Global Research

The spokesman of Al-Bunyan Al-Marsous coalition Mohammed Al-Ghasri confirmed in an interview to a Libyan media outlet “Ain Libiya” that U.S. African Command team arrived at Air Defense College airbase located in Libyan port city of Misurata on July 22.

He said that USAF aircraft carrying American military came to Libya in a framework of cooperation with the UN-backed Government of National Accord Presidential Council in field of combating the Islamic State.

“We welcome any kind of cooperation in this sphere,” added Mohamed Al-Ghasri.

Previous report also claims that the USAF C17-A Globemaster III, a large military transport aircraft (10-0222) callsign RCH157, left the Aqaba airport, Jordan, for Misurata.

This is the first statement made by officials of both Libya and the United States, concerning the return of U.S. troops to Libya since the AFRICOM announced last April a temporarily relocation of all security personnel from this country. The move caused by the “increase of unrest” subsequent to the launch of military operation to capture Tripoli by the Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar.

“The command is making the personnel adjustments in response to the evolving security situation. U.S. Africa Command will continue to monitor conditions on the ground in Libya, and assess the feasibility for renewed U.S. military presence, as appropriate,” the US AFRICOM said in an April statement.

Contradicting statements

Given the promises to re-establish the military presence in Libya, a report on the arrival of American military doesn’t come as a surprise.

However, on July 25 the U.S. AFRICOM spokeswoman Becky Farmer stirred things up by saying to the London-based Ashark Al-Awsat newspaper that no force was sent to Misurata.

Thus, the official version announced by the U.S. mouthpiece appeared to be completely at odds with what Mohammed Al-Ghasri stated. The Al-Bunyan Al-Marsous alliance – made up basically of armed groups and Islamist factions from Misurata – was formed in 2016 and took a leading part in cooperation with the US in eradicating the ISIS terrorists in the city of Sirte. Seems that this time they failed to coordinate moves.

Such discrepancies contained in those statements conveyed an impression that Washington still officially attempts to maintain a cautious position on Libya and was reluctant to help escalate confrontation between the Government of National Accord and the Libyan National Army led by commander Khalifa Haftar.

Many analysts consider that the United States has no clear and unified approach to resolving the long-standing conflict in North African country and continues to be confronted with the dilemma which of two warring parties they should support.

The U.S. shift to the Tripoli’s unity government and the city-state of Misurata

It’s important to point out that Misurata remains the main bastion of the anti-Haftar military forces, the bulk of them Islamist.

In this context, the decision to dispatch the U.S. troops namely to Misurata might have become a marker for a major shift in policies and modus operandi of the United States toward the oil-rich country. This shift can mean that Americans took a side of the GNA that has been long relying on a wide range of influential militias in domestic affairs, and on the backing of Qatar and Turkey in external.

In addition, it’s worth noting that to date no official response has been released neither on the AFRICOM website nor its Twitter. Neglecting these discrediting claims circulated by the GNA high-ranking military official seems suspicious as it used to pay close attention to the image of its military mission in Libya as well as the public perception of its tasks performed. AFRICOM also hardly worked on preventing its actions in Libya to be misinterpreted.

On this occasion, silence had precisely the opposite effect and put an apparently feeble attempt to obscure yet uncertain involvement of the American military in the Libyan conflict in the spotlight. If it’s true, this might jeopardize the reputation of the US as a neutral and “uniquely qualified external actor” capable of exerting influence on the rival parties and broker the peace.

Beyond that, any involvement in malicious activities in one of the pivotal countries in Northern Africa isn’t a good advertisement for the AFRICOM and its newly appointed commander U.S. Army General Stephen Townsend. On one hand the renewal of the American military presence in Libya could serve as an effective starting point for the career development of the new commander, who previously advocated for a more proactive role of the US in the region amid the growing foreign interference there. But on the other, Washington, in this case, will no longer be able to act as a neutral international mediator in the Libyan crisis.

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Alaeddin Saleh is editor of the Special Monitoring Mission to Libya (SMM Libya).

The Indian Ambassador to Russia was right when he said that his host nation increasingly views his homeland as a global player, an observation that’s becoming all the more significant after Moscow has shown that it’s willing to contradict China on key international issues and possibly even “balance” it abroad.

The ongoing liquidity crisis in India’s shadow banking sector is intensifying. The troubles that started with defaults by Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services Limited (IL&FS) last year are far from over as the sector continues to face a severe liquidity crisis. If tight liquidity conditions persist over the next three quarters, it may turn into a solvency issue for several shadow banks.

After the IL&FS collapse, the entire sector is facing a crisis of confidence as investors are shying away from investing in securities issued by shadow banks. Several shadow banks are finding it difficult to raise money from banks, mutual funds, and the rest of the financial system for either funding their growth or rollover of existing short-term debt. Some are resorting to asset monetization to meet their immediate repayment obligations. Leave aside those shadow banks that have weak financial profiles, even financially sound and better-governed entities are also facing a liquidity squeeze. Most private-sector shadow banks have reduced disbursement of loans to preserve liquidity.

After grown aggressively in the last three years, the credit disbursals by shadow banks have fallen almost by a third this year and consequently lending to housing, automobile, consumer durables, and small businesses has substantially reduced. Since shadow banks play a vital role in loan financing in the housing and automobile sectors, the reduced availability of funding has significantly contributed to the slowdown in these sectors.

The Liquidity Crisis Hits the Automobile Sector Hard

The automobile sector has been badly hit by the ongoing liquidity crisis as shadow banks were the leading financiers of commercial vehicles, passenger cars, and two-wheelers in India. Before the onset of the liquidity crisis, close to 40 percent of new auto loans were issued by shadow banks.

According to Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers, passenger car sales declined by 26 percent in April-July 2019 over the same period last year. Close to 300 dealer showrooms of passenger vehicles have shut down across India in the last one year as shadow banks have stopped financing vehicle purchase, while automakers have either cut production or shut production plants temporarily to keep inventory in check. Analysts estimate that tens of thousands of jobs in India’s auto sector are at risk if the slump in the automobile sector continues.

Since commercial banks are still struggling with high levels of non-performing assets, they are not rushing in to fill the void left by the shadow banks. Rather, commercial banks may also like to reduce their exposure to stressed sectors such as automobile and housing to improve their balance sheets.

All these developments in the financial sector will have severe ramifications for the overall economy as the bulk of India’s economic growth is driven by domestic demand.

DHFL: The New Poster Boy of Liquidity Crisis

Since September 2018, hardly a week passes without more bad news about the cash-strapped Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd (DHFL). On August 16, DHFL again defaulted on its repayment obligations worth Rs 15.7 billion on non-convertible debentures and commercial papers. Nothing new as the company has not been able to meet most of its debt repayment obligations since June 2019, but this was the largest default by the DHFL till date.

DHFL has a total debt liability of Rs 850 bn as of June 19, 2019 (see Table 1), out of which secured loans stood at Rs 749 bn while the rest is unsecured. The company posted a net loss of Rs 22 bn in the fourth quarter of 2018-2019.

Table 1: Key Liabilities of DHFL (as on June 19, 2019)

Source: Business Standard

The company’s lending business has virtually come to a standstill with no fresh disbursements of loans taken place in the last six months. The series of defaults have made it almost impossible for the company to raise new money from the financial markets.

In July, while announcing the fourth-quarter financial results, the company admitted that it is “undergoing substantial financial stress” and its ability to raise funds was “substantially impaired and the business has been brought to a standstill with there being minimal/virtually no disbursements… These developments may raise a significant doubt on the ability of the company to continue as a going concern.”

Of late, DHFL sold its stake in non-core businesses to meet some of its repayment obligations, but it has not been able to find suitable buyers for a majority equity stake in the company. So far, investors have only shown interest in buying portions of its asset portfolio.

Earlier this month, the company approached the consortium of lenders with a resolution plan that includes conversion of debt to equity, a moratorium on repayments, and new credit lines to start fresh lending. The bankers are currently discussing the resolution plan. At present, the Wadhawan family controls DHFL, with a 39.21 percent stake in the company. If the lenders accept the resolution plan, they may also demand to replace the company’s management because in January CobraPost (an online news portal) raised allegations that DHFL created shell companies to divert funds worth Rs 31 bn.

After the IL&FS collapse, DHFL is the second large-sized shadow bank on the verge of bankruptcy. With so much public money at stake, banks, mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance companies are all keen to avoid bankruptcy at debt-ridden DHFL.

A Belated Regulatory Response

In the past two months, several regulatory measures have been announced by the Ministry of Finance and the Reserve Bank of India. Some of the regulatory measures were long overdue. For instance, returning the regulatory authority over the housing finance sector from National Housing Bank to the RBI is a welcome move, provided the staff strength of RBI is suitably increased to undertake both onsite inspections and off-site surveillance of housing finance companies that constitute a major segment of India’s shadow banking sector.

Another notable development is that the RBI is now empowered to remove any director and supersede the board of directors of shadow banks “in the public interest or to prevent the affairs of a nonbanking financial company being conducted in a manner detrimental to the interest of the depositors or creditors, or financial stability or for securing the proper management of such company.”

Besides, the RBI has been given powers to remove or debar auditors if they fail to conduct their role correctly. The financial penalties are also enhanced if the shadow banks don’t implement the regulatory measures.

The RBI has recently canceled registrations of 1,851 shadow banks that could not raise even Rs 20 million to meet the minimum regulatory requirements. One wonders why such entities were permitted to run a shadow bank in the first place?

What about Carrots?

Both the Finance Ministry and the RBI have announced several policy measures to ease liquidity pressure in the shadow banking sector. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains to be seen. Amongst others, these include an increase in any bank’s single-exposure limit to a single shadow bank from the existing 15 percent to 20 percent of tier-1 capital; priority sector lending status for credit to shadow banks for on-lending to agriculture, SMEs and housing; and reduced risk-weights for consumer loans.

In her Union Budget speech on July 5, Nirmala Sitharaman, the finance minister, provided a one-time six months’ partial credit guarantee to public sector banks for the first loss of up to 10 percent to purchase high-rated pooled assets from financially sound shadow banks amounting to Rs 1 trillion. It is too early to assess the impact of this measure as its operational guidelines have been issued on August 13, but the fact remains that this one-time facility is only meant for “financially sound” shadow banks. In other words, the least risky shadow banks (such as HDFC and LIC Housing Finance) will benefit from this facility, not the cash-starved weaker entities such as DHFL and Reliance Capital.

On August 23, Finance Minister announced additional liquidity support of Rs 200 bn to housing finance companies to be provided by the National Housing Bank, as part of a stimulus package. The minister also announced that public sector banks (PSBs) would fast track collaborations with shadow banks for loans to SMEs, small traders, and microfinance institutions under the co-origination scheme introduced in last August by the RBI. Under this scheme, shadow banks will take a minimum of 20 percent of the credit risk by way of direct exposure while the co-originating PSB will take the rest of credit risk.

This scheme allows shadow banks to expand their business and thereby book profits with little investments while the PSBs can meet their priority sector targets of lending to such sectors, albeit with higher credit risks. At the time of writing, there is no information available about the volume of loans disbursed under the co-origination scheme. Since there are better and safer options available to the PSBs to achieve priority sector lending targets, they may not be willing to collaborate with ailing shadow banks and thereby accept higher credit risk, unless they are forced to do so by New Delhi.

The Risks of Forced Lending

This policy move begs the question: Why push public sector banks to increase lending to shadow banks? And particularly at a time when the capital-constrained PSBs already have considerable exposure to troubled shadow banks (such as DHFL and Reliance Capital) and are currently struggling to repair their balance sheets from the NPA crisis.

Despite recapitalization, the PSBs don’t have the appetite to take on higher credit risk by lending more to ailing shadow banking sector. Such policy moves would make public sector banks more vulnerable as the potential risks in the shadow banks could spillover to banks. The PSBs account for nearly 70 percent of India’s banking sector and therefore raises potential financial stability concerns.

Rather the strategy should be to ringfencing the current liquidity crisis in the shadow banking sector and thereby preventing the problems spilling over into the Indian banking sector.

In China and elsewhere, the authorities are trying to disentangle the interconnectedness between the shadow banks and commercial banks to ensure the contagion risks arising out a failure of large shadow banks in the banking sector are contained, and the overall financial stability is preserved.

To restore the investors’ confidence, the RBI should undertake the asset quality review of shadow banks to bring out all problems on the fore, similar to what the RBI conducted for commercial banks in 2015.

An inherent problem with the business model of shadow banks is their over-reliance on short-term funding to fund longer-term assets, which creates an asset-liability mismatch and a liquidity problem. To finance infrastructure and long-term industrial projects, New Delhi should set up specialized development finance institutions with explicit public policy mandates and higher standards of transparency and accountability.

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This article was originally published on Madhyam.

Featured image is from Madhyam

No nation may legally attack another state preemptively — what US-dominated NATO and Israel do time and again unaccountably.

It’s what aggression is all about — defined by UN General Assembly Res. 3314.

Calling it the “most serious and dangerous form of the illegal use of force,” the resolution defined aggression as “the (unjustifiable) use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations.”

The Nuremberg Tribunal called aggression the key offense committed by Nazi war criminals above all others — the supreme international crime.

At the same time, UN Charter Article 51 affirms the right of self-defense if attacked, stating:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Last weekend, Israeli warplanes preemptively (without just cause) attacked targets in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon on the phony pretext of countering an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist and never did.

The Islamic Republic is the region’s leading peace and stability proponent, never attacking another nation preemptively throughout its history — threatening none except in self-defense if attacked, its legal right.

Last Sunday, Lebanon’s Hezbollah Secretary General Sayed Hassan Nasrallah warned of retaliation against Israeli aggression, saying:

“I say to the Israeli army on the border from tonight, stand guard. Wait for us one, two, three, four days.”

“Do not rest. Do not be reassured, and do not bet for a single moment that Hezbollah will allow…aggression of this kind.”

US-dominated NATO and Israel are waging endless regional wars without declaring them. The Netanyahu regime upped the stakes by striking targets in three countries last weekend.

Netanyahu responded to Nasrallah, saying

“I heard what (he) said. I suggest to Nasrallah to calm down. He knows well that Israel knows how to defend itself and to pay back its enemies” — a veiled threat of possible Israeli war on Lebanon, with full US support if occurs.

On Wednesday, unnamed Israeli sources said a crushing blow on Lebanon will follow any Hezbollah retaliation against IDF weekend attacks.

On Tuesday, Reuters claimed Hezbollah intends a “calculated strike” on Israel in response to its last weekend aggression.

An unnamed source was quoted, saying it’s “being arranged in a way which wouldn’t lead to a war that neither Hezbollah nor Israel wants,” adding:

“The direction now is for a calculated strike, but how matters develop, that’s another thing.”

On Tuesday, Lebanon’s Higher Defense Council (including its president, prime minister and army commander) said the nation’s ruling authorities have “the right to defend themselves against any attack.”

Lebanese President Michel Aoun called aggressive Israeli drone strikes on the country a “declaration of war.”

The Fatah Coalition in Iraq’s parliament said the Trump regime is responsible for IDF attacks on the country — “which we consider to be a declaration of war on Iraq and its people.”

Coalition members want all US (occupying) forces out of Iraq. Israel’s attack on the country was its first on its territory since striking Saddam Hussein’s Osirak reactor under construction in June 1981 near Baghdad.

Israel falsely considers Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other Palestinian resistance groups threats to its security. Clearly it’s the other way around.

The US and Israel invent nonexistent threats to unjustifiably justify a state of undeclared war on their enemies.

Though Israel’s IDF capabilities greatly exceed Hezbollah’s military strength, its thousands of missiles and rockets can do considerable damage to Israeli targets if fired in enough numbers.

Nasrallah earlier said

“(t)he  purpose of our (missiles and) rockets (are) to deter Israel from attacking Lebanese civilians,” adding:

“The enemy fears that every time he confronts us, whenever there are victims in our ranks among Lebanese civilians, this will lead to a counter-barrage of our (missiles and) rockets, which he fears.”

With its advanced missiles, Hezbollah is much stronger militarily than during Israel’s 2006 aggression on Lebanon, embarrassing IDF ground forces at the time.

Israel’s aerial capabilities are another matter entirely — posing a major threat to targeted regional nations and two million Gazans, grievously harmed under longterm suffocating blockade, imposed for political reasons, a high crime unchallenged by the world community.

Will Hezbollah retaliate militarily against Israel for last weekend’s IDF attacks?

Despite hundreds of Israeli strikes on Syria, Damascus never retaliated, clearly not wanting greater war on the country than already.

Hezbollah wants regional peace, not war. It’s unclear whether it’ll strike back against last weekend’s Israeli aggression.

Chance for retaliation will be greater if further IDF attacks are launched.

Note: The US and Israel partner in regional aggression. The Trump regime fully supports preemptive IDF attacks on regional targets.

On Sunday, Pompeo and Netanyahu spoke by phone. The State Department said the secretary “expressed support for Israel’s right to defend itself from threats posed by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (sic) and to take action to prevent imminent attacks against Israeli assets in the region (sic).”

The US faced no geopolitical threats since WW II ended. Israel faced none since end of the October 1973 Yom Kippur war.

So both countries invent them to unjustifiably justify regional aggression.

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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: President Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Sept. 18, 2017. (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)

“Cancelling Palestine (Palestinian Authority or Palestinian Territories) from the U.S. State Department’s list is not related to American national interests,” PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erekat said. 

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Palestinian officials slammed the United States Sunday for removing it from its list of countries. The U.S. State Department removed the Palestinian Authority (PA) from its list of countries on its website.

Nabil Abu Rudaineh, spokesperson for the PA presidency said that the removal is  “consistent with the ideas of the Israeli extreme Right and an unprecedented descent in American foreign policy.”

He also said that the move by the U.S. “comes in the context of desperate attempts to wipe out the Palestinian cause and people.”

The Palestinians rejected and condemned the move which according to Rudaineh “shows that the US administration is biased in favor of the Israeli occupation.” and it “reflects the content of the so-called American Deal of the Century.”

He also warned that “there will be no peace, security, and stability in the region without the establishment of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital on the June 4, 1967 borders.”

The Palestinian Liberation Organization Secretary-General Saeb Erekat also condemned the move.

“Cancelling Palestine (Palestinian Authority or Palestinian Territories) from the U.S. State Department’s list is not related to American national interests,” he said. “The decision aims to support the schemes of the Israeli Council of Settlements.”

The PA severed its ties with the U.S. after President Donald Trump announced Jerusalem as the capital of Israel in 2017 and moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 2018.

“The current US government implements the Israeli vision of destroying the two-state solution and escaping from its entitlements,” the PA Foreign Ministry said in a statement after the latest move by the U.S.

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On August 25^th, 2019, Israel attacked Lebanon. It has done it again.

Just as it attacked Syria, the same night.

RT reported the same day:

“Israeli drone flights were “an open attack on Lebanese sovereignty” and an assault on UN Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, Hariri said on Sunday, just hours after reports of two Israeli UAV incidents in Beirut.

Hariri called the drone incursion a “threat to regional stability and an attempt to increase tensions.”

He said there’s a heavy presence of planes in the airspace over Beirut and its suburbs, adding he will consult with Lebanese President Michel Aoun on what could be done to repel the “new aggression.””

So, what? Really, we have been ‘here’ before, on so many occasions.

PM Hariri is fuming, but he is one of the closest allies of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in the region. In fact, he is a Saudi citizen. Is he going to do anything, like getting into a war with Israel? Never.

Can he actually do anything? No; nothing, even if he would want to. The truth is that practically, he can do absolutely nothing. Not he, nor Lebanon’s President Aoun, or even the Lebanese armed forces. Lebanon has no means with which to repel any Israeli attack. Absolutely no means! The country’s air force is pathetic, consisting of several flying toys, like modified Cessnas, old helicopters, and several A-29 Super Tucanos. That could hardly frighten some of the mightiest and well-trained squadrons in the world – those of the Jewish state.

The bitter and uncomfortable truth is, also, that Israel can basically do anything it desires, at least in this part of the world.

Just a few days ago, I dared to drive, again, from Beirut all the way down to Naqoura, and then, along the Blue Line (‘protected’ by the United Nations), east to Kfarkela.

Now, the repulsive Israeli wall which is scarring one of the most beautiful landscapes in the Middle East, has almost been completed, all along the border. One year ago, the Lebanese government protested, calling it almost an act of war. The Israelis did not care. As always, they did what they wanted. They came right towards the line, or more precisely, at least on several occasions, they crossed the line; and constructed their concrete monstrosity right in front of the eyes of the Lebanese soldiers and the UN personnel. “So, now, what are you going to do?” they were practically saying, without pronouncing it.

Nobody has done anything in retaliation. Zero! Now UNIFIL Indonesian soldiers are taking selfies right in front of the Blue Line, leaning against their armored vehicles, while Hezbollah flags are waving only few meters away from Israel. All this horror show is just some 10 kilometers from the Israeli occupied Syrian territory of the Golan Heights. You can see the Golan Heights easily from here. A few years ago I was there, in the Golan Heights; I ‘smuggled’ myself there, to write a damming report. I learned then, and I am getting more and more confirmation now: Israelis are really great experts at building the walls that are ruining and fragmenting the entire region!

But then and now, nothing that can stop them!

Whatever Israel bombs it gets away with it, no one dares to intervene.

Today as the Israel drones, full of explosives, flew into Lebanon, UN battle ships were docked in the harbor of Beirut. After an explosion rocked a Shi’a neighborhood, damaging the Hezbollah Media Center (which I visited some two years ago), the ships did not even change their position, let alone depart from the harbor in order to defend Lebanon!

So why are these ships there? No one knows. No one asks, obviously.

Here, it is always like that. I drive to a Hezbollah area. There is a private checkpoint. I photograph it. They stop me. A huge guy with a machinegun blocks my way. I jump out of the car, put my hands together: “Do you want to arrest me?” He gets insecure. I ignore him. I drive away. I am pissed off: why not better fight the Israelis and their constant invasions, with such a physique and weaponry?

A friend of mine, a top UN official from the Gulf who doesn’t want to be identified, just told me bitterly:

“There is no condemnation: there is complete silence from the United Nations and from the West.”

Hariri feels obliged to protest, as his nation was attacked. But is he really outraged? Hardly. He hates Syria, he hates Hezbollah.

Lebanon is only united by a few iconic dishes, culinary delights; not by politics.

Is the country ready to defend itself? Hardly. Those who have money are too busy racing their European cars, without mufflers, on potholed streets, or showing their legs in various five-star malls.

The poor people of Lebanon do not matter; they do not exist. Palestinians matter nothing, living and dying, cramped like sardines in repulsive camps with hardly any rights. This has been going on for long decades.

Many Lebanese Christians actually secretly cheer Israel. Or not so secretly… And they are so enamored with everything Western, that, as they told me on several occasions, they would love to be colonized by France, again.

Lebanon is so fragmented by race, religion, social status, that it cannot stand on its feet. Turkish powerplant platforms are providing energy. Infrastructure has collapsed. Filth is everywhere. Cynical corruption consumes everything. But exhibitionism and showing off never stop. Money is there only for hedonistic clubs and sojourns to Nice. Hezbollah is the only institution which cares about the welfare of all Lebanese people; the only force ready to defend the country against foreign interventions. Israel and the West know it. And they are doing all they can to destroy Hezbollah.

Lebanon has become a laughing stock in the region. Like this, it is very difficult to face one of the mightiest militaries on earth.

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Just a few hours before Lebanon was hit, Israel admitted that its air force hit the Shi’ite militia and Iranian targets in Syria. It declared that it took out “killer drones” prepped by the Quds Force to carry out attacks in Israeli territory.

Israel justifies everything by its ‘defense’. Any outrageous attack, any bombing, is always ‘preventive’. The world has become used to it, by now. The world is doing nothing to stop it.

People die. Many do; annually. So, ‘the Israeli citizens can be safe’. So the West and its allies can control the region, indefinitely.

On August 25^th, Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, described the ongoing situation in the Middle East as ‘very, very dangerous’:

“U.S. tries to revive Daesh in Iraq… U.S. helicopters are rescuing Daesh in Afghanistan… “

He spoke about the attack on Lebanon:

“The drones that entered the suburbs at dawn are military aircraft. The first aircraft was a reconnaissance aircraft flying at low altitude to get an accurate picture of the target. We did not shoot down the plane, but some young men threw stones at it before it fell. What happened last night was a suicide drone attack on a target in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Netanyahu would be mistaken if he thinks that this issue can go unnoticed. Lebanon will face a very dangerous situation if this incident goes unaddressed. The dawn suicide attack is the first act of aggression since 14 August 2006. The Lebanese State’s condemnation of what happened and referral of the matter to the Security Council is good, but these steps do not prevent the course of action to be taken. Since 2000, we have allowed Israeli drones for many reasons but no one moved. Israeli drones entering Lebanon are no longer collecting information, but assassinations. From now on, we will face the Israeli drones when they enter the skies of Lebanon and we will work to bring them down. I tell the Israelis that Netanyahu is running with your blood.”

The West and its allies are escalating tensions all over the Middle East. Some say, “war is possible”. Others say “it is imminent”. But it is not just a possibility. There is a war. Everywhere. In Afghanistan and Syria, in Yemen and Iraq. Wherever you look! Even in Lebanon.

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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.” 

All images in this article are from NEO

So-called “environmental interventions” might become commonplace as global powers seek excuses to intervene in the domestic affairs of sovereign states in order to seize control of their natural resources.

The entire world has watched in horror over the past week as the Amazon rainforest burns worse than it’s ever done before, or at least that’s the narrative that the Mainstream Media wants the global audience to believe. The storyline is that ranchers have been emboldened by Brazilian President Bolsonaro’s rhetoric about developing the rainforest region and therefore decided to set more fires than ever in order to clear as much land as possible for future cattle ranching and settlement. It’s true that the country’s leader might have inspired some rogue ranchers, who he belatedly decided to blame after first suggesting that left-wing environmental groups were responsible, but that doesn’t explain the media firestorm that’s since commenced and the manipulation of international perceptions in favor of what can only be described as an “environmental intervention” by a select group of global powers.

It’s factually false to assert that these latest fires are unprecedented, as proven by the investigative reporting that Off Guardia’s Catte Black carried out, and Bolsonaro already called out French President Macron for jumping on the bandwagon and misleadingly sharing older photos purporting to be of the most recent fires just like a host of celebrities have done as well. The French leader has taken the lead in trying to assemble international support for putting out this blaze, though he and the rest of his ilk are silent about the much worse fires presently raging all across the Southern African country of Angola right now, strongly suggesting that there are ulterior motives behind their laser-focused interest in the resource-rich Amazon. Macron has already politically instrumentalized the crisis to blackmail Brazil by threatening to block a long-negotiated EU-Mercosur trade deal because of it, showing that he’s not afraid to exploit these fires for his own purposes.

Unwittingly, the possible collapse of EU-Mercosur trade talks would only help the US since it would make it much easier for Trump to clinch a similar pact with the bloc as part of his “Fortress America” vision of reestablishing the US’ hemispheric hegemony if it’s not institutionally tied to the EU. Macron’s EU allies must be aware of this possibility, which might be why Merkel commented that she didn’t think that this move would be an “appropriate response” to what’s happening, further exacerbating ongoing Franco-German divisions driven by the competition between those two countries for leadership of the EU. In any case, it’s clear that foreign powers are trying to take advantage of this crisis to increase their influence over the Amazon basin on the pretext that its forestry resources are much too important to mankind to be allowed to burn uncontrollably. That “publicly plausible” mission statement, for lack of a better word, is a dangerous precedent.

Russia’s vast Siberian region has recently struggled with large-scale fires as well, though mostly thought to be naturally occurring and not the result of rogue ranchers, and could one day become the target of similar “environmental interventions” by the G7 countries (even in the event that Russia returns to the organization). There’s no denying that the Amazonian rainforests and Siberian taiga greatly contribute to producing significant amounts of the world’s oxygen and reducing some of its carbon dioxide, but the question arises of how far other countries should go to ensure that these resources aren’t “naturally” destroyed. Furthermore, it’s fair to ask whether their “environmental interventions” are sincere or driven by ulterior motives, whether political (like with Macron and his Mercosur trade deal statement) or strategic (such as capturing control of these resources). Brazil and Russia are incomparable in terms of their national strength, but it’s possible that the former might be a test case for perfecting “environmental intervention” plots against the latter one day.

As it stands, there isn’t any credible chance that a large-scale “environmental intervention” on par with the “humanitarian interventions” before it is in the cards, but the possibility nevertheless exists for further foreign meddling in Brazil’s sovereign affairs on the pretext that the national government can’t ensure the safety of its globally significant forestry resources. This train of thought mirrors the exact same one utilized by proponents of “humanitarian interventions” whenever they purport that the targeted national government can’t ensure the safety of its civilians so the world therefore has a “Responsibility to Protect” them by whichever means necessary. The dawn of “environmental interventions” is therefore approaching, and they’ll probably be much more commonplace in the coming future as global powers compete for access to dwindling forestry and hydrological resources (both rivers and aquifers) and use whatever excuse they can come up with to rally support for their Machiavellian moves.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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.

Brazil has always been a land of superlatives. Yet nothing beats the current, perverse configuration: a world statesman lingers in jail while a clownish thug is in power, his antics now considered a threat to the whole planet.

In a wide-ranging, two-hour, world exclusive interview out of a prison room at the Federal Police building in Curitiba, southern Brazil, former president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva not only made the case to global public opinion for his innocence in the whole Car Wash corruption saga, confirmed by the bombshell leaks revealed by The Intercept, but also repositioned himself to resume his status as a global leader. Arguably sooner rather than later – depending on a fateful, upcoming decision by the Brazilian Supreme Court, for which Justice is not exactly blind.

The request for the interview was entered five months ago. Lula talked to journalists Mauro Lopes, Paulo Moreira Leite and myself, representing in all three cases the website Brasil247 and in my case Asia Times. A rough cut, with only one camera focusing on Lula, was released this past Thursday, the day of the interview. A full, edited version, with English subtitles, targeting global public opinion, should be released by the end of the week.

Asia Times writer Pepe Escobar, front left with scarf, meets Lula in prison. Photo: Editora Brazil 247

Lula is a visible embodiment of Nietzsche’s maxim: whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Fully fit (he hits the treadmill at least two hours a day), sharp, with plenty of time to read (his most recent was an essay on Alexander von Humboldt), he exhibited his trademark breadth, reach and command of multiple issues – sometimes rolled out as if part of a Garcia Marquez fantastic realism narrative.

The former president lives in a three-by-three-meter cell, with no bars, with the door open but always two Federal policemen outside, with no access to the internet or cable TV. One of his aides dutifully brings him a pen drive every day crammed with political news, and departs with myriad messages and letters.

The interview is even more astonishing when placed in the literally incendiary context of current Brazilian politics, actively flirting with a hybrid form of semi-dictatorship. While Lula talks essentials and is clearly recovering his voice, even in jail, President Jair Bolsonaro has framed himself as a target of global indignation, widely regarded as a threat to humanity that must be contained.

It’s all about the Day of Fire

Cut to the G7 in Biarritz: at best a sideshow, a talk-shop where the presumably liberal West basks in its lavish impotence to deal with serious global issues without the presence of leaders from the Global South.

And that brings us to the literally burning issue of Amazon forest fires. In our interview, Lula went straight to the point: by noting the absolute responsibility of Bolsonaro’s voter base.

The G7 did nothing but echo Lula’s words, with French President Emmanuel Macron stressing how NGOs and multiple judicial actors, for years, have been raising the question of defining an international statute for the Amazon – which Bolsonaro’s policies, single-handedly, have propelled to the top of the global agenda.

Yet the G7’s offer of an immediate $20 million aid package to help Amazon nations to fight wildfires and then launch a global initiative to protect the giant forest barely amounts to a raindrop.

[Brazil, after this article was written, rejected the proffered aid from G7 countries, with a top official telling France’s President Macron on Monday to take care of “his home and his colonies,” AFP reported. “Maybe those resources are more relevant to reforest Europe,” Onyx Lorenzoni, Bolsonaro’s chief of staff, told the G1 news website. “Macron cannot even avoid a foreseeable fire in a church that is a World Heritage site. What does he intend to teach our country?” He was referring to the fire in April that devastated the Notre-Dame Cathedral. “Brazil is a democratic, free nation that never had colonialist and imperialist practices, as perhaps is the objective of the Frenchman Macron,” Lorenzoni said. -eds.]

Significantly, US President Donald Trump did not even attend the G7 session that covered climate change, attacks on the biodiversity and oceans – and Amazon deforestation. No wonder Paris simply gave up issuing a joint statement at the end of the summit.

In our interview, Lula stressed his landmark role at the Conference of Parties (COP-15) climate change summit in Copenhagen in 2009. Not only that, he told the inside story of how the negotiations proceeded, and how he intervened to defend China from US accusations of being the world’s largest polluter.

At the time Lula said:

“It’s not necessary to fell a single tree in the Amazon to grow soybeans or for cattle grazing. If anyone is doing it, that is a crime – and a crime against the Brazilian economy.”

COP-15 was supposed to advance the targets established by the Kyoto Protocol, which were expiring in 2010. But the summit failed after the US – and the EU – refused to raise their projections of CO2 reduction while blaming Global South actors.

In a sharp contrast with Lula, Bolsonaro’s project actually amounts to a non-creative destruction of Brazilian assets such as the Amazon for the interests he represents.

Now the Bolsonaro clan is blaming the government’s own Cabinet of Institutional Security (GSI, in Portuguese) – the equivalent of the National Security Council – led by General Augusto Heleno, for failing to evaluate the scope and gravity of the current Amazon forest fires.

Heleno, incidentally, is on record defending a life sentence for Lula.

Still, that does not tell the whole story – even as Bolsonaro himself also kept blaming “NGOs” for the fires.

The real story confirms what Lula said in the interview. On August 10, a group of 70 wealthy farmers, all Bolsonaro voters, organized on WhatsApp a “Day of Fire” in the Altamira region in the vast state of Pará.

This happens to be the region with the highest number of wildfires in Brazil – infested with aggressive rural developers who are devoted to massive, hardcore deforestation; they’re invested in land occupation and a no-quarter war against landless peasants and small agricultural producers. “Day of Fire” was supposed to support Bolsonaro’s drive to finish off with official monitoring and erase fines over one of the “Bs” of the BBB lobby that elected him (Beef, Bullet, Bible).

Lula was evidently well informed:

“You just need to look at the satellite photos, know who’s the landowner and go after him to know who’s burning. If the landowner did not complain, did not go to the police to tell them his land was burning, that’s because he’s responsible.”

On the road with the Pope

A vicious, post-truth, hybrid-war strategy may be at play in Brazil. Two days after the Lula interview, a fateful paella took place in Brasilia at the vice-presidential palace, with Bolsonaro meeting all the top generals including Vice President Hamilton Mourao. Independent analysts are seriously considering a working hypothesis of the sell-out of Brazil using global concern about the Amazon, the whole process veiled by fake nationalist rhetoric.

That would fit the recent pattern of selling the national aviation champion Embraer, privatizing large blocks of pre-salt reserves and leasing the Alcantara satellite-launching base to the United States. Brazilian sovereignty over the Amazon is definitely hanging in the balance.

Considering the wealth of information in Lula’s interview, not to mention his storytelling of how the corridors of power really work, Asia Times will publish further specific stories featuring Pope Francis, the BRICS, Bush and Obama, Iran, the UN and global governance. This was Lula’s first interview in jail where he has felt relaxed enough to relish telling stories about international relations.

What was clear is that Lula is Brazil’s only possible factor of stability. He’s ready, has an agenda not only for the nation but the world. He said that as soon as he leaves, he’ll hit the streets – and cash in frequent flyer miles: he wants to embark alongside Pope Francis on a global campaign against hunger, neoliberal destruction and the rise of neo-fascism.

Now compare a true statesman in jail with an incendiary thug roaming his own labyrinth.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

It is possible that Abe’s Korea bashing is a part of his ambition of restoring the pre-1945 Japan where Shintoism ruled the body and the mind of the Japanese people.

Under Shintoism, the Japanese were united, or forced to be united in order to win “the holy war of liberating Asia from domination of the West.”

Shintoism along with Bushido is gaining its force and expands its influence in Japan.  

Shintoism is the ideological roots for the Association of Shinto and the “Japan Conference” which are the most conservative political forces in Japan trying to restore the Meiji era’s Shintoist military empire. 

This should not happen, because, if it happens, democracy will be gone in Japan and the dark clouds of war will cover once again the sky of Asia.

In this paper, I will first discuss the origin and the nature of Shintoism and then, I will examine the possibility of restoring it under the conservative governments. Finally, I will argue that Abe and his friends should not even dream of using Shintoism for their dangerous ambition to dominate East Asia either through military power or economic manipulation.

1. Origin and Nature of Shintoism 

The widely spread religion in Japan has been Shintoism which means “the way of god”. This is a folk belief practiced for centuries by the Japanese people. It is a sort of shamanism in which everything can be god: sky, moon, trees, rocks, flowers, rivers, mountains and so on.

However, Japanese shamanism has been much influenced by Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism in such a way that it has been playing key roles in forming Japanese mentality and culture.

For instance, self-discipline, order and strictly vertical structure of human relationships are some of the influences of these three religions or philosophies which came from China and went to Japan through Korea.

Shintoism is practiced in Shinto shrines led by Shinto priests. Shinto congregation is organized as parish; the number of parish members can vary from shrine to shrine and from time to time. Also, in many cases, Shintoism is practiced at home through miniature shrine hanged on the wall or placed on the shelf.

God knows how many shrines there were before 1945, the year of the end of State Shinto. But in 2017, there were 80,000 Shinto shrines in cities, towns, villages, mountains and other places.

The most important Shinto shrine is the Ise Shrine where the goddess, Amaterasu is worshiped; it is the most sacred shrine in Japan.

The Japanese believe that the founder of Japan was Amaterasu Omikami meaning “the great (omi) goddess or god (kami). The Japanese people believe that the emperors are direct liner descendants of the goddess, Amaterasu.

The golden era of Japanese Shintoism was the era of the Meiji Restoration which began in 1867 with the crowning of Emperor Meiji and which ended in 1912 with his death.

Emperor Meiji was the most remarkable, powerful and successful Japanese emperor. It was Emperor Meiji (image on the right) who made Japan free from the rule of Shogunate which began in 1602 with Tokugawa Ieyasu, four years after the retreat of the defeated Toyotomi Hideyoshi‘s army from Korea.

Emperor Meiji was perhaps the only emperor who not only reigned but also ruled Japan for half a century; he was the emperor who transformed the feudal Japan into the most industrialized, the most modernized and the richest and the most militarily powerful in Asia.

The government of Meiji needed an absolute authority needed for the unity, discipline and the absolute loyalty of the Japanese people. Well, Shintoism provided the means to meet such needs. Japan needed a god that can rule all other gods; such god was the emperor.

The deity of the emperor meant two things in people’s mind. First, the emperor was god; so, the people must worship and obey him. Second, self sacrifice, especially the death for the emperor-god was the ultimate honour and even salvation of the people.

In short, Shintoism during the Meiji era and post-Meiji period until the end of WWII was a powerful religion.

One of the most productive policies undertaken by Emperor Meiji was the consolidation and integration of Shinto types into an official State Religion.

In 1871, Meiji established the Ministry of Rites which appointed Shinto priest as civil servants and divided Shinto shrines into many classes on the top of which was the Ise Shrine dedicated to goddess Amaterasu, symbol of divine legitimacy of the emperor.

In 1872, the Ministry of Rites was replaced by the Ministry of Religion.

In 1890, the Meiji government issued the Imperial Prescript on Education inspired by Shintoism; the students were required ritually recite the oaths: “offer myself to the State as well as to protect the imperial family.” This lasted until 1945.

From 1942 to 1945, I was a student at a Japanese Normal School which was a specialized school for future teachers of primary school. The school was located in the city of Chunchon, Korea.

We had to repeat every day the Shinto ritual, as did the students in Japan. Early in the morning every day, we had to go to a government-run Shinto shrine where we had to wash our hands and mouth before passing through the line beyond which the ground was sacred.

Inside the hall of prayer, we prayed for the glory of the emperor, the victory of Japan and pledged our lives to save Japan and the emperor.

Being well brainwashed, I almost believed, like many other young students in Korea and Japan that the emperor was a living god.

At school, we went through another kind of Shinto rituals. Every morning, there was a ceremony which consisted in the principal’s reading of a long declaration of the Pacific War justifying the sacred war.

Monday morning every week, we attended what was called “Sushin” class which was intended to glorify our sacrifice for the emperor and intensify our hatred against Americans.

We were taught that North Americans were uncivilized, they were cruel; they had no tears, they had no family life.

In short, the brainwashing process of Shintoism had the following psychological outcomes.

First, the State Shinto made Japanese people to believe in the beauty of dying for the emperor.

Second, it made them feel superior to all others races for the reason of being the people of emperor-god. Here we see the origin of Japan’s unhealthy racism.

In fact, I remember how Japan classified the world population. Japan made a long list of races and peoples in a vertical hierarchy in terms of importance and quality.

On the top of the list were, of course, the Japanese; the rest were servants serving the Japanese; Koreans were supposed to be number one servants”.

Third, since the western powers being the enemy of the emperor, they deserved Japanese people’s hatred.

Shintoism has greatly contributed to the whole mobilization of body and mind of the Japanese people not only for the preparation but also the conduct of Japan’s annexation of Korea, its conquest of Manchuria, its invasion of China and its attack against Pearl Harbour.

There was another quasi-religious culture which even strengthened Shintoism, namely the tradition of Bushido (the code of Samurai) There were several codes, but the most important code was the total sacrifice of oneself for the glory of the master, the emperor.

Bushido has transformed Shintoism into a weapon more powerful than any other military weapons.

For instance, the “glorious sacrifice” of the kami-kazé pilots was regarded by the Japanese as the ultimate Shintoist gesture.

Then, there was the notion of “Hakko-Ichiu” (see Joseph H. Chung. Korea-Japan Trade Plus War: Where Are You Going Mr. Shinzo Abe? Global Research, July 18, 2019)

This expression means eight continents (Hakko) under one roof (Ichiu). The roof is Japan. This implies that the whole world should be under the domination of one nation, which is, obviously, Japan.

We can imagine easily what can come out of the combination of Shintoism and Hakko-Ichiu.

Image below: Japanese pilots who gathered under the flag of Hakkō ichiu during the Pacific War (Source: Public Domain)

The wars conducted by Japan before 1945 were the Hakko-Ichiu holy wars of “liberating Asia from the domination of the West.” At least, this was what the war-time Japanese leaders seemed to believe; even some of the contemporary conservative leaders led by Abe seem to share the same view.

In fact, the Tanaka Memorial of 1927 and the concept of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere of 1940 were the concrete manifestation of Hakko-Ichiu war.

According to this Tanaka Memorial, Japan’s world conquest should proceed in steps.

First target was Korea which was important for Japan; Korea was the bridge to Manchuria and China, even to Russia; Korea was a buffer zone offering to Japan defensive advantages.

In fact, Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s army attacked Korea in the period, 1592-1598, because Korea refused to be used as the bridge for the Japanese army’s plan to invade China.

South Korea played well the role of Japan’s buffer zone in the 1950s preventing the spread of communism before the Korea War.

The second target was Manchuria. In 1931, units of Japanese army disguised as Chinese soldiers exploded a part of railway near Mukden City in Manchuria in order to justify the invasion of undefended Manchuria.

The third target of the Hakko-Ichiu war was China. In 1937, near the Bridge Marco Polo not far from the city of Nanjing, the powerful Japanese army attacked a small Chinese army unit under the pretext of saving a Japanese soldier who was enjoying himself somewhere near the bridge. The Japanese army justified its attack accusing the Chinese unit for alleged kidnapping of the Japanese soldier

The fourth target of the holy war was the brutal attack in 1941 against Pearl Harbour without a declaration of war.

The Tanaka Plan failed.

But we can imagine, with shiver, how the Shintoism-inspired holy war of Hakko-Ichiu could have enslaved Asia, if Japan did win the Pacific war. 

In short, Shintoism along with Japan’s faith in Hakko-Ichiu has led Japan to engage in wars for half a century during which the Japanese people had to go through physical suffering including inhuman starvation and constant psychological trauma of the war.

The Hakko-Ichiu holy war that was inspired and guided by Shintoism ended in 1945.

Because of this war, tens of millions of human beings were killed; countless innocent women including teenage fragile girls were raped; civilizations built for centuries were destroyed and the worst kind of violation of human rights was committed.

For whom was this holy war? Surely it was not for the Japanese people.

The war was for a few who benefited from the war including some political leaders misguided by wrong perceptions of Japan’s destiny, some military leaders who sought for glory in the battle ground and some greedy corporations which wanted to make money by producing murderous weapons..

The Japanese people have not forgotten the misery of this war; they want to never see again the Hakko-Ichiu war; they want peace; they may never obey again the war-loving misleading leaders.

2. Abe’s Plan for the Restoration of Shintoism-Inspired Imperial Japan

Yet, a group of ultraconservative political leaders led by Shinzo Abe have been trying to restore Shintoism and Bushido.

There is the Shinto Association of Spiritual Leadership (Shinto Seiji Renmei) founded in 1969; it is becoming more and more visible and influential.

Most of the ultraconservative politicians are members of this Association.

Abe visits every year the Ise Shinto Shrine which is dedicated to the goddess Amaterasu. He hosted in 2016 the G7 meeting near the Shrine. Abe held one of his cabinet meetings at the same Shrine.

Keiji Furuya, one of the most outspoken ultraconservatives in Japan joined the Association, so did Abe. More than 300 members of the Japanese parliament are member of the Shinto Association.

The Shinto Association is one of the most powerful political lobby groups in favour of the revival of the Shintoism-dominated military empire of Japan.

The members of the Shinto Association are also members of the Japan Conference (Nippon Kaigi). The Japan Conference is a terribly powerful ultraconservative political organization fighting for the restoration of the Meiji era. More than 80% of Abe’s ministers are its members.

Just imagine how the combined forces of the Shinto Association and the Japan Conference can easily change the destiny of Japan.

Former director of the Shino Association was quoted to have said: he was claiming for the restoration of the divinity of the emperor.

“In Japan, policies were adapted weakening the relationship between the imperial household and the people and the fundamental elements of Japanese history were not taught at schools.” (Michael Holtz, Christian Science Monitor, October 5, 2015)

Another alarming sign is the return of Bushido. The book by Masahiko Fujiwara, “Dignity of a Nation”, one of the bestsellers advocates the revival of Bushido (Way of Samurai).

Bushido has had a long process of evolution, but the Bushido since the Meiji era until the end of WWII, has meant absolute loyalty to the emperor, the belief in the glory of death for the emperor and even suicide in the form of “harakiri” or “seppuku”, one of the most brutal and torturing way of killing oneself; harakiri is a ritual suicide to punish oneself for the failure of performing the given duty.

A friend of mine told me about the collective harakiri of a whole company of the defeated Japanese army in Shanghai in 1946; they knelt toward the imperial palace in Tokyo and cut opened their belly and died for their responsibility of losing the war.

In fact, Bushido is a part of Shintoism; the kind of Shintoism which Abe might have in mind could be the culture of “banzai suicide attack” (banzai means long live emperor) which the world saw with horror time after time during WWII. What Bushido does is to make Shintoism more militant and more aggressive. A Bushido-man would say:

“It is shameful for man to die without risking his life in battle!”

3. Feasibility of Abe’s Plan for the Restoration of Shintoism-Inspired Imperial Japan 

All indicate that Shintoism is coming back. The interesting question is whether the return of Shintoism will remain as cultural and religious phenomenon or lead to the restoration of the Shintoist military imperial Japan.

It seems to be more than possible that Abe and his friends dream for the restoration of the Shintoist military imperial empire.

However, to restore the Shintoist military imperial regime, Abe must amend the Peace Constitution.

To do so, he must do the following:

• First Abe’s LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) must have permanent control of political power.
• Second, LDP needs two-third of votes in both houses of the Diet in favour of the constitutional amendment.
• Third, at the popular referendum, LDP must get a majority votes in favour of constitutional amendment.

Abe’s LDP is sure of keeping power for good. There are several factors which allow LDP to remain in power for more than 60 years including the tripartite collusion of politics-business-civil service, corruption deriving from such collusion, rural biased electoral system and the proliferation of small political parties.

And the local private political support group (Koenkai) is perhaps one of the most effective factors responsible for the permanent ruling of Abe’s friends.

Through this system, the electoral campaign never stops. The trouble is that the management of Koenkai is expensive, but the ultra-conservatives never lack money because of their collusion with rich business friends.

The amendment of the Peace Constitution is like to be achieved eventually. If needed, Abe’s group can buy the votes in the upper house.

To get the majority of referendum votes, LDP will continue to silence the opposition voices, intensify Korea bashing in order to intensify anti-Korea culture in Japan and create a climate of fear making easier to convince the people of the need for militarily strong Japan.

On the other hand, there are factors for the possible failure of Abe’s dream.

It is true that the Japanese people are well known to be docile and respect authority. But, they are likely to reject Abe’s leadership for two reasons.

To begin with, the Japanese people will not tolerate Japan getting into once again into the folly of making wars; they suffered so much and so long from the holy war of Shintoist Japan.

Moreover, the Japanese people are not happy with Abenomics. In fact, according to a NHK survey in 2016, more hat 75% of them say that they have not benefited from Abenomics.

In other words, because of the Japanese people’s hatred for war and disappointment with Abe’s economic policy, LDP might have some difficulty of having the majority vote for the constitutional amendment at the referendum.

But what will happen, if Abe will get the majority votes at the referendum and gets the right to invade other countries?

It is not impossible that Abe might have the ambition of following the Tanaka memorial of 1927. If this happens, East Asia might once again go through the nightmare of war and destruction

But I hope that the Abe and his ultraconservative friends wake up from their out-of-date dream, think for the welfare of the ordinary people in Japan, remain peaceful country and work together with Korea, ASEAN countries and China for the security and the prosperity of the region and the world.

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Professor Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the East Asia Observatory (OAE) of the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM), Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM). He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Throughout Israel’s history, its ruling authorities have been responsible for virtually every form of indignity, degradation, barbarity, and other high crimes of war and against humanity imaginable.

Palestinians suffered most from the theft of 78% of their historic homeland in 1948, the remainder in June 1967 — living under brutalizing military occupation since that time, their fundamental rights lost under apartheid ruthlessness.

Supporters of peace, equity, and justice accused Israel of daily high crimes against the Palestinian people, including cold-blooded murder and other forms of state terror.

Israel gets away with mass murder and much more because the world community fails to hold it accountable, the US most of all — both countries partnering in each other’s high crimes.

Last week, Alison Weir’s If Americans Knew blog explained that surviving veterans of the USS Liberty June 1967 attack by Israel are banned from attending an American Legion National Convention.

Its website claims it’s committed “to helping our fellow veterans, service members and their families.”

No mention was made of blackballed USS Liberty vets — “the most decorated (ones) since World War II, (because of their) extraordinary record of heroism, Weir explained, adding:

“Legion personnel have repeatedly treated Liberty veterans, their families, and their friends with arrogance, disrespect, and even disdain that many feel demeans these American servicemen, their ship, their service to their country, and the memory of their 34 fellow crewmembers who never returned.”

On June 8, 1967, during Israel’s preemptive Six-Day War, an act of aggression, against regional Arab states planned years in advance, IDF pilots and navy attack boats provocatively struck the USS Liberty intelligence gathering ship, about 25.5 nautical miles northwest of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula in international waters.

The incident took 34 US lives, another 171 wounded, the vessel severely damaged, lucky to stay afloat.

It was deployed to monitor belligerents’ communications in response to Israeli aggression on Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq – not the other way around.

Israeli leaders and generals explained long after the fact that the Jewish state was unthreatened at the time.

In 1972, IDF chief General Haim Barlev said:

“We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the six-day war, and we had never thought of such a possibility.”

In 1978, IDF air force General Mordechai Hod said:

“Sixteen years of planning had gone into those initial eighty minutes. We lived with the plan. We slept on the plan. We ate the plan.  Constantly we perfected it.”

Knowing it faced no regional threats, Israel preemptively and aggressively attacked four nonbelligerent Arab states and its key US ally without just cause.

It was no accidental IDF attack on the USS Liberty. Israel knew the ship’s identity, its US flag clearly visible. Good weather conditions made it easy to spot.

Israeli warplanes circled overhead before attacking, at times low enough for US sailors to wave to its pilots.

They waved back before opening fire with rockets, machine guns, and napalm terror-bombs against the lightly armed vessel.

Parts of the deck were set ablaze. Torpedoes launched from IDF boats caused a 40-foot-wide hole in its hull, flooding lower compartments, causing the ship to list 10 degrees, a defenseless smoking hulk, lucky to avoid sinking.

The ship’s radio frequencies were jammed to prevent a distress call for help. When finally able to communicate, it was too late. The damage was done, the human toll testimony to Israeli viciousness.

Israel willfully attacked the US with impunity to this day, the incident officially buried down what Orwell called the “Memory Hole.”

USS Liberty survivors are treated like nonperson enemies of state by the American Legion and US war department. They were supposed to die, not live, to silence them.

Former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Thomas Moorer minced no words, saying:

“Those men were…betrayed and left to die by our own government.”

US navy signalman on the vessel Joe Meadors posted the following on the USS Liberty Veterans’ Association blog on what its survivors were told, saying:

“You will not discuss the attack with anyone. Once the Court of Inquiry findings are released you will not contradict them.”

“This order will remain in effect after you are discharged from the Navy. If you violate this order you will be prosecuted and will spend a considerable amount of time in a Federal Prison.”

“This order was repeated every day at quarters while we were in drydock in Malta.”

“If anyone tells of witnessing the deliberate machine gunning of our life rafts in the water, he runs the risk of doing time in a Federal prison.”

“If anyone tells of witnessing the use of unmarked aircraft or of the jamming of our radios on both US Navy tactical and international maritime distress frequencies, he runs the risk of doing time in a Federal prison.”

“We cannot talk about this among ourselves. We cannot talk about this with our family. We cannot talk about this with any counselor. We cannot talk about this at a meeting of any veterans group we may become involved with.”

“We cannot talk about this with our Congressional Delegation. We cannot talk about this at The American Legion National Convention.”

“We cannot talk about this with anyone. If we do, we risk Federal prison.”

“But we defy the Federal Government and speak about the attack anywhere we can.”

“But now we cannot talk about it at The American Legion National Convention.”

The organization “has a long record of trying to stifle USS Liberty survivors in our effort to tell the story of what happened on a US Navy ship.”

Alison Weir’s If Americans Knew and others on the right side of history won’t let this story die.

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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.

Does anyone remember what the Mueller investigation was all about? It was to determine whether the team surrounding candidate and then president-elect Donald Trump had colluded with a foreign power, presumed to be Russia.

It did not discover any such collaboration to get Trump elected president, but it did discover a foreign nation that had directly intervened with key players surrounding president-elect Trump to get them to do it a favor. That country was Israel, but somehow the media never quite managed to pull it all together even if leading public intellectual Noam Chomsky was able to, saying

“…if you’re interested in foreign interference in our elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies…”

This is how Jewish power works on behalf of the Jewish state. It is done right out in the open, at least if one knows where to look, and it operates by what the intelligence community would refer to as misdirection. That means that you never talk about Israel itself, except in a positive, laudatory fashion, you never mention Jewish power in America, and, finally, you have in reserve some fabricated threats that can be surfaced to dominate discussion and render Israel’s malign activity invisible.

Currently, the Russian threat is the enemy du jour. Even though we now know that “Russiagate” never existed in any serious form, it continues to be hyped by both the Democratic Party and by the accommodating media as the over-the-horizon threat to American democracy. It is now being claimed, minus any real evidence, that the Kremlin has a plan to ruin the upcoming 2020 election by way of nationwide tampering with the voting machines and the electronic tallying procedures. Oddly enough, the states, where the voting actually takes place, have not noticed any attempted Russian interference. As the story goes, if the Russians are successful, no one will have any confidence in the results and the American republican experiment will collapse in ruins.

No one is, of course, asking why Moscow would want to change a United States that, for all its power, is so politically inept and corrupt from top to bottom that it found itself unable to stage a coup in Venezuela. If the U.S. government collapses, it might well be replaced by something more authoritarian and, dare I say, more efficient, that would certainly pose a greater threat to Russia, so why would Putin want that?

Nevertheless, many people who should know better are hyping the threat. I sometimes peruse the Defense One website, a warmhearted place funded by defense contractors where all those people who want to blow up the world can share bon mots and grin about all the money they are making.

Last week I noted a particularly loathesome article on the site “Here’s what foreign interference will look like in 2020,” written by one Uri Friedman, who I presume to be – inevitably – an Israeli. Uri is very upset about all those evil countries that will be/might be interfering in the election, to include Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and the United Arab Emirates – though he does exclude the one country that is most likely to interfere, which is, of course, Israel. Uri is described as a “a senior associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Global Channel.” The Atlantic is in fact a media black hole, where all semi-literate journos of a globalist persuasion go to die.

Uri begins with the sub-headline,

“The incentives for foreign countries to meddle are much greater than in 2016, and the tactics could look dramatically different”

followed by:

“Russia is ‘doing it as we sit here.’ This stray line, buried in seven hours of testimony on Capitol Hill, wasn’t just Robert Mueller’s way of rebutting the charge that his investigation into the Kremlin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election amounted to a two-year, $32 million witch hunt. It was also a blunt message to the lawmakers arrayed before him, the journalists hunting for a bombshell, and the millions of Americans monitoring the proceedings: We’re all here fighting the last war, when we really should be bracing ourselves for the coming one. The Russians ‘expect to do it during the next campaign,’ the special counsel continued, and ‘many more countries are developing capability to replicate’ Moscow’s model.”

Friedman states that “It’s unclear whether the Russian government will reprise most infamous and innovative act in 2016: the hacking and leaking of emails from the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign” before moving on to the details of Moscow’s alleged subversion. He considers all allegations about Russia to be truthful even when they were never proven. The Democratic National Committee never cooperated with the FBI after their supposed hack, but instead used their own very suspect firm to do the investigation. And the Mueller investigation took that report at face value in spite of the company’s very clear conflict of interest.

That about sums up Friedman’s rather lengthy and convoluted argument, though he does omit any consideration of how many foreign elections the United States government acting through its intelligence agencies interferes in each year. Or indeed how much CIA Director John Brennan and the FBI’s James Comey themselves interfered in the 2016 election on behalf of Hillary Clinton. But he does speculate that

“This is the shoe that didn’t drop in 2016. A Senate Intelligence Committee report released in July found that while there’s no evidence that votes were altered or vote tallies manipulated during the past U.S. presidential election, the Russians likely targeted election systems in all 50 U.S. states, including research on ‘election-related web pages, voter ID information, election system software, and election service companies.’ In a couple of cases, the Russians succeeded in breaching state election infrastructure. Among the theories aired in the report about Moscow’s motivations is that it was cataloging ‘options or clandestine actions, holding them for use at a later date.’”

In other words, Friedman actually concedes that Russia didn’t do anything and the evidence that it is planning an attack for 2020 is thin to non-existent. But here in the United States, other foreign agents are hard at work to remove the two Muslim women elected to the House of Representatives in 2018 “for Jewish reasons.”

Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss reports how the tale of powerful Detroit region-based Jews raising money and pulling in political markers to try to defeat Rep. Rashida Tlaib has been circulating on the web. Per Weiss, Ron Kampeas of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on a gathering of Jewish power brokers in Detroit three weeks ago, arranged by a leading Jewish organization, at which they vowed to raise money to get rid of Tlaib because she supports a boycott of Israel. Tlaib is a Muslim woman and is a U.S. born and raised Palestinian-American.

Tlaib responded to the story on twitter:

“This type of hate never succeeds when the truth is on our side. Palestinians *are* dehumanized. Those who want to suppress the truth by trying to discredit me can #bringit. My sidy [grandmother in Palestine] taught me of the days where everyone lived side by side in peace & that is what I will fight for.”

This type of hate never succeeds when the truth is on our side. Palestinians *are* dehumanized. Those who want to suppress the truth by trying to discredit me can #bringit. My sidy taught me of the days where everyone lived side by side in peace & that is what I will fight for. https://t.co/7ff94O9VmH

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 8, 2019

The meeting was held at Bloomfield Hills Michigan branch office of the Jewish Federation, the largest Jewish group in the United States. It included many local Jewish leaders and potential political donors who are clearly not bothered by dual loyalty, but it did not appear to include anyone who actually lives in Tlaib’s district. Nevertheless, consensus was quickly established that “the Palestinian-American freshman in the 13th District [Tlaib] has got to go.”

One participant declared “We in this community will go against Rashida Tlaib” while another described how there had already been an approach to Brenda Jones, the Detroit City Council president, who had been defeated in 2018 by Tlaib. Money was being raised for her campaign, according to another participant.

The thinking in the room was that the African-American community in the 13th Congressional District would support a single black candidate — likely Jones — and that candidate would also be able to draw on considerable pro-Israel support for funding and favorable media coverage.

There was some pushback, with a rabbi telling Kampeas that a Jewish organized effort to remove Tlaib would be “catastrophic.” He observed that it would be such an open and blatant demonstration of Jewish power that it would be a major setback to the effort to keep younger, more liberal Jews, who are suspicious of power politics, engaged.

The rabbi was being naïve. Removing politicians who are not fully on board with the Israel agenda is normal practice and has been for many years. Just ask Senators William Fulbright and Chuck Percy or Congressmen Paul Findley, Pete McCloskey, and Cynthia McKinney. Criticizing Israel means not being reelected to Congress next time around, and it is not because Israel is greatly loved by voters. It is because Jewish-American citizens who are protective of Israel are willing to organize and collect money to support alternative candidates in any congressional district in the country, even where they do not reside, just as they plan on doing to Tlaib. Their goal is to defeat anyone who dares to say anything against Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang of war criminals or, even worse, suggest that Palestinians just might be human beings and might actually have rights.

Israel has the most powerful foreign policy lobby in Washington but it operates as freely as it does by pretending that it has no power at all, that American involvement in the Middle East is driven by U.S. interests. That is complete nonsense and has been so for over fifty years as the Lobby has tightened its grip. Until more congressmen like Rashida Tlaib get elected and begin to speak out, the corrupt status quo will, unfortunately, continue to prevail.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

In their hunger for US funding, Nicaraguan “human rights” NGO’s inflated the death toll during last year’s coup. Today, these groups are in a state of complete disarray.

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When political conflict results in people being killed – especially at the hands of a government – the deaths are not just personal tragedies, they become fodder for that government’s foes. This dynamic unfolded during last year’s attempted coup in Nicaragua, when the opposition tried and failed to bring down the elected government of President Daniel Ortega through a nationwide campaign of protest and violent sabotage.

When the regime change attempt was finally halted in July 2018, the opposition alleged through a triad of “human rights” NGO’s that the government had killed anywhere from 325 to 500 protesters.

This death toll was repeated in practically every international media report, on the floor of the US Congress, and in the halls of the Organization of American States, all to drum up support for sanctioning the Nicaraguan government.

The Guardian was among papers that reported now-discredited death counts without a shred of skepticism.

But a year later, the ‘human rights’ outfits whose reports generated these numbers have started to fall apart. And as their US funding dries up, their former staffers have begun to reveal the truth about their dubious data.

The Grayzone reported last month on the dramatic break-up of the Nicaragua Association for Human Rights (ANPDH), an opposition NGO whose board of directors confessed to exaggerating the death toll in order to rake in more US government money.

In a press conference this July that was totally ignored by corporate media, ANPDH ex-director Gustavo Bermúdez accused his former boss, Álvaro Leiva, of having “inflated the death toll.” Bermúdez said,

“We personally asked him where you got that figure; a friend called me saying to please get his grandmother who died of a heart attack off the list of people who were supposedly victims of the repression.”

But ANPDH group is only one part of a sizable human rights industry in Nicaragua that has functioned as a weapon of regime-change, putting politics over professionalism in order to secure their maximalist goals. And now that the coup they participated in has failed, their network is collapsing and their directors are positioned in a circular firing squad.

The opposition’s propaganda machine

Until recently, three local bodies claimed to monitor human rights, all doing so with foreign funding. Their work complimented regular reports by international bodies such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), and frequent interventions by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the UN Commission for Human Rights (UNCHR). Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan government operated own human rights office. Though the international bodies have enormous resources, the three small local bodies have had a disproportionate influence on them.

The oldest local NGO, the Permanent Commission on Human Rights (CPDH for its initials in Spanish) dates from before Nicaragua’s 1979 revolution, and receives funding from the US regime-change outfit, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). For its part, the Nicaragua Association for Human Rights (ANPDH) was set up in Miami with $3 million from the Reagan administration in the 1980s, with the aim of whitewashing the violence of the US-backed ‘Contra’ forces that were attempting to overthrow the Sandinista government. The third of these opposition NGO’s is CENIDH, or the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights. This group was set up with European funding in 1990, and is headed by an ex-FSLN member, Vilma Nuñez de Escorcia, who is one of the founders of the opposition MRS party.

None of these three bodies have made any attempt at political neutrality. Indeed, all were opposed to the Sandinista government well before last year’s coup attempt. But when the overthrow attempt began last April, they became a key part of the opposition’s propaganda machine.

CENIDH and ANPDH, in particular, published regular reports whose bias is made obvious by the language: CENIDH, for example, referred to the Nicaraguan government, elected in 2016, as the ‘dictatorial regime’ of Daniel Ortega and (vice-president) Rosario Murillo. This group’s initial report, issued on May 4, immediately exaggerated the numbers of deaths by recording six fatalities on the first day of the violence (April 19), all but one attributed to the government, when in fact there were only three: a police officer, a Sandinista defending a town hall from attack, and an uninvolved bystander. By late July, CENIDH’s fifth report logged 302 deaths, all attributed to “state terrorism.”

By the same date, ANPDH was reporting no less than 448 deaths in ‘civic protests’, a figure repeated by the BBC, MSN, news sources across the West and the United Nations Human Rights Council. By early September, ANPDH’s death count had reached 481, of which 455 were listed as “homicides.” 

ANPDH director Álvaro Leiva categorized the deaths with remarkable confidence and specificity: 152 died in “random executions,” Leiva claimed, while 116 were killed in “planned executions,” 86 in “disproportionate” clashes between government forces and civilians, 57 in “selective executions,” 36 deaths “appear to be planned and executed by hooded and armed paramilitaries,” and only eight were unexplained. By the end of the same month in which there was very little violence, ANPDH’s death toll – all blamed on the government – had reached 512. According to ANPDH, a further 1,300 people had “disappeared.”

By early July last year, the accounts published by the ‘human rights’ bodies had already started to unravel. Enrique Hendrix, a resident of Managua, went systematically through the death counts to produce a report he called Monopolizing death: Or how to frame a government by inflating a list of the dead.

By identifying each victim, he was able to spot double-counting and in most cases, determine the real cause of death. Hendrix found, for example, that CENIDH’s list included a suicide, traffic accidents and various duplications or unexplained deaths. Of the 167 deaths included in their early reports, just 31% (51 people) were actually protesters who had died in the conflict. In the case of ANPDH, which by that stage had logged 285 deaths, only 20% (58) were confirmed as protesters. A report released weeks later by the Nicaraguan National Assembly’s Truth Commission also found a huge gap between ANPDH’s figures and the real number of deaths arising from the conflict.

International “human rights” bodies echo opposition disinformation

Following the publication of Amnesty International’s unbalanced and poorly researched investigations of last year’s violence, a group of local researchers responded with a report called Dismissing the Truth. This paper examined in detail the casualty lists produced by the ‘human rights’ bodies relating to the central zone of Nicaragua, where considerable violence occurred in and around the roadblocks set up by the opposition and guarded by people with weapons.

Through a case-by-case examination, the researchers found that of the 16 reported deaths that were confirmed as conflict-related, 15 were killed as the result of opposition action (the victims consisted of five police officers, six government supporters or workers, and five unaffiliated citizens). For the 16th and final conflict-related death, responsibility was undetermined, and possibly was the result of crossfire.

In addition to these 16 deaths, ANPDH reported another 18 which, on investigation, were clearly not a result of the conflict. Causes of death included fights between armed opposition activists at roadblocks (e.g. over money), robberies, a road accident and two cases where names were duplicated. In other words, more than half the deaths recorded by ANPDH were wrongly attributed to the conflict. Nevertheless, ANPDH gave the impression that all 34 deaths resulted from government violence, when the evidence showed that only one possibly did so.

Shockingly, evidence of malpractice and outright mendacity by by local “human rights” bodies was largely ignored by the international bodies monitoring the casualties from last year’s conflict. The first report by the Organization of American States’ Inter American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) listed 212 deaths, but Hendrix found only 25% of those (52 deaths) were actual protesters. Nor did IACHR identify deaths which were opposition killings, thus giving the same impression as the local bodies that all, or most, of the deaths it counted were attributable to government repression.

By September, Amnesty International had pushed the death toll to 322, claiming that “most [occurred] at the hands of state agents.” It based its allegation on the counts by IACHR and the local bodies. Amnesty’s second report on the conflict absurdly condemned the government for “challenging the information put forward by human rights organizations,” as if they were above criticism and their casualty lists should have been accepted without a hint of skepticism.

Of course, the whole point of examining and challenging the lists was precisely because they were part of the propaganda drive against the Ortega government, referred to in practically every international media report on the crisis and cited as authoritative by international bodies, including detailed references to ANPDH by the UN Commission for Human Rights in its 2018 report on Nicaragua.

As late as last December, when the violence was months in the past, the IACHR’s secretary general Paulo Abrão was still denouncing Nicaragua as a “police state.” In a session attended by all three local opposition bodies (CPDH, CENIDH and ANPDH), he said that “not a day goes by” when the IAHCR fails to receive a report of a human rights abuse from the country, presumably via those organizations.

Yet by February 2019, the Truth Commission was able to issue a final report on the death toll from the attempted coup which, after exhaustive analysis of the different sources, confirmed the total number of conflict-related deaths as 253 – less than half that claimed by ANPDH six months before. Those deaths consisted of 31 known supporters of the opposition, 48 probable or actual Sandinista supporters, 22 police and the remainder (152) of unknown affiliation.

Things fall apart

Image on the right: ANPDH board member and anti-Ortega activist Gustavo Bermúdez accused his group’s director, Álvaro Leiva, of embezzlement and fraud on a massive scale

But 2019 has turned out to be a bad year for the three ‘human rights’ bodies. ANPDH and CENIDH were found by the government to have violated their own statutes and their registration as NGOs was terminated. Some of their functionaries fled to Costa Rica. CPDH continues, but its lawyer, María Oviedo, was arrested recently when, in a visit to a police station in support of a leading opposition member who had been found to have an unregistered firearm, she slapped a police officer. The officials of the other two bodies are fighting among themselves. When CENIDH director Gonzalo Carrión tried to open a new NGO in Costa Rica, he was denied support by ex-colleagues who feared he would pocket the foreign donations and use them for his own purposes.

The fate of the former staff members of ANPDH is most disturbing, however. The former general secretary, Álvaro Leiva, was given asylum in Costa Rica last October, a move welcomed by the IAHCR’s Paulo Abrão, who awarded him “protective measures” this June.

However, as The Grayzone reported, when Leiva attempted to open a new NGO in Costa Rica, his former colleagues angrily accused him of appropriating funds supplied by US bodies such as the NED. More importantly, they revealed that Leiva personally ordered them to inflate ANPDH’s casualty counts last year because he believed padding the death tolls would help secure extra funding from the US. ANPDH director Gustavo Bermúdez, in a press conference ignored by corporate media, said:

“Álvaro Leiva inflated the death toll. We personally asked him where you got that figure; a friend called me saying to please get his grandmother who died of a heart attack off the list of people who were supposedly victims of the repression.”

ANPDH received over $88,000 from the NED, and $348,000 from other US sources last year. CPDH received $180,000 from the NED in 2018 alone, out of NED spending of $1.8 million spent that year to promote Nicaragua’s opposition bodies.

Today I asked USAID’s Mark Green about the lethal violence of the opposition his agency backs in Nicaragua and the proximity of one the favorite US grantees, Felix Maradiaga, to armed elements. As expected, he totally ducked the question. #NicaraguaQuierePaz pic.twitter.com/Oc2UEYcLpB

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) August 8, 2018

The NED and USAID clearly viewed Nicaraguan organizations working in the human rights field as one of the most crucial elements of Washington’s regime-change agenda. By incentivizing NGO’s to produce anti-government disinformation, the US set the stage for their public collapse of their credibility.

Critics of the Contras transform into soft coup supporters

Allen Weinstein, a founding member of the NED told the Washington Post in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly twenty-five years ago by the CIA.” It is therefore hardly surprising that among the biggest recipients of NED funding in Latin America have been NGO’s operating in nations that John Bolton has labelled the “troika of tyranny”: Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela.

And while the NED dumped US money into supposedly neutral human rights bodies that functioned as regime-change weapons, the international media provided them with an uncritical platform for disseminating their propaganda without ever mentioning the source of their funding.

It was not always this way, however. Back in 1989, Human Rights Watch slammed ANPDH as “for all intents and purposes a US State Department funded arm of the Nicaraguan Resistance,” referring to the CIA-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinista government. The left-leaning political magazine Envío was also highly critical of both CPDH and ANPDH in the 1980s. It described Lino Hernández, then director of the CPDH, as coming from a “far right” background. Commenting on the $3 million ANPDH received from the US government, the magazine asked

“What kind of human rights watchdogging has the ANPDH done with all this money? Hardly a whimper, much less a bark.”

A NGO prominent at the time, the Catholic Institute for International Relations, pointed out that ANPDH did not even set up a Nicaragua office until after the Sandinistas left power in 1990. In its report on a Contra attack in which women and a baby had its throat slit, ANPDH exonerated the Contra forces involved. Paul Laverty, a Nicaragua-based human rights lawyer, also strongly criticised CPDH for ignoring atrocities by the Contras.

Skepticism was not only reserved for the local “human rights” bodies. Envío was critical of Human Rights Watch and, even more so, of Amnesty International, accusing both of a “lack of thoroughness” and criticizing Amnesty for its “extremely sloppy investigation” and “unquestioning reliance” on reports from biased organizations like CPDH. While working for Scottish Medical Aid for Nicaragua, Laverty published a damning critique of Amnesty’s assessment of human rights under the 1979-1990 Sandinista government, concluding that their accusations of harsh treatment of political prisoners were exaggerated or, at worst, entirely unfounded.

Thirty years later, critical thinking about the real role of Nicaraguan “human rights” NGO’s in stirring up regime-change is practically off limits. When ANPDH and CENIDH lost their NGO registration last year, HRW complained that,

“Public officials repeatedly made stigmatizing statements to undermine the credibility of [human rights] defenders.”

As noted earlier, Amnesty does not even accept the Nicaraguan government’s right to analyze the death counts produced by human rights bodies. Envío magazine, meanwhile, has become an unflinching critic of the Ortega government and supporter of CENIDH; Paul Laverty, now a screenwriter famous for his work with Ken Loach, has lent support to opposition members touring Europe to promote their anti-Sandinista message.

Raking in millions to advance empire

Meanwhile, human rights has become a lucrative and glitzy business. HRW, for example, has 450 staff members and a budget of over $90 million, while Amnesty’s global budget reaches almost $300 million. While HRW relies heavily on the fortune of anti-communist billionaire George Soros, Amnesty gains much of its budget from small donations, and its need to maintain its profile has brought multiple criticisms of its “toxic” working culture.

Both organizations have been criticized for their alignment with US government policy in Latin America, where their attention focuses particularly on the countries in Bolton’s “troika of tyranny” while downplaying or ignoring the huge damage caused to people in those countries by US intervention. (AI’s most recent, 56-page report on Venezuela, Hunger for Justice, only has the briefest reference to US sanctions).

After this meeting, Amnesty issued a denunciatory report ignoring the US economic war on Venezuela and a statement supporting Trump's interventionist "aid" sham. No surprise to seem them pumping up another R2P extravaganza against a regime change target. https://t.co/4hgayBhcPI https://t.co/mAfwqCzeM7

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) February 21, 2019

In the case of Nicaragua, the local ‘human rights’ bodies provided HRW and AI with evidence that fit their own prejudices about the Ortega government. While these local bodies depended on publicity from HRW and AI to maintain credibility, they also needed to demonstrate to US government organizations like the NED that they were useful regime-change weapons.

Thanks to this toxic dynamic, CDPH, ANPDH and CENIDH are in complete disarray, and their former staffers are spilling the beans about the bogus death tolls they spun out to justify US funding. A year after they helped stoke a coup, the only regime that is changing is their own.

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John Perry is a writer based in Masaya, Nicaragua whose work has appeared in the Nation, the London Review of Books, and many other publications.

All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated

The Hong Kong protests are escalating, just as the US-China trade war is also escalating. None of this is out of the blue. For quite some time now, the US has been shifting the focus of its hegemonic and imperial ambitions towards China, recognizing it – even more than Russia – as its main rival superpower. Author Graham Allen published his 2017 book entitled Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? addressing growing US-China tension and the potential for a future US-China war. James Corbett also offered his analysis.

The term Thucydides trap is derived from ancient Greece to describe a situation when a rising power gains enough strength to challenge and disturb the existing ruling power. With this phenomenon in mind, let’s take a look at the background to the current US-China trade war (which is becoming more bitter and intense by the week) and the Hong Kong Protests.

Step 1: Identifying the Enemy

Quotes from top US officials, military and non-military alike, show that China has gradually been replacing Russia as the #1 enemy, although this is not clear cut; there is still a lot of hatred towards and fear of Russia. In 2018, the USA changed its official defense strategy. Terrorism was no longer the #1 threat and was replaced by Russia and China. The DoD report accused China of wielding predatory economics and building fake islands in the South China Sea to intimidate nearby countries. Admiral Harry Harris, former commander of the US Pacific Command, said this about China in 2018:

“China remains our biggest long-term challenge. Without focused involvement and engagement by the United States, and our allies and partners, China will realize its dream of hegemony in Asia.”

He also said this:

“China’s intent is crystal clear. We ignore it at our peril. I’m concerned China will now work to undermine the international rules-based order … China’s impressive military build-up could soon challenge the United States across almost every domain.”

Earlier this year, DNI (Director of National Intelligence) Dan Coats said:

“[The] rule of law, international norms, and fairness in trade and international engagements is not the Chinese model … Chinese leaders will increasingly seek to assert China’s model of authoritarian capitalism as an alternative—and implicitly superior—development path abroad, exacerbating great-power competition that could threaten international support for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.”

Previously in 2018 Coats had followed Trump’s lead by blaming China for interfering in US elections (where have I heard that one before?). He stated:

“[China is targeting] state and local governments and officials … It is trying to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy, and uses investments and other incentives to expand its influence.”

All this rhetoric comes against a backdrop of intertwined economies, where many US companies have outsourced and offshored their labor to China. The arrangement seems to have been working pretty well for the Chinese factory owners, US companies and US consumers; it seems the real loser is the Chinese laborer who has to work incredibly long hours each week in horrible conditions, sometimes in factories with ‘suicide nets’ to prevent people from killing themselves when they jump.

Step 2: The Pivot to Asia

Militarily, the first stage of realigning US forces towards tackling China was the Obama’s Pivot to Asia which I discussed in this 2015 article Pivot to Asia: Ongoing US Militarization of Pacific An Alarming Trend. This involved the massive shift of US forces to the Pacific – 60% of US Air Force and Navy resources were moved from the Middle East to the Pacific.

Step 3: Claiming ‘Freedom of Navigation’ as a Pretext for Provocation

On multiple occasions, the US has made a point of sailing its ships through Chinese waters (or disputed waters near China) and then trying to claim that it was innocently sailing there due to freedom of navigation. To free thinkers, it’s transparently obvious that these stunts are not about navigation but rather provocation. Just last Friday (August 23rd), the USS Green Bay, an amphibious transport dock ship, sailed through the Taiwan Strait that separates China from the island of Taiwan. Like Hong Kong, Taiwan is an island which is part of China through retains some autonomy in the way it rules. The US has likewise sailed its warships many times (September 2018, May 2019) near the Spratly Islands, which China claims it owns but which are still under international dispute. On the earlier occasion, the guided-missile destroyer Decatur nearly collided with an oncoming Chinese warship.

Step 4: Targeting Chinese Institutions, Initiatives and Projects

The US has taken a dim view of practically every Chinese effort to develop itself in the last decade. The US has opposed China’s gigantic OBR (One Belt, One Road) Initiative which has been dubbed the New Silk Road. The US has directed propaganda against BRICS, China’s SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), its development bank and many other trade initiatives. The US accuses China of trying to control the world, yet such accusations must be difficult to receive with a straight face given that the US routinely threatens both its allies and enemies with economic warfare, sanctions, trade wars, governmental overthrow, invasion or even nuclear annihilation if they don’t toe the line.

Step 5: Funding and Training Muslim Uyghurs – Sometimes as Part of ISIS

You may not have heard of them, but there is a Chinese minority group known as the Uyghurs or Uighurs. Many are Muslim and of Turkic ethnicity. They live in the semi-autonomous region of north-west China in a province called Xinjiang. Well, guess what? The USG has been funding them for various reasons. Marco Rubio, Zionist neocon and warhawk, sponsored this 2018 bill pushing the US to get involved. Rubio, for those who don’t recall, was the very same guy itching for war with Venezuela earlier this year in 2019. He was also the one who mysteriously happened to find out before almost anyone else that Venezuelans’ power grid has been taken down. Hmmm. However, much of the funding is done under-the-table by the soft power network of NGOs, illustrious among them the National Endowment for Democracy of NWO (New World Order) insider George Soros. The UHRP (Uyghur Human Rights Project) admits on its website that it was “founded by the Uyghur American Association (UAA) in 2004 with a supporting grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).”

Since when does the USG deeply care about oppressed minorities in other nations? It’s a rhetorical question, but I’ll answer it this time: if – and only if – US interests are aligned with that minority, and for the (usually short) time period the interests are aligned.

In his article Turkish-Uyghur Terror Inc. – America’s Other Al Qaeda, geopolitical author Tony Cartalucci writes:

“The alleged “struggle” by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang, referred to by the terrorists and their foreign sponsors as “East Turkistan,” consists of two essential components – a foreign harbored political front including the Washington D.C. and Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and a militant front clearly backed by the US and NATO through intermediary groups like Turkey’s Grey Wolves … Encouraging separatism in China’s western Xinjiang region, if successful, would carve off a substantial amount of territory. In conjunction with US-backed separatism in China’s Tibet region, an immense buffer region stands to be created that would virtually isolate China from Central Asia.”

So, just as the US funded and trained Operation Gladio warriors to fight communism in Europe, Mujahideen fighters to battle the USSR, ISIS to battle Syria, it is also preparing for war with China by funding and training the ‘separatists’, whoever they may be, in this case the Uyghurs. In another article, all the way back in 2014, Cartalucci quoted a Reuters article that admitted that ISIS was training the Uyghurs:

“Chinese militants from the western region of Xinjiang have fled from the country to get “terrorist training” from Islamic State group fighters for attacks at home, state media reported on Monday.”

Step 6: Initiating a Trade War

There is no doubt that it was the US under Trump who initiated the US-China trade war. Even before he took office, Trump took to twitter bashing China for its supposed economic exploitation of the US. Trump says the objective is a better trade deal with China to benefit all Americans, but this trade war is producing a massive fallout and host of negative effects for American consumers, farmers and manufacturers. Chris Kanthan writes:

“How about China’s economy? Are Trump’s tariffs crushing the Chinese economy? Not really. During Jan-May 2019, China’s exports to the US fell about 5%, but China’s exports to the EU rose more than 14%. And, guess what, EU is China’s #1 trading partner (and ASEAN is the #2 trade partner), while the US is #3. So, China keeps growing at a healthy pace — even the IMF predicts a healthy 6.2% real GDP growth for China this year!

But here’s the kicker. While China’s exports to the US fell 4.8%, the reverse — US exports to China — fell by a whopping 24% (for the first five months of 2019). So, US exporters and farmers are hurting real bad. And Trump cannot win re-election without the support of those “great soybean/corn/pork farmers.””

Step 7: Attacking Huawei, China’s Leading Cell Phone/Wireless Company

The Trump Admin has come out with all guns blazing against Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant, which is now the 2nd biggest smartphone producer in the world, second only to Apple and within striking distance of them.  The USG has accused Huawei of assisting Chinese Intelligence by placing backdoors in its software and hardware that allow surveillance by Chinese authorities. Trump has even pressured allies like the UK to stop using Huawei altogether, despite the fact that Britain relies heavily of Huawei for its infrastructure. The attacks against Huawei escalated on December 1st 2018, when the US orchestrated a totally illegal kidnapping and illegal detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s CFO (Chief Financial Officer). Wanzhou is still being held against her will in Canada on US orders.

Step 8: Approving $8 Billion Deal to Sell F-16 Fighter Jets to Taiwan

Whether its Xinjiang (Uyghurs), Taiwan or Hong Kong, the US is an expert at destabilizing a country by targeting areas where there is dissent. Recently on August 20th, 2019, the USG announced its intentionto sell Taiwan 66 F-16 C/D Block 70 aircraft, related equipment and support for an estimated $8 billion. This move infuriated China which considers Taiwan a Chinese region or states, not a separate nation.

Step 9: Instigating a Color Revolution by way of the Hong Kong Protests

One of the most significant examples of US aggression against China is the instigation of a color protest or color revolution in Hong Kong. The aim is to provoke China into reacting harshly and violently, which would reinforce the Western perception that China is heavy-handed, tyrannical and totalitarian. China has already moved troops to its southern mainland border, just across the water from Hong Kong. It is possible that another US objective is to push the protestors into declaring Hong Kong independent of China. There are some who say the Hong Kong protests are a grassroots affair. There is usually a grassroots element to many of these protests, but almost always the bigger factor in the shadows is US interference (or US-UK, or US-UK-Israeli, interference). Here is a very telling comment about the Hong Kong protests found under the article Violent Protests In Hong Kong Reach Their Last Stage on the MoonOfAlabama.org website:

“The Extradition Law revision that started this was only a convenient proxy for those wanting chaos in HK to create chaos. The instigators behind the initial protest march are the same ones who started Occupy Central five years ago. They are the ones who huddle with operatives from US/UK Consulates, who travelled to the Washington/London/Brussel/Taipei, etc. to see politicians and plot strategies, to arrange for funding, and to recruit dare devils for the carnage. Lucky for them that HK was ripe for such shenanigans because HKers in general are sullen over their loss of superiority complex against mainland Chinese, brainwashed subconsciously through schools and churches about CCP wickedness, and desperately stressed under HK’s economic realities. Most of the protesters don’t even know what the Extradition Law is all about …”

“The instigators, however, are well versed in all the intricacies. They know who they can easily recruit and order to do violence … they know the fifth column within the government and business … If large casualties result what do they care? … [T]hey know their foreign backers are only too glad to see Chinese killing Chinese …”

“By the way, the US Consulate in HK has over 1,000 on payroll (an estimated 200 CIA agents), UK’s is over 500 (among them MI6 agents). That size of consulate in a city of less than 400 sq. miles of land (over half of which mountainous) is a laughable anomaly, wouldn’t you think? What are they all there for?”

And yes, there is proof. The senior US consulate member Julie Eadeh was photographed secretly meeting with the top 2 leaders of the Hong Kong protests, Joshua Wong and Nathan Law.

Remember – the NED now does overtly what the CIA did covertly decades ago. Allen Weinstein, one of the founders of NED, confessed that “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

Conclusion: Fomenting the US-China War

China is hardly a bastion of freedom. The extent of government surveillance, censorship and control is extreme and tyrannical. It is not surprising that NWO insiders such as the late David Rockefeller extolled China as a paradigm for society; it’s the kind of hierarchical, dictatorial example the NWO controllers want for a world government. This article is by no means praising China, but rather to point out that, right now, it is the victim of US aggression. The very same tactics of subversion the US has been using for decades on all sorts of countries – Russia, Iran, Guatemala, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. – it is now using against China with the Hong Kong protests. Are some of the protestors genuine? Surely. The truth is never black-and-white, but always shades of gray. However, the Hong Kong protests can be seen as a color protest and part of the bigger US geopolitical strategy to encircle and target China, to ward off a rising power and to prepare itself for a possible WW3 scenario.

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

Sources

*https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-320-echoes-of-wwi-china-the-us-and-the-next-great-war/

*https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf

*https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/30/politics/harry-harris-pacific-command-north-korea-china-intl/index.html

*https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/16/admiral-warns-us-must-prepare-for-possibility-of-war-with-china

*https://freebeacon.com/national-security/dni-beijing-set-for-ideological-battle-with-u-s/

*https://www.rt.com/usa/440236-china-next-enemy-america/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/pivot-to-asia-militarization-of-pacific/

*https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-military/two-us-warships-sail-in-disputed-south-china-sea-idUSKCN1SC085

*https://www.navytimes.com/news/your-navy/2019/02/11/two-navy-warships-sailed-through-disputed-south-china-sea-waters-on-monday/

*https://www.rubio.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/1045ec83-597c-4418-9299-cb5973dd24c8/997C1A8CB02CAABCEB7A415B11E8A6A2.dav18g88.pdf

*https://uhrp.org/about

*https://journal-neo.org/2015/09/23/turkish-uyghur-terror-inc-americas-other-al-qaeda/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/top-10-proofs-isis-us-israeli-creation/

*https://journal-neo.org/2014/10/21/turmoil-in-hong-kong-terrorism-in-xinjiang-america-s-covert-war-on-china/

*https://worldaffairs.blog/2019/07/01/how-and-why-trump-folded-in-the-trade-war-with-china/

*https://dsca.mil/major-arms-sales/taipei-economic-and-cultural-representative-office-united-states-tecro-f-16cd-block

*https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/08/violent-protests-in-hong-kong-reach-their-last-stage.html

*https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/sesame-credit-gamification-control/

All images in this article are from the author

A future without independent media leaves us with an upside down reality where according to the corporate media “NATO deserves a Nobel Peace Prize”, and where “nuclear weapons and wars make us safer”.

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Nestlé and the Privatization of Water

By Franklin Frederick, August 27, 2019

Last February, the Government of Switzerland announced the creation of a Foundation in Geneva, under the name ‘Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator’ (GSDA). The purpose of this new foundation is to regulate new technologies, from drones and automatic cars to genetic engineering, which are examples mentioned by the Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis at the public launch of this initiative.

Are Sanders and Warren Throwing a Lifeline to the Military-Industrial Complex?

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, August 27, 2019

Among the frontrunners in the Democratic Party presidential primary, Senators Warren and Sanders not only have the most progressive domestic agenda, but also the most anti-war, pro-diplomacy foreign policy agenda. The sharpest distinction between them is that Sanders has voted against over 80% of recent record military spending bills in the Senate, while Warren has voted for two thirds of them. 

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

By Tina Renier, August 27, 2019

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

Tinderbox Earth: The Significance of the Amazon and Siberian Fires

By Dr. Andrew Glikson, August 27, 2019

As fires rage across tens of thousands square km the Amazon forest, dubbed the Planet’s lungs, producing some 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, with some 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, where fires on such a scale are uncommon, as well as through Siberia, Alaska, Greenland,  southern Europe and elsewhere, they herald a world where increasing temperatures and droughts overwhelm original habitats, flora and fauna.

World Extreme Weather: Is it Man or Something Else?

By F. William Engdahl, August 27, 2019

Our planet seems to be in a growing crisis in terms of agriculture and crop production related to unusual weather shifts. Many reports in recent months use the term “extreme weather” to describe record heat across Europe this summer, record flooding in US Midwest farm states, or record drought across India and major parts of Africa and China.

America’s Authoritarian Use of the Word “Authoritarianism”

By Dr. Dennis Etler, August 27, 2019

We see the word “authoritarianism” all over the US media, a blanket term employed to describe countries that the United States government currently considers as threats to its interests.

The West Is Spinning the “Cultural Genocide” of Macedonians

By Bill Nicholov, August 26, 2019

What they could be doing, instead, is preventing the forced name and identity change on Macedonia and Macedonians. Yes, the one initiated by Greece, and executed by the West.

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The Amazon Rainforest biome has an extension of about 6.7 million square kilometers shared between Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam and the French Guyana. Some 62% of it is in Brazil, where 84% of its original area at the time of the arrival of the Portuguese in 1500 A.D. are preserved. This mostly untouched area is about the size of France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Holland, Italy, Spain and Portugal together; if it were a country, it would be the world seventh in extension, larger than India.

The Amazon Rainforest must not be confused with the Legal Amazon (Amazônia Legal), a geographical region delimited for the purpose of establishing special tax regimes in order to encourage economic activities in the nine Northern Brazilian states. These states comprise 61% of the national territory but harbor less than 13% of the country’s population, and account for less than 8% of Brazil’s GDP. Their low living standards can be assessed by the fact that only 13% of its urban inhabitants have access to sewage systems; a great part of the 4 million Brazilians who do not have a simple toilet at home live there. The region also holds significant parts of two other Brazilian biomes, the Cerrado (savannah) and the Pantanal (wetlands). The Legal Amazon covers 5.1 million sq.km; the Brazilian part of the Rainforest, 4.2 million sq.km.

The Rainforest is not the “lungs of the world”; its vegetal and animal biotas consume all the photosynthesis-generated oxygen in their process of respiration (yes, plants do breathe), so the net budget is near zero. (And after all, lungs do not produce oxygen.)

It is not a functional “carbon sink” either, because as a stable climax ecosystem its net carbon budget is also close to zero (except when it burns). Anyway, if people are worried about carbon, they should support the clearing of the forest and its replacement by the secondary regeneration vegetation (called “capoeira”) instead, that captures the atmospheric carbon during its growth, indeed. By the way, between 2008 and 2012, the area of “capoeiras” increased two and a half faster than the area of cleared forest (there isn’t more recent data). (Disclaimer: I’m not suggesting this course of action.)

The Rainforest is obviously relevant for the biogeochemical cycles of the biosphere but it does not have any significant impact upon the world climate. Its chief contribution for the atmospheric dynamics is to recycle half of the rainwater coming westwards from the Atlantic Ocean back to the atmosphere by means of evapotranspiration, forming a water vapor flow that is partly re-directed southward. This process is important for the Rainforest itself and its surroundings but its influence can hardly be regarded as being global.

The much-ballyhooed projections about a feared “tipping point” of deforestation beyond which the Rainforest would supposedly suffer an irreversible “dieback” are just products of mathematical models without factual evidence. These models may be useful as academic drills but should not be the turf of policymaking. If other biomes are useful for comparison, the Atlantic Forest (Mata Atlântica), with a biodiversity similar to the Rainforest, covered 1.3 million sq.km of the Brazilian territory along the coast in the 16^th century, and has lost over 80% of its original area since but it has not suffered such a “dieback” so far. The hypothetical deforestation “tipping point” for the rainforest is 20%, a number that grants appealing apocalyptic forecasts and shocking media headlines but does not fit with the hard facts and common sense.

The annual deforestation rates in the Legal Amazon have been decreasing steadily since the last decade, and are now well under 10,000 sq.km a year. Taking into account that much of this deforestation occurs in the Cerrado, a hypothetical linear projection using such rates suggests that it would take well over 400 years to clear the Rainforest entirely – an absurd scenario that is unimaginable by anyone in their right mind except some delusional and uninformed radical environmentalists, anyway.

Much of the deforestation occurs in private properties and government-sponsored settlement areas for small family farmers, meaning that it is legal. The Brazilian 2012 Forest Code allows that 20% of the property areas in the Rainforest and 50% in the Cerrado be cleared for economic use. Unfortunately, the deforestation rates regularly trumpeted in the media do not make this needed distinction.

The number of fires in the Legal Amazon (including the Cerrado) has also been falling since the record years of 2004-05; the projections for 2019 indicate that they will reach half or so the numbers of those years. A good deal of such fires occur in private properties where people have been using fire as a method of cleaning the terrain for centuries; it’s not the best method but it is what they have access to. It’s relevant to notice that most of the fires are not located in the Rainforest itself but in its Southern transition zone to the Cerrado and in the Cerrado itself, as can be seen in the Fire Information for Resource Management System website (See this – the Rainforest is roughly delimited by the huge dark green and light green area north of parallel 15^oS). Incidentally, one can also observe that Brazil is far from being alone in the current worldwide fire season.

There are over 25 million people living in the Legal Amazon, most of them in precarious socio-economic conditions. The vast majority of people who cut trees or make use of fire are not criminals but do it because they need to eke out a living somehow (of course, there are criminals that manage to avoid the law enforcement and the due punishment, like everywhere else). Keeping in mind the respective proportions, nobody but some stubborn environmentalists is regarding the Germans as environmental criminals because the remnants of the Hambach Forest near Köln are intended to be felled by the RWE energy company, in order to get the lignite in the subsoil needed to fuel thermoelectric plants, after chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the closing of several of the country’s nuclear plants for purely political reasons.

Brazil is a developing country and is still struggling to find its way towards the full development of its human and natural resources. For the Amazon region, the path is not “preserving” it as a gigantic combo of botanic garden and zoo, as many people seem to think naively. It must begin with the long overdue tasks of land rights regularization, ecological-economic zoning, adding value to the local productions and resources with the best techniques available, improving and expanding the infrastructure needed to enable quality of life gains for the local populations and a massive effort of research and development of its vast biodiversity resources, combining research institutions, private enterprises and the precious traditional knowledge of its inhabitants. In short, a kind of an Industrial Amazon 4.0, an impulse capable of bringing most of its inhabitants to the levels of wellbeing permitted by the 21^st century knowledge. All this can and must be done with the needed care for the environment and, hopefully, we will be able to put this rational agenda in practice but a fundamental prerequisite for this is to dispel the myths and hysteria about the region and its development.

So, people, including foreign leaders and personalities, should inform themselves better before ridiculously blaming Brazil of “threatening the world climate”, or asking for sanctions against the country (mostly motivated by political and economical reasons). And the same goes for many Brazilians who are always willing to reverberate any criticisms against the country coming from abroad, regardless of their seriousness or lack thereof.

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Geraldo Luís Lino is a Brazilian geologist, former environmental consultant and co-founder and director of the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIa – www.msiainforma.org); e-mail: [email protected]. 

Last February, the Government of Switzerland announced the creation of a Foundation in Geneva, under the name ‘Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator’ (GSDA). The purpose of this new foundation is to regulate new technologies, from drones and automatic cars to genetic engineering, which are examples mentioned by the Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis at the public launch of this initiative. According to Cassis, new technologies are developing very fast and this Foundation must ‘anticipate’ the consequences of these advances for society and politics. The Foundation will also be a bridge between the scientific and diplomatic communities, hence its strategic placement in Geneva, which houses several international organizations, from the UN to the World Trade Organization.

The Swiss Foreign Ministry will contribute 3 million Swiss francs – just over 3 million dollars – to the Foundation’s initial phase from 2019 to 2022. The city and the Canton of Geneva will each contribute 300,000 Swiss francs for the same period and contributions from the private sector are also expected.

As President of this new Foundation, the former CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe (image right) was chosen. The Vice-President is Patrick Aebischer, the former President of the Lausanne Federal Institute of Technology – EPFL is the French acronym. Patrick Aebischer has also been a member of the Nestlé Health Science Steering Committee since 2015, founded in 2011 by Nestlé and located right on the EPFL campus.

The choice of Peter Brabeck and Patrick Aebischer – both with strong connections to Nestlé – to run this new foundation has a very clear rationale. It primarily represents the recognition of Nestlé’s power within the Swiss Government – a former Nestlé CEO is, by definition, competent to drive this initiative. More upsettingly, Peter Brabeck’s choice is yet another example of the ever-closer “partnership” between governments and large transnational corporations, leading to the establishment of an international corporate oligarchy that is gradually taking over power within Western democracies.

Amply documented, Nestlé as a private corporate entity has battled various form of State regulation, the best-known case being the regulation of infant food marketing standards, particularly milk powder. The conflict between Nestlé under the direction of Peter Brabeck and the IBFAN – International Baby Food Action Network – is well known. (See the Muller report)

But the biggest irony – and the biggest danger – is that Brabeck’s choice to chair this Foundation indicates that the real purpose of this initiative is precisely to prevent any form of regulation by the government that might impose  limits on profits from the technological advances of the private sector.

It is also not expected that this Foundation will defend any protection of the public sphere or the environment against possible threats posed to society by new technological advances. On the contrary, Brabeck’s choice indicates that this Foundation’s primary objective is to defend and support  the private sector. What can be expected from this Foundation are proposals for self-regulation by the private sector in  cases of overly explicit conflicts, which is nothing effective. Since this Foundation is an initiative of the Government of Switzerland – certainly after talks with the private sector – and is located in Geneva, it will have an enormous influence  and I believe that organized social movements must carefully follow the future steps of this Foundation, as it embodies a huge threat to democracy.

Just a few months after the launch of this new Foundation, the Government of Switzerland announced that Christian Frutiger (image left), Nestlé’s current Global Head of Public Affairs, will soon take over the Vice-Presidency of the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation – SDC – which is the Swiss Government Agency responsible for development aid projects in other countries. Another example of the growing collaboration between the private sector and the government, but this time in a much more sensitive area: development cooperation.

This constitutes yet another example of the growing influence and presence  of Nestlé within the Government of Switzerland. This presence is neither new nor recent, and it is important to remember that the SDC not only supported the creation of the Water Resources Group – WRG – the initiative of Nestlé, Coca-Cola and Pepsi to privatize water, topics on  which I’ve written a few articles – (see this) as the SDC Director himself is a member of the WRG Governance Board.

The contradiction of the fact that Switzerland has one of the best public sanitation and water distribution services in the world, but uses Swiss citizens’ tax money to support water privatization in other countries through the SDC partnership with Nestlé, does not seem to be a problem.

The budget of Switzerland’s international cooperation for the period 2017-2020 is around 6.635 billion francs – a little over 6.730 billion dollars. As Deputy Director, Christian Frutiger will have a great deal of influence over decisions regarding the application of part of this budget. Most importantly, as Deputy Director, Frutiger will be directly responsible for the SDC’s ‘Global Cooperation’ Division and for the WATER program. Christian Frutiger started his career at Nestlé in 2007 as a Public Affairs Manager after working at the International Red Cross.

In 2006, Nestlé’s “Pure Life” bottled water brand became its most profitable brand and in 2007, with the purchase of the Sources Minérales Henniez S.A. group,

Nestlé became the leading company in bottled water within the Swiss market. In 2008, just a decade after its release, “Pure Life” became the world’s top-selling brand of bottled water. Within this context, it was only natural that Christian Frutiger’s work at Nestlé should focus on the topic of WATER.

In 2008, the Nestlé espionage scandal broke out in Switzerland. A  Swiss TV journalist denounced in a program that Nestlé hired security firm SECURITAS to infiltrate spies within Nestlé-critical groups within Switzerland, particularly the ATTAC group. Proven espionage took place between 2002 and 2003 but there is evidence of spying until 2006. ATTAC filed a lawsuit against Nestlé and SECURITAS, and in 2013, the Swiss court finally condemned Nestlé for organizing this espionage operation, indicating the involvement of at least four company directors in the operation.

The fact that Nestlé organized an illegal espionage operation within Switzerland and was condemned by the Swiss courts for doing this had no effect on the company’s relations with the Swiss Government and especially with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, as one would expect. No one asked Nestlé’s CEO Peter Brabeck then if his company was capable of such actions within Switzerland itself, what could we expect from the behaviour of the same company in other countries of weaker democratic guarantees?

Infiltrating undercover agents under  false identitites to spy the ATTAC gorup is, to say the least, grossly unethical. But it seems that ethics was not one of the criteria that the SDC took into account when hiring Christian Frutiger who, throughout this episode, kept silent, never apologized to the people who were spied on by the company he worked for, and did everything to minimize the impact of the problem, which means that he complied with his employer’s lack of ethics. But the appointment of Frutiger as Deputy Director of the SDC points to much deeper and far-reaching problems, especially with regard to WATER, as it seems clear to me that his choice for this position is all about this topic.

Peter Brabeck’s appointment to chair the new foundation of the Swiss Government in Geneva and Christian Frutiger’s appointment as Vice-President of the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation reveal a link between the private sector and the Swiss Government to deepen the privatization policies – especially water – and corporate control over public policies. But this articulation goes beyond the Government of Switzerland, it will take place above all at the level of the international agencies and organizations present in Geneva as Christian Frutiger will be responsible for the contacts with many of these organizations. These new roles also indicate that the transnational corporate sector is very consciously organizing and articulating itself at various government levels to ensure that its demands and policy proposals are met.

Not much reaction from the major Swiss NGOs should be expected in the face of all this, especially as SDC is the main financier of almost all of them, which explains the deep silence around Nestlé and its actions within Switzerland. A recent example of this silence occurred in Brazil at the World Water Forum held in Brasilia in March 2018. Since this Forum is in fact the Forum of large private enterprises,

Nestlé and WRG were present within the official Swiss pavilion, along with organizations such as HELVETAS, HEKS/EPER and Caritas Switzerland, three of Switzerland’s largest private development agencies and all supported by SDC. HEKS/EPER – which are German and French abbreviations – is linked to the Protestant Church of Switzerland, as Caritas Switzerland is linked to the Catholic Church.

During the Forum, 600 women from the Landless Movement occupied Nestlé’s premises in São Lourenço, Minas Gerais for a few hours, to draw attention to the problems caused by the company and the water bottling industry. None of these Swiss organizations expressed any solidarity with the Landless Movement, none condemned Nestlé’s practices, nor did they even mention on their return to Switzerland that this occupation had taken place. But HEKS/EPER and Caritas Switzerland claim to fight for the human right to water and “support” social movements – but not when they stand against Nestlé. In São Lourenço, located in the Circuito das Águas region in MG, and in many other places in Brazil, there are problems with Nestlé’s exploitation of water and citizen’s movements trying to protect its waters. HEKS/EPER has an office in Brazil but has never approached the groups that fight Nestlé in Brazil.

The SDC does not consider problems with Nestlé in many parts of the world – not just in Brazil – as a reason to re-evaluate its partnership with the company. There are very well-documented problems with Nestlé’s bottling operations and water pumping in the U.S.A, Canada, and France, for example – countries considered to be established democracies. What is common among all of these countries is that the governments always stand in favor of the company and against their own citizens. In the town of Vittel, France, the situation is absurd: studies by French government agencies indicate that the aquifer from which the Vittel population draws its water and from which Nestlé also collects bottled water as “VITTEL” is at risk of depletion. The aquifer is not in a position to withstand the long-term demands of the local population and Nestlé’s bottling company. The solution proposed by the French authorities: to build a pipeline about 50 km long to seek water in a region neighboring Vittel to meet the needs of the population – leaving Nestlé free to exploit the Vittel aquifer waters!

In Wellington County, Canada, a local group called Wellington Water Watchers was created to protect its waters from Nestlé exploration, which has the support of the local government to renew its permission to continue bottling water. In Michigan, U.S.A, the problem is similar. None of this seems to bother the Swiss Government, the SDC, or Christian Frutiger – and if such problems occur in these countries, what couldn’t happen in countries that are much more fragile in their social and political organization? As current Head of Public Affairs of Nestlé, Christian Frutiger has done his best to ignore completely the problems created by his employer in many countries.

As I write, Europe is suffering from an intense heat wave. There is water rationing in France, and fire hazards in many places. Big cities like Paris suffer from record-high temperatures never recorded before, and water consumption only tends to increase. On the other hand, glaciers are melting at an increasing rate and water is becoming increasingly scarce. Groundwater sources, many of them fossil water, are an important reserve for the future and should remain untouched. But the greed of bottling companies like Nestlé are acquiring more water sources. The picture is the same all over the planet – the remaining unpolluted waters are increasingly in the hands of a few companies.

In Brazil under the Bolsonaro government, the situation is even worse, with an environmental minister whose task is to facilitate the taking of Brazilian natural resources by foreign capital. It is important to remember that the main shareholder of the AMBEV group is the Swiss-Brazilian citizen Jorge Paulo Lemann, who has excellent communication channels with the Swiss Government. AMBEV is also part of the WRG which has already opened its first office in Brazil to support the privatization of SABESP, the public water company in the state of São Paulo. (see more here).

What is happening in Switzerland is just the tip of the iceberg – the visible part is the international articulation of big corporations, and the taking over of public space for political decisions by the world corporate oligarchy. We have to be vigilant and well organized to defend our waters, our earth and our society from the corporate attack on the common good.

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Translated by Tamanna Kohi

The situation in the Middle East is once again escalating.

On August 24, Israeli warplanes bombed what the Israeli military described as ‘Iranian targets’ near the town of Aqraba south of the Syrian capital, Damascus. The Syrian air-defense forces intercepted several hostile missiles. However, the rest of them hit the target.

According to claims by the Israeli side, the targeted positions were used by the Qods Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps and affiliated units to prepare an attack on Israel with several armed drones. The Israeli military also released a satellite image of the positions its warplanes struck claiming that the image shows Qods Force Operatives’ building and a weapons warehouse.

IRGC commander Mohsen Rezaee denied that any Iranian position was hit. However, Lebanese sources reported that two Hezbolalh members were killed by the airstrikes. They were identified as Hassan Yusuf al-Zabib from the town of Nmairiyeh in southern Lebanon and Yasser Ahmad Dahir from the town of Blida in the same region. Hassan Yusuf al-Zabib is reportedly the son of Yusuf al-Zabib, a key administrator in the Hezbollah-affiliated news channel al-Manar.

Click here to watch the video.

Early on August 25, an explosion rocked Beirut’s Southern Suburb, known as the stronghold of Hezbollah. According to initial reports, two Israeli drones crashed in the area. Later, Hezbollah clarified that the drones were rigged with explosives and attacked the group’s media center.

“The first drone fell without causing damage while the second one was laden with explosives and exploded causing huge damage to the media center,” Mohamed Afif, the group’s spokesman said adding that the inactive drone is in the Hezbollah hands now.

Later on the same day, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah made an official statement on the situation vowing to shoot down Israeli drones flying over Lebanon. Nasrallah also promised that Hezbollah will respond to recent Israeli airstrikes on Damascus, which killed two fighters of the Lebanese group.

These developments were followed by a mysterious airstrike on a convoy of the Iraqi Armed Forces’ Popular Mobilization Units (the part of the military often describe as Iranian proxies by US-Israeli media) near the Syrian border. The strike destroyed at least 3 vehicles and reportedly killed a PMU officer.

The recent increase of Israel military actions across the region accidentally came ahead of the election into Israel’s Knesset in September 2019. It seems that once again the current Israeli leadership is escalating the situation in the region to secure a local political victory.

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On August 21, the Australian government convened a “crisis meeting” with representatives of the universities and the intelligence agencies, as part of a hysterical campaign alleging pervasive “Chinese influence” throughout society.

Little has been revealed about what was discussed at the closed-door meeting. It was called amid demands by senior political figures and the corporate press for a crackdown on ties between Australian and Chinese research institutions, supposedly because they threaten “national security.”

The official purpose of the talks was to set “guidelines” governing collaboration with Chinese academics. As well as Education Department officials, the gathering was attended by representatives of the Home Affairs Department, which oversees the domestic spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the Australian Federal Police. Representatives from the Group of Eight, the country’s elite public universities, participated, along with members of university security and computer departments.

The Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported that the major universities had agreed to the meetings after briefings by Education Minister Dan Tehan earlier this month.

The article declared that the “university sector has allowed itself to become dependent on Chinese students.” It stated:

“The government and its security agencies feel the sector has become compromised, and over past weeks and months the sector has been given multiple briefings by such agencies as ASIO, the Home Affairs Department, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Defence Signals Directorate voicing concerns about Chinese influence.”

The article said the “security agencies” were particularly concerned about research partnerships involving Australian and Chinese universities. After the meeting, Tehan insisted that universities would “likely” have to “liaise more closely with national security agencies.”

Lurid claims that such collaboration aids the Chinese military have played a central role in an anti-China campaign spearheaded over the past two years by the government, the Labor Party, the Greens and the corporate media.

These unsubstantiated assertions have been based almost entirely on the claims of the intelligence agencies. In 2017, for instance, the Guardian warned against a $100 million “innovation precinct” at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), unveiled the previous year by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Chinese Premier Li Keqiang.

The Guardian trumpeted “defence fears” over the centre. It was funded, however, by private Chinese corporations, and focused on non-military research projects, including marine technologies, solar and wind power generation and the development of nanotechnologies.

Similar media campaigns have targeted other research initiatives, claiming, without any evidence, that they are of use to the Chinese military. The military and intelligence apparatus has invoked these assertions to push for unprecedented control over research, directly attacking academic freedom.

In a submission to the government in July 2018, the Australian Department of Defence requested powers to prohibit the publication of research, even for scientific purposes, and for warrantless entry, search, questioning and seizure powers to monitor compliance.

The department demanded authority to prohibit research on the virtually limitless ground that it has “reason to believe the technology is significant to developing or maintaining national defence capability or international relations of Australia.”

The request was inextricably tied to the Australia’s deepening integration into the US-led war drive against China, overseen by successive governments, Labor and Coalition alike.

The latest crackdown is also doubtless being conducted in close collaboration with the Trump administration. The AFR reported after last week’s meeting:

“The university sector fears the government could be pressured by the United States to crack down even harder on its collaboration with China, following a series of measures being proposed by US Republicans, one of which directly implicates Australia.”

The Trump administration is currently pushing a series of bills targeting Chinese academics, researchers and students.

One bill would ban visas for “individuals who are employed, funded, or otherwise sponsored by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.” Given that China’s university sector is state-controlled, this provision could be used to target any Chinese researcher. Other measures would force Chinese, Russian and Iranian students to undergo intrusive background checks before engaging in any “sensitive research projects” in the US.

The US legislation demands that Washington’s allies impose the same authoritarian regulations, declaring:

“Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom should take measures similar to the measures outlined in [the bill] to address security concerns posed by researchers and scientists affiliated with, or funded by, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”

The AFR noted that “the university sector is aware it needs to work with the government if only to avoid an even more onerous crackdown on its liaison with Chinese institutions.”

The US measures are one aspect of a military, economic and diplomatic confrontation with the Beijing regime, aimed at shoring-up Washington’s dominance in the Asia-Pacific and internationally. The attack on Chinese researchers is connected to the Trump administration’s trade war measures, which seek to stymie Beijing’s development of the high-tech sector.

The crackdown on Australian universities comes amid warnings from Washington’s mouthpieces within the political and media establishment over the sector’s reliance on Chinese student enrolments after decades of government funding cuts. At the same time, estimates indicate that partnerships with Chinese research institutions will eclipse those involving any other nation by the end of next year.

The growing ties underscore the dilemma facing the Australian corporate and political establishment, between its strategic alignment with US imperialism and its economic and trade ties to China. The Coalition government’s measures, which have Labor’s full support, are another indication that the dominant sections of the ruling elite are fully committed to the US confrontation with China.

The renewed focus on universities follows the visit to Australia last month by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Labor and the Coalition welcomed Pompeo as he called for stepped-up involvement in US provocations targeting China, and in preparations for war with Iran.

Following Pompeo’s trip, Chinese international students have again been vilified as agents of the Chinese Communist Party, and there have been calls for their prosecution under draconian “foreign interference” legislation.

This week, the New South Wales Coalition government cancelled Mandarin and Chinese cultural classes in 13 public schools on the absurd grounds they “could be facilitating inappropriate foreign influence.” The sole ground for the decision was that the program involved Chinese government agencies, Hanban and the Confucius Institute.

These measures are aimed at vilifying China to legitimise the escalating war drive. They are also establishing a precedent for further attacks on democratic rights, to suppress the opposition to militarism and war that exists in the working class.

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The short answer is yes and no. 

G7 nations Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and US are united in one respect. They’re profoundly undemocratic while pretending otherwise.

They’re united for privileged interests over beneficial social change. They operate as virtual US colonies most often, even when harming their own interests.

Is Trump isolated on the world stage as the Wall Street Journal suggested? Regardless of how Western leaders feel about him, their nations are very much allied with the US geopolitically.

According to Sputnik News, Trump and his aides were “blindsided” by Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif’s arrival at the G7. Does it matter given US war on the Islamic Republic by other means? More on this below.

What’s very important is the refusal of Western nations to join a Trump regime anti-Iran Persian Gulf coalition, lessening the possibility of war.

The US is largely a coalition of one so far, Britain, Israel, and Australia offering token support alone.

Russia was absent from G7 talks, excluded from the club since 2014 over nonexistent aggression in Ukraine.

G7 countries support the US transformation of the country from sovereign and independent to US client state bordering Russia — a dagger threatening its heartland, especially if joins NATO.

Economic powerhouse China, the world’s second largest economy, is excluded from G7 participation.

So-called global challenges were discussed on Saturday through Monday in Biarritz, France, Iran one of many topics.

Since Trump’s unlawful abandonment of the JCPOA nuclear based on Big Lies, an international treaty unanimously affirmed by Security Council members, making it binding international law, Europe pretended to go its own way.

By failing to fulfill their treaty obligations, Britain, France, Germany, and the EU breached the JCPOA, going along with the Trump regime’s pullout without admitting it.

French President Macron first said he’d lead G7 discussions on Iran, then about-faced, claiming no mandate from other G7 leaders to pass on joint messages to Tehran, adding:

“We had a discussion (Saturday) on Iran and that enabled us to establish two common lines.”

“No member of the G7 wants Iran to get a nuclear bomb and all the members of the G7 are deeply attached to stability and peace in the region,” adding:

“But there is no formal G7 mandate that is given so there are initiatives that will continue to be taken to reach these two objectives. We agreed on what we wanted to say jointly on Iran.”

Fact: Britain, France and the US have nuclear arsenals.

Fact: The Islamic Republic has none, doesn’t want one, never did, and urges elimination of these destructive weapons.

Fact: Judge them by their actions. G7 countries abhor “stability and peace in the” Middle East and elsewhere while pretending otherwise.

They back endless US wars of aggression in multiple theaters. The Islamic Republic is at peace with other countries.

It never attacked another nation, seeking cooperative relations regionally and globally — its nonbelligerent agenda polar opposite the US and its imperial partners.

Macron added that G7 leaders “will talk on Iran together” and issue a joint statement, the US excluded from it.

Trump said he’ll pursue his own (hostile) agenda on Iran, independently of other G7 nations.

Asked he agreed on a G7 statement Macron intends making making when discussions end, he said he hadn’t discussed this, adding:

“We’ll do our own outreach, but, you know, I can’t stop people from talking. If they want to talk, they can talk.”

Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif arrived at the G7 to discuss the nuclear deal on its sidelines — reportedly on invitation from Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian.

He intends no meeting with US officials while there. RT reported that Macron’s plan for saving the JCPOA “involves the US lifting its oil embargo on Iran, in exchange for Iran immediately returning to compliance with the 2015 deal, and coming to the negotiating table.”

Despite increasing its uranium enrichment, Iran remains in compliance with the agreement. Trump illegally pulled out and Europe continues to breach its obligations.

There’s virtually no chance that Trump regime hardliners will ease their “maximum pressure” on Iran that’s all about replacing its sovereign independence with pro-Western puppet rule and gaining control over its vast hydrocarbon resources.

Zarif has been conducting full-court press negotiations with other G7 members — except the US because of its illegal JCPOA pullout and weaponized sanctions war.

The JCPOA is dead short of a formal obituary notice. The only chance to save it is if Europe breaks with the Trump regime on this issue by fulfilling its treaty obligations — what it failed to do since May 2018, and shows no signs of changing policy.

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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.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

We bring to the attention our readers excerpts from an important study on the development of autonomous weapons largely guided by artificial intelligence. The report entitled Don’t be evil? A survey of the tech sector’s stance on lethal autonomous weapons addresses weapon systems with increasing levels of autonomy.

Needless to say artificial intelligence (AI) which is already embedded in conventional and strategic weapons systems modifies the nature of modern warfare. 

To consult the full report click here.

The text below which consists of the Executive Summary and the Introduction provides a broad overview.

The development of lethal autonomous weapons has raised deep concerns and has triggered an international debate regarding the desirability of these weapons. Lethal autonomous weapons, popularly known as killer robots, would be able to select and attack individual targets without meaningful human control. This report analyses which tech companies could potentially be involved in the development of these weapons. It highlights areas of work that are relevant to the military and have potential for applications in lethal autonomous weapons, specifically in facilitating the autonomous selection and attacking of targets. Companies have been included in this report because of links to military projects and/or because the technology they develop could potentially be used in lethal autonomous weapons.

Lethal autonomous weapons

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to make many positive contributions to society. But in order to realize its potential, it is important to avoid the negative effects and backlashes from inappropriate use of AI. The use of AI by militaries in itself is not necessarily problematic, for example when used for autonomous take-off and landing, navigation or refueling. However the use of AI to allow weapon systems to autonomously select and attack targets is highly controversial. The development of these weapons would have an enormous effect on the way war is conducted. It has been called the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and the atomic bomb. Many experts warn that these weapons would violate fundamental legal and ethical principles and would destabilize international peace and security. In particular, delegating the decision over life and death to a machine is seen as deeply unethical.

The autonomous weapons debate in the tech sector

In the past few years, there has been increasing debate within the tech sector about the impact of new technologies on our societies. Concerns related to privacy, human rights and other issues have been raised. The issue of weapon systems with increasing levels of autonomy, which could lead to the development of lethal autonomous weapons, has also led to discussions within the tech sector. For example, protests by Google employees regarding the Pentagon project Maven led to the company installing a policy committing to not design or deploy AI in “weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people”. Also more than 240 companies and organisations, and more than 3,200 individuals have signed a pledge to never develop, produce or use lethal autonomous weapon systems.

Tech companies have a social responsibility to ensure that the rapid developments in artificial intelligence are used for the benefit of humankind. It is also in a company’s own interest to ensure it does not contribute to the development of these weapons as this could lead to severe reputational damage. As Google Cloud CEO Diane Green said, “Google would not choose to pursue Maven today because the backlash has been terrible for the company”.

The tech sector and increasingly autonomous weapons

A number of technologies can be relevant in the development of lethal autonomous weapons. Companies working on these technologies need to be aware of that potential in their technology and they need to have policies that make explicit how and where they draw the line regarding the military application of their technologies. The report looks at tech companies from the following perspectives:

• Big tech
• Hardware
• AI software and system integration
• Pattern recognition
• Autonomous (swarming) aerial systems
• Ground robots

Level of concern

Fifty companies from 12 countries, all working on one or more of the technologies mentioned above, were selected and asked to participate in a short survey, asking them about their current activities and policies in the context of lethal autonomous weapons. Based on this survey and our own research PAX has ranked these companies based on three criteria:

1. Is the company developing technology that could be relevant in the context of lethal autonomous weapons?
2. Does the company work on relevant military projects?
3. Has the company committed to not contribute to the development of lethal autonomous weapons?

Based on these criteria, seven companies are classified as showing ‘best practice’, 22 as companies of ‘medium concern’, and 21 as ‘high concern’. To be ranked as ‘best practice’ a company must have clearly committed to ensuring its technology will not be used to develop or produce autonomous weapons. Companies are ranked as high concern if they develop relevant technology, work on military projects and have not yet committed to not contributing to the development or production of these weapons.

Recommendations

This is an important debate. Tech companies need to decide what they will and will not do when it comes to military applications of artificial intelligence. There are a number of steps that tech companies can take to prevent their products from contributing to the development and production of lethal autonomous weapons.

• Commit publicly to not contribute to the development of lethal autonomous weapons.
• Establish a clear policy stating that the company will not contribute to the development or production of lethal autonomous weapon systems.
• Ensure employees are well informed about what they work on and allow open discussions on any related concerns.

Companies have been ranked by levels of concern. The ranking was based on three criteria:

1. Is the company developing technology that could be relevant in the context of lethal autonomous weapons?

2. Does the company work on relevant military projects?

3. Has the company committed to not contribute to the development of lethal autonomous weapons?

Introduction to the Report 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is progressing rapidly and has enormous potential for helping humanity in countless ways, from improving healthcare to lifting people out of poverty, and helping achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals – if deployed wisely.[1] In recent years, there has been increasing debate within the tech sector about the impact of AI on our societies, and where to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable uses. Concerns related to privacy, human rights and other issues have been raised. The issue of weapon systems with increasing levels of autonomy, which could lead to lethal autonomous weapons, has also led to strong discussions within the tech sector.

In reaction to a project with the Pentagon, Google staff signed an open letter saying “We believe that Google should not be in the business of war”.[2] Following the controversy Google published its AI principles, “which include a commitment to not pursue AI applications for weapons”.[3]

Microsoft employees responded to the company’s efforts to participate in another US military contract by affirming that they worked at Microsoft in the hope of empowering “every person on the planet to achieve more, not with the intent of ending lives and enhancing lethality”.[4]

In 2014, Canadian company Clearpath Robotics was the first company committing not to contribute to the development of lethal autonomous weapons. It said: “This technology has the potential to kill indiscriminately and to proliferate rapidly; early prototypes already exist. Despite our continued involvement with Canadian and international military research and development, Clearpath Robotics believes that the development of killer robots is unwise, unethical, and should be banned on an international scale”.[5]

In order to realize the great above-mentioned potential for AI to make the world better, it is important to avoid the negative effects and backlashes from inappropriate AI use. The use of AI by militaries is not necessarily problematic, for example for autonomous take-off and landing, navigation or refueling. However, the development of lethal autonomous weapons, which could select and attack targets on their own, has raised deep concerns and triggered heated controversy.

This is an important debate in which tech companies play a key role. To ensure that this debate is as fact-based and productive as possible, it is valuable for tech companies to articulate and publicise clear policies on their stance, clarifying where they draw the line between what AI technology they will and will not develop.

Concerns about Lethal Autonomous Weapons

Lethal autonomous weapon systems are weapons that can select and attack individual targets without meaningful human control.[6] This means that the decision to use lethal force is delegated to a machine, and that an algorithm can decide to kill humans. The function of autonomously selecting and attacking targets could be applied to various autonomous platforms, for instance drones, tanks, fighter jets or ships. The development of such weapons would have an enormous effect on the way war is conducted and has been called the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and the atomic bomb.[7]

Many experts warn that lethal autonomous weapons would violate fundamental legal and ethical principles and would be a destabilising threat to international peace and security. Moral and ethical concerns have centred around the delegation of the kill decision to an algorithm. Legal concerns are related to whether lethal autonomous weapons could comply with international humanitarian law (IHL, also known as the law of war), more specifically whether they could properly distinguish between civilians and combatants and make proportionality assessments.[8] Military and legal scholars have pointed out an accountability vacuum regarding who would be held responsible in the case of an unlawful act.[9]

Others have voiced concerns that lethal autonomous weapons would be seriously destabilizing and threaten international peace and security. For example, by enabling risk-free and untraceable attacks they could lower the threshold to war and weaken norms regulating the use of force. Delegating decisions to algorithms could result in the pace of combat exceeding human response time, creating the danger of rapid conflict escalation. Lethal autonomous weapons might trigger a global arms race where they will become mass-produced, cheap and ubiquitous since, unlike nuclear weapons, they require no hard-to-obtain raw materials. They might therefore proliferate to a large number of states and end up in the hands of criminals, terrorists and warlords. Sized and priced smartphones, lethal drones with GPS and facial recognition might enable anonymous political murder, ethnic cleansing or acts that even loyal soldiers would refuse to carry out. Algorithms might target specific groups based on sensor data such as perceived age, gender, ethnicity, dress code, or even place of residence or worship. Experts also warn that “the perception of a race will prompt everyone to rush to deploy unsafe AI systems”.[10]

“Because they do not require individual human supervision, autonomous weapons are potentially scalable weapons of mass destruction; an essentially unlimited number of such weapons can be launched by a small number of people. This is an inescapable logical consequence of autonomy”, wrote Stuart Russell, computer science professor at the University of California in Berkeley.[11] Therefore, “pursuing the development of lethal autonomous weapons would drastically reduce international, national, local, and personal security”.[12] Decades ago, scientists used a similar argument to convince presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to renounce the US biological weapons programme and ultimately bring about the Biological Weapons Convention.

Twenty eight states, including Austria, Brazil, China, Egypt, Mexico and Pakistan, have so far called for a ban, and most states agree that some form of human control over weapon systems and the use of force is required.[13] UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called lethal autonomous weapons “morally repugnant and politically unacceptable”, urging states to negotiate a ban on these weapons. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has called on states to establish internationally agreed limits on autonomy in weapon systems that address legal, ethical and humanitarian concerns. The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of over a hundred civil society organisations across 54 countries, aims to stop the development and use of fully autonomous weapons through an international treaty. An IPSOS poll in 26 countries shows that 61 per cent of respondents oppose lethal autonomous weapons. Two-thirds answered that such weapons would “cross a moral line because machines should not be allowed to kill”.[14]

This Report

This report analyses developments in the tech sector, pointing to areas of work that are highly relevant to the military and have potential for applications in lethal autonomous weapons, specifically in facilitating the autonomous selection and attack of targets. While certain technologies may well ensure sufficient human control over a weapon’s use, it is often unclear what this entails and how this is ensured. Similarly, certain technologies may be intended for uncontroversial uses that do not cause harm, but it is often unclear how companies ensure their technology will not be used for lethal applications, and especially not for autonomous weapons.

Whereas military production in the past was naturally the domain of the arms industry, with the emergence of the digital era, the tech sector has become increasingly involved. Thus this report analyses the connections between the public and private sectors in the area of military technology with increasingly autonomous capabilities.

The research is based on information available in the public domain, either from company websites or from trusted media. PAX also sent out a survey to 50 companies in the tech sector that we deemed relevant because of their (actual or potential) connections with the military, as a development partner and/or as a supplier of specific products. The survey asked companies about their awareness of the debate around autonomous weapons, whether the company has an official position regarding these weapons, and whether they have a policy to reflect this position (See ‘Annex: Survey Questions’). These companies have been ranked based on three criteria

1. Is the company developing technology that could be relevant in the context of lethal autonomous weapons?
2. Does the company work on relevant military projects?
3. Has the company committed to not contribute to the development of lethal autonomous weapons?

This report is not intended to be an exhaustive overview of such activities, nor of the tech sector itself; rather, it covers a relevant range of products and companies to illustrate the role of this sector in the development of increasingly autonomous weapons. This role brings a responsibility for tech companies to be mindful of the potential applications of certain technologies and possible negative effects when applied to weapon systems.

Many emerging technologies are dual-use and have clear peaceful uses. In the context of this report, the concern is with products that could potentially also be used in lethal autonomous weapons. Moreover, there is the worry that unless companies develop proper policies, some technologies not intended for battlefield use may ultimately end up being used in weapon systems.

The development of lethal autonomous weapons takes place in a wide spectrum, with levels of technology varying from simple automation to full autonomy, and being applied in different weapon systems’ functionalities. This has raised concerns of a slippery slope where the human role is gradually diminishing in the decision-making loop regarding the use of force, prompting suggestions that companies, through their research and production, must help guarantee meaningful human control over decisions to use force.

Click here to read the full report.

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UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson met with French counterpart Emmanuel Macron last week in Paris as part of his continuing tour with European leaders in a last-minute attempt to strike a deal over Brexit.  President Macron echoed the words of German Chancellor Angela Merkel who when meeting the UK PM on Wednesday gave him just 30 days to come up with an alternative to the Irish backstop. She said that the time was nigh for Britain to put its proposals forward and vowed to ‘put our all’ into finding a solution to the current stalemate.

Macron for his part said he would like some ‘visibility’ on the UK’s plan to withdraw from the EU on October 31st, emphasising that waiting till the last minute was not an option. He said:

“We should all together be able to find something smart within 30 days if there is goodwill on both sides.”

Furthermore he emphasised the importance of the Irish backstop, highlighting it was an ‘indispensable’ guarantee for the stability of Ireland but also as a way of protecting the integrity of the European single market.

Boris Johnson however made it absolutely clear that the backstop, which would avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland if a deal had not been reached by the end of the Brexit transition period, was ‘undemocratic’ and could not be contemplated, as it effectively would keep Britain in a customs union with the EU. He went further to say that ‘under no circumstances’ would the UK get to the point of imposing checks or controls of any kind at the Irish border and that he thought there were ways of protecting the single market and allowing for Brexit to take place.

Given their opposing stances towards these crucial aspects of the Brexit deal, the likelihood of the UK and EU coming to any consensus over EU withdrawal is not high. And despite the positive vibes coming from discussions last week, the Irish border question will continue to present difficulties in the negotiations. Boris Johnson may have been ‘powerfully encouraged’ as he said by the conversations with Merkel and Macron last week but the reality is that with just over two months to go till Britain is due to leave the EU, no concrete proposals have been put forward by the UK government as an alternative to previous rejected deals. And even if the EU is to approve another version of a withdrawal agreement, it’s still unlikely to be passed by a predominantly pro-Remain parliament.

In which case one could argue that Johnson’s European tour last week was nothing more than a performance for onlookers at home. The fact is that Johnson is preparing for a No Deal Brexit, and has been since he took office – as Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon confirmed after her meeting with him last month. Indeed with the prospect of a lucrative trade deal with the US in the pipeline and encouraging rhetoric from President Donald Trump during their meeting on Sunday at the G7 –

“We’re going to do a very big trade deal, bigger than we’ve ever had with the UK,” Trump said – Johnson is well on the way to leading the UK out of the EU on October 31st with no deal in place.

And where is the UK opposition in all this, you may ask? Well, quite frankly in a state of disarray. Indeed, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s attempt to gather cross-party support for his plan to call a vote of no confidence in Boris Johnson followed by the formation of a national unity government, was a damp squib. Whilst gaining a positive reaction from the Scottish National Party, Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson rejected Corbyn’s proposal to lead such an interim government outright, suggesting instead several other candidates. Despite the considerable opposition to Brexit at Westminster, there remains a lack of unity and consensus amongst Remainers which continues to prevent a credible force against Brexit from forming. Instead, with the arrival of Boris Johnson on the scene, and the charisma and leadership qualities he naturally possesses, the Conservatives have now surged in the polls to become, according to one survey, 17 points ahead of Labour. This now suggests that given a general election, Johnson’s chances of succeeding over Corbyn are now far greater than they were when his predecessor, Theresa May, was in power.

Having said that, now is the calm before the storm for Boris. With a report into the full extent of government preparations for a No Deal Brexit having being leaked last weekend, it is now clear that what mayhem awaits. Shortages of food, medicines, are all anticipated; not to mention what impact it will have on the economy as a whole. And despite positive talk surrounding a trade deal with Trump, Johnson admitted it probably wouldn’t be negotiated within a year. Brexit may have been messy up till now but it looks like it’s about to get a whole lot more chaotic…

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Turkish President Erdogan’s visit to Moscow on 27 August will see him and his Russian counterpart hashing out the details of the Syrian end game.

Among the frontrunners in the Democratic Party presidential primary, Senators Warren and Sanders not only have the most progressive domestic agenda, but also the most anti-war, pro-diplomacy foreign policy agenda. The sharpest distinction between them is that Sanders has voted against over 80% of recent record military spending bills in the Senate, while Warren has voted for two thirds of them. 

But their pro-diplomacy worldview has blind spots. They have both tempered their calls for peace and diplomacy with attacks on Russia and China, framed as warnings against “authoritarianism.” These attacks—in the present-day context of bipartisan Russia- and China-bashing—carve out an ominous exception to their foreign policy agenda big enough to fly a squadron of F-35s through. This creates a pretext for continuing U.S. militarism and risks undermining their commitment to peace.

Warren’s and Sanders’ visions

Warren defined her vision of U.S. foreign policy with an article in the January/February 2019 edition of Foreign Affairs.  She began,

“Around the world, democracy is under assault. Authoritarian governments are gaining power, and right-wing demagogues are gaining strength.” 

She asked, “How did we get here?”, and answered her question with an accurate and intelligent account of the failures of neoliberalism.  

Warren explained that, after the Cold War,

U.S. policymakers “began to export a particular brand of capitalism, one that involved weak regulations, low taxes on the wealthy, and policies favoring multinational corporations. And the United States took on a series of seemingly endless wars, engaging in conflicts with mistaken or uncertain objectives and no obvious path to completion. The impact of these policy changes has been devastating.”

Warren made a coherent critique of the U.S.’s militarized approach to terrorism, and promised to cut military spending and bring troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq. She champions a No First Use nuclear weapons policy, which would be a long overdue step toward ending the threat of nuclear annihilation that still hangs over us all.  

But Warren also launched a fierce attack on Russia and China, lumping them together with Hungary, Turkey, the Philippines and Brazil under the umbrella of “authoritarianism.”

“This marriage of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism,” Warren declared, “…allows authoritarian leaders to foment a global crisis of confidence in democracy.”

And yet, by her own analysis, it is neoliberal “center-left” and “center-right” governments that have sold out their voters to plutocratic corporate interests and caused this public loss of faith in mainstream politicians and parties. The rise of extreme right-wing leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte is the result of this “global crisis of confidence in democracy,” not the cause of it.

Senator Sanders gave a major foreign policy speech in 2017 at Westminster College in Missouri, from the same stage where Churchill made his “iron curtain” speech in 1946. Sanders’ speech laid out a bold, progressive foreign policy agenda, filling in what many people felt was a missing piece in his 2016 campaign.

Sanders quoted President Eisenhower’s farewell speech on the Military-Industrial Complex and his 1953 speech after Stalin’s death, in which Eisenhower called military spending “a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” 

Eisenhower backed up that rhetoric by slashing U.S. military spending by 39% in his first two years in office, and then holding it at about that level for the remainder of his presidency, even under the extreme pressures of the Cold War.

Sanders argued that the U.S. post-Cold War goal of “benevolent global hegemony” had been “utterly discredited,” particularly “by the disastrous Iraq War and the instability and destruction it has brought to the region.”  Instead, he went on, “Our goal should be global engagement based on partnership, rather than dominance.” 

Sanders went on to talk about how U.S. military and covert interventions in other countries “have caused incalculable harm,” mentioning U.S. roles in the 1953 coup in Iran, the Vietnam War, the 1973 coup in Chile, civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. war in Iraq, and the Saudi-led war in Yemen.  

Sanders contrasted the harm these interventions have done with the success of the post-WWII Marshall Plan, an example of the good that can come from using U.S. power and resources to rebuild war-torn countries instead of using U.S. weapons and covert operations to destroy them. 

Connecting his foreign policy with a familiar theme from his domestic agenda, Sanders pointed out that,

“The planet will not be secure or peaceful when so few have so much, and so many have so little.”

And he looked forward to a day when “human beings on this planet will live in a world where international conflicts will be resolved peacefully, not by mass murder.”

Authoritarianism: From Syngman Rhee and the Shah to Trump and MBS

But, like Warren, Sanders made several references to “authoritarianism,” in particular in relation to Russia, and he has repeated that theme in more recent speeches. 

When Sanders catalogued the history of disastrous U.S. interventions in other countries, he neglected to point out that his examples nearly all involved U.S. support for the most extreme, authoritarian right-wing governments of their day.  

In fact, throughout the Cold War, the U.S. consistently supported conservative, right-wing parties and politicians in Asia, Africa and Latin America, bringing dictators and mass murderers to power in many countries. The examples range from Syngman Rhee in South Korea and Suharto in Indonesia to apartheid South Africa and Mbuto in the Congo to military dictatorships throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. 

Current U.S. alliances with Saudi Arabia and the other absolute monarchies in the Persian Gulf, as well as Sisi’s Egypt and Netanyahu’s Israel, make it clear that the U.S. still does not choose its friends and allies based on their freedom from authoritarianism. 

Nor can we even claim that the U.S. is free of authoritarian tendencies, including fear-mongering by Donald Trump, “the best Congress money can buy,” the rise of white nationalism, and two million Americans— disproportionately people of color—condemned to harsh prison terms and dehumanizing conditions in an American gulag. 

The presidential candidates should also recognize that U.S. efforts to impose its political will on other countries through economic sanctions or by the threat or use of force are themselves a dangerous form of authoritarianism, and flagrant violations of the rules-based international order that the U.S. claims to uphold.    

So if we are honest about it, Russia and China have not earned the hostility of U.S. policymakers because of their authoritarianism, but because they are large, powerful countries that have resisted U.S. ambitions for “global hegemony,” as Sanders described it.  

As a critic of those ambitions himself, Sanders should appreciate Russia and China’s difficult position and the fine line they have had to walk to defend their sovereignty and develop economically without falling foul of this domineering, destructive U.S. militarism. 

A New War to Rescue the Military-Industrial Complex? 

After a 45-year Cold War against communism and a 20-year Global War on Terror, the last thing we need from our next president is a New Cold War, a “War on Authoritarianism” or a war of any kind as a new organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy.  Authoritarianism is not a concept the U.S. can defeat militarily, any more than “communism” or “terror.”

To the extent that authoritarianism is an international problem, the solution for it lies in progressive movements and in real policy solutions that will reverse the inequities of neoliberalism and improve the lives of working people here and around the world. 

Senators Sanders and Warren have correctly diagnosed many of the problems of our society and helped to craft serious policy proposals to address them, from Medicare For All to the Green New Deal. We hope that these programs will be shining examples of democracy at work that other countries will want to emulate. But presidential candidates should not talk about exporting an American democratic revolution to other countries when we have barely begun the serious work of reforming our own country. 

As Representative Gabbard keeps reiterating in her campaign, we must not let this moment and this chance for peace slip away into a New Cold War.  

Sanders and Warren may not intend their criticisms of Russia and China to justify record Pentagon spending, but the Military-Industrial Complex is seizing on the Russia- and China-bashing by both Democrats and Republicans for precisely that purpose. After decades of fighting losing battles with guerrilla forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East, the US military is now once again preparing to combat “peer competitors,” i.e. Russia and China. 

Rolling out its massive FY2020 budget proposal of $750 billion, the Pentagon noted,

“With the largest research and development request in 70 years, this strategy-driven budget makes necessary investments in next-generation technology….The operations and capabilities supported by this budget will strongly position the US military for great power competition for decades to come.” 

That’s why the budget calls for so many high-tech, big ticket items: $58 billion for advanced aircraft, $35 billion for new state-of-the-art warships, $14 billion for space systems, $10 billion for cyberwar, $4.6 billion for AI and autonomous systems, and $2.6 billion for hypersonic weapons. 

Democratic candidates should beware lest their tangled rhetoric about “authoritarianism” and their attacks on Russia and China are seized upon by military-industrial interests and braided into a lifeline to rescue the Military-Industrial Complex from its real mortal enemies: peace and disarmament.

In 2002, Senator Edward Kennedy called the Bush administration’s policy of “preemptive” war, “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.” After two decades of intractable violence and chaos and a debilitating, ever-growing military budget, aspiring U.S. leaders should not be blaming other countries for the failures of U.S. policy or whipping up a new Cold War with old enemies. 

Progressive candidates should instead be sending the entire world an unequivocal message that the United States is finally ready to turn the page to a new era of peaceful, cooperative and lawful diplomacy.  Until they do, and until they back it up in practice, it is premature to assume that Russia and China are committed to irredeemable hostility and a new arms race.    

Without such a genuine commitment to peace and disarmament, the next president will find him- or herself caught in the same bind as Obama and Trump, squandering our country’s scarce resources on record military spending and stoking a New Cold War and arms race with Russia and China that neither the people of those nations nor the American public want.

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This article was originally published on CODEPINK

Medea Benjamin, co-founder of CODEPINK for Peace, is the author of Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran and Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection.

Nicolas J. S. Davies is a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

Featured image is from CODEPINK

In Woody Allen’s 1973 film, Sleeper, a character wakes up in the future to learn that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.” Shanker was condemned by many when he shut down the New York City school system in the bitter strikes of 1967 and 1968, and he was denounced for stirring up animosity between black parents and Jewish teachers.

Well, there you have it. Juxtapose the names of Trump, Bolton or Pompeo for Shanker if Woody had recently made this film. Sadly, this is funny yet frightening. From the late and ‘not so great’ John McCain, only a few years ago, borrowing from the Beach Boys song Barbara Ann with “Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran” to Trump dropping his ‘Mother of All Bombs’ in Afghanistan in 2017, we have evil running things with such transparency. With the help of the Fox channels ‘Trump and chumps’ push the empire’s agenda to its fullest extent. They even continually fail to target this horrific rise of Neo Nazi-like white supremacy day after day.

CNN and MSNBC, meanwhile, are still railing and insinuating, 24/7, on the Russians and Chinese as being our ‘enemies’. They fail to reveal how all of this is simply about ‘Whose currency (i.e. Whose dick) is bigger and better?’ This is ALL about the threat to our Petrodollar by the Russians and Chinese. When our dollar is no longer used as the favored currency in the trade in oil and natural gas, as Groucho announced in the film Duck Soup “This means war!” Thus, the continuing ‘Military Madness Mindset’ that this empire has transferred to the gullible public year after year. It can sicken any rational person to see the slew of license plates and car stickers celebrating our military as if we were actually AT WAR. Folks, we have NOT been at war since WW2… period! To really celebrate the bravery of our military is to NOT place them in areas we have NO business being in! If you truly love them, well, demand from our leaders to bring them home.

To this writer, a baby boomer who participated in the infamous ‘Duck and Cover’ drills in grade school, these times are becoming worse. One remembers those air raid drills done regularly, especially during the ‘Bomb shelter’ era of the late 50s and early 60s. The siren went off, really loud, and we were escorted to the hallways of our school. Then, we were made to sit up against the solid wall to wait for it all to end.

These drills replaced the earlier ones, whereupon kids would go under their desks and cover up. Either way, imagine the anxiety these events caused for little five and six year olds. It really never leaves you. When Hurricane Mathew hit my town head on in October of 2016, as the noise of the 100+ mph winds built up, we just did the same ‘Duck and Cover’ on our bedroom floor. Out two little precious kittens, trapped in each of their carrying cases, were scared beyond belief. So much so that the boy cat, Algernon, still hides whenever he senses a storm approaching. The sound of the thunder and heavy rain falling on our roof sends him into a panic for the duration. In a previous column I alluded to what real people in some village in Iraq or Afghanistan must have felt when our missiles, sent by some kid in an airbase thousands of miles away, whistled down to their roofs.

The Guided Age of Amerika (1865 to 1914) saw the super rich feeding on pheasant and drinking champagne while tens of millions of Amerikans ate scraps. This disparity of wealth was so great that it spawned a multitude of great muckraking writers, too many to mention here. What all of them had in common was that ‘They cared!’ Of course, the 1930s saw even deeper divisions between ‘Haves and Have not’s. The 1937 film Dead End (from the Sidney Kingsley play, screenplay by Lillian Hellman and directed by William Wyler) depicted that polarity excellently.

In the film the Joel McCrea character, an out of work architect, is developing a romance with a lady who lives in the high rise down the street from all the tenements… including the one he lives in. The woman, living with a rich lover who she does not love, is enamored with McCrea. He asks her why she stays with the guy and she explains how she too, like McCrea, comes from ‘hard times’. She finally wants to leave the man and hook up with McCrea. One day she goes looking for him, for the first time, at the tenement he lives in. When she sees the misery and filth of such a place, it is too much for her, and she runs away back to her life. The romance is ended, before it even can be consummated.

For some reason, perhaps due to the endless propaganda of a compliant mainstream media, many of today’s ‘Have Not’s still hold such an almost reverence for the super rich. The lie that we were all told from childhood right up and through our adult years is that ‘Anyone can make it in Amerika’. Thus, we can all become rich if we just work hard and keep plugging. The super rich, whether they be in the business world, world of politics, world of sports or entertainment, are celebrated. Thus, there can never be viable change in this nation until more of we working stiffs stand together and say ‘Enough is enough’! As long as millions of us stay engrossed in foolish dime novel scandals instead of what really Ails us…..

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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].

We see the word “authoritarianism” all over the US media, a blanket term employed to describe countries that the United States government currently considers as threats to its interests. Although “authoritarian” refers to a society in which political power is employed as a primary means to compel people to submit to the government’s authority, the term as it is used in the media has no objective basis in a scientific analysis of political systems. The term has been applied to US allies like Saudi Arabia, but not against nations like France (with the brutal suppression of popular protest by the police) or the United Kingdom and Germany (where executive authority is vested in a Prime Minister or Chancellor unelected by universal suffrage) because they are democratic allies. But in most cases, “authoritarianism” is reserved to describe Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and Syria, and any other country that resists neo-liberal ideology.

But there is one country for which the term “authoritarianism” is trotted out without failure. Just like Homer’s epithet “swift-footed Achilles” the New York Times and other media outlets attach the delicate adjective “authoritarian” to “China” with a literary perfection. This withering attack on China over the last few years is an attempt to portray a nation that makes up one-sixth of the Earth’s population as the embodiment of an anti-democratic political culture.

First and foremost, it is critical that American citizens have negative associations with China before they have a chance to assess it on its own merits. China is the most serious challenge to the United States today. But the challenge is not from its military, but rather from its economic and political systems.

As the United States devolves into a playground for the super-rich, China retains a government capable of putting the wealthy and powerful in prison when they violate laws and go against the common good. China has long-term economic and ecological plans focused on the needs of its citizens and considers the elimination of poverty to be a national priority. It does not allow its economy to be dominated by multinational investment banks and it does not create foreign wars to make money for military contractors.

Nothing resembling a people-centered policy has even been considered in the United States over the last forty years.

China’s massive investments in renewable energy are unmatched by any other country and it refuses to engage in or to support foreign wars. That is to say, China offers a concrete, viable, alternative to a Western system whose traditional opposition parties have decayed into corrupt power-brokers and whose mainstream parties support a grotesque combination of ruthless capitalism and unfettered militarism.

The attempt to quickly dismiss any positive mention of China by slapping the authoritarian label on it has much in common with the campaigns of the 1950s to dismiss socialist approaches to governance and economics as being “anti-democratic” and “anti-American” while working overtime to render the term “communist” as a four-letter word that could only be used to describe the worst of Stalinist bureaucracy (and even that had to be exaggerated and distorted).

The Cold War strategy of attacking communism was meant to discredit various systems of shared governance and shared economic systems that were developed in Europe, Russia, Asia and yes, even in the United States without any consideration of their accomplishments. The campaign to red-bait and blacklist anything associated with the word “communism” was crude, thoughtless, destructive but ultimately successful. Today most Americans are unaware that the United States had a powerful communist party in the 1930s and 1940s, and few indeed know that the Communist Party, and not Martin Luther King, led the original fight against segregation and defended the Scottsboro Boys against rigged up accusations of rape.

For that matter, the campaigns to blackball any group or organization that was friendly to the Soviet Union in the 1950s using the tar brush of “Communism” left a generation of Americans in complete ignorance of the central role that the Soviet Union played in the war against Fascism, defeating Nazi Germany almost single-handedly. Many educated Americans in 1946 would have had no problem describing the critical role of the Soviet Union in winning the Second World War, but by the 1960s the American population had been force-fed, through the media and textbooks, the myth of the Anglo-American landing at Normandy as the great salvation of Europe.

As the United States slips deeper and deeper into decadence and corruption, the need to label China as “authoritarian “increases.

After all, China might inspire Americans to question the corrupt and bankrupt political system that they enjoy. Such books as Ann Li’s thoughtful “What the U.S. Can Learn from China: An Open-Minded Guide to Treating Our Greatest Competitor as Our Greatest Teacher” layout in very concrete terms how the United States can learn from Chinese best practices. Li’s book is uncannily similar to Ezra Vogel’s “Japan as Number One” (1979) which jolted Americans out of their complacency and forced them to take Japan seriously as an innovator.

Even CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies), a DC think tank that has thrived on promoting the China Threat, was forced to launch a Belt and Road program because so many American businessmen are no longer interested in bogeyman tales now that the Chinese economy has gone global.

There lurks a deep fear in the beltway among those who make billions off of the massive military buildup against the “China threat” that the United States could reach a tipping point where ordinary citizens see the benefits of cooperation with China and Cold War rhetoric will no longer work. As China leaps ahead in green energy and in its commitment to cutting edge research in basic science (which under-girds technological progress) that shift is becoming a reality. It is critical for the corporate media to make sure that no Americans get the wrong idea.

But there is a darker and more grotesque process that is playing out behind the surface of the campaign to label China “authoritarian.” That is a process best understood in psychological terms as projection. The radical concentration of wealth, the deep institutional corruption, the growth of militarism and of an economy driven by plunder, has created a United States which is unrecognizable to many Americans.

Actually, what is happening in the United States is not entirely a secret. But the economic and ideological contradictions are so stark and overwhelming that the vast majority of the privileged and educated find it far easier to project what is wrong with the United States onto China and thereby they can articulate dark secrets about American society that are taboo by projecting them on an imagined nightmare, China. They can also shift the blame for the problems that originate from the decay of American society onto China. China is a scapegoat on which all the sins and crimes of the United States can be heaped and then it can be attacked and humiliated in a ritual cleansing that makes Americans feel a bit more comfortable with their decadence and cowardice.

Let us take a few highlights from the current campaign to create an image of an authoritarian China for domestic consumption.

Military expansionism

There is no end to the rhetoric about how the Chinese are increasing their military power and using it to threaten and intimidate their neighbors. But China has not engaged in military conflict since 1979, and that was brief border conflict with Vietnam. You have to go back to the Korean War to find the Chinese engaged in a sustained military conflict and that one was clearly brought on by the United States. Although China has increased its military spending in response to the US buildup in Northeast Asia, it does not hold a candle to the insane increases in military spending being pursued by the United States.

The United States has been in a non-stop war since the Korean War and is reaching this very moment an unprecedented level of expansion of military threats, ranging from showdowns with Russia and China, to threats of war against Venezuela, Syria, North Korea and Iran, to criminal military operations on a large scale (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria) and a small scale (Nigeria, Sudan, Yemen, Myanmar, Hong Kong, Philippines).

While the US continues to destabilize and intervene in one nation after another in Latin America and the Caribbean, in the Middle East and in Central Asia, adversely affecting the lives of millions of people, the American government and press continues to harp about alleged Chinese aggression in the South China Sea over uninhabited islands long-claimed by China which do no harm to any indigenous peoples. What a carnival! Perhaps it helps to exorcise the spirits of the thousands of native people displaced from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to make way for a US naval base, or the thousands in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific who were exiled from their homes when the islands were subject to atmospheric nuclear arms testing in the 1950s.

Oppression of minorities

Hardly an American newspaper comes out that does not describe how China is allegedly oppressing Tibetans and suppressing their natural right to be independent, or how Uyghers are supposedly being rounded up by the millions to be placed in concentration camps for a cultucidal reeducation campaign. Recent investigations by delegations from a wide array of Muslim majority nations have however demonstrated that those charges are groundless and the efforts to combat Islamist terrorism in Western China are entirely appropriate and constructive. Compared to the repression of Kashmiri Muslims in “democratic” India the status of Islam in Xinjiang is benign. The vast majority of Muslims in China, by any standard, are entirely free to practice their faith and the drive for independence by radicals is fed by black glove operators on the payroll of the United States.

If we want to find concentration camps used to round up minorities on the basis of explicitly racist ideology and to subject them to abuse and torture, the model is the United States, not China.

It may be years before we learn the full range of concentration camps set up by the Trump administration, but the illegal rounding up of Hispanic refugees as part of a drive not only to intimidate minorities, but to make such fascistic practices acceptable, and commonplace, for average Americans, is no secret.

And that is only part of the American problem. The incarceration of (often completely innocent) African Americans to work as slaves in private prisons, the constant abuse of native Americans on their own lands, and the cruel immigration policies developed by the Obama administration, and perfected by the Trump administration, go beyond anything imaginable in China, or for that matter in any other country.

Lack of freedom

It is a popular opening line at a DC think tank to lament the lack of freedom of the Chinese. Although no nation is truly free, and the definition of freedom has been debated by philosophers for millennia, this argument repeated in the US media is ludicrous. The Chinese media is far from perfect, but the sophistication of its editorials and investigative reporting is impressive and the willingness to go after high-level corruption (as opposed to the festering swamp of Jeffery Epstein and his enablers in finance and intelligence) admirable.

If you are looking for a nation free of freedom, go no further than the good old US of A.

The United States government has enforced unspeakable tyranny, punishing people of color with long jail sentences for non-violent crimes, leading to the destruction of familial bonds and cohesive communities. Whistle-blowers face exile and other forms of persecution for exposing its criminal actions, or for protesting against its dangerous militarism.

Although the New York Times has cultivated a refined patina that appeals to Upper West Side progressive sentimentality, do not be deceived. The truth about the radical concentration of wealth, or the connections between oil companies, politicians, investment banks, arms manufacturers and the corporate media will only be peripherally alluded to in that newspaper. Like the rest of the corporate media, it promulgates a dishonest narrative that the United States is a robust democracy full of opportunities that just happens to have a few “bad apples” or that all will problems will be solved by some miraculous change in policies that never materialize.

“Human rights” is one of the most popular tools in the shed for attacking China. In a comical tour de force, a country whose police killed at least 1,000 people last year, a country that has the largest prison population in the world in both absolute and per capita terms, a country whose elite traffics in under-age girls as sex slaves, and a country which heaps unspeakable abuse on innocent children in unsanitary cages, trots out Amnesty International reports about how terrible China’s human rights record is.

Surveillance state

Whenever the topic of China’s growing IT prowess comes up, the American media must remind us that the Chinese government constantly subjects its citizens to surveillance, that it is a dystopia of run-away state power that spies on everyone. But closer examination reveals that more often than not the use of surveillance technology in China serves a positive purpose (such as apprehending scofflaws and deadbeats) and the emphasis has been consistently on improving the lives of ordinary people, not harassing them.

But the documents leaked by Edward Snowden and others reveal that it is rather the United States government and industry that has embraced a totalitarian vision of full-spectrum information collection as a means to control and intimidate the entire population. The genius of the American experiment is that the massive, for-profit, gathering of information on citizens is seldom mentioned in the commercial media (which makes no small profit from its participation in the surveillance state) whereas creative and constructive uses of technology in China are condemned as signs of dictatorship.

Anti-democratic China

It is one of the great ironies of history that the elections held by the United States are considered to be representative of “democracy.” These elections, rampant with voter suppression and gerrymandering, following an arcane Electoral College that dramatically over-represents sparsely populated rural states full of conservative whites, offer citizens (if their vote is even counted by the corrupt electronic voting machines owned by big business) a choice between two candidates that are selected in advance by two political parties dedicated to preserving a state run by, for and of a handful of mega-industrial complexes, investment houses and wealthy families. These parties make decisions in secret meetings, completely unaccountable to the law. Moreover, much of American policy is determined within these two parties (Democratic Party and Republican Party), with help from PR and consulting firms which are tasked to manipulate public opinion, even though they are not even mentioned in, or sanctioned by, the constitution. This is not a democracy, but a sham.

By contrast, the People’s Republic of China has a system of consultative democracy in which a set of overlapping committees that stretch in an unbroken chain from local village gatherings, up through the provincial committees, to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, discuss, debate and frame policies meant to address the needs of the people and the nation. The Chinese Communist Party has developed a system of governance in which best practices are identified and spread throughout the country.

It is a fascinating question which is the more democratic approach: public elections in which citizens vote for political operatives who vie for power to represent them or committees in which stakeholders from various sectors of the population participate in governance. However, as the United States does not practice anything resembling honest elective democracy, the comparison is moot.

What to do?

The overwhelming consensus around the world is that the collapsing American empire is the greatest threat to world peace, to human rights and to the environment. Yet the elaborate mythology of “authoritarian China” has become a critical pillar propping up the ideology that allows Americans to go through their daily lives without coming to terms with the profound criminality that surrounds them. The first step towards addressing this crisis will be for Americans to stop projecting their own crimes onto China and start to confront their own culpability directly.

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Dennis Etler holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. He conducted archaeological and anthropological research in China throughout the 1980s and 1990s and taught at the college and university level for over 35 years.

As fires rage across tens of thousands square km the Amazon forest, dubbed the Planet’s lungs, producing some 20 percent of the oxygen in the atmosphere, with some 72,843 fires in Brazil this year, where fires on such a scale are uncommon, as well as through Siberia, Alaska, Greenland,  southern Europe and elsewhere, they herald a world where increasing temperatures and droughts overwhelm original habitats, flora and fauna (Figure 1).

As the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets progressively melt, at more than 6 times faster than during the Seventies, the tropics expand and arid deserts encroach into temperate Mediterranean-type climate zones at a rate of 56 – 111 km per decade, the Earth’s fertile regions are progressively replaced by environments less suitable for farming.

According to reports

“climate change itself is making dry seasons longer and forests more flammable. Increased temperatures are also resulting in more frequent tropical forest fires in non-drought years. And climate change may also be driving the increasing frequency and intensity of climate anomalies, such as El Niño events that affect fire season intensity across Amazonia.”

Figure 1 (A) Burning Amazon rainforest; (B) A warm smoke plume emanating from the Amazon fires; (C) The spate of Siberian wildfires from July 2019, reaching 6.4 million acres.

The pace of global warming is astounding climate scientists. Within the last 70 years or so major shifts in climate zones and an accelerating spate of extreme weather events—cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves and fires (Figure 2)— is increasingly ravaging large tracts of Earth.

Figure 2. Extreme weather events around the world 1980-2018, including earthquakes, storms, floods, droughts. Munich Re-insurance.

However, despite  its foundation in the basic laws of physics (the black body radiation laws of Planck, Kirchhoff’ and Stefan Boltzmann), as well as empirical observations around the world by major climate research bodies (NOAA, NASA, NSIDC, IPCC, World Meteorological Organization, Hadley-Met, Tindale, Potsdam, BOM, CSIRO and others), the anthropogenic origin, scale and pace of climate change remain underestimated and the subject to extensively propagated denial and untruths. Extreme climate change remains counterintuitive to many, let alone where potential mitigation could affect vested economic interests.

Climate scientists find themselves in a quandary similar to medical doctors, committed to help the ill and facing situations where they need to communicate a grave diagnosis.  How do they tell people that the current spate of cyclones, devastating islands from the Caribbean to the Philippine, or floods devastating coastal regions and river valleys from Mozambique to Kerala, Pakistan and Townsville, can only intensify in a rapidly warming world? How do scientists tell the people that children are growing into a world where survival under a mean temperatures higher than +2 degrees Celsius (above pre-industrial temperatures) may be painful, and in some parts of the world impossible, let alone under +4 degrees Celsius projected by the IPCC?

The Cassandra syndrome is alive and well. Throughout history messengers of bad news have been rebuked or worse, nowadays facing reluctance on the part of the mainstream media to publish the dire climate change projections. Given the daunting scenarios climate scientists are looking at, many find it difficult to talk about the issue, even among friends and family.

As atmospheric levels of CO₂, methane and nitrous oxide have reached a combined level of near 500 parts per million, intersecting the melting threshold of the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets and heralding a fundamental shift in state of the terrestrial climate, fires consume large parts of the land.

It would appear parliaments preoccupied as they are with economics, legal issues and international conflicts, hardly regard the future of nature and civilization as a priority.

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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from End of the American Dream

Our planet seems to be in a growing crisis in terms of agriculture and crop production related to unusual weather shifts. Many reports in recent months use the term “extreme weather” to describe record heat across Europe this summer, record flooding in US Midwest farm states, or record drought across India and major parts of Africa and China. Parts of the USA Midwest are undergoing the worst growing conditions since at least the 1980s. In the UK the weather has been ruinous to the grain harvest there.

The crucial question to ask is whether we can assume, as many do, that this is all part of man-made global warming, today renamed climate change, or whether it can be caused by something quite different: The periodic cycles of solar activity that in the past months have entered what astro-scientists call a “solar minimum.” If it is due to the latter, we are spending huge sums on addressing a wrong problem, in fact trillions of dollars.

Until this July large parts of India were suffering record drought. Chennai reservoirs were down to 0.2% of capacity over the past two years as a severe heat wave saw 99% less water than a year ago. Acute water shortages have forced thousands to flee their villages. Though in early August above-average monsoon seasonal rains relieved the situation in some parts, so far the rainfall is far from adequate to restore empty reservoirs across India. In China severe drought has left about 800,000 hectares of crops affected in northern China’s Hebei Province with rainfall some 55% below normal. That comes as a devastation of China’s pig population from the deadly African Swine Fever spreads and crops across the country are being destroyed by a plague of Army Fallworm infestation that is resistant to most weed-killers.

At the same time record rains have devastated agriculture in key growing regions. In the UK excessive rainfall in August has brought the wheat harvest to a halt according to the National Farmers’ Union. Across the major US Midwest record snowfall in winter, coupled with record rains this spring, have severely delayed plantings for corn and soybeans. The twelve months through July have been the wettest on record in the Midwest grain belt resulting in millions of acres going unplanted.

In Africa, Zambia is experiencing the worst drought since 1981, and severe drought in other African countries is reported.

Solar Minimum…

The events have been dramatized by various advocacy groups and political parties as proof that man-made global warming– emissions of CO2 from industry, coal plants, cars and the like– are the cause. We are being inundated with proposals for new taxes in the hundreds of billions of dollars in especially the European Union, taxes that we are told are needed to solve this problem. What if we are focused on the wrong cause-effect relation?

Recent research suggests that we have been too limited in our science and are ignoring what is likely orders of magnitude a greater influence in world weather and its shifts than any manmade emissions. What is relevant to this discussion is the fact that no linear climate model used by the UN IPCC or any of the hundreds of climate think tanks around the world are able to model what is by far the greatest single factor affecting our weather, the “moody” sun.

What astrophysicists have documented is that our sun—by far the greatest factor for whether we experience heat or cold spells, El Nino Pacific events, or severe volcanic or earthquake activity as in the past months—that the sun undergoes a complex cyclical series of intense activity followed by declining activity, activity commonly known as sunspots or solar eruptions, huge electro-magnetic events. Typically the sun eruptions come in roughly 11 year cycles of peaks and lows. These cycles overlay longer cycles and relate to the highly complex motion of our solar system in the universe. Currently since 2018 we are experiencing a period of significant decline in solar activity, a solar minimum. The last such was during 2008-2009. There is convincing evidence that this minimum will be what is called a Grand Solar Minimum, far more than any in the recent decades. What are observable effects of such cyclical solar minimum periods?

Cosmic Rays and Clouds

According to astrophysicists, when the sun’s magnetic field weakens, the outward pressure of the solar wind decreases. This allows more cosmic rays to penetrate our planet’s atmosphere. In turn the cosmic rays hitting Earth’s atmosphere create aerosols which, in turn, seed clouds. According to Dr Roy Spencer,

“Clouds are the Earth’s sunshade, and if cloud cover changes for any reason, you have global warming, or global cooling.”

The US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says,

“All weather on Earth, from the surface of the planet out into space, begins with the Sun. Space weather and terrestrial weather (the weather we feel at the surface) are influenced by the small changes the Sun undergoes during its solar cycle. The most important impact the Sun has on Earth is from the brightness or irradiance of the Sun itself.”

What are the effects of a weaker solar activity, a more dormant cycle as we now experience of less solar energy or irradiance reaching Earth? In addition to increased cloud coverage globally, the vital jet streams weaken and volcanic activity increases, along with earth quakes, combined with erratic unpredictable weather. The Earth’s magnetosphere, which normally locks the Jet Stream in place, weakens, and that in turn causes the stable Jet Stream to shift South as it did in January 2019 in North America causing the record cold and snows across the USA Midwest. In some regions there will be significantly more drought while in others significant flooding with major effect on world food production possible. The weaker solar activity, known as Solar Minimum, also correlates with a global cooling trend. This has been documented going back centuries and longer.

The current solar cycle, called by NASA the Number 24 Cycle, peaked in early 2014 before starting its measurable decline in annual sunspot activity. The minimum is predicted to take place in 2020. It could last for years. Some predict a new “mini Ice Age.”

The subject is complex and vastly under-researched as we focus instead almost exclusively on man-made changes or possible changes to our weather with simplistic computer models. If the coming winter in the Northern Hemisphere is anything like the past one, it should prompt us to take this solar component of our climate seriously. By refusing to promote vigorous new research, we run a real risk in coming years of being unprepared for dramatic harvest failures globally at a time when most OECD governments have decided to eliminate emergency public grain reserves, and our food supply is organized on a “just-in-time” system. Science is not about “consensus,” but rather about discovering truth, however controversial.

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

Featured image is from NEO

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Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

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

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

 

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

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

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

Online independent analysis of US-led wars, rampant corruption, corporate greed, civil rights and fraudulent monetary transactions is invariably relegated to the bottom rung of search engine results.

As a result we presently do not cover our monthly running costs which could eventually jeopardize our activities.

Do you value the reporting and in-depth analysis provided by Global Research on a daily basis?

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Amazonia in Flames – Brazil’s Bolsonaro Is a World Criminal – Encouraging Jungle Burning for Private Exploitation of Freed Land

By Peter Koenig, August 26, 2019

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January 2019 in Davos Switzerland, Bolsonaro made a sumptuous presentation, “We Are Building a New Brazil”. He outlined a program that put literally Brazil up for sale, and especially the Brazilian part of Amazonia.

Trump Escalates Trade War with China. Orders Corporate America to Stop Doing Business with China. Beijing Will Retaliate

By Stephen Lendman, August 26, 2019

Trade wars assure losers, not winners, Trump waging it on multiple fronts — China his main target, a nation able to give as much as it takes directly and asymmetrically.

After Covering the Paris Notre Dame Cathedral Fire Non-Stop, Media Silent as the Amazon Burns for Weeks

By Matt Agorist, August 26, 2019

When the famous Notre Dame Cathedral erupted in flames last April, images of the blaze were plastered across television and computer screens alike. For days on end, mainstream media networks around the world devoted round-the-clock coverage to this burning church. While the burning of such a historical place was undoubtedly a tragic incident, the coverage devoted to it versus the coverage — or, rather, lack there of — given to the Amazon rain forest fires is insulting.

Israel’s Ban on Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar Backfires

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, August 26, 2019

AIPAC subsidizes congressional trips to Israel in order to further the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid: $3.8 billion annually. AIPAC is the chief Israel lobby in the United States and a consistent apologist for Israel’s oppressive policies toward the Palestinians.

Trump’s Other Wall. “The Wall of Money”. Towards a Global Currency War?

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, August 26, 2019

Trump brags about the ‘wall of money’ now flowing into the US from abroad–from Europe, Asia, emerging market economies–as the global economy slides into recession there faster than in the US. He thinks that is great news for the US economy. But it’s quite the opposite.

Western Governments Seek Pretext to Maintain Zimbabwe Sanctions

By Abayomi Azikiwe, August 26, 2019

A number of imperialist states have issued a statement criticizing the Zimbabwe security forces for a decision, backed up by the judiciary, to restrict the activities of an opposition party which has a history of violent protest.

Hong Kong Crisis: Made in America

By Tony Cartalucci, August 25, 2019

Claims that Western interests are driving unrest in Hong Kong to undermine China have been decried across the Western media as “fake news,” “disinformation,” and even grounds for censorship from platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

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No último mês de fevereiro o Governo da Suíça anunciou a criação de uma Fundação em Genebra ( https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foundation-for-the-future_switzerland-moves-to-boost-international-geneva/44771548 ) , com o nome de “Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator” (GSDA).

O objetivo desta nova fundação é o de regulamentar novas tecnologias, desde drones e carros automáticos à engenharia genética, os exemplos mencionados pelo Ministro das Relações Exteriores da Suíça Ignazio Cassis na ocasião do lançamento público desta iniciativa. Segundo Cassis, as novas tecnologias estão se desenvolvendo muito rápido e esta Fundação deve “ antecipar” as consequências destes avanços para a sociedade e para a política. A Fundação será também uma ponte entre as comunidades científicas e diplomáticas, daí sua colocação estratégica em Genebra, que abriga várias organizações internacionas, desde a ONU até a Organização Mundial do Comércio. O Ministério das Relações Exteriores da Suíça contribuirá com 3 millhões de francos suíços – um pouco mais de 3 milhões de dólares – para a fase inicial da Fundação de 2019 até 2022. A cidade e o cantão de Genebra contribuirão cada um com 300 mil francos suíços para o mesmo período e espera-se contribuições do setor privado.

Como Presidente desta nova Fundação foi escolhido o ex-CEO da Nestlé Peter Brabeck-Letmathe e como Vice-Presidente o ex-Presidente do Instituto Federal de Tecnologia de Lausanne – EPFL da sigla em francês – Patrick Aebischer, desde 2015 também membro do comitê diretor do Nestlé Health Science, fundado em 2011 pela Nestlé e localizado justamente no campus da EPFL. A escolha de Peter Brabeck e de Patrick Aebischer – ambos com notória ligação com a Nestlé – para dirigir esta nova Fundação tem razões muito claras. Representa primeiramente o reconhecimento do poder da Nestlé dentro do Governo da Suíça – um ex-CEO da Nestlé é , por definição, competente para dirigir esta iniciativa. Mais preocupante porém, a escolha de Peter Brabeck é mais um exemplo da “parceria” cada vez mais estreita entre Governos e grandes companhias transnacionais, levando ao estabelecimento de uma oligarquia corporativa internacional que vem paulatinamente tomando o poder real dentro das democracias ocidentais.

Como CEO da Nestlé, Peter Brabeck passou a maior parte de sua carreira lutando contra toda forma de regulamentação estatal do setor privado, o caso mais conhecido sendo contra a regulamentação das normas de marketing dos produtos alimentares infantis, principalmente o leite em pó. O conflito entre a Nestlé sob a direção de Peter Brabeck e o IBFAN – International Baby Food Action Network (Rede Internacional pela Amamentação Infantil) – é célebre. Mas a ironia maior – e o maior perigo – é que a escolha de Brabeck para presidir esta Fundação indica que o objetivo real desta iniciativa é justamente impedir qualquer forma de regulamentação pelo poder público que possa impor qualquer limite aos lucros procedentes dos avanços tecnólogicos do setor privado.

Não é de se esperar também que esta Fundação venha a defender qualquer proteção da esfera pública ou do meio ambiente face à possíveis ameaças colocadas à sociedade pelos novos avanços tecnológicos, muito pelo contrário, a escolha de Brabeck indica que esta Fundação tem como objetivo prioritário a defesa e a promoção do setor privado. O que se pode esperar desta Fundação são propostas de auto-regulamentação pelo setor privado no caso de conflitos demasiado explícitos, ou seja, nada de efetivo. E como esta Fundação é uma iniciativa do Governo da Suíça – certamente depois de conversas com o setor privado – e localiza-se em Genebra, ela já dispõe desde o início de uma enorme influência e creio que os movimentos sociais organizados devem seguir atentamente os passos futuros desta Fundação, pois esta encarna uma enorme ameaça à democracia.

E apenas alguns meses depois do lançamento desta nova Fundação, o Governo da Suíça anunciou que Christian Frutiger, atual “Global Head of Public Affairs” da Nestlé (Diretor Global de Negócios Públicos) vai assumir, dentro de pouco tempo, a Vice-Presidência da Agência Suíça para o Desenvolvimento e a Cooperação – Swiss Development and Cooperation , SDC – em inglês, DEZA da sigla em alemão – ou seja, a Agência do Governo da Suíça responsável por projetos de ajuda ao desenvolvimento em outros países.

Mais um exemplo da crescente colaboração entre o setor privado e o poder público, mas desta vez numa área muito mais sensível, a da cooperação para o desenvolvimento. E mais um exemplo também da influência e presença cada vez maior da transnacional Nestlé dentro do Governo da Suíça. Esta presença não é nova nem recente, é importante lembrar por exemplo que o SDC não só apoiou a criação do Water Resources Group – WRG – a iniciativa da Nestlé, da Coca-cola e da Pepsi para privatizar a água, sobre a qual escrevi alguns textos – (ver https://jornalggn.com.br/opiniao/nestle-e-o-fim-da-era-brabeck-por-franklin-frederick/) como o próprio Diretor do SDC é membro do Conselho Diretor do WRG. A contradição entre o fato de a Suíça possuir um dos melhores serviços públicos de saneamento e distribuiçâo de água no mundo mas utilizar o dinheiro do imposto dos cidadãos suíços para apoiar a privatização da água em outros países através da parceria do SDC com a Nestlé não parece ser um problema. O orçamento para a cooperação internacional da Suíça para o período 2017-2020 é de cerca de 6.635 bilhões de francos – um pouco mais de 6.730 bilhões de dólares. Como Vice-Diretor, Christian Frutiger terá bastante influência sobre as decisões relativas à aplicação de parte destes recursos. Ainda mais importante, como Vice-Diretor, Frutiger será responsável direto pela Divisão de “Cooperação Global” do SDC e pelo programa ÁGUA.

Christian Frutiger iniciou sua carreira na Nestlé em 2007, como “Public Affairs Manager” – Gerente de Negócios Públicos – depois de ter trabalhado na Cruz Vermelha Internacional. Em 2006 a marca de água engarrafada da Nestlé “Pure Life” tornou-se sua marca mais lucrativa e em 2007, com a compra do grupo Sources Minérales Henniez S.A. , Nestlé tornou-se a empresa líder em água engarrafada dentro do mercado suíço. E em 2008, apenas uma década depois de seu lançamento, “Pure Life” tornou-se a mais vendida marca de água engarrafada em todo o mundo. Dentro deste contexto, era natural que o trabalho de Christian Frutiger na Nestlé se concentrasse desde o início no tema ÁGUA. E em 2008 estourou na Suíça o escândalo da espionagem da Nestlé. Um jornalista da TV da Suiça Francesa denunciou em um programa que a Nestlé contratou a empresa de segurança SECURITAS para infiltrar espiões dentro dos grupos críticos à Nestlé dentro da Suíça, sobretudo no grupo ATTAC.

A espionagem comprovada ocorreu entre os anos de 2002 e 2003 mas há evidências de espionagem até o ano 2006. O grupo ATTAC abriu um processo contra a Nestlé e contra a empresa SECURITAS e em 2013 finalmente a justiça da Suíça condenou a Nestlé por ter organizado esta operação de espionagem, indicando o envolvimento de pelo menos 4 diretores da empresa na operação. Durante este período, Christian Frutiger teve um papel fundamental e muito bem sucedido em minizar o impacto da operação de espionagem na imagem da Nestlé na Suíça, o que certamente contribuiu para a sua promoção à posição que ele ocupa hoje. O fato de a Nestlé ter organizado uma operação ilegal de espionagem dentro da Suíça e de ter sido condenada pela justiça deste país por isto não teve qualquer efeito nas relações da empresa com o Governo Suíço e sobretudo com a Agência de Cooperação para o Desenvolvimento, como seria de se esperar. Ninguém perguntou ao então CEO da Nestlé Peter Brabeck se a sua empresa era capaz de tais ações dentro da própria Suíça , o que poderíamos esperar então do comportamento da mesma empresa em outros países de garantias democráticas mais frágeis? Espionar cidadãos na Suíça utilizando para este fim a infiltração de agentes disfarçados e sob nome falso é, no mínimo, de uma enorme falta de ética. Mas parece que a ética não foi um dos critérios que o SDC levou em conta ao contratar Christian Frutiger que, em todo este episódio, manteve o silêncio, jamais se desculpou perante as pessoas espionadas pela empresa para a qual trabalhava e ainda fez tudo para minimizar o impacto do problema, ou seja, compactuou com a falta de ética de seu empregador.

Mas a contratação de Frutiger como Vice-Diretor do SDC aponta para problemas muito mais profundos e abrangentes, sobretudo no que se refere ao tema ÁGUA, pois me parece claro que a sua escolha para esta posição tem tudo a ver com este tema. A indicação de Peter Brabeck para presidir a nova fundação do Governo da Suíça em Genebra e a de Christian Frutiger como Vice-Presidente da Agência de Cooperação para o Desenvolvimento da Suíça revelam uma articulação entre o setor privado e o Governo Suíço no sentido de aprofundar as políticas de privatização – sobretudo da água – e o controle das corporações sobre as políticas públicas. Mas esta articulação vai além do Governo da Suíça, ela vai se dar sobretudo ao nível das agências e organismos internacionais presentes em Genebra pois Christian Frutiger será responsável pelo diálogo com muitas dessas organizações. O que estas novas funções de Peter Brabeck e de Christian Frutiger indicam também é que o setor corporativo transnacional esta se organizando e se articulando muito conscientemente ao nível dos governos para assegurar que suas demandas e suas propostas políticas, sejam atendidas.

Não se deve esperar muita reação das principais ONGs da Suíça diante de tudo isso, principalmente pelo fato de o SDC ser o principal financiador de quase todas elas, o que explica o silêncio profundo em torno da Nestlé e de suas ações dentro da Suíça. Um exemplo recente deste silêmcio ocorreu no Brasil por ocasião do Fórum Mundial da Água realizado em Brasília em março deste ano. Como este Fórum é na realidade o Fórum das grandes empresas privadas, a Nestlé e o WRG estavam presentes, dentro do pavilhão oficial da Suíça, junto com organizações como HELVETAS, HEKS/EPER e Caritas Suiça, três das maiores agências de desenvolvimento privadas da Suíça e todas apoiadas pelo SDC. A HEKS / EPER – das siglas em alemão e francês respectivamente – é ligada à Igreja Protestante da Suíça, como a Caritas Suíça é ligada à Igreja Católica.

Durante o Fórum, 600 mulheres do Movimento Sem Terra ocuparam por algumas horas as instalações da Nestlé em São Lourenço, Minas Gerais, para chamar a atenção para os problemas causados pela empresa e pelo indústria engarrafadora de água em geral. Nenhuma destas organizações da Suíça manifestou qualquer solidariedade com o MST, nenhuma condenou as práticas da Nestlé, nenhuma sequer mencionou, em seu retorno à Suíça, que esta ocupação tinha acontecido. Mas HEKS /EPER e Caritas Suiça afirmam lutar pelo direito humano à água e “apóiam” os movimentos sociais – mas não quando estes se colocam contra a Nestlé. Em São Lourenço, na região do Circuito das Águas em MG, e em muitos outros lugares no Brasil, há problemas com exploração de água pela Nestlé e movimentos de cidadãos que tentam proteger suas águas. HEKS / EPER tem um escritório no Brasil mas jamais se aproximou dos grupos que, no Brasil, lutam contra a Nestlé.

O SDC tampouco considera os problemas com a Nestlé em diversas partes do mundo – não apenas no Brasil – como uma razão para reavaliar sua parceria com a empresa. Há problemas muito bem documentados com os engarrafamentos e os bombeamentos de água da Nestlé nos EUA, no Canadá e na França, por exemplo, países considerados democracias estabelecidas. O que há de comum entre todos eles é que os governos se colocam, sempre, à favor da empresa e contra seus próprios cidadãos.

Na cidade de Vittel, na França, a situação é absurda: estudos realizados por órgãos do governo francês indicam que o aquífero de onde a populaçâo de Vittel retira sua água e de onde a Nestlé também coleta a água engarrafada como “VITTEL” se encontra em risco de esgotamento. Não há condições de o aquífero suportar a longo prazo as demandas da população local e da empresa de emgarrafamento da Nestlé. Solução proposta pelas autoridades francesas: construir uma tubulação – pipeline – de cerca de 50 km para buscar a água em uma região vizinha à de Vittel para atender às necessidades da população – deixando à Nestlé à exploração das águas do aquífero!!!

No condado de Wellington, Canadá, se construiu um grupo local – o Wellington Water Watchers – para proteger suas águas da exploração da Nestlé, que conta com o apoio do governo local para renovar sua permissão de continuar engarrafando água. Em Michigan, nos EUA, o problema é semelhante. Nada disso parece incomodar o Governo da Suíça, o SDC ou Christian Frutiger – e se tais problemas ocorrem nestes países, o que não poderá acontecer em países bem mais frágeis em sua organização social e política?

No momento em que escrevo a Europa sofre com uma intensa onda de calor. Há racionamento de água na França, riscos de incêndio em vários locais. Grandes cidades como Paris sofrem com recordes de temperaturas nunca registrados antes e o consumo de água só tende a aumentar. Por outro lado, geleiras derretem cada vez mais e a água se torna cada vez mais escassa. As fontes de águas subterrâneas, muitas das quais fósseis, são uma importante reserva para o futuro e deveriam permanecer intocadas. Mas a ganância das empresas engarrafadoras como a Nestlé adquirem cada vez mais fontes de água. O quadro é o mesmo em todo o planeta – as poucas águas ainda não poluídas se encontram cada vez mais nas mãos de poucas empresas.

No Brasil do governo Bolsonaro a situação é ainda mais grave, com um ministro do meio ambiente cuja tarefa é facilitar a tomada dos recuros naturais brasileiros pelo capital estrangeiro. É importante lembrar que o principal acionista do grupo AMBEV é o cidadão suíço-brasileiro Jorge Paulo Lemann que certamente dispõe de excelentes canais de comunicação com o Governo da Suíça. E a AMBEV também faz parte do WRG que, aliás, já abriu o seu primeiro escritório no Brasil para apoiar a privatização da SABESP ( ver mais em https://jornalggn.com.br/sustentabilidade/as-aguas-do-brasil-o-que-vem-por-ai-franklin-frederick/ ).

O que está acontecendo na Suíça é apenas a ponta do iceberg, a parte visível da articulaçâo internacional das grandes corporações e a tomada do espaço público de decisões políticas pela oligarquia corporativa mundial. Temos que ficar atentos e nos organizarmos para defender nossas águas, nossa Terra e nossa sociedade.

 Franklin Frederick

What they could be doing, instead, is preventing the forced name and identity change on Macedonia and Macedonians. Yes, the one initiated by Greece, and executed by the West. You see, the US, EU and other Western countries have forcibly changed the Republic of Macedonia’s name to “North Macedonia”, changed the identity of Macedonians to “North Macedonian” and forced the revision of Macedonian history – including the rewriting of textbooks and curricula – all in the name of appeasing Greece. The history changes even have to be “approved” by Greece, a country that publicly celebrates the eradication of Macedonians. This is all per the Western-celebrated, anti-Macedonian “Prespa Agreement”.

This is the formal description of a failed state – “A failed state is a political body that has disintegrated to a point where basic conditions and responsibilities of a sovereign government no longer function properly. A state can also fail if the government loses its legitimacy even if it is performing its functions properly. For a stable state, it is necessary for the government to enjoy both effectiveness and legitimacy.”

It’s hard to even contemplate a country like Britain crumbling to the point of becoming a failed state. In the above description, it would be true to say that Britain’s political system has become weak and unstable and that the government is not really in control of the immediate or near future. Certainly, the government’s legitimacy is questionable.

Brexit has in some way disabled almost all parts of government including its civil service from performing its normal functions properly. The institutions that support civil society have been thoroughly undermined by the governing party since 2010. Sovereignty is now challenged, not least because the union itself looks set to fail but also because the agenda of some foreign policy decisions are not being made within Britain’s own government. Britain does have a strong economy and even if a deep recession occurs, which is now expected as a direct result of Brexit – the economy will continue, albeit in a weakened state.

The question of Britain becoming a failed state is, is now being raised by economists, political commentators, columnists and quietly within parliament itself. Type in the keywords into your favourite search engine – ‘Britain Failed State.’ Results returned come from all over the world and from some serious thinkers.

On its current trajectory from the Tory coalition government of 2010 to the referendum to this point – the next ten years look very bleak.

If you don’t think so, just look at Chris Patten’s (1) recent comments –

“Failed states used to be largely the preserve of the developing world, where the institutions of democracy do not have deep roots. But given the extent to which the Brexit campaign has undermined Britain’s institutions through lies, it is reasonable to worry that the country will soon come to resemble a tinpot dictatorship.”

Then there is the global organisation whose task it is to monitor such things as state failure. Just a few months ago, the results of the annual Fragile States Index (2019) was published. Five countries made the rankings as this year’s “most worsened”. In referring to Britain it said:

“After scoring among the top 10 most worsened countries in the 2018 FSI, the United Kingdom is this year the fourth-most worsened country, The United Kingdom has again seen increases in its indicator scores for Group Grievance, Factionalized Elites, and State Legitimacy, among the same indicators that have been driving the country’s spiral over the past decade — indeed, more long-term, the United Kingdom is now ranked as the 15th most worsened country on the FSI since 2009.”

By now most environmentally conscious people understand that Jair Bolsonaro is a bad guy. Brazil’s president has scandalously blamed environmentalists for starting fires burning in the Amazon region, after having called for more “development” of the huge forests.

Canadians are lucky we have a prime minister who is not such an embarrassment and understands environmental issues, right?

While Justin Trudeau has called for better protection of the Amazon, his  government and Canadian corporations have contributed to the rise of a proto fascist Brazilian politician who has accelerated the destruction of the ‘planet’s lungs’.

In 2016 Workers Party President Dilma Rousseff was impeached in a “soft coup”. While Canadian officials have made dozens of statements criticizing Venezuela over the past three years, the Trudeau government remained silent on Rousseff’s ouster. The only comment I found was a Global Affairs official telling Sputnik that Canada would maintain relations with Brazil after Rousseff was impeached. In fact, the Trudeau government began negotiating — there have been seven rounds of talks — a free trade agreement with the Brazilian-led MERCOSUR trade block. They also held a Canada Brazil Strategic Dialogue Partnership and Trudeau warmly welcomed Bolsonaro at the G20 in June.

Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election largely because the front runner in the polls was in jail. Former Workers Party president Lula da Silva was blocked from running due to politically motivated corruption charges, but the Trudeau government seems to have remained silent on Lula’s imprisonment and other forms of persecution of the Brazilian left.

With over $10 billion invested in Brazil, corporate Canada appears excited by Bolsonaro. After his election CBC reported,

“for Canadian business, a Bolsonaro presidency could open new investment opportunities, especially in the resource sector, finance and infrastructure, as he has pledged to slash environmental regulations in the Amazon rainforest and privatize some government-owned companies.”

Canada’s support for right-wing, pro-US, forces in the region has also favored Bolsonaro. Since at least 2009 the Canadian government has been openly pushing back against the leftward shift in the region and strengthening ties with the most right-wing governments. That year Ottawa actively backed the Honduran military’s removal of social democratic president Manuel Zelaya. In 2011 Canada helped put far-right Michel Martelly into the president’s office in Haiti and Ottawa passively supported the ‘parliamentary coup’ against Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo  in 2012. In recent years Canada has been central to building regional support for ousting Venezuela’s government. The destabilization efforts greatly benefited from the ouster of Rousseff and imprisonment of Lula. Brazil is now a member of the Canada/Peru instigated “Lima Group” of countries hostile to the Nicolás Maduro government.

Ottawa has long supported the overthrow of elected, left leaning governments in the hemisphere. Ottawa passively supported the military coup against Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 and played a slightly more active role in the removal of Dominican Republic president Juan Bosch in 1965 and Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. In Brazil Canada passively supported the military coup against President João Goulart in 1964. Prime Minister Lester Pearson failed to publicly condemn Goulart’s ouster and deepened relations with Brazil amidst a significant uptick in human rights violations. “The Canadian reaction to the military coup of 1964 was careful, polite and allied with American rhetoric,” notes Brazil and Canada in the Americas.

Along with following Washington’s lead, Ottawa’s tacit support for the coup was driven by Canadian corporate interests. Among the biggest firms in Latin America at the time, Toronto-based Brascan (or Brazilian Traction) was commonly known as the “the Canadian octopus” since its tentacles reached into so many areas of Brazil’s economy. Putting a stop to the Goulart government, which made it more difficult for companies to export profits, was good business for a firm that had been operating in the country for half a century. After the 1964 coup the Financial Post noted “the price of Brazilian Traction common shares almost doubled overnight with the change of government from an April 1 low of $1.95 to an April 3 high of $3.06.”

The company was notorious for undermining Brazilian business initiatives, spying on its workers and leftist politicians and assisting the coup. The Dark side of “The light”: Brascan in Brazil notes,

“[Brazilian Traction’s vice-president Antonio] Gallotti doesn’t hide his participation in the moves and operations that led to the coup d’État against Goulart in 1964.”

Gallotti, who was a top executive of Brascan’s Brazilian operations for a couple decades, was secretary for international affairs in the Brazilian fascist party, Acao Integralista. Gallotti quit the party in 1938, but began working as a lawyer for Brascan in 1932.

Historically, Canadian companies empowered fascists in Brazil. Today, corporate Canada appears happy to do business with a proto-fascist trampling on Indigenous rights and fueling climate chaos. Ottawa has also enabled Bolsonaro. At a minimum the Trudeau government should be pressed to follow French President Emmanuel Macron’s call to suspend free-trade negotiations with MERCOSUR until Bolsonaro reverses his wonton destruction of the earth’s ‘lungs’.

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An explosion occurred Tuesday at an ammunition storage warehouse used by Iraqi security forces operating under the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) close to the US air and military base in Balad, Salahuddin province, 64 km north of Baghdad. Over a week before, a warehouse at Camp-Sakr used by the Federal Police and PMF in Baghdad city blew up, causing casualties.

The vice commander of the PMF Abu Mahdi al-Muhandes accused Israel of being behind the explosions, claiming “four Israeli drones were stationed at the US military base in Iraq, responsible for both explosions”. Israel Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu hinted at the responsibility of Israel for the attacks saying “Iran has no immunity anywhere… In Iran itself, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen.” Why is Iran the target and what could be the consequences?

There is no doubt that the war between the “Axis of the Resistance” (i.e. Iraqi PMF, Syria, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthis in Yemen and Palestinians in Gaza) and the “US-Israel Axis” and their Middle Eastern allies (Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain) is at a new peak- since 2006 and the “large and serious failure” of Israel’s third war on Lebanon. Moreover, in 2003, when the US declared itself an occupation force in Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell visited Syria and delivered President Bashar al-Assad a warning to stop supporting Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas, paving the road for a “New Middle East”. Assad had the choice to join the “Axis of Resistance” or join the “US new World Order”. When Assad’s decision was made, the war started in Syria in earnest in 2011, to cut off the link with the “Axis of Resistance” and stop the flow of weapons to Lebanon (one of many reasons for the war in Syria). But again, the war failed to achieve its objectives and Damascus cemented its partnership with the “Axis of Resistance”.

Iraq was next on the list of wars: the US watched ISIS, the “Islamic State” terror group, transferring its jihadists from Iraq into Syria and observed – without interfering for two months – how ISIS was occupying a third of Iraq in 2014. It was judged suitable for the US-Israel Axis and their Middle Eastern allies to watch idly the partition of Iraq, obviously in the hope it might disrupt the “Axis of Resistance”. A sectarian war would have lasted decades in the Middle East, keeping all the countries concerned “very busy”.

In Palestine, resistance groups imposed a new rule of engagement on Israel following their acquisition of new missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv and hunting down Israeli vehicles with laser-guided technology. Iran supplied the Palestinians with military technology and military expertise. Gaza has become very difficult for Israel to “chew and squash”.

In the Yemen, four years of war against the poorest country in the Middle East managed to increase the poverty of the Yemenites, but failed to break their will. Indeed, the Iranian supply of weapons imposed a new rule of engagement in turn on Saudi Arabia, allowing the Yemenites to down US drones, hit far-flung airports and target energy resources.

Following these failures on all fronts (Iraqi, Syrian, Palestinian, Yemenite and Lebanese) the US-Israeli Axis seems to be changing its objectives. Instead of hitting Iran’s allies, the target-objective is focused on Iran itself. The US administration, influenced by Prime Minister Netanyahu, revoked the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” (JCPOA), known as the “nuclear deal”, and imposed what it calls “maximum pressure” on Iran.

President Hassan Rouhani said

“one of the EU leaders I met in New York last year told me that Trump advised him to stop dealing with Iran because there will be no more Islamic Republic in three months”.

But Iran proves to be holding its ground firmly, ready for war if imposed, or if prevented from exporting its oil. It has downed a US drone and was close to an all-out war situation, hitting tankers and confiscating a British-flagged tanker when one of its supertankers was captured. However, despite these measured responses by Iran to provocation, particularly its wish to avoid downing a US spy plane with 38 crew onboard, tensions between the US and Iran are far from decreasing.

What we are observing in Iraq today is a change in the US-Israeli Axis’s policy, hitting the “Axis of the Resistance,” its capabilities and friends wherever possible. A decision-maker within this “Axis” said:

“(US Secretary of State Mike) Pompeo and his ministry’s effort seems to be to chase and surround the Axis of the Resistance, and in particular the Lebanese Hezbollah. In Africa, Latin America, Europe, anywhere in the world, the US is focused on hitting Hezbollah’s sympathisers and the societies that support it and to dry up its resources. This is because Israel failed to defeat it face-to-face on the battlefield- and because Hezbollah is one of the most dangerous and effective allies of Iran.”

It is indeed true that Israel hit hundreds of targets in Syria in the first years of the war without claiming responsibility. Only in the last two years did Israel announce its responsibility overtly. Most of Israel’s hits – according to well-informed sources – were selective targets based on intelligence information. Israel hit strategic weapons in Syria or on their way to Lebanon but always before they reached the Lebanese-Syrian borders, in Syrian territory.

“There is a consensus between the US and Israel to hit Iran and its allies. Nevertheless, the confrontational style differs between the two. In Iraq, objectives were hit and personalities assassinated but not revealed to public. What is happening today in Iraq (warehouses blown-up) is similar to the Israeli style of hitting targets in Syria”, said the source.

In Baghdad, sources within the decision-making authority said “Israel targeted the PMF in June 2018 and killed a few dozen PMF. Last month, the PMF revealed the CIA connections of Iraqi Brigadier General Mahmoud al-Fallahi, commander of Anbar, who was caught delivering to a CIA agent in Iraq all coordinates of the location of PMF and their ammunition warehouses. The audio release stated that Israel was planning to hit PMF positions. Therefore, Israeli involvement is not excluded because the destruction of the capability of Iran’s allies is the objective”.

“If PMF warehouses holding strategic missiles that can hit Israel and destroy any US bases in Iraq with precision have been destroyed, it means that the principal US-Israeli objective has been reached. The PMF is the continuation of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Palestinian groups in Gaza and Yemen. They are ready to stand by Iran and take part in any war against the Islamic Republic. Both the US and Israel know that very well”, said the source.

In Iraq, it is not that difficult to have access to sensitive information. The news of the storage of precision missiles in PMF warehouses is in every mouth. During my presence in Iraq for over a decade (and I continue to travel to Iraq regularly), I realised that many Iraqis cannot keep secrets or sensitive information. For example, in 2004 I was informed the same day when the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Brigade Haj Qassem Soleimani arrived in Baghdad. He used to travel regularly to Lebanon for more than 20 years and no one within Hezbollah middle level of command knew about his presence. Yet every time Soleimani visited Iraq, the entire country knew about it the same day, including whom he visited.

Revealing the location of precision missiles and PMF warehouses is a normal exchange of information among Iraqis. It is therefore inevitable that the US and Israel were alerted and reacted by destroying these missiles, knowing that Iran would like to keep Iraq outside its battlefield with the US for many reasons. The US has agreed to allow Iraq to do commerce and buy electricity from Iran, giving waivers for another three months. This is resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in Iranian pockets, in cash!

The Israelis, who are excellent at reading opportunities and probabilities in warfare and military strategy, understand when to hit their enemies- and also when to refrain when a harsh response might be triggered. They have attacked Syria hundreds of times, while keeping away from Lebanon for 13 years. Israel knows very well that Assad, for now, is not willing – despite the encouragement of its allies – to hit back and trigger a new front with Israel in retaliation for Netanyahu’s continuous aggression against the Syrian state. In the meantime, Israel is most likely aware that Hezbollah is just looking for an opportunity to hit Tel Aviv hard if attacked, and if any of its men are killed by Israeli raids or air attacks.

Iraq, in Israel’s view, is not ready to attack Tel Aviv because it has not yet constructed its full strength. Therefore, it is a soft target for Israel and a potential objective for destroying Iranian missiles stocked in PMF warehouses, for example. But to confirm or not the use of “four Israeli drones working as part of the US fleet in Iraq to target PMF” would still be a very early, premature conclusion.

Brigadier Hassan Salame, the commander of the IRGC, stated correctly in Mash’had that “Iran is fighting invisible wars on many fronts”. Indeed, Iraq is one of the multiple fronts on which Iran is engaging the US-Israel Axis. Actually, the Iran-US “war” has never ever really stopped since 1979, the declaration of the “Islamic Revolution”.

Despite the Iranian desire to keep Iraq away from its military theatre with the US, Washington itself would be taking a great risk by allowing Israel to hit the Iraqi security forces if these warehouses were hit by Israeli jets. Indeed, no possible Israeli attack on the Iraqi forces can take place without US approval and knowledge. The US has many military airports and bases in the country, and enjoys the use of several airports in the occupied north-east of Syria (al-Hasaka and Deir-ezzour provinces).

The explosion and destruction of PMF warehouses are in fact only tactical attacks: they do not actually affect Iran and its allies. As in Syria, hundreds of targets were destroyed, but Iran was capable of replacing the destroyed missiles because its factories continue producing them! Israel acknowledges that Hezbollah, despite hundreds of attacks on Syria, managed to accumulate more than 150,000 missiles and rockets. The Palestinian groups still receive the latest warfare technology and so does the Yemen (the Houthis), despite the apparent blockade.

In Iraq, the US risks coming out as the biggest loser. Not only Israeli strikes undermine the relations with Iraq but also because Iran has managed to build a second Hezbollah in Mesopotamia. Hashd al-Shaabi needed a robust ideology to stand by and defeat ISIS. This ideology is durable: it will not dissolve, and it will persevere in opposition to US Middle East hegemony.

It is true that Iraq has US weapons and needs US intelligence support to stand on its own feet. But it should be kept in mind that Iraq 2019 is no longer Iraq 2003 (the US occupation), nor Iraq 2014 (occupation by ISIS). New allies and partners are ready to take over, like Russia (already offering intelligence through the common military operation room in Baghdad), China and Iran: they are indeed no longer at Iraq’s gates, but inside its walls.

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Her public statements, website positions, and body language suggest she’s a genuine anti-war presidential aspirant.

Wanting US wars of aggression ended against nations threatening no one makes her worthy of everyone’s support.

At the same time, it’s important to note that candidates on the stump say one thing, then time and again do things entirely different in office, notably the nation’s highest.

Candidate Obama was anti-war. As president, he bragged about terror-bombing seven countries. On his watch, millions suffered and died from his wars of aggression.

Candidate Trump raged about trillions of dollars poured down a black hole of waste, fraud, and abuse for endless wars.

As president, he escalated inherited wars of aggression on Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Yemen — on the phony pretext of combating the scourge of ISIS the US created and supports.

He’s waging all-out war on Iran and Venezuela by other means, pushing things toward possibly turning things hot.

That said, among the crowded field of about 25 Dem aspirants, Gabbard, and 89-year-old former Senator Mike Gravel’s symbolic candidacy, are the only ones in the race that appear genuinely anti-war and progressive.

Gravel is running to promote what all just societies hold dear, not win. He’ll be age-90 next May, a challenge for anyone his age  to work long hours daily — especially in a high-stress position on the world stage.

At age-38, Gabbard has plenty of vigor to handle head of state rigors. This article focuses on her foreign policy positions.

On Russia, she’s falsely called a Kremlin darling, far from it. She voted for illegal US sanctions on the country, along with falsely accusing its ruling authorities of “aggression” in Ukraine.

That was long ago, her views perhaps changed after getting reliable information, dispelling what’s clearly false, misleading and unacceptable.

Asked in May if she believes Vladimir Putin is a threat to US security, she said the following:

“(T)ime and again…our continued wasteful regime change wars have been counterproductive to the interests of the American people and the approach that this administration has taken in essentially choosing conflict rather than seeing how we can cooperate and work out our differences with other countries in the world has been counterproductive to our national security.”

A better answer would have been that the US clearly threatens Russia and all other countries it doesn’t control — not the other way around.

The Russian Federation never attacked another nation, threatening none now. The US wages endless wars of aggression, threatening everyone everywhere.

She added that

“escalated…tensions…between the (US) and nuclear-armed countries like Russia and China…brought us to this very dangerous point where nuclear strategists point out that we are at a greater risk of nuclear war now than ever before in history and we’ve got to understand what the consequences of that are.”

The obvious solution is stepping back from the brink, seeking world peace and cooperative relations with other countries. Instead, policies of Republicans and Dems are polar opposite — indeed risking possible nuclear war by accident or design.

Last February, Gabbard slammed the Trump regime’s trade war with China, tweeting:

It “damaged, not helped, our economy, has undermined our efforts to denuclearize North Korea, and has strengthened the hand of Chinese anti-American militarists.”

She strongly opposes preemptive US wars on any nations. She correctly said

“war with Iran would be far more costly and far more devastating than anything that we experienced in Iraq.”

“So, it would essentially make the war in Iraq look like a cakewalk.”

She’s against illegal US nuclear related sanctions on Iran, stressing the country’s full compliance with its JCPOA obligations.

She opposed Trump’s JCPOA pullout, risking “very dangerous consequences.”

She falsely claimed it will likely “result in Iran restarting its nuclear weapons program” — what it never had, doesn’t want, calling for elimination of these weapons.

She denounced decades of US interventionist policies against the country. She incorrectly believes Iran earlier sought a nuclear deterrent for self-defense.

North Korea developed nuclear weapons for this purpose, not the Islamic Republic.

On the DPRK, she falsely believes the country poses a threat, perhaps unaware that its ruling authorities never attacked another nation throughout its post-WW II history — beginning on August 17, 1945 when the Korean peninsula was divided, changing the course of history negatively.

She supports meeting with Kim Jong-un “without preconditions,” knowing the DPRK developed nuclear weapons over feared US aggression.

She strongly opposes “US regime change war policy because it has been completely counterproductive to US interests and has caused immense human suffering around the world.”

She called for ending “genocidal war in Yemen” and breaking off longstanding US relations with Saudi Arabia, a despotic crime family masquerading as a nation-state, true as well about other despotic Gulf states.

The US should stay out of Venezuela, she said, adding: It’s all “about the oil.”

“Let the Venezuelan people determine their future. We don’t want other countries to choose our leaders, so we have to stop trying to choose theirs.”

Asked if she opposes (US-designated puppet) Guaido, US sanctions on Venezuela, and military intervention, she said “all of the above.”

Despite voting for a nonbinding congressional resolution, condemning the right to boycott Israel in support of Palestinian rights, she pledged to oppose legislation that “restrict(s) freedom of speech by imposing legal penalties against those who participate in the BDS movement.”

On Afghanistan, the longest US war in modern times with no end of it in prospect, she said she’ll “bring our troops home within the first year in office because they shouldn’t have been there this long.”

They shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11 — the mother of all US state-sponsored false flags.

Gabbard joined the army national guard “after the al-Qaeda terror attacks on 9/11 so I could go after those who attacked us on that day,” she said.

An Iraq war veteran, older and wiser, she said the war “was based on lies,” and accused the CIA of “funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda.”

She’s may be the only congressional member boldly stating the above cold hard truths publicly to her credit.

She’s wrongfully criticized for meeting with Syria’s Assad, touring parts of the country, and seeing firsthand the devastation of US aggression.

She called all anti-government forces terrorists, saying so-called moderate rebels don’t exist, stressing “(t)hat is a fact.”

Returning home from Syria, she expressed “even greater resolve to end our illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government.”

She vowed as president and commander-in-chief to “end these regime change wars.”

She said US interventionist wars in Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere caused enormous human suffering, along with “imped(ing)  our ability to form relationships with countries that are skeptical of our intentions.”

She calls for “spending the trillions of dollars wasted in interventionist wars on more pressing domestic issues in America, like infrastructure, college debt, (and) healthcare.”

Polls show the vast majority of Americans favor use of the military only as a last resort. The US prioritizes preemptive wars of aggression — against invented enemies. Real ones don’t exist.

In December 2016, Gabbard introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act, saying the following at the time:

“The legislation would prohibit the US government from using American taxpayer dollars to provide funding, weapons, training, and intelligence support to groups like the Levant Front, Fursan al Ha and other allies of Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, al-Qaeda and ISIS, or to countries who are providing direct or indirect support to those same groups.”

Separately she said

“(i)f you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail.”

“Yet the US government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”

“The CIA…direct(ly) and indirect(ly) supports…ISIS and al-Qaeda.”

“This support has allowed (these jihadists) to establish strongholds throughout Syria, including in Aleppo.”

“That is why I’ve introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists bill – legislation based on congressional action during the Iran-Contra affair to stop the CIA’s illegal arming of rebels in Nicaragua.”

She called “the issue of war and peace” central to her campaign, describing herself as an anti-war/anti-Trump progressive.

She also vowed “to fight for equal rights for all.” Is she an ideal presidential aspirant?

No one is. I take issue with some of her views, but admire her opposition to imperial wars and support for social justice.

Polls show she has scant backing sadly, making it highly unlikely for her to become the Dem standard bearer.

Establishment media first ignored her. Then as her name recognition grew, they considered her unqualified for the nation’s highest office for being anti-war and pro-social justice.

History shows no anti-war US presidential aspirant has a chance to win out over challengers — not in a nation addicted to endless wars of aggression.

It’s the longstanding American way. Both extremist right wings of its war party abhor peace, equity and justice.

Candidates with these views for president and congressional leadership positions haven’t got a chance.

As long as Gabbard maintains them, she’s likely destined to be no more a footnote in US political history at most.

It’s a disturbing testimony to what the scourge of US imperialism and neoliberal harshness are all about.

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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 Another Day in the Empire

Turkey will continue exploring for oil and gas in the eastern Mediterranean waters around disputed Cyprus, and “No project can be realised if Turkey and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus are not involved,” said President Recep Erdogan as quoted by Cypriot media.

“We will continue to defend the rights of Turkish Cypriots with the same dedication,” Erdogan said following a meeting with the head of the Cypriot Turks.

Turkey, which recognizes the northern Turkish Cypriot government and doesn’t have diplomatic relations with the internationally recognized government of EU member Cyprus, claims that part of the Cyprus offshore area is under the jurisdiction of Turkish Cypriots or Turkey, and they are entitled to part of the potential oil and gas resources in the area. Turkey doesn’t recognize the agreements that Cyprus has signed with other countries in the Mediterranean over the exclusive maritime zones either.

Last month, tensions between Turkey and Greece regarding the Cyprus drilling rights spiked again when Greece’s newly elected government said Turkey undermined the security of the eastern Mediterranean with its drilling operations off the Cypriot shores.

“The illegal actions of Turkey, which defy international law are placing the security of the region at risk. As such, they are absolutely condemnable,” Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias said, adding “We discussed this flagrant violation of the sovereignty and the sovereign rights of the Republic of Cyprus perpetrated by Turkey.”

A string of natural gas discoveries in the waters around Cyprus have turned the divided island into one of the new hot spots for gas, along with Egypt and Israel. Just recently, the island greenlit a consortium involving Eni and Total to drill for gas in a new part of its exclusive economic zone.

Turkey’s strong position on the issue of oil and gas suggests that internal tensions in Cyprus will continue and the newly found gas wealth will not help their resolution.

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Ivanka Trump, Kellyanne Conway and other senior White House aides have vacated their West Wing offices while asbestos is removed – even as the Trump administration is manipulating a federal chemical safety law to keep asbestos legal.

Bloomberg reported that a number of staffers, also including policy aide Stephen Miller and economic aide Larry Kudlow, have temporarily relocated while new fire safety equipment and other updates are being installed. The asbestos removal comes despite the fact that President Trump is a longstanding fan of the deadly fireproof material, a notorious carcinogen that kills tens of thousands of Americans each year.

In his 1997 book, “The Art of the Comeback,” Trump argued that asbestos is “100 percent safe, once applied.” In 2005, Trump testified before Congress, claiming asbestos would have kept the World Trade Center from collapsing following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

And last year, one of the world’s biggest producers of asbestos, a Russian company with ties to Vladimir Putin, used an image of the president to label pallets of asbestos “APPROVED BY DONALD TRUMP.” The company said it was praising Trump for the administration’s efforts to keep asbestos legal for use in the U.S.

“While these measures are being taken to protect White House employees, the president and his EPA chief Andrew Wheeler are actively working to ensure this deadly carcinogen remains legal,” said Linda Reinstein, president and founder of the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, or ADAO. “Every American should be protected from exposure to asbestos, and the only way to ensure that is to ban it once and for all from being imported and used in the U.S.”

“When it comes to his own family and closest aides, President Trump takes steps to protect them from asbestos,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “But for the 327 million Americans who don’t work in the White House, the president and Wheeler don’t show as much concern. Protecting public health was once a top priority for presidents, but not now, and there is no better example than the Trump administration’s outrageous push to keep asbestos legal.”

In 2016, Congress passed legislation revamping the woefully weak federal Toxic Substances Control Act finally giving the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to ban asbestos and other dangerous substances. But under Wheeler’s direction, the agency is laying the groundwork to allow asbestos to remain legal.

In April, Wheeler issued a new rule that would allow manufacturers to resume abandoned uses of asbestos if approved by the EPA. Internal agency memos, obtained by ADAO and reported by The New York Times, show that top political appointees at EPA ignored calls by agency scientists and lawyers to implement an outright ban.

The EPA banned asbestos, in 1989, only to see the ban overturned two years later after a court challenge by the chemical industry. Since 1989:

• More than 1 million Americans have died from preventable asbestos-caused diseases, according to ADAO’s analysis of data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, at the University of Washington.
• Although domestic production of asbestos has ended, ADAO’s analysis of U.S. Geological Survey data shows that an estimated 375,000 metric tons of asbestos have been imported to the U.S. The chlor-alkali industry is the main importer of raw asbestos, which relies on it to produce chlorine and other chemicals.
• Nearly 70 other countries have banned asbestos.

The Environmental Working Group Action Fund’s analysis of federal mortality data estimates that asbestos-triggered diseases kill an estimated 15,000 Americans a year. Last year, an international peer-reviewed study found the annual death toll from asbestos exposure may be much higher – nearly 40,000 Americans a year, and more than 255,000 a year worldwide.

Members of Congress are making efforts to block the Trump administration’s move to allow asbestos to remain legal for use. Legislation sponsored by Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Reps. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.), Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) would ban the import, manufacture and distribution of all forms of asbestos.

The Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act would also require the EPA, Labor Department and Department of Health and Human Services to conduct a comprehensive review to assess the “presence of asbestos in residential, commercial, industrial, public, and school buildings” and “the extent of exposure and risk to human health associated with the asbestos present in such buildings.”

The legislation is named after Linda Reinstein’s husband, Alan Reinstein, who died in May 2006 of mesothelioma, an incurable cancer caused only by asbestos.

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The influential Indian online opinion outlet Daily O is reviving the old narrative that the Khalistani cause is supposedly backed by Pakistan and therefore represents a betrayal of Sikh interests as part of the latest stage of the state’s increasingly desperate infowar that it’s waging against this popular separatist movement.

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India already lost the battle for hearts and minds when it comes to the Khalistani cause after worldwide awareness of this movement skyrocketed following the Sikhs For Justice’s (SFJ) global flag-raising protests last week during India’s “Independence Day” (which isn’t recognized as suchby the Sikh community) and famous Punjabi-born but UK-based rapper Hard Kaur’s fierce resistance to her home country’s intimidation campaign against her for her widely publicized support of this movement. It’s therefore unsurprising that the state is reviving its old narrative that the separatists are supposedly backed by Pakistan and therefore are traitors to their fellow Sikhs, as Harbir Singh wrote in the influential Indian online opinion outlet Daily O in his article titled “Serving the global jihad: This is what Khalistanis supporting Pakistan are doing. And it is a betrayal of Sikhs“.

He began by expressing the outrage that he felt when he saw a Pakistani flag flying among Khalistani ones during a protest outside the Indian consulate in Toronto, after which he went on to describe his family’s experience during the time of the subcontinent’s partition. He ended by asking some rhetorical questions to his fellow Sikhs that invoked famous figures from that religion’s history in order to make the point that the community shouldn’t ally with Pakistan in its quest to create Khalistan, which he concluded makes anyone who’s in support of this cause “ignorant, hate-filled servants of the global Jihad.” It’s very sad to read about what his family went through decades ago, but the understandably emotional reaction that he has to those events apparently clouded his judgement since he should have known that no such Pakistan-Khalistan alliance exists had he spent a few minutes researching the context behind the image that provoked him so much.

The SFJ’s legal advisor Gurpatwant Singh Pannun announced in the run-up to the global flag-raising protests that his organization has allied with the Kashmiris out of the solidarity that their movements feel for one another as oppressed people that are denied their UN-enshrined right to self-determination, revealing that they’ll be jointly participating in those demonstrations all across the world on Indian “Independence Day”. By the very nature of their conflict with the Indian state, many Kashmiris are sympathetic to Pakistan and are in favor of unifying with it, which explains why some of the protests’ participants waved the Pakistani flag. It wasn’t because the Khalistan movement is allied to Pakistan like the Daily O’s writer wrongly said that it is, but because some of its Kashmiri allies have a favorable opinion towards India’s neighbor. In fact, if Harbir had done his research ahead of time, he would have known that Pakistan curtailed the SFJ’s activities in the country earlier this year and even received a harsh rebuke because of it from Pannun himself.

It might actually be the case that he was aware of this but deliberately omitted it from his article because he intended for the piece to function as “agitprop” (agitational propaganda) in provoking the Sikh community to turn against the Khalistani cause. That could also explain why he focused so much on his family’s experience in Pakistan during the subcontinent’s partition in order to strike a nerve with the other Sikhs that fled, which he might have hoped would then inspire them to condemn the supporters of Khalistan who they’re being mislead into thinking are just Pakistan’s pawns instead of the members of a purely indigenous movement like they really are. About that last-mentioned point, the Khalistani cause was started by Indian-based Sikhs who finally had enough of the state’s suppression of their community, which reached genocidal proportions after “Operation Blue Star“, “Operation Woodrose“, and the anti-Sikh pogroms (all three of which took place in 1984).

It was then joined by even more Sikhs whose family members “disappeared” during the central government’s intense anti-Khalistan crackdown of the 1990s and who are nowadays afraid that history might horrifyingly repeat itself in the coming future as a result of eight states recently obtaining the right to utilize the so-called “Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act” (UAPA, which had recent amendments proposed to it that would grant the government the right to declare anyone a “terrorist” without due process) against their community. This latest development complements the government’s revived narrative that Khalistan supporters are “Pakistani-backed terrorists” and raises fears that the notorious “Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act” (AFSPA) might be imposed in part or all of Punjab ahead of the region’s plebiscite on independence that the SFJ are organizing through their Referendum 2020 campaign.

In other words, the tragic experience that some Sikhs went through in partition-era Pakistan is in the past, yet their nightmare in India has never ended, and that’s what gave rise to the Khalistan movement in the first place. The non-Sikh reader outside of the subcontinent wouldn’t know that though based on how Harbir framed his article in order to smear the supporters of Khalistan as Pakistani puppets and traitors to the Sikh community. His insistence on repeating the claims that Pakistan is obsessed with waging jihad on India (apparently just because it’s a Muslim country) is Islamophobic and intended to appeal to the hyper-nationalist Hindutva volkgeist of his country, but the only reason why it’s even mentioned in the first place is because he ignored the fact the Pakistan curtailed the SFJ’s activities earlier this year and instead pretended that it’s sponsoring the movement. Only Harbir himself can account for why he wrote an entire article based on such a factually false premise, but it certainly looks like it was meant to contribute to India’s anti-Khalistan infowar and divide Sikhs.

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This article was originally published on Geopolitica.RU.

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

Featured image is from Geopolitica.RU

Just when things seemed to be settling down a little bit, our conflict with China has suddenly escalated to a dangerous new phase.  This is not simply just a “trade war” any longer, and our relationship with China will never be the same again.  As you will see below, President Trump just referred to Chinese President Xi Jinping as our “enemy”, and this is something that the Chinese are going to take extremely seriously. 

In China, the national leader is a representation of the government as a whole, and the government as a whole is a representation of the entire county.  So to the Chinese people, what Trump just said will be interpreted as “the United States and China are now enemies”.  Of course for Trump everything would be forgiven tomorrow if the Chinese totally caved in to his demands and started saying all sorts of nice things about him, but for the Chinese what has transpired in recent months will be remembered for generations. 

President Trump has insulted their national honor over and over again, and that sort of thing may not mean much to us here in the western world anymore, but over in China their sense of honor is central to who they are as a people.  After everything that has already been said and done, there will be no going back, and we are now facing a future in which the United States and China will be very bitter enemies.

In response to previously announced U.S. tariffs, China stunned global markets when it announced a new wave of tariffs on U.S. goods early on Friday…

The trade war between the U.S. and China escalated further Friday as Beijing announced a new set of tariffs on American products, sending the stock market plunging.

The China State Council announced it would impose tariffs ranging from 5% to 10% on an additional $75 billion in U.S. goods, according to state media outlet Global Times.

After Trump learned of this, he hit the ceiling, and he immediately went on a Twitter rant in which he pledged to hit Chinese goods with even higher tariffs…

For many years China (and many other countries) has been taking advantage of the United States on Trade, Intellectual Property Theft, and much more.

Our Country has been losing HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS a year to China, with no end in sight.

Sadly, past Administrations have allowed China to get so far ahead of Fair and Balanced Trade that it has become a great burden to the American Taxpayer.

As President, I can no longer allow this to happen! In the spirit of achieving Fair Trade, we must Balance this very unfair Trading Relationship.

China should not have put new Tariffs on 75 BILLION DOLLARS of United States product (politically motivated!).

Starting on October 1st, the 250 BILLION DOLLARS of goods and products from China, currently being taxed at 25%, will be taxed at 30%.

Additionally, the remaining 300 BILLION DOLLARS of goods and products from China, that was being taxed from September 1st at 10%, will now be taxed at 15%. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

In addition, Trump “hereby ordered” U.S. corporations “to immediately start looking for an alternative to China”…

Trump then tweeted that American companies “are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.” He did not immediately detail the authority he thought he could use to compel firms to leave China.

When I first saw that I could hardly believe what I was seeing, and you may have had the same reaction.

Can Trump actually do that?

Well, no, the truth is that he can’t.

He can certainly encourage U.S. businesses to leave China, but as CNN has pointed out, he doesn’t have the authority to unilaterally order all of our companies to leave an entire country…

Here’s the thing: Donald Trump can’t order American business to do anything. There’s a reason the business world is known as the “private sector” — because it’s not owned or controlled by the government (aka the “public sector.”) We don’t have state-run industry (or media). The President of the United States can’t “order” privately held business to do, well, much of anything.

And on top of everything else, President Trump posted another tweet in which he called Chinese President Xi Jinping our “enemy”.  The following comes directly from Trump’s Twitter account…

As usual, the Fed did NOTHING! It is incredible that they can “speak” without knowing or asking what I am doing, which will be announced shortly. We have a very strong dollar and a very weak Fed. I will work “brilliantly” with both, and the U.S. will do great…

….My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

Any hopes for a trade deal with China during the Trump administration were already dead, but this has put even more nails in the coffin.

When the outlook for the U.S. economy was brighter, getting a trade deal with China done was not so critical for Trump, but now things have dramatically changed.

At this point, even the White House’s own internal forecasts are showing “that the economy could slow markedly over the next year”…

Top White House advisers notified President Trump earlier this month that some internal forecasts showed that the economy could slow markedly over the next year, stopping short of a recession but complicating his path to reelection in 2020.

The private forecast, one of several delivered to Trump and described by three people familiar with the briefing, contrasts sharply with the triumphant rhetoric the president and his surrogates have repeatedly used to describe the economy.

Things just continue to get even bleaker.  U.S. manufacturing just contracted for the very first time since 2009, and the financial markets are starting to figure out that there aren’t any promising solutions on the horizon.

On Friday, the trade war turmoil greatly spooked investors and the Dow ended the day down more than 600 points…

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed 623.34 points lower, or 2.4% at 25,628.90. The S&P 500 slid 2.6% to close at 2,847.11. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 3% to end the day at 7,751.77. The losses brought the Dow’s decline for August to more than 4%.

The major indexes also posted weekly losses for the fourth straight time. The Dow dropped about 1% this week while the S&P 500 pulled back 1.4%. The Nasdaq lost 1.8%.

As I noted at the end of last month, the stock market started to decline in July, and now it has fallen every single week here in August.  Just like in “The Beginning Of The End”, we are potentially facing a scenario in which we experience great economic and financial turmoil during the second half of the year.

Over and over again, I have kept warning my readers that our relations with China were going to get progressively worse.  We have been expecting this for a long time, but most Americans still do not grasp the implications of this crisis.

This conflict between the United States and China is going to change everything.  An extraordinary amount of pain is heading our way, and our society is completely and utterly unprepared to handle it.

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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.

Featured image is from Stansberry Churchouse

On 28 October 2018, Jair Bolsonaro was elected President of Brazil with 55.1% of the vote – and with a gigantic help from Cambridge Analytica.

At the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January 2019 in Davos Switzerland, Bolsonaro made a sumptuous presentation, “We Are Building a New Brazil”. He outlined a program that put literally Brazil up for sale, and especially the Brazilian part of Amazonia. He was talking particularly about Brazil’s water resources, the world’s largest, and the rain forest – offering a huge potential for agricultural development and mining.

None of the world leaders present at the WEF, precisely those that regularly meet pretending to save the planet, reacted to Bolsonaro’s statement on the Amazon region. They all new who Bolsonaro was and is – they knew that the man had no scruples and would destroy – literally – the world’s lungs. They did nothing. They stayed silent in words and deeds, applauding the neonazi for his openness to international business and globalization.

Today, on the occasion of another similar world event, the meeting of the G7 in Biarritz, France, French President Macron accused Bolsonaro of lying when he talked and pledged environmental consciousness after taking office, about protecting the Amazon area. Macron was joined by Germany in threatening Brazil with canceling the trade agreement with Mercosur, if he would not immediately undertake to stop the “wildfires”. They have most likely nothing to do with ‘wild’ – as they according to all circumstantial evidence were planted in a concerted effort to rid the rich Amazon territory of the life-sustaining jungle, so as to make the newly gained flame-deforested land accessible for private agri-business and mining.

Mind you, the G7 is another self-appointed totally illegal group of industrialized, rich countries (similar to the G20); illegal, because they have been approved by nobody, not by the UN or any international body. They became rich mostly on the back of poor developing nations that were and are still colonized for hundreds of years. The G7 count today about 10% of the world population and are controlling 40% of the globe’s GDP.

Despite the fact that nobody, other than themselves ratified their existence and their machinations, they believe they can call the shots of how the world should turn and function. They have no official backing by anybody, especially not the people across the globe, who, with a vast majority are fighting globalization. It’s a useless structure – RT refers to them as “The Unbearable Pointlessness of G7” – but their power lays in the rest of the world’s silence – their silent acceptance of the G7’s arrogant wielding of the scepter of power.

So, would Bolsonaro take them seriously, knowing that he is one of them and they are fully sharing his ideology of profit first, shoving environmental and social values down the muddy waters of the Amazon River? Hardly. He knows they are hypocrites. He knows that they make a bit of noise, because they have to. It makes for good public relation and propaganda – so people don’t go on the barricades. He knows that starting this coming Monday, 26 August, when the G7 summit will be history, that anything the Macrons of this world so impressively said, will fade away. The media will concentrate on other ‘news’ – and the forest fires will burn the life stream of Amazonia away – to make room for corporate profit making by the elite few.

Never mind the Constitutional protection of indigenous people and their land, Bolsonaro backed by evangelists and his military junta will rapidly dismantle any remaining protection for the ecosystem and native communities. His argument goes that the native people’s land is sitting on huge reserves of natural resources that belong to Brazil and may be concessioned to private corporations for mining, exploitation of agriculture and lumber.

The indigenous folks are people who have for thousands of years made a peaceful living in the Amazon. They are the gatekeepers of Amazonia; they are the people who may carry our genes from the present killer civilization to the next, hopefully less of a killer one, when mankind has finally managed to destroy itself. It will not destroy the planet. Never. The planet will just get rid of the nefarious elements of annihilation – mankind – and renew itself. As has happened many times in the past – a new civilization will eventually be born – and, yes, the world’s indigenous people, the likely only survivors, may carry on our DNA, possibly to the next attempt at humanity.

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The fires have so far in about 20 days since they were discovered, consumed at least 74,000 ha of tropical rain forest. The smoke is already trespassing the border to Argentina and affecting the provinces of Formosa, Jujuy, Corrientes, Catamarca, La Rioja, Santa Fe and may have already reached Buenos Aires. NASA reports that about 3.2 million square kilometers of South America are covered by smoke.

The flames are massive and are devastating the jungle at a rapid pace. Amazonia comprises one of the world’s largest rainforests, also known as Mother Earth’s lungs – without which humanity – and fauna and flora might not survive.

According to the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the fires increased by 83% – almost double – from what they were last year, and, not coincidentally, at least 68% of protected areas have been affected. The Brazilian Space Research spotted 72,000 fires, of which 9,000 last week alone. The Amazon is home to 34 million people, including over 350 indigenous groups.

At the onset of the G7 conference, Mr. Macron tweeted:

“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let’s discuss this emergency first order in two days!”

Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire. It is an international crisis. Members of the G7 Summit, let's discuss this emergency first order in two days! #ActForTheAmazon pic.twitter.com/dogOJj9big

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) August 22, 2019

The destruction of the Amazon is indeed a crime of first degree. Accordingly, there are protests around the world against Bolsonaro’s “free for all” mining, lumbering, land and water grabbing policies. The eco-warriors Extinction Rebellion (XR) organize widespread protests, and in front of London’s Brazilian Embassy protesters chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Bolsonaro’s got to go!”.

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While the Brazil fires catch world attention, there are jungle fires even larger than those in Amazonia burning down other parts of the world’s oxygen-generating lungs. Bloomberg cites NASA data, according to which last Thursday and Friday, 22 an 23 August – in two days alone – more than 6,900 fires were recorded in Angola and about 3,400 in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), about 5 times as many as in the same two days in the Brazilian Amazon region. The destruction of the jungle in Africa progresses virtually unnoticed and is hardly reported in western media. Bloomberg is an exception. Whys is that?

Could it be that the same globalized corporations interested in Brazil’s natural resources underlaying the Amazon forests, are also interested in those enormous reserves of minerals and hydrocarbon resources of Central Africa? Have they – DRC, Angola and possibly others been encouraged tacitly or directly by Bolsonaro and his clan to let the jungle burn? There are plenty of Brazilian corporations which have a vivid interest in Angola, another former Portuguese colony.

Despite the G7 apparent concern to protect the world’s lungs in Amazonia, they seem to be oblivious about the Central African rain forest devastation. The massive African fires too advance rapidly and extinguish another part of the world’s lungs. But these fires are not on the G7 radar, or agenda for discussion, and nobody is threatened with sanctioning if the respective governments remain hapless onlookers.

In 2008, a so-called Amazon Fund, the first UN REDD+ initiative for the protection, preservation and monitoring of the Amazon region was created (UN REDD+ = reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and foster conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks).

Germany and Norway – and others – have accused Brazil for not having properly invested their contribution into the Fund. Norway has recently blocked a payment of US$ 30 million destined for the Fund. Germany had blocked already in early August the equivalent of US$ 39 million for different Amazon protection programs to be financed by the Fund. But Bolsonaro, in a nonchalant manner dismissed the blocked payments, suggesting that Germany should use the funds for reforestation of Germany.

In the case of Brazil, the threats by the Macron-Merkel duo – and others – seem to have had at least at the outset the effect that Bolsonaro is mobilizing the military to help extinguish the fires. Will he succeed? – Does he want to succeed? – In any case will the media continue reporting on progress once the G7 have gone home? – Will the world’s outcry be loud enough to force a concerted effort, possibly UN led – to fight and extinguish these fires that are menacing not only to destroy a key oxygen generator for life on mother earth, but also a UNESCO protected world heritage?

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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; 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.

Trade wars assure losers, not winners, Trump waging it on multiple fronts — China his main target, a nation able to give as much as it takes directly and asymmetrically. 

His MAGA agenda has nothing to do with reducing the US trade deficit — caused by corporate America shifting manufacturing and other operations to low-wage countries.

It’s all about serving US interests at the expense of other nations, the hallmark of imperial arrogance.

Major US differences with China are all about wanting the country marginalized, weakened, contained and isolated — its industrial, economic, and technological development undermined.

Trump trade/tariffs war with China shows he’s economically ignorant and incompetent. He has access to the best and brightest economic minds in the nation.

Months after announcing his candidacy for president in June 2015, Psychology Today called him “unwilling to listen, overbearing, and shoot(s) off at the mouth without thinking,” adding:

He “doesn’t shy away from confrontation, or really care much about peoples’ feelings.” He lacks “prudence…doesn’t care much for rules and tends to avoid them.”

He lacks diligence and is unpredictable. A previous article asked: Is Trump too Mentally Unstable to Govern?

It discussed a petition signed by 60,000 mental health professionals, judging him “psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States.”

They requested his removal from office “according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is ‘unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.’ ”

Announcing major policy moves impulsively by Twitter alone is disturbing — his latest by escalating trade war with China that won’t go unanswered.

On Friday, Beijing announced new 5 – 10% tariffs on $75 billion worth of US imports, effective September 1 and December 15, 25% tariffs on US autos and 5% on auto parts, effective Dec. 15.

It’s in response to the Trump regime’s announced 10% duties on the same dates.

Trump responded by “hereby order(ing)” corporate America to stop doing business with China, called President Xi Jinping a US “enemy,” asked whether he or Fed chairman Powell is a bigger enemy, and impulsively escalated trade war hours later.

He raised existing 25% tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports to 30%, effective October 1, along with hiking his announced 10% duty on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods to 15%, effective September 1 and December 15.

“We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them,” he roared via Twitter.

….better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 23, 2019

There’s virtually nothing the Fed can do to undo trade war damage from his wrongheaded policies toward China and other countries.

Money printing madness doesn’t stimulate growth or create jobs when used for speculative investments, mergers and acquisitions, high salaries, and big bonuses – while wages for ordinary Americans fail to keep pace with inflation and vital benefits erode.

Dropping money on Wall Street and into pockets of high-net worth individuals gets none of it to main street where it’s vitally needed.

When people have money they spend it. A virtuous cycle of prosperity follows. America once had sustainably prosperous growth.

Today the nation is in decline, heading for third world status — its privileged class benefitting at the expense of the general welfare, most people struggling to get by.

Trump’s war on China by other means will harm them greatly if it generates a stiff economic downturn ahead.

Beijing responded to his Friday tariffs hike, calling it “barbaric.” Its official broadsheet the People’s Daily warned that state authorities will fight back “until the end.”

Ahead of Friday events, China’s Global Times said

“the world is no longer unipolar, and there is less room to do what one wants, as seen in the tug of trade war with China,” adding:

“The authorities in Beijing have reiterated that they would come up with countermeasures against the new round of (US) tariff increases. Nobody emerges a winner from the trade war.”

“(I)t is increasingly evident that we are in the midst of a strategic conflict provoked by the US” — because of US “hubris (and) neo-mercantilism.”

Global Times editor Hu Xijin tweeted:

“Based on what I know, China will take further countermeasures in response to US tariffs on $300 billion Chinese goods,” adding:

“Beijing will soon unveil a plan of imposing retaliatory tariffs on certain US products. China has ammunition to fight back. The US side will feel the pain.”

Separately, he tweeted:

“Without China’s market of 1.4b people, US farm goods will have nowhere to go, farm land being abandoned, farmers going bankrupt,” adding:

“US energy products will also lose an infinite market. Chinese auto market is already bigger than US’…all of this don’t have to happen.”

On Friday, US equity markets reacted to what’s going on by falling sharply — ahead of a three-day G7 meeting in Biarritz, France beginning Saturday.

Clearly, slowing global economic conditions and adverse effects of Trump’s trade wars will be discussed.

US National Retail Federation vice president David French slammed Trump, saying:

“It’s impossible for businesses to plan for the future in this type of environment,” adding:

Trump’s “approach clearly isn’t working, and the answer isn’t more taxes on American businesses and consumers. Where does this end?”

US Chamber of Commerce executive vice president Myron Brilliant challenged Trump’s order for corporate America to stop doing business in China, saying:

“He can provide guidance. He can provide his own thought, but US companies are going to continue to invest and do business with China because it’s too important a market.”

US economic conditions are weakening, likely to show up in reports ahead.

Economist John Williams highlighted the 501,000 downward revision in US jobs creation, adding that the “final 2019 benchmarking estimate should be even worse.”

“Estimated jobs gain for (the) full year end(ing) March 2019 was reduced by 20%…year-to-year payroll growth revised” down to the weakest level since the “Great Recession.”

Trump’s escalated trade war with China is making things worse — punctuated by his impulsiveness, imprudence, and irrational rage.

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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 FinanceTwitter

Most of us agree. Donald Trump is a disaster. He’s an unmoored mental case consumed with attacking enemies real and perceived. Trump’s not Hitler or a white supremacist. He’s a malignant narcissist. 

Joe Walsh, a former Illinois Republican representative, wants to challenge Trump during the upcoming primaries. 

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Friends, I'm in. We can't take four more years of Donald Trump. And that's why I'm running for President.

It won't be easy, but bravery is never easy. But together, we can do it. Join me… join us: go to https://t.co/d40HA9h2Kz.

Let's show the world we're ready to be brave.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) August 25, 2019

Not that it matters. A Walsh administration would be pretty much like the Trump administration. 

This would be true in one crucial regard—support for Israel. 

Joe and The Donald share this ugly obsession, this support for apartheid, slow-motion ethnical cleansing (so we won’t notice), and attacks against Syria and Iraq, and Lebanon once again (this time Israel says it will kill a whole lot of innocent civilians as it once again tries to destroy Hezbollah). 

Walsh, like Trump, wants Israel to annex the occupied territories. He advocates “the combined wrath of Israel and the United States” to force the Palestinians to accept continued military occupation, land theft, and ethnic cleansing. 

Back in 2011, Walsh wrote for the Daily Caller:

As a freshman Congressman, I am pro-Israel first and pro-peace second. True peace in the Middle East will only come when that is our nation’s stated policy and not the other way around. Most U.S. presidents have followed the old paradigm and tried to be an honest broker between the two sides. President Obama seems only to pay lip service to even that role, and clearly his sympathies lie with the Palestinians. He is not capable of achieving peace in the Middle East because he is not pro-Israel.

It is interesting Walsh believes—along with the rest of the MAGA crowd—that Obama worked against Israel during his tenure. This is categorically untrue. Obama paid empty lip service to the Palestinians and sided with Israel. He told Netanyahu and the Israelis “so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vahd (You are not alone).” 

In 2016, Jason Ditz wrote: 

White House officials were reported in the Israeli press today saying they are willing to immediately sign a memorandum of understanding on a record-large military aid package that would give Israel more money per year than any nation in US history.

The difference? Obama didn’t grovel at Netanyahu’s feet or yammer platitudes about the eternal love of the United States government for “the only democracy in the Middle East,” which is, of course, another lie. He did not change the “special relationship,” merely underplayed it while the Benjamins went from American taxpayers to colonialist settlers who not only hate Arabs and Muslims but Americans as well. 

WATCH: Take a look, “Inside Trump Heights.”The first Israeli settlement to be named after a sitting US president.

After dealing with Obama’s lack of support for 8-years, President Trump has restored the U.S.’s relationship with Israel. pic.twitter.com/aqPCcJeLQO

— 𝕄𝔸𝔾𝔸🇺🇸🅟🅐🅣🅡🅘🅞🅣🇺🇸𝕊𝕋𝔼𝕍𝔼™️ (@RealMAGASteve) August 18, 2019

Joe’s not going to make it. Republicans will stand by their man, the contemptible Donald Trump, come hell or high water.

If Joe Walsh successfully divides the Republican side of the two-headed hydra and empowers the neocon Never Trump faction, the Democrats will take back the White House next year. They might do this anyway without Walsh’s help. If Trump wasn’t an ogre, his standing might be a little better, not that it matters. If the bottom falls out of the economy between now and the election, Trump will most certainly not be re-elected. 

The national security state will remain and US foreign policy will continue regardless of who sits in the White House or the state of the economy. 

Joe’s more of the same, albeit outwardly more well-mannered.  

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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 the author

When the famous Notre Dame Cathedral erupted in flames last April, images of the blaze were plastered across television and computer screens alike. For days on end, mainstream media networks around the world devoted round-the-clock coverage to this burning church. While the burning of such a historical place was undoubtedly a tragic incident, the coverage devoted to it versus the coverage — or, rather, lack there of — given to the Amazon rain forest fires is insulting.

After the fires in Paris, donors from all over Europe came together and pledged millions to rebuild it and the work started almost immediately. Consequently, the Amazon has been on fire for three weeks, and there are no calls for unity, no 24-hour media coverage, and no one is pledging anything to help stop it. In fact, if you search Google News for “Amazon,” the first ten stories are about Jeff Bezos. And, if you look for “Amazon Fire” you get ads for the tablet.

I heard about this horrible fire in the Amazon. Googled Amazon fire and hit News and this is all that came up…..Earth – it was fun while it lasted. pic.twitter.com/IWOn8VbgRo

— Patrick J Adams (@halfadams) August 21, 2019

The fires burning across the South American rain forest have become so intense that NASA has photographed them from space. The smoke from the fire is literally blacking out the sky in São Paulo, and the fires are over 1,700 miles away. The scope of this damage is massive and threatens the entire world, yet the media is barely mentioning it.

This is Sao Paulo today, 4PM. The cloud from the burning of Amazon rainforest in Rondonia, covered the city. Sao Paulo is 3300km (2052 miles) distant from Boa Vista. Athens is closer to London than Sao Paulo is to Boa Vista. Just to give you an idea of the damage. pic.twitter.com/rVVBFFxPZS

— Beyond the Shadows (@BeyondDShadows) August 19, 2019

To be clear, the Amazon experiences fires every year. However, Brazil’s Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, (INPE) or National Institute for Space Research said its satellite data showed an 84% increase on the same period in 2018.

Amazonas, the largest state in Brazil, recently declared a state of emergency over the forest fires, according to Euro News.

The single largest tropical rain forest on the planet — responsible for 20 percent of the clean air we breathe — has been burning for three weeks, and the media is mum.

And cap wants to talk about Jill stien ? RT @Y2SHAF: a reminder that the amazon forest has been on fire for 3 weeks now and because of the lack of media coverage people don’t know about it. this is one of most important ecosystems on earth pic.twitter.com/JERjoKbWjE

— John Cusack (@johncusack) August 21, 2019

The Brazilian government is attempting to downplay the fires as well, with President Jair Bolsonaro claiming the fires are a political stunt to attack his administration.

“So, there could be…, I’m not affirming it, criminal action by these ‘NGOers’ to call attention against my person, against the government of Brazil. This is the war that we are facing,” he said in a Facebook Live session on Wednesday.

He said the fires are normal, claiming it was the “season of the queimada” or when farmers use fire to clear land. But the INPE disagrees and noted that the number of fires was not in line with those normally reported during the dry season.

“There is nothing abnormal about the climate this year or the rainfall in the Amazon region, which is just a little below average,” Inpe researcher Alberto Setzer told Reuters. “The dry season creates the favorable conditions for the use and spread of fire, but starting a fire is the work of humans, either deliberately or by accident.”

As BBC pointed out, Ricardo Mello, head of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Amazon Program, said the fires were “a consequence of the increase in deforestation seen in recent figures.”

So here we have the  “lungs of our planet“ quite literally going up in smoke and the Western media seemingly couldn’t care less. Why is that?

Well, one potential reason for this silence could be due to beef. Seriously.

To dispel any preconceived notions, I eat beef. But I seek out sustainably grown, grass-fed beef that is humanely produced. Because this beef is produced in an environmentally friendly and more sustainable manner, it is more expensive and thus eaten less often—which, if the US had a true free market, would apply to regular beef as well. But this is not the case because the government heavily subsidizes factory farming.

Because factory farming cattle takes such a massive toll on the environment, the beef industry is in a constant state of damage control and subsequent lobbying.

It is estimated that approximately 80 percent of rain forest destruction in the Amazon is done to make way for cattle farming.

Instead of preventing the wholesale destruction of rain forests through illegal logging, and curbing the rampant pollution caused by cattle farming, the Brazilian government — which is staunchly supported by the West — has proven to be in the pocket of the industry and has done everything in their power to worsen the problem.

When it was discovered that beef industry hitmen were murdering journalists and activists who exposed their crimes in the rain forests, instead of prosecuting the murderers, the government increased the criminalization of activism and journalism. And in some instances, the murders were even carried out by government agencies.

As TFTP reported, more than 180 people were killed in 2015 alone for attempting to prevent the illegal logging in the rain forest to make way for beef production.

According to recent data from Metonomics, the American government spends $38 billion each year to subsidize the meat and dairy industries, but only 0.04 percent of that (i.e., $17 million) each year to subsidize fruits and vegetables.

Beef is big business and it is big business that sponsors the mainstream media. When people start to wonder why the lungs of the planet are on fire, they will start asking questions that many people in this industry do not want answered. Therefore, the media has an incentive to stay quiet to keep their advertisers happy.

Whatever the reason is for the media’s lack of attention to the fires in the Amazon, the damage done by remaining silent is the same.

As Jessie Stephens eloquently noted in a recent article comparing the Notre Dame fire to the Amazon, “perhaps global awareness will put more pressure on President Bolsonaro to act.”

In stark contrast, the ashes had not yet settled on the 4th arrondissement of Paris when President Emmanuel Macron addressed the nation.

“I tell you solemnly tonight: We will rebuild this cathedral,” he said, standing outside the Notre Dame Cathedral.

The fire still burned as Macron said, “Notre Dame of Paris is our history. The epicenter of our lives. It’s the many books, the paintings, those that belong to all French men and French women, even those who’ve never come.”

We watched as Parisians covered their mouths in horror, as they felt a piece of themselves burn.

That same horror, for a Cathedral that could be rebuilt, with beams and wood and stained glass windows, needs to be applied to a rain forest that won’t be so easy to put back together.

UPDATE: Good news! After the major grassroots efforts to draw attention to the Amazon began to go viral, mainstream media has actually started reporting on it. This is an example of how refusing to stay silent on issues can force the mainstream to give it attention. Now, we just need to act on it.

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Changing narratives is a new buzz term. I even heard a Distinguished Professor say he can change the narrative about himself. He can’t change it much. Narratives are intellectual, depending on concepts that depend on societies. They are ultimately conservative.

This was known in early Buddhism. The Buddha said emotional is the highest form of wisdom, ahead of rationalization, which depends on traditions. He didn’t say “narrative change” is useless. But the merely intellectual is the status quo, fundamentally.

Toni Morrison referred to the story beneath the story. James Baldwin called it a burning fire. In a letter to Angela Davis, awaiting trial, he wrote:

“we have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death”.

In other words, everything.

Baldwin discovered what “history had made of him”. It happened when he was jailed in Paris with North Africans. He learned he was distinct, not for being black, but for being powerful. Despised in the US, he was a product of US power: a “bastard of the west”. In a new biography, Living in Fire,^[i] Bill V. Mullen says Baldwin should be “understood the way we understand Fanon, García Marquez, Assata Shakur”: They wrote outside the US, aware of imperialism: what history has made of us. They knew the fire.

The point is hard, for some. In Young Castro,^[ii] Harvard University Senior Lecturer, Jonathen Hansen, offers a sympathetic portrait of Fidel Castro with no such awareness. He mentions the struggle for independence but doesn’t explain how and why the “impossible” gripped whole generations.

In Náhuatl culture, of Middle America, fire images refer to truth. You get it by burning up, metaphorically. Volcanic images run through centuries-long traditions from which Castro emerged.

Hansen leaves that out. It’s like writing a biography of Stephen Hawking and leaving out collapsing stars and imaginary time. We wouldn’t have had Hawking without Hubble, Lemaitre, and Einstein, and Castro couldn’t be who he was without Varela, Bolívar, Luz, and Cespedes. He said it repeatedly.  Yet Hansen writes about Castro without mentioning any of them. They knew about fire. Hansen doesn’t.

Arguably, the most notable “narrative change” in the Americas was by José Martí, 19^th century Cuban independence leader. He changed the narrative of US supremacy.  Cuban scholar Juan Marinello says one of the great puzzles about Cuba, for its enemies (and some sympathizers), is how ideas have survived. It’s because they weren’t “mere thinking”, as Einstein put it.

Latin America had no “cultural passport”, no identity.^[iii] It had resisted Spanish colonialism for hundreds of years, but the models were English, French or US. Martí was the first, arguably, to set out an idea of Latin Americanness. He said, famously, that ideas are stronger weapons than ones of steel. But Martí’s ideas weren’t just ideas. He proposed “una cultura nueva” (new way of living).^[iv]

It wasn’t about naming identities and giving some priority. Martí did what Baldwin intended: challenged the terms of daily life: “love, life and death”. In 1961, Baldwin said “the only hope for this country …. [is] to undermine the standards by which the middle-class American lives”.  The bridge uniting black people, he wrote, is suffering. He articulated that suffering drawing on his own lived reality.

But Baldwin gets fitted into a contradictory narrative: identity politics. Mullin wonders whether Baldwin at the end of his life recognized black lesbians as political agents or whether he still saw black men as agents of change. It seems a silly question, given what we learn about Baldwin in Mullin’s book. Baldwin expressed suffering within the community he knew. He thereby moved his readers to understanding human suffering, the place from which we know other people as people.

For instance, Palestinians.  Baldwin learned, early on, from a “radical, white female mentor” that white people didn’t act as they did because they were white but for other reasons. Trying to know those reasons “burned at the core of his political education”. It made him an internationalist.

As a result, Baldwin discovered “something of the universal and inevitable human ferment which explodes into what is called a revolution”. It’s not narrative. It’s not identity.

In Report to Greco, describing his life-changing reaction to the 10^th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Nikos Kazantzakis writes that

“Beyond all reasoning, beyond learned bickering … higher than programs, higher than leaders, higher than Russia … [was a] lightening flash [that]  illuminated their minds … All men are brothers!”

It’s connection. Kazantzakis says the “lightening flash” happened as “boundaries were crumbling away, [and] names, countries and races were vanishing”. Perhaps it sounds cliché, but it makes a philosophical point. Before identity, and naming, is connection. It explains narrative change, when it counts.

Closing the new documentary on her life, Toni Morrison describes how, in an art exhibit, she looks through a mirror and sees someone approaching. She raises her hand to the glass and an unknown figure meets her hand on the other side. Morrison says, “I didn’t need to know her name or who she was, or anything about her.” The connection was enough.

Imperialism’s narratives are about names: “people” and “non-people”. The “non-people” are somehow not like us and our self-image requires knowing them as such. Martí called it “historical logic”, as did Fanon. Hansen plays right into it, assuming about Castro what would never be assumed about Hawking: that his actions are explained by his idiosyncrasies not by a mind rooted in a history moving forward.

He doesn’t know that Castro, like Morrison, can be a “friend of my mind” because he expressed what Martí called “energía original”, and Baldwin called “dignity”. Whatever the name, it must first be felt, like the Náhuatl fire and sun imagery that drove Martí, personally first, and then intellectually.

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] Pluto Press, 2019. See review forthcoming at https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/

[ii] https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/young-castro

[iii] Noel Salomón “José Martí y la toma de conciencia latinoamericana” Anuario del Centro de estudios martianos (4 1972)

[iv] Pedro Pablo Rodríguez, Los dos Américas, 5

People often ask and hint at the similarities between the Hong Kong protests and the French Yellow Vests. The former started on 31 March and are approaching their 19^th week – the Yellow Vests (YV) have celebrated last weekend their 40^th week of protests. As of recently some voices of Macron-infiltrates into the YV movement – or Fifth Columnists – have suggested that the YVs may support the Hong Kong protesters in solidarity for freedom….

Well, that didn’t go down well with the highly educated and well informed YV. Many of them actually felt insulted by the Macronites – ‘for whom does this guy [Macron] take us?’ – And right they are. There is not a shred of comparison between the two movements, except that they are protests – but for widely different reasons, and serving widely different agendas. The YV can in no way be associated with the Hong Kong “protests” – which are equal to US funded Color Revolutions.

We, the YV leaders said, are fighting against an ever more totalitarian French government that is ever more stealing our legitimate income in the form of all sorts of taxes and keeps a minimum wage on which ever-more French families cannot survive. Life is unaffordable on a regular workers pension. The Macron Government is creating poverty, by shifting the financial resources – the few that are left, from the bottom to the top. – That’s what we are fighting and protesting against. We want a fundamental change in the French economic structure and the French leadership. You see, all of this has nothing to do with the Washington funded Hong Protests that are directed on Washington’s behalf by Hong Kongers against the Government of Mainland China.

It couldn’t be clearer. The French Yellow Vests know what they are fighting for. The Hong Kong protesters, most of them, follow a few leaders under false pretenses against their country, against Beijing. Granted, many of the protesters are pro-westerners, they sing the US National Anthem, and wave the British flag – the flag of their former colonialists.

Actually, funding to destabilize Hong Kong in the future has already started at the latest in 1994, 3 years before the official Handover of Hong Kong by the UK to the Beijing Government. Way before the official date of returning Hong Kong in 1997 to the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), the US built up a network of Fifth Columnists in Hong Kong.

Washington pours millions into creating unrest in Hong Kong, similarly as in Ukraine, when the US State Department financed the preparation of the 2014 coup at least 5 years ahead at the tune of US$ 5 billion, according to Victoria Nuland’s, Deputy Secretary of State, own admission, directly and through NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, an “NGO” which it isn’t. It is rather the extended or soft arm of the CIA, receiving hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department for their ‘regime changing’ activities around the globe.

In 1991, The Washington Post quoted a NED founder, Allen Weinstein, as saying

“a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”.

Couldn’t have been said better. We see the results all over the world.

Precisely this has happened in Hong Kong and is going on until this day – and probably way beyond. The US will not let go. Especially now that most people who have at least a limited understanding on how these western manipulations work, comprehend and see for themselves who is sowing the unrests. Take the 22-year-old student and western hero of the 2014 Umbrella Revolution, Joshua Wong, trained programmed and funded by the US State Department / NED / CIA. He is again a main player in the current protest movement. Wong is the on-the-ground boy for the local media tycoon, Jimmy Lai, who has spent millions of his own money in the 2014 “Occupy Central” protests (Umbrella Revolution).

The oligarch uses his funds widely to finance protest leaders and protest groups. He also created his own National Party, with significant xenophobic connotations. Yet Mr. Lai is very close to the Trump Administration and met, along with many of his protest leaders, with the US envoy in Hong Kong, as well as with National Security Advisor John Bolton – and other US officials. On July 8, Mr. Jimmy Lai met US Vice President Mike Pence at the White House.

Lai has full support of the US Government to fire-on and promote these protest groups. Yet, if asked, the protesters have no precise plan or strategy of what they want. The island is largely divided. By far not all protesters want to separate from the mainland. They feel Chinese and express their disgust with Jimmy Lai’s radical anti-Beijing propaganda. They call him a traitor.

Mr. Lai was born in 1948 in mainland China, in an impoverished family in Canton. He was educated to fifth grade level and smuggled to Hong Kong in a small boat at age 13. In HK he worked as a child laborer in a garment factory at about the equivalent of US$ 8 per month. In 1975 he bought a bankrupt garment factory for a pittance and created Giordano, producing sweaters and other clothing for mostly US clients, like J.C. Penny, Montgomery Ward and others. Mr. Lai today is openly criticized even by his own people as a conspirator behind the violence of the HK riots, or protests, as he prefers to call them.

The protests started with a ‘controversial’ extradition law – which, by the way, exists between most States in the United States, as well as between nations in Europe and to a large extent internationally. Therefore, this is nothing unusual. Yet, its importance was blown out of proportion by the western media and by Mr. Lai’s own local media to distort the picture. A minority, of course, would like their full independence from China which is totally against the agreement signed between the UK and Beijing at the so-called 1997 Handover.

A few days ago, the US sent a couple of war ships into China waters at Hong Kong. They had the audacity to ask Beijing to grant them the right to dock at Hong Kong harbor. Beijing, of course, refused and warned Washington – do not meddle in our internal affairs. Of course, Washington has no intention to heed China’s advice – they never do. They have been inoculated with the view that the exceptional nation calls the shots. Always. Nobody else should even dare to contradict them. Period.

On July 3, The China Daily pointedly reported

“The ideologues in Western governments never cease in their efforts to engineer unrest against governments that are not to their liking, even though their actions have caused misery and chaos in country after country in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Now they are trying the same trick in China.”

The US tactics in Hong Kong, may be combined with Trump’s trade war, with the Pentagon’s greater presence – mainly new military bases and navy presence in the Indo-Pacific region – Obama’s (in)famous Pivot to Asia which prompted Obama to order 60% of the US Navy fleet to the South China Sea.

All of this and more are part of a destabilization war with China. Washington is afraid of China’s rising economic power in the world, of China’s monetary system, that is based on economic output and on gold, not fiat money like the US Dollar and the Euro and other currencies following the western turbo-capitalist system; and Washington is afraid of losing its dollar hegemony, as the Chinese yuan is gradually taking over the dollar’s role as world reserve currency.

Hong Kong was basically stolen by the Brits in 1842 at the heights of the Opium Wars. Under pressure of the British military might, China ceded Hong Kong under the Treaty of Nanking, signed on 29 August 1842. Hong Kong became, thus, a Crown Colony of the British Empire. In 1898, Hong Kong’s Governor Chris Patten and Prince Charles agreed on a 99-year lease and pledged to return Hong Kong to China in 1997.

After 155 years of British colonial oppression of the people of Hong Kong, it was time to normalize the status of Hong Kong as what it always should have been, namely an integral territory of China. The “One Country, Two Systems” agreement of 1997, returned Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, but the parties agreed to leave the capitalist system in place for 50 years. The agreement also stipulated that all intervention and colonial claims on Hong Kong were supposed to end. Full sovereignty was to return to China. What’s happening now – US-UK fomented riots to seek independence of the island, is in total disregard of the 1997 Handover Treaty.

The US inspired and funded protests are destined to challenge the HK-China sovereignty clause, by mobilizing public opinion that wants full “freedom” – i.e. independence from China.

The 50 years of the usual abusive capitalist continuation, would allow the imperialist US and UK to maintain economic control over Hong Kong and thereby exert economic influence over the PRC. How wrong they were! – In 1997 Hong Kong’s GDP constituted 27% of the PRC’s GDP – today that proportion shrunk to a mere 3%. China’s rapidly growing level of development, especially the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which the west chose to literally ignore until about a year ago, has become a vital threat to the US corporate world.

What the US and UK – and the rest of the West – is particularly interested in is HK’s special banking position in the world. Through Singapore and Hong Kong, Wall Street and key European banks, in cohorts with their not so ‘ethically-clean’ and often fraudulent HSBC partner, pretend to control and influence Asian economics – and especially attempt to prevent China to take over the Asian financial markets. Hong Kong has the most liberal banking laws, possibly worldwide, where illegal money transactions, money laundering, shady investments in the billions can be carried out and nobody watches. Maintaining HK as long as possible with this special nation status and wielding influence and control over PRC’s financial markets is one of the western goals.

But little does the West understand that China and other eastern countries, plus Russia, India, Pakistan, have already largely detached, or are in the process of detaching from the dollar economy and are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Let’s face it, the SCO comprises about half of the world’s population and controls about one third of the globe’s economic output.

Therefore, the SCO members do no longer depend on the western financial markets and monetary manipulations. In fact, Shanghai has in the last decades grown to become China’s financial hub with way more importance for China than Hong Kong. So, it is very unlikely that China will crack down on Hong Kong for the protests. There is too much political capital to be lost by interfering. The West and Hong Kong protesters may as well riot themselves into rot.

But if China gets tired of these incessant western provocations and really wants to put an end to them, the PRC could take over Hong Kong in less than 48 hours, abridge the 50 years of western capitalism and make HK a full-fledged province of China, no privileges, no special status, just a part of sovereign China. End of story.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

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; 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.

Featured image is from Jimmy Lai from Wikimedia Commons

In late June 2019, Fox News Channel published a video material, taken in Al-Hol refugee camp in northwestern Syria. On the footage, we can see a group of children under five chanting ISIS slogans. “We will stand on the heads of the apostates and crush them one by one. By the will of Allah, Islamic State caliphate remains,” the kids screamed. This is not the first evidence of radical ideology spread in the camp. Earlier, another video from Al-Hol emerged. It shows the ISIS terrorist flag hoisted in the field, and women urging other refugees to return to the lands of terrorists.

Nevertheless, the camp’s administration prefers to ignore the situation. Moreover, in June Al-Hol leadership reported that more than 800 women and children who allegedly didn’t pose a threat left the camp. It worth noting that such arguments look quite dubious, especially after watching highly mentioned videos. So, a logical question arises who is responsible for the current situation.

Let us remind you, Al-Hol refugee camp was set up after U.S.-led international coalition forces initiated the bloody liberation of Raqqa city from ISIS terrorists. However, following the fall of ISIS in the city and the formation of camp, the appropriate measures to combat the terrorist ideology among refugees were not taken by the U.S. On the contrary, Washington is making every effort to spread radical thoughts among Syrians.

Since 2017, the necessary environment for refugees has not been created. For instance, neither schools nor hospitals have been built in the camp. According to the UN reports, Al-Hol residents suffer from malnutrition, stomach upsets caused by poor hygiene and lack of drinking water. In fact, refugees are left to care for themselves. Only occasionally they receive humanitarian aid from Western medical organizations.

“Maintaining ISIS potential is a key factor for the U.S. to save its presence in the region for a long time,” a Syrian expert Rada Ahmad Shariki said.

Also, according to the residents, suspicious persons regularly get into the camp and smuggle edged weapons and drugs. This is confirmed by an incident that occurred last months when a former ISIS wife slaughtered an SDF fighter who guarded Al-Hol. Most likely, these smugglers were sent by the U.S. Special Services to destabilize the situation in the camp.

A similar situation has arisen in northwestern Syria. Even though Idlib province is largely controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadist, the Western states continue delivering humanitarian aid to the region.

Turkey plays a unique role in the Syrian conflict since it has long been a kind of buffer between the West and terrorists. Currently, all the humanitarian supplies enter Idlib through the territory of Turkey and the Syrian National Army (created by Turkey) in cooperation with HTS is directly engaged in clashes with the Syrian Arab Army in northern Hama.

On August 2, militant’s war correspondent from Idlib, Abdussamed Degul, in an interview with the Qatari resource Ayman Javad stated that HTS militants had received heavy weapons, including MLRS and anti-tank missiles, from SNA. It turned out that they got it from the Turkish intelligence services.

It is obvious that the jihadists can’t repeal SAA attacks without support from the outside. Therefore, Western leaders determined to exploit special services to maintain tension and instability in the region as well as to counteract Syrian troops.

It is well understood that the Western states have long been supporting various terrorist groups in Syria, evacuating field commanders and training the radicals. These missions are carried out by American PMCs that are taking orders from the CIA or other Special Service. Consequently, it is the Western countries that are responsible for the actions of militants in Syria, which create chaos, organize crime and kill civilians.

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Conservation groups sued the Trump administration today to challenge a land-swap deal with King Cove Corporation aimed at putting a road through the heart of Izembek National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.

Izembek is one of America’s most ecologically significant wildlife refuges, home to world-class wetlands that support millions of migrating birds, fish and caribou.

In March a federal judge threw out a previous land exchange proposal. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt agreed to the new land swap July 12 without public knowledge or input. Unlike the earlier proposal, the latest deal does not limit the road to health, safety and non-commercial uses. It is otherwise similar to the previous agreement rejected by the court.

“The Department of Interior has attempted an end run around the recent federal court decision that halted its plans to desecrate the Izembek Refuge Wilderness and its wildlife,” said David C. Raskin, president of Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges. “This new backroom deal adds to a long series of actions by Interior to give away public lands to serve special interests at the expense of the American people. We are disappointed by this continuation of the illegal and unethical efforts of the current administration to circumvent decades of legislation and regulations enacted to protect public lands and natural areas from destructive developments and preserve them for the benefit of all Americans. We will use every means at our disposal to continue the fight to save the Izembek Refuge.”

Today’s lawsuit, filed by Trustees for Alaska in U.S. District Court in Anchorage, says Interior cannot use the land exchange provision of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act to gut a national wildlife refuge and circumvent public process, environmental review and congressional approval. It also says the latest land exchange violates the National Environmental Policy Act and fails to adequately justify the agency’s reversal of an Obama-era decision rejecting a land exchange.

“This deal violates the same laws as the first one, and we’re prepared to continue the legal fight to protect this irreplaceable wilderness,” said Bridget Psarianos, staff attorney for Trustees for Alaska. “This is another Trump administration public land giveaway that breaks multiple laws and dishonors the public processes that go into protecting the health of the lands, waters and wildlife of the National Refuge and Wilderness System.”

Congress passed ANILCA to preserve natural landscapes, wildlife, unaltered habitat and designated wilderness areas. Interior’s proposed land swap would give an ecologically irreplaceable corridor of land between lagoons to King Cove Corporation for a road. This vital area of the isthmus forms the heart of the Izembek refuge.

“Spending millions to build a road through federal wilderness would be a bad deal for taxpayers and a bad deal for the environment,” said Kristen Miller, conservation director at Alaska Wilderness League. “Yet the Bernhardt Interior Department continues to try and sidestep bedrock environmental laws like the Wilderness Act and the federal court system to satisfy politic desires and commercial interests. The previous administration looked long and hard at the road proposal and rejected it for sound reasons, and the district court and the Ninth Circuit agreed. This new plan, and really the entire process, reeks of self-serving backroom dealing and public lands theft at its most egregious.”

Trustees for Alaska also notified Bernhardt today of the groups’ intent to sue for Endangered Species Act violations related to the land swap.

“Bernhardt’s shady backroom deal is just as illegal as the land swap a judge already rejected,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Izembek is a vital wildlife refuge that feeds millions of birds from three continents. You can’t swap land here for anywhere else because there’s nothing else like it. We’ll keep fighting to ensure Izembek remains protected.”

All Harvey, the Alaska campaign representative from the Sierra Club, said,

“The Trump administration’s plan to trade away wilderness in Izembek to be industrialized has been repeatedly studied and consistently rejected for good reason. Now, despite confirmation from the District Court that it’s illegal, Secretary Bernhardt is shamelessly trying to work behind closed doors to push the same deal forward again. We will continue to fight back against this costly and irresponsible deal.”

“The Trump administration is once again trading away public lands for a road through the Izembek Refuge Wilderness that would not only destroy the ecological integrity of Izembek, but would also establish a ruinous precedent for the entire National Wilderness Preservation System,” said Fran Mauer, representative of the Alaska chapter of Wilderness Watch. “This must not stand!”

Sarah Greenberger, vice president of conservation policy at the Audubon Society, said,

“Common ground exists between critical wildlife protection for some of the world’s largest flocks of migrating birds and community needs of rural Alaskans. But it doesn’t require the sacrifice of an internationally important wetland refuge with tremendous costs to American taxpayers.”

David Krause, assistant state director for The Wilderness Society, said,

“The Trump administration is up to its usual shady shenanigans to give away America’s public lands within a federally protected wilderness area. Like the previous backroom deal that was struck down by a federal court less than five months ago, we will fight this every step of the way.”

The lawsuit’s plaintiffs are Friends of Alaska National Wildlife Refuges, Alaska Wilderness League, the Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, National Audubon Society, the National Wildlife Refuge Association, Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and Wilderness Watch.

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Featured image: Izembek National Wildlife Refuge. Photo credit: Kristine Sowl/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Image is available for media use.

Beijing has released a new policy laying out its ambitions for Shenzhen City—located in Guangdong Province just across the border from Hong Kong—to become a world-class tech innovation city.

Media in Hong Kong are theorizing that it signals the Chinese regime’s intention to replace the city as a major financial hub.

The timing coincides with Chinese state media and the Hong Kong government’s recent statements admonishing Hong Kong protesters, and accusing them of disrupting the city’s economy as they stage mass demonstrations calling for a controversial extradition bill to be withdrawn.

New Policy

China’s cabinet-like State Council released the policy on Aug. 18, in which it set the target for building Shenzhen into an “international innovation city” by 2025, a “model for the modernization of socialism” by 2035, and a “global benchmark city with competitiveness, innovation, and influence” by 2050.

To reach these targets, Beijing plans for Shenzhen to become the center for research and development in 5G telecommunications, artificial intelligence (AI), biomedical laboratories, and more, according to the document. Specifically, authorities will set up a new state-run institute for biomedical research called the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Beijing also plans to integrate the financial markets in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Macau. The Chinese city will then “open up foreign currency management” and lift some barriers to foreign investment. Currently, China has strict allowances on how much Chinese and foreign companies can exchange into foreign currency, and limits the percentage of foreign ownership at joint-venture firms.

Finally, Shenzhen will seek to attract foreign experts and talents by making it easier for foreigners to obtain residency visas, which would, in turn, allow them to become legal representatives of companies in China.

The document includes a section on the social credit system, explaining that the city would establish a “center for big data for the Guangdong Province, Hong Kong, and Macau area.”

Since 2014, Chinese authorities have begun rolling out a social credit system to monitor citizens’ activities, including online purchases and daily behaviors in public spaces, and assign them a “trustworthiness” score. Individuals with bad credit scores are banned from public services, such as boarding a plane or buying a train ticket.

Similar to Guangdong provincial government policy guidelines released in July, the Shenzhen plan alludes to a social credit system for Hong Kong and Macau, although Hong Kong officials have denied that such plans exist.

The new policy hints at Beijing’s desire to turn Shenzhen into a financial center capable of replacing Hong Kong, but an analysis by the Hong Kong Economic Times noted that would be difficult to accomplish, owing to Hong Kong’s flexible financial system and more complete legal and regulatory systems.

David Xia, a Chinese economist and visiting researcher at the U.S. think tank Cato Institute, holds a similar view.

“Whether it’s Shenzhen or Shanghai, a precondition to replacing Hong Kong is that the city must have a free and open society that can protect human rights, rule of law, and does not have any controls on foreign capital and speech,” Xia said in an Aug. 19 interview with The Epoch Times. “Without this precondition, any plan will not succeed.”

He added that Hong Kong’s guaranteed freedoms make the city a favorable investment environment, unlike mainland Chinese cities, where businesses must toe the Chinese Communist Party’s line.

Xia added that should the Party wish to achieve a Hong Kong-like free market system in Shenzhen, it would have to implement “one country, two systems,” the framework by which Hong Kong retains its autonomy despite Chinese sovereignty.

Meanwhile, U.S.-based commentator Jie Sen noted that this policy is a rare declaration from the Party that it wants to “demonstrate to the world that socialism can build the best city in the world,” Jie told The Epoch Times. “This is an ambition it has not displayed before.”

He believes that the timeline outlined in the Shenzhen policy is an indication of China’s greater plan for its socialist economic system to dominate the world.

On Aug. 20, the Shanghai government published a similar policy to Shenzhen’s, announcing a new “free trade zone” in the Lingang area, with easing of restrictions on residency visas, favorable tax policies, and more.

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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a U.S. Presidential candidate in the Democratic Party primaries, presented on August 22nd the most-detailed climate-plan that has ever been presented by any U.S. Presidential candidate — 14,000 words, or the equivalent of a normal 55-page booklet.

One of the billionaires-controlled news-media, the New York Times, promptly headlined its news-story about it, “Bernie Sanders’s ‘Green New Deal’: A $16 Trillion Climate Plan”, and said little else about it than its total expense-side, no mention at all about its income side (and virtually nothing at all about its benefits, which were detailed in those 14,000 words). The report also said that the Democratic National Committee had just banned CNN’s planned and unofficial Democratic Presidential candidates debate about the climate, which had been scheduled by CNN for September 4th. The NYT reported that the DNC would permit the candidates to appear only one-after-another — without any interaction with each other, regarding climate-issues. The news-site Vice then promptly headlined “The DNC’s Climate Debate Is As Good As Dead”, and reported that, “Democratic voters want to talk about climate. Three quarters of respondents to a June CNN poll said that they wouldn’t vote for a candidate who didn’t recognize climate change as humanity’s greatest existential threat.” Of course, if Democratic Party voters are really serious about that, they’ll follow through on it. But, evidently, the DNC is quite convinced that they won’t be.

Another billionaires-controlled news-medium, Mother Jones, issued online its official blogger, Kevin Drum, bannering “Bernie Sanders Gets a D- for His Climate Plan” and he opened:

Bernie Sanders released his climate change plan today, and Bernie being Bernie it was naturally the biggest, leftiest, most socialist plan out there. And that was the good part. The bad part is that it’s practically designed to fail.

If you’re going to propose a massive, $16 trillion plan, the first thing you should do is get as many people on board as possible. Instead, Sanders practically revels in pissing off as many stakeholders as possible.

Mr. Drum wanted Sanders to be proposing things that the billionaires who fund political campaigns find acceptable.

However, The Intercept, a site that’s owned by Pierre Omidyar, a Democratic Party billionaire from Silicon Valley (and who is not committed to fossil fuels himself), has been remarkably honest about “climate change” or “global warming” (which are the accepted euphemisms that are pumped for global burnout — the actual  threat).

In fact, back on 3 July 2019 it had bannered “WILL BERNIE SANDERS STICK WITH A CARBON TAX IN HIS PUSH FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL?” and it honestly presented the reason why that ought to be included in a plan but also mentioned that all pollings show that the public don’t and almost certainly won’t understand that, and so any commitment to a carbon tax would probably sink any candidate who would specifically include it. (Sanders’s new plan does not.) And, then, on 22 August 2019,

The Intercept headlined “BERNIE SANDERS’S CLIMATE PLAN IS MORE RADICAL THAN HIS OPPONENTS’ — AND MORE LIKELY TO SUCCEED”. That was the nitty-gritty truth about the matter: All of the other candidates are so afraid of going up against the billionaires (including not up against the Republican ones), but Sanders is doing it nonetheless, and his new plan shows that he really means it when he says, “We must take action to ensure a habitable planet for ourselves, for our children, and for our grandchildren.” He is now putting his entire candidacy on the line for this.

Sanders is the only candidate who is still in the race who has zero billionaires backing him. He has already committed himself: zero dependency upon any of the billionaires. You can agree with him, or disagree with him, but that’s a fact about him. Obviously, the DNC is just as much against him now as it was in 2016. Practically nothing has changed in the Democratic Party since then.

Part of his climate plan even mentions: “Trade deals have been written in secret by billion-dollar companies to give polluters special handouts and protections, as well as the right to sue governments that pursue stronger environmental protections. Under a Sanders Administration, this will end. Trade deals will be renegotiated to ensure strong and binding climate standards, labor rights, and human rights with swift enforcement.” That’s a slam against not only both Bushes and both Clintons, but against the lionized-by-Democratic-voters Barack Obama, whose biggest effort, of all, was to pass his mammoth proposed TPP, TTIP and TISA trade-deals, all of which were even worse in that regard than any of its predecessors such as NAFTA were. And Sanders had led the fight in Congress against all of them. (None of them became passed, though Hillary Clinton would have resumed Obama’s push to pass them if she had become President. Trump isn’t worse in every respect than she was.)

Also, here are some of the passages in the plan that I find particularly striking:

Instead of accepting that the world’s countries will spend $1.5 trillion annually on weapons of destruction, Bernie will convene global leaders to redirect our priorities to confront our shared enemy: climate change. …

we will support less industrialized nations in the Global South, excluding China, to help them reduce emissions by 36 percent from 2017 levels by 2030, consistent with meeting our fair share of emissions reductions under the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recommendations. …

Bernie recognizes that the Pentagon is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and that the United States spends $81 billion annually to protect oil supplies and transport routes. We are uniquely positioned to lead the planet in a wholesale shift away from militarism. …

When we are in the White House, we will create millions of union, family-wage jobs through the Green New Deal in steel and auto manufacturing, construction, energy efficiency retrofitting, coding and server farms, and renewable power plants. We will spend $1.3 trillion to ensure that workers in the fossil fuel and other carbon intensive industries receive strong benefits, a living wage, training, and job placement. We will protect the right of all workers to form a union without threats or intimidation from management. …

End overseas fossil fuel financing. The federal government currently supports investments in fossil fuels through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, OPIC, the Export-Import Bank, and other multilateral institutions.  …

Bernie will make fossil fuel corporations pay for the irreparable damage they have done to our communities and our planet, and he will ensure that all fossil fuel workers affected by the transition are entitled to new jobs, health care, pensions, and wage support. He will not allow fossil fuel executives to reap massive profits while endangering the future of humanity. He will not leave it to the market to determine the fate of the planet. …

Prosecute and sue the fossil fuel industry for the damage it has caused. …

Scientists have been clear that in order to solve the climate crisis, we must leave fossil fuels in the ground. …

The last two of those are the most important. For example: to “leave fossil fuels in the ground” means to lay off a large percentage of fossil-fuels corporations’ workforces, especially all who are involved in exploring, and negotiating for the exploitation of, new wells and mines; and, furthermore, the stock-market values of all of those corporations will crash, because the vast majority of their market-value is their assets-in-the-ground, their “Reserves”. As the leading study of this matter phrased it in 2013:

If CAPEX continues at the same level over the next decade it would see up to $6.74 trillion in wasted capital developing reserves that is likely to become unburnable. This would drive an even greater divergence between a 2DS and the position of the financial markets. This has profound implications for asset owners with significant holdings in fossil fuel stocks. It is particularly acute for those companies with large CAPEX plans that continue to sink shareholder funds into the development of additional new reserves that are incompatible with a low-carbon pathway.

Furthermore: “Oil, gas and coal mining companies spent $674billion of capital expenditure in the last year seeking to develop more reserves.” This at a time when 100% of such expenditures is actually waste — unburnable excess upon the already-existing excess of unburnable carbon reserves, which those corporations already own and are already producing from.

This is the way capitalism is. Democratic socialism (such as in the Scandinavian countries) isn’t, at all, like Karl Marx’s communism, but billionaires equate those two — democratic socialism and dictatorial socialism — in order to discredit democratic socialism (progressivism), by lies, because billionaires are the only people who really benefit from capitalism.

Especially the owners of fossil-fuels corporations will lose their entire investments in those corporations, because not only of the inevitable crash in their stock-values but also because whatever value still remains in those corporations will then — under the Sanders plan — become transferred to the government, as a partial payment for the massive criminality of those corporations during the many decades in which they were bringing to the precipice the very continuance of life on Earth.

So: it is clear why this nation’s media — which are controlled (even when not outright owned) by billionaires — will do everything possible in order to prevent Sanders from becoming its President. For them, the choice is stark, and it is between either him, or else any of the other candidates. They will congeal around whichever of the other candidates is the likeliest one to defeat Sanders. That’s the reality, about the Democratic Presidential primaries. The Sanders climate plan makes this absolutely clear.

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This article was originally published on Washington’s Blog.

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

Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson is worried. He thinks that maybe — just maybe — the U.S. government is not spending enough on defense. In a column entitled, “Here’s Why We Could Be Under-Spending on Defense,” Samuelson has come up with a complicated formula that has caused him to fear that China and Russia might actually be spending more money on their militaries than the United States. Bringing to mind the famous missile-gap controversy during the Cold War, Samuelson wrote, “Our reputed military superiority might be exaggerated or a statistical fiction.”

I won’t delve into Samuelson’s complicated formula for arriving at his scary conclusion because, well, it is complicated, a point that even he concedes:

The only way to find out is to estimate our and their defense budgets, using an unconventional methodology called “purchasing power parity” (PPP). To do that, Congress should create a task force of experts that would examine Russia’s and China’s defense spending and compare it with our own.

So, I’ll leave his main point to that task force of experts. I do wish, however, to confront the other major point in Samuelson’s analysis, one to which he, like so many others in Washington, D.C., is obviously oblivious: that U.S. spending on the military and the rest of the national-security establishment is for defense. That is one great big delusion and falsehood.

After all, defense means that one is defending. In a personal context, that means that when someone comes up to you and throws a punch, and you respond by raising your hands to block the blow, you are defending. He is the attacker and you are the defender. In an international context, if one nation invades another nation, the invading nation is the attacker and the invaded nation is the defender.

During the last 70 years, the U.S. government has spent trillions of dollars for “defense.” But it hasn’t really been for defense because no other nation has ever invaded the United States during that time. Of course, the U.S. has been embroiled in several foreign wars that have cost a lot of money, but none of those wars involved defense since the opposing nations never invaded the United States.

Consider the Korean War. North Korea never attacked the United States. The same holds true for North Vietnam. And Panama. And Grenada. And Cuba. And Iraq. And Afghanistan. And Syria. And Libya. And many more. None of them ever invaded the United States.

Equally important, no nation state is threatening to invade the United States. No foreign regime even has the money to undertake such an invasion. They are all broker than the U.S. government. No Latin American nation has the military capability or even the interest in invading the United States. And no nation state in Europe, Asia, or Africa has even the remotest military capability of successfully crossing the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans and invading and conquering the United States.

So, what have all those trillions of dollars been spent on if not defense? The answer is: empire and intervention, which oftentimes encompass instances where the U.S. government, ironically, is the attacker and invader and the targeted nation is the defender.

Iraq is a good example. After the 9/11 attacks, which were not the first step in an invasion of the United States but rather a retaliatory act for U.S. empire and intervention in the Middle East, President George W. Bush and the U.S. national-security establishment decided to attack and invade Iraq, a country that had never attacked the United States. That’s because 11 years of U.S. economic sanctions, which had killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children in the 1990s, had nonetheless failed to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein from power. Bush’s invasion and long occupation of Iraq made the U.S. the aggressor power and Iraq the defending nation. There is no way that anyone can rationally argue that the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq War were for “defense.”

Of course, this gigantic lie is manifested in the name “Department of Defense.” It is clearly a false name but one that hardly anyone questions. It really should be named the “Department of Empire, Interventionism, and War.”

Why is it important to U.S. officials that Americans be made to believe that all this massive military spending, year after year, is for “defense.” What better way for the national-security establishment to keep sucking ever-increasing monies from American taxpayers than to continue making them believe that U.S. aggression, interventionism, and empire constitute “defense.”

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

Featured image is from Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

Venezuelan government officials have had secret contact with US officials for “months,” President Maduro revealed Tuesday.

“I confirm that for months there have been contacts between senior officials from the Trump administration and from the Bolivarian government, with my express permission,” he said, adding that there had been “various contacts” to “regularize” the conflict with Washington.

The Venezuelan president went on to add that he is always “ready for dialogue,” urging Trump to “really listen” to Venezuela. No details of the contents of the discussions were disclosed.

Maduro’s comments followed an Associated Press report that a Trump administration intermediary had held “secret talks” with National Constituent Assembly President Diosdado Cabello. The report did not disclose the identity of the intermediary, claiming that the goal of the meeting was to increase pressure by contributing to a “knife fight” allegedly taking place behind the scenes.

Cabello later confirmed that a meeting had taken place with Maduro’s blessing, dismissing claims of divisions among high ranking officials.

Caracas broke diplomatic relations with Washington after the latter’s recognition of self-proclaimed “Interim President” Juan Guaido as head of state on January 23, with Maduro giving US diplomatic staff 72 hours to leave the country. Following unsuccessful talks to downgrade the embassies to “interests sections,” US embassy staff left Venezuela in March.

Washington’s recognition of Guaido came alongside an escalation of unilateral sanctions targeting key sectors of Venezuela’s economy, including mining, banking, and especially oil. The sanctions regime was elevated to an embargo on August 5, blocking all Venezuelan state assets in US territory and threatening secondary sanctions against third parties trading with the Caribbean nation.

The embargo led the Venezuelan government to suspend dialogue with the opposition, which was being mediated by Norway in Oslo and later in Barbados. While Norwegian officials have held meetings with both sides in Caracas, neither side has signaled willingness to return to the negotiating table, with the opposition delegation reportedly traveling to the United States for meetings with US officials.

Revelations about secret talks between Caracas and Washington coincided with a US top military commander pledging that the US Navy is ready to “do what needs to be done” on Venezuela.

US Southern Command chief Admiral Craig Faller made the comments in Rio de Janeiro on Tuesday as the US started its UNITAS maritime exercises alongside Latin American countries, the UK, Portugal and Japan.

“The United States Navy is the most powerful navy in the world. If a policy decision is made to deploy the navy, I’m convinced that we’ll be able to do what needs to be done,” Faller told reporters.

Faller’s statement comes weeks after President Trump told reporters he was considering a blockade or quarantine against Venezuela, while opposition leader Guaido had also called for “cooperation” with the US Southern Command in May.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Faller’s hardline stance on Thursday, telling the press that there will be “no change” in US policy towards Venezuela so long as Maduro remains in power.

Speaking alongside Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland, Pompeo said that both countries would continue working “on behalf of the Venezuelan people” to oust the Maduro government.

For its part, Russia reaffirmed its backing for the Maduro government after a meeting between Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Wednesday.

“We will always stand in solidarity with [Venezuela] and uphold every nation’s right to independently choose its own development path,” Lavrov told reporters.

Caracas and Moscow have signed a series of bilateral agreements in recent months in different areas, most recently a deal allowing both countries’ warships to visit each other’s ports.

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Featured image: Southern Command chief Admiral Craig Faller said the US Navy is “ready” to intervene in Venezuela. (Dvids)

During Congress’s August recess, a group of 41 Democratic and 31 Republican congressmembers traveled to Israel on a delegation sponsored by American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). AIPAC subsidizes congressional trips to Israel in order to further the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. military aid: $3.8 billion annually. AIPAC is the chief Israel lobby in the United States and a consistent apologist for Israel’s oppressive policies toward the Palestinians.

Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, the first two Muslim women elected to Congress, had planned their own “Delegation to Palestine,” scheduled to begin on August 17. Tlaib, who was born in the U.S., planned to travel to the West Bank to visit her 90-year old Palestinian grandmother, whom she hasn’t seen for a decade. But, aided and abetted by Donald Trump, Israel withdrew permission for the trip unless Tlaib agreed to remain silent about Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians. She refused to abide by the gag order and the trip was cancelled.

Tlaib said in a statement,

“Visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions meant to humiliate me would break my grandmother’s heart. Silencing me with treatment to make me feel less-than is not what she wants for me – it would kill a piece of me that always stands up against racism and injustice.” She added, “Being silent and not condemning the human rights violations of the Israeli government is a disservice to all who live there, including my incredibly strong and loving grandmother.”

Omar, who expressed “strength and solidarity” with Tlaib in a tweet, told reporters,

“[Israeli Prime Minister] Netanyahu’s decision to deny us entry might be unprecedented for members of Congress. But it is the policy of his government when it comes to Palestinians. This is the policy of his government when it comes to anyone who holds views that threaten the occupation.” She tweeted, “We cannot let Trump and Netanyahu succeed in hiding the cruel reality of the occupation from us.”

Israel’s refusal to allow members of the U.S. Congress entry into Israel-Palestine without muzzling them backfired. It has garnered widespread criticism, even by AIPAC, and focused the national discourse on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS), which Tlaib and Omar support.

Omar, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said,

“It is my belief that as legislators, we have an obligation to see the reality there for ourselves. We have a responsibility to conduct oversight over our government’s foreign policy and what happens with the millions of dollars we send in aid.”

She says the U.S. must ask Netanyahu’s government to “stop the expansion of settlements on Palestinian land and ensure full rights for Palestinians if we are to give them aid.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders said,

“the idea that a member of the United States Congress cannot visit a nation which, by the way, we support to the tune of billions and billions of dollars is clearly an outrage,” adding, “And if Israel doesn’t want members of the United States Congress to visit their country to get a firsthand look at what’s going on … maybe [Netanyahu] can respectfully decline the billions of dollars that we give to Israel.”

Tlaib and Omar Planned to Witness the Occupation Firsthand

Tlaib and Omar were scheduled to meet with members of the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) and Palestinian and leftist Israeli activists and nonprofits, as well as international human rights organizations in Jerusalem and the West Bank. They were also set to confer with members of Breaking the Silence, a group of former members of the Israel Defense Forces who now actively oppose Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. Omar tweeted that the goal of the delegation “was to witness firsthand what is happening on the ground in Palestine and hear from stakeholders —our job as Members of Congress.”

The visit by Tlaib and Omar “was to be something else” in contrast to the AIPAC delegation, James Zogby, co-founder and president of the Arab American Institute, wrote in the Forward.

Tlaib and Omar “weren’t going to focus on officials,” according to Zogby. “They were going to expose the reality of Palestinian daily life under occupation. They were going to visit the Wall that separates Palestinians from their lands. They were going to refugee camps now cut off from US funding. They were going to see how Hebron has been horridly deformed by a settler invasion and military occupation.”

Israel had approved the Tlaib/Omar trip last month. Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Ron Dermer said,

“Out of respect for the U.S. Congress and the great alliance between Israel and America,” Israel would not deny entry “to any member of Congress.”

But Donald Trump reportedly told several of his advisers that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should bar Tlaib and Omar because they supported BDS. Hours after Israel cancelled the trip, Trump tweeted,

“It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people.”

The Israeli government agreed to allow Tlaib to visit her grandmother, provided she agree in writing not to discuss her support for BDS. But after emotional conversations with her family, Tlaib refused to submit to the condition that she not discuss the Israeli occupation.

Tlaib “was forced to make a choice between her right to visit her grandmother and her right to political speech against Israeli oppression,” Sandra Tamari wrote at In These Times.

Tamari has been barred from seeing her family in Palestine for more than 10 years because of her advocacy for Palestinian freedom and justice.

Tlaib “ultimately chose the collective over the personal: She refused Israel’s demeaning conditions that would have granted her a ‘humanitarian’ exception to enter Palestine, so long as she refrained from advocating for a boycott of Israel during her visit,” Tamari added.

What Is the BDS Movement?

In 2005, Palestinian civil society — including 170 Palestinian unions, political parties, refugee networks, women’s organizations, professional associations, popular resistance committees and other Palestinian civil society bodies — issued a call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.

BDS is a nonviolent movement for social change in the tradition of boycotts of South Africa and the southern United States. It is aimed at ending Israel’s illegal occupation. In 1967, Israel took control of Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights by military force. UN Security Council Resolution 242 describes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calls for the “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the [1967] conflict.”

But Israel continues its illegal occupation and exercises total control over the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Israel regulates the ingress and egress of the people, as well as the borders, airspace, seashore and waters off the coast of Gaza. Israel expels Palestinians from their homes and builds illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel’s 2014 massacre in Gaza led to the deaths of 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians, and the wounding of 11,231 Palestinians. These actions likely constituted war crimes, according to the UN Human Rights Council’s independent, international commission of inquiry.

Former UN deputy high commissioner for human rights, Flavia Pansieri, said that human rights violations “fuel and shape the conflict” in the occupied Palestinian territories and “[h]uman rights violations in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are both cause and consequence of the military occupation and ongoing violence, in a bitter cyclical process with wider implications for peace and security in the region.”

Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, writing in the Tampa Bay Times, cited the 2010 Human Rights Watch report which “describes the two-tier system of laws, rules, and services that Israel operates for the two populations in areas in the West Bank under its exclusive control, which provide preferential services, development, and benefits for Jewish settlers while imposing harsh conditions on Palestinians.” Tutu wrote, “This, in my book, is apartheid. It is untenable.”

The call for BDS describes boycotts, divestment and sanctions as “non-violent punitive measures” that should last until Israel fully complies with international law by (1) ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the barrier wall; (2) recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and (3) respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their land as stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

What Are Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions?

Boycotts encompass the withdrawal of support for Israel and Israeli and international companies which are violating Palestinian human rights, including Israeli sporting, cultural and academic institutions.

Divestment campaigns urge churches, banks, local councils, pension funds and universities to withdraw investments from all Israeli companies and international companies involved in the violation of Palestinian rights.

Sanctions campaigns pressure governments to hold Israel legally accountable by ending military trade and free-trade agreements and expelling Israel from international fora.

The BDS movement has had a major impact on Israel. BDS was a critical factor in the 46 percent reduction in foreign direct investment in Israel in 2014, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Individuals and entities who have heeded the call for divestment include George Soros, the Bill Gates Foundation, TIAA-CREF public sector pension fund, Dutch pension giant PGGM and Norwegian bank Nordea. Several churches, including the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, the United Church of Christ and many Quaker meetings, have divested from companies the BDS movement has targeted. The security services company G4S is planning to sell its subsidiary in Israel because the Stop G4S campaign resulted in a loss of millions of dollars in contracts. The withdrawal of French multinational utility company Veolia from Israel led to billions of dollars in lost contracts.

Tutu, who finds striking parallels between apartheid South Africa and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, supports BDS. He has called on “people and organizations of conscience to divest from … Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett Packard,” which profit “from the occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.”

Twenty-seven states have enacted legislation targeting boycotts of Israel, but activists have successfully defeated anti-boycott laws in several states. These bills are unconstitutional infringements on protected First Amendment activity.

In banning Tlaib and Omar, Israel relied on its 2017 law prohibiting entry to any non-Israeli citizen who “has knowingly published a public call to engage in a boycott” against Israel “or has made a commitment to participate in such a boycott.”

And the United States’ overwhelming support for Israel is reflected in a resolution the House of Representatives adopted on July 23. H. Res. 246, which passed easily on a 398-17 vote, opposes the BDS movement. Tlaib and Omar voted against the resolution.

Questioning U.S. Aid to Israel

Interestingly, although the Republicans on the AIPAC trip tweeted vociferously about their visit, there was near silence on Twitter from the Democratic members of the delegation, although the group had given Netanyahu a standing ovation.

“The absence of chatter from the Democrats obviously reflects the misgivings that the Democratic base has about the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel,” Philip Weiss and Michael Arria wrote at Mondoweiss. “A recent survey shows that a majority of Democrats support sanctions against Israel over settlements, even as the House votes overwhelmingly to condemn the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.”

The outrageous exclusion of members of Congress from Israel-Palestine has focused unprecedented attention on the Israeli occupation and the BDS movement. This is the time to pressure congressional representatives to rethink their uncritical support for Israel and the $3.8 billion annually the United States provides to Israel.

To learn more about the BDS campaigns, see https://bdsmovement.net/.

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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. She is a contributor to the new book, Reclaiming Judaism From Zionism: Stories of Personal Transformation. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Trump brags about the ‘wall of money’ now flowing into the US from abroad–from Europe, Asia, emerging market economies–as the global economy slides into recession there faster than in the US. He thinks that is great news for the US economy. But it’s quite the opposite.

Trump’s trade war, his provoking of a global currency war, his monetary policy of forcing the Fed to lower rates all exacerbate the Wall of Money inflow to the US which hastens the decline of the global economy.

Behind the Wall of Money inflow is $17 trillion in negative interest rates in Europe and Japan that is driving money out of those economies and into US Treasuries as a ‘safe haven’, causing a rise in the dollar relative to other currencies and causing currencies worldwide outside the US to fall in turn. As other currencies fall, capital flight from their economies (Europe, Latin America, Asia) sends still more dollars to the US–driving the dollar higher still. A vicious cycle ensues: declining currencies leads to more capital flight, to more demand for US$, to rising dollar value, to further decline in other currencies, etc. Investment collapses and recessions deepen further outside the US.

US Multinational corporations doing business in other countries see their profits rapidly eroding in those economies, as the currencies in the countries in which they’re doing business collapse. They then rush to convert their Pesos, Euros, Rupees, etc. into dollars as quickly as possible and repatriate their offshore profits back to the US. The result: the US$ rises still more.

Trump’s trade war has a similar negative compounding effect as negative rates offshore, capital flight, and multinational corporation repatriation: Today’s slowing global economy (already in a manufacturing recession everywhere including the US) is largely driven by business investment contracting in the face of uncertainty due to Trump’s trade war. That uncertainty and declining investment leads to central banks worldwide reducing their interest rates in a desperate effort to stimulate their economies, which is now happening. But lower interest rates in Europe, Emerging markets, etc. has the negative effect of depressing the value of their currencies still further–leading to even more capital flight to the US, buying up more US Treasuries, and driving up the US $ even more. In other words, Trump’s trade war is also driving the Wall of Money to grow further.

But the Wall of Money is a symptom and represents the global economy outside the US sliding deeper into recessions–a global economic decline that is now spilling over to the US economy.

What’s Trump’s solution? Trump browbeats the Federal Reserve to get Powell, its chair, to lower rates, in the hope lower rates will discourage capital inflow to the US (i.e. the Wall) and thus slow the rise of the dollar. But global recession and the ‘wall of money’ now more than offset any Fed rate cuts effect on the US$. Meanwhile, Trump’s monetary policy (lower interest rates) accelerates the wall of money inflow further by forcing the central banks of other economies to lower their rates still further.

Trump policies have also set off a global currency war, which is about to intensify as he targets China’s Yuan-Reminbi. China is already responding by allowing the Yuan to slowly devalue to offset Trump’s tariffs on China exports. Devaluation of the Yuan forces other economies to devalue their currencies further, as their central banks lower their interest rates further, in Europe and Japan that means even deeper negative rates and more capital flight to US Treasuries and an even higher US$.

In short, Trump’s trade war, his provoking of a global currency war, his monetary policy of forcing the Fed to lower rates all exacerbate the Wall of Money inflow to the US and hasten the decline of the global economy.

Trump has not only clearly now lost control of trade negotiations with China. He has lost control of US monetary policy with the Fed that now refuses to be stampeded, he has lost control of any stabilization of the US dollar, and he has accelerated forces that are driving the global economy into recession.

And it’s only a matter of time–a short time–before it’s also clear he’s lost control of the US economy as well.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Jack Rasmus.

Jack Rasmus is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, October 1, 2019. His website is http;//kyklosproductions.com and twitter handle @drjackrasmus.

“To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle [….] Without cruelty there is no festival.”  — Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals / Ecce Homo

Why do powerful governments revel in their ability to cause human suffering in order to bring about a desired political change? The West, led by the United States, has become the initiator and prosecutor of purposeful pain and suffering, and is continuing to advance policies that breed anguish and hardship against the innocent in many countries. These innocent, many of them children, are left starving, left without medical care, and are forced to live in fear due to the horrible conditions placed on them by the western world.

Much of this agony is due to brutal economic sanctions being levied against those countries that do not bow down to the hegemony known as the U.S. The ruling elites are boastful in their support for these harsh policies, as what they claim to seek from these atrocious sanctions is regime change or major policy change by extreme force. But is that the entire story, or do they also find joy in the festival of causing harm to the people of countries they claim as enemies? Do they secretly gain pleasure from this planned cruelty? It seems evident that those implementing this suffering do take satisfaction in their ability to cause pain in order to gain power.

The idea of sanctions has become the norm. It is even anticipated and desired by not only the political class, but by many in the general population as well. Why is this so? Is it due to false beliefs? Is it because the propagandized masses fear that without these sanctions, other countries might rise up to be aggressors threatening our “national security?” Is it because by destroying others economically, Americans believe they will be more prosperous? Does the average person really believe that sanctions will prevent these countries from attaining weapons of mass destruction? Or do many in the general populace also take pleasure in witnessing human suffering at the hands of their rulers?

There are a few pretend dissenters in the mainstream media, and even some in the alternative media, who talk out of both sides of their mouths about this issue. While some claim to expose the brutality of these economic sanctions, they in many cases give cover to the narrative by using the excuse that these sanctions are not effective in bringing about regime change. If they were effective in causing regime change, would that then make this strategy moral or right? How can an aggressive act of war like that of forcing sanctions on an entire country or region, ever be warranted because it might affect regime change?

Many of these so-called defenders of human rights also claim that even though sanctions are levied with “good intentions,” the results are not positive. How can deliberately starving entire populations, depriving them of medical care, destroying their means of economic survival, and generally decimating their lives, have ever been considered a good intention?

It is useful to understand language, as what people say and write should not be taken lightly, it should be scrutinized and studied. In most cases, people will eventually say what they really mean, and many will either speak with a forked tongue, or fashion their position using a double-edged sword. Excusing heinous behavior by suggesting it was only heinous because it did not achieve a certain goal, is not only a weak argument, it is completely immoral. This is a very common way to take both sides of an issue, while falsely claiming the high ground. In other words, it is a lie.

The truth about economic sanctions is that they are abhorrent. It is the intentional use of power and control by governments to purposely brutalize an entire population of innocent men, women, and children, in order to advance a political agenda. This is the definition of terrorism. It is done without compassion or caring for the mass suffering that will always result. It is a knowingly planned destruction of entire societies, which can only lead to the mass suffering of innocent people. It is unholy.

The United States, with the help of its complicit allies, is now sanctioning countries around the world. Some of the more brutal situations are occurring in Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, several countries in Africa, Syria, Yemen, and many others of course. The people of Venezuela have been persecuted by U.S. sanctions, and are literally starving in the streets. Iran’s economy is in dire condition, as horrendous economic sanctions are being enforced there.

This is all being done with the full knowledge that many millions of people will suffer terrible consequences. There is malnutrition, starvation, sickness, disease, lack of medical care, lack of medicine, and in many cases families are forced to abandon their homes and country. This is strictly due to the outside pressure of sanctions and aggressive war. This is true cruelty, but the attitudes of the ruling elite and political class are only consumed by indifference. This is what they desire; this is what they seek.

How can anyone ever forget the ice-cold words of Madeleine Albright when she was Secretary of state under Bill Clinton, as Iraq was suffering under barbarous sanctions? Over 500,000 children under the age of 5 died due to those sanctions, and they died horrible deaths. On national television, the question asked by Lesley Stahl and answered by Albright in a very calm, calculated, and matter of fact manner was this:

“Lesley Stahl on U.S. sanctions against Iraq: We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright: I think this is a very hard choice, but the price-we think is worth it.”

The current face of deliberate U.S. terrorism is steeped in economic sanctions that cause massive human suffering. Sanctions are acts of war, and when committed by U.S. power brokers against so many innocents around the world, they are terrorist acts. These economic sanctions are cold, heartless, and evil, and can only lead to the total destruction of what little is left of human decency and compassion in this fallen country called America.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

A number of imperialist states have issued a statement criticizing the Zimbabwe security forces for a decision, backed up by the judiciary, to restrict the activities of an opposition party which has a history of violent protest.

The Southern African nation has been ruled by the Zimbabwe African National Union, Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) as a dominant political force since national independence in April 1980. Since 2000, there has been the growth of the western-backed Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) which has challenged ZANU-PF in a number of elections as well as through protests and strikes.

In the most recent harmonized elections on July 30, 2018, ZANU-PF won both the parliamentary and presidential poll. Several days after the casting of ballots and prior to the announcement of the results of the voting for the presidential race, the Movement for Democratic Change-Alliance (MDC-A) called for a demonstration against the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) for allegedly rigging the outcome.

Several people were killed in the ensuing clashes between the police, military forces and anti-government protesters in downtown Harare on August 3 (2018). The unrest placed an unfortunate stain on the electoral process which had been largely peaceful.

In recent weeks, the MDC-A, just one of the factions which emerged from the original MDC, has been threatening to hold marches to protest government policies. The opposition grouping has demanded western imperialist states maintain their draconian sanctions against Zimbabwe claiming that the ZANU-PF government stole last year’s election and is ruling the country through undemocratic means, including repressive measures.

Nonetheless, since the forced resignation of the first President Robert Mugabe during an internal split within ZANU-PF in November 2017, there has been virtually no unrest inside the country other than the MDC-A march which ended in violence on August 3 (2018) where in addition to several people being shot to death and wounded, several arson attacks were carried out against the ruling party offices, vehicles, along with damage to both private and public buildings in Harare.

In a joint statement on August 20, the diplomatic officials of several foreign missions including European Union (EU) members France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden and the United Kingdom, along with the missions of Australia, Canada and the United States condemned the ZANU-PF government based upon the criticisms leveled against the administration of President Emmerson Mnangagwa by the MDC-A. In part the statement issued by the western regimes accused the Zimbabwe government of “intimidation, harassment and physical attacks on human rights defenders, trade union and civil society representatives and opposition politicians.”

These alleged human rights violations are designed to further delay the lifting of sanctions against the government. A virtual blockade by these imperialist states has been in place since the year 2000 when the Zimbabwe parliament passed a land reform bill which seized the farms of several thousand white agricultural business owners.

The land had been expropriated from the African people during the onslaught of colonialism in the late 19^th century. After a protracted armed struggle led by ZANU-PF and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU-PF), carried out from the early 1960s to 1979, the white settler-colonial regime of former leader Ian Smith conceded to the release of political prisoners, allowing refugees to return to the country and the conducting of multi-party democratic elections.

Britain and U.S. pledged to assist in the land reform process at the dawn of national independence in 1980. After two decades this promise remained unfulfilled prompting the ZANU-PF government backed by revolutionary war veterans to occupy the land held by the commercial farmers and business interests. A redistribution program was launched which granted much needed land to the African people.

Zimbabwe governmental officials responded to the western missions’ statement related to the proscription of potentially violent demonstrations by the imperialist-funded opposition forces saying:

“The Government of Zimbabwe is taken aback by the intrusive and judgmental attitude displayed by the Missions and the shocking partisanship informing the joint statement with respect to the situation in Zimbabwe. [The] Government of Zimbabwe expects those countries committed to supporting the freedom of expression, association and assembly – seen as facets for a politically stable, economic stable and prosperous Zimbabwe – to exercise impartiality and not to unduly interfere in the internal affairs of Zimbabwe in a way that promotes unrest and public disorder unless they harbor an ulterior motive.” (See this)

Regional Dimensions to the Conflict

The 39^th Summit of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) held in the United Republic of Tanzania on August 17-18, issued a communique calling for the immediate lifting of western sanctions against Zimbabwe. October 25 was designated as a Day of Action throughout the Southern Africa region and Africa as a whole aimed at ending the sanctions.

Image on the right: SADC delegates to the 39th Ordinary Summit

SADC specifically mentioned the renewal of sanctions against Zimbabwe by the U.S. in recent months. The summit which represents 16 member states from South Africa, Namibia and Lesotho to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Union of Comoros, Madagascar, the Seychelles, among others nations, spoke with one voice in solidarity with the people of Zimbabwe.

Executive Secretary for SADC, Dr. Stergomena Lawrence Tax, read the communique on Zimbabwe which strongly emphasized that:

“[The] Summit noted the adverse impact on the economy of Zimbabwe and the region at large of prolonged economic sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe and expressed solidarity with Zimbabwe, and called for the immediate lifting of sanctions to facilitate socio-economic recovery in the country. Summit declared the 25 October as the date on which SADC member states can collectively voice their disapproval of the sanctions through various activities and platforms until the sanctions are lifted.” (See this)

The SADC has been tasked with lobbying the current Chairperson of the AU, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt, to extend the contents of the communique of the Tanzanian summit to the entire continental organization. In addition, President el-Sisi will be asked to raise the issue of sanctions against Zimbabwe at the upcoming 74^th Ordinary General Assembly of the United Nations scheduled to take place in September in New York City.

Image below: SADC 39th Summit in Tanzania held during August 17-18, 2019

Zimbabwe President Mnangagwa expressed his satisfaction with the action taken by the SADC Summit. He told journalists on the sidelines of the gathering about the priorities of Harare noting:

“Well, as Zimbabwe, we were very pleased that this time around SADC was unanimous on the issue of sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe. We resolved that we must pronounce ourselves as SADC that sanctions on Zimbabwe should be lifted; that our secretariat should communicate that position of SADC to the AU, so that the AU chairman, at the United Nations, can also pronounce the position of SADC and the position of AU. We are happy that again it was emphatic that there was no cause or need for sanctions to continue; after all, the basis for the sanctions are not there anymore, and they were illegal at the time when they were imposed by a few Western countries, America and the EU. So, we are very happy with that.”

Zimbabwe Sanctions Contributes to Decline in Growth throughout the SADC Region

Other issues conveyed through the resolutions passed at the SADC Summit acknowledged the problems of drought, water shortages, cyclones and other by-products of climate change which are having a devastating impact on the region. South Africa, the largest industrial economy in the entire continent, has been reeling from escalating unemployment (officially 29%) due to the decline in commodity prices and the lack of foreign investment. (See this)

Overall the growth rate for the entire SADC region is being stifled due to the Zimbabwe sanctions. A recently launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in Niger holds the potential for exponential growth and development as a result of the breaking down of trade barriers imposed through the legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the adoption of a single currency and the intensification of planning on a regional basis.

Image on the right: SADC meeting on gender issues held at 39th Summit in Tanzania, August 17-18, 2019

Nonetheless, until imperialism is defeated in Africa the prospects for sustainable development will remain unstable and limited. The dependency upon the international markets for the determining of prices and terms of trade for raw materials, energy resources and agricultural commodities still being controlled by the leading capitalist states will hinder any continental efforts to build genuine cooperation and unification of Africa and its people.

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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; featured image: SADC Executive Secretary Stergomena Lawrence Tax at 39th Summit held in Tanzania on Aug. 17-18, 2019

On Friday, as world leaders gathered in France for this weekend’s G7 summit, US President Donald Trump unleashed a barrage of invective all but declaring economic war on China.

Trump called Chinese President Xi Jinping an “enemy,” announced massive tariff increases on all US imports from China, and “hereby ordered” American companies to stop doing business in the country.

Shortly before noon, Trump condemned what he said were insufficient actions by the Federal Reserve to devalue the US currency and make American exports more competitive against China and other countries.

“My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, [Federal Reserve head] Jay Powell or Chairman Xi Jinping,” Trump said on Twitter in an extraordinary condemnation of both an American official and the head of a sovereign state.

This outburst, along with previous statements, amounts to a demand that the United States weaponize the dollar, the primary reserve currency of the global economy, as part of a currency war that threatens the foundations of every institution of economic and political life all over the world.

The American president continued:

“We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far better off without them… Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing… your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

The rising trade war comes amid rapidly escalating military threats and provocations against China by the US. Just hours before Trump’s Twitter outburst, the United States sent a warship through the Taiwan Strait, following a major new US arms sale to Taiwan. Washington has also vowed to stand by Vietnam in its escalating conflict with Beijing over disputed territory in the South China Sea.

Earlier this month, after the United States officially pulled out of the INF treaty that restricted the production of certain nuclear missiles, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that he would like to begin deploying medium-range missiles near China within a matter of “months.”

This week, Esper said the Pentagon must focus on preparing for “high-intensity conflicts against competitors such as Russia and China,” declaring that the US production of weapons banned by the INF treaty is necessary to “deter Chinese bad behavior.”

Trump’s “order” for American companies to leave China marks a milestone in the global eruption of economic nationalism, protectionism, and preparations for military conflict. This process finds its most direct expression in the clash between the two largest economies: The United States, with a GDP of $20 trillion, and China, with a GDP of $13 trillion.

Since the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the American corporate oligarchy has used China as a giant sweatshop, extracting profits from its massive working class while using the threat of “offshoring” to drive down wages within the US and internationally.

But the entry of China-based companies into high-value-added industries—such as semiconductor design and production, cell phones, high-end machine tools, medical devices, and optics—has placed them in direct competition with US-based companies, threatening their control of the pool of profits sweated out of the international working class.

The US president’s rantings ultimately reflect the desire of American capitalism to secure its flagging dominance through threats, and, when required, by the use of military force.

Trump, in his brutal and thuggish worship of power, threats and violence, represents the essential characteristics of the American ruling elite: its endless greed, its brutality and its belief that “force works.”

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made an extremely revealing statement.

“I’ll hear folks talk about trade and economic issues as separate from national security,” Pompeo said. “Let’s make no mistake about it, China’s capacity, the People’s Liberation Army’s capacity… is a direct result of trade relationships that they built.”

In other words, China’s economic growth is seen by Washington as a military threat to be countered by anything from trade conflict to full-scale war.

Pompeo’s words are in keeping with the doctrine of great-power rivalry against Russia and China embraced by the Pentagon last year, which declared that “Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security.”

The waging of such “great-power” conflicts will require a “whole-of-society” approach, the Pentagon declared, referring to what is more conventionally called total war.

This starkly poses the significance of Trump’s “order” for American companies to leave China. Under normal circumstances, American presidents have no such power. But in wartime, presidents have asserted sweeping powers to mobilize the economy, and Trump’s statements have such dictatorial overtones. In this context, his repeated references to extending his presidency beyond constitutionally-mandated term limits and his “jokes” about cancelling the 2020 election take on an air of plausibility.

Trump’s outbursts and escalation of trade war clearly rattled financial markets, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging more than 600 points. His bitter denunciation of the Federal Reserve chairman can only intensify the sense within significant sections of the ruling elite, and not only within the United States, that Trump’s policies are leading to a disaster.

However, despite the deep divisions that exist within the American ruling class, the confrontation with China would not end even if he were replaced. While there may be differences with Trump’s methods, there exists a broad anti-China consensus, based on the global interests of American imperialism.

What makes the situation exceedingly dangerous, however, is that there exists no politically articulated opposition to Trump’s policies, which are bringing the United States on a collision course with the world’s most populous country.

For three years in a row, the Democrats have voted for Trump’s record military spending increases, raising defense spending from $619 billion in 2016 to $738 billion in 2020.

The New York Times, the unofficial house organ of the Democratic Party, has demanded that he take a harder line against Chinese technology companies Huawei and ZTE. An op-ed this year blustered that “we need to untie the American economy from China.” Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote an op-ed titled “The U.S. Needs More Nukes” that fully backed the White House’s violation of the INF treaty and its nuclear buildup against China.

As Steve Bannon, the far-right ideologue credited with masterminding Trump’s 2016 victory, commented:

“The Democrats are just as hard on [China] as the Republicans.”

Or, as Robert Daly of the Kissinger Institute, put it

“There is a bipartisan consensus that China is America’s greatest long-term strategic challenge.”

Virulent nationalism, xenophobia, protectionism, dictatorship—all the filth that characterized fascism in the 20th century—is spewing out of every orifice of American capitalism.

No one should have any illusions. It was not hollow rhetoric when Defense Secretary Esper asserted that the Pentagon is preparing for “high-intensity conflicts against competitors such as Russia and China.” American imperialism, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons, is on the warpath.

But the American working class, whose sons and daughters would go off to fight abroad, and who would die in the smoldering ruins of America’s cities in a nuclear holocaust, do not want war. And they, along with workers in China, Russia and internationally, are the only social force that can stop it.

As the International Committee of the Fourth International wrote in its 2016 statement, “Socialism and the Fight Against War”:

• The struggle against war must be based on the working class, the great revolutionary force in society, uniting behind it all progressive elements in the population.
• The new anti-war movement must be anti-capitalist and socialist, since there can be no serious struggle against war except in the fight to end the dictatorship of finance capital and put an end to the economic system that is the fundamental cause of militarism and war.
• The new anti-war movement must therefore, of necessity, be completely and unequivocally independent of, and hostile to, all political parties and organizations of the capitalist class.
• The new anti-war movement must, above all, be international, mobilizing the vast power of the working class in a unified global struggle against imperialism.

Since the publication of that statement, the working class has entered into struggle all over the world: from China and India, to the “yellow vest” protests in France, to the fight for democratic rights in Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, to the strike of auto parts workers in Mexico, and, in just a matter of weeks, an explosive battle by American autoworkers for decent jobs, wages and conditions.

It is the vast and immensely powerful social force of the international working class that must be mobilized to stop the war plans and dictatorial schemes of the capitalist ruling elites.

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Update: Protests continued in Hong Kong this weekend. The protesters returned to the use of violence and the police responded. The South China Morning Post reported: “In a now familiar pattern, the protesters threw bricks, petrol bombs, corrosive liquid and other projectiles at the police, who responded with tear gas, pepper balls and sponge grenades. Twenty-eight people were arrested, including an organiser of an approved protest march. At least 10 people were hospitalised, including two men in serious condition.”

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Some people in the United States are confused about the protests going on in Hong Kong. Whenever the corporate media and politicians, especially people like Marco Rubio, applaud a social movement, it is a red flag that the protests are not a progressive people’s movement, but serve other purposes.  Is this really a democracy movement? Are workers protesting the deep inequality and exploitation there? If not, what are these protests really about?

Fortunately, a more complete narrative of what is happening in Hong Kong and how it relates to the geopolitical conflict between the United States and China is developing among independent and movement media. The following is a description of what has been learned recently.

Hong Kong Protests: Not a Democracy Movement, but an Anti-China Tool

What is happening in Hong Kong is not actually a people’s uprising for democracy, but a tool for anti-China rhetoric and “Great Power Conflict.” Many Hong Kong protesters are pro-capitalist and racist in nature, referring to mainland Chinese as locusts, and are calling for the United States to intervene. Many of the same tactics employed by Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, and Ukrainian regime change operations are re-appearing in Hong Kong. For example, demonstrators have used violence as a tactic to entice police to respond with violence in order to put out a false narrative of state repression against them.

Fight Back News describes the problem:

“There’s a tendency among progressives in the United States to support big crowds of people protesting in other countries. No doubt, the corporate media assists in this process by labeling certain movements ‘pro-democracy’ or ‘freedom fighters.’”

Just because there are people in the street does not make protests progressive, worker-based or for the people’s interests. Fight Back News reports how Hong Kong has been used by China as a way to attract foreign investment, but also as a way to make the Renminbi (RMB) a more powerful currency as well as to advance China’s Belt & Road initiative. These are major threats to US dominance.

Image on the right: Controversial American political activist Joey Gibson, founder of the group Patriot Prayer, holds up an American flag while attending an anti-extradition rally in Hong Kong on July 7, 2019. Facebook Live screengrab

Dan Cohen of the Grayzone mentions the ties between the protest movement and right-wing racist groups in the US. This is an issue requiring further reporting as it is strange that pro-Trump, racist groups are supporting the protests and the protesters are using US racist symbols.

Cohen’s major focus is the capitalist ties of the Hong Kong protesters. He describes the Rubert Murdoch of Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai, the self-described “head of opposition media,” who has been spending a lot of money, millions, to build the movement and giving a lot of media time to the anti-China rhetoric. And, he shows the connections between these capitalists and the Trump administration, i.e. he has had meetings with Bolton, Pence, and Pompeo as well as with neocons in the Senate, Marco Rubio, and Tom Cotton.

The goal of the Hong Kong protests is only unclear because they are trying to hide their true purpose. The real goal is preventing the full integration of Hong Kong into China in 2047 when the transition agreement between China and the United Kingdom is finished. The United States, the United Kingdom, and billionaires in Hong Kong want it to be integrated into the western capitalist economy and fear China’s state-planned economy. If they succeed, Hong Kong will become a base of economic, military and political operations for the US at the Chinese border, a critical position for the West’s ‘Great Power Conflict’ with Russia and China.

The US is investing in an anti-China movement to make integration of Hong Kong into China difficult. China is already hedging its bets by building Shenzhen across the bay, a state-planned, market-based economy, which will become an alternative to Hong Kong and shrink Hong Kong’s importance. The people of Hong Kong will be the losers if this occurs.

The Hong Kong Protest Is Not A Working-Class Revolt

Even though there are good reasons for workers in Hong Kong to revolt, these protests are not focused on the issues of economic insecurity, i.e. high levels of poverty, the exorbitant cost of housing, low wages, and long hours. As Sara Flounders writes,

“For the last 10 years wages have been stagnant in Hong Kong while rents have increased 300 percent; it is the most expensive city in the world.”

But, as Fight Back News explains,

“The Hong Kong protests are absolutely not driven by or in the interests of the working class, whether in Hong Kong or mainland China.”

In fact, the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions is not backing the demonstrations and called on its members to reject the call for a strike on August 5 put out by the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, which is backed by the US National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

If the protesters were focused on workers rights, they would be demanding an end to, or at least reform of, the neoliberal capitalism of Hong Kong that is dominated by big financial interests and corruption. In fact, half of the seats in the legislature are set aside for business interests who vote to protect their profits and not basic needs such as housing, but there is no criticism of this by the protesters.

In Popular Resistance, we wrote:

“Hong Kong has the world’s highest rents, a widening wealth gap and a poverty rate of 20 percent.”

These are crisis-level problems for the vast majority of people in Hong Kong, but they were not the focus of the protests.

Fight Back News writes:

“In actuality, the protests in Hong Kong serve the interests of finance capital, both in the city itself and around the world,” and makes the important point that “Hong Kong’s working class has nothing to gain from worse relations with mainland China, much less from ‘independence.’ They suffered greatly under British colonial rule – no minimum wage laws; no labor protections; barbaric legal punishments like flogging and more.”

The Role of the United States is Evident to Anyone Who Looks

The NED has spent millions of dollars to build this anti-China movement over the years in a place with a population of 7.3 million people, over a million fewer people than New York City. The first to report on NED involvement in the current protest was  Alexander Rubinstein of Mintpress News, who wrote:

“the coalition cited by Hong Kong media, including the South China Morning Post and the Hong Kong Free Press, as organizers of the anti-extradition law demonstrations is called the Civil Human Rights Front. That organization’s website lists the NED-funded HKHRM [Human Rights Monitor], Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the Civic Party, the Labour Party, and the Democratic Party as members of the coalition.”

HKHRM alone received more than $1.9 million in funds from the NED between 1995 and 2013.

The Viable Opposition blogger, in How Washington is Meddling In the Affairs of Hong Kong, describes NED’s history as a regime change agent for the United States and the recent NED funding in Hong Kong, pointing to a total of $1,357,974 on grants to organizations described as promoting freedom, democracy and human rights in Hong Kong over the period from 2015 to 2018.

This is not short-term funding but a long-term commitment by the United States.  NED has been doing mass funding in Hong Kong since 1996. In 2012, NED invested $460,000 through its National Democratic Institute, to build the anti-China movement (aka pro-democracy movement), particularly among university students. Two years later, the mass protests of Occupy Central occurred.

Sara Flounders points out US funding goes beyond NED, writing:

“Funding from the NED, the Ford, Rockefeller, Soros and numerous other corporate foundations, Christian churches of every denomination, and generous British funding, is behind this hostile, subversive network orchestrating the Hong Kong protests.”

The US-funding of NGO’s confuses political activists, media and commentators because they fund a myriad of NGO’s in Hong Kong. As a result, there are human rights, democracy, youth and other Hong Kong spokespersons whose NED funding is not disclosed when they talk in the media.

Image below: Martin Lee, Benny Tai and Joshua Wong speak at Freedom House, 2015.

Hong Kong protesters are not always secret about their ties to the US. In 2014, Mintpress News exposed US involvement in Occupy Central. They pointed out that Martin Lee, a Hong Kong protest figure, was in bed with NED. They gave him an award and had his bio on their website. He came to Washington, DC in 2014 along with Anson Chan, another protest figure, and met with Vice President Joe Biden and Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).  Lee took part in a NED talk hosted specifically for him. In 2015, Lee and others were applauded for their leadership by Freedom House, which, as the now-deceased Robert Parry described in 2017, works hand in hand with the NED.

In this Popular Resistance story, we point out that during the current protests, participants were meeting with Julie Eadeh, of the US Consulate at a hotel. And, when Nathan Law and Agnes Chow visited the US they met with the China-hawk Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Rep. Eliot Engel. They also met with Vice President Pence, Secretary of State Pompeo, National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Senator Marco Rubio.

Protesters carry US and UK flags, and sing the Stars and Stripes Forever and the US national anthem, displaying their connection to western nations. In one of the most iconic moments, demonstrating how these protests are really a microcosm of the conflict between the US and China, a protester used a US flag to beat a Chinese reporter, Fu Guohao of Global Times, who was tied up and assaulted at the Hong Kong airport.

Some believe the protests are too big for the US to control and point to the amount of money being spent by the NED. If the populations of Hong Kong and the US are compared, $1 million in funding for the movement in Hong Kong is equivalent to $60 million in the US. Additional funds are also being provided by billionaires. That level of resources is gigantic for popular movements that typically run on shoestring budgets.

The only way not to see US involvement in the Hong Kong protests is to close your eyes, ears, and mind and pretend it does not exist.

Challenging the Dominant Western Narrative

Although Western backing and political ambitions are the reality, it is a challenge to get this narrative out more widely. Too many in the US are confused by the messaging coming from the Hong Kong billionaires, NED-funded NGO’s, bi-partisan politicians in DC and the military-intelligence establishment, all made larger by the corporate mass media.

Corporate powers are banning social media accounts and YouTube Channelsfrom China to suppress social media activism that tells a different narrative. For example, an article in the China Daily documents US involvement in detail with photographs of meetings between US officials and Hong Kong opposition, as well as the role of NED and Voice of America.

Independent media outlets, such as the ones cited above, are exposing who is behind the protests and their pro-capitalist, imperialist agenda. They are starting to change the dominant western narrative. This is critical because it is easy for activists to be drawn into supporting movements that are counter to our goals for social and economic justice as well as peace.

Hong Kongers have also been manipulated pawns in the US Great Power Conflict with China. They are advocating against their own interests by seeking what will essentially be re-colonization by the West. If the US is successful, it will not be good for the people of Hong Kong, Asia or the world.

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

Featured image:  Agnes Chow and Nathan Law accept the 2018 Lantos Human Rights Prize on behalf of Joshua Wong in Washington, DC. Facebook.

Cardinal George Pell, formerly the Vatican’s minder of cash, was confident that his conviction would not stand the withering scrutiny of the Victorian appeals court.  The December convictions in the county court involving the charges of sexual assault against two choirboys had made institutional history; the key test was whether such convictions might survive the appellate process.  The actions had taken place in 1996-7 against two 13 year old choirboys in the St. Patrick’s Cathedral choir. Memories of details had faded; witness evidence was there for the challenge.

Three grounds by his defence team were suggested to Chief Justice Anne Ferguson, Justice Chris Maxwell and Justice Mark Weinberg.  The first was that the guilty verdicts were “unreasonable and cannot be supported having regarding to the evidence”; the second, the refusal by the trial judge to permit a 19 minute animation in the closing address to the jury; the third, whether there a fundamental irregularity arose because Pell did not enter his plea of not guilty in the presence of the jury.  The Court of Appeal unanimously refused leave to appeal on the second and third grounds, though Pell did convince Justice Weinberg that he could succeed on the “unreasonableness ground”. 

The Chief Justice and Justice Maxwell were satisfied that neither the complainant’s evidence nor the opportunity evidence had reason to put the jury in doubt about the veracity of the account.  To merely claim that the jury “might have had a doubt” was not a sufficient test; the test, rather, was that the jury “must have had a doubt”.  “The jury were entitled to reject the falsity contention” advanced by Pell’s defence team.

The Chief Justice and Justice Maxwell were swayed by the prosecution’s argument that the complainant was compelling. 

“Throughout his evidence, [the complainant] came across as someone who was telling the truth.  He did not seek to embellish his evidence or tailor it in a manner favourable to the prosecution.  As might have been expected, there were some things which he could remember and many things he could not.  And his explanations of why that was so had a ring of truth.” 

The court majority noted that “an appeal court should be slow to substitute its own judgments about human behaviour for those made by a jury.”

The heavy artillery tended to pop weakly at points.  Thirteen “solid obstacles” were asserted by the defence as standing in the way of a sound conviction.  The majority rejected all of them, evidently seeing them as lacking necessary solidity.  One stand out “obstacle”, rather ghoulishly, was whether the robes were manoeuvrable enough in the infliction of assault.  Statements by Monsignor Portelli, prefect of ceremonies to Pell, and the sacristan, were submitted by the defence, both categorical in asserting that it was impossible for the robes to be pulled to the side.  These were not sufficient to impeach the jury’s finding that Pell might have manoeuvred the robes adequately to inflict the said harm.

The lengthy dissenting judgment, one upon which Pell’s supporters and the Church are hanging their hopes on appeal, was that of Justice Weinberg’s finding that the unreasonableness ground could be sustained.

“Having had regard to the whole of the evidence led at trial, and having deliberated long and hard over this matter, I find myself in the position of having genuine doubt as to the applicant’s guilt.” 

He lacked the same confidence shown by his fellow judges in the complainant’s evidence. 

While Weinberg did not accept Pell’s argument that the complainant was a fantasist (“I cannot conclude that the complainant invented these allegations”), or even that it was impossible for the robes to be parted, “a number of things had to have taken place in the space of just a few minutes”; essentially, “the changes of ‘all the planets aligning’, in that way, would, at the very least, be doubtful.”  In sum, “my doubt is a doubt which the jury ought also to have had.”    

The dissenting material was sufficient to cause a titter in the legal fraternity. “You would be pretty safe ground following Weinberg,” suggested a barrister to the Australian Financial Review.  A fundamental reason for this was said to be Weinberg’s criminal law pedigree, one sharpened as the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.  Justices Ferguson and Maxwell, by way of contrast, were noted for their, in the words of Michael Pelly, “exclusively commercial law” backgrounds.

The Vatican, as it has done for a good number of centuries, was playing the cautious wait-and-see card.  Should the Cardinal be defrocked?  That might be premature: the Australian legal system had to run its course.  In the words of Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni,

“The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is awaiting the outcome of the ongoing proceedings and the conclusion of the appellate process prior to taking up the case.”

Pell’s defenders continue to demonstrate how the application of the law is often susceptible to cloying sentiment and rampant disbelief.  Elliptical reasoning has been proffered.  Andrew Bolt, Melbourne’s reigning provocateur of reaction, continues to lead the charge, if only on grounds of Pell’s reputation and incredulity. 

“Even if Pell could physically have been in the sacristy, in time, and without being seen, and physically done these attacks, how insane would he have to be to do all this, attack two boys he didn’t know, in an open room in a busy cathedral?” 

Bolt’s idea of a paedophile is evidently that of a reasoned predator, awaiting to strike when all is calm and silent.  And all paedophiles, he surmises, must have offended before, giving the impression that there can never be a first time. The circle of absurd reasoning is thereby complete. 

The court majority were cognisant of the issue of “improbability” or “implausibility”.  There was a high risk of discovery, that either one of the boys “would cry out”, and a high risk to reputation.  But the majority, in a more tempered manner than Bolt, acknowledged case law that “sexual offending sometimes take place in circumstances carrying a high risk of detection.”  The rush of blood does not necessarily entail the exercise of calm and calculating reason. 

Pell continues to fight, but there was never any doubt of that.  The burdens of history weigh heavily, as they have done for victims.  The Cardinal is a reminder of an institution in decay, and has been, perhaps in some ways, unjustifiably saddled with a greater broad-blanket responsibility.  Even the trial judge was clear in warning that Pell was “not to be made a scapegoat for any [perceived] failings… of the Catholic Church” or for the failings of the other clergy in the matter of child abuse.  But the law has now tread where it previously had no place: the realm of historic crimes of a sexual nature, perpetrated against those in care in the shadings of fallible memories.  The High Court chapter, however, remains to be written.

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

Featured image is from Salt and Light / Youtube

The US under both extremist wings of its war party imposes illegal sanctions on nations targeted for regime change — part of its war on these countries by other means.

European and most other nations go along even when harming their own interests — instead of breaking from the US aim to achieve dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations, endless wars and other hostile actions its favored strategies.

Trump escalated hot wars he inherited and is waging them by other means on China, Russia, Venezuela and Iran.

The US is in decline, exacerbated by Trump’s wrongheaded policies. Beijing responded to his latest tariff hike, calling it “barbaric,” warning it’ll fight back “until the end” — with plenty of muscle and will to stay the course.

The more Trump pushes, the stronger Beijing will push back. On Saturday, China’s Global Times called trade war between both countries “a test of endurance,” adding:

US bullying shows “arrogance and narcissism…(It) must be prepared for counterfire.”

Nobody wins trade wars. When Trump boasts of benefits to the US he shows profound economic and financial ignorance. “(T)he entire world laughs at (his) overt lie.”

Other nations aren’t laughing. They’re greatly concerned about the negative effects to their economies.

An astonishing $17 trillion in European and Japanese interest rates, a sign of economic weakness, things likely to worsen ahead, are exacerbated by Trump’s wrongheaded policies — driving the US and global economy toward recession.

The greater his trade war, the worse things are likely to get. David Stockman call the US national debt a “ticking time bomb.”

It’s growing at over a trillion dollars annually, exceeding GDP. Trump reportedly is considering big cuts in Medicare and Social Security to offset it if elected to a second term — reason enough to want him defeated.

If he’s reelected and Republicans control both houses, it’s likely coming as a way to help pay for the December 20, 1987 GOP tax cut swindle — benefitting corporate interests and high net-worth individuals at the expense of ordinary Americans.

According to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the 2017 tax cut heist “add over $1.5 trillion in debt.”

“Now we know how they’ll pay for those tax cuts, by cutting Social Security and Medicare” — what was planned all along.

According to the Washington Post, Trump “instructed aides to prepare for sweeping budget cuts if he wins a second term in the White House” — meaning social programs, while increasing military and related spending.

Reportedly he wants $845 billion in Medicare cuts and another $25 billion from Social Security. Hardliners in Washington deplore these programs and other social ones, wanting them eliminated altogether.

Iran is a key Trump regime geopolitical focus, its hostile agenda risking war on the country, an act of madness if launched given Tehran’s ability to hit back hard.

Last week, Pompeo falsely claimed US actions against Iran aim “to bring stability and prosperity to the Middle East.” What’s going on is greatly destabilizing the region more than already.

He warned other nations against letting Iran’s Adrian Dayra 1 dock in their port, saying they’ll jeopardize relations with the US, adding:

“(A)nyone who supports it, anyone who allows a ship to dock is at risk of receiving sanctions from the United States.”

He consistently and repeated turns truth on its head about the Islamic Republic, falsely accusing the country of “engag(ing) in malign and destabilizing activities” — a US, NATO, Israeli specialty, not how Iran operates anywhere.

His State Department said the following:

“The shipping sector is on notice that we will aggressively enforce US sanctions. All parties in the shipping sector should conduct appropriate due diligence to ensure that they are not doing business with nor facilitating business for, directly or indirectly, sanctioned parties or with sanctioned (Iranian) cargo.”

Whatever the Adrian Dayra 1’s possible original destination, the MaritimeTraffic/ship trafficking website indicated it’s heading for Mersin, Turkey, estimated to arrive on August 31.

Reportedly the port doesn’t have enough water depth to accommodate a super-tanker like the Adrian Dayra 1.

If its destination is correct and Turkey is willing to accept its cargo, perhaps offloading it onto one or more smaller vessels is planned.

Tehran and Ankara have good relations. Last year, Turkey vowed to keep buying Iranian oil, its Foreign Minister Cavusoglu saying:

“We buy oil from Iran and we purchase it in proper conditions.” More recently it was reported that Turkey is seeking alternative sources of supply.

In the coming days, it’ll be clear if it intends buying the Adrian Dayra 1’s cargo or not — and whether the Trump regime will impose sanctions on Turkey if it maintains normal trade relations with Tehran.

Despite heavy US pressure and threats, Turkey broke with the Trump regime by buying Russian S-400 air defense missiles, the gold standard for this purpose.

Will it act the same way in maintaining normal trade relations with Iran?

Note: Mersin, Turkey is about 125 miles northwest of Syria’s Baniyas refinery, a possible destination for the Iranian vessel’s cargo.

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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 Palácio do Planalto, Flickr

After falsely accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), Washington unilaterally repudiated the treaty. Thus did the US military/security complex rid itself of the landmark agreement achieved by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev that defused the Cold War.

The INF Treaty was perhaps the most important of all of the arms control agreements achieved by American 20th century presidents and now abandoned in the 21st century by US neoconservative governments. The treaty removed the threat of Russian missiles against Europe and the threat of European-based US missiles to Russia. The importance of the treaty is due to its reduction of the chance of accidental nuclear war. Warning systems have a history of false alarms. The problem of US missiles on Russia’s border is that they leave no time for reflection or contact with Washington when Moscow receives a false alarm. Considering the extreme irresponsibility of US governments since the Clinton regime in elevating tensions with Russia, missiles on Russia’s border leaves Russia’s leadership with little choice but to push the button when an alarm sounds.

That Washington intends to put missiles on Russia’s border and pulled out of the INF Treaty for this sole purpose is now obvious. Only two weeks after Washington pulled out of the treaty, Washington tested a missile whose research and development, not merely deployment, were banned under the treaty. If you think Washington designed and produced a new missile in two weeks you are not intelligent enough to be reading this column. While Washington was accusing Russia, it was Washington who was violating the treaty. Perhaps this additional act of betrayal will teach the Russian leadership that it is stupid and self-destructive to trust Washington about anything. Every country must know by now that agreements with Washington are meaningless.

Surely the Russian government understands that there are only two reasons for Washington to put missiles on Russia’s border: (1) to enable Washington to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike that leaves Russia no response time, or (2) to enable Washington to threaten such a strike, thus coercing Russia to Washington’s will. Clearly, one or the other of these reasons is of sufficient importance to Washington for Washington to risk a false alarm setting off a nuclear war.

Military analysts can talk all they want about “rational players,” but if a demonized and threatened country with hostile missiles on its border receives a warning with near zero response time, counting on it to be a false alarm is no longer rational.

The 1988 treaty achieved by Reagan and Gorbachev eliminated this threat. What purpose is served by resurrecting such a threat? Why is Congress silent? Why is Europe silent? Why is the US and European media silent? Why do Romania and Poland enable this threat by permitting US missiles to be stationed on their territory?

Little doubt the Romanian and Polish governments have been given bagfulls of money by the US military/security complex, which wants the multi-billion dollar contracts to produce the new missiles. Here we see the extreme irresponsibility of small countries. Without the corrupt and idiotic governments of Romania and Poland, Washington could not resurrect a threat that was buried 31 years ago by Reagan and Gorbachev.

Even the American puppet state of occupied Germany has refused to host the missiles. But two insignificant states of no importance in the world are subjecting the entire world to the risk of nuclear war so that a few Romanian and Polish politicians can pocket a few million dollars.

Missiles on Russia’s borders that provide no response time are a serious problem for Russia. I keep waiting for Moscow to announce publicly that on the first sign of a missile launching from Romania or Poland, the countries will immediately cease to exist. That might wake up the Romanian and Polish populations to the danger that their corrupt governments are bringing to them.

Why aren’t the Romanian and Polish provocations sufficient justification for Russia to pre-emptively occupy both countries? Is it more provocative for Russia to occupy the two countries than it is for the two countries to host US missiles against Russia? Why only consider the former provocative and not the latter?

No one is capable of coming to Romania and Poland’s aid even if anyone was so inclined. NATO is a joke. It wouldn’t last one day in a battle with Russia. Does anyone think the United States is going to commit suicide for Romania and Poland?

Where are the UN resolutions condemning Romania and Poland for resurrecting the specter of nuclear war by hosting the deployment of US missiles on their borders with Russia? Is the entire world so insouciant that the likely consequences of this act of insanity are not comprehended?

It does seem that human intelligence is not up to the requirements of human survival.

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