Global Research

First published by WhoWhatWhy and Global Research at the outset of the Trump Administration  in February 2017

When the uninitiated think of the “Deep State,” they tend to imagine a group of men getting together in a room, smoking cigars and plotting world domination. But the Deep State is not one coordinated network of people controlling the government from the shadows. 

Instead, it refers to individuals and groups that have the resources to shape the direction of the world to their benefit and don’t hesitate to make use of them. At times, the interests of different factions of the Deep State collide. That often happens when the direction of the world is rapidly changing, as is the case now after the election of Donald Trump. 

Nobody knows this better than Peter Dale Scott, the foremost expert on the US Deep State. Below, you will find a new introduction to the paperback version of The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Struggle for U.S. Democracy, Updated Edition (copyright 2017), (with permission of the publisher, Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved). 

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, poet, and 2002 recipient of the Lannan Poetry Award. 

His political books include Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007), The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008), American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan  (2010), The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014) and  Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House (2015). A complete bibliography can be found on his website at http://www.peterdalescott.net.

***

On February 3, 2017, the Wall Street Journal reported President Trump’s plans to pave the way for a broad rollback of the recent financial reforms of Wall Street.[1] Although no surprise, the news was in ironic contrast to the rhetoric of his campaign, when he spent months denouncing both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for their links to Goldman Sachs, even when his campaign’s Financial Chairman was a former Goldman Sachs banker, Steve Mnuchin (now Trump’s Treasury Secretary).

Trump was hardly the first candidate to run against the banking establishment while surreptitiously taking money from big bankers. So did Hitler in 1933; so did Obama in 2008. (In Obama’s final campaign speech of 2008, he attacked “the greed and irresponsibility of Wall Street.”[2] But it was revealed later that Wall Street bankers and financial insiders, chiefly from Goldman Sachs, had raised $42.2 million for Obama’s 2008 campaign, more than for any previous candidate in history.)[3]

However, Trump’s connections to big money, both new (often self-made) and old (mostly institutional) were not only more blatant than usual; some were also possibly more sinister. Trump’s campaign was probably the first ever to be (as we shall see) scrutinized by the FBI for “financial connections with Russian financial figures,” and even with a Russian bank whose Washington influence was attacked years ago, after it was allegedly investigated in Russia for possible mafia connections.[4]

Trump’s appointment of the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin (under Clinton) and Hank Paulson (under Bush), has reinforced recent speculation about Trump’s relationship to what is increasingly referred to as the deep state. That is the topic of this essay.

But we must first see what is really meant by ‘the deep state”.

What Is Meant by the Deep State?

Since 2007, when I first referred to a “deep state” in America, the term has become a meme, and even the topic of a cautious essay in The New York Times.[5] Recently it has been enhanced by a new meme, “the ’deep state’ versus Trump,” a theme that promoted Donald Trump as a genuine outsider, and entered the electoral campaign as early as August 2016.[6]

Trump reinforced this notion when he expressed opposition to America’s international defense alliances and trade deals that both traditional parties had long supported, as well as by his promise to “drain the Washington swamp.” It was encouraged again post-election by Trump’s longtime political advisor Roger Stone, formerly of the Washington lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, once a major feature of that swamp.[7]

But those who saw the election as a contest between outsider Trump and a “deep state” tended to give two different meanings to this new term. On the one hand were those who saw the deep state as “a conglomerate of insiders” incorporating all those, outside and inside the traditional state, who “run the country no matter who is in the White House…and without the consent of voters.”[8] On the other were those who, like Chris Hedges, limited the “deep state” to those perverting constitutional American politics from the margin of the Washington Beltway — “the security and surveillance apparatus, the war machine.”[9]

But both of these simplistic definitions, suitable for campaign rhetoric, omit the commanding role played by big money — what used to be referred to as Wall Street, but now includes an increasingly powerful number of maverick non-financial billionaires like the Koch brothers. All serious studies of the deep state, including Mike Lofgren’s The Deep State and Philip Giraldi’s Deep State America as well as this book, acknowledge the importance of big money.[10]

It is important to recognize moreover, that the current division between “red” and “blue” America is overshadowed by a corresponding division at the level of big money, one that contributed greatly to the ugliness of the 2016 campaign. In The American Deep State (p. 30), I mention, albeit very briefly, the opposition of right-wing oilmen and the John Birch Society “to the relative internationalism of Wall Street.”[11] That opposition has become more powerful, and better financed, than ever before.

It has also evolved. As I noted in The American Deep State, (p. 14), the deep state “is not a structure but a system, as difficult to define, but also as real and powerful, as a weather system.” A vigorous deep state, like America, encompasses dynamic processes continuously generating new forces within it like the Internet — just as a weather system is not fixed but changes from day to day.

The Current Divisions in America and Its Wealth

Three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump, “Frontline” on PBS began a two-part program, “Divided States of America,” documenting how the polarization of American public opinion has contributed to both stagnation in Washington and widespread popular anger, on both the left and the right, against the traditional two-party system.

The Frontline show failed to address the major role played by money in aggravating this public division. For example, it followed many popular accounts in tracing the emergence of the tax-revolt Tea Party to the apparently spontaneous call on February 19, 2009, by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli in Chicago, for a “tea party,” in response to President Barack Obama’s expensive bailouts.[12]

However, this event (on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, a deep state institution) was not only staged, it had been prepared for in advance. A domain name, chicagoteaparty.org, had been registered for it in 2008, before Obama had even been elected.[13] Jane Mayer has conclusively demonstrated the role in the funding groups behind the Tea Party played by the brothers Charles and David Koch, who in 2014 were two of the ten richest people on earth, worth a combined $32 billion as owners of the largest private oil company in America.[14]  (Today their wealth is estimated at $84 billion.)

More important, as Mayer pointed out,

the Tea Party was not “a new strain” in American politics. The scale was unusual, but history had shown that similar reactionary forces had attacked virtually every Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt. Earlier business-funded right-wing movements, from the Liberty League [of the 1930s] to the John Birch Society to [Richard Mellon] Scaife’s [anti-Clinton] Arkansas Project, all had cast Democratic presidents as traitors, usurpers, and threats to the Constitution. The undeniable element of racial resentment that tinged many Tea Party rallies was also an old and disgracefully enduring story in American politics.[15]

The Kochs’ lavish funding of the Tea Party, along with anti-tax candidates and climate-change deniers, was only one more phase in what I described in 1996 as

an enduring struggle between “America Firsters” and “New World Order” globalists, pitting, through nearly all of this [20th] century, the industry-oriented (e.g. the National Association of Manufacturers) against the financial-oriented (e.g. the Council on Foreign Relations), two different sources of wealth.[16]

A decade later Trump has revived the slogan of “America First!”, and vowed to reconsider both NATO and multilateral trade. Both factions are still there today; but, as we shall see, both now have international connections.

American Politics and the Increase in Wealth Disparity

Mayer’s helpful overview overlooks the alarming increase in wealth disparity since 1980 and especially in the last decade. Ten years ago, when I published The Road to 9/11, I noted that 225 billionaires owned as much as the bottom fifty percent of people in the world, and I repeated Kevin Phillips’ warning that

As the twenty-first century gets underway, the imbalance of wealth and democracy in the United States is unsustainable….  Either democracy must be renewed, with politics brought back to life, or wealth is likely to cement a new and less democratic regime— plutocracy by some other name.[17]

In 2010, only three years later, that indicator of disparity had risen up the pyramid from 225 billionaires to 43; and today the figure has shrunk still further to eight.[18]

As The New York Times reported in October 2015, just 158 families supplied half of the early money that had already poured into the 2016 campaign, and 138 of these families supported Republican candidates. Sixty-four of these 138 families made their fortunes in finance, mostly in hedge funds, private equity or venture capital. A further seventeen families were wealthy from energy, mostly oil and gas. What both these two groups were seeking was lower taxes and also deregulation: repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act reforming Wall Street, and (according to the Times) a lifting of the 40-year-old ban on export of US oil.[19]

Many were also “tied to networks of ideological donors who, on the left and the right alike, have sought to fundamentally reshape their own political parties” — on the one hand the twice-yearly anti-tax seminars hosted by the Kochs, and on the other “the Democracy Alliance, a network of liberal donors who have pushed Democrats to move aggressively on climate change legislation and progressive taxation.”[20]

Once again, a division in the American public was being fomented and funded by an old division within Big Money — roughly speaking, between those Trilateral Commission progressives, many flourishing from the new technologies of the global Internet, who wish the state to do more than at present about problems like wealth disparity, racial injustice and global warming, and those Heritage Foundation conservatives, many from finance and oil, who want it to do even less.

We see this ideological split even among the top eight US super billionaires in 2016, four of whom (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Larry Ellison) have made their fortunes from the Internet and want the present US to progress more or less along its recent course. Warren Buffett (once number one, now number three) endorsed Hillary Clinton early on, “while calling for increased taxes on the country’s highest wage earners.”[21] Deeply dissatisfied with the status quo were numbers seven and eight, the Koch brothers, who “have fortunes largely drawn from fossil fuels,” and have “poured money into fighting solar.”[22]

The Kochs assembled a donor network of fellow mavericks, many of whom were distinguished by private ownership of their businesses, and many (Jane Mayer pointed out) “had serious past or ongoing legal problems.”[23] In early 2015 their organization revealed that it would spend $889 million leading up to the 2016 presidential contest. As USA Today reported, this unprecedented sum, “unrivaled for an outside organization, represents more than double the nearly $400 million the Republican National Committee (RNC) raised and spent during the 2012 presidential election cycle.”[24] This huge organized flow of outside funds has contributed greatly to the weakening of party discipline in Congress, especially among Republicans.

Throughout the campaign, the Kochs and Trump (whose chief backer was another maverick billionaire, Robert Mercer) were apparently at arm’s length from each other. Vanity Fair suggested in September that at that time the Kochs were “in direct opposition to the Mercers,” in a “civil war that threatens to tear the party apart” — even though, starting around 2011, the Mercers had been donating “at least $1 million a year to the Koch network.”[25]

Whatever the tensions, it was clear after the election that Trump in his transition team had “surrounded himself with people tied to the Kochs.”[26] Soon the Trump nominee for Education Secretary was Betsy DeVos, another major billionaire contributor to the Koch donor list. (Betsy’s brother Erik Prince, famous as the founder and owner of the notorious private army Blackwater, was quietly advising the Trump transition team on matters related to intelligence and defense.)[27]

And Trump’s CIA Director is Mike Pompeo, formerly a Koch-sponsored congressman “who was so closely entwined with the climate-change denying Koch brothers that he was known as the ‘congressman from Koch.”[28] (The new administration has reportedly instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website.)[29]

Since his election, Trump has attacked the U.S. intelligence agencies for leaking information, and reporters as being among “the most dishonest human beings on Earth.” But while attacking the Washington establishment, he is clearly reflecting the dissident big money faction of the deep state, no longer as marginal as it was in the era of the John Birch Society and later Goldwater.[30]

As the campaign and pre-inaugural preparations progressed, it became clearer that Trump, no stranger to the world of big money, had brought the old big money camp into his campaign, as well as the new. In January 2017 Trump nominated to be his SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, a Sullivan & Cromwell partner who in the past has represented Goldman Sachs and other big banks in Wall street superdeals.[31]

Clayton is the fourth former Goldman-related Trump nominee for the new administration, all of them chosen under the eyes of Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, himself a former Goldman banker who moved on to become a Tea Party coordinator and executive director at the alt-right Breitbart News. (Bannon once promised to build “an insurgent, center-right populist movement that is virulently anti-establishment.”[32] It took only 10 days in the White House to make it clear that Bannon had “rapidly amassed power in the West Wing, eclipsing chief of staff Reince Priebus.”) [33]

Undoubtedly Trump entered politics as a maverick real estate investor and TV star, funding the early stages of his campaign himself. But as his campaign grew, he came to reach out more and more to Wall Street financing, notably from Robert Mercer, the co-CEO of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies,[34] Then Trump named as his campaign’s Finance Chairman Steve Mnuchin, formerly of Skull and Bones and Goldman Sachs.[35]

As many predicted, Mnuchin later became Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, which could make him the third former Goldman executive to lead Treasury in the last four administrations, after Robert Rubin and Hank Paulson. In addition, Trump has named Gary Cohn, former president of Goldman Sachs, as his chief economic advisor and Director of the National Economic Council.[36]

In short, Trump did not challenge but preserved the status of what Jeffrey Sachs has called

the Wall Street-Washington complex, which has steered the financial system toward control by a few politically powerful Wall Street firms, notably Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and a handful of other financial firms.[37]

Meanwhile, just as Trump expanded his financial base to all elements of big money, so Wall Street, as it always does, ensured it had good connections to both of the final candidates. After Mnuchin joined the Trump campaign, Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs announced in October 2016 his support of Hillary Clinton.[38]

All of this complexity calls for further reflection on the nature of the deep state.

Turkey and the International Deep State

To survey the more serious accounts of the “deep state in the United States,” it is useful to begin with their summary in Wikipedia under this title: as a “state within a state, which [authors] suspect exerts influence and control over public policy, regardless of which political party controls the country’s democratic institutions.”

Citing five different authors, (including myself) Wikipedia expands this definition to include the military–industrial complex, intelligence community, Wall Street, plutocrats, “big oil,” the mainstream media, national security officials, and Silicon Valley.[39]

All five authors see two essential components to the deep state. On the one hand is big money. On the other are the extra-constitutional Washington Beltway agencies like CIA that Wall Street originally campaigned for and staffed, along with the government-oriented industries that these agencies and the Pentagon work with and outsource to.[40]

Besides myself, Philip Giraldi and Mike Lofgren have also recognized that “the term was actually coined in Turkey, and is said to be a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary, and organized crime.”[41] A more precise definition is that of Hugh Roberts:

The notion of the deep state … originated in Turkey, where it connoted not merely the secretive apparatuses of the state such as the police and intelligence services but above all the shady nexus between them, certain politicians and organised crime.[42]

But I may be the only author showing the extent to which the Turkish deep state, when first exposed in 1996, both overlapped with the American deep state and revealed its dark underside.

The Turkish term “deep State” (deren devlet) was coined after the so-called Susurluk incident, a 1996 car crash whose victims included the deputy chief of the Istanbul Police Department, a Member of Parliament, and Abdullah Çatlı, an international heroin trafficker and killer recruited by the Turkish police for “special missions” and paid in heroin while he was officially being sought by the Turkish authorities for murder.[43]

We see in the Susurluk incident three features of the Turkish deep state, unmentioned by Lofgren, that not only resemble the American deep state but are actually a significant component of it (and still of major importance today).

The first is that it was partly international: Abdullah Çatlı was part of a death squad chiefly recruited from the ranks of the Turkish OHD (Ozel Harp Dairesi – Special Warfare Department). The OHD had originally been set up with US encouragement as the Turkish branch of NATO’s Operation Gladio, a stay-behind force in the event of a Warsaw Pact invasion. Diverted and renamed Counter-Guerrilla to suppress the Kurdish resistance movement, the OHD troops continued to be trained in the US and to use US counterinsurgency manuals.[44]

Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from Minestrone / Wikimedia, David Benbennick / Wikimedia and Abdullah Çatli / Twitter.

The second is that the international deep state connection revealed at Susurluk was partly criminal: the sanctioned para-state activities with Çatlı were financed by billions of dollars in profits from drug smuggling; just as the CIA in Laos and elsewhere utilized a protected drug traffic to finance its covert operations in Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Afghanistan.[45] Çatlı, a convicted drug trafficker with a special Turkish passport, was himself part of this post-Gladio international network:

Çatlı, according to Yalçın and Yurdakal, visited Miami in 1982 in the company of a known Gladio agent (and Italian neo-Nazi) and was considered to be “under the protection” of the CIA.[46]

(The Gladio agent was Stefano delle Chiaie, who had his own connections to state-sponsored terrorist activities in Italy, to the World Anti-Communist League or WACL, and more specifically to death squads working for the Operation Condor murder operation in Latin America, sponsored by the right-wing dictatorships in the region.[47] The CIA had its own shadowy connections to all three, as well as to Gladio.)

The third feature of the Susurluk event is that it was and remains a largely inscrutable intelligence-related event, or what in this book I call a “deep event,” like similar events in the United States, such as the John F. Kennedy assassination. Nearly all western accounts of the car crash overlook the claim that it was not an accident but an intended assassination.[48] Moreover the Turkish deep state was later suspected in the Turkish coup attempt of Ergenekon in 2007,[49] and its one-time parent, the US deep state, in the failed military coup of July 2016.[50] Both of these coup attempts reveal elements of what I mean by deep events.

Not just in Turkey, but also in the United States, respected authors have linked the deep state to what I call (pp. 98, 119) “structural deep events,” unsolved mysterious events that affect the political system of the country.[51] As I write, there have been a series of charges that, if substantiated, would seem to link Trump not only to an element of the American deep state, but also to an element of the Russian deep state.

Trump and the International Deep State

The first charge against Trump was the CIA-backed claim that Russian intelligence agencies hacked organizations affiliated both with Hillary Clinton and with the Democratic Party, and that the hacks were apparently “designed to benefit Donald Trump’s presidential aspirations in one fashion or another.”[52] (Politico also reported that “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office.”)[53]

A second charge against Trump, closely related, was that

as major banks in America stopped lending him money following his many bankruptcies, the Trump organization was forced to seek financing from non-traditional institutions. Several had direct ties to Russian financial interests in ways that have raised eyebrows. What’s more, several of Trump’s senior advisors have business ties to Russia or its satellite politicians.[54]

In May 2016 the Washington Post and Buzzfeed charged specifically that

Trump’s top adviser, Paul Manafort, has spent much of his recent career working for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine, and doing complex deals for an oligarch with close ties to Putin.…  Manafort … has, according to court documents, managed tens of millions of dollars for Oleg Deripaska, an oligarch denied entry to the U.S. reportedly for ties to organized crime, but so close to Vladimir Putin that top Russian officials fought (unsuccessfully) to get him a visa.[55]

On the eve of the new Trump presidency The New York Times reported that

American law enforcement and intelligence agencies are examining intercepted communications and financial transactions as part of a broad investigation into possible links between Russian officials and associates of President-elect Donald J. Trump, including his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort… and Roger Stone.[56]

In January 2017 Buzzfeed leaked the source of these charges: a private intelligence report transmitted by the CIA to Trump.[57] This report, by former British intelligence Christopher Steele, did not as released mention Deripaska at all, but contained instead an unexplained discussion of Deripaska’s bankers, the Alfa Group, along with its founders Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven.

Just before the election The New York Times reported that

For much of the summer, the F.B.I. … scrutinized advisers close to Donald J. Trump, looked for financial connections with Russian financial figures, … and even chased a lead — which they ultimately came to doubt — about a possible secret channel of email communication from the Trump Organization to a Russian bank….

F.B.I. officials spent weeks examining computer data showing an odd stream of activity to a Trump Organization server and Alfa Bank. … But the F.B.I. ultimately concluded that there could be an innocuous explanation, like a marketing email or spam, for the computer contacts.[58]

The next day the Jewish paper Forward raised a question, not yet answered, about Alfa Bank’s principal owner, the philanthropist oligarch Mikhail Fridman, listed as #73 on the Forbes list of the world’s billionaires in 2016 (once #20), and the second wealthiest Russian:

Is a Russian Jewish oligarch with Israeli citizenship and close ties to both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu running a secret cyber-communications channel between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian authorities? [59]

The various speculations about the Trump link to Alfa and Fridman, whether innocuous or shady, justify a closer look at the charges about Alfa’s influence two decades ago, when Alfa’s dubious clout in Washington included protection from both senior Democrats like Richard Burt of Kissinger McLarty Associates and also senior Republicans like Dick Cheney.[60] As The Guardian reported in 2002, Alfa’s 1990s clout in Washington was demonstrated when its oil company, Tyumen,

was loaned $489m in credits by the US Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburton…. The [Clinton] White House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol Hill [which then was Republican controlled]…. The State Department’s concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for mafia connections.[61]

Veteran newsman Knut Royce (a major contributor to three Pulitzer Prize-winning stories) reported the details:

Under the guidance of Richard Cheney, a get-the-government-out-of-my-face conservative, Halliburton Company over the past five years has emerged as a corporate welfare hog, benefiting from at least $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans.

One of these loans was approved in April by the U.S. Export-Import Bank. It guaranteed $489 million in credits to a Russian oil company [Tyumen, owned by Alfa] whose roots are imbedded in a legacy of KGB and Communist Party corruption, as well as drug trafficking and organized crime funds, according to Russian and U.S. sources and documents.

[Two reports, one by “a former U.S. intelligence officer,” and one by the Russian FSB] claim that Alfa Bank, one of Russia’s largest and most profitable, as well as Alfa Eko, a trading company, had been deeply involved in the early 1990s in laundering of Russian and Colombian drug money and in trafficking drugs from the Far East to Europe….

The FSB report, too, claimed that the Alfa Group’s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven, “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.”[62]

This impression is reinforced by the statements and actions of Michael Flynn, Trump’s new national security advisor. Flynn has made several appearances on Russia’s RT network, where he has often argued “that the US and Russia should be working more closely together on issues like fighting ISIL and ending Syria’s civil war.” In June 2016 Flynn attended an RT gala dinner in Moscow, seated just two seats away from Putin. [63] And in December Flynn reportedly met with far-right Austrian political party leader Heinz-Christian Strache, whose Freedom Party had recently signed a cooperation deal with Putin’s United Russia Party. [64]

President Vladimir Putin, Igor Sechin, Chairman of the Board of Rosneft (left) and Rex Tillerson, Chairman of ExxonMobil signed an agreement on joint development of petroleum reserves in Western Siberia, June 2012. Photo credit: President of Russia / Wikimedia (CC BY 3.0)

An even closer friend of Putin in Trump’s team, ironically, is former Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, his Secretary of State.[65] In fact Tillerson, through Exxon’s development of Russian oilfields, “has deep ties to Russia, dating back to the Boris Yeltsin administration.”[66] As Julian Borger told the Guardian,

Putin… bestowed the Order of Friendship on Tillerson in 2013. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Friends and associates said few US citizens are closer to Mr. Putin than Mr. Tillerson.”[67] The 64-year-old Texas oilman spent much of his career working on Russian deals, including a 2011 agreement giving Exxon Mobil access to the huge resources under the Russian Arctic in return for giving the giant state-owned Russian oil company, OAO Rosneft, the opportunity to invest in Exxon Mobil’s operations overseas. ….The 2011 Exxon-Rosneft agreement was frozen when sanctions were imposed on Russia in 2014, following the annexation of Crimea and covert military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Exxon Mobil estimated the sanctions cost it $1bn and Tillerson has argued strenuously for the measures to be lifted.[68]

The $500 billion Exxon-Rosneft exploration deal, allegedly “the biggest oil deal ever,” was so huge that the Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that its temporary cancellation “put Exxon at risk.”[69]

Trump’s criticisms of Obama’s sanctions on Russia were one powerful reason for Exxon to prefer Trump in the 2016 election.[70] But Trump was also attractive for his promises of deregulation:

President Trump will “absolutely” be a boon to Exxon and the rest of the oil industry, Fadel Gheit, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., said in a telephone interview. “The industry hasn’t asked for a hand up from Washington, but instead has said, ‘Get off our backs.’ Less regulation means less burden” on oil explorers.[71]

And Trump clearly will continue Exxon’s longtime history of opposition to measures to control global warming.[72] (When still CEO, Tillerson ended Exxon’s two decades of strenuous climate change denial, and came out for a carbon tax. But skeptics, including The New York Times, suspected this was merely a skillful means of defeating the more viable “cap-and-trade” carbon proposals that were then being debated in Congress, and ultimately defeated.)[73]

My book The American Deep State documents the leading role played by Exxon behind the elections of the oil-friendly presidents Eisenhower in 1952, and Reagan in 1980 (below, pp. 18-20, 27-28). It is not surprising that Exxon in 2016 should have helped propel yet another former television performer into the White House.

The “Party of Davos” and the “New New International Order”

In short, the Trump team connections to the Russian state and deep state — both overt (through Exxon) and covert (through Manafort and Alfa) would appear to link Trump to a shady larger network or networks connected also to the same Washington swamp he promised to drain. Such networks led me in the Preface to the French edition of this book to talk of

a supranational milieu of the super-rich, just eighty of whom are now said to own nearly as much as the 3.5 billion people who occupy the bottom half of the world’s income scale.[74] Thanks to the enormous increase in global wealth in recent years, the “global power elite” who meet annually at Davos now have far more influence on how the world will be governed than those who meet annually at the United Nations General Assembly.

Those at Davos do not need to give instructions to the American deep state, which is already structured around responsiveness to the requirements of extreme wealth in Wall Street and elsewhere. And some of them are members of what have been called “shadow elites, those whose influence stems from illicit or unconventional means.”[75]

Naomi Klein, ascribing Trump’s victory to the neoliberalism of the Democrats and of Davos, has written of the rise of the Davos class, a hyper-connected network of banking and tech billionaires, elected leaders who are awfully cosy with those interests (neoliberal policies), and Hollywood celebrities who make the whole thing seem unbearably glamorous.[76]

And before becoming the Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor in the Trump White House, Steve Bannon, while executive chair of Breitbart News, had said in a speech at the Vatican that working men and women in the world were “tired of being dictated to by what we call the party of Davos.”[77]

Trump has just chosen an ambassador to the European Union, Ted Malloch, a professor “well-known for his pro-Brexit and anti-EU views,” positions consistent “with Trump’s longstanding anti-EU and anti-NATO biases.” Reporting this, Salon notes also that “some American foreign policy watchers are concerned that he is also motivated by his close ties to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.”[78]

The Trump attack on the “party of Davos,” the status quo of the world superclass, is likely to continue.[79] On January 26, Trump announced “he would strike numerous bilateral trade deals, as opposed to multilateral accords like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”[80]

This approach, which by itself could please China as well as Russia, seems to reflect a coherent effort to replace the old consensus of the “party of Davos”, with what the right-wing Drudge Report approvingly called the “new, new world order”.[81]

The  “New, New World Order” may be said to represent the mavericks of the international deep state, eager to dispense with the regulations of the old insiders. But they are still part of the nexus of uncontrolled big money, even if drawn more from the under-reported shady underside of that superclass.

As I write after just one week of Trump in office, it already seems clear that we can expect a “Trump revolution,” one that will almost certainly attempt to reflect and repeat the major features (deregulation, anti-abortion measures, a defense spending buildup, tax cuts for the rich, and deficit financing) of the Reagan revolution before it. And it should not be too surprising if the Trump revolution, just like the Reagan revolution before it, turns out to have been not just financed, but partly plotted, at the levels of the American and the international deep state.[82]

Personal Postscript

As I write this new Introduction in January 2017, the involuntary response to Trump’s election from many of my friends in both political parties has been anger, hatred, or despair. Many, like Michael Kinsley in the Washington Post, have charged that “Donald Trump is a fascist.”[83] From such alienation, millions of people protested worldwide, the day after Trump’s inauguration, in what was perhaps the world’s first global political action. This was a welcome step towards shaping a global active public opinion.

It is true that Trump, like Hitler, campaigned against big bankers while quietly taking money from them. But the infant Weimar Republic Hitler overthrew, jerry-built amid the ruins of post-war Germany, cannot be compared to the constitution and civil polity of America, among the oldest and hardiest in the world.

I say below (p.99) that America is also exceptional

for its percentage of citizens who are incarcerated, for its disparity in wealth and income between rich and poor (a ratio exceeded among large nations only by China), and for its indiscriminate use of lethal power abroad.

From the beginning, America has been embroiled in major divisions, arising chiefly from its amazing diversity. But it is also the leader among world powers in its ability to process and transcend, however imperfectly, these divisions.

As so many times before in US history, we are entering another period of divisions and protests. But a successful protest of the nonviolent kind I hope for in this book (see below, pp. 164, 181-90) must be one inspired by deeply critical love of this flawed country, not by hatred.

References

[1] Michael C. Bender and Damian Paletta, “Donald Trump Plans to Undo Dodd-Frank Law, Fiduciary Rule,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-moves-to-undo-dodd-frank-law-1486101602. Cf.

[2] R.G. Ratcliffe, “Obama’s final campaign speech of 2008,” Houston Chronicle, October 27, 2008, http://blog.chron.com/texaspolitics/2008/10/obamas-final-campaign-speech-of-2008/.

[3] Eugene Kiely, “Obama, “White House ‘Full of Wall Street Executives’?” Factcheck.org, March 1, 2012.

[4] Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” New York Times, October 31, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html (FBI); “Cheney Firm Won $3.8bn Contracts from Government,” Observer, July 21, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/21/globalisation.georgebush. See below.

[5] Anand Giridharadas, “Examining Who Runs the United States,” New York Times, September 15, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/15/us/examining-who-runs-the-united-states.html?_r=0. I believe the first to apply the Turkish term “deep state” (derin deret) to U.S. politics was the Swedish writer Ola Tunander (Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], x, 244, 270, 384).

[6] Michael Covel, “The Deep State V. Trump,” Daily Reckoning, August 25, 2016, https://dailyreckoning.com/deep-state-v-trump/: “Donald Trump has the establishment scared out of their establishment minds.”

[7] Ryan Lizza, “Roger Stone Versus the ‘Deep State’”, New Yorker, January 20, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/roger-stone-versus-the-deep-state. Stone has been described as a “political provocateur” who “helped choreograph the… riot which shut down the Bush v. Gore recount in Miami-Dade County” (Jeffrey Toobin, “Bad Old Days,” New Yorker, May 2. 2016, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/02/the-political-provocateur-roger-stone-talks-trump. During the campaign, Stone and fellow provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart together promoted the divisive notion  “how the general election will almost certainly be hijacked by acts of voter fraud” — by Democrats (Ken Meyer, :Roger Stone Says There Will Be a ‘Bloodbath’ if Election is Stolen From Trump,” Medaite.com, August 2, 2016, http://www.mediaite.com/online/roger-stone-says-there-will-be-a-bloodbath-if-election-is-stolen-from-trump/. Their politics of division is shared by Steve Bannon, who “is so dominated by a desire to wage war and vanquish his enemy that he cannot think clearly about damage wrought by his destructive, polarizing approach” (Conor Friedersdorf, “The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon,” Atlantic, August 25, 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/08/the-radical-anti-conservatism-of-stephen-bannon/496796/).

[8] Covel, “The Deep State V. Trump.” Cf. John W. Whitehead, “The Deep State: The Unelected Shadow Government Is Here to Stay,” Rutherford Institute, November 10, 2015, https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_deep_state_the_unelected_shadow_government_is_here_to_stay: “The Deep State…is comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations, contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling the shots behind the scenes right now.”

[9] “Chris Hedges on How the ‘Deep State’ Will Influence the Trump Presidency,” Truthdig, Jan 17, 2017, http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_the_deep_state_will_influence_the_trump_presidency_20170117. In this camp are Glenn Greenwald, who equates the “deep state” with “the intelligence community,” and Eric Margolis, who equates it with “the massed national security apparatus” (Glenn Greenwald, “The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer,” The Intercept, January 11, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/11/the-deep-state-goes-to-war-with-president-elect-using-unverified-claims-as-dems-cheer/; Eric Margolis, “Trump Versus the Deep State,” The Unz Review, January 13, 2017, http://www.unz.com/emargolis/trump-versus-the-deep-state/.

[10] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016); Philip Giraldi, “Deep State America,” The American Conservative, July 30, 2015, http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/deep-state-america/.

[11] Peter Dale Scott, The American Deep State (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 30. I later wrote in Dallas ’63: “In The American Deep State I devoted only a few lines to the oppositional faction of right-wing Texas oilmen and the John Birch Society, opposed to the relative internationalism of Wall Street. In this [book] we shall see that under Kennedy their opposition was so deeply embedded that America was, for a while, ruled by a dyadic deep state” (Peter Dale Scott, Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House [New York: Open Road Media, 2015], 191).

[12] “Divided States of America,” Part 1, Frontline, PBS, January 17, 2017. Cf. Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right(New York: Doubleday, 2015), 165-68.

[13] Rick Ames and Yasha Levine, “Exposing The Rightwing PR Machine: Is CNBC’s Rick Santelli Sucking Koch, The Exiled, February 27, 2009, http://exiledonline.com/exposing-the-familiar-rightwing-pr-machine-is-cnbcs-rick-santelli-sucking-koch/; Chris Douglas, “The Tax That Started the Tea Party,” FrumForum. September 3, 2010, http://www.frumforum.com/the-tax-that-started-the-tea-party/. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “POEM: To the Tea-Party Patriots: A Berkeley Professor says Hello!,” GlobalResearch, November 2, 2010, http://www.globalresearch.ca/poem-to-the-tea-party-patriots-a-berkeley-professor-says-hello/21727; reprinted in Peter Dale Scott, Tilting Point (San Luis Obispo, CA : Word Palace Press, 2012), 42.

[14] Jane Mayer, “Covert Operations: The Billionaire Brothers Who Are Waging a War Against Obama,” New Yorker, August 30, 2010, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations; Mayer, Dark Money, 167-68, 193. In 2014 the Koch brothers were tied for sixth place among the world’s wealthiest, with $40.7 billion each. Combined, their net worth is $81.4 billion, which was higher than the highest-ranking individual on the list — Microsoft founder Bill Gates, at $77.8 billion (Louis Jacobson, “Harry Reid says Koch brothers are richest family in the world,” Politifact, April 2, 2014, http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/apr/02/harry-reid/harry-reid-says-koch-brothers-are-richest-family-w/). Chris Douglas observes, “Until the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax stood at 55%.  As a result of the tax cuts initiated by the Bush administration, by 2010, it was zero.  Unless Congress acts, it will return full-force to 55% in 2011. To understand the impact on the Koch family, consider that some reports place the wealth of the Koch brothers at $36 billion dollars [in 2010; four years later Forbes estimated it at $81 billion], their company second at times only to Cargill as the largest privately held company in America. To the Koch family, a 55% estate tax means they must contemplate a corporate re-organization, the result of which would conceptually be to go public and sell off 55% of their shares in order to pay the tax or, more likely, that they would donate the majority of shares to a charitable foundation.   Either way, the estate tax at 55% would entail a transformation of Koch Industries and a diversification of ownership, with ramifications for the family’s long term control” (Chris Douglas, “The Tax That Started the Tea Party”).

[15] Mayer, Dark Money, 167. Cf, Nella Van Dyke and David S. Meyer, eds., Understanding the Tea Party Movement (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub. Company, 2014), 100.

[16] Peter Dale Scott, “Bringing It All Together: The New Releases and How They Help Us Converge on the Heart of the Case,” The Fourth Decade, Vol. 4, #1, November, 1996; republished at http://www.assassinationweb.com/scotte.htm. Of the eleven businessmen at the 1958 founding meeting of the John Birch Society, many, including the founder Robert Welch, were former members of the National Association of Manufacturers (Terry Lautz, John Birch: A Life [New York: Oxford University Press, 2016]. 225). One was William J. Grede, who served as president of the National Association of Manufacturers in 1952. Still another was Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch (Jeff Nesbit, Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP [New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2016], 30; Van Dyke and Meyer, Understanding the Tea Party Movement, 100). Charles and David Koch also joined the John Birch Society.

[17] Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (New York: Broadway Books, 2002). 422; quoted in Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11[Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007], 3, cf. 254.

[18] “World’s Eight Richest as Wealthy as Half Humanity, Oxfam Tells Davos.” Reuters, January 16, 2016, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-davos-meeting-inequality-idUSKBN150009.

[19] “From Fracking to Finance, a Torrent of Campaign Cash,” New York Times, October 10, 2015,

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/us/politics/wealthy-families-presidential-candidates.html#donors-list. Much of the petroleum wealth was probably also aimed at preventing climate change regulations.

[20] “From Fracking to Finance, a Torrent of Campaign Cash,” New York Times, October 10, 2015.

[21] Amy Chosick, “Warren Buffett Endorses Hillary Clinton and Calls for Higher Taxes on Wealthy,” New York Times, December 16, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/16/warren-buffett-endorses-hillary-clinton-and-calls-for-higher-taxes-on-wealthy/?_r=0.

[22] Sarah Jaffe, Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 265. None of the eight endorsed Trump, who pointedly distanced himself from the Kochs during the campaign.

[23] Mayer, Dark Money, 17.

[24] Fredreka Schouten, “Koch brothers set $889 million budget for 2016, USA Today, January 27, 2015, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2015/01/26/koch-brothers-network-announces-889-million-budget-for-next-two-years/22363809/.

[25] Abigail Tracy, “The Brewing Billionaire Feud at the Heart of the G.O.P.,” Vanity Fair, September 7, 2016, http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/09/robert-rebekah-mercer-charles-david-koch-republican-party.

[26] Kenneth P. Vogel and Eliana Johnson, “Trump’s Koch Administration,” Politico, November 28, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/trump-koch-brothers-231863

[27] Jeremy Scahill, “Notorious Mercenary Erik Prince Is Advising Trump from the Shadows,” The Intercept, January 17 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/17/notorious-mercenary-erik-prince-is-advising-trump-from-the-shadows/: “In July [2016], Prince told Trump’s senior adviser and white supremacist Steve Bannon, at the time head of Breitbart News, that the Trump administration should recreate a version of the Phoenix Program, the CIA assassination ring that operated during the Vietnam War, to fight ISIS.”

[28] Mayer, Dark Money, 15, 276.

[29] Valerie Volcovici, “Trunp Administration Tells EPA To Cut Climate Page from Website: Sources,” Reuyers, January 25, 2017, http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN15906G?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews.

[30] On page 5 of this book, I refer to a formerly “minority element in our political economy [that now] finances and dominates both parties, and indeed is now also financing threats to both parties from the right, as well as dominating our international policy. As a result, liberal Republicans are as scarce in the Republican Party today as Goldwater Republicans were scarce in that party back in 1960.” Today I would no longer define this element as “the military-industrial complex,” but the trend has become even more clear.

[31] Matt Taibbi, ‘Trump Nominee Jay Clayton Will Be the Most Conflicted SEC Chair Ever,’ Rolling Stone, January 5, 2017, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-pick-jay-clayton-to-be-most-conflicted-sec-chair-ever-w459289. Clayton’s wife Gretchen is a wealth management advisor at Goldman Sachs.

[32] Conor Friedersdorf, “The Radical Anti-Conservatism of Stephen Bannon,” Atlantic, August 25, 2016.

[33] Josh Dawsey, Eliana Johnson and Annie Karni, “The man behind Trump? Still Steve Bannon,” Politico, January 29, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/donald-trump-steve-bannon-234347.

[34] “How One Family’s Deep Pockets Helped Reshape Donald Trump’s Campaign By Nicholas Confessore Aug. 18, 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/19/us/politics/robert-mercer-donald-trump-donor.html?_r=0

[35] Bloomberg BusinessWeek, August 31, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-08-31/steven-mnuchin-businessweek When Mnuchin was Financial Chairman of the Trump campaign, his counterpart at the RNC was Lew Eisenberg, his father’s old partner at Goldman Sachs.

[36] Pam Martens and Russ Martens, “Here’s How Goldman Sachs Became the Overlord of the Trump Administration,” Wall Street on Parade, January 9, 2017, http://wallstreetonparade.com/2017/01/heres-how-goldman-sachs-became-the-overlord-of-the-trump-administration/

[37] Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity(New York: Random House, 2011), 117.

[38] Zeke Faux, “Goldman CEO Blankfein ‘Supportive’ of Clinton for Pragmatism,”

Bloomberg, October 22, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-10-22/goldman-ceo-blankfein-supportive-of-clinton-for-pragmatism.

[39] “Deep state in the United States,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_States. The five authors are Philip Giraldi, Bill Moyers, David Talbot, Mike Lofgren, and myself.

[40] Scott, The American Deep State, 14-15, 30-35, etc.) The Pentagon, unmentioned by Wikipedia, is hard to classify. Although the Department of Defense is part of the official state and headed by a cabinet member, it contains within it the NSA, which simultaneously reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Other Pentagon agencies, such as DIA and JSOC, also deserve to be classified with the deep state.

[41] Mike Lofgren, The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government (New York: Viking, 2016), 5. I see no further references in Lofgren’s book to organized crime; his notion of the deep state focuses primarily on the Beltway agencies.

[42] Hugh Roberts, The Hijackers.” London Review of Books, July 16, 2015, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n14/hugh-roberts/the-hijackers, a review of Jean-Pierre Filiu, From Deep State to Islamic State: The Arab Counter-revolution and Its Jihadi Legacy (Oxford : Oxford University Press, [2015]).

[43] Jean-Louis Briquet; Gilles Favarel-Garrigues; Roger Leverdier, eds. Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 43-44; Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), 19-20. Çatlı “is reckoned to have been one of the main perpetrators of underground operations carried out by the Turkish branch of the Gladio organisation and had played a key role in the bloody events of the period 1976-80 which paved the way for the military coup d’état of September 1980” (“Turkey’s pivotal role in the international drug trade, Le Monde diplomatique, July 1998).

[44] Desmond Fernandes and Iskender Ozden, “United States and NATO inspired ‘psychological warfare operations’ against the ‘Kurdish communist threat’ in Turkey”. Variant. 12, https://web.archive.org/web/20060614080445/http://www.variant.randomstate.org/12texts/Fernandes.html; Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe(New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 241.

[45] Hakan Aslaneli and Zafer F. Yoruk, ‘Traffic Monster’ reveals state-mafia relations”. Hürriyet, November 7, 1996; Scott, American War Machine, 4-6, etc.

[46] Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228; citing Soner Yalçın and Doğan Yurdakul, Reis: Gladio’num Türk Teriçisi (Istanbul: Doğan Kitapeilik, 2007), 152-56.

[47] Scott, American War Machine, 20; cf.p.30: In Italy “Stefano delle Chiaie was eventually accused of involvement in the Piazza Fontana and Bologna bombings as well as the Borghese coup.” The Condor Operation (about which I will say more) was responsible for the 1976 murder in Washington of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier.

[48] HRFT Human Rights Foundation of Turkey Human Rights Report – TİHV, en.tihv.org.tr/wp-content/uploads/2015/…/Ra1998HumanRigthsReport.pdf, 39. In addition, no one has yet fully explained why one of the fake passports found in Çatlı’s possession was in the name “Mehmet Özbay”, an alias used fifteen years earlier by Mehmet Ali Ağca, the Turk who in 1081 attempted to kill Pope John Paul II (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010], 19; Ryan Gingeras, Heroin, Organized Crime, and the Making of Modern Turkey [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 228.

[49] Dexter Filkins. “The Deep State,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2012, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/12/the-deep-state: “Prosecutors maintain that Ergenekon is the deep state itself—not merely a cabal of reactionary officers within the military but a shadow government that aims at making Turkish democracy permanently unstable.”

[50] Tim Arango and Ceylan Yeginsu, “Turks Can Agree on One Thing: U.S. Was Behind Failed Coup,” New York Times, August 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/03/world/europe/turkey-coup-erdogan-fethullah-gulen-united-states.html?_r=0.

[51] On page 47 I speak of “a deep event, by which I mean an event predictably suppressed in the media and still not fully understandable.”
[52] “Donald Trump’s Many, Many, Many, Many Ties to Russia.” Time, August 16, 2016, http://time.com/4433880/donald-trump-ties-to-russia/

[53] Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern, “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire…. Kiev officials are scrambling to make amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton,” Politico, January 11, 2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446: “A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation. The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”

[54] Ibid.

[55] “Trump Adviser’s Ties Raise Security Questions,” BuzzfeedNews, May 6, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/manafort-russia?utm_term=.htL7NyLEDb#.elgKkM63xN, linking to “Inside Trump adviser Manafort’s world of politics and global financial dealmaking” (Washington Post, April 26, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-business-as-in-politics-trump-adviser-no-stranger-to-controversial-figures/2016/04/26/970db232-08c7-11e6-b283-e79d81c63c1b_story.html?utm_term=.db8349a4a754). These charges should not be confused with the more sensational Buzzfeed leak in January 2017 of a private intelligence report shown by the CIA to Trump (https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia?utm_term=.ppJ6nP7KJA#.hrE3zm5pPx). This report, by former British intelligence Christopher Steele, did not as released mention Deripaska, but contained instead an unexplained discussion of the Alfa Group, whose connections to Halliburton when run by Dick Cheney are discussed by me in American War Machine, 187.

[56] “Intercepted Russian Communications Part of Inquiry Into Trump Associates,” New York Times, January 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/19/us/politics/trump-russia-associates-investigation.html. For a critique of Manafort’s and Stone’s responses to the charges, see Joseph Cannon at http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2017/01/busted-on-inauguration-day.html. In addition to the charge that Russian officials helped Trump, Politico has also claimed that “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton” (Ukrainian Efforts to Sabotage Trump Backfire,” Politico, January 11,2017, http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446.

[57] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia?utm_term=.ppJ6nP7KJA#.hrE3zm5pPx.

[58] Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, “Investigating Donald Trump, F.B.I. Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” New York Times, October 31, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-trump.html.c f. Geoffrey Smith, “Meet the Russian Bank with Ties to Donald Trump,” Fortune, November 2, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/11/02/donald-trump-alfa-bank/.

[59] Larry Cohler-Esses, “Is Jewish Oligarch the Cyber Link Between Donald Trump and Russia?” Forward, November 1, 2016, http://forward.com/news/world/353170/is-a-russian-israeli-oligarch-running-a-covert-cyber-channel-between-trump/.

[60] Scott, American War Machine, 187: “Diligence’s chief transnational  connection  in  Russia  is  Alfa  Bank.  The chairman of Diligence from 2001 to 2007 was former U.S. ambassador and arms negotiator Richard Burt, of Barbour, Griffith and Rogers and McLarty Kissinger Associates. Burt, a neoconservative who once called the SALT agreement “a favor to the Russians,” is also on the Alfa Bank’s Senior Advisory Board in Moscow.

[61] “Cheney Firm Won $3.8bn Contracts from Government,” Observer, July 21, 2002, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/21/globalisation.georgebush; quoted in Scott, American War Machine, 187. In 2003 the Alfa Group of investors formed a 50-50 joint venture with BP, called TNK-BP. A dispute in 2011 between Mikhail Fridman and BP led Rosneft, blocked in its plans to develop its Arctic oilfields with BP, to agree to a deal on the same Arctic acreage with ExxonMobil instead (Guy Chazan and John Thornhill, “Mikhail Fridman: The Alpha oligarch,” Financial Times, March 5, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/b47de3d4-c325-11e4-ac3d-00144feab7de). See below.

[62] Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller, “Cheney led Halliburton to feast at federal trough,” Center for Public Integrity [CPI]. August 2, 2000 Updated: 12:19 pm, May 19, 2014; https://www.publicintegrity.org/2000/08/02/3279/cheney-led-halliburton-feast-federal-trough. Alfa sued CPI for libel over the release of the Royce report, but in 2005 the suit was dismissed. Federal Judge John D. Bates wrote “No claim is made that the defendants fabricated the assertions in the CPI article. Nor are the allegations of organized mob ties and drug trafficking so inherently improbably [sic] that actual malice can be presumed” (“Libel case over mafia-Halliburton link dismissed,” Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, October 4, 2005, http://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/news/libel-case-over-mafia-halliburton-link-dismissed).

[63] Michael Cowley, “The Kremlin’s Candidate,” Politico. May/June 2016, http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/donald-trump-2016-russia-today-rt-kremlin-media-vladimir-putin-213833.

[64] Natasha Bertrand, “A far-right Austrian leader who just signed a pact with Putin says he met with Trump’s national security adviser in New York,” Business Insider, December 20, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-flynn-putin-trump-austria-far-right-2016-12.

[65] I say “ironically,” because Exxon, until the 1960s, joined the other big oil majors in plotting to exclude the Soviet Union from international oil markets. This change is characteristic of how increasing globalization has changed the international deep state.

[66] http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferwang/2016/12/13/trump-taps-exxonmobil-ceo-putin-ally- rex-tillerson-to-be-secretary-of-state/#46e49c726a55

[67] Cf. Bradley Olson, “Rex Tillerson, a Candidate for Secretary of State, Has Ties to Vladimir Putin,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2016, https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-candidate-for-state-has-close-ties-to-vladimir-putin-1481033938.

[68] Julian Borger, “Rex Tillerson: an appointment that confirms Putin’s US election win,” Guardian, December 13, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/11/rex-tillerson-secretary-of-state-trump-russia-putin .

[69] Daniel Gilbert, “Sanctions Over Ukraine Put Exxon at Risk: Deal With Russia’s Rosneft to Drill in Arctic Is Crucial to Oil Company,” Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/sanctions-over-ukraine-put-exxon-at-risk-1410477455. The deal was originally made by Rosneft with BP, but the BP deal was blocked by a successful legal challenge from a company controlled by Mikhail Fridman. See above.

[70] An Exxon link to the Trump campaign surfaced in June 1916, when Paul Manafort, then the campaign chairman, hired leading Exxon lobbyist Jim Murphy to be the campaign’s national political director (Melissa Cronin, “This lobbyist denied climate change for ExxonMobil. Now he’ll do it for Trump,” Grist.org, June 7, 2016, http://grist.org/climate-energy/this-lobbyist-denied-climate-change-for-exxonmobil-now-hell-do-it-for-trump/).

[71] Joe Carroll, “Exxon CEO-in-Waiting to Inherit Rex Tillerson’s Mixed Legacy.” Bloomberg, December 12, 2016, 4:55 PM PST December 13, 2016, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-13/exxon-s-ceo-in-waiting-to-inherit-rex-tillerson-s-mixed-legacy.

[72] Farron Cousins, “Republican Attorneys General Met Secretly with Exxon Lobbyists to Stop Climate Change Investigations,” Desmog, September 30, 2016, https://www.desmogblog.com/2016/09/30/republican-attorneys-general-met-secretly-exxon-stop-climate-change-investigations.

[73] John Schwartz, “Tillerson Led Exxon’s Shift on Climate Change; Some Say ‘It Was All P.R.’”, New York Times, December 28, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/28/business/energy-environment/rex-tillerson-secretary-of-state-exxon.html.

[74] Patricia Cohen, “Oxfam Study Finds Richest 1% Is Likely to Control Half of Global Wealth by 2016,” New York Times, January 19, 2015. By an earlier estimate, “In 2010, the wealth of the world’s eleven million super-rich individuals stood at $43 trillion, or 70 percent of global gross domestic product” (Financial Times, May 6, 2012, 4).

[75] David Rothkopf, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), 289; cf. xx.

[76] Naomi Klein, “It was the Democrats’ embrace of neoliberalism that won it for Trump,” Guardian, November 9, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/09/rise-of-the-davos-class-sealed-americas-fate. Cf. Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Dealbook: What to Make of the ‘Davos Class’ in the Trump Era,” New York Times, January 16, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/business/dealbook/world-economic-forum-davos-trump.html: “The World Economic Forum — an annual gathering of global policy and business leaders…  known as the ‘Davos class.’ It is this group of so-called plutocrats that largely failed to anticipate — and may have even unconsciously generated — the seeping anti-establishment movement across the globe.

[77] Matt Clinch, “The ‘party of Davos’ wakes up to the new, new world order,” CNBC, Januaty 9,  2017 http://www.cnbc.com/2017/01/09/davos-wakes-up-to-the-trump-new-world-order.html.

[78] Matthew Rozsa, “President Trump’s United Nations, European Union ambassadors send early message, shock waves,” Salon, January 27, 2017, http://www.salon.com/2017/01/27/president-trumps-united-nations-european-union-ambassadors-send-early-message-shock-waves/.

[79] The “party of Davos” is a target of a new book by Hugh Hewitt (The Fourth Way: The Conservative Playbook for a Lasting GOP Majority (New York: Simon & Schuster, January 2017).

[80] “Trump says plans lots of bilateral trade deals with quick termination clauses,” Reuters, January 26, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-trade-idUSKBN15A2MP?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews.

[81] Clinch, “The ‘party of Davos’ wakes up to the new, new world order,” CNBC, January 9, 2017.

[82] See Scott, The American Deep State, 101–08.

[83] Michael Kinsley, “Donald Trump is actually a fascist,” Washington Post, December 9, 2o16, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/donald-trump-is-actually-a-fascist/2016/12/09/e193a2b6-bd77-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.09661e9af547. 

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“The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman for the military hardware manufacturers and to speak as often as possible about the nation’s desire for peace. He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists.” – Jim Garrison (May 27, 1969) [1]

The murder of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963 is widely recognized as a pivotal moment in U.S. history.

It was the first assassination of a U.S. president in the television age. The death of Kennedy enabled Cold Warriors within Washington to pursue their pillaging of the African, South American and Asian continents with substantially less resistance. But perhaps just as significantly, it marked an important chapter in a long-standing power struggle between big moneyed interests in America along with their intelligence operatives, and recognizable constitutional government, made up of representatives elected by the people and accountable to the public.

It was in direct response to inconvenient questions around the first Kennedy assassination that the CIA weaponized the term ‘conspiracy theory,’ a thought-stopping ad-hominem attack intended to disarm truth-seekers challenging the crimes that a controlled media fail to thoroughly investigate.

The existence of Wall Street overlords acting in tandem with military-intelligence figures as a kind of shadow government or ‘Deep State’ to appropriate the foreign policy and war-making apparatus of a country puts in doubt any assertions of America as a properly functioning democracy with power overseen and exercised by duly appointed representatives.

There have been several examples of similar State Crimes Against Democracy deliberately concealed and covered up so as to protect unaccountable elites. The assassinations of John Kennedy’s brother Robert, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, as well as the (false flag) terrorist attack known as 9/11 being among the more famous examples.

Against this backdrop, we witness the spectacle of President Trump having his authority challenged in an exhaustively publicized impeachment proceeding. Considering documented war crimes and other malfeasance committed by presidents spanning the last half century, one wonders why the particular allegations against Trump are being pursued so relentlessly, and not others. At the end of the day, impeachment or no, will the people end up with a marginally more accountable government, or will the unaccountable power behind the throne have been reinforced by this 21st Century Kabuki theater?

This week’s episode of the Global Research News Hour radio program is as much an attempt to view the current impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump through the lens of ‘deep politics’ as an anniversary commemoration of the assassination of one of America’s most popular presidents. We have taken the liberty to reach out to two authoritative scholars of events like the Kennedy assassinations and 9/11 to get their insights into what the Trump impeachment drama might mean from the stand-point of entrenched unaccountable power within the USA.

In our first half hour. We hear from writer, researcher and frequent guest Mark Robinowitz. He discloses his thoughts about how and why earnest investigators into clandestine operations implicating the Deep State get side-tracked and typically fail to achieve the changes in the political and legal system that should, in a fair world, spring from revelations of truths implicating high officials.

In our second half hour, legendary ‘Deep State’ researcher and author Professor Peter Dale Scott joins us to describe some of the characteristics all of these events have in common, he locates the commonalities between Trump and former Presidents Nixon and Kennedy, and tracks the evolution of the National Security State’s grip on power since that fatal shooting in Dallas 56 years ago.

Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist and ecological campaigner. He manages the sites oilempire.us and jfkmoon.org which look into the Deep Political events and how they intersect with politics, economics and ecology. He is based in Eugene, Oregon.

Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat, Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Peace and Conflict Studies program at Berkeley, poet, and 2002 recipient of the Lannan Poetry Award. His political books include American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan  (2010), The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy (2014) and  Dallas ’63: The First Deep State Revolt Against the White House (2015). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

(Global Research News Hour episode 278)

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Notes:

1. Interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney for Parish of Orleans, Louisiana. File Reproduced at the National Archives and released June 7, 2004; 200https://statick2k-5f2f.kxcdn.com/images/pdf/garrison-interview-05-27-1969.pdf

This article was first published on November 21, 2013. 

Today November 22, 2019 is the 56th anniversary of the assassination of JFK

Why was he assassinated?

He favored peace over war.

The normalization of relations with the Soviet Union.

***

November 22, 2013, is the 56th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  The true story of JFK’s murder has never been officially admitted, although the conclusion that JFK was murdered by a plot involving the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff has been well established by years of research, such as that provided by James W. Douglass in his book, JFK And The Unspeakable, published by Simon & Schuster in 2008.  Ignore Douglass’ interest in the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and Merton’s prediction and focus on the heavily documented research that Douglass provides.

Or just turn to the contemporary films, taken by tourists watching JFK’s motorcade that are available on YouTube, which show clearly the Secret Service pulled from President Kennedy’s limo just prior to his assassination, and the Zapruder film that shows the killing shot to have come from President Kennedy’s right front, blowing off the back of his head, not from the rear as postulated in the Warren Commission Report, which would have pushed his head forward, not rearward. 

I am not going to write about the assassination to the extent that the massive information permits. Those who want to know already know. Those who cannot face the music will never be able to confront the facts regardless of what I or anyone else writes or reveals.

To briefly review, the facts are conclusive that JFK was on terrible terms with the CIA and the Joint Chiefs. He had refused to support the CIA organized Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  He had rejected the Joint Chiefs’ “Operation Northwoods,” a plan to commit  real and faked acts of violence against Americans, blame Castro and use the false flag events to bring regime change to Cuba.  He had rejected the Joint Chiefs case that the Soviet Union should be attacked while the US held the advantage and before the Soviets could develop delivery systems for nuclear weapons. He had indicated that after his reelection he was going to pull US troops out of Vietnam and that he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. He had aroused suspicion by working behind the scenes with Khrushchev to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, leading to claims that he was “soft on communism.”  The CIA and Joint Chiefs’ belief that JFK was an unreliable ally in the war against communism spread into the Secret Service.

It has been established that the original autopsy of JFK’s fatal head wound was discarded and a faked one substituted in order to support the official story that Oswald shot JFK from behind. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and President Johnson knew that Oswald was the CIA’s patsy, but they also understood, as did members of the Warren Commission, that to let the true story out would cause Americans to lose confidence in their own government at the height of the Cold War.

Robert Kennedy knew what had happened. He was on his way to being elected president and to holding the plotters accountable for the murder of his brother when the CIA assassinated him. A distinguished journalist, who was standing behind Robert Kennedy at the time of his assassination, told me that the killing shots came from behind past his ear.  He submitted his report to the FBI and was never contacted.

Acoustic experts have conclusively demonstrated that more shots were fired than can be accounted for by Sirhan Sirhan’s pistol and that the sounds indicate two different calibers of firearms.  

I never cease to be amazed by the gullibility of Americans, who know nothing about either event, but who confidently dismiss the factual evidence provided by experts and historians on the basis of their naive belief that “the government wouldn’t lie about such important events” or “someone would have talked.”  What good would it do if someone talked when the gullible won’t believe hard evidence?

Secret Service pulled from JFK’s limo

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/11/james-huang/must-watch-video/

Zapruder film

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufvmHYqfdbU (Preview) 

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, Simon & Schuster, 2008

Operation Northwoods: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

Today, November 22, 2019, we commemorate the passing of JFK.

Why was he killed?

He opposed the Deep State?

He was opposed to waging war on Cuba.

He favored dialogue rather than war with the Soviet Union.

***

Several of the more intriguing files released in the President John F. Kennedy assassination files have little to do with specific aspects of the assassination. Instead, they involve covert operations that were contextually related to possible theories that were initially entertained by investigators.

A special group of military generals and CIA officials met to discuss “sabotage operations” in Cuba on September 6, 1962. The group discussed “agricultural sabotage.”

General Marshall Carter suggested introducing “biological agents which would appear to be of natural origin” to destroy crops.

“General [Marshall] Carter emphasized the extreme sensitivity of any such operation and the disastrous results that would flow from something going wrong, particularly if there were obvious attribution to the U.S.,” according to top secret minutes from the meeting. Carter believed that, if subtle, such sabotage would succeed.

McGeorge Bundy, a national security adviser, was confident that any sabotage could be “made to appear as the result of local Cuban disaffection or of a natural disaster, but that we must avoid external activities such as release of chemicals, etc, unless they could be completely covered up.”

Over 2,800 files were released in the evening on October 27, as a result of the JFK Records Act from 1992. The law—passed after Oliver Stone’s “JFK” film—established a collection of “assassination records” at the National Archives and required all records be released no later than 25 years later.

But at the last moment, even though the CIA and FBI had plenty of time to prepare for this release, President Donald Trump allowed the agencies to invoke “national security” and put the 50 to 60 year-old files through yet another review. Parts may be censored, and the rest of the files may not be seen until April 26, 2018.

One report drafted by Phil Buchen, who served as White House counsel for President Gerald Ford, for a commission into CIA activities addresses the agency’s involvement in assassination plots of foreign leaders. It notes the commission was denied access to papers of special groups or special operating groups.

“The investigation is not complete with regard to the question of who, if anyone outside the CIA, authorized or directed the planning of any assassination attempts against foreign leaders. However, with particular reference to the plans directed against Fidel Castro, the investigation is sufficiently complete to show that plans were undertaken by the CIA.”

According to the report, the CIA discussed plans to assassinate Castro if he was visiting the United States. The CIA shipped arms from the U.S. to “persons in the Dominican Republic, who sought to assassinate Generalissimo Trujillo.”

The commission struggled to uncover evidence of CIA involvement in the assassination of Congo leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961. However, it confirmed the agency considered an assassination plot.

According to a “case officer,” who failed to keep his appointment to testify before the commission, Richard Bissell, the CIA deputy director of plans, “asked him to go to the Congo and there murder or arrange for the murder of Lumumba, and the case officer said that he told Bissell that he refused to be a party to such an act.”

The CIA also considered assassinating President Sukarno of Indonesia. Bissell told the commission the agency identified an “asset who it was felt might be recruited for this purpose.” But the plan never reached a point where the CIA thought it was “feasible.”

U.S. officials considered using members of the Mafia to kill Castro. In September 1960, a “syndicate member” from Chicago, Sam Giancana, was contacted.

“An arrangement was made through Giancana for the CIA intermediary and his contact to meet with a ‘courier’ who was going back and forth to Havana. From information received back by the courier, the proposed operation appeared to be feasible and it was decided to obtain an official agency approval in this regard.”

“A figure of one hundred fifty thousand dollars was set by the agency as a payment to be made on completion of the operation and to be paid only to the principal or principals who would conduct the operation in Cuba.”

When the CIA advised Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy of this plan involving Giancana, he apparently wanted the CIA to consult the Department of Justice before they took such actions again. He was concerned that Giancana could not be prosecuted anymore because he “could immediately bring out the fact that the United States government had approached him to arrange for the assassination of Castro.”

Another document prepared by Buchen contains further details on anti-Castro plots. It contains details of “Operation Bounty,” which was to establish a “system of financial rewards, commensurate with position and stature, for killing or delivering alive known communists.

Leaflets, delivered by air, would contain names of Communist leaders. The next round of leaflets would “revise the names by job, i.e. cell leader, informer, party members, etc. They would contain the “amount of reward, how, and where it may be collected.” One final leaflet would indicate a reward of two cents if someone delivered the body of Castro.

General Edward Lansdale, a deputy assistant secretary for special operations, distributed an “action plan” in February 1962 that called a “special target” operation that could include “gangster elements” attacking police. “CW agents” [chemical weapons] should be fully considered.

There was a plan known as Task 33, a “Plan for Incapacitation of Sugar Workers,” that was completed in February. “Task as assigned was to develop a plan for incapacitating large sections of the sugar workers by the covert use of BW [biological weapons] or CW agents.”

A part of the Task 33 plan previously kept secret was released showing Lansdale proposed putting a majority of sugar workers out of action during the remainder of the harvest by introducing “non-lethal BW, insect-borne” agents. The Navy would conduct the biological attack. (Lansdale noted Robert Edwards at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and Cornelius Roosevelt at the CIA would provide biological weapons information for the suggested operation.)

Plans for military intervention, or a coup, always depended upon the belief within the U.S. government that a pretext could be created. As one top secret stated,

“If we announced incident going in; that we were moving in to restore order and hold free elections and that we would withdraw from Cuba as soon as the new government advised that they had the capability to maintain order without further assistance,” it could probably be successful.

The U.S. government did not think such covert operations would negatively impact world public opinion. Officials found the Soviet Union threat to be so severe that if they did not at least contemplate these actions in Cuba they may allow the Soviets to setup military bases in Cuba. Were that to happen, officials were prepared for World War III.

While the essence of planned operations against Castro and Cuba were known, the files offer vivid representations of flagrant and immoral disregard U.S. officials had for international law, sovereignty and human life. They reflect secrets the CIA and FBI were most intent on keeping from the public as long as possible.

Published in partnership with Shadowproof

This is probably the most difficult piece I’ve ever had to write, at least about the Labour Party. My feelings about Corbyn and the Labour Party are on record, here, here, here and here, to name a few. The Labour Party is a party of Imperialism and always has been since its inception, well over a century ago. Even its high point in 1945, with the creation of the welfare state, occurred through pressure from below and just as today, capitalism was bankrupt and in crisis. The Labour government, in return for the Welfare state, saved capitalism from revolution (or collapse). The gains made during that critical period following WWII lasted about thirty years before the lords of capital started taking back what ‘we’ had tried to take from them and by 1975 we were clearly not equipped to resist. In part, the Labour Party was directly responsible, in fact it was party to the attacks on the Welfare state and the working class.

But is this election different? Can we expect a Corbyn-led government to turn back the tide? Can we even expect an attempt at turning back the tide? Frankly, I don’t think we have much choice, after all, what else is there? The left, such as it is, is bankrupt and devoid of revolutionary ideas so the Labour Party, at this critical juncture, is all we have.

Does Corbyn have a socialist programme? Of course not. At best it’s a rehash of 1945 but minus most of the reformist stuff, so the same old social democracy then, the one that was effectively neutralised ages ago. But desperate times require desperate measures.

The question is, if by some chance we do get a Labour government on December 13, what kind of government will it be? What kind of space will Corbyn and his (not very reliable) team be able to carve out of our rank neoliberal, Victorian times? In a word, what are we voting for and what are the chances of getting any of Corbyn’s diluted reforms, carried through?

If Labour’s 2017 election manifesto is anything to go by (not the leaked, draft manifesto), then we may see some minor changes for example, ending zero hours contracts and maybe a rollback of some of the NHS privatisation. But the real question to ask is whether even these limited reforms will be possible in the current climate? The hysterical climate of fear that’s been created about Corbyn’s alleged views on pretty much everything he touches now or has in the past, makes it virtually impossible for a Corbyn-led government to function as it would want to.

Of course, the first hurdle would be the size of the Labour majority. To be potentially effective, it will have to be able to survive alliances in opposition and given the politics of the Lib-Dems, the Greens and the SNP, anything is possible, especially getting stabbed in the back.

Politics, such as it is, is so poisonous, so corrupt and driven by personal ambition and sheer greed for power and/or money, that frankly, will it make any difference to most of us which party gets elected? Well that’s the hope isn’t it, that Corbyn will attempt at least to reverse or ameliorate the worst of the neoliberal destruction of the gains made since 1945. That’s what inspired so many to support Corbyn and put an end to this reactionary attack on the working class and the gains that have been made.

All of my lefty/liberal friends are desperate for a Labour victory, the thought of more Bojo and the backward and reactionary Tories is more than they can bear and who can argue with that!

Capitalism is in crisis, a crisis like no other, compounded by the environmental catastrophe that capitalism has unleashed on our planet. So you would think that extraordinary times would demand extraordinary measures.

So where does the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn sit in all this mess? In a way, they’re all of a kind. Everyone is in denial about something. Corbyn’s earnestness, his sincerity in the face of the atrocious red-baiting and slander he has put up with contrasts with the ‘cosiness’ of Extinction Rebellion and the almost masochistic enjoyment in how it deals with the arrests of its members. In contrast, Corbyn turns the other cheek whenever these slanderous lies are hurled at him.

In the name of maintaining “party unity” with the Blairites, he has presided over the NEC’s expulsion of Livingstone, Jacqui Walker and Marc Wadsworth. Just last week, while Corbyn stayed silent, Chris Williamson was told by the party’s pro-Corbyn NEC that he would not be able to stand as an MP in his Derby North constituency. Williamson, like Sultana, had merely pointed out that the anti-Semitism campaign is “proxy wars and bullshit”—the “weaponisation of antisemitism for political ends.” – ‘Corbyn refuses to fight ramped-up bogus “anti-Semitism” witch-hunt’, WSWS, 12 November 2019

Are we to ignore Corbyn’s vacillations simply in order to get Labour elected? It’s the lack of response by Corbyn over the witch hunt against him and other anti-Zionists that raises questions about Corbyn’s ability, once in power, to pursue the agenda that has made him so popular. Many who support Corbyn, will no doubt put these questions to one side, just as Corbyn, in pursuit of ‘party unity’, ignores the Israeli-funded attacks made on him but frankly, it doesn’t give me much confidence in Corbyn’s ability to ‘stay the course’ once elected.

We live, or try to, by rules that no longer apply. Labour’s nostalgia about 1945 exemplifies the paradox. And it’s arguable that the left as whole, lives by rules that probably have never applied. Much is wishful thinking and wishful thinking, just like moralising, will get us nowhere.

Somehow, thinking about who (or what) to vote for on December 12, seems ludicrous, yet just as with the totally unnecessary Brexit Referendum, ludicrous votes do serve a purpose, of a sort anyway. They give us the illusion of control over events, when it’s obvious that the opposite prevails. We are neither informed nor equipped with the necessary knowledge or skills to do much of anything, let alone possess the political will to see things through.

But in spite of this, you would think that choosing between Corbyn and Johnson would be a no-brainer for any decent, progressive person, and you would be correct. Clearly, if you put Corbyn next to Johnson it’s obviously a no-brainer except of course (I think I said this in 2017), you’re not voting for Corbyn, you’re voting for the Labour Party. It’s a Labour Party that’s divided between its base and its superstructure. In reality, there are two Labour Parties and it’s a bit of irony that the superstructure, the Parliamentary Party and the Party’s bureaucracy are firmly a part of the political class that runs (or pretends to) the country but it’s supported by the base, the Constituency Party and its tens of thousands of members, and these two entities couldn’t be further apart.

So really the question a would-be Labour voter needs to ask is what to expect from a Labour government with Corbyn at its (titular) head but in reality, run by the same old political elite? What could we expect it to do when confronted with for example, some of the quite radical proposals passed at the Labour Party conference in September?

The Grassroots

It was obvious, to me at least, that Corbyn’s best bet for moving the Labour Party to the left and away from its Blairite, neoliberal reality, was to mobilise the tens of thousands that grassroots organising had brought onboard with Corbyn as its figurehead. After all, the Labour Party was suddenly the biggest political party in Europe! But it created a dilemma for the Labour Party bureaucracy and the majority of the PLP. Mobilising the Constituency Labour Parties would have created a mass base with which to challenge the power of the bureaucracy and the PLP. But this never happened. Instead, the Right mounted a disinformation campaign using the ‘anti-semitism’ tag (amongst others, notably the ‘unelectable’ tag), to vilify and marginalise Corbyn and others on the left of the Labour Party in the eyes of the public. How successful the campaign has been will no doubt be revealed come election time.

The second objective should have been to dump the right-wing MPs by changing the selection rules for candidates but again, this wasn’t done either. The Blairites maintained their control of Parliamentary Party and the Party’s bureaucracy. They write (and therefore enforce) the rules.

Then came the coup de grace, Momentum, a key tool for reaching the marginalised and the young who never voted, and primarily the work of John Lansman, Corbyn’s former election agent, was taken ‘in-house’. No longer could it reach out to potential supporters unless you first joined the Labour Party. The key tool that mobilised the thousands who joined the Labour Party was effectively sidelined. The centre reasserted control.

Yet what choice do I have? The alternative is to abstain as there’s no other party worth voting for as far as I’m concerned. So assuming a Labour victory, what are the chances of a grassroots mobilisation bringing pressure to bear on a Labour government to enact even a few of the policies voted for at the Labour Party conference?

Back in 2017 in a piece I wrote about the then snap general election, I quoted from a piece on the WSWS Website which highlighted the contradictions between what Corbyn wanted as laid out in his draft manifesto and what the final, published manifesto stated. By the time the real power in the bureaucracy had finished ‘editing’ Corbyn’s draft, very little was left of the original. Opposition to Austerity had been watered down to some reforms but leaving the body of Austerity in place. So too with Corbyn’s opposition to Trident nuclear weapons and his ‘reluctance’ to start a nuclear conflagration.

I’m minded to say, this time, so what? Yes, the arguments WSWS presents are true, the Labour Party is an imperialist party but can Corbyn, if supported by a grassroots movement, move beyond its imperialist past and its Blairite present? Is the situation so dire that Corbyn, aka the Labour Party is all we have got and we’ll just have to make the best of a bad bunch?

Maybe it’s the last chance we have to halt the headlong rush into barbarism but only if we mobilise the masses of Corbyn supporters, which of course, if successful, runs the risk of splitting the Labour Party in two which, just like the Conservative Party, has passed its sell-by date and splitting the Labour Party could be the best thing we’ll ever do for British politics.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Investigating Imperialism.

Featured image is from Global Justice

“Two years, three years, five years’ maximum from now, you will not recognize the same Middle East”, says the former Egyptian FM, Arab League Secretary General and Presidential Candidate, Amr Moussa, in an interview with Al-Monitor.

Mousa made some unexpected points, beyond warning of major change ahead (“the thing now is that the simple Arab man follows everything” – all the events). And in reference to the protests in Iraq, Moussa says that Iraq is in “a preparatory stage for them to choose their way as Iraqis — emphasizing that “the discord between Sunni and Shia is about to fade away.”

The present regional turbulence, he suggests, is [essentially] a reaction to the US playing the sectarian card – manipulating “the issues of sect and religion, et cetera, was not only a dangerous, but a sinister kind of policy”. He added however, “I don’t say that it will happen tomorrow, but [the discord between Sunnis and the Shi’a fading away], will certainly happen in the foreseeable future, which will reflect on Lebanon too.”

What we are witnessing in Iraq and Lebanon, he adds,

“are these things correcting themselves. It will take time, but they will correct themselves. Iraq is a big country in the region, no less than Iran, no less than Turkey. Iraq is a country to reckon with. I don’t know whether this was the reason why it had to be destroyed. Could be. But there are forces in Iraq that are being rebuilt … Iraq will come back. And this phase – what we see today, perhaps this is the — what can I say? A preparatory stage?”

Of course, these comments – coming from a leading Establishment Sunni figure – will appear stunningly counter-intuitive to those living outside the region, where the MSM narrative – from Colombia to Gulf States – is that the current protests are sectarian, and directed predominantly at Hizbullah and Iran. Certainly there is a thread of iconoclasm to this global ‘Age of Anger’, targeting all leaderships, everywhere. In these tempestuous times, of course, the world reads into events what it hopes and expects to see. Moussa calls such sectarian ‘framing’ both dangerous and “sinister”.

But look rather, at the core issue on which practically all Lebanese demonstrators concur: It is that the cast-iron sectarian ‘cage’ (decreed initially by France, and subsequently ‘corrected’ by Saudi Arabia at Taif, to shift economic power into the hands of the Sunnis), is the root cause to the institutionalised, semi-hereditary corruption and mal-governance that has infected Lebanon.

Is this not precisely articulated in the demand for a ‘technocratic government’ – that is to say in the demand for the ousting of all these hereditary sectarian Zaim in a non-sectarian articulation of national interests. Of course, being Lebanon, one tribe will always be keener for one, rather than another, sectarian leader to be cast as villain to the piece. The reality is, however, that technocratic government exactly is a break from Taif – even if the next PM is nominally Sunni (but yet not partisan Sunni)?

And just for clarity’s sake: An end to the compartmentalised sectarian constitution is in Hizbullah’s interest. The Shi’i – the largest minority in Lebanon – were always given the smallest slice of the national cake, under the sectarian divide.

What is driving this sudden focus on ‘the flawed system’ in Lebanon – more plausibly – is simply, hard reality. Most Lebanese understand that they no longer possess a functional economy. Its erstwhile ‘business model’ is bust.

Lebanon used to have real exports – agricultural produce exported to Syria and Iraq, but that avenue was closed by the war in Syria. Lebanon’s (legal) exports today effectively are ‘zilch’, but it imports hugely (thanks to having an artificially high Lebanese pound). All this – i.e. the resulting trade, and government budget deficit – used to be balanced out by the large inward flow of dollars.

Inward remittances from the 8 – 9 million Lebanese living overseas was one key part – and dollar deposits arriving in Lebanon’s once ‘safe-haven’ banking system was the other. But that ‘business model’ effectively is bust. The remittances have been fading for years, and the Banking system has the US Treasury crawling all over it (looking for sanctionable Hizbullah accounts).

Which brings us back to that other key point made by Moussa, namely, that the Iraqi disturbances are, in his view, “a preparatory stage for them to choose their way as Iraqis … and that will reflect on Lebanon too”.

If the ‘model’ – either economically or politically – is systemically bust, then tinkering will not do. A new direction is required.

Look at it this way: Sayyed Nasrallah has noted in recent days that other alternatives for Lebanon to a US alignment are possible, but have not yet consolidated into a definitive alternative. That option, in essence, is to ‘look East’: to Russia and China.

It makes sense: At one level, an arrangement with Moscow might untie a number of ‘knots’: It could lead to a re-opening of trade, through Syria, into Iraq for Lebanon’s agricultural produce; it could lead to a return of Syrian refugees out from Lebanon, back to their homes; China could shoulder the Economic Development plan, at a fraction of its projected $20 billion cost – and, above all it could avoid the ‘poison pill’ of a wholesale privatisation of Lebanese state assets on which the French are insisting. In the longer term, Lebanon could participate in the trade and ‘energy corridor’ plans that Russia and China have in mind for the norther tier of the Middle East and Turkey. At least, this alternative seems to offer a real ‘vision’ for the future. Of course, America is threatening Lebanon with horrible consequences – for even thinking of ‘looking East’.

On the other hand, at a donors’ conference at Paris in April, donors pledged to give Lebanon $11bn in loans and grants – but only if it implements certain ‘reforms’. The conditions include a commitment to direct $7 bn towards privatising government assets and state property – as well as austerity measures such as raising taxes, cutting public sector wages and reducing social services.

Great! But how will this correct Lebanon’s broken ‘business model’? Answer: It would not. Devaluation of the Lebanese pound (almost inevitable, and implying big price rises) and further austerity will not either make Lebanon again a financial safe-haven, nor boost income from remittances. It is the classic misery recipe, and one which leaves Lebanon in the hands of external creditors.

Paris has taken on the role of advancing this austerity agenda by emphasising that only a cabinet acceptable to the creditors will do, to release crucial funds. It seems that France believes that it is sufficient to introduce reforms, impose the rule of law and build the institutions – in order to Gulliverise Hizbullah. This premise of US or Israeli acquiescence to this Gulliverisation plan – seems questionable.

The issue for Aoun must be the potential costs that the US might impose – extending even to the possible exclusion of Lebanese banks from the dollar clearing system (i.e. the infamous US Treasury neutron bomb). Washington is intent more on pushing Lebanon to the financial brink, as hostage to its (i.e. Israel’s) demand that Hizbullah be disarmed, and its missiles destroyed. It might misjudge, however, and send Lebanon over the brink into the abyss.

But President Aoun, or any new government, cannot disarm Hizbullah. But Israel’s newly ambiguous strategic situation (post – Abqaiq), will likely hike the pressures on Lebanon to act against Hizbullah, through one means or another. Were Aoun or his government to try to mitigate the US pressures through acquiescence to the ‘reform’ package, would that be the end to it? Where would it all end, for Lebanon?

And it is a similar conundrum in Iraq: The economic situation though, is quite different. Iraq has one-fifth of the population of neighbouring Iran, but five times the daily oil sales. Yet the infrastructure of its cities, following the two wars, is still a picture of ruination and poverty. The wealth of Iraq is stolen, and sits in bank accounts abroad. In Iraq, it is primarily the political model that is bust, and needs to be re-cast.

Is this Moussa’s point – that Iraq presently is in the preparatory stage of choosing a new path ahead? He describes it as a self-correcting process leading out from the fissures of sectarianism. Conventional Washington thinking however, is that Iran seeks only a Shi’i hegemony for Iraq. But that is a misreading: Iran’s policy is much more nuanced. It is not some sectarian hegemony that is its objective, but the more limited aim to have the strategic edge across the region – in an amorphous, ambiguous, and not easily defined way – so that a fully sovereign Iraq becomes able to push-back against Israel and the US – deniably, and well short of all-out war.

This is the point: the end to sectarianism is an Iranian interest, and not sectarian hegemony.

The New York Times has once again exposed itself as an organ of US special interests operating under the guise of journalism – contributing to Wall Street and Washington’s ongoing and escalating hybrid war with China with a particularly underhanded piece of war propaganda.

Its article, “‘Absolutely No Mercy’: Leaked Files Expose How China Organized Mass Detentions of Muslims,” at face value attempts to bolster allegations made primarily by the United States that China is organizing unwarranted and oppressive “mass detentions” of “Muslims” in China’s western region of Xinjiang.

But just by investigating the quote in the headline alone reveals both the truth behind what is really happening in Xinjiang, why Beijing has reacted the way it has, and that the United States, including its mass media – is deliberately lying about it.

Ten paragraphs into the NYT article, the quote “absolutely no mercy” appears again – only this time it is placed within proper context. It was the response Beijing vowed in the aftermath of a coordinated terrorist attack in 2014 that left 31 people dead at China’s Kunming rail station.

Source: NEO

The NYT would write (emphasis added):

President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

The NYT – which has actively and eagerly promoted every US war in living memory – would unlikely flinch at the notion of the US showing “absolutely no mercy” against “terrorism, infiltration, and separatist,” yet it demonstrates a particular adversion to it in regards to Beijing just as the prominent newspaper has done regarding Syria and its now 8 year struggle against foreign-funded terrorism.

Despite claiming to have “400 pages of internal Chinese documents” – the most damning allegations made by Washington and indeed the NYT itself – are still left unsubstantiated.

This includes claims that “authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.”  No where in the NYT article is evidence derived from these documents to substantiate that claim.

Dubious Origins 

Like much of what the US media holds up as “evidence” to bolster establishment narratives – the “leaked files” come with it doubts over their provenance, translation, and the context and manner in which they are being presented to the public. There are also the lies of omission deliberately presented by the NYT and others covering this recent “leak” that need to be considered.

The NYT itself admits (emphasis added):

Though it is unclear how the documents were gathered and selected, the leak suggests greater discontent inside the party apparatus over the crackdown than previously known. The papers were brought to light by a member of the Chinese political establishment who requested anonymity and expressed hope that their disclosure would prevent party leaders, including Mr. Xi, from escaping culpability for the mass detentions.

Regardless – nothing appearing in the NYT article is actually a revelation of any kind. China has made its policies clear regarding terrorism and separatism in Xinjiang. Like every other nation on Earth – China refuses to tolerate violent terrorism and the extremist ideology used to drive it. These policies – when presented out of context as the NYT has deliberately done – appear heavy-handed, oppressive, unwarranted, and authoritarian.

If presented together with the very real violence, terrorism, and foreign-sponsored separatism emanating from Xinjiang – the policies take on an entirely different and understanble light.

Terrorism in Xinjiang is Real, But Omitted When Reporting Beijing’s Counter-terrorism Efforts

The Western corporate media itself has even repeatedly covered deadly terrorism carried out by a minority of extremists among China’s Uyghur population. However – they do so in the most ambiguous way possible – and refuse to mention it when subsequently covering Beijing’s attempts to counter it.

For example, CNN in a 2014 article titled, “China train station killings described as a terrorist attack,” would report:

A day after men armed with long knives stormed a railway station in the southwest Chinese city of Kunming, killing dozens of people and wounding more than 100, authorities described what happened as a premeditated terrorist attack. 

The article also admits that Xinjiang is beset with “frequent outbreaks of violence,” in reference to waves of violent terrorism carried out by Uyghur separatists, but falls far short of qualifying just how bad this violence has been.

The BBC would extensively elaborate on what CNN meant by “frequent outbreaks of violence” in a 2014 article titled, “Why is there tension between China and the Uighurs?,” reporting that (emphasis added):

In June 2012, six Uighurs reportedly tried to hijack a plane from Hotan to Urumqi before they were overpowered by passengers and crew. 

There was bloodshed in April 2013 and in June that year, 27 people died in Shanshan county after police opened fire on what state media described as a mob armed with knives attacking local government buildings

At least 31 people were killed and more than 90 suffered injuries in May 2014 when two cars crashed through an Urumqi market and explosives were tossed into the crowd. China called it a “violent terrorist incident”. 

It followed a bomb and knife attack at Urumqi’s south railway station in April, which killed three and injured 79 others. 

In July, authorities said a knife-wielding gang attacked a police station and government offices in Yarkant, leaving 96 dead. The imam of China’s largest mosque, Jume Tahir, was stabbed to death days later. 

In September about 50 died in blasts in Luntai county outside police stations, a market and a shop. Details of both incidents are unclear and activists have contested some accounts of incidents in state media.

Some violence has also spilled out of Xinjiang. A March stabbing spree in Kunming in Yunnan province that killed 29 people was blamed on Xinjiang separatists, as was an October 2013 incident where a car ploughed into a crowd and burst into flames in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.

While the NYT also references deadly terrorism in Xinjiang – it does so in a muted, secondary fashion, attempting to decouple it from Beijing’s motivations for pursuing policies with “absolutely no mercy” in response.

One need not imagine what would follow if such violence took place on US or European soil or the polices demonstrating “absolutely no mercy” that would undoubtedly follow not only domestically, but across the globe against nations perceived – or claimed – to have been involved.

The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington D.C. precipitated a now 20 year long “War on Terror” which has evolved into multiple ongoing wars, military occupations, and covert operations across scores of nations. The US Department of Defense’s own newspaper, Stars and Stripes, in a recent article titled, “Post 9/11 wars have cost American taxpayers $6.4 trillion, study finds,” would admit (emphasis added):

American taxpayers have spent some $6.4 trillion in nearly two decades of post-9/11 wars, which have killed some 800,000 people worldwide, the Cost of Wars Project announced Wednesday. 

The numbers reflect the toll of American combat and other military operations across some 80 nations since al-Qaida operatives attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington in 2001, launching the United States into its longest-ever wars aimed at stamping out terrorism worldwide.

By comparison, China’s attempts to rehabilitate extremists through education and employment is a far cry from America’s global war – in which as many have died, as the US claims China is “detaining.”

This is before even considering that out of the 80 nations the US is waging war and killing people in – the one nation from which the majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from – Saudi Arabia – has not only been spared, but is sold record-breaking amounts of US weapons and hosts US troops to protect it from regional states it openly attacks with legions of armed extremists espousing the same toxic ideology that motivated the 9/11 hijackers.

The US Sponsors Xinjiang Unrest 

Worse still, the US has been repeatedly caught jointly-sponsoring the very strain  of extremism allegedly behind the 9/11 attacks in its various proxy and regime-change wars beforehand and ever since.

Not surprisingly, there is also evidence that the US is fueling the violence in Xinjiang itself as well as recruiting extremists from the region to fight in US proxy wars abroad – most notably in Syria. These militants are then returned to China with extensive experience in terrorism.

US State Department-funded and directed Voice of America (VOA) in an article titled, “Analysts: Uighur Jihadis in Syria Could Pose Threat,” would admit (emphasis added):

Analysts are warning that the jihadi group Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) in northwestern Syria could pose a danger to Syria’s volatile Idlib province, where efforts continue to keep a fragile Turkey-Russia-brokered cease-fire between Syrian regime forces and the various rebel groups. 

The TIP declared an Islamic emirate in Idlib in late November and has largely remained off the radar of authorities and the media thanks to its low profile. Founded in 2008 in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang, the TIP has been one of the major extremist groups in Syria since the outbreak of the civil war in the country in 2011. 

The TIP is primarily made up of Uighur Muslims from China, but in recent years it also has included other jihadi fighters within its ranks.

Uyghur recruits have been trafficked through Southeast Asia where – when discovered, detained, and deported back to China – are followed by protests from the US State Department.

When Thailand refused to heed US demands that Uyghur recruits be allowed to move onward to Turkey – where they would be armed, trained, and sent into Syria – a deadly bomb would detonate in Bangkok killing 20. The bombing was linked to the Turkish terrorist organization, the Grey Wolves, co-sponsored by the US for decades to augment NATO’s unconventional warfare capabilities.

The US government’s own National Endowment for Democracy (NED) openly funds fronts operating out of Washington D.C. espousing separatism with the NED’s webpage detailing its funding of these groups even including the fictional name of “East Turkestan” used by separatists who reject the official designation of Xinjiang which resides within China’s internationally-recognized borders.

The inclusion of the term “East Turkestan” implies US support for separatism as well as the very real, ongoing deadly terrorism demonstratably used to pursue it.

And more than just implicitly supporting separatism, US government support in the form of NED money is admittedly provided to the World Uyghur Congress (WUC) which exclusively refers to China’s Xinjiang province as “East Turkistan” and refers to China’s administration of Xinjiang as the “Chinese occupation of East Turkistan.” On WUC’s own website, articles like, “Op-ed: A Profile of Rebiya Kadeer, Fearless Uyghur Independence Activist,” admits that WUC leader Rebiya Kadeer seeks “Uyghur independence” from China.

The US State Department’s “Radio Free Asia” network even maintains a “Uyghur Service” which pumps out daily accusations aimed at stirring domestic tension within China, and smearing China’s image internationally. RFA allegations are uncritically repeated by other Western corporate media networks in an attempt to bolster the impact of this propaganda.

US Gaslighting on a Global Scale 

The US through its policies and propaganda – including this most recent NYT article – accuse Beijing of “repression” for responding to very real, admitted, and extensively documented deadly terrorism plaguing China.

At the same time, the US pursues a global war spanning 80 nations and resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands, destroying entire countries, and displacing or otherwise destroying the lives of millions.

While citing “terrorism” as a pretext for its global aggression, it is simultaneously fueling the very armed extremism it claims it is fighting against. This includes the very real terrorism the NYT attempted to downplay to maximize the propaganda value of its “leaked files” story – despite other Western media networks covering this terrorism for years.

Not only is this US policy disjointed, deceitful, and deadly – it is incredibly dangerous. It is essentially a low-intensity version of what the US has been doing in Syria and had previously done in Libya leading to the North Africa nation’s destruction.

It is all but a declaration of war against China – not through direct military intervention – but through armed proxies, propaganda, and a deliberate, concerted effort to sow instability, division, and strife across Chinese society.

Coupled with economic warfare aimed at crippling China’s economy – Beijing finds itself a nation under siege. The fact that it has not responded to this very real, demonstratable existential threat with a fraction of the violence and global-spanning destruction the US has employed to fight its fictional “War on Terror,” is the best proof of all that the dystopian authoritarian regime the NYT tries to portray Beijing as – is as fictional and nonexistent as journalism is at the NYT’s office.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine“New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Yuri M. Kozlov, the Russian Trade Representative in Pakistan, suggested that Russia and Pakistan establish a “reliable and mutually acceptable banking system”, which strongly hints at Moscow’s desire to improve its commercial trade ties with Islamabad in order to lay the basis for N-CPEC+.

Clearing the FOG (forces of greed) hosts Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers interviewed Chip Gibbons, an expert on Constitutional Law and the legal and policy counsel for Defending Rights and Dissent about a recent right to protest victory in Washington, DC plus his new report, “Still Spying on Dissent: The enduring problem of FBI First Amendment Abuse.” You can read and download the report here. This report, which finds that people are being investigated for their political opinions, is part of a new campaign to hold the FBI accountable and stop its widespread surveillance and infiltration of social movements. You can listen to the entire interview and the week’s news analysis on Clearing the FOG.

Interview

Clearing the FOG (CtF): Before we get into your new report, let’s talk about the recent victory over an effort by the Trump Administration to stifle protest in Washington DC. Can you tell us about that?

Chip Gibbons (CG):  Late last year, the National Park Services asked for comments on new proposed rules that would have severely curtailed the ability to protest on public lands, national parks. One of the elements of the proposed rules that got the most attention was the so-called protest tax that would have allowed the National Park Service to charge protesters for the cost of policing or cleaning up of demonstrations. There was also concern that they were going to eliminate the deemed granted rule, which is that if you don’t hear back from the National Park Service within a certain period of time when you apply for a permit, your permit request is deemed granted.

A hundred and forty thousand people submitted comments about this proposal opposing it. Eighty civil society groups, including Popular Resistance and Defending Rights and Dissent, labor unions, and civil rights groups submitted comments opposing it. It was just announced this week that the Park Service was withdrawing the proposed rule change. That’s a pretty big victory because, at the end of the day, democracy is about more than just voting. It’s also about freedom of expression and assembly and that includes the right of people to come together in a common cause.

The National Park System is not only a custodian of our parks, but they also play a crucial role in facilitating democracy. Under international law, the right of free expression is interpreted as recommending that governments only require notice, not permits, for political demonstrations because as the previous rapporteur for the United Nations on Free Speech and Assembly said, “A right is not a right if it has to be granted.”

CtF: We really want to ask you about this new report that you authored for Defending Rights and Dissent. It’s about the FBI’s monitoring of social movements. Can you tell us about it?

CG: The report is called “Still Spying on Dissent: The enduring problem of FBI First Amendment abuse,” and it focuses on FBI surveillance or monitoring of social movements, protests, and civil society activity since 2010. It’s based on information that was already in the public domain. A number of journalists have filed FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests and a number of activists have reported being visited at their homes by the FBI.

A very interesting development was when Walmart was brought before the National Labor Relations Board for unfair labor practices, it was revealed in discovery that they contacted the FBI JTTF, Joint Terrorism Task Force, about Occupy protesters. This is information that’s been in the public domain, but the point of the report was to compile it all in one place. When you put all of the incidents we know about together in one place in detail, a picture starts to emerge of a systemic problem of surveillance in the United States. After covering that, the report steps back and puts it in the context of the FBI’s history since 1908 of spying on dissent.

The other thing is that in a number of cases what we know actually raises further questions, which is why it would be very helpful for somebody with subpoena power like Congress to actually step in and do their own investigation of this matter. A number of times when people received FOIA documents, they were redacted to the point of being unintelligible. We know that different people have filed FOIA requests about the same information and have gotten different responses. There’s some evidence to suggest the FBI is wrongfully withholding information when they’re subjected to FOIA requests. And when you hear stories about activists being visited at their homes, the question is what investigation is that part of?

What we know is very disturbing and it is cause for concern but just as important is what we don’t know. That’s why Congress needs to make sure we know more.

CtF: We don’t really know the extent of the FBI’s infiltration and monitoring of social movements. The Church Committee hearings exposed widespread government and FBI surveillance in the past. Do you think we’re really at that stage again where it’s so widespread that we need to have a series of Congressional hearings focusing on FBI surveillance of political activity in the United States?

CG: I absolutely do think so. I mean the Church Committee is the example that usually gets cited. The Church Committee was a select committee investigation into bad acts by the intelligence community in general. It talked about assassinations and about CIA tricks overseas, but the committee also talked about the use of intelligence to infringe on people’s rights domestically. A lot of people don’t know this, but the FBI is not only a law enforcement agency, but it’s also an intelligence agency. So, there is some information in it about the FBI’s use of its domestic intelligence powers to violate American’s constitutional rights.

In the late 80s, there was another investigation done by the Senate Intelligence Committee with some input from the Senate Judiciary Committee into what the FBI was doing when they were spying on opponents of Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy. It came out in the 1980s that the FBI had been spying on the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. There are a number of ways this came to light, my favorite of which is that they didn’t pay their informant and he complained. The Senate had an investigation, not a hearing, but an actual investigation. They released a report. People at the time felt like it was a bit of a whitewash but compared to the types of oversight we have of the FBI today, it certainly was an improvement.

In 2006, it came out that the Bush Administration was spying on a bunch of groups and that led Congress to ask the DOJ Inspector General to study the matter. They released their report on the Bush-era FBI spying in September of 2010. That’s why we choose 2010 as our starting date because there’s been no real oversight since then. Just four days after the report was released, the FBI raided the homes of anti-war and solidarity activists in the Midwest. The report showed that the FBI has loose guidelines.

When the Bureau of Investigation was created in 1908, it was created while Congress was on recess and to this day it has no statutory charter. After the Church Committee, there were some efforts to impose a charter on it, but Congress instead allowed the Attorney General to write guidelines in lieu of a Charter. As you can imagine, conservative attorney generals like those in the Reagan Administration and the Bush Administration rewrote the guidelines to be less restrictive and less protective of civil liberties.

Since the time period covered in the OIG report, the FBI’s guidelines have actually gotten even looser. George Bush’s lame-duck attorney general Michael Mukasey promulgated the current guidelines, which created a new category of investigations called assessments that allow the FBI to investigate people using very intrusive techniques when there’s no suspicion of criminal wrongdoing or national security threat, just an “authorized law enforcement purpose.” That’s the first time since the Church Committee the FBI was allowed to investigate people absent facts that suggested they were engaged in either a national security threat or in criminal wrongdoing. The other type of investigations allowed in the guidelines are literally called predicated investigations and that means they have a factual predicate. So, an assessment is an investigation without a factual predicate to suggest any wrongdoing at all.

CtF: So in the “land of the free” people can be investigated simply because of their political opinions. You mentioned that they use intrusive techniques to surveil activists. Can you talk about what some of those are?

CG: The biggest problem is human intelligence or confidential informants. There’s a lot of focus contemporarily on sort of the high-tech surveillance that the NSA does or all these sorts of spy tools that local police departments are acquiring and that’s very scary. And I think just as analogous when people talk about the FBI of the pre-Church Committee era, there’s a lot of fixation on illegal wiretaps and stuff like that.

Most of the surveillance the FBI does is through human intelligence. That’s either an undercover officer or confidential informant. You can have the best encryption in the world, but if the person that you’re sending the message to is reporting everything back to the FBI, it’s not very helpful. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be concerned with bulk surveillance and all this technology that is sucking up all our information. We should be terrified of it.

We also should not lose sight that the FBI is still using the tried and true old methods as well. And increasingly what we see is that these confidential informants go well beyond gathering information and they actively engage as agents provocateurs meaning that they come up with terror plots and they entice people into participating in them. Then the FBI turns around and arrests them and that allows the FBI to sort of over-exaggerate the threat of terror as well. If they say they’re arresting all these terrorists, that implies there’s some sort of further need for security.

When Donald Trump issued the first executive order authorizing the Muslim ban, the courts asked about the purpose. The second executive order used two terror plots supposedly involving refugees as justification for it, but in both cases, those plots were the product of FBI agents provocateurs. In one of the cases cited by Trump’s executive order, a judge found it to be an example of “imperfect entrapment,” which is different than perfect entrapment. That is an affirmative defense and bars your conviction. Imperfect entrapment is just an argument for a lesser sentence. A judge said this was imperfect entrapment and Trump then turned around and cited that as justification for a repressive policy.

CtF: Right after the Occupy Movement was winding down in 2012, there were a few cases of relatively young men who were vulnerable and they were entrapped into making it look like they were going to commit violent acts. In the past, the FBI would go after leaders of movements, but in this case, they went after the low-hanging fruit and then made headline cases out of it. Can you talk about that?

CG: I believe the case you are referring to is Occupy Cleveland where there were a number of young men sort of on the margins. They had issues and an FBI informant enticed them into participating in this plot to blow up a bridge on May Day. Obviously, that’s horrible, you shouldn’t blow up civilian bridges. But there was no such plot and the FBI announced the arrests right on the eve of Occupy Cleveland’s major May Day demonstration, which was supposed to have revived the movement in Cleveland that had sort of gone into hibernation during the winter. So they had to cancel the march given the negative publicity. So, they completely decimated the resurrection of Occupy Cleveland by creating this fake terror plot and then being able to defame the movement.

CtF: Can you give us a sense of the kind of groups targeted by the FBI?

CG: It’s the same groups the FBI has always targeted. It’s peace and solidarity groups, environmental groups, racial justice groups and economic justice groups. We know the FBI has this ridiculous threat assessment called “Black Identity Extremism”, which argues that perceptions of racism, police violence and social injustice in the African-American community could lead to retaliatory lethal violence against police. The argument is that if you’re rightfully angry or rightfully concerned about the racism or police brutality you’ve been on the receiving end of in our society and you want to speak out against that, that’s a precursor to violence. That’s a really insidious logic because it treats not only First Amendment protected speech as a precursor to criminality but rightful and legitimate concern about injustice as a precursor to doing a criminal act.

CtF: That’s such circular reasoning. Police commit violations of people’s rights, especially racist violations. The community is aware of it. And because you are aware of it, you’re a suspect for potential violence yourself and therefore under surveillance by the FBI.

CG: They use that logic repeatedly. There was a recent document that Yahoo! News got a hold of from an FBI office in Arizona where they mentioned that because of people being angry at children being put in concentration camps and the abuse of migrants that there could be an increased likelihood of armed confrontation between anarchists and the federal government. It’s totally insidious. It just treats First Amendment protected speech as a reason to be suspicious of someone as willing to commit a crime. When they single out these groups, oftentimes the FBI and their own files admit there’s no indication that anyone is planning on engaging in violence, but an unknown person at an unknown point in the future could.  So, the FBI has very clearly embraced this logic that certain points of view are inherently suspicious and that they should be monitored and investigated.

MF: One of the major groups that have been targeted by the FBI is the Muslim Community. Can you talk about that?

CG: Another really insidious thing the FBI does when it uses these confidential informants is it oftentimes sends them to the Muslim Community without any specific targets.

There’s a very notorious case where the FBI engaged in something called Operation Flax where they sent an informant into a mosque in Orange County. The mosque actually reported the informant to the FBI because he was acting rather ridiculously and the informant came forward and said that he had asked the FBI, “Who is my target ?” and they said, “Oh the target will come to you.” So what you’re talking about is a sort of dragnet suspicion-less surveillance. They asked this informant to infiltrate a Southern California mosque to gather personal information such as email addresses, cell phone numbers, and political and religious views. He was even encouraged by the FBI to enter into sexual relations with Muslim women in order to gather intelligence.

There’s an ongoing lawsuit about this surveillance. The FBI has tried to have it dismissed under the State Secrets Doctrine. It doesn’t look like they’re going to get away with that, but it still highlights the problem of this suspicion-less surveillance. Another famous case is the Newburgh Four.

The informant goes into this mosque and he’s not targeting anyone in particular, as far as we know. We have no idea why the FBI picked Newburgh for this particular type of surveillance. He eventually encounters the person he entices into this fake plot in a parking lot. So, they’re just going into Muslim communities where no one is suspected of any crime and just surveilling them and then trying to invent crime.

The FBI clearly views the Muslim community as a fifth column, which is why they are subjecting them to this awful suspicion-less surveillance.

CtF: In Robert Mueller’s era as FBI director, he did a lot of that kind of activity in the Muslim community, yet people look at Mueller as a great hero because he investigated Trump for Russiagate.

CG: There’s an entire OIG report on Robert Mueller’s FBI counterterrorism investigation of domestic advocacy groups, like Greenpeace, PETA, and the Catholic Workers. The last major attempt at oversight, the report released in 2010, coincides with Robert Mueller’s time at the FBI. Robert Mueller is not a hero.

CtF: You are a constitutional law expert, Chip. Can you talk about the state of our constitutional freedoms in the United States right now? How would you assess our rights to protest and to free speech?

CG: In terms of the FBI’s political surveillance, the courts have made it very difficult to challenge it. There’s a very important case in the 1970s where people who were protesting the Vietnam War in DC were spied on by the US Military and they tried to sue, Laird v. Tatum. They tried to sue the military for spying on them and the Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 decision refused to hear the case on the merits; therefore, never ruling whether or not they had a First Amendment complaint.

In order to be able to have standing to sue, you have to show that you suffered a harm and that the court can remedy that harm. The Supreme Court reasoned that the idea that if the military creates a dossier on you with your picture and tracks you because of your First Amendment protected activity, that if you might not want to engage in that activity, then that’s a self-subjective chill. You’re doing the harm to yourself. There are instances where people have gotten over that hurdle, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to challenge political surveillance in the courts.

What’s really needed is for Congress to act. Over the years, there have been a number of fine pieces of legislation proposed to impose limits on the FBI. I think those limits should be part of an overarching charter. We’re talking stuff like forbidding the FBI from investigating First Amendment protected activity unless there are facts indicating a violation or likely violation of the federal criminal code and that they have to weigh the magnitude of the crime against the threat to free speech, which you know isn’t a terribly radical suggestion. It’s actually quite moderate. Also, any sort of FBI charter needs to be judicially enforceable, meaning that if the FBI does break the charter and spies on you, you have a remedy in terms of both declaratory and injunctive relief. So, the courts can say this spying broke the charter and the FBI has to stop it. Those would be positive steps forward.  Congress needs to have an investigation into why the FBI is doing what it’s doing.

CtF: If you add the attacks on journalism with Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, Max Blumenthal, there are so many attacks on our freedoms. When they know a protest is being planned, like Occupy, how early do you think the FBI starts infiltrating and investigating protesters?

CG: Well, with Occupy, we don’t have to speculate because we know from the documents that were released the FBI began monitoring Occupy Wall Street in August of 2011. That’s a month before the protests began. Before the very first protester ever set foot in Zuccotti Park, the FBI was on the case. I don’t know in every instance how with-it the FBI is. The FBI is not always the most with-it people when you look at some of these documents they’ve released. It’s not unlikely before a protest or a movement happens for the FBI to start investigating or monitoring it. That’s clearly what happened in Occupy.

There are other cases where they’re sort of late to the picture. There’s a very disturbing example that we talk about in this report that involves By Any Means Necessary, which is a civil rights group, a racial justice group. They were doing a counter-protest of the Traditionalist Workers Party, which is right-wing, white supremacist, and fascist. The counter-protesters, the racial justice protesters, were stabbed. They were attacked. And the FBI instead of investigating the fascists who committed a crime, investigated By Any Means Necessary. What’s very fascinating is that the FBI gets the name of the racist group wrong. They think it’s the Ku Klux Klan. So, you have these FBI documents where the FBI says things like the Ku Klux Klan is a group that some people perceive as having a white supremacist agenda. They end up investigating the civil rights group as part of a counter-terrorism investigation and for possibly violating the civil rights of the Ku Klux Klan.

I’ve seen FBI documents where they’re describing the relationship between different activist groups, groups that I’m familiar with, and it’s like wow. On the one hand, the degree of surveillance is so terrifying but on the other hand, it’s like you guys are also kind of really out of it.

CtF: It’s not just the FBI. That’s just one agency. There are over 30 police agencies in Washington DC. The New York City Police Department is the size of an army. The US has been increasing the number of police officers since the Clinton era. He added more than a hundred thousand police to the streets in his era. How does the FBI work with local and state law enforcement?

CG: The FBI as a police force isn’t actually that large. The NYPD has more police than there are FBI agents, at least that used to be the case. What we increasingly see is that local police are working for the FBI in these so-called Joint Terrorism Task Forces. And in the Joint Terrorism Task Force, local law enforcement, and in some cases other federal agents are assigned to them, carry out their day to day missions as JTTF officers and they do this under the purview of the FBI. In most cases, they follow the FBI’s own guidelines.

There’s been a lot of pushback against this recently because, in a number of cases, states have laws on the books governing local police conduct and those laws are more stringent than the FBI’s own guidelines. So, in theory, the local police by following the FBI’s guidelines could be breaking state law. San Francisco rewrote their memorandum of understanding with the FBI mandating that local police have to follow local laws even when they’re acting as FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force agents. They then turned around and broke away from the Joint Terrorism Task Force completely. Portland also left that.

There’s been some controversy recently with some of these federal task forces, not just the Joint Terrorism Task Force, but some of the DEA ones, where they don’t allow their agents to wear body cameras. I believe this may have changed but they weren’t allowing the agents to wear body cameras. So, in cities or states where it was the law that police had to wear body cameras, they weren’t doing so when they were acting as Federal Task Force agents. Local officials rightfully got upset by that.

More and more, the FBI is turning local police into their foot soldiers.

CtF:  There are ways to deal with informants, infiltrators and agents provocateurs. On our Popular Resistance website, we have a class on how social transformation occurs and at least one class is on these issues. This report is very helpful for people to know what kind of tactics they use, how widespread it is and what to expect, but beyond that, there are other things people can do to build their movement in a way that handles this pretty well. How can people who care about this issue get more involved? Is there anything that they can do concretely?

CG: We have repeatedly called on Congress to investigate the FBI. We had a major campaign in 2016 where something like a hundred and thirty-seven groups, including Popular Resistance, and 88,000 people signed our petition to ask the Senate and House Judiciary committees to hold hearings about FBI surveillance of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and pipeline protesters. We are gearing up to relaunch that campaign in light of the report.

If people want to read the report, it’s on our website at rightsanddissent.org/FBI- spying/. On that page, there is an action you can take. In the coming weeks, we’re going to be using this report as an organizing tool and trying to build pressure around this issue of FBI political surveillance.

This is the time to put the pressure on Congress to use this moment to try to look into what’s going on and actually come up with some tangible solutions. The first attempt to check the FBI political surveillance was in 1924. Harlan Fiske Stone read a report by the ACLU about the FBI doing political spying. He was so concerned by it, he made J Edgar Hoover meet with Roger Baldwin, the head of the FBI. Stone did not know that Hoover was spying on Roger Baldwin and the ACLU. He put into place a regulation that the FBI had to stick to investigating violations of the criminal code and he asked Hoover, can you show us anywhere where it’s illegal to be a communist? Hoover found ways to get around that.

The FBI is very good at finding reasons to spy on people. But then in the 30s, there was a whole bunch of national executive orders from Roosevelt that gave the FBI very broad national security powers. So, this isn’t a new issue, but you know some of the ideas that have been proposed over the last almost 100 years are still very good ideas.

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

The Trump impeachment hearings give the illusion that voters in the United States have a choice between two different political parties: the Democrats and Republicans. The daily impeachment hearings dominate news headlines. Meanwhile, politicians of both parties have unanimously passed the Hong Kong Human Rights And Democracy Act revealing how both wings of the American elite share the same visceral fear of China’s challenge to the American empire.

Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House of Representatives, sums up nicely the flagrant hypocrisy of the American political elite with her declaration:

“The Congress is sending an unmistakable message to the world that the United States stands in solidarity with freedom-loving people of Hong Kong and that we fully support their fight for freedom. This has been a very unifying issue for us.”

The Hong Kong Democracy Act threatens China with sanctions if human rights are in Hong Kong are curtailed in any way. How ironic considering the United States stands full square behind the ongoing coup in Bolivia that recently removed the democratically elected President Evo Morales.

There are over 150 pieces of legislation awaiting Congressional approval that all aim to counter the growing power of Chinese capitalism. On the economic front these range from the China Technology Transfer Control Act to the Defending America’s 5G Future Act and Fair Trade With China Enforcement Act. Meanwhile, on the geo-political front we have the Tibetan Policy And Support Act and Uyghurs Human Rights Policy Act. If implemented these would massively ramp up the economic and geo-political tensions between the two superpowers.

If Trump approves the misnamed Hong Kong Democracy Act he will put in jeopardy any ‘phase 1’ trade deal deal with China. Wall Street investors fear that this political attack upon China could endanger the trade deal which they have been on tenterhooks for since last year.

Despite all of his aggressive bluster, Trump is desperate for a trade deal with China as the 2020 election inches nearer. As I have outlined previously, the trade war, that Trump started back in spring 2018 when he bragged that winning trade wars was easy, poses a significant threat to the rapidly slowing global economy. Without the unprecedented and gigantic money printing of global central banks this year the world economy would already be in recession.

If Trump approves the Hong Kong Democracy Act it will clearly signal a major escalation of policy towards China. The Chinese one party state, having stoked up nationalist feeling amongst its population during the trade war, will find it very difficult to sign any ‘phase 1’ trade deal with the U.S. after such a blatant attack upon its sovereignty.

Not surprisingly, the Chinese government reacted with anger to news that the U.S. Congress had passed the Hong Kong Democracy Act. A Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said that the act undermined both countries interests in Hong Kong. Geng warned the U.S.:

“We urge the U.S. to grasp the situation, stop its wrongdoing before it’s too late, prevent this act from becoming law (and) immediately stop interfering in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs. If the U.S. continues to make the wrong moves, China will be taking strong countermeasures for sure.’’

Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned U.S. Defence Secretary William Cohen, during a meeting last Wednesday, that the act represented “a naked interference in China’s internal affairs,” which China would not tolerate.

The hubris of the United States knows no bounds as it launches such an overt attack upon its major rival. I don’t recall China lecturing the United States as its police forces violently crushed the Occupy Wall Street movement during the autumn of 2011.

The clock is ticking for the United States as more and more countries put increasing effort into trade deals that don’t use the U.S. dollar. This de-dollarisation is viewed very negatively by Washington as it threatens its ability to print huge quantities of money that finance its huge war machine used to police American interests around the world. More and more countries resent the use of the dollar as a weapon against any state not pursuing policies favourable to American corporations.

The American empire is aware that it has to act over the next period to contain China before initiatives such as the Made In China 2025 and the Belt and Road projects decisively swing the balance of economic power in Beijing’s favour.

The U.S. still has time to seek a rapprochement with China as urged by foreign policy guru Henry Kissinger on his visit to Beijing last year. He warned that there is a risk of “destroying hopes for the new world order,” if the two superpowers cannot come to some mutually beneficial agreement on trade.

The Hong Kong Democracy Act and the 150 pending pieces of anti-China legislation in Congress suggests that the American empire is moving towards confrontation towards China which poses great dangers in the volatile period ahead.

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Bolivia is currently in turmoil after President Evo Morales was deposed in a U.S.-supported coup d’état on November 10. The new coup government forced Morales into exile, began arresting politicians and journalists while pre-exonerating security services of all crimes committed during the “re-establishment of order,” effectively giving them a license to kill all resistance to their rule. Dozens have died and massacres of indigenous protesters have occurred in the city of Cochabamba and the small town of Senkata.

In confusing and alarming situations such as these, millions of people around the world look to international human rights organizations for leadership and guidance. However, far from standing up for the oppressed, Human Rights Watch has effectively endorsed the events. In its official communiqué, it refrained from using the word coup, insisting Morales “resigned”, its Americas Director José Miguel Vivanco claiming the President stepped down “after weeks of civil unrest and violent clashes” and does not even mention opposition violence against his party or the role of the military in demanding, at gunpoint, that he resign. Therefore, Morales mysteriously “traveled to Mexico,” in the organization’s words, rather than fleeing there to escape arrest. Instead, it tacitly endorses the new government, advising it to “prioritize rights.”

Human Rights Watch Director Kenneth Roth went further, presenting the elected head of state fleeing the country at gunpoint as a refreshing step forward for democracy, claiming that Morales was “the casualty of a counter-revolution aimed at defending democracy…against electoral fraud and his own illegal candidacy,” noting that Morales had ordered the army to shoot protesters.

Bolivia's Evo Morales was "the casualty of a counter-revolution aimed at defending democracy..against electoral fraud & his own illegal candidacy. The army w/drew its support because it was not prepared to fire on people in order to sustain him in power." https://t.co/jeVnGta0Kk

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) November 18, 2019

Roth also described the coup approvingly as an “uprising” and a “transitional moment” for Bolivia, while presenting President Morales as an out-of-touch “strongman.”

The most important thing now in this transitional moment for Bolivia is ensuring that authorities reestablish the rule of law and protect fundamental rights, including to protest peacefully and to vote in transparent, competitive, and fair elections. https://t.co/ayWcCKdedS pic.twitter.com/WdxFmxEuhw

— Kenneth Roth (@KenRoth) November 13, 2019

New self-declared President Jeanine Añez, whose party received 4% of the vote share in the October elections, has already expelled hundreds of Cuban doctors, broken off ties to Venezuela and pulled Bolivia out of multiple international and intercontinental organizations and treaties. She describes the indigenous majority of Bolivians as “satanic” and insists they should not be allowed to live in cities, instead, being sent to the desert or the sparsely populated highlands. Añez declared that she is “committed to taking all measures necessary to pacify” the population.

"I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous practices. The city is not for the Indian: they should go to the highlands or the desert" – new US-backed self-declared President of Bolivia Jeanine Añez. pic.twitter.com/fD7jpnYJHX

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) November 13, 2019

Human Rights Watch described the law giving Bolivian security forces complete impunity to kill dissenters as a “problematic decree,” as if Añez had used racially insensitive language, rather than was ordering a massacre. In its statement, it noted that “nine people died and 122 were wounded” during the Cochabamba demonstration, leaving its readers completely in the dark about who died and who was responsible for the killing.

A long history of double standards

Human Rights Watch was originally established in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, an American organization dedicated to exposing the crimes of Eastern Bloc countries and monitoring their compliance with the Helsinki Accords. Since its establishment, it has consistently been criticized for being an agent of U.S. foreign policy, employing former U.S. government officials in key positions, and for displaying bias against leftist governments unfriendly to the United States.

For example, a 2008 report on human rights violations in Venezuela authored by Jose Vivanco was immediately panned by hundreds of academics and Latin American scholars, claiming the “grossly flawed” document “did not meet even the most minimal standards of scholarship, impartiality, accuracy, or credibility.” Indeed, Vivanco openly stated his biases, revealing that he wrote the report “because we wanted to demonstrate to the world that Venezuela is not a model for anyone.”

In contrast, Human Rights Watch was relatively silent on the Honduran coup d’état that deposed leftist President Manuel Zelaya, and the repression that came after, effectively carrying water for U.S.-backed regime change. As Bernie Sanders’ Communications Director Keane Bhatt wrote:

Human Rights Watch’s deep ties to U.S. corporate and state sectors should disqualify the institution from any public pretense of independence.”

Likewise, Amnesty International’s image as a defender of human rights hides a dark past of being effectively a front organization for Western governments. As MintPress News revealed earlier this year, one co-founder of the organization, Peter Benenson was an avowed anti-communist with deep ties to the British Foreign and Colonial Offices, propping up the Apartheid regime of South Africa at the British government’s request. Another co-founder, Luis Kutner, was an FBI asset who was involved in the government’s assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. Kutner went on to form an organization called “Friends of the FBI”, dedicated to countering and combating criticism of the Bureau.

Therefore, while some may be surprised by its response to the Bolivia crisis, Human Rights Watch’s applause of the U.S.-backed right-wing coup against a democratically elected leftist head of state may not be an aberration or a mistake, but it performing its actual purpose in reinforcing U.S. hegemony by condemning any leftist challengers in America’s “backyard.”

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Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.

Featured image: Jeanine Anez receiving the presidential sash from a representative of the Bolivian military (photo: EFE)

[Ignored by much of the Western media], The Jerusalem Post reports on the worsening humanitarian crisis in Yemen:

“There is nothing that shows any improvement,” Hisham Al-Omeisy, an independent Yemeni political analyst, told The Media Line. “The only thing that is visible in the media is that there is less coverage.”

Perhaps this is due to conflict fatigue or because the protests in places like Lebanon and Iraq have become the topic du jour. Whatever the reason, the Yemen conflict, now being called the “forgotten war,” is in danger of becoming even more forgotten when it comes to the human cost.

Olivia Headon, Yemen spokeswoman for the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM), says that conditions for 3.6 million people displaced by the conflict have worsened in the past half year because of the weather.

“We have had really heavy rain, which has caused people who are already displaced by conflict to be displaced by floods,” Headon said. “This is still the largest humanitarian crisis in the world.”

The war on Yemen has been “forgotten” more times than I can count. It has been common to describe the war and humanitarian crisis this way, because it suggests that the problem is simply outside neglect rather than complicity in causing the disaster. Unfortunately, the U.S. government and other Western governments have not ignored or forgotten Yemen. On the contrary, they have paid it the worst kind of attention possible by providing arms and support to the Saudi coalition’s interminable military campaign. Yemen would be much better off if the Saudi coalition’s arms suppliers and patrons had forgotten all about it, but the opposite has been true.

Yemen has been the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for almost as long as the war has been going on. The numbers of people at risk from starvation and disease continue to horrify as they grow ever larger. This year’s cholera epidemic has now spread to more than 750,000 cases. The World Health Organization has warned that Yemen’s devastated health care system cannot cope with the rampant spread of disease fueled by the conditions created by the war:

The World Health Organization warns disease outbreaks are flourishing in Yemen and many people are dying from a lack of health care and serious shortages in supplies and personnel.

Yemen’s economy is in tatters and its health care system in a state of near total collapse after more than five years of conflict. The WHO says about half of Yemen’s health facilities are functioning but are suffering from serious shortages of medicine, equipment and staff.

Consequently, it says health teams are unable to respond quickly to disease outbreaks and epidemics, which are thriving. For example, the WHO says a cholera outbreak in January is still ongoing and so far, has infected more than three-quarters of a million people and killed nearly 1,000.

In addition to the spread of cholera, there has also been an outbreak of diphtheria that has affected many hundreds more. Malaria and dengue fever have been spreading as well. Tens of thousands of cancer patients cannot receive treatment because of the terrible conditions and the unaffordable costs:

“Another challenge, of course, are the non-communicable diseases. An estimated 35,000 cancer patients amongst which 10% are children, and more than one million people who suffer from non-communicable diseases will no longer receive life-saving treatment. Also, a total of 7,000 renal patients were in need of weekly sessions in 2019,” he said.

The war has made it increasingly difficult to deliver essential supplies to isolated parts of the country, and Save the Children warns that thousands more children are being cut off from their food supplies:

An estimated 17 000[1] children living in hard to reach areas in Yemen– cut off by war –are at increased risk of severe acute malnutrition and death if issues with aid access are not urgently resolved, Save the Children reveals today.

Currently, 75 districts in Yemen are ‘hard to reach’ according to the UN definition – areas that humanitarian actors cannot regularly access for the purpose of sustained humanitarian service delivery[2]. More than 4.4 million people live in hard to reach areas, including almost 2,2 million children. 80 percent of these areas face crippling food shortages (IPC4)[3], which is one step away from famine. By comparison, half of the accessible districts face that level of food insecurity.

A further 121 000 [4] children under five in these hard to reach areas are already moderately malnourished, and are at risk of sliding into severe malnourishment. Children in these areas are much less likely to receive life-saving goods like medicines and therapeutic foods with only 35 [5] percent of these children having received the support they needed by September 2019.

The widespread starvation and spread of preventable disease should make Yemen’s humanitarian crisis one of the world’s top stories every week, but except for a couple brief surges in interest over the last few years virtually no one writes about what is happening to the people of Yemen. It almost never shows up in television reports, and it is a surprise when it comes up in our political debates. The burden is heaviest on the young and the vulnerable:

Swangin explained that some 12.3 million children there are now dependent on foreign aid.

“Almost the entire population of Yemen under 18 now requires some sort of humanitarian assistance to be able to survive,” he said. “Each day of the conflict makes the humanitarian situation worse.”

Millions of people are starving thanks to policies supported by our government, and the man-made famine that is unfolding barely registers here. Hundreds of thousands suffer from preventable and treatable diseases, but their health care facilities have been destroyed and damaged and their supplies of essential medicine and equipment have been strangled. The people of Yemen have been condemned to years of living in hell, and our government has played a significant role in sending them there. They will need substantial assistance to recover from the disaster that has befallen them over the last five years:

“Even if the conflict stops, we will still have the humanitarian crisis. Just because fighting stops doesn’t mean that everyone is going to be able to go home straight away or have access to employment like they did before,” she said. “They will still need support from the international community.”

The U.S. has been involved in helping to wreck and starve Yemen, and it is incumbent on our government to do what it can to stop causing more harm and to help repair the damage that our policy has caused.

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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image: Rubble aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a Yemeni neighborhood in 2015. Almigdad Mojalli/Voice of America

U.K. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders have both sent messages of solidarity to the recent anti-IMF protests in Ecuador, which have succeeded in forcing the government to scrap a controversial austerity decree.

“Let’s give a shout out to those people in Ecuador that are standing up against what the IMF are doing to their economy and their people,” said leftist opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, whilst at a rally with supporters, in anticipation of an upcoming election.

Progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders also celebrated the movement in Ecuador.

 “I applaud Ecuador’s Indigenous-led grassroots movements who stood up to repression and blocked the IMF’s austerity agenda. Economic elites keep pushing austerity worldwide, making life unbearable for working people. The U.S. should stop supporting this,” Sanders said in a tweet.

Both Sanders and Corbyn have fiercely opposed austerity drives in their own countries. With Sanders highlighting growing inequality in the U.S. and calling for universal, publicly funded healthcare.

Meanwhile, Corbyn has made nationalization of public utilities and investment in public housing a central theme in the run-up to a possible election that many are expecting to be held after the due date for Britain’s withdrawal from the EU on Oct. 31

The anti-austerity movement in Ecuador, led by Indigenous groups, succeeded in forcing the government to scrap decree 883 which withdrew fuel subsidies, and which protesters say would have triggered a huge rise in the cost of living. The decree was issued as part of an economic package in line with recommendations from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as part of a $4 billion-loan deal.

However, though the government was forced to back down on the decree, they have doubled down on accusations that former leftist President Rafael Correa had orchestrated the uprising and has begun arresting the leaders of his party.

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Elected on a progressive platform, the Moreno government has resorted to the politicization of justice and the militarization of politics to repress its former allies and constituents.

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Ecuador is facing some of its darkest days. The country is trapped with a highly unpopular president who has betrayed his mandate and proved his willingness to shed blood to implement a conservative economic agenda. Last October, the Moreno government unleashed a wave of repression to stifle widespread opposition to IMF-dictated policies.

Since taking office and after forcing a split within the ruling party Alianza País, Lenín Moreno has handed the state back to the powerful left-outs of Rafael Correa’s government. He used his mandate to subvert democratic institutions, persecute the opposition, and bring back the old neoliberal model to Ecuador, all in the name of the descorreización of the country. This has gained him the support of big business, the right-wing sector, the private media, and the U.S. government, who are not willing to let him go easily.

The Rule of Unconstitutionality

To push forward its agenda, the Moreno government has often disregarded the constitution. The first instance was the referendum held in February 2018 without the approval of the Constitutional Court, which kick-started the purge and ad hoc designation of state authorities, including the Attorney General and the Constitutional Court itself.

The capture of the judiciary did not rid the political system of all the obstacles to a neoliberal restoration. For this reason, the agreement signed with the International Monetary Fund was riddled with unconstitutional details. Apart from contradicting domestic regulations on monetary policy and fiscal deficit, the agreement bypassed the Assembly and the Constitutional Court. This violates articles 419 and 438 of the constitution and deprives the agreement of any democratic legitimacy.

The Moreno government employed unconstitutional measures to meet the protests against the economic policies imposed by the IMF. The state of exception that the government declared on October 3 and October 8 presented a number of serious legal flaws. Most importantly, it lacked constitutional backup for four days. This legal vacuum exposed the citizenry to a worrisome state of defenselessness and gave the government leeway to crack down on the protesters.

Repression, Militarization of Politics, and Delegitimization of Protests

For 12 days, Ecuador witnessed extensive repression by state forces. Official numbers of the Ombudsman Office talk about eleven dead, 1,340 wounded, and 1,192 arrested—96 of which were below 15 years of age. Eighty percent of all detentions was said to be arbitrary and illegal. Data on missing persons was not made available.

Brutality from the police and the armed forces was systematic and widespread. Repression targeted hospitals, universities, and shelters, where children and elders were resting at night. Armed forces used live ammo, grenades, and expired tear gas bombs. Citizens have denounced torture, illegal detentions, and trials in military quarters. The night of October 11, explosions around the El Arbolito park, where the vast majority of protesters gathered, were heard all over northern Quito. The next day, the exasperated population took to the streets in all neighborhoods and the government called a curfew at 3 PM. When the protesters defied the measure, the level of state violence increased. Protesters were shot at and some reported the presence of snipers. All of this while the government insisted that it was open to dialogue.

The official narrative centered on the denial of the reasons of the protests and the normalization of state violence. The president on different occasions accused Correa, Maduro, the ELN, the FARC, and the Latin Kings—a former gang that evolved into a legalized cultural organization in Ecuador—of being behind the demonstrations in an attempt to overthrow the government. Anti-Correa propaganda was transmitted on mandatory nationwide broadcast with the double aim of reducing the protests to acts of vandalism and blaming the opposition of golpismo.

Various actors used media exposure to directly threaten the population and call for more heavy-handed use of force. Minister of Defense Oswaldo Jarrín on national television warned that the armed forces would use lethal weapons and reminded everyone that they had experience in war-like scenarios. One journalist from the TV channel Teleamazonas reinforced this narrative and asked for the use of the whole military arsenal to quash the protests.

Politicians close to the government added fuel to the fire. Former presidential candidate and banker Guillermo Lasso, defeated by Moreno in the 2017 elections, complained of the excessive softness of the police and armed forces in dealing with the protesters. Similarly, former Guayaquil mayor Jaime Nebot and current mayor Cynthia Viteri resorted to war-like racist rhetoric to call for the defense of the city from a supposed invasion.

The Media Siege

Throughout the protests, traditional media outlets combined echoing of the official discourse with blatant censorship. The blackout on the events was near complete, and the scant coverage obscured anti-government, anti-IMF socioeconomic nature of the protests. While the country was in turmoil, TV channels offered entertainment programs. There have been various instances of journalists in the streets abruptly cutting off the interview when citizens expressed views not aligned with the government.

The government also cracked down on the few outlets detailing the protests. Public radio Pichincha Universal was pulled off-air and all its equipment was confiscated on accusations of inciting unrest. The next day, it was shut down and forced to retransmit the programming of the government’s public radio. The radio station had been denouncing harassment before. Telesur’s signal was also cut off without notice during curfew in Quito on October 12. The government had also been accused before of harassing other non-aligned outlets, such as Ecuadorinmediato.

The siege was partly broken by the excellent work of digital outlets such as Voces, Wambra, La Kolmena, KolectiVOZ, and many others, who helped disseminate information about the protests online. They are now the target of government harassment. Furthermore, the activist group critical of the government, La Kolmena, has also experienced anonymous threats. Unable to censor social media and limit the influence of independent media participation, the government appeared to engage in the disruption of mobile internet in crucial moments of the mobilizations.

Correista Witch Hunt

The sociopolitical chaos and the ensuing truce have given the government the chance to further damage the correista opposition. Selective political persecution of the previous government began two years ago with the removal from office and incarceration of vice-president Jorge Glas through faulty process. Since then, other important figures such as Rafael Correa, former minister Ricardo Patiño, and legal adviser Alexis Mera have been put on trial with various accusations.

Hours after Moreno reached an agreement to end the protests, Paola Pabón, governor of the province of Pichincha—where Quito is located—was taken into custody. The police raided her house at dawn without court order, and she was incarcerated without any evidence supporting detention. She was later accused of supporting armed rebellion together with two assistants. The offices of the Pichincha government were also raided a few days later. The Attorney General formulated the same charges against former congressman Virgilio Hernández.

Other political figures of the opposition were detained during the mobilizations and another seven of them, including former President of the Assembly Gabriela Rivadeneira, have received asylum in the Mexican embassy.

These cases demonstrate a lack of respect for due process. The Attorney General’s office is currently tweeting pictures of the supposed evidence found in police raids in complete violation of the principle of objectivity and the presumption of innocence. Through its Twitter account, the Attorney General’s office has also announced that it is working together on these cases with the U.S. Embassy in Quito.

The activism of the Attorney General against corruption, disruption of public service, and incitement to violence has been focused on the opposition. The evidence for corruption against Moreno and the block of public transit ordered by Guayaquil mayor Cynthia Viteri have not yet led to charges.

The Government That Won’t Fall

Considering the betrayal of its mandate and massive popular rejection, it is striking how the Moreno government has managed to hang onto power. This is all the more unusual in a country like Ecuador, where—before Correa’s tenure—presidential removal was routine.

This, however, is a different story. While in the past presidents were removed largely as a result of oligarchic infighting with limited redistributive consequences, this time the oligarchy is united behind Moreno. The restoration of the old economic model benefitting the few, largely dismantled by Correa during his presidency, is now at stake.

In addition, Moreno has found an important ally in the U.S. government. The permission to use the Galapagos Islands as a U.S. military airfield, the finishing blow to UNASUR, the delivery of Julian Assange, and the agreement with the IMF were all appreciated in Washington. Most importantly, the United States knows that the return of Correa would mean losing their influence in the country.

For these reasons, Correa is still considered a threat. He is yet to be defeated at the polls and received a high level of endorsement in the last provincial and municipal elections. That is why the constitutional solution to the crisis—the so-called muerte cruzada with anticipated elections—was always available but never pursued.

Moreno is now doing the dirty work with tax waivers and reckless economic reforms accompanied by extensive repression and annihilation of correista forces. He is unlikely to run again and therefore has no political capital to safeguard. Moreno is disposable, but in the middle of this process of reform and repression, absolutely irreplaceable. His fall would mean going to elections while the extinction of correismo is far from over.

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Fabio Resmini is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In his doctoral research, he examines the communication policy challenges of left-wing governments in Latin America.

Featured image: Protesters marching during protests on 9 October (Todos Noticias/Wikimedia)

Following Evo Morales’ democratic reelection on October 20, a CIA-orchestrated coup d’etat unconstitutionally replaced him with hard-right, political nobody senator Jeanine Anez.

Article 169 of Bolivia’s Constitution states:

“In case of impediment or definitive absence of the president of the State, he will be replaced in office by the Vice President and, in his absence, by the President of the Senate, and in the absence of this by the President of the Chamber of Deputies. In the latter case, new elections will be called within a maximum period of ninety days.”

Nothing in Bolivia’s Constitution permits a senator to self-declare herself president. Nothing in international or Bolivian law permits fascism over democratic freedoms.

Anez and her Bolivian backers have no legitimacy. Straightaway, she announced a pre-selected cabinet of hard-right, anti-populist ministers — charged with eliminating challenges to their rule and re-establishing fascist tyranny over governance serving all Bolivians equitably.

In days, they reversed positive changes Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) party instituted since January 2006.

MAS politicians, independent journalists, human rights workers, and activists for equity and justice have been harassed, intimidated, arrested or threatened with arrest.

By illegitimate presidential decree, Bolivia’s military and police were authorized to use brute force, including live fire and mass arrests against protesters for democratic freedoms over fascist rule, stating:

“The @CIDH Alert for Supreme Decree No. 4078 on FF.AA. in Bolivia, dated November 15, 2019. The Decree intends to exempt FF.AA. personnel from criminal responsibility that participate in the operations for reestablishment and stability of the internal order.”

An opposition statement said

“(i)n Bolivia, things are not well and will not likely improve because now Bolivia’s (coup d’etat) president Jeanine Anez has signed a decree that exempts the military from criminal responsibilities caused by the exercise of repression against citizens.”

A Bolivian student group denounced police state “raids on homes of People’s Congress” activists.

National Confederation of Indigenous Female Farmers spokesperson Maribel Avalos said the coup d’etat regime is “repress(ing) us…but the people are united” against it.

Dozens have been killed, hundreds injured, over 1,000 arrested. Weeks of blood in the streets mark the aftermath of Anez’s power grab, a self-declared, unelected, coup d’etat president with no legitimacy — installed by the CIA to serve US interests.

Coup d’etat interior minister Arturo Murillo said the prosecutor’s office established a “special apparatus” to charge and arrest MAS lawmakers with “subversion and sedition” if unwilling to switch allegiance from Morales to the coup regime.

Twitter supports it, permitting establishment of tens of thousands of fake accounts backing it, set up in days following Anez’s usurpation, spreading fake news of events in the country.

Anez may prohibit MAS participation in new elections when held. Morales tweeted:

“The putschist government of…Anez plans to suspend the Plurinational Legislative Assembly.” Pro-Morales members hold a two-thirds majority.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International (AI) failed to call what’s going on in Bolivia a coup.

HRW’s Americas director Jose Miguel Vivanco said Morales stepped down “after weeks of civil unrest and violent clashes,” ignoring his toppling.

HRW director Kenneth Roth tweeted:

“Bolivia”s Evo Morales was ‘the casualty of a counter-revolution aimed at defending democracy (sic) against electoral fraud & his own illegal candidacy (sic).”

“The army w/drew its support because it was not prepared to fire on people (sic) in order to sustain him in power.”

He “was so determined ‘to remain in power he made the classic strongman’s mistake of losing touch with the street (sic).’ ”

“He finagled an end to term limits (sic). ‘He then claimed victory in a dubious election last month (sic). That triggered the uprising.’ ”

“The most important thing now in this transitional moment for Bolivia (sic) is ensuring that authorities reestablish the rule of law and protect fundamental rights (sic), including to protest peacefully and to vote in transparent, competitive, and fair elections (sic).”

CIA-orchestrated blood in the streets followed post-October 20 2019 elections, Morales democratically triumphing over his leading opponent.

Independent Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) analysis revealed a free, fair and open process, no electoral fraud and irregularities as the Washington-based, US imperial tool Organization of American States (OAS) falsely claimed.

In cahoots with their corporate donors and Washington, HRW and Amnesty International (AI) support US imperial interests over peace, equity and justice.

Despite weeks of CIA-orchestrated blood in the streets, HRW and AI failed to call events in Bolivia a coup d’etat.

On Tuesday, HRW said:

“The priority (in the country) should be to ensure that the fundamental rights of Bolivians, including to peaceful protest and other peaceful assembly, are upheld.”

Post-election last month, AI falsely blamed Morales’ government for CIA-orchestrated violence following his reelection triumph, saying:

“(T)he Evo Morales administration must guarantee the Bolivian people’s right to peaceful protest (sic),” adding:’’

“(T)he Bolivian authorities’ response to the demonstrations has been deeply alarming and has shown contempt for human rights.”

HRW and AI ties to corporate donors and US imperial interests destroy their phony pretext of independence and impartiality.

Belatedly on November 19, a month after anti-Morales coup d’etat violence erupted, HRW said the following:

The Anez regime “adopted and announced alarming measures that run counter to fundamental human rights standards,” HRW’s America’s director Vivanco, adding:

“We are extremely concerned by measures taken by Bolivian authorities that appear to prioritize brutally cracking down on opponents and critics and give the armed forces a blank check to commit abuses instead of working to restore the rule of law in the country.”

On November 18, AI’s Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas said the following:

“The grave human rights crisis that Bolivia has experienced since the elections of 20 October has been aggravated by the intervention and action of the security forces,” adding:

“Any message giving carte blanche for impunity is extremely serious. The disastrous historical precedents of intervention by the Armed Forces in the region require maximum observance and commitment to respect and protect human rights.”

Neither statement explained weeks of CIA-orchestrated coup d’etat violence, installing fascist tyranny over democratic rule in Bolivia.

On Wednesday, Morales said the following:

“The mobilized people’s resounding demand is that the dictatorship should step down,” adding:

“That means we finish our term, and in exchange we won’t be a candidate (in the next election). If it’s a matter of peace, so no more lives are lost, no problem, I renounce” my candidacy.

The coup d’etat Anez regime “is…not a transition government. With repression, they are killing our people. They are traitors to our country.”

“My great wish is to return quickly to Bolivia…I have been told from people in a position to know that the Americans don’t want me back…Why do the gringos fear an Indian?”

He’s in contact with Bolivian allies, getting countless messages of support, urging him to return.

“Evo, come help pacify us,” he said, noting messages he received.

Trump regime hardliners will go all-out to prevent his return. Bolivia is Washington’s latest imperial trophy if able to keep it.

The country’s history of resisting tyranny offers hope of restoring democratic rule.

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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 Behind Back Doors

Wednesday’s public hearing on the impeachment of President Trump featured the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, who testified that, contrary to the White House narrative, there had been a “quid pro quo” in Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

Trump, Sondland said, offered military aid and an invitation to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to visit the White House in return for an announcement by Zelensky of an investigation into the activities of the Democratic National Committee in Ukraine in 2016 and the role of Hunter Biden. Biden was paid $50,000 a month by a large Ukrainian gas company while his father, then the vice president, was point man for Ukrainian policy in the Obama administration.

Sondland’s appearance was trumpeted by the Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee and most of the media as a “smoking gun” against Trump. Sondland was even compared to John Dean, the White House counsel whose testimony against Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal paved the way to Nixon’s resignation to avoid certain impeachment.

The testimony of John Dean, however, was part of the uncovering of a major attack on the democratic rights of the American people. The break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex, carried out by ex-CIA agents working for Nixon, was the outcome of a protracted campaign of political spying and repression directed against Vietnam War protesters, the former military official Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, and other political opponents.

There are no such issues of democratic rights in the conflict between Trump and the Democrats, who are acting as the political front men for the CIA and other sections of the national security apparatus. The significance of Sondland’s testimony lies not in what he revealed about Trump, but in his account of the everyday relationship between American imperialism and Ukraine, a small, dependent nation that has been turned into a vassal state by successive administrations in Washington.

The president of Ukraine is told by American diplomats exactly what words he must use and what promises he must make to appease his overlord in Washington. When President Zelensky offers to have his chief prosecutor make a statement along the lines demanded by Trump, he is told that he himself must make the statement, and it must be televised so that he is on the record. He is told to jump, and exactly how high.

In that respect, there is no difference whatsoever between Trump’s conduct in 2019 and the actions of his Democratic nemesis, Vice President Biden, in 2016. Biden traveled to Ukraine and told its government that Washington was withholding $1 billion in promised aid until certain actions were taken, including the firing of a corrupt national prosecutor. Biden even boasted in a US television interview that within six hours of his delivering that ultimatum the Ukrainian president had sacked the official.

Apologists for the Democrats and Biden will insist that Biden was carrying out official US government policy, in the interests of US “national security,” whereas Trump was looking out for his personal interests, seeking dirt on a potential election rival. This argument is questionable even on its own terms, since the prosecutor whose firing Biden demanded had control over the corruption investigation into the gas company Burisma, which was lavishly paying Biden’s son.

But there is a more fundamental issue: What was the “national security” interest that Biden was upholding? Why is the United States supplying vast quantities of military aid and weaponry to Ukraine? It is part of the effort by American imperialism, carried out over two decades, to turn Ukraine into an American puppet state directed against Russia.

For all the claims by the Democrats that they are shocked by Trump seeking “foreign interference” in the 2020 presidential election, every presidential election in Ukraine since 2004 has been characterized by massive foreign interference, particularly by the United States. One US official boasted in 2013 that Washington had expended more than $5 billion on its operations to install a pliable anti-Russian regime in Kiev.

Detaching Ukraine from Russia has been a key US foreign policy objective since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ukraine and Russia were the two largest components of the USSR. They share a land border of more than 2,000 kilometers and economies that were once closely integrated. Thirty percent of the Ukrainian people speak Russian as their first language, including the vast majority of the population of Crimea and the eastern Ukrainian region now controlled by pro-Russian forces.

In both World War I and World War II, German imperialism made the seizure of Ukraine, with its rich soil and proximity to the oilfields of the Caucasus, a key strategic objective. The largest number of Soviet Jews massacred as part of the Holocaust were killed in Ukraine, in atrocities such as Babi Yar, the ravine outside Kiev where 34,000 Jews were machine-gunned, and Odessa, where 50,000 Jews were slaughtered.

American imperialism is seeking to do what German imperialism failed twice to accomplish: use Ukraine as a launching pad for political subversion and military violence against Russia. Behind the backs of the American people, with little or no public discussion, the US government has been shipping large quantities of arms and other war materiel to Ukraine, in an operation that brings with it the increasing danger of a direct US military collision with Russia, a conflict between the two powers that between them deploy most of the world’s nuclear weapons.

The impeachment hearings have focused on anti-Trump witnesses who are themselves key participants in this reactionary foreign policy, and who speak in the Orwellian language of American imperialism. They define “democracy” in Ukraine in terms of the degree to which Ukraine’s government agrees to serve as an instrument of American foreign policy. They hail the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” in which an elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, was overthrown because he was viewed as an obstacle to the anti-Russia campaign. They salute fascistic figures like Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, sponsor of the notorious Azov Battalion, which marches under modified swastikas and celebrates the Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis in World War II.

Nothing of this political reality is so much as hinted at in the coverage of the impeachment hearings by either the pro-Trump or anti-Trump corporate media. On the contrary, the presumption is that the foreign policy of the United States government is aimed at the promotion of freedom and democracy and opposed to Russia because Russian President Vladimir Putin is a tyrant.

The role of US imperialism in Ukraine, however, is only one example of the depredations of American imperialism throughout the world, in which countless tyrants and fascists—like Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Brazilian President Jair Bolsanaro—are aligned with the CIA, the Pentagon and the State Department.

Nor is the cavalier attitude of the US government to Ukrainian sovereignty an exception. There is no difference between Washington’s role in Ukraine in 2014, its intervention against the Rajapakse government in Sri Lanka in 2015, its backing for the abortive military coup in Turkey in 2016, or its support for the overthrow of Evo Morales in Bolivia today.

Weaker nations whose rulers get in the way of American imperialism will pay the price, and in some cases, as in Iraq, Venezuela, Syria and Libya—all countries where oil wealth is a major consideration—the result can be invasion, occupation, military coup or a combination of all three.

Washington has its hands around the throats of the Ukrainian people. The issue is not whether this stranglehold is being used for improper “personal” ends by Trump, as the Democrats allege, rather than for the purposes laid down by the national security establishment. The issue is the intervention of the American and international working class to free the Ukrainian people, and the population of the world, from the deadly grip of Wall Street and the Pentagon.

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Featured image is Gordon Sondland from Wikimedia Commons

After my work in the Middle East had finished, at least for the time being, I was waiting for my flight to Santiago de Chile. In Paris. I could count on a few ‘free’ days, processing what I had heard and witnessed in Beirut. Day after day, for long hours, I sat in a lounge, typing and typing; reflecting and typing.

As I was working, above me, France 24 television news channel was on, beaming from a flat screen.

The people around me were coming and going: West African elites on their wild shopping sprees, shouting unceremoniously into their mobile phones. Koreans and Japanese doing Paris. Rude German and North American beefy types, discussing business, laughing vulgarly, disregarding ‘lower beings’, in fact everyone in their immediate radius.

No matter what was happening in my hotel, France 24 was on, and on, and on. Yes, precisely; for 24 hours, recycling for days and nights the same stories, once in a while updating news, with a slightly arrogant air of superiority. Here, France was judging the world; teaching Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, about themselves.

In front of my eyes, above me, on that screen, the world was changing. For many months I had been covering the nightmarish riots of the treasonous violent ninjas in Hong Kong. I was all over the Middle East, particularly Lebanon, and now I was on my way to my second home, Latin America, where socialism has kept winning elections, but was getting beaten, even terrorized, by the corrupt and crooked Western empire.

All that France 24 kept showing, I have been habitually witnessing with my own eyes. And more, much more, from many different angles. I have filmed it, written about it, and analyzed it.

In many countries, all over the world, people have been sharing their stories with me. I have seen barricades, photographed and filmed injured bodies, as well as tremendous revolutionary enthusiasm and excitement. I have also witnessed betrayals, treasons, cowardice.

But in the lounge, in front of the television set, everything appeared pretty groovy, very classy, and comforting. The blood looked like a well-mixed color, the barricades like a stage of the latest Broadway musical.

People were dying beautifully, their shouts muted, theatrical. The elegant anchor in a designer dress was beaming benevolently, whenever people on the screen dared to show some powerful emotions, or were grimacing in pain. She was in charge, and she was above all of this. In Paris, London and New York, powerful emotions, political commitments and grand ideological gestures, were made outdated, already a long time ago.

During just the few days that I spent in Paris, many things have changed, on all the continents.

The Hong Kong rioters were evolving; beginning to set on fire their compatriots simply because they dared to pledge their allegiance to Beijing. Women were unceremoniously beaten, with metal bars, until their faces were covered in blood.

In Lebanon, the big clenched fists of the pro-Western regime-change Otpor were suddenly at the center of the anti-government demonstrations. The economy of the country was collapsing. But the Lebanese ‘elites’ were burning money, all around me, all around Paris and all around the world. Poor Lebanese Misérables, as well as the impoverished middle class, were demanding social justice. But the rich of Lebanon were mocking them, showing. They had it all figured out: they have robbed their own country, then left it behind, and now were having a great ball here, in the “City of Lights”.

But to criticize them in the West has been taboo; forbidden. Political correctness, the mighty Western weapon used to uphold the status quo, has made them untouchable. Because they are Lebanese; from the Middle East. A good arrangement, isn’t it? They are robbing their fellow Middle Easterners, on behalf of their foreign masters in Paris and Washington, but in Paris or London, it is taboo to expose their ‘culture’ of debauchery.

In Iraq, the anti-Shi’a and therefore anti-Iranian sentiments have been dispersed, powerfully and clearly, from abroad. The second big episode of the so-called Arab Spring.

Chileans have been fighting and dying, trying to depose a neo-liberal system, forced down their throats ever since 1973 by the Los Chicago Boys.

The Bolivian socialist government, successful, democratic and racially inclusive, has been overthrown, by Washington and Bolivian treasonous cadres. People have been dying there, too, on the streets of El Alto, La Paz, and Cochabamba.

Israel was at it again, in Gaza. Full force.

Damascus was bombed.

I went to film the Algerians, Lebanese and Bolivians; people who were pushing for their agendas at the Place de la Republique.

I anticipated the horrors that were waiting for me, soon; in Chile, Bolivia and Hong Kong.

I was writing, feverishly.

While the television set was humming.

People were entering and leaving the lounge, meeting and separating, laughing, shouting, crying and making up.

Nothing to do with the world.

The outbursts of indecent laugher erupted periodically, even as the bombs were exploding on the screen, even as the people were charging against the police and the military.

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Then, one day, I realized that nobody really gives a damn. Like that; so simple.

You witness what happens, all over the world; you document it. You are risking your life. You are getting engaged. You get injured. Sometimes you come close, extremely close, to death.

You do not watch TV. Never, or almost never. You appear on the television, yes; you supply stories and images. But you never watch the results; what emotions your work, your words and images, truly evoke. Or do they evoke any emotions at all? You only work for the anti-imperialist media outlets, never for the mainstream. But for whomever you work for, you have no clue what the facial expressions your reports from the war zones are arousing. Or what emotions any war zone reports stir.

And then, you are in Paris, and you have some time to watch your readers, and suddenly you understand.

You get it: why so few are writing to you, support your struggle, or even fight for the countries being destroyed, decimated by the empire.

When you look around, observing people who are sitting in a hotel lounge, you clearly realize: they feel nothing. They want to see nothing. They understand nothing. France 24 is on, but it is not a news channel, which it was intended to be, many years ago. It is entertainment stuff, which is supposed to produce sophisticated background noise. And it does. Precisely that.

Same as the BBC, CNN, Fox and Deutsche Welle.

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As the legitimately elected socialist President of Bolivia was being forced into exile, tears in his eyes, I got hold of the remote control, and switched channel to some bizarre and primitive cartoon network.

Nothing changed. The expressions on the faces of some twenty people around me did not change.

If a nuclear bomb would have exploded on the screen, somewhere in the Sub-Continent, no one would pay any attention.

Some people were taking selfies. While I was describing the collapse of the Western culture on my MacBook. All of us were busy, in our own way.

Kashmir, West Papua, Iraq, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Palestine, Bolivia and Chile were on fire.

So, what?

Ten meters away from me, an American businessman was shouting into his phone:

“Are you going to invite me back to Paris in December? Yes? We have to discuss details. How much am I getting per day?”

Coups, uprisings, riots, all over the world.

And that plastic, professional smile of the lady, the news announcer, in her blue and white retro designer dress; so confident, so French, and so endlessly fake.

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Lately, I keep wondering whether the inhabitants of Europe and North America have any moral right to control the world.

My conclusion is: definitely not!

They do not know, and they do not want to know. Those who have power are obliged to know.

In Paris, Berlin, London, New York, individuals are too busy admiring themselves, or ‘suffering’ from their little, selfish problems.

They are too busy taking selfies, or being preoccupied with their sexual orientation. And of course, with their ‘business’.

That is why I prefer to write for Russian and Chinese outlets, to address people who are scared like myself, anxious about the future of the world.

The editors of this magazine, in faraway Moscow, are; they are anxious and passionate at the same time. I know they are. I, and my reports, are not some ‘business’ for them. People whose cities are smashed, ruined, are not some sort of entertainment in the editorial room of NEO.

In many Western countries, people have lost their ability to feel, to get engaged, and to fight for a better world.

Because of this loss, they should be forced to give up their power over the world.

Our world is damaged, scarred, but is tremendously beautiful and precious.

It is not a business, to work for its improvement and survival.

Only great dreamers, poets and thinkers can be trusted, fighting for it, steering it forward.

Are there many poets and dreamers amongst my readers? Or do they look, do they behave, as those guests in the hotel lounge in Paris, in front of the screen beaming France 24?

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Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including China and Ecological Civilization. He writes especially 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 the author

Controlling your mind is key

as we head deeper into the 21st century. The mind is the new frontier – and from a military standpoint the new battleground – as governmental-military-corporate organizations become enmeshed with each other to push the same AI (Artificial Intelligence) driven agenda of a NWO (New World Order). Research is feverishly underway with the aim of completely understanding and decoding the brain, with the idea that such an understanding will lead to many ‘useful’ benefits (but not for the average person), such as governments being better able to control their citizens without threats or force, and military forces being better able to defeat their enemies without firing a single shot. Do you realize you and your mind are being targeted? And, on the other hand, do you realize you can harness the power of your mind to achieve your potential, including lifting yourself out or poverty, creating deep and strong relationships, and fulfilling your dreams?

Broad Mind Control

Mind control is a term with broad and specific meanings. In the broad sense, it refers to the widespread propaganda and programming (mostly doled out by the MSM [Mainstream Media]) that aims to brainwash people by limiting their perception of Who They Are and what reality is. The idea of this broad mind control is always to manipulate and disempower the individual, so that his/her attitudes and behavior come into alignment with what the Controllers want. It is said that Americans are the most propagandized people on Earth.

Specific Mind Control

In the narrow or specific sense, mind control refers to the projects started by the Nazis and continued by the CIA that sought to influence and control people’s minds to the point where they would become programmable robots, rendering themselves with docility into the hands of their manipulators. This would include doing whatever they were told and in some cases not even remembering it, because the programming involved splitting up the person’s mind into different ‘altars’ or personalities which were tightly compartmentalized in their brains. Each altar had no idea of the existence or actions of the other altars. A handler would then use certain triggers to activate a particular altar and bring it to the front, in order to get the mind-controlled victim to perform certain actions. In this way, mind-controlled assassins were created and used in major political assassinations, such as with Robert Kennedy and the dazed and confused Sirhan Sirhan. Mind-controlled sex slaves (e.g. Cathy O’Brien, Brice Taylor, Arizona Wilder, Cisco Wheeler, Svali, Kathy Collins and many more) have also been a common theme. The CIA’s notorious MK Ultra began in 1953. It is stated that it was shut down in 1973. When it was later declassified, the public learnt there were an incredible 149 sub-projects!

Advanced Overt Mind Control: Neuralink, BMIs, Nanochips, Neuro-enhancement

If you think the CIA, the government and other military agencies had a change of heart and suddenly stopped their mind control research, think again. Mind control continues today and has become even more advanced. Big Tech corporations like Google (Alphabet) and Facebook, which are not really private companies but rather a fusion of government-military-intelligence money/direction with corporate execution, are investing millions of dollars into developing technologies that can read your thoughts and devices which make a computer mouse and typing obsolete. They want to access your thoughts and make it so your brain is directly connected to a computer, to the internet and to AI (Artificial Intelligence). The USG under Obama launched the BRAIN initiative, estimated to cost $6 billion over a decade ($4.5 billion to the NIH alone). Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and founder of the Neuralink Corporation, is developing a device (like a neural lace) which he claims will basically read your mind. Dr. James Giordano (who worked at the DoD and DARPA) reveals all the areas the military is exploring – and it’s scary. In his own words, this includes stuff like neuroimaging, cyber-linked neurocog manipulation, directed energy devices, implantable BMIs (Brain-Machine Interfaces), nanoneurotechnologicals, nanochips and the neuro-enhancement of soldiers. Yes, he actually admitted the existence of directed energy devices – DEW was used on 9/11 and in other crimes such as the engineered fires in Paradise, California.

Advanced Covert Mind Control: V2K, Dream Hacking, Forced Speech, Synthetic Telepathy, EEG Cloning/Heterodyning, Cybernetic Hive Mind

These things are the admitted, overt brain research, and when it comes to exposing the conspiracy, there’s always one thing we are told and another thing that is actually happening. The covert brain research is even more shocking. Ex-CIA officer turned whistleblower Dr. Robert Duncan, an engineer who built many of these systems, has for years exposed numerous covert current mind control techniques. He confesses that he worked on the V2K (Voice to Skull) ‘Voice of God’ weapon, which had 4 different techniques that can pipe voices into people’s heads. This was used in the Iraq War against the Iraqi soldiers (“Lay down your guns, this is Allah”). He reveals how dreams can be hacked and people can be made to speak (forced speech). He also exposes how the following area are being researched and weaponized: remote mind reading, synthetic telepathy, cybernetic hive mind experimentation (multiple people sharing the same mental ‘space’), the existence and use of a technology for remotely ‘cloning’ or copying thoughts, emotions & other states (e.g. intense pain) onto a target (EEG cloning or EEG heterodyning). He also confirms that people can be targeted and tracked remotely via their energy signature or ‘brain print’.

Targeted Individuals

More and more people are blowing the whistle about how they are being attacked via electronic harassment and stalking. This is the remote assault on victims (known as TIs or Targeted Individuals) using frequency or directed energy weapons and other mind control technology to bombard people with invisible attacks. These TIs are made to feel certain emotions and think certain thoughts which are not their own. Sadly, these TIs may initially think they are crazy, and unfortunately many people around them do when they report it, however it is a very real phenomenon. Calling people crazy, forcing them to do a psychiatric evaluation or having them locked up all old tricks that have been used by governments worldwide to silence political opponents and dissidents.

In a nutshell, the overall point is this: control someone’s mind, control their perception and control their reality, because perception creates reality. Mind control is a tool of a very few psychopathic manipulators to control the whole of humanity.

Controlling Your Mind and Taking Back Your Power

So that’s the bad news – and it’s better to be aware of it than blindly ignorant of it just hoping it will go away. Far from going away, it’s expanding and increasing. So what can you do in the face of all of that? Yes, you can be aware of it, and yes, you can take some steps to protect yourself against it. However I want to highlight how most of us don’t use our brains to anywhere near the full potential. What if you took the full journey from mind control to controlling your mind? After all, if you don’t control yourself, eventually someone outside of you will control you; likewise, if you don’t control your mind, someone else will control it.

So, here’s the good news. Controlling your mind is a choice. You have the power to expand your consciousness and use the untapped potential of your own mind – intentionally, for your own good. You can learn to harness the amazing capacity of your mind and emotions to create the life you want. How? There is ancient knowledge, wisdom and a host of techniques which explain how to do this. The theme of controlling your mind has many facets, however in this article, for the sake of brevity, I will touch on just a couple. Firstly, there is the nature of the mind itself, spewing out thought after thought. Many spiritual traditions emphasize the importance of meditation, inner silence and full immersion in the now/present moment. This is training to reign in the so-called monkey mind so that you control it, rather than allowing it to control you.

Intention + Emotion = Creation

Secondly, there is a formula for creating or manifesting in this life. The formula is very well known to the Secret Societies that underpin the NWO and run the world. It is Intention + Emotion = Creation. Like any piece of knowledge or technology, it is neutral; it can be used for good or evil. If you use it for good, it’s White Magic; if you use it for evil, it’s Black Magic.

The key idea is to get clear on what you want, release any negative thoughts around it (e.g. it’s impossible, I’m unworthy etc.), make it specific and achievable, then focus on it. Then you bring your emotions into it: imagine feeling grateful for whatever it is. Imagine the feeling of already having it. Make this ‘imagining’ into a deep trust and knowing that what you want to create already exists and is yours for the taking. It works! This kind of magic power lies within each and every human, regardless of age, gender, race, religion or income bracket. And, it does not at all have to be limited to material things. Perhaps you wish to exercise your power on manifesting material things first, but after awhile you may find it is more fulfilling to create and manifest non-material things, such as loving relationships with your children, parents, romantic partners, relatives and friends, or non-tangible things such as having more love, harmony, time and fun in your life. The sky is the limit with what you can manifest.

Apply these principles in your own life by controlling your own mind and watch what happens! Use the power of your emotions to supercharge your vision, then watch as it springs into life. You don’t need to focus on what the Controllers are doing; being aware of it is enough; focus instead on what you can do to control and expand your own mind, for that is where your power lies. The power of your will and consciousness is more than the power of their mind control technology.

Mind => Perception => Reality

The mind is the source of our perception, and perception is the source of our reality. When we change our perception, we automatically change our reality. People are already waking up and doing this, realizing they are infinite consciousness using the body-mind as a vehicle for experience. Once we perceive ourselves as divine and deserving of love, freedom, abundance, peace and more as our birthright, we win the mind battle.

Work on Controlling your Mind – or Someone Else will Control It for You

Remember: control yourself or someone else will control you; control your mind or someone else will control it. The NWO agenda is to narrow the allowable, acceptable and ultimately POSSIBLE range of human thought, so that it becomes illegal, unthinkable and ultimately IMPOSSIBLE to think or do anything other than what the State wants you to think or do. However, humanity is 7.8 billion strong. A relative handful of manipulators cannot control your mind unless you willingly acquiesce and give your mind away. Think critically. Question everything. Read from a wide variety of sources. Investigate the origin and funding of those sources – many are connected to the NWO in some way, e.g. via Big Pharma, the Military Industrial Complex, Zionism, etc. all of which have massive lobbies and control over the MSM. Always check the facts! Don’t rely on organizations to do your fact-checking for you. Everything is a mind game. You can take back your mind and perceptual sovereignty to rise above the control and achieve freedom and prosperity.

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This article was originally published on The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and FB.

This year, China as “Intimidating Monster” has become the popular motif in Canberra circles.  Australian government members Andrew Hastie and Senator James Paterson have become vigorous moral, if hollow enthusiasts.  Their criticism of China has led to the revocation of visas to the country, something that has given reason to flash their plumage for the Australian electorate.  How dare China do what Australia has done a countless number of times to those they do not regard as passing a character test?

Senator Eric Abetz, chair of the Senate foreign affairs committee, has accepted the findings of an independent China tribunal that genocide is being committed against the Falun Gong.  “Genocide – in relation to Falun Gong – is something that might be an appropriate description.”  The brush, suggests the senator, is broad, including “Buddhists, Uighurs, house Christians and indeed criminals”, all of whom have been targets for organ harvesting.  

A somewhat different perspective is offered by Paul Keating, the last Australian prime minister to have the vision bug and see Australia as something a bit better than a spacious annex of US power.  He proved to be in fine tongue-lashing form on Monday.  Speaking at the Australian newspaper’s strategic forum, he suggested that, “The Australian media has been recreant in its duty to the public in failing to present a balanced picture of the rise, legitimacy and importance of China.”  The China image being preferred was one of “side plays dressed up with cosmetics of sedition and risk.”

The language of sedition and risk had a distinct genealogy: China, he posed, had become modern code for the “communism” of old, seamless substitute.  Particularly irritating to Keating were those “do-gooder” hacks scrounging on the selected titbits delivered by security agencies.  They, he argued, were not only shaping the narrative on China but caging it.  It was pious, indulgent, self-serving. It ignored the obvious point that powerful states tended to be “rude and nasty”, not to mention selfish, hardly a qualification of exclusion.

As for dealing with authoritarian powers, this was a normal and immutable facet of foreign policy.  To avoid engaging China for not being a model democracy was a principle doomed to failure.  It would “have cost us the Second World War – for Europe had no chance of being liberated singularly from the West.  Twenty-six million Russians died defeating Nazism in the brutal battles across the northern European plain.”

Keating, as ever, is hard to ignore.  His premise rings powerfully: Australia’s political classes have been hijacked by the security wonks, jam packed with “phobias” and “effectively running the foreign policy of the country.”  An elementary lesson on the politics of governance, he felt, was in order.  “The reason we have ministries and cabinets is that a greater and collective wisdom can be brought to bear on complex topics – and particularly on movements of tectonic importance.”  It was a process, he argued, that was “not working in Australia.”

How then, to deal with a boisterous, strapping China?  Not, suggests Keating, to encourage menacing behaviour, but discourage notions of strategic encirclement, a theme so common in the glacial language of Cold War confrontation. “Closer US political and commercial links with the countries of the region should help establish a web of self-reinforcing, cooperative ties over time, should assuage Chinese concerns that a structure is being built with the express purpose of Chinese strategic containment.”  This is wishful thinking, given the evident narrative from Canberra, boosted by Washington’s enthusiasm, that a firmer line is required.

The China fear factory, however, has its devotees.  Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott counts himself among them, drumming up the containment argument before various regional fora with regular insistence.  To the India Foundation in New Delhi, Abbott insisted that Australia had “put too many eggs into the China basket”. The word preferred is not that of “containment” so much as “constrainment”, suggesting that Beijing had become an unruly patient escaping the ward of orderly international relations.

Australian governments had gone about successfully cultivating the relationship with Beijing but any further engagement, suggested Abbott, would be dangerous. 

“The often-glossed-over reality is that it’s hard for Australia to be a meaningful strategic partner to a country that thinks it can bully its neighbours on the basis of confected territorial claims that it refuses to submit to arbitration and tires to resolve unilaterally in its favour.” 

One would think, on consulting such views, that Abbott might be referring to the United States, a country inclined, notably during various stages of its history, to unilaterally puncture holes in the international system as deemed fit.  Talk about any rule-based order is only relevant from the perspective of those who set those rules.  The makers are often the breakers.  From international human rights conventions to the International Criminal Court, the US imperium remains selective and aloof while retaining a rather tarnished crown as protector of the muddled free world.

Abbott continues the theme, again showing how interchangeable the logic of great power politics can be to middle or small powers.  “It’s hard for any country to be [anything] other than a client, or  a strategic competitor, with a country that still regards itself as the ‘middle kingdom’ and that has now dropped the mask hiding its strength and biding its time”. 

It was important, therefore, to encourage counter balances.  India, for instance, would in a half-century “be much more prosperous and no less democratic; every bit as strong as China, in fact, but far less overbearing.  I hope that Australia will be a key partner in India’s rise.”

Both Keating and Abbott have points of merit.  Australia cannot afford to be paranoid; nor can it afford to be unquestioning in its relations with China.  Dollars should not dull and drug strategic common sense.  But this is an area where balance is never assured.  Righteous hypocrisy is in abundant supply: Australia will continue to export its fossil fuels to China and receive its students while releasing gobbets of dislike and disdain – an all too familiar process.  It will also tolerate foreign interference when needed, something done over the decades since the Australian politicians cast their eyes to that ample bosom across the Pacific.

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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]

Opposition leader and former Defense Minister Lieutenant Colonel Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the first round of elections and will become Sri Lanka’s next president, thus returning his family to power after his brother Mahinda’s 2005-2015 presidency.

The latter was narrowly defeated in the January 2015 elections and attributed his surprise loss to foreign meddling, stating in March 2015 that

“It was very open, Americans, the Norwegians, Europeans were openly working against me. And RAW” (India’s foreign intelligence agency). He also added that “I asked the Indians, ‘Why are you doing this? It’s an open secret what you are doing.’ I had assured them that I would never allow the Sri Lankan soil to be used against any friendly country, but they had other ideas.”

His successor’s rule coincidentally saw Sri Lanka moving much closer to India, though the country didn’t pivot away from China like some analysts feared would happen at the time. Nevertheless, elements of President Sirisena’s administration politicized some of the island’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) investments, which contributed to the hostile information warfare narrative that attempted to falsely portray Sri Lanka as a “victim” of a so-called “debt trap” and therefore raise global doubts about the long-term strategic intentions of BRI.

There’s no greater refutation of that manufactured narrative than Gotabaya’s recent election since his brother was responsible for Sri Lanka’s strategic partnership with China that resulted in at least $7 billion dollars’ worth of BRI investments. His people voted for him not just because they want a strong leader who has a proven track record of security successes after he decisively ended the quarter-century-long civil war in 2009 (which is reassuring for them after last Easter’s Daesh terrorist attacks), but also because of his family’s ties with China.

Former President Mahinda’s vision was to make Sri Lanka a key node on the New Silk Road in order to assist its post-civil war recovery, though that strategy was thrown into uncertainty following President Sirisena’s reluctance (possibly under foreign pressure) to fully carry through with it. There was also a creeping perception among many people that Sri Lanka’s “recalibrated” foreign policy vector was turning it into other countries’ “junior partner”, especially after the US requested changes to its current “Status Of Forces Agreement” (SOFA).

An allegedly leaked copy of these proposed revisions was published by the press over the summer and claimed to show that American servicemen on the island would be granted immunity akin to the type that diplomats have per the Vienna Convention. This is extremely controversial when keeping in mind that such legal guarantees had previously been abused by American servicemen in Japan so much that the host state demanded changes to the original terms of their pact in order to finally prosecute some of those criminals.

It’s unclear at this moment whether Gotabaya will go through with the proposed SOFA revisions or not, but it’s abundantly clear that he and his brother will reprioritize their country’s commitment to BRI in order to return Sri Lanka to its path of prosperity in becoming one of the world’s most geostrategic trade and logistics hubs with time. This development isn’t aimed against India or the US, but would actually aid their long-term interests by ensuring stability in this formerly civil war-torn state, thus making it a better partner for all.

Proper development cannot occur without proper security measures first being in place, and it’s unfortunate that the previous government rolled back some of former President Mahinda’s security initiatives which in hindsight made the island vulnerable to Daesh’s worst-ever terrorist attack last Easter. Gotabaya plans to ensure that the security of all his compatriots is assured, after which all Sri Lankans can then begin reaping the benefits of further BRI investments.

The Rajapaksa’s return to power will therefore contribute to the stabilization of the Indian Ocean Region and enable the island nation to regain its previously lost role as one of the world’s most promising trade hubs.

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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Leaked Memo Shows the U.S. Still Does Not Understand Turkey’s Syria Operation

By Paul Antonopoulos, November 21, 2019

An ‘internal memo’ that was intentionally leaked has blasted U.S.President Donald Trump’s decision for the U.S. military to withdraw from Syria, or more accurately, relocate from northern Syria to the oilfields in the east, as well as his complacency as Turkey commits “war crimes and ethnic cleansing” against the Kurdish minority.

Trump’s New Policy on Israeli Settlements Is Illegal and Self-Serving

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, November 21, 2019

Thumbing his nose at the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute, the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice, Donald Trump decided that Israel’s unlawful construction of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory is lawful. This policy change is part of Trump’s pattern of seeking to legalize illegal Israeli practices. It panders to Israel at the expense of the Palestinians while aiming to burnish Trump’s bona fides with his Christian Zionist base. Christian Broadcasting Network quoted Jack Graham, pastor of the megachurch Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, as saying that the Trump administration “once again has demonstrated why evangelical Christians have been unwavering in their support.”

The Schiff Committee Finds No Impeachable Offense against Donald Trump

By Renee Parsons, November 21, 2019

After several days of unremarkable testimony by assorted State Department functionaries the Democrats continue to struggle with ferreting out a legally defensible impeachable offense to warrant the three ring circus currently being conducted by Rep. Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intel Committee.

On a railroad through the Intel Committee, the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s alleged attempt at a Quid Pro Quo (QPQ), Dems are no closer to a sure-fire ‘we got him now’ piece of evidence than when the inquiry began as they shift gears to widen the probe into  “bribery’ and/or ‘extortion,’ whichever shoe fits.

China-Bolivia – A Lithium Deal, No More?

By Peter Koenig, November 21, 2019

China has by far the largest lithium market. China produces already today the most electric cars, about 1 million in 2018, and will at least triplicate their production by 2025 – and in the following decade or two, demand is expected to increase exponentially.

Bolivia has the world’s largest – by far – known lithium reserves. A long-term win-win contract between China and Bolivia was under preparation since early 2019 and being negotiated as a 51% Bolivia – 49% China share-arrangement, with manufacturing of batteries and other lithium-related products foreseen in Bolivia – added value, job creation in Bolivia – with an initial investment of US$ 2.3 billion – was about to be signed, when the US-instigated Bolivian military coup occurred. It was immediately followed with the usual US-style intimidating, violent and murderous oppression, particularly directed at protests by indigenous people.

Chicago Teachers Union Ratifies Contract in the Aftermath of 11 Day Strike

By Abayomi Azikiwe, November 21, 2019

The strike also was joined by members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which reached a tentative agreement prior to the teachers. A division of SEIU represents thousands of security guards and teachers’ assistants in Chicago Public Schools system.

An October 30 tentative agreement between the CTU and the city administration was agreed upon by the executive board ending the strike paving the way for a return to classes for 350,000 students on November 1. The deal created the conditions for schools to open fully staffed since the SEIU said it would not return to work until the city administration reached an agreement with the CTU.

Impeach the Government: Rogue Agencies Have Been Abusing Their Powers for Decades

By John W. Whitehead, November 20, 2019

To allow the President or any rogue government agency or individual to disregard the rule of law whenever, wherever and however it chooses and operate “above the law” is exactly how a nation of sheep gives rise to a government of wolves.

To be clear: this is not about Donald Trump. Or at least it shouldn’t be just about Trump.

Video: The Madness of Putting 53,000 5G Satellites in Space

By Claire Edwards, November 20, 2019

Elon Musk has now applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch a further 30,000 satellites into Earth orbit, bringing the current total to 53,000 (October 2019). With the issues of space debris and weaponization being the two major issues of concern at the UN year after year, this is a mad enterprise, especially when NATO intends to declare space a domain of warfare in December 2019.

We stand at the brink of extinction if we do not stop the madness.

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Featured image is a White House photo

With less than a month to go before the UK general election, all efforts are being made by political parties to further their agendas. Naturally each side is launching attacks on the other, but perhaps the most virulent campaign is that of the Conservatives towards Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party. Their malicious accusations, particularly regarding allegations of widespread anti-semitism in the Labour party, which are without any proper foundation, have been propagated more or less since Corbyn came to power.

The anti-Corbyn propaganda reached its peak last week with an article in The Guardian entitled: “Concerns about anti-semitism mean we cannot vote Labour”. Signed by 24 ‘celebrities’, the piece stated that Jeremy Corbyn was

‘steeped in association with anti-semitism’ and that the opposition leader had ‘a long history of embracing antisemites as colleagues’.

And yet a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry into antisemitism in the UK in 2016 found

“no reliable, empirical evidence to support the notion that there is a higher prevalence of antisemitic attitudes within the Labour Party than any other political party”.

Furthermore, Labour’s own investigation the same year ruled that the party was not “overrun by anti-Semitism or other forms of racism”. Some party members did resign over matter – but this equated to as little as 0.08% of the membership – hardly a widespread issue it seems.

We therefore have to ask ourselves, why is it that we, the British people, are constantly being bombarded with information that the Labour party, and leader Jeremy Corbyn himself is anti-semitic? One can only deduce that it is pure propaganda being promoted by the Conservative party, because the fact is, there is very little to attack the Labour leader on. His policies genuinely have the potential to become extremely popular with the electorate, some of which are truly revolutionary and would nourish what is a nation starved of welfare provision after years of Tory austerity. Free broadband internet for all, raising the minimum wage to £10 an hour, nationalising public services – including rail, bus and Royal Mail – and creating a state-run pharmaceutical organisation: what is not to like? Britain is now a society steeped in injustice, with record levels of poverty and homelessness and despite Johnson’s attempt to compete with Corbyn on welfare with talk of also raising the minimum wage, he simply can’t undo the years of Tory austerity and the damage it has done to the lives of millions of ordinary working Brits.

Yet the Tory propaganda machine is on full blast. On Wednesday, after the ITV leaders’ debate where Corbyn and Johnson went head to head, it emerged that the Conservative press office twitter account was changed to the title ‘factcheckUK’ during the course of their exchange. The fact that it was temporarily changed during the one-hour programme was clearly an attempt to mislead the public into thinking that this was an unbiased, impartial media outlet offering commentary on the Labour leader’s performance. It’s video entitled: ‘factcheckUK verdict: Boris Johnson is winner of the leader’s debate’ demonstrates a clear aim to deceive the public.

But we should not be surprised that a Johnson government is prepared to go to such lengths to mislead and dupe the electorate. Under the current Prime Minister’s leadership, such deception is an everyday occurrence it seems, to the extent that one of the questions put to Johnson at the debate on Tuesday night was about ‘trust’ and whether indeed he could be trusted. The PM has been caught out lying, whether consciously or not, on so many occasions, and was engaged in this even before he took office. In the run up to the EU referendum he was one of many claiming that the UK would save around £350 million a year by leaving the EU.

It is easy to lose count of the number of times he has lied since becoming PM. He said the Conservatives were building 40 new hospitals – this has been shown to be untrue. He keeps repeating that there will be 20,000 new police officers to tackle crime; misleading considering his party have taken 21,000 police officers off the streets in recent years. His propensity to be untruthful does not go unnoticed, and frequently makes headlines: ‘For nine extraordinary minutes, Boris Johnson stood next to his bus and lied and lied and lied without stopping’ and ‘PM Makes String of False Claims in BBC Interview’. And it’s a sad state of affairs when you almost except the Prime Minister not to tell the truth: ‘Johnson’s Brexit would devastate business; the CBI must be hoping he is lying’, Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian.

And yet propaganda, it seems, works. For despite the woes of ordinary working Brits, they are still prepared to vote Conservative, for one reason or another at the ballot box. Personally, I find it difficult to work out why. One candidate is offering real solutions to the everyday strife facing working people, and another is promoting further uncertainty under Brexit  and a continuation of the status quo when it comes to social provision. And yet people seem to be taken in by the glossy, slick packaging of the Conservative manifesto and Johnson’s buffoonish, amiable personality. ‘He’s one of the boys, isn’t he?’ one Leave voter told Sky News recently. I shuddered in disbelief. One of the boys? How many average blokes in Britain have attended Eton and the Bullingdon Club? And yet people speak about him as if he joins the locals for a pint after work at the pub.

It’s time for people to waken up and smell the coffee come December 12th. For people’s livelihoods are at stake.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist.

Our relationship with China just went from bad to worse, and most Americans don’t even realize that we just witnessed one of the most critical foreign policy decisions of this century. The U.S. Senate just unanimously passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019”, and the Chinese are absolutely seething with anger.

Violent protests have been rocking Hong Kong for months, and the Chinese have repeatedly accused the United States of being behind the protests. Whether that is true or not, the U.S. Senate has openly sided with the protesters by passing this bill, and there is no turning back now.

The protesters in Hong Kong have been waving American flags, singing our national anthem and they have made it exceedingly clear that they want independence from China. And all of us should certainly be able to understand why they would want that, because China is a deeply tyrannical regime. But to the Chinese government, this move by the U.S. Senate is essentially an assault on China itself. They are going to argue that the U.S. is inciting a revolution in Hong Kong, and after what the Senate has just done it will be very difficult to claim that is not true.

The Chinese take matters of internal security very seriously, and the status of Hong Kong is one of those issues that they are super sensitive about. China will never, ever compromise when it comes to Hong Kong, and if the U.S. keeps pushing this issue it could literally take us to the brink of a military conflict.

And you can forget about a comprehensive trade agreement ever happening. Even if a Democrat is elected in 2020, that Democrat is going to back what the Senate just did. That is why it was such a major deal that this bill passed by unanimous consent. It sent a message to the Chinese that Republicans and Democrats are united on this issue and that the next election is not going to change anything.

And the trade deal that President Trump was trying to put together was already on exceedingly shaky ground. “Phase one” was extremely limited, nothing was ever put in writing, and nothing was ever signed. And in recent days it became quite clear that both sides couldn’t even agree about what “phase one” was supposed to cover…

A spokesperson for China’s Commerce Ministry said earlier this month that both countries had agreed to cancel some existing tariffs simultaneously. Trump later said that he had not agreed to scrap the tariffs, lowering hopes for a deal.

“They’d like to have a rollback. I haven’t agreed to anything,” the president said.

On Tuesday, Trump was visibly frustrated by how things are going with China, and he publicly warned the Chinese that he could soon “raise the tariffs even higher”…

President Donald Trump threatened higher tariffs on Chinese goods if that country does not make a deal on trade.

The comments came during a meeting with the president’s Cabinet on Tuesday. The U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies, have been locked in an apparent stalemate in trade negotiations that have lasted nearly two years.

“If we don’t make a deal with China, I’ll just raise the tariffs even higher,” Trump said in the meeting.

Unfortunately, raising tariffs isn’t going to fix anything at this point.

In fact, Trump can raise tariffs until the cows come home but it isn’t going to cause the Chinese to budge.

That is because on Tuesday evening everything changed.

When they passed the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019” by unanimous consent, the U.S. Senate essentially doused our relationship with China with kerosene and set it on fire. The following comes from Zero Hedge…

In a widely anticipated move, just after 6pm ET on Tuesday, the Senate unanimously passed a bipartisan bill, S.1838, showing support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong by requiring an annual review of whether the city is sufficiently autonomous from Beijing to justify its special trading status. In doing so, the Senate has delivered a warning to China against a violent suppression of the demonstrations, a stark contrast to President Donald Trump’s near-silence on the issue, the result of a behind the scenes agreement whereby China would allow the S&P to rise indefinitely as long as Trump kept his mouth shut.

As we reported last week, the vote marks the most aggressively diplomatic challenge to the government in Beijing just as the US and China seek to close the “Phase 1” of their agreement to end their trade war. The Senate measure would require annual reviews of Hong Kong’s special status under U.S. law to assess the extent to which China has chipped away the city’s autonomy; in light of recent events, Hong Kong would not pass. It’s unclear what would happen next.

I am finding it difficult to find the words to describe what this means to the Chinese.

We have deeply insulted their national honor, and our relationship with them will never be the same again.

Many will debate whether standing up to China on this issue was the right thing to do, but in this article I am trying to get you to understand that there will be severe consequences for what the U.S. Senate just did.

There isn’t going to be a comprehensive trade deal, the global economy is going to suffer greatly, and the Chinese now consider us to be their primary global adversary.

Shortly after the Senate passed the bill, a strongly worded statement was released by the Chinese government. The following excerpt comes from the first two paragraphs of that statement…

On November 19th, the US Senate passed the “Hong Kong Bill of Rights on Human Rights and Democracy.” The bill disregards the facts, confuses right and wrong, violates the axioms, plays with double standards, openly intervenes in Hong Kong affairs, interferes in China’s internal affairs, and seriously violates the basic norms of international law and international relations. The Chinese side strongly condemns and resolutely opposes this.

In the past five months, the persistent violent criminal acts in Hong Kong have seriously jeopardized the safety of the public’s life and property, seriously trampled on the rule of law and social order, seriously undermined Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability, and seriously challenged the bottom line of the “one country, two systems” principle. At present, what Hong Kong faces is not the so-called human rights and democracy issues, but the issue of ending the storms, maintaining the rule of law and restoring order as soon as possible. The Chinese central government will continue to firmly support the Hong Kong SAR Government in its administration of the law, firmly support the Hong Kong police in law enforcement, and firmly support the Hong Kong Judiciary in punishing violent criminals in accordance with the law, protecting the lives and property of Hong Kong residents and maintaining Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.

For a long time I have been warning that U.S. relations with China would greatly deteriorate, and this is the biggest blow that we have seen yet.

The U.S. and China are now enemies, and ultimately that is going to result in a tremendous amount of pain for the entire planet.

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Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. 

On November 20, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) announced that they had carried out “wide-scale strikes” on the “Iranian Quds Force” and the Syrian Armed Forces in Syria. The IDF claimed that the strikes were carried out in response to 4 rockets, which were reportedly launched from Syria at targets in northern Israel on November 19. The IDF’s Iron Dome intercepted these rockets over the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Commenting on the November 20 attack, the IDF claimed that it destroyed “a number” of Syrian air defense batteries because they did not refrain from responding to Israeli strikes. The IDF provided almost no details regarding the impact of its attack. However, photos and videos of the ground show that it successfully hit civilian buildings in southwest and west of Damascus. At least 2 civilians were killed and several others were injured.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its Turkish-backed allies repelled an attack by the Syrian Army on the town of Misherfah in southern Idlib. According to pro-militant sources, the army suffered “notable casualties”. However, no precise number was provided. The army attack on Misherfah demonstrates that government forces are not going to halt their anti-terrorist efforts in the area.

On November 19, Asayish, a security force, of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), apologized for the ‘unfortunate incident’ with a Russian patrol in northeastern Syria. To be clear, this ‘unfortunate incident’ was an attempt by SDF supporters to burn a Russian vehicle with petrol bombs.

According to the Asayish statement, the group will work to prevent further attacks on Russian personnel in the region from Kurdish ‘activists’. The statement followed remarks by the Turkish foreign minister that Ankara is not satisfied with the implementation of the safe zone agreement and is ready to resume its offensive in northeastern Syria.

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Professor Chossudovsky’s most recent book describes America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 reality whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

There is an intimate relationship between the Globalization of War and the Economic Crisis.  This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history. It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

Michel Chossudovsky views “economic conquest” as an integral part of the US military agenda. The US military and intelligence apparatus consults with Wall Street and the Texas oil conglomerates. Conversely the IMF and the World Bank are in permanent liaison with the Pentagon and the US State Department.

The Globalization of War, by Michel Chossudovsky

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity, Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 pages with complete index

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The Global Economic Crisis, Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Editors 

In all major regions of the world, the economic recession is deep-seated, resulting in mass unemployment, the collapse of state social programs and the impoverishment of millions of people. The meltdown of financial markets was the result of institutionalized fraud and financial manipulation. The economic crisis is accompanied by a worldwide process of militarization, a “war without borders” led by the U.S. and its NATO allies.

This book takes the reader through the corridors of the Federal Reserve, into the plush corporate boardrooms on Wall Street where far-reaching financial transactions are routinely undertaken.

The complex causes as well as the devastating consequences of the economic crisis are carefully scrutinized with contributions from Ellen Brown, Tom Burghardt, Michel Chossudovsky, Richard C. Cook, Shamus Cooke, John Bellamy Foster, Michael Hudson,  Tanya Cariina Hsu, Fred Magdoff,  Andrew Gavin Marshall, James Petras, Peter Phillips, Peter Dale Scott, Bill Van Auken, Claudia Van Werlhof and Mike Whitney.

The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century, Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall, Editors (Paperback)

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-3-9

Year: 2010

Pages: 416 pages with complete index

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The developing story about how the US intelligence and national security agencies may have conspired to influence and possibly even reverse the results of the 2016 presidential election is compelling, even if one is disinclined to believe that such a plot would be possible to execute. Not surprisingly perhaps there have been considerable introspection among former and current officials who have worked in those and related government positions, many of whom would agree that there is urgent need for a considerable restructuring and reining in of the 17 government agencies that have some intelligence or law enforcement function. Most would also agree that much of the real damage that has been done has been the result of the unending global war on terror launched by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, which has showered the agencies with resources and money while also politicizing their leadership and freeing them from restraints on their behavior.

If the tens of billions of dollars lavished on the intelligence community together with a “gloves off” approach towards oversight that allowed them to run wild had produced good results, it might be possible to argue that it was all worth it. But the fact is that intelligence gathering has always been a bad investment even if it is demonstrably worse at the present. One might argue that the CIA’s notorious Soviet Estimate prolonged the Cold War and that the failure to connect dots and pay attention to what junior officers were observing allowed 9/11 to happen. And then there was the empowerment of al-Qaeda during the Soviet-Afghan war followed by failure to penetrate the group once it began to carry out operations.

More recently there have been Guantanamo, torture in black prisons, renditions of terror suspects to be tortured elsewhere, killing of US citizens by drone, turning Libya into a failed state and terrorist haven, arming militants in Syria, and, of course, the Iraqi alleged WMDs, the biggest foreign policy disaster in American history. And the bad stuff happened in bipartisan fashion, under Democrats and Republicans, with both neocons and liberal interventionists all playing leading roles. The only one punished for the war crimes was former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed some of what was going on.

Colonel Pat Lang, a colleague and friend who directed the Defense Intelligence Agency HUMINT (human intelligence) program after years spent on the ground in special ops and foreign liaison, thinks that strong medicine is needed and has initiated a discussion based on the premise that the FBI and CIA are dysfunctional relics that should be dismantled, as he puts it “burned to the ground,” so that the federal government can start over again and come up with something better.

Lang cites numerous examples of “incompetence and malfeasance in the leadership of the 17 agencies of the Intelligence Community and the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” to include the examples cited above plus the failure to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. On the domestic front, he cites his personal observation of efforts by the Department of Justice and the FBI to corruptly “frame” people tried in federal courts on national security issues as well as the intelligence/law enforcement community conspiracy to “get Trump.”

Colonel Lang asks

“Tell me, pilgrims, why should we put up with such nonsense? Why should we pay the leaders of these agencies for the privilege of having them abuse us? We are free men and women. Let us send these swine to their just deserts in a world where they have to work hard for whatever money they earn.”

He then recommends stripping CIA of its responsibility for being the lead agency in spying as well as in covert action, which is a legacy of the Cold War and the area in which it has demonstrated a particular incompetence. As for the FBI, it was created by J. Edgar Hoover to maintain dossiers on politicians and it is time that it be replaced by a body that operates in a fashion “more reflective of our collective nation[al] values.”

Others in the intelligence community understandably have different views. Many believe that the FBI and CIA have grown too large and have been asked to do too many things unrelated to national security, so there should be a major reduction-in-force (RIF) followed by the compulsory retirement of senior officers who have become too cozy with and obligated to politicians. The new-CIA should collect information, period, what it was founded to do in 1947, and not meddle in foreign elections or engage in regime change. The FBI should provide only police services that are national in nature and that are not covered by the state and local jurisdictions. And it should operate in as transparent a fashion as possible, not as a national secret police force.

But the fundamental problem may not be with the police and intelligence services themselves. There are a lot of idiots running around loose in Washington. Witness for example the impeachment hearings ludicrous fact free opening statement by House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (with my emphasis)

“In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire.”

And the press is no better, note the following excerpt from The New York Times lead editorial on the hearings, including remarks of the two State Department officers who testified, on the following day:

“They came across not as angry Democrats or Deep State conspirators, but as men who have devoted their lives to serving their country, and for whom defending Ukraine against Russian aggression is more important to the national interest than any partisan jockeying…

“At another point, Mr. Taylor said he had been critical of the Obama administration’s reluctance to supply Ukraine with anti-tank missiles and other lethal defensive weapons in its fight with Russia, and that he was pleased when the Trump administration agreed to do so…

“What clearly concerned both witnesses wasn’t simply the abuse of power by the president, but the harm it inflicted on Ukraine, a critical ally under constant assault by Russian forces. ‘Even as we sit here today, the Russians are attacking Ukrainian soldiers in their own country and have been for the last four years…’ Mr. Taylor said.”

Schiff and the Times should get their facts straight. And so should the two American foreign service officers who were clearly seeing the situation only from the Ukrainian perspective, a malady prevalent among US diplomats often described as “going native.” They were pushing a particular agenda, i.e. possible war with Russia on behalf of Ukraine, in furtherance of a US national interest that they fail to define. One of them, George Kent, eulogized the Ukrainian militiamen fighting the Russians as the modern day equivalent of the Massachusetts Minutemen in 1776, not exactly a neutral assessment, and also euphemized Washington-provided lethal offensive weapons as “security assistance.”

Another former intelligence community friend Ray McGovern has constructed a time line of developments in Ukraine which demolishes the establishment view on display in Congress relating to the alleged Russian threat. First of all, Ukraine was no American ally in 2014 and is no “critical ally” today. Also, the Russian reaction to western supported rioting in Kiev, a vital interest, only came about after the United States spent $5 billion destabilizing and then replacing the pro-Kremlin government. Since that time Moscow has resumed control of the Crimea, which is historically part of Russia, and is active in the Donbas region which has a largely Russian population.

It should really be quite simple. The national security state should actually be engaged in national security. Its size and budget should be commensurate with what it actually does, nothing more. It should not be roaming the world looking for trouble and should instead only respond to actual threats. And it should operate with oversight. If Congress is afraid to do it, set up a separate body that is non-partisan and actually has the teeth to do the job. If the United States of America comes out of the process as something like a normal nation the entire world will be a much happier place.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

Featured image is from rouzer.house.gov

An ‘internal memo’ that was intentionally leaked has blasted U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision for the U.S. military to withdraw from Syria, or more accurately, relocate from northern Syria to the oilfields in the east, as well as his complacency as Turkey commits “war crimes and ethnic cleansing” against the Kurdish minority.

The author of the memo, diplomat and former ambassador to Bahrain, William V. Roebuck, took every opportunity to lambast Trump as he faces impeachment 12 months before the next U.S. presidential elections. Roebuck questioned whether the U.S. could have prevented the Turkish military operation in northern Syria by increasing military patrols, sanctions and threats, but conceded that “the answer is probably not,” citing Turkey’s membership in NATO and its large army against the small American presence in the region. “But we won’t know because we didn’t try,” Roebuck added.

The New York Times claims that Roebuck’s memo was delivered to the State Department’s special envoy on Syria, James F. Jeffrey, and to dozens of officials focusing on Syria in the State Department, White House and Pentagon. However, the entirety of the 3,200-word memo failed to mention Ankara’s motivation in conducting this operation.

The Syrian perspective is that this is part of a project for a Greater Turkey. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu emphasized in an October interview that Turkey is not interested in territorial expansionism, stating

“Russia is concerned about some sensitive issues, such as territorial integrity and the unity of the country [Syria]. We are also worried. If we look at all the joint statements of Turkey, Russia and Iran, we emphasize it.”

Although it may sound conspiratorial, this statement would have done little to alleviate this fear as Turkey has controlled large swathes of northern Syria since 2016 without any process to negotiate the return of these regions to Syrian government administration. In conjunction, Damascus would also remember the 1939 Turkish annexation of its Hatay province, Turkey’s invasion of neighboring Cyprus in 1974, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan invoking an early 20th-century irredentist document that claims northern Syria, northern Iraq, most of Armenia, the entirety of Cyprus, much of Bulgaria and Greece’s northern and eastern Aegean islands as under Turkish sovereignty.

Although territorial expansionism may be a motivating factor for many in the Turkish political and military leadership, it would be a secondary motivating factor. What Roebuck’s memo failed to mention is that Turkey’s Syria policy today is motivated by security concerns.

In an academic article titled “Turkey’s interests in the Syrian war: from neo-Ottomanism to counterinsurgency,” I first made the argument that Turkey’s initial interests in Syria was to expand its influence, and perhaps territory. What was not envisioned by the Turkish leadership was the re-emergence of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Syria, recognized as a terrorist organization by Turkey, Syria and the U.S., but not by Russia. The PKK in Syria fight under the banner of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), who comprise the majority of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

Washington confusingly recognizes the PKK as a terrorist organization, but has directly funded, armed and supported the YPG in Syria. Ankara makes no distinction between the PKK and the YPG, and this has been a primary source of recent hostilities between Turkey and the U.S. Although Syria once supported the PKK against Turkey, it has recognized the group as a terrorist organization since 1998, initially easing the tense relations between Damascus and Ankara, with Erdoğan even describing his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad as his “brother.”

Former Turkish Foreign Minister (2009–2014), Ahmet Davutoglu, adopted a “zero problems with neighbors” policy that saw his country strengthen economic and political ties with the Islamic World by lifting visa restrictions and taking a larger active role in critical Islamic issues like the fallout between the Palestinian Hamas and Fatah groups, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Syria and Israel. However, this new doctrine was taken to the test when the Syrian war began in 2011, with Ankara immediately contradicting the “zero problems with the neighbours” policy by supporting terrorist organizations and getting itself into disputes and hostilities with not only Syria, but also Iraq, Greece, Cyprus and Armenia.

The Arab Spring changed the status quo in the Middle East and provided an opportunity for Turkey to engage in power projections within a new regional order where Ankara would be the center of power. However, what Ankara had not calculated is that by abandoning the “zero problems with neighbors” policy and flooding Syria with tens thousands of terrorists, it was creating the very conditions for the PKK to return to Syria after a more than 20-year hiatus under the guise of protecting Syria’s Kurds.

Essentially, the project for a Greater Turkey has become secondary in the case of Syria, with Ankara’s current focus on what it calls a counterterrorist operation against the PKK/YPG, after they created the very conditions for them to return to Syria. Although Trump has whole teams dedicated to Syria, it appears that Washington refuses to acknowledge Turkey’s security concerns, just as Roebuck’s memo demonstrates.

The rise of the YPG brought questions of Kurdish independence or autonomy in northern Syria, which can also find justification for an autonomous or independent Kurdish state in eastern Turkey as the PKK, militarily and politically, has struggled for decades to achieve this. A Kurdish push for independence or autonomy in northern Syria not only threatens Turkey’s desire to illegally annex this region, but destabilizes Turkey as the Kurds can make a greater push for independence or autonomy in eastern Anatolia.

As Turkey strengthens its relations with Russia, the question remains whether the country will formally leave NATO or not. It is unlikely that the U.S. will push for Turkey’s expulsion from NATO as it has the second largest military in the alliance and occupies one of the most strategic spots on the planet.

Although the U.S. has turned to Greece as its Plan B to contain Russia in the Black Sea in any hypothetical war, Washington would know there is a great possibility that the next general election in Turkey could see Erdoğan out of power and replaced by a more Washington-friendly leader. Not only is Erdoğan’s popularity diminishing because of the economic crisis and his unpopular Syria policy, but the highly popular ex-economy minister Ali Babacan and ex-Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu have both recently left Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to establish their own respective political parties, which will only further weaken AKP who have lost over 840,000 members in one year alone.

The U.S. would be hoping that by continuing to apply military, diplomatic and economic pressure against Turkey, the tense situation in Turkey will see Erdoğan’s popularity diminish, and the return of a  pro-U.S. leader. The difficult economic situation, the millions of refugees and the increased terror attacks in Turkey can all be directly attributed to Erdoğan’s Syria policy, and the U.S. will continue to use these means to pressure Turkey until it conforms to Washington’s desires and reverse its strengthened ties with Russia.

Many within Washington are unsatisfied with Trump’s Turkey policy and feel that they are not utilizing their advantages to pressure Erdoğan. Roebuck’s memo however appears to be a potential gamechanger as it has critically expressed opposition to Trump’s policy at a formal, and now public, level.

Roebuck publicly revealed that Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria is “spearheaded by armed Islamist groups on its payroll” who are committing what can “only be described as war crimes and ethnic cleansing.” The same jihadist forces utilized by Turkey are no different to the ones the U.S. supported against Assad, who not only ethnically cleansed Kurds, but also Shi’ites, Alawites, Antiochian Greeks, Assyrians and Armenians.

Roebuck also suggested that the U.S. must maintain relations with Turkey. As Turkey is at a crossroads with its political leadership, Washington knows there is a strong possibility that Erdoğan might not be around by the time the next general election is scheduled in 2023, although it appears likely that these elections will take place years earlier. With Roebuck’s ‘leak,’ it is likely that Trump will start receiving stronger domestic political pressure to deal with Turkey in a much tougher way and continue to make every destabilizing effort to remove Erdoğan and have him replaced with a pro-U.S. leader.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

Thumbing his nose at the Geneva Convention, the Rome Statute, the UN Security Council, the UN General Assembly and the International Court of Justice, Donald Trump decided that Israel’s unlawful construction of Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory is lawful. This policy change is part of Trump’s pattern of seeking to legalize illegal Israeli practices. It panders to Israel at the expense of the Palestinians while aiming to burnish Trump’s bona fides with his Christian Zionist base. Christian Broadcasting Network quoted Jack Graham, pastor of the megachurch Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, as saying that the Trump administration “once again has demonstrated why evangelical Christians have been unwavering in their support.”

“The timing of this was not tied to anything that had to do with domestic politics anywhere in Israel or otherwise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed, denying that the change in policy was designed to benefit Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s locked in a tight battle for political survival.

Rabbi Alissa Wise, acting co-executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, said,

“It’s hardly a surprise that on the eve of Netanyahu’s indictment and Trump’s impeachment proceedings we suddenly have the Trump administration throwing the Geneva Convention and international consensus out the window and shamelessly pandering to the right-wing and evangelical base.”

Walking in lockstep with Netanyahu, Trump also illegally declared Jerusalem the capital of Israel. And three months after he illegally recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, Netanyahu named a new — and illegal — settlement under construction, “Trump Heights.”

On November 18, Pompeo announced the end of the United States’s 41-year policy of considering Israeli settlements to be unlawful.

“The establishment of Israeli civilian settlements in the West Bank is not per se inconsistent with international law,” Pompeo declared.

In 1978, the Carter administration adopted the position detailed in a letter written by State Department Legal Advisor Herbert Hansell. It concluded that

“the establishment of the civilian settlements in [the occupied Palestinian] territories is inconsistent with international law.”

Hansell’s letter cited Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring “parts of its own civilian population into the territories it occupies.” The letter stated that just because territory comes “under the control of a belligerent occupant,” it “does not thereby become its sovereign territory.”

After the 1967 war, Israeli military forces occupied Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights. The narrative that Israel acted in self-defense when it attacked Egypt, Jordan and Syria and seized those Palestinian territories is a false one.

Security Council Resolution 242, passed in 1967, specifies “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war.” In 2016, the Council reiterated that language in Resolution 2334, which condemned Israel for the establishment of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. The Resolution says that the building of settlements “has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law.”

The United States abstained from Resolution 2334. Barack Obama allowed it to pass by not vetoing it. Just before Trump took office, he tried unsuccessfully to keep the resolution from reaching the Council floor. In addition to pandering to his evangelical base, Trump is reversing still another Obama achievement. Pompeo admitted that the new policy is a rejection of Obama’s failure to veto Resolution 2334.

In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion stating that the “settlements have been established in breach of international law.” The Court cited the Security Council’s characterization of Israel’s policy of establishment of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court considers an occupying power’s direct or indirect transfer “of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” to be a war crime.

Over 600,000 Israelis live in settlements in the occupied West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem. About 3 million Palestinians live there.

Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator and secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, condemned the Trump administration’s “unceasing attempts to replace international law with the ‘law of the jungle.’” He called on the global community to resist the new U.S. policy.

“Israel’s colonial-settlement enterprise perpetuates the negation of the Palestinian right to self-determination,” Erekat said.

“Israeli settlements in occupied territory are illegal,” Bernie Sanders tweeted. “This is clear from international law and multiple United Nations resolutions. Once again, Mr. Trump is isolating the United States and undermining diplomacy by pandering to his extremist base.”

Trump has made explicit what has long been implicit: The United States directly enables Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands and oppression of the Palestinians. As journalist Ali Abunimah tweeted, the U.S. proclamation that Israeli settlements do not violate international law “is merely a shedding of the fiction that the U.S. has ever opposed Israel’s land-theft colonies. It changes nothing but makes clear to all that the U.S. and Israel are partners in crime.”

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

What originally began as an expression of legitimate outrage at the Mideast country’s dysfunctional government and endemic corruption quickly transformed into a Color Revolution aimed at carrying out regime change in Lebanon through the removal of Hezbollah from its government, the threat of which makes this a defining moment for the Resistance because its supporters’ loyalty is being tested to the core.

Some analysts see the world dodging a recession next year, which provides some upward room for oil prices.

Last week, the IEA warned last week that “the hefty supply cushion” building up in the first half of 2020 will cause OPEC+ problems as the group tries to balance the oil market. Part of the reason for another potential surplus is the steep drop in demand growth this year, forcing oil forecasters to make multiple downward revisions to their projections.

“With consumption growth of just 830 thousand b/d YoY in 2019, global oil demand has easily expanded at the lowest rate since the global financial crisis 10 years ago,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a note.

The slowdown was particularly concentrated in industrial sectors, which have been hit hard by the trade war.

“The manufacturing downturn in 2019 has been so pronounced that we think it could aptly be labeled as the third global industrial recession in the past 10 years, following the activity drops witnessed in 2012 and 2016,” the bank said.

Or, put more succinctly, “The world has just lived through an industrial recession,” Bank of America concluded, and oil prices really only held up because of massive supply outages in 2019. The industrial slowdown spread around the world.

Take India, for example. The “weak picture for the manufacturing and industrial” sectors of the Indian economy continue, JBC Energy said in a note on Monday, which have hit diesel sales.

“The 120,000 b/d (7%) y-o-y contraction was greater than even the demonetization-driven downside from January 2017,” JBC Energy said. “With bitumen sales also low, it appears activity in Indian manufacturing and construction is waning.”

But there are some reasons to think that things could turn around. While a lot still depends on the outcome of the U.S.-China trade war and the “partial deal” that the market still believes is likely, recent streams of data have tamped down fears of a recession.

“Looking into 2020, we expect an improvement in cyclical demand conditions as manufacturing PMIs seem to have stabilized and in some cases appear to be turning positive,” Bank of America said.

Part of the reason for more optimism is that corporations with global supply chains have held back on purchases over the past year, in large part because of the trade war, and have whittled away at inventory. The strategy seemed to be an attempt to wait out tariffs in the hopes of a negotiated breakthrough. That makes sense at the individual company level, but it hit manufacturers hard as sales and activity dropped. However, companies will now have to restock in 2020, Bank of America says. That could help steady the economy.

Meanwhile, if the U.S. and China can indeed agree to a partial trade deal, that would “further help boost industrial activity and confidence in the global economy,” Bank of America said, and “any signs of improvement on the trade front could add upward pressure to cyclical energy and metals prices.” The removal of some tariffs could both push down the dollar and raise commodity prices.

Still, a comprehensive breakthrough in the trade war is going to be extremely difficult, and the two sides have been far apart on the big issues. The partial deal, such as it is, would only suspend tariffs in exchange for China buying large sums of agricultural goods.

But even the partial deal has run into trouble. The Trump administration has hyped a $50 billion purchase from China for U.S. agricultural goods, a figure that some say is “not possible.” So, it’s worth noting that even a very narrow and modest agreement has become a challenging prospect, to say nothing of more structural differences between the two countries.

In short, while the tone has softened and both sides have signaled that negotiations are proceeding to a conclusion, the U.S.-China trade war is far from finished.

In fact, right on cue, doubts began to resurface on Monday. CNBC said that the “mood in Beijing about a trade deal is pessimistic due to U.S. President Donald Trump’s reluctance to roll back tariffs.” Beijing may instead decide to sit and wait, betting that Trump’s standing continues to deteriorate in the face of an impeachment inquiry.

“It looks like this is by no means a done deal,” Matthew Miskin, a market strategist at John Hancock Advisors in Boston, told Bloomberg.

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Nick Cunningham is an independent journalist, covering oil and gas, energy and environmental policy, and international politics. He is based in Portland, Oregon. 

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

Welche Rolle spielt der Internationale Währungsfonds (IWF) bei den zahlreichen gegenwärtigen Protesten in Südamerika? Eine große, aber keine gute – so das Fazit von Peter König, der über zwanzig Jahre lang als Ökonom für die Weltbank tätig war.

Im Interview mit Maria Janssen beleuchtet der Schweizer Wirtschaftswissenschaftler die ökonomischen Hintergründe der Ereignisse in Südamerika und kommt zu dem Schluss, dass die Umsetzung der Konzepte des IWF (auch als IMF – International Monetary Fund – bezeichnet) noch nie zu einem besseren Lebensstandard für die Masse der Bevölkerung geführt hat.

Im Gegenteil sei der IWF ein Kriegsinstrument der USA und diene dazu, ressourcenreiche Länder in die Verschuldung zu treiben, um deren Rohstoffe ungehindert ausplündern zu können.

Following revelations of grave flaws in its Syria reporting, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons must allow whistleblowers’ evidence to be heard at the coming OPCW Conference of States Parties. That’s the message from the following public figures who have signed an Open Letter to OPCW permanent representatives.

José Bustani, Ambassador of Brazil, first Director General of the OPCW and former Ambassador to the United Kingdom and France.

William Binney, a former technical director at NSA

George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury

Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor, MIT

Alain Chouet, former chief of the Security Intelligence Service within the French external intelligence service (DGSE)

Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Professor Emeritus, former head Research group Cross-cultural Injury Epidemiology, Karolinska Institute. Chair Swedish Doctors for Human Rights – SWEDHR

Anne Gazeau-Secret, former French Ambassador, The Hague

Katharine Gun, former GCHQ (UKGOV), Whistleblower

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Officer and Former Senior Investigator, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

Annie Machon, former MI5 Officer, UK Security Services

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and presidential briefer; co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence; former Army Infantry/Intelligence officer.

John Pilger, Journalist and documentary film maker

Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security, MIT

Scott Ritter, UNSCOM Weapons Inspector 1991-1998

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel, 9-11 whistleblower and a 2002 Time Magazine Person of the Year

Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator (Iraq)

Oliver Stone, Film Director, Producer and Writer.

Courage Foundation Panel Members:-

Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University; Visiting Professor, Istinye University, Istanbul

Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief, Wikileaks

John Holmes, Maj Gen (retd) DSO OBE MC, former director of Special Forces, British Army

Dr. Helmut Lohrer, MD, Board member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and International Councilor of its German affiliate

Prof. Dr. Günter Meyer, Centre for Research on the Arab World (CERAW) at the University of Mainz

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence; member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence

And with support of members of the OPCW Douma Fact-Finding Mission

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Open Letter to Permanent Representatives of States Parties

cc: Office of the Director General, OPCW

Dear Permanent Representative,

We are writing in order to bring to your attention the recent meeting of the Courage Foundation Panel held in October 2019 and to ask for your support in taking action at the forthcoming CSP aimed at restoring the integrity of the OPCW and regaining public trust. The Courage Foundation is an international organisation that supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record.

The Courage Foundation Panel heard testimony and saw documentation from an OPCW official who was a member of the team investigating the alleged chemical weapon attack in Douma, Syria, April 2018. The panel, comprised of eminent individuals including José Bustani (the first Director General of the OPCW), Professor Richard Falk (Professor of International Law at Princeton and former UN Special Rapporteur) and Dr Helmut Lohrer (International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War), was unanimous in finding that ‘unacceptable practices’, involving suppression of information aimed at reaching a ‘preordained conclusion’, had occurred during the Douma investigation. Substantive concerns were raised regarding the credibility of the report, specifically with respect to toxicology and ballistics assessments, as well as the use and interpretation of witness testimonies. Suppression of internal debate and questioning within the investigation team appears to have been systematic. The full statement and accompanying analytical points can be found at https://couragefound.org/?s=OPCW and https://wikileaks.org/opcw-douma/.

The deliberations of the Courage Foundation Panel occurred against the backdrop of existing public controversy following the leaking in May 2019 of an engineering report authored by OPCW official Ian Henderson which reached very different conclusions from the official final OPCW report. In this regard, the Courage Foundation Panel noted that little consideration had been given in the final OPCW report to alternative hypotheses on how the alleged chlorine munitions came to be found in the two apartment buildings.

In view of the current disclosures, and the questions inevitably raised with respect to the integrity and credibility of OPCW FFM investigations, the Panel has called on the OPCW to ‘permit all inspectors who took part in the Douma investigation to come forward and report their differing observations in an appropriate forum of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention’.

We believe this request is eminently reasonable and indeed an essential step toward both establishing the truth of what happened in Douma and restoring public trust in the OPCW. If the organization is to faithfully implement the Chemical Weapons Convention, proper accountability and transparency of process are now required.

We hereby call on you to support the Panel’s request and facilitate efforts to allow all members of the FFM team to speak freely and without risk of censure at an appropriate forum.

Yours Sincerely,

José Bustani, Ambassador of Brazil, first Director General of the OPCW and former Ambassador to the United Kingdom and France

William Binney, former technical director at NSA

George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury

Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor, MIT

Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Professor Emeritus, former head Research group Cross-cultural Injury Epidemiology, Karolinska Institute. Chair Swedish Doctors for Human Rights – SWEDHR

Anne Gazeau-Secret, former French Ambassador, The Hague

Katharine Gun, former GCHQ (UKGOV), Whistleblower

John Kiriakou, Former CIA Officer and Former Senior Investigator, US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

Annie Machon, former MI5 Officer, UK Security Services

Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst and presidential briefer; co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) and of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence; former Army Infantry/Intelligence officer

John Pilger, Journalist and documentary film maker

Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security, MIT

Scott Ritter, UNSCOM Weapons Inspector 1991-1998

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel, 9-11 whistleblower and a 2002 Time Magazine Person of the Year

Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary-General and UN Humanitarian Coordinator (Iraq)

Oliver Stone, Film Director, Producer and Writer

Courage Foundation Panel Members:-

Richard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University; Visiting Professor, Istinye University, Istanbul

Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief, Wikileaks

John Holmes, Maj Gen (retd), DSO OBE MC

Dr. Helmut Lohrer, MD, Board member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) and International Councilor of its German affiliate

Prof. Dr. Guenter Meyer, Centre for Research on the Arab World (CERAW) at the University of Mainz

Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence (retd); member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence

This letter is supported by members of the OPCW Douma Fact-Finding Mission

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After several days of unremarkable testimony by assorted State Department functionaries the Democrats continue to struggle with ferreting out a legally defensible impeachable offense to warrant the three ring circus currently being conducted by Rep. Adam Schiff, Chair of the House Intel Committee.

On a railroad through the Intel Committee, the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump’s alleged attempt at a Quid Pro Quo (QPQ), Dems are no closer to a sure-fire ‘we got him now’ piece of evidence than when the inquiry began as they shift gears to widen the probe into  “bribery’ and/or ‘extortion,’ whichever shoe fits.

At the outset, it is essential to recognize that the debate surrounding Trump’s impeachment is not to protect the Republican status quo as a preference to the Democratic status quo – as both have failed the American people when trusted honorable people of quality were needed. Today’s assembly of House Republicans opposing Schiff et al provide a glimmer that perhaps such individuals may yet exist. The opposition to the Democrat’s impeachment inquiry is, more importantly, an effort to preserve what remains of a constitutional democracy and the rule of law on the outside chance that a true patriot of unimpeachable, exceptional character may arise from the ashes.

Once Schiff agreed to take the behind-closed-doors witness depositions public, HR 660 was approved to establish new ground rules favorable to the Democrats to determine “whether sufficient grounds exist for the House of Representatives to exercise its Constitutional power to impeach.”  Those new rules invest Schiff with an insatiable  power to rein in Republican committee members when and how he sees fit – limiting the ability of the minority to question witnesses, limiting due process for the accused and to deny Republican requests for witnesses unfavorable to Schiff like the alleged WB himself.

The first day of hearings began with Schiff opening statement inserting Russia into the fray with a totally inaccurate portrayal: “in 2014 Russia invaded  US ally Ukraine to reverse that nation’s embrace of the west and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russia empire.” What Schiff conveniently omitted was the role of Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State in Kiev in February, 2014 to effect the US overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych when he refused to join the EU in favor of a trade agreement with Moscow.

In his statement, Schiff, known as the Dems most bold prevaricator on Russiagate, omitted any mention of the alleged WB/CIA operative who filed the Complaint and, after public promises to the contrary, is not expected to testify on the matter as neither is Hunter Biden whose presence on the Burisma Board is central to the inquiry.

During Day One, two career State Department officials, known as Ambassadors, pontificated on their version of how foreign policy should be conducted as if their experience entitled them to special decision-making authority above and beyond an elected President of the United States.  Both remained ignorant and indifferent to the fact that unelected, embedded bureaucrats do not conduct their version of reality different from what an elected President has determined.  Neither offered any incriminating evidence of wrongdoing, no bombshell of misbehavior or any compelling revelations besides scant meaningless trivia that had already been stated.  All State Department testimony is against the background of the US State Department role in the 2014 coup what former President Obama referred to as ‘brokering a transition.”

On day one, former Ambassador William Taylor was the first, albeit the Democrats Star Witness who did not provide the smoking gun the Democrats needed.   When a stand up comic as talented as Jimmy Dore effectively destroyed former Ambassador William Taylor’s testimony, disintegration of the Democrat’s case for impeachment cannot be far behind.

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent then proved his own agenda in conflict with Trump’s objective that Ukraine is not vital to US interests when he reiterated Schiff’s earlier comments regarding the 2014 coup as a “popular revolution of dignity in 2014 forcing a corrupt pro Russian communist to flee to Moscow – after that Russian invaded Ukraine, including the Crimea and the Donbass territories currently occupied by Russia.”  What neither Schiff nor Kent mentioned was that Volodymyr Zelensky was overwhelmingly elected President of Ukraine over US puppet Petro Poroshenko with 73% of the vote and the stated goal of cleaning up corruption, resolving the conflict in the Donbas and normalizing relations with Russia.   Putin and Zelensky are scheduled to meet in Paris on December 9^th.

Kent went on to describe having a “front row seat” in early 2015 when he “raised questions with the Deputy Prosecutor General about why the (Burisma) investigation had been terminated. Later he said he ‘became aware that Hunter Biden was on the Burisma board and soon after, in a briefing call with the National Security staff of VP Biden’s office in 2015”, he “raised concerns that Hunter Biden status on the Board member could create the perception of a conflict of interest.”   In other words, if it was permissible for Kent to raise questions of the younger Biden’s presence on Burisma, the President of the US would have an even more legitimate reason for concern. 

Kent confirmed that ‘there are and always have been conditionality placed on our sovereign loan guarantees for Ukraine; the IMF does the same thing.” which sounds like an administration using political incentives as a negotiating tool to achieve political objectives.  In other words, it is common practice for any administration to provide loan guarantees with strings attached.

On Day Two, former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yuvanovich testified for longer than was necessary since she had nothing relevant to contribute except how her feelings were hurt as she was summarily dismissed from her position.  Soon after Yuvanovich made a controversial statement calling for the removal of Ukraine’s special anti corruption prosecutor,  she was told the President had lost faith in her and that she would be dismissed. Any President has the constitutional right to dismiss any State Department diplomat or any other political appointee at any time.

Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah) inquired of Yuvanovich “Do you have any information regarding the President of the United States accepting any bribes?”  Yovanovitch responded: “No.”

Stewart again inquired “Do you have any information regarding any criminal activity that he has been involved with at all?”   Again Yovanovitch responded “No.”  Period.  End of Story.

NSC staffer Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman testified this week and offered his opinion that the President was “inappropriate” or “improper” but was unable to provide Ranking Member Nunes with a factual basis of wrongdoing or to questions as Schiff interceded on behalf of the WB.

By the end of day three, former Special Envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testified that he saw no QPQ and no evidence of bribery or extortion. Tim Morrison, former National Security staff testified he did not agree with Schiff’s interpretation of the Trump Zelensky July 25th transcript.

On day four, another Star Witness former Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland also failed to provide Schiff with the necessary clincher to provide an irrefutable impeachable offense.

What was inescapable during the hearing was the absence of parliamentary courtesy or simply personal gracious conduct on the part of Chair of the Committee who was consistently intrusive as he overstepped his role with arbitrary, prejudicial violations of Roberts Rules of Order.  Schiff routinely ruled Points of Order to be out of order with an inflated sense of magisterial presence.  His demeanor proved to be classless and boorish as if he had been granted special dispensation from the House of Representative’s  Code of Conduct to treat his colleagues with disdain and contempt. Schiff routinely refused to ‘recognize’ a Member, liberally gavelled his authority to cut off debate and at times, badgered Republican witnesses and further treated Republican Members, who are his peers, as second class citizens in what was once regarded as a collegial body.   Once the dust settles, the House Ethics Committee may ultimately weigh in on Schiff’s character and the manner in which he conducted the Committee’s business.

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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31

What is the difference between an outright lie — stating something as a fact while knowing that it is false — and a deliberate material representation that accomplishes the same end? Here is an example that really pushes the boundary between the two, to the point where the distinction practically vanishes.

And the consequences are quite serious; this misrepresentation (or lie) has already played a major role in a military coup in Bolivia last week. This military coup overthrew the government of President Evo Morales before his current term was finished — a term to which nobody disputes that he was democratically elected in 2014.

More violent repression and even a civil war could follow.

OAS mission

The Organization of American States (OAS) sent an Electoral Observation Mission to Bolivia, entrusted with monitoring the Oct. 20 national election there. The day after the election, before all the votes were even counted, the mission put out a press release announcing its “deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results…”

Here is what the OAS was referring to: there is an unofficial “quick count” of the voting results that involves contractors who upload results at intervals, as the tally sheets are available. At 7:40 p.m. on election day, they had reported about 84% of the votes and then stopped reporting for 23 hours (more on that below).

When they resumed reporting results at 95% of votes counted, Morales’s lead had increased from 7.9% before the interruption to just over 10%.

This margin was important because in order to win without a second-round runoff, a candidate needs either an absolute majority, or at least 40% and a 10-point margin over the second-place finisher. This margin — which grew to 10.6% when all the votes were counted in the official count — re-elected Morales without a second round.

Morales’s lead grew steadily

Now, if you had any experience with elections or maybe even arithmetic, what is the first thing you would want to know about the votes that came in after the interruption? You might ask, were people in those areas any different from people in the average precinct in the first 84%?

And was the change in Morales’s margin sudden, or was it a gradual trend that continued as more vote tally sheets were reported?

You might even want to ask these questions before expressing “deep concern and surprise” about what happened, especially in a politically very polarized situation that was already turning violent.

CEPR

A look at that data shows that the change in Morales’s lead was actually gradual and continuous, and started rising many hours before the break in reporting of the quick count. You can see that in a graph of the results.

It’s geography

Why did it happen? The answer is simple and not that uncommon: the people in later-reporting areas were more pro-MAS (Morales’s party, the Movement Toward Socialism) than those in areas that reported earlier. Hence the gradual and continuous rise in Morales’s lead, in which the votes after the interruption put him over the top.

The OAS has published two press releases, one preliminary report, and one preliminary audit on the election. How many of these contained the disparagement of the election results implied by the “deep concern and surprise” quoted above? Three. How many contained anything about the difference between the percentage of MAS/Morales voters in areas with later returns versus earlier? Zero.

As it turns out, the interruption in the quick count was not a sign of foul play either.

Quick count has no legal status

The quick count is separate from the official count, and has no legal status to determine the results. It’s never been intended or promised to be a complete count; in prior elections it did not even near 84%.

It’s just a quick series of snapshots, done by contractors, to provide early results before the official count is done. It makes sense that the electoral authorities might not want two sets of voting results, which are inherently different, coming out at the same time in a violently polarized political situation.

For those who like numbers better than graphs: Morales’s margin after the first 84% of votes was 7.9%, as noted. If we look at the remaining 16% of precincts, and we ask, what is Morales’s pre-interruption margin in the areas where these later-reporting precincts were located? That margin is about 22%. Again, a simple explanation of how his margin increased as it did with later returns.

For a more powerful statistical analysis, we can project the remaining (and thus total) vote count on the basis of the first 84% reported. And — no surprise here — Morales’s projected final margin based on the first 84% of votes turns out to be slightly more than 10%.

It is difficult, almost impossible, to believe that this OAS mission, or those above them in the OAS Department of Electoral Cooperation and Observation, felt “deep concern and surprise” and yet were too incompetent to even look at this data.

Three lies

That is why I would say that they lied at least three times: in the first press release, the preliminary report, and the preliminary audit. And that is why I would regard with great skepticism the allegations presented in their preliminary audit, and further publications — unless these can be verified by independent investigators from publicly available data.

And the OAS isn’t all that independent at the moment, with the Trump administration actively promoting this military coup, and Washington having more right-wing allies in the OAS than they did just a few years ago.

Not to mention that the U.S. supplies 60% of its budget. But the OAS has horribly abused its mandate in election monitoring before, helping to reverse election results as the U.S. and its allies wanted: most destructively, in 2000 in Haiti; and also in the same country in 2011.

More evidence: in the last three weeks, the OAS has refused to answer questions from journalists, on the record, about their statements or reports since the election.

Maybe they are afraid that a curious reporter would ask questions like these: Is there a difference between the political preferences of people who live in later-reporting areas as compared to earlier ones? Doesn’t this explain how Morales’s lead rose to more than 10% as votes from more pro-Morales areas came in? Did you even look at this question?

Since I am an economist, I believe in incentives: I am offering a $500 reward for the first journalist who can get a substantive answer to these questions from an OAS official, on the record. Even if turns out to be a lie.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C. CEPR is a research and education organization established to promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives. He is also the author of “Failed: What the ‘Experts’ Got Wrong About the Global Economy” (2015, Oxford University Press). You can subscribe to his columns here.

China has by far the largest lithium market. China produces already today the most electric cars, about 1 million in 2018, and will at least triplicate their production by 2025 – and in the following decade or two, demand is expected to increase exponentially.

Bolivia has the world’s largest – by far – known lithium reserves. A long-term win-win contract between China and Bolivia was under preparation since early 2019 and being negotiated as a 51% Bolivia – 49% China share-arrangement, with manufacturing of batteries and other lithium-related products foreseen in Bolivia – added value, job creation in Bolivia – with an initial investment of US$ 2.3 billion – was about to be signed, when the US-instigated Bolivian military coup occurred. It was immediately followed with the usual US-style intimidating, violent and murderous oppression, particularly directed at protests by indigenous people.

They – the indigenous people, 70% to 80% of the Bolivian people – didn’t want to lose their President, Evo Morales, who has improved their lives enormously, like nobody else before since Bolivia’s independence from Spain some 200 years ago. Evo has drastically reduced poverty and provided most Bolivians with jobs and with a decent living. President Evo Morales had to seek asylum in Mexico to protect himself and his family from threats to his life and that of his loved ones, as well as to his political associates and members of Congress, who were in line to succeed him. The CIA, its handlers and their paid assets work with impunity, without scruples.

A day after Evo Morales left Bolivia, the opposition, led by the self-proclaimed neofascist, racist President, Jeanine Añez, ransacked and looted the Central Bank of its gold and large amounts of cash reserves. The loot was seen to be transported to the airport to be flown out of the country, presumably to the US. Madame Añez said she needed the money to buy weapons, of course, from America to keep oppressing and killing the indigenous protesters.

After the long-prepared and US- orchestrated ‘civic-military’ coup on 10^th November, Bolivia is being ruled by a self-appointed, illegal, temporary (they say), neofascist government which is not only supported by the United States – the “putsch-maker” – but also by the abysmally shameful European Union, as well as by the Organization of American States – OAS (boasting, the US pays 60% of OAS’ budget…).

Bolivians have been plunged into a violent military-police dictatorship knowing no restraint beating up indigenous protesters and shooting them with live ammunition. At least 25 have already been killed and hundreds wounded. Añez has signed a decree exonerating police and military from criminal prosecution for crimes and murders committed on protesters, giving the police and military a direct license to kill. Evo Morales, was forced to resign by top military brass which has been secretly trained by the School of the Americas, now called The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC).Evo has been bitterly betrayed by Washington-corrupted and trained officers.

About 20 of Evo’s closest entourage, including members of congress, who according to the Bolivian Constitution would have been in line to take up temporarily the Presidency until new elections are organized – a fact Evo proposed before being forced to resign, hardly reported by the western media – were also ordered to resign. They were all granted asylum in Mexico. They were told by the new, illegal self-appointed Government, that they were not allowed to run for the Presidency in upcoming elections. This is the type of “Democracy” exported by Washington. Its more aptly called dictatorship.

The power and fervor of pro-Morales protests in Bolivia is increasing day-by-day. Evo was the first indigenous President of the plurinational Andean country. Indigenous Bolivians, the vast majority, are strong supporters of Evo’s and his MAS party (MAS = Movimiento al Socialismo, or movement towards socialism).

US President Trump has made it abundantly clear that he does not tolerate socialist governments in the world, let alone in his backyard, Latin America. Congratulating the US-trained putsch leaders, he warned Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua of what might soon happen to them. He doesn’t lose an opportunity dishing out threats to world leaders who do not follow his orders. Indeed, the CIA via locally trained and bought agents is also causing havoc and bloody uprisings in Iran, Hong Kong, Lebanon. He, Mr. Trump the Great, a President in the process of being impeached himself for corruption and other misdeeds by the US Parliament. Bravo.

Having a socialist Government was certainly a reason for the coup d’état, but not the only one, perhaps not even the key reason. Bolivia, like Venezuela, is rich in natural resources, gas, oil, minerals and metals – and lithium, a light metal, used in car batteries, especially batteries for electric cars. They are ideal assets to be privatized by a neoliberal government for the benefit of a few local oligarchs and of foreign corporations – mostly US, of course. Stealing natural resources from developing countries is a key objective for the empire’s attempting to establish monetary and territorial world hegemony.

Already before Evo Morales first took office in January 2006, he pledged to the Bolivian people that the vast and rich natural resources treasures of Bolivia belong to Bolivia, to the Bolivian people. Among the first actions of his Presidency was the partial nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry – gas and petrol. Evo inherited from his predecessors, Goni Sanchez and Carlos Mesa an absurd arrangement, whereby the foreign corporations would receive on average 82% of the profits from hydrocarbon exploitation and the remaining 18% would stay in Bolivia. It is precisely for this reason that both Goni and Mesa were thrown out by the people in bloody people’s rebellions in 2003 and 2005, respectively.

When Evo was elected President in 2005 and took office in January 2006, he reversed this proportion: 82% for Bolivia and 18% for the transnationals. The western world screamed and hollered and warned him that all the foreign investors will abandon Bolivia – and Bolivia will be alone and her economy will collapse miserably. None of this happened, of course. Because even under this new arrangement foreign corporations made enough profit for them to stay in Bolivia. They are there as of this day.

In comes lithium, a soft, light and highly flammable mineral – what some call the gold of the 21^st Century. The world’s total known lithium reserves are about 15 million tons, with a potential of up to 65 million tons. Bolivia has arguably the world’s largest single known lithium deposits with a projected 9 million tons, about 60% of all known reserves.

Bolivia’s lithium has so far remined largely untapped, whereas major current producers are Chile, Argentina, Australia and China. Bolivia’s reserves are located in the Uyuni salt flats, the world’s largest salt desert (some 10,000 km2) in the remote southern tip of Bolivia, about 4,000m above sea level. Lithium is contained in salt brine pools below the Uyuni salt flats.

Access is complicated because of altitude and remoteness and lithium mining has also environmental issues. Finally, and maybe most importantly, Evo Morales has promised his people that this valuable resource will not just be exported as raw material, but processed in Bolivia so that added value and major benefits remain in Bolivia. The general manager of state-owned Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) assures that “Bolivia will be a relevant actor in the global lithium market within four or five years.”

Lithium is mainly used for the production of car batteries, cell phones, electronic devices in sophisticated weapons systems. In the age of growing environmental consciousness and electric cars, the car battery market is expected to explode in the coming years. China’s President, Xi Jinping, recently said that as of 2030, all new cars on China’s roads will be electric. Though, this may be optimistic, it speaks for a huge market. It is expected that the use of lithium in car batteries alone could triple – or beyond – in the coming 5 to 10 years.

In the last few weeks, the Bolivian Government was about to sign a contract with ACI Systems Alemania (ACISA), a small German mining company. On November 4, the deal was canceled, due to local protests over profit sharing. The local population wanted an increase of royalty payments from 3% to 11%. The deal would have brought a US$ 1.3 billion investment in the Salar del Uyuni (the Uyuni Salt Flats) over time for a vehicle battery factory and a lithium hydroxide plant. Similar deals with Tesla and other US and Canadian battery producers also failed, because of unacceptable profit-sharing arrangements.

China has the World’s largest lithium market. By far. And the one with the fastest growth potential. With a million Chinese electric cars sold in 2018 alone, demand is expected to increase almost exponentially. President Xi’s predictions may be slightly optimistic, but according to a Chinese thinktank, by 2040 all new vehicles on China’s roads will be electric. Already today, almost 100% of all scooters roaming major cities are electric.

In February 2019, the Chinese company Xinjiang TBEA Group Co Ltd. And the Bolivian state company Yacimientos de Litio Bolivianos (YLB) negotiated a deal that would have given Bolivia 51% and the Chinese 49% shares of a lithium extraction investment, an initial US$ 2.3 billion investment venture, expandable according to market demand. The project would have included manufacturing of vehicle batteries – and more – thus, adding value in Bolivia and creating thousands of jobs.

The Chinese Ambassador to Bolivia estimates that China would need some 800,000 tons of the light metal by 2025. Electric cars with today’s technology require massive amounts of lithium, about 63 kilograms for a single 70 kWh Tesla Model S battery pack.Officially known reserves in the Salar Uyuni of some 9 million tons, correspond to about a quarter of total known world reserves, according the US Geological Survey. Countrywide lithium deposits in Bolivia, but not yet proven, may reach 21 million tons, mostly in the Uyuni salt flats, according to government projections.  World Bank projections see global demand for lithium skyrocketing in the coming years, reaching more than 1,000% of present demand by 2050.

A huge proportion of this multi-multibillion-dollar market would be Chinese. It is therefore not too far-fetched to believe that the US-induced military coup itself, and particularly its timing – has something to do with Bolivia’s lithium – and more precisely with the China-Bolivia partnership deal.

Since the beginning of this year Bolivia has been negotiating with China, Bolivia’s linking up to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The lithium extraction and industrial development was part of it. Under Evo’s guidance it could have lifted this still most impoverished country of South America out of poverty, to a level of “living well” for most Bolivians. China, with her win-win approach for the BRI expansion around the globe and for such bilateral deals, as would have been lithium development in and with Bolivia – would have contributed greatly to the improvement of living conditions for this landlocked Andean country.

With China being lambasted, thrashed and aggressed on every occasion, clearly, such a multiple billion-dollar long-term arrangement, for a market the west wants to claim for itself, is not allowed by the true axis of evil, the United States, the vassalic Europeans, Canada and Australia. So, President Evo Morales and his close MAS party allies – and potential successors – had to go. Unarmed indigenous people had to be intimidated by bought police and military forces. They are beaten up and shot at with live ammunition. As of today, the dead toll has reached at least 25, since the police-military violence began when Evo was forced to resign, about a week ago.

It is predictable that the current “interim” government will call a State of Emergency, meaning a de factomilitary-police dictatorship. The natural riches of a poor country that wants to use reserves for the betterment of her people, can be a curse – and especially if that country has a socialist regime. But – as a positive glare of hope, the Bolivian people are known to be headstrong and staunch defenders of their rights. So, with the support and solidarity of neighboring countries’ people protesting for their lost civil rights, Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and maybe soon also Brazil, not all may be lost.

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Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The United Kingdom’s government and its armed forces hid solid evidence of war crimes committed by British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq against civilians among them children, an investigation led by the BBC and the Sunday Times revealed Sunday.

The investigation found that British troops were implicated in the murders of children and the killing and torture of civilians. The soldiers’ behavior during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq was documented by two government-ordered inquiries – the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) and Operation Northmoor – which investigated war crimes during the occupation in Afghanistan.

Based on leaked documents kept secret by the government, the accusations include assassinations by a soldier from the elite SAS unit, as well as deaths in custody, beatings, torture, and sexual abuse of detainees by members of the Black Watch infantry unit.

Military detectives who disclosed proof of the alleged war crimes told the year-long investigation that senior commanders covered it “for political reasons.”

In response, the Ministry of Defence said the allegations were “untrue” and the decisions of prosecutors and investigators were “independent” and involved “external oversight and legal advice.”

The British government closed IHAT and Operation Northmoor’s investigations in 2017 after Phil Shiner, a lawyer who had registered more than 1,000 allegations, was suspended from practicing law as a consequence of an accusation of paying fixers in Iraq to find clients.

However, some former IHAT and Operation Northmoor detectives say Shiner’s actions served as a pretext to shut down the inquiries after wrongdoings at the highest levels were discovered. None of the cases investigated by IHAT or Operation Northmoor resulted in a prosecution.

“The MoD had no intention of prosecuting any soldier of whatever rank he was unless it was absolutely necessary, and they couldn’t wriggle their way out of it,” an investigator told the BBC.

Another former detective said the victims had been gravely failed.

“I use the word disgusting. And I feel for the families because… they’re not getting justice. How can you hold your head up as a British person?”

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told the BBC that “all of the allegations, that had evidence, have been looked at,” adding “the right balance” had been struck over decisions whether or not to investigate alleged war crimes.

Iran has been swept by protests since November 15^th, with banks, stores and gas stations being set on fire. So far, more than 1,000 have been arrested and upwards of 12 people have died. Iranian authorities said 87,400 people were involved in the unrest across the country.

People took the streets after the government-implemented increase in the price of fuel by 50%. According to the decision, vehicles for private use would be restricted to 60 liters of fuel monthly, while the price of petrol would jump 50% to 15,000 Iranian rials per liter. Any fuel in excess of those 60 liters would be charged with an additional 30,000 rials ($0.26) per liter.

Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raeisi said that the decision was taken hastily, without consulting the wide public, but that it was necessary. The move is intended to raise about $2.5 billion a year for additional subsidies for 18 million families, or about 60 million Iranians on lower incomes. As of November 19^th, the Iranian government began carrying out the direct payments to the 60 million poorest, of the country’s 80 million population.

The current economic situation in Iran is a result of the ongoing US-led sanction war against the country. In 2018, Iran’s $1.63 trillion economy was reduced by 3.5%. Iran’s inflation is officially upwards of 40%. The country’s economy is projected to shrink by around 6% in 2019. Official oil exports have gone down from about 2.5 million barrels a day before the US left the nuclear deal to less than 200,000 barrels a day.

The current round of protests began in Tehran on November 15^th, with citizens blocking main roads and destroying property. By November 17^th, the protests had reached some 100 cities and towns, including Tabriz, Isfahan, Kermanshah, Sanandaj and Shiraz. At least 100 banks and 57 stores were set on fire.

The US publicly supported the demonstrations, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even tweeting his support of the Iranian people. The Trump administration released a general statement condemning Tehran’s alleged use of “lethal force” and its proven use of communications restrictions. US officials and mainstream media actively endorsed protestors make an attempt to overthrow the government.

Tehran called the US stance “hypocritical,” highlighting that Washington’s sanctions are the main reason for the unrest. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei expressed his support of the fuel price increase, saying that it was necessary, while condemning the violent protesters. There’s been a wide internet shutdown since the protests began, with connectivity falling to only around 4-7% of normal levels.

Prior to now, protests in Iran have sporadically happened, expressing public discontent with the complicated economic situation.

There’s been a tendency, beginning from December 2017, and they lasted until mid-January 2018.  Protesters expressed their opposition to cuts to fuel and cash subsidies, contained in the 2018 budget proposal unveiled in mid-December 2017. The previous protests were similar in nature to these, but less violent. There were similar protests in August, November and December 2018. In all the cases, protests had no clear political agenda and were mostly focused on the economic and social situation.

On November 19, authorities announced that the calm has been restored across the most of the country. However, the situation remains unstable and more unpopular economic moves needed to counteract the US economic pressure on the country may cause a new round of riots. Iran is unlikely to comply with the US’ demands for the “maximum pressure” campaign and trade the sovereignty to ease the sanctions.

The behavior of the US, which publicly calls on protestors to overthrow the Iranian government, is more common for a period of active war than for any kind of a peacetime public diplomacy. It demonstrates that Washington sees Iran as a country with which it is in a state of the military conflict. Such statements were unprecedented even towards the USSR during the Cold War. In fact, the US is waging an open aggressive hybrid war on Iran pushing the entire Middle East towards a further instability.

If Washington achieves its desired goal and anti-government protests in Iran expand and involve a large part of the population (20-30%), and the US continues endorsing them for more violence and regime-change attempts, there are notable chances that the cornered Iranian government will have to use the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Army against rioters. In the event of a deep crisis threatening the existence of the Iranian state in the current form, the country’s leadership may even opt to carry out a retaliatory strike on Israel, Saudi Arabia or US infrastructure in the region.

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Il ministro degli Esteri Luigi Di Maio, accogliendo a Roma i cinque militari feriti in Iraq, ha dichiarato che «lo Stato italiano mai indietreggerà di un centimetro di fronte alla minaccia terroristica e reagirà con tutta la sua forza di fronte a chi semina terrore».

E’ quindi volato a Washington per partecipare alla riunione del gruppo ristretto della «Coalizione globale contro Daesh» di cui fanno parte, sotto guida Usa, Turchia, Arabia Saudita, Qatar, Giordania e altri paesi che hanno sostenuto Daesh/Isis e analoghe formazioni terroristiche, fornendo loro armi e addestramento (come abbiamo documentato su questo giornale).

La Coalizione – di cui fanno parte Nato, Unione Europea, Lega Araba, Comunità degli Stati del Sahel/Sahara e Interpol, più 76 singoli Stati – rivendica nel suo comunicato del 14 novembre di «aver liberato l’Iraq e la Siria nord-orientale dal controllo di Daesh/Isis», mentre è evidente che le forze della Coalizione avevano lasciato volutamente mano libera a Daesh/Isis.

Questa e altre formazioni terroristiche sono state sconfitte solo quando la Russia è intervenuta militarmente a sostegno delle forze governative siriane.

La Coalizione rivendica inoltre di aver «fornito 20 miliardi di dollari di assistenza umanitaria e per la stabilizzazione ai popoli iracheno e siriano, e addestrato ed equipaggiato oltre 220.000 membri delle forze di sicurezza per stabilizzare le comunità locali».

Scopo di questa «assistenza» è in realtà non la stabilizzazione ma la continua destabilizzazione di Iraq e Siria, facendo leva strumentalmente soprattutto sulle diverse componenti dell’indipendentismo curdo, per disgregare questi Stati nazionali, controllare il loro territorio e le loro riserve energetiche.

Nel quadro di tale strategia l’Italia, definita «uno dei massimi contribuenti della Coalizione», è impegnata in Iraq principalmente nell’addestramento delle «Forze di sicurezza curde» (Peshmerga), in particolare all’uso di armi anti-carro, di mortai e artiglieria, e a quello di fucili di precisione in speciali corsi per cecchini.

Operano attualmente in Iraq circa 1100 militari italiani, divisi in diverse task force in luoghi differenti, dotati di oltre 300 mezzi terrestri e 12 mezzi aerei, con una spesa nel 2019 di 166 milioni di euro.

A quella in Iraq è affiancata una componente aerea italiana in Kuwait, con 4 cacciabombardieri Typhoon, 3 droni Predator e un aereo-cisterna per il rifornimento in volo.

Con tutta probabilità le forze speciali italiane, cui appartengono i cinque feriti, partecipano ad azioni di combattimento anche se il loro compito ufficiale sarebbe solo quello di addestramento.

L’impiego delle forze speciali è di per se stesso segreto. Ora diviene ancora più segreto perché il loro comando, il Comfose, viene trasferito dalla caserma della Folgore a Pisa alla limitrofa area della base di Camp Darby, il più grande arsenale Usa fuori dalla madrepatria, dove si svolgono anche attività di addestramento.

Nella Coalizione l’Italia ha inoltre il compito di co-dirigere il «Gruppo finanziario di contrasto all’Isis» insieme ad Arabia Saudita e Stati uniti. ossia a coloro che hanno finanziato e organizzato l’armamento delle forze dell’Isis e di altre formazioni terroristiche (v. inchiesta del New York Times nel 2013).

Forte di tutti questi meriti, il ministro degli Esteri Di Maio ha avanzato a Washington la proposta, subito accettata, che sia l’Italia ad ospitare la riunione plenaria della Coalizione nel 2020.

L’Italia avrà così l’onore di ospitare strenui oppositori del terrorismo come l’Arabia Saudita che, dopo aver finanziato l’Isis, ora spende i suoi petrodollari per finanziare la sua guerra terroristica nello Yemen.

Chicago educators on November 16 approved by a wide margin the contract negotiated by their union leadership.

On October 17, 25,000 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members walked off the job demanding better salaries and working conditions among other issues.

The strike also was joined by members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which reached a tentative agreement prior to the teachers. A division of SEIU represents thousands of security guards and teachers’ assistants in Chicago Public Schools system.

An October 30 tentative agreement between the CTU and the city administration was agreed upon by the executive board ending the strike paving the way for a return to classes for 350,000 students on November 1. The deal created the conditions for schools to open fully staffed since the SEIU said it would not return to work until the city administration reached an agreement with the CTU.

This agreement guarantees all CTU members a 16% salary increase over the five-year life of the contract. The City of Chicago has also pledged to invest $35 million into the school system in order to reduce class sizes, placing at least one nurse and a social worker in every building by 2023.

Public support for the strike was widespread throughout the city and around the United States as school systems have come under tremendous pressure due to privatization of services, the proliferation of charter schools and tax-funded vouchers for private educational institutions. Although Chicago is a major center for industrial production, retail outlets and finance capital, the majority African American and Latinx communities still suffer from disproportionate allocations for schools.

Many of the students attending the Chicago Public Schools come from families living just above or below the poverty lines. A housing crisis which has plagued many large urban areas has impacted Chicago with the razing of public housing complexes, an epidemic of home foreclosures and the rising costs of rental units.

The recent work stoppage was the second of its kind since 2012. Nonetheless, it appears as if the situation has worsened for students, service employees and teachers over the last seven years.

Two issues raised by the CTU during the strike appear to have remained unresolved: the growing demand for affordable housing and the need to address the shrinking availability of trained librarians within the CPS. Since the previous strike in 2012, the number of librarians has declined.

An article published in the November 8 edition of American Libraries Magazine says of the situation in Chicago that:

“Roughly 80% of the 514 district-run schools in the CPS system are without a librarian, and Nora Wiltse, the only CPS librarian at the bargaining table during the negotiations, says she believes the situation is likely to get worse under the new contract. Wiltse, a librarian at Coonley Elementary School who has pressed for more funding for librarians since 2012, says there are only 108 full-time working librarians in the district. That’s down from 454 librarians in the 2012–2013 school year, the year of the last Chicago Teachers Union strike.”

The lack of available librarians is the direct result of the austerity which has impacted public schools. In Chicago many of the librarians have either been laid off, resigned or found positions in other sectors.

Some more affluent areas of the city have kept school libraries open through parental and community volunteers. Nonetheless, this is not necessarily an option for distressed neighborhoods and it does not address the pressing need for personnel trained in information science.

This same above-mentioned report published by American Libraries Magazine continues by emphasizing:

“While the new contract commits funding to 120 schools in economically depressed parts of the city to create new positions—though Wiltse says the language of the contract allows the funds to be used for programming or materials, not necessarily for hiring new employees—principals are tasked with making tough decisions on where to allocate those dollars. They could opt to bring librarians back to their schools, but they likely won’t, Wiltse says. ‘This contract had a lot of really big wins for our students, but it’s not going to help the lack of librarians in our school system,’ she says.”

The Chicago Administration and Labor Relations

Chicago’s new Mayor Lori Lightfoot, the first woman and only third African American to serve in that position, was elected to office in April of this year amid a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party political machine. Lightfoot pledged to improve the social conditions of the working class and poor residents of this municipality of 2.7 million people.

However, the mayor failed to negotiate an agreement with the CTU that could have avoided the 11-day strike. Tensions between the administration and the CTU continued after the tentative agreement was announced on October 30 as representatives of the union refused to appear in a proposed joint press conference with Lightfoot.

CTU President Jesse Sharkey wrote an open letter to the public after the tentative agreement in which he characterized the political atmosphere in the city as lacking representation on the part of the electorate to choose members of the CPS board. The board is selected by the mayor making all of its members political appointees of the city administration.

The letter also went on to address broader social issues underlying the strike, stressing:

“While a linchpin in our bargaining was the demand to lift our paraprofessionals out of poverty, this was not a strike solely about wages and benefits. We returned to our school communities with the same pay increase that was on the table before our strike. We fought, instead, to shift CPS policy away from a relentless agenda of austerity and privatization toward real student needs, and, by extension, the needs of the neighborhoods our school communities anchor. We fought for the common good of students, and CPS must now — for the first time in decades — invest in the bare minimum: a nurse in every school every day; social workers and counselors; and manageable class sizes, especially in schools with urgent needs.”

Chicago Strike Representative of Nationwide Labor Struggles in Education Sector

The Chicago Teachers’ strike follows similar actions over the last year-and-a-half. Beginning with an unexpected statewide strike in West Virginia, teachers continued to demand better wages and working conditions along with pension guarantees in other districts in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Arizona, Kentucky, Arkansas and Colorado.

Strikes occurred in 2018 and 2019 in Los Angeles and Oakland, California. Similar labor actions have taken place among bus drivers in Georgia and part-time faculty members in Virginia. This trend has been labelled #RedforEd.

November 19 was a day of action by the Indiana State Teachers Association and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) which stayed away from the classroom to stage a rally at the Capitol building in Indianapolis. The union websites published testimonials from teachers deploring the deteriorating conditions under which they are working.

City administrations and school districts are increasingly subjected to the withholding of tax revenues for the purpose of funding high profile prestige economic projects owned and controlled by capitalist corporations. The Lincoln Yards Development in Chicago is a prime example of this process where taxpayers in the city are mandated to provide $1.3 billion in Tax Increment Funding (TIF).

A major community struggle aimed at blocking the transferal of public funds for corporate profit-making projects is underway in Chicago. Mayor Lightfoot while running for office said she had reservations about the Lincoln Yard Development and its reliance on TIF. Nevertheless, after being elected, Lightfoot gave her support to the project along with a majority of the Board of Alderman.

The Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights is suing Sterling Bay, the Lincoln Yards Development leader, saying that the utilization of TIF violates the laws of the State of Illinois which suggests that the funds should be invested in distressed communities for the benefit of the people who live there.

Aneel Chablani, chief counsel for the Lawyers Committee, said of the legal ramifications of the project:

“It just doesn’t comply with the state statute – and that’s $1.3 billion over the next 23 years that should be going to the general tax base. Another goal though is to really step back with the entire TIF program that the city has been administering and to evaluate the kind of impact it’s having on increasing wealth inequality in our city on perpetuating residential racial segregation and economic segregation.”

These issues can potentially link the labor unions with community-based movements against austerity. The current phase of capitalist development requires even greater levels of worker exploitation and the expropriation of public funds for private investments which further enrich the billionaire ruling class.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

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Obama knows Democrats will lose next November if they keep pushing “socialism” as a campaign objective. Americans on the coasts may support a command economy, control freak regulations, legalized theft—larger theft than now—and a braindead wad of social justice idiocy that is predicated on racism and sexism, but all of this is rejected by voters out here in flyover country. 

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Obama wades into the 2020 race, warning of the dangers of listening to “certain left-leaning twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.”

“Even as we push the envelope and we are bold in our vision we also have to be rooted in reality," he said. https://t.co/OioCWy4pbv

— Lisa Lerer (@llerer) November 16, 2019

Obama may want to ask why people support radical ideologies. The answer is simple—most Americans are struggling to make ends meet and millions are no longer the middle class. Half the country is on government assistance. 

The implosion of the economy going on behind the smokescreen of Trump’s feel good propaganda—millions of jobs created (if you don’t mind minimum wage) and low inflation (when it is in fact over 10%)—will convince many Americans that capitalism is broken and the answer is communism (as Gary Allen noted a few decades ago, socialism and communism are virtually the same). 

Left out of the conversation is the fact Obama and his predecessors are responsible for a crumbling economy. Trump, who said he would take a hard look at the Federal Reserve and then forgot about this campaign promise after the election, is basically the same as Obama, Clinton, Bush, and the rest of the neoliberal clan that runs the economy. 

Obama in particular. He gave his blessing to “bailing out” the banks, essentially a reward for banksters who nearly crashed the economy a decade ago with their financial instruments of destruction. 

Since that time, the controllers and their clan of professional shysters have scooped up billions by moving funny money around, hedging bets, repackaging toxic waste as investment, and moving wealth into the coffers of the ultra-rich and corporations. 

These professional economic criminals are responsible for huge “asset bubbles” that are now splitting at the seams, ready to crash and drive the country into a horrific depression, “The Greatest Depression.” The last depression, simply “Great,” was engineered by the Federal Reserve and its cartel of banksters. This was admitted by former Fed boss, Ben Bernanke. 

The people, generally ignorant of economic issues, will run to the socialists after the economy implodes. There is a distinct possibility it will crash before the election, thus sealing Trump’s fate, and thus ushering in a freshly minted cabal of SJW socialists masquerading as Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren (a multimillionaire) and Bernie Sanders (also a multimillionaire). 

However, as it stands now, most Americans are not supportive of the sort of socialism advocated by Warren and Sanders. In 2016, around half of voters went to the polls to pull the lever for Trump. 

It is primarily millennials pushing for socialism. This is to be expected. Not only are they woefully ignorant of economics, but they are also seriously brainwashed by the state’s educational institutions. 

I don’t think Warren, Sanders, Beto, Mayor Pete, Kamala, and the rest stand a chance, not necessarily due to a rejection by Americans (why else would the mental case Joe Biden be a frontrunner). 

Early next year, Hillary Clinton will announce her candidacy and the DNC will clear the board, sweeping away the SJW Democrats, basically the same two-step they performed on Sanders in 2016. 

Responsibility for the crashing economy will be foisted off on Trump, mostly because most Americans don’t understand the president has little effect on the economy and the damage is largely inflicted by the Federal Reserve and the banksters. 

Of course, it doesn’t really matter who wins the election. There is little substantial difference between Democrats and Republicans. Both support the current fraudulent economic system that drives wealth into the coffers of the mega-wealthy at the expense of average citizens. 

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Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Non-intervention by nations in the internal affairs of others is fundamental international law.

In Nicaragua v. United States (1986), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled against Washington for breaching international law and violating Nicaraguan sovereignty by supporting Contra death squads in the country, along with mining its waters and operating illegally in its airspace.

Unilaterally imposed sanctions by nations on others breach the principle of non-intervention and the UN Charter — giving the Security Council exclusive authority to take this action.

UN Charter Article 2 (4) states: “All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Time and again, the US breaches the letter and spirt of international and its own constitution — operating exclusively by its own rules, making them up to serve its interests.

Last month, House members unanimously passed the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 by voice vote.

On Tuesday, Senate members unanimously adopted its version of the same measure — violating the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries.

Among 535 congressional members, not a single profile in courage opposed the hostile, interventionist measure, breaching international and constitutional law.

It has nothing to do with promoting democracy, a notion the US abhors and tolerates nowhere, especially not at home.

It has nothing to do with supporting human rights in Hong Kong — US dirty hands all over months of violence and chaos in the city, aiming to destabilize China by attacking its soft underbelly.

On Wednesday, Xinhua reported the following:

“The Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the top legislature of China…firmly opposed…and strongly condemned the passing of the so-called Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act of 2019 by the US Senate.”

“The US Senate passed the bill on Tuesday local time despite stern representations and strong opposition from China.”

“The move ‘grossly interfered in China’s internal affairs,’ ” the NPC stated, adding: Adopting the measure is all about “US intervention in Hong Kong affairs and China’s internal affairs.”

China’s Foreign Ministry condemned the measure’s adoption, saying:

It “disregards the facts, confuses right and wrong, violates the axioms, plays with double standards, openly intervenes in Hong Kong affairs, interferes in China’s internal affairs, and seriously violates the basic norms of international law and international relations. The Chinese side strongly condemns and resolutely opposes this,” adding:

“In the past five months, the persistent violent criminal acts in Hong Kong have seriously jeopardized the safety of the public’s life and property, seriously trampled on the rule of law and social order, seriously undermined Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability, and seriously challenged the bottom line of the ‘one country, two systems’ principle.”

“(W)hat Hong Kong faces is not the so-called human rights and democracy issues, but the issue of ending the storms, maintaining the rule of law and restoring order as soon as possible.”

“The Chinese central government will continue to firmly support the Hong Kong SAR Government in its administration of the law, firmly support the Hong Kong police in law enforcement, and firmly support the Hong Kong Judiciary in punishing violent criminals in accordance with the law, protecting the lives and property of Hong Kong residents and maintaining Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.”

“(A)ttacks on the police and other criminal acts (have nothing to do with) the pursuit of ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy.’ ”

They have everything to do with “support(ing) the extremist forces and violent elements in the anti-China chaos and to undermine Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability.”

“This bad behavior of the United States not only harms China’s interests, but also undermines the important interests of the United States itself in Hong Kong.”

“Any attempt by the US to intervene in China’s internal affairs and hinder China’s development will not succeed.”

“Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong, and Hong Kong affairs are purely China’s internal affairs.”

“If the US (continues its hostile actions), China will surely take effective measures to resolutely counteract and firmly safeguard national sovereignty, security, and development interests.”

The unacceptable measure calls for annual reviews of Hong Kong’s special status. It challenges China’s “one country, two systems” status.

Congressional adoption supports CIA orchestrated violence and chaos in the city.

On Wednesday, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) said Beijing summoned the US embassy Minister Counsellor for Political Affairs William Klein, China’s Foreign Ministry saying:

Its ruling authorities “will take strong opposing measures, and the US has to bear all the consequences.”

“If the US sticks to its course, China will surely take forceful measures to resolutely oppose it to safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interest.”

House and Senate reconciliation of differences in the measures passed will follow. Given unanimous adoption by both houses negates Trump’s veto power if he opposes the legislation.

The measure amends the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act. It “directs various departments to assess whether political developments in Hong Kong justify changing Hong Kong’s unique treatment under US law.”

It requires annual certification by the secretary of state on whether US special treatment should be afforded to Hong Kong.

It requires the president to identify persons involved in committing human rights abuses in the city — freezing their assets, denying them entry into the US.

It requires the president to determine whether to revise the US/Hong Kong extradition agreement and State Department’s travel advisory for the city.

It requires the commerce secretary to issue annual assessments on whether Hong Kong authorities are enforcing US regulations regarding certain dual-use items and sanctions it (unlawfully) imposed on various nations, notably Iran, North Korea and Venezuela.

Months of violence and chaos in Hong Kong, followed by unacceptable congressional legislation certain to become US law, are all about illegally meddling in China’s internal affairs by the Trump regime and Congress.

Unacceptable US actions aim to undermine China’s economic, financial, technological, and military development — what its ruling authorities won’t tolerate.

A Final Comment

Last Sunday, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the following:

“Every time we emphasize that Moscow and Beijing fully share stance that any foreign meddling in domestic affairs of all countries, and in particular Russia and China, is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable to impose any system of values on other countries.”

Illegally meddling in the internal affairs of other countries is longstanding US policy.

It’s all about seeking control over their sovereignty, resources and populations — preemptive wars, color revolutions, economic terrorism, and other hostile actions its favored strategies.

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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.

Note: This paper was presented in part at a public meeting held by the Communist Workers League (CWL) in Detroit. In addition to the presentation by Abayomi Azikiwe, Yusuf Mshahwar, a student at Wayne State University, spoke on the current situation in Syria and the role of the United States. Also Randi Nord, co-founder of Geo-Politics Alert website, spoke on the ongoing imperialist war against Yemen and its implications for the balance of forces in the region. Jerry Goldberg, a lawyer and member of the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, gave a report on the anti-imperialist conference hosted by the Republic of Cuba earlier in November in which he had attended along with more than 1,200 other delegates from throughout Latin America and the world.

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Since late 2010, the political atmosphere throughout North Africa and contiguous regions has been volatile, shaking the foundations of various fragile states and arousing the sentiment of the masses of workers, farmers and youth.

This area of the continent has been a source of United States and European imperialist interventions for many years. Such involvement by Washington and other Western capitals should be of no surprise considering the vast natural resource wealth and geo-strategic significance of the region and its connection with West Asia and the Mediterranean states of Southern Europe as well as the rest of the African continent.

The U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established nearly twelve years ago in February 2008 when the Pentagon enhanced its military presence across the continent. We were the only political tendency inside this country and one of the few in the world which recognized early on the ominous threat these developments posed to the people of Africa.

At that time in February 2008, we held a day-long conference on “U.S. Imperialism and Africa” where we examined the history of Washington’s role in the region and the necessity to organize and mobilize against it based upon a scientific analysis utilizing historical and dialectical materialism. Our conclusions were that the stated purpose of AFRICOM was not altruistic. Its aim was to enhance the capacity of the Pentagon, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to conduct operations on the continent so that the ongoing exploitation and oppression of the people could be carried out with greater efficiency.

In a public call for the “U.S. Imperialism and Africa” Conference it stated clearly that:

“The Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) is an anti-war and anti-imperialist coalition that opposes United States military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, MECAWI has responded to further interventionist maneuvers by the Bush administration in Somalia, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela and other geo-political regions of the world. Based upon recent political events on the African continent such as:-the US-backed invasion of Somalia in 2006;-the escalation of destabilization efforts against Sudan, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Chad;-as well as the much publicized American plans to establish military bases on the continent through the Africa Command (AFRICOM) that is directly administered from the Pentagon, many of us in the anti-imperialist and anti-war movements see the mounting danger of greater United States military intervention in Africa.”

This same document goes on to emphasize:

“Recent Bush administration plans to implement AFRICOM has been met with rejection among various African countries. Two of the largest nations in Africa, Nigeria and South Africa, have refused to allow the American military to set up AFRICOM bases in their respective territories and have come out solidly against any other country allowing such intervention. Consequently, MECAWI is holding a conference to address the political and historical context in which these events are occurring in Africa and to discuss action proposals to ensure that these concerns are fully addressed by the anti-war and peace movements here in the United States. In addition, we wish to advance activities that will express solidarity with the peoples of Africa and other regions that are subjected to imperialist intervention and manipulation.”

Since 2008 we have witnessed this process unfold. There has not been greater security and stability in Africa as the U.S. had falsely stated. Despite the inherent reluctance by the overwhelming number of African states during the time period in question, a series of events has prompted a deeper penetration of the continent by the Pentagon.

On the economic front, the U.S., its imperialist allies in Europe and their surrogates within the region, have implemented policies which have in fact weakened the ability of Africa to determine its own destiny through the utilization of its resources for the benefit of the majority of people.  The prices of natural resources and agricultural commodities have overall declined precipitously while the share of the international market has been marginalized for these assets.

Such a set of circumstances can easily be associated with the socio-economic uncertainty of the working people, peasants and youth throughout Africa. Despite the phenomenal growth within these states over the last two decades as manifested through the proliferation of telecommunications technology, further discovery of strategic minerals and resources, along with the greater political consciousness of the people, the imperialist centers of the world system are determined to crush the popular aspirations of the masses in order to fortify the West and its interests.

Egypt: U.S. Militarism and Economic Dependency

Since the ascendancy of the government of now President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in 2013, the Egyptian political status remains in close coordination with that of the U.S. The president, who transformed himself from a military field marshal to a head-of-state, is now the Chair of the African Union (AU).

The Egyptian state-controlled media agencies are filled with articles on the purported growth within the national economy. There is much discussion on the rebuilding of the tourism industry in the aftermath of a tumultuous past decade where longtime leader President Hosni Mubarak was overthrown by the military amid mass demonstrations and strikes during the early months of 2011.

In recent months there have been demonstrations in Egypt against the government. These are the first significant protests since the crackdown on Muslim Brotherhood and Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) supporters in the aftermath of the July 2013 military coup. Since this time period the military and its allies within the civilian population have dominated Egyptian politics.

A recent article says of the demonstrations and the designated leader:

“Almost two months after prompting rare demonstrations in Egypt, former army contractor Mohamed Ali says he will leave no stone unturned to push for the departure of President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi.  In an interview with Anadolu Agency in Barcelona, where he lives, Ali claims massive corruption in Egypt under al-Sisi’s rule. Ali has posted several videos from exile, in which he accused the military of corruption, while al-Sisi denied the accusations as ‘false’ and a ‘conspiracy’. In the interview, Ali, a businessman and actor, says he plans foreign tours to expose the financial irregularities in his country. The Egyptian opponent says he receives ‘constant threats’ from the regime, but he hopes to unify the Egyptian opposition abroad and heal the rift within the Muslim Brotherhood group.”

With the failure of the alliance with Washington to provide an enhanced standard of living for the majority of the population, Egypt continues to have economic and social problems. Poverty is rampant and the need for infrastructural development is imperative.

Consequently, there has been no fundamental change in the foreign policy of the Egyptian state since in most instances the domestic situation is a determining factor in international relations. The agreements made with the State of Israel have remained in force. There is no apparent shift towards viewing the liberation of Palestine as a primary state priority.

As it relates to the role of Egypt as Chair of the AU, they have been involved in the negotiations surrounding the creation of a new political dispensation in neighboring Sudan. Even though former President Omer Hassan al-Bashir was overthrown in a military coup in April of this year, the country is still struggling in an attempt to stabilize the domestic situation. As far as relations between Egypt and Sudan are concerned, there does not appear to be any major shifts in policy orientation.

A potentially explosive diplomatic row with Ethiopia has not been resolved. The issue stems from the construction of the Grand Renaissance Dam Project which Egypt charges will redirect waters from the Blue Nile potentially creating a social crisis for Cairo. Negotiations surrounding the dispute are continuing while U.S. President Donald Trump has offered to assist in the discussions.

Sudan: Revolution or Counter-Revolution?

The Republic of Sudan is another important state in Africa and the areas known as the Middle East. These geo-political regions have been inextricably linked historically while remaining so today in the 21^st century.

Since the second term of former U.S. President Barack Obama, there has been a concerted effort to undermine the economic growth of the emerging states of Africa, Asia and Latin America. This aspect of U.S. energy policy has had a profound impact particularly on oil and natural gas producing states in the Global South.

With specific reference to the Republic of Sudan, the partitioning of the country, previously Africa’s largest geographical state, created an immediate economic crisis. Much of the oil produced by Sudan had its origination in the South which separated to form an independent state in 2011. A brief conflict over the control of oil in one of the key border regions ended with both sides facing a much weakened position in regard to oil production and export capacity.

Later there was a split within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army between President Salva Kiir and Vice-President Riek Machar. These issues are still not resolved and the U.S., of all governments, has threatened sanctions against the South Sudanese leadership if they do not create a unified administration. It was the U.S. and the State of Israel which encouraged the SPLM/A to realize its grievances with Khartoum by creating a new country.

As has been stated before, it remains to be seen whether the Republic of South Sudan can become a viable state. Over the last eight years the stability of the Juba government has not been in evidence. The responsibility for this situation cannot be assessed separately from the foreign policy of Washington, the former colonial power of Britain and the ongoing interference by Israel, which has provided the South with military and political support.

In the Republic of Sudan in the North, this economic crisis engendered by the volatile nature of the international energy market, triggered a social crisis due to the decline in foreign exchange revenues largely garnered from the export of oil and natural gas. The economic decline in Sudan influenced the foreign policy trajectory of Khartoum.

Sudan became involved in the genocidal Washington-directed war against the people of Yemen since March 2015. Hundreds of thousands of people have died in Yemen in order to prevent the consolidation of power by the Supreme Revolutionary Committee allied with the Ansurallah. The western corporate and governmental media outlets have sought to frame the Yemen war as a bulwark of defense against growing Iranian influence in West Asia.

As Marxist-Leninists we see the struggle within the context of imperialism in its quest for world domination in opposition to the genuine resistance forces among the people. This war was initiated by the U.S. The Pentagon and the CIA supply the ordnances, targeting and refueling technology along with diplomatic cover for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which is bombing Yemen on a daily basis. Relief agencies have stated that the situation in Yemen represents the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today.

Demonstrations which erupted in Sudan in December of 2018 were sparked by the rise in consumer prices. Soon enough the demands escalated for the removal of the National Congress Party (NCP) government under former President al-Bashir. On April 6, an alliance of opposition groups and parties known as the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) began a sit-in in front of the Ministry of Defense in Khartoum.

Just five days later, a Transitional Military Council (TMC) seized power and placed President al-Bashir under arrest. Opposition groupings demanded the relinquishing of power by the TMC and the transferal of leadership to a government selected by them. These disagreements led to a series of strikes and violent clashes. Eventually, through the mediation efforts facilitated by neighboring Ethiopia and Egypt, the military leadership agreed to the creation of an interim transitional government.

This interim government has selected Economist and former Deputy Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, to lead the transition process. Nonetheless, these developments have not resolved the contradictions in Sudan. There are opposition parties which have refused to join the Sovereign Council now ruling Sudan in alliance with the military. Of course there are divisions within the military as well which has manifested itself through purges.

The Sudanese Communist Party (SCP) has maintained a critical posture towards the FFC and Sovereign Council leadership. Although the SCP is a signatory of the Declaration of the Forces for Freedom and Change, it has rejected any governing alliance with the military.

In a recent statement the SCP called for the transitional government to take control of gold resources in North Darfur which they claimed were outside the purview of the national state in Khartoum. They went further to allege that the economy is under the control of unlawful forces operating within society.

An article published earlier this week explained about the organization that:

“Another economist and member of the Communist Party, Abdelmunim Hasan, said at the press conference that ‘the Sudanese economy is dominated by criminal networks formed in the earliest era of the integration of banking capital into commerce, and over time shifted to a criminal networks trading the country’s strategic resources.’ He attributed the deterioration of the economy to the lack of control and to smuggling, and pointed out that Sudanese goods are sold on the world markets as products of other countries after being smuggled from Sudan. In the end of October, the Sudan Democracy First Group (SDFG) released its latest report, ‘Insurance Sector in Sudan – Islamization and Corruption’, which is part of a series of studies on corruption in Sudan. The Sudanese activist think-tank asserts that lack of transparency and corruption was inherent of the operation of the public and private sector during the Omar Al Bashir regime (1989-2019).”

Moreover, the continuing talks in Juba between the interim Sovereign Council and the alliance of armed groups in Darfur, South Kordofan and Blue Nile, known as the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF), has brought into focus the potential for resolving these conflicts. An agreement was signed in late October which was described in a report in Dabanga as follows:

“The political agreement also includes an agreement renewing the cessation of hostilities for humanitarian purposes. The government will also deliver humanitarian assistance from inside and outside Sudan to conflict-affected areas. The parties agree to negotiate all issues related to the Sudanese crisis, including areas of armed conflict, national issues, and specific issues. The government is holding separate talks with the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N) faction, led by Abdelaziz El Hilu. On Friday the SPLM-N El Hilu and the Sudanese transitional government reached an agreement on a roadmap for peace negotiations concerning South Kordofan.”  (see this)

One glaring aspect of the Sovereign Council and TMC foreign policy is that they have not pledged to withdraw the Republic of Sudan and its military forces from Yemen. This is a critical issue that will determine the political character of the government going forward.

In addition, elements within the FFC and even some opposition parties are calling for ousted President al-Bashir to be turned over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC has been under constant criticism from African people and their allies due to its almost exclusive preoccupation with events on the continent while taking no effective action against the imperialist powers of the U.S., Britain, France, and the Netherlands as well for their historical and contemporary crimes against humanity, primarily those genocidal actions taken against the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Tunisia: A New Government amid a Neo-Colonial Continuing Crisis

It was in Tunisia that the uprising of 2010-2011 began which were characterized as the “Arab Spring.” Yet Tunisia is in North Africa where some of the earliest world civilizations were formed thousands of years ago.

The popular rebellions and general strikes in Tunisia and later Egypt set the stage for other forms of mass demonstrations and social unrest which unfortunately were misdirected due a political vacuum created in the absence of no single or multiple political parties’ alliance of revolutionary forces, which could have provided leadership for a transformative, anti-capitalist and socialist-oriented movement which is very much needed in the region.

Events in Tunisia and Egypt provided a rationale for the imperialists to intervene in Libya during February of 2011. A counter-revolutionary rebellion against the Gaddafi government was framed in the same vein as the “Arab Spring”, a purported form of democratic renewal for the masses. Nonetheless, the CIA deployed hundreds of operatives in Benghazi to coordinate the putative “revolutionaries” fighting against the Jamahiriya political system which had transformed Libya into the most advanced and prosperous state in Africa, with a standard of living for the masses which outstripped many of the states in Southern Europe.

Tunisia and Egypt in a revolutionary sense were never fully transformed in the interests of the workers, farmers and youth. In the most recent elections in Tunisia, the new president has tapped into the discontent which has arisen to the continued pro-western orientation of the political elites. Interestingly enough, when the leader was elected, thousands of people went into the streets of Tunis chanting for the liberation of Palestine. This clearly illustrates the revolutionary sentiment still in existence among the masses where the creation of a Palestinian state resonates in the hearts and minds of the people.

The formation of a new government in Tunisia has been given back over to the Islamist Ennahdha Party. Nonetheless, the question remains as to what can this incoming administration actually do to improve the conditions for the unemployed and other exploited and oppressed groups in the North African state?

An article published by Tasnim News Agency says of the current situation:

“Tunisia’s recently elected President Kais Saied has tasked agricultural engineer Habib Jemli with forming a government after the Ennahdha party nominated him for the prime minister’s job…. Tunisia’s new Parliament on Wednesday (Nov. 13) elected Ennahdha’s Rached Ghannouchi as its speaker after the rival Heart of Tunisia party backed him, opening the way for a possible coalition government between them.”

However, with the international financial institution making claims against the Tunisian government it will be extremely difficult under the present circumstances to foster growth and genuine development inside the country. All of the independent nation-states in Africa have been adversely affected by finance capital including both the U.S.-based International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

This same report mentioned above continues by stressing that:

“Analysts say the new government will need clear political will and strong backing in Parliament to push through economic reforms started by the outgoing Prime Minister, Youssef Chahed, who is acting as caretaker during coalition talks. Chahed’s cabinet has focused on spending cuts backed by the IMF to bring Tunisia’s hefty deficit and public debt under control while raising spending on security to woo back tourists to the country. Economic challenges – unemployment of 15 percent nationally and 30 percent in some cities, inflation of nearly seven percent and a weak dinar – have plagued Tunisia since its 2011 revolution, which spawned democracy and sparked the ‘Arab Spring’ that swept across the region. Those problems, alongside deteriorating public services and a public perception of widespread government corruption drove voters to reject the political establishment in this autumn’s presidential and parliamentary elections.”

Therefore, the process of indirect rule through the financial machinations of the global banking interests continues to stifle growth, development and the much coveted political stability needed to implement reforms. The new administration will not be able to address these concerns without a mass movement committed to reversing the system of dependency inherited from the colonial period where the existence of these territories were exclusively for the benefit of imperialism.

Algeria: The Dialectics of Armed Struggle, Mass Demonstrations and Electoral Politics

France colonized Algeria beginning in 1830 and continued this process well into the 20^thcentury when after World War II the people’s indignation with the imperialist system boiled over into an independence movement in the form of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Starting in 1954, the FLN initiated an armed struggle against the colonial occupation forces based in Paris.

By 1962, the French recalcitrance to the freedom struggle in Algeria could no longer persist. The independence of Algeria ushered in a period of anti-imperialism and Pan-Africanism. The FLN played a significant role in the ongoing campaigns for the total liberation of the African continent.

In July 1969, the Black Panther Party in the U.S. was recognized as the legitimate leadership of the African American liberation movement. During the same period the Pan-African Cultural Festival (PACF) brought together thousands of delegates from across Africa and the Middle East in order recommit the revolutionary parties, liberation movements and progressive states to the unification of the continent on an anti-imperialist basis.

In recent months Algerian students and professional groupings have been demonstrating against the government calling for the resignation of the former head-of-state President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Even after Bouteflika left office, the protests continued demanding that the entire FLN-dominated government steps down and that the planned elections be cancelled.

Yet the government is by no means interested in suspending the electoral process. Some five official candidates have been placed on the ballot for the upcoming national poll.

France24 assessed the situation in an article noting:

“The campaign for the December 12 elections in Algeria was launched on Sunday, November 17, despite popular demonstrations to call for an end to the electoral process. The Hirak, as the protest movement has been dubbed, began February 22 against former President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for a fifth term in office but has so far failed to change the course of the election.”

In fact the spokespersons for the Hirak movement seem to have suggested that power be turned over directly to them even prior to the holding of an election. The aims and objectives of this anti-government crusade are not spelled out specifically as it relates to the concrete challenges facing Algeria and the region. There is no articulation as to why the removal of the existing administration is a prerequisite to meeting their demands.

Such a posture harkens back to events in Egypt and Tunisia during the period of 2010-2013 when the milieu of youth and professional associations which appeared to be leading the democracy movement did not have the capacity organizationally and ideologically to make a bid for the seizure of political power. Algeria during the 1990s was plunged into civil war after an election in 1991 resulted in a majority of parliamentary representatives from the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) poised to take office. The FLN as a party along with the military structures refused to cede control of the state to Islamist party. Thousands died in the nearly decade-long war which resulted in the defeat of the Islamist guerrilla groups and the maintenance of control by the existing FLN party apparatus.

Other factors in the present scenario are enunciated in the same France24 report cited previously:

“On Saturday, the five candidates, including Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s former prime ministers, Ali Benflis and Abdelmajid Tebboune, the favorites heading into the campaign, signed a charter on the ethics of electoral practices in Algiers. The charter, drafted by the Independent National Electoral Authority (Anie), ‘sets out the guiding principles and specific practices that form the framework for the moral behavior expected of the candidates and persons involved in the electoral process’. It’s the first time that candidates for an election in Algeria have signed such a charter….General Ahmed Gaïd Salah, the country’s main powerbroker in the post-Bouteflika era, and the military high command have for months refused any way out of the crisis other than a presidential election and rejected the establishment of transitional institutions demanded by the demonstrators.”

The outcome of the elections will have an important influence on the direction of political events in Algeria, a large-scale oil and natural gas producer. Overcoming the legacy of colonialism and the subsequent neo-colonial dependency facing AU member-states is not exclusively the burden of Algeria and other contiguous states. This represents a continental and global challenge to the overall struggle against imperialism.

Libya and the Extreme Consequences of Destabilization and Attempted Recolonization

On February 17, 2011, a counter-revolutionary war against the Jamahiriya system in Libya was declared with the open direction and coordination of the Pentagon and the CIA. The project to violently remove Col. Muammar Gaddafi was adopted by the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance along with its allies in Africa and West Asia. Consequently, Libya, a former center for Pan-Africanism and national liberation, is today a major source of instability and underdevelopment throughout the region.

By March 21, 2011, the United Nations Security Council had endorsed the mandate for a genocidal war of regime-change. During the course of the air campaign, the coordination of the rebel ground war by the CIA along with Special Forces from Egypt and the Gulf monarchial states, underlined the facilitation politically of an international disinformation campaign to vilify Gaddafi. During the eight months war it was reported that tens of thousands of Libyans and other Africans died.

By the end of October 2011, the major urban centers and oil producing areas had been devastated by NATO bombs, some 10,000 in number, while lawless militias armed by the Pentagon and other imperialist governments roamed the cities and countryside enforcing self-serving laws only benefitting their interests. Since this time period there has been no stability in Libya.

At present a protracted and deadly conflict continues over the control of the capital of Tripoli where the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (GNA and its Prime Minister Fayez Mustafa al-Sarraj is based. The so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) headed by renegade Gen. Khalifa Haftar, a longtime CIA asset, has been attempting unsuccessfully to take control for many months.

Where does the White House stand in this conflict? Washington’s position is contradictory where it is stated on the one hand that they back the al-Sarraj GNA regime in Tripoli and at the same time, President Donald Trump has reportedly held telephone conversations with Haftar. The former Gaddafi governmental official, Haftar is a well-known entity to the U.S. having resided in Virginia for many years after he defected from the Libya army in the 1980s during the war in Chad.

For several years the horrendous conditions endured by African migrants in Libya has been a major by-product of Pentagon-NATO war. Africans are being sold in and out of slavery in Libya while thousands are imperiled every month in the desperate attempts to escape on rickety vessels to Southern Europe.

The failure of the neo-colonial scheme in Libya is indicative of the broader chaos created by Washington and its allies in North Africa and West Asia. In every subversive project that the U.S. has embarked upon, the outcomes have been disastrous for the people of these geo-political regions. From Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria, Palestine and Yemen, the intervention of successive administrations in the U.S. have resulted in hundreds of thousands and even millions of deaths and injuries, the dislocation of tens of millions and the proliferation of armed conflict under the guise of “Islamic terrorism.”

These same terrorist groups which the U.S. has repeatedly designated as the principal source of their military operations have their origins within the strategic vision of imperialism. This was illustrated in both Libya and Syria, where Al-Qaeda and Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), were armed in order to wage war in alliance with imperialism against the Gaddafi government and the ruling administration in Damascus headed by President Bashar al-Assad.

With specific reference to Libya, Pentagon warplanes routinely engage in bombing missions supposedly in pursuit of ISIS elements in the South of the country. These aerial strikes are said to be successful in killing “Islamist terrorists”, yet the war appears to proceed in perpetuity.

This continuing military engagement on the part of the imperialists only reinforces the rationale for the presence of AFRICOM. Meanwhile, the western corporate and governmental news outlets provide virtually no information on the actual situation in Libya approaching nine years since the imperialist intervention to remove the Jamahiriya.

Which Way Forward for North Africa and the AU Member-states?

Even a cursory examination of the present political, economic and social situation in North Africa at the conclusion of the second decade of the 21^st century clearly reveals that neo-colonialism remains the dominant system on the continent. Although there is the advent of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) initiated in 2018, where plans are enforce to create tariff free exchange zones and enhanced regional economic planning, these valiant and necessary goals cannot be realizable in the contemporary reality of burgeoning U.S. and NATO military involvement.

Compounding and underlying the military presence of imperialist forces is the renewed economic war being waged by Washington against numerous geo-political regions on an international scale. Tariffs leveled at the People’s Republic of China, the European Union states and other nations, have not resulted in the dividends sought by the ruling class in the U.S.  Warnings of a new recession and the widening gap between the rich and poor, is a reality that cannot be escaped by people both inside and outside of the U.S.

In order to bring stability and prosperity in North Africa and other regions throughout the continent, a protracted struggle must be waged against neo-colonialism and its imperialist underpinnings. This will require the full mobilization and organization of the working class, peasantry and youth into an anti-imperialist movement. Consequently, the unification of Africa and its genuine development are intertwined with the global movement for sustainable peace and social justice.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated

The scandals erupting within No. 10 Downing street are seriously undermining any remaining confidence in the government. It doesn’t matter where you look – mutual respect, tolerance, the rule of law, liberty and democracy are now just thin veils covering the ugly truth of a government constantly overreaching its authority.

Today, Britain has a prime minister accused of misusing public funds. The police investigation into that incident has been conveniently ‘delayed’ until after the election. Quite rightly there has been a furious response from political opponents and the general public.

In addition, the police and Electoral Commission have recently announced more cases to bring against the very organisations that campaigned for Brexit – fronted by the Prime Minister. It should not be forgotten that senior Tory ministers and peers, past and present, have been caught red-handed in the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw the theft and misuse of mass citizen data in a propaganda campaign designed to rig the outcome of a referendum.

In the meantime, the Electoral Commission itself has been swamped with complaints – and investigations have unearthed political campaigners accepting funds from impermissible donors and parties involved in false accounting, over-spending, illegal use of expenses and accepting illegal gifts.

Cash-for-donors was another scandal. American donors were paying a so-called think-tank to broker access to ministers who were either negotiating Brexit or very close to Brexit ministers to influence the outcome of a UK/US trade deal. They were caught on camera and the press barely blinked at this corruption of the highest office in the land.

Last week we learned that political opponents of Boris Johnson have been offered peerages and safe Conservative seats to stand down. In the last few days, we’ve now heard that the Brexit Party is compiling a dossier of complaints from its candidates of alleged inducements and bullying from senior Tories to persuade them to step down. This is tantamount to state-sponsored bribery, corruption and intimidation to sway the outcome of an election.

Then we have the new Brexit Withdrawal Agreement Bill, which has hidden in the depths of its small print – appendices that allows the prime minister nineteen new sets of powers that cannot be easily challenged by representative democracy. This alone amounts to a huge shift towards executive powers being granted to just one person.  If Boris Johnson wins this election and does push through that Bill, he will have more power than anyone in Britain (aside of two World War periods) has had for over 400 years.

After the Skripal poisonings in Salisbury, no less than 21 countries stood shoulder-to-shoulder with to Britain just six months ago in what was the worlds biggest expulsion of Russian spies. This was in response to what the government of the day saw as Russian aggression on British soil. And yet, they have been casually jettisoned for Johnson to realise his dream of power with another scandal involving large amounts of election funding found to be tainted with money emanating from the Kremlin.

For those rolling their eyes about Britain’s own ‘Russiagate’ – TruePublica has never endlessly harped on about Russian interference into Britain’s politics – but this is different.

This scandal of political malfeasance is potentially seismic. The Russia Report is serious and is consistent with accusations of abuse of office and power. The term ‘cover-up’ says it all.

We are all stuck in this trajectory. Malfeasance in office is becoming normalised as it has in America. Britain is being led down a very dark alley towards a stronger form of centralised power. This is not the statement of some rambling paranoid – this is already happening.

James Cusick at openDemocracy describes this latest incident of abuse of power:

“Downing Street acted “beyond the conventions of its authority” by demanding that specific names be removed from a report into Russian influence on UK politics by the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), according to sources close to the committee.

The redactions are understood to have been ordered to protect London-based Russian oligarchs who are either leading donors to the Conservative Party or individuals regarded as friends of the prime minister, Boris Johnson. According to Whitehall sources close to the ISC, with detailed knowledge of how it operates, Number 10 or senior ministers can order the redaction of names only if publication is regarded a matter of national security.

One source said: “If it is simply politically inconvenient or embarrassing for Number 10 or the Conservative Party that individuals are named in a controversial report, that cannot be an official reason to issue an order that names be covered up. However if Downing Street does genuinely believe these names represent a security risk, then the importance of this report and the need for its immediate publication has just grown.”

The source added that Downing Street has acted “beyond the conventions of its authority”.

We are led to believe that the money involved in this case will be boosting the potency of the Tory election machine and comes from well-connected Russian oligarchs and companies involved in lobbying for Russian commercial interests. Those commercial interests are what exactly? We know gangsters such as arms dealers and money launderers feature in the ‘Russia Report’ – so it’s a fair question to ask to what end are they seeking for their investment in our prime minister? And even if they were not wanting a return – it’s the cover-up that’s important here. And there are so many of them going on, it makes you wonder what have we not yet heard about? And if we don’t believe a word of what MI5, MI6, the police and senior cyber-security officers say when it’s accusations are about the establishment and political elite, then we’ve lost all confidence in Britain – it’s time to pack a bag and abandon ship.

The result of this abuse of power is that this election has boiled down to what appears to be a fight between Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, the far-right, American religious extremists, Steve Bannon and the ultra-conservative free-market jihadists and the oligarchs on the one side – and European social democracy on the other. It’s the fight for a pivot – look left to Europe, look right to America. And what do we really have left? Deep-seated tribalism, division, a never-ending Brexit catch22 and an institutional spiral.

As a result of this abuse of power, this election has boiled down to what appears to be a fight between Boris Johnson, Vladimir Putin, the far-right, American religious extremists, Steve bannon and his ultra-conservatives and the oligarchs on the one side and European social democracy on the other.

This institutional spiral means dark money is now coursing through the veins of Britain’s democracy and what we have seen in real-time is a government that has done nothing but encourage it. The police and electoral commission appear to be more cautious, seemingly acting like they are being threatened and reluctant to act. The BBC has been accused of discarding rules of impartiality to become a propaganda mouthpiece for the hoodlums installed in Downing Street.

Boris Johnson took the opportunity of the Queen’s speech to use it as a conduit to illegally shut down parliament and then not mention a word of protecting Britain’s weakened democracy.

So what’s really happening here? The slogan ‘taking back control’ was never meant for the people – it was meant for them. They are a mix of Tory elites like Johnson and Rees-Mogg, American free-market fundamentalists, Russian orthodox ultra-conservatives and the increasingly more belligerent movement of the far-right. (read this article by Hope Not Hate – it’s scary)

They are pumping millions into their destabilisation of Europe plan – and it’s working, especially in Britain.

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Turkish President Erdogan reaffirmed to his American counterpart that his country won’t completely abandon its purchase of Russia’s S-400s like Washington wants but that Ankara would buy its Patriot competitor as well if an offer was made “under suitable conditions”, suggesting that one or the other air-defense system would become a ‘white elephant’ under that scenario, with the odds being likely that it would be the Patriots which would fulfill this expensive but useless role and not the S-400s.

Converge With Planned Labour Strikes

This past weekend the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) celebrated their first birthday, with convivial barbeques on traffic circles (roundabouts) all over France followed by direct actions like liberating tollbooths. Although number of protestors has declined to about 10 per cent of the estimated 400,000 who rose up a year ago on November 17, 2018 – thanks to a year of violent police repression, media distortion, and sheer fatigue – a surprisingly large number of women and men throughout la France profonde (“middle France”) came out of ‘retirement’ and donned their yellow vests for “ACT 53” of the weekly Yellow Vest drama – double the previous weeks’ numbers. Recent polls indicate that 10 per cent of French people consider themselves “Yellow Vests,” and two-thirds still support them (although a majority wish they would go home!).

The first anniversary of the Yellow Vest uprising marks an historic moment: perhaps the first time in history that a self-organized, unstructured, leaderless, social movement has survived for so long. This weekend there was much eager discussion out on the traffic circles of the upcoming unlimited general strike called by the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) and other unions for December 5. Two weeks ago the Yellow Vests’ nationwide “Assembly of Assemblies” called for “convergence” with the upcoming strike, and the leader of the CGT, who had previously snubbed the Yellow Vests, reacted by inviting them to join.

So, after a year of lonely, increasingly dangerous, physical resistance to the neoliberal counter-reforms of the arrogant, unpopular “President of the rich,” suddenly new perspectives are opening for the Yellow Vests in their unequal struggle with the powerful, unified, increasingly authoritarian, capitalist state. (We will turn to this enticing possibility in a moment.)

This Revolution will not be Televised

None of the above events transpired through the French mainstream media, which as usual concentrated on two subjects: violence and Paris. In the capital this Saturday, as happens every Saturday, brigades of robo-cops outnumbered demonstrators and prevented them from actually marching along routes that had been (for once!) previously agreed upon, while a few bands of black-clad casseurs (vandals who somehow never seem to get arrested or even shot at) managed to smash bank windows and set a couple of cars on fire. The usual. Despite the fact, universally recognized by sociologists, historians, and analysts, that the Yellow Vests are unique among revolutionary movements because based in the provinces rather than centered in Paris, you would never guess this from French television.

Indeed, the highpoint of Channel 3’s evening coverage of the nationwide Yellow Vest anniversary, was a woman reporter filmed standing in front of the Arc of Triumph, with a perfectly empty Champs Elysées in the background, going on at length about the great achievement of the “forces of order” (as they are invariable termed) in keeping this rich Parisian neighborhood safe by emptying it. The next day’s top story quoted a thuggish gangster named Costner, Macron’s Minister of Interior (police), calling the Paris vandals “thugs and gangsters.” Nothing new.

On Sunday, Channel 5 aired a serious, well-produced, hour-long retrospective on the Yellow Vests. The words “convergence” and “Assembly of Assemblies” (of which there have been four) were never spoken. Clips of Yellow Vests acting violent were shown, but no images of another taboo subject: the government’s systematic excessive violence against demonstrators, sharply condemned by the Human Rights Commissions of both the UN and the European Union. No wonder “Turn off your TV and come out to talk with us” was among the Yellow Vests’ first slogans.

New Perspectives

Two weekends ago, the self-organized Yellow Vest movement held its fourth nation-wide Assembly of Assemblies here in Montpellier. This Assembly brought together 500 Yellow Vests delegated by over 200 local groups from all over France.¹ Pulled together at the last minute in an abandoned, futuristic Agriculture museum known as “the Saucer” as a squat, it was a convivial event, with food supplied by local soup-kitchens, endless small-group discussions and endless good will, despite a certain amount of controversy around the issue of “convergence” with the unions, of which many Yellow Vests are suspicious, as they are of political parties.

Montpellier was chosen at the Third Assembly of Assemblies to host the Fourth, and the local organizers, a somewhat secretive group, designed the format so as to exclude plenary sessions and official appeals, for example for Convergence with the unions, which many of us in Montpellier, as elsewhere, had been working toward for months. It soon became clear, as the results of the small-group discussions were synthesized, that the huge majority of delegates, although openly critical of the unions’ bureaucratic leaders, were eager to support and ally themselves with the organized workers and to converge with the nationwide, unlimited labour strikes that are scheduled to begin on December 5. At the last minute, the efforts of the organizers to limit debate were overwhelmed, and a near-unanimous Assembly voted the following appeal:

After a year of tireless mobilization, the situation has reached a turning point. The time has come for convergence with the world of work and its web of thousands of union members who, like us, don’t accept it. All the constituant sections of the people of France must join together: peasants, retired people, the youth, artists, people with disabilities, artisans, artists, the unemployed, temps, workers in both the public and private sectors…

Beginning on December 5, hundreds of thousands of workers will be on strike and meeting in general assemblies to ratify its continuation until the satisfaction of our demands. The ADA of Montpellier calls on the Yellow Vests to be at the heart of the movement, with their own demands and aspirations, at their jobs or on their traffic circles with their Yellow Vests clearly visible!

The defeat of the government’s reform of retirements would open the way to other victories for our camp. Everyone into the street beginning December 5, on strike, on traffic circles or in blocking actions.

Interviewed on BFM/TV, Philippe Martinez, the leader of the CGT labour federation, immediately declared that the Yellow Vest appeal to join the December 5 strike movement “A very good thing.” He added, “We have been trying for a year to find convergences, and little by little we’re getting there. We have the same preoccupations, the cost of living, the environment, unemployment.”

The Yellow Vest Assembly of Assemblies also voted unanimous appeals for international solidarity with all the spontaneous, horizontal social movements and uprisings around the globe, including Algeria Chile, Irak, Catalonia, Lebanon, Hong Kong, Equator, Sudan, Colombia, Haïti, and Guinée-Conakry, as well as the Syrian Kurds, while recognizing France’s heavy responsibility as an imperialist power and arms producer. The Yellow Vests were clearly proud and encouraged that peoples across the world were following, as it were, in their footsteps.

Cracks in the System

Since the Yellow Vests first rose up a year ago – in the wake of the abject failure of organized labour to mount a credible resistance to Macron’s steamrolling into law a series of neoliberal attacks on public services, wages, and social services – the social crisis in France has only deepened. The signs of cracks in the system are everywhere, as working people organize themselves to resist. Already there are struggles in hospital emergency rooms where patients wait hours on stretchers in corridors and where dedicated doctors and nurses are protesting lack of beds and lack of personnel; in schools, where classes are overcrowded, teacher aids cut back, and incomprehensible new programs are imposed from above, forcing students to choose their futures at age 15; on the railroads, where for the first time in a generation, railway workers spontaneously walked off the job after a safety emergency without asking permission from either management or the union; and most recently among firefighters, whose demonstration was gassed by the police in Paris and who have now formed an interprofessional alliance with the striking emergency room personnel.

The straw which broke the camel’s back was Macron’s recent unveiling of his proposed “reform” of France’s retirement system which, like much that is positive in France, dates back to 1945 when the French owning class was in disgrace for collaborating with the Nazis and the Communist- and Socialist-led Resistance was still powerful.

Macron’s pension “reform” would do away with early retirement for workers in dangerous or arduous jobs (for example railways) and replace today’s system, where retirement income is about 75 per cent of your last year, to one based on “points.” Points are calculated on the total number of weeks you worked in your life. This penalizes, for example, workers who have been unemployed and women who have taken time off for children. Each point would be worth a sum in Euros to be decided by the government in power when you retire! Based on current estimates, people would commonly lose around 30 per cent of expected benefits under the proposed system.

In their arrogance, Macron and the financial groups he represents are finally crossing a line which even Trump and the Republicans are afraid to cross: cutting retirement – the last straw in their systematic shredding of France’s (admirable) historical social contract. They can expect trouble.

Popular anger and resentment have been building up in France since early 2018, when Macron started pushing through his reactionary decrees and the 50th Anniversary of the 1968 student-worker uprising and general strike was on everyone’s mind. When the unions failed to rise to the occasion, ordinary people were so angry and disgusted that the pot boiled over and in November, the Yellow Vest movement burst on the scene out of nowhere.

Far from having “achieved nothing” by refusing to negotiate, the Yellow Vests got more out of Macron than all the unions: 1.7 billion Euros in concessions last December including year-end bonuses, tax breaks for the poor and rescinding of the gas tax that set the movement in motion. When these concessions failed to stop the movement, Macron unleashed a PR “great debate” where he did most of the talking and doubled down on police repression, but the Yellow Vests, whose theme song is “We are here!” are still here.

Today, French workers in almost every sector are already in motion in advance of the planned general strike, and the issue of retirements – along with health, education, public services – unites the whole population against the government and the narrow financial interests it represents. The declared goals of the Yellow Vests – Macron’s resignation, fiscal justice, economic equality, and participatory democracy – are frankly utopian, and when the general strike gets going, they are unlikely to be willing to stop half way when Martinez and the union bureaucrats decide to settle and end the strike as they did in 1936, 1945, 1968 and 1995. New perspectives?

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Richard Greeman has been active since 1957 in civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuke, environmental and labour struggles in the U.S., Latin America, France (where he has been a longtime resident) and Russia (where he helped found the Praxis Research and Education Center in 1997). He maintains a blog at richardgreeman.org.

“When a man unprincipled in private life[,] desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanour — known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty — when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity — to join in the cry of danger to liberty — to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion — to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day — It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”—Alexander Hamilton

By all means, let’s talk about impeachment.

To allow the President or any rogue government agency or individual to disregard the rule of law whenever, wherever and however it chooses and operate “above the law” is exactly how a nation of sheep gives rise to a government of wolves.

To be clear: this is not about Donald Trump. Or at least it shouldn’t be just about Trump.

This is a condemnation of every government toady at every point along the political spectrum—right, left and center—who has conspired to expand the federal government’s powers at the expense of the citizenry.

For too long now, the American people have played politics with their principles and turned a blind eye to all manner of wrongdoing when it was politically expedient, allowing Congress, the White House and the Judiciary to wreak havoc with their freedoms and act in violation of the rule of law.

“We the people” are paying the price for it now.

We are paying the price every day that we allow the government to continue to wage its war on the American People, a war that is being fought on many fronts: with bullets and tasers, with surveillance cameras and license readers, with intimidation and propaganda, with court rulings and legislation, with the collusion of every bureaucrat who dances to the tune of corporate handouts while on the government’s payroll, and most effectively of all, with the complicity of the American people, who continue to allow themselves to be easily manipulated by their politics, distracted by their pastimes, and acclimated to a world in which government corruption is the norm.

Don’t keep falling for the Deep State’s ploys.

This entire impeachment process is a manufactured political circus—a shell game—aimed at distracting the public from the devious treachery of the American police state, which continues to lock down the nation and strip the citizenry of every last vestige of constitutional safeguards that have historically served as a bulwark against tyranny.

Has President Trump overstepped his authority and abused his powers?

Without a doubt.

Then again, so did Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, and almost every president before them.

Trump is not the first president to weaken the system of checks and balances, sidestep the rule of law, and expand the power of the president. He is just the most recent.

If we were being honest and consistent in holding government officials accountable, you’d have to impeach almost every president in recent years for operating “above the law,” unbound by the legislative or judicial branches of the government.

When we refer to the “rule of law,” that’s constitutional shorthand for the idea that everyone is treated the same under the law, everyone is held equally accountable to abiding by the law, and no one is given a free pass based on their politics, their connections, their wealth, their status or any other bright line test used to confer special treatment on the elite.

When the government and its agents no longer respect the rule of law—the Constitution—or believe that it applies to them, then the very contract on which this relationship is based becomes invalid.

Although the Constitution requires a separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government in order to ensure accountability so that no one government agency becomes all-powerful, each successive president over the past 30 years has, through the negligence of Congress and the courts, expanded the reach and power of the presidency by adding to his office’s list of extraordinary orders, directives and special privileges.

All of the imperial powers amassed by Barack Obama and George W. Bush—to kill American citizens without due process, to detain suspects indefinitely, to strip Americans of their citizenship rights, to carry out mass surveillance on Americans without probable cause, to suspend laws during wartime, to disregard laws with which he might disagree, to conduct secret wars and convene secret courts, to sanction torture, to sidestep the legislatures and courts with executive orders and signing statements, to direct the military to operate beyond the reach of the law, to operate a shadow government, and to act as a dictator and a tyrant, above the law and beyond any real accountability—were inherited by Donald Trump.

These presidential powers—acquired through the use of executive orders, decrees, memorandums, proclamations, national security directives and legislative signing statements and which can be activated by any sitting president—enable past, president and future presidents to act as a dictator by operating above the law and beyond the reach of the Constitution.

Yet in operating above the law, it’s not just the president who has become a law unto himself.

The government itself has become an imperial dictator, an overlord, a king.

This is what you might call a stealthy, creeping, silent, slow-motion coup d’état.

This abuse of power has been going on for so long that it has become the norm, the Constitution be damned.

There are hundreds—make that thousands—of government bureaucrats who are getting away with murder (in many cases, literally) simply because the legislatures, courts and the citizenry can’t be bothered to make them play by the rules of the Constitution.

Unless something changes in the way we deal with these ongoing, egregious abuses of power, the predators of the police state will continue to wreak havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives.

It’s the nature of the beast: power corrupts.

Worse, as 19th-century historian Lord Acton concluded, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about a politician, an entertainment mogul, a corporate CEO or a police officer: give any one person (or government agency) too much power and allow him or her or it to believe that they are entitled, untouchable and will not be held accountable for their actions, and those powers will eventually be abused.

We’re seeing this dynamic play out every day in communities across America.

A cop shoots an unarmed citizen for no credible reason and gets away with it. A president employs executive orders to sidestep the Constitution and gets away with it. A government agency spies on its citizens’ communications and gets away with it. An entertainment mogul sexually harasses actors and actresses and gets away with it. The U.S. military bombs civilian targets and gets away with it.

Abuse of power—and the ambition-fueled hypocrisy and deliberate disregard for misconduct that make those abuses possible—works the same whether you’re talking about sexual harassment, government corruption, or the rule of law.

Twenty years ago, I was a lawyer for Paula Jones, who sued then-President Clinton for dropping his pants and propositioning her for sex when he was governor of Arkansas. That lawsuit gave rise to revelations about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern at the White House, and his eventual impeachment for lying about it under oath.

As Dana Milbank writes for The Washington Post:

We didn’t know it at the time, of course. But in Bill Clinton were the seeds of Donald Trump. With 20 years of hindsight, it is clear… Clinton’s handling of the Monica Lewinsky affair was a precursor of the monstrosity we now have in the White House: dismissing unpleasant facts as “fake news,” self-righteously claiming victimhood, attacking the press and cloaking personal misbehavior in claims to be upholding the Constitution…. Clinton set us on the path, or at least accelerated us down the path, that led to today.

It doesn’t matter what starts us down this path, whether it’s a president insisting that he get a free pass for sexually harassing employees, or waging wars based on invented facts, or attempting to derail an investigation into official misconduct.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

After all, it is a tale that has been told time and again throughout history about how easy it is for freedom to fall and tyranny to rise, and it often begins with one small, seemingly inconsequential willingness on the part of the people to compromise their principles and undermine the rule of law in exchange for a dubious assurance of safety, prosperity and a life without care.

For example, 86 years ago, the citizens of another democratic world power elected a leader who promised to protect them from all dangers. In return for this protection, and under the auspice of fighting terrorism, he was given absolute power.

This leader went to great lengths to make his rise to power appear both legal and necessary, masterfully manipulating much of the citizenry and their government leaders.

Unnerved by threats of domestic terrorism and foreign invaders, the people had little idea that the domestic turmoil of the times—such as street rioting and the fear of Communism taking over the country—was staged by the leader in an effort to create fear and later capitalize on it.

In the ensuing months, this charismatic leader ushered in a series of legislative measures that suspended civil liberties and habeas corpus rights and empowered him as a dictator.

On March 23, 1933, the nation’s legislative body passed the Enabling Act, formally referred to as the “Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation,” which appeared benign and allowed the leader to pass laws by decree in times of emergency.

What it succeeded in doing, however, was ensuring that the leader became a law unto himself.

The leader’s name was Adolf Hitler, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Yet history has a way of repeating itself.

Hitler’s rise to power should serve as a stark lesson to always be leery of granting any government leader sweeping powers.

Clearly, we are not heeding that lesson.

“How lucky it is for rulers,” Adolf Hitler once said, “that men cannot think.”

The horrors that followed in Nazi Germany might have been easier to explain if Hitler had been right. But the problem is not so much that people cannot think but that they do not think. Or if they do think, as in the case of the German people, that thinking becomes muddled and easily led.

Hitler’s meteoric rise to power, with the support of the German people, is a case in point.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in full accordance with the country’s legal and constitutional principles. When President Paul von Hindenburg died the following year, Hitler assumed the office of president, as well as that of chancellor, but he preferred to use the title Der Füehrer (the leader) to describe himself. This new move was approved in a general election in which Hitler garnered 88 percent of the votes cast.

It cannot be said that the German people were ignorant of Hitler’s agenda or his Nazi ideology. Nazi literature, including statements of the Nazi plans for the future, had papered the country for a decade before Hitler came to power. In fact, Hitler’s book Mein Kampf, which was his blueprint for totalitarianism, sold more than 200,000 copies between 1925 and 1932.

Clearly, the problem was not that the German people did not think but that their thinking was poisoned by the enveloping climate of ideas that they came to accept as important.

At a certain point, the trivial became important, and obedience to the government in pursuit of security over freedom became predominant.

As historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free, “Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had. There was no need to. Nazism gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about—we were decent people‑—and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated, yes, fascinated, by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us.”

The German people were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. As historian Robert Gellately points out, “[A]nyone in Nazi Germany who wanted to find out about the Gestapo, the concentration camps, and the campaigns of discrimination and persecutions need only read the newspapers.”

The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on. . . . [T]here is no getting away from the fact that at that moment, ‘the vast majority of the German people backed him.’”

Half a century later, the wife of a prominent German historian, neither of whom were members of the Nazi party, opined: “[O]n the whole, everyone felt well. . . . And there were certainly eighty percent who lived productively and positively throughout the time. . . . We also had good years. We had wonderful years.”

In other words, as long as their creature comforts remained undiminished, as long as their bank accounts remained flush, as long as they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor, life was good.

This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

So yes, let’s talk about impeachment, but don’t fall for the partisan shell game that sets Trump up as the fall guy for the Deep State’s high crimes and misdemeanors.

Set your sights higher: impeach the government for overstepping its authority, abusing its power, and disregarding the rule of law.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Sex, the late Gore Vidal astutely observed, is politics, and not merely from the vantage point of those who wish to police it.  In the case of whistleblowers, claims of aberrant, unlawful sex serves the purpose of diminishing credibility, tarring and feathering the individual and furnishing a distraction.  Forget what was disclosed; focus, instead, on the moral character of the person in question.  The rotter could not have been good anyway. 

In the case of Julian Assange, the stench of accusation (never charge) of sexual assault clung stubbornly. 

“The road to Belmarsh and 175-years in prison was paved in Stockholm – and so it will be remembered,” tweeted the Defend Assange Campaign.

Then came the announcement from the Deputy Director of Public Prosecution Eva-Marie Persson: the Swedish investigation was being laid to rest. 

“The reason for this decision is that the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.” 

This did not mean Persson would let Assange off without a blemish on character.  Some stain still had its place. 

“I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events.  Her statements have been coherent, extensive and detailed; however, my overall assessment is that the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent that there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation.”

Despite no charge or trial, untested accounts are still being permitted to linger on the historical chronicle.

The effort to get at Assange via the sexual channel has been sporadic, arbitrary and inconsistent.  In 2010, Assange was accused by two women of rape and sexual assault following a WikiLeaks conference in Stockholm.  One of the women, Miss A (Anna Ardin), claimed that Assange had fiddled with a condom during sex.  Miss W claimed to have been penetrated by Assange without a condom while asleep.  The accusations were also supplemented by claims of unlawful coercion and molestation, though these had run their course by 2015.

The initial phase of prosecution lacked conviction.  Stockholm chief prosecutor, Eva Finne, was unimpressed.  She immediately cancelled the arrest warrant claiming no “reason to suspect that he has committed rape.”  Four days later, she dismissed the rape investigation.  One of the accusers would also say that he had not been raped.  But another chapter was being drafted.  Claes Borgström, taking it upon himself to represent the two women, persuaded Marianne Ny seize the reins.  The case was re-opened.  All of this took place under the cloud of claims that US-Sweden intelligence sharing would be compromised if Assange was sheltered in Sweden, and the very pointed views of Sweden’s military intelligence service that WikiLeaks posed a threat to the country’s soldiers in Afghanistan under US command.      

In 2017, the tired effort was shelved.  With the storming of Ecuadorean embassy in London and the forced eviction of Assange, prosecutors again got a burst of inspiration: the investigation was re-opened for a second time.  The exercise seemed redundant, given that the United States would be having first dibs with its effort to extradite the publisher.

Over time, the sexual angle to the issue morphed into a crusade, becoming, intentionally or otherwise, a means to demonise the efforts of Assange and WikiLeaks.  It aligned neatly, consistently, and even conspiratorially, with the recommendations of the US Army Counterintelligence Centre within the Counterintelligence Assessments Branch in its March 2008 document “Wikileaks.org – An Online Reference on Foreign Intelligence Services, Or Terrorist Groups?”  As WikiLeaks relies on “trust as a centre of gravity by protecting the anonymity of the insiders, leakers or whistleblowers,” it was possible that “identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this centre of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site.”

Sexual misdemeanour was always going to be a formidable vehicle by which this could be executed.  For Yana Walton of the Women’s Media Centre, the issue was condensed and simple: “Rape is rape is rape is rape, and should be prosecuted as such.”  Such arguments ignored the defective processes behind the Swedish prosecution, the refusal to conduct interviews with Assange in the embassy, and the obsession with physically having him present in Sweden. 

Beyond that was the point made by WikiLeaks, now gruesomely evident, that the United States would seek to have Assange delivered into its custody the moment he reached Swedish soil.  Claims of sexual impropriety were subsequently sharpened to suggest that Assange was never a political prisoner in the embassy, let alone an agent of radical transparency.   

In May this year, Caroline Orr’s less than considered scribbles parroted the US Department of Justice line that Assange “wasn’t a prisoner at all.  He wasn’t being pursued for bravely standing up for truth; rather, he was hiding from it.”  Very generous of Orr to know something others do not.  

In suggesting her own understanding of the truth as unimpeachable, she proceeded to take a leaf out of the covert manual of whistleblower demonization, using misogyny as her preferred weapon. Being one naturally meant you could not speak, let alone shout truth, to power.  “Assange is a misogynist who spent nearly seven years living in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London because he didn’t want to return to Sweden to answer to two women accusing him of sex crimes.  Regardless of your feelings toward WikiLeaks, this is a major part of Assange’s legacy – and it matters.”

On his apprehension, British Labour MP Jess Phillips was appalled by the idea of women’s issues being “the political side salad, never the main event.”  In responding to Assange’s arrest, “the political establishment slapped us around the face.”  Speaking collectively as voice of the slapped, she found the debate about how best to deal with the Australian publisher one that ignored “the fact that Assange, for seven years, evaded accusations of sexual violence in Sweden.”  Not a sliver of acknowledgment about Assange’s status of political asylum was made.  Assange was merely a creep worthy of punishment. 

Philips’s own tendency to trim the record was evident, ignoring the obvious point that the sex allegations (and not charges, as she mistakenly implies) were very much placed in the foreground to take discussions away from WikiLeaks and its disruptions. The bigger picture, which she dismisses as a case of “big boys playing toy soldiers”, was cluttered with the ongoing US investigation that finally confirmed its presence in April this year.   

As with other figures with historical freight, Assange is a character flawed and troubled, hardly your card carrying Women’s Libber or gallant knight.  The ramshackle motor of history is not operated by saints; to even assume that level of purity and clean living suggests a degree of shuddering naïveté.  But the stuttering Swedish prosecution, shelved then restarted, was never based purely on the dictates of conscience and the pursuit of justice on behalf of the claimed victims.  Sex is politics, and from the start, the Assange prosecution, from Washington to Stockholm, was and remains, political.

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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: Julian Assange court sketch, October 21, 2019, supplied by Julia Quenzler.

An important and informative interview on the topic of 5G and the “International Appeal To STOP 5G on Earth and in Space”. Spokesperson for the Appeal to STOP 5G, Claire Edwards is the guest on this eye-opening, in-depth and compelling episode of Age of Truth TV, interviewed by presenter and investigative reporter, Lucas Alexander.

Watch the interview below.

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Transcript of the interview is as follows.

Lucas: Hello and welcome to this edition of Age of Truth TV. I’m Lucas Alexander in Copenhagen, Denmark. It’s the 30th of October 2019 and our guest today is the British/Irish spokesperson for the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. She’s a former United Nations editor, an author and researcher, and has a master’s degree in intercultural competence. Claire Edwards.

Lucas: Claire Edwards, it’s wonderful to have you on the show and welcome to Denmark.

Claire: Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here with you.

Lucas: You are a former United Nations editor and have now become a spokesperson for the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. But why are you going against the rollout of 5G? A lot of people, a lot of scientists say that it’s just something that we are now going to have in order to have a faster-running Internet connection.

Claire: 5G is potentially an annihilation event for this planet. 5G was marketed as 5G because it was intended for people to believe that it was just an upgrade from 4G. But in fact, if you understand wireless technology and cell phones, you would know that cell phones were never tested for health or safety, and wireless technology was never tested for health or safety. So all of this is devastating for health. We have the health results now from all of these first generations of wireless technology so we know that this is absolutely devastating for people’s health and for the environment. And 5G is going to be a very, very different technology. It has very little in common with 4G actually, and it would be truly, truly devastating.

Lucas: What is the difference between 4G and 5G, if 5G is so different?

Claire: Well, the difference between earlier generations of wireless technology and 5G is that you could think of 4G as an antenna that you might see in the distance – and I tend to think of what 4G puts out as a soup. So we’re all sitting in this soup 24/7. But, what 5G does is – it’s basically densification on every level so you – with the 5G box you have up to or more than a thousand mini-antennas in one box. And what this produces is a beam. So it’s beam-forming. It’s like a laser and the laser goes out – a very concentrated signal and it does not attenuate over distance, so it does not weaken over distance as the 4G signal does. And therefore it maintains its power and therefore it’s particularly devastating. Now, the densification aspect of 5G is huge because, again, as I said, 4G, you have – you might see it off in the distance. But 5G would be absolutely everywhere. And the list of places from which 5G will come at you is so long that it’s hard to enumerate. So for a start, “smart” meters are part of the 5G rollout. LED street lights are part of the 5G rollout. Cabinets on the street – so they have designed new cabinets on the street which will let the signal pass. Under manhole covers – so imagine that you’re taking your baby for a walk and you see a friend and you leave the baby standing over the manhole cover. Your baby is being irradiated. Then you have satellites in the Earth orbits. So now SpaceX has asked for permission to put up a further 30,000 satellites, so now we’re up to a figure of 53,000 satellites in the Earth orbits. Plus, they want to put pseudosatellites in the stratosphere. Plus, you’re talking about networked civil aircraft, which would network between them and then beam down broadband down to Earth level, ground level. And also the plan is to put the 5G antennas approximately every third house. So you’re talking about a hugedensification. You’re talking about putting these antennas extremely close to where people are and where they live, outside their bedroom windows, for example. You’re also talking about different power levels. Now, because we have no standards for 5G – if you look at the press conference with Tom Wheeler in 2016, Tom Wheeler said it: we’re not waiting for the standards; we’re not waiting for committees and commissions to sit around deciding the standards. Therefore we have no standards for this. This is completely unprecedented. So we actually do not have a definition for 5G. It is undefined. They’re making it up as they go along. In terms of frequencies, people think that the higher frequencies will be used, which is true. They have – obviously there have been frequency auctions and it’s proposed to use frequencies up to 100 GHz for 5G. But also they will use low frequencies and we have to consider that evenextremely low frequencies do tremendous damage to the human body. So it’s a common misconception that 5G just means higher frequencies – it doesn’t. And it will devastate on all levels and at all frequencies.

Lucas: But isn’t it because of the low frequencies that a lot of scientists who are allowed to speak in the mainstream media, though, are saying that it’s not a danger to our health or anything else?

Claire: Well, 5G is complicated. The whole issue of wireless technology is complicated. The problem we have is that a lie has been perpetrated. Ever since we’ve had wireless technology. The lie is the “thermal hypothesis”. And the thermal hypothesis says that there are no biological effects to microwave radiation, which is absolutely not true. The US military collected compendia of thousands of studies detailing the biological effects of microwave radiation precisely because they wanted to develop weapons. So the biological effects are absolutely known. The World Health Organization organized a symposium in 1973, which was actually called “The Biologic Effects and Health Hazards of Microwave Radiation”. But since then they have conveniently forgotten that they organized that symposium. So it is absolute fact that there are biological effects but the regulatory agencies have been, basically, taken over and corrupted by industry and the lie of the thermal hypothesis has been propagated. So they want us to believe that there are only heating effects. So all your cell phones are based on this principle, that there are only heating effects and therefore if you simply hold the phone away from your head, you’re not being heated and therefore there’s no problem. And they test this on plastic mannequins filled with gel, into which they put a probe to ascertain to what extent this mannequin has been heated. So it’s absolutely fraudulent and people think if they hold the phone away, it’s not affecting them, but of course it’s going through their arm; it’s going into their body and there are biological effects so the whole body is being totally devastated by wireless technology and cell phones.

Lucas: So what are the possible dangers and health effects of electromagnetic radiation and frequencies?

Claire: Well, now we have the results after 25 years of cell phone use, now we have the results and they could not be more devastating. We have 9 to 10 year-old children presenting with the brains of senile old people. We have the highest suicide rate in the US since World War Two.

Lucas: So how is suicide connected to those frequencies?

Claire: Because it causes changes in the brain and it causes people to become depressed. So we have the first three-year fall in life expectancy since World War One[in the US] and numerous other devastating health effects, really too numerous to list. British insurer Legal & General, the CEO recently told us that there is now a premature death trend.

Lucas: What does that mean? Is that because it causes cancer and other illnesses?

Claire: Well, there was recently a paper which was putting out a hypothesis that it is wireless technology, it is the ubiquitous nature of electromagnetic radiation that is causing neurological disease and deaths in the Western world. So we have the information now. The Blue Cross Blue Shield health insurance association in the United States put out a report in April this year where they said that millennials, who are the first generation to have used cell phones for a considerable period of time, they have double-digit increases in all the major diseases and you have 27 year-olds now who are presenting with dementia. It could not be more devastating. You also have a prominent scientist in the US who has predicted that, by 2025, every second baby born in the US will be autistic. Autism and ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder] are both associated with electromagnetic radiation.

Lucas: And we have the studies to prove that?

Claire: Absolutely. These are the studies. These are the results.

Lucas: People, when they hear you talk about these things—we will talk much more about it—can actually do their research and find some evidence about this?

Claire: Absolutely. If people go and they read the articles that I’ve written, I reference everything that I say and I give links to all the studies. The University of Aachen has an EMF Portal and on that portal there are over 28,000 studies. Not all of those are peer-reviewed, obviously. But we have an enormous, an overwhelming amount of studies showing these biological effects, which are absolutely known.

Lucas: So why don’t we hear about them on the mainstream news? Why is it not something that they’re taking into consideration. Why don’t they stop it?

Claire: Because this industry, the telecommunications industry is one of the most powerful industries on this planet. And they estimate that the 5G rollout is worth approximately 17 trillion dollars. And you will also find, since about three months ago because of the success of our Appeal and because so many millions of people now know about the dangers of 5G, the mainstream media started a pushback of fake news. This is mainstream media fake news, which started about three months ago. And you will find that, for example, the BBC has some sort of collaboration going with a telecommunications company. Le Monde in France has done two attacks on what we are saying, one very recently which was specifically about our Appeal.

Lucas: That was a French paper?

Claire: That’s one of the main French newspapers, and that is owned by a man who owns a telecommunications company. And so it goes on. You will find very strong links between the telecommunications companies and the newspapers. So, for example, there was an article in The New York Times about three or four months ago attacking what we’re saying and then it was done – in fact, attacking what Russia Today America was saying about 5G and then Russia Today answered back and said, well, actually The New York Times has a collaboration with Verizon, one of the very major American telecommunications companies. So frankly, the mainstream media has a huge conflict of interest. Not a single whisper comes out about the dangers of 5G. There is no balance and if you listen to what they say about the evidence – please listen carefully because I’ve written an article about this and it’s called BBC Fake News on 5G Decoded – how to decode this fake news. Because if you listen very carefully to what they say. Every time they say there is no evidence, they say there is no solid evidence, there is no convincing evidence, there is no valid evidence. Listen for the key word: there’s lots of evidence, but it’s not solid, convincing, valid, believable, etc.

Lucas: So is it not solid? Is it not believable? Is it not something we can trust?

Claire: Well, you know, do you want to dismiss in excess of 28,000 studies? And in that case, why then would the American military have compiled all these compendia on the biological effects of microwave radiation? Why would they have bothered if none of this is solid, convincing, valid or believable?

Lucas: But all these people behind the scenes or whoever is part of rolling it out, they will be irradiated as well?

Claire: I don’t know what they believe. I think that there are some innocent parties in this. I certainly believe that a lot of the people who work for the telecommunications companies cannot be aware of this.

Lucas: And so it’s on a need-to-know basis? It’s more like a compartmentalized …

Claire: Well, no, it goes back to the thermal hypothesis, you see. The regulatory agencies have put out the lie about the thermal hypothesis and a lot of people have believed it because they’re simply not aware of the biological effects. And so the main culprit in this is the so-called “international commission on non-ionizing radiation protection (icnirp). And this has this very grand name “international commission” so we should all respect this international commission. What this is, this is simply a club under German law. Now I could go and I could start a club and I could call myself the international commission. So this international commission so-called, it appoints its own members. There is no transparency; there is no supervision. It has no legal standing in international law. And yet, clearly they must be doing the bidding of industry, their pronouncements – they dismiss all the science on the biological effects. They say there is only thermal effect. And then, mysteriously, their pronouncements are taken up by the World Health Organization and by the International Telecommunication Union, both of which are UN organizations. And, as far as I can see, there is no legitimacy in the fact that their pronouncements are taken up. And you may also wish to consider that on icnirp’s website, they actually have a disclaimer disclaiming all responsibility for any of their pronouncements, obviously including their so-called safety guidelines, which actually don’t protect anybody from anything whatsoever.

Lucas: And the UN is not taking any action on this either, right?

Claire: The UN is the chief promoter of this.

Lucas: But you worked for the United Nations for a long time. So why aren’t they doing that? Do you think that the United Nations is actually a part of the New World Order structure?

Claire: I have no idea if they are part of the New World Order, but you can just look at what the United Nations actually does.

Lucas: You worked there?

Claire: I worked there and I came into this because, in December 2015, I was working in Vienna at the Vienna International Centre and they put up public access points on the ceilings. Now, these public access points were for Wi-Fi and cell phones and they have very little in common with your home Wi-Fi router. They are much, much more powerful. So when I saw these go up on the ceilings, I was extremely concerned and I tried to bring it to the attention of the authorities in Vienna, none of whom listened to me. And I was sick as a result of that. I was sick for seven months with flu, cold, flu, cold, flu, cold and the symptoms of flu …

Lucas: Caused by that, do you think?

Claire: Well, I would say so. I didn’t realize this until afterwards when I was talking to a friend. I didn’t realize it at the time but afterwards I thought, “Well, gosh, that happened as soon as those things went up”. And the symptoms of flu are almost identical to the symptoms of radiation poisoning, you know, so it’s very difficult for a doctor to differentiate between the two. So I was sick for seven months and, because nobody would listen to me and because I was extremely concerned about the situation, I actually took early retirement to get out of there. But I continued to try to alert people, including the Medical Service at the UN in Vienna, and nobody listened. Nobody even replied to my emails. So in the end, when I heard that the Secretary-General was coming in May last year and was going to speak to staff – you have to understand that when you work for the UN, you keep a grounds pass when you retire. So you’re still part of the UN if, you know, even though you’re retired.

Lucas: So you had access to go there?

Claire: Yes. So I went there to warn him about these public access points and also about 5G. Now, what I find extremely interesting – so that video is now on the Internet– and if you watch that video, what is extremely interesting is that it took me quite a time to read what I had to say out to the Secretary-General. So in other words, he had about three minutes to think how to respond to me. And when he responded to me, he laughed. Which is – I find that quite a strange response.

Lucas: Why did he laugh? That is so immature, isn’t it?

Claire: Well, I mean, I had brought my very serious concerns to him about the welfare of the UN staff. I mean, I hear anecdotally that many people have had breast cancer, some people have died. People have had heart attacks. I know a lot of people have had burnout, which is also associated with exposure to electromagnetic radiation.

Lucas: Stress, huh?

Claire: No, it’s to do with electromagnetic radiation. There’s also connections there so I know that there have been very serious consequences, but I only know anecdotally. What I was asking was that, for example, building biology experts should be brought in. Nobody needs to listen to me. I’m not an expert. I’m simply raising the alarm. So I asked the UN to bring in experts and they failed to do so. Now, what I find interesting about the fact that the Secretary-General laughed is that he could have done something else. So I raised my very serious concerns about the welfare of the staff and his response was to laugh. I find that wildly inappropriate myself. And also think about what he did notsay. So I should have been reassured – if these public access points are fine on the ceilings and he knows that they are fine, then actually he should have reassured me and said, “Oh, don’t worry about a thing. It’s all absolutely safe”. He did not do that.

Lucas: So, other than finding it funny and laughing, did he actually say something constructive or anything that you could use positively?

Claire: He said that he would consult the World Health Organization, which he did not do subsequently. Now, then you have to look at what the Secretary-General actually did do after I told him about 5G. First of all, I should say that he is an electrical engineer by training and also a physicist and he also taught telecommunications signals early in his career. So if there’s one man on this planet who should have known what I was talking about, about the dangers …

Lucas: Should have been him, shouldn’t it?

Claire: … he should have known. So what did he actually do? Approximately two months later he appointed a High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and this was to promote digitalization. And this Panel was stuffed solely with industry insiders. So this was all Melinda Gates and the man who started Ali Baba … all people who were pro-5G. So this was about promoting 5G. There was not a single doctor involved; there was not a single environmentalist involved. Then he went on to bring out a document on digital technologies. So, basically, you have these digital technologies being pushed through absolutely every UN programme. The word – if you look at the literature, the word that’s used in the UN literature – and other literature emanating from the European Union and the US – the word they use is to “blanket” the Earth. Their intention is to blanket the Earth. As I have already described, 53,000 satellites, pseudosatellites in the stratosphere, networked civil aviation, densification of antennas absolutely everywhere. They intend that every square centimetre of this planet be bathed in electromagnetic radiation. Now when you consider that, already, we have the canaries in the coalmine – you could say – are so-called electrohypersensitive people. Now this term electrohypersensitivity, it’s actually a political term, because, when you talk about, “Oh, you are electrohypersensitive”, this points the finger at you. “Oh, you have a problem because you are electrohypersensitive. The rest of us are not feeling anything” – because this is the problem, you don’t feel anything. We are all being attacked and our health is being massively damaged and the environment is being damaged. So some people – and we don’t know why – but some people feel this, where others don’t.

Lucas: Maybe later on they’ll feel it.

Claire: Well, with 5G, I mean, I’m quite sure that everybody will feel it because this is going to be …

Lucas: But this is the United Nations and the WHO we’re talking about here. People depend on these organizations. They think they’re doing something good, right? Trying to help the human race. That’s at least the official narrative.

Claire: There tends to be a very positive view. But we live in a society where authority is respected and people defer to authority. And I would say this is exactly the problem. That people do not realize that actually they need to inform themselves of what is really going on. And people need to realize that they have a lot of power to change what is going on.

Lucas: But the UN Secretary-General, he knows. Because he’s part of – he knew about all of this, being an engineer, right?

Claire: Yes, I would say he undoubtedly has to know.

Lucas: I mean, really know, in depth.

Claire: Yes, really know, yes, in depth. Yes.

Lucas: Yes, so this he knows and therefore he is actually he’s implement … he’s part of the knowledge and going against what is actually secure and good for the human race. That’s really what it comes down to, right?

Claire: I don’t believe in coincidences. He was appointed Secretary-General at the time when it was known that 5G was going to be rolled out. So I don’t believe in coincidences

Lucas: And he was not too thrilled to meet you when you asked him those questions or presented this material in front of him?

Claire: He patronized me. He may be regretting it now because it was actually what he did that caused me to start cooperating and working on the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space.

Lucas: And we’re gonna talk, of course, much more about that. But why do you think that they’re rolling it out at rapid speed – so fast. Why does that have to happen, so fast?

Claire: That question was actually asked in an EU report [page 6: “The notion of a “race” is part of the campaign”]. It was asked sceptically in an EU report earlier this year. And frankly, I think nobody knows why this has been characterized as a race. My guess is that they need to roll it out before people really realize. Or they hoped to roll it out before people really realized the dangers of 5G and by giving it the name “5G”, people assume that it’s just more of the same as 4G, but just a lot better and a lot faster.

Lucas: “Next generation.”

Claire: So they were hoping really that nobody would inform the public about the real nature of 5G. So by characterizing it as a race, you have to get there before any other country gets there …

Lucas: Because it’s easier to stop it than to take it back or to actually disarm it or destroy it afterwards?

Claire: Er, no. I think they wanted to roll it out before people could realize how damaging it would be. And before people had an opportunity to organize and stop it.

Lucas: It’s more difficult to take it away once it’s there.

Claire: I would say it’s extremely difficult to take it away once it’s there. How are you going to take down 53,000 satellites once they are up? The whole point about 5G is that it affects your brain. I mean, not only does it affect your body, but it affects your brain and therefore it affects your judgment. It can also be used for mind control because it’s very closely associated with HAARP. It has many of the same characteristics as far as I can see …

Lucas: Please, for the viewers, just explain what HAARP is.

Claire: HAARP is the – if I can remember correctly – the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. H-A-A-R-P and it’s an ionospheric heater. And what you can do with HAARP is you can mind-control people, you can change their emotional state, all sorts of things.

Lucas: Weather.

Claire: The weather, yes, you can interfere with the weather. It’s a very sinister tool. And it heats the ionosphere. Now, my question would be – I think that there are very close parallels between HAARP and 5G. Of course, nobody is drawing attention to this.

Lucas: Some people say that HAARP, which was in Alaska, is no longer functioning.

Claire: No, that’s not true. There was an interview with Dr. Nick Begich, who has written several books on this. And it’s all a switcheroo. It’s all just public relations to make people believe things.

Lucas: So it’s kept under the radar?

Claire: In his opinion, it was taken over, I think, from the American military, it was given to DARPA. And, as we know, DARPA is one of the most sinister organizations on this planet. And from DARPA, it was then transferred to the University of Alaska. So it comes under the University of Alaska now, but the University of Alaska was already working with the American military on HAARP. So it’s just a question of PR. Now the University of Alaska is still providing the same services to those same “clients”, if you want to call it. So, basically, it’s still controlled by the same people. HAARP has multiplied over the years so I believe – I mean, I can’t substantiate that – I haven’t done any detailed research into HAARP, but I believe that there are HAARP stations all around the world at this stage.

Lucas: The European version is placed in Norway, in Tromso.

Claire: Exactly. Exactly. And that was just updated – a couple of years ago there was a huge investment in that. So, far from being downgraded, I would say this is something that has been upgraded.

Lucas: So just explain DARPA. What does that stand for? What is DARPA?

Claire: [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.] I’ve forgotten what it stands for. This is the organization that does some of the most sinister projects on the planet. So, for example, they have designed these battlefield robots that look like robotic dogs. Now, the problem on the battlefield – and this really shows you the connection with 5G because you can – so, for example, the invasion of Iraq by the US.

Lucas: In 2003.

Claire: Yes, exactly. So a lot of the veterans from the Iraq so-called war came back and complained of some sort of peculiar syndrome. Now, it would appear that, in fact, the Iraq invasion – they were using electronic weapons. So if you listen to what Mark Steele has to say … Mark Steele is based in the UK and he’s a weapons expert. And he says that 5G is battlefield interrogation technology, which it is. So what happened with these Iraq veterans is that they were very damaged by this battlefield interrogation technology. And therefore you really cannot deploy soldiers on the battlefield any more, which is why you need these DARPA robotic dogs.

Lucas: Like Manchurian Candidate syndrome, really?

Claire: That sort of thing, yes. It’s a similar technology. I mean, we also have to realize that the mind-control technology goes back decades. And was taken from the Nazis. In Operation Paperclip, where a lot of Nazis were – thousands of Nazi scientists were brought into the US. And all the various projects that they worked on were taken up by the Americans. And, of course, they’ve had decades to improve this technology.

Lucas: CIA?

Claire: Yes, and the mind-control technology is absolutely real.

Lucas: MKULTRA?

Claire: MKULTRA. And it’s extremely sophisticated at this stage and 5G also includes mind control.

Lucas: So frequencies can be beamed from this satellite grid around Earth that they’re creating with this technology? And it can be beamed into a person’s mind in order to make them do certain things or think in a certain direction. Is that what you mean?

Claire: Exactly. Well, we have the proof you see. This was deployed during the Iraq war when these frequencies were beamed at Iraqi soldiers. In fact, it was put on top of a radio signal so when they were listening to prayers and so forth and they went into fear and panic. And they were told to put down their weapons and they did. So they didn’t understand where this fear and panic came from. So we’ve already had a public demonstration of this.

Lucas: Is 5G part of UN agenda 21, also now known as UN Agenda 2030?

Claire: I can’t really speak to that because I don’t have expertise in that area. I would simply say that 5G …

Lucas: Even if you worked for the UN?

Claire: Well, no, because it depends who you work for. I worked in the Conference Management Service so we were providing services to conferences, so translations and documentation, conference rooms, etc. And, you know, there are many different parts of the UN. So Agenda 21 is the UN Environment Programme and we don’t have the UN Environment Programme in Vienna. In Vienna, we work on space so I edited a lot of the space documents, which is why I have some knowledge of space law and the issues in space.

Lucas: And they also work closely with NASA?

Claire: Not necessarily, no.

Lucas: When you talk about space?

Claire: Oh, well – you know – there are various parts of the UN work on space. So you have the Office of Disarmament Affairs is one, the First Committee in New York is another one. And in Vienna we have the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and so for several years I edited all the documents for them, including their Legal, and Scientific and Technical subcommittees. And what I can tell you is that the two major, major issues that were always talked of were space debris and weaponization. So right now – I don’t know if it’s because of 25 years of cell phone use, but it’s like we have gone into some sort of collective amnesia because the 5G rollout is totally illegal. It’s totally illegal on every level. The number of international treaties that it breaches– you know – I can’t even list them for you. But environmental treaties, human rights, space law. It’s astonishing. And so the two issues that the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space [discussed] were always space debris and weaponization. And it’s almost as if those discussions never ever took place because now we’re putting up 53,000 satellites and so the two issues – let’s separate them. So the space debris – there was a paper written, I think back in the 1970s or 1980s by a man called Kessler who posited what became called the Kessler syndrome. And what he says is that if you reach a point where you have so much space debris that it starts colliding, you could have a cascade effect where you cannot stop the constant cascade of collisions and you would have a situation where the space orbits became unusable for a thousand years.

Lucas: Please explain to us where this space debris comes from. How does that happen?

Claire: Well, there’s – we’ve had a lot of space exploration, obviously, for decades, and so as you – I mean, some, certain countries have actually attacked their own satellites.

Lucas: So it’s from satellites, it’s from rockets or from …

Claire: Rockets, satellites, all the activities that have gone on in space. So you you’ve had I think the US has also attacked its own satellite. Certainly China did, and India did. India did that earlier this year. And when you destroy your own satellite, of course, it shatters into – I don’t know how many pieces. And you have to consider that the velocity at which these pieces travel means that the tiniest, tiniest piece could cause such damage, for example, to the International Space Station, that it could no longer function. So the tiniest – it’s not a question of size. The tiniest piece can be absolutely devastating. And they estimate that there are over 500,000 pieces of space debris already. And by 2025 they estimate that …

Lucas: How can it cause damage when it’s so tiny?

Claire: Because of the velocity at which it travels. And also there was a project during the Cold War called Project West Ford, where the Americans put up 480 million needles into the Earth orbits and those are still up there. They’re floating around. So you – if you look at a picture of space debris. If you go on to YouTube, for example, and look up the Kessler syndrome or space junk, you can actually see the tremendous amount of space debris that exists up there. And so, at the UN, year after year after year, they constantly talked about the dangers from space debris. And now suddenly we’ve forgotten all of that. It’s like we never had those discussions. But now we’re going to put up 53,000 satellites and nobody considers it a problem any more. But the other issue that constantly came up year by year was the issue of weaponization of space. The Outer Space Treaty of 1966 bans weapons in space – it’s actually illegal now the problem with the weaponization of space is of course you don’t have visibility you can’t look out the window and see what’s happening in the earth orbits so if a military satellite and of course the militaries all depend increasingly on the intelligence satellites so if one of these satellites blips out suddenly and makes that country vulnerable. Now, if that country believes that it was another state that caused the , of their satellite, they could launch nuclear missiles! They could think that they’re under attack! It’s tremendously dangerous. This issue of weaponization in space. And again this is another issue where it’s as if these conversations never ever took place because now we have NATO, this December, intends to designate space a domain of warfare! And this year, President Trump announced a space force.President Macron of France has also announced a space force. Where are we going now? We have descended into lunacy now. And all I can suppose is that, because we’ve had 25 years of cell phones, people have lost their minds. It’s unimaginable what is happening now.

Lucas: Some people say that the governments of the world, well, the top elite factions of the governments are working with alien races, people from other worlds. What are your thoughts on that when you’re talking about, let’s say, human-made space stations around Earth?

Claire: I can’t speculate about alien races. I mean, my personal opinion is I don’t see why there should not be alien races. If we exist, you know, why should alien races not equally exist? But I can’t really speak to that, but I can speak to artificial intelligence. Again, this is not an area where I have expertise.

Lucas: People think that 5G is actually, let’s just say a pathway, a route to AI, artificial intelligence.

Claire: Absolutely. 5G is what facilitates artificial intelligence.

Lucas: Is that the agenda?

Claire: 5G, in my view, is about a total surveillance and mind control and kill grid. That’s what 5G is.

Lucas: A kill grid? In order to kill the population?

Claire: Well, people speculate on that.

Lucas: What are your thoughts?

Claire: Well, you know, people say, “Is it a weapon?” Well, you know, if you have a technology which is potentially going to annihilate everything on Earth, do we need to decide whether it’s a weapon or not? I mean, the only difference between it being a weapon and not a weapon is just intention.

Lucas: But why would the leaders of the world and even the moguls in the financial system who are behind the whole control system. Why would they want to kill a large number of the population on Earth known as depopulation?

Claire: Please don’t ask me for insights into the mind of psychopaths. You know, I am not the author of 5G. I think it is more insane, demented than anything I have ever come across in my life.

Lucas: Is it because they think we’re too many or is it because a growing number of the population is waking up to what possibly is behind what we talked about just before a little bit –the new world order structure, a one-world government strategy.

Claire: Well, for me it is a form of madness. What we have in the West is – we have the materialist-reductionist paradigm. And this is very much left-brain thinking. So in left-brain thinking, everything is separate, so nothing is ever seen in context. And in left-brain thinking, you are very much in fear. You tend to exercise control. The right-brain thinking is much more holistic and much more accepting of the idea that you cannot grasp everything – not everything is understandable. So the left-brain thinking is materialistic. Now, if you subscribe to this kind of thinking, which frankly I don’t. Nikola Tesla said that if you think of the universe in terms of energy, frequency and vibration, you would make more progress in a decade in science than ever before. So clearly it’s an energy universe. I mean, this is absolutely indisputable. And I don’t understand why anybody would even argue about it. Even at school we are taught that everything is atoms and molecules. So we know that everything is energy and when you touch something, you should know by now that what you’re touching is, it’s about electron repulsion. You’re not actually touching something solid because there IS nothing solid.

Lucas: Because atoms have no solidity. So everything is holographic in structure or …

Claire: According to some theories, yes. But it’s an energy universe. But when you believe – as many scientists, extraordinarily, still perpetuate this belief that we live in a material world, then you tend to think that everything is scarce and perishable. Life is limited. And therefore you live in fear. And you believe that the resources of the world are limited because they’re made of matter. Now, when you believe that, then you start to worry that you have too many people on Earth. So, depopulation agenda? Is it a conspiracy theory? Well, I would invite people to go and do the research because …

Lucas: Or conspiracy fact?

Claire: Conspiracy fact. Because if you go and do the research and you look at eugenics, this has been touted for well over a hundred years. And very prominent people such as George Bernard Shaw were talking about finding a humane gas to reduce the human population, so if …

Lucas: Bill Gates talked about it.

Claire: Bill Gates talked about it as well.

Lucas: Even Prince Philip.

Claire:  I don’t know if that’s true or not. I’ve certainly heard it. But eugenics and the depopulation agenda is absolutely real. So whether 5G is intended to depopulate the planet, I couldn’t say, but as to its potential for doing so, absolutely!

Lucas: What’s the reason for AI? What is artificial intelligence? Well, that of course explains a little bit what it is, but please talk about why we need that. Why do we want to connect the human brain to artificial intelligence?

Claire: Well, this again for me, it goes to your perception of our existence and potential as human beings. Our brain is fantastically powerful so when Elon Musk talks about the Neuralink, it seems to me a complete inversion. So what he’s offering is that people should connect up their brains to the Internet. And artificial intelligence can be thought of as algorithms, so, you know, in terms of algorithms, I mean it’s pathetic and childish. So I think that this kind of Neuralink and this kind of artificial intelligence is actually about tapping our brain power. It’s not about us connecting ourselves to the Internet and tapping in to the Internet. No. It’s that for such an Internet to work they would actually need our brain power. So it’s complete nonsense to think that you want to connect your brain via Neuralink.

Lucas: To imprison the mind.

Claire: Yes, I think it’s about imprisoning the mind. Absolutely. Yes. But as to artificial intelligence, you know, I think that there are different perceptions of artificial intelligence. It always seemed to me – I was never interested in Facebook. But if you look back to the beginning of the Internet, you used to receive these emails from people, which said “Oh, you have to send on this email to 10 people within the next 15 minutes, and then something wonderful will happen to you”. And I was always very suspicious of this so I never did it. And then Facebook started up and it was very clear to me from the start that Facebook was about getting people’s data. So what they’ve collected over the years is the human reaction to every type of human event in order to develop machines such as Sophia the robot. So that Sophia can come out with a reaction to anything that she might be presented with because it’s been picked up from social media. So is this creature intelligent? I would say absolutely not. It’s just based on algorithms. Now, whether there is another type of artificial intelligence on another level, which could be trained to be intelligent. Well, that may be possible, yes.

Lucas: What are you talking about now? Are you talking about something other-worldly, extraterrestrial or connected to that?

Claire: Well, there’s the algorithmic AI, which I think, frankly, is pretty childish and it’s just imitative of human beings. A sort of fake imitation. But there’s also another level to AI, where it’s posited that machines can actually learn. And that, I think, is extremely sinister and I think it’s that aspect of AI that the UK Prime Minister was addressing when he spoke at the General Assembly just a few weeks ago. And he gave a very, very strong warning about the threat from AI. And he spent some time on it. And he talked about it as a dark cloud, lowering over the human race, over which potentially the human race would have no say whatsoever. So I was very glad to see that he …

Lucas: Boris Johnson?

Claire: Boris Johnson.

Lucas: Why do you think that he actually did that? If he’s part of – like all presidents and prime ministers in a way, supposedly part of this new world order structure and the whole agenda behind that. Why do you think he actually spoke and was allowed to talk about that?

Claire: Well, because I do think that occasionally you can get wildcards. I don’t think everybody … You know, I personally don’t live in fear and paranoia. And so I think that it’s perfectly possible to get somebody who is independent-minded and don’t forget that Boris Johnson came to be Prime Minister in a fairly accidental way because of Brexit. Now, there’s been some questioning about the – how can I put it? The authenticity of what Boris Johnson said. And in the second part of his speech he went on to talk about the importance of vaccinations and so on.

Lucas: And you’re not for that?

Claire: No. And I just think that that was window dressing because he had to be supportive of technologies for strategic reasons. But if you listen to the first part of his speech, he – Boris Johnson is a maverick. And I think that 5G is going to be combatted by mavericks. What you need is, you need free-thinkers, people who don’t just go with the herd. People who actually are clear-sighted and can see what is happening and are prepared to stand up and oppose it. And it seems to me that Boris Johnson is one of those. I’m told that he has planted an enormous number of trees. Certainly he always used to cycle to the House of Commons. So it seems to me that – he’s also a writer and a journalist and he’s benefited from a very good education. So I would say that he was genuine when he was talking.

Lucas: But you don’t like what he said about vaccinations?

Claire: Well, it would appear that, possibly, the vaccinations, the purpose of the vaccinations is again something to do with interfering with the processes of the mind because the adjuvant that is used in vaccinations is aluminium. And it would appear that aluminium in some way also works with these frequencies. Now, I’m not sure exactly how, but certainly aluminium and barium had something to do with the HAARP processes. So equally, I would suggest, that that’s going to affect the brain – the combination of the aluminium adjuvant and these frequencies.

Lucas: And microchipping the population, even through vaccines.

Claire: Well, you don’t need to microchip the population because everybody has cell phones and they’re addicted to them. And it would be my guess that very soon it will become compulsory to carry a “smart” phone. I don’t have one. I don’t want to be mind-controlled. I don’t have one. I took a hammer and I smashed my cell phone in January this year. And I’ve never been happier than to be free of this mobile phone.

Lucas: So please talk about your thoughts on climate change, which is the big thing at the moment. We are in October 2019 and all through this year we’ve been hearing about the climate, almost that the world is going under and that the whole CO2 scare and this Swedish girl, 16-year-old girl Greta Thunberg and how she has been promoted all over the world. But it seems that everybody is worried about the environment and the climate. But the same people are not very worried, it seems, about 5G. So what are your thoughts on climate change? Is it real or not? And why is it not connected to 5G?

Claire: As far as I’m concerned, you cannot talk about anthropogenic climate change as long as you are interfering with the weather, which is what you’re doing with HAARP and it’s what you’re doing with geoengineering. Now, as far as Little Greta is concerned, I thought – if you look at what she said in front of the UN, this terrible rage and distorted expression on her face. Pointing the finger and accusing adults of stealing her childhood. This is revolting. This child is being manipulated. She has a German handler who is paid by one of the George Soros organizations. The child is autistic. She’s being manipulated. And this is about distracting people from the reality of the danger of 5G. The Powers That Be want everybody to be looking in the wrong direction. And if you look at the – all the green parties, the environmental organizations, are so busy talking about anthropogenic climate change and they absolutely refuse to look at electromagnetic radiation, which has been far more devastating over the last 25 years. We have lost between 75 and 80 per cent of our insects at this stage. If you look – there are papers, studies that have been done. The insect loss in the Puerto Rico rainforest can also be attributed to the installation of a very large radar antenna there. There were other studies done in Germany on radar antennas, Cold War radar antennas which have shown absolute devastation to the environment [Summary of Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life, chap. 16: Bees, Birds, Trees, and Humans;full book here]. So in my view, and in the view of a lot of scientists, the environmental devastation is actually far more attributable to electromagnetic radiation than it is to any hypothesized climate change.

Lucas: But everybody is talking about that now. It’s covered all in the mainstream media, on the news every single day. Everybody’s, even scientists are saying that we have manmade climate change.

Claire: There are – there’s a substantial body of scientists who say that there is no anthropogenic climate change. And if you look into the climate issue, you will find that the science has actually been distorted and the calculations have been very conveniently done to exclude the [Little] Ice Age. So these figures have been distorted. We know that there has been manipulation in scientific circles. So the whole climate change agenda originated – there was a very interesting document published a couple of months ago by the Canadian civil liberties organization. And they actually identified this fake climate change agenda as coming from, I think, the 1970s and …

Lucas: Club of Rome.

Claire: Club of Rome, exactly. So it’s something that has been cooked up to put people in fear and manipulate them. Now, as to the real motive behind the climate change agenda. This was revealed a couple of weeks ago, where I came across a very interesting article, which included a video, where our Little Greta has now teamed up with a very fake environmental journalist called George Monbiot who writes for the UK Guardian. And so we had Little Greta lying on a carpet on her stomach, looking into the camera. So they were clearly trying to make her look like an ordinary teenage girl and not an autistic child. So she spoke first and then she was followed by George Monbiot, who told us, “Wow, we have a machine that converts CO2 to oxygen and it’s called a tree!” So now we have, the trees are now machines. This again is materialist-reductionist paradigm. It’s the madness of seeing everything as mechanistic. The tree is a living organism. This is not a machine. And what I further learned from this article is that actually the aim of all this is a new regime which is “Naturocracy”. So Naturocracy is now about monetizing nature. So it’s not enough that the neoliberals of the last 40 years have stolen everything on this planet, stolen all the resources, exploited everybody, stacked up vast fortunes in tax havens, but now they want the Earth orbits, they want the stratosphere, they want the ionosphere, and they want every last blade of grass! This is what this is about. It’s about monetizing nature. That is the purpose of the fake climate change agenda. And I don’t know about you, but I find that frankly horrifying. This is my planet. This is my home and I will do everything to defend this planet and protect all the creatures that live on it and all the nature that lives on it. So I would say to people, they have to stop following blindly what they find in the media. Now, I suspect that, we do know that the cell phones are about mind control and manipulation. We know that people do become addicted to cell phones. Weapons expert Barrie Trower has told us that these phones are 17 times as addictive as heroin. So what you have now is, I think, you have memes that are put out by the media and they are reinforced by these cell phones to make people into herds who will simply follow what they have been told. And you can just move them left and right and manipulate them. I would ask people to stop parroting absolute nonsense which has no scientific foundation whatsoever and to actually go and do their own research. There’s enough information …

Lucas: Most people believe the scientists when they speak through the mainstream media.

Claire: Well, you know, it’s always a manipulation. I mean, you know, cui bono? Who is making money out of this? People need to ask some serious, hard questions.

Lucas: Who benefits.

Claire: Who benefits?

Lucas: Some of those people, some climate activists who are advocating that we have to really worry about the climate, say now that the oil company, I think called Exxon, is part of this anti-climate change propaganda happening, saying that it’s not real because they are worried about the whole oil industry thing. Do you think that could also be orchestrated?

Claire: I think everything is a fiction at this stage. I mean, if people were to wake up and look around them, I think they would quickly see that everything is a fiction. And I find it very interesting to note that you recently saw these so-called Extinction Rebellion people, who again are funded by the same George Soros organizations, by the way. But recently they all dressed up in red robes and protested somewhere. Now, did nobody else notice the parallels with the ISIS theatricals where the ISIS so-called terrorists were all dressed up in theatrical costumes and all arranged – you know, posing for photographs. It’s the same manipulation. I think that I would really say – I would really plead with people to get rid of these dangerous cell phones because people are clearly being prevented from thinking properly. Their brains don’t function properly and they’re being seriously misled. People need to get rid of these cell phones, they need to switch off their Wi-Fi routers, they need to cable their computers and they need to start seriously looking at the facts.

Lucas: Here in Denmark, and maybe other places around the world, “smart” meters are mandatory. It’s actually forced that we must have a “smart” meter rigged up in our homes. How can we actually say no to that?

Claire: Lucas, you can say no to anything. It depends whether you are in your power and your sovereignty. We are sovereign human beings. It doesn’t matter what manmade laws there are. It doesn’t matter what you are told. Ultimately, you are a human being and you are sovereign. So you don’t have to be told anything whatsoever. You simply refuse to cooperate. And this is really what is the problem on this planet. That people think they have no power. They do not realize that they are creator beings. And their intention creates everything. What do you think creates everything that we have around us? Everything started with an idea. Everything started with the creation of a mind. Everything that we have here is about intention. So the most important thing that we have to do now is say “No!” to this whole agenda. Every single part of it. Now, you don’t need everybody to do that; you simply need a sufficient number for a tipping point. So people need to take back their power. In fact, I would simply say they need to recognize the power that they have and they need to start asserting it. They just have to refuse. So do what you feel necessary to make sure that you do not have a “smart” meter. And I would say further, that you have a lot of – so the 5G rollout is taking place on a local basis and people are following orders. “Oh, the government told us we have to do this.” Okay, but the government is acting illegally under national and international law. So are you like Nazis now? Is that your excuse? That you’re going to follow orders and kill your local population? Or are you going to inform yourself and stand up and confront this agenda?

Lucas: You certainly do that through the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. Please talk about this initiative. Who is part of this International Appeal to Stop 5G and how can people join or sign up? What is the purpose of this Appeal? What do you think can be the positive result?

Claire: Well, there have been a lot of previous scientific appeals. People don’t realize this. There have been at least 60 previous appeals by scientists and doctors and none of those succeeded in coming to public notice, really. So they really didn’t have any effect because they remained within those closed circles and the governments and institutions just ignored them. Now, what’s different about our International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space is that, one, it’s extremely comprehensive. It’s telling you the whole context of 5G and not purely addressing the science. So it tells a story to people. It sets out the whole situation and, for me, the most important aspect of this Appeal is that it provides the information people need and information is empowering. So that’s the most important aspect of the Appeal as far as I’m concerned. In terms of an appeal, I think it’s questionable – making an appeal to the very organizations that are rolling out 5G, appealing to them to stop. I wonder about the effectiveness of that. However, again, the Appeal – by signing the Appeal, you are joining a project to refuse your consent. So rather than the Appeal side of things, it’s more like a vehicle to say that you do not agree with this agenda. So in those terms I think it’s extremely powerful. We currently have approximately 165,000 signatories, which includes many thousands of scientists and doctors and also organizations. We would like to have a lot more signatories. It’s being sent to the addressees at the moment, but it’s going to remain open for people to sign. And I would like to see millions of people sign that Appeal because, as I say, that expresses their own intention to oppose this agenda.

Lucas: How can people sign the Appeal?

Claire: Well, they simply look up “5G space appeal” on the Internet and they will instantly find it. There’s one other very significant thing about this Appeal. It’s that we chose as our symbol the bee. And the bee is a symbol of life. And it’s also an insect that we really love and we really love it because we know that the bee assists us in in having our food. So it’s something very beautiful and it’s motivating because we love the bee. Now, a lot of other appeals, they would put a cell phone mast as the symbol of their appeal. Well, you don’t motivate people by fear. You motivate people by love. And it’s absolutely love that motivates me in campaigning here. For me, this has nothing to do with fear. Now, when people – you know, some people say, “Oh, you know, they’re so powerful. There’s nothing I can do to change this because I’m just one person.” But this is absolute nonsense because – if you say that, it means that you have not understood 5G. 5G is potentially an annihilation event. Oleg Grigoriev, who is the head of the Russian National Committee on Non-ionizing Radiation Protection, he has called 5G “a slow Hiroshima”. Professor Emeritus Martin Pall has said that, with 5G we can expect societal breakdown within months, not years. So when you really understand 5G, you are not going to say, there is nothing I can do and I have no power. You are absolutely going to stand up and oppose this agenda.

Lucas: Can 5G be stopped from being rolled out?

Claire: Absolutely. I’ve always believed it. I’ve always said this must be stopped. The important thing is that 5G is unlike any other human challenge we have had because, in the past, when we’ve made mistakes, for example, with asbestos and tobacco. Okay, many people have been injured and many people have died and then we’ve adjusted and done something about it. But with 5G you cannot do that. You’re talking about a total surveillance, mind control and kill grid. Once this is in place, you will not be able to stop it. You will already be damaged. And you will not be able to withdraw it. So people have to take action now so that 5G never happens. Now, it’s being rolled out as we speak. In many countries, it’s being rolled out, but there’s also huge opposition. People have to realize that millions of people are now aware of the dangers of 5G. I have a list of at least 30 countries where people are opposing the 5G agenda. So far from being powerless, it’s absolutely the opposite. I recently published an article where I listed all the official pushback. I’m not talking about demonstrations I’m talking about official pushback against 5G and this is massive. We are already succeeding in stopping 5G.

Lucas: They stopped the rollout in the former EU capital, Brussels, in Belgium, didn’t they? Why do you think they hesitated or stopped it there and not all over the world?

Claire: Well, the Environment Minister said that the people of Brussels were not guinea pigs and she acknowledged that the scientific data were not there on the safety of 5G and therefore she was not prepared to roll it out in Brussels. My question would be, what’s happening with the rest of Belgium? Why do the environment ministers there only talk about Brussels? So are they rolling it out in the rest of Belgium? Or is it just Brussels that is unique? But you’ve already had – one company has pulled out of Australiabecause they were convinced by the health arguments. And another company has pulled out of the US. So we have to remember that this is being rolled out by commercial companies. So this is their Achilles heel. I would say that we need to keep pushing these companies. These companies cannot get insurance for injuries or damage caused by electromagnetic radiation. So this is their Achilles heel. One thing about these space launches. I would like to know whether these companies launching these satellites actually have insurance. Because there isa space Liability Convention, which says that launching states are responsible for any damage caused by objects launched into space. And if these companies cannot get insurance – you know, you have to think about the potential consequences here. I mean, you could have vastareas of this planet destroyed, you know, vast populations affected by this. So these companies need to have insurance in the many billions. Do they have any insurance at all? I mean, for example, we have Portugal now, which has set up a space port– or it’s just about to be set up in January 2020 on the island of Santa Maria in the Azores. And if you look at the Liability Convention, it’s the launching state that carries the liability for damage caused by a space launch. So you have to ask the question, “Why is Portugal establishing its space agency on Santa Maria, which is a little island with nothing. I would guess that they are trying to avoid liability. Now, Portugal is not a signatory to the Liability Convention, but nevertheless, we need to make these people accountable. What we have with 5G is a total free-for-all. And I come back to the beginning of this conversation, where we said that in 2016 Tom Wheeler said that they would not wait for the standards. That means that 5G is completely undefined. Now, a lot of people are saying that this is a crime against humanity under the Nuremberg Code because there has never been any health or safety testing on 5G. But, in my view, it’s not that that makes it a crime against humanity. What makes it a crime against humanity is that it’s undefined and it’s a free-for-all. Because if you had to define this and create norms and standards for this before it’s rolled out, it would never be rolled out. So the first person who has to be held liable for crimes against humanity is Tom Wheeler of the Federal Communications Commission. But we need now, as the population of the world, we need to hold these people accountable.

Lucas: And you say that the global warming or climate change scare propaganda is actually a diversion away from 5G, which you say is the essential problem.

Claire: Absolutely. The climate change agenda is a total distraction and it’s designed to have people focus on something which is irrelevant. 5G is a planetary emergency and everybody needs to drop everything to stop 5G.

Lucas: Is there any possibility …?

Claire: The people who realize this, Lucas, they have they have given up their jobs to work on this. I’ve been working on this day and night since I found out about it and that’s what you do once you understand 5G. If you are not currently working on stopping 5G, it means you don’t understand it yet. When you understand it, nothing else matters any more because this is about the survival of you, your children and this planet.

Lucas: Do you know if there is a possibility that we can shield ourselves from 5G radiation, the electromagnetic frequencies that’s coming from 5G? If it’s being rolled out.

Claire: This is one of my bêtes noires, my hobbyhorses. To me, this is another manifestation of the mad thinking of the left brain: “Oh, we have a disaster of a technology. Let’s find another technology to combat the last technological disaster. And if that turns out to be a disaster, perhaps we can find another technology to combat that as well.” The fact is, you cannot shield yourself against 5G. There is no shielding yourself against 5G. You’re not going to paint your walls with lead paint. You’re not going to wear little doo-dads, pendants and so on. There is nothing that you are going to be able to use to shelter yourself from 5G. And even if you did, what then would happen to the environment? How are you going to have your food when we have no pollinators left? Do you want to live in a totally devastated environment, where all the trees are dead? So the solution to this has to be holistic. It’s not about you solely and your individual survival. This is about the survival of all of us together and that’s why it’s so beautiful. I think that this is a problem for individuals to stand up to and cooperate with other individuals. So this is not a problem where you’re going to go to an organization or a leader or a government to stop this. This is the responsibility of every single individual to confront this. And when you confront 5G, you’re confronting something that is more terrifying than anything you have ever confronted in your life. Because you are talking about the potential annihilation of everything you have ever related to in your entire life. Everything you’ve ever known could be annihilated by this. So this is a terror such as you have never felt. You are facing your own death and you have to look truth in the face. And when you do that, you find that you pass through a trial by fire. And it’s necessary. If you like, this trial by fire is transformative. Because the only way you can deal with this is to change yourself. We have to change from passive, powerless beings into immensely powerful creator beings and say “No!” to this. And we do that inside ourselves. There are no answers out there. Forget it! Who’s doing this? All these authorities that you have believed in all your life – they are the ones doing this. And the only people who are going to stop this are individuals.

Lucas: So that is your most important message for people to hear if they are a bit fearful after hearing all of what you’ve said here.

Claire: Well, people have to realize that it’s necessary to feel the fear. Unless you feel the fear, you have not understood 5G unless you feel this terror. But all I can say is, yes, you feel the terror, and it’s a process and you pass through it and you come out the other side. And you come out the other side transformed. I don’t feel any fear about it. I have a job here to do, which is to stop 5G. And I do that in love; I don’t do that in fear. Because every time I hear something more horrible about an aspect of 5G, which unfortunately I hear pretty much every day, I actually feel more love. I feel more love and I feel more connection. When I walk out in the street and I see the children, the little children dancing and playing and smiling and laughing, I feel devastated for them. They don’t know that these antennas are underneath manhole covers or coming at them from cabinets on the street that they’re passing. They don’t know that these cell phones are injuring their brains. They have no idea. These are innocents in all of this and I feel tremendous love for them. I feel tremendous love for the trees. So everything I hear about 5G now actually generates more love in me. For me, 5G means fifth-generation, but for me, what it is generating? It’s generating love. Now, you know, people talk about the Awakening. 2012 and the Awakening. Well, to my mind, 5G IS the Awakening. That’s exactly what it is. So when you confront 5G, you transform internally. And the Awakening is not something out there, it’s something in here. And it’s every individual responding to this threat. And what is unique about 5G is precisely that there is no escape. It’s hermetically sealed. You cannot protect yourself because it’s going to come at you from everywhere. And therefore you have to transform. Therefore, the answer is always within yourself. So 5G for me is absolutely perfect. And in my team, we always say, “I love 5G”.

Lucas: If people want to know more, read your articles, maybe get involved, to participate or something, or have you to come to their place or their country for a lecture, how can they contact you?

Claire: People – a lot of my articles are published on Global Research. I think they probably have all of my articles at this stage.

Lucas: What is the website?

Claire: Well, just look up Global Research and my name and they’ll find me as an author on Global Research and they’ll be able to see all my articles. Now, the mainstream media is completely missing in action over 5G so what I try to do is I try to write articles which address the different aspects of 5G. I’m trying to cover the different aspects. Now, as a former UN editor, I reference everything extremely carefully. I don’t put anything in my articles that I cannot substantiate. So if people look at the references and the links to those articles, they can do their own research and they will see that I have all the evidence in those articles.

Lucas: Under your name, Claire Edwards.

Claire: Absolutely. I try to simplify and make this – I like to put the whole thing in context and try to make it clear for people. So, at the end of those articles, they will find my address and they can contact me there. [[email protected]]

Lucas: It’s been absolutely fascinating, really informative, mind-blowing and very, very interesting to have you on the show and you are obviously a great inspiration and we wish you the best of luck with the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space. Claire Edwards, thank you very much for doing this interview.

Claire: Thank you for inviting me, Lucas. It’s been a real pleasure.

Lucas: Thank you.

Lucas: Thank you very much to Claire Edwards. And thanks to all of you for watching Age of Truth TV. You can support us by clicking onto our website, Age of Truth TV. And please like our videos, subscribe to our channel and hit the bell for notifications. Your support is greatly appreciated. Thank you very much for watching and we’ll see you again soon.

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Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Claire Edwards was speaking at a seminar in Oslo, Norway, on Saturday 26 October 2019.

Elon Musk has now applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to launch a further 30,000 satellites into Earth orbit, bringing the current total to 53,000 (October 2019). With the issues of space debris and weaponization being the two major issues of concern at the UN year after year, this is a mad enterprise, especially when NATO intends to declare space a domain of warfare in December 2019.

We stand at the brink of extinction if we do not stop the madness.

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Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoRos

Kurdish provocateurs have tried to burn a Typhoon MRAP vehicle of the Russian Military Police and a Kirpi MRAP vehicle of the Turkish Army in northern Syria. The incident happened during a joint Russian-Turkish patrol, which was conducted in the framework of the safe zone agreement reached between Ankara and Moscow.

Russian and Turkish forces once again showed an amazing restraint and avoided the use of force against the Kurdish radicals. Nonetheless, a Turkish vehicle rammed one of the cars involved in the provocations.

Such actions of Kurdish radicals affiliated with the Syrian Democratic Forces pose a serious threat to the shaky stability in the region. If their actions lead to casualties among Russian or Turkish personnel, they will easily find themselves in the situation when the Turkish Army will have to resume its military operation in the area and Moscow will not hurry up to rescue them once again.

The intensity and frequency of attacks on the Russian-Turkish patrols by pro-SDF rioters that are always timely supported by journalists are a strong signal that these developments are a part of well-organized pre-planned campaign to instigate tensions in the area.

Local experts say that by such actions the US-affiliated part of the Kurdish leadership is attempting to undermine the de-escalation and demonstrate to the so-called international community that the US troop withdrawal led to the destabilization of northern Syria.

At the same time, the SDF leadership announced that it rejects the deployment of the Syrian Army and the Russian Military Police in the town of Tell Tamir. Earlier reports appeared that the Russian Military Police will establish an observation point there. The Russian military convoy even deployed near the town. This move is aimed to de-escalating the situation north of the town, where clashes between Turkish-led forces and SDF units in some cases backed by the Syrian Army.

However, it seems that the SDF leaders have once again demonstrated that they are more interested in keeping their fleeting influence than in stability in the area.

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Anyone remember the line from the film Forest Gump: ‘Stupid is as stupid does’? Well, now we have, each and every passing day, the bastard children of our violent empire. Yes, violence has always been with us, this the frailty and flaw of humanity. One would think that as more (supposedly) ‘evolved’ a culture becomes, the less inclined it is to choose violence as a meaningful expression of distaste or disagreement. No siree bob! Amerika in this the 21st Century is more and more violent.

Think about this when you hear of crazed individuals blowing away groups of people, or a professional football player ‘losing it’ and crashing a helmet on the bare head of the opposing quarterback at the end of his team’s winning game. Recently, the fifteen year old boy shooter at the California grade school  and the man child football player are but symptoms of just how violent our Amerikan empire has become. Most of the apathetic public have never been too concerned for what their government has done and is doing to the people of other nations. Go back to the disgraceful and immoral (so called) Vietnam War, whereupon Uncle Sam interceded in what was in essence a civil war between the Vietnamese people. We bombed the shit out of those people, with Napalm and other incendiary devices that either melted or maimed for life hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. Let us not forget the 50,000 US servicemen who came home, like Vito P. and Tommy l. from my neighborhood, in wooden boxes, and the tens of thousands of their ‘brothers in arms’ who lost arms, legs, eyes and in many cases their minds for life! Many great directors like Oliver Stone, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino and Stanley Kubrick captured the sad reality of that Phony War.

Throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s, and finally right into this new century, this Amerikan empire has trampled on the bodies of so many civilians worldwide, all in the name of ‘Restoring Democracy’. Sadly, where is that democracy right here at home? The super rich, whether private or corporate, have the money to place the candidates they purchase on Column A or Column B of this Two Party/One Party scam. The only democracy they allow is to let the suckers… sorry, the voters, to make the final choice… Sometimes. I say sometimes because in 2000 and even 2004 they wouldn’t even allow that to chance. The Fix was in both times. This writer recalls how even the Deep State stooge, pollster Dick Morris, as political analyst for one of the news networks, summed it up best on election night 2004. When he noticed how the exit polls in Ohio were decidedly for John Kerry, he remarked how they were always ‘right on target’. Later in the night, when it became clear that Junior Bush would win Ohio, Morris said in essence that ‘Something smelled!’ No guns were needed at all to maintain the status quo of continuing to keep our republic hostage and undemocratic.

Martin Luther King Jr. said it best: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world: My own government. I cannot remain silent.” Even in the sports world violence reigns supreme. For over a century baseball was called ‘America’s pastime’. Since our intrusion into Vietnam football became our new ‘Amerikan pastime’. Think about this: Wars are fought for gaining another’s territory… by force. Football’s game plan is to move into and take over the other team’s territory, and finally, to land into what they call ‘The END Zone’. Reminiscent of the anger and rage that permeated in Weimar Germany circa 1930, as the Nazi mindset gained influence amongst rank and file Germans, so one can feel it here and now in Amerika. The Deep State’s scapegoating of foreign nations parallels a similar attitude by many towards foreigners and or non white and non Christian peoples right here at home. For some who think and behave that way we can dismiss them as just being foolish or stupid. Yet, many fine and decent folks in Germany circa 1930 may have said the same thing about those jackasses in brown or black uniforms wearing the swastika. What Forrest Gump should have said is “Evil is as evil does”.

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Over the past days, southern Idlib, southern Raqqah, northwestern al-Hasakah remained the main points of tensions in Syria.

On November 16, the Syrian Army repelled an attack by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies on the hill of Khaznah in southeastern Idlib. According to pro-government sources, at least 7 militants were killed in the clashes.

The Syrian Army, backed up by the Russian Aerospace Forces, liberated the Khaznah hill and the village of Luwaybidah on November 14 in an attempt to expand a buffer zone between militants’ positions and nearby civilian areas. Despite this, attacks in the area continued. If government forces want to remove the threat of shelling by militants to nearby villages, they will have to push deeper into southern Idlib.

On November 17, the Russian Aerospace Forces delivered a series of strikes on positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham near Maarzita and Misherfah eliminating several strong points.

On November 15, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces retook the villages of Bir Tmah and Sa’dah from Turkey’s Syrian National Army. On November 15 and 16 clashes were also ongoing north of Tell Tamir.

Watch the video here.

On November 17, a Russian military convoy deployed in the Tell Tamir area. According to reports, the Russians will establish an observation post in the area as a part of the local de-escalation deal. Under the same deal, SDF units will reportedly withdraw from the town and Turkish-backed militants will abandon several villages north of Tell Tamir.

In the period from November 14 to November 15, Israel, the United States, Germany, Italy and Greece participated in the Blue Flag 2019 military drill at the Uvda Air Force base north of Israel’s Eilat. According to the Israeli Defense Forces, the drill involved 70 aircraft, including F-35I, and approximately 1,000 personnel.

The storyline guiding the exercise was based on two fictional neighboring countries, one blue and the other red. The scenarios included large aircraft formations, including fighter jets, remotely piloted aerial vehicles, transport aircraft and helicopters. The blue force’s mission was protecting Israel’s skies and overcoming the red’s air power and air defenses.

Several pro-Israeli media outlets and military experts reported that the Red’s Patriot surface-to-air missile systems simulated Russia’s S-300 and S-400 air defense systems, which were successfully overcome during the exercise.

The success demonstrated by US-made Patriot missiles in Saudi Arabia, where they defended a half of Saudi oil production from Houthi strikes, is widely-known on the international level. So, there are no reasons to doubt the result of the drill.

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We spent the last week in Occupied Palestinian Territory, commonly referred to as Israel, where we traveled around the country to visit communities in Jerusalem, Jaffa, Bethlehem, the West Bank, the Nagab, and more.

We call Israel Occupied Palestine because it is not just the West Bank and Gaza that are occupied, but all of historic Palestine, the entire Palestinian nation. Palestinian people do not have equal rights and their communities are constantly encroached upon by settlers pushing them into small, crowded areas. The mistreatment of Palestinians happens right before the eyes of the Israeli Jews. If they do not see it, it is either because they do not want to see it or because they are encouraged not to see it. Just as Jim Crow racism was evident to all in the southern states of the US, apartheid in Palestine is obvious.

This visit deepened our support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement because we saw modern apartheid, Jim Crow-segregation laws, ongoing land theft, and ethnic cleansing. For example, we were in Jerusalem when a squadron of fighter jets flew over our heads to bomb the open-air prison of Gaza killing more than 30 people. The Israeli people, media and politicians applauded that, displaying a sickness that runs deep in this colonized land founded on theft, terrorism, and violence.

To end the colonization, there is great hope of developing a movement for the creation of One Democratic State (ODS). This is being organized by a large group of Palestinians and Jews as the formation of two separate states is impossible. ODS envisions a universally equal and democratic nation where minority communities are protected and every person can vote. ODS is the first step to the decolonization and healing of Palestine.

Aida Refugee Camp, photo by Margaret Flowers.

Correcting The Record

Palestinians are disenfranchised:  Occupied Palestine is called a liberal democracy. In reality, while Palestinians are the majority, most of them can’t vote. Out of a total population of twelve million people, five million Jews can vote and five million Palestinians can’t. The remaining two million Palestinians who live in “The 48,” the land between the West Bank and Gaza, can vote but often boycott elections in protest. The dominant parties all support anti-Palestinian policies.

Image on the right: Sign entering Area A, Israeli Citizens Forbidden.

Palestine has hyper-segregation: Palestine can only be described as a modern apartheid state with updated Jim Crow laws. We drove on Jewish-only roads where the color of a person’s license plate determines if they can use the road. There are military checkpoints along these roads. Palestinians are often forced to take long detours to get around the segregated roads and walls. Many Jews never meet a Palestinian because their lives are so segregated.

Under the 1993 Oslo Accords, Occupied Palestine was divided into Areas A, B and C. We visited Bethlehem, classified as Area A, where a sign upon entry warns it is against the law for Israeli-citizens to enter. In Area A, the Palestinian Authority (PA) serves as police and can arrest Israeli-Jews and turn them over to Israeli-police. In Area B, both the PA and Israeli-police have power. And, in Area C, the majority of the country, only the Israeli-police have authority.

Land Theft Against Palestinians Continues: People are often told that no one lived here before 1948 when the occupation of the area by Jewish settlers began. This massive land theft continues today. Although the German Holocaust is used to justify this, the Zionist project began well before then.

Image below: Jaffa, above as depicted by Gutman and below as the crowded Arab city that actually existed. Photo by Margaret Flowers.

This false picture is depicted by the well-known Zionist artist Nahum Gutman. His famous painting of the major Arab city of Jaffa showed only sand dunes and a few buildings where hundreds of houses stood.  Today Sir Charles Clore Park covers the remains of this section of the city. Similar tactics have hidden thousands of Palestinian villages that existed before “The Nakba” in 1948.

Forests planted by the Jewish National Fund (JNF), founded in 1901, are still being used to hide the sites of Palestinian villages. We visited the village of Al-Araqib, which has been destroyed 167 times. All that remains is a cemetery built in 1914 and a few residents who hold space under a tree near the cemetery in fear of losing access to it. In Canada, there is a campaign to end the non-profit status of the JNF.

Jaffa was an important Arab port city with a population of 90,000 before 1948 that served as an entry point into Jerusalem and beyond. The first Jewish neighborhoods were built there in the late 19th Century. Tel Aviv, the first Jewish-governed city, began in the early 20th century as a suburb of Jaffa. More than ninety-five percent of the population of Jaffa was expelled by Zionist militias in 1948 and beyond. The remaining residents were confined to an area under guard and forced to operate the port. Between 1947 and 1949, the Nakba terrorized Palestinians and forced 800,000 to flee their homes. The Absentee Property Law was used to seize the homes of those who fled.

Zionist settlers continue encroaching on land in Palestinian neighborhoods. In the historic walled city of Old Jerusalem, they come up from underground tunnels to seize homes in the Palestinian quadrant and put them under armed guards. In Palestinian East Jerusalem, Zionists continue to confiscate houses and land, pushing Palestinians to the other side of the segregation wall where they are crowded into areas without city services. Similar forced urbanization and crowding is occurring throughout Palestine. Gaza is perhaps the most severe example of this. Over the last 50 years, the Israeli government has transferred between 600,000 and 750,000 settlers to the West Bank and East Jerusalem in at least 160 settlements and outposts.

In the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza, this land annexation has made a two-state solution physically impossible. The combination of hundreds of thousands of settlers, Jewish-only roads plus the Expansion (or Annexation) Wall that divides Palestinian communities, and more than 200 checkpoints have severely restricted movement for Palestinians and seized 78% of their country.

A banner hanging in Mea Shearim, a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem.

Judaism is not Zionism: In the 1880s, Palestinian Jews amounted to three percent of the total population. They were apolitical and did not aspire to build a Jewish state. We met with Rabbi Meir Hirsch in the Mea Sharim neighborhood of Jerusalem. This tightly-knit ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighborhood has signs posted on the walls that say: ‘A Jew Not a Zionist,’ ‘Zionism is Dying’ and ‘Arabs are Good.’

Hirsch’s family came to Palestine 150 years ago from Russia. His people came to better worship God, not to take land from Palestinians. Hirsch told us about Jacob Israël de Haan, a Dutch-Jew who worked to prevent the 1917 Balfour Declaration and almost succeeded. The Balfour Declaration, issued by the British government, announced support for the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. De Haan was assassinated in Jerusalem by the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah for his anti-Zionist political activities. His murder led to the Neturei Karta movement, which resists Zionism to this day.

Hirsch views Zionism as contradictory to the Jewish religion. His community believes the Torah does not allow Jewish sovereignty of any kind over the Holy Land and those who want to live there must have the approval of the native Palestinian people. Hirsch says that ultra-Orthodox Jews “want to see the end of the Zionist tragedy and the restoration of peace to the Middle East.” His views counter those who claim criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic as, he says, “Judaism and Zionism are as foreign to each other as day and night, good and evil.”

One Democratic State

There is a positive path to resolving the conflict between Jews and Palestinians. The path comes from the movement for One Democratic State, which envisions a genuinely just and workable political agreement developed by Palestinians and Jews together.

There has been a marked decline in support for a two-state solution. A poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research from September 11-14, 2019 found only 42% of Palestinians now support the two-state solution. When President Netanyahu entered office a decade ago, that figure was 70%. Similarly, fewer than half of the Jews now support a two-state solution. Further, 63% of Palestinians believe a two-state solution is no longer practical or feasible due to the expansion of the settlements and 83% support the local and international boycott (BDS) movement against Israel.

We met separately with two leaders of this campaign, Awad Abdelfattah, a founder of the Arab Balad Party, and Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian. Along with many others in the ODS campaign, they seek a multicultural and constitutional democracy in which all people enjoy a common citizenship, a common parliament, and equal civil rights, with constitutional protection granted to national, ethnic and religious views. ODS means equal rights for Palestinians and protection of the rights of Jews.

Their vision includes making the Palestinian ‘right of return’ a reality. Palestinian homes and communities were demolished years ago. According to the Palestinian geographer Salman Abu-Sitta, 85% of Palestinian lands taken in 1948 are still available for resettlement. While more than 530 villages, towns, and urban areas were systematically demolished, their agricultural lands still exist. Other lands lie under public parks and forests. Refugees could actually return, if not to their former homes, at least to the parts of the country where they originated. Palestinian planners could design modern communities for refugees and their descendants in the areas they left with new communities and economic infrastructure that is integrated with other segments of the society. Land redistribution, financial compensation, and equal access to education, training and the economy would enable refugees, like other Palestinians, to achieve economic parity with Jews within a fairly short time.

For Jews, their security will increase by providing constitutional protection of their collective rights. While structures of privilege and domination would be dismantled, the “collective rights” of groups to maintain their community in the framework of a multi-cultural democracy (e.g., communities of ethnic Russians, African asylum-seekers, foreign workers, anti-Zionist ultra-orthodox Jews, and others) give Jews the collective security they need.

ODS views the establishment of a just and working state as requiring: decolonization, restoration, and reconciliation. Decolonization includes ending economic, cultural, political, and legal domination. This means building an egalitarian, inclusive and sustainable society that restores the rights, properties (actual or through compensation), identities and social position of those expelled, excluded and oppressed. This is followed by reconciliation to confront the still-open wounds of the Nakba and the Occupation, and the suffering they have caused.

While the view may sound Utopian to some, in fact, it is the practical path out of the current disaster of Occupied Palestine. Palestine is already one nation. The issue is whether it will be a democratic state with equal rights for all citizens that dismantles the apartheid system or whether it will remain an undemocratic and unequal settler-colonial nation.

We titled this article “BDS to ODS” because while this solution must come from the Palestinian people, along with Jews, people in the United States and throughout the world who support peace and justice have an important role to play through the growing BDS campaign to pressure Israel into accepting ODS. This struggle will be won through solidarity between popular movements inside and outside Occupied Palestine.

We encourage you to visit Occupied Palestine to see and learn for yourself. If you visit Jerusalem, be sure to take the tour offered by Grassroots Jerusalem. They also offer a guide to Palestinian places to stay, shop and eat. Zochrot is an organization that also offers tours and resources about the Nakba. If you are interested in direct service, you can volunteer to assist with the olive harvest or volunteer in places such as the Aida Refugee Camp. They need all sorts of volunteers, especially those who can provide instruction to children in music and arts. Visit Volunteer Palestine to see the many opportunities available.

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

One of Canada’s top child advocacy groups, Children First Canada, has released a new poll on Canadian’s attitudes on the wellbeing of our country’s kids. The poll is being released today on the occasion of National Child Day and the 30^th Anniversary of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.

According to the new poll, 71% believe Canada ranks in the top 10 compared to other wealthy nations, with 36% believing it ranks in the top 5. In fact, Canada ranks 25^th overall.

Once informed of Canada’s actual rank, nine in ten respondents said Canada should put a high priority on improving children’s well-being, with 4 in 10 believing it should be a very high priority.

The number of Canadians prioritizing children’s well-being has increased since the poll was last conducted in 2016. Then, 86% said it was a high priority (compared to 91% today) and 24% said it was a very high priority (increasing 19 points to 43% in 2019). 

“It’s discouraging to know there is so much work that needs to be done to improve the health and wellbeing of Canada’s children, but Canadians aren’t aware of the problem. What this poll shows us is that when Canadians become aware of the state of our children, they strongly support urgent action to improve our kids’ wellbeing,” Says Sara Austin, Founder and CEO of Children First Canada. 

“As Canadians celebrate National Child Day, the federal cabinet is being sworn into office. Children First Canada urges the Prime Minister and his Cabinet to put our children at the top of the agenda, and to swiftly take action on the long-standing recommendations to appoint an independent Commission for Children and Youth,” adds Austin. 

Today has additional significance for Austin because it is the 30^th anniversary of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child and National Child Day. In the early 2000s, the child advocate lobbied the United Nations to pass the “Third Optional Protocol,” which allows children to hold their governments accountable for the protection of their rights. The protocol was passed in 2011, but has yet to be ratified by Canada.

As part of its unveiling of today’s report, Children First Canada is also holding an event in Ottawa to bring together children and youth to learn about their rights and the Canadian Children’s Charter. The event will also assemble representatives from federal government and Canada’s leading charities, hospitals, research institutes and major corporations to discuss current challenges and create a plan of action.

Satellite events will also take place across the country, bringing together youth and adult leaders to be part of a national conversation on how to make Canada the best place in the world for kids to grow up.

“Children have a right to be at the table when decisions are being made that impact their future. They have a voice and it needs to be heard,” adds Austin.

Top issues affecting children as identified by poll respondents:

1. mental health/depression/anxiety – mentioned by 48% of respondents

2. Bullying/safety online – mentioned by 34% of respondents

3. Health/fitness/obesity/nutrition: mentioned by 32% of respondents

4. Schools/education: mentioned by 31% of respondents

5. Poverty/poor families: mentioned by 31% of respondents

6. Domestic violence/child abuse and post-secondary education: both cited by 23% of respondents

“It’s heartening to hear that Canadians are concerned about the issues that matter most to our children,” say Austin. The top priorities identified in the poll are well aligned with the research released earlier this by Children First Canada in the Raising Canada report on the top 10 threats to Canada’s kids. 

Other findings:

• Only 54% believe that young Canadians get the support they need to achieve their full potential (only 7% stating they totally agree)
• 92% believe that investing in children now saves additional spending in the future
• 59% believe Canada is not doing its best for poor people

The study was conducted by Ipsos on behalf of Children First Canada and two of its partners: Children’s Healthcare Canada and the IWK Health Centre.

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Last month a fire roared through the refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos, a few miles from the coast of Turkey. The immediate cause of the fire is unclear, but there were clashes between Afghan and Syrian refugees in the nearby town of Vathy earlier in the evening, which some witnesses said continued in the camp. There were chaotic scenes during the fire, and almost the entire camp was evacuated, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Field Coordinator Eirini Papanastasiou.

“The shelters are totally burnt down,” she told Newsweek. “They’re mainly made out of tents and plywood and plastic sheeting and all of this has burned down.”

The camp, originally constructed as an army base meant to house 650 individuals, now hosts close to 6,000 refugees. Roughly 3,000 reside in the camp itself, while the remainder scramble to find a spot to pitch their makeshift tents on an adjacent hillside, which is known as the Jungle. Because of the extreme overcrowding, the shelters are built close to each other, and it does not take much for a fire to spread. While no serious injuries were reported, the blaze did destroy the shelters of 700 people residing in the Jungle.

Samos is one of a handful of Greek islands where migrants arrive seeking refuge in Europe, fleeing war, hunger, torture and poverty. At the height of the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, over a million asylum seekers used this route to make their way to Germany and other countries. In March of 2016, however, the European Union and Turkey, in an attempt to stem the flow of refugees, signed an agreement that would allow the EU to transfer Syrian refugees on the Greek islands back to Turkey. The deal has been criticized on many points, including the fact that it is based on the premise that Turkey is a safe country for refugees. One of the provisions of the deal was that refugees would be detained on the Greek islands until their asylum cases were heard, after which those who were refused asylum would be deported. However, the Greek asylum service was overwhelmed by the number of asylum applicants, and refugees have been staying on the islands—sometimes for two or three years—waiting to have their future decided. As a consequence, the Aegean islands in practice have become detention centers.

The conditions on Samos—as well as the other islands—are deplorable.

“C’est l’enfer,” said Jean, a forty-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo told me a week after he arrived on Samos with his six-year-old daughter. It is hell.

Aref Kassem, his wife Fariba and three of their children, refugees from Afghanistan, are lucky because they live in the camp itself, rather than the Jungle. They stay in a container with fifteen other families. Their own space is two meters by two meters, separated from those of the others by curtains. The container has four toilets and one shower, used not only by the residents of the container, but by the refugees living in the Jungle, where there are no toilet facilities at all.

“It is not a place for human beings,” said Aref.

The food and water is a particular issue of contention for many of the refugees. Everyone gets 1.5 liters of water every day, which is not nearly sufficient for the hot days of summer. The food is generally of poor quality, and much of it is expired.

“We get potatoes, rice, beans and sometimes chicken for lunch. But no vegetables. I have been here one year and have never seen a vegetable,” said Farzaad, a twenty-two-year-old from Afghanistan.

To obtain breakfast, which consists of a small pastry and a juice box, residents must rise at 2 am and wait in line for six hours. This process is repeated for lunch and dinner. It is so arduous that many of the residents buy their own food in the town.

Violence is a consequence of the extreme overcrowding and the deplorable conditions. The fighting on the evening of the fire resulted in stab wounds. Clashes are especially common in the food line.

“There is always fighting in the line. Every day. Every breakfast. Every lunch. Every dinner. Women against women. I was in front of you. I was here first,” said Farzaad. “Every day. Sometimes with knifes. I saw one guy stab another.”

The camp and the Jungle are both filthy, and there are snakes, scorpions, rats and bedbugs.

“Some of the refugees bring stray cats to the camp in the hopes they will chase away the rats,” said Abdul, a refugee from Yemen. “But the rats are so big that the cats are afraid of them.”

The access to medical care in the camp is almost non-existent, as there is only one doctor for the 6,000 refugees. Residents often spend the night on the ground in front of the doctor’s office, hoping to be seen the next day. More often than not, they are turned away.

“The worst thing about being in the camp is the waiting,” said Farzaad. “All you do is wait. For food, for the doctor, for your interview.”

Farzaad is speaking about an interview with the Greek asylum office, where the fate of the refugees is decided. A survey recently administered by NGO’s on the island revealed that over 40% of the respondents have their first interview with the asylum office in 2021 or later.

The situation has become untenable for those affected directly by the fire. Sandrine Vollebregt, a doctor working for a medical NGO on Samos, described the situation.

“When you walk around town, you see many women and children lying on the street. The playgrounds are full of people,” she said. “Many people lost their medication. We saw babies that couldn’t stop crying after the fire. Some mothers couldn’t produce breast milk anymore.”

The Greek government has attempted to alleviate the situation by transferring 700 asylum seekers from Samos to the mainland, with plans to move another 300. While this will help in the immediate aftermath of the fire, a real solution will not be found until Europe changes its policies vis-à-vis the refugees and discontinues its practice of forcing those fleeing the horrors of war and torture to suffer in these camps in abominable conditions.

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Prof. Richard Hardigan is a university professor in the United States, whose work has appeared in Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, and other websites. His book, The Other Side of the Wall: An Eyewitness Account of the Occupation in Palestine, was recently published by Cune Press. His website is richardhardigan.com.

Featured image is from Regis via the author

It’s no secret that Donald Trump is one of the most aggressive arms salesmen in history. How do we know? Because he tells us so at every conceivable opportunity. It started with his much exaggerated “$110 billion arms deal” with Saudi Arabia, announced on his first foreign trip as president. It continued with his White House photo op with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in which he brandished a map with a state-by-state rundown of American jobs supposedly tied to arms sales to the kingdom. And it’s never ended. In these years in office, in fact, the president has been a staunch advocate for his good friends at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics — the main corporate beneficiaries of the U.S.-Saudi arms trade (unlike the thousands of American soldiers the president recently sent into that country’s desert landscapes to defend its oil facilities).

All the American arms sales to the Middle East have had a severe and lasting set of consequences in the region in, as a start, the brutal Saudi/United Arab Emirates war in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians via air strikes using U.S. weaponry and pushed millions of Yemenis to the brink of famine. And don’t forget the recent Turkish invasion of Syria in which both the Turkish forces and the Kurdish-led militias they attacked relied heavily on U.S.-supplied weaponry.

Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear that he cares far more about making deals for that weaponry than who uses any of it against whom. It’s important to note, however, that, historically speaking, he’s been anything but unique in his obsession with promoting such weapons exports (though he is uniquely loud about doing so).

Despite its supposedly strained relationship with the Saudi regime, the Obama administration, for example, still managed to offer the royals of that kingdom a record $136 billion in U.S. weapons between 2009 and 2017. Not all of those offers resulted in final sales, but striking numbers did. Items sold included Boeing F-15 combat aircraft and Apache attack helicopters, General Dynamics M-1 tanks, Raytheon precision-guided bombs, and Lockheed Martin bombs, combat ships, and missile defense systems. Many of those weapons have since been put to use in the war in Yemen.

To its credit, the Obama administration did at least have an internal debate on the wisdom of continuing such a trade. In December 2016, late in his second term, the president finally did suspend the sale of precision-guided bombs to the Royal Saudi Air Force due to a mounting toll of Yemeni civilian deaths in U.S.-supplied Saudi air strikes. This was, however, truly late in the game, given that the Saudi regime first intervened in Yemen in March 2015 and the slaughter of civilians began soon after that.

By then, of course, Washington’s dominance of the Mideast arms trade was taken for granted, despite an occasional large British or French deal like the scandal-plagued Al Yamamah sale of fighter planes and other equipment to the Saudis, the largest arms deal in the history of the United Kingdom. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, from 2014 to 2018 the United States accounted for more than 54% of known arms deliveries to the Middle East. Russia lagged far behind with a 9.5% share of the trade, followed by France (8.6%), England (7.2%), and Germany (4.6%). China, often cited as a possible substitute supplier, should the U.S. ever decide to stop arming repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, came in at less than 1%.

The U.S. government’s stated rationales for pouring arms into that ever-more-embattled region include: building partnerships with countries theoretically willing to fight alongside U.S. forces in a crisis; swapping arms for access to military bases in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Persian Gulf states; creating “stability” by building up allied militaries to be stronger than those of potential adversaries like Iran; and generating revenue for U.S. weapons contractors, as well as jobs for American workers. Of course, such sales have indeed benefited those contractors and secured access to bases in the region, but when it comes to promoting stability and security, historically it’s been another story entirely.

The Nixon Doctrine and the Initial Surge in Mideast Arms Sales

Washington’s role as the Middle East’s top arms supplier has its roots in remarks made by Richard Nixon half a century ago on the island of Guam. It was the Vietnam War era and the president was on his way to South Vietnam. Casualties there were mounting rapidly with no clear end to the conflict in sight. During that stopover in Guam, Nixon assured reporters accompanying him that it was high time to end the practice of sending large numbers of U.S troops to overseas battlefields. To “avoid another war like Vietnam anywhere in the world,” he was instead putting a new policy in place, later described by a Pentagon official as “sending arms instead of sending troops.”

The core of what came to be known as the Nixon Doctrine was the arming of regional surrogates, countries with sympathetic rulers or governments that could promote U.S. interests without major contingents of the American military being on hand. Of such potential surrogates at that moment, the most important was the Shah of Iran, with whom a CIA-British intelligence coup replaced a civilian government back in 1953 and who proved to have an insatiable appetite for top-of-the-line U.S. weaponry.

The Shah’s idea of a good time was curling up with the latest copy of Aviation Week and Space Technology and perusing glossy photos of combat planes. Egged on by the Nixon administration, his was the first and only country to buy the costly Grumman F-14 combat aircraft at a time when that company desperately needed foreign sales to bolster the program. And the Shah put his U.S.-supplied weapons to use, too, helping, for instance, to put down an anti-government uprising in nearby Oman (a short skip across the Persian Gulf), while repressing his own population at the same time.

In the Nixon years, Saudi Arabia, too, became a major weapons client of Washington, not so much because it feared its regional neighbors then, but because it had seemingly limitless oil funds to subsidize U.S. weapons makers at a time when the Pentagon budget was beginning to be reduced. In addition, Saudi sales helped recoup some of the revenue streaming out of the U.S. to pay for higher energy prices exacted by the newly formed OPEC oil cartel. It was a process then quaintly known as “recycling petrodollars.”

The Carter Years and the Quest for Restraint

The freewheeling arms trade of the Nixon years eventually prompted a backlash. In 1976, for the first (and last) time, a presidential candidate — Jimmy Carter — made reining in the arms trade a central theme of his 1976 campaign for the White House. He called for imposing greater human-rights scrutiny on arms exports, reducing the total volume of arms transfers, and initiating talks with the Soviet Union on curbing sales to regions of tension like the Middle East.

Meanwhile, members of Congress, led by Democratic Senators Gaylord Nelson and Hubert Humphrey, felt that it was long past time for Capitol Hill to have a role in decision-making when it came to weapons sales. Too often Congressional representatives found out about major deals only by reading news reports in the papers long after such matters had been settled. Among the major concerns driving their actions: the Nixon-era surge of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, then still an avowed adversary of Israel; the use of U.S.-supplied weapons by both sides in the Greek-Turkish conflict over the island of Cyprus; and covert sales to extremist right-wing forces in southern Africa, notably the South African-backed Union for the Total Independence of Angola. The answer was the passage of the Arms Export Control Act of 1978, which required that Congress be notified of any major sales in advance and asserted that it had the power to veto any of them viewed as dangerous or unnecessary.

As it happened, though, neither President Carter’s initiative nor the new legislation put a significant dent in such arms trafficking. In the end, for instance, Carter decided to exempt the Shah’s Iran from serious human-rights strictures and his hardline national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, undercut those talks with the Soviet Union on reducing arms sales.

Carter also wanted to get the new Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) he established — which eventually morphed into the U.S. Central Command — access to military bases in the Persian Gulf region and was willing to use arms deals to do so. The RDF was to be the centerpiece of the Carter Doctrine, a response to the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the fall of the Shah of Iran. As the president made clear in his 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside forces to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States. It will be repelled by use of any means necessary, including the use of force.” Selling arms in the region would prove a central pillar of his new doctrine.

Meanwhile, most major sales continued to sail through Congress with barely a discouraging word.

Who Armed Saddam Hussein?

While the volume of those arms sales didn’t spike dramatically under President Ronald Reagan, his determination to weaponize anti-communist “freedom fighters” from Afghanistan to Nicaragua sparked the Iran-Contra scandal. At its heart lay a bizarre and elaborate covert effort led by National Security Council staff member Oliver North and a band of shadowy middlemen to supply U.S. weapons to the hostile regime of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran. The hope was to gain Tehran’s help in freeing U.S. hostages in Lebanon. North and company then used the proceeds from those sales to arm anti-government Contra rebels in Nicaragua in violation of an explicit Congressional ban on such aid.

Worse yet, the Reagan administration transferred arms and provided training to extremist mujahedeen factions in Afghanistan, acts which would, in the end, help arm groups and individuals that later formed al-Qaeda (and similar groups). That would, of course, prove a colossal example of the kind of blowback that unrestricted arms trading too often generates.

Even as the exposure of North’s operation highlighted U.S. arms transfers to Iran, the Reagan administration and the following one of President George H.W. Bush would directly and indirectly supply nearly half a billion dollars worth of arms and arms-making technology to Iran’s sworn enemy, Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein. Those arms would bolster Saddam’s regime both in its war with Iran in the 1980s and in its 1991 invasion of Kuwait that led to Washington’s first Gulf War. The U.S. was admittedly hardly alone in fueling the buildup of the Iraqi military. All five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the U.S., the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom, and China) provided weapons or weapons technology to that country in the run-up to its intervention in Kuwait.

The embarrassment and public criticism generated by the revelation that the U.S. and other major suppliers had helped arm the Iraqi military created a new opening for restraint. Leaders in the U.S., Great Britain, and other arms-trading nations pledged to do better in the future by increasing information about and scrutiny of their sales to the region. This resulted in two main initiatives: the United Nations arms trade register, where member states were urged to voluntarily report their arms imports and exports, and talks among those five Security Council members (the largest suppliers of weapons to the Middle East) on limiting arms sales to the region.

However, the P-5 talks, as they were called, quickly fell apart when China decided to sell a medium-range missile system to Saudi Arabia and President Bill Clinton’s administration began making new regional weapons deals at a pace of more than $1 billion per month while negotiations were underway. The other suppliers concluded that the Clinton arms surge violated the spirit of the talks, which soon collapsed, leading in the presidency of George W. Bush to a whole new Iraqi debacle.

The most important series of arms deals during the George W. Bush years involved the training and equipping of the Iraqi military in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But $25 billion in U.S. arms and training was not enough to create a force capable of defeating the modestly armed militants of ISIS, when they swept into northern Iraq in 2014 and captured large swaths of territory and major cities, including Mosul. Iraqi security forces, short on food and equipment due to corruption and incompetence, were also short on morale, and in some cases virtually abandoned their posts (and U.S. weaponry) in the face of those ISIS attacks.

The Addiction Continues

Donald Trump has carried on the practice of offering weaponry in quantity to allies in the Middle East, especially the Saudis, though his major rationale for the deals is to generate domestic jobs and revenues for the major weapons contractors. In fact, investing money and effort in almost anything else, from infrastructure to renewable energy technologies, would produce more jobs in the U.S. No matter though, the beat just goes on.

One notable development of the Trump years has been a revived Congressional interest in curbing weapons sales, with a particular focus on ending support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. (Watching Turkish and Kurdish forces face off, each armed in a major way by the U.S., should certainly add to that desire.) Under the leadership of Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA), and Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA), Congress has voted to block bomb sales and other forms of military support for Saudi Arabia, only to have their efforts vetoed by President Trump, that country’s main protector in Washington. Still, congressional action on Saudi sales has been unprecedented in its persistence and scope. It may yet prevail, if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2020. After all, every one of the major presidential contenders has pledged to end arms sales that support the Saudi war effort in Yemen.

Such deals with Saudi Arabia and other Mideast states may be hugely popular with the companies that profit from the trade, but the vast majority of Americans oppose runaway arms trading on the sensible grounds that it makes the world less safe. The question now is: Will Congress play a greater role in attempting to block such weapons deals with the Saudis and human-rights abusers or will America’s weapons-sales addiction and its monopoly position in the Middle Eastern arms trade simply continue, setting the stage for future disasters of every sort?

William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular, is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy and the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex.