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Former Vice President, turned journalist and TV host José Vicente Rangel recently returned to the screen in a big way with an interview with President Nicolas Maduro, in which Maduro shook the hornet’s nest with his comments concerning dollarisation.

Asked about the serious economic problems in the country, Maduro said he did not see the increasingly open presence of the US dollar in everyday transactions (1) as a bad thing, praising it as a mechanism which helps some people supplement their [Bolivar currency] incomes.

Following the interview, Troy began to burn, and continues to smoulder, albeit with low intensity given that news from neighbouring countries is dominating headlines.

Maduro’s opinion received major criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Some described this position as inconsistent and contradictory, while others deemed it improvised, heterodox and legitimising ever deeper inequalities.

Accuracy required

Chavista economist and National Constituent Assembly deputy Jesus Faría made some clarifications regarding what the president said.

“At no time did he hail dollarisation as an economic framework for our country nor did he say that promoting it is part of his economic policy. Likewise, he did not say that the deliberate and open incorporation of dollarisation is in the Bolivarian government’s plans,” Faria says.

The economist also explains that almost all opinions circulating regarding the president’s comments stem from a misrepresentation of his statement, which merely said that this is a situation which exists, is quantifiable, and must be evaluated. According to Faria, the president was observing that the phenomenon has helped some sectors to alleviate their immediate economic situation.

“This has been positive when you consider the impact that US sanctions have had on the foreign exchange revenue generated by our oil industry.” The president referred to a situation that already exists in our economy, which is the growing existence of international payment methods, not just the dollar, in everyday transactions. This has allowed some consumer needs to be met in one way or another in certain sectors. In that context, dollarisation need not surprise anyone. It is normal for a [hard] currency to be incorporated into our economy in the face of the impact which hyperinflation (2) has had on our monetary system,” he continued.

Faría predicts that the dollarisation process is going to be reversed when the accelerated price rises are slowed, which must happen with the revival of the economy and oil production.

“These are plans which are in place, but in the international context in which we are in, they are hampered by the blockade and sanctions,” he said.

He adds that dollarisation has always existed in Venezuela, because the economy depends on oil revenues, which has historically created income in US currency. Therefore, to a very high degree, the economic apparatus has always been determined by the amount of dollars entering the country.

“The incidence of the dollar is an old story. In the last forty years, the price of the [Bolivar] currency has had numerous cycles of peaks and troughs, of much speculation and currency flight. The economy has traditionally been affected by the administration of the foreign exchange systems,” he explained.

Discursive inconsistency

Many of those who have castigated the head of state for his comments point to a lack of coherence with his own discourse in the recent past.

Indeed, Maduro himself and some senior government and party officials have criminalised the dollar, describing it as a factor which detracts from national sovereignty. They also point out that dollarisation is one of the quintessential mechanisms of economic warfare.

This contradiction is even more drastic when one remembers that the US currency has even been outlawed from official references and valuations, rather opting to use Venezuela’s Petro cryptocurrency or a collection of other foreign currencies, including the euro, the ruble or the yuan.

The president’s defenders claim, however, that this is a tactical change of approach and that it is up to official experts to better explain the importance of this shift.

A heterodox dollarisation

Stemming mainly from the opposition, this criticism relates more to the fact that, in Maduro’s words, dollarisation is not a government policy but a resultant phenomenon which the executive now considers positive.

Assessing this criticism, it is stated that the dollarisation phenomenon is not governed by any public institution nor, in reality, by the financial system. There are no rules of the game or financial requirements which, among other things, allow tax collection.

Pollster Luis Vicente Leon states that

“it does not represent a formal dollarisation of the economy, but a permit for a de facto dual monetary system,” adding that “it is not a process of formal, comprehensive, rational and efficient dollarisation, that helps restore a feeling of economic balance, but a de facto and disorderly generalisation of the use of foreign currencies to respond to the loss of value, confidence and liquidity of the Bolivar currency.”

Another opposition economist, Jose Toro Hardy, has compared what is happening to what he calls “a normal dollarisation.”

He explains that if a coherent policy were to be in place, the Central Bank (BCV) would deliver dollars in exchange for local currency, which would be automatically withdrawn from circulation.

“There are no dollars in the BCV. Atypical dollarisation is taking place, without anyone knowing the origin of most of the dollars circulating,” he says.

At the opinion of far-right opposition banker Oscar García Mendoza, the dollars which nourish the system and generate a certain sense of calm come from drug trafficking. He predicts that this bubble of prosperity will burst and the consequences will be catastrophic.

Inequality

In the revolutionary camp, there are many who cried out after the president’s statement. This criticism focuses on the fact that dollarisation is openly biased: it applies to prices, but not to workers’ wages, which makes it an aggravating factor in social inequalities.

“Corruption and prices are dollarised, the only things left to dollarise are the most important things: wages, pensions and retirement packages,” says a tweeter named Malayo, representing the opinion of a portion of those who depend on Bolivar currency income in the middle of an economy in which green paper reigns supreme.

The complaint comes mostly from public sector employees, given that the private sector has been [partially] imposing dollar wages as a mechanism to retain their workforce, particularly if they are skilled workers.

Sociologist Luis Salas, who briefly served finance minister under Maduro’s first government, has emphasised the political component of the presidential about-face.

In his view, Maduro’s comments prove “how what only a real or imaginary crisis can make happen, how the politically impossible becomes politically ‘inevitable’: a Bolivarian government sympathetic to dollarisation.”

Other dollarisations

In the global context, dollarisation has, in some cases, been a public policy decision, while in others it is a phenomenon closer to the Venezuelan case, that is, a reality that imposes itself.

Officially in Latin America, Panama, Ecuador, El Salvador and the Bahamas are dollarized. Each case has its specificities and peculiarities, but in general US money circulates as an internal currency.

In several other countries across the continent, dollarisation has been proposed, in particular as a possible way out of serious inflationary crises. In almost all of these cases there is already a real circulation of the US currency as a way of saving and preserving the international value of goods and services.

Another example of a country that became dollarised – and a very negative case – is Zimbabwe, which did so about a decade ago and has seen its economic situation deteriorate severely.

Other, non-dollar, foreign currencies are also used in the African country as domestic forms of payment, including the euro, UK sterling, the Australian dollar, as well as currencies of neighbouring countries such as the South African rand and the Batswana pula. This resembles Venezuela, as in the regions bordering Colombia there is a replacement of the Bolivar by the [Colombian] peso more than the US dollar.

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Translation by Paul Dobson for Venezuelanalysis.

Clodovaldo Hernández is a Venezuelan journalist who has written for left leaning news sites Supuesto Negado and Aporrea.

Notes

(1) Since August 2018, when the National Constituent Assembly overturned a law prohibiting foreign currency transactions in Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro pegged the minimum wage to the value of the Petro, legal dollar-based trade has taken off, especially in high-value markets, such as real estate, vehicles, or even phones. This has coincided with the opening up legal exchange shops in some banks, and a 2018 decree enabling some wages to be dollarised.

(2) Recent economic data suggests that Venezuela has technically come out of “hyperinflation.” Nonetheless, inflation is still rampant, despite having slowed since the start of the year.

Featured image: Dollar bills are increasingly common in the Venezuelan economy as a form of payment. (Supuesto Negado)

Over a century ago, the systematic mass extermination and expulsion of 1.5 million ethnic Armenians from the Ottoman Empire took place between 1914 and 1923 (some accounts state 1915-1922). For decades, Turkish and Israeli lobbies in Washington have successfully prevented the United States from recognizing the Armenian Genocide, despite thirty-one other nations having already done so.

Last Thursday, the Senate unanimously passed S.Res.150 which officially commemorates the Armenian Genocide through recognition and remembrance. This was after three consecutive weeks of Washington recruiting three different Republican Senators to veto the resolution. In October, the House passed a similar resolution H.Res.296 affirming the United States record on the Armenian Genocide.

Aram Hamparian, the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) said

“The Senate today joined the House in rejecting Ankara’s gag-rule against honest American remembrance of the Armenian genocide — overriding the largest, longest foreign veto over the US Congress in American history.”

Turkey has accused American lawmakers of politicizing history and summoned their US ambassador back to Ankara in protest. In fear of further damaging relations between Ankara and Washington, US President Donald Trump opposed the resolution. However, that argument doesn’t hold much water considering relations between Turkey and other countries who have already recognized the Armenian genocide committed by the Turks and Kurds have remained in place with little effect on their existing normalization of political and trade relations. Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Brazil, etc. are just a few examples.

Armenia’s closest neighbors Georgia and Azerbaijan do not recognize the Armenian Genocide. I asked Andrew Korybko, a political analyst, about Georgia’s reasoning and he said,

“Likely because Turkey is a key trading partner and the two are connected to Azerbaijan with pipelines and now even a railroad, there are considerable economic interests at stake if Georgia recognized the Armenian Genocide, though its relations with Armenia are pretty good even though it hasn’t done that. I don’t think there’s any incentive for it to change its stance”.

According to The Armenian National Institute,

“The Armenian Genocide was perpetrated by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the radical wing of the Young Turk party that seized power in the Ottoman Empire. In their zeal to create a homogeneous society exclusively Turkish and Muslim, the Young Turk radicals sought to exclude the Christian populations that had inhabited Asia Minor. Through expulsions, expropriations, and extermination, by 1923 no Christians to speak of, including Assyrians and Greeks remained across Anatolian Turkey”.

Historical accounts identify three Ottoman Empire leaders known as the “Three Pasha’s” as the architects of this ideologically motivated genocide; Ismail Enver, Ahmed Djemal, and Mehmet Talaat. However, there is another leading figure in the Turkification of the Ottoman Empire Dr. Mehmet Nazim (also known as Nazim Bey or simply Dr. Nazim) that along with other members of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa special organization played an important role. Dr. Nazim was from a Dönmeh background, a group of Sabbatean crypto-Jews who converted publicly to Islam but retained their beliefs in secret.

During a CUP meeting Dr. Nazim made a chilling speech,

“If we remain satisfied with the sort of local massacres which took place in Adana and elsewhere in 1909…if this purge is not general and final, it will inevitably lead to problems. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to eliminate the Armenian people in its entirety, so there is no further Armenian on this earth and the very concept of Armenia is extinguished.” And continued by saying, “the procedure this time will be one of total annihilation, it is necessary that not even one single Armenian survive this annihilation”.

During a secret meeting of the Young Turks, Dr. Nazim said,

“The massacre is necessary. All the non-Turkish elements, whatever nation they belong to, should be exterminated”.

Two months prior to the Armenian Genocide in February 1915, Dr. Nazim Bey declared a new government policy for the total annihilation of Armenian’s stating his plan of “freeing the fatherland of the aspirations of this cursed race” referring to the Armenians.

Dr. Nazim fled to Germany three years later and was sentenced to death in absentia for his role in the Armenian genocide but this was never carried out, he was however executed for attempting to assassinate Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1926.

A lesser known fact is that the Kurds played a significant role in the massacre of Armenian, Assyrian, Aramean, and Yezidi people as well, in order to win favor with Turkey and in hopes of claiming their lands. Five years ago, Ahmed Turk, a Kurdish politician in Turkey, declared that the Kurds have their share of “guilt in the genocide, too,” and apologized to the Armenians. “Our fathers and grandfathers were used against Assyrians and Yezidis, as well as against Armenians. They persecuted these people; their hands are stained with blood. We as the descendants apologize,” Turk said. 33 years after the Armenian Genocide the UN Genocide Convention was adopted.

By recognizing and condemning the first genocide of the century and providing relief to the survivors of the campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, and other Christians the United States is taking a step in the right direction, but one can’t help but wonder when will the United States be held responsible for their many massacres and the deaths that have recently resulted from their supposed “war on terror”.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

When it comes to Mexico, one can at this point easily spot the signs of a brewing U.S. regime change operation. Since Mexico’s president Andre Manuel López Obrador was elected last year, he’s been thoroughly vilified by the U.S. media. After Brazil’s fascist president Jair Bolsonaro was elected, the Financial Times’ John Paul Rathbone even argued that Obrador is a greater threat to liberal democracy than Bolsonaro. Such views of Obrador have come from claims that he’s an authoritarian, or “too strong” as the Washington Post recently put it.

From the perspective of the global capitalist class, Obrador is indeed a much bigger threat than Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro’s agenda of neoliberal hyper-capitalism made plutocrats around the world celebrate his election, while the presence of the anti-neoliberal Obrador has rattled markets. In March, Obrador declared that “The neoliberal model and its economic policy of pillage and handouts are abolished” in Mexico, starting on a 2019-through-2024 plan to undo the country’s privatization and redistribute wealth. Since Obrador has given Asylum to Evo Morales and said that Morales is the victim of a coup, the U.S. has gained further interest in advancing regime change in Mexico.

As the international implications of the Bolivia coup have developed, it’s become more clear how the U.S. aims to destabilize and take over Mexico. Last week, Trump declared that he’s going to classify Mexico’s cartels as terrorist groups, opening the possibility for military intervention in Mexico. This has gone along with the Mexican right’s recent efforts to attack Obrador for a recent botched raid on the Sinaloa Cartel, a cry of outrage which the U.S. media has amplified through headlines like“Mexico loses its sovereignty to cartels.” The fact that the right-wing President Felipe Calderón was the one who helped create the rise of the Sinaloa Cartel has been omitted from the prevailing narrative about this incident.

Washington seeks to revamp Mexico’s destructive war on drugs so that it can exploit these ruptures in Obrador’s control over the country. Trump and some Democrats are willing to send in troops to make this happen, raising the possibility of yet another U.S. war against Mexico.

If Washington gets its way, Obrador will be replaced with a U.S.-backed neoliberal president as soon as possible, perhaps through a military coup. The victory of Washington’s plans for Mexico depend on the popular acceptance of the narrative that Obrador is an aspiring dictator who must be removed; to advance this narrative, the U.S. media has compared Obrador to Turkey’s genocidal far-right president Recep Erdogan, creating the perception that Obrador is part of the worldwide trend of anti-democratic populist leaders.

But Obrador’s populism isn’t reactionary or authoritarian like the phony right-wing “populism” of Trump, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro. He’s won his great support by delivering upon his promises for lifting people out of poverty, and by helping advance the gains of Mexico’s indigenous communities. Far from being the strongman that the U.S. media makes him out to be, he’s much more pro-democracy than his reactionary predecessors, and within mainstream Mexican politics he’s uniquely in favor of the rights of poor and working people.

Obrador isn’t a communist like I would prefer for him to be. He only seeks to reform capitalism, and he’s increased migrant deportations and carried out self-described “austerity budgets.” But in terms of the issue of imperialism-which is the issue that American socialists should prioritize the most when they’re deciding whether or not to support foreign leaders-Obrador is not on the side of the U.S. empire. He therefore deserves to be supported, and to be defended when necessary.

This is the gist of how anti-imperialists should view Mexico right now; it’s a predictable situation of the U.S. characterizing a disfavored leader as a tyrant so that it can get them out of power. What’s unusual about this regime change project is the global geopolitical dynamic that surrounds it. The U.S. is rapidly losing its global influence, an imperial decline that correlates with the slow-motion collapse of neoliberal capitalism and the intensification of class conflict worldwide. The American bourgeoisie is in danger of losing their power and resources, so they’re in the process of clamping down on the assets they can more solidly control.

This U.S. imperial clampdown is taking place primarily throughout the Pan-American hemisphere. Washington is consolidating and attempting to expand its hold over Latin America. This has become apparent as the U.S. has meddled in Brazil’s election last year in order to get Bolsonaro elected; as the U.S. has escalated its efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s Chavista government, as well as the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; as the U.S. has overthrown Bolivia’s government; as Washington has begun to try to suppress the protests against U.S.-backed neoliberal regimes throughout Latin America; and of course as the campaign against Obrador has intensified.

We’re seeing a repeat of Operation Condor, the Cold War campaign from the U.S. to carry out violence throughout Latin America and redraw the region’s political map. Trump’s decline to rule out drone strikes in Mexico in response to the “terrorist” cartels shows how much this new effort may escalate in the coming years.

Washington’s ultimate goal is to establish fascism throughout the entire Pan-American Hemisphere. If the imperialists won’t be able to regain domination over the globe, they’ll try to suppress the re-emergence of socialist and anti-colonial movements in both Americas through brute force. We must make them fail.

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Featured image is from Flickr/Eneas

La Denuncia Del Magistrato Imposimato:

Nel 50° anniversario della strage di Piazza Fontana, ripubblichiamo l’intervento del magistrato Ferdinando Imposimato, Presidente Onorario della Suprema Corte di Cassazione, al Convegno del Comitato No Guerra No Nato, svoltosi a Roma il 26 Ottobre 2015.

Imposimato riassume i risultati delle indagini da lui compiute, dalle quali emerge il ruolo della Nato nelle stragi che hanno insanguinato l’Italia. Una precisa denuncia, ignorata da quel mondo politico-mediatico che formalmente oggi commemora il tragico anniversario.

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Source: PandoraTV

It’s unsurprising that political parties are becoming more sophisticated in their attempts to use data to profile voters whilst campaigning during elections. However, getting insight into what they think they know about us is often challenging. 

The Open Rights Group (ORG) has conducted some research to shed some light on this by asking the UK’s main political parties – ‘who do you think we are?’. And the results are quite interesting.

For example, did you know that Experian is selling commercial datasets to the Labour and Conservative Parties for profiling? Or did you know that the Labour Party essentially has massive league tables, ranking you based on how you feel about certain issues?

These are some of the revelations that have been released by the ORG ahead of the upcoming 12th December election. The group was able to pull together the findings by exercising its rights under GDPR to find out what UK political parties are doing with personal data.

Staff and supporters of ORG were asked to write to parties across Britain to find out what personal data they are holding, which has given them a “sketch” of how data is being used to profile, target and shape voters intentions.

The ORG has now also built a tool that makes it easy for anyone to submit similar data requests to all political parties, which it hopes will help it build a more “detailed portrait”.

The group said:

We want to know what exactly is going on with personal data in politics, and at what scale, and use this knowledge to stop shady data practices that break trust and the law, polarise society and damage democracy.

We’ve created an automated online tool that allows you to easily ask all active UK political parties what data they’re holding on you. With a few simple clicks you can discover what parties think about you and who they’ve decided you are.

Our data requests uncovered some strange and troubling practices. To help you see what your “political data self” might look like, we wanted to share what we’ve learned so far from the three major parties: Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats.

Key findings

The ORG’s research found that all three major parties – the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrat’s – are collecting personal data and doing some kind of internal score to target and/or screen out people.

For example, the Lib Dems are scoring voters on how likely they are to vote for Brexit, how much of a “pragmatic liberal” you are, what connection you have to other parties and whether that means you are likely to swing to the Lib Dems.

The Conservatives, on the other hand, are giving people a “priority” rating which will determine whether they should try to encourage you to vote or not.

Labour is ranking people in massive local league tables based on where they think you stand on issues such as housing, tax, health, austerity and Brexit. For example, ORG found that its Scotland Directo was ranked 12,966 out of a possible 65,801 in his his whole constituency on the issue of tax.

ORG said:

This “trading and grading” of data is deeply troubling. We think it is going to vary based on where you live, whether in a marginal constituency, or who you are, if you belong to a particular community. This would make sense as some kinds of people and some places are of particular importance to the different parties, and with increased importance will come an increased focus on profiling and scoring.

We will be able to explore this theory with more data from a more diverse range of people. This is one of the reasons we are so keen for lots and lots of people all over the UK to ask parties what personal data they currently hold.

Inaccuracy

Interestingly, some of the profiling being done by parties is highly inaccurate. For example, ORG’s Scotland Director Matthew Rice was found by the Labour Party to likely be retired, over-65, childless and owning the flat he was registered to vote from. None of this is correct.

The ORG said that this will obviously be less than helpful during campaigning:

Parties are still trying to target every voter, not with particularly narrow data but with big wide data that they then tie to everyone in a given area. This isn’t accurate but it is invasive. Because it is also wrong, it creates further issues down the line in political campaigns for Matthew and others that live in the same area but may have different views, values or lifestyles.

What Labour’s deducastions mean ultimately is that they are relying on concocted fictions to make decisions about what messaging to send Matthew, or even whether to include him in a campaign. They’re not only wasting both their time and his, but limiting his opportunity to genuinely engage with what their party stands for and how they compare to other political voices.

Finally, the ORG also found that Labour and the Conservatives are using Mosaic codes in their voter profiles. This is a system of household and individual classification owned by corporate data broker company, Experian. Mosaic contains over 500 variables and segmentation and is traditionally used for targeted commercial advertising.

The Lib Dems are also using commercial datasets to get their scores, but the ORG wasn’t able to find out what data sources they rely on.

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Donald John Trump has turned back the clock in the Western Hemisphere to an era that saw coups and political unrest as the order of the day. Trump and his administration of far-right and pro-fascists have already overthrown the democratically-elected government of President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Trump has announced a policy of turning up the heat on President Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela by ratcheting up the economic blockade of Cuba, a Venezuelan ally.

Trump’s reinvigoration of the 19^th century imperialist Monroe Doctrine, which Washington uses as a political lever to prevent the Western Hemisphere from adopting its own foreign and domestic policies, has, once again, cast the United States in the light of an oppressive overlord over the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The Trump regime has returned to a Cold War playbook of color-coding Western Hemisphere nations with red or pink for “socialist” and “communist.” Falling into the “red” category are Venezuela, which is suffering from crippling US-led economic, diplomatic, and trade sanctions, and Nicaragua and Cuba, which are also subject to sanctions. Color-coded “pink” are Mexico and Argentina, led by progressive presidents and which have shifted from their heretofore pro-US stances. Argentina elected progressive leftist Alberto Fernández as president and, as vice president, former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The Peronista left ticket defeated incumbent right-wing president Mauricio Macri, a one-time real estate business crony of Trump and someone who had abused the nation’s security services in a failed attempt to dig up dirt to target former President Kirchner in a bogus corruption court case. The same CIA-backed “lawfare” operation was used to impeach and remove from office Brazilian leftist president Dilma Rousseff and imprison her predecessor, the wildly popular Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Lula, recently freed from prison after his trial and conviction were deemed by the Supreme Court to have been a right-wing ruse, is vowing to challenge neo-Nazi president Jair Bolsonaro in the next presidential election.

Trump and his Central Intelligence Agency’s aggressive stance toward progressive hemispheric governments have seen more transitions from the “red/pink” bloc to the fascistic and pro-US bloc than the other direction. Ecuador has moved from the red/pink bloc to the blue as a result of the pro-US policies of President Lenin Moreno, who served as vice president under the leftist president Rafael Correa from 2007 to 2013. Moreno’s threats against his predecessor forced Correa to flee to political exile in Belgium. The recent right-wing coup in Bolivia was supported by fascist leaders of Brazil and Colombia. Bolivia’s democratically-elected president Evo Morales was forced to flee to Mexico, which granted him political asylum.

The revanchist imperialism of the Trump administration has witnessed Moreno and Morales being forced to flee the fascist “thugocracy” policies of their respective nations, which rely on abusing the legal system to stifle dissent and imprison opposition politicians. The governments of Chile and Peru have also firmly lined up with Washington and have engaged in anti-opposition policies that, in the case of Chile, has led to bloodshed in the streets as a result of brutal police actions.

A recent addition to the blue bloc from the pink/red coalition is Uruguay. After fifteen years of rule by the left-wing Broad Front, the right-wing National Party’s presidential candidate, Luis Lacalle Pou, declared a razor-thin victory over Broad Front candidate Daniel Martinez. One of Lacalle Pou’s first decisions was to recognize the opposition Venezuelan regime of the CIA puppet, Juan Guaido. Lacalle Pou also decided to align Uruguay with the Lima Group, a bloc of US lackey regimes dedicated to overthrowing the Maduro government of Venezuela. Lacalle Pou has also signaled his willingness to develop closer ties with the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil and distance Uruguay from the Fernandez- Kirchner government of Argentina. It is not secret that Argentina’s Alberto Fernández supported the Broad Front’s Daniel Martinez for president.

Of special concern to progressive Uruguayans is the role that Lacalle Pou’s coalition partner, the Cabildo Abierto party of far-right winger Guido Manini Ríos, will play in his government. If the CIA’s lawfare operations in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia are any indication, the Cabildo Abierto elements in Lacalle Pou’s government, all supporters of the former military junta’s war against leftists in the 1970s, may seek the arrest of former leftist presidents Jose Mujica, a leader of the leftist Tupamaro guerrillas in the 1970s, and Tabaré Vázquez. The Latin American fascist acolytes of Trump, from Bolsonaro and Bolivian politician Luis Fernando Camacho – known as the “Bolivian Bolsonaro” – to Manini Ríos and Colombian President Ivan Duque, all share in common a desire to imprison and even torture and execute the leftist opposition of their respective nations.

If the fascistic foreign policy power levers of the Trump White House, CIA, and State Department have their way, another leftist leader in South America will face prison or worse. Suriname’s leftist president Desi Bouterse was recently convicted by a military court of the extrajudicial executions of 15 political opponents in 1982, while he served as the military leader of the former Dutch colony.

The death of the 15 opposition leaders may have been the work of the CIA, which launched a coup attempt against Bouterse in 1982. In December 1982, the CIA worked closely with Dutch intelligence to establish contacts with Bouterse’s opposition in Suriname, including politicians, businessmen, and journalists. The Dutch provided assistance to former President Henck Chin a Sen and his Amsterdam-based opposition forces. The CIA plan included landing Surinamese rebels in Paramaribo, the Suriname capital, and seize power. There were also reports that the CIA planned to assassinate Bouterse during the coup, a direct violation of a White House executive order banning assassinations of foreign leaders. The CIA’s chief in-country liaison for the coup was US ambassador to Suriname Robert Duemling.

A CIA dispatch from Suriname, dated March 12, 1982, describes the CIA’s hands-on involvement in the coup against Bouterse: “Dissident military officers opposing the leftist trend of the military leadership launched a coup yesterday, but forces loyal to the government are still resisting. The group, calling itself the Army of National Liberation, is led by two officers who have been associated with conservative elements of the Surinamese society . . . Although the rebels have control of the Army’s main barracks and ammunition depot in Paramaribo, government strongman Army Commander Bouterse and troops loyal to him apparently have taken up a defensive position in the capital’s police camp some 6 kilometers away. Fighting subsided somewhat last night, with both sides claiming to be in control and appealing for support from military troops and citizenry. A large number of rank-and-file military, who had objected to Bouterse’s leftist policies several months ago, probably will join the dissidents if Bouterse’s position weakens further.” If anyone is responsible for the deaths of the opposition figures in 1982, one does not need to look beyond CIA headquarters in Langley and its interlocutors with the Ford Foundation in New York.

Suriname’s third largest ethnic group is Javanese, people who originally were settled by the Dutch colonizers from Indonesia. In 1982, Barack Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, who spoke fluent Javanese, was already well-entrenched with CIA programs in Java through her employment with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Ford Foundation. Dunham, who used her Indonesian last name, re-spelled Sutoro from Soetoro, was a valuable asset for the CIA’s program to destabilize Suriname through its business-oriented and very anti-Bouterse Javanese minority. Curiously, Ann Sutoro’s employment contract with the Ford Foundation ended in December 1982, the same month that the CIA attempted to oust Bouterse. During her 1981-1982 contract with the Ford Foundation, Dunham Sutoro spent much of her time liaising with the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in New York, a city that was also a base for the CIA-backed Surinamese opposition.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Bouterse was on a state visit to China when the court delivered its guilty verdict, along with a 20-year prison sentence. Bouterse seized power in 1980 during an era that saw leftist leaders like Daniel Ortega and his Sandinistas, Panamanian President Omar Torrijos, Ecuadorian President Jaime Roldos, Bolivian President Hernán Siles Zuazo, Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, and Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop all buck Washington’s influence in the hemisphere. Bouterse became a destabilization target of the Ronald Reagan-George H. W. Bush administration. After stepping down from power in 1987, Bouterse and his National Democratic Party returned to power when Bouterse was elected president in 2010 and re-elected in 2015. In 2012, the National Assembly passed a bill that granted Bouterse immunity from prosecution. It was later overturned by a court in another blatant display of Washington-orchestrated lawfare. In 1999, the Dutch weighed in against Bouterse by being convicted by a Netherlands court of drug-trafficking. Bouterse denies all the claims against him and remains popular among the primarily Afro-Surinamese population.

The legal action against Bouterse appears to be part of the Trump administration’s program to curb China’s international “Belt and Road Initiative,” particularly in Latin America. Trump has countered with his own contrivance, called the “Growth in the Americas” program. Peru has signaled that it will join Argentina, Chile, Jamaica, and Panama in supporting the American anti-Chinese bloc. It is clear that if Washington is able to depose Bouterse from power in Suriname, it can prevent China from establishing a foothold in the country.

The Trump regime is attempting to move its chess pieces around on the Western hemisphere’s political chessboard. Increasingly, it will be up to exiled progressives like Correa and Morales, as well as the recently-liberated Lula, to counter the march to fascist rule from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Grande.

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Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist, author and syndicated columnist. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the National Press Club.

Featured image is from SCF

Ltamenah is a village in Hama countryside which the Syrian Arab Army recently cleansed of foreign-owned and armed terrorist savages. Last week, authorities discovered a mass grave. This week, they have found a massive quantity of weapons left behind: Mortar, missiles, cannons, rockets, launching pads, and shells. 

Ltamenah was occupied by the Jaish al Ezza faction of al Qaeda in Syria. The Ezza thugs are aligned with the al Saud tyrants occupying Arabia. This gang of armed savages was responsible for the ongoing mass slaughter of civilians in Mhardeh, Saleh, and Sqaiblbieh, in addition to having bombed the Mhardeh power plant.

From Ltamenah, the criminally insane serial killers carried out their massacres. The people of Mhardeh were forced to hold a mass funeral, in mid-September 2018.

We again remind our readers that the al Ezza pathogens were the primary source of the chemical hoax claims in Ltamenah, March 2017.

OPCW’s FFM were better called “FFS.” “Confidence” & “very likely” are not synonymous with any variation of “confirm.”

Though the OPCW was cautious not to explicitly note the Ezza vermin in its report, UC Berkeley School of Law’s Human Rights Investigations Lab was not so discerning. This ‘lab’ gave the murderous and monstrous human garbage entourage credibility in its claim of building a surgical hospital that was chemical weapons bombed while leaving its pristine sign intact.

The prestigious ‘lab’ has not issued an apology, nor a retraction.

No matter, as Syrians celebrate the liberation of Ltamenah.

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All images in this article are from Syria News

This is arguably the ultimate road trip on earth. Marco Polo did it. All the legendary Silk Road explorers did it. Traveling the Pamir Highway back to back, as a harsh winter approaches, able to appreciate it in full, in silence and solitude, offers not only a historical plunge into the intricacies of the ancient Silk Road but a glimpse of what the future may bring in the form of the New Silk Roads.

This is a trip steeped in magic ancient history. Tajiks trace their roots back to tribes of Sogdians, Bactrians and Parthians. Indo-Iranians lived in Bactria (“a country of a thousand towns”) and Sogdiana from the 6-7^th centuries BC to the 8^th century AD Tajiks make up 80% of the republic’s population, very proud of their Persian cultural heritage, and kin to Tajik-speaking peoples in northern Afghanistan and the region around Tashkurgan in Xinjiang.

Proto-Tajiks and beyond were always at the fringe of countless empires – from the Achaemenids, Kushan and Sogdians to the Greco-Bactrians, the Bukhara emirate and even the USSR. Today many Tajiks live in neighboring Uzbekistan – which is now experiencing an economic boom. Due to Stalin’s demented border designs, fabled Bukhara and Samarkand – quintessential Tajik cities – have become “Uzbek.”

Bactria’s territory included what are today northern Afghanistan, southern Tajikistan and southern Uzbekistan. The capital was fabled Balkh, as named by the Greeks, carrying the informal title of “mother of all cities.”

Sogdiana was named by the Greeks and Romans as Transoxiana: between the rivers, the Amu-Darya and the Syr-Darya. Sogdians practiced Zoroastrianism and lived by arable agriculture based on artificial irrigation.

Western Pamirs: Road upgrade by China, Pyanj River, Tajikistan to the left, Afghanistan to the right, Hindu Kush in the background. Photo: Pepe Escobar

We all remember that Alexander the Great invaded Central Asia in 329 B.C. After he conquered Kabul, he marched north and crossed the Amu-Darya. Two years later he defeated the Sogdians. Among the captured prisoners was a Bactrian nobleman, Oxyartes, and his family.

Alexander married Oxyartes’s daughter, the ravishing Roxanne, the most beautiful woman in Central Asia. Then he founded the city of Alexandria Eskhata (“The Farthest”) which is today’s Kojand, in northern Tajikistan. In Sogdiana and Bactria, he built as many as 12 Alexandrias, including Aryan Alexandria (today’s Herat, in Afghanistan) and Marghian Alexandria (today’s Mary, formerly Merv, in Turkmenistan).

By the middle of the 6th century, all these lands had been divided among the Turkic Kaghans, the Sassanian Empire and a coalition of Indian kings. What always remained unchanged was the emphasis on agriculture, town planning, crafts, trade, blacksmithing, pottery, manufacture of copper and mining.

The caravan route across the Pamirs – from Badakshan to Tashkurgan – is the stuff of legend in the West. Marco Polo described it as “the highest place in the world.” Indeed: the Pamirs were known by the Persians as Bam-i-Dunya (translated, appropriately, as “roof of the world”).

The highest peaks in the world may be in the Himalayas. But the Pamirs are something unique: the top orographic crux in Asia from which all the highest mountain ranges in the world radiate: the Hindu Kush to the northwest, the Tian Shan to the northeast, and the Karakoram and the Himalayas to the southeast.

Ultimate imperial crossroads

The Pamirs are the southern boundary of Central Asia. And let’s cut to the chase, the most fascinating region in the whole of Eurasia: as wild as it gets, crammed with breathtaking peaks, snow-capped spires, rivers ragged with crevasses, huge glaciers – a larger-than-life spectacle of white and blue with overtones of stony gray.

This is also the quintessential crossroad of empires – including the fabled Russo-British 19^th century Great Game. No wonder: picture a high crossroads between Xinjiang, the Wakhan Corridor in Afghanistan and Chitral in Pakistan. Pamir may mean a “high rolling valley.” But the bare Eastern Pamirs might as well be on the moon – traversed less by humans than curly-horned Marco Polo sheep, ibex and yaks.

Countless trade caravans, military units, missionaries and religious pilgrims also made the Pamir Silk Road known as “road of Ideologies.” British explorers like Francis Younghusband and George Curzon hit the upper Oxus and mapped high passes into British India. Russian explorers such as Kostenko and Fedchenko tracked the Alai and the great peaks of the northern Pamir. The first Russian expedition arrived in the Pamirs in 1866, led by Fedchenko, who discovered and lent his name to an immense glacier, one of the largest in the world. Trekking toward it is impossible as winter approaches.

And then there were the legendary Silk Road explorers Sven Hedin (in 1894-5) and Aurel Stein (1915), who explored its historical heritage.

Chinese container cargo trucks negotiate the Western Pamirs. Photo: Pepe Escobar

The Pamir Highway version of the Silk Road was actually built by the Soviet Union between 1934 and 1940, predictably following ancient caravan tracks. The name of the region remains Soviet: the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast (GBAO). To travel the highway, one needs a GBAO permit.

For no less than 2,000 years – from 500 B.C. to the early 16^th century – camel caravans carried not only silk from East to West, but goods made of bronze, porcelain, wool and cobalt, also from West to East. There are no fewer than four different branches of the Silk Road in Tajikistan. The ancient Silk Roads were an apotheosis of connectivity: ideas, technology, art, religion, mutual cultural enrichment. The Chinese, with a keen historical eye, not by accident identified “common legacy of mankind” as the conceptual/philosophical base for the Chinese-led New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative.

Afghan village by the Pyanj River, Hindu Kush in the background. Photo: Pepe Escobar

Have China upgrade, will travel

In villages in Gorno-Badakhshan, stretched out along stunning river valleys, life for centuries has been about irrigation farming and seasonal-pasture cattle farming. As we progress toward the barren Eastern Pamirs, the story mutates into an epic: how mountain people eventually adapted to living at altitudes as high as 4,500 meters.

In the Western Pamirs, the current road upgrade was by – who else? – China. The quality is equivalent to the northern Karakoram Highway. Chinese building companies are slowly working their way towards the Eastern Pamirs – but repaving the whole highway may take years.

The Chinese are coming: upgrading the highway in the Western Pamirs. Photo: Pepe Escobar

The 3rd century BC Yamchun fortress, known as ‘The Castle of the Fire Worshippers.’ Photo: Pepe Escobar

The Pyanj river draws a sort of huge arc around the border of Badakhshan in Afghanistan. We see absolutely amazing villages perched on the hills across the river, including some nice houses and owners with an SUV instead of a donkey or a bike. Now there are quite a few bridges over the Pyanj, financed by the Aga Khan foundation, instead of previous planks jammed with stones suspended above vertiginous cliffs.

From Qalaykhumb to Khorog and then all the way to Ishkoshim, the Pyanj river establishes the Afghan border for hundreds of kilometers – traversing poplar trees and impeccably-tended fields. Then we enter the legendary Wakhan valley: a major – barren – branch of the Ancient Silk Road, with the spectacular snow-capped peaks of the Hindu Kush in the background. Farther south, a trek of only a few dozen kilometers of trekking, it’s Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan.

The Wakhan could not be more strategic – contested, over time, by Pamiris, Afghans, Kyrgyz and Chinese, peppered with qalas (fortresses) that protected and taxed the Silk Road trade caravans.

The star of the qalas is the 3^rd century B.C. Yamchun fortress – a textbook medieval castle, originally 900 meters long and 400 meters wide, set in a virtually inaccessible rocky slope, protected by two river canyons, with 40 towers and a citadel. Legendary Silk Road explorer Aurel Stein, who was here in 1906, on the way to China, was gobsmacked.The fortress is locally known as the “Castle of the Fire Worshippers”.

Pre-Islamic Badakhshan was Zoroastrian, worshipping fire, the sun and spirits of ancestors and at the same time practicing a distinct Badakhshani version of Buddhism. In fact, in Vrang, we find the remains of 7^th-8^th century Buddhist man-made caves that could have also been a Zoroastrian site in the past. The early Tang dynasty wandering monk Xuanzang was here, in the 7^th century. He described the monasteries and, tellingly, took notice of a Buddhist inscription:  “Narayana, win.”

Ishkoshim, which Marco Polo crossed in 1271 on the way to the upper Wakhan, is the only border crossing in the Pamirs into Afghanistan open to foreigners. To talk of “roads” on the Afghan side is audacious. But old Silk Road tracks remain, negotiable only with a study Russian jeep, delving into Faizabad and farther into Mazar-i-Sharif.

Here are the parts the 18-year-long, trillion-dollar, Hindu Kush-of-lies-told American war on Afghanistan never reaches. The only “America” available is Hollywood blockbusters on DVDs at 30 cents apiece.

I was very fortunate to spot the real deal: a camel caravan, straight from the ancient Silk Road, following a track on the Afghan side of the Wakhan. They were Kyrgyz nomads. There are roughly 3,000 Kyrgyz nomads in the Wakhan, who would like to resettle back in their homeland. But they are lost in a bureaucratic maze – even assuming they secure Afghan passports.

These are the ancient Silk Roads the Taliban will never be able to reach.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Straight from the Ancient Silk Road: a camel caravan on the Afghan Wakhan Corridor. Photo: Pepe Escobar / Asia Times

As we transition into 2020, our World is in the grip of a deliberate attempt to destroy the fundamental values upon which all civilised life depends.

Humanitarian values of love, kindness, compassion and mutual support – are being deliberately blocked, distorted and down-graded as part of a global propaganda regime designed to indoctrinate the people of this planet into selfish, materialistic and essentially passive ‘convenience’ life styles. 

While today’s ‘world media headlines’ are strictly confined to reflect the ethos of the corporations that sponsor and control them. That ethos is profit and power – the methodology is coercion. 

Meanwhile ‘social media’ brainwashes its users with a ‘virtual reality’ world of superficial and emotional trivia – making young people, in particular, slaves to instant access convenience. 

As if this wasn’t enough – a huge push is being made to sell ‘global warming/climate change’ as the definitive cause of various predicted ‘extinction events’ which, we are told, will bring about the collapse of all the natural systems that supply humanity with its present needs. Fear is being used as the primary tool for the uptake of this doctrine. 

The villain chosen to lead this war against humanity is a harmless natural gas called carbon dioxide (CO2)  which is now being cited as the undisputed killer of all killers, by governments, corporations and multi millionaires – who just yesterday were claiming fossil fuel energy as the only way that global industry can maintain necessary levels of production to meet the needs of the majority of the world’s people. 

Soros, Rockerfeller, Rothschild, Zuckerberg, Gates and fellow members of an elite cabal, have noted that even more money can be made out of managing a ‘green economy’ than a dark brown one.  Green New Deal – aka ‘the fourth industrial revolution’ – is their current slogan for capturing and controlling all aspects of the green market place. Under the cooked-up pretext of preventing global warming/climate change. 

While public attention is turned towards this planetary wide deception – telecom corporations are  rolling-out their deeply toxic 5G microwave technologies, as the so called ‘smart solution’ to just about everything.  A solution that perfectly fills the bill for these corporations, since it makes mankind a servant to the machine rather than its master. In this case, the 100% wireless machines that exert a rapidly tightening control over all aspects of our daily lives as well as 100% surveillance of all our activities, from the bedroom to the board room. 

Surveillance, that comes from largely invisible weapons, whose radiated microwave emissions wage a highly destructive war on all human, animal, insect and plant life of the planet; leading to the subsequent introduction of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as a synthetic replacement for sentient human beings. A subject I deal with at length in my new book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’. 

All of this, you understand, is being spun on the back of a purported ‘climate emergency’ and the subsequent need for a Green New Deal – as a means to make money from this emergency. 

But, let us tell the facts: the world is not warming, the climate change that is occurring – and the climate is always changing – is doing so not due to an excess of CO2, which constitutes just 0.039 % of atmospheric elements – but due to unreported human and natural causes. Unreported because mainstream media defends the great deception, and not the truth. 

The most significant ‘human’ causes associated with the disruption of the climate at this time are atmospheric aerosol geoengineering (chemtrails), ubiquitous electro-smog, HAARP ionospheric heaters, war and war games.

The most significant ‘natural’ causes come from changing sun spot activity, a weakening magnetosphere, the shifting Poles and changes in ocean current oscillations – amongst others. 

‘Green New Deal’ (Fourth Industrial Revolution) is neither green, nor new, nor a deal. It is an unprecedented scam, which, if put into effect, will involve a global mining operation many times greater than than the one which produces the world’s present requirements for oil, coal and gas – combined. The objective, as stated by the leading institutions promoting it – is ‘Zero Carbon’. 

To switch the world over to the new renewable energy machinery necessary to generate 100% of the population’s manufactured energy requirements – will require the construction of a vast new corporate owned and tax payer sponsored infrastructure. One whose ‘non-green’ embedded energy requirement would far outstrip the amount of genuinely green energy subsequently generated. 

A vast manufacturing programme which would involve the mining and processing of exponential volumes of fossil fuels and rare earth minerals in every region of the world – raising the spectrum of the almost certain extinction of our species. 

It is surely abundantly clear that this is an entirely insane idea, which would be immediately consigned to the dustbin, if anyone still capable of rational human thought was at the helm of world affairs. 

Yet this is the present agenda being proposed by leading Green NGO’s, governments, bankers, super-states, billionaires and even well paid climatologists; all of whom have demonstrated themselves to be immune to the fact that they are pushing forward a programme which combines  genocide, ecocide and homicide all rolled into one. A ‘big brother’ overseen global package, under the perverse and twisted moniker of ‘sustainable development’. Brain-child of the two faced United Nations. 

SOLUTION: We need Resistance. Absolute, uncompromising and sustained resistance – until our job is done –  and the perpetrators of this anti-life programme have been unceremoniously removed from their despotic thrones. Such an action has to be done in order to enable the flowering of ‘true humanity’ to finally take centre stage – leading to an unstoppable process of global healing. 

For this flowering to become manifest, we need decentralised, people-led local economies and local – not central – governance. The imperative is for ‘we the people’ to now take back full control of our destinies and reclaim our true relationship with nature and with each other; before both we and nature are beyond the point of being rescued.   

That means the propagation of truly ‘human scale’ ecological and community oriented land management practices, skilled civil engineering and traditional artisan building programmes and  farming methods that ensure the widespread availability of nutritious, fresh ‘real food’ – as well as essential quality-crafted products that are built to last. It means an end to vast banker led global marketing and centralised energy distribution structures, and an end to the supermarket ‘convenience’ stores that sell over-packaged, overpriced, over travelled, and over rated fake foods. 

We are talking about a major shift of emphasis that rids this world of the agrichemical and genetically modified toxic foods responsible for an ever larger number of people getting ever more sick; while real farmers loose their ability to survive, due to consumers abandoning them for the very corporations that are systematically destroying the resource base of the planet.

Let an aware body of citizens become firmly established – and lead by example – thereby demonstrating that they will not live ‘the life of hypocrisy’ ubiquitous amongst the political class of the planet, with all the disastrous results that follow. 

The first major step in all this, is to demonstrate that we can be responsible enough to govern ourselves, according to the deeper values we claim to believe in. For only once a ‘responsible’ self-governing foundation is firmly laid, can that which follows reflect the true path of spiritual and human evolution which is our ever beckoning destiny. 

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Julian Rose is author of  ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through, now available from independent book stores and Amazon. See www.julianrose.info for more information. Julian is an international activist, writer, broadcaster, organic farming pioneer and actor.  In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Demonstrators at the anti-5G protest in Bern on Friday. (© Keystone / Peter Klaunzer)

More than 100 medical doctors have issued an urgent appeal to the Australian government to protect the life of its citizen, imprisoned WikiLeaks journalist and publisher Julian Assange.

The doctors’ action follows warnings from medical and human rights experts that Mr Assange’s health is rapidly deteriorating and that he might die in a UK prison where he is being held pending US extradition hearings that begin in February.

In an open letter to the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs (dated 16/12/2019), the doctors urge Marise Payne to negotiate Julian Assange’s safe passage from Belmarsh Prison to an appropriate hospital setting in Australia, “before it is too late.”

“It is an extremely serious matter for an Australian citizen’s survival to be endangered by a foreign government obstructing his human right to health. It is an even more serious matter for that citizen’s own government to refuse to intervene, against historical precedent and numerous converging lines of medical advice,” the letter states.

“Should Mr Assange die in a British prison, people will want to know what you, Minister, did to prevent his death.”

On November 22, more than 60 medical doctors wrote to the UK Home Secretary urging that Mr Assange be transferred from Belmarsh maximum-­‐security prison to a university teaching hospital for expert medical assessment and care. Despite worldwide media attention, the doctors’ urgent advice was ignored.

Signatory and Australian medical practitioner, Arthur Chesterfield-­‐Evans said that sacrificing Mr Assange by aiding and abetting the obstruction of his medical care reflected a chilling example of Australia ceding its sovereignty, freedoms and laws.

“If Australia believes in universal moral values of truth ahead of authoritarian regimes using fear and abusing legal process to silence journalists, it must act to protect Julian Assange, his life, and his health,” Dr Chesterfield-­‐Evans said.

Specialist in Diagnostic Radiology (UK and Sweden) and signatory, Stephen Frost said the doctors agreed with the assessment of the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, that Julian Assange had been ‘psychologically tortured’.

“That doctors should have to write open letters to the UK and Australian governments to demand appropriate health care for a victim of torture is beyond belief,” Dr Frost said.

“The torture must stop now, and Mr Assange must be provided with immediate access to the health care which he so obviously needs before it is too late.”

“We appeal to the Australian public to support us in ensuring that the Australian government protects the rights of its citizens, which is its primary duty. There can be no exceptions,” he said.

Copies of the letter have also been sent to Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Leader of the Opposition Anthony Albanese and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong.

The open letter will be publicly accessible online along with an accompanying addendum explaining the medical basis for the doctors’ warnings and concerns.

The full text of the November 22 open letter and list of signatories can also be found here.

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Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

Prior to the UN Convention on Climate Change talks held in Madrid, the sense that tradition would assert itself was hard to buck.  Weariness and frustration came in the wake of initial high minded optimism. Delegates spent an extra two days and nights attempting to reach a deal covering carbon reduction measures before the Glasgow conference in 2020.  The gathering became the longest set of climate talks in history, exceeding the time spent at the 2011 Durban meeting by 44 hours.

As Climate Home News noted, Durban still stood out as being worthier for having “produced a deal between countries that laid the foundations for the Paris Agreement.”  In stark contrast, “Madrid produced a weak gesture toward raising climate targets and failed to agree for the second year in a row on rules to govern carbon markets.”

The UN Secretary General António Guterres was all lament.  “The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaption and finance to tackle the climate crisis.”  He hoped that the next year would see “all countries commit to do what science tells us is necessary to reach carbon neutrality in 2050 and no more than 1.5 degree temperature rise.” 

The wisdom of COP25 remains similar to that of previous gatherings on climate: politics and environment do not mix well.  Big powers and heavy polluters stuck to their stubborn positions, stressing the merits of loose, open markets to solve the problem, notably in terms of reducing carbon emissions; smaller states more concerned by their actual disappearance lobbied European, Latin American and African allies for firmer commitments and pledges. 

Australia was also confirmed as one of the chief spoilers, if not outright saboteurs, at the show, noted for its insistence that it be allowed to claim a reduction of its abatement for the 2021-30 Paris Accord.  This, went the argument, was due to its own excelling in meeting the 2012-20 Kyoto Protocol period.  Previous good conduct could justify current bad and future behaviour.  What Canberra offered the globe was an accounting model of deception, exploiting a regulatory loophole in place of lowering emissions.  It lacked legal plausibility, given that both Kyoto and Paris are separate treaties. 

Former French environment minister Luciana Tubiana was clear about the implications of this idea.  “If you want this carryover,”she told the Financial Times, “it is just cheating.  Australia was willing in a way to destroy the whole system, because that is the way to destroy the whole Paris agreement.” 

Other states were also noted in performing roles of obstruction, including Saudi Arabia, Brazil and the United States.  These parties were particular keen to push their differences with other states over Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, a provision dealing with mechanisms and models of trading in emission reductions.  Such trade can have a habit of losing validity when put into practice; the issue of transparency remains a considerable problem in such markets. 

The US statement at the conference emphasised realism and pragmatism “backed by a record of real world results.”  (Real world results tend to exclude environmental ruination for unrepentant polluters.)  Market results were primary; environmental matters were subordinate to such dictates.  Usual mantras were proffered: innovation and open markets produced wealth, but also “fewer emissions, and mores secure sources of energy.”  Despite leaving as a party to the Paris Agreement, “We remain fully committed to working with you, our global partners, to enhance resilience, mitigate the impacts of climate change, and prepare for and respond to natural disasters.” 

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro reconfirmed his climate change scepticism, claiming that the entire issue of COP25 could be put down to commerce.  “I don’t know why people don’t understand that it’s just a commercial game.”  The Europeans, he suggested, were merely being irksome about cash and meddling.  “I’d like to know,” he posed rhetorically to journalists, “has there been a resolution for Europe to be reforested, or are they just going to keep bothering Brazil?”   

Brazil’s environment minister Ricardo Salles, known to some as Minister for Deforestation, was similarly keen to place the blame elsewhere.  He had demanded, bowl in hand, some $10 billion under the Paris Climate deal to combat deforestation in 2020.  All in all, he was not optimistic. “Rich countries did not want to pay up.”   

Like Australia, Brazil’s environmental ploy is driven by creative accounting, an attempt to leverage previous supposed good conduct in the climate change stakes, playing accumulated carbon credits from Kyoto to meet those under the Paris arrangements.  Using open market rationales, Salles condemned the “protectionist vision” that had taken hold: “Brazil and other countries that could provide carbon credits because of their forests and good environmental practices came out losers.”  In an act of some spite, the minister would subsequently post a tweet featuring a photo of a platter heavy with meats.  “To compensate for our emissions at COP, a vegetarian lunch!” 

Madrid will be remembered for its stalemate on carbon credits and the botched rule book on carbon trading.  An effort spearheaded by Costa Rica, including Germany, Britain and New Zealand, to convince states to adopt the San Jose principles, with a prohibition on the use of carbon credit carryover along with other Kyoto gains, was rejected. 

COP25 again exposed that degree of prevalent anarchy, if not gangsterism, in global climate change policy.  The emphasis, then, is on attempts and arrangements made within regional areas: EU policy on de-carbonised economies (albeit resisted within by such states as Poland), and bilateral arrangements (the EU and China).  As these take place, the apocalyptic message led by activists such as Greta Thunberg will become more desperate. 

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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 Countercurrents

The chorus of smear attacks on Jeremy Corbyn was so vile and relentless that it is unseemly to blame him personally for the defeat of his party in the December 12 parliamentary elections.  Perhaps Labour’s defeat was inevitable.  But with a different strategy, it would have been a defeat with more promise for the future.

Tactically, Corbyn’s great error was to submit so blandly to the smear campaign accusing Labour of anti-Semitism.  The “danger to Jews in Britain” was totally imaginary and should have been vigorously denounced as politically motivated slander. If Corbyn did anything to promote anti-Jewish feeling in Britain, it was by allowing self-appointed spokesmen and women of a small minority to destroy the reputation of party members whom he should have defended. But not even the smear campaign’s identification of British Jews with unquestioning defense of Israel can endanger the secure position of Jews in British society.

But Corbyn’s strategic error was the total failure to develop a Labour-friendly Brexit strategy.  His campaign failed to project his program into a post-EU context. Instead, he accepted the prospect of a second referendum that would reverse the first one. A prospect of endless confusion and division.

Comparison with France

Adapting a left policy to leaving the EU would have been much easier here in France.  Since enactment of the post-World War II Resistance Council program, France has had a very special attachment to its public services, understood as both a national asset (providing a favorable environment for business and daily life) and an egalitarian method of redistribution of wealth.  The Macron regime’s attacks on public services are a major cause of the massive Gilets Jaunes street protests and trade unions strikes.  Macron’s program to introduce a uniform national retirement scheme, aside from its prospect of more work for less pension, is also an attack on public services, since it would undermine the esprit de corps necessary to perpetuate the publicly useful professions needed by key public services such as nursing, education, energy production and rail transport.

Active opposition to Macron’s policies is raising awareness that all these unwelcome reforms have been dictated to France by the European Union, in order to promote privatization and unimpeded competition of private capital. The unwelcome retirement measures are simply one of the items dictated by the Grandes Orientations des Politiques Economiques or GOPE (Broad Economic Policy Guidelines in English) determined by an unelected bureaucracy in Brussels and imposed on Member States.

In France, popular unrest is thus fostering increasing criticism of the EU. A “Frexit” would easily take on a socializing coloration because it would be so closely tied to the prospect of rescuing public services and key economic sectors from privatization. The successful mixed economy of the Gaullist years survives as the memory of a better system than neoliberalism. Return to such a system is impossible within the EU.

Ideological Defeat

In the UK there is no tradition of a successful mixed economy as in France. Nevertheless, Corbyn campaigned for renationalization of the railroads and preservation of the National Health Service, which were the achievements of the Labour Party after World War II, parallel to similar social advances in France. But he failed to link his strong defense of public services to independence from the EU. Such linkage could have been the basis of a “left Brexit”, in clear opposition to the EU drive for massive privatization and lower labor costs. In the absence of a socio-economic left Brexit, there was no vigorous counter to the notion that the working class voted for Brexit only to oppose immigration for reasons of racism and xenophobia – the line pushed by the Blairite open society crowd, which hates Corbyn and cares more for “minorities” than for the British working class.

Corbyn’s failure to take a strong stand illustrated the ideological weakness of the left faced with globalization.  Much of the left has allowed its traditional “internationalism” to be redefined as “open borders”. This apparent generosity toward outsiders in fact is highly compatible with the demands of globalized finance capital.  Old-fashioned Socialist internationalism meant solidarity with workers in their struggle against the capitalist ruling class in each and every country where they lived and worked. Open borders means weakening the position of workers everywhere, and strengthening global capitalism.

Corbyn’s desire to compromise with his enemies led him to capitulate to those who consider that the primary if not unique task of “the left” is to decry “racism” and “anti-Semitism”.  Such a left merely provides a moral cover for global capitalism by demonizing popular resistance as “populism”.

I have the impression that in Britain, many more or less progressive people wanted to stay in the EU out of fear of being left alone with their own horrible ruling class, with its MI6, its aggressive imperialist traditions, its virtual caste system.  “Europe” seemed more gentle and “social” than Britain itself – even though the task of the EU is to wreck the social state to make way for the global reign of finance capital.

Aside from economic or social issues, the vote to leave the European Union was a profound expression of fidelity to Britain’s democratic institutions, to the right of British citizens to make their own laws.  The British were never comfortable with accepting regulations and directives drafted in Brussels.  They were never totally “in” Europe, having rejected the euro and the Schengen rules on borders. A party that is unwilling to govern a nation reclaiming its sovereignty has disqualified itself.

Failing to embrace Brexit and give it a social program was a fateful timidity. It meant handing Brexit to Boris Johnson. A BoJo Brexit appears more than likely to strengthen the UK’s imperialist ties with the United States and Israel and pursue drastic privatizations at home.  And it seems most unlikely to set an appealing example to citizens of other European countries whose dissatisfaction with socio-economic decline under EU direction is growing.

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According to the London Daily Mail, the Trump regime intends to use secret evidence against Assange — undisclosed to him and his legal team, wanting them prevented from preparing a proper defense.

He faces 18 spurious charges under the long ago outdated 1917 Espionage Act, a WW I relic, pertaining solely to the war, used to persecute state victims for exposing dirty imperial secrets.

Assange is a journalist, WikiLeaks a publisher, phony charges against him all about wanting truth-telling that conflicts with the official narrative silenced — the hallmark of totalitarian rule.

According to a member of his defense team Gareth Peirce:

“The summary case which we have prepared is a dense document.”

“Mr. Assange has not been given what he must be given, and we are keen to go through this to the best of our abilities to keep with the requests of the court.”

“It is predicated on the underlying evidence that Mr. Assange has not reviewed.”

Britain in cahoots with the Trump regime wants Assange pronounced guilty by accusation.

A rigged process wants him imprisoned longterm, likely never to be free again for publishing uncomfortable hard truths.

What’s going on is a message to other investigative journalists that they risk a similar fate if reveal information the US wants suppressed.

In the US and elsewhere, pre-trial judicial proceedings afford all parties the right to as much information as possible – nothing kept secret except for constitutional protection from self-incrimination.

Defendants and their lawyers have the right to all relevant documents, witness depositions, questions and answers from interrogations, crime scene and other forensic evidence including toxicology results, police reports, “raw evidence,” arrest and search warrants, grand jury testimony, and other relevant data.

The purpose of what’s called “discovery” is to assure judicial fairness.

Prosecutors are prohibited from withholding relevant evidence and related materials from the defendant and counsel.

Unlike film-portrayed crime dramas, actual ones rarely include surprise evidence by any party during proceedings, especially anything introduced near their conclusion.

According to the law dictionary: “The theory of broad rights of discovery is that all parties will go to trial with as much knowledge as possible and that neither party should be able to keep secrets from the other” — to give one side an unfair advantage over the other.

That’s what appears in play against Assange, Trump regime prosecutors wanting no chance that he’ll be ruled innocent and released.

Given his brutal mistreatment, languishing under draconian conditions, ill-fed and denied vitally needed medical treatment, his health greatly deteriorated, he may die from neglect in Britain.

The Trump and Boris Johnson regimes may plan his fate this way — to avoid a possible judicial defeat if US courts support First Amendment speech and media freedoms — what earlier Supreme Court rulings upheld.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The United States has recently deployed more military reinforcements to Syria’s northeastern oil fields controlled by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, Anadolu reported.

The agency quoted local sources in the Syrian governorate of Deir Ez-Zor as saying that the US troops entered the area on Saturday night from the Al Waleed border crossing – also known as Al-Tanf crossing – with Iraq and headed towards the oil fields south of Hasakah governorate.

According to the sources, the convoy of logistic reinforcements consisting of about 100 trucks, ambulances as well as buses and fuel tanks.

In early December, a US reinforcements convoy of 150 trucks entered Syria from the Al Waleed and Zamalka border crossings and headed towards the oil fields of Deir Ez-Zor.

US President Donald Trump has previously said he will not allow Daesh to seize the oil fields in northern Syria and will keep troops in the country to this end.

Russia, however, questioned America’s intentions saying it only wants to steal Syria’s oil.

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Increasingly violent protests are sweeping the self-professed “world’s largest democracy” as its people fight to protect the secular nature of their state following Prime Minister Modi’s decision to push forward with a religiously discriminatory citizenship amendment, with this national uprising being met with the disproportionate use of force by law enforcement authorities who are showing zero concern for the collateral damage that they’re causing, especially after they stormed the Jamia Millia Islamia (JMU) university on Sunday and injured at least 100 students.

The war in Afghanistan, the longest war in American history, is based on lies made by top U.S. officials and was “idiotic” as there was no clear plan, according to the documents published by the Washington Post, dubbed the ‘Afghanistan Papers.’ According to the papers, the U.S. has wasted nearly $1 trillion of taxpayers money in war against Afghanistan, with it expecting to cost trillions more. Effectively, it is the taxpayer’s money being wasted to maintain the war and occupation so that shareholders in U.S. military industries can profit while millions of Americans remain in poverty.

Almost half a century ago, the famous Pentagon Papers revealed the secret history and embarrassing truth about the Vietnam War. Documents published by the Washington Post have effectively replicated this in relations to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which have been led with equal stubbornness by three different U.S. presidents – George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Although Trump proclaimed withdrawing from Afghanistan, approaching the end of his first mandate and 18 years into the war, there has been hundreds of thousands of victims and nearly a trillion dollars spent, with no end in sight.

General Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, behind closed doors, unaware that his words would once reach the public, testified that:

“There is a machinery that is behind what we do, and it keeps us participating in the conflict because it generates wealth.”

After all, former US diplomat James Dobbins was quoted as saying:

“We don’t invade poor countries to make them rich. We don’t invade authoritarian countries to make them democratic. We invade violent countries to make them peaceful and we clearly failed in Afghanistan.”

And the “staggering” amount of money spent so far on the war in Afghanistan – between $934 billion and $978 billion at no cost to the CIA, caught the attention of the Washington Post as it has never been audited and justified. We must not be mistaken and think it is conspiratorial, there is a powerful Military Industrial Complex that needs war for profit.

The Afghanistan Papers demonstrates that there is inertia in Washington’s endless war strategy that has been going on for decades. It has been shown time and again that the overwhelming U.S. forces cannot subjugate Afghanistan with the existence of the Taliban that are determined to fight for their country. This is not to endorse the Taliban, but it is to say that Afghanistan since the times of Alexander the Great around 2,300 years ago, has been a place of strong resistance to foreign occupation.

The Afghanistan Papers reveal that 775,000 U.S. troops have passed through Afghanistan since 2001, with some 2,300 killed and 20,589 wounded, yet, U.S. officials acknowledge that their military strategies have been fatally flawed. The documents reveal confusion on whether Al-Qaeda or the Taliban is the enemy; is Pakistan a friend or an adversary; or if there are jihadists on the CIA payroll. As the documents reveal, Washington has never been able to agree on a response. As a result, on the ground, U.S. troops were often unable to distinguish friend from enemy.

Officially, according to the Washington Post, one of the intentions of the occupation forces was to curb opium production. However, Afghan farmers now produce more poppies than ever before, with strong evidence that the CIA are involved in the cultivation and smuggling of the poppies. Last year, according to the United Nations, Afghanistan was responsible for 82% of global opium production. With over $133 billion invested in Afghanistan alone – more than the Marshall Plan for all of Western Europe, when the figures adjust for inflation, the achievement has only “been the development of mass corruption,” said former U.S. ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top U.S. diplomat in Kabul in 2002 and from 2011 to 2012. He added, “Once it gets to the level I saw, when I was out there, it’s somewhere between unbelievably hard and outright impossible to fix it.”

The true goal of occupation of Afghanistan is actually quite clear: it is a central strategic point in the Eurasia area to counter Chinese and Russian interests in Central Asia. The true reason for the occupation of Afghanistan is actually quite clear, to control the more than $1 trillion of riches found in the country, and have access to other rich deposits of natural resources in Central Asia, a space traditionally influenced by Russia and China.

Although Washington knew these reasons for the invasion in 2001, the overwhelming majority of the American people and military did not know. As revealed in the Afghanistan papers:

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing,” said one general.

A former commanding general in Afghanistan said:

“I tried to get someone to define for me what winning meant . . . and nobody could. Some people were thinking in terms of Jeffersonian democracy, but that’s just not going to happen in Afghanistan.”

If the American people can escape the vicious cycle of endless wars and the accompanying lies that justify them, they will be driven by the very processes that are taking place in the rest of the world that are inevitably leading us to a balanced Multipolar system in which this kind of intervention will no longer be possible. The Afghanistan war was built on a system of lies, deceit and confusion and eventually has accelerated multipolarism.

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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 New Eastern Outlook

Educators are ramping up their fight against the Tories’ 18-month attack on public education.

On Tuesday, public elementary teachers stepped up their work-to-rule refusing, for example, to participate in performance evaluations, plan new field trips, buy school supplies on their own time and register for additional qualifications courses.  Yesterday, many Ontario Secondary teachers staged another one-day strike in districts including Toronto, Grand Erie, Simcoe County, Muskoka and Rainy River.

Cranking up pressure on the government was pretty clear at the Elementary Teachers of Toronto’s (ETT) Federation Day last Friday. Mind you, both local president Joy Lachica and Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) head Sam Hammond, were keeping their cards close – acknowledging the 98 percent strike vote of teachers, and the need to “harness our power” though not getting too specific about what comes next if the work-to-rule doesn’t produce results.

Messages of activism

But the messages sent by the speakers ETT invited to the gathering of public elementary teachers across Toronto delivered a message of activism more plainly. Rachel Huot of Ontario Parent Action Network assured teachers that despite the government’s attempt to drive a wedge between them and parents, they won’t be on opposite sides of job actions. “This is our fight,” she said.

There was Maggie MacDonell winner of the 2017 Global Teacher Prize describing how she pushed, badgered and organized her way to create programs for Innuit youth in her Nunavik community of Salluit; about the bicycle repair shop worked by a notorious but reformed ex-bicycle thief or the Nunavik Running Club which has enabled young people to travel widely to compete.  She spoke about the community hauling equipment for a rec centre overland by snow machines because the ship that was supposed to bring it all in, couldn’t make it into port. It was all about what a teacher can do as an organizer in her community.

Geneticist David Suzuki might have been talking directly to the Ford government as he outlined the dire environmental situation in which humans find themselves, the multiplier effect of our vast destruction of the natural world: “we think we’re so clever, but we have no idea what the long-term ramifications will be.”

But it was Jollene Levid who concentrated on the task facing Ontario educators right now. She is an organizer for the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) which won major concessions after a 6 day strike last winter.

Organizing Los Angeles educators

Los Angeles schools had been crumbling for years. Class sizes had risen anywhere from 30 in elementary schools to as high as 50 in high schools. Since 2008, austerity measures deprived many schools of caretakers, guidance counsellors and librarians. It was normal practice for school administrators to run random searches of their kids. Teachers and educational workers struck for liveable wages, but also for improvements to the conditions in schools as well as the neighbourhoods around them. They demanded more teaching, less testing and for a cap on privatized charter schools so popular across the United States.

UTLA won a 6 percent retroactive pay increase for education workers, a nurse in every school 5 days a week, some reductions in class size, more librarians in secondary schools and more counsellors. LA educators also managed to get the Los Angeles school board to cap the number charter schools allowed to open.

The gains they won came from organizing and building a coalition with neighbourhood groups as well as organizations like Black Lives Matter. Over 5 years, UTLA transformed itself from a service union focusing on wages and working conditions for its members, to a movement for social and economic change. The union, Ms. Levid explained, recruited natural leaders from school sites and taught them how to organize. It created a research department and kept track of educators’ commitment for organizing. To pay for this, it raised members’ dues after getting a commitment from them that this was the right way to go. To further test that commitment, it re-signed 98 percent of UTLA members to their own union.  Eighty-nine percent of them voted in favour of a strike.

Union leaders tested the water as they moved towards the strike and the campaign was built around escalating actions: handing out flyers, then picketing, then holding regional rallies and when it was clear there was support for it, going for the strike vote.

“Everything we did,” said Jollene Levid, “was building towards our capacity to strike.” All the members knew this was where they, as a union, were heading. UTLA was “unapologetically ideological” she said, adding that in these times of intense political and economic oppression, we all need to move to the left.

What about Ontario?

This is where educators across Ontario find themselves. They face a government that has been reckless with everything it has put its hands on and is now trying to touch up its image after a precipitous fall in popularity. After a disastrous federal election, the Tories are vulnerable.

But the Ford government is never going to be reasonable despite what Education Minister Stephen Lecce claims; it’s in too deep. It can’t afford to look weaker than it already does. If it had any sense of reason it would never have cut health care, social services, child care, environmental programs, the cap and trade agreement, half of Toronto’s city councillors, the Basic Income Pilot Project, the province’s child advocate, school board budgets and endlessly so on, while it appointed friends to key government positions.

No one, likely not even the Minister, believes that this government is bargaining in good faith with educators. It capped wage increases to 1 percent and offered to increase class sizes to only 25 rather than 28; to require secondary school kids to take only 2 credits online rather than 4. This doesn’t take into account that slashing school board budgets alone, resulted in higher class sizes, cuts to programs and cuts to services.

Education sector unions tested the waters and have seen tens of thousands of people show up to rallies over the past year. Parent and community groups are cropping up everywhere; students have gone out on strike to stop education cuts. Unions need to keep moving forward as they build a coalition of public and Catholic teachers in both elementary and secondary panels to put an enormous strain on Doug Ford and the sycophants who enabled his policies. As one teacher on the strike line last Wednesday said:

I think it’s great that we’re out today. I think it’s what it’s going to take, really causing that disruption that puts the pressure on the government that forces them to come to the bargaining table. It’s also really heartening to hear all the public support—you can hear that in the background… it sends a really clear message to the government that the public, parents, students and teachers united are against these cuts.

Keep pushing

Educators along with parents and other allies have the numbers and credibility to push this government hard.

Unions should not back down; they should keep demanding a full restoration of all the money and staff taken from education over the past 18 months. They also need to be mindful of parents’ support, something that Stephen Lecce is doing his best to split away from educators as he puts out the fiction that their job actions are mostly about wages. Still, if this all comes to a longer strike, unions need to be prepared to address the needs of parents like those who require supervision for their children while they’re at work. They have got to keep parents on their side and be willing to go to a lot of trouble to do so.

As the Los Angeles educators understood, what’s at stake here is not just wages or even class size and the number of courses kids might have to take by computer. It’s much bigger than that. Ontario is stuck with a government that has no progressive ideas- a government bent on squeezing the health out of this province to make a case for privatization of basic services. This government ignores the future and we can thank educators and the people who support them for doing all they can to bring it down.

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All images in this article are from School Magazine

Global Research strives to shine light on the under-reported, less known injustices ignored or buried.

Governments know it too, which is why there is an unprecedented threat to the independent media and the Internet. Fight-back was never more needed.

Please, during this season of giving, consider donating something, however large or small, to Global Research’s continuation.

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The Hidden Military Use of 5G Technology

By Manlio Dinucci, December 16, 2019

At the London Summit, the 29 member countries of NATO agreed to “guarantee the security of our communications, including 5G”. Why is this fifth generation of mobile data transmission so important for NATO?

While the earlier technologies were perfected to create ever more advanced smartphones, 5G is designed not only to improve their performance, but mainly to link digital systems which need enormous quantities of data in order to work automatically. The most important 5G applications will not be intended for civil use, but for the military domain.

New WikiLeaks Bombshell: 20 Inspectors Dissent from Syria Chemical Attack Narrative. Leaked Documents and Emails of OPCW

By Zero Hedge, December 16, 2019

Late Saturday WikiLeaks released more documents which contradict the US narrative on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, specifically related to the April 7, 2018 Douma incident, which resulted in a major US and allied tomahawk missile and air strike campaign on dozens of targets in Damascus.

US/NATO Staged “False Flag”: More Evidence of OPCW Doctored Douma Chemical Weapons Attack, Syria Documents

By Stephen Lendman, December 16, 2019

On Saturday, WikiLeaks released more information on how the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) doctored its report on an alleged April 7, 2018 CW attack in Douma, Syria that never happened.

WikiLeaks revelations are more evidence of a pro-Western organization that plays fast and loose with alleged facts, inventing them to serve a higher power in Washington.

UN Renews Agency Helping Palestinian Refugees in Defiance of US

By Telesur, December 16, 2019

With 169 votes in favor, nine abstentions, and two votes against, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Friday extended the mandate for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) until June 30, 2023.

Members of Argentine Delegation in Bolivia Tell the Horror They Recorded (Coup Repression)

By Orinoco Tribune, December 16, 2019

On Thursday night, the members of the delegation arrived at the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, to connect with another flight to La Paz. Upon arrival, the Bolivian police detained them, separated them from the rest of the travelers and identified, by name and surname, 12 of the members of the entourage and took them to another room to interrogate them.

Europe Was the Main Player in Destroying Syria and Creating the Refugee Crisis

By Steven Sahiounie, December 15, 2019

Monica Maggioni is an Italian journalist and is CEO of Rai.com, which broadcasts ‘Rai News 24 TV’, among others.  She interviewed Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, on November 26, and the interview was to be broadcast on December 2; however, it was mysteriously postponed.

Behind the scenes, at Rai.com there was conflict over the interview, with Fabrizio Salini declaring the interview was not commissioned, therefore it would not be broadcast, while Antonio Di Bella, director of news, declared it was not suitable to be broadcast, and Italian Senator Alberto Airola requested Maggioni to explain her role in the interview and answer charges of creating a diplomatic incident.

The Bogus Legend of Paul Volcker. The Break with Gold

By F. William Engdahl, December 15, 2019

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve during the 1980’s, has died at age 92. Major media are writing words of praise for the banker who “killed inflation” in the wake of the 1970’s oil crises and food price crisis. Volcker’s true legacy is far less positive. No one person did more to bring about the dysfunctional debt-bloated financial system we have today than the former Chase Manhattan Bank economist who spent most of his life in the employ of America’s most powerful oligarch family.

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I have just finished reading William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer’s account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press, convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.

Then the Reich, with no justification whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon of evil. It was.

How did Nazi Germany differ from the United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press, informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn’t challenge any of this.

Having prepped the American public as the Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)

Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward’s war with warplanes butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis different?

The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these, men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian, or German, are Nazis.)

Photos of Iraqis at the American torture operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to have been edited.)

Abu Ghraib. A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A female general ran the operation.

Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.

An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having fun yet?

President Trump has just pardoned several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the “confidence to fight.” This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was “Crush Their Skulls and Eat Their Faces.”)

Perhaps the best known example of implied approval was Nixon’s pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which he received three years of house arrest.

The Germans wanted empire, lebensraum, and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have lots of oil, while it has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.

As Shirer points out, the German public was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today. Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is the difference?

The parallels with the Reich are not complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler, Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically aggressive as any in the Fuehrer’s entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are connected to God on broadband. O’Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.

My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div…excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say, brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.

Wikipedia: “Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers …Victims included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as were children as young as 12.”)

For this Calley got three years house arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said, and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.

The German Nazis worshiped Blood and Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all others. Americans can’t easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance, slightly different foundation.

Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America, intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).

Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway, Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.

The Third Reich was, and America is, the chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.

Is this something to be proud of?

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All images in this article are from The Unz Review

At the London Summit, the 29 member countries of NATO agreed to “guarantee the security of our communications, including 5G”. Why is this fifth generation of mobile data transmission so important for NATO?

While the earlier technologies were perfected to create ever more advanced smartphones, 5G is designed not only to improve their performance, but mainly to link digital systems which need enormous quantities of data in order to work automatically. The most important 5G applications will not be intended for civil use, but for the military domain.

The possibilities offered by this new technology are explained by the Defense Applications of 5G Network Technology, published by the Defense Science Board, a federal committee which provides scientific advice for the Pentagon –

“The emergence of 5G technology, now commercially available, offers the Department of Defense the opportunity to take advantage, at minimal cost, of the benefits of this system for its own operational requirements”.

In other words, the 5G commercial network, built and activated by private companies, will be used by the US armed forces at a much lower expenditure than that necessary if the network were to be set up with an exclusively military goal. Military experts foresee that the 5G system will play an essential role for the use of hypersonic weapons – missiles, including those bearing nuclear warheads, which travel at a speed superior to Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound). In order to guide them on variable trajectories, changing direction in a fraction of a second to avoid interceptor missiles, it is necessary to gather, elaborate and transmit enormous quantities of data in a very short time. The same thing is necessary to activate defences in case of an attack with this type of weapon – since there is not enough time to take such decisions, the only possibility is to rely on 5G automatic systems.

This new technology will also play a key role in the battle network. With the capability of simultaneously linking millions of transceivers within a defined area, it will enable military personnel – departments and individuals – to transmit to one another, almost in real time, maps, photos and other information about the operation under way.

5G will also be extremely important for the secret services and special forces. It will enable control and espionnage systems which are far more efficient than those we use today. It will improve the lethality of killer drones and war robots by giving them the capacity of identifying, following and targeting people on the basis of facial recognition and other characteristics. The 5G network, as a weapon of high-tech capacity, will also become the target for cyber-attacks and war actions carried out with new generation weapons.

As well as the United States, this technology is under development by China and other countries. The international disagreement concerning 5G is therefore not only commercial. The military implications of 5G are almost entirely ignored, because the critics of this technology, including many scientists, are concentrating their attention on its toxic affects for health and the environement, due to exposure to very low-frequency electromagnetic fields. This engagement is of course of the greatest importance, but must be linked to research on the military use of this  technology, financed indirectly by ordinary users. One of its greatest attractions, which favours the dissemination of 5G smartphones, will be the possibility of participating, by subscription, in war games of impressive realism in direct contact with players from all over the world. In this way, without realising it, the players will be financing the preparation for war – but this time it will be a real war.

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This article appeared on Dec. 10 in the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto. Translation:Pete Kimberley

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Late Saturday WikiLeaks released more documents which contradict the US narrative on Assad’s use of chemical weapons, specifically related to the April 7, 2018 Douma incident, which resulted in a major US and allied tomahawk missile and air strike campaign on dozens of targets in Damascus.

The leaked documents, including internal emails of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) — which investigated the Douma site — reveal mass dissent within the UN-authorized chemical weapons watchdog organization’s ranks over conclusions previously reached by the international body which pointed to Syrian government culpability. It’s part of a growing avalanche of dissent memos and documents casting the West’s push for war in Syria in doubt (which had resulted in two major US and allied attacks on Syria).

This newly released batch, WikiLeaks reports, includes a memo stating 20 inspectors feel that the officially released version of the OPCW’s report on Douma “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria]”. This comes amid widespread allegations US officials brought immense pressure to bear on the organization.

RELEASE: Third batch of documents showing doctoring of facts in released version of OPCW chemical weapons report on Syria. Including a memo stating 20 inspectors feel released version “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria]”https://t.co/ndK4sRikNk

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 15, 2019

The Daily Mail’s Peter Hitchens, who saw the leaked documents just prior to WikiLeaks going public with them had this to say:

Sources stress that the scientists involved are ‘non-political, utterly uninterested in any strategic implications of what they reveal’.

They just ‘feel that the OPCW has a duty to be true to its own science, and not to be influenced by political considerations as they fear it has been’.

An internal memo seen by The Mail on Sunday suggests that as many 20 OPCW staff have expressed private doubts about the suppression of information or the manipulation of evidence.

This suppression of information included key evidence which undermined claims Syrian military helicopters dropped a gas cylinder from the air, which had long been the linchpin in Washington’s accusation that “Assad gassed his own people” at Douma.

Like waking up from a long nightmare that almost led to WWIII:
"The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a senior official at the @OPCW demanded the ‘removal of all traces’ of a document which undermined claims that gas cylinders had been dropped from the air.."https://t.co/MvMwX1xrEr

— Ian Wilkie (@Wilkmaster) December 14, 2019

The leaks also suggest the OPCW possessed scientifically credible evidence showing the victims of the alleged attack had symptoms not consistent with chemical gas exposure (prior OPCW statements pointed to chlorine use), casting further doubt on that aspect of the investigation.

OPCW memo raising concerns: pic.twitter.com/UHFJbm0iDQ

— Koen (@KoenSwinkels) December 15, 2019

But perhaps the most important leak in the new trove of emails centers on a raging debate among scientists over whether to include in their report the phrase “chlorine containing compounds were detected” and how to qualify it — given it was found only in such trace amounts as to be consistent with common household levels of chlorine-related items.

That final report claimed there were ‘reasonable grounds’ that chlorine gas was used in Douma, but an OPCW whistleblower says only tiny quantities of chlorine were detected in forms possible to find in any household. — Daily Mail

OPCW inspector tries to argue to FFM team leader Sami Barrek that the low levels of chlorinated organic chemicals need to be reported to avoid misrepresentation and confusion. Barrek says he'll unilaterally overrule the inspectors and omit the information.https://t.co/nPZtMbakAF pic.twitter.com/norATrlc7l

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 15, 2019

This crucial document (among others), which expresses concern that the media would wrongly assume a “chlorine attack” based on common household trace levels is found in the following memo:

And here’s another example:

Another stunning OPCW admission heretofore unreleased to the public:

Hitchens continues commenting on the trove of leaked documents as follows:

Alleged casualties shown in videos of the attack were foaming at the mouth in a way that might be expected of victims of sarin, but not by victims of chlorine. Yet all the reports agree that no traces of sarin were found at Douma.

These doubts were confirmed by expert toxicologists consulted by the OPCW investigation team on a visit to Germany in June 2018.

They concluded ‘there was no correlation between symptoms and chlorine exposure’.

In a key passage it adds ‘the team considered two possible explanations for the incongruity.

‘A) The victims were exposed to another highly toxic chemical agent that gave rise to the symptoms observed and has so far gone undetected.

‘B) The fatalities resulted from a non-chemical-related incident.’ In other words, either the victims died from an unknown, undetected gas for which no evidence exists or there never was a chemical attack.

These severe doubts which were expressed internally among scientists, analysts, and technicians were never made public by the OPCW, hence the new leaks, apparently facilitated by frustrated staff who want to make the case to the world about the significant doubts.

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14 December, 2019

Today WikiLeaks releases more documents showing internal disagreement within the OPCW about how facts were misrepresented in a redacted version of a report on an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018.

Amongst these is a memorandum written in protest by one of the scientists sent on a fact finding mission (FFM) to investigate the attack. It is dated 14 March 2019 and is addressed to Fernando Arias, Director General of the organisation. This was exactly two weeks after the organisation published its final report on the Douma investigation.

WikiLeaks is also releasing the original preliminary report for the first time along with the redacted version (that was released by the OPCW) for comparison. Additionally, we are publishing a detailed comparison of the original interim report with the redacted interim report and the final report along with relevant comments from a member of the original fact finding mission. These documents should help clarify the series of changes that the report went through, which skewed the facts and introduced bias according to statements made by the members of the FFM.

The aforementioned memo states that around 20 inspectors have expressed concerns over the final FFM report, which they feel “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma”. Only one member of the fact finding team that went to Douma, a paramedic, is said to have contributed to the final version of the report. Apart from that one person, an entirely new team was gathered to assemble the final report, referred to as the “FFM core team”…

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Read the full WikiLeaks press release

See the new batch of leaked documents

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The European Commission is “irresponsible” in not addressing the health risks associated with the future rollout of next-generation mobile network, Bulgarian MEP Ivo Hristov has said.

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His comments echo concerns recently highlighted by EU telecoms ministers, related to “non-technical” elements of 5G cybersecurity, as the debate continues around Europe’s ability to keep pace with the rest of the world on 5G deployment.

However, discussion over the potential health risks of establishing denser network infrastructures consisting of considerably higher capacities has recently surfaced as a growing concern among Parliamentarians in Brussels.

Speaking at an event at the European Parliament on Tuesday (10 December), S&D’s Hristov hit out at the Commission for failing to conduct a health impact assessment report on 5G, despite warnings being highlighted by many in the scientific community.

“Currently the EU has no assessment of the human health risk of the introduction of 5G technology,” he said. “The European Commission took the position that such an assessment was not necessary, despite warnings of the scientific community. I find this irresponsible.”

He added that he has asked the Parliament’s Science and Technology Options Assessment (STOA) Panel to prepare a study of the potential effects on health and the environment from the introduction of 5G networks.

Hristov’s point was supported on Tuesday by a contingency of Green MEPs who came out in force to challenge various telecom industry representatives, keen on making sure that Europe doesn’t lag further behind in its deployment of 5G network infrastructure.

5G technologies were described as an “inevitability” by Prof. Vladimir Poulkov, head of the intelligent communications infrastructure R&D Laboratory at Sofia Tech Park.

Poulkov said there were “forces at play” that would mean 5G deployment in the EU would become a necessity in order to keep up with the demand for higher capacity data transfers and speeds, something, he said, may help with wider goals in reducing Europe’s energy consumption.

This point in particular was heavily refuted by Paul Lannoye, former MEP and chairman of the Environmental Group Grappe, who claimed that there are no benefits whatsoever to the application of 5G in the energy sector.

In terms of the environment, Lannoye referred to several scientific studies that claim radio waves emitted from 5G transmitters could negatively impact insect populations, causing disruption to natural ecosystems.

Along this axis, German Green MEP Klaus Buchner was keen to highlight the importance that the EU follow its own commitments in exercising the ‘precautionary principle’ with regards to the future deployment of 5G across the bloc, which involves potentially taking preventive action in the face of uncertainty or possible risk.

Enshrined in Article 191 of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s precautionary principle states that “environmental damage should as a priority be rectified at source.”

In 2016, the European Commission put forward plans to provide an EU-wide commercial launch of commercial 5G by 2020, with additional targets to cover urban areas by 2025.

However, these plans have faced a series of potential setbacks, thus far principally concerning the security of 5G network infrastructure, and allowing third-party access to the bloc’s next-generation telecommunications networks.

Last week, EU ministers adopted conclusions concerning the importance and security of 5G technology, stressing that an approach to 5G cybersecurity should be comprehensive and risk-based, while also taking into account ‘non-technical factors’.

Europe currently finds itself under pressure to take a stance on the involvement of China’s Huawei in the EU’s 5G networks. The US has already signed agreements with several EU member states including Poland and Romania, stressing that they will work together on a 5G approach.

Meanwhile, Bulgaria Prime Minister Boyko Borissov has recently met with US President Donald Trump in Washington, and the two released a joint statement saying that the “United States and Bulgaria declare the shared desire to strengthen cooperation” in the field of 5G.

More broadly, in order to reach Bulgaria’s 2023 targets for connectivity and e-government, the country’s Minister of Transport, Information Technology and Communications, Rosen Zhelyazkov, recently said that people need to be won around on some of the issues currently holding up the wider rollout of 5G infrastructures, such as security and health.

For Bulgarian MEP Hristov, however, these issues should be at the top of the list.

“It is the irreversibility of the process that should cause us to pay attention to fifth-generation mobile networks,” he said on Tuesday. “Along with the numerous advantages, I believe that we should pay serious attention to the possible risks related to cybersecurity and potential effects on the environment and human health.”

For the Commission at least, it appears that security rather than health is the most important issue.

An October report from the Commission about the coordinated risk assessment of 5G networks noted that “threats posed by states or state-backed actors are perceived to be of highest relevance,” and member states have now been tasked with working on a set of risk alleviating measures to mitigate the cybersecurity risks outlined in the report.

EU nations will work alongside the Commission and ENISA, the European Agency for Cybersecurity, in the drawing up of the plans, which are set to be ready by the end of December this year.

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Turkey’s recent maritime and military deals with the UN-recognized authorities in Libya are shrewd geostrategic moves intended to ensure that Ankara remains the dominant player in the Eastern Mediterranean in the face of a concerted effort by its rivals to undermine its influence with a game-changing pipeline that could set the stage for an anti-Turkish alliance if it’s successfully completed.

On Saturday, WikiLeaks released more information on how the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) doctored its report on an alleged April 7, 2018 CW attack in Douma, Syria that never happened.

WikiLeaks revelations are more evidence of a pro-Western organization that plays fast and loose with alleged facts, inventing them to serve a higher power in Washington.

The so-called incident was fake, a US/NATO-staged false flag, Syria wrongfully blamed for a victimless nonevent.

No one in Douma died, was hospitalized, or became ill from exposure to chemical or other toxins.

Local eyewitnesses and medical personal debunked the falsified narrative. Russian technical experts found no evidence of chemical or other toxins in soil samples and other analysis of the site.

According to new WikiLeaks information, documents it obtained show “internal disagreement within the OPCW about how facts were misrepresented in a redacted version of” its initial Douma report.

Twenty OPCW inspectors objected to the final Fact Finding Mission (FFM) report that “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to Douma.”

Only one FFM member contributed to the redacted report, prepared by a new “FFM core team” that “only operated in country X” — “presumably not Syria,” said WikiLeaks.

A memorandum by one FFM member, dated March 14, 2019, was written two weeks after publication of the OPCW’s final report.

He “was tasked with analysis and assessment” of what was found at the site of the alleged CW attack because of his scientific expertise.

Yet “(i)n subsequent weeks, I found that I was being excluded from the work, for reasons not made clear,” he said.

Despite repeatedly asking to be informed on information to be included in the final report, his request was denied. “The response was utmost secrecy,” he explained.

When the final report was released on March 1, conclusions of the initial one were doctored.

“At the conclusion of the in-country activities in the Syrian Arab Republic, the consensus within the FFM team was that there were indications of serious inconsistencies in findings,” he wrote in his memorandum, adding:

“After the exclusion of all team members other than a small cadre of members who had deployed (and deployed again in October 2018) to Country X, the conclusion seems to have turned completely in the opposite direction.”

“The FFM team members find this confusing, and are concerned to know how this occurred.”

His memorandum concluded saying

“I must stress that I hold no opinion, interest or strong views on the technical part of the matter, nor any interest in the political outcomes.”

“My interest is in sound technical rigor; the science, engineering and facts will speak for themselves.”

All wars are based on Big Lies and deception, time and again false flags used to justify what’s unjustifiable, blaming victims for hostile acts against them.

The alleged April 2018 Douma CW incident was false flag deception, Syria wrongfully blamed.

Throughout nearly nine years of war, Damascus was falsely blamed for numerous CW incidents it had nothing to do with — committed by US-supported terrorists every time.

Government forces are combatting them to liberate the country and its people from their scourge.

Unasked by US-led Western officials and supportive establishment media is why would these troops harm civilians they’re going all out liberate?

When cities, towns and villages are freed from occupation by ISIS and other jihadists, civilians joyously welcome government forces.

On occasions when Assad visited liberated areas, residents welcomed him warmly, thanking him for freeing them from US-supported terrorists.

In November 2018, he greeted residents of liberated Suwayda province, bordering Daraa in the country’s southwest where Obama regime aggression began in March 2011.

Al-Watan video showed him cheered and lifted onto the shoulders of a Syrian man, people thanking him for their freedom from US-supported terrorists – the scene repeating what happened in earlier liberated areas.

In March 2018, he drove a Honda through liberated East Ghouta, a videographer filming him, no aides or security forces in the vehicle, saying he went there “to see the situation” for himself, adding:

“We’ll see the armed forces that are fighting and the areas that have been liberated” – telling them “(y)ou are the sons of our country.”

“We will protect all the people of Ghouta. In these areas, every meter has a drop of blood from a Syrian fighter. A hero among heroes.”

There’s nothing “civil” about Obama regime orchestrated aggression in Syria, begun in March 2011, escalated by Trump, a forever dirty war like other US post-9/11 conflicts.

Last week, US war secretary Mark Esper said Pentagon forces will stay in Syria for years — on the phony pretext of combatting ISIS the US created and supports, along with likeminded jihadists.

In his important book titled “The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance,” Tim Anderson explained what the official narrative suppressed, saying:

“Washington and its allies try another ‘regime change’ in Syria. A fake ‘revolution’ uses Islamic gangs, during an ‘Arab Spring.’ The Western media constantly lie about this covert, dirty war.”

“A political reform movement is driven off the streets by Islamic violence. (The misnamed pro-Western) ‘Free Syrian Army’ slaughters minorities and government workers.”

“Saudi and Qatari backed Islamists carry out a series of massacres, falsely blaming them on the Syrian Army and President Assad.”

“Most of Syria’s opposition backs the state and army against terrorism. Washington calls a puppet exile group ‘the Syrian opposition.’ ”

“Washington (using NATO, the Saudis, Qatar, Turkey and Israel) backs all the armed Islamist groups, pretending some are ‘moderate rebels.’ ”

“A resistance coalition rallies to Syria. Iran, Hezbollah, Iraq and Russia join the Syrian Army in destroying western backed terrorist groups.”

Anderson explained Washington’s dirty war in great detail, his documented facts polar opposite official narrative propaganda.

Over the weekend, Michel Chossudovsky republished an article on Syria he wrote in May 2011 on “the inception of the jihadist terrorist insurgency.”

Things began in mid-March 2011 “in Daraa, a small border town with Jordan…instigated by Washington…(events) documented from” when US-orchestrated aggression began.

No protest movement uprising occurred. “(I)t was an armed insurgency integrated by US-Israeli and allied supported ‘jihadist’ death squads,” he explained.

They were “trained and equipped by NATO and Turkey’s High Command.” What happened and continues was “a staged event involving covert support to Islamic terrorists by Mossad and/or Western intelligence.”

The official narratives of all wars are exercises in mass deception. Establishment media reports on years of war in Syria are some of the worst in modern memory.

Endless US-orchestrated aggression continues for regime change.

It’s all about wanting overwhelmingly popular Bashar al-Assad replaced with pro-Western puppet rule, Iran isolated ahead continued economic war aiming to topple its legitimate government.

US wars are all about making the world safe for America’s military, industrial, security, media complex, Wall Street and other corporate interests.

They have nothing to do with combatting the scourge of ISIS or other jihadists — elements the US uses as proxy foot soldiers to advance its imperial interests.

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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.

How resilient the human spirit is! Within hours of Boris Johnson’s shock election triumph on Thursday night, the crushed ‘metropolitan elite’ had begun to console itself with an optimistic forecast. Boris, the idea circulated, is really a closet centrist, and the scale of his victory means that he can now turn his back on the radical right who put him into power, and govern as the One Nation Conservative he claims to be. Did he not, after all, re-enter Downing Street on Friday morning with the words “healing” and “unite” on his lips?

Alas, we have been there before – as Donald Trump approached the White House. Remember all those confident predictions that Trump was more interested in the trappings of power than its exercise? “More Berlusconi than Mussolini”, we were assured. He would be “managed” by the “adults in the room”. That worked out well, didn’t it?

Johnson, of course, is a very different figure from Trump. But they have certain crucial characteristics in common, most obviously: mendacity, ruthlessness, and, it is becoming increasingly apparent, vindictiveness. Both men can be genial when things are going their way – but neither responds well to opposition, and each has a well-developed instinct for scapegoating when things go wrong.

And things will certainly go wrong for Boris. The great “Get Brexit Done” lie may have helped him back to Downing Street, but it left untouched the insoluble conundrum at the heart of Brexit – the fact that we can maintain the close economic relationship with the European Union on which Britain’s prosperity depends; or we can go for the sort of low-cost, low-regulation “Singapore-on-Thames” that Johnson’s financiers (oligarchs, hedge funds, expatriate media barons) demand; but we cannot have both. Looking ahead to negotiations on the “comprehensive free trade agreement” with the EU that Boris has sworn to deliver by next year’s end, it is hard to see any outcome other than breakdown or capitulation. It will be tough to spin either as a success.

So, too, with the terms of the US trade deal that American healthcare and agricultural interests will then force on us. And so, too, with the looming disintegration of our once-United Kingdom, as Scotland’s comprehensive rejection of both Brexit and Johnson precipitates Britain’s own Catalonia-style crisis.

One could go on. As the respected Institute for Fiscal Studies made clear in its analysis of the Conservative manifesto, apart from much-bruited pledges of more money for health and education what we have been promised is an economic future with austerity “baked in”. In other words, the voters who put their faith in Johnson as the unlikely champion of the working class will find that the bulk of public services continue to deteriorate, and the holes in the welfare safety net will become ever harder to overlook. They may not react well.

So the going will get tough – and the tough will get nasty. Johnson’s pieties on the steps of Downing Street were at once followed by a trip to Sedgefield, the newly Tory constituency once held by Tony Blair, for a little dance on the grave of the Labour Party. And of course the way ahead was clearly signposted by Johnson’s autumn purge of 21 Conservative moderates who had voted to block a no-deal Brexit. Opposition will not be tolerated, or forgotten – and Johnson has a hit-list.

Some items were clearly foreshadowed in Johnson’s manifesto: in a section with the Orwellian title “Protect our democracy”, we are given a brief preview of what “the necessary task of restoring public trust in government and politics” will entail. Obviously, the First Past The Post voting system, which worked so well to disenfranchise Britain’s “Remainers”, will be preserved. Equally obviously, the media barons will get their payoff in the final abandonment of efforts to impose some minimum standards on the press. Such long-standing rightwing aspirations as voter ID and a dilution of the Human Rights Act are also promised.

What is new, however, is the proposal for a Constitution, Democracy and Rights Commission. There are no details, of course, on how it will be selected or operate, but among other things, it will target the judiciary, and even the Royal Prerogative. So the Supreme Court, which had the temerity to judge illegal Johnson’s autumn attempt to shut down parliament, will have its wings clipped; and though the monarchy may have connived in that same illegal move, it will find itself punished for supporting the suggestion that Johnson lied to the Queen.

So much for what was advertised in advance. Post-election announcements have already identified two further pillars of Britain’s traditional political dispensation that are to pay the price for insufficient enthusiasm for Johnson. The Svengali-like Dominic Cummings is to drive a “radical reform” of the civil service, “including a review of processes for hiring and firing officials”; so Britain’s widely admired public administration, with its 150-year tradition of political impartiality and “speaking truth unto power”, is to get its comeuppance. And so too the BBC, where a review of whether to decriminalise failure to pay the licence fee is in effect a threat to cut that institution’s financial legs off.

In sum, the political culture of Britain as we have known it for generations is earmarked for demolition. Anyone or anything that has tried, however ineffectually, to scrutinise Johnson’s plans or hold him to account will reap the coming authoritarian whirlwind. Trump will no doubt represent himself as this revolution’s enabler, and he will be right. But Johnson may well outdo even his mentor – Britain, after all, lacks the protection of a written constitution. A resilient human spirit that hopes for the best and adapts to circumstances looks sadly inadequate for what is now in prospect.

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Five years ago tomorrow, in near disbelief, we watched on television as the Cuban Five were released from US prisons and flown home after a 16 year struggle.  Leading up there had been some signs that their freedom was being negotiated by the Obama Administration but out of a healthy distrust of the US government we didn’t accept it as reality until we actually saw them arrive in Havana, out of handcuffs, and into the arms of their families.

As intelligence officers the Cuban 5 had been assigned to come to the US to monitor the activities of right wing anti Cuba terrorist groups operating with impunity in Southern Florida in the early 1990’s. They came without weapons with their only intention being to defend the Cuban people against terrorist attacks of various natures that since the Revolution in 1959 was responsible for the deaths of close to 3,500 Cubans.

On September 12, 1998, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Rene González, Ramón Labañino and Gerardo Hernández were arrested and thrown into solitary confinement in a Miami Federal Prison and for the next 18 months they had no contact of any kind. The intention of the US was to wear them down, break them and get them to renounce the revolution.

The guards would remind them constantly that they were forgotten and no one even knew they were there. But as Gerardo Hernandez, who was serving two life sentences plus 15 years, explained to Resumen Latinoamericano, that it was there in June of 2001 when the struggle, which would turn into a worldwide movement, began.

“When Fidel acknowledged us and said publicly ‘Volverán!’ (they will return), it was from that moment on when we knew they could not defeat us, that the struggle would be long and hard, as the Commander warned, but that we would return to the homeland. Only someone with his far sighted vision could assure such a thing to the world, at a time when all the hatred and desires for revenge of the empire were turned against us. That’s how big Fidel was. That’s why the return of the Five was his victory, and we were able to celebrate it with him.”

While Fidel provided the spark that started this extraordinary struggle it was the Cuban people, collectively viewing the Five as their own sons, who mobilized as a nation; never wavering. And it was their families, particularly the women, with remarkable strength and dignified courage, who travelled the world to explain that this was a case of simple justice and the right of a nation to defend itself and to co-exist in peace. The Cuban Five were unique political prisoners who enjoyed the support of an entire country inspiring thousands of solidarity activists to join a movement demanding their release. In the beginning it was a few committees and individuals but coinciding with the advent of social media and the internet it grew into a connected international campaign made up of hundreds of solidarity groups in the majority of countries and also actors, artists, lawyers, workers, students, academics, writers and faith based organizations. During those years there were few US embassies or consulates  that were spared regular protests calling for the freedom of the Cuban Five and for three consecutive years people from different states and countries gathered for a week of activities in Washington DC to demand their freedom including protesting in front of the White House.

Gerardo explained how this support was never lost on the Five.

“We never forget that if today we have the good fortune of so much happiness, we owe it to the efforts of compañeros and compañeras from Cuba and the world that for many years fought for our liberation. This was also their victory, and there is not a day that goes by in which we do not remember it.”

Five years have gone by, and these men who gave the best years of their lives, not for money or fame but for love of their country, something the US government will never understand, are in the process of integrating into society. As Gerardo told us,

“We always dreamt of someday returning to our homeland and contributing together with all our people to the construction of that society to which we all aspire to. Since we have been back we have been contributing our modest efforts, side by side with all Cubans, in the different tasks assigned to us. Personally I feel very happy as Vice Dean of the Higher Institute of International RelationsRaul Roa Garciain Havana, where our diplomats are trained”.

The freedom of the Cuban 5 was an integral key in the steps made by Obama towards normalization of relations with Cuba that he carried out through negotiations with the Cuban government.

Since Trump came to office he has reversed most of Obama’s gestures towards the Island by the odd illusory and transitory privilege, the Executive Order. But Trump didn’t stop there. He has used one Executive Order after another to tighten the blockade that has gone now for over 60 years. It seems like every morning the Cuban people wake to find yet another bolt of punishment, based on unfounded pretext, coming their way from the oval office.

While the Cubans constantly express their willingness to dialogue with the US in an atmosphere of mutual respect they will not bend to the threats and arrogant behavior.

And one thing is for sure, no Executive Order can be issued that would reverse the return of the Five Cuban Heroes to their homeland.

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Featured image is from the authors

According the study below, soybean production in South America now covers over 57 million ha, more than on any other continent. The consequences for amphibians have been devastating, as is clear from the study highlights and abstract.

The authors conclude in their study: “Our work has triggered alarm about the detrimental impact of pesticides (insecticides and herbicides) on native amphibians inhabiting the shallow ponds of the richest agricultural lands of South America. We documented effects caused by pesticides on tadpoles which can compromise the viability of populations living in agricultural landscapes. The intensive agricultural model based on the GMO technological package currently applied in South America is expected to expand (and intensify) over the coming years. Therefore, it is also expected that native amphibian populations will continue being affected. We suggest that conservation priorities should be focused on developing a better policy legislation for pesticide use, including not only the protection of human settlements but also native terrestrial and wetland habitats.”

Pesticides in the real world: The consequences of GMO-based intensive agriculture on native amphibians
M. Gabriela Agostini, Ignacio Roesler, Carlos Bonetto, Alicia E.Ronco, David Bilenca
Biological Conservation
Volume 241, January 2020, 108355
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320719309905
(open access)

Highlights

• Collaborative work with farmers allowed us to test pesticide impacts on amphibians.
• Tadpole survival dramatically decreased after pesticides reached the ponds.
• 93% of surviving tadpoles exposed to insecticides, exhibited impairment of mobility.
• Glyphosate exposures caused sublethal effects, reducing tadpole mobility in 79% [of tadpoles].
• We detected pesticide impacts on amphibians in real exposure scenarios.

Abstract

Pesticide use has been suggested as one of the major drivers of the global amphibian decline. Laboratory and mesocosm studies have addressed several questions to understand the mechanism by which pesticides cause detrimental effects on amphibians. However, the extrapolation of those results to natural populations may not be adequate to predict environmental impacts or to understand the role of pesticides in the amphibian decline. By using in situ enclosures, we evaluated the effects (survival and mobility) of common pesticides applied by farmers (cypermethrin, chlorpyrifos, endosulfan, glyphosate, and 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid) on tadpoles. We assessed these effects in four common amphibian species from South America across 91 ponds located in the Pampas of central Argentina. We found that survival decreased in 13 out of 20 pesticides applications concomitantly with detection of pesticides in water ponds. 48 h after applications, mixtures containing endosulfan or chlorpyrifos reduced tadpole survival to <1% while the cypermethrin mixtures reduced survival to 10%. In addition, we found impairment of mobility in all combination of pesticides, including glyphosate. The ecological context involved in our study represents the common exposure scenarios related to GMO-based agriculture practices in South America, with relevance at regional levels. We emphasize that multifaceted approaches developed to understand the role of pesticides in the amphibian decline need a conservation perspective. This will be achieved by work focusing on the integrated use of state-of-the-art techniques and resources for documenting pesticide effects over wild amphibians’ populations, allowing conservation scientists to generate better management recommendations.

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Featured image is from GMWatch

With 169 votes in favor, nine abstentions, and two votes against, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) Friday extended the mandate for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) until June 30, 2023.

“The General Assembly… expresses special commendation to the Agency for the essential role that it has played for almost seven decades since its establishment in providing vital services for the well-being, human development and protection of the Palestine refugees and the amelioration of their plight and for the stability of the region,” the UN resolution states.

Favorable reactions to the UNGA decision were immediate, especially among those who know from their own experience the consequences of the Israeli military occupation.

“We welcome the decision to renew the international mandate to UNRWA and we see it as another failure to hostile U.S. policies to the Palestinian rights,” the Hamas spokesperson Sami Abu Zuhri said.

When most people picture #Bethlehem this time of year, they don't imagine these scenes – refugee camps, 8m high walls, & Israeli military checkpoints. Yet this is what Oisín McConville saw when he visited the 'little town' of Bethlehem in #Palestine. https://t.co/84yKTwcDuA pic.twitter.com/7ER0hFg8vM

— Trócaire (@trocaire) December 13, 2019

Established in 1949, the UN humanitarian agency provides housing, education, health, relief services, and microfinance assistance to more than 5 million Palestinian refugees who are currently living in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.

Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi also praised the vote and said it was the UN’s responsibility to combat the U.S. and Israeli attacks on Palestinian refugees.

“All attempts at trying to limit the mandate of the UNRWA, defund it or attack it have failed, and we hope that the international community will continue to come to the rescue,” she said.

The U.S. and Israel, which have been leading a smear campaign accusing UNRWA of mismanagement and anti-Israeli incitement, voted against the resolution entitled “Assistance to Palestine Refugees.”

The nine abstentions came from Cameroon, Canada, Guatemala, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Vanuatu.

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Most US establishment media call for impeaching Trump — for the wrong reasons, ignoring real impeachable offenses.

Like most of his predecessors and vast majority of congressional members, past and present, along with a legion of current and former high-level and other apparatchiks, Trump is guilty of crimes of war and against humanity, of serving monied interests exclusively, and flagrantly betraying the public trust.

He breached virtually every positive pledge made. In his inaugural address, he falsely said the following:

Up to now, there’s been “little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.”

“That all changes – starting right here, and right now, because this moment is your moment. It belongs to you.”

“January 20th 2017, will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.”

“The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer…The oath of office I take today is an oath of allegiance to all Americans.”

“I will fight for you (ordinary Americans) with every breath in my body – and I will never, ever let you down.”

All of the above was and remains BS rubbish. In nearly three years in office, he handed trillions of dollars to Wall Street, the military, industrial, security complex, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and other corporate predators — at the expense of ordinary Americans he betrayed.

His colossal tax cut heist was and remains all about a massive wealth transfer to corporate America and high-net worth households — wanting Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other social programs slashed to pay for it.

Social justice is on the chopping block for slow-motion elimination, a longtime GOP goal supported by hardline/neoliberal undemocratic Dems.

Throughout his campaign and post-election, the NYT waged editorial war on Trump. Its latest edition screamed: “Impeach.”

Its editors never forgave him for triumphing over media darling Hillary. On election day 2017, it said she “has an 85% chance to win,” adding:

Her “chance of losing is about the same as the probability that an NFL kicker misses a 37-yard field goal.”

A supposed sure thing didn’t turn out that way. The Times never forgot or forgave. It’s waged near-daily war to demonize Trump, largely for the wrong reasons, the most important right ones ignored because the broadsheet supports them.

The Times: Trump “abused the power of his office by strong-arming Ukraine, a vulnerable ally, holding up hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid until it agreed to help him influence the 2020 election…”

Ukrainian President Zelensky debunked the above Big Lie.

The Times: Trump “show(ed) ‘unprecedented, categorical and indiscriminate defiance’ in the face of multiple subpoenas (sic).”

“He made it impossible for Congress to carry out fully its constitutionally mandated oversight role, and, in doing so, he violated the separation of powers, a safeguard of the American republic (sic).”

The impeachment process by undemocratic Dems is a colossal scam, one of the most disturbing political spectacles in US history, modern-day McCarthyism no one should support.

No credible evidence presented backs it, no legitimate constitutional grounds, no quid pro quo as falsely claimed, no bribery or other criminal act, no obstruction of justice.

No US president was ever impeached for non-criminal actions or phony abuse of power claims.

Time and again, US presidents push foreign leaders to serve US interests. By that standard, virtually all Trump’s predecessors should have been impeached and removed from office.

What’s going on to continue in the new year is all about an attempt by Dems to gain a political advantage in 2020 elections — a scam that may backfire and hand Trump a second term, perhaps giving the GOP a chance to control both houses.

On all things Trump and most other major domestic and geopolitical issues, the Times abandoned journalism for advocacy, operating as a mouthpiece for powerful interests.

The same goes for other establishment media, featuring managed news misinformation and disinformation exclusively over journalism the way it’s supposed to be.

The neocon/CIA connected Washington Post supports the impeachment scam.

Its latest edition discussed what it called “a growing roster of national and regional newspapers that” support impeachment, naming the following ones:

The NYT, LA Times, USA Today, Tampa Bay Times, Orlando Sentinel, Boston Globe, New York Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle — along with its own editorial board.

Last week, Wall Street Journal editors went the other way, headlining: “The Incredible Shrinking Impeachment,” saying:

“(G)rounds (by Dems) for ousting Trump are weak—and damaging to constitutional norms,” adding:

“After all the talk of obstruction of justice, collusion with Russia, bribery, extortion, profiting from the presidency, and more, House (Dems settled for) abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Honey, we shrunk the impeachment” — to illegitimacy.

New polls show most Americans oppose impeachment. Give credit less to their understanding of the facts, more to failure by Dems to present a credible case.

Months of anti-Trump huffing and puffing by Dems and supportive media laid an egg.

According to the Arizona Republic’s editorial director Phil Boaz, Dems “will impeach.”

“The Republican Senate will acquit. And then we’ll have an election. The rest is all posturing.”

US voters will have the last word next November.

A Final Comment

Trump is a political anomaly, the first billionaire businessman, reality TV personality elected US president, defying the odds and pre-election polls.

In office, he escalated wars he inherited, handed trillions of dollars to monied interests, supporting dirty business as usual throughout his tenure.

Why would beneficiaries of his agenda want him removed? They don’t.

Dems and supportive media want him ousted for winning an election he was supposed to lose.

Pre-election, power brokers were likely divided. Hillary may have lost because a majority of their numbers decided she was damaged goods, too contentious to lead.

Polls showed most voters disliked both candidates. Most likely a deal was struck with Trump to continue dirty business as usual. He didn’t disappoint.

Dems and supportive media want revenge because their candidate lost — Hillary snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

That’s what the impeachment scam is all about, its outcome to unfold in the new year.

No matter what happens ahead, peace, equity, justice, and the rule of law have no chance against US dark forces opposing these values.

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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 Windover Way Photography

“They opened Pandora’s box and hatred came out,” they write. Government Minister Arturo Murillo publicly threatened them: “Be careful, we are watching you.”

“This government has unleashed a huge racial hatred. They opened pandora’s box and a thousand demons came out who are expressing themselves in situations of profound violence,” says jurist Luis Arias, one of the members of the Argentine delegation that traveled to Bolivia. On Thursday, a group of forty social and human rights leaders arrived in the neighboring country with the aim of preparing a record of the deaths and abuses suffered by the population since the coup d’etat against Evo Morales was consummated.

Disappearances, murders, arbitrary detentions, rapes, torture and hospitals that refuse to take care of those wounded by the repression were some of the events recorded during the first day of work. They were held and kicked at the airport by a pro-coup mob. Then the Minister of Government of Añez, Arturo Murillo, came out to threaten them publicly:

“Be careful, we are watching you.”

From the moment they stepped on Bolivian soil, the delegation -composed of Juan Grabois (CTEP), the lawyer Roberto Carlés, Pablo Pimentel and Mauricio Rojas (APDH), Victoria Freire (Observatory of Gender and Public Policies of the City), Daniel Catalano (ATE), Marianela Navarro (FOL), Sergio Smietniansky (CADEP), among many others – had to face the attacks, threats and misgivings of the de facto government of Jeanine Añez.

On Thursday night, the members of the delegation arrived at the airport of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, to connect with another flight to La Paz. Upon arrival, the Bolivian police detained them, separated them from the rest of the travelers and identified, by name and surname, 12 of the members of the entourage and took them to another room to interrogate them.

“They were waiting for us,” Carles said and added: “They selected the people whose names had appeared in the press and subjected them to an interrogation.” “They started asking us about our plans in Bolivia, where we were going to go and who we were going to visit. They treated us with great hostility and after a few hours they let us go,” said Arias, who was in this group.

On the way to the boarding area, they were accosted by a gang of ten people in civilian clothes.

“We did not know if they were shock forces or people linked to Luis Fernando Camacho. They began to insult us, to threaten us, to ask us what we were doing in Bolivia. They called us ‘communist gauchos’ and ‘homosexuals.’ They made reference to the cartoneros, it was clear they wanted to let us know that they knew who we were and provoke us to react. The place was deserted: they had taken over the area,” said Carlés.

At one point, they started pushing and hitting them, the ATE Secretary General, Daniel Catalano, was kicked.

“From the apparel they wore, we assume they were civilian police forces. Meanwhile, the uniformed police were there witnessing all the harassment and doing nothing,” Catalano said.

After this reception from the de facto government there was another more worrisome event:

“Walk carefully, we are watching you,” the government minister told them through statements to the press, calling them “those foreigners who are coming to try to burn the country.” “The first false step that they take to try to make terrorism or sedition is going to be met with the police,” he threatened. After these statements, some of the members of the delegation visited the Argentine embassy in Bolivia to ask for protection; they were granted some cars to travel in. “We are completely guarded all the time,” Carlés said.

Despite these inconveniences, the delegation continued with the agenda and spent the entire day in El Alto collecting testimonies from relatives of victims who suffered in their own flesh the violence exercised by the security forces. “The stories are frightening,” Arias told Pagina/12 . There are reports of disappearances, arbitrary detentions – among which are the case of three young people with Downs syndrome -, torture of children, murders as a result of repressive actions by police forces, injuries by lead bullets, fires, among other things.

Much of the survey was carried out in the San Francisco de Asís Church, where vigils for the deaths caused by the repression in Senkata had been held. “The situation is very terrible, families report not being treated in hospitals. Many of the wounded are in homes because when they go to hospitals they are charged with terrorism and sedition,” said Marianela Navarro, delegate of the Organizations in Struggle Front. According to the commission, it is not only the security forces who are attacking the population, but there are numerous institutions that are also reproducing the racist hatred that goes through the de facto government violence. “Public hospitals do not want to treat the wounded and the public defenders do not want to defend the victims. There is a deep racial hatred that is directed especially against the most vulnerable sectors and women, ” said Arias.

The commission also identified that there is a deep cruelty against “women with polleras” (traditional indigenous skirt). There have been numerous cases of rapes and sexual assaults against indigenous women and girls, attacked while alive and after their death. At the same time, there have been complaints that claim to have seen mutilated and dismembered bodies.

“People are very much in need of being heard, that the world know the truth of what is happening, because here there is a huge silencing,” said Arias, referring to the silence of the Bolivian media, which played an important role in the legitimization of the de facto government. “They ask us for help, they ask us for justice. What they have suffered has been virtually ignored by the international community. And they feel alone,” Carlés concluded.

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Featured image: The commission collected testimonies from victims and family members. Image: Pablo Añelli

O governo do Presidente Jair Bolsonaro está embarcando em um projeto de revisão histórica e cultural. Em setembro, a Cinemateca Brasileira ficou “ocupada” por militares e politicos da extrema-direita que criticaram o “marxismo cultural” da instituição e prometeram uma futura mostra cinematográfica dedicada a reabilitar a imagem da antiga ditadura militar do país. Tambem em setembro, a Ancine, agência nacional para o desenvolvimento cinematográfico, viu seus fondos  subitamente cortados por quase a metade. O antigo Ministro da Cultura Marcelo Calero expressou que todos os paises devem investir nas artes e no desenvolvimento científico, e que estes últimos ações “são medidas que têm um elemento ideológico muito forte”.

A Associação Brasileira de Documentaristas e Curtas Metragens (ABD) emitiu um comunicado no qual declara que, diante da ocupação da Cinemateca e dos cortes da Ancine, a comunidade cinematográfica do país está vivendo “uma violação material e simbolica por ativistas da extrema-direita”.

Esta semana, o governo anunciou a criação de uma nova série de vídeo sob a égide da TV Escola, intitulada “Brasil: A Última Cruzada”, “vai revelar a história escondida do Brasil”. A produtora Brasil Paralelo promete combater ” idéias esquerdistas” com a série, cujos primeiros episódios podem ser vistos gratuitamente no Youtube, e no futuro estarão disponíveis de base pagado.

O primeiro vídeo abre com o que os produtores sugerem ser a falsa narrativa do Brasil, com imagens do Lula, longas filas e crime. Em seguida, umas tomadas aéreas de monumentos, igrejas e arranha-céus contrastam com pilhas de livros e cabeças falantes, nos quais destaque o teórico da conspiração Olavo de Carvalho, que contesta que a terra é redonda e afirma que Pepsi é adoçada por fetos abortados.

Esta semana, Olavo humilhou o ex-presidente e outro humanitário brasileiro de origem humilde ao comentar sobre o autor de “Pedagogia do Oprimido”: “Que é que o Paulo Freire fez pelo Brasil? Porra nenhuma. Não alfabetizou nem o Lula”.

Uma das missões da Cinemateca é a preservação e a distribuição continuada das obras de um dos períodos mais marcantes da história do cinema, o Cinema Novo, movimento que começou em meados dos anos 50. Influenciado pelo neorealismo italiano, “Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol” (Glauber Rocha, 1964) retrata de forma vívido a história desesperada e violenta do sertão, aonde místicos e cangaceiros lutam contra fazendeiros impiedosos para sobreviver à grande seca da região.

(Imagen do filme “Deus e o diabo na terro do sol”)

Rocha foi forçado ao exílio pela ditadura militar durante dez anos, só regressando quando foi transferido de um hospital português com uma infecção pulmonar, morrendo dias depois aos 42 anos.

“Como era gostoso meu Francês” (1971), de Nelson Pereira dos Santos, que foi filmado quase inteiramente na língua tupí, satirizou o canibalismo literal do povo tupinamba e o canibalismo imperialista cometido pelos europeus nas Américas. Os Tupinambás podem ter comido o francês, mas mais tarde foram dizimados pelo colonialismo.

Em “Bye, Bye Brasil” (1979, Carlos Diegues), uma caravana de atores luta para encontrar um público em uma cidade aparentemente deserta, finalmente acontecendo com uma multidão reunida em torno de um aparelho de televisão.

Enquanto o espetáculo itinerante continua a se mover em busca de melhores perspectivas, eles testemunham a morte e a destruição do deserto pelas mãos dos industriais. Depois de encontrar um grupo de indígenas expulsos de suas terras ancestrais, as mulheres do circo são forçadas à prostituição para ganhar dinheiro. Finalmente, os povos indígenas ficam encantados por sua primeira viagem de avião quando são recrutados como trabalhadores manuais, e os líderes do circo compram uma caravana coberta de luzes de néon com o seu novo dinheiro, declarando que vão trazer a modernidade para o que resta da selva. 

“Pixote (1981, Héctor Babenco) e “Cidade de Deus” (2002, Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund) são explorações brutais das vidas de crianças de rua forçadas a se adaptar à violência endêmica das enormes favelas que se agarram às colinas acima ou residem nas periferias de São Paulo, do Rio e de outras das grandes cidades do Brasil. Ambos os filmes usaram atores não-profissionais, como fez Glauber Rocha nos anos 60, vindos de cidades onde crianças sem-teto sofrem de  “limpezas” pela polícia. O documentário “Cidade de Deus – 10 Anos Depois” revisita os protagonistas do filme e descobre que muitos não conseguiram escapar dos problemas.

“Central do Brasil” (1998, Walter Salles) segue uma odisséia que atravessa a vasta extensão do Brasil por ônibus e caminhão com uma professora aposentada e um menino órfão que morava na estação ferroviária. A professora primeiro vende o menino a um comerciante de órgãos para comprar uma televisão, mas depois decide recuperá-lo e levá-lo do Rio de Janeiro até a Bahia em busca de sua família.

Fernanda Montenegro, agora com 90 anos, foi fotografiada em setembro, para a capa da revista brasileira “Quatro Cinco Um”, coberta de corda pesada em cima de uma pilha de livros, referenciando óbviamente à queima de bruxas e de livros. Ela foi chamada de “sórdida” e “mentirosa” pelo falido diretor conservador cristão Roberto Alvim, que em novembro foi nomeado Ministro da Cultura por Bolsonaro.

(Telenovela e favela no filme de Bruno Barreto  “Ultima Parada 174”, 2008)

Enquanto as telenovelas comerciais do Brasil (novelas) se concentram quase exclusivamente na riqueza e nas riquezas, a maioria com atores de ascendência européia, os filmes apoiados pela Ancine e pela Cinemateca exploram a pluralidade e a realidade do Brasil empregando inovações exclusivamente brasileiras.

O Brasil teve uma longa história de censura durante a ditadura militar de 1964 a 1985, e os EUA passou por um periodo de censura das artes alguns anos antes. O artista multimídia brasileiro Vik Muniz, que vive e trabalha entre Nova York e o Rio, adverte que Bolsonaro, ou Trump nos EUA, não é o único culpado. “Você tem que entender que nós elegemos essas pessoas”, aponta ele. “Se você goste ou não, [eles] representam a maioria do povo”.

Mas essa maioria de pessoas não é homogênea, nem estão morando nos bairros glorificados em “A Última Cruzada”. O novo Índice de Desenvolvimento Humano (IDH) das Nações Unidas, divulgado este segunda-feira, 9 de dezembro, coloca o Brasil em segundo lugar entre os países mais desiguais do mundo, com mais de 28% da riqueza do país concentrada nas mãos de apenas 1% da população. Ao se concentrar em descrever apenas os mais ricos do Brasil, Bolsonaro está ignorando a grande maioria do país e a riqueza de suas diversas histórias.

Danica Jorden

Foto : Jeso Carneiro, flickr.com

Os jornais e outros órgãos de comunicação social nos Estados Unidos, na Grã-Bretanha e na Austrália proferiram recentemente a sua paixão pela liberdade de expressão, principalmente no que toca ao seu direito a publicar livremente. Estão preocupados com o “efeito Assange”.

É como se a luta de reveladores de verdades como Julian Assange e Chelsea Manning seja agora um aviso: que os rufias que arrastaram Assange para fora da embaixada equatoriana em Abril possam um dia vir por eles.

O Guardian na semana passada ecoou um estribilho comum. A extradição de Assange, disse o jornal, “não é uma questão de quão conhecedor o Sr. Assange seja, ainda menos quão afável. Não tem a ver com o seu carácter, nem com o seu discernimento. É uma questão de liberdade de imprensa e do direito do público a ser informado.”

O que o Guardian está a tentar fazer é separar Assange dos seus notórios feitos, que tanto deram a ganhar ao Guardian e expuseram a sua vulnerabilidade, juntamente com a sua propensão a dar graxa ao poder rapinante e a achincalhar aqueles que revelam os seus dúplices padrões.

O veneno que tem alimentado a perseguição de Julian Assange não é assim tão óbvio neste editorial como costuma ser; não inclui a ficção acerca de Assange esfregar fezes nas paredes da embaixada ou a ser horrível para o seu gato.

Em vez disso, as fuinhas referências ao “carácter”, ao “discernimento” e à “afabilidade” perpetuam uma calúnia épica que conta já quase com uma década.

Nils Melzer, o relator das Nações Unidas para a Tortura, utilizou uma descrição mais apta. “Tem decorrido”, escreveu, “uma campanha incansável e sem tréguas acompanhada de assédio público”. Explica este assédio como “um fluxo interminável de afirmações humilhantes, degradantes e ameaçadoras na imprensa”. Este “ridículo colectivo” constitui um acto de tortura e pode levar à morte de Assange.

Tendo testemunhado muito do que Melzer descreve, posso atestar a veracidade das suas palavras. Se Julian Assange sucumbir à crueldade que lhe descarregam em cima, semana após semana, mês após mês, ano após ano, como alertam os médicos, jornais como o Guardian serão também responsáveis.

Há alguns dias, o homem do Sydney Morning Herald em Londres, Nick Miller, escreveu uma pretensiosa e preguiçosa peça titulada “Assange não triunfou, limitou-se a esperar até a justiça caducar”. Referia-se ao abandono por parte da Suécia da dita investigação a Assange.

O relato de Miller não é atípico nas suas omissões e distorções, enquanto se mascara de tribuna pelos direitos das mulheres. Não há qualquer trabalho original, nenhum inquérito real: só calúnia.

Não há nada sobre o comportamento documentado de um bando de zelotas suecos terem sequestrado as “alegações” de má conduta sexual contra Assange e terem feito uma zombaria da lei sueca e da vaidosa decência dessa sociedade.

Não menciona que em 2013 a procuradora geral sueca tentou abandonar o caso e enviou uma missiva electrónica à Procuradoria Geral da Coroa em Londres afirmando que já não iria manter o Mandato de Captura Europeu, à qual recebeu a resposta: “Nem se atreva!!!” (O nosso obrigado a Stefania Maurizi do La Repubblica)

Outros emails demonstram como a PGC desencorajou os suecos de irem a Londres inquirir Assange – o que era uma prática comum – bloqueando assim o progresso de um processo que o teria libertado em 2011.

Nunca houve uma intimação. Nunca houve quaisquer acusações. Nunca houve uma tentativa séria de levar as “alegações” a Assange e de o interrogar – comportamento que o Supremo Tribunal de Apelação da Suécia considerou serem negligência, e que o Secretário Geral da Ordem dos Advogados da Suécia desde então condenou.

Ambas as mulheres envolvidas afirmaram não ter havido estupro. As provas cruciais impressas das suas mensagens de texto foram propositadamente recusadas aos advogados de Assange, claramente por minarem as “alegações”.

Uma das mulheres ficou tão chocada por Assange ter sido preso, que acusou a polícia de a ter pressionado e de ter alterado o seu testemunho. A procuradora geral, Eva Finne, descartou a “suspeição de ter cometido qualquer crime”.

O homem do Sydney Morning Herald omite como um político ambicioso e comprometido, Claes Borgstrom, emergiu por detrás da fachada liberal da política sueca e efectivamente açambarcou e ressuscitou o processo.

Borgstrom alistou uma ex-colaboradora política, Marianne Ny, como nova procuradora. Ny recusou garantir que Assange não seria enviado para os Estados Unidos se fosse extraditado para a Suécia, mesmo embora, como relatou o The Independent, “já tenham decorrido negociações informais entre oficiais suecos e dos EUA sobre a possibilidade do fundador do WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, ser entregue à custódia dos americanos, de acordo com as nossas fontes diplomáticas”. Tal era um segredo conhecido em Estocolmo. Que a libertária Suécia seja detentora de um negro e documentado passado a entregar pessoas às mãos da CIA não é novidade nenhuma.

O silêncio foi interrompido em 2016 quando o Grupo de Trabalho Para as Detenções Arbitrárias das Nações Unidas, corpo que decide se os governos estão a cumprir com as suas obrigações para com os direitos humanos, deliberou que Julian Assange fora ilegalmente detido pela Grã-Bretanha e apelou a que o governo britânico o libertasse.

Tanto o governo da Grã-Bretanha como o da Suécia participaram na investigação da ONU, e concordaram em acarretar com a sua decisão, que detinha o peso da lei internacional. O secretário dos Negócios Estrangeiros britânico, Philip Hammond, foi ao Parlamento e fez pouco do painel da ONU.

O processo sueco foi uma fraude desde o momento em que a polícia secreta e ilegalmente contactou um tablóide de Estocolmo e desencadeou a histeria que iria consumir Assange. As revelações dos crimes de guerra da América pelo WikiLeaks envergonhou as aias do poder e dos seus interesses velados, as quais tomam para si o título de jornalistas; e por esta razão, o inatingível Assange jamais seria perdoado.

Estávamos agora em época aberta de caça. Os atormentadores de Assange na comunicação social copiavam e colavam as mentiras e injúrias uns dos outros. “Ele é mesmo um cagalhão enorme”, escreveu Suzanne Moore, cronista do Guardian. O conhecimento adquirido era de que este tinha sido acusado, o que nunca foi verdade. Na minha carreira, reportando em locais com extrema insurreição, sofrimento e criminalidade, nunca testemunhei nada do género.

Na pátria de Assange, Austrália, este “assédio público” atingiu o seu apogeu. Tão ansioso estava o governo australiano de entregar um seu cidadão aos Estados Unidos ao ponto da primeira ministra em 2013, Julia Gillard, querer tirar-lhe o passaporte e acusá-lo de um crime – até que lhe foi dito que Assange não cometera qualquer crime e que não tinha o direito de lhe retirar a cidadania.

Julia Gillard, de acordo com o portal Honest History, detém o record do discurso mais bajulador alguma fez proferido no Congresso dos EUA. A Austrália, afirmou ela entre aplausos, era a “grande amigaça” da América. A grande amigaça uniu-se à América na sua caça por um australiano cujo crime foi o jornalismo. Foi-lhe negado o direito à protecção e à devida assistência.

Quando o advogado de Assange, Gareth Peirce, e eu reunimos com dois funcionários do consulado australiano em Londres, ficamos chocados quando soubemos que tudo o que estes conheciam acerca do caso “foi o que lemos nos jornais”.

Este abandono por parte da Austrália foi a principal razão pela atribuição do asilo político pelo Equador. Como australiano, considero isto particularmente vergonhoso.

Quando questionado acerca de Assange recentemente, o actual primeiro ministro australiano, Scott Morrison, respondeu, “deve deitar-se na cama que fez”. Este tipo de acto de rufia, despojado de qualquer respeito pela verdade, pelos direitos, pelos princípios e pela lei, é a razão pela qual a imprensa que é na sua larga maioria controlada por Murdoch na Austrália está agora preocupada com o seu próprio futuro, tal como se preocupa o Guardian, e tal como se preocupa o The New York Times. A sua preocupação tem um nome: “o precedente de Assange”.

Sabem que o que acontecer a Assange também lhes poderá acontecer. Os direitos elementares e a justiça que lhe forem negadas também lhes podem ser negados a eles. Foram avisados. Fomos todos avisados.

Sempre que visito Julian no inóspito e surreal mundo da prisão de Belmarsh, recordo-me da responsabilidade daqueles como nós que o defendemos. Neste caso estão em risco princípios universais. Ele próprio costuma dizer: “não sou só eu. É muito mais amplo.”

Mas no centro da sua notável luta – e trata-se, acima de tudo, de uma luta – encontra-se um ser humano cujo carácter, e repito cujo carácter, demonstrou a mais avassaladora coragem. Saúdo-o.

Esta é uma versão condensada da apresentação que John Pilger fez em Londres no lançamento da obra In Defense of Julian Assange, uma antologia publicada pela Or Books, de Nova Iorque.

John Pilger

Consulte também:   www.dontextraditeassange.com

Artigo original em inglês:

The Lies About Assange Must Stop Now

Tradução: Flávio Gonçalves

John Pilger é jornalista e cineasta de nacionalidade britânico-australiana e reside em Londres. O portal de Pilger encontra-se em www.johnpilger.com. Em 2017, a Biblioteca Britânica anunciou a criação de um Arquivo John Pilger com toda a sua obra escrita e filmada. O Instituto Britânico do Filme inclui o seu filme de 1979, “Ano Zero: A Morte Silenciosa do Camboja”, entre os 10 documentários mais importantes do século XX. É colaborador frequente do Global Research.

àClima. Quem haveria de dizer. As próprias mega-corporações e mega-bilionários por trás da globalização da economia mundial nas últimas décadas, cuja busca de valor para o accionista e redução de custos infligiu tantos danos ao meio ambiente – tanto no mundo industrializado quanto nas economias subdesenvolvidas da África, Ásia e América Latina – são os principais apoiantes do movimento de base da “descarbonização” com origem na Suécia, Alemanha, EUA e outros lados.

Será um repente de consciência culpada, ou poderia haver uma agenda mais profunda da financiarização do próprio ar que respiramos e muito mais?

O actual movimento em torno das questões climáticas pode ser observado sob muitos ângulos. Mas um que não pode ser ignorado é o que regista o facto de, por trás das suas expressões mais mediáticas, estarem gigantes da finança capitalista global e entidades cujo currículo é não a defesa do planeta mas uma acção danosa global sobre o ambiente e as sociedades humanas.

Mesmo que se acredite nos perigos do CO2 e nos riscos do aquecimento global criador de uma catástrofe global com o aumento da temperatura média de 1,5 a 2 graus Celsius nos próximos 12 anos, vale a pena observar quem está a promover a actual inundação de propaganda e de activismo climático.

Finança verde

Vários anos antes de Al Gore e outros decidirem utilizar uma jovem escolar sueca para ser cabeça de cartaz quanto à urgência da acção climática, ou de surgir nos EUA o apelo de Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a uma completa reorganização da economia em torno de um Green New Deal, os gigantes da finança começaram a elaborar esquemas a fim de direccionar centenas de milhares de milhões de fundos futuros para investimentos em empresas “climáticas” em muitos casos sem valor.

Em 2013, após anos de cuidadosa preparação, uma empresa imobiliária sueca, a Vasakronan, emitiu o primeiro “Título Verde” (“Green Bond”) corporativo. Foram seguidas por outras, incluindo Apple, SNCF e o grande banco francês Credit Agricole. Em Novembro de 2013 a muito esburacada Tesla Energy de Elon Musk emitiu o primeiro título lastreado na energia solar. Hoje, de acordo com a chamada Climate Bonds Initiative, mais de US$500 mil milhões de tais Títulos Verdes estão pendentes. Os criadores da ideia dos títulos declaram que o seu objectivo é conquistar uma grande fatia dos US$45 milhões de milhões (trillion) em activos sob gestão global que assumiram o compromisso nominal de investir em projectos “amistosos com o clima.

O gentil príncipe Charles, futuro monarca do Reino Unido, juntamente com a finança do Banco da Inglaterra e da City de Londres, promoveram “instrumentos financeiros verdes”, liderados pelos Green Bonds, a fim de redireccionar planos de pensão e fundos mutualistas para projectos verdes. Um interveniente chave na ligação das instituições financeiras mundiais com a Agenda Verde é o governador em vias de saída do Banco da Inglaterra, Mark Carney. Em Dezembro de 2015, o Financial Stability Board (FSB) do Banco de Pagamentos Internacionais, presidido na altura por Carney, criou a Força-Tarefa sobre Divulgação Financeira Relacionada com o Clima (Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure, TCFD ), para aconselhar “investidores, credores e seguros sobre riscos relacionados com o clima”. Isso certamente era um foco bizarro para os banqueiros centrais do mundo.

Em 2016, a TCFD, juntamente com a City of London Corporation e o governo do Reino Unido, iniciaram a Iniciativa de Financiamento Verde, com o objectivo de canalizar milhões de milhões de dólares para investimentos “verdes”. Os banqueiros centrais do FSB nomearam 31 pessoas para constituir o TCFD. Presidido pelo bilionário Michael Bloomberg, do sector financeiro, inclui pessoas-chave do JP MorganChase; do BlackRock – um dos maiores gestores de activos do mundo, com quase US$7 milhões de milhões; o Banco Barclays; HSBC, o banco Londres-Hong Kong repetidamente multado por lavagem de fundos da droga e outras origens obscuras; a Swiss Re, a segunda maior resseguradora do mundo; o Banco ICBC da China; a Tata Steel, a petroleira ENI, a Dow Chemical; o gigante mineiro BHP Billington e David Blood da Generation Investment LLC de Al Gore. De facto, parece que são as raposas que estão a escrever as regras para o novo Galinheiro Verde.

Carney, do Banco da Inglaterra, também foi um actor-chave nos esforços para transformar a City de Londres no centro financeiro da Finança Verde global. O Chanceler do Tesouro do Reino Unido que está de saída, Philip Hammond, divulgou em Julho de 2019 um Livro Branco, “Estratégia Financeira Verde: Transformando a Finança para um Futuro Mais Verde”. O documento afirma: “Uma das iniciativas mais influentes a emergir é o Conselho de Estabilidade Financeira, Força-Tarefa do Sector Privado sobre Divulgações Financeiras Relacionadas com o Clima (TCFD), apoiada por Mark Carney e presidida por Michael Bloomberg. Isto foi endossado por instituições que representam US$118 milhões de milhões de activos em todo o mundo. “Parece haver aqui um plano. O plano é a financiarização de toda a economia mundial usando o medo de um cenário de fim do mundo para alcançar objectivos arbitrários, tais como “zero emissões líquidas de gases de efeito de estufa”.

Goldman Sachs actor principal

O omnipresente banco da Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, que desovou, entre outros, o presidente cessante do BCE, Mario Draghi, e o presidente do Banco da Inglaterra, Carney, acaba de revelar o primeiro índice global das acções ambientais mais cotadas, realizado em conjunto com o CDP de Londres, anteriormente o Projecto de Divulgação de Carbono. O CDP, significativamente, é financiado por investidores como HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, American International Group e State Street Corp.

O novo índice, chamado CDP Environment EW e CDP Eurozone EW, visa atrair fundos de investimento, sistemas de pensões estatais como o CalPERS (Sistema de Aposentadoria de Funcionários Públicos da Califórnia) e CalSTRS (Sistema de Aposentadoria de Professores do Estado da Califórnia) com um total combinado de mais de US$600 mil milhões em activos, para investir nos seus alvos cuidadosamente escolhidos. As empresas mais bem cotadas no índice incluem a Alphabet, proprietária do Google, Microsoft, ING Group, Diageo, Philips, Danone e, convenientemente, Goldman Sachs .

Entram Greta, AOC & companhia

Neste ponto, os acontecimentos assumem uma feição cínica quando somos confrontados com muito populares e muito promovidos activistas climáticos, como Greta Thunberg da Suécia, ou Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29 anos, de Nova York, e o Green New Deal. Por muito sinceros que tais activistas possam ser, existe uma bem oleada máquina financeira por detrás da sua promoção em busca do ganho.

Greta Thunberg faz parte de uma rede bem conectada, ligada à organização de Al Gore, que está a ser cínica e profissionalmente comercializada e usada por agências como a ONU, a Comissão da UE e os interesses financeiros por detrás da actual agenda climática. Como o investigador e activista climático canadiano Cory Morningstar documenta numa excelente série de posts, o que está em jogo é uma rede bem urdida que está ligada ao investidor climático e enormemente rico aproveitador do clima nos EUA, Al Gore, presidente do grupo Generation Investment.

O parceiro de Gore, David Blood, ex-funcionário do Goldman Sachs, como mencionado anteriormente, é membro do TCFD criado pelo BIS. Greta Thunberg, juntamente com sua amiga climática norte-americana de 17 anos, Jamie Margolin, foram listadas como “conselheira e encarregada especial para a juventude” da ONG sueca Não Temos Tempo (We Don’t Have Time), fundada pelo seu CEO Ingmar Rentzhog. Rentzhog é membro dos Líderes de Organização da Realidade Climática de Al Gore e integra a Força-Tarefa de Política Climática Europeia. Foi treinado em Março de 2017 por Al Gore em Denver e novamente em Junho de 2018 em Berlim. O Projecto de Realidade Climática de Al Gore é um parceiro de We Don’t Have Time.

A congressista Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), que causou um grande alvoroço nos seus primeiros dias no Congresso dos EUA por apresentar um “Green New Deal” para reorganizar completamente a economia dos EUA a um custo de talvez US$100 milhões de milhões, também não está sem orientação especializada. AOC admitiu abertamente que concorreu ao Congresso por insistência de um grupo chamado Justice Democrats. Disse a um entrevistador: “Eu não estaria a concorrer se não fosse o apoio dos Justice Democrats e do Brand New Congress. Na verdade foram essas organizações, tanto a JD como o Brand New Congress, que me pediram em primeiro lugar para concorrer. Foram quem me pediu para concorrer há um ano e meio…” Agora, como congressista, os conselheiros de AOC incluem o co-fundador do Justice Democrats, Zack Exley. Exley era bolseiro da Open Society e obteve fundos de, entre outras, a Fundação Open Society e da Ford Foundation para criar um antecessor do Justice Democrats a fim de recrutar candidatos seleccionados para os cargos.

A verdadeira agenda é económica

As ligações entre os maiores grupos financeiros do mundo, bancos centrais e corporações globais à actual promoção de uma estratégia climática radical para abandonar a economia dos combustíveis fósseis em favor de uma vaga e inexplicada economia verde, parece que tem pouco a ver com a preocupação genuína em fazer no nosso planeta um ambiente limpo e saudável para viver. É antes uma agenda, intimamente ligada à Agenda 2030 da ONU para uma economia “sustentável” e para gerar literalmente milhões de milhões de dólares em nova riqueza para os bancos globais e os gigantes financeiros que constituem os poderes reais existentes.

Em Fevereiro de 2019, na sequência de um discurso de Greta Thunberg na Comissão da UE em Bruxelas, o então presidente da Comissão da UE Jean-Claude Juncker, depois de beijar galantemente a mão de Greta, parecia ter sido impelido a uma acção efectiva. Disse a Greta e à imprensa que a UE deveria gastar centenas de milhares de milhões de euros durante os próximos 10 anos no combate às alterações climáticas. Juncker propôs que entre 2021 e 2027, “um em cada quatro euros gastos no orçamento da UE vá para uma acção para mitigar a alteração climática”. O que o astuto Juncker não disse foi que a decisão não tinha nada a ver com o apelo da jovem activista sueca. Fora tomada em conjunto com o Banco Mundial um ano antes, em 26 de Setembro de 2018, na One Planet Summit, juntamente com o Banco Mundial, as Fundações Bloomberg, o Fórum Económico Mundial e outros. Juncker usou espertamente a atenção mediática dedicada à jovem sueca para promover a sua agenda climática.

Em 17 de Outubro de 2018, dias após o acordo da UE na Cimeira One Planet, a UE de Juncker assinou um Memorando de Entendimento com a Breakthrough Energy-Europe, no qual as empresas membros da Breakthrough Energy-Europe terão acesso preferencial a qualquer financiamento .

Os membros da Breakthrough Energy incluem Richard Branson, da Virgin Air, Bill Gates, Jack Ma do Alibaba, Mark Zuckerberg do Facebook, Príncipe Al-Waleed bin Talal da HRH, Ray Dalio da Bridgewater Associates; Julian Robertson do gigante de hedge funds Tiger Management; David Rubenstein, fundador do Carlyle Group; George Soros, Presidente do Soros Fund Management LLC; Masayoshi Son, fundador do Softbank, Japão.

Não se engane. Quando as mais influentes corporações multinacionais, os maiores investidores institucionais do mundo, incluindo BlackRock e Goldman Sachs, a ONU, o Banco Mundial, o Banco da Inglaterra e outros bancos centrais do BIS se alinham por trás do financiamento da chamada Agenda Verde, chamem-lhe Green New Deal ou outra coisa, é hora de olhar para além da superfície das campanhas activistas do clima, para a agenda real. A imagem que surge é a tentativa de reorganização financeira da economia mundial usando o pretexto do clima – algo em que o Sol e sua energia têm ordens de grandeza mais próximas daquilo que a humanidade jamais conseguiu – a fim de tentar convencer as pessoas comuns a fazerem sacrifícios incalculáveis para “salvar o nosso planeta”.

Remontando a 2010, o chefe do Grupo de Trabalho 3 do Painel Intergovernamental das Nações Unidas sobre Mudanças Climáticas (IPCC), dr. Otmar Edenhofer, disse a um entrevistador: “… é preciso dizer claramente que nós de facto redistribuímos a riqueza mundial através da política climática. É preciso libertarmo-nos da ilusão de que a política climática internacional é política ambiental. Isto não tem quase nada a ver com política ambiental, com problemas tais como desflorestação ou o buraco do ozono “. Desde então, a estratégia de política económica tornou-se muito mais desenvolvida.

F. William Engdahl

Versão Inglesa:

Climate and the Money Trail

Este artigo foi publicado originalmente na New Eastern Outlook, o 25 de Setembro de 2019.

Tradução: Resistir.info

F. William Engdahl é orador e consultor de riscos estratégicos, é licenciado em Ciência Política pela Universidade de Princeton e é um autor best-seller nas temáticas relacionadas com petróleo e geopolítica, escreve em exclusivo para a revista digital “New Eastern Outlook” e é colaborador frequente do Global Research.

The important legacy of the late William Blum will live. This article was first posted on GR in June 2016.

***

It is a scandal in contemporary international law, don’t forget, that while “wanton destruction of towns, cities and villages” is a war crime of long standing, the bombing of cities from airplanes goes not only unpunished but virtually unaccused. Air bombardment is state terrorism, the terrorism of the rich. It has burned up and blasted apart more innocents in the past six decades than have all the antistate terrorists who ever lived.

Something has benumbed our consciousness against this reality. In the United States we would not consider for the presidency a man who had once thrown a bomb into a crowded restaurant, but we are happy to elect a man who once dropped bombs from airplanes that destroyed not only restaurants but the buildings that contained them and the neighborhoods that surrounded them. I went to Iraq after the Gulf war and saw for myself what the bombs did; “wanton destruction” is just the term for it. – C. Douglas Lummis, political scientist

The above was written in 1994, before the wanton destruction generated by the bombing of Yugoslavia, another in a long list of countries the United States has bombarded since the end of World War II, which is presented below.

There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves, their government, and their marvelous “family values”. Washington officials are careful to distinguish between the explosives the US drops from the sky and “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), which only the officially-designated enemies (ODE) are depraved enough to use.

The US government speaks sternly of WMD, defining them as nuclear, chemical and biological in nature, and “indiscriminate” (meaning their use can’t be limited to military objectives), as opposed to the likes of American “precision” cruise missiles.

This is indeed a shaky semantic leg to stand on, given the well-known extremely extensive damage to non-military targets, including numerous residences, schools and hospitals, even from American “smart” bombs, in almost all of the bombings listed below.

Moreover, Washington does not apply the term “weapons of mass destruction” to other weapons the US has regularly used, such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs, which can be, and often are, highly indiscriminate.

WMD are sometimes further defined as those whose effects linger in the environment, causing subsequent harm to people. This would certainly apply to cluster bombs, and depleted uranium weapons, the latter remaining dangerously radioactive after exploding. It would apply less to “conventional” bombs, but even with those there are unexploded bombs lying around, and the danger of damaged buildings later collapsing. But more importantly, it seems highly self-serving and specious, not to mention exceptionally difficult, to try to paint a human face on a Tomahawk Cruise missile whose payload of a thousand pounds of TNT crashes into the center of a densely-populated city, often with depleted uranium in its warhead.

A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn’t have an air force.

The bombing list

• Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War)
• Guatemala 1954
• Indonesia 1958
• Cuba 1959-1961
• Guatemala 1960
• Congo 1964
• Laos 1964-73
• Vietnam 1961-73
• Cambodia 1969-70
• Guatemala 1967-69
• Grenada 1983
• Lebanon 1983, 1984 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets)
• Libya 1986
• El Salvador 1980s
• Nicaragua 1980s
• Iran 1987
• Panama 1989
• Iraq 1991 (Persian Gulf War)
• Kuwait 1991
• Somalia 1993
• Bosnia 1994, 1995
• Sudan 1998
• Afghanistan 1998
• Yugoslavia 1999
• Yemen 2002
• Iraq 1991-2003 (US/UK on regular basis)
• Iraq 2003-2015
• Afghanistan 2001-2015
• Pakistan 2007-2015
• Somalia 2007-8, 2011
• Yemen 2009, 2011
• Libya 2011, 2015
• Syria 2014-2015

Pyongyang 1951

Plus

Iran, April 2003 – hit by US missiles during bombing of Iraq, killing at least one person

Pakistan, 2002-03 – bombed by US planes several times as part of combat against the Taliban and other opponents of the US occupation of Afghanistan

China, 1999 – its heavily bombed embassy in Belgrade is legally Chinese territory, and it appears rather certain that the bombing was no accident (see chapter 25 of Rogue State)

France, 1986 – After the French government refused the use of its air space to US warplanes headed for a bombing raid on Libya, the planes were forced to take another, longer route; when they reached Libya they bombed so close to the French embassy that the building was damaged and all communication links knocked out.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, May 13, 1985 – A bomb dropped by a police helicopter burned down an entire block, some 60 homes destroyed, 11 dead, including several small children. The police, the mayor’s office, and the FBI were all involved in this effort to evict a black organization called MOVE from the house they lived in.

Them other guys are really shocking

“We should expect conflicts in which adversaries, because of cultural affinities different from our own, will resort to forms and levels of violence shocking to our sensibilities.” – Department of Defense, 1999

The Targets

It’s become a commonplace to accuse the United States of choosing as its bombing targets only people of color, those of the Third World, or Muslims. But it must be remembered that one of the most sustained and ferocious American bombing campaigns was carried out against the people of the former Yugoslavia – white, European, Christians. The United States is an equal-opportunity bomber. The only qualifications for a country to become a target are:

1. It poses a sufficient obstacle to the desires of the American Empire;
2. It is virtually defenseless against aerial attack.

The survivors

A study by the American Medical Association: “Psychiatric disorders among survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing”:

Nearly half the bombing survivors studied had an active postdisaster psychiatric disorder, and full criteria for PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] were met by one third of the survivors. PTSD symptoms were nearly universal, especially symptoms of intrusive reexperience and hyperarousal.

Martin Kelly, publisher of a nonviolence website:

We never see the smoke and the fire, we never smell the blood, we never see the terror in the eyes of the children, whose nightmares will now feature screaming missiles from unseen terrorists, known only as Americans.

*

This is a chapter from Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower by William Blum.

Notes

1. The Nation, September 26, 1994, p.304 

2. RFE/RL Newsline, April 9, 2003 (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is a “private” international communications service in Europe and Asia funded by the US government.) 

3. Washington Post, January 1, 2003; Australian Broadcasting Company, January 1, 2003; Agence France Presse, September 19, 2003 

4. Associated Press, “France Confirms It Denied U.S. Jets Air Space, Says Embassy Damaged”, April 15, 1986 

5. U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, “New World Coming” (Phase I Report), September 15, 1999, p.3 

6. Journal of the American Medical Association, August 25, 1999, p.761 

On November 15, 2019 the UN security Council extended the illegal, immoral and racist 27 years of  arms sanctions on Somalia which was in effect since 1992.

Through a recorded vote, the Security Council today renewed the mandate of the Panel of Experts for the sanctions regime on Somalia until 15 December 2020, while also extending exemptions for the arms embargo and enforcement authorizations for the ban on illicit trade.

“Adopting resolution 2498 (2019) through a vote of 12 in favour to none against, with 3 abstentions (China, Equatorial Guinea, Russian Federation), the Council renewed for one year the partial lifting of the arms embargo on Somali security forces and exemptions related to humanitarian aid, as well as the authorization for maritime interdiction of arms imports and charcoal exports that could benefit Al‑Shabaab and other armed groups.

In its restrictions on weapons for the security forces, the Council decided that the delivery to Somali security forces of heavy weapons listed in the resolution’s Annex A requires advance approval by the Committee pursuant to resolution 751 (1992), while light weapons listed in its Annex B require advance notification.  Noting with concern reports that States were not adequately following such notification procedures, the Council reminded States of their obligations in that regard.

The Council also maintained exemptions regarding military weapons, technical advice and training to the United Nations Assistance Mission in Somalia (UNSOM), the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) and the European Union Training Mission Somalia.”[1]

Somalia is located in the Horn of Africa region with a 2019 population estimated at 17.44million (HornCSIS.org) estimates done August 27, 2019. It’s the unity of Italian and British Somaliland’s in 26 June 1960 and July 1^st, 1960 respectively to form the united Somali Republic.

The country is rapidly expanding with almost 3% annual population growth and a high fertility rate of 6.26 children per woman, which is the 4th highest in the world. Somalia’s population ranks 73rd in the world. Somalia is rich in natural and mineral resources from abundant marine resources off the Somali coast – the longest coastal line in Africa; rich in both rare and strategic mineral resources; Fertile soil for  agricultural production  between the two main rivers of Jubba & shabelle as the  main bread- basket in conjunction with  potential production of animal resources.

Somalia occupies approximately 246,200 square miles (637,657 square kilometers) of area in Africa, on the eastern coast which borders the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden. When calculated with the 2019 population of 15.44 million people, the population density is 62.7 people per square mile (24.2 people per square kilometer) which ranks 155^th in the world.

Somalia has been an independent, united, sovereign and geostrategtically very significant  nation from1960-69 with civilian government and a socialist military administration from 1969-91  Until a western influenced, created and  founded hyper-warfare engulfed the country starting the 1980’s with tribally – based rebel movements mostly based in Marxist Ethiopia and UAE.

The civil war of 1991- 2000 completely destroyed the country physically, socially, economically, with high toll in human loss. The ousting of Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 sparks a decades-long civil war between rival clan warlords and the disintegration of central authority and pitted one tribe against another Former British Somaliland declares unilateral independence.

The Transitional National + Federal Governments of Somalia from 2000-2019

By 2000 Somali political figures and militia leaders got together a peace conference in Arta, a small town outside of Djibouti city, with the election of 245 members of the parliament for Transitional National Government (TNG) and its first President Abdiqassem Salaad Hassasn.  The Transitional National Government of Somalia was the first Somali national government fully recognized by the world community from the AU, United Nations and the League of Arab States. By the end of the TNG term in 2003 there were unease among the political leadership and the general public to where the future of Somali peace, peace-building and sustainable reconciliation.

Foreign interventions and meddling of Somalia by American and European interests using  the fake Global war on terror (GWOT)  via neibouring countries of Ethiopia and Kenya has completely destabilized and destroyed the country from 2003- 2009  thus, using UN security council arms sanctions and foreign military personal and PMC funded by both US/EU  in order to control and subjugate Somalia under their geo-strategic, economic and political interests since 1991.

Therefore, it seems  with 27 years if UNSC arms sanctions to be another form of Neocolonialism and Occupation of Somalia by certain international actors i.e. US/EU /UN  are not really interested fundamentally in finding a sustainable security solutions for Somalia  and those employing and using the United Nations security Council arms sanctions to keep Somalia a trusteeship of United Nations  through decades long arms sanctions which prevent  independent, sovereign Somalia Nation- state the right to Protection of its citizens, Control and security of its territorial borders land, sea and Air space.

Conclusion

The election of 2017 of President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, known as Farmajo, Somali nationalist  and centrist who strongly believes in rehabilitating and re-building the Somali National Army, Police, intelligence, coast and Border Guards have lifted the Somali psychic and  herald for dreaming a better tomorrow. He was a popular prime minister during his brief tenure in 2010 and 2011, with a reputation for making sure soldiers were paid their monthly salaries. And with state finances allegedly being diverted to fund an expensively corrupt electoral process they will be hoping to jump to the front of the queue.

Together with his new Prime Minister Hassan Ali Kheyre and cabinet they set their immediate  national goal of re-building Somali security forces and apparatus form 2400 – to 45000 military and police personal across the country in less than 4 years with the assistance of friendly nations of Turkey, Egypt, and more recently Russia.

Strengthening the national army and police force – in the new federal state that Somalia has become – Their National Goal for preserving, protecting and Preventing Somali security and Unity.

Today, Somalia desperately needs an effective, professional, well equipped and national army to stabilize the country and protect its citizens and country from one of the world’s deadliest militant groups, al-Shabaab and foreign exploitation, occupation, balkanization and pillaging of Somali resources and affairs.

The Somali Federal Government and its 17 Million people’s cannot depend on their Sovereignty, territorial integrity and national security. Somalia needs the Lifting of these illegal, immoral, unsustainable arms sanctions immediately since these sanctions are detrimental to Somali security, economic, political, territorial integrity and soverngity.

As Somali UN amabassador Abukar Dahir Osman called for the lifting of outdated sanctions imposed against his country. The measures fail to take into account Somalia’s new positive reality and are not properly aligned with the Federal Government’s efforts to rebuild a unified, equipped Somali National Army (SNA) capable of safeguarding its own people and territory.  Affirming that Al‑Shabaab remains a serious threat to the peace and stability of Somalia and the wider region, he said that the sanctions lack clearly defined benchmarks in that context.

As well, the millions that the international community has spent on monitoring teams and the Panel of Experts for more than a decade “will not properly address the root causes of the problem”, he continued. Somalia’s partners should instead invest in improving the Government’s capacity in border control in order to curb the flow of foreign fighters and illegal weapons. Noting that the military base in Berbera is in clear violation of Somalia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, he stressed that his country will not tolerate the naming of Somali individuals and business enterprises by the Panel of Experts without a reasonable standard of proof.

“Somalia’s representative, encouraging the Council to see the current challenges in the context of his country have continued upward trajectory and steady path towards the rebuilding process, said steps are being taken to improve relations among the states, combat sexual violence, enhance security and tackle humanitarian challenges.  “A State can only be as strong as the people within it,” he said, noting that efforts are also under way to ensure women’s participation in all aspects of life and to establish free, fair and credible elections.

Also speaking today were representatives of the United Kingdom, United States, Kuwait, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, China, Indonesia, Peru, Belgium, Russian Federation, Germany and Poland.”[2]

It has made significant progress in the political, economic and social spheres.  The backing of countries in the region and support from the United Nations, IGAD and the African Union has been essential to achieving peace and stability and countering the political stalemate. Good relations between different levels of government remain essential to enhancing security, he emphasized, calling on parties to speed up discussions on key issues.

These are the 11 UN Security Council imposed arms Embargo since 1992:

1) In January 1992 the UN Security Council imposed an open ended arms embargo on Somalia.

2) February 2007 the embargo was amended to allow arms supplies to Somali Government Forces.

3) In January 1992 Security Council Resolution 733 established an arms embargo on Somalia in reaction to the ongoing conflict and deteriorating humanitarian situation. This Resolution was unanimously adopted.

4) In June 2001 Security Council Resolution 1356 allowed for exemptions to the embargo for supplies of non-lethal military equipment for use in humanitarian operations.

5) In July 2002 Security Council Resolution 1425 clarified the scope of the arms embargo, making clear that it prohibited the financing of arms acquisitions as well as the direct or indirect sale or supply of technical advice or military training.

6) In December 2006 Security Council Resolution 1725 partially lifted the UN arms embargo on Somalia. The resolution authorized the Intergovernmental Authority for Development (IGAD) and African Union member States to deploy a regional intervention force to protect Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government (TFG) and to arm and train the TFG security forces. The resolution maintains the existing embargo but states that its provisions do not apply to transfers of military equipment, technical training and assistance intended for the regional intervention force.

7) In February 2007 Security Council Resolution 1744 limited the embargo to non-state actors. It allowed the supply of weapons and military equipment intended solely for the purpose of helping develop Somali security sector institutions if the sanctions committee on Somalia had been notified in advance and on a case by case basis and if the SC had not made a negative decision within five working days after the notification.

8) In November 2008 Security Council Resolution 1844 amended the arms embargo to target entities that have violated the arms embargo or obstructed the delivery of humanitarian assistance to or in Somalia.

9) In December 2009 the UN imposed an arms embargo on Eritrea, partly in response to reports that Eritrea had violated the arms embargo on Somalia. (For more information see the entry on the UN arms embargo on Eritrea)

10) In March 2013 Security Council Resolution 2093 amended the restrictions and procedures related to arms supplies to the Somali  Government while maintaining the embargo on arms supplies to non-state actors in the country. Security Council Resolution 2111 from July 2013 further clarified the decisions of Resolution 2093. Under the resolutions, for a one-year period, until 6 March 2014, ‘(…) the arms embargo on Somalia shall not apply to deliveries of weapons, military equipment, assistance or training intended solely for the development of the Security Forces of the Federal Government of Somalia, and to provide security for the Somali people (…)’.

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Notes

1)   UN Security Council Resolutions https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/sc14021.doc.htm%2 (Accessed 15 November 2019)

2)  https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/sc13925.doc.htm (Accessed 15, November, 2019)

3)  In 2018, UNentities in Somaliahad a combined total budgetof over US$677million across all UNSF Strategic Priorities, of which over US$458 million was delivered.

4)  IPIhttps://www.ipinst.org/wpcontent/uploads/2019/04/1904_Transitioning-in-Somalia.pdf (Accessed on November 20, 2019).

According to the media, The Afghanistan Papers released in early December 2019 by the Pentagon point to ” US dysfunction” ‘We did not know what we were doing’?

Nonsensical. They knew what they were doing. The object of US wars of aggression consists in appropriating the wealth of victim nations. 

Article of relevance to an understanding of America’s ongoing military and economic agenda in Afghanistan as well as its confrontation with Russia and China.

First published in August 2012 (translated from Russian)

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Curious information surfaced in the media [2012] – based on space reconnaissance, the US Department of Defense put together a map of Afghanistan showing in detail the country’s mineral riches which, as it transpired, may be quite impressive.

The fact that Afghanistan sits on a wealth of (strategic) natural resources was recognized indirectly back in 2010 when the Afghan ministry of mines rolled out a $1b (!) estimate of what the country might have, and The New York Times quoted a source in the US Administration as saying that Afghanistan’s list of reserves included copper, gold, cobalt, and even lithium on which the present-day high tech industry is heavily dependent.

A Pentagon memo actually described Afghanistan’s potential lithium holdings (used to make batteries) as big enough to make it the “Saudi Arabia of lithium”.

Somehow, the news flew below the radars of most watchers worldwide.

It must be taken into account that the areas used for poppy in Afghanistan expanded dramatically since the Western coalition invaded the country with an anti-terrorist mission and brought down the Taliban rule.

At the moment, millions of Afghans are involved in poppy farming and processing or in heroin trafficking. A year after the advent of the Western coalition, Afghanistan entered the world stage as a heroin monopoly, with approximately 90% of the global supply of opium. 

Citing the above claims, in the 2000s Washington dropped Afghanistan from the narcotics blacklist and lifted the relevant  sanctions. The US President said the step was in the US national interest.

Actually, Soviet scientists discovered decades earlier that the soils of Afghanistan contained ample mineral resources. Among those, for example, are precious and semiprecious stones: samples of the Sar-e-Sang District Lazurite, whose quality craftsmen praise as exemplary, were found even in Pharaohs’ tombs and during the Troy excavations. The emerald deposit unsealed back in the 1970s in the Panjshir Province ranks with the world’s largest, with gems comparable in quality to the acclaimed ones mined in Columbia.

Moreover, the Soviets were aware of the existence of Uranium reserves in Afghanistan – in Gen. A. Lyakhovsky’s account presented in his Tragedy and Honor in Afghanistan, the threat that the Uranium would be grabbed by Pakistan and Iran to build nuclear weapons was cited as an argument in favor of the future Soviet invasion at a pivotal December 8, 1979 meeting personally chaired by L.I. Brezhnev.

The Soviet explorations which were carried out in Afghanistan till the late 1980s showed that Afghanistan was extremely rich in various types of ores, with the resources hitherto untapped as the country had never been colonized.

The Aynak copper deposit is the biggest in Eurasia, and the Hadjigek iron ore in the proximity of Kabul is believed to be the top one in South Asia. Pegmatite reserves usable as sources of rubies, Beryl, and seldom-found gems – kunzite and hiddenite – are located east of Kabul. Pegmatite fields can, furthermore, serve to derive Beryllium (estimatedly, the corresponding reserves are the biggest known up to date with a total of over 73,500 tons), Lithium, Tantalum, and Niobium, the substances steady demand for which is pressed by the high tech sector along with the nuclear and aerospace industries.

The Pentagon, therefore, confirmed the earlier Soviet findings about the reserves of precious metals, ores, sulfur, Lazurite, Baryte, Celestine, etc. in Afghanistan, and actually went further, systematically  compiling a map of the deposits.

Monica Maggioni is an Italian journalist and is CEO of Rai.com, which broadcasts ‘Rai News 24 TV’, among others.  She interviewed Syrian President, Bashar al Assad, on November 26, and the interview was to be broadcast on December 2; however, it was mysteriously postponed. 

Behind the scenes, at Rai.com there was conflict over the interview, with Fabrizio Salini declaring the interview was not commissioned, therefore it would not be broadcast, while Antonio Di Bella, director of news, declared it was not suitable to be broadcast, and Italian Senator Alberto Airola requested Maggioni to explain her role in the interview and answer charges of creating a diplomatic incident.

What was so explosive in the interview that the Italian news media wanted to hide from the Italian viewers? Many believe it has to do with questions 8 and 9 and President Assad’s response.

Question 8: At this moment, when Europe looks at Syria, apart from the considerations about the country, there are two major issues: one is refugees, and the other one is the Jihadists or foreign fighters coming back to Europe. How do you see these European worries?

President Assad:  We have to start with a simple question: who created this problem?  Why do you have refugees in Europe?  It’s a simple question: because of terrorism that’s being supported by Europe – and of course the United States and Turkey and others – but Europe was the main player in creating chaos in Syria.  So, what goes around comes around.

Question 9: Why do you say it was the main player?

President Assad:  Because they publicly supported, the EU supported the terrorists in Syria from day one, week one or from the very beginning.  They blamed the Syrian government, and some regimes like the French regime sent armaments, they said – one of their officials – I think their Minister of Foreign Affairs, maybe Fabius said: “we send.”  They sent armaments; they created this chaos.  That’s why a lot of people find it difficult to stay in Syria; millions of people couldn’t live here so they had to get out of Syria.

The US-NATO-EU attack on Syria is unprecedented in history.  General Wesley Clark was told there was a plan to ‘take out Syria’ well before the first protests took place in Deraa. This was an internationally coordinated attack on Syria by the US and Europe. This was a classic ‘regime-change’ project, which was instigated between the US and Israel, but agreed to by the EU and NATO members.  From the early stages of the conflict in Syria, the US and Europe provided political, military and logistic support to the ‘rebels’ in Syria and refused to call them terrorists. On 18 August 2011, President Barack Obama stated, “The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.” This US statement was fully supported by Europe.

In 2013 President Assad stated he was ready for dialogue with the armed terrorists, but only if they surrender their weapons. However, the US-NATO-EU plan to support the terrorists never included a peaceful surrender of weapons, followed by a national dialog, which would end in a peaceful solution to the conflict.  The plan only called for weapons, training, and European officers to be continuously available to the terrorists, for ‘regime-change’.  Europe only wanted to fuel the fires in Syria, and never planned to be the voice of peace and international law.

What was at first billed as ‘rebels’ and ‘freedom fighters’ soon morphed into sectarian extremists and Radical Islamic terrorists who filled the battlefields under many names and uniforms, but who were all essentially the same terrorists.  Their names ranged from the ‘Free Syrian Army’ to ISIS. Radical Islam is a political ideology and is not a religion or a sect. Many experts have called Radical Islam a ‘Death-Cult’, which glorifies the killing of unarmed civilians, as well as armed adversaries, even to the point of eating human flesh while recording it on video.

Presidents Obama and Sarkozy convinced the EU to follow their lead.  However, the Syrian people and armed forces fought back.

Some of the refugees left Syria for ideological reasons, they sided with the terrorists and followed the Muslim Brotherhood. Others left for Europe because their homes and livelihoods were destroyed by the terrorists, but many were just economic migrants, and had not lost a home, were from safe areas, and perhaps had never seen any fighting, and they left to seek an income from the charity offered to them in the EU.

EU-NATO support of terrorism in Syria

Bulgaria: Boïko Borissov, Prime Minister from 2014, supplied the drug ‘Captagon’ to the terrorists in Syria on orders of the CIA.  The drug causes the terrorists to lose inhibitions and while under the influence they are capable of horrific atrocities.

Germany: A ship with intelligence ad satellite capabilities was off the coast of Syria providing the terrorists the locations and movements of the Syrian military, as well as intercepted telephone communications. Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, said: “If the West supplies arms itself, it has more chance of influencing how they are used.”

Great Britain: British intelligence provided terrorists with information on Syrian military movements. In 2012, SAS Commandos were conducting covert operations within Syrian territory, and provided terrorists with military aid, including communications equipment and medical supplies, and provided intelligence support from its Cyprus bases, revealing Syrian military movements which were passed on to the terrorists. In 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron said that Britain would send weapons to the terrorists. In August 2016, the BBC published photographs that showed British Special Forces soldiers guarding the perimeter of the terrorist’s base at al-Tanf, on the Syria-Iraq border, and the terrorists were shown to be equipped with four-wheel drive Al-Thalab vehicles and weapons such as sniper rifles, anti-tank weapons, and heavy machine guns.

France: The ‘Friends of Syria’ group was initiated by then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012. They declared their intent to support the terrorists in Syria, “If the regime fails to accept the terms of the political initiative outlined by the Arab League and end violence against citizens, the Friends of Syria should not constrain individual countries from aiding the Syrian opposition by means of military advisers, training, and provision of arms to defend themselves.” In 2013, French President François Hollande said, that France was ready to begin supplying lethal aid to the terrorists, and by 2014 Hollande confirmed that France had delivered arms to the terrorists, and by 2015 had begun airstrikes in Syria.

Italy: On 28 February 2013, the ‘Friends of Syria’ held their meeting in Rome, and among the 11 members were France, Germany, Italy, UK, and the EU.  In a study published in 2019, the number of terrorists from Italy who were in Syria numbered 135 as of July 2018.

The EU: in 2013 Brussels decided assistance to the terrorists would include weapons training.  Jane’s Defense Weekly reported a US shipment of 994 tons of weapons and ammunition in December 2015 from Eastern Europe to Syrian rebel groups, including 9M17 Fleyta anti-tank missiles, RPG-7s, AK-47S, DShKs, and PKMs. In early March 2013, a Jordanian security source revealed that the U.S., Britain, and France were training terrorists in Jordan to begin building a militia that would take over after Assad’s fall. By 2019, the EU issued a statement about Syria in which they now claim to call for peace and political negotiations to settle the conflict of almost 9 years duration and to have supported humanitarian and economic assistance there.  However, when faced with documented history, this statement is a bald-faced lie.  The EU position from the outset of the conflict was to support the armed terrorists and to prevent even chemotherapy drugs to be imported to Syria, because of the EU sanctions, which today prevents any possible rebuilding effort.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a political commentator.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

The world war of Democracy against its people is now official.

On Oct 20, 2019, Chilean president Sebastian Pinera publicly admitted the singular capitalist threat implicitly and silently embraced by virtually all politicians across our embattled Earth: Pinera formally declared war on his people. Said this corporatist salesman of the draconian and ever-expanding horrors of corporatist austerity- better known as greed:

“We are at war against a powerful enemy, who is willing to use violence without any limits.”

Then, Pinera had his army unload their weaponry on the non-violent protesters; attempting to kill the dreams of freedom by these impoverished Chilean people who had reached the limits of their human tolerance for this oppression. As a natural reaction, a million Chileans hit the streets to raise their middle fingers at Pinera and all he and his puppet masters stand for. Then they did it again. They continue to do so this day.

Pinera’s self-serving lie, however, had already been recently translated into English by another corporate lackey also no longer possessed of proper human conscience: disgraced former UK Prime Minister Theresa May, who, while departing No.10 for Brussels with her ever reddening barbed tail thus tucked between her bowed and knee scabbed legs, declared to the world:

“Populism will be the death of the Conservative party!”

In a democracy?!

Occupy Redux? – A Forgotten Spark in a Worldwide Box of Matches

“The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules… but by people following the rules.”- Banksy

The World is in flames as never before. Humanity has had all it can take. It will take no more.

Now cornered by national oppression orchestrated by an insatiable globalist salivation for untold riches, the human-animal has but one remaining choice. It is now time for strong words and stronger actions. It is time for real populist leadership. It is time– in any national language– for growing worldwide opposition and activism to come together as one. The forces of capitalism fight minute-by-minute in a collective battle against humanity. The world must now rebel with maximum strength, not only as nations but as the global Congress of the Humane.

As seen in so many desperate protests across the globe, this Congress is increasing, but so far without a cohesive effort that transcends boundaries with a common focal point, one that will bring all national protest movements together to fight this corporate enemy of man. After spending a week marching through the streets of London while reflecting with optimism on the increased opposition protests globally, it just may be that Extinction Rebellion- that scourge started mere months ago here in London- will provide effective necessary organization and an epicentre of protest to this overdue worldwide non-violent demand for real systemic governmental change.

Today, the list of truly populist national leaders is a rarity of decimal point proportions. This past month’s’ American backed and capitalist orchestrated horror show coup against newly re-elected Bolivian President Evo Morales well illustrates this in detail each and every day. Those who aspire to true leadership- like Morales- are demonized, marginalized and vilified- or overthrown- by Zio-Corporate interests and a complicit media that exists for the same purpose as Pinera and May and who have no interest whatsoever in populist democracy.

Rather, today’s leaders of each of the purported international democracies- political, spiritual, and societal- are in reality a far-reaching sociopathic conspiracy cloaked within a very antiquated definition of “democracy” long ago dead and gone. These faux leaders are gladly willing to steal the livelihood of the many while defrauding all but themselves of any future prosperity, thus stealing the democratic apple once known as “Hope” and turning it, instead, into nothing more than a dangling carrot.

Yet…they still want more!

Throughout our ever more impoverished world, what these forces of non-stop austerity do not want, will never tolerate, and abhor to the base of their soulless drive for greed- ever – is resistance: A public resistance that becomes a rebellion and then sparks into revolution. This natural humanist cycle –now suffering under similar social conditions as seen today-has been repeated throughout history by humane civilian necessity when the proper conscience of man finally awakens to the vital need for personal or family liberation from…one’s own government!

These “primal forces of nature, Mr Beale”?! Oh, how they detest Extinction Rebellion.

For, it is THEM that we come for!

As I stepped off the train at Paddington Station after a two-hour ride down to London, memories came to mind of arriving in Los Angeles, then New York, then Washington, D.C., in what seemed like aeons ago, but a mere eight years. Like tens of thousands of others back then whose backs had been broken by the last straw of capitalism, I had come to resist. The name of that resistance was called, “Occupy!”

In those heady days, there was an optimism in the air and an understanding, like here this past few weeks at XR, that it was indeed the “system itself” that was-is-the problem, and that we could change it. Would change it. As documented in more than twenty articles from the Occupy camps at that time and recently encapsulated in, “The Day American Activism Died,” a nation rose to fix that endemic problem: to fix the system. Occupy provided a communal epicentre within scores of US towns for common collective protest. We did this so well- all of us– that Occupy was within 30 days of the first Occupy National Assembly and a potential move to a third political party. Better: A return to the proper definition of populist democracy too long ago forgotten.

Then America’s new constitutional scholar president… he crushed it!

That experience in becoming involved with Occupy on both coasts of America, now on this new day, left an indelible and sad memory of what might have been.

So, while marching up the stairs of Charing Cross station in London, a city steeped in populist history that provided sanctuary to Marx and later Lenin and saw the powerful rise of the political epicentres of The Weavers and the Chartists who propagated social revolution in the time of the industrial revolution. Walking over to Trafalgar Square to join my new brethren at the main XR camp, as I tossed down my backpack- the same one as long before- I once again slowly straightened my spine, drew breath and looked about the camp; slowly turning 360 to carefully study this brand new epicentre of protest: it’s colours, it’s tents, its banners, its protesters chatting with impassioned gestures in small groups, the costumes; drummers beating skins, musicians playing and optimism dancing.

Listening with just the right ears to these increasing winds of change, one could hear a special note so rarely heard: that perfect low rumbling pitch…a cadence? A march? Ever-increasing in its frequency, rising high across this XR camp, entwining with every part of it to create a sweet music that only a concert made of the full instruments of human protest can distil into a simple smile. Oh, it had been far, far, too long. So, so many memories roared back in once again before moistened eyes.

But what had we learned?

The world everywhere howls in protest. Worldwide, democracy is now merely oppression rebranded. The old fashioned definition is repeatedly dashed on the rocks of capitalist austerity while the cries of so many nations beg for release from the iron grip of America, IMF, World Bank, EU, and the docket of ever-greedy corporations and their prostitute politicians who provide them with the military support for their crimes. This has been witnessed just this past week in Chile, Guinea, Catalonia, Kashmir, Hong Kong, Honduras, Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, Pakistan, Gaza, Egypt, Lebanon, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and again on the Brexit stained streets here in London; where the same human condition has been squeezed- and squeezed– to rebellion.

These protests are growing. They will not stop.

Worldwide, the problem is now understood by far too many. Silence? Acquiescence? Obedience? No more. World protesters are now righteous in their individual causes and sacrifices. But, they all so far lack the one essential strength- the First Rule of Democracy– necessary to achieve real long-lasting change. So far, they resist alone. To win, all must come together.

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 180 in-depth articles over the past ten years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated and republished. On-scene reporting from important current events has led to his many multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan’s Turkey and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene ((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk

All images in this article are from the author

The crime scene was straight out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie. One hundred and fifty dead birds lay sprawled on the ground, fallen out of trees in a park in The Hague, Netherlands.

Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve during the 1980’s, has died at age 92. Major media are writing words of praise for the banker who “killed inflation” in the wake of the 1970’s oil crises and food price crisis. Volcker’s true legacy is far less positive. No one person did more to bring about the dysfunctional debt-bloated financial system we have today than the former Chase Manhattan Bank economist who spent most of his life in the employ of America’s most powerful oligarch family.

Two major events define the true Volcker legacy. First was in August 1971 when he was a senior official in the US Treasury under Nixon. The second was as Jimmy Carter’s Fed chairman beginning in October 1979. These define the events that led to the deindustrialization of the United States and the economic collapse of most of the once-developing world beginning four decades ago.

The Break with Gold

During the 1960’s the US economy began a serious crisis of under-investment. The world-class industries built up during and just after World War II, from steel to aluminum to Detroit cars were all badly in need of modernization and investment. Europe had rebuilt its industry after the devastation of the war and especially Germany and France were competing with US on the world market with often more advanced state-of-the-art industry. Their economies were earning dollar surpluses for their exports. The problem was that those US dollars were no longer backed by the world’s strongest economy.

By the beginning of the 1960s, as Europe began to grow at rates outpacing that of the United States, it was becoming clear to many that something had to change in the fixed Bretton Woods arrangement. But Washington, under the growing influence of the powerful New York banking community, led by Citibank and David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank, refused to play by the very rules it had imposed on its allies in 1944. New York banks began to invest abroad in new sources of higher profits. This vast outflow of vital investment capital turned the decade of the 1960s into a succession of ever worsening international monetary crises.

New York’s international banks were earning huge profits by walking away from investing in America’s future. Between 1962 and 1965, U.S. corporations in western Europe earned between 12 and 14 per cent return, according to a January 1967 Presidential Report to Congress, double that for US industry investment. By the end of the 1960’s European central banks were holding large dollar surpluses from trade and investment, urged by Washington not to redeem them for gold as allowed under Bretton Woods.

French President Charles de Gaulle, on advice from his economic strategist Jacques Rueff, criticized the Johnson Administration for ignoring the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement by refusing to revalue the dollar price of gold. Rueff had proposed a 100% dollar devaluation to restore fairness and stability to the monetary order. Wall Street and the Washington administration rejected anything of the sort. It would reduce the power of the US international banks.

Bretton Woods was a Gold Exchange Standard which set every currency to the US dollar and only the dollar to gold at the fixed price of $35 it held since the Great Depression in the 1930’s. In 1944 the US was by far the world industrial leader and held the vast majority of central bank gold, so Bretton Woods was reluctantly accepted by other countries. But by the 1960’s exploding US budget deficits, mainly caused by costs of the growing war in Vietnam, in effect exported dollar inflation to US allies. Beginning the mid-1960’s major countries, led by France and later Germany, began to demand the US Federal Reserve redeem their dollar trade surpluses in gold from the New York Fed, custodian for the US Government gold.

In 1959, the external liabilities of the United States still approximated the total value of her official gold reserves. By 1967, the US total of external liabilities had soared to three times that gold reserve at $35 an ounce. European and other central banks began to redeem their dollars and demand gold from the US Government. In 1967 France determined to exchange its dollar and sterling reserves for gold, leaving the voluntary 1961 Group of 10 gold pool arrangement. By 1971 with Nixon as President, the dollar crisis was growing untenable as official gold was down to only 25% of US foreign liabilities. If all dollar holders demanded gold, the US couldn’t redeem. With gold prices on world markets rising by the day, dollar holders were demanding US gold for the paper. Jacques Rueff continued to plead for a $70 gold price, arguing that that would calm speculation and let the US redeem the Eurodollar balances abroad with causing severe US economic damage. It would have made US industrial exports far more competitive and sparked a revival of US industry as well he argued.

Instead, Nixon followed the advice of his Treasury and notably, that of the Under Secretary for International Monetary Affairs, Paul Adolph Volcker. Volcker had come to the Treasury from the post as Vice President at David Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan Bank. David Rockefeller and Volcker were to cross paths continuously in the coming decades.

On August 15, 1971, Nixon announced formal suspension of dollar convertibility into gold, effectively putting the world fully onto a fiat dollar standard with no gold backing. He unilaterally ripped up a US Bretton Woods treaty agreement and the world was forced to swallow the huge negative consequences of floating exchange rates.

Four months later in a compromise known as the Smithsonian Agreement, which Nixon called “the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world,” (sic) the United States formally devalued the dollar a mere 8 per cent against gold, placing gold at $38 instead of the long-standing $35, a meaningless move. Wall Street had beaten Main Street and US industry. It was the actual beginnings of American deindustrialization in favor of what later would be called “globalization.” Years later Volcker would call his role in the suspension of gold convertibility, “the single most important event of his career.”

By 1973 Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, another Rockefeller protégé, orchestrated events that erupted in the October, 1973 Yom Kippur War, a war that was actually manipulated to trigger an OPEC oil embargo that would raise the price of the world’s most valuable commodity by 400% in months. The US dollar, though few understood, had gone from a gold-backed currency to a petrodollar-backed currency. Washington made sure OPEC would sell oil only in US dollars, a pact that held until Saddam Hussein broke it decades later. Paul Volcker’s role in August, 1971 to decouple the dollar free from gold was key to the Petrodollar strategy. Saudi Arabia, Iran and others in OPEC recycled their huge petrodollar gains to London where Chase Manhattan and other New York and London banks relent it to developing countries at low “floating” interest rates.

Fed Chairman ‘Kills’ Inflation

By 1979 the dollar was in a new crisis as the toppling of the Shah in Iran led to a second major oil price spike and a dollar crisis. A troubled Jimmy Carter was convinced by his good friend David Rockefeller to name Paul Volcker as chairman of the Fed to calm markets and stabilize the dollar. Volcker had left Washington in 1974 to become President of the New York Federal Reserve. He was also one of the founding members of David Rockefeller’s highly influential and little-known Trilateral Commission along with Zbigniew Brzezinski and a Georgia peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter. Carter owed his Presidency to David Rockefeller and filled his cabinet with Trilateral members.

When Volcker took control of the Federal Reserve by October, 1979 he unleashed a monetary shock that sent Fed interest rates to 20% in weeks and plunged the US economy into the most severe collapse since the 1930’s. He claimed it was necessary to “squeeze inflation out of the system.” Volcker blamed the inflation on trade unions and small producers who were simply struggling to keep up with soaring prices of energy and food.

When Volcker convinced Nixon to break with gold in 1971, that triggered the first rise of post-1945 inflation as the dollar’s value plummeted making import prices higher. Nixon tried to stop it with wage-price controls in 1971. That restricted business activity, slowed growth.

Before Carter became President in 1977, Nixon had ordered the Fed to get rid of the effects of oil and food in the Consumer Price Index. The result was the fake number known as “core inflation,” minus oil and food. In his interest rate actions after October, 1979 Volcker never mentioned the true inflation came from David Rockefeller’s machinations in the 1970’s with OPEC. Instead he argued the population’s rising living standard was the problem. In defending his controversial monetary shock therapy, Volcker notably told the New York Times’ David McNally, “The American standard of living must decline.”

Decline it certainly did, as the economy was plunged into deep recession from 1980 through 1982, with unemployment above 10% as bankruptcies across construction, farming and industry deepened. By 1982 the soaring dollar interest rates had devastated the entire world economy owing to the primacy of the dollar. It triggered what came to be known as the Third World debt crisis from Mexico, Argentina Brazil to Yugoslavia, Poland and beyond. The Volcker interest rate policy combined with his decoupling of the dollar from gold set the stage for what has been the greatest inflation of all, the world inflation from 1971 through today. Between 1971 and the early 1990’s, shortly after Volcker left the Fed, the volume of dollars in world circulation has expanded by more than 2,500% as gold no longer limited creation of dollars.

Paul Volcker should be remembered, but for what he really did, not the mythology invented by his backers on Wall Street. His entire career, like that of his long-time associate Kissinger, was tied to the Rockefellers. Volcker left the Fed in 1987 and was named to the Trust Committee of the Rockefeller Group. He was long-time member of Rockefeller-founded Bilderberg and Trilateral Commission groups, as well as chairing the Wall Street investment firm, Wolfensohn & Co. of James D. Wolfensohn , who later became president of the World Bank. If we trace the actual actions of Paul Volcker from 1971 on we better understand the origins of the crisis the world economy is in today.

*

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

É impressionante a facilidade com que o império ocidental está a conseguir destruir os países “rebeldes” que estão no seu caminho, sem que haja resistência.

Trabalho em todos os cantos do planeta, onde os “conflitos” kafkianos forem desencadeados por Washington, Londres ou Paris.

O que vejo e descrevo, não são apenas aqueles horrores que estão a acontecer à minha volta; horrores que estão a arruinar vidas humanas, a destruir aldeias, cidades e países inteiros. O que tento perceber é que, nas telas da televisão e nas páginas dos jornais e da Internet, os crimes monstruosos contra a Humanidade são descritos até certo ponto, mas as informações são distorcidas e manipuladas de tal forma que os leitores e os espectadores de todas as partes do mundo, acabam por não saber quase nada sobre o seu próprio sofrimento e/ou o sofrimento dos outros.

Por exemplo, em 2015 e em 2019, tentei reunir-me e argumentar com os manifestantes de Hong Kong. Foi uma experiência verdadeiramente reveladora! Eles não sabiam nada, absolutamente nada sobre os crimes que o Ocidente cometeu em lugares como o Afeganistão, Síria ou Líbia. Quando tentei explicar-lhes quantas democracias latino-americanas Washington tinha derrubado, pensaram que eu era um lunático. Como é que o Ocidente, bom, terno e “democrático”, tinha matado milhões de pessoas e mergulhado continentes inteiros em sangue? Não foi o que nos ensinaram nas universidades. Não foi o que a BBC, a CNN ou mesmo o que o China Morning Post disseram e escreveram.

Olhem, estou a falar a sério. Mostrei-lhes fotografias do Afeganistão e da Síria; fotos armazenadas no meu telefone. Eles deviam ter compreender que  era algo genuíno, em primeira mão. Ainda assim, eles observavam, mas os seus cérebros não eram capazes de processar o que lhes estava a ser mostrado. Imagens e palavras; essas pessoas estavam condicionadas a não compreender certos tipos de informações.

Mas isto não está a acontecer só em Hong Kong, uma antiga colónia britânica.

Talvez considerem difícil de acreditar, mas mesmo num país comunista como o Vietname; um país orgulhoso, um país que sofreu enormemente com o colonialismo francês e o imperialismo louco e brutal dos EUA, as pessoas com quem me relacionei (e morei em Hanói durante 2 anos) não sabiam quase nada sobre os crimes horríveis cometidos pelos EUA e pelos seus aliados durante a chamada “Guerra Secreta” contra os pobres e indefesos habitantes do país vizinho, o Laos; crimes que incluíam o bombardeio de camponeses e búfalos de água, dia e noite, por bombardeiros estratégicos B-52. E no Laos, onde fiz uma reportagem sobre os trabalhos de desminagem, as pessoas não sabiam nada sobre as mesmas monstruosidades que o Ocidente tinham cometido no Camboja; onde tinham assassinado centenas de milhares de pessoas através de atentados à bomba e desalojado milhões de camponeses das suas casas, provocando a fome e abrindo as portas para o domínio do Khmer Vermelho.

Quando falo dessa falta de conhecimento chocante no Vietname, sobre a região e sobre o que esse povo foi forçado a suportar, não falo apenas de vendedores ou de fabricantes de vestuário. Aplica-se a intelectuais, artistas, professores vietnamitas. É uma amnésia total e surgiu com a chamada ‘abertura’ para o mundo, o que significa com o consumo da comunicação mediática ocidental e, mais tarde, com a infiltração das redes sociais.

Pelo menos, o Vietname partilha fronteiras com o Laos e o Camboja, além de uma história turbulenta.

Mas imaginem dois grandes países só com fronteiras marítimas, como as Filipinas e a Indonésia. Alguns moradores de Manila que conheci, pensavam que a Indonésia se situava na Europa.

Agora, adivinhem, quantos indonésios têm conhecimento dos massacres que os Estados Unidos efectuaram nas Filipinas há um século, ou como as pessoas nas Filipinas foram doutrinadas pela propaganda ocidental sobre todo o Sudeste Asiático? Ou quantos filipinos têm conhecimento do golpe militar de 1965, desencadeado pelos EUA, que depôs o Presidente Sukarno, matando entre 2 a 3 milhões de intelectuais, professores, comunistas e sindicalistas na “vizinha” Indonésia?

Consultem as secções estrangeiras dos jornais indonésios ou filipinos e o que verão? As mesmas notícias da Reuters, AP, AFP. De facto, também verão os mesmos relatórios nas agências de notícias do Quénia, da Índia, do Uganda, do Bangladesh, dos Emirados Árabes Unidos, do Brasil, da Guatemala e a lista continua. Este esquema foi planeado para produzir um único resultado: a fragmentação completa!

***

A fragmentação do mundo é incrível e está a aumentar com o passar do tempo. Aqueles que esperavam que a Internet melhorasse a situação, pensaram erradamente.

Com a falta de conhecimento, a solidariedade também desapareceu.

Neste momento, em todo o mundo, decorrem tumultos e revoluções. Estou a noticiar as mais significativas; no Médio Oriente, na América Latina e em Hong Kong.

Deixem-me ser franco: não há absolutamente nenhuma percepção no Líbano sobre o que está a acontecer em Hong Kong, ou na Bolívia, no Chile ou na Colômbia.

A propaganda ocidental joga tudo no mesmo saco.

Em Hong Kong, os manifestantes doutrinados pelo Ocidente são apresentados como “manifestantes pró-democracia”. Eles matam, queimam, espancam pessoas, mas ainda são os favoritos do Ocidente. Porque estão a antagonizar a República Popular da China, considerada agora, o maior inimigo de Washington. E porque esses manifestantes foram criados e apoiados pelo Ocidente.

Na Bolívia, o Presidente anti-imperialista foi derrubado por um golpe orquestrado por Washington, mas a maioria da população indígena, que exige o seu regresso, é citada como um bando de arruaceiros.

No Líbano, assim como no Iraque, os amotinados são tratados gentilmente pela Europa e pelos Estados Unidos, principalmente porque o Ocidente espera que o Hezbollah pró-iraniano e outros grupos e partidos xiitas, possam vir a ser enfraquecidos pelos protestos.

A revolução, visivelmente anti-capitalista e anti-neoliberal no Chile, bem como os protestos legítimos na Colômbia, são relatados como uma espécie de combinação de explosão de queixas genuínas e hooliganismo e saques. Mike Pompeo alertou, recentemente, que os Estados Unidos apoiarão os governos de direita da América do Sul, na tentativa de manter a ordem.

Todas essas reportagens são um absurdo. De facto, têm um único objectivo: confundir os espectadores e os leitores. A fim de assegurar que eles não saibam nada ou que percebam muito pouco. E que, no final do dia, aterrem nos sofás com suspiros profundos, exclamando: “Oh, o mundo está um caos!”

***

Também conduz à tremenda fragmentação dos países em cada continente e em todo o hemisfério sul do globo.

Os países asiáticos conhecem muito pouco uns dos outros. O mesmo acontece com a África e com o Médio Oriente. Na América Latina, são a Rússia, a China e o Irão que estão, literalmente, a salvar a vida da Venezuela. Os outros países latino-americanos, com a excepção brilhante de Cuba, não fazem nada para ajudar. Todas as revoluções latino-americanas estão fragmentadas. Todos os golpes produzidos pelos EUA, basicamente, não têm oposição.

A mesma situação está a acontecer em todo o Médio Oriente e na Ásia. Não há brigadas internacionalistas que defendam os países destruídos pelo Ocidente. O grande predador vem e ataca a sua presa. É uma visão horrível, como um país morre perante o mundo, em terrível agonia. Ninguém interfere. As pessoas apenas vêem.

Um após o outro, os países estão a render-se.

Não é assim que, no século XXI, os Estados devem comportar-se. Esta é a lei da atracção da selva. Quando eu morava em África, fazia documentários no Quénia, no Ruanda e no Congo, conduzindo através do deserto; era assim que os animais se comportavam, não as pessoas. Os grandes felinos a encontrar a sua vítima. Uma zebra ou uma gazela. E a caça começava: uma ocorrência terrível. Depois, a morte lenta – comendo a vítima viva.

Muito semelhante à designada Doutrina Monroe.

O Império tem de matar. Periodicamente. Com regularidade previsível.

E ninguém faz nada. O mundo está a assistir. Fingindo que nada de extraordinário está a acontecer.

Perguntem a si mesmos: A revolução legítima pode ser bem sucedida em tais condições? Qualquer governo socialista eleito democraticamente poderá sobreviver? Ou tudo que é decente, esperançoso e optimista acaba sempre vítima de um império degenerado, brutal e vulgar?

Se for esse caso, qual é o sentido de seguir regras? Obviamente, as regras estão podres. Existem só para manter o ‘status quo’. Protegem os colonizadores e castigam as vítimas das rebeliões.

Mas não é este assunto que eu queria discutir aqui, hoje.

O que quero dizer é que as vítimas estão divididas. Sabem muito pouco umas das outras. As lutas pela verdadeira liberdade estão fragmentadas. Aqueles que lutam e sangram, mas que mesmo assim lutam, muitas vezes são hostilizados pelos seus companheiros que são mártires menos ousados.

Eu nunca vi o mundo tão dividido. Afinal, o Império está a vencer?

Sim e não.

A Russia, a China, o Irão, a Venezuela – já acordaram. Ergueram-se. Estão a adquirir conhecimento sobre os outros, uns com os outros.

Sem solidariedade, não pode haver vitória.

Sem conhecimento, não pode haver solidariedade.

Nitidamente, a coragem intelectual vem agora da Ásia, do “Oriente”. Para mudar o mundo, a comunicação mediática de destaque ocidental precisa de ser marginalizada, confrontada. Todos os conceitos ocidentais, incluindo a “democracia”, a “paz” e os “direitos humanos” devem ser questionados e redefinidos.

E naturalmente, o conhecimento.

Precisamos de um mundo novo, não de um mundo melhorado.

O mundo não precisa de Londres, Nova York e Paris para ensiná-lo sobre si mesmo.

A fragmentação tem de terminar. As nações precisam de aprender, directamente, umas sobre as outras. Se o fizerem, dentro em breve, as verdadeiras revoluções serão bem sucedidas,  enquanto os tumultos e as falsas revoluções coloridas, como as de Hong Kong, da Bolívia e de todo o Médio Oriente, serão confrontadas regionalmente e impedidas de arruinar milhões de vidas humanas.

Andre Vltchek

Artigo original em inglês : I Never Saw a World So Fragmented!, New Eastern Outlook, o 10 de Dezembro de 2019.

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Email: [email protected]

Webpage: NO WAR NO NATO

Andre Vltchek, filósofo, romancista, cineasta e jornalista investigador, é o criador de ‘O Mundo de Vltchek em Palavras e Imagens’. Escreveu vários livros, incluindo a ‘China e a Civilização Ecológica’. Escreve, especialmente, para a revista online “New Eastern Outlook.”

Numa dada circunstância, o Juiz do Distrito Federal, Miles Lord, que faleceu em 10 de Dezembro de 2016, aos 97 anos de idade, poderia ter-me aplicado uma sentença de dez anos. Longe disso, o famoso Juiz sem rodeios, que era conhecido por proteger as pessoas comuns de crimes associativos e de desacatos, usou o caso anti-nuclear que um grupo nosso apresentou perante ele, para proferir uma condenação notavelmente irónica sobre armas nucleares e sobre a corrupção que as protege.

Em 10 de Agosto de 1984, Barb Katt e eu, provocámos um estrago de mais de 36.000 dólares nos computadores de controlo de lançamento que estavam a ser construídos para os submarinos Trident, pela Sperry Univac (agora Unysis) em Eagan, Minnesota. Foi a nona de uma série de 100 acções denominadas Plowshares, que planeamos durante dois anos.

Depois de entrar na fábrica Sperry, vestidos como executivos, usamos martelos domésticos para espatifar dois dos computadores de orientação de mísseis da empresa que estavam em construção.

Nós “especificámos” os destroços, derramando sangue sobre eles porque, como disse a filósofa Simone Weil, “as armas nucleares matam sem serem usadas, forçando as pessoas a passar fome”.

Não fugimos, mas ficámos à espera das autoridades, explicando aos trabalhadores que estavam na sala, que desactivámos parte das máquinas de guerra nuclear de ‘first strike’, do governo.

Um trabalhador disse mais tarde, como testemunha: “Ouvi a palavra ‘Trident’, mas não sei o que ela significa”.

Um recorte da notícia do Star Tribune, de 1984, sobre LaForge e Kate, dos arquivos do autor.

Fomos acusados da prática do crime de “vandalismo” e fomos condenados por um júri, após um julgamento de três dias. Enfrentando uma pena máxima de 10 anos de prisão, mediante a sentença de 8 de Novembro, Barb e eu pedimos ao Juiz Miles Lord que denunciasse com ousadia os preparativos de guerra nuclear dos EUA, que eram então de conhecimento comum. O Juiz Miles Lord fez exactamente isso.

O Juiz Miles Lord era um protector dos fracos e dos oprimidos. (Youtube)

Com o governo federal actualmente, a levar a cabo um programa de modernização de armas nucleares de um trilião de dólares, semelhante ao que Ronald Reagan estava a supervisionar, em 1984, a crítica impressionante do Juiz Miles Lord ao militarismo empresarial criminoso é tão oportuna como sempre. Estas são as observações de sentença dada pelo Juiz, conforme relatado na transcrição oficial:

“A alegação destes jovens é que eles cometeram os actos aqui expostos como um apelo desesperado ao povo americano e ao Governo, para interromper a loucura militar que eles acreditam sinceramente, que irá destruir todos nós, amigos e inimigos.

 “Eles argumentaram, de modo plausível, que o Direito Internacional proíbe o que nosso país está a fazer através do fabrico de armas de destruição em massa.

 “Ao reflectir sobre o castigo a ser dado a estas duas pessoas que tentavam eliminar armas de destruição em massa, devemos interrogar-nos:

Será que os que fabricam armas para matar estão empenhados num empreendimento mais santificado do que aqueles que, pelos seus actos, tentariam aconselhar a moderação e a mediação, como método alternativo para resolver as disputas internacionais?

Por que estamos tão fascinados por um poder tão grande que não podemos compreender a sua magnitude?

O que há de tão sagrado numa bomba, ou de tão romântico num míssil?

Por que razão condenamos e enforcamos assassinos individuais, enquanto exaltamos as virtudes dos criadores da guerra?

Qual é o fascínio fatal que nos atrai para o pensamento da destruição em massa dos nossos irmãos de outro país?

Por que motivo podemos considerar o pensamento de que todas as pessoas de um lado de uma linha imaginária devem morrer – e se formos tão ímpios e cínicos ao ponto de aceitar esse pensamento – por que motivo é que não ponderamos o facto de que, ao executar esse decreto, também morreremos?

Quem arquitecta estas linhas e quem é que assim decretou?

Quantas pessoas nesta democracia reflectiram seriamente sobre a futilidade de cometer um suicídio nacional para punir os nossos adversários?

Temos tão pouca fé no nosso sistema de livre iniciativa, no nosso capitalismo e nos conceitos fundamentais que são ensinados nas nossas constituições e nas nossas diversas Bíblias, que, para nos protegermos da propagação de ideologias estrangeiras, devemos estar preparados para morrer pelas nossas próprias mãos?

Tal pensamento indica muita falta de fé na nossa democracia, no nosso corpo político, no nosso povo e nas nossas instituições.

“Há indivíduos, em altos cargos, que acreditam que o Armageddon voltará em breve e que, dentro em pouco, Cristo voltará à Terra e levar-nos-á todos de volta com Ele para o céu. Parece que muito do nosso esforço nacional está a ser dedicado a facilitar o processo. Pode até ser uma espécie de celebração. Quando as bombas explodirem, Cristo não terá que vir à Terra. Todos nós, crentes e não crentes, encontrá-Lo-emos a meio do caminho.

 (“Acredito que os pobres são abençoados e que temos o dever de ajudá-los”, disse o Juiz Miles Lord num pequeno vídeo de 2017 sobre ele, mostrado acima.)

 “A anomalia desta situação é que sou chamado aqui para punir dois indivíduos acusados de terem causado danos a bens de uma empresa no valor de 36.000 dólares. É a mesma empresa que, há apenas alguns meses atrás, foi acusada de desviar indevidamente do Governo dos EUA, a soma de 3.6 milhões de dólares.

“Os funcionários desta empresa conseguiram aumentar os lucros empresariais, manipulando os livros de maneira errada e criminosa. Como estes indivíduos eram todos funcionários de uma empresa, parece que não ocorreu a ninguém no Departamento da Procuradoria Geral dos Estados Unidos que as acções desses indivíduos constituíssem uma conspiração criminosa pela qual deveriam ser punidos. O governo exigiu, somente, que a Sperry pagasse apenas 10% do valor pelo qual a empresa tinha sido ilegalmente enriquecida.

“Será que esses empresários que estavam a trabalhar para construir armas de destruição em massa, receberam tratamento especial devido à natureza de seu trabalho?

“Também sou convocado para determinar a quantidade de restituição a ser exigida a estes dois indivíduos que causaram danos aos bens da Sperry. As informações financeiras obtidas pelo Departamento Jurídico indicaram que nenhum dos réus deve dinheiro a ninguém. Embora a Snra. Katt não possua bens pessoais avultados, o Snr. LaForge é comparativamente mais bem dotado. É dono de um Volkswagen de 1968, de uma guitarra, de um saco de dormir e de 200 dólares em dinheiro.

“A pressão inexorável gerada por aqueles que se dedicam a ganhar a vida e lucrar com a construção de equipamentos militares, e as somas ilícitas(‘luvas’) que acontecem nos corredores do Congresso, a fim de obter mais contratos desse tipo para cada estado, consumir-se-ão no máximo, num holocausto atómico. Estes mesmos factores exercem uma forte pressão sobre um Juiz Federal na minha posição, para concordar com a teoria de que há algo sagrado numa bomba e que, aqueles que levantam as vozes ou as mãos contra ela, devem ser derrubados como inimigos do povo, apesar de que, nos seus corações, sintam e saibam que são amigos do povo.

“Uma conduta deste tipo não pode ser tolerada sob o disfarce de liberdade de expressão. Nem deve ser totalmente condenada como subversiva, traidora ou traiçoeira, catalogada na categoria de espionagem ou noutras coisas impróprias. Neste caso, eu tiraria o aguilhão da bomba, tentaria de alguma maneira, forçar o governo a remover a auréola com a qual parece dotar qualquer dispositivo que possa matar e colocar nela uma mortalha, a mortalha da morte, da destruição, da mutilação, da doença e da debilitação.

 “Se houver uma reacção adversa a esta sentença, aguardarei ansiosamente os protestos daqueles que se queixam das minhas tentativas de corrigir o desequilíbrio que agora existe num sistema que opera de maneira a fornecer um tipo de justiça para os ricos, e um tipo de justiça menor para os pobres, um padrão para os poderosos e outro para os mansos, e um sistema que considera que a sua humanidade e objectividade é louvada e glorificada pela loucura militar e pelo adoração da Bomba.

 “Um Juiz que preside a este julgamento, como eu,  não é convocado para fazer aquilo que é politicamente correcto ou popular, mas é instado a exercer um julgamento calmo e deliberado da maneira mais adequada para realizar, acomodar e reivindicar os direitos das pessoas que actuam através do seu governo, e os direitos das pessoas que são objecto de tais acções. O que seria mais popular fazer, neste momento específico, seria condenar [Katt e LaForge] a um período de 10 anos de prisão, e alguns juízes podem estar dispostos a fazê-lo.

 [Então, as sentenças foram impostas: seis meses de prisão, suspensa, com seis meses de liberdade vigiada.]

“Também estou ciente do poder do argumento, que diria que esta sentença encorajaria outras pessoas a fazerem o mesmo. Se outros fizerem o mesmo, devem ser questionados nesse momento. Também estou impressionado com o argumento de que esta mesma sentença pode, de alguma forma, constituir uma sentença absurda, que [Katt e LaForge] não foram punidos adequadamente porque alguns outros podem não ser dissuadidos de fazer [o que eles fizeram]. Realmente interrogo-me sobre a constitucionalidade de condenar uma pessoa por um crime que pode ser cometido por outra pessoa, noutro momento e noutro local.

“Também é difícil para mim comparar a sentença que aqui vos dou – por destruir bens no valor de 36.000 dólares, porque vocês foram processados – com a situação daqueles que roubaram 3,6 milhões de dólares e não foram processados, nem destituídos, nem punidos de alguma maneira. A minha consciência está limpa. Declaro encerrada a presente sessão.” 

John LaForge

Artigo original em inglês : The judge who assailed “worship of the Bomb”, Beyond Nuclear International, 1 de Dezembro de 2019.

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos
Email: [email protected]
Webpage: NO WAR NO NATO

John LaForge, publica e difunde a PeaceVoice, é co-Director do Nukewatch, um grupo de justiça ambiental e de paz em Wisconsin, e é co-Editor com Arianne Peterson, de Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States./ Nuclear Heartland, Revisado: Um Guia para os 450 Mísseis Baseados no Solo dos Estados Unidos.

Latin America has long been regarded as the exclusive stomping ground of US economic interests, US military, and US intelligence services for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, to the point that the US public has grown to view meddling in its neighbors’ domestic politics as some sort of birthright which is still faintly rooted in the 19th century “white man’s burden” racialist policies. That the majority of Democratic Party presidential candidates supports the military coup in Bolivia, the escalating repressions in Chile, and the plundering of Brazil by the Bolsonaro regime is actually unremarkable in that regard. Such policies have long been the norm.

However, if one were to take a quick survey of recent developments in the “information battlefield” in the United States, one would be struck by the rapid elevation of Latin America to a place where direct US military action is needed. It is not just Trump who, in the aftermath of an apparently cartel-related murder of an American Mormon family in Mexico, “offered” Mexico the “help” of the US military in fighting the cartels. The latest boy-wonder of the US Establishment, “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg likewise allowed that he is “open” to the idea of sending US troops to Mexico. Neither of these statements was seen as in any way controversial by the mainstream media—even though the US public is broadly anti-war and skeptical of additional international entanglements, the Washington Establishment views the sovereignty of other countries as nothing more than legal fiction.

These politicians’ statements do not stand in isolation. Hollywood has long been “joined at the hip” with the US national security establishment and can always be relied upon to propagate the latest set of Washington talking points. While Russian villains remain the staple of US movies and video games, Latin America is gradually reclaiming its role as a battlefield and source of threats to the United States – a status it had lost after 9/11. There are now at least two currently running US TV series which specifically focus on direct US interventions in Latin America.

America’s favorite CIA analyst Jack Ryan (who, it should be noted, became President on the pages of Tom Clancy’s novels after the rest of the US government was conveniently eliminated by a Boeing 747 flown into the Capitol  by a suicide pilot) is now bravely thwarting Russian plots in Venezuela. Going considerably further, Last Ship’s current season actually posits the emergence of Gran Colombia, a veritable Latin American empire which launches a Pearl Harbor-style surprise air raid which destroys the just-rebuilt US Navy with the assistance of a cyber-strike. In retaliation, the United States employs the full range of its conventional capabilities, starting with CIA covert operatives working with some modern equivalent of the Nicaraguan Contras whose connections to the drug cartels are not even concealed, and ending with US Marines landing on the shores of Latin American countries in order to “liberate” them from their own governments.

There are other indications that the US establishment is bracing for a major deterioration of the political situation “south of the border”, up to and including a major refugee crisis comparable to that which Europe has experienced. While Donald Trump has been roundly condemned for his immigration policies, particularly the deportations of Latin American refugees, the construction of a major barrier on the US-Mexico border, and the efforts to transform Mexico into a holding tank for refugees seeking admission into the United States, no senior Democratic Party politician or candidate has promised to reverse these policies.

The rekindling of interest in Latin America is a logical consequences of the drift toward a global multi-polar system. It means, first, a retrenchment in the Middle East due to the demonstrated power of Russia and China which has proved sufficient to thwart not only covert US plots but also overt uses of economic and military capabilities. This power transition has meant that even long-standing US allies such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia are adopting a multi-vector foreign policy no longer wholly centered on their relationship with the United States. It certainly does not help that the United States has proved of limited utility in resolving the many international conflicts and rivalries in that region, not only the obvious Iran-Saudi Arabia one, but also the lower-intensity Saudi Arabia—Turkey one. Since Russia is literally the only international power capable of credibly negotiating with each of these three regional rivals, its reputation as an honest broker backed up by non-trivial “hard power” has elevated its standing in the region to the detriment of the United States.

The second implication is an even closer binding of Latin American countries to the United States, with the remarkably compliant Organization of American States (OAS) which has never seen a military coup it did not like, serving as the overt instrument of control. Conversely, regional organizations which have proven resistant to US control such as the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America-Trade between Peoples (ALBA-TCP) and  the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), both of which actually condemned the coup in Bolivia in strong terms, will find themselves the target of US pressure. Post-coup Bolivia’s announced departure from both of these organizations is unlikely to be an aberration, particularly since it follows on the heels of Lenin Moreno’s Ecuador’s departure from ALBA in 2018. The remaining ALBA states include Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela (in addition to several small island states), all of which are continuing targets of US regime change policies.

UNASUR also appears headed for extinction. As many as six countries, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay and Peru, suspended their membership in 2018. Chile moreover launched PROSUR, an organization explicitly intended to target Venezuela, with the initial states invited to join the new organization being  Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Guyana and Suriname, none of which can be described as pursuing policies contrary to US wishes.

The Trump Administration’s regional trade war that resulted in the launch of USMCA – a new trade pact by the US, Mexico and Canada intended to replace the North America Free Trade Association (NAFTA) is indicative of the future course of US policy. It’s doubtful that many in the region failed to note the new trade pact’s abbreviation is exactly the same as that of the US Marine Corps which has a long and dark history of invasions and occupations of Latin American states. Consistent with the plot of “Last Ship”, the US, Mexico and Canada will find themselves once again the final arbiter of trade arrangements in Latin America in the #MAGA era, an era that will not end with Trump.

Economic developments in countries that have suffered right-wing regime shifts in the last few years show the direction in which Latin America will evolve. In Brazil, Boeing was allowed to acquire the commercial aircraft division of EMBRAER which hitherto was able to compete, as an independent actor, against both Boeing and Airbus even in their own home markets. The move strengthens Boeing by making it more competitive against Airbus in certain niches that it lacked, and strips Brazil of a major industrial asset. Bolsonaro also aims to privatize another of Brazil’s economic “crown jewels”, the Petrobras energy firm which is all but guaranteed to fall into the hands of Washington-favored energy companies.  US interest in the lithium reserves in Bolivia and neighboring countries has also been well documented. Preventing Morales’ Bolivia from entering into a development deal with China was one of the main motives behind the coup. Like Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Moreno’s Ecuador is pursuing plans to allow oil drilling in the Amazon region.

The famed Argentinian revolutionary Che Guevara suffered a heroic death in Bolivia, attempting to mobilize an indigenous rebellion against the post-conquistador elite. The inevitable backlash to the ever more evident US efforts to ruthlessly exploit Latin America in order to compensate for the loss of influence and business elsewhere in the world means that the United States will find itself with several insurgencies and refugee crises not halfway around the world but in its own geopolitical backyard. Their intensity will eclipse the Cold War-era struggles.  Should the United States insist on pursuing its current course, it risks losing power and influence in Latin America in the same way  it did in the Middle East.

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According to China’s official People’s Daily broadsheet, Beijing and Washington “agreed on the text of a phase one economic and trade agreement based on the principle of equality and mutual respect,” adding:

“The text includes nine chapters: the preface, intellectual property rights, technology transfer, food and agricultural products, financial services, exchange rate and transparency, trade expansion, bilateral assessment and dispute settlement, and the final terms, according to a statement issued by the Chinese side Friday night.”

“Both sides have reached consensus that the US side will fulfill its commitments to phase out its additional tariffs on Chinese products, so as to achieve a switch from hiking to cutting additional tariffs.”

The above remarks omit details of what was agreed on, likely to remain unpublished in full.

According to China’s Vice Commerce Minister/deputy trade representative Wang Shouwen, Beijing will increase imports of US agricultural products — no specific amount agreed on, Wang adding:

The US pledged to eliminate duties on Chinese imports “phase by phase, (its) tariffs undergo(ing) a change from going up to going down.”

Beijing’s Vice Minister of Finance Liao Min said eliminating US tariffs on Chinese products is the “core concern” of its government.

A statement by Trump regime trade representative Robert Lighthizer said the following:

The US and China “agree(d) on a phase one trade deal that requires structural reforms and other changes to China’s economic and trade regime in the areas of intellectual property, technology transfer, agriculture, financial services, and currency and foreign exchange,” adding:

China “commit(s) (to) make substantial additional purchases of US goods and services in the coming years” — no amounts in dollars or quantity mentioned.

US 25% tariffs on around $250 billion worth of Chinese imports remain unchanged, 15% US duties on another $120 billion worth of Chinese goods cut to 7.5%.

New 15% US tariffs on another $156 billion worth of Chinese imports scheduled for December 15 are suspended. Trump tweeted:

“We will begin negotiations on the phase two deal immediately, rather than waiting until after the 2020 election.”

Barron’s claimed unexplained phase one “details weren’t as important as what the agreement stopped from happening.”

Perhaps it’s so for the short-term, the devil in them and what follows in further talks key to the US and Chinese economies and how markets will react in the weeks and months ahead.

Wall Street Journal editors said Friday’s announced phase one one deal “isn’t VE Day, but it’s still welcome economic news,” calling it “modest,” adding:

What’s agreed on in principle are “merely promises,” fulfillment another matter entirely, notably by the US side, viewing China as a threat to its hegemonic aims.

Beijing’s Vice Minister of Commerce Wei Jianguo struck a positive note, saying:

“The trade war has taught the US a lesson. They finally realize that engaging in a prolonged trade war will bring no good, and that ending it as soon as possible is their best option.”

Beijing-based Chinese Academy of Social Sciences analyst Gao Lingyun warned that what’s agreed on in principle hangs in limbo. Major bilateral differences on trade and other issues remain unresolved.

According Chinese government advisor Shi Yinhong said momentum in talks “for the time being” doesn’t dispel longterm confrontation.

“It just pushes the difficulties into the future. And the future could be very quick to materialize because Trump is a very volatile person.”

China knows the US side can change things any time for any reason because of uneasy bilateral relations.

A phase one signing date hasn’t been announced, nor where it will  take place and who’ll represent both countries.

Chinese purchases of US products are likely to depend on internal needs, its contractural import arrangements with other countries, whether the Trump regime fulfills its obligations, and its other policies toward Beijing.

Clearly, bilateral relations are greatly strained, trade one of many areas of disagreement, including Sino/Russian unity, the US considers a strategic threat.

It represent a vital counterforce against US rage for unchallenged global dominance by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives.

It’s why unthinkable nuclear war is ominously possible, Sino/US trade relations a minor issue by comparison.

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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.

Why is the US talking “democracy, human rights and justice” with an opposition who lost recent elections, abuses human rights and works daily to undermine and evade justice?

Time was precious at the 35th ASEAN Summit. Leaders from across Southeast Asia converged on Bangkok, Thailand to discuss economics, diplomacy, defence and a whole host of other issues.

With so much to discuss and do, it was particularly surprising to see the US spend much of its time coercing local leaders to take up its flagship regional crisis centred on stirring up trouble in the South China Sea as well as meet with and promote unpopular opposition parties.

One meeting in particularly, headed by US Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs (EAP) David Stilwell, was held with members of Thailand’s opposition party, Future Forward.

The EAP in a social media post would claim:

Assistant Secretary Stilwell appreciated the opportunity to meet with Members of Parliament in [Thailand] to learn more about their efforts to promote democracy, justice, and human rights.

No mention was made of who these Members of Parliament (MPs) were, what party they came from or anything at all about why they were chosen for the meeting from among Thailand’s 500 MPs.

First, Does the US Even Stand for “Democracy, Justice and Human Rights?”  

At face value the US would appear to be upholding noble values; democracy, justice and human rights. That is until even the most rudimentary observation skills are employed in considering Washington’s own contempt and abuse of all three of these principles not only domestically, but worldwide.

The US regularly interferes in the democratic processes of nations around the globe, with entire organisations like the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its many subsidiaries dedicated solely to the purpose of manipulating the internal political affairs of targeted nations, including elections.

The notion of the US standing for or upholding “justice” is also dubious at best, with the US the world leader in both its incarceration rate and the total number of people imprisoned in jails. The US, guilty of serial wars of aggression and all abuses generally related to war, has escaped justice both from within its own justice system and from the so-called “international community.”

Of course, both the US’ industrialised prison system and its global wars of aggression bury any notion at all that the US stands for human rights, rather than merely hides behind them.

With even average people around the globe aware of these facts and the hypocrisy the US would bring to any meeting discussing “democracy, justice and human rights,” why would any member of Thailand’s parliament meet in good faith with the US regarding these matters? What business of Washington’s in the first place is “democracy, justice and human rights” in Thailand?

Why did Future Forward eagerly attend this meeting?

US and Future Forward: Birds of a Feather 

Future Forward, like the US, merely hides behind principles like democracy, justice and human rights.

The party is also the eager recipient of US backing in order to do so. Several of the party’s founding members belong to US NED-funded fronts including Prachatai whose director is literally an NED fellow.

When members of the party are summoned by Thai police for their various criminal activities, US embassy staff often accompany them.

In the 2019 general election, the party came in distant third, with it and its political allies losing the popular vote to the military-aligned Palang Pracharath Party. Despite having no mandate, it continues seeking the rewriting of Thailand’s constitution and justifies its disruptive activities under the pretext of representing the Thai people despite being rejected by them at the polls.

More recent by-elections have suggest the party is even more unpopular now than when it lost the general elections earlier in the year.

The party is led by nepotist billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit, who before entering politics, busted unions at his family’s Thai Summit autoparts factory. The abuses involved even attracted the attention of international rights watchdogs, including Industri-ALL Global Union who reported in 2007 that:

Thai Summit Eastern Seaboard Auto Parts Company, owned and controlled by Thai Summit Group has drawn fire from the International Metalworkers’ Federation, IMF affiliates, and the National Human Rights Commission in Thailand for committing trade union and human rights violations at their Rayong auto parts plant.

Thanathorn and his Future Forward Party are currently partners with Pheu Thai Party (PTP), another opposition party, run by another corrupt billionaire and also fugitive, Thaksin Shinawatra. PTP would even nominate Thanathorn as their candidate for prime minister following the 2019 general elections.

Thaksin himself has the worst human rights record in Thai history. His 2003 “war on drugs” alone left over 2,500 innocent people dead in just 90 days. The following year, his instigation of tensions in the nation’s troubled deep south led to protests in which over 80 would die in a single day.

His violent targeting of critics and opponents while in power and since being ousted has left over 100 dead and has even resulted in terrorism, armed violence and city-wide arson. Justice has been slow, owed at least in part to opposition parties like Future Forward failing to call for accountability and even at times defending rights abusers either by omitting their crimes, or spinning them.

Not only does Future Forward omit mentioning any of this as it cites “democracy, justice and human rights” in its own daily condemnation of the current Thai government, its US backers do likewise.

Thus, it makes perfect sense to see two abusive circles of power who share a mutual strategy of hiding behind otherwise genuine principles and rights while trampling them in actuality, meeting on the sidelines of the 35th ASEAN Summit.
But to what end?

Rolling Back Thai-Chinese Relations 

The current Thai government has spent years cementing Thai-Chinese relations. This includes replacing Thailand’s aging inventory of US military hardware with modern Chinese alternatives. Among recent acquisitions are Chinese main battle tanks, armoured personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles as well as naval vessels including the Kingdom’s first modern submarine.

Thailand and China are jointly developing a growing number of weapon systems including mobile rocket launcher platforms.

Thailand is also working with China on its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

Key BRI components running through Thailand involve high-speed rail connecting together a China-Laos-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore network. Highways and bridges to improve connectivity between Thailand and its neighbours including Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos also contribute to the BRI’s overarching goal of stitching together the region through transportation infrastructure and the trade it facilitates.

It should come as no surprise then that an opposition party supported by the US has come out against much of these developments.

Thanathorn himself openly and directly opposed Thai-Chinese high-speed rail lines (already under construction) and proposed Thailand work with the West to build lines using still-nonexistent “hyperloop” technology.
Bloomberg in an article titled, “Thailand needs hyperloop, not China-built high-speed rail: Thanathorn,” would report:

A tycoon turned politician who opposes Thailand’s military government has criticised its US$5.6 billion high-speed rail project with China because hyperloop technology offers a more modern alternative. 

An option such as Richard Branson’s Virgin Hyperloop One — which is working on building networks of pods traveling at airplane-like speeds — is better for Thailand as it would help the nation to be a technological leader, according to Future Forward Party head Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit.

Thanathorn has also come out heavily against Thailand’s defence budget in an oblique attempt to stem growing Thai-Chinese military relations.

Far from merely buying tanks, ships and submarines, Thailand’s recent purchases and collaborations with China involve growing levels of cooperation to train Thai personnel on the use and maintainence of its expanding inventory of Chinese hardware both on a tactical level and through joint exercises, on a strategic level.

Thailand’s defence spending will only increasingly shift from buying US weapon systems to those bought from or developed with nearby China. While Future Forward’s motives in undercutting Thailand’s national defence would seem unclear, Washington’s motives to do so in order to slow down or reverse growing Thai-Chinese military relations is obvious.

With Washington supporting Future Forward, manifesting itself in this most recent meeting, Future Forward’s otherwise inexplicable campaign to undermine Thailand’s development comes into clearer focus.

It should be noted that David Stilwel, before taking up his current position and according to his official US State Department biography, served as the Director of the China Strategic Focus Group.

In one document regarding the Group’s activities under a section titled, “Alliances,” it claims:

Alliances. This homeland area, coupled with our treaty alliances with Australia, Japan, Republic of Korea, Philippines, and Thailand are the cornerstone of U.S. engagement in the region. We will modernize and strengthen these alliances by enhancing our ability to train and operate together, jointly developing high-tech capabilities, expanding information sharing, and exploring new areas of cooperation.

These “alliances,” many of which including with Thailand are in irreversible decline, are aimed at what the US claims is its responsibility to ensure China’s military and economic rise is “peaceful.”

Thus, Stilwel meeting eager collaborators in undermining Thai-Chinese relations fits in perfectly with much of what he has spent his career doing; preserving US primacy over Asia and attempting to shape China’s neighbours into a united front to contain and control its rise regionally and globally.
Again, nothing could be less “democratic” or less conducive to notions of self-determination for Thailand, China or Asia as a whole regarding US influence, interference and intents.

The real danger lies not in Washington’s isolated support for an increasingly unpopular political party in Thailand, but in the synergies the US is attempting to create among multiple campaigns of subversion it is sponsoring across the region; in Hong Kong and neighbouring Cambodia for example, all of it ultimately aimed at shifting the dynamics of China’s rise.

While the US State Department intended to boost the credibility of Future Forward by organising a special meeting with them at the 35th ASEAN Summit, it should instead serve as an ominous warning that among America’s few remaining exports, meddling and chaos are still on the offering.

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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from NEO

According to the Wall Street Journal, it’s a “template for deals to come,” adding:

“The new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (has) implications for agreements beyond North America, including new bilateral deals being contemplated for China, Japan, the European Union, and the UK.”

On Thursday, Mexico’s Senate approved the deal after top North American officials agreed on its terms, ratification by the US and Canada expected in early 2020 — Trump, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, and Mexican President Obrador to sign it into law.

Commenting on the deal, Global Trade Watch director Lori Wallach explained the following:

The deal is better than the 2018 US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), a jobs-destroying neoliberal ripoff, a corporate coup d’etat, empowering corporate predators at the expense of ecosanity, worker pay, benefits and other rights.

Trade deals, including NAFTA 2.0, are all about maximizing corporate profits, offshoring US jobs to low-wage countries to continue, worker rights steadily eroding.

Still, NAFTA 2.0 “remove(d) Big Pharma giveaways and improve(d) labor and environmental terms” over USMCA’s 2018 provisions, said Wallach, adding:

Despite much in the agreement that’s unacceptable, it’s “better than the original NAFTA.”

Trump’s approval of anti-worker, anti-ecosanity provisions in last year’s USMCA betrayed ordinary Americans he pledged to serve — how he’s governed across the board throughout his time in office, serving corporate and high-net households interests at the expense of the public welfare.

After pledging to seek lower drug prices last year, last year he agreed on “new Big Pharma giveaways that lock in high drug prices and labor and environmental terms that were too weak to stop NAFTA’s original sin of job outsourcing,” said Wallach.

NAFTA 2.0 changes improved some, not all, pro-business, anti-consumer, anti-worker provisions of the 1994 agreement.

“(M)any NAFTA flaws were not fixed,” Wallach stressed. “The best (NAFTA 2.0) feature…is the gutting of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).”

It grants corporate predators the right to sue governments for virtually unlimited compensation before a rigged panel of three corporate lawyers – their ruling final, not subject to appeal.

Favorable rulings can be gotten by claiming laws protecting public health or ecosanity violate corporate trade agreement rights.

If a nation refuses to pay, its assets can be seized for compensation. ISDS incentivizes offshoring of jobs by providing special privileges and rights for firms relocating operations abroad – facilitating a global race to the bottom.

Most 1994 NAFTA provisions have nothing to do with trade – everything to do with maximizing corporate profits, compromising ecosanity, worker rights, as well as human health and welfare.

Last year’s signed but not ratified USMCA empowers corporate predators to continue offshoring jobs.

It lets them ignore ecosanity, worker rights, and human health and welfare. ISDS let corporate predators ripoff around $400 million from North American taxpayers.

Wallach: “That a US (NAFTA 2.0) pact largely eliminates extreme ISDS protections for foreign investors and anti-democratic tribunals sends a signal worldwide about the illegitimacy of the ISDS regime.”

Trump’s claim about the deal bringing back hundreds of thousands of new manufacturing jobs is pure rubbish.

At the same time, “labor and environmental standards and enhanced enforcement terms may help raise wages in Mexico, and this may also reduce US corporations’ incentives to outsource US jobs to Mexico to pay workers less,” said Wallach, adding:

NAFTA 2.0 “shows that to be politically viable, trade pacts can no longer include extreme corporate rights like ISDS or new monopoly protections for Big Pharma that have been featured in past US trade deals and that they must have enforceable labor and environmental standards.”

“This is a significant shift after decades of US trade pacts, expanding corporate rights and Big Pharma monopoly protections.”

Wallach may be overly optimistic. Since the neoliberal 90s, worker rights steadily eroded — along with fundamental freedoms and a nation safe and fit to live in.

Policies now pursued by congressional Dems aim to improve their November 2020 electoral prospects.

The Clinton co-presidency was responsible for the original NAFTA. Will Dems today govern differently if control the reigns of government? It’s highly unlikely.

Their pro-endless wars, pro-business, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-rule of law record since the 1990s speaks for itself.

Fixing NAFTA falls way short of “negotiating a truly progressive trade agreement from scratch, which would additionally require climate provisions, truly enforceable currency disciplines, and the elimination of limits on consumer protections for food, product safety, the service sector and online platforms,” Wallach stressed.

Unlike the Wall Street Journal’s rosy scenario, “(t)he new NAFTA is not the template for future agreements, but establishes the floor from which we will continue to advocate for a new model of trade and globalization that puts people and the planet first,” she added.

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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.

Al-Qaeda in Syria has two noteworthy apologists. One is the jihadist propagandist Bilal Abdul Kareem, a former correspondent for CNN, often seen in videos sporting a long beard and reporting from the ground in the al-Nusra Front strongholds in northwestern Syria, and the other is Syria analyst and the fellow of the Middle East Institute Charles Lister.

Recently, Lister has written a research paper for the Hudson Institute, titled “The Syria Effect: Al-Qaeda Fractures,” [1] in which he has tried to prove that militants of al-Qaeda in Syria are not “bad guys” per se, rather they are “good terrorists” whose ambitions are restricted to fighting the Syrian government, and they don’t intend to mount terror attacks in the Western countries.

In conclusion of the lengthy screed, he has craftily proposed “Gaza-fication” of Syria’s northwestern Idlib, where like the Hamas in Gaza, the so-called “Salvation Government” of the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian affiliate of al-Qaeda, can be recognized as a legitimate government administering the northwestern enclave under the tutelage of Ankara.

Unwittingly, however, Charles Lister has spilled the beans in the article about a July 30 American airstrike in rural Aleppo that killed several high-profile jihadist dissidents, who had challenged the unity of the Washington-backed insurgency against the Syrian government offensive in northern Hamah and Idlib in late April.

Before getting into details, it’s worth noting that Hurras al-Din is a small radical outfit in Syria’s northwestern Idlib that split in 2018 from al-Qaeda in Syria, which was formerly known as al-Nusra Front until 2016, and now as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).

An excerpt from Charles Lister’s research paper reads:

“When the Syrian regime and Russia launched their all-out military offensive on northwestern Syria in late-April 2019, a debate ensued within Hurras al-Din – a breakaway faction of Tahrir al-Sham, formerly known as al-Nusra Front – should they assist Tahrir al-Sham and other opposition groups by reinforcing their frontlines in northern Hama?

“Given al-Qaeda Central chief Ayman al-Zawahiri’s public directives indicating the importance of Islamist unity and sustaining the armed struggle against the regime, the leader of Hurras al-Din Abu Hammam al-Suri and his deputy Sami al-Oraydi emerged as tacitly supportive of helping other jihadist groups, including Tahrir al-Sham, wherever necessary.

“The debate over Hurras al-Din’s role on Tahrir al-Sham’s opposition frontlines spilled out into the open in late June of 2019, when Hurras al-Din leader Abu Hammam al-Suri expelled two prominent Hurras al-Din clerics, Abu Dhar al-Masri and Abu Yahya al-Jazairi, for having issued non-sanctioned rulings forbidding fighting in northern Hama. Some alleged Abu Yahya had gone as far as pronouncing takfir on Tahrir al-Sham, thereby excommunicating them from Islam and labeling them apostates and legitimate targets for attack.

“Abu Hammam’s dismissal of Abu Dhar and Abu Yahya sparked an uproar within Hurras al-Din. The group’s internal judicial court, led by Abu Amr al-Tunisi, issued a petition signed by more than 300 members on June 23 demanding an arbitration involving Abu Hammam and his deputy, Sami al-Oraydi.

“However, neither Abu Hammam nor Oraydi turned up at the planned arbitration on June 25, leading the court’s chief, Abu Amr, to issue a furious five-minute audio statement accusing HaD’s leaders of nepotism. Abu Amr was swiftly expelled from Hurras al-Din, and this led another senior leader, Abu Yaman al-Wazzani, to declare in exasperation ‘the jihadist project over.’ Later that day, a statement confirmed that Wazzani and another fellow critic, Abu Musab al-Libi, had also been expelled from Hurras al-Din.

“Tensions persisted through the summer of 2019, albeit less intensely. But in a mysterious twist on June 30, 2019—just days after the above-mentioned crisis—Abu Amr al-Tunisi, Abu Yahya al-Jazairi and Abu Dhar al-Masri were all killed, along with three other allied hardliners (Abu al-Fid’a al-Tunisi, Abu Dujana al-Tunisi and Abu Ibrahim al-Shami) in an American airstrike that targeted a meeting of Hurras al-Din detractors in rural Aleppo.

“That was the first American strike in northwestern Syria in more than two years and it was followed up two months later by another on August 31, 2019, targeting Hurras al-Din ally Ansar al-Tawhid. Al-Qaeda veteran Abu Khallad al-Mohandis was also killed in an improvised explosive device attack that targeted his personal vehicle in Idlib city on August 22, 2019.”

It becomes abundantly clear after reading the excerpts from Charles Lister’s article that not only has Washington provided weapons and training to militant factions battling Damascus but it has also conducted airstrikes eliminating jihadist dissidents who dared to threaten the unity of large militant outfits in northwestern Idlib, such as Tahrir al-Sham, formerly known as al-Nusra Front.

During the eight-year proxy war in Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of al-Nusra Front, has emerged as the second most influential militant leader after the Islamic State’s slain chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In fact, since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to April 2013, the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front were a single organization that chose the banner of Jabhat al-Nusra.

Although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed[2] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the late leader of Islamic State, in January 2012. Thus, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent organization in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two organizations.

In August 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was based in Iraq, began sending Syrian and Iraqi jihadists experienced in guerrilla warfare across the border into Syria to establish an organization inside the country. Led by a Syrian known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the group began to recruit fighters and establish cells throughout the country. On 23 January 2012, the group announced its formation as Jabhat al-Nusra.

In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audio statement in which he announced that al-Nusra Front had been established, financed and supported by the Islamic State of Iraq. Al-Baghdadi declared that the two groups were merging under the name “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” The leader of al-Nusra Front, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, issued a statement denying the merger and complaining that neither he nor anyone else in al-Nusra’s leadership had been consulted about it.

Al-Qaeda Central’s leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, tried to mediate the dispute between al-Baghdadi and al-Jolani but eventually, in October 2013, he endorsed al-Nusra Front as the official franchise of al-Qaeda Central in Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, defied the nominal authority of al-Qaeda Central and declared himself the caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Keeping this background in mind, it becomes abundantly clear that a single militant organization operated in Syria and Iraq under the leadership of al-Baghdadi until April 2013, which chose the banner of al-Nusra Front, and that the current emir of the subsequent breakaway faction of al-Nusra Front, al-Jolani, was actually al-Baghdadi’s deputy in Syria.

Thus, the Islamic State operated in Syria since August 2011 under the designation of al-Nusra Front and it subsequently changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April 2013, after which it overran Raqqa and parts of Deir al-Zor in the summer of 2013. And in January 2014, it overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in Iraq and reached the zenith of its power when it captured Mosul in June 2014.

Excluding al-Baghdadi and a handful of his hardline Islamist aides, the rest of Islamic State’s top leadership is comprised of Saddam-era military and intelligence officials. According to a Washington Post report [3], hundreds of ex-Baathists constitute the top- and mid-tier command structure of the Islamic State who plan all the operations and direct its military strategy.

It is an indisputable fact that morale and ideology play an important role in battlefield, and well-informed readers must also be aware that the Takfiri brand of most jihadists these days has directly been inspired by the puritanical Wahhabi-Salafi ideology of Saudi Arabia, but ideology alone is not sufficient to succeed in battle.

Looking at the Islamic State’s astounding gains in Syria and Iraq in 2013-14, a question naturally arises that where did its recruits get all the training and state-of-the-art weapons that were imperative not only for hit-and-run guerrilla warfare but also for capturing and holding large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq.

According to a revelatory December 2013 news report [4] from a newspaper affiliated with the UAE government which supports the Syrian opposition, it is clearly mentioned that along with AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades and other military gear, the Saudi regime also provided machine gun-mounted Toyota pick-up trucks to every batch of five jihadists who had completed their training in the training camps located in Jordan’s border regions along southern Syria.

Once those militants crossed over to Daraa and Quneitra in southern Syria from the Jordan-Syria border, then those Toyota pickup trucks could easily have traveled all the way to Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria, and thence to Mosul and Anbar in Iraq – the former strongholds of the Islamic State.

It is clearly spelled out in the report that Syrian militants got arms and training through a secret command center known as the Military Operations Center (MOC) based in the intelligence headquarters’ building in Amman, Jordan, that was staffed by high-ranking military officials from 14 countries, including the US, European nations, Israel and the Gulf states to wage a covert war against the Syrian government.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] The Syria Effect: Al-Qaeda Fractures

[2] Al-Jolani was appointed as the emir of al-Nusra Front by al-Baghdadi

[3] Islamic State’s top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam’s army

[4] Syrian rebels get arms and advice through secret command center in Amman

Ladies and gentlemen I have here at my fingertips indisputable proof that egregious election meddling took place in the United Kingdom on Thursday.

Before you get all excited, no, it wasn’t the Russians. It wasn’t the Chinese, the Iranians, Cobra Command or the Legion of Doom. I’m not going to get any Rachel Maddow-sized paychecks for revealing this evidence to you, nor am I going to draw in millions of credulous viewers waiting with bated breath for a bombshell revelation of an international conspiracy that will invalidate the results of the election.

In fact, hardly anyone will even care.

Hardly anyone will care because this election interference has been happening right out in the open, and was perfectly legal. And nobody will suffer any consequences for it.

The centrists and mainstream media outlets are responsible for the right wing win in the UK. They spent all their time bashing and smearing Jeremy Corbyn bc they will always prioritize smashing the left, even if it means allying with the far right. Shameful.

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) December 13, 2019

Nobody will suffer any consequences for interfering in the UK election because the ones doing the interfering were extremely powerful, and that’s who the system is built to serve.

As of this writing British exit polls are indicating a landslide victory for the Tories. Numerous other factors went into this result, including most notably a Labour Party ambivalently straddling an irreconcilable divide on the issue of Brexit, but it is also undeniable that the election was affected by a political smear campaign that was entirely unprecedented in scale and vitriol in the history of western democracy. This smear campaign was driven by billionaire-controlled media outlets, along with intelligence and military agencies, as well as state media like the BBC.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has been described as the most smeared politician in history, and this is a fair description. Journalist Matt Kennard recently compiled documentation of dozens of incidentsin which former and current spooks and military officials collaborated with plutocratic media institutions to portray Corbyn as a threat to national security. Journalistic accountability advocates like Media Lens and Jonathan Cook have been working for years to compile evidence of the mass media’s attempts to paint Corbyn as everything from a terrorist sympathizer to a Communist to a Russian asset to an IRA supporter to a closet antisemite. Just the other day The Grayzone documented how establishment narrative manager Ben Nimmo was enlisted to unilaterally target Corbyn with a fact-free Russiagate-style conspiracy theory in the lead-up to the election, a psyop that was uncritically circulated by both right-wing outlets like The Telegraph as well as ostensibly “left”-wing outlets like The Guardian.

Just as Corbyn’s advocacy for the many over the plutocratic few saw him targeted by billionaire media outlets, his view of Palestinians as human beings saw him targeted by the imperialist Israel lobby as exposed in the Al Jazeera documentary The Lobby. For a mountain of links refuting the bogus antisemitism smear directed at Corbyn, a lifelong opponent of antisemitism, check out the deluge of responses to this query I made on Twitter the other day.

This interference continued right up into the day before the election, with the BBC’s political editor Laura Kuenssberg flagrantly violating election rules by reporting that early postal votes had been illegally tallied and results were “looking very grim for Labour”.

There was extreme election interference in the #UKElection. It didn't come from the Russians. It didn't come from the Chinese. It came from the billionaire class and its political/media lackeys. And it was perfectly legal.

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 12, 2019

The historically unprecedented smear campaign that was directed at Corbyn from the right, the far-right, and from within his own party had an effect. Of course it did. If you say this today on social media you’ll get a ton of comments telling you you’re wrong, telling you every vote against Labour was exclusively due to the British people not wanting to live in a Marxist dystopia, telling you it was exclusively because of Brexit, totally denying any possibility that the years of deceitful mass media narrative management that British consciousness was pummelled with day in and day out prior to the election had any impact whatsoever upon its results.

Right. Sure guys. Persistent campaigns to deliberately manipulate people’s minds using mass media have no effect on their decisions at all. I guess that’s why that whole “advertising” fad never made any money.

I am not claiming here that the billions of dollars worth of free mass media reporting that was devoted to smearing Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party had a greater effect on the election results than Brexit and other strategic stumbles in the party. I’m just saying that it definitely had a much greater effect than the few thousand dollars Russian nationals spent on social media memes in the US, which the American political/media class has been relentlessly shrieking about for three years. To deny that a media smear campaign the size and scope of that directed at Corbyn had an effect is the same as denying that advertising, a trillion-dollar industry, has an effect.

Which means that plutocrats and government agencies indisputably interfered in the British election, to an exponentially greater extent than anything the Russians are even alleged to have done. Yet according to British law it was perfectly legal, and according to British society it was perfectly acceptable. It’s perfectly legal and acceptable for powerful individuals to have a vastly greater influence on a purportedly democratic election than any of the ordinary individuals voting in it.

A free and healthy society would not work this way. A free and healthy society would view all forms of manipulation as taboo and unacceptable. A free and healthy society would not allow the will of members of one small elite class to carry more weight than the will of anyone else. A free and healthy society would give everyone an equal voice at the table, and look after everyone’s concerns. It certainly wouldn’t tolerate a few individuals who already have far too much abusing their power and wealth to obtain even more.

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Overnight the electoral map of the UK has changed significantly. Scotland is once again bathed in a sea of yellow, as England has been shrouded in blue. With the Scottish National Party obtaining 45% of the vote north of the border, and the Conservatives only 25% it is clear not only is there no mandate for Brexit in Scotland, but as leader Nicola Sturgeon has said, there is now very much a mandate for holding a second referendum on Scottish Independence.

England, on the other hand has put its support resoundingly behind Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his mantra of ‘Get Brexit Done’. With a remarkable 364 seats, as opposed to Labour’s 203 – its worst performance since 1935 – he proclaimed that a ‘political earthquake’ had occurred and that he would end all the squabbling of the last few years he would take the country out of the EU ‘no ifs and no buts’. This was a message that appealed to the majority, clearly sickened by the deadlock of Brexit. Despite the radical spending programme proposed by the Labour party, this election ended up being, as it was promoted, all about Brexit.

And this takes us to the broader context of what is in fact happening in the UK. Indeed, it’s important to see this election in the wider European political landscape. This was not just a Conservative party win, but a victory for nationalism. Not just Scottish Nationalism, but English Nationalism under the banner of Brexit, and Welsh and Irish Nationalism. For the first time ever, Northern Ireland elected more Nationalist MPs than Unionist, in what was also, like Scotland, an anti-Brexit vote, which will spur on more talk of Irish reunification. Welsh Nationalist party Plaid Cymru also held on to its four seats in Wales.

So while it may be portrayed as a landslide victory for the Conservatives, this election more than ever has shown up the cracks forming in the Union. Scottish Nationalism appears to be on an irreversible path to independence, with the question now being not if there will be a referendum on independence, but when. The strong Remain vote up north has only boosted the case for leaving the UK, as Scotland places more importance on being part of Europe, than being part of Britain. England, for its part, has clearly put more emphasis on being out of Europe, than it has on retaining the Union.

Indeed, looking at the western world in general, the popularity of nationalist and right-wing parties is undisputedly on the rise. The AfD in Germany, the National Front in France or Vox in Spain – these parties are all gaining popularity, just as Trump has in the US. And together with Johnson’s Conservatism, they all have something in common, that ‘populist’ appeal that really gets its message across. For regardless of their party leaders’ sins (Boris Johnson has been repeatedly been lambasted as a liar, racist, and misogynist), they have not been enough to deter voters, for whom clearly the nation state is what matters most.

There’s no doubt that Brexit has been a shock for the EU. Arguably Britain had always been a hesitant member, refusing to join the Euro, or join the Schengen zone (which allows borderless travel between states); it never quite developed that European mindset. But the Brexit vote took EU politicians by surprise, sending shockwaves across a Union already under pressure from Eurosceptic parties. They will no doubt breathe a sigh of relief in Brussels that the Brexit stalemate will now be broken with Boris Johnson’s parliamentary majority – finally a deal can be passed – but the reality that one of their major players finally leaving must be making them nervous.

Boris Johnson put faith in the people, and the gamble paid off. But whether he appreciates the real seismic consequences of this ‘political earthquake’ is another question. For cracks are not only emerging between Britain and Europe, but across the United Kingdom itself. It’s the price to be paid for Brexit.

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Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Members of al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham repelled a Syrian Army attack on the area of al-Katibat al-Mahjura in southern Idlib on December 12. A day earlier militants captured this area and repelled a first Syrian Army attempt to regain it. Pro-militant sources claim that at least 25 soldiers were killed in the clashes.

It’s interesting to note that radicals are using areas close to Turkish observation posts to shell government-controlled villages and towns.

On December 11, another video showing Hayat Tahrir al-Sham militants shelling Msheirfeh from the Turkish post at Suramn appeared online. Furthermore, militants used the Turkish-supplied HY-12 mortar.

The Afrin Liberation Forces, a group affiliated with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, announced that they had killed at least eleven Turkish-backed militants in attacks in northern Aleppo during the past few days.

The Turkish military is expanding its presence in the captured part of northeastern Syria. On December 12, the Turkish Defense Ministry announced that its forces had established 41 checkpoints between the border towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tell Abyad.

The defense ministry said that commandos are deployed at the checkpoints, registering vehicles’ chassis numbers, engine numbers and the personal IDs of the owners.

“Road checks are being carried out 24-7 in order to prevent incursions by PKK/YPG and ISIS terrorists, mainly their car-bomb attacks. Additionally, our commandos are also preventing smuggling thanks to the in-depth search and sweep operations being conducted,” the statement said.

8,272 vehicles have been checked and tagged on Turkish checkpoints, so far. More checkpoints are to be established soon.

Earlier, it was revealed that the Turkish Army set up fortified positions south of Tell Dhi’ab and southwest of Tell Barqah. Turkish troops there were reinforced by several Leopard 2A4 battle tanks and ACV-15 armored personnel carriers.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan called Paul Volcker “the most effective chairman in the history of the Federal Reserve.” But while Volcker, who passed away Dec. 8 at age 92, probably did have the greatest historical impact of any Fed chairman, his legacy is, at best, controversial.

“He restored credibility to the Federal Reserve at a time it had been greatly diminished,” wrote his biographer, William Silber. Volcker’s policies led to what was called “the New Keynesian revolution,” putting the Fed in charge of controlling the amount of money available to consumers and businesses by manipulating the federal funds rate (the interest rate at which banks borrow from each other). All this was because Volcker’s “shock therapy” of the early 1980s – raising the federal funds rate to an unheard of 20% – was credited with reversing the stagflation of the 1970s. But did it? Or was something else going on?

Less discussed was Volcker’s role at the behest of President Richard Nixon in taking the dollar off the gold standard, which he called “the single most important event of his career.” He evidently intended for another form of stable exchange system to replace the Bretton Woods system it destroyed, but that did not happen. Instead, freeing the dollar from gold unleashed an unaccountable central banking system that went wild printing money for the benefit of private Wall Street and London financial interests.

The power to create money can be a good and necessary tool in the hands of benevolent leaders working on behalf of the people and the economy. But like with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Disney’s “Fantasia,” if it falls in the wrong hands, it can wreak havoc on the world. Unfortunately for Volcker’s legacy and the well-being of the rest of us, his signature policies led to the devastation of the American working class in the 1980s and ultimately set the stage for the 2008 global financial crisis.

The Official Story and Where It Breaks Down

According to a Dec. 9 obituary in The Washington Post:

Mr. Volcker’s greatest historical mark was in eight years as Fed chairman. When he took the reins of the central bank, the nation was mired in a decade-long period of rapidly rising prices and weak economic growth. Mr. Volcker, overcoming the objections of many of his colleagues, raised interest rates to an unprecedented 20%, drastically reducing the supply of money and credit.

The Post acknowledges that the effect on the economy was devastating, triggering what was then the deepest economic downturn since the Depression of the 1930s, driving thousands of businesses and farms to bankruptcy and propelling the unemployment rate past 10%:

Mr. Volcker was pilloried by industry, labor unions and lawmakers of all ideological stripes. He took the abuse, convinced that this shock therapy would finally break Americans’ expectations that prices would forever rise rapidly and that the result would be a stronger economy over the longer run.

On this he was right, contends the author:

Soon after Mr. Volcker took his foot off the brake of the U.S. economy in 1981, and the Fed began lowering interest rates, the nation began a quarter century of low inflation, steady growth, and rare and mild recessions. Economists attribute that period, one of the sunniest in economic history, at least in part to the newfound credibility as an inflation-fighter that Mr. Volcker earned for the Fed.

That is the conventional version, but the stagflation of the 1970s and its sharp reversal in the early 1980s appears more likely to have been due to a correspondingly sharp rise and fall in the price of oil. There is evidence this oil shortage was intentionally engineered for the purpose of restoring the global dominance of the U.S. dollar, which had dropped precipitously in international markets after it was taken off the gold standard in 1971.

The Other Side of the Story

How the inflation rate directly followed the price of oil was tracked by Benjamin Studebaker in a 2012 article titled “Stagflation: What Really Happened in the 70’s”:

We see that the problem begins in 1973 with the ’73-’75 recession – that’s when growth first dives. In October of 1973, the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries declared an oil embargo upon the supporters of Israel – western nations. The ’73-’75 recession begins in November of 1973, immediately after. During normal recessions, inflation does not rise – it shrinks, as people spend less and prices fall. So why does inflation rise from ’73-’75? Because this recession is not a normal recession – it is sparked by an oil shortage. The price of oil more than doubles in the space of a mere few months from ’73-’74. Oil is involved in the manufacturing of plastics, in gasoline, in sneakers, it’s everywhere. When the price of oil goes up, the price of most things go up. The spike in the oil price is so large that it drives up the costs of consumer goods throughout the rest of the economy so fast that wages fail to keep up with it. As a result, you get both inflation and a recession at once.

… Terrified by the double-digit inflation rate in 1974, the Federal Reserve switches gears and jacks the interest rate up to near 14%. … The economy slips back into the throws of the recession for another year or so, and the unemployment rate takes off, rising to around 9% by 1975. …

Then, in 1979, the economy gets another oil price shock (this time caused by the Revolution in Iran in January of that year) in which the price of oil again more than doubles. The result is a fall in growth and inflation knocked all the way up into the teens. The Federal Reserve tries to fight the oil-driven inflation by raising interest rates high into the teens, peaking out at 20% in 1980.

… [B]y 1983, the unemployment rate has peaked at nearly 11%. To fight this, the Federal Reserve knocks the interest rate back below 10%, and meanwhile, alongside all of this, Ronald Reagan spends lots of money and expands the state in ’82/83. … Why does inflation not respond by returning? Because oil prices are falling throughout this period, and by 1985 have collapsed utterly.

The federal funds rate was just below 10% in 1975 at the height of the early stagflation crisis. How could the same rate that was responsible for inflation in the 1970s drop the consumer price index to acceptable levels after 1983? And if the federal funds rate has that much effect on inflation, why is the extremely low 1.55% rate today not causing hyperinflation? What Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is now fighting instead is deflation, a lack of consumer demand causing stagnant growth in the real, producing economy.

Thus it looks as if oil, not the federal funds rate, was the critical factor in the rise and fall of consumer prices in the 1970s and 1980s. “Stagflation” was just a predictable result of the shortage of this essential commodity at a time when the country was not energy-independent. The following chart from Business Insider Australia shows the historical correlations:

The Plot Thickens

But there’s more. The subplot is detailed by William Engdahl in “The Gods of Money”(2009). To counter the falling dollar after it was taken off the gold standard, U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and President Nixon held a clandestine meeting in 1972 with the Shah of Iran. Then, in 1973, a group of powerful financiers and politicians met secretly in Sweden to discuss how the dollar might effectively be “backed” by oil. An arrangement was finalized in which the oil-producing countries of OPEC would sell their oil only in U.S. dollars, and the dollars would wind up in Wall Street and London banks, where they would fund the burgeoning U.S. debt.

For the OPEC countries, the quid pro quo was military protection, along with windfall profits from a dramatic boost in oil prices. In 1974, according to plan, an oil embargo caused the price of oil to quadruple, forcing countries without sufficient dollar reserves to borrow from Wall Street and London banks to buy the oil they needed. Increased costs then drove up prices worldwide.

The story is continued by Matthieu Auzanneau in “Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History”:

The panic caused by the Iranian Revolution raised a new tsunami of inflation that was violently unleashed on the world economy, whose consequences were even greater than what took place in 1973. Once again, the sharp, unexpected increase in the price of crude oil instantly affected transportation, construction, and agriculture – confirming oil’s ubiquity. … The time of draconian monetarist policies advocated by economist Milton Friedman, David Rockefeller’s protégé, had arrived. The Bank of England’s interest rate was around 16% in 1980. The impact on the economy was brutal. …

Appointed by President Carter in August 1979, Paul Volcker, the new chief of the Federal Reserve, administered the same shock treatment [drastically raising interest rates] to the American economy. Carter had initially offered the position to David Rockefeller; Chase Manhattan’s president politely declined the offer and “strongly” recommended that Carter appeal to Volcker (who had been a Chase vice president in the 1960s). To stop the spiral of inflation that endangered the profitability and stability of all banks, the Federal Reserve increased its benchmark rate to 20% in 1980 and 1981. The following year, 1982, the American economy experienced a 2% recession, much more severe than the recession of 1974.

In an article in American Opinion in 19179, Gary Allen, author of “None Dare Call It Conspiracy: The Rockefeller Files” (1971), observed that both Volcker and Henry Kissinger were David Rockefeller protégés. Volcker had worked for Rockefeller at Chase Manhattan Bank and was a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1971, when he was Treasury undersecretary for monetary affairs, Volcker played an instrumental role in the top-secret Camp David meeting at which the president approved taking the dollar off the gold standard. Allen wrote that it was Volcker who “led the effort to demonetize gold in favor of bookkeeping entries as part of another international banking grab. His appointment now threatens an economic bust.”

Volcker’s Real Legacy

Allen went on:

How important is the post to which Paul Volcker has been appointed? The New York Times tells us: “As the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System, which by law is independent of the Administration and Congress, has exclusive authority to control the amount of money available to consumers and businesses.” … This means that the Federal Reserve Board has life-and-death power over the economy.

And that is Paul Volcker’s true legacy. At a time when the Fed’s credibility was “greatly diminished,” he restored to it the life-and-death power over the economy that it continues to exercise today. His “shock therapy” of the early 1980s broke the backs of labor and the unions, bankrupted the savings and loans, and laid the groundwork for the “liberalization” of the banking laws that allowed securitization, derivatives, and the repo market to take center stage. As noted by Jeff Spross in The Week, Volcker’s chosen strategy essentially loaded all the pain onto the working class, an approach to monetary policy that has shaped Fed policy ever since.

In 2008-09, the Fed was an opaque accessory to the bank heist in which massive fraud was covered up and the banks were made whole despite their criminality. Taking the dollar off the gold standard allowed the Fed to engage in the “quantitative easing” that underwrote this heist. Bolstered by OPEC oil backing, uncoupling the dollar from gold also allowed it to maintain and expand its status as global reserve currency.

What was Volcker’s role in all this? He is described by those who knew him as a personable man who lived modestly and didn’t capitalize on his powerful position to accumulate personal wealth. He held a lifelong skepticism of financial elites and financial “innovation.” He proposed a key restriction on speculative activity by banks that would become known as the “Volcker Rule.” In the late 1960s, he opposed allowing global exchange rates to float freely, which he said would allow speculators to “pounce on a depreciating currency, pushing it even lower.” And he evidently regretted the calamity caused by his 1980s shock treatment, saying if he could do it over again, he would do it differently.

It could be said that Volcker was a good man, who spent his life trying to rectify that defining moment when he helped free the dollar from gold. Ultimately, eliminating the gold standard was a necessary step in allowing the money supply to expand to meet the needs of trade. The power to create money can be a useful tool in the right hands. It just needs to be recaptured and wielded in the public interest, following the lead of the American colonial governments that first demonstrated its very productive potential.

Ellen Brown chairs the Public Banking Institute and has written thirteen books, including her latest, Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. she is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

This article was first posted on Truthdig.com.

With the world fixated on Turkish actions against Syria, Greece and Libya at the moment, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate of the United States Congress approved a bill, “Promoting American  National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act,” spearheaded and thoroughly promoted by staunch anti-Syria/Venezuela/Iran/Russia Democratic Senator Robert Menendez who celebrated the bills passing on his Twitter. The Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 18-4 to send the bill for a vote in the full Senate.

The approval of the bill was widely reported in the mainstream media as an “anti-Turkey bill.” Senator Jim Risch, the panel’s Republican chairman, a fellow endorser of the bill with Menendez, said that the approval of this bill is because of the “drift by this country, Turkey, to go in an entirely different direction than what they have in the past. They’ve thumbed their nose at us, and they’ve thumbed their nose at their other NATO allies.”

According to the draft bill, the Turkish acquisition of the powerful S-400 missile defense system gives grounds to impose sanctions against this country, under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In particular, the document restricts the sale of U.S. weapons to Turkey and imposes sanctions on Turkish officials responsible for supplying weapons towards their illegal military operation in Syria.

Turkey signed in December 2017 the first contract with Russia for the purchase of the S-400 for a value of $2.5 billion, which caused tension in relations between Ankara and Washington. The U.S. demanded that Ankara renounce that transaction and buy U.S. Patriot systems, and threatened to delay or cancel the sale of the F-35 fighters to Turkey. Ankara refused to make concessions and assured that its purpose of acquiring Russian systems remains firm.

What was missed, perhaps intentionally by the majority of the mainstream media is that this bill has a heavy anti-Russian/Syrian component to it. Although not as detailed and expansive as the Turkish section of the bill, it claims that “the Russian Federation and Iran continue to exploit a security vacuum in Syria and continue to pose a threat to vital United States national security interests,” without explaining what these security interests are, exactly as we have become accustomed to.

According to the bill, there will be a

“list of each Russian person that, on or after such date of enactment, knowingly exports, transfers, or otherwise provides to Syria significant financial, material, or technological support that contributes materially to the ability of the Government of Syria to acquire defense articles, defense services, and related information.”

Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria, which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse to impose sanctions.

These proposed new sanctions that will have to pass the House of Representatives, which passed its own anti-Turkish sanctions bill by an overwhelming 403-16 vote in October, is part of a wider effort for the U.S. to keep pressurizing Russia’s economy. On December 9, the committees of both chambers of the U.S. Congress previously agreed on the military budget for 2020, which includes restrictions against the Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream pipelines to bring Russian energy to Europe, infrastructures designed to raise Europe’s energy security. The U.S. bill that provides sanctions against companies participating in the laying of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline aims to obtain unilateral advantages in the gas area to the detriment of the interests of the countries of Europe. This prompted the chairman of the Board of Directors of the Russian-German Foreign Chamber of Commerce, Matthias Schepp, to explain that the new measures against Nord Stream 2 affect not only Russia, but, above all, European companies and Germany’s energy interests.

Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S., which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk.

Effectively, the “Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act,” which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been pioneering anti-sanction measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity.

Paul Antonopoulos, Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies

The decision by Democrats sitting on the House Judiciary Committee to approve Articles of Impeachment that will be affirmed in a full vote of the House of Representatives just handed Donald Trump a probable victory in the 2020 election barring a sudden economic downturn, the eruption of an unlikely war, or yet another revolt by a discontented electorate.  The Democrats know that conviction in the Republican controlled Senate is impossible.  Why pursue a dead end agenda? 

From all appearances, the strategy seems to involve an attempt to discredit Trump and increase the chances of defeating the orange tinted billionaire in next year’s November election.  If that’s the calculation, the Democrats are grossly misguided as Trump is America’s second Teflon President, the invariably cheerful Ronald Reagan being the first.  Nothing sticks.  Reagan beat Iran Contra-gate. Trump beat Russia-gate and will most certainly emerge unscathed from the Ukraine-gate impeachment proceedings in the eyes of his supporters thus lending credence to the fiction that he is fighting the swamp.

As for the popularity of Reagan and Trump, both opportunistic politicians had a simple persistently optimistic ‘Make America Great Again’ feel good message that played well amongst the disenchanted masses.  Reagan won office amidst the economic stagflation and malaise of the Carter years. Trump won the White House after the prolonged recession of the Bush and Obama eras. The extended economic slump that propelled Trump to victory occurred as a direct result of the financialization of America and the subprime meltdown.  It should be well understood that Wall Street’s speculative frenzy was financed by the deindustrialization of the United States, a global flight of capital that cast millions of American workers on the scrap heap of various rustbelt cities.

Both Reagan and Trump used rightwing populist rhetoric to win their respective elections only to serve the interests of the corporate plutocracy as exemplified by the enormous tax cuts both gave to the upper class and the corporations they own.

So why don’t the Democrats fight Trump politically and contest his far right policies of upward wealth transfer; deregulation and privatization of the economy; slashing of food stamp benefits; environmental destruction; unending war; unqualified support for apartheid Israel, the Saudi monarchy and the Egyptian dictatorship; and the imposition of deadly economic sanctions on Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela?

Because they agree with the substance of these policy orientations that’s why. The Democrats pose no serious alternative to the Republicans on matters of economic and geopolitical significance, the anti-corporatist noises being made by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren notwithstanding.  Stripped of all pretenses, both parties advance an imperialist agenda that protects the process of global capital accumulation in America’s corporate neo-liberal empire.  Not a dime’s worth of difference on that score between the two rival gangs that former independent Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura once insightfully referred to as Democrips and Rebloodlicans.

The difference between the two parties in foreign policy is fundamentally tactical and stylistic, not strategic or substantive.  In the realm of international relations both parties genuflect before the alter of international law and national sovereignty in word while violating their essence in deed by supporting the peculiar notion of ‘American exceptionalism’.

Diplomatically, both political regimes employ a negotiating strategy that conceals the clenched fist of mafia-like demands within a velvet glove of duplicitous dialogue.  They make offers that cannot be refused.   The price of refusal is regime change.  For example, sequential coup  d’etats were engineered by the CIA in Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973, Haiti 1991, Honduras 2009 and Bolivia 2019.

Militarily, the Republicans favor unilateralism, the Democrats prefer multilateralism; the Republicans utilize pre-emptive invasions, the Democrats employ humanitarian and responsibility to protect (R2P) interventionist rationalizations.  Both parties backed the overarching strategic paradigms for global hegemony after World War II, namely the ‘War on Communism’ and the more resent ‘War on Terrorism’.  Serial U.S. military interventions occurred in Korea 1950, Vietnam 1965, Dominican Republic 1965, Lebanon 1982, Panama 1983, Iraq 1991, Somalia 1993, Yugoslavia 1994, Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003.  These interventions were led by Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

The foregoing lists documenting covert and overt interventions are partial, the criminal pattern is evident.

Domestically, the Republicans pose as the party of individualism and self-reliance. They serve the American plutocracy by hiding behind the pretense of support for personal freedom and individual rights against a corrupt government and media.  The Republicans appeal to religious fundamentalists who oppose abortion, separation of church and state, and LGBT rights; second amendment literalists who oppose gun-regulation; free market fundamentalists who hate taxation of the rich, corporate regulation, trade unions, immigration; big government (meaning welfare for the poor); and unrestrained militarists.  They are openly the party of wealth, war and bigotry.

To court favor with their domestic voting base, Democrats have adopted the veil of identity politics to disguise their support for the American plutocracy.  They support greater social rights for women, the LGBT community, immigrants, racial minorities and some modicum of a diminished welfare state for the poor.  But the Democrats are caught in a web of contradictions because of their support for the plutocratic minority and its predacious wars.

They claim to support American workers but signed the NAFTA trade deal that destroyed millions of jobs in the heartland.  They pretend to support main street but deregulated the financial industry by removing Glass Steagall and continuing the Bush bailout of Wall street.  They opposed Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants but supported the invasion and bombing of the very countries that Muslim’s fled.  They support refugee status for Central American immigrants but engineered a coup d’etat of the Honduran socialist President Zelaya in 2009 causing a flood of migrants from a newly installed neo-liberal regime that deeply impoverished country.  They support LGBT rights but are closely allied to Saudi Arabia, a country that executes its gay subjects giving a new and hideous meaning to the heterosexual dictatorship once so aptly described by Christopher Isherwood.

No small wonder the majority of Americans view Washington as a fetid swamp inhabited by creatures that need to be flushed down the drain of history.  Electoral politics will never accomplish this ameliorative task because of the deep divisions that animate a political terrain in freedom’s land that has been systematically fractured over the past several decades by both political parties on behalf of the wealthy few at the expense of an increasingly despairing many.  A revolutionary politics is needed to initiate the monumental project of progressive social transformation.  But that brand of radical political ideology is sadly missing amongst the ranks of Trump lovers and Trump haters in the age of personality politics.

In the end, it may be useful to recall that ‘America has only one political party, the party of private property consisting of two right wings’, as the iconoclastic writer Gore Vidal never tired of asserting.  Only when the property party and its benefactors are directly confronted can genuine social change occur.

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

Beginning next year, a neurotoxic pesticide that at low doses can trigger brain and behavioral damage in children will be banned from use by agricultural operations in New York State.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo has directed the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation to take immediate steps to phase out all aerial applications of chlorpyrifos for all uses, except spraying apple tree trunks, by December 2020. All uses of the pesticide will be banned by 2021.

The state legislature passed a bill banning the crop chemical earlier this year, but Cuomo vetoed the measure. He argued that he did not agree with taking such action “by legislative decree,” preferring instead to rely on the judgment of “chemists, health experts, and other subject matter experts in this field.”

New York is now the third state to take such action. California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a complete ban on chlorpyrifos in October, and in 2018 Hawaii was the first state to act, banning all uses of the pesticide.

A 2015 analysis of federal data by EWG found chlorpyrifos was most heavily used in Columbia, Ulster and Orange counties in upstate New York.

The European Union announced a phaseout of chlorpyrifos on Dec. 6.

The Environmental Protection Agency was poised to implement a nationwide ban on chlorpyrifos early in 2017. But after the 2016 election, Dow launched an aggressive campaign to block that decision.

Dow, the pesticide’s main manufacturer, donated $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration festivities, and its CEO met privately with then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Ignoring his agency’s own scientists, Pruitt aborted the scheduled ban soon after.

Pruitt resigned in disgrace in July 2018 after a scandal-ridden 18-month tenure, but Andrew Wheeler, who took over as agency administrator, fought in federal court to keep chlorpyrifos legal.

EWG President Ken Cook said Cuomo’s move demonstrates the kind of leadership needed from elected officials to put the health and safety of children ahead of the narrow interests of the pesticide industry.

“The children of New York will be safer as a result of the decision to ban this pesticide that can cause irreversible neurological damage,” Cook said. “Chemical agribusiness may hold sway within the Trump EPA over pesticide policy, but not in those states where protecting the health of children and farmworkers is a top priority.”

The Environmental Working Group is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization that empowers people to live healthier lives in a healthier environment. Through research, advocacy and unique education tools, EWG drives consumer choice and civic action.