.

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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.

Film-maker Oliver Stone has won 12 Academy Awards for his films.  But this outstanding record doesn’t help when he seeks financing for a film critical of one of America’s wars.

“You do those kinds of stories, it’s not going to happen.”  Stone said that his dissent from the pro-war narrative has brought him “economic censorship.” See this. 

Hollywood practices the same censorship as CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the presstitutes who champion war. Stone notes that we never hear the point of view from the countries that are labeled “threats,” such as Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela.  

The Democrat and Republican political parties are also all for war. The Democrats won’t even let Tulsi Gabbard participate in the New Hampshire presidential Town Halls, because she is not a partisan of war.

Stone says that the fact that Democrat leaders such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are as pro-war as Dick Cheney and the Zionist neocons “shows you how locked up America is.”  As Putin said in the interviews Stone did with him, “It doesn’t make a difference who is President of the United States.”  Washington’s  policy is hegemony achieved through war.

Trump said that he wanted to get America out of war.  Trump said he would normalize relations with Russia and withdraw American forces from the countries that George W. Bush and Obama had invaded with US troops or with proxies called “freedom fighters.”  However, under pressure from “Russiagate” and “impeach-gate,” Trump has fruitlessly sought protection from the powerful Israel Lobby, all for naught.  The most active people in Trump’s impeachment are Jewish members of the Democrat majority in the house and most of the contrived and false witness testimony against Trump was from Jews.  

Nevertheless, Trump has put his presidency at the service of Israel.  Trump recently said that he withdrew from the solid multi-state agreement with Iran, which Iran kept by ceasing to enrich uranium that could be used for weapons, because Israel wanted him to.  Here is Trump in his own words kowtowing to Netanyahu at a joint press conference with indicted felon Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, in Washington on Tuesday, January 28, 2020, a performance by an American President that must embarrass every American and make them feel deep shame:

“As everyone knows I have done a lot for Israel; moving the United States embassy to Jerusalem [al-Quds], recognizing the Golan Heights, and frankly perhaps most importantly, getting out of the terrible Iran nuclear deal,” said the US president to a roaring pro-Israel audience at the White House.

Trump’s movement of the US embassy to Jerusalem is contrary to the position held by the rest of the world and by Washington until Trump violated the UN position.  Trump does not own the Syrian Golan Heights, Israeli seized territory that cannot be annexed into Israel according to international law, and has no authority or legal power, other than might is right, to give Syrian territory to Israel.  But Trump did.  

Notice:  Trump provides reasons for impeaching him, but it would have required the Democrats to take a position against Israel, something they will never do.  And neither will the Republicans. Both parties are owned lock, stock and barrel by the Israel Lobby.

Therefore, America’s war in Israel’s behalf in the Middle East will continue.  Israel wants the water resources of southern Lebanon, and as Israel’s two failed attempts demonstrate Israel is unable to achieve this on its own.

Twice Israel sent the vaunted Israeli Army into southern Lebanon to occupy the region, and twice the vaunted Israeli Army was sent fleeing for its life by the Hezbollah militia.

Hezbollah is funded and supplied by Syria and Iran, and this is the reason that Netanyahu is using his puppet, the President of the United States Donald Trump, to continue to create conditions for Americans to die fighting for Israel against Syria and Iran.  

Trump would willfully comply with Netanyahu’s instructions, but Russia is in the way.

The question before us is whether Russia in order to gain acceptance from the West will sell out Syria and Iran in exchange for membership in the corrupt politics and social dysfunction of the Western World.  

Considering the Western interests of significant Russian movers and shakers —oligarchs—who were enriched by the US takeover of Russia during the Yeltsin years, it is not inconceivable that the Russian government would accept Greater Israel in the Middle East in exchange for membership in the Western World.

Russia is very susceptable to being corrupted by the West.  Life under communism, or tales thereof, have prejudiced much of Russian youth against Russia.  There is a belief that America is Nirvana where streets are paved with gold.  The success of American propaganda is world wide, and this is a huge weakness for Russia.  Today Washington-financed NGOs can bring thousands of Russian youth into the streets to protest Putin, which makes headlines in the US and supports Washington’s propaganda that Putin is a dictator who suppresses Russian democracy.  That the Russian government permits this fifth column activity indicates a lack of confidence on the part of the Russian government. Washington seizes on the lack of Russian confidence and increases the pressure.

With Washington and its European vassals operating against Russia every minute of every day, week, month, year, the Russian government could fall again as it did in 1991.  Russia is far from home free. Russian sovereignty is still not guaranteed. 

Washington is the source of war.  Washington is the only country that invades, bombs, demonizes, and threatens other countries.  The threat of war resides only in Washington. 

Trump murdered a high-ranking government official of Iran, Soleimani, who was on a peace mission on a commercial flight to Iraq where he was invited.  This was both a crime and an act of war.  Russia suppressed the Iranian response, so now Washington is threatening to murder the successor of Soleimani.  

The world turns a blind eye.  Americans are indoctrined to see Iran, like Russia and China and North Korea and Venezuela, as an enemy.  So the more Iranians who are killed, the happier the indoctrinated Americans.

Europe and Japan, being Washington’s vassals, are useless in introducing any restraint and intelligence into deterring Washington’s drive for world hegemony in Israel’s service.  

The conclusion is that War Is Our Future.  The coronavirus, assuming it is not just another pandemic hype like bird flu, SARS, swine flue, etc., will kill far less people than nuclear weapons.

Indeed, Washington and its wars are a threat to the life of planet Earth. The world is trapped in Washington and Israel’s ambitions.  As Russia and China refuse to put their foot down and continue to stupidly open themselves to American interference and, perhaps, biological attack, war is our future. When the button is pushed, we will cease to exist.  And so will the animals, the birds, the plants and trees. 

Only ruin created by Washington will remain.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

There is a real danger for foreign policy advisors and analysts – and especially those they serve – when they are in a bubble, an echo chamber, and all of their conclusions are based on faulty inputs. Needless to say it’s even worse when they believe they can create their own reality and invent outcomes out of whole cloth.

Things seldom go as planned in these circumstances.

President Trump was sold a bill of goods on the assassination of Iran’s revered military leader, Qassim Soleimani, likely by a cabal around Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the long-discredited neocon David Wurmser. A former Netanyahu advisor and Iraq war propagandist, Wurmser reportedly sent memos to his mentor, John Bolton, while Bolton was Trump’s National Security Advisor (now, of course, he’s the hero of the #resistance for having turned on his former boss) promising that killing Soleimani would be a cost-free operation that would catalyze the Iranian people against their government and bring about the long-awaited regime change in that country. The murder of Soleimani – the architect of the defeat of ISIS – would “rattle the delicate internal balance of forces and the control over them upon which the [Iranian] regime depends for stability and survival,” wrote Wurmser.

As is most often the case with neocons, he was dead wrong.

The operation was not cost-free. On the contrary. Assassinating Soleimani on Iraqi soil resulted in the Iraqi parliament – itself the product of our “bringing democracy” to the country – voting to expel US forces even as the vote by the people’s representatives was roundly rejected by the people who brought the people the people’s representatives. In a manner of speaking.

Trump’s move had an effect opposite to the one promised by neocons. It did not bring Iranians out to the street to overthrow their government –  it catalyzed opposition across Iraq’s various political and religious factions to the continued US military presence and further tightened Iraq’s relationship with Iran. And short of what would be a catastrophic war initiated by the US (with little or no support from allies), there is not a thing Trump can do about it.

Iran’s retaliatory attack on two US bases in Iraq was initially sold by President Trump as merely a pin-prick. No harm, no foul, no injuries. This despite the fact that he must have known about US personnel injured in the attack. The reason for the lie was that Trump likely understands how devastating it would be to his presidency to escalate with Iran. So the truth began to trickle out slowly – 11 US military members were injured, but it was just “like a headache.” Now we know that 50 US troops were treated for traumatic brain injury after the attack. This may not be the last of it – but don’t count on the mainstream media to do any reporting.

The Iranian FARS news agency reported at the time of the attack that US personnel had been injured and the response by the US government was to completely take that media outlet off the Internet by order of the US Treasury!

Today the US House voted to cancel the 2002 authorization for war on Iraq and to prohibit the use of funds for war on Iran without Congressional authorization. It is a significant, if largely symbolic, move to rein in the oft-used excuse of the Iraq war authorization for blatantly unrelated actions like the assassination of Soleimani and Obama’s thousands of airstrikes on Syria and Iraq.

President Trump has argued that prohibiting funds for military action against Iran actually makes war more likely, as he would be restricted from the kinds of military-strikes-short-of-war like his attack on Syria after the alleged chemical attack in Douma in 2018 (claims which have recently fallen apart). The logic is faulty and reflects again the danger of believing one’s own propaganda. As we have seen from the Iranian military response to the Soleimani assassination, Trump’s military-strikes-short-of-war are having a ratchet-like effect rather than a pressure-release or deterrent effect.

As the financial and current events analysis site ZeroHedge put it recently:

[S]ince last summer’s “tanker wars”, Trump has painted himself into a corner on Iran, jumping from escalation to escalation (to this latest “point of no return big one” in the form of the ordered Soleimani assassination) — yet all the while hoping to avoid a major direct war. The situation reached a climax where there were “no outs” (Trump was left with two ‘bad options’ of either back down or go to war).

The Iranians have little to lose at this point and America’s European allies are, even if impotent, fed up with the US obsession with Saudi Arabia and Israel as a basis for its Middle East policy.

So why open this essay with a photo of Trump celebrating his dead-on-arrival “Deal of The Century” for Israel and Palestine? Because this is once again a gullible and weak President Trump being led by the nose into the coming Middle East conflagration. Left without even a semblance of US sympathy for their plight, the Palestinians after the roll-out of this “peace” plan will again see that they have no friends outside Syria, Iran, and Lebanon. As Israel continues to flirt with the idea of simply annexing large parts of the West Bank, it is clear that the brakes are off of any Israeli reticence to push for maximum control over Palestinian territory. So what is there to lose?

Trump believes he’s advancing peace in the Middle East, while the excellent Mondoweiss website rightly observes that a main architect of the “peace plan,” Trump’s own son-in-law Jared Kushner, “taunts Palestinians because he wants them to reject his ‘peace plan.’” Rejection of the plan is a green light to a war of annihilation on the Palestinians.

It appears that the center may not hold, that the self-referential echo chamber that passes for Beltway “expert” analysis will again be caught off guard in the consequence-free profession that is neocon foreign policy analysis. “Gosh we didn’t see that coming!” But the next day they are back on the teevee stations as great experts.

Clouds gathering…

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The UK government updated the Ministerial Code last August. Its introduction is written Boris Johnson and starts like this: “We must win back the trust of the British people, we must uphold the very highest standards of propriety – and this code sets out how we must do so. There must be no bullying and no harassment; no leaking; no breach of collective responsibility. No misuse of taxpayer money and no actual or perceived conflicts of interest. The precious principles of public life enshrined in this document – integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest – must be honoured at all times; as must the political impartiality of our much-admired civil service.”

Before even scrutinising this 36-page document any further than page one, I practically choked on my morning brew.

The country is now more divided over Brexit than over any political matter than before the Great War and it was the politicians who divided it – no-one else. The Tory party are the Brexit party – they own it, lock, stock and barrel.

The very highest standards of propriety have either been completely ignored or avoided to achieve this massive gain for the corporations who pumped millions into the next stage of their neoliberal model. Morality, correctness, legitimacy, respectability and suitability are all characteristics of propriety – characteristics that Boris Johnson and his team find both inconvenient and detrimental to their personal ambitions.

The misuse of taxpayer money and conflicts of interest are at the very heart of questions hanging over our Prime Minister right now. Personally, I don’t care what Boris Johnson does in his private life but the Arcuri scandal is about public funds, not his private life, it’s about conflict of interest, not his inability to control himself. And let’s consider ‘integrity, objectivity, accountability, transparency, honesty and leadership in the public interest’ when Johnson answers questions about the involvement of Russia and its funding of the Tory party and interference into our politics. The trouble is Johnson is none of the honourable things we expect from those in high office. The truth will simply not emerge in this informational war against accountability.

As for the ‘political impartiality of our much-admired civil service’ – this government has made no secret of their animosity and contempt towards the department that has been the backbone of the government since the 1850s. Threats and public shaming have been issued to anyone in the service who do not comply. One senior civil servant wrote recently that the service will turn into – “an increasingly partisan US-style civil service that falls into dangerous groupthink.” The service is actually recognised as the most respected civil service in the world and is about to be torn apart by the likes of Dominic Cummings described as a – “shock doctrine aficionado who has seen in Brexit a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to ram through policy ideas that couldn’t be implemented at any other time.”

We shouldn’t forget that it was Cummings and Gove that pushed through the effort to turn 9,000 schools in England into ‘academies’ that has since turned out to be little more than a privatisation drive of public education.

The new code also demands that: “The Ministerial Code should be read against the background of the overarching duty on Ministers to comply with the law and to protect the integrity of public life. They are expected to observe the Seven Principles of Public Life.”

These principles are – selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership.

After reading this – I have a question; where is the advertising standards authority when you need them?

 

Governing with smoke and mirrors

When Bill Deedes was appointed editor of The Daily Telegraph in 1974, he asked his proprietor, Lord Hartwell, if he had any guidance to give as to editorial policy. “Just give Conservative Central Office a ring,” was his Lordship’s advice. Lord Deedes, being a life-long Tory anyway, would not have found that difficult to follow. And so it is to this day – except, the information provided by No10, now regarded as the ‘ministry of propaganda‘ goes without challenge. The Telegraph, along with other gutter papers such as hate rag The Daily Mail, Express and Sun espouse any nonsense now dished out by Downing Street. So unacceptable is this arrangement that Peter Oborne’s truth-fest was nothing more than a scathing attack on his own employers. His blazing words shine out in the fog of the informational war on reality:

“there is now clear evidence that the prime minister has debauched Downing Street by using the power of his office to spread propaganda and fake news. British political journalists have got chillingly close to providing the same service to Boris Johnson that Fox News delivers for Donald Trump.”

The scene of our new political reality has been set. The general public is to be immersed in lies, disinformation and propaganda. And the reason is quite simple. Ask a question about how they will deliver on Brexit, on the crisis that now completely envelopes our public services such as health, education, social services, elderly care, housing and so on – there’s no real answer other than increasing the national debt.

Some of their best answers could be seen at December’s election. A video clip, doctored by Tory party campaigners of Sir Keir Starmer answering a question about Labour’s Brexit policy was falsified to show him lost for words when he had in fact given a full reply without the slightest hesitation. The official Tory answer to Labour’s policy on Brexit was – fake news. It was propaganda of the worst kind.

In the end, it made no difference if you supported the left, right or centre at the last election, the hyper-propagandised anti-Corbyn campaign was the worst political crusade ever witnessed in this country.

The evidence for this came in an 18 page report (HERE pdf) from the London School of Economics, which said British Journalism demonised Jeremy Corbyn by persistently reporting lies about him as if they were fact. They went further to state that ‘scorn, ridicule and personal attacks’ were at the heart of a massive collective disinformation campaign.

Other easy to remember false statements include promises to employ 50,000 NHS nurses, which turned out to be just a play on words and not true. And what of the 20,000 police officers? Boris Johnson claimed it was the police who fired them not his own government. And it wouldn’t be 20,000 extra officers as he claimed – it really meant replacing those that should have been there. Johnson also conveniently failed to mention that 21,000 police support staff had been fired too. And that was only political hot potato in the first place because the Conservative government of Cameron, May and Johnson got its policies all wrong. Somehow, reversing austerity was to be used as campaign material, not an admission of societal breakdown due to their own political failures.

But at least we now have The People’s PMQs. This is something no-one asked for but channels its way into the ‘people’s parliament‘ narrative. It is rambling nonsense. A disjointed 15-minute monologue from what looks like a desperate PM responding to questions from the public on fishing rights to his choice of shampoo, all live-streamed on the propaganda channel of choice – Facebook. It’s no wonder this government refuses to legislate against fake news through foreign digital platforms isn’t it!

Is Brexit done?

One of the many stupid clichés of the never-ending Brexit saga is that Brexit will happen at the end of January. Many people somehow actually believe this. During the last election campaign, Boris Johnson himself was calculated to have said: “Get Brexit Done” at least ten times a day if they voted for him. They did – and Boris has since announced that by the end of January – it will be done.

It’s not until you read this piece by Ian Dunt combined with a whole host of expert contributors of what leaving the EU under Brexit entails – that you fully realise the size of the Brexit lie. The article starts with – “We are about to enter the most perilous system-level recalibration of an advanced economy in trading history” and concludes  “The government either does not know what it is doing or is not prepared to reveal what it is doing. We are heading towards a truly disastrous set of outcomes unless that changes.”

All of these lies, these play on words, the issuance of misinformation and disinformation threatens the very basis on which democracy rests. Add to all this the most recent threats to the BBC’s future and the ongoing preparations for curtailing the power of the courts to determine the legality of ministerial actions, and it is clear that scrutiny and transparency is being assaulted from all directions.

Far from the promises of the dawn of a new era, without the truth to make informed decisions, Britain will slide into darkness and obscurity. Brand UK – looked up to and revered by so many countries around the world will decay in an environment such as this. The damage already done will take years to unravel – if ever it does.

Informed people know this government is only in power because of its lies. Does anyone really think that a ministerial code, with promises written by Boris Johnson himself means anything at all? Does anyone really think these same people will change their strategies and tactics used to lever themselves into power? The reality is, they will double down, they will commit even further the more they get away with it.

We are now in an informational war against reality. And our commander is on the wrong side of that war. And just like all the other disastrous political decisions Britain has made since 1945, and there’s been a few – Brexit will be the one that finally immerses us under the weight of our mistakes. The consequence is that the people of Britain will need a new illusion of reality that all is good.

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I have read through the entire 181 pages of Trump’s “peace deal” for Israel, and it is breathtaking. It is not just that the “solution” it proposes is ludicrously one-sided, it is the entire analysis of the problem to be solved which reads as pure, unadulterated zionist propaganda.

For example, the word “violence” is used repeatedly. But it only ever refers to violence by Arabs. There is not one single mention of violence by Israel against the Palestinians, even though the ratio of killing between Israelis and Palestinians over the last ten years is approximately 80:1 . The only mention of violence against Palestinians at all relates to Kuwaiti expulsion of Palestinian refugees after the first Gulf war.

The analysis of the refugee issue is the same. Nowhere can the paper bring itself to note the key historic fact, that the Palestinian refugees were expelled from Israel. The paper treats Palestinian refugees as if they had simply materialised as an inconvenient phenomenon, like a plague of locusts. This “othering” of Palestinian refugees permeates the entire paper:

It must be stressed that many Palestinian refugees in the Middle East come from war torn countries, such as Syria and Lebanon that are extremely hostile toward the State of Israel

No. Palestinian refugees were driven by violence from the land that is now Israel. Families who lived there two generations ago have been displaced in favour of families who claim the land because their ancestors lived there eighty generations ago. That is a matter of indisputable fact.

You can claim that displacement of the Palestinians from Israel was justifiable because of the urgent need for a state for Jewish people after the Holocaust. You can claim that the displacement of Palestinians from Israel is justifiable because it is divinely ordained. You can claim the displacement of Palestinians from Israel is regrettable but irreversible. Make what argument you wish, but to refuse to acknowledge the basic fact that the Palestinian refugees were driven from Israel is a pathetic act of cowardice that underlines the sheer intellectual shoddiness of the paper.

The “deal” makes a direct equivalence between Palestinian refugees and “the Jewish refugees who were forced to flee from Arab and Muslim countries”. The language here is extremely revealing. The Jewish refugees “were forced to flee”. There is no hesitation about this claim of victimhood. Whereas there is no acknowledgement at all that the Palestinian refugees “were forced to flee” by the Israelis.

It is undoubtedly a valid point that many Jews were disgracefully and involuntarily driven out by Arab nations, and their suffering is too often overlooked. However to claim the numbers are equivalent is to ignore the fact that a significant portion of the Jewish population of Arab states moved voluntarily to the new homeland, whereas none of the Palestinians expelled from Israel left voluntarily. But the more glaring fact ignored in the paper is that the majority of the Jewish refugees from Arab lands were given the property of Palestinian refugees in Israel. The claim that both sides are in equal need of compensation is therefore a nonsense.

The failure to admit the Palestinian refugees were driven out of Israel panders disgracefully to the most extreme zionist propaganda, which claims that the land was empty before the Israelis settled it in 1948. This is a classic colonist origin myth, used repeatedly by the British Empire, by white settlers in the USA, and of course by apartheid South Africa. When the Trump deal was first published, I was genuinely astonished to find twitter awash with thousands of tweets claiming the Palestinians do not exist as a people. This is an extraordinarily prevalent racist trope among zionists and appears to be not policed on the internet at all. I have read hundreds of articles about the hateful phenomenon of anti-semitism in the mainstream media. I don’t think I have ever seen this extreme zionist racism of “there is no such thing as Palestinians” ever mentioned in the MSM as a problem. But zionist racism is a huge problem, and it underlies the fundamental analysis of the Trump paper.

If you cannot bring yourself to acknowledge, even once in 181 pages, that the Palestinian inhabitants were driven out of Israel, there is no chance the proposals built on these fundamentally dishonest foundations will be solid.

The Trump paper has three fundamental “solutions” to the Palestinian refugee issue.

1) Only those originally displaced to be deemed refugees, not their families.
2) Not one single refugee to be allowed to return to Israel (yes, it does actually say that)
3) No compensation to be paid to refugees by Israel

I have often pointed out that the proposed “two state solution” for Palestine has always been no more and no less than the old apartheid policy of “Bantustans” in South Africa, where the indigenous population were herded into six self-governing and four supposedly “independent states”.

It is worth pointing out that the apotheosis of the apartheid system, the Bantu Self-Governing Act of 1959, was given Royal Assent by Queen Elizabeth II, a point now rather skated over by a false narrative that apartheid was a solely Afrikaaner project post-Independence.

The major similarity that I had been pointing out with Bantustans was revealed by the map: fractured lands, not forming any kind of economically viable unit. Trump proposes Israeli annexation of the whole of the Jordan Valley, of North Jerusalem and large areas of the West Bank, the remnant of which is to be shattered by 15 Israeli sovereign settlements connected by Israeli only roads. Trump’s “Palestine” is very plainly not viable.

But the Trump proposals for how “Palestine” will run, make the Bantustan comparison still more stark. Indeed, the restrictions on the so-called “state” of Palestine under the Trump plan from having its own military or security forces are even greater than those imposed on the Bantustans by apartheid South Africa. Trump also proposes that Israel should have the right to stop Palestinian refugees from the wider diaspora entering the new “state” of Palestine.

A “state” not permitted to define its own citizens is not a state.

It does not stop there. The “state” is to have no right to a territorial sea or exclusive economic zone, with its sea to be given to Israel in contravention of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. It is not to be allowed to conclude treaties without Israeli consent. It is not even to be allowed to open a port but to be forced to import and export goods through Israeli ports – in other words, the Israeli economic blockade is to continue on the new “state”. Plainly, even apart from the unviable fracturing and the shrunk territory, the administrative arrangements proposed make no attempt to reach the level of statehood.

Surely, then, the proponents of the “two state solution” must have reacted strongly to this betrayal of their proposal?

Well, no.

In many ways the most incredible thing about the Trump proposals is how welcoming the western powers were. The general reaction from all European governments was that these are serious proposals with which the Palestinians must engage. While the ridiculous assessment from Dominic Raab that “this is clearly a serious proposal” is perhaps what you would expect from a state looking to the US for economic crumbs, the Palestinians might legitimately have expected better from the EU than the official response, which welcomed Trump’s “commitment to a two state solution”, of France which “welcomes Donald Trump’s efforts”, and of Germany which “appreciates that the president is sticking to the two state solution”.

The Palestinians were probably less disappointed by the support of the traitorous dictatorships of the Saudi and other Gulf States for their close Israeli ally, which is par for the course. But the fact that the international community recognises as a proposed “two state solution” a paper which in no sense whatsoever establishes a Palestinian state within any normal definition of the word, should tell us something important.

As I have repeatedly stated, those who trumpeted the “two state solution” have always been con-artists who do not believe in a viable Palestinian state at all. The fact that Blair and Bush, two dedicated ultra-zionists, stood in the Rose Garden and promised a “two state solution” as part of their propaganda for the Iraq War and other Middle East invasions, really should have shown people of goodwill this was a blind alley. The Trump proposals are a betrayal of the Palestinians, of course. But they are not unique to Trump and they are exactly what Blair, Bush and all the zionist apologists intended all along.

The “two state solution” was always a con.

There is no viable two state solution. To create a viable Palestinian state alongside a viable Israeli state would now involve highly undesirable further forced movements of population. The only long term solution for Palestine/Israel is, as with South Africa, a single state in which everybody has a vote and everybody is treated equally, irrespective of ethnicity, creed or gender.

Trump may, peculiarly, have done one good thing with these ludicrously unfair proposals. He has exposed the hollowness of the “two state solution”, and the pretence that it offers any justice to the Palestinians of way forward towards peace.

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An elephant trap has for years now laid in the path of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s messianic plans to establish the state of Israel between the river and the sea.

It was the demographic fact that, in that space, there were more Palestinians than Jews. According to 2016 figures from the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) that were provided to the Israeli Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee, there were 6.5 million Muslims and 6.44 million Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, although those figures are out of date now. The committee referred to Muslims rather than Palestinians, thus excluding Palestinian Christians.

This means that Netanyahu’s annexation plan on its own cannot work. The huge concrete infrastructure with which Israel has cemented its occupation of the West Bank – settlements, walls, roads and tunnels – and its apartheid state as cruel and as complete as anything manufactured in South Africa, are all palliatives – medicines which reduce the pain to a Jewish majority state but not the cause.

Another Nakba

You can announce as many times as you like, as US President Donald Trump did yesterday, that Israel will take over the Jordan Valley and thus about 30 per cent of the West Bank, and establish Israeli law over the settlements. But without physically moving greater and greater numbers of Palestinians out of the expanded state of Israel, little changes. Annexation just becomes another form of occupation.

Population transfer, mass population transfer, another Nakba or Catastrophe, therefore, lies at the heart of Trump’s and Netanyahu’s “vision” for peace.

This is a peace of sorts. It’s the silence you hear in the Palestinian villages in 1948, in Beit Hanoun in 2014, when Israel bombed a UN school in northern Gaza crowded with hundreds of displaced civilians killing 15 and injuring 200 people, or in East Aleppo or Mosul, after each in turn have been bombed to a pulp. It’s the peace created in the total and complete defeat of the Palestinian struggle for a state built on their own land.

The hidden plan

So, for me, the heart of the apocalyptic vision lay not in the supremacist speeches of Trump or Netanyahu, in which both proclaimed “mission accomplished”, and the complete victory of the Zionist movement over the Palestinian people. It lay in a paragraph buried deep inside the 180-page document, the most detailed document Trump bragged that had ever been produced about this conflict. Precisely.

It’s the paragraph which says that land swaps by Israel could include both “populated and unpopulated areas”. The document is precise about the population it is referring to – the 1948 Palestinian population of the so-called northern triangle of Israel – Kafr Qara, Baqa-al-Gharbiyye, Umm al-Fahm, Qalansawe, Tayibe, Kafr Qasim, Tira, Kafr Bara and Jaljulia.

The document goes on:

“The Vision contemplates the possibility, subject to agreement of the parties, that the borders of Israel will be redrawn such that the Triangle Communities become part of the State of Palestine. In this agreement, the civil rights of the residents of the triangle communities would be subject to the applicable laws and judicial rulings of the relevant authorities.”

This is the hidden and most dangerous part of this plan. The triangle is home to about 350,000 Palestinians – all of whom are Israeli citizens – perched beside the north western border of the West Bank. Umm al-Fahm, its main city, has been the home of some of the most active defenders of Al Aqsa.

Yousef Jabareen, a member of the Israeli Knesset from the Joint List, told me:

“Umm al-Fahm is my hometown, Wadi Ara is my lifeblood. The Triangle is home to hundreds of thousands of Arab-Palestinian citizens living in their homeland. Trump and Netanyahu’s annexation and transfer programme remove us from our homeland and revoke our citizenship; an existential danger to all Arab minority citizens. Now is the time for Jews and Arabs who value democracy and equality, to stand and work together against this dangerous plan.”

Official ‘ethnic cleansing’

For years now the “static transfer” of this population out of Israel has been toyed with by Israeli leaders of the centre or the right. The idea of a population and land swap was alluded to by former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. But it was only Avigdor Lieberman who took the expulsion of Palestinians up consistently as a cause.

He advocated stripping a suggested 350,000 Palestinians in the Triangle of their Israeli citizenship and forcing the other 20 per cent of the Israeli population, who are non-Jews, to make a “loyalty oath” to Israel as a “Jewish Zionist state”, or face expulsion to a Palestinian state.

Two years ago, Netanyahu proposed to Trump that Israel should rid itself of the Triangle. Today these plans for ethnic cleansing have been sealed in an official White House document.

As Palestinian member of the Knesset, Ayman Odeh, tweeted, Trump’s announcement was “a green light to revoke the citizenship of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab citizens who live in northern Israel”.

Supporting Trump

The presence of the Emirati, Bahraini and Omani ambassadors in the audience was the other remarkable feature of the announcement in the White House on Tuesday. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE welcomed the plan without reservation. Qatar did too, although it added that the Palestinian state should be negotiated on 1967 borders and Palestinians should retain their right of return.

Trump said he was amazed at the number of calls he received from world leaders in support of his plan. Not least from our very own British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Ditching four decades of British foreign policy on an equitable and just two-state solution, Johnson threw the UK’s weight behind the Trump plan. British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab also released a statement to say they “welcome” the deal. “This is clearly a serious proposal, reflecting extensive time and effort,” he said.

“I cannot believe the amount of support this morning has,” Trump bragged. “I have been called by leaders, Boris [Johnson] called; so many called. They’re all saying, ‘whatever we can do to help”.

There are some, however, who realise the danger of this plan. Senator Chris Murphy is one of them. He tweeted:

“The unilateral annexation of the Jordan River valley and existing settlements, deemed illegal under US and international law, will set back the peace process decades. And it risks real violence and massive destabilization inside places like Jordan.”

Home alone

No-one should underestimate the historic nature of the declaration that has just taken place. The two-state solution or the idea that a viable, contiguous Palestinian state can be created alongside a Jewish majority state is dead. It was dead long before Oslo Accords.

Arab peacemakers like King Hussein of Jordan was told in terms by both the Soviets – Yevgeny Primakov – and James Baker, then secretary of state, that an independent Palestinian state would never be achieved. This was even before the Madrid conference which preceded Oslo. The king did not need to attend the funeral of his friend Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995, to realise this. He knew it already. But it really is dead now.

The US has now given its official imprimatur to the eastern borders of the state of Israel. The map Middle East Eye published says it all. The Palestinian state envisioned by the plan looks like an MRI scan of the brain of an Alzheimer’s victim. The Palestinian state has been entirely eaten away.

The message of this map to Palestinians of whatever faction is now crystal clear. Forget your divisions, forget what happened between Fatah and Hamas in Gaza in 2007, cast aside claims of coups, and unite. Unite against an existential threat.

The Palestinians are truly alone. All of the staples of their negotiating position have gone. They have no Jerusalem, no right of return, no refugees to return, no Golan Heights and now no Jordan Valley. They have no Arab allies. Syria is wrecked, Iraq divided, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are now Israel’s playthings. The Palestinians have lost the support of the most populous Arab nation and its richest one.

They have nowhere to flee to. Europe is closed for any future mass migration. They have only one option: to stay and fight. United, they can undo Israel’s supremacist plans for ethnic cleansing. They have done this before and they can do this again.

A new struggle

Palestinians now have to face this reality. The PLO’s recognition of Israel, in 1993, has finally hit the dead end that this road was always going to lead to. The US, international law, UN resolutions were never going to come to their rescue, and in this sense alone, Trump’s brutal plan has done Palestinians a favour. It has blown away decades of fantasy.

What has to start now is a new wave of struggle for equal rights in one state on all of the land of historic Palestine. This will involve a huge fight. No-one should underestimate what will happen if the Palestinian people rise up again. But no-one should be in any doubt too, of the consequences of acquiescence.

This is the first time since 1948 that all Palestinians can join together to do this. They have to seize this opportunity or wither away as a footnote in history.

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David Hearst is the editor in chief of Middle East Eye. He left The Guardian as its chief foreign leader writer. In a career spanning 29 years, he covered the Brighton bomb, the miner’s strike, the loyalist backlash in the wake of the Anglo-Irish Agreement in Northern Ireland, the first conflicts in the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in Slovenia and Croatia, the end of the Soviet Union, Chechnya, and the bushfire wars that accompanied it. He charted Boris Yeltsin’s moral and physical decline and the conditions which created the rise of Putin. After Ireland, he was appointed Europe correspondent for Guardian Europe, then joined the Moscow bureau in 1992, before becoming bureau chief in 1994. He left Russia in 1997 to join the foreign desk, became European editor and then associate foreign editor. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he worked as education correspondent.

Parliament Square is the site, muddied by rain, trodden by hundreds who have made it their celebratory space.  The Leave Means Leave official website had been busy for weeks, thrilled about January 31 and the fact that that Britain would finally be leaving that beastly collective they know as the European Union.  Those who promised to be in attendance were the usual suspects of the Little England brigade who had been so successful in convincing citizens that leaving the European Union was tantamount to gaining one’s freedom from a stifling oppressor.  Over time, the EU had become a figure no less savoury and vicious than Hitler, an achievement of branding if ever there was one.

London is ground zero for the anti-Brexit sentiment that clings to this city with depressing dedication.  It is the Leavers’ primary target, and affirmation they have won.  Vae victis – woe to the vanquished – is a sentiment they seem to relish, though few would know the provenance of the term.  There are parties taking place celebrating the event across this wounded city, daggers into the heart of the metropolitan centre.  During the day, London talkback radio was bubbling and humming with an upbeat note in the morning, occasionally moving into a state of delirium.  Some, it seemed, had already been on the sauce.  Bikers for Brexit, for instance, were happy to share their views about the “revelation” that their freedom was being returned; that the “tyranny” of the European Union was finally being overthrown.

A good number of callers could not see what the fuss was all about.  “We can trade with Europe; we can still trade with Europe,” suggested a sozzled David, who promised to be nursing a brandy as the celebrations commenced.  But beyond trade, David’s true colours showed.  The EU had been responsible for the sort of immigration that that had produced “beggars” and the “homeless” problem in Britain.  No mention was made of the industrious contributions of those millions, spearheaded by the Poles.

Robert was particularly irate at the divisions.  As an arch Leaver living in a Remain borough, he faced the cancellations of play dates for his children, a feeling of having contracted leprosy.  His account was marked by breezy uses of “apparently” (“Old people voted for Brexit, apparently”.)  But the caller was clear: he was definitely not racist, because “I’m black.”

Anecdotes seemed to be the order of the day, an easy if questionable form of data sampling.  Craig from Shoreditch spoke of “the Pole, the Israeli, and the Czech” who told him what a good thing Britain was doing against a seventy-year old effort to initiate a “global takeover”.  One had to “fight the system”.  This, it seemed, entailed voting for the very same man with system etched on his forehead. 

By the afternoon, the mood had moderated, though still dominated by the theme of hope that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had reiterated for months.  On radio, Vincenzo from Sheffield felt he had little to celebrate.  He had been in Britain for four decades as had others of his generation. “They forgot us,” he lamented.  Another spoke of moving to Ireland and chasing up his business contacts there, abandoning this sceptred Isle of Idiots.  

By 5 in the evening, the dissenters had vanished from Parliament Square with their mild, even defeated voices, with placards such as “We’ll be back” and “You have destroyed my future career and dreams.”  Predictably, the statue of Winston Churchill found itself the subject of much attention.  There were posters such as the “Restoration Bill 2020” appended at the base, a document scatterbrained and meandering in its clauses.  The authors wished for all EU flags to be removed from buildings, fishing rights restored exclusively to Britain, a re-instatement of the Magna Carta and the abolition of hate-speech laws.  Evidently unaware that British law and EU law have nourished and influenced each other over almost a half century, such documents become parochial venom to direct at those in disagreement.  Just to keep with that theme, a rotund gentleman, cheeks red and defiantly moving his placard around before Churchill’s indifferent gaze, was giving tips on how to tell a “Remoaner from a Remainer.”  The former, spat his message, are offered money to betray their country.

There are pockets on the square gradually growing in number, but at this time, they resemble devotees of a cult.  Like Sadhus in a trance, several men dance before drum beats, their eyes shut, limbs a jumble of ecstatic movements and gyration.  Donald Trump inspired imitation Stetsons are handed out, albeit sporting the Union Jack on flimsy material.  Others in attendance seem to resemble an animal species preserved in a sanctuary, making Parliament Square something of a historical zoo.  A man decked in full Union Jack regalia from head to toe, his dark skin and flashing grin a striking contrast to his outfit, terrifies some of those who have decided to see spectacle. 

As the Brexiters had failed in getting their Big Ben to bong for 11 in the evening, a makeshift miniature was assembled on the square, with the more modest title of “Little Ben”.  Makeshift Little Ben was plastered with “Democracy”, “Sovereignty”, boasting a small bell to sound by anybody wishing to partake.  The drum attached below the small makeshift tower, which resembled a haphazard paper construction, was belted with manic delight.

Covering the show was an entire regiment of press officials and support staff from any number of countries.  They seemed as bemused as anybody else, adjusting their cameras and mikes between the statues of Churchill and Jan Smuts, with an illuminated Westminster as the backdrop.  A few interviewees were already being drawn in, their eyes sparklingly enthusiastic about what is to come.

The hour duly arrived and, impressive as ever on timing, comes Nigel Farage, a man who has been paid from EU funds as a member of the European Parliament for years, yet has never won a seat in Britain’s parliament.  To be paid by the enemy, it seems, is not a form of betrayal, except when others do it.  “The war is over,” he declares emphatically.  “The vast majority of people who voted Remain now say we’re a democratic country and its right we accept Brexit.”

The sense that this is done and dusted for those who wished to exit the EU is unshakeable.  It ignores the obvious point that the machinery that will extricate Britain is still to be hammered out, sorted and implemented between British negotiators and their counterparts in Brussels.  The EU strategy on this is to bring in the squeeze after those months are out, imposing what will be a form of moderated misery.  January 31 is but a symbolic day; the practical cruelties and nastiness will only be felt once the transition period expires, when the bureaucrats so loathed by the populists will have their say.  For now, Britain continues to pay EU dues without any representation. Not exactly independence, by any stretch of the imagination.

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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]

Featured image is from TruePublica

It’s January 31st and Brexit is upon us. The day many thought would never come is finally here. But far from the pomp and circumstance that could have been expected from No.10, the affair itself looks pretty low-key. Ironically, after years of Brexit dominating the media headlines, Britain’s actual exit from the EU is something of an anti-climax. Nigel Farage, you can be sure, will have his champagne ready, his Union Jacks flying (and a party set for parliament square) but Boris Johnson’s preparations are nothing more than a pre-recorded speech, to be broadcast at 11pm, and a ‘countdown clock’ which is to be beamed on to 10 Downing Street in the final hours.

It’s hardly surprising however that the government has chosen this low-key approach. Brexit is an issue that remains deeply divisive. Half the country will be in mourning tomorrow, as the UK’s future out of Europe is shrouded in uncertainty. Boris Johnson may have won the December election on a mandate to ‘Get Brexit Done’ but it’s far from being an oven-ready Brexit deal. There are still many details needing ironed out. Take travel, for instance. Brits are still unclear as to what Brexit will mean for their travel plans. According to research by the ABTA, 31% are unsure about how Brexit will affect their future travel. Hits to their Brexit advice page have increased by 376% as people try to get what information they can. Previously, with a No Deal Brexit looming, the government had stated that people would need at least six months left on their passports to be able to travel to the EU after Brexit. This advice has now been replaced with assurances that until December 2020, travel arrangements with the EU should remain the same. All in all, there is a sense of complete confusion as so little information has been provided by the government on this key issue.

Efforts have gone into other more controversial endeavours – such as the minting of a new coin to commemorate Brexit. With an alarming cost of £11.5 million to the taxpayer (in addition to the £100 million advertising campaign launched for the expected No Deal Brexit which was due to take place on October 31st, but never did), several prominent figures have declared they will boycott the coin completely. Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell, an ardent Remainer, said that the message the coin bears – ‘Peace, Prosperity and friendship with all nations’ – goes against everything that Brexit stands for. But despite the angst to be felt by EU supporters tomorrow, as has been pointed out by several commentators already, the fact is that there are no Remainers now -we are all Leavers.

Nevertheless, all is not quite so straightforward, as another threat to Johnson’s post-Brexit stability is looming: Scottish independence. On Brexit day, celebrations down south will be contrasted not only with vigils north of the border, where Brexiteers are in the minority, but with a speech due to be made by First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, setting out her ‘next steps’ for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Sturgeon’s request last month for powers to be transferred to the Scottish parliament in order to call a second vote on leaving the Union were denied by Boris Johnson, who must surely have thought that would be an end to the matter. But to think this would quell the independence movement is naive on his part. As Sturgeon herself has indicated, the less cooperative Westminster is, the more determined indyref2 supporters become. The EU flag is to be kept flying at the Scottish parliament for the time being, it was decided this week, and Scottish politicians voted again on Wednesday to “reassert the principle that it is the right of the people of Scotland to determine their future”.

Scotland is not going to give up the fight for self-determination any time soon. The Brexit furore may have subsided, but further divisions lie ahead for the United Kingdom as the battle for Scottish independence ensues and the other nations of Wales and Northern Ireland begin to reevaluate their positions in the Union. Far from resolving the Brexit issue, the withdrawal deal forged by Boris Johnson is only a temporary plaster on a deep wound in Britain’s side. The real story of Brexit is only just beginning as Britain begins a new life outside the EU, for which many of the rules have not yet been written. Let the Brexit experiment commence…

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

It is another one of those contests and disagreements where the contestants should all loose, or at the very least, be subjected to a torturous stalemate.  Hillary Clinton remains the nasty sprinkle on the Democratic Party in the United States, ever hopeful that some door might open to enable her to come sliding in, taking the reins to what she regards as her possession: the White House.   

Not winning in 2016 against Donald Trump, a person considered less electable than most cartoon characters, requires more than sessions of therapy and good dozes of mind numbing medication.  Clinton’s therapy has been one of self-denial and accusation of others, strained through a device that gives her miraculous exoneration for her own failings.  That device lies in the realm of information, because this individual, renowned for her own sharp slant on it (remember those fictional sniper bullets she apparently dodged during a visit to Bosnia in 1996?), feels she has been terribly hard done by.  The US may have attempted to thrown off aristocracy in becoming a republic, but it has done a good job of finding sawdust substitutes.   

The dish served up to interviewers and journalists regarding Clinton’s defeat is always the same: I would have won had I not encountered the roadblocks of that impossible James B. Comey and “Russian WikiLeaks”.  She remains obsessed by rites of self-purification that ignore the inner workings of the parasitic machine she and her husband created, marked by an inability to understand the blue collar revolt that fell into Trump’s lap.

Having isolated the cause of defeat as mind controlling “fake news” and “misinformation”, a seedy strategy that ignores the information that was discomfortingly accurate in a populist election (in bed with Wall Street profiteers, the problems with free trade, foreign interventions), she sees the enemy as those who dish out information she does not like.  Those who provide such material must be motivated.  They must have an agenda against her, however mummified she seems to be.  More to the point, having such an agenda miraculously dispenses with the need to confront the details.

This leads to her latest splenetic spray.  Her claim made in an interview with The Atlantic sounds like a lingering old home rant, somewhat demented, totally resentful.  Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook are in Trump’s pocket, she claims.  This is far from a useful designation, because the only pocket Zuckerberg has ever been in is his own, and my does it go deep.  She claims to have a ring side seat to reading his mind, suggesting “that it’s to his and Facebook’s advantage not to cross Trump.  That’s what I believe.  And it just gives me a pit in my stomach.”

The approach is very much in the mould of Clinton, and builds upon the idea that facts are supposedly immutable, accept when they apply to you.  But the failed candidate insists that she has found this one fact: that Facebook is “not just going to re-elect Trump, but intend[s] to re-elect Trump.”  The Atlantic is thrilled to suggest a scoop on the Zuckerberg view on this.  Senator Elizabeth Warren, for instance, is not favoured because she nurses notions of regulating Facebook.  What a stunner of a revelation! 

The tech behemoths have been besieged by opponents who insist they are anti-democratic and authoritarian.  There are neither, being shallow information streams that merely reflect the corrugated perversions of their users, the voyagers on the Internet who do not seek to be enlightened so much as reassured.  More importantly, much of that material is generated by users themselves.  “Facebook is, in a sense, the world’s first technocratic nation-state,” argues Adrienne LaFrance.  Missing here is the understanding that it is more akin to a city-state of information, having monetised it for use and encouraged citizen users to participate.  It is of little concern to FB where such material goes; the quality of merchandise might be shonky, yet still find a buyer or user.   

What Zuckerberg’s opponents never supply is a way of circumventing the tendency inherent in such companies: that they feed instinct, desire and interest.  In doing so, a confusion arises; entertainment is muddled with political sensibility; information that is merely opinion serving as engagement.  It has nothing to do with reasoned debate, whatever the utopians might have thought.     

What is popular is what is extreme; what ranks in searches and information is what is controversial not necessarily what is accurate.  Facebook merely performs a role Roman emperors were familiar with and what the dark lord of the press world Rupert Murdoch always practised: give the people what they want, because their self-respect only rises as far as the next supplement will take them.  Do readers of trashy but election turning paper The Sun wish for a critical debate format on political candidates?  Does the consumer of the Facebook “feed” desire counter-narratives and a range of sources to reach a decision?  The answer to both is a resounding no.  The decisions are already made, prejudices merely re-enforced.  

Zuckerberg, like Clinton, has his own confusions about democratic practice.  He is only to be trusted the way a press mogul should be.  “In general, in a democracy, I think people should be able to hear for themselves what politicians are saying,” suggests the billionaire sociopath.  The principle, for all that wimpy enthusiasm, is a hard one to dismiss.  But he confuses how his platform, through its algorithmic bazaar, has become the means to merely reassure people about their set views rather than change them. Facts have nothing do with it. 

There are others, of course, that also exercise Clinton’s concerns.  This is a person filled with vengeful regret, and it shows.  She has taken against Democratic Presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard, accusing her, in the very counterfeit news she despises, of being a “Russian asset”.  Gabbard has returned the serve in the way that public figures in the US love: through the courts.  A defamation suit has been filed.  Clinton also keeps the dagger sharp for Bernie Sanders, suggesting that “nobody likes him” (old habits die hard for Clinton) for being something she knows all too well: a career politician. 

Such ruminations are not helpful for either Clinton or the Democrats.  They are, however, most useful for Trump, who has, better than his opponents, found the means to deploy the mechanisms of information, accurate or otherwise, in his favour.  The issue is not Zuckerberg, however attractive he seems as a target.  What social media has done is provide the mass dissemination tool that makes distraction the norm and correction impossible.  There is no dialogue in such a debate, because the debate has changed within a matter of hours, if not minutes.  Either ban Facebook and its emissaries, or let it be.  The path to regulation is already proving hopelessly messy and will, in time, prove dangerous.  

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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]

Russians have been terrorized for the past several months by online bomb hoaxes spread throughout the country by anonymous email services based abroad, which represent a cutting-edge threat to the modern world’s way of life and thus necessitates a concerted response by the international community if this scourge is to ever be fully defeated.

In the period from 1820 to the Civil War the great profits which the New England factory owners accrued were dependent upon the fact that the owners paid women half of men’s wages, though they worked as hard and as long as men. But the super-profits the factory owners amassed were based upon slave labor in the South. The raw material, cotton, which the Northern manufacturers depended upon, was very cheap, owing to the    exploitation and oppression under which unwaged enslaved people labored.   

Factory owners did not want slave labor in their mills. Millworkers bought everything they needed, and could not grow or make their own goods as they had done when they were on the farm. So, the Northern industrialists and merchants, boardinghouse owners and farmers did not want a workforce that had no money.

They wanted workers to plough their wages back into the purchase of   commodities. They wanted the workers to send money home as remittances so the families that workers left “back on the farm” could pay off their mortgages or debts for new equipment or land.   Farmers and businessmen and bankers depended upon the cash nexus which enhanced their enterprises.  Slavery in the North would cut into profitability.

The textile and other industries expanded Southern slavery.

The expansion of slavery West and South involved US Army invasions and ethnic cleansing in the South.   The wars against the indigenous people and the Indian Removal Act spurred both the expansion of slavery and   the growth of the textile industry in the North.

The wars enabled the extension of slavery and the growth of Cotton Kingdom. Conditions for the enslaved people deteriorated as the slavocracy doubled their land holdings and political power. The internal slave trade grew to provide more hands for the new cotton fields in the South and West, separating people from their loved ones, increasing the “breeding” of children for human trafficking  to distant plantations..

Conditions and wages for industrial workers were also worsening as the mill owners’ profits were growing.  Slave holders were enriching themselves too, thanks to the US industrial revolution in textiles, and Britain’s increasing demand for US cotton.

By the middle of the 19^thcentury, the development of steamships, railroads and other infrastructure, called “Internal Improvements,” sent raw cotton and then textiles everywhere, to the North, West, and overseas. Cotton calico was durable and its tight patterns hid stains, so millions of farm and industrial women workers bought it and made their dresses from it.

The new products of US industry were protected by tariffs hotly debated in Congress. Tariffs were always favorable to the manufacturers. The purpose of tariffs, taxes on goods coming into a country, was to make foreign goods more expensive than US-made ones.  These tariffs appeared to be the basis of the conflict between the ruling classes of the North and the South. Tariffs angered the leaders of the South where industrial development was rare, and many Congressional debates centered around them. The Southern planter class was angry that tariffs raised the prices of imported manufactured goods forcing Southern planters to buy the less-expensive Northern industrial goods like cloth and tools.

The Political Economy of Slavery vs: Pre-Industrial Capitalism  

If the ruling class in the South, the “Slavocracy,” had industrialized their region, they would have had their own manufactured goods, but that was impossible. The plantation system prevented the Southern ruling class from having enough available “liquid” capital to industrialize.   It was the slave system itselfthat made the South dependent on Britain or the North for manufactured goods.   Southern senators several times threatened to secede from the Union over tariffs. But their antiquated economic system was the cause of their problems.

It began to be clear to Northerners that slave labor in a growing capitalist economy was an anachronism. Neither enslaved people nor poor whites in the South could afford to buy any industrially-produced commodities. The South was economically a dead zone, where little commerce or industry could succeed, while the North was economically advancing both industrially and agriculturally, and expanding its infrastructure to advance commerce. Its population was larger and bought the new commodities the factory workers produced.

New farm machinery and scientific agronomy were intensifying agricultural production in the Northeast and the Middle West.  New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the “breadbasket” Middle States, produced grains on large estates and family farms.  Northern industrialists and Northern farmers began to see that Southern slavery as unhelpful to their financial advancement. They could not sell much to the South. The South was agriculturally self-sufficient, consuming their own grains, greens, and hogs.  The industrialists could not make a profit from a region of the US where abject poverty ruled. When the depressions- the Panics of 1837, the economic downturn of the 1840s, and the Panic of 1857 hit, the South was slow to recover.

The North was dominated by businessmen, and in the North, working classes bought cloth and bonnets, shoes and books, while Northern farmers bought the new improved farm equipment, clocks, tools or calico or anything being produced in those Northern factories. Free workers and free-soil farmers’ cash could pay for these commodities.  In the South, only the Planter class was wealthy, and they bought mostly luxuries for themselves, and cheap tools for the enslaved to use.The enslaved people, always managed to “lose” or break these tools, and that was a mark of ongoing resistance to slavery throughout the South.

Source: https://face2faceafrica.com

Northern capitalists and British bankers or textile industries essentially controlled the Southern economy.  Planters were usually in debt to Northern or British bankers.   In what historian Eugene Genovese described as thePolitical Economy of Slavery[1], amongst Southern ruling class, capital was “frozen.” Their actual money was sunk in buying and maintaining their enslaved Black people, buying luxuries, paying back debts, and buying new land to expand the Cotton Kingdom. Plantation land was literally used up by cotton farming, and the soil was useless after a few seasons. They did not teach the enslaved people modern methods of soil improvement because they did not teach enslaved people anything that might enhance their knowledge and lead to escape.

Wars against the Indigenous for the extension of slavery

The Planters got land when the US government passed laws to remove “Indians.” And with every military incursion against the indigenous, they took the fertile acres the government acquired for them for the expansion of the Cotton Kingdom.

This planter class was responsible for promoting every ante-bellum US war:  The War of 1812, the Seminole Wars in Florida(1817–18, 1835–42, 1855–58), and the Mexican War (1846-48).  US always claimed they were under attack by “Savage Indians.” The US Army made wars for the Slavocracy, and justified US colonization and white settlement of the continent as advancements for “civilization.”

Slavery, the system, was connected to everything in the United States. The US army killed Indigenous People to enlarge the Cotton Kingdom.  Laws were created to expand it. Indigenous were exiled from their homelands to enrich the Slavocracy.  Andrew Jackson even flouted a Supreme Court ruling, Worcester v. Georgia, which said that the 1830 Indian Removal Act by which the US army forcibly removed over 100,000 indigenous peoples from their lands, was unconstitutional. Jackson’s refusal to abide by the Court’s decision produced the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing the South of the major Indigenous nations of the region, causing the deaths of 4000 Cherokee, 8000 Muscogee (Creek), 500 Seminole, 500 Chickasaw, and 2000 Choctaw people. Over 15,000 indigenous people died on these death marches.  Those surviving faced forced migration to Oklahoma, so Southern planters could grab land for the expansion of slavery and the cotton kingdom. [2]

This was how the Constitution worked.   The army worked for the slavocracy to invade and seize territory. The Slavocracy ran the government. They got what they wanted, except for the tariff laws.

Transportation advancements, and Internal Improvements -like New York’s Erie Canal and railroads – transported the commodities enslaved Africans produced, as well as the goods and crops Northern farmers and industrial workers made.  Steamships enabled the growth of coastal and internal river commerce, including the internal slave trade, and carried people away from their loved ones forever. By the 1850s, hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were routinely torn from their families and moved South and West by railroad.

A former slave wrote:

“While the cars were at the depot, a large crowd of white people gathered, and were laughing and talking about the prospect of negro traffic; but when the cars began to start and the conductor cried out, ‘All who are going on this train must get on board without delay,’ the colored people cried out with one voice as though the heavens and earth were coming together, and it was so pitiful, that those hard hearted white men who had been accustomed to driving slaves all their lives, shed tears like children. As the cars moved away, we heard the weeping and wailing from the slaves as far as human voice could be heard; and from that time to the present I have neither seen nor heard from my two sisters, nor any of those who left Clarkson depot on that memorable day.”

My Life in the South, by Jacob Stroyer.[3]

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Notes

[1] Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South,

Wesleyan University Press, 2014

[2] Elizabeth Prine Pauls, (Trail of Tears.) https://www.britannica.com/event/Trail-of-Tears 

[3] Susanna Ashton I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives, University of South Carolina Press, 2010.

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When the mainstream media writes about war, even critically, the image that often comes to mind for me is an infant wrapped in plastic. That infant is naked reality, a.k.a., the present moment, suffocating and screaming for its life; the plastic smothering it are the journalistic euphemisms by which murder and terrorism turn into abstract acts of national necessity.

Thus, the recent news that the United States clobbered war-torn Afghanistan with a record number of bombs and missiles in 2019 came to us via Stars and Stripes in language protecting all concerned from raw awareness and flying shrapnel:

“American aircraft released 7,423 munitions in the country in 2019, according to figures published Monday by U.S. Air Forces Central Command. Coalition aircraft flew nearly 8,800 sorties during the period, over a quarter of which carried out strikes.

“The tally surpasses the previous record set last year when 7,362 munitions were released and comes amid ongoing discussion between American and Taliban officials aimed at ending America’s longest war.

“Talks between the two sides continued for most of 2019 as American bombs were dropped.”

This is, basically, the language of gamers. I bring it up not to criticize a single story but to throw a wild question into the wind: What if the media suddenly denied war its free moral pass? What if acts of military mayhem were not discussed as chess moves in a global game of competing national interests but sheerly for what they were: acts of slaughter, blood and psychological hell?

Maybe there was a time when war could be seen as rational and contained. After all, the major wars of the 20th century were neatly distinguished by Roman numerals. Peace prevailed for the rest of the century, right?

In point of fact, war begets nothing but war, a reality that’s getting harder and harder not to acknowledge here in the 21st century. But the language of war — “releasing munitions,” let us say, rather than blowing the arms and legs off children — lets the game proceed, at least beyond the national borders and national consciousness. If something awful happens on the home front, the reporting’s a bit different, of course. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, were covered for what they were, not from al-Qaeda’s strategic point of view. Compare that, let us say, to the shock-and-awe bombing of Iraq a year and a half later.

Here, for instance, was CNN reporting on March 22, 2003, shortly after the invasion was underway. We were in the process of killing 6,000 people in the initial bombing campaign, but the U.S. strategic (and humanitarian!) viewpoint was the prime focus of the coverage:

“Rumsfeld said that the strike had taken place ‘on a scale that indicates to Iraqis’ that Saddam and his leadership were finished. He added that the allies would work to search for, capture, and drive out terrorists who had found safe harbor in Iraq, as well as to deliver humanitarian relief to the Iraqi people.”

Perhaps the media can’t be blamed because things didn’t work out the way the pols said they would, but when does enough become enough? Are we at the point where, as endless war consumes ever larger segments of Planet Earth, it’s now time to declare that it’s out of control and stop writing about war in the same terms used by those who wage it? War is not a chess game. Whatever strategy it employs involves killing people, mostly civilians, and we should at least begin acknowledging that the ramifications of doing so are never strategically contained.

Back to Afghanistan and the fact that we bombed this ravaged country more heavily last year than we have since we started keeping count, which was in 2006. Why? We’ve been pummeling Afghanistan since 2001.

Luke Mogelson, writing last year in The New Yorker, pointed out:

“In 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared, ‘We clearly have moved from major combat activity to a period of stability.’ Since then, more than a hundred and fifty thousand people have been killed in Afghanistan, and about seven hundred and fifty thousand Americans have served there. The U.S. has spent about eight hundred billion dollars on military operations and on a multitude of economic, governance, education, health, gender-equality, and counter-narcotics initiatives. Today, most Afghans live in poverty, corruption is endemic, literacy and life-expectancy rates rank among the lowest in the world, approximately a third of girls become child brides, and no country exports more illicit opium. The Taliban control or contest more than half the country.”

There’s more going on here than strategic failure. War is hell in all directions, and perhaps it’s time to question the sanity of trying to maneuver hell for your own advantage.

One way that hell comes back home is via veterans’ suicides, which continue at a rate of about 20 per day. More and more people studying the matter are clutching hold of the term “moral injury” to describe the cause. Moral injury means a damaged conscience, a pierced sense of self, often due simply to following orders and helping inflict hell on a dehumanized enemy. Indeed, waging war requires dehumanizing fellow human beings. We couldn’t have released 7,423 munitions last year on people we valued.

But a dehumanized enemy can suddenly rehumanize herself in a veteran’s conscience. As Tyler Boudreau has pointed out: “Moral injury by definition includes the memories of those who have been harmed.”

The dehumanization process of war comes home in other ways as well. Domestic mass murders — which are growing ever more commonplace here in the greatest country on Earth — borrow the morality of war. The killer, avenging whatever grievance haunts him, employs the “principle of social substitutability” to kill people he doesn’t know, because for whatever reason they stand for the enemy he has chosen to punish.

And eighteen years on, we’re bombing Afghanistan more savagely than ever. We’ve already destroyed the country, but we can’t stop trying to save it.

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In retaliation for the Trump regime’s assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani on January 3, the IRGC struck two Pentagon bases in Iraq days later.

Iranian missiles successfully penetrated US air defenses, striking targets with pinpoint accuracy — causing significant damage and injuries to US forces.

What Trump dismissively called “headaches and a couple of other things…not very serious…no Americans…harmed,” the Pentagon admitted otherwise in delayed after-action reports.

After initially saying nothing, then  reporting 11 US military personnel evacuated from Iraq with concussion-like symptoms, the Pentagon raised the number to 34, then 50 and now 64, perhaps a larger number to be revealed ahead.

They’re being treated in US military hospitals for traumatic brain injuries (TBI) — from powerful missile blasts.

According to the Mayo Clinic, TBI “usually results from a violent blow or jolt to the head or body.”

Mild TBI affects “brain cells temporarily.” More serious TBI can result in “long-term complications or death.”

Symptoms include:

• Loss of consciousness for seconds or minutes
• Being dazed, confused or disoriented
• Headaches
• Nausea or vomiting
• Fatigue or drowsiness
• Problems with speech, sleeping, or requiring more of it than usual
• Dizziness or loss of balance (vertigo)
• Blurred vision
• Tinnitus (ringing in the ears) or hearing loss
• Sensitivity to light or sound
• Memory and/or concentration problems
• Mood changes
• Feelings of depression, anxiety, irritability and/or anger
• Convulsions or seizures
• Dilation of the pupil of one or both eyes
• Fluid emissions from the nose or ears
• Weakness and/or numbness in fingers and/or toes
• Loss of coordination
• Epilepsy
• Loss of consciousness or coma in severe cases

Any or a combination of the above symptoms can be short-term or persist much longer — longterm injury called “persistent post-concussive symptoms.”

Athletes participating in football, basketball, and other contact sports are vulnerable to traumatic brain injuries — most always publicly called concussions, downplaying them.

Affected players and others experiencing TBI are at greater risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia later in life.

A 2013 Harvard University study showed the lifespan of former NFL players on average are nearly 20 years shorter than the US average for men overall.

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

Professional football, basketball and hockey are combat by other means, players smashing one another and getting smashed, risking significant brain damage.

TBI is potentially very serious, longterm effects taking time to show up.

According to the Mayo Clinic, individuals most vulnerable to TBI include young children, adolescents and young adults aged 15 – 24, adults aged 60 or older, and males of any age, adding:

“(C)omplications can occur immediately or soon after a traumatic brain injury. Severe injuries increase the risk of a greater number and more-severe complications.”

TBI can be mild or have serious longterm effects. It’s too soon to know the severity of injuries to dozens of hospitalized US military personnel, including those discharged and returned to duty.

The Pentagon called their injuries “mild,” what may or may not be true, what most likely won’t be reported otherwise if symptoms worsen ahead and persist for some of all US military personnel diagnosed with TBI.

Treatment in US military and VA hospitals is notoriously poor. The American College of Surgeons reported that procedures performed in 16 large military hospitals had higher rates of post-surgery complications than in civilian hospitals — including infections and improperly performed procedures.

According to military doctors and nurses, the problem stems from a culture of secrecy and failure to prioritize patient health and safety.

The poorly run system results in deaths and permanent harm to ill or injured US military personnel.

Annual suits by veterans result in millions of dollars paid by Washington to malpractice victims.

Active duty military personnel are prohibited from suing the government. According to a Congressional Budget Office estimate, if permitted to sue, the amount would be triple the annual payout to victims.

The difference in treatment between civilian and military hospitals is world’s apart.

As a US army veteran circa 1950s, I personally experienced poor outpatient VA treatment and learned about more of the same from conversations with Vietnam War vets — ill-treated by the government post-service.

Former US army surgeon general Dr. Mary Lopez called the patient-safety system “broken,” adding:

“It has no teeth. Reports are submitted, but patient-safety offices have no authority.”

“People rarely talk to each other. It’s ‘I have my territory, and nobody is going to encroach on my territory.’ ”

An earlier Pentagon patient safety “analysis” falsely said the “harm rate (is) unknown.”

Medical error is one of the leading causes of preventable deaths and injuries in the US medical system overall —especially in military hospitals for active duty personnel and vets.

Independent studies show military suicides way exceed war deaths, little publicly reported.

Victims are consumed by unbearable emotional pain — on active duty and after returning to civilian life, unable to adjust.

Often unheeded warning signs include depression, withdrawal, lethargy, loss of interest in usual activities, poor appetite, loss of weight, sleep and other behavioral changes, recurring suicidal thoughts, and feelings of hopelessness and despair.

Daily stress is bad enough. Combat theater deployments exacerbate it. It’s intolerable for many. The little known human cost of war raises disturbing questions. America consumes its own.

Epidemic post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) levels affect hundreds of thousands of combat forces and vets.

VA and DOD officials consistently understate problems. Independent reports reveal more. Some say nearly half of Afghan and Iraq vets have emotional and/or physical combat injuries.

Veterans of all US war theaters are vulnerable PTSD and physical injuries.

The toll of war on US military personnel is way underreported and largely concealed.

How many US military personnel deployed to combat theaters return home physically or emotionally scared?

How many stay that way longterm? How many are traumatized from war theater experience?

How many are ill-treated at home when no longer needed to serve US imperial interests?

Many war theater deaths are misreported, little said publicly about them. Many veteran suicides are covered up, slipping under the radar unnoticed.

How many countless thousands of troubled vets are untreated or ill-treated?

How many TBI service personnel from Iraq and other US war theaters will be affected longterm from what they experienced — largely forgotten and ignored when return to civilian life?

A Final Comment

According to the Arabic-language Kuwaiti broadsheet Al-Qabas, the Pentagon is downplaying the severity of injuries to US forces in Iraq from retaliatory Iranian missile strikes.

Aside from PTI injuries, the paper claimed at least 16 US military personnel were severely burned and/or sustained shrapnel wounds, taken to a Pentagon hospital in Kuwait for surgical treatment — currently in ICU for observation.

IRGC aerospace commander General Ali Hajizadeh was quoted saying:

Although Iran’s retaliatory missile strikes on US bases in Iraq tried to avoid casualties, “tens of US troops have likely been killed and wounded and were transferred to Israel and Jordan on 9 sorties of C-130 flights,” adding:

Had the IRGC intended to cause mass casualties, thousands of US military personnel could have been killed and injured.

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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.

This new edition of David Edgerton’s book The Rise and Fall of the British Nation is timely and apposite given the unprecedented Conservative landslide in traditional Labour seats in the recent general election. Inevitably in the world of day-to-day, parliamentary politics, analyses of the defeat and prescriptions for Labour’s future have been short term and even superficial, but given the scale of the defeat which has taken place during a generational change in Britain’s relations with Europe, a deeper historical examination of the issues involved is needed. 

The verdict of received wisdom is that Labour’s “Red Wall” — its traditional heartland of support in the North and Midlands — fell in the December 2019 election, inflicting the worse defeat since 1935, because the party failed to speak the patriotic language of the working class.  Edgerton’s characterisation of Labour and Britain in the post-war period casts an interesting light on the assumptions underlying this reading of Labour’s electoral disaster.

The first point to be made is that considering Labour was rent with splits in 1935 it actually did rather well. This was when the foundations of the so-called Red Wall were laid. Labour’s heartlands do not as is often supposed go back to the dawn of the industrial revolution. They are a twentieth century creation and owe most to the nationally oriented policies of post-war Labour governments. If the language of the working class in these constituencies is patriotic it is the Labour Party that taught them to speak it.

As Edgerton points out “Labour presented itself in 1945 as the true national party. Its manifesto barely included the word ‘socialism’ (which appeared once), or ‘socialist’ (which appeared twice).”  Often taken to be an icon of socialist policy, the 1945 manifesto concentrated on a national programme of economic development. Welfare reform came a poor second.

The National Health Service, Edgerton admits, was a remarkable creation, unprecedented its universal character. Yet it had not been envisaged in any Labour manifesto and no new hospitals were built when it was created. Labour constructed “an austerity welfare state.” The increase in welfare spending had been greater after the First World War. British spending on social services and health remained low until the 1970s compared to other rich countries.

Where Labour was prepared to spend money was on the military. Britain’s military expenditure amounted to 10% of GDP during the 1950s, more than it had been in 1913 or 1938 and continued at more than 5% into the 1970s. Britain was, in Edgerton’s view more of a warfare state than a welfare state.

Labour was committed to maintaining Britain’s remaining colonial territories. It fought a savage war in Malaya, perpetuating conscription to do so. The Kenyan Uprising took place under a Conservative government but Labour had made no move to abolish the pass laws that were one of the main grievances. The RAF base at Khoramaksar in Yemen was expanded. Repression of the Greek Cypriots continued, ultimately leading to a bloody civil war.

Edgerton resists calls to define the post war period as one of British decline, except in a relative sense. Statistics, he argues, show that Britain was at its most industrialised in the 1950s and 1960s rather than the 1850s or during the industrial revolution.  Manufacturing workers peaked as a proportion of the total workforce in this period. “For the British working class the years from 1950 to at least the late 1960s were years of success.”

Many of the older working class voters who opted for Brexit in the referendum and Boris Johnson in the general election remember this period as one of relative prosperity. Their political consciousness was formed at a time when “Labour could be seen as a nationalist party after 1945, indeed as the nationalist party. It put nation before class, it invoked national victories from the past, and not class victories (or defeats). It is not accidental that Labour prime ministers invoked the national interest again and again, nor was it a mere cliché.”

Even as international competition intensified the Labour Party offered a solution in the form of a technocratic critique of British capitalism. British capitalists, Labour leader Harold Wilson argued, remained “Gentlemen in a world of Players”. We, Wilson told the Labour conference in 1963, “are re-stating our Socialism in terms of the scientific revolution”. Britain would be “reforged in the white heat of this revolution”

Edgerton makes it clear that there was no deficit of nationalism on the part of the Labour left. He admits that Aneurin Bevan objected to the level of military spending proposed by the Labour government. His principle reason for doing so, Edgerton argues, was that it risked damaging the national economy. He acknowledges that Bevan rebelled against the hydrogen bomb in 1955 but points out that he had come round to the idea by the 1957 Labour Party conference.

When he became Labour leader Michael Foot was pilloried by the tabloid press for his lack of patriotism but it was he who led calls in the House of Commons to send a naval task force to the Malvinas Islands. On economic policy too the left was above all national in outlook. The 1983 Labour Manifesto argued for national revival in terms not so very different from Wilson or Callaghan.  The Alternative Economic Strategy championed by Tony Benn was, Edgerton concludes a “modernizing, techno-nationalist, productionist, autarchic programme” comparable to that of 1945.

However useful it is in understanding the political character of Labour, Edgerton’s analysis has some contentious features. Firstly, he rejects any notion of an absolute, long term decline of British capitalism. Decline, in so far as Edgerton admits it, was only relative to other major powers. It is a view that can be challenged. Relative decline translates into lost deals, lost opportunities for expansion, lost investment and, for the nation state concerned, lost power and status. Old empires die hard and in the process can do a lot of damage.

The other contentious term is “nation”. Edgerton argues that the name “Britain” only became standard in political life and history books after 1945 when a British nation replaced the British Empire and the cosmopolitan economy of the pre-war period. Using the term “nation” in this way presents a number of problems. Can we really afford to ditch the concepts of nation and nationalism in the run up to the First World War or the Boer War?

As E. H.Carr warned, all historians have bees in their bonnets. Edgerton’s concepts of “nation” and “decline” might seem to be purely idiosyncratic bees in one historian’s bonnet, except that Edgerton’s bees seem to be buzzing in a particular direction. Writing in the New Statesman before the election Edgerton characterised Brexit as a sign of “a new politics with freshly invented pasts and futures” After the election, he was looking ahead to the break up of the United Kingdom under the impact of Brexit bringing an end to the “short-lived fantasy of the ‘British nation’.” Edgerton sees hope in the prospect of a new English nation emerging from the break up of the UK. Shorn of its pretensions to power, England would be “Less cocksure and more understanding of its real place in the world”.

The idea that we live in imagined realities and that nations are imagined communities is now well rehearsed. Edgerton’s kinder, warmer English nationalism, a nationalism with its imperialist claws clipped so to speak, belongs to that intellectual tradition, or perhaps to an Ealing comedy. Nationalisms are not imagined, they are forged by real economic interests and cannot be re-shaped at will.The concept of the imagined nation is a failure of moral and intellectual courage in the face of the horrors produced by nationalism. It is not so much a better form of nationalism that the left needs as internationalism

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At the start of the twentieth century, Vladimir Lenin was studying Hegel’s notes on science. [i] Stalin told him not to bother, that it was more important to unify the party. Lenin replied that by the end of the century, the nature of science would be the most urgent question: how to get truth?

What did Lenin foresee?

Every second year at this time, honoring the birth of José Martí (January 28, 1853),  a conference is held at the Palacio de los Convenciones in Havana: “For the balance of the world”.[ii] Balance is measurement but not of things. It is about parts, always in some sense relative to motion.

The conference draws activists and academics from across the world.

Adam Chávez was there last time. He is the older brother of Hugo Chávez who led the Bolivarian revolution and died in 2013. Adam pushed Hugo, who preferred baseball, into politics and then followed. He said Venezuela had received pledges from across the continent, to fight if the US intervened.  The US had not yet defeated Venezuela, Chávez said, because of Hugo’s legacy: People who have tasted dignity don’t turn back to erasure and humiliation.

He spoke softly. The room was packed. A woman from Honduras spoke from the floor, then another from Peru. More than the substance of the presentation, I remember the feel of the room.

I’ve felt it before. I’m used to conferences where every claim is pinned down. Every “t” is crossed, every “I” dotted. No distinction is undefended. Pieces fit together, like a tightfitting jigsaw puzzle. All is clear.

It’s not clear where it is going.

Adam Chávez’ talk was not like that. Distinctions went unnoted, remarks unexplained. What I felt in that room was resonance. What wasn’t said didn’t need to be, even shouldn’t be. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe, an escaped slave, circles the story of why she murdered her children. A circle is all there is, she says, for anyone who must ask.

It can’t be pinned it down. There are truths that aren’t stateable. Philosophers call them “non-propositional”. They are not in sentences. Instead, they explain movement, ways of being.

They are presupposed. In Adam Chávez’ case, the movement is 500 years old. The way of being is human. In the Second Declaration of  Havana, it is the “march of humanity”. Martí said precisely that march can right the “unsteady equilibrium of the world”. That means it is also about knowledge.

It is for truth. The thing about balance is that it can’t be determined according to script. Like someone skilled at theatrical or musical improvisation, balance requires awareness of  relations and ability and willingness to respond, to create, to recreate. Lenin called it a “passage through dark waters”.

He wrote about dialectic and what it means in practise: for discovery.[iii] Che Guevara used the metaphor of a tuning fork. One prong affects the other and between the two, new sound emerges.

Something was known about truth in early 19^th century Cuba. Like Lenin, independistas thought the nature of truth mattered for politics. What they knew is: All individual thinking is “group think”. Every supposedly private thought involves naming. You name what you are thinking about. You think to yourself, “I am falling in love”. But why call it “love”? Names are socially dependent. They are shared.

This mattered for early independence leadersbecause the “group” in question  – imperialists  – denied their humanity. However, they knew a way out of group think: Feeling. Thinking involves naming. Feeling doesn’t.  Well, it sometimes does, as in the example of love, but it doesn’t have to.

It is why José de la Luz y Caballero stood before his students in 1862, before dying, and said he’d rather be struck dead than lose the feeling for justice. It was how he knew slavery was wrong. He couldn’t know from a theory of justice because it uses names, depending on society, which has no names for slaves: as people.

Fidel Castro knew it. In 1960, he invited an audience at the UN to imagine “that a person from outer space were to come to this assembly, …  If he were to ask how the world was divided up and he saw on a map that the wealth was divided among the monopolies of four or five countries, he would say, ‘The world has been badly divided up’”.

The point is not  that the world is divided badly. The intellectual truth of such a claim is obvious. Plenty of information shows it. But who believes it? Who thinks it matters?

That would take someone from outer space, not conditioned. In 1953, Cuban philosopher, Raúl Roa, said the world was passing through its gravest crisis ever.[iv] It was because the consolidation of US power was the consolidation of false ideas: about rationality, for instance. If you’re conditioned by such ideas – and it is hard not to be – you think the world is supposedto be divided badly.

And you don’t know you think that.

It’s who you are. Roa argued that the “world’s gravest crisis” was consolidation of an idea of thinking. It went with an idea of human beings, identifying selveswith minds. I am my thoughts. Condemned to group think. Martí said, in contrast, “To think is to serve”. It breaks up the puzzle.

There’s a chance for balance. A chance to discover false beliefs, not stated, but lived. Roa, like Lenin, questions an ideaof how we think. Perhaps, Lenin foresaw a future of jigsaw puzzles. The wrongness of slavery, in early nineteenth century Cuba  couldn’t be known by collecting information and fitting the pieces together.

The wrongness of imperialism is not known that way either.  But not all buy into the lies Roa identified.

It’s why I felt resonance in that room.

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] Lenin was writing Materialism and Empirio criticism (Volume 14, Collected Works)

[ii] http://www.porelequilibriodelmundocuba.com/es/general3

[iii] Volume 38, Collected Works

[iv] “Grandeza y servidumbre del humanismo”,  Viento Sur, 44-62 .

With the impeachment trial of U.S. President Donald Trump in full swing, a new defense was presented by Trump attorney Alan Dershowitz.

Dershowitz made an astounding defense, saying that as long as the president acted in what he thought was the best interest of the country – in this case, being re-elected – there was no impeachable crime.

Using that logic, Richard Nixon would have served out his second term. Certainly, he thought breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters would help his re-election chances, which he certainly thought was in the best interest of the country. Using Dershowitz’s logic, there is no crime for which a president can be removed from office if he commits it believing that it will help him be re-elected, which he firmly believes is in the nation’s best interest.

Dershowitz admitted that every politician believes that their re-election is in the country’s best interest, so it would seem, by extension, that anything any officeholder does to get re-elected – bribery, murdering opponents, etc. – would be fine. After all, it was done in the national interest.

Let us, for a moment, take this out of the lofty halls of Congress and bring it back to a more realistic example, using everyday life, where people generally recognize that crimes are crimes. If, for example, this writer supports a charity whose work he believes in deeply, and which he thinks provides an excellent service, if he wants to contribute additional money that he doesn’t have to that charity, well, he can rob a bank to get some more! Why not? It’s in the best interest of the people served by the charity, after all.

Trump’s attorneys were wise, in a twisted, clown-like way, to raise this defense. There is no realistic defense to the things Trump has done: withholding foreign aid that Congress has approved until the country that is supposed to receive it agrees to investigate a political rival is hardly something that the revered Founding Fathers (racists and misogynists though they were) would ever countenance. But they probably wouldn’t have agreed that corporations are people or everyone in the country should be running around with multiple guns, either.

If Trump gets away with this, which is likely, considering the spineless members of the Senate who are terrified of his wrath come re-election time, who knows what he will do for the next nine months until the election or, possibly, for the next five years (one cannot rely on the Democratic Party not to do something stupid, like nominate a rich, old, white establishment man who is so middle-of -the-road that he could be the yellow line down its center)? He can sell the U.S. to Russia in exchange for hacking all the voting machines to assure he is elected. Why not? After all, as long as he thinks it’s in the U.S.’s best interest, there’s nothing in the world wrong with it, at least according to Dershowitz and the craven Republicans in the Senate.

This, of course, takes the winds out of the John-Bolton sails. In Bolton’s new book, which is described as ‘explosive’, he says plainly that Trump told him to withhold the foreign aid until the Ukranian president anted up with the dirt on Biden, or at least agreed to announce he was looking for it. But if doing so isn’t a crime, Bolton’s revelations aren’t worth considering.

Trump has often led, and sometimes still leads, his lemmings-like groupies in chants of ‘lock her up’, referring to Hillary Clinton and her use of a private server for official emails. But if Clinton felt that doing so was in the national interest, why should she be ‘locked up’? According to Dershowitz, there is no crime committed in any attempt by an elected official to gain office, if he or she believes it is in the nation’s best interest, which Dershowitz concedes all candidates believe.

The possibilities for this defense are endless. Consider any crime, and there is often a good reason for it, at least according to the perpetrator. Murder a wife? She stood in the way of the happiness of another woman. Rob a bank? That’s discussed above, or at least one ‘honorable’ motive for doing so is. Assault a homeless person? Better a person’s rage be spent on an anonymous stranger than on one’s own wife or children.  Commit road rage after being cut off? Well, that careless drive will learn a lesson. Use racial slurs against a minority neighbor? Standing up to such things will make him or her stronger.

Oh, can’t one see the possibilities? A few short years ago, a lawyer used ‘Affluenza’ as a defense for a young man who’d killed multiple people while driving under the influence. It was argued that, because the young man grew up rich and with few limits, he was not really responsible for his behavior. The entire case was mocked across the country, even though the defense was successful. One wonders what creative defense strategies attorneys will invent now, with the precedent that is about to be set in the nation’s capital.

The U.S. was a grand experiment in democracy that failed miserably. It is not a nation governed for, by and of the people. Corporations contribute millions of dollars to the campaigns of officials who are then completely beholden not to the people in their districts, but to those corporations. Entering political life requires, under most circumstances, considerable financial resources, but if a person is fortunate enough to grab that gold ring, they have the potential to become far richer during and after their terms in office.

There was much talk of Russian influence in the 2016 presidential election, but no one ever talks about Israeli influence. In 2016, for example, one of Florida’s Republican senators, Marco Rubio, received nearly $500,000.00 from pro-Israel lobbies. Is it merely coincidental that he has a perfect voting record on all pro-Israel and anti-Palestine legislation? This writer only mentions him because in 2016, Rubio received more pro-Israel lobby money than any other senatorial candidate.

But now, none of that matters. If Rubio, and those many, many elected officials (this writer cannot refer to them as ‘representatives’) accept huge sums of money from pro-Israel lobbies, the NRA, ‘defense’ (read: offense) contractors, etc., it is all, we can be sure, because those officials are convinced that their election and re-election are what is best for the country.

This is what it has come to in the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’. Free to violate laws, and brave enough, or perhaps brazen enough, to feel no shame in doing so.

The world has suffered for centuries due to U.S. disdain for international law and common decency. There is no end in sight.

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“Fortune thus blinds the minds of men when she does not wish them to resist her power.” — Livy

It seems quite evident to many that the United States has been consumed by the same ambition and thus fate with that of the Roman Empire. That one of the most notorious periods in history for its extensive imperialism, corruption and barbaric slavery are the blueprint for what the founding fathers used in forming the moral constitution of the United States, and thus it has been rotten to its core from its very inception.

There is no doubt that the United States is acting in accordance with that of an empire presently.

However, from this alone, we cannot confirm whether it is in fact her founding constitution which is at fault or rather, her abandonment of her constitution which has led her to this monstrous outcome.

It is true that the founding fathers of the United States were very much influenced by Rome, but for those who have some knowledge on the history of that titan of an era, they would know that Roman history consists of three phases; that of the kingdom, the republic, and the empire. The period of empire was its most corrupt and malevolent, but what defined Rome’s characteristics before this? Was Rome actually something noble and honorable once? Which period were the founding fathers influenced and inspired by? Is the United States doomed to repeat the collapse of the Roman Empire? We will discuss all these questions here.

What Defined Rome before it Became an Empire?

Rome was founded in 753 BC as a kingdom, though much of the details around this partake in legend, it suffices for our purpose here that she was founded by Romulus who ruled until 717 BC. Numa Pompilius who would rule as king for the next 43 years, was a very wise king and founded the laws and governmental institutions that Rome would use for most of her existence. It should be noted that during this period, the kings were not chosen by bloodline but rather through a voting process by the senate, yes, there was already a senate formed during the period of kings.

Servius Tullius would become Rome’s 6^th king and would rule 43 years until the day that his own daughter, whom he had marry to one of Tarquinius’ sons (Superbus), conspired together to brutally murder Servius in his elder years in a terribly bloody public spectacle and usurp the throne. Servius’ body would then be run over by his daughter by horse carriage causing an even further grisly scene, and the street would be known afterwards as Vicus Sceleratus (street of shame, infamy). Superbus would earn his nickname, meaning ‘proud’ or ‘arrogant’ due to his refusal to bury the body of Servius. And Servius would be known as the last of the benevolent kings.

Tarquinius Superbus would rule for 26 years and would be the last of the kings. He, not surprisingly, was very unpopular with the Roman people and senate, ruling as a cruel despot. This hatred for Superbus would find its snapping point when one of Superbus’ sons, Sextus raped a nobleman’s wife, named Lucretia. Lucretia was so humiliated and felt so dishonored by this act that once she had relayed the message to a group of four high-ranking men she stabbed herself in the heart with a dagger. Junius Brutus was one of the men present during this scene, and Livy writes that as soon as Lucretia had committed suicide, Brutus rushed over to her, plucked the dagger out of her breast and raised it, swearing the end of the Tarquin kingship.

Junius Brutus was able to quickly organise a gathering within the city where he exhorted the Roman people to rise up against the tyrant king. The people would support this and vote for the deposition of Superbus and the banishment of him and his entire family. Junius Brutus then gathered the people of Rome to swear an oath that they would suffer no man to rule Rome ever again, and as per Livy, the Roman people desirous of liberty would vow from that point on no longer to be swayed by the entreaties or bribes of kings.

A Republic is Born

If Superbus had been a just king, the crime against Lucretia would have been presented to him to act as judge over and he would not have been punished for the crime of his son, but this was not done. It was not done because it was known that Superbus had no respect for a law benefitting the general welfare of the people but rather only knew his own personal law, and this is what the people could no longer suffer under.

The largest change which transformed Rome from a kingdom into a republic would be the replacement of the king with two consuls, who would be voted in by the Roman citizenry and would only have a one year term. This was done to dissuade anyone from desiring to rule indefinitely and from abusing their powers for personal gain and thus was to protect against the corrupting lust for unbounded power seen during the age of kings from their sons.

Junius Brutus would be one of the first consuls of two, in replacing the king of Rome. During his term, Brutus had to act as judge over his sons who had committed treason and sentenced them to death, for which he witnessed their executions, something that was expected of the consul. This is not to say that Brutus was a cold man, but rather that he treated his sons with no additional favour, and judged their punishment for their crimes as he would have done for anyone else. It was because of this reputation for upholding honor that Brutus became a hero in Roman history; that he not only overthrew a tyrant king and helped establish the republic, but that he embodied the noble qualities it was to represent and that nobody was above the law for the general welfare of its people.

The Roman Republic would exist from 510 BC to 27 BC, however, before we go further I would like to point out a few parallels from another time.

His Majesty Hath Cast Them Off

On June 12, 1630, after a voyage of 76 days, four ships with 800 passengers, under the command of John Winthrop, anchored in Massachusetts Bay. With more ships on the way, he was soon to preside over nearly 20, 000 colonists by 1650.

Why were so many Europeans willing to take the risk of such a long voyage to a land that they knew hardly anything about and with no assured prospects? A major factor was that Europe had been experiencing almost ongoing warfare since the hundred years war and was presently experiencing the thirty years war, thus poverty, famine and pestilence ran rampant and the death rate was horrifying. There was no future for most people in Europe, which had descended into such chaos that its continued existence was really not certain.

It was recognised that one of the core reasons for Europe’s descent into madness was the unreliability of its kings, being concerned more for their personal welfare than that of their people.

Faced with constant threats by King Charles I of England to remove the rights he had accorded the colonists under the Massachusetts Bay Charter to establish a town, Winthrop replied back that if such a thing were to occur, “the common people here will conceive that his Majesty hath cast them off, and that hereby they are freed from their allegiance and subjection [to the Crown], and thereupon will be ready to confederate themselves under a new government.”

The New England Confederation would be established in 1643 and John Winthrop was elected its president. Its Articles of Confederation served as the first step toward realizing a new nation under constitutional rule. Historian Graham Lowry recounts in How the Nation Was Won: America’s Untold Story (1630-1751) that Benjamin Franklin would later cite these articles to the French government during the American Revolution for their support.

The Massachusetts Bay colonists had made their stand against the British Monarchy and were ready to face the consequences, from this point on, they would be the shapers of their own destiny.

A Republic if You Can Keep It

For a little less than 300 years (5^th to 2^nd century BC), the Roman Republic had succeeded in upholding the oath that the people swore with Junius Brutus. And though it would be confronted with challenging times, additional heroes would follow after, such as Quinctius Cincinnatus, who became a legend not only in Roman but in American history as a representation of the ideal Roman virtue; as a man who had received absolute power in order to defend Rome at a time of crisis, and when his duty was complete and Rome was saved, returned the pre-existing political order and resumed a life as a citizen farmer.

Though Rome was in warfare for most of its existence, it should be noted that everyone was in warfare and to not be at war was not an option during these times. However, during this period, Rome treated for the most part its captured cities well and formed a sort of commonwealth to which their citizens, as Livy confirms, had pretty much equal rights to those in Rome, in fact they were called Roman citizens which was not a term taken lightly. Slavery also existed in Rome, however, slavery unfortunately was prevalent in every major civilization of the time, including within Sparta, Athens, and Egypt. The point being that Rome, unlike its counterparts, did offer its citizenship to foreigners rather than death or slavery.

It was only by around the 2^nd century BC that Rome started to develop core fundamental problems that would lead to extensive corruption and civil unrest. They would never fully recover from this and it would spell the end of the republic in 27 BC. One factor to this, were that militaries were led by their generals for longer periods of time as military campaigns became longer distances from Rome, and elite military groups started to form who held more allegiance to their General than to the Republic. This is what made the power of Caesar and the existence of the two triumvirates possible. In addition, slavery became much more prevalent, the treatment of their slaves much more barbaric, and thus the gladiator games became popular (which only started end of 3^rd century BC). The gladiator games would be a terrible corruption on the people, and Spartacus would lead a successful rebellion for two years in response to this inhumanity in 73-71 BC.

Despite this fall from grace, many Roman heroes fought against this trend of corruption, such as Cato the Elder, Scipio Africanus, Cato the Younger and Cicero. Marcus Brutus thought it was in his destiny to return Rome to a republic when Caesar had seized it and crowned himself a king, just as his ancestor Junius Brutus did. However, Marcus did not learn from Junius’ example. The death of Caesar did not return Rome to a republic but rather sealed its fate to be ruled again by the whim and folly of kings, and the age of empire was born.

The people of Rome had forgotten their liberty and thus foolishly forsook it. If they could have only foreseen the monstrous tyrants they would unleash on themselves, such as; Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, they would have shuddered at the thought and done everything in their power to fight and return the republic to its original principles. Their folly would not only prove to be the doom of Rome but that of much of the world for centuries after.

Ben Franklin would state at the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 in response to a question as to what form of government had been formed, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin was entirely aware of the failure of Rome as a republic and it was never meant to be a literal model for the American Republic. However, that said the upholding of any republic would ultimately be subject to the moral condition of that society. The right of sovereignty meant the responsibility to uphold its integrity, the people would no longer have a king to blame but themselves if they were to squander this freedom.

Fortune favours the….

So what are we to take from all of this? Though Roman history is much too large to cover within this one paper, if you read either Livy or Machiavelli’s review of this history, it is undeniable that the Roman Republic did originate from an honorable and noble view of mankind, its execution was left wanting at times but it strove for most of its earlier existence for these ideals.

In addition, the Roman influences that inspired the founding fathers of the American Republic were based on these very evident principles to uphold liberty above all else. The Americans wished nothing more than to be free of the subjugation of monarchical rule and were willing to go to war with the most powerful empire in the world to win their liberty from it.

Though slavery was a mark that the United States had to battle with, it is important to acknowledge that this did not originate from within its self-conceptualisation but rather was a mark that was carried forth from Europe. A whole book could be written debating whether the founding fathers truly meant all men were born equal and free, suffice to say that when it came to a head during Lincoln’s time and a civil war erupted, there was a stand for the liberty of all.

For those who are uncertain whether the origin of the U.S. is indeed a noble and good one, I would bring forward that the Russians deemed it so. It would be stated by Czar Alexander II that if Britain and France would have intervened in America’s civil war for the side of the Confederates, that Russia would have considered this a casus belli and was willing to go to war with Britain and France over the matter. For the reason why, refer to my paper on this. It is thus undeniable that Russia deemed the continued existence of an intact United States rather important.

Though the U.S. would be in an internal conflict with itself as to which identity it would ultimately choose, it is important to recognise that there were indeed many engaged on the side for the emancipation of all people and access to a decent standard of living. Frederick Douglass, born a slave but amongst the most free as a man, understood that the preservation of the country during the civil war needed to occur before and not after equal rights and became opposed to the Abolitionists over this matter. He saw what the power of the machine tool industry in Massachusetts could accomplish in comparison to the brute slave labour of the south and understood that slavery would not be able to compete with the North’s offer and economic boom.

Lincoln had succeeded in preserving the country, however, he would not be allowed to continue into a second term and was assassinated in 1865. This was followed by a number of additional assassinations of American presidents: Garfield in 1881, McKinley in 1901, and Harding in 1923 (from a very suspect food poisoning). FDR would pass away in office in 1945, and after a questionable decision to replace his former VP Henry Wallace with cardboard cut-out Truman, the United States was set on a course that caused her to abandon what she had first set out to accomplish.

By 1961, President Eisenhower would warn of a lagoon creature that had been created in the post WWII world, the military industrial complex, as something that had gotten out of control and would threaten the liberty of Americans and the world. That the United States, who had before then a citizens army, had now elite full-time military units that were only growing in size, who only knew the life of a soldier opposed to a constant enemy.

The United States would suffer one more assassination of a president in 1963, and now here we find ourselves today, in perpetual war.

Is it too late to turn around?

Machiavelli said, that if a system is corrupt it depends on two things as to whether it will be doomed to collapse or not, firstly whether it was always corrupt or had become corrupted and secondly if the people were past a point of salvation. If the system was good at its origins, and the people had some imprint of that remaining, there would be hope that that system could still turn itself around. And therefore I say, there is still a chance. A chance not just for the continual existence of the U.S. as something good but that the rest of the world need not risk getting pulled down along with it in the case of a collapse.

There is a stirring amongst a number of people within the United States, they have had enough with war. There is growing disdain for the present corrupt structures of their system and a growing support for those who wish to enforce peace. Tulsi Gabbard is an inspiring response to this corrupt age, and she has been succeeding despite the sabotage and attacks she has undergone from mainstream media and her very own political party.

The predictable rise and fall of empires is not based off of a cyclical formula that we are condemned to repeat for the rest of our existence. We do have the capability, if we have the will, to break out of this shrinking room and enter a new paradigm, namely, the Eurasian Economic Union and the New Silk Road.

“For where men have but little wisdom and valor, Fortune more signally displays her power; and as she is variable, so the states and republics under her influence also fluctuate, and will continue to fluctuate until some ruler shall arise who is so great an admirer of antiquity as to be able to govern such states within a republic so that Fortune may not have occasion, with every revolution of the sun, to display her influence and power.” — Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy

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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).

Tom Clifford reporting from Beijing

The new coronavirus has been declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization.

“The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. So, what measures have been taken in Beijing?

Workers returning to the capital next week after the Chinese new year break face quarantine, regardless of whether they went overseas or stayed in China. Those coming back are being told to stay at their places of residence for at least a week under self-quarantine. China’s State Council, the cabinet, announced on January 27 that the Lunar New Year / Spring Festival holiday will be extended to February 2 across the country; the holiday week was originally from January 24 to January 30. Some companies are telling their employees not to return to work until February 9, to factor in the quarantine period. This may again be extended.

Many shops, restaurants and bars in the capital have closed. Few people are taking public transport. Major supermarkets remain open but there have been isolated instances of panic buying with people stocking up on fruit, noodles, milk and vegetables.

Residential compounds have introduced a visitor list where people who are non-residents must give their name and telephone number to a security guard. Compounds usually have a number of entrance and exit points. Most have been closed, allowing just one closely guarded entrance/exit gate.

Workplaces in Beijing have instituted temperature checks for employees. An electronic thermometer, about the size of a toothbrush is placed next to a wrist and if it reads 36-37 C admission is granted. However, on many occasions the thermometer cannot immediately get an accurate reading. This can mean delays of 10 minutes or so. This has not been a major issue this past week as relatively few people are at work. However, next week when hundreds of thousands return there could be long queues and angry scenes as people are denied access to their workplaces.

Everyone in the capital, without exception, is wearing a face mask when outdoors. Some places will not admit anyone not wearing one.

The key figure is the fatality rate. It is currently estimated at around 2 percent, the WHO said.

This rate may change as a virus can mutate, according to epidemiologists but at current levels the death rate is far less than the figure for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS 9.6 percent) or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS 30 percent).

At least 213 people in the China have died from the coronavirus, mostly in Hubei, with almost 10,000 cases nationally. But within China, this figure varies. Once the province Hubei (where the epicenter Wuhan is situated) is removed from the calculation, the national mortality rate drops to 0.3 percent. Within Hubei province, the mortality rate is about 1 percent when excluding the city of Wuhan (5.5 percent). It is appreciably lower than SARS or MERS and far less fatal than the common flu virus.

The WHO said there had been 98 cases in 18 other countries, but no deaths.

Most international cases are in people who had been to Wuhan. However, there have been eight cases of human-to-human infection – in Germany, Japan, Vietnam and the United States.

The central province of Hubei, where nearly all deaths have occurred, is in a state of lockdown.

Wuhan, with a population of 11 million, has effectively been sealed off and China has put numerous transport restrictions in place to curb the spread of the virus.

The WHO declares a Public Health Emergency of International Concern when there is “an extraordinary event which is determined… to constitute a public health risk to other states through the international spread of disease”.

It has previously declared five global public health emergencies: Swine flu in 2009 saw the H1N1 virus spread across the world, killing more than 200,000 people. Polio, in 2014 even though it was closer than ever to eradication in 2012, saw numbers of those infected rise dramatically.

The WHO declared Zika a public health emergency in 2016 after the disease spread rapidly through the Americas. There were two outbreaks of Ebola in 2014 and 2019. The first emergency over the virus lasted from August 2014 to March 2016 as almost 30,000 people were infected and more than 11,000 died in West Africa. A second emergency was declared last year as an outbreak spread in DR Congo claiming more than 2,200 lives.

February will be crucial. The influx of workers returning to the major cities will severely test containment measures.

Mistakes have been made. At the beginning of the outbreak, the Chinese authorities said the virus was not spreading between people. We now know that is not the case.

Each infected person seems to be passing the virus on to between 1.4 and 2.5 people.

This figure is called the basic reproduction number. Anything higher than 1 means it’s self-sustaining.

It seems that this is not a virus that will burn out on its own and disappear and the decisions being made in China – including shutting down cities – are crucial to prevent it from spreading.

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“So the cold hard truth about Brexit is this. There is only one Brexit as Mervyn King says – a hard-Brexit… The government is going to the polls to extend its powers to the point of authoritarianism in order that it can bypass representative democracy and do as it pleases. Its legacy will be to force a deregulation festival upon Britain if it wins.” – True Publica (October 29, 2019) [1]

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A marriage of nearly half a century is coming to an end.

As of 23:00 GMT on January 31, 2020, the United Kingdom officially withdraws all of its personnel from all influential bodies within the European trading block, including the European Parliament, and begins negotiations with the European Union on a new trade and security relationship. [2]

The road to this divorce has been a chaotic one. Originating with a high stakes gamble by pro-EU Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to contain the Eurosceptics in his own party, the island country voted to end its relationship with its continental neighbour by the slimmest of margins in the June 2016 referendum. Cameron’s successor Theresa May, unable to secure a deal to establish the terms of a Brexit, would resign as PM, making room for Leave campaigner Boris Johnson to take charge of the UK government and its Brexit process.

In the lead up to the December 12th election, Johnson was able to set the tone for the campaign with a clear pledge to ‘Get Brexit Done’ while the Labour Party would be dogged by their poor handling of the Brexit issue as well as smears directed toward leader Jeremy Corbyn. When the dust cleared, the Conservatives would command the largest majority of seats since Margaret Thatcher’s historic election in 1979, thereby establishing for himself a strong mandate to complete once and for all the UK’s departure from the EU.

A transition period will persist until the end of 2020 at which point, deal or no deal, the UK will no longer receive any of the advantages or handicaps associated with EU membership. [3]

The Brexit drama has unquestionably left an indelible mark on the political institutions of this once mighty imperial power, and will no doubt have consequences for its former partners, and the economies it will now be dealing with as a separate entity. This week’s Global Research News Hour radio program endeavours to explore these and other developments in the country within this exciting and timely one hour show.

For the bulk of the show, two guests, Winnipeg based Political Studies Professor Radhika Desai and Belgium-based journalist Youri Smouter discuss the foreseeable impact of Brexit, what happened during the December 2019 election, and the challenges within the Labour Party and how they may affect its policy stance, if or when that party should ever return to power. Toward the end of the show, we touch base with commentator Patrick Henningsen about the session of Parliament he attended which featured whistleblower testimony challenging the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) conclusions regarding alleged chemical weapons use by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, and Director, Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. She co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press. She is the author of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013) among other books, as well as numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, International Critical Thought, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly, World Review of Political Economy and other journals.

Youri Smouter is a journalist and host/producer of an upcoming online current affairs program. He had participated in the September 2019 Labour Party Conference as a press correspondent.

Patrick Henningsen is a journalist, geopolitical analyst and Founder/Editor of 21st Century Wire. He has been a regular host on UK Column and has appeared as an expert commentator on a number of international publications including Consortium News, UK Column, The Guardian, Global Research, New Dawn Magazine (Australia), and also on leading global networks like RT New International, Al Jazeera, ITN (UK), CGTN (China), Indus News (PK), Edge Media (SKY 200 UK) and US syndicated radio shows Fault Lines Radio, and Coast to Coast AM.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 285)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 3pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/brexit-the-cold-hard-truth-emerges/5693360
2. Adam Bienkov, Thomas Colson and Adam Payne (January 31, 2020) ‘What will actually change after the UK leaves the EU on Brexit day?’, Business Insider; https://www.businessinsider.com/what-will-actually-change-after-the-uk-leaves-the-eu-on-brexit-day-2020-1
3. ibid

In the course of the last two weeks, the World Health Organization (WHO) had already pointed to a possible Global Public Health crisis in relation to China’s novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) categorized  as a viral pneumonia. The virus outbreak is centred in the city of Wuhan, a city in Eastern China with a population in excess of 11 million.

On 22 January, the members of the WHO Emergency Committee “expressed divergent views on whether this event constitutes a PHEIC or not”.

On January 30, The Committee reconvened  and declared the coronavirus epidemic as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

(for details on the Committee meetings scroll down to ANNEX)

What justified this far-reaching decision by the WHO Director General?

About 9,600 corona virus (pneumonia) confirmed cases (Jan 30). And 213 deaths  recorded in China on Jan 30, which has a population of almost 1.4 billion.

No deaths have been reported out of Mainland China.

Out of 9600 confirmed cases, approximately 150 cases of infection have been recorded outside China. Moreover, (based on the above data, Jan 30), the 2019  nCoV has a low mortality rate  (2.1%) compared to the Seasonal flu.

CBS Screen scan, Jan 30, 2020

The above CBS quotation is misleading.

Based on January 30 data, what should be emphasized is the following

• No deaths occurred outside China,
• More than 9500 recorded cases in China,
• Approximately 150 cases recorded outside China, (see list below)

In contrast, in the US,  the Centers of Disease Control  estimate that so far for the 2019-20 season, at least 15 million flu virus illnesses, 140,000 hospitalizations and 8,200 deaths in the U.S, which has population of 330 million, about a quarter that of China.

And there was virtually no coverage or concern regarding the Seasonal Flu, which in 2017 resulted globally in 650,000 deaths.

Source CDC

The media has gone into hight gear: The Wuhan coronavirus is portrayed as a global threat.

The latter is not corroborated by the recorded cases of infection and death.

Only 150 cases outside of China Mainland (Jan 30).  No deaths recorded outside China.

Ironically, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a press conference confirmed that:

“The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it.”

What was happening “in other countries” (aka approximately 150 cases of infection and no recorded deaths in 23 countries and 2 territories (Macau and Hong Kong) (Jan 30)) does not justify the launching of a WHO sponsored Worldwide Public Health Emergency. (See below for distribution by country).

Coronavirus cases of infection: by country

Source Al Jazeera quoting official sources, January 31, 2020

Fake Emergency? Can we Trust the WHO?

In turn, the corporate media serves as an instrument of disinformation. The public has been misled.

About 150 infections Worldwide (excluding China). The World population is 7.7 billion, China’s population is 1.4 billion.

A rash Committee decision adopted at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

Déjà Vu: Flashback to 2009. The H1N1 swine flu pandemic

There are precedents: In 2009, based on incomplete and scanty data, the WHO predicted (“with authority”) that the H1N1 swine flu virus would result in :

“…as many as 2 billion people could become infected over the next two years — nearly one-third of the world population.” (World Health Organization as reported by the Western media, July 2009).

It turned out to be a multibillion bonanza for Big Pharma supported by the WHO’s Director-General Margaret Chan. 

In June 2009, Margaret Chan made the following statement:

“On the basis of … expert assessments of the evidence, the scientific criteria for an influenza pandemic have been met. I have therefore decided to raise the level of influenza pandemic alert from Phase 5 to Phase 6.  The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic. … Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), Press Briefing  11 June 2009)

What “expert assessments”?

In a subsequent statement she confirmed that:

“Vaccine makers could produce 4.9 billion pandemic flu shots per year in the best-case scenario”,Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO), quoted by Reuters, 21 July 2009)

A financial windfall for Big Pharma Vaccine Producers including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Merck & Co., Sanofi,  Pfizer. et al.

Swine Flu Fake News, Fake Statistics, Lies at the Highest Levels of Government

The media went into overdrive. (without a shred of evidence). Fear and Uncertainty. Public opinion was deliberately misled

“Swine flu could strike up to 40 percent of Americans over the next two years and as many as several hundred thousand could die if a vaccine campaign and other measures aren’t successful.” (Official Statement of Obama Administration, Associated Press, 24 July 2009).

“The U.S. expects to have 160 million doses of swine flu vaccine available sometime in October”, (Associated Press, 23 July 2009)

But the pandemic never happened.

There was no pandemic affecting 2 billion people…

Millions of doses of swine flu vaccine had been ordered by national governments from Big Pharma. In the meantime the H1N1 virus had mutated. Millions of doses were subsequently destroyed: a financial bonanza for Big Pharma, an expenditure crisis for national governments.

There was no investigation into who was behind this multibillion fraud. 

Several critics said that the H1N1 Pandemic was “Fake”.

Reported by Forbes:

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), a human rights watchdog, is publicly investigating the WHO’s motives in declaring a pandemic. Indeed, the chairman of its influential health committee, epidemiologist Wolfgang Wodarg, has declared that the “false pandemic” is “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century.” (Forbes, February 10, 2010, emphasis added)

For more details on the 2009 H1NI pandemic see:

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

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 25, 2020

Important Lessons from the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic: 

Can we trust the Western media?

Can we trust the World Health Organization (WHO) and Western governments including the US Centers  for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), all of which are serving the interests of Big Pharma (at tax payers’ expense)?

What are the stakes, why the media propaganda?

---

ANNEX 

This annex provides details on the January 3oth WHO Decision to identify the Wuhan coronavirus epidemic as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).

Below are relevant excerpts 

Members and advisors of the Emergency Committee were convened by teleconference

The Director-General welcomed the Committee and thanked them for their support. He turned the meeting over to the Chair, Professor Didier Houssin.

….

Representatives of the Ministry of Health of the People’s Republic of China reported on the current situation and the public health measures being taken. There are now 7711 confirmed and 12167 suspected cases throughout the country. Of the confirmed cases, 1370 are severe and 170 people have died. 124 people have recovered and been discharged from hospital.

The WHO Secretariat provided an overview of the situation in other countries. There are now 83 cases in 18 countries. Of these, only 7 had no history of travel in China. There has been human-to-human transmission in 3 countries outside China. One of these cases is severe and there have been no deaths. 

At its first meeting, the Committee expressed divergent views on whether this event constitutes a PHEIC or not. At that time, the advice was that the event did not constitute a PHEIC, but the Committee members agreed on the urgency of the situation and suggested that the Committee should continue its meeting on the next day, when it reached the same conclusion.

This second meeting takes place in view of significant increases in numbers of cases and additional countries reporting confirmed cases.

…

The Committee welcomed the leadership and political commitment of the very highest levels of Chinese government, their commitment to transparency, and the efforts made to investigate and contain the current outbreak. China quickly identified the virus and shared its sequence, so that other countries could diagnose it quickly and protect themselves, which has resulted in the rapid development of diagnostic tools.

The very strong measures the country has taken include daily contact with WHO and comprehensive multi-sectoral approaches to prevent further spread. It has also taken public health measures in other cities and provinces; is conducting studies on the severity and transmissibility of the virus, and sharing data and biological material. The country has also agreed to work with other countries who need their support. The measures China has taken are good not only for that country but also for the rest of the world.

The Committee welcomed a forthcoming WHO multidisciplinary technical mission to China, ..

The Committee wished to re-emphasize the importance of studying the possible source, to rule out hidden transmission and to inform risk management measures

The Committee also emphasized the need for enhanced surveillance in regions outside Hubei, including pathogen genomic sequencing, to understand whether local cycles of transmission are occurring.

WHO should continue to use its networks of technical experts to assess how best this outbreak can be contained globally.

WHO should provide intensified support for preparation and response, especially in vulnerable countries and regions.

Measures to ensure rapid development and access to potential vaccines, diagnostics, antiviral medicines and other therapeutics for low- and middle-income countries should be developed.

WHO should continue to provide all necessary technical and operational support to respond to this outbreak, including with its extensive networks of partners and collaborating institutions, to implement a comprehensive risk communication strategy, and to allow for the advancement of research and scientific developments in relation to this novel coronavirus.

WHO should continue to explore the advisability of creating an intermediate level of alert between the binary possibilities of PHEIC or no PHEIC, in a way that does not require reopening negotiations on the text of the IHR (2005).

WHO should timely review the situation with transparency and update its evidence-based recommendations.

The Committee does not recommend any travel or trade restriction based on the current information available.

The Director-General declared that the outbreak of 2019-nCoV constitutes a PHEIC and accepted the Committee’s advice and issued this advice as Temporary Recommendations under the IHR.

…

The Emergency Committee will be reconvened within three months or earlier, at the discretion of the Director-General.

The Director-General thanked the Committee for its work.

Since 1945, the British government have made some catastrophic errors of judgement, which has led to the continuing decline of British prosperity. From the mismanagement and indecision over extricating itself from its empire to the Suez Canal crisis. In the space of barely a decade, the former led to collapsing local economies and generational resentment towards Britain – the latter resulted significantly towards Britain’s decline as a world power. These two events alone demonstrate that the government does not always know best.

Brexit, which won’t actually happen until the end of 2020 has already cost the economy £130billion and expected to cost another £70billion by the end of the year. It might not seem like much when the government can throw nearly £110billion at a (train set) vanity project that won’t achieve anything other than slicing 20 minutes off a journey that only takes 2 hours in the first place. HS2 is going to be a failure for all sorts of reasons – but hey – let’s just ramp up the national debt. Why not, it’s the kids who’ll have to pay for that one.

This government spent £46 million on a “Get ready for Brexit” advertising campaign which didn’t actually make the public any better prepared for Brexit. This is the view from the UK’s official spending watchdog, the National Audit Office.

The government budgeted a total of £100 million for a public billboard, newspaper, and social media campaign, promoting Britain’s then planned exit from the European Union on October 31 2019.

However, the NAO found that by the time the campaign was brought to an end, just 34% of the public were likely to seek out information about preparing for Britain’s exit, which was broadly unchanged from before the start of the campaign. What it really meant was that – the money was wasted. Every penny.

The plan was the most expensive of four options considered by the government, with the least expensive option being simply to do nothing – which, as it turned out, would have achieved the same.

It is also true to say that the NAO was being polite when it said – “that the effectiveness of the campaign may have been hindered by the public’s awareness that the October 31 Brexit deadline promoted by the campaign was unlikely to be kept.” 

Overall, the government has spent £8billion preparing for Brexit so far. Then there’s £11 million on 50p coins (plus two false starts). Oh and let’s not forget that Brexit has caused two additional general elections. The last one in 2017 cost £140million. So there’s another £280million (ish) up the wall.

Apparently, the government is due to spend £120million on the Brexit festival that 80 per cent of the public have stated they do not want to celebrate.

Forgetting for one moment that the economy will be down £200billion in eleven months time – ‘spaffing’ over £8.5billion on Brexit is what we can expect from our PM. He has form when it comes to wasting other peoples money.

Those who worked closely with Johnson as mayor of London, including fellow Conservatives, told the Guardian last July that he defied senior officials over a string of profligate projects and resisted being held to account for their ballooning costs. “The projects included going ahead with new Routemaster buses despite being told by his transport commissioner that they would be too expensive to run. He also purchased three secondhand water cannons against the advice of the lead police officer on riot control. And Johnson refused to publish the results of an 18-month study that he commissioned after it unequivocally warned against his idea of building an airport in the Thames estuary.”

Johnson championed eight high-profile projects that mostly ended in failure or wasn’t worth the trouble. Between them, they cost the taxpayer about a billion pounds. One million pounds takes the average worker on average full-time permanent pay, 41 years to earn. A stack of £20 notes needs to be 6 metres (20ft) high and weighs about 50kilos to reach a million quid. Johnson had a thousand of those piles and blew them to the wind to make him look good. Which they didn’t.

Johnson even spent £417,000 on a gala for a garden bridge he was advised against, no-one wanted and was then abandoned. There were other dramatic projects that ended in failure such as the Olympic Orbit Tower that no-one has heard of, which accrues debt interest of £700,000 a year due to its failure. Johnson allegedly commissioned the tower after bumping into the steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal at a cloakroom at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Mittal was also at the centre of the ‘cash-for-influence’ scandal in 2002, which almost brought the government down. At the time, the leader of the Opposition, David Cameron, described the scandal as “shocking” and demanded an inquiry.  The word ‘hypocrite’ simply doesn’t describe him or Johnson does it? Would it surprise you to know that Mittal poured last-minute cash into the leadership campaign of Boris Johnson a few months back? No – it didn’t surprise me either.

So it is perfectly logical and reasonable to expect that Brexit will continue to cost the country and its inhabitants billions, that vanity projects puffed up with propaganda campaigns against all the advice will continue. All this will come at significant cost to the public purse that is itself overly stretched because of the negative effects two events – the bank-led financial crisis, which is still not over and Brexit. It’s a cycle. And just like the Suez crisis that blew up in Tory PM Anthony Eden’s face in 1956 that led to his resignation a year later – the cost and losses were incalculable to Britain then as Brexit will be too.

If HS2 comes in at about £100billion (the latest estimate), that will cost each household in the United Kingdom in today’s money about £3,700. By this year-end, Brexit will have cost double that to each household. The difference between the two is that with HS2 there is a visible and tangible reminder of failure that we can blame – a bit like the failure of rail privatisation in general. Brexit, on the other hand, will be blamed on everyone else but those who brought it to us. And both will have to be paid for by a generation who can’t even afford to buy a place to live, and whose future employment prospects have just been reduced!

There’s a point when the realisation of what has happened becomes reality. The first real signs of Brexit’s ‘dividends’ will be seen in the economy. But it will take years to come to a real conclusion.

We should all remember that it took nearly fifty years before historians finally concluded that the Suez crisis “signified the end of Great Britain’s role as one of the world’s major powers.”

And it’s ironic isn’t it that just five years after Suez, the government then realised that the slow economic growth of the UK’s population compared to that of the European Economic Community was a point of real concern, so in 1961 they opened the first round of talks to join it. Applications were refused in 1963 and 1967 because  – “Britain harboured a deep-seated hostility to any pan-European project.” They were right then and they are right now. It took two decades for British businesses and EEC member states to lobby for Britain’s entry. The Foreign Office of the day finally produced a document that concluded (paragraph 26) that it was “advisable to put the considerations of influence and power before those of formal sovereignty” – exactly the reverse turned out to be the argument for leaving.

By the late 1960s exports from Britain to western Europe outstripped those to countries participating in ‘Imperial Preference’ and British investment in the EEC was much faster than that going to the Commonwealth. So if Britain has now left the EU and it abandoned investment in the Commonwealth years ago, we all are in for a rude awakening. If Britain joined the EU to keep up after our own home-made crisis then we are in trouble. If we are leaving because of sovereignty in place of influence and power – then we made a mistake either then or now. One way or the other – Britain has screwed this decision up as well. I wonder when the realisation stage really comes to being something because one thing is for sure – the EU won’t allow Britain back in after all this as it has proved exactly what they thought five decades ago.

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Since no-peace/peace plans first surfaced in the 1970s, the US and Israel supported Palestinian self-determination in name only.

Both countries opposed the idea since Israel seized Palestinian territory not stolen in 1948.

A two-state solution was theoretically possible years earlier, no longer with Israel controlling 70% or more of West Bank land and Jerusalem entirely — unwilling to relinquish any of it with US support.

Jimmy Carter is right saying the Trump regime’s scheme “undercuts prospects for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.”

He’s wrong claiming that its implementation “will doom the only viable solution to this long-running conflict, the two-state solution” — because no such solution ever existed in fact, just rhetorically.

Urging UN member states to reject the scheme, Carter correctly said it “breaches international law regarding self-determination, the acquisition of land by force, and annexation of occupied territories,” adding:

“By calling Israel ‘the nation-state of the Jewish people,’ the plan also encourages the denial of equal rights to the Palestinian citizens of Israel.”

At age-95, Carter is the longest-living former US president. Visiting Jerusalem in 2015, months after Israeli aggression against defenseless Gazans in summer 2014, he said the following:

“What we have seen and heard only strengthens our determination to work for peace. The situation in Gaza is intolerable.”

Warning of a “humanitarian catastrophe” at the time, events on the ground bore him out.

The Strip is unlivable for its two million residents under a medieval blockade, punctuated by cross-border Israeli ground and air attacks at its discretion.

At the time of his Jerusalem visit, Carter said “(a)s long as (Netanyahu) is in charge, there will be no two-state solution and therefore no Palestinian state.”

Since Israel’s preemptive 1967 Six Day War, Palestinian self-determination was opposed by all its ruling regimes to this day.

In response to Carter calling Israeli aggression on Gaza “illegitimate,” president Rivlin refused to meet with him. Israel’s foreign ministry boycotted his visit.

Carter earlier compared Israel’s occupation and settlement construction to  to South Africa’s apartheid, saying:

“When Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects the 200-or-so settlements with each other, with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa.”

His book titled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” aimed to stimulate debate on the issue, never occurring in the US, West or Israel.

Carter earlier and likely today believes that regional peace remains unattainable as long as Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory continues.

It’s only attainable if Israel “compl(ies) with international law,” he said — the same true about the US he left unexplained.

In discussing Carter’s book earlier, Norman Finkelstein noted harsh mainstream criticism of his “apartheid analogy” — what pro-Zionist Jewish groups call “dangerous and anti-Semitic,” how virtually all legitimate criticism of Israel is characterized.

Finkelstein: “After (over half a century) of Israeli occupation, the infrastructure and superstructure of apartheid have been put in place,” quoting former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti observing the following in his 1995 book titled “Intimate Enemies:”

“It goes without saying that ‘cooperation’ based on the current power relationship is no more than permanent Israeli domination in disguise, and that Palestinian self-rule is merely a euphemism for Bantustanization.”

B’Tselem earlier criticized Israel as follows, saying:

“Israel has created in the Occupied Territories a regime of separation based on discrimination, applying two separate systems of law in the same area and basing the rights of individuals on their nationality.”

“This regime is the only one of its kind in the world, and is reminiscent of distasteful regimes from the past, such as the apartheid regime in South Africa.”

In 2006, Haaretz said “the apartheid regime in the territories remains intact.”

“Millions of Palestinians are living without rights, freedom of movement or a livelihood, under the yoke of ongoing Israeli occupation.”

Activists, honest academics, independent jurists, and Nobel laureates condemn Israeli apartheid rule the same way.

Under international law, apartheid is considered a crime of war and against humanity — a gross perversion of governance of, by, and for everyone equitably, a notion rejected in the West and Israel.

In its unanimous 2004 ruling, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) called construction of Israel’s apartheid wall a violation of international law that must cease, be dismantled, Palestinian land returned, and compensation paid for property destroyed

The ICJ went further, adding:

“No territorial acquisition resulting from the threat or use of force shall be recognized as legal” by any UN member state, its ruling binding on the world community.

The Trump regime’s annexation scheme of the century can only succeed by brute force.

His so-called “vision” is nightmarish for long-suffering Palestinians, world’s apart from what he called a “win-win” deal.

Hardline Israeli war minister Naftali Bennett said “(w)e will not allow for Israel, under any circumstances, to recognize a Palestinian state,” adding: “Everything should be taken…now.

Militant pro-settler Yesha Council head David Elhayani said “(w)e  cannot agree to a plan that will include the formation of a Palestinian state which will pose a threat to the State of Israel and a great danger in the future.”

Other Israeli hardliners expressed similar views.

Trump’s scheme is polar opposite a “path of peace…a great step for peace.”

It’s a notion both right wings of the US war party and their Israeli counterparts categorically reject, along with Palestinian self-determination the way it should be, vastly different from the Trump regime’s proposed bantustan version.

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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 IMEMC

Less than a week after millions of Iraqis took to the streets demanding the U.S. military leave for good, the United States announced that is planning to build three new military bases in Iraq, according to military news service Breaking Defense. The three sites chosen – Erbin, Sulimania and Halabja – are all extremely close to Iran, with Halabja (the site of the 1988 chemical weapons attack) just eight miles from the border.

The news will come as a shock to the Iraqi parliament, who earlier this month voted overwhelmingly (with some abstentions) to expel American forces from the country. But the U.S. government has flatly refused to leave.

“At this time, any delegation sent to Iraq would be dedicated to discussing how to best recommit to our strategic partnership — not to discuss troop withdrawal, but our right, appropriate force posture in the Middle East,” said State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus, adding, “We strongly urge Iraqi leaders to reconsider the importance of the ongoing economic and security relationship between the two countries… We believe it is in the shared interests of the United States and Iraq to continue fighting ISIS together.”

Earlier this month the U.S. decided to send an extra 3,000 troops to the region.

President Trump responded by threatening sweeping mass punishments against the Iraqi people.

“We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it…If they do ask us to leave, if we don’t do it in a very friendly basis, we will charge them sanctions like they’ve never seen before ever,” he said.

U.S.-led sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s are thought to have killed over one million people, including over half a million young children. Successive U.N. diplomats in charge of Iraq during the sanctions denounced them as genocide against its people. Trump said his sanctions would make the ones on Iran look tame by comparison.

“If there’s any hostility,” he said, “we are going to put sanctions on Iraq, very big sanctions.” Trump also threatened to commit genocide against the people of Iran, destroying their cultural heritage sites in a move condemned by many and compared to the Taliban’s destruction of the world-renowned Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan.

Despite the president’s threats, enormous numbers of Iraqis heeded Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s call for a “million man march” in Baghdad last week. While Time magazine claimed there were only “hundreds” in attendance, drone footage told a very different story. Some estimates put the total at over 2.5 million. And despite Bloomberg Quick Take originally claiming that they were “anti-government demonstrations,” the huge banner on the main stage reading “GET OUT AMERICA” in uppercase English letters suggested otherwise.

Sadr asked for it. Today's the day. Baghdad now#Iraqmillionmanmarch #Iraq pic.twitter.com/9xPLS29U5q

— Logiko Iko (@IkoAfortiori) January 24, 2020

Hostilities between the United States and Iran threatened to spiral out of control after the January 3 assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani had been invited to Baghdad by Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi for regional peace talks. Abdul-Mahdi asked Trump for permission for Soleimani to enter Iraq. Trump accepted, then used the opportunity to kill the general with a drone strike, something the Iraqi parliament declared a violation of their national sovereignty. In retaliation, the Iranians fired ballistic missiles at U.S.-occupied bases in Iraq, causing pinpoint damage, but no fatalities, as the U.S. was warned of the impending response. The Pentagon has said that dozens of troops have suffered brain injuries as a result, but the president disagrees, claiming they amount to little more than headaches.

Source | Express

The plan to build new bases will be seen in Iran as an attempt to tighten the noose around it more tightly. There are already over 65,000 American military personnel in neighboring countries. The U.S. continues to occupy Iraq and Afghanistan since the invasions launched in the wake of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks.

Since 2003, an estimated 2.4 million people have been killed in the U.S. war on Iraq. One of the consequences of the wars in the Middle East was the rise of the Islamic State, which itself has led to further conflict. The U.S. military also operates from a network of bases in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and many other states in the region.

The move to establish three new U.S. military bases on Iran’s borders will not be a welcome move to those who wish to deescalate tensions, least of all by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, who moved their Doomsday Clock to just 100 seconds to midnight, citing a possible regional nuclear catastrophe as a factor.

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Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Featured image: Protesters take to the streets of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, for a million-man rally to call for an end to the military presence of the United States in their country. Photo | Mehr

China’s Virus Response Has Been ‘Breathtaking’

By Pepe Escobar, January 31, 2020

President Xi Jinping formally told WHO head Tedros Ghebreyesus, at their meeting in Beijing earlier this week, that the coronavirus epidemic “is a devil and we cannot allow the devil to hide.”

Ghebreyesus for his part could not but praise Beijing for its extremely swift, coordinated response strategy – which includes fast identification of the genome sequence. Chinese scientists have already handed over to Russian counterparts the virus genome, with snap tests able to identify it in a human body within two hours. A Russia-China vaccine is under development.

England Came and Went, Leaving Europe in a Mess. UK Leaves EU

By Diana Johnstone, January 31, 2020

Whew. Finally, at last, the United Kingdom is formally leaving the European Union on January 31.  Here in Paris, the champions of French withdrawal from the EU are celebrating. They see Brexit as the harbinger of a future “Frexit”, a French departure from undemocratic governance, and the beginning of the end of a failed project to unify Europe around the demands of neoliberal capitalism.

Endless War Is a Disastrous (but Profitable) Enterprise

By Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, January 31, 2020

Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, was sitting right beside the president as Obama spoke. I recall asking myself at the time if he were lecturing Kerry as well as lamenting his own decision, because Kerry had been rather outspoken at the time about heavier U.S. participation in yet another endless war then — and still — transpiring in Syria. Obama however, was apparently having none of that.

How the FBI Sabotaged Trump Foreign Policy

By Renee Parsons, January 30, 2020

It does not take a poli sci major to figure out that Flynn’s immediate removal from the Administration was essential to undermining Trump’s entire foreign policy initiatives including no new interventionist wars, peace with Russia and US withdrawal from Syria and Afghanistan.  In retrospect, the entire fraudulent Russiagate conspiracy makes sense when viewed from the perspective of an effort to rein in Trump’s foreign policy goals of which Flynn would have been a necessary, integral part.

The Torturers and the ‘Ticking Bomb’: How Torture Became Routine in the Global War on Terror

By Philip Giraldi, January 30, 2020

Acting as if it really cared about illegal activity, the White House back at that time found two malleable Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Busby who would be willing to come up with a defense of torture. They discovered somewhere in their law books that it was possible to do anything to a suspect as long as it did not bring about organ failure. That became the bottom line for interrogations, though in practice some prisoners died anyway, which might be considered the ultimate organ failure. The only one who was subsequently punished over the illegal torture program was former C.I.A. employee John Kiriakou, who blew the whistle on it.

Gaza Is Already Unliveable: Help the Freedom Flotilla Sail Against the Inhuman Blockade of Gaza

By Freedom Flotilla Coalition, January 31, 2020

In 2020, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition will sail again to break the illegal and inhuman blockade of Gaza. During this mission we will be focusing on children and youth struggling to survive in the wreckage of Gaza, their beloved home. Canada Boat to Gaza is reaching out to children and youth organizations, and to individuals like you, to help support our work and to bring an end to the suffering in Gaza.

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If you have the means to make a small or substantial donation to contribute to our fight for truth, peace and justice around the world, your gesture would be much appreciated.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) yesterday decided to formally declare the outbreak of 2019-nCoV, the new coronavirus first identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan, as a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC).” The PHEIC classification was only established by WHO in 2005 following the 2002–2003 SARS pandemic. It has been declared on five occasions since, in response to the 2009 Swine Flu, the outbreaks in 2014 of Ebola and polio, the 2016 Zika virus and the 2019 resurgence of Ebola in central Africa.

Chinese authorities reported last night that the number of confirmed cases of 2019-nCoV has reached at least 8,100. The virus has spread from its source in Wuhan across mainland China and now around the world. At least 100 cases—predominantly people either from or who had visited Wuhan—have been diagnosed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, South Korea, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, France, Finland, the United States and Canada. Dozens of suspected cases are under investigation in other countries.

The number of deaths directly linked to 2019-nCoV infection, which can lead to severe pneumonia that cannot be treated with antibiotics or existing antiviral drugs, currently stands at 171. All of the fatalities were in China and, according to Chinese authorities, were mainly older people with existing medical conditions. The fatality rate, at around 2.7 percent, is low in comparison with other coronavirus outbreaks such as SARS and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). As with any virus, there is the possibility that as it spreads it could mutate into a far more deadly strain.

Like SARS and MERS, 2019-nCoV is an animal virus that has migrated to infect humans, most likely originating in either bats or snakes. At present, scientists postulate that it is being transmitted between people via respiratory “droplets” spread by coughing, so most likely can only be contracted if someone is in close and protracted proximity to an infected individual. By way of comparison, the common influenza virus, which spreads between people far more easily, has infected at least 15 million Americans and caused at least 8,200 deaths just in the 2019–2020 flu season.

In designating 2019-nCoV a global public health emergency, WHO officials took into account the evidence that the rate of human-to-human transmission outside China is increasing.

WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a press conference last night:

“The main reason for this declaration is not because of what is happening in China, but because of what is happening in other countries. Our greatest concern is the potential for the virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems, and which are ill-prepared to deal with it.”

The media has generally interpreted this statement as a reference to so-called underdeveloped or “Third World” countries. In fact, the United States—where there is now one reported case of human-to-human transmission in Chicago—would be high on the list of concern. Tens of millions of people live in extreme poverty and lack any health insurance, while the public health system is drastically under-resourced. If several thousand patients sought treatment at the same time for severe respiratory illnesses in a major American city, it would completely overwhelm the medical system. A comparable situation exists in virtually all the so-called “advanced” capitalist countries.

The dangers are heightened by the likelihood that a vaccine for 2019-nCoV will not be developed for at least four months and would most likely not be available for roll-out to the general population for well over a year. One factor in the time length is the lack of collaboration between dozens of rival medical clinics internationally, which will be striving to patent a vaccine so their corporate owners can profit from its sale.

The international unpreparedness for serious pandemics—in terms of adequate medical facilities, dedicated quarantine wards and coordinated research teams—is reflected in the panicked responses to the coronavirus being announced around the world.

In China, health workers have reportedly had to deal with insufficient testing kits to diagnose the virus and shortages of protective suits to guarantee their own safety. In one Wuhan hospital, a nurse told CNN that at least 30 of the 500 staff are now infected. Hospitals have run out of beds and are telling people to go home unless they are displaying severe symptoms. Chinese authorities have rushed 1,800 additional doctors and specialists to Hubei province, while two temporary hospitals with a combined 2,300 beds are being rapidly built to cope with the number of patients.

Since January 22, the Chinese government has attempted to seal off Wuhan and other cities in Hubei province to try and stem the spread the virus. In total, some 50 million people are living under travel bans. As with all such blanket measures, however, those with wealth and power easily circumvent them. Moreover, 2019-nCoV was first identified in late December. By the time the quarantine was declared, as many as five million people had moved in and out of Wuhan, the largest city in central China, including thousands who travelled overseas. A factor in the spread of the virus was that people travelled elsewhere in China because they could not get treatment in the city.

Long after the virus has well and truly gone global, most airlines have now suspended or reduced their flights in and out of China. Airports internationally have erected elaborate screening measures to try and identify potential carriers of the virus, though infected people do not exhibit any symptoms for as long as seven to 10 days. Russia and North Korea have sealed their borders with China. In Italy, panicked authorities refused to allow thousands of people aboard a cruise ship to disembark due to suspicion that two passengers may have been infected. Test results came back negative.

A number of countries have organised flights to evacuate their citizens from the Wuhan region, but then placed them in quarantine in often substandard conditions. The Australian government stands out for its callousness. It is seeking to charge hundreds of Australian nationals $1,000 to be evacuated and intends to isolate them on the remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean and house them in the bleak facilities built to imprison so-called illegal refugees.

Amid the geostrategic and economic tensions between the United States and its allies with China, various demagogues are seizing the opportunity presented by the virus outbreak to stoke anti-Chinese xenophobia and sing nationalist praise of their own countries.

The Washington Post lambasted the Chinese government in the headline of an editorial yesterday for having “put everyone at risk” due to the lag between when the virus was identified and health warnings and drastic quarantine measures were announced. The Post implied that in the US, the “free press” would have ensured that information emerged more quickly. In fact, as has emerged time and again, the major American newspapers and networks collaborate just as intimately to censor information, on behalf of the government and the corporate ruling class, as their Chinese counterparts.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Australian published today a particularly obscene piece by right-wing academic Salvatore Babones. He implied that the reason why coronaviruses have migrated from animals to humans in China and not in Australia was because Chinese—due to Confucianism and “communism”—relied on the state and did not “self-organise” to ensure sanitation and public health.

Babone wrote: “Australian civil society accomplishes what 100 million bureaucrats cannot—it ensures good public health by promoting safe practices broadly, across every niche of the economy, nearly all of the time.”

The utter stupidity of such nationalist assertions can be seen in the way that decades of Australian government indifference and inaction have left the population totally unprepared for the devastating impact of climate-change linked droughts, fires and floods. People have had to “self-organise” in fire-affected towns and regions over recent weeks because the emergency services and social support networks have been so deprived of resources that they are unable to provide the needed assistance.

The virus outbreak, like the climate change-linked natural disasters wreaking havoc on the lives of millions of people, starkly poses the necessity of international scientific planning and organisation and the investment of hundreds of billions of dollars into health and safety infrastructure, emergency services and preventative measures. The obstacle is the capitalist system, which subordinates economic and social life to the accumulation of private profit for a minority and maintains the division of the integrated and interdependent global economy into competing national states.

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Featured image is from EPA/STRINGER CHINA OUT

“Trump’s policy rollback is a step toward the past, like many of his other decisions, and sends exactly the wrong message to those working to rid the world of the scourge of landmines.”

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President Donald Trump is reportedly preparing to roll back established constraints on the U.S. military’s ability to use landmines overseas despite the weapons’ long history of killing and maiming civilians around the world.

CNN, citing multiple anonymous Defense Department officials, reported Thursday that the Trump administration is expected to loosen landmine restrictions in the coming days by rescinding a 2014 order by former President Barack Obama that limited U.S. landmine use to the Korean Peninsula.

“President Obama’s policy brought the U.S. policy closely in line with the obligations of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty,” Jody Williams, an anti-war activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997 for her work to ban landmines, told Common Dreams in an email. “Mr. Trump’s policy rollback is a step toward the past, like many of his other decisions, and sends exactly the wrong message to those working to rid the world of the scourge of landmines.”

More than 160 nations have ratified the Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Treaty, which prohibits the stockpiling, production, and use of landmines. The United States is one of just 32 U.N. member states that have not ratified the treaty.

“The beauty of the treaty is that it has established a new norm and even countries outside the treaty felt the stigma related to landmines and changed policies, even if they didn’t join the treaty,” said Williams. “Mr. Trump’s landmine move would be in line with all of his other moves to undercut arms control and disarmament in a world much in need of them. The landmine ban movement will do what it has always done with governments that still remain outside the Mine Ban Treaty—push back and continue the push to universalize the treaty—including the U.S.”

The Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, a non-governmental research initiative, estimated in a November 2019 report that 130,000 people were killed by landmines between 1999 and 2018. The majority of the deaths were civilians.

According to CNN, the Trump administration’s new policy will place the authority to use landmines in the hands of “commanders of the U.S. military’s combatant commands, usually a four-star general or admiral, such as the commanders of U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Central Command which oversee operations on the African continent and the Middle East respectively.”

“The new policy… is expected to permit the operational use of landmines only if they have a 30-day self-destruction or self-deactivation feature,” CNN reported. “The new policy would also allow for the development, production, and procurement of landmines only if they have these features.”

The decision to rescind the Obama administration’s 2014 policy was recommended following a Pentagon review launched in 2017 by then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis.

“So horrific that after decades of international efforts to rid the world of landmines, Trump is about to ‘make landmines great again’ by loosening restrictions on their use,” Medea Benjamin, co-founder of anti-war group CodePink, told Common Dreams.

Advocacy group Public Citizen echoed that reaction on Twitter.

“Is this what Make America Great Again means? Who in their right mind can justify this?” the group asked. “Landmines have a long history of killing and wounding civilians and are banned by more than 160 countries. Absolutely horrific.”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Featured image: Landmine survivor Mohammed Gulzar hold sa placard during a peace march in New Delhi on February 15, 2010. (Photo: Manpreet Romana/AFP via Getty Images)

President Xi Jinping formally told WHO head Tedros Ghebreyesus, at their meeting in Beijing earlier this week, that the coronavirus epidemic “is a devil and we cannot allow the devil to hide.”

Ghebreyesus for his part could not but praise Beijing for its extremely swift, coordinated response strategy – which includes fast identification of the genome sequence. Chinese scientists have already handed over to Russian counterparts the virus genome, with snap tests able to identify it in a human body within two hours. A Russia-China vaccine is under development.

The devil, of course, is always in the details. In a matter of a few days, at the peak of the most congested travel period of the year, China did manage to quarantine an urban environment of over 56 million people, including megalopolis Wuhan and three nearby cities. This is an absolute first in terms of public health, anytime in history.

Wuhan, with a GDP growth of 8.5% a year, is a significant business center for China. It lies at the strategic crossroads of the Yangtze and Han rivers and at a railway crossroads as well – between the north-south axis linking Guangzhou to Beijing and the east-west axis linking Shanghai to Chengdu.

As premier Li Keqiang was sent to Wuhan, President Xi visited the strategic southern province of Yunnan, where he extolled the immense government apparatus to boost control and sanitary prevention mechanisms to limit propagation of the virus.

Coronavirus catches China at an extremely sensitive juncture – after the (failed) Hybrid War tactics displayed in Hong Kong; an American pro-Taiwan offensive; the trade war far from solved by a mere “phase 1” deal while more sanctions are being plotted against Huawei; and even the assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, which ultimately is about targeting the expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Southwest Asia (Iran-Iraq-Syria).

The Big Picture spells out Total Information War and non-stop weaponization of the China “threat” – now even metastasized, with racist overtones, as a bio-threat. So how vulnerable is China?

A people’s war

For almost five years now a maximum-security biolab has been operating in Wuhan dedicated to the study of highly pathogenic micro-organisms – set up in partnership with France after the SARS epidemic. In 2017, Nature magazine was warning about the risks of dispersion of pathogenic agents out of this lab. Yet there’s no evidence this might have happened.

In crisis management terms, President Xi has lived up to the occasion – ensuring that China fights coronavirus with nearly total transparency (after all, the internet wall remains in place). Beijing has warned the whole government apparatus in no uncertain terms not to attempt any cover-ups. A real-time webpage, in English, here, is available to everyone. Whoever is not doing enough will face serious consequences. One can imagine what awaits the party chief in Hubei, Jiang Chaoliang.

A post that went viral all over the mainland this past Sunday states, “We in Wuhan have truly entered the stage of people’s war against the new viral pneumonia”; and many people, “mainly Communist Party members” have been confirmed as “volunteers and observers according to street units.”

Crucially, the government directed everyone to install a “Wuhan Neighbors” applet downloaded from WeChat. That determines “our home’s quarantine address through satellite positioning, and then lock on our affiliated community organization and volunteers. Thenceforth, our social activities and information announcements would be connected to the system.”

Theoretically, this means that “anyone who develops a fever will report their condition through the network as soon as possible. The system will immediately provide an online diagnosis, and locate and register your quarantine address. If you need to see a doctor, your community will arrange a car to send you to the hospital through volunteers. At the same time, the system will track your progress: hospitalization, treatment at home, discharge, death, etc.”

So here we have millions of Chinese citizens totally mobilized in what’s routinely described as a “people’s war” using “high technology to fight against illness.” Millions are also drawing their own conclusions when comparing it with the use of app software to fight against the police in Hong Kong.

The biogenetic puzzle

Apart from crisis management, the speed of the Chinese scientific response has been breathtaking – and obviously not fully appreciated in an environment of Total Information War. Compare the Chinese performance with the American CDC, arguably the top infectious disease research agency in the world, with an $11 billion annual budget and 11,000 employees.

During the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 – considered a maximum urgency, and facing a virus with a 90% fatality rate – the CDC took no less than two months from getting the first patient sample to identifying the complete genomic sequence. The Chinese did it in a few days.

During the swine flu in the US in 2009 – 55 million infected Americans, 11,000 killed – the CDC took over a month and a half to come up with identification kits.

The Chinese took only one week from the first patient sample to complete, vital identification and sequencing of coronavirus. Right away, they went for publication and deposit in the genomics library for immediate access by the whole planet. Based on this sequence, Chinese biotech companies produced validated essays within a week – also a first.

And we’re not even talking about the now notorious building of a brand new state of the art hospital in Wuhan in record time just to treat victims of coronavirus. No victims will pay for their treatment. Additionally, Healthy China 2030, the reform of the health/development system, will be boosted.

Coronavirus opens a true Pandora’s box on biogenetics. Serious questions remain about experiences in vivo in which the consent of “patients” will not be required – considering the collective psychosis initially developed by Western corporate media and even the WHO around coronavirus. Coronavirus could well become a pretext for genetic experiments via vaccines.

Meanwhile, it’s always enlightening to remember Great Helmsman Mao Zedong. For Mao, the top two political variables were “independence” and “development.” That implies full sovereignty. As Xi seems determined to prove a sovereign civilization-state is able to win a scientific “people’s war,” that does not exactly spell out “vulnerability.”

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The unacceptable scheme is further proof of a geopolitical know-nothing US president — on top of his contempt for ordinary people everywhere, concerned only about power politics and self-enrichment.

Polls so far show no bump for Netanyahu after the scheme’s unveiling, his Likud party projected to win 33 or 34 of 120 Knesset seats in March 2 elections to 35 seats for Gantz-led Blue and White party — both leading parties deadlocked as in April and September last year, elections a few weeks away.

According to Channel 12 and 13 polls, around half of Israelis support the Trump scheme, about one-fourth opposed. Others are undecided or don’t know.

B’Tselem slammed the scheme, equating it to “Swiss cheese with the cheese being offered to the Israelis and the holes to the Palestinians,” adding:

The scheme “legitimizes, entrenches and even expands the scope of Israel’s human rights abuses, perpetuated” since seizing historic Palestinian land not stolen in 1948.

“Palestinians…will be relegated to small, enclosed, isolated enclaves, with no control over their lives as the plan eternalizes the fragmentation of Palestinian space into disconnected slivers of territory in a sea of Israeli control, not unlike the Bantustans of South Africa’s Apartheid regime.”

“With no territorial contiguity, Palestinians will not be able to exercise their right to self-determination and will continue to be completely dependent on Israel’s goodwill (sic) for their daily life, with no political rights and no way to influence their future.”

“They will continue to be at the mercy of Israel’s draconian permit regime and need its consent for any construction or development.”

“(N)ot only does the plan fail to improve their predicament in any way, but, in fact, it leaves them worse off as it perpetuates the situation and gives it recognition.”

It illegitimately legitimizes permanent subjugation under Israel’s repressive boot to be stomped on at its discretion.

A scathing Al Jazeera op-ed expressed an inability to discuss Trump’s scheme “with a straight face,” adding:

It’s an affront to what peace is all about to label it this way. “It is so much worse that a better term for it would be an ‘assault on peace.’ ”

“Everything about (it) is farcical…its author unfit…Kushner a fanatic Zionist supporter of illegal Israeli settlements…”

The scheme “punishes the victims and rewards the aggressors.”

Instead of opposing Israeli apartheid, Trump’s scheme endorses it.

Manipulated and out-of-touch with reality, he fails understand the potentially devastating consequences of his unacceptable sellout.

On Tuesday, Sergey Lavrov and Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reserved official comment on Trump’s scheme until after reviewing its text.

Meeting with Palestinian factions in Moscow on Tuesday, Lavrov said Trump’s scheme does not include Palestinian statehood with East Jerusalem its capital, adding:

Russia “support(s) a diplomatic solution based on decisions of the international community” — failing to say it must be according to international law, what’s fundamental in resolving endless conflicts.

Separately, a PLO letter to foreign diplomats said the following:

“The attempts by the Trump (regime) at legitimizing Israeli crimes and violations as well as endorsing Israeli policies and narrative, including by illegally recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, defunding UNRWA, legitimizing settlements, cutting all humanitarian and development aid to the Palestinian people, closing the Palestinian mission in Washington as well as the US consulate in Jerusalem and dangerously justifying such policies using a religious narrative, have done nothing but to strengthen extremists in our region, further harming the prospects of security and stability for the Arab world and the rest of the world,” adding:

“The question of Palestine remains an unfulfilled test for the international community in regards to its commitment to international law.”

The letter called for “convening of an international peace conference based on international law and relevant UN resolutions.”

“Participation (in) this conference would include Israel and Palestine as well as all international stakeholders, including Arab countries.”

Similar earlier initiatives failed, another clearly to go the same way, US and Israeli manipulation to assure the outcome and what follows go their way.

The only solution is popular revolution, sustained resistance against illegal occupation. Nothing else can work.

Abbas and other key PA politicians long ago sold their souls to Israel.

Palestinians must go it on their own to have any hope for eventual liberation.

Their choice is either putting their bodies on the line for positive change or remaining subjugated by a brutal US-supported occupier.

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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.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is coasting into his country’s third elections on March 2 with the success of two tremendous achievements over the past week that was interestingly made possible by both American and Russian Presidents. U.S. President Donald Trump unveiled the long-awaited “deal of the century” earlier this week, after which Netanyahu immediately traveled to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin to discuss it in detail and also return home with Naama Issachar, who was just pardoned by him for her drug conviction.

The first of Netanyahu’s victories was globally significant because the world has been eagerly waiting to see what Trump’s team envisaged for bringing peace to the Middle East. Although the deal itself has been widely criticized, there isn’t much that anyone can do to stop the U.S. and Israel’s unilateral moves in implementing it if the Palestinians continue to oppose this controversial plan. Netanyahu is assured of American support, which is all that matters in practical terms.

Concerning the second of his successes, the Israeli Prime Minister triumphantly returned to his homeland with the dual Israeli-American citizen who had previously been sentenced to 7.5 years in a penal colony after her arrest last April. The Russian authorities found over nine grams of cannabis in her luggage, as she was transiting through a Moscow airport from India back to Israel, and thus accused her of drug trafficking. President Putin’s pardon stated that he was guided by the principles of humanity, which Netanyahu sincerely thanked him for.

Altogether, these two achievements will predictably boost the Israeli incumbent’s chances of winning his country’s third elections in a year in early March. It doesn’t mean that he’s guaranteed to do so, but both the American and Russian leaders would be indirectly responsible if he did. To be clear, they made their decisions based on the calculation that they’d improve state-to-state relations, not necessarily because of their close personal relations with the Israeli premier.

Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to point out that these two geopolitical rivals share some common ground when it comes to Israel. The U.S. and Russia each cooperate with it on a very high strategic level, though in somewhat different domains. America is fully in support of everything that Israel does and therefore voluntarily decided to author a peace plan that entirely serves Israel’s political interests, while Russia cooperates real closely with it when it comes to Syrian affairs and thus advances the self-professed Jewish State’s security interests.

The key takeaway from this observation is that third countries could function as bridges for connecting an opposing pair of states exactly as Israel is currently doing vis-a-vis the U.S. and Russia. For example, Jerusalem hosted the first-ever trilateral National Security Advisor meeting between the Israeli, American, and Russian representatives last June, which showed the world how Washington and Moscow are willing to put aside their overall differences in the interests of jointly cooperating with Tel Aviv on pressing regional issues.

American-Israeli ties have always been strong since Israel’s establishment, but it’s been under Netanyahu’s premiership that Russian-Israeli ties really began to take off. Netanyahu’s visit to Russia immediately after unveiling the deal of the century in the U.S. speaks to just how much importance he and the State of Israel place in securing Russian support for this initiative. It also presented him with an excellent opportunity to pull off a soft power coup by returning to Israel with Issachar, who was coincidentally pardoned just the day before.

This was therefore arguably the best week ever in Netanyahu’s career since he was able to successfully portray himself as such a strong champion of Israeli interests that he even secured differing degrees of symbolic support from the U.S. and Russia despite their ongoing geopolitical rivalry. With the help of the American and Russian leaders, Israel’s international profile has continued to grow despite the heavy criticism that it’s historically come under, and especially since the recent unveiling of the contentious deal of the century.

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This article was originally published on CGTN.

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

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Whew. Finally, at last, the United Kingdom is formally leaving the European Union on January 31.  Here in Paris, the champions of French withdrawal from the EU are celebrating. They see Brexit as the harbinger of a future “Frexit”, a French departure from undemocratic governance, and the beginning of the end of a failed project to unify Europe around the demands of neoliberal capitalism.

But the paradox is that the champions of European unification might be celebrating even more – if it weren’t too late. Because years of British membership have already helped shatter the original dreams of a united European, whether the aspirations of the federalists for political unity or the project of a European confederation of independent States advocated by Charles De Gaulle some sixty years ago.

Way back then, when De Gaulle was meeting with the aged West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer to promote Franco-German reconciliation, the two old statesmen were thinking in terms of working gradually toward a partnership of core European states that would preserve their sovereignty within a confederation ensuring peace and cooperation.

From the start, the question of British membership appeared as a thorn in the side of European unity.  Initially, London was opposed to the Common Market.  In 1958, prime minister Harold MacMillan assailed it as “the Continental Blockade” (alluding to Napoleon’s 1806 European policy) and said England would not stand for it.  But as the project seemed to take shape, London sought accommodation.

De Gaulle warned from the start that Great Britain didn’t belong in a unified Europe, geographically, economically or above all psychologically.

The remark has become famous: in 1944, on the eve of the Normandy invasion, in a quarrelsome exchange, Churchill reportedly told De Gaulle that if Britain had to choose, it would always go for “the open sea” rather than the European continent.

Of course, Britain long ago lost both Churchill and its Empire. Nevertheless, the English remain psychologically wedded to their island status, the origin of their overwhelming maritime power that built the empire and has left traces of English-speaking nations and preferred trade relations all around the world.  Brits do not normally feel part of “the continent” and the traditional policy of their governments was always to keep the continent divided and weak.  This policy was passed on to London’s pupils in Washington, echoed in the description of NATO’s purpose: “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in and the Germans down” – the joke that tells the truth.

Sixty years ago, De Gaulle, who envisaged a European confederation as a way to achieve independence from the American liberators (who came to stay), saw very clearly that the UK would be America’s Trojan horse in the European community. That is called vision, the quality of a statesman – a breed that seems to have died out in the West.  He opposed British membership as long as he could, but the American influence was too great.  And curiously enough, the ardent European federalists joined in promoting British membership, seemingly unaware that such membership was totally incompatible with the political unity they desired.

British leaders, firmly attached to their parliament, their royalty, their class system, and their unique role in the world – now largely passed on to their heirs in Washington – never would consider genuine political unity with the continent.  But as a trading nation, they wanted to be part of a Europe that would favor free trade, period.

The United Kingdom first applied for membership in 1961, at a time when it comprised the central core made up of France, Germany, the Benelux countries and Italy. But as long as De Gaulle was President of France, this was not possible, despite U.S. support (the United States has always supported enlargement, notably Turkish membership, now considered out of the question).  The United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community only on January first, 1973, bringing with it both Ireland and Denmark, another advocate of free trade.

Bringing in Britain was the decisive step toward making unified Europe into a vast free market, a step toward globalization.  This was indeed the program of Jean Monnet, a totally Americanized French businessman who plotted the path to European unity through purely economic measures, indifferent to political issues. But it took British weight to pull Europe firmly in that direction, away from the original Common Market idea (removing trade barriers only between Member States) toward an open market, with minimum trade barriers, extending the benefits of its “free competition” doctrine to such giants as the United States and China.

In 1989, Margaret Thatcher appointed Leon Brittan to the post of European Commissioner for competition, where he stayed until 1999 in charge of trade and external affairs. In Brussels his was the most powerful influence in confirming the EU’s role as chief enforcer of neoliberal policies. At the same time, Thatcher demanded “her money back” and strengthened the UK’s own freedom from European institutional constraints.

The UK never agreed to the Schengen agreement on EU borders and declined to scrap the pound sterling for the euro – a wise move, no doubt. But also symptomatic of the essential incapacity of England to fully merge with the continent.

At the same time, the presence of London has certainly contributed to the total inability of the EU to develop a foreign policy which deviates from that of Washington. Britain supported the enlargement to the East which has made the EU more politically disunited than ever and has been the strongest supporter of the paranoid Russophobia of Poland and the Baltic States which pushes other European countries into a dangerous conflict with Russia that is contrary to their own interests.

Not that Britain is responsible for everything that is wrong with the European Union today.  A major mistake was made by French President François Mitterrand in the 1980s when he insisted on a “common European currency” under the illusion that this would help France contain Germany – when it turned out not only to do the contrary but to ruin Greece and cause ravages in Portugal, Spain and Italy.

And there are plenty of other mistakes that have been made, such as Angela Merkel’s invitation to come to Europe, ostensibly addressed to Syrian war refugees but understood by millions of unfortunates in the Middle East and Africa as meant for themselves.

And certainly, there were and are a minority of Englishmen and women who sincerely identify with Europe and want to feel part of it.  But they are a minority.  England has for too many centuries cherished and celebrated its uniqueness for that to be erased by complex impersonal institutions.

As England returns to the uncertainties of the open sea, it leaves behind a European Union that is bureaucratically governed to serve the interests of financial capital.  Member States, such as Macron’s France, are governed according to EU decrees against the will of their people.  British membership contributed to this denial of democracy, but paradoxically, the British people themselves are the first to reject it and demand a return to full national sovereignty.

Even the ardent fans of European unity increasingly insist that they want “a different Europe”, recognizing that the project has failed to produce the wonders that were promised. But changing this particular Europe would require unanimity between the 27 remaining, and increasingly quarrelsome, Member States.

That is why the idea is growing that it may be time to give up this failed European union and start all over, seeking political understanding issue by issue between sovereign democracies rather than a nonfunctional economic unity as decreed by transnational capitalist bureaucracy.

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Diana Johnstone’s latest book is Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020).

Featured image is from TruePublica

“The collapse of the Libyan state has had region-wide repercussions, with flows of people and weapons destabilizing other countries throughout North Africa.” This statement came from the Soufan Group’s recent Intelbrief, entitled “Fighting Over Access to Libya’s Energy Supplies” (24 January 2020). 

Are you listening, Barack Obama?

“There’s a bias in this town [Washington, DC] toward war,” President Obama said to me and several others assembled in the White House’s Roosevelt Room on September 10, 2015, almost seven years into his presidency. At the time, I thought he was thinking particularly of the tragic mistake he made by joining the intervention in Libya in 2011, ostensibly implementing United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973.

Obama’s secretary of state, John Kerry, was sitting right beside the president as Obama spoke. I recall asking myself at the time if he were lecturing Kerry as well as lamenting his own decision, because Kerry had been rather outspoken at the time about heavier U.S. participation in yet another endless war then — and still — transpiring in Syria. Obama however, was apparently having none of that.

The reason is that the Libya intervention not only lead to the grisly death of Libya’s leader, Muammar Qaddafi — and set in motion a brutal and continuing military conquest for the title of “who rules Libya,” invite outside powers from all over the Mediterranean to join the fray, and unleash a destabilizing refugee flow across that inner sea — it also put the weaponry from one of the world’s largest arms caches into the hands of such groups as ISIS, al-Qa’ida, Lashkar e-Taibi, and others. Additionally, many of those formerly Libyan weapons were being used in Syria at that very moment.

Before we offer faint praise for Obama having learned his lesson and thus not deciding to intervene in Syria in a more significant manner, we need to pose the question: Why do presidents make such disastrous decisions like Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan and, tomorrow perhaps, Iran?

President Dwight Eisenhower answered this question, in large part, in 1961:

“We must never let the weight of this combination [the military-industrial complex] endanger our liberties or democratic processes. … Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals.”

Simply stated, today America is not composed of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, and the Complex that Eisenhower so precisely described is in fact, and in ways not even Eisenhower could have imagined, endangering our liberties and democratic processes. The Complex creates the “bias” that President Obama described.  Moreover, today the U.S. Congress fuels the Complex — $738 billion this year plus an unprecedented slush fund of almost $72 billion more — to the extent that the Complex’s writ on war has become inexhaustible, ever-lasting, and, as Eisenhower also said, “is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.”

With respect to the “alert and knowledgeable citizenry,” an outcome not only in the long-term attributable to proper education but in the short-to-medium term principally inculcated by a responsible and capable “Fourth Estate,” there is an abysmal failure as well. 

The Complex for most of its nefarious purposes owns the media that matters, from the nation’s newspaper of record, The New York Times, to its capital city’s modern organ, The Washington Post, to the financial community’s banner paper, The Wall Street Journal. All of these papers for the most part never met a decision for war they didn’t like. Only when the wars become “endless” do some of them find their other voices — and then it’s too late.

Not to be outdone by print journalism, the mainstream TV cable media features talking heads, some of them paid by members of the Complex or having spent their professional lives inside it, or both, to pontificate on the various wars. Again, they only find their critical voices when the wars become endless, are obviously being lost or stalemated, and are costing too much blood and treasure, and better ratings lie on the side of opposition to them.

Marine General Smedley Butler, a two-time Medal of Honor recipient, once confessed to having been “a criminal for capitalism.” An apt description for Butler’s times in the early days of the 20th century. Today, however, any military professional worth his salt as a citizen as well — like Eisenhower — would have to admit that they too are criminals for the Complex — a card-carrying member of the capitalist state, to be sure, but one whose sole purpose, outside of maximizing shareholder profits, is facilitating the death of others at the hands of the state. 

How else to describe accurately men — and now women — wearing multiple stars ceaselessly going before the people’s representatives in the Congress and asking for more and more taxpayer dollars? And the pure charade of the slush fund, known officially as the Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund and supposed to be strictly for operations in theaters of war, makes a farce of the military budgeting process. Most members of Congress should hang their heads in shame at what they have allowed to happen annually with this slush fund.

And Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s words at the Center for Strategic and International Studies this week, ostensibly spoken to illustrate “new thinking” at the Pentagon with regard to budgeting, suggest no indication of real change in the military’s budget, just a new focus — one that promises not to diminish cash outlays but to increase them. But rightfully so, Esper does indicate where some of the blame lies as he glibly accuses the Congress of adding to already bloated budget requests from the Pentagon: “I’ve been telling the Pentagon now for two and a half years that our budgets aren’t gonna get any better — they are where they are — and so we have to be much better stewards of the taxpayer’s dollar. … And, you know, Congress is fully behind that. But then there’s that moment in time when it hits their backyard, and you have to work your way through that.”

“[T]hat moment in time when it hits their backyard” is an only slightly veiled accusation that members of Congress often plus-up Pentagon budget requests in order to provide pork for their home districts (no one is better at this than the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who in his many years in the Senate has provided millions of taxpayer dollars — including to Defense — for his home state of Kentucky to ensure his long-lived hold on power there. And he’s no piker either in receiving money from the defense sector into his campaign coffers. McConnell just might be different, however, from other members of Congress in the way he returns to Kentucky and openly brags about the huge amounts of pork he brings annually to his state in order to offset his increasingly bad poll ratings). 

But Esper continued in a far more telling manner:

“We’re at this moment in time. We have a new strategy. …We have a lot of support from Congress. … We have to bridge this gap now between what was Cold War-era systems and the counter-insurgency, low-intensity fight of the last ten years, and make this leap into great power competition with Russia and China — China principally.”

If the old Cold War brought sometimes record military budgets, we can expect the new cold war with China to outstrip those amounts by orders of magnitude. And who is it that decided that we needed a new cold war anyway?

Look no further than the Complex (from which Esper comes, not coincidentally, as one of the top lobbyists for Raytheon, a stellar member of the Complex). One of the Complex’s sine qua nons is what it learned from the almost half century of the cold war with the Soviet Union: nothing on earth pays out so handsomely and consistently than a prolonged struggle with a major power. Thus, there is no stronger, more powerful advocate for a new cold war with China — and throw Russia into the mix too for extra dollars — than the Complex. 

However, at the end of the day, the very idea that the U.S. must spend annually more money on its military than the next eight nations in the world combined, most of whom are U.S. allies, should demonstrate to an even unknowledgeable and not-so-alert citizenry that something is seriously wrong. Roll out a new cold war; something is still seriously wrong.

But apparently the power of the Complex is simply too great. War and more war is the future of America. As Eisenhower said, the “weight of this combination” is in fact endangering our liberties and democratic processes.

To understand this explicitly, we need only examine the futile attempts in the past few years to wrest back the power to make war from the executive branch, the branch that when equipped with the power to make war, as James Madison warned us, is most likely to bring tyranny.

Madison, the real “pen” in the process of writing the U.S. Constitution, made certain that it put the war power in the hands of the Congress. Nonetheless, from President Truman to Trump, almost every U.S. president has usurped it in one way or another.

The recent attempts by certain members of Congress to use this constitutional power simply to remove America from the brutal war in Yemen, have fallen to the Complex’s awesome power. It matters not that the bombs and missiles of the Complex fall on school buses, hospitals, funeral processions, and other harmless civilian activities in that war-torn country. The dollars pour in to the coffers of the Complex. That is what matters. That is all that matters.

There will come a day of reckoning; there always is in the relations of nations. The names of the world’s imperial hegemons are indelibly engraved in the history books. From Rome to Britain, they are recorded there. Nowhere, however, is it recorded that any of them are still with us today. They are all gone into the dustbin of history.

So shall we someday soon, led there by the Complex and its endless wars.

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Damage caused by aerial herbicide spraying conducted by Israel on three consecutive days (January 14-16) along Gaza’s perimeter fence has become visible on crops in the Strip. Individuals working with London-based research agency Forensic Architecture collected samples from fields located east of Jabalya, in northern Gaza, at distances of 100, 200, 400 and 600 meters from the fence. The damage to the crops is clearly visible on the samples they collected. According to local farmers, dunams more of parsley, peas, wheat, barley, spinach and other produce were destroyed entirely. The effect of the spraying appears several days after the spraying is conducted.

Riad Al Nisar, a farmer from Al Bureij Refugee Camp, who cultivates more than 20 dunams (about five acres) of parsley and zucchini crops about 300 meters away from the fence, reported that the effects of the spraying in the area on Wednesday and Thursday appeared on the crops clearly on Sunday. Al Nisar has suffered from significant financial losses caused by the spraying in previous years as well. In late 2018, he assessed that losses he had sustained amounted to at least 10,000-15,000 USD.

Another local farmer, Salah Al Najjar, has farmland located 300 to 600 meters from the fence in an area stretching east of Khan Yunis. His spinach fields were completely destroyed. He said his brother’s fava bean field, about a kilometer away from the fence, is also showing signs of damage. Al Najjar’s crops have been severely impacted as a result of previous spraying.

Image on the right: A sample collected after the recent round of spraying. Photo by Forensic Architecture

A video update by Forensic Architecture confirms the farmer’s assessmentthat the spraying was timed so that westward-blowing wind would carry the chemical agents used in the spraying into the Strip. Farmers were not given any notice, leaving them unable to take precautions to protect their crops or harvest them in advance to avoid further losses.

In response to Freedom of Information requests by Gisha, Israel admittedto having conducted aerial spraying over Israeli territory near the perimeter fence almost 30 times between 2014 and 2018. The army has stated that the spraying is conducted in order to expose the terrain “to enable optimal and continuous security operations.” No incidents of spraying were recorded in 2019. It is estimated that aerial herbicide spraying by Israel has affected a total area of 7,620 dunams of arable land in the Strip. In July 2019, Forensic Architecture published a multi-media investigation into the practice, based in large part on research and legal work by human rights organizations Gisha, Adalah, and Al Mezan. The report strengthened the organizations’ findings whereby aerial herbicide spraying by Israel has damaged lands deep inside Gaza.

Last Thursday, Gisha, Adalah and Al Mezan, sent a letter to Israel’s Minister of Defense, Military Advocate General, and Attorney General, arguing that such a disproportionate measure, with detrimental impact on livelihoods and the health of the civilian population, is unlawful under both Israeli and international law, and calling on Israeli authorities to stop the practice immediately.

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Featured image: Spinach in Gaza, after the spraying was conducted. Photo by Forensic Architecture

Relying on confidential industry research, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a final interim decision today to reapprove glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto/Bayer’s Roundup and the world’s most heavily used pesticide.

The EPA’s assessment contradicts a 2015 World Health Organization analysis of published research that determined glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.

“The Trump EPA’s assertion that glyphosate poses no risks to human health disregards independent science findings in favor of confidential industry research and industry profits,” said Lori Ann Burd, the Center for Biological Diversity’s director of environmental health. “This administration’s troubling allegiance to Bayer/Monsanto and the pesticide industry doesn’t change the trove of peer-reviewed research, by leading scientists, that’s found troubling links between glyphosate and cancer.”

While today’s decision is called interim, the EPA’s practice is to issue interim, rather than final, decisions in its registration-review process for pesticides, which means this is akin to a final decision.

In addition to the World Health Organization’s conclusion, multiple U.S. federal agencies have acknowledged evidence of a link between glyphosate and cancer. This includes the EPA’s Office of Research and Development and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Earlier this week the EPA’s Office of Inspector General announced it’s starting an audit to assess whether the EPA’s pesticide regulatory office adheres to pesticide registration risk assessment regulations, policies and procedures.

“The EPA’s pesticide office is clearly willing to bend over backwards, including disregarding its own guidelines for evaluating cancer risks, to give the industry what it wants,” said Burd. “This pesticide is heavily used on food crops, landscaping and even playgrounds, and the public deserves unbiased answers to the basic question of whether it’s safe.”

Emails obtained in litigation brought against Monsanto/Bayer by cancer victims and their families have uncovered a disturbingly cozy relationship between the EPA and the company on matters involving the glyphosate risk assessment.

In one example, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it would be reviewing glyphosate’s safety, an EPA official assured Monsanto he would work to thwart the review, saying, “If I can kill this, I should get a medal.”

The Health and Human Services review was delayed for three years and only recently released.

Monsanto/Bayer also enjoys broad support from the Trump White House. A domestic policy advisor in the Trump administration stated, “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.”

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Featured image is from Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc

Back in November 2015, a Turkish F-16 fighter jet shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24M near the Syria–Turkey border on the allegations that the Russian warplane had violated Turkish airspace for 17 seconds – an interesting casus belli considering that Turkey violates Greek airspace thousands of times a year, occupies large swathes of northern Syria in defiance of international law, and continues to rebel against United Nations resolutions by illegally occupying northern Cyprus. Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2015 promised Turkey they “will regret” being responsible for the death of Russian pilots. Although rumors circulated of a first Russo-Turkish War since World War I, the only reaction Russia made against Turkey were sanctions.

But rather than a deterioration of relations, the exact opposite has happened with an acceleration of bilateral relations, so much so that Turkey even acquired the lucrative Russian-made S-400 missile defense system, in addition to the two countries opening the Turkstream pipeline earlier this month and cooperating on Syria through the Astana and Sochi formats. It appears that the “regret” Putin would inflict on Turkey has not even remotely come to fruition and rather Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been rewarded for his insolence, especially as there has been at least 116 Russian military deaths, most of them killed by Turkish-backed terrorists groups in Syria.

Putin has caused havoc in NATO by giving Turkey the confidence to act in its own interests, despite Erdoğan’s own imperial ambitions. This sense of self-confidence in Turkey has allowed the country to pursue its Neo-Ottoman dreams that has antagonized all of its neighbors, the European Union, NATO and all regional states with the exception of Qatar, which unironically was one of the last countries to get independence from the Ottoman Empire. By instilling a self-confidence in Turkey, a confidence that pushes for an ambition it cannot meet, Putin turned Erdoğan into an ally and a friend. However, when we look at the long game that Putin has played, Russia has been using Turkey for its own interests.

Turkey’s Libya gambit has once again shown that it is isolated, finding no support from any interested party in the conflict. At a time when Turkey is becoming increasingly isolated but still confident in its relations with Russia, Moscow condemned Turkey’s decision to increase its military assistance to the Tripoli government.

Despite the increasing isolation and memories of the crippling Russian sanctions on Turkey in 2015, Erdoğan appears to be frustrated and lashed out against Moscow yesterday saying:

“Currently, Russia is not abiding by Astana or Sochi [peace formats on Syria]. If we are loyal partners with Russia on this, they have to put forth their stance… Our wish is that Russia immediately makes the necessary warnings to the [Syrian] regime which it sees as a friend. The Astana process has fallen into silence now. We need to look at what Turkey, Russia and Iran can do to revive the Astana process.”

It certainly cannot be denied that Erdoğan is frustrated and is now falsely claiming that Russia is not adhering to the deals made in Astana and Sochi. The deals allow for the Syrian government and its allies to conduct operations against terrorist organizations, such as the Al-Qaeda affiliated Al-Nusra Front and the Turkestan Islamic Party, with the former being the most dominant and powerful militant group in the Syrian province of Idlib.

Russia’s assistance in fighting Al-Qaeda in Idlib prompted Erdogan’s outburst, where he also said “Russia tells us they fight against terrorism. Who are terrorists? The people fighting to defend their own lands?” This once again shows Turkey’s complete defense and apology for terrorist organization operating in Syria, unsurprising since it was Russia who revealed and destroyed the lucrative ISIS-Turkey oil trade in 2015 with surgical airstrikes against convoys that were ignored by the U.S. air force. So not only has Turkey revealed its frustrations against Russia for its own failures in Libya and Syria, it is now reverting to lies and contradictions that it usually reserves for using against Greece, Cyprus, Syria and Armenia, by deceitfully claiming Russia is “not abiding by Astana or Sochi.”

With increasing of anti-Turkish sentiment in Washington, Europe and the wider region Turkey has become militarily, diplomatically and economically weaker, as well as completely isolated – effectively destroying all ambitions for a Neo-Ottoman Empire.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Featured image is from RIA Novosti