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When will the leadership at social media platform Facebook get it? When will they understand the scale of damage being done with its insidious and pernicious system of systematically promoting division, distrust and disharmony through the slow-burn destruction of democratic principles?

It is simply not a good enough defence to say that as a private company they can do anything they like as long as they don’t break the law.

Just last week, Facebook was exposed yet again accepting political ‘dark money’ to promote a hard Brexit. An Observer investigation found that the single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. Two weeks before, the same happened – more dark money poured into political campaigning for a hard-Brexit. Again, more being spent than all known campaigning groups combined.

The influence of “dark money” in British politics has been unearthed through relentless and tenacious investigative journalism, not by the police or other state agencies. No-one has yet been arrested, even after the evidence has mounted. The police, National Crime Agency and Electoral Commission are all forcibly involved and other than a few paltry fines have dragged their feet. By the time anything happens, a terrible Brexit deal will be done or Britain will go over its self-imposed cliff.

In last week’s exposure, a little-known campaign group, with almost no public exposure, no public following to speak of and publishes no information about itself, has spent more than £340,000 on Facebook adverts backing a hard Brexit – making it a bigger spender than every UK political party and the government combined. For clarity, this type of money gets you tens of millions of adverts pushed to specific groups of people.

As editor of TruePublica, I published a story about Brexit and added a paragraph about a book we are promoting – Brexit – A Corporate Coup D’Etat. That paragraph included a link to the publishers. That was enough for Facebook to email me and demand A) payment to promote the article and B) that I provide passport and proof of address – because this was clearly a “political advert sensitive to the national interest.”

And yet – SCL Elections/Cambridge Analytica had the full force of Facebook’s database to pump billions of targeted micro-ads to swing voters during the EU referendum and during a period where it was illegal to do so. That acceptance of ‘dark money’ and the organisations and individuals involved was exposed and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg summoned to appear before the British political system. He simply refused to answer any questions.

In the Observer’s article of last week, it was obvious what is going on.

“The sophisticated campaign includes thousands of individual pro-Brexit adverts, targeted at voters in the constituencies of selected MPs. The adverts urge voters to email their local representative and create the impression of a grassroots uprising for a no-deal Brexit. The MPs then receive emails, signed by a “concerned constituent”, demanding a hard Brexit. The emails do not mention the involvement of an organised campaign group.”

In the meantime, Sky News has just published its own investigative findings on the same subject. Its headline is: “Fake, foreign and far-right: Dodgy accounts uncovered pushing Brexit agenda on social media.” The entire article is about research that confirms how political extremists outside of the UK have been amplifying online pro-Leave views on Brexit. Unsurprisingly, it mentions America a few times.

Tell me if this deception is right and proper given Britain’s delicate situation?

The problem is that no law is being broken by this type of campaigning. It is quite legal for any individual or campaign group to promote political material without declaring where the funds come from as long as it is outside a defined election period.

However, this moment, the Brexit moment, is Britain’s biggest political moment – and much of what is happening is due to perception. This must be true or no-one would bother spending vast sums of money on it in such a way – and then going to great lengths disguising where it comes from. It can’t be ethical, professional or moral can it and probably not legal – not if you’re hiding in the shadows.

And who is funding this campaign? Don’t we have a right to know? Doesn’t the government want to know if it might be arch nemesis Putin and his white cat, mad missile Kim Wrong’Un or even worse, the most bigly orange estate agent sat in the roundest of rooms in Washington DC?

Does anyone really believe that our misguided, out of control, domestic surveillance agency, MI5 knows nothing of this attack against Britain’s democracy? Is that not what they are for in the first place – to ensure that the dark forces operating under the radar are not usurping the establishment?

Does this look right to you?

Theresa May is part of the establishment. She headed up the Home Office. She has twice been accused of serious Brexit cover-ups. That’s the Prime Minister of Britain – accused of cover-ups. In any previous government in British history, May would have resigned by now. Even Cameron, the worst PM since god decided seven days was enough work to create an entire world full of wonderful and equally rubbish things resigned.

One coverup was the accusation that she blocked an investigation into Brexit bankroller Arron Banks in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. He’s since under investigation by the National Crime Agency. This only happened because of journalism, not the government or police action.

In the aforementioned book, you know the one that’s been censored by FB, there is a chapter dedicated to another coverup by Theresa May.

“However, it was not until after the EU referendum, that the Home Office under Theresa May was found to have held back a number of other government generated reports that detailed the positive impacts immigration has had upon Britain in recent decades. Vince Cable commented on what can only be described as vitally important information suppression (censorship) by the government stating that:

“When I was Business Secretary there were up to nine studies that we looked at that took in all the academic evidence. It showed that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment. But this was suppressed by the Home Office under Theresa May because the results were inconvenient. I remember it vividly.”

The book (that unearths some amazing facts) quoted another report that said:

“Theresa May faced accusations from within the government that she tried to remove evidence. Correspondence seen by the Guardian laid bare a six-month tussle between Conservative and Liberal Democrat advisers, which was part of a government-wide exercise into the pros and cons of EU membership. Emails dating back to 2014 show Lib Dem advisers, who were then in government as part of the coalition, complaining repeatedly about Theresa May’s deliberate interventions.”

In the book (you should buy one, it’s only £2.99), another little fact is unearthed. It is a fact, that almost everyone would not just understand but would support.

“The report also detailed numerous ways in which Britain could easily reduce the overall number of EU nationals coming to work in the UK if it had wanted, including implementing a two-year residency restriction for unskilled workers and further restrictions on bringing family members over.

“A lot of the pro-free-movement evidence has been removed,” complained one adviser, citing a UCL report This was, if anything, a disgraceful cover-up by the government.”

Actually, it was yet another report stifled and shoved under the carpet during the EU referendum debate by none other than – Theresa May.

At what point do we really think she campaigned to Remain – because let’s be fair – other than the odd low profile speech, she didn’t.

Interestingly, pro-EU campaigners believe Theresa May made it harder for David Cameron to argue for Britain’s continued membership in the EU as a direct result. David Cameron’s former director of communications, Craig Oliver, also accused the Home Secretary of repeatedly failing to throw her weight behind the campaign to keep Britain in the EU. I wonder why?

Last November, Theresa May was again accused of being at the heart of another coverup by blocking publication of the full legal advice behind her Brexit deal. That is hardly democracy is it? May has persistently proceeded to Brexit failure at every stage – even though she has been warned with specific legal counsel.

Theresa May’s government has been found to be in contempt of parliament – a first. And she was handed the most overwhelming defeat in British political history – another first. All this alongside the coverups, the lying and threats.

In the meantime, why has the ultra-hard-right ERG group of Brexiteers, described as one of the most ‘powerful forces in British politics‘, funded by British taxpayers been given anonymity for so long?

That additional dodgy cash it gets from dodgy foreign donors called ‘dark money’ might have something to do with it, is nothing less than a scandal. Think about that for a minute. The ERG are hiding their member’s identities and where the money comes from whilst being at the very heart of not just government but Brexit. That doesn’t just smell a bit does it – it wreaks.

As Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk put it last week when commenting about Theresa May and her government –

“The shame is gone. And that permeates all the way down the system, from the ceaseless lies told by MPs to the limitless cash ministers waste. Organisations take on the character of those at the top. We have Theresa May, so shamelessness, ignorance and inadequacy have now tricked down to every part of the governing structure.”

You’d think May had some sort of undercover protection team ensuring that no matter how bad the defeat, no matter how much she breaks ethical, moral or parliamentary rules, no matter how many lies or threats she issues – she will stand until the deal is done and then, just like David Cameron, disappear into the night.

If it doesn’t look, feel or sound right – guess what.

Frankly, It stinks.

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The US will most likely misportray Russia as an “aggressor” in order to intentionally destabilize the EU and thus make it more compliant to America’s hegemonic demands

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There shouldn’t be any doubt that Russia will respond in a tit-for-tat fashion to the US’ possible deployment of previously banned short- and -intermediate missiles anywhere in the world and especially in Europe after President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Chairman of the Duma Defense Committee Vladimir Shamanov all literally said as in several statements over the past couple of weeks.

Russia reserves its legitimate right to do so in order to maintain strategic parity between it and the US and therefore reinforce global stability in an increasingly chaotic world, but it’s also walking into an unavoidable infowar trap by doing this. There isn’t any alternative to Russia’s tit-for-tat response otherwise it risks undermining its own national security interests, though its defensive reaction will almost certainly be reframed by the US as an “aggressive” one as Washington incessantly continues its anti-Russian fearmongering campaign in the EU.

It’s not Russia that wants to return Europe to being conceptualized as a conventional battleground in the New Cold War just like it was in the old one, but the US, though it’s unlikely that America actually intends to make it one but is instead seeking to exploit this sentiment for its own self-interested hegemonic reasons.

Pushing the narrative of “Russian aggression” and pointing to “proof” of Moscow’s deployment of short- and -intermediate range missiles (conveniently leaving out the tit-for-tat part) could allow Trump to squeeze his country’s NATO allies for even more funding than ever before, as well as advance his administration’s “cost plus 50” plan to have every country hosting American troops pay the base cost of doing so plus an additional 50% premium. In parallel, the US’ military-industrial complex can also pressure its partners to purchase more American weapons on this pretext, which could create jobs that Trump could promote as part of his re-election campaign.

Nevertheless, the end effect would be the same, and that’s to accelerate the militarization of the Eurasian Rimland with a specific emphasis on the European part that most directly concerns Russia’s strategic security. The point in doing so is to compel Russia to compete in a new interconnected arms and space race and spend the requisite funds to “keep pace” with American-led developments in this sphere, which could combine with the existing and proposed sanctions regimes against the country to deprive the government of some of the financial resources that it allocated to President Putin’s “Great Society” socio-economic development program.

The end goal is to shape the perceptions of average Russian citizens and influence their electoral behavior ahead of the country’s inevitable political transition at the end of President Putin’s fourth and final term in office in 2024, hoping that this can eventually be weaponized to strategically advantageous ends for America.

That’s the plan, at least, but it’s far from foolproof and has a credible chance of failing to accomplish all of what it sets out to do. For starters, Russian decision makers are confident in the knowledge that their world-class hypersonic missiles are more than adequate to ensure the long-term security of the country and that there’s no need to redirect funds away from the “Great Society” and back into the military-industrial complex. This makes a new arms and space race between it and the US more of a political fantasy than anything, albeit one that unaware civilians could easily be convinced into believing.

As such, it’s absolutely integral that the Russian state harnesses its domestic and international information capabilities to convey this truth to their intended audiences, doing what must be needed to debunk the false notion that Russia would be responding “aggressively” through its tit-for-tat policy and reassuring everyone that it doesn’t intend to participate in an arms and space race.

To be sure, Russia is already trying to do that and has succeeded on the home front, but the odds of success are stacked against it abroad. The EU is increasingly suppressing Russia’s publicly funded international media platforms and private Alt-Media ones alike that share statements by Russian representatives to the aforementioned effect, leading to a situation where the European public is unlikely to directly hear Russia’s position on these important issues without it being manipulatively distorted by their anti-Russian Mainstream Medias.

As for the decision-making element of Russia’s targeted audience, most European leaders are unable to resist the US’ Hybrid War pressure upon them and will probably go along with America’s plans whether they want to or not, especially if Trump weaponizes economic instruments against them such as unrelated secondary sanctions pertaining to Iran and Venezuela for instance in order to get them to strategically submit.

Having said that, it can’t be discounted that the US’ hegemonic demands will partially backfire if some independently minded leaders like Germany’s publicly speak out against this in defense of their own objective national interests, basing their opposition on the need to avoid a costly and dangerous return to the Old Cold War’s conventional threats in Europe and not risk worsening already strained relations with Russia that could otherwise be improved to the economic advantage of average citizens.

Given its hefty economic sway, bloc-wide leadership, and hosting of so many US troops, Germany is the only country that can conceivably set the precedent for this to happen and encourage others to follow in its path, but it’ll probably have no effect on Three Seas leader Poland who will try to position itself as the “New Germany” vis-à-vis its rising military-strategic importance to the US. Even so, as long as Russia avoids being dragged into a new arms and space race, then America will be deprived of its sought-after “victory”.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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 InfoRos

What happened to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was troubling. On the one hand, because she dared to challenge the way supporters of Israel have worked to silence debate on US policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she became a victim of incitement, and the target of legislation meant to shame her. At the same time, however, the heavy-handed tactics employed against her by some pro-Israel members of Congress backfired, exposing new fault lines in the US-Israel relationship.

The weapon of choice utilized by Omar’s opponents was to demonize her as an anti-Semite. Her “sin,” it appears, was her continued umbrage over the double-standard that exists in American policy toward Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

During Israel’s assault on Gaza, for example, she criticized the failure of the US media to pierce through Israeli propaganda and see what was actually happening to Palestinians in that impoverished strip of land. Once in Congress, she was deemed to have “sinned” again when she challenged the power of AIPAC to intimidate politicians and silence debate on Israel/Palestine.

New to Washington and the “acceptable language” one should use to discuss these issues, she admitted that her word choices had been unfortunate and apologized for the pain she may have caused.

Despite her apology, she remained a target. Because she is a hijab-wearing Muslim, who was critical of Israel, the GOP sought to exploit her in their continuing effort to drive a wedge between the Jewish community and Democrats. For their part, some Democrats reacted with hyperventilated outrage. Extreme language was used to denounce Omar. Her words were described as “bigoted,” “vile,” and, of course, “anti-Semitic slurs.”

Never, in all this time, was there a critical examination of what she actually said. In fact, she never accused the Jewish community of controlling the media (unless one assumes that Israel’s ability to dominate media coverage of events occurring in the occupation can be attributed to the Jewish community). Nor did she accuse the Jewish community of using money to buy influence in Washington (unless one suggests that AIPAC speaks for and acts on behalf of the entire Jewish community). It didn’t matter, her opponents continued to call her an “anti-Semite,” and did so with such frequency that the term stuck, putting her at risk to threats of violence from bigots.

The entire affair came to a head when, at a town hall last week, Omar attempted to explain herself. Asked to address the controversy that had erupted over her advocacy of Palestinian rights, Omar’s colleague, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, spoke first noting that to her the question of Palestine is personal – her grandmother still lives in the West Bank and Congresswoman Tlaib desires that she receive equal justice and recognition of her rights to live in dignity. Reacting to what she had just heard, Omar said that she couldn’t agree with those who fight for human rights and dignity for others and yet exclude Palestinian rights and dignity. For her part, she said, the focus should be universal – leaving no one out. She then chided those in Congress who have pressed her to reject her commitment to call out Israeli abuses and ignore Palestinians rights. Because she is a Muslim, Omar said, her criticism of Israel has been automatically seen as anti-Semitic in order to silence her. Even more troubling she noted was that, as a result of the manufactured controversy over her words, the discussion became whether or not she was an anti-Semite, while ignoring “the broader debate about what is happening in Palestine.”

At that point, Omar said that she resented those who are pushing her to demonstrate allegiance to Israel. She concluded by saying that she wanted to have this conversation about “the political influence in this country that says it’s okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

The reaction to this newest “sin” was near hysteria. Without ever listening to what she actually said, some members of Congress accused her of saying that the Jews had dual-loyalty – despite the fact that she had said no such thing. They demanded that Omar be censured or removed from her committee posts. And the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee proposed a resolution that would have denounced anti-Semitism in a way that was clearly directed at the congresswoman.

What was disturbing about this proposed resolution was that none of “Whereas” clauses included had anything to do with what Omar actually said. She never accused Jews of “dual loyalty because they support Israel”; nor did she display “prejudicial attitudes” towards Jews; nor did she ever make “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews”.

What she did do was: challenge official American, and in particular, Congressional silence on the suffering of the Palestinians; the efforts by pro-Israel groups to silence debate on this issue; and the way that some have sought to create a virtual identity being pro-Israel and American interests.

Despite the obvious falseness of their claims, Omar’s opponents in Congress plowed ahead with their proposed bill in order “to teach her a lesson.” In their remarks rebuking Omar, they unwittingly made her point. One congressman said, “Questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable.” Another said, “there are many reasons to support Israel, but there is no reason to oppose Israel.” While still another said that Democrats and Republicans, alike, are committed to insuring that the “United States and Israel stand as one.”

It is exactly this attitude to which Omar objected when she wrote,

“I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel…I know what it means to be an American and no one will ever tell me otherwise…I have not said anything about the loyalty of others, but spoke about the loyalty expected of me.”

Because Omar has touched what some have come to say is “the third rail of American politics” she was being exploited by some Republicans and hung out to dry by some Democrats. They put a target on her back. And haters were quick to respond with frightening death threats and shameful bigoted assaults on her as a Muslim woman. There is no question that these threats against Omar were the byproduct of the sustained campaign of incitement.

It’s important to note, however, that outside of the halls of Congress a different reality was unfolding. The attacks on Congresswoman Omar were rejected by many Democrats, including progressive Jewish groups, and a debate was sparked by the issues she raised and the over-reaction to them by Congress.

By week’s end, the entire effort appeared to backfire. Instead of being the “slam dunk” they expected, the proposed resolution ran into blocks. Some members objected to singling out of anti-Semitism, without also denouncing racism, sexism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, etc. Others protested that Omar was being singled out and put at risk.  And a few of the more prominent Democratic presidential hopefuls (Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris) insisted that charges of anti-Semitism should not be used to silence debate on Israeli policy.

By week’s end, Congress passed a resolution denouncing all forms of hate or intolerance against any religious, ethnic, or religious community. Since it made no mention of Ilhan, it was clearly a loss for those who began the push to shame or punish her

Two final points must be made:

Firstly, Representative Omar is owed an apology. False charges and a manufactured crisis have sullied her name and put her at risk.

And secondly, it is clear that Omar’s courage has helped to open a door enabling a discussion of Israeli policy and the US-Israel relationship. While her opponents attempted to slam it shut, it seems that their behavior and incitement against her backfired stirring a debate that has helped to pry the door even further open.

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The Solons on Capitol Hill are terrified of the expression “dual loyalty.” They are afraid because dual loyalty means that one is not completely a loyal citizen of the country where one was born, raised and, presumably, prospered. It also suggests something more perverse, and that is dual citizenship, which in its present historic and social context particularly refers to the Jewish congressmen and women who just might be citizens of both the United States and Israel. There is particular concern over the issue at the moment because a freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar has let the proverbial cat out of the bag by alluding to American-Jewish money buying uncritical support for a foreign country which is Israel without any regard to broader U.S. interests, something that everyone in Washington knows is true and has been the case for decades but is afraid to discuss due to inevitable punishment by the Israel Lobby.

Certainly, the voting record in Congress would suggest that there are a lot of congress critters who embrace dual loyalty, with evidence that the loyalty is not so much dual as skewed in favor of Israel. Any bill relating to Israel or to Jewish collective interests, like the currently fashionable topic of anti-Semitism, is guaranteed a 90% plus approval rating no matter what it says or how much it damages actual U.S. interests. Thursday’s 407 to 23 vote in the House of Representatives on a meaningless and almost unreadable “anti-hate” resolution was primarily intended to punish Ilhan Omar and to demonstrate that the Democratic Party is indeed fully committed to sustaining the exclusive prerogatives of the domestic Jewish community and the Jewish state.

The voting on the resolution was far from unusual and would have been unanimous but for the fact that twenty-three Republicans voted “no” because they wanted a document that was only focused on anti-Semitism, without any references to Muslims or other groups that might be encountering hatred in America. That the congress should be wasting its time with such nonsense is little more than a manifestation of Jewish power in the United States, part of a long-sought goal of making any criticism of Israel a “hate” crime punishable by fining and imprisonment. And congress is always willing to play its part. Famously, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) official Steven Rosen (image on the right) once boasted that he could take a napkin and within 24 hours have the signatures of 70 Senators on it, reflective of the ability of the leading pro-Israel organization to impel the U.S. legislature to respond uncritically to its concerns.

Ilhan Omar has certainly been forced to apologize and explain her position as she is under sustained attack from the left, right and center as well as from the White House. One congressman told her that “Questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable.” Another said “there are many reasons to support Israel, but there is no reason to oppose Israel” while yet another one declared that all in Congress are committed to insuring that the “United States and Israel stand as one.”

But Omar has defended herself without abandoning her core arguments and she has further established her bona fides as a credible critic of what passes for U.S. foreign policy by virtue of an astonishing attack on former President Barack Obama, whom she criticized obliquely in an interview Friday, saying

“We can’t be only upset with Trump. His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was. That’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

Presumably Omar was referring to Obama’s death by drone program and his destruction of Libya, among his other crimes. Everything she said about the smooth talking but feckless Obama is true and could be cast in even worse terms, but to hear the truth from out of the mouth of a liberal Democrat is something like a revelation that all progressives are not ideologically fossilized and fundamentally brain dead. One wonders what she thinks of the Clintons?

The Democrats are in a tricky situation that will only wind up hurting relationships with some of their core constituencies. If they come down too hard on Omar – a Muslim woman of color who wears a head covering – it will not look good to some key minority voters they have long courted. If they do not, the considerable Jewish political donations to the Democratic Party will certainly be diminished if not slowed to a trickle and much of the media will turn hostile. So they are trying to bluff their way through by uttering the usual bromides. Senator Kristin Gillibrand of New York characteristically tried to cover both ends by saying

“Those with critical views of Israel, such as Congresswoman Omar, should be able to express their views without employing anti-Semitic tropes about money or influence.”

Well, of course, it is all about Jews, money buying access and obtaining political power, with the additional element of supporting a foreign government that has few actual interests in common with the United States, isn’t it?

As Omar put it,

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country…”

She also tweeted to a congressional critic that

“I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.”

Gilad Atzmon, a well known Jewish critic of Israel, observed drily that

“How reassuring is it that the only American who upholds the core values of liberty, patriotism and freedom is a black Muslim and an immigrant…”

But such explicatory language about the values that Americans used to embrace before Israel-worship rendered irrelevant the Constitution clearly made some lightweights from the GOP side nervous. Megan McCain, daughter of thankfully deceased “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” Senator John McCain appears on a mind numbing talk-television program called The View where she cried as she described her great love for fellow Israel-firster warmonger former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman as “like family,” before launching into her own “informed” analysis:

“I take the hate crimes rising in this country incredibly seriously and I think what’s happening in Europe is really scary. On both sides it should be called out. And just because I don’t technically have Jewish family that are blood-related to me doesn’t mean that I don’t take this seriously and it is very dangerous, very dangerous… what Ilhan Omar is saying is very scary to me.”

The New York Times also had a lot to say, covering the story on both its news and op-eds pages daily. Columnist Michelle Goldberg, who is usually sensible, criticizes Omar because of her “minimizing the legacy of the holocaust” and blames her because “she’s committed what might be called, in another context, a series of microaggressions — inadvertent slights that are painful because they echo whole histories of trauma.” In other words, if some Jews are indeed deliberately corrupting American politics on behalf of Israel and against actual U.S. interests using money to do so it is not a good idea to say anything about it because it might revive bad historical – or not so historical – memories. It is perpetual victimhood employed as an excuse for malfeasance on the part of Jewish groups and the Jewish state.

Another Times columnist Bret Stephens also takes up the task of defenestrating Omar with some relish, denying that “claims that Israel…uses money to bend others to its will, or that its American supporters ‘push for allegiance to a foreign country’” are nothing more than the “repackage[ing] falsehoods commonly used against Jews for centuries.” He attributes to her “insidious cunning” and “anti-Jewish bigotry” observing how “she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress “Israeli-occupied” territory.” And it’s all “…how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It’s why anti-Semitism is just outside the frame, bidding to get in.” He concludes by asking why the Democratic Party “has so much trouble calling out a naked anti-Semite in its own ranks.”

Stephens clearly does not accept that what Omar claims just might actually be true. Perhaps he is so irritated by her because he himself is a perfect example of someone who suffers from dual loyalty syndrome, or perhaps it would be better described as single loyalty to his tribe and to Israel. Review some of his recent columns in The Times if you do not believe that to be true. He has an obsession with rooting out people that he believes to be anti-Semites and believes all the nonsense about Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” In his op-ed he claims that “Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion.” Yes, a theocratic state’s summary execution of unarmed protesters and starving civilians while simultaneously carrying out ethnic cleansing are traditional Democratic Party programs, at least as Bret sees it.

People like Stephens are unfortunately possessors of a bully pulpit and are influential. As they are public figures, they should be called out regarding where their actual loyalties lie, but no one in power is prepared to do that. Stephens wears his Jewishness on his sleeve and is pro-Israel far beyond anyone else writing at The Times. He and other dual loyalists, to be generous in describing them, should be exposed for what they are, which is the epitome of the promoters of the too “passionate attachment” with a foreign state that President George Washington once warned against. If the United States of America is not their homeland by every measure, they should perhaps consider doing Aliyah and moving to Israel. We genuine Americans would be well rid of them.

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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 that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.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.

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Venezuela: Suspend Debt Repayments and Create an Emergency Humanitarian Fund

By Eric Toussaint, March 13, 2019

Faced with the aggressive measures taken by foreign powers who have not hesitated to confiscate assets of the Republic of Venezuela deposited abroad and which are necessary for maintaining commercial exchanges, the government must declare a suspension of repayment of foreign debt.

Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Affair: The Site C Dam Project and Bulk Water Export

By Joyce Nelson, March 13, 2019

In all the press coverage of the “the SNC-Lavalin affair,” not enough attention has been paid to the company’s involvement in Site C – the contentious $11 billion dam being constructed in B.C.’s Peace River valley.

Buying Back the “Iron Dome” from Israel

By Philip Giraldi, March 13, 2019

In early February, the U.S. Army announced that it would be buying Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system to protect American troops against incoming rockets, artillery shells, and mortar rounds.

Distorting American History: Jefferson Exhibit Generates Racial Controversy in Detroit

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 13, 2019

On March 12, approximately 100 people picketed the Wright Museum demanding that the Jefferson exhibit be reconsidered. Participants carried a banner challenging the official narrative and characterization of Jefferson.

UK Parliament Rejects No-Brexit/Brexit Deal for Second Time

By Stephen Lendman, March 13, 2019

The deal calls for the UK remaining in the EU customs union, Brussels and Berlin retaining control. A number of May’s ministers resigned over her deal, refusing to support capitulation to EU authorities.

US Congressmen Introduce Bill to Prohibit US Courts from Recognizing Cuban Trademarks

By Telesur, March 13, 2019

Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) presented a bill on Tuesday before the US Congress in which they seek to prohibit the official recognition and rights of Cuban trademarks in the United States.

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

By John W. Whitehead, March 13, 2019

According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).

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It’s not only the mafia that demands ransom money in exchange for its “protection”. “The rich countries that we protect” – warned President Donald Trump in a menacing speech at the Pentagon – Our allies “are all notified. They will have to pay for our protection”.

President Trump – reveals Bloomberg — is going to present the plan “Cost Plus 50” which includes the following criteria – the allied countries which shelter US forces on their territory will have to cover their total cost, and pay the USA a supplement of 50 % in exchange for the “privilege” of housing them and therefore enjoying their “protection”.

The plan also requires that the shelter countries pay the salaries of US military personnel and the costs of the management of the aircraft and warships that the United States keep in that country. Italy must therefore pay not only the salaries of approximately 12,000 US military employees based on their territory, but also the management costs for the F-16 fighters and other aircraft deployed by the USA at Aviano and Sigonella. To this must be added the costs of the Sixth Fleet based at Gaeta. According to this same requirement, we will also have to pay for the management of Camp Darby, the biggest US arsenal outside of the homeland, and for the upkeep of the US nuclear weapons stored at Aviano and Ghedi.

We do not know how much the United States intend to charge Italy and the other European countries which shelter their military forces, since we do not even know how much they are currently paying. These data are covered by Secret-Defense. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, the European members of NATO assume the average charge of 34 % of the cost of the US forces and bases present on their territories. But we do not know how much of the annual cost they currently pay to the USA. The only estimation – 2,5 billion dollars – was made 17 years ago.

The sum paid by Italy is therefore also secret. We only have information on certain posts – for example the tens of millions of Euros spent to adapt the airports of Aviano and Ghedi to the needs of the US F-35 fighters and the new B61-12 nuclear bombs that the USA will begin to deploy in Italy in 2020, plus approximately 100 million Euros for the work on the aeronaval base at Sigonella, which is also to be paid for by Italy. At Sigonella, only the Nas I, the administrative and leisure area, is exclusively financed by the USA, while Nas II, the operational departments – the most expensive – are financed by NATO, and therefore also by Italy.

In any case, it is certain – warns a researcher from the Rand Corp – that with the “Cost Plus 50” plan, the costs for the allies “will skyrocket”. There is talk of an increase of 600 %. This will be added to the usual military spending, which in Italy reaches approximately 70 million Euros per day, soon to climb to about 100 million Euros according to the engagements taken by consecutive Italian governments at NATO headquarters.

This is public money drawn from our pockets, subtracted from productive investments and social spending. But it is possible that Italy could pay less for the US forces and bases deployed on its territory. The “Cost Plus 50” in fact plans for a “good behaviour bonus” in the favour of those “allies which closely align themselves with the United States, by doing what they are asked”.

We are sure that Italy will profit from a strong reduction because, from government to government, it has always followed close behind the United States, most recently, by sending troops and warplanes to Eastern Europe on the pretext of containing the “Russian menace” and by favouring the US plan to bury the INF Treaty in order to deploy in Europe, including Italy, sites for nuclear missiles pointed at Russia.

Since these are the targets of possible reprisals, we will need the “protection” of other US forces and bases. Which we will have to pay for, but still with the reduction bonus.

Source: PandoraTV

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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated by Pete Kimberley.

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

Featured image is from the author

While the Justin Trudeau government’s interference in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin highlights corporate influence over politics, it is also a story about a firm at the centre of Canadian foreign policy.

In a recent story titled “Canada’s Corrupt Foreign Policy Comes Home to Roost” I detailed some of SNC’s controversial international undertakings, corruption and government support. But, there’s a great deal more to say about the global behemoth.

“With offices and operations in over 160 countries”, the company has long been the corporate face of this country’s foreign policy. In fact, it is not much of an exaggeration to describe some Canadian diplomatic posts as PR arms for the Montréal-based firm. What’s good for SNC has been defined as good for Canada.

Even as evidence of its extensive bribery began seeping out six years ago, SNC continued to receive diplomatic support and rich government contracts. Since then the Crown Corporation Export Development Canada issued SNC or its international customers at least $800-million  in loans; SNC and a partner were awarded part of a contract worth  up to $400 million to manage Canadian Forces bases abroad; Canada’s aid agency profiled  a venture SNC co-led to curb pollution in Vietnam; Canada’s High  Commissioner Gérard Latulippe and Canadian Commercial Corporation vice president Mariette Fyfe-Fortin sought “to arrange  an untendered, closed-door” contract for SNC to build a $163-million hospital complex in Trinidad and Tobago.

Ottawa’s support for SNC despite corruption allegations in 15 countries is not altogether surprising since the company has proven to be a loyal foot soldier fighting for controversial foreign policy decisions under both Liberal and Conservative governments.

SNC’s nuclear division participated  in a delegation to India led by International Trade Minister Stockwell Day a few months after Ottawa signed a 2008 agreement to export nuclear reactors to India, even though New Delhi refused to sign the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (India developed atomic weapons with Canadian technology). Describing it as the “biggest  private contractor to [the] Canadian mission” in Afghanistan, the Ottawa Citizen referred to SNC in 2007 as “an indispensable part of Canada’s war effort.” In Haiti SNC participated  in a Francophonie Business Forum trip seven months after the US, Canada and France overthrew the country’s elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Amidst the coup government’s vast political repression, the Montreal firm met foreign installed prime minister Gérard Latortue and the company received a series of Canadian government funded contracts in Haiti.

SNC certainly does not shy away from ethically dubious business. For years it manufactured grenades for the Canadian military and others at its plant in Le Gardeur, Quebec. According to its website, SNC opened an office  in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1982 amidst the international campaign to boycott the apartheid regime. Later that decade SNC worked on the Canadian government funded Manantali Dam, which led to “economic ruin, malnutrition and disease to hundreds of thousands of West African farmers.”

More recently, SNC has been part of numerous controversial mining projects in Africa. It had a major stake in a Sherritt-led consortium that initiated one of the world’s largest nickel and cobalt mines in Ambatovy Madagascar. Backed by Canadian diplomats  and Export Development  Canada, the gigantic open pit mine tore up more than 1,300 acres of biologically rich  rain forest home to a thousand species of flowering plants, fourteen species of lemurs and a hundred types of frogs.

According to West Africa Leaks, SNC dodged its tax obligations in Senegal. With no construction equipment or office of its own, SNC created a shell company in Mauritius to avoid paying tax. Senegal missed out on $8.9 million the Montréal firm should have paid the country because its ‘office’ was listed in tax free Mauritius. SNC has subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions Jersey and Panama and the company was cited in the “Panama Papers” leak of offshore accounts for making a $22 million payment to a British Virgin Islands-based firm to secure contracts in Algeria. (In a case of the tax-avoiding fox protecting the public’s hen house, former SNC president and chairman of the board, Guy Saint-Pierre, was appointed to Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 2007 advisory panel  on Canada’s System of International Taxation.)

SNC has benefited from Ottawa’s international push for neoliberal reforms and Canada’s power within the World Bank. A strong proponent of neoliberalism, the Montréal firm has worked  on and promoted  privatizing water services in a number of countries. Alongside Global Affairs Canada, SNC promotes the idea that the public cannot build, operate or manage services and that the way forward is through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which often go beyond a standard design-and-build-construction contract to include private sector participation in service operation, financing and decision making. SNC is represented on the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, which promotes PPPs globally. The Montréal firm has also sponsored many pro-privatization forums.With Rio Tinto, Alcan, Teck Resources and the Canadian International Development Agency, SNC funded  and presented at a 2012 conference at McGill University on Public-Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Towards a Framework for Resource Extraction Industries.

In an embarrassing comment on the PPP lobby, the year before SNC was charged with paying $22.5 million  in bribes to gain the contract to build the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) the Canadian Council  for Public-Private Partnerships and Thomson Reuters  both awarded the MUHC project a prize for best PPP.

Further proof that in the corporate world what is good for SNC is seen as good for Canada, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants gave SNC its award for excellence in corporate governance in seven of the ten  years before the company’s corruption received widespread attention.

In an indication of the impunity that reigns in the corporate world, the directors that oversaw SNC’s global corruption have faced little sanction. After the corruption scandal was revealed board chairman Gwyn Morgan, founder of EnCana, continued to write a regular column for the Globe and Mail Report on Business (currently Financial Post) and continues his membership in the Order of Canada. Ditto for another long serving SNC director who is also a member of the Order of Canada. In fact, Conservative Senator Hugh Segal was subsequently made a member of the Order of Ontario. Another Order of Canada and Order of Ontario member on SNC’s board, Lorna Marsden, also maintained her awards. Other long serving board members — Claude Mongeau, Pierre Lessard, Dee Marcoux, Lawrence Stevenson and David Goldman – received corporate positions and awards after overseeing SNC’s corruption.

The corporate face of this country’s foreign policy is not pretty. While Trudeau’s SNC scandal highlights corporate influence over politics, it’s also the story of the Ugly Canadian abroad.

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From February 24 to 27th, the International People’s Assembly (AIP) was held in Caracas, in solidarity with the people and government of Venezuela represented by Nicolás Maduro. Almost 500 delegates from 90 countries of the world attended the event, and one of the most ardent supporters of this initiative in the last two years is the leader of the Landless Movement of Brazil, João Pedro Stédile.

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Carlos Aznarez (CA): Why an International People’s Assembly now?

João Pedro Stédile (JPS): The effort that we are making with this coordination, not substituting any other action by the parties and unions, is to try to gather all the popular forces so that we can promote common struggles against the common enemies that are the imperialists. That is the main reason to look for new forms of international organization that promote struggles and try to unite the diverse spaces and forms of organization in our countries. In this first Assembly, because of the extent of conflict in Venezuela, which is now the epicenter of the world class struggle, at least in the West, where imperialism seeks by any means to overthrow Venezuela, the number one task, the absolute priority of all of us is to leave here with an agenda of actions, of denunciation, so that our movements can be developed in each of the countries represented here.

CA: I am the devil’s advocate: whenever this type of meeting is held, it is proposed to return to the countries and coordinate actions, and then, for some reason or because of the internal actions of each country, these things are not carried out and the documents and resolutions are packed away. Why do you think that this time it is going to happen or it should happen?

JPS: That is our self-critical reflection: we have to get out of paperwork and try to promote more actions. I believe that we should promote concrete struggles and actions because the popular forces that are here are accustomed to processes of popular organization in their countries. In other words, it is not a bureaucratic meeting that comes with the acronym or the party, but rather people who are involved in real processes of struggle in their countries. So, we are confident that when they return to their countries they will put the issue of Venezuela, the issue of internationalism, permanently on their agenda in the national struggles they are already waging.

CA: Venezuela is a turning point today in the anti-imperialist struggle. How do you think it is most valid or most effective to express solidarity with Venezuela on the continent?

JPS: It is true that there is tremendous confusion and that is why Venezuela is a key point, because even some left-wing sectors of Latin America and Europe allow themselves to be influenced by what the bourgeois press says. We had invited several European forces that refused to come to Venezuela because Venezuela is not a democracy. Look, a country that has held 25 elections in 20 years, where the private press is the majority, where the opposition marches every day it wishes, how can we say that there is no democracy in that country? So, those ideas of the bourgeoisie have also influenced sectors of the left, the most institutional, which later are moved only by electoral logic, which if they are in an election year believe that it is convenient for us to be close to Venezuelans because they are radical. Just as in the past they isolated themselves from Cuba, but Cuba is there, after 60 years of resistance and today with its happy, educated people.

So Venezuela is very important because it is the battle of this century. If the empire succeeds in overthrowing Venezuela, that means that it will have more forces to overthrow Cuba, Nicaragua, and all the processes that propose changes, even that institutional left that only thinks of elections with the defeat of Venezuela will have more difficulties winning elections. So, even for the institutional or public struggle, it is very important to defend Venezuela and transform it into a trench of resistance and at least make it the grave of the Trump government.

CA: In your speeches and statements you tend to criticize the errors of the neo-developmental governments, but there is a tendency that in order to get out of this imperialist offensive, you have to resort back to the recourse of social democracy. How do you see that, is that valid or do we have to define ourselves more clearly by proposing the path to socialism?

JPS: The assessment that we make is that there is a profound crisis of the capitalist mode of production and the exit that they are seeking to resolve the accumulation of their problems is to seize control of resources more offensively, be it oil, mining, water, biodiversity, and increasing the rate of exploitation of the working class by stripping away historical rights that we have gained throughout the decades after World War II. In ideological terms, what capital is promoting is the recovery of the extreme right, as happened in the crisis of the 1930s when it resorted to fascist and Nazi ideology.

The advantage we have now is that this approach cannot be repeated as a right-wing proposal because they do not have a mass movement in the working class as fascism and Nazism used to have, and that gives us some security. But, on the other hand, since they don’t have the masses, they wage an ideological struggle and use all the weapons they have, television, internet, networks, fake news, to defeat us with their ideology.

In the capitalist plan, they have themselves defeated social democracy. In Latin America, Europe and the whole world social democracy was a means of humanizing capital, but capital no longer wants to be human. Capital, in order to recover, has to be the devil, to go to the extreme of consequence, whether in terms of manipulation of the State or of super-exploitation of nature and human labour.

Then, it would be a mistake for the left to think that in order to win elections we have to become stronger social democrats. Now we have to attempt to return to grassroots work, to engage in ideological struggle, to recover our social base which is the working class that has been displaced, is precarious, and faces numerous challenges. But we have to reorganize it under other forms that are not only union and party as we were used to, but also new forms, new movements, to have a social base that brings new forms of participatory democracy to the table, because winning elections alone, as was proven in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina, is not enough. Of course it is important to win elections, but we must have accumulated forces to achieve structural changes in the economy and in the political system.

CA: There is a phenomenon in Europe that is attracting attention and that is the yellow vests. Strangely enough, this wave comes from Europe and not from Latin America as one might imagine, but that there is an anti-system approach. Do you see that this phenomenon could take shape in the new forms of struggle that must be applied to empire?

JPS: Without a doubt. We are very interested in the process of developing them, we are going to try to send our people to stay a while to learn with them the forms they have adopted. It caught our attention because they are part of the working class, it is not a movement of the petty bourgeoisie or disillusioned students as it was once the case in Europe with camps in public squares. We perceive that initiatives are being promoted there by the precarious working class outside the unions, the political parties, but that reacted to this contradiction when they saw that capitalism no longer solves their daily problems and they adopted this form that seemed very interesting to us.

However, it is not a form that we should apply in each country but the importance of it is that they were creative and discovered a form that serves the French reality. That’s what we have to look for in Brazil, in Argentina and in each of the countries. In other words, to promote a debate in grassroots movements to look for new forms of struggle that will stop capital and that will cause damage, because just with demonstrations, slogans of order, rallies, capital is not stopped. The yellow vests of France have caused hardship because they are blocking the roads and everyone knows that capital no longer moves through trucks carrying goods. I congratulate the comrades and I hope that the French left will learn from them and get involved so as to extract lessons from the methodological point of view of how we should work with the disorganized masses.

CA: How is the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) approaching the struggle at this moment in Brazil where time is passing, Lula is still in prison, there are inconsistencies in the government but it is advancing over the rights of the workers and the gains that have been made?

JPS: The MST is now in a very complex situation since we have to redouble our work and our efforts, because our movement has a peasant base, it developed its experience of class struggle in the countryside against the landlords and agricultural capital, which are the big transnationals. There we were formed, we politicized and we understood how the Agrarian Reform is not only land for those who work there as the Zapatista ideas were defended in the 20th century, but that now Agrarian Reform is a struggle against international capital, against its transgenic and agrotoxic technology. It was that struggle that politicized us to extrapolate what the classic peasant movements were.

Faced with the defeat we had because of Lula’s imprisonment and with Bolsonaro’s victory, new challenges are imposed on us that extrapolate the struggle for Agrarian Reform. At the same time, to expose Agrarian Reform we have to win in a political struggle. So the MST has to proceed more carefully in Agrarian Reform because the right wing is preparing for us to fall into some trap and beat us up. Now in the countryside we have to act with much more wisdom and with many more people to protect ourselves from the coming repression. For now it has been coming in a very specific way from the militias that capital has, we have not yet faced repression from the State, from the government of Bolsonaro, but we do not doubt that this is precisely what they desire.

In political terms what we have to do, and we are planning our struggle, is to try to go to the city with our militancy, our experience, and to develop a movement that acts precisely on the periphery with all its strength, and for that we have created in Brazil a broad united front of popular movements called the Popular Brazil Front. We are developing our own way of doing grassroots work that we call the People’s Congress, it is a pompous name, but it is an attempt to challenge, to go house to house to talk to people, to ask about their problems, and to motivate them to go to a popular assembly in their neighborhood, parish, work place. After the assemblies where people voice their problems, try to hold municipal assemblies, then provincial assemblies, to arrive some day, next year or at the end of the year, at a National People’s Congress as a way to stimulate the people to participate in politics, to recover new means of communication, to distribute our newspaper, to discuss it with the people, to use Internet networks, to hold cultural events, to reach the people through music, theatre, and not just because of the political discourse that no-one listens to. We have to use other mass pedagogies so that the masses understand what is happening in Brazil, and the creativity I was talking about.

CA: Will Lula and his freedom continue to be on the agenda of the MST?

JPS: That’s the second big issue in politics: Lula’s freedom is at the center of the class struggle in Brazil. There is no successor to Lula because the one who chooses popular leadership is not the parties, it is the people, that is why it is called popular leadership because the people choose their leaders and Lula is the popular leader of Brazil.

It is a fundamental task for the class struggle that we succeed in liberating Lula so that he becomes the principal spokesman, he is the one who has the capacity to help mobilize the masses against the system and the project of the extreme right. That’s why the extreme right is terrified and prevents him from even speaking, giving interviews, something that goes against the Constitution. Any narco-trafficker in Brazil speaks on national television, but Lula cannot give an interview even to a newspaper.

So, we are fighting for Lula’s freedom, which is going to depend on two important factors: international solidarity, which is why I take this opportunity to ask everyone to help us. The second factor is the national mobilization: we are promoting from Brazil in order to join the campaign for Lula with concrete struggle. We want people to begin to realize that they will have to mobilize against the measures of the neoliberal government, in defense of the historical rights of the working class that they want to eliminate today.

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This interview was first published on the Resumen Latinoamericano.org website. Translation by Internationalist 360°.

Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, which took off with the election of President Hugo Chávez in December 1998, frequently and even quite recently received praise for its social gains from the United Nations, international humanitarian organizations and economists. This aspect of the country’s story has been almost entirely written out of media coverage of the effort to overthrow the Venezuelan government by the US, Canada and their right-wing partners in Venezuela and the region.

Under Chávez, poverty in Venezuela was cut by more than a third, and extreme poverty by 57 percent (CEPR, 3/7/13). (These declines were even steeper if measured from the depths of the opposition-led oil strike, designed to force Chávez out by wrecking the economy.)

In June 2013, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) included Venezuela in a group of 18 nations that that had cut their number of hungry people by half in the preceding 20 years, 14 of which were governed by Chavismo: The FAO said that Venezuela reduced the number of people suffering from malnutrition from 13.5 percent of the population in 1990–92 to less than 5 percent of the population in 2010–12; the FAO credited government-run supermarket networks and nutrition programs created by Chávez.

Malnutrition in children under five was one of several social indicators that improved dramatically in Venezuela following the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999. (Source: Instituto Nacional de Nutrición/CEPR)

Three months later, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination said that it “welcomes the social development measures, programs and plans that include indigenous peoples and people of African descent, which have helped to combat structural racial discrimination” in the country. The committee also noted that it

welcomes the progress made by the [Venezuelan government] in the area of education and its efforts to reduce illiteracy, as a result of which it was declared an “illiteracy-free territory” by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in October 2005.

In 2014, Niky Fabiancic, resident UN coordinator for Venezuela, called the country “one of the leading countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in reducing inequality,” according to Venezuelanalysis (5/9/14). The website also quoted UNICEF representative Kiyomi Kawaguchi as saying that from 2009–10, 7.7 million students attended school, an increase of 24 percent over ten years previously.

Thus, in the Bolivarian Revolution’s 14th and 15th year, multiple UN organs highlighted how Chavismo had improved the lives of Venezuela’s poor majority.

Similarly, the UN’s Economic and Social Council published a report in 2015, two years into the presidency of Nicolas Maduro, that said the council

takes note with satisfaction of the progress made by [the Venezuelan government] in combating poverty and reducing inequality. The Committee also welcomes the huge progress made by the [Venezuelan government] in the fight against malnutrition through the expansion of the school meals program and the food allowance for low-income families.

One widely used measure of a country or territory’s overall well-being is the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), a statistical composite index of life expectancy, education and per capita income indicators. The most recent HDI report is the one that was published in 2018, based on 2017 data.

The 2018 report put Venezuela in the category of countries or territories that have “High Human Development,” the second best of the HDI’s four rankings, and 78th of the 189 countries and territories examined. On that list, Venezuela outranks the majority of the states in the 14-country Lima Group currently trying to overthrow its government, including Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Saint Lucia. Guatemala, Guyana and Honduras are categorized as “Medium Human Development,” the group below the one to which Venezuela belongs and the second lowest HDI category.

The HDI does not provide a perfect picture of present conditions in Venezuela, since the situation in the country has evolved and appears to have worsened since 2017, in large part because of the sharp escalation of the economic war on the country by the Trump administration in August 2017. The HDI does, however, indicate that by this metric, in 2017 Venezuela was doing reasonably well by regional and global standards even in the face of harsh sanctions.

While the progress made by the Bolivarian Revolution has eroded—in larger measure due to US, Canadian and European sanctions undercutting Venezuela’s economy and its people’s access to food and medicine—a mere six months ago, Alfred de Zayas, the first UN special rapporteur to visit Venezuela in 21 years, issued a report based on his late 2017 visit to the country, four years into the Maduro era. The report says:

In the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Gran Misión Vivienda low-cost housing program has contributed to saving millions of persons from homelessness. Over 2 million housing units have been delivered to persons who would otherwise live in shanty towns. In order to address hunger, the Local Supply and Production Committees provide needy Venezuelans with 16kg packages containing sugar, flour, dried milk, oil etc., as the independent expert was able to verify at the Urbanización Nelson Mandela. Another social acquis, El Sistema, established by the late José Antonio Abreu, has offered free musical education to over 1 million youngsters, contributing to a reduction in juvenile delinquency.

Each of these pieces of information constitutes evidence about life in Venezuela in the Chavismo period, which the US and its partners are attempting to end. As such, this data should at least be part of the current conversation about Venezuela, especially inside of states that are trying to illegally oust the Venezuelan movement that not long ago was being praised for its successes by the UN, international humanitarian groups, and economists, and drawing favourable comparisons to the social order that had previously prevailed in the country.

To assess whether US media have noted this crucial part of the story of the Bolivarian Revolution, I used the media aggregator Factiva to search the databases of three of the country’s major newspapers:  the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post. I examined the period since the US government and its allies have asserted that Juan Guaidó is the president of Venezuela, not the elected Nicolás Maduro. According to Factiva, the three outlets have run a combined 800 pieces in the intervening period, and I was able to find four that make reference to Chavismo social programs and even these are done in a vague, dismissive fashion. None discuss in any detail the accomplishments that won the Bolivarian Revolution international acclaim.

To the Wall Street Journal (2/7/19), Venezuela was “paradise” when it was much more unequal.

The Wall Street Journal (2/7/19) gave a timeline of Venezuelan history that, in a section labelled “2003–12,” asserts:

Mr. Chávez expropriates farms and businesses, and uses oil revenue to build homes, distribute food and upgrade healthcare. The programs reduce poverty and make him popular. But he also saddles Venezuela with high inflation, billions in foreign debt and makes the country even more oil dependent.

This piece’s mention of Chavismo’s achievements subsumes them into an overarching narrative that is overwhelmingly focused on the many failures the authors attribute to the Bolivarian Revolution.

Max Fisher of the New York Times (1/24/19) noted that “Mr. Chávez was a dedicated leftist who spent heavily on social programs,” but failed to mention that these programs benefited Venezuelans for a very long time, especially the poorest in the country. In a common trope that’s typically used against leftist governments, especially those in the Global South with non-white majorities, Fisher denigrates the use of Venezuela’s resources to aid its people as a kind of bribery: “handouts to maintain support among his supporters.”

Also in the Times, Virginia Lopez Glass (1/25/19) made a brief, hand-waving reference to the long period of successes of the Bolivarian Revolution, writing that “perhaps Venezuela is finally at the end of a political cycle that, despite some years of social gains, ultimately impoverished what was once the richest nation in the region.”

Times columnist Bret Stephens  (1/28/19) mentioned Chavismo’s social programs, but only to blame government spending on these for the country’s ailments.

The Post seems not to have made any mention at all of the improvements the Bolivarian Revolution brought to the poor and working class who make up most of Venezuela’s population.

When the gains that Chavismo made are erased from the story being told about the country, a distorted version of events is presented. This accounting carries the incorrect message that the Bolivarian Revolution has been an abject failure from start to finish, and that every aspect of the project must therefore be abandoned in order to improve Venezuelans’ conditions. Such a misleading narrative further suggests that, since the Venezuelan government has allegedly brought only harm to the country’s people, the states involved in the effort to remove the Venezuelan government are justified in so doing, and their citizens should support rather than try to stop these efforts.

The starting point for discussions about Venezuela involving anyone who purports to care about the welfare of the people of the country ought to be the question, “What steps can be taken for Venezuela to resume making the impressive strides that it made for the majority of the time that Chavismo has held power?” as opposed to, “How can we disempower the social forces that gave birth to those gains, namely Venezuela’s poor and disproportionately mestizo, indigenous and black populations?” To their discredit, corporate media have framed their coverage around the latter rather than the former–a question whose answer necessarily involves lifting the draconian sanctions.

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Featured image is from FAIR

Two days ago I was in the Syrian Christian town of Al Skeilbiyyeh that has endured sustained attacks from the various terrorist groups backed by the U.S Coalition. These groups are embedded in the countryside bordering Al Skeilbiyyeh. In the last two weeks they have targeted schools, residential areas and civilian districts with 25 rockets/GRAD missiles, causing significant material damage to homes and infrastructure. Children have been told they cannot go to school during these precarious times.

I met with the courageous commander of the volunteer National Defence Forces in this beautiful town, Nabel Alabdalla – and he took me to see the devastation caused by just one rocket that decimated a neighbourhood.

#AlSkeilbiyyeh and the neighbouring town of Mhardeh represent the brave resistance of these besieged peoples against violent and brutal sectarianism and extremism. They are the light in the darkness that has been introduced into their land by the imperialist predators. God bless them and protect them.

Full transcript of Nabel Alabdalla’s words:

“This time, the rockets that landed on this area were unusual and very destructive. We think they have used C4 or another prohibited explosive because this extent of destruction is not from a normal GRAD rocket

This is the result of the Gulf blood money and Erdogan’s policy, his treacherous policy. International mercenaries are targeting civilians in the steadfast city of al-Skeilbiyyeh to drive us from this land.

We send a message to the world that we are staying on this land no matter what they do, we will remain steadfast with the determination of the heroic Syrian Arab army

Our people confirm this because they will stay in their homes neighbouring the international terrorism that is gathered in the countryside of Idleb. We confirm that we always carry the candles of love and peace in one hand and the other hand is on the trigger, we will not leave this land.

Look, there are children toys here, there are homes here, what else is here? Is there a military base here? Where is Europe about this? Why is the Vatican silent? Why is the international community silent and the “humanitarian organisations? Would they accept this landing on their homes?

He worked in Lebanon for 4 years, collecting pennies to build this house, for 4 years. Is he a terrorist? Look at his face, is he a militant? What is he? Why are they targeting him? They are cowards.

They made people homeless

Look, it was not a usual rocket that caused all this destruction

Here the rocket landed. This may collapse, don’t stand on it.

This the level of destruction of one rocket, this is not a usual rocket, look there, it has severed a concrete pillar, scraped the iron bars here, destroyed this house, destroyed that house, it has destroyed two neighborhoods – one rocket.

These are unusual rockets, they have modified them with C4 fillers. The criminals of the world supported by Erdogan, by the American intelligence and by the Gulf blood money want to displace us from this land.

We can assure everyone that we are staying on this land with the determination of the heroic Syrian Arab Army, and the protection of the Virgin Mary. We are not going anywhere, and with the determination of the heroes – our steadfast civilian people – they are showing all levels of steadfastness

We hope for unequivocal support for our civilians to maintain resistance and steadfastness on this Holy Land. We affirm the resistance and we will remain steadfast. We will not move from this land, no matter what they do.

Here we are now, and the launching site is visible. There it is, Tall Othman. There it is … look at the destruction.

International terrorism is gathered in Idleb… we want a solution for this terrorism… it will transfer to Europe, to America and to the world.

They (the terrorists) always send messages of forced displacement, murder – sectarian messages which we have never experienced before.

Here, we are all Syrians. The city of Skeilbiyyeh houses 4000 refugees, Syrians from northern Idleb, the northern villages, from the northwestern countryside of Hama and from the countryside of Idleb.

They came to the city of Skeilbiyyeh fleeing from the criminality of their sons, from the terrorization of their sons, they sought refuge with us, and we embraced them. We provide for them, give them everything they need.

Parents are forced to flee the terrorism of their sons, what should we say about those sons? The mother and father couldn’t endure the terrorization of their sons! Why are the West and Europe supporting them? They are criminals, we must find a solution!

That is the monastery….look where the rocked had landed. Look at the monastery there, the Monastery of the Virgin Mary, the Monastery of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, look where the rocket ( landed), it’s visible, it landed on the wall… there.

They targeted the churches, they targeted the markets, the market was completely destroyed, they targeted the children’s schools, now you will see the footage, they had targeted 4 children schools. What is this?

The city (of Skeilbiyyeh) has been targeted by 4000 rockets and shells until now… this is the protector, look, the photo of saint George is still in its place

The houses were full of children, and this is the patron saint of warriors crowned with victory – Saint George, in his place, steadfast, and we will stay like him

Thank you too…, we always thank the independent journalist who speaks on a humanitarian level, our friend Vanessa Beeley. We convey a message of love and appreciation to you in my name and in the names of the people of Skeilbiyyeh

We will not forget those who stood with us in the most dangerous circumstances and through the darkest times.

Your presence in this land that’s bordering the international terrorism – coming from Paris, from France – strengthens the determination of all the soldiers… and increases the steadfastness of the civilians when they see the humanity in your eyes, and your arrival in the land bordering terrorism.

We thank you in my name and in the name of the city. We confirm our resistance and steadfastness to everyone. We have every confidence that our voice will reach to the whole world, with the terrorism that our city is exposed to, and the terrorism that the civilians are exposed to.

We have complete confidence in you and in your presence in this land and we thank you again for standing with us whenever adversity intensifies.

The late leader Hafez al-Assad said in his clear words: adversities reveal the metal of people, and the more adversity intensifies, the more pure gold is revealed

We always see you with us on this land during dark times, and that is what strengthens us and relieves our people’s suffering, you are always welcome.

Vanessa Beeley, thank you”

***

Thank you to Nabel Alabdalla and your wonderful family – to the brave soldiers in the NDF, the SAA and to the people of Skeilbiyyeh and Mhardeh who truly teach us the meaning of resistance against the terrorist plague that threatens us all.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s Patreon page.

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. You can support Vanessa’s journalism through her Patreon Page. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: One of the volunteer Syrian National Defence Forces soldiers in Al Skeilbiyyeh. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

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In the wake of the February 14, 2018, mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and staff members, a teacher said the school looked “like a war zone.” And to many young Americans, that’s exactly what it felt like. But this shooting was different. Refusing to be victims, Parkland survivors disrupted the “thoughts and prayers” cycle by immediately rallying student activists and adults across the country, mobilizing them around such tragedies and the weapons of war that often facilitate them.

Recent history suggested that such a movement, sure to be unable to keep the public’s attention or exert significant pressure on lawmakers, would collapse almost instantly. Yet, miraculously enough, the same fear — of their school being next — that had kept young Americans paralyzed for almost 20 years was what drove these newly impassioned activists not to back down.

Let me say that, much as I admire them, I look at their remarkable movement from an odd perspective. You see, I grew up in the “school-shooting era” and now work for a non-profit called ReThink Media tracking coverage of the American drone war that has been going on for 17 years.

To me, the U.S. military and CIA drones that hover constantly over eight countries across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and regularly terrorize, maim, and kill civilians, including children, are the equivalents of the disturbed shooters in American schools. But that story is hard to find anywhere in this country. What reports Americans do read about those drone strikes usually focus on successes (a major terrorist taken out in a distant land), not the “collateral damage.”

With that in mind, let me return to those teenage activists against gun violence who quickly grasped three crucial things. The first was that such violence can’t be dealt with by focusing on gun control alone. You also have to confront the other endemic problems exacerbating the gun violence epidemic, including inadequate mental health resources, systemic racism and police brutality, and the depth of economic inequality. As Parkland teen organizer Edna Chavez explained,

“Instead of police officers we should have a department specializing in restorative justice. We need to tackle the root causes of the issues we face and come to an understanding of how to resolve them.”

The second was that, no matter how much you shouted, you had to be aware of the privilege of being heard. In other words, when you shouted, you had to do so not just for yourself but for all those voices so regularly drowned out in this country. After all, black Americans represent the majority of gun homicide victims. Black children are 10 times as likely to die by gun and yet their activism on the subject has been largely demonized or overlooked even as support for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students rolled in.

Image on the right: Cruz, Parkland school shooting perpetrator, during his arrest 

The third was that apathy is the enemy of progress, which means that to make change you have to give people a sense of engagement and empowerment. As one of the Parkland students, Emma Gonzalez, put it:

“What matters is that the majority of American people have become complacent in a senseless injustice that occurs all around them.”

Washington’s Expanding Drone Wars

Here’s the irony, though: while those teenagers continue to talk about the repeated killing of innocents in this country, their broader message could easily be applied to another type of violence that, in all these years, Americans have paid next to no attention to: the U.S. drone war.

Unlike school shootings, drone strikes killing civilians in distant lands rarely make the news here, much less the headlines. Most of us at least now know what it means to live in a country where school shootings are an almost weekly news story. Drones are another matter entirely, and beyond the innocents they so regularly slaughter, there are long-term effects on the communities they are attacking.

As Veterans for Peace put it,

“Here at home, deaths of students and others killed in mass shootings and gun violence, including suicide gun deaths, are said to be the price of freedom to bear arms. Civilian casualties in war are written off as ‘collateral damage,’ the price of freedom and U.S. security.”

And yet, after 17 years, three presidents, and little transparency, America’s drone wars have never truly made it into the national conversation. Regularly marketed over those years as “precise” and “surgical,” drones have always been seen by lawmakers as a “sexy,” casualty-free solution to fighting the bad guys, while protecting American blood and treasure.

According to reports, President Trump actually expanded the U.S. global drone war, while removing the last shreds of transparency about what those drones are doing — and even who’s launching them. One of his first orders on entering the Oval Office was to secretly reinstate the CIA’s ability to launch drone strikes that are, in most cases, not even officially acknowledged. And since then, it’s only gotten worse. Just last week, he revoked an Obama-era executive order that required the director of national intelligence to release an annual report on civilian and combatant casualties caused by CIA drones and other lethal operations. Now, not only are the rules of engagement — whom you can strike and under what circumstances — secret, but the Pentagon no longer even reveals when drones have been used, no less when civilians die from them. Because of this purposeful opaqueness, even an estimate of the drone death toll no longer exists.

Still, in the data available on all U.S. airstrikes since Trump was elected, an alarming trend is discernible: there are more of them, more casualties from them, and ever less accountability about them. In Iraq and Syria alone, the monitoring group Airwars believes that the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS is responsible for between 7,468 and 11,841 civilian deaths, around 2,000 of whom were children. (The U.S.-led coalition, however, only admits to killing 1,139 civilians.)

In Afghanistan, the U.N. recently found that U.S. airstrikes (including drone strikes) had killed approximately the same number of Afghan civilians in 2018 as in the previous three years put together. In response to this report, the U.S.-led NATO mission there claimed that “all feasible precautions” were being taken to limit civilian casualties and that it investigates all allegations of their occurrence. According to such NATO investigations, airstrikes by foreign forces caused 117 civilian casualties last year, including 62 deaths — about a fifth of the U.N. tally.

And those are only the numbers for places where Washington is officially at war. In Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Libya, even less information is available on the number of civilians the U.S. has killed. Experts who track drone strikes in such gray areas of conflict, however, place that number in the thousands, though there is no way to confirm them, as even our military acknowledges. U.S. Army Colonel Thomas Veale, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition against ISIS, put it this way last year:

“As far as how do we know how many civilians were killed, I am just being honest, no one will ever know. Anyone who claims they will know is lying, and there’s no possible way.”

After a U.S. strike killed or injured an entire Afghan family, the trauma surgeon treating a four-year-old survivor told NBC,

“I am sad. A young boy with such big injuries. No eyes, brain out. What will be his future?”

In other words, while America’s teenagers fight in the most public way possible for their right to live, a world away Afghanistan’s teenagers are marching for the same thing — except instead of gun control, in that heavily armed land, they want peace.

Trauma Is Trauma Is Trauma

Gun violence — and school shootings in particular — have become the preeminent fear of American teenagers. A Pew poll taken last year found that 57% of teens are worried about a shooting at their school. (One in four are “very worried.”) This is even truer of nonwhite teens, with roughly two-thirds of them expressing such fear.

As one student told Teen Vogue:

“How could you not feel a little bit terrified knowing that it happens so randomly and so often?”

And she’s not exaggerating. More than 150,000 students in the U.S have experienced a shooting on campus since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, considered the first modern mass school shooting.

And in such anticipatory anxiety, American students have much in common with victims of drone warfare. Speaking to researchers from Stanford University, Haroon Quddoos, a Pakistani taxi driver who survived two U.S. drone strikes, explained it this way:

“No matter what we are doing, that fear is always inculcated in us. Because whether we are driving a car, or we are working on a farm, or we are sitting home playing… cards — no matter what we are doing, we are always thinking the drone will strike us. So we are scared to do anything, no matter what.”

Similar symptoms of post-traumatic stress, trauma, and anxiety are commonplace emotions in countries where U.S. drones are active, just as in American communities like Parkland that have lived through a mass shooting. Visiting communities in Yemen that experienced drone strikes, forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld found that 92% of their inhabitants were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, with children the most significantly affected. Psychologists have come up with similar figures when studying both survivors of school shootings and children who have been psychologically affected by school-lockdown drills, by the media’s focus on violence, and by the culture of fear that has developed in response to mass shootings.

The Voices Left Out of the Conversation

The Parkland students have created a coherent movement that brings together an incredibly diverse group united around a common goal and a belief that all gun violence victims, not just those who have experienced a mass shooting, need to be heard. As one Parkland survivor and leader of the March For Our Lives movement, David Hogg, put it, the goal isn’t to talk for different communities, but to let them “speak for themselves and ask them how we can help.”

The Parkland survivors have essentially created an echo chamber, amplifying the previously unheard voices of young African-Americans and Latinos in particular. At last year’s March For Our Lives, for instance, 11-year-old Naomi Wadler started her speech this way:

“I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead the evening news.”

In 2016, there were nearly 39,000 gun deaths, more than 14,000 of them homicides and almost 23,000 suicides. Such routine gun violence disproportionately affects black Americans. Mass shootings accounted for only about 1.2% of all gun deaths that year. Yet the Parkland students made headlines and gained praise for their activism — Oprah Winfrey even donated $500,000 to the movement — while black communities that had been fighting gun violence for years never received anything similar.

As someone who spends a lot of her time engrossed in the undercovered news of drone strikes, I can’t help but notice the parallels. Stories about U.S. drone strikes taking out dangerous terrorists proliferate, while reports on U.S.-caused civilian casualties disappear into the void. For example, in January, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command claimed that a precision drone strike finally killed Jamel Ahmed Mohammed Ali al-Badawi (image on the right), the alleged mastermind behind the deadly October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. Within a day, more than 24 media outlets had covered the story.

Few, however, focused on the fact that the U.S. command only claimed al-Badawi’s death was “likely,” despite similar reports about such terrorists that have repeatedly been proven wrong. The British human rights group Reprieve found back in 2014 that even when drone operators end up successfully targeting specific individuals like al-Badawi, they regularly kill vastly more people than their chosen targets. Attempts to kill 41 terror figures, Reprieve reported, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. That was five years ago, but there’s no reason to believe anything has changed.

In contrast, when a U.S. airstrike — it’s not clear whether it was a drone or a manned aircraft — killed at least 20 civilians in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in December, 2018, only four American media outlets (Reuters, the Associated Press, Voice of America, and the New York Times) covered the story and none followed up with a report on those civilians and their families. That has largely been the norm since the war on terror began with the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. In the Trump years so far, while headlines scream about mass school shootings and other slaughters of civilians here, the civilian casualties of America’s wars and the drone strikes that often go with them are, if anything, even more strikingly missing in action in the media.

When Safa al-Ahmad, a journalist for PBS’s Frontline, was asked why she thought it was important to hear from Yemenis experiencing American drone strikes, she responded:

“I think if you’re going to talk about people, you should go talk to them. It’s just basic respect for other human beings. It really bothered me that everyone was just talking about the Americans… The other civilians, they weren’t given any names, they weren’t given any details. It was like an aside to the story… This is part of the struggle when you construct stories on foreign countries, when it comes to the American public. I think we’ve done [Americans] a disservice, by not doing more of this… We impact the world, we should understand it. An informed public is the only way there can be a functioning democracy. That is our duty as a democracy, to be informed.”

This one-sided view of America’s never-ending air wars fails everyone, from the people being asked to carry out Washington’s decisions in those lands to ordinary Americans who have little idea what’s being done in their name to the many people living under those drones. Americans should know that, to them, it’s we who seem like the school shooters of the planet.

Waking Up An Apathetic Nation

For the better part of two decades, young Americans have been trapped in a cycle of violence at home and abroad with little way to speak out. Gun violence in this country was a headline-grabbing given. School shootings, like so many other mass killings here, were deemed “tragic” and worthy of thoughts, prayers, and much fervid media attention, but little else.

Until Parkland.

What changed? Well, a new cohort, Generation Z, came on the scene and, unlike their millennial predecessors, many of them are refusing to accept the status quo, especially when it comes to issues like gun violence.

Every time there was a mass shooting, millennials would hold their breath, wondering if today would be the day the country finally woke up. After Newtown. After San Bernadino. After Las Vegas. And each time, it wasn’t. Parkland could have been the same, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids. Having witnessed the dangers of apathy, Gen-Z seems increasingly to be about movement and action. In fact, in a Vice youth survey, 71% of respondents reported feeling “capable” of enacting change around global warming and 85% felt the same about social problems. And that’s new.

For so long, gun violence seemed like an unstoppable, incurable plague. Fed up with the “adults in the room,” however, these young activists have begun to take matters into their own hands, giving those particularly at risk of gun violence, children, a sense of newfound power — the power to determine their own futures. Whether it’s testifying in front of Congress in the first hearing on gun violence since 2011, protesting at the stores and offices of gun manufacturers, or participating in “die-ins,” these kids are making their voices heard.

Since the Parkland massacre, there has been actual movement on gun control, something that America has not seen for a long time. Under pressure, the Justice Department moved to ban the bump stocks that can make semi-automatic weapons fire almost like machine guns, Florida signed a $400 million bill to tighten the state’s gun laws, companies began to cut ties with the National Rifle Association, and public support grew for stricter gun control laws.

Although the new Gen Z activists have focused on issues close to home, sooner or later they may start to look beyond the water’s edge and find themselves in touch with their counterparts across the globe, who are showing every day how dedicated they are to changing the world they live in, with or without anyone’s help. And if they do, they will find that, in its endless wars, America has been the true school shooter on this planet, terrorizing the global classroom with a remarkable lack of consequences.

In March 2018, according to Human Rights Watch, American planes bombed a school that housed displaced people in Syria, killing dozens of them, including children. Similarly, in Yemen that August, a Saudi plane, using a Pentagon-supplied laser-guided bomb, blew away a school bus, killing 40 schoolchildren. Just as at home, it’s not only about the weaponry like those planes or drones. Activists will find that they have to focus their attention as well on the root causes of such violence and the scars they leave behind in the communities of survivors.

More tolerant, more diverse, less trustful of major institutions and less inclined to believe in American exceptionalism than any generation before them, Generation Z may be primed to care about what their country is doing in their name from Afghanistan to Syria, Yemen to Libya. But first they have to know it’s happening.

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Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at ReThink Media, where she works with leading experts and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the Truman National Security Project. Find her on Twitter @ally_harp.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

There is no doubt that Donald Trump’s policies, those of the Lima group [1] and the European powers who seek to impose the usurper Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela and do not hesitate to interfere in order to succeed, must be opposed. As usual, Washington and its allies are announcing a humanitarian crisis as a pretext for the threat of military intervention in a country that has important quantities of natural resources that they seek to grab. The trick is cheap and must be shown up for what it is. All the more so, that the mainstream media are conniving to prepare public opinion for this possibility. The situation is presented in the starkest of terms: a catastrophic dictatorial regime refuses to allow humanitarian aid to reach its needy population; whereas the self-proclaimed new President wants freedom for his people and calls for international help to release the aid that is blocked at the frontier, to the population.

This false and misleading image of the situation must be denounced. The Maduro regime is not a dictatorship: opponents may express themselves and call demonstrations, and President Maduro was elected by direct suffrage against opposing candidates. At the same time it is clear that the level of democracy enjoyed in Venezuela during the period that Hugo Chavez was President has withered: when the Maduro government decided to call an election to create a new constituent assembly, the procedure used by Hugo Chavez was not applied. There was no referendum to decide if a general election in order to elect a new constituent assembly was required; the choice of candidates to the assembly was made under pressure from the party and from Maduro. Over the last few years several popular demonstrations have been repressed.

On the other hand, one must not go to the other extreme and hold that what is happening in Venezuela is solely because of manipulation by foreign enemies of the Bolivarian process. Of course the measures taken by Trump since 2017, and the previous less aggressive measures by Obama, [2] cause great difficulties to the authorities and the economy of the country. There is however a measure of responsibility of the Maduro government and the new Bolivarian bourgeoisie that has emerged and prospered in the wake of the new government and President Maduro’s PSUV party. The root of the problems goes back a long way.

Beyond the discourse of “21^st Century Socialism”, no real anti-capitalist measures were ever taken in Venezuela and the government largely allowed the local capitalist class to maintain its control over the industrial, financial and distribution sectors of the economy. A large space was also left open to big foreign capital from the US, Canada, Russia, China and Brazil. The effort to diversify the economy was insufficiently developed, so the country has remained heavily dependent on oil and raw material exports. Public participation in policy making was also insufficient and a new sector of privileged bourgeois parasites has appeared, known as the “Boli-bourgeoisie”. [3]

A previous article published on 28 January 2019, five days after Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself President in place of Maduro, [4] made several criticisms:

“his continuing to repay external debt instead of declaring a moratorium and using the financial resources that would thus be freed up to do more to relieve the humanitarian crisis the Venezuelan people are now suffering. In 2016 the CADTM had called on the Venezuelan government to conduct an audit of the debt with citizen participation (CADTM AYNA appeals to the Venezuelan government to set up a Citizens’ Debt Audit and offers its support). Other critiques of the Maduro government’s policies coming from the Left are also justified: its failure to combat the capital flight organised with the complicity of the highest authorities of the administration and the government; the continuance of the extractivist exportation model, encouraging exhaustion of the country’s natural resources; the repression against trade unionists and other activists; the development of policies of clientelism and a Constituent Assembly whose actual operation does not live up to the hopes its election had raised.”

These are serious criticisms and they cannot be left unanswered.

At the same time, it is absolutely certain that the proposals made by Juan Guaidó and his supporters are not compatible with the needs of Venezuela and of maintaining its sovereignty. Guiado wants to facilitate the exploitation of the country’s natural resources and manpower by local and foreign corporations. A victory by Guiado would mean Venezuela would sink into the debt system to the advantage of its domestic creditors (the old Establishment and the new Boli-bourgeoisie who purchased Venezuelan debt meaning to profit at the expense of the people) and foreign investors such as big American and European banks and Russian and Chinese corporations, to mention just a few. Guaidó would not end corruption nor the flight of capital or speculation on food and medicine prices. Guaidó represents the traditional idle rich Venezuelan Establishment who have never been interested in developing the Venezuelan economy and whose interests are the opposite to those of the vast majority of the people. An elite who is happy to export the country’s raw materials and import more or less everything else the country needs. An elite that is favourable to paying the foreign and domestic debt, as they are among the holders of the titles.

But beyond all that, another fundamental factor needs to be taken into account: Guaidó’s attempted coup can succeed only if foreign powers intervene directly and succeed in buying off a part of the army (which Trump has made no bones about wanting to do) and fighting the remaining part. If the intervention now being prepared for is not halted, there will be dramatic consequences for the people of Venezuela, for the entire continent and internationally. The Latin American governments who are allied with Washington against Venezuela are ultra-reactionary. The very names of heads of state such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Mauricio Macri in Argentina, Iván Duque in Colombia, Jimmy Morales in Guatemala, Martín Vizcarra in Peru, Juan Carlos Varela in Panama and Sebastián Piñera in Chile are synonymous with reactionism. And of course the European powers, in a parade led by France, Germany, the UK and Spain, fearful that they might miss an opportunity to get a piece of Venezuela’s natural wealth, have rushed to get in line behind the United States and recognize Guaidó. The former colonial powers must be denounced for conducting such policies while at the same time not hesitating for a moment to lend their support to true dictatorships like that of Abdel Fattah el-Sissi in Egypt, Idriss Déby in Chad, and Mohammed Ben Salman in Saudi Arabia, who is killing the people of Yemen and had an opposition journalist literally butchered in his embassy in Istanbul. The government of the State of Israel, which is responsible for war crimes against the Palestinian people, also supports Guaidó. The dominant media repeat as if by rote that the “international community” supports Guaidó, without mentioning the fact that sixty countries have announced that they continue to recognize the Maduro government. Only fifty support Guaidó. Note that the Centre-Left governments of Mexico and Uruguay refuse to fall in line with the Lima Group countries and have offered to act as mediators – a fact very rarely mentioned in the press.

For all these reasons, working-class political movements must refuse any contact with Guaidó and his backers. Guaidó must be unequivocally denounced and combated as a putschist, a representative of big capital and a traitor to the Venezuelan nation because he has called for armed intervention from Washington and its allies. And, faced with threats of a foreign intervention that is anything but imaginary, there is no other choice than to try to organize as broad a front as possible to oppose it. Of course, to avoid an escalation of the conflict, the two opposing camps must negotiate; but working-class political movements must refuse to meet with Guaidó, since he would only instrumentalize them to cloak himself with legitimacy. They must also maintain their autonomy and their ability to criticize the Maduro government.

Faced with the various forms of aggression adopted by Washington and its allies, and in order to improve living conditions for the people of Venezuela, the Maduro government should apply the proposals made by the Venezuelan economist Simón Andrés Zúñiga in an article entitled “Venezuela: El bloqueo y pirateo de fondos obligan a una moratoria de la deuda” (“The blockade and the theft of government funds demand a debt moratorium” – also available in French.

The author of the article begins by stating:

“The stratagem of ‘humanitarian aid’ must not be underestimated, because it is one of the most powerful political tools for ideological manipulation used by the forces who are prepared to crush any expression of sovereignty and independence. They want to convince the population, or a large part of the population, that the government is violating human rights by refusing to let the invaders pass.”

Zúñiga warns:

“Papering over the objective conditions the working population is suffering under is a suicidal attitude, the equivalent of running away from reality. It’s quite simple: the price of a medication in a pharmacy can easily be in excess of two week’s or a month’s wages for working men and women, and that can be seen on the cash-register receipt.”

The article proposes that “…against the Trojan horse of ‘humanitarian aid’ promoted by the US and its allies to justify violating and taking control of Venezuelan territory, while at the same time fraudulently blocking access to Venezuela’s sovereign deposits and assets, the government should organise a mobilisation of the people in solidarity, involving all organisations and communities, in order to meet priority health and nutritional needs as well as organise to resist the criminal siege.

This should be done by means of a broad appeal for participation by all sectors in determining priorities for the use and control of existing resources. It would be an agenda of solidarity and support with broad popular participation, as opposed to the mendacious and cynical ‘humanitarian aid’ agenda.” The proposals contained in the balance of the article, which we can support, can be summed up roughly as follows. We have added certain items while keeping the content of the proposals intact. Obviously applying them would require a change of direction, and depends on the will as well as the ability of the people’s movements to make them their own and insist that they be applied. Unfortunately it seems improbable that they will take concrete form, but they do show that there is a way out of the humanitarian crisis.

1. Faced with the aggressive measures taken by foreign powers who have not hesitated to confiscate assets of the Republic of Venezuela deposited abroad and which are necessary for maintaining commercial exchanges, the government must declare a suspension of repayment of foreign debt.

We would add that international law permits a country facing an emergency situation, for example a humanitarian crisis, to decree a unilateral moratorium on debt repayment (without accumulation of interest or late penalties). And since in addition Venezuela is faced with measures of the type taken unilaterally by Washington without consulting the UN, a unilateral act of suspension of debt repayment is all the more justified.

2. Rather than use its low reserves of hard currencies for repayment of the debt, the government must use them to meet the fundamental needs of the population. As Zúñiga puts it: “The health and nourishment of the people must take priority over repayment of foreign debt.”

3. The moratorium would be accompanied by an open, detailed public audit which, without doubt, would throw light on the numerous manoeuvres and illegal capital flight that have taken place under the protection of the private financial system and of some of the country’s authorities.

4. There are political and economic reasons and legal precedent for supporting a decision of this scope. Unilaterally declaring a moratorium on debt and conducting an audit would be proof of determination to put priorities back in the proper order. The priority use of the nation’s resources must not be to repay debt, but rather to improve the dramatic living conditions being endured by a large part of the population. By suspending repayment, the government of Venezuela would be in a position of strength in its relationship with its creditors.

5. The suspension of debt repayment would apply to all debts issued by the national government and by PDVSA [the Venezuelan state-owned oil and natural gas company].

6. The implementation of an emergency plan for acquisition of food and medicines for the benefit of the population is inevitable. Simultaneously, financial resources must be invested in developing production of food and medicine at the national level. Priority must be given to local producers.

7. A solidarity plan for distributing medicines and care for persons suffering from serious diseases such as diabetes, cancer, renal failure, Parkinson’s disease and HIV/AIDS, among others, which require ongoing and stable treatment, must be implemented immediately. The same goes for the basic medicines needed by the population. A special effort must be made for the people of Amazonia, who are living with an epidemic of malaria.

8. The government and a front made up of forces opposed to foreign interference must take on this task massively, including both those affected and popular organisations. This inclusive and unifying strategy requires breaking with the culture of paternalism, mystification, clientelism and electoralism which characterises many countries, Venezuela among them. All forces that oppose foreign interference, without exception, must be called to unite. A popular mobilisation is possible and necessary, and if it is led by a broad front it can obtain immediate and effective results to ease the current health and nutritional emergency and the very real threat of outside intervention.

9. These measures and the necessary mobilization must and can be supported by a programme that will multiply resources in order to denounce the masquerade of the fake “humanitarian-aid” programme, which amounts to a miserable 20 million dollars.

10. In the case of certain medicines, the plan must overcome the dependence on importsand move towards producing basic medicines nationally. In that sector, the accent should be put not only on the finished products, but also on acquisition of the necessary active substances and on domestic production, which would promote the use of nationally-produced medicines instead of imported ones.

11. Eliminate the Ministry of Food and Nutrition, which has become an anarchic tangle of blind importations (and a haemorrhage of foreign currencies) and contributes to the destruction of domestic food production. The idea is to centralise policies for promoting and supporting the agricultural sector, both plant and animal, in one place. This entity must have a coherent, coordinated and complete vision of the agricultural sector.

12. Foreign trade must be publicly controlled and information on all transactions must be made transparent.

13. The Communal Councils [the basic structure of the country since 2006 [5]] must play a predominant role in agricultural production. In fact, certain Councils have brought about major improvements in productivity and political awareness.

In another context, several of the proposals listed above had been put forward by the Venezuela Citizens’ Debt Audit Platform in 2016-2017. The platform proposed suspending repayment of the debt and conducting a public debt audit with citizen participation with the support of the Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM) and the participation of social movements and citizen organizations. Paulino Núñez and Oly Millán Campos explain: “The goal is to determine what share of the debt is odious and illegitimate and therefore must be cancelled before any debt restructuring. Rather than giving priority to debt servicing by the government, the many health and nutrition problems the Venezuelan people are experiencing must be addressed.” Venezuela : la dette comme expression d’un modèle d’extraction de capitaux permanente et délictueuse (in French). CADTM members in Venezuela have been campaigning for 20 years for an audit of the debt, and since 2016-2017 have called for suspension of payment in the face of the humanitarian crisis affecting the majority of the country’s population.

Given the seriousness of the situation of Venezuela’s people, there should be no hesitation in adopting the proposed suspension of debt repayment in order to create an emergency fund for purchase of medicines and foodstuffs.

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Translation by Snake Arbusto, Vicki Briault and Mike Krolikowski pour le CADTM where this article was originally published.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc.

Notes

Even if one spends years exploring the dark corners infested by Israel’s agents and its diaspora proxies in their successful effort to control much of Capitol Hill and the White House, it is still possible to be shocked by the effrontery of what many have dubbed the 51st state.

In early February, the U.S. Army announced that it would be buying Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system to protect American troops against incoming rockets, artillery shells, and mortar rounds. The sale means that the United States, which has the largest and most advanced defense industries in the world, is now agreeing to buy some of its military hardware from Israel rather than producing its own equivalent version.

The Iron Dome was developed and produced by Israeli government-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems company with some assistance from Raytheon in the United States. It has been operational since 2011 and was deployed to intercept mostly homemade incoming rockets from Hamas during Israel’s large-scale ground and air attacks on Gaza in 2012 and 2014 as well as in the more recent bloody clashes along the border fences that separate Israel from Gaza, which have killed nearly 3,000 Arabs.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu inevitably took credit for the sale, describing it as “a great achievement for Israel and yet another expression of the strengthening of our powerful alliance with the U.S.” The U.S. Army is committed to buy two Iron Dome batteries for deployment next year for $373 million as a first phase of a possible $1.7 billion procurement to develop an enhanced mobile missile defense capability. It is believed that the purchase could lead to far bigger deals if Rafael proves able to upgrade Iron Dome to defeat the more complex battlefield threats envisioned by the Pentagon.

There are a number of problems related to the agreement to purchase Iron Dome. First of all, there is some dispute about whether it actually works. Israeli government sources unsurprisingly claim that it does, but some critics believe that its actual success rate might be considerably lower than the 90% that is being claimed by Rafael and by the Israeli government based on 1,700 reported interceptions. It has been observed that intercepting an incoming bottle rocket is a relatively easy task compared to an artillery or mortar round, which have lower trajectories and less flight time, making locking in the system’s radar more difficult. And, as Iron Dome has not been used with any frequency against enemies firing military-grade rockets, mortars or artillery, so the testing of it has not been fully subjected to the actual field conditions if the U.S. Army were to deploy the system.

The second problem involves the purchase itself. According to a report examining the Iron Dome project, the United States has already provided at least $5.5 billion of the development costs of the system since it was first proposed in 2010. In 2018, Congress provided an additional $705 million to the Israeli government for various missile defense projects, which included Iron Dome. That means that Washington is buying back a system that it paid to develop and is therefore paying for it twice. This is a wonderful way to do business for Israel, but it is a complete rip-off of the American taxpayer. The fact that no one in Congress is complaining is perhaps attributable to the willingness of the government to do favors for Israel, including favors that undercut the U.S.’s own defense industries, as Israel will undoubtedly use reports of the sale to boost its own efforts to market the product worldwide.

A third problem is the cost effectiveness of the system, even if it does work. Each Iron Dome battery will cost close to $125 million, but actually using the system is also expensive. Each Iron Dome-compatible Israeli-developed Tamir missile costs between $50,000 and $150,000, and two are normally used to counter each incoming target. In operations against homemade rockets emanating from Gaza, that means that $100,000-$300,000 is spent to destroy a projectile that might have cost less than $1,000 to make if one is dealing with resistance groups, insurgencies, or terrorist organizations that might be improvising their armaments. And, as the supply of missiles is depleted either in training or in actual combat, it will be necessary to go back to Israel for more, creating a regular cash flow for government-owned Rafael.

When all is said and done, if the U.S. Army has no defense against low-level missile and projectile attacks and Iron Dome is the only tested option available, then there would be a certain desirability to obtain the system for deployment in parts of the world where the military faces that kind of threat. But, as is often the case when it comes to Israel, one has to suspect that politics are quite likely behind the purchase, most particularly in the form of Pentagon officials and congressmen who are desirous of enhancing the benefit packages that Israel receives from U.S. taxpayers.

The bottom line should be the bottom line. If the United States has contributed more than $6 billion to the development of Israel’s military antimissile defenses and actually needs Iron Dome, there should be payback. The two batteries should be freely provided to the U.S. Army as a thank you from the grateful people of Israel for the unprecedented financial aid totaling $134 billion since 1948, as well as the virtually unlimited political cover for Israel’s bad behavior that the American people have provided for the past 70-plus years. Perhaps someone on Capitol Hill or in the White House should remind Netanyahu of the $38 billion that Congress has just approved for Israel on top of all the money that has already gone to Iron Dome. This presents a wonderful opportunity for Israel to finally demonstrate its willingness to do something for the United States, a reciprocity which its powerful American lobby always boasts about but which has never actually been the case in practice.

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This article was originally published on American Free Press.

Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from American Free Press

Musician Stephen Travers hopes a new documentary on a notorious massacre in the north of Ireland during the Troubles will lead to justice almost 50 years later.

In a new Netflix documentary released later this month he says that the 1975 Miami Showband Massacre was not a random sectarian attack but was masterminded by British intelligence services.

Three members of the band, one of Ireland’s most popular, were killed in the attack by the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).

They were heading to Dublin in their van when they were stopped by uniformed men at what looked like a random army checkpoint near Newry in Co Down and shot.

Bass player Mr Travers had only joined the band six weeks earlier. He tells how the “soldiers” fitted a bomb underneath the van which detonated early.

Watch the trailer below.

The blast and subsequent shootings left three band members dead: Brian McCoy, Tony Geraghty and lead singer Fran O’Toole, who was shot 22 times at close range.

Mr Travers believes the band was deliberately targeted due to its popularity among Irish nationalists.

He claimed the killings were masterminded by the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force’s brigadier Robin “the Jackal” Jackson, working closely with British intelligence services. At least four of the gunmen were soldiers from the British Army’s Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR).

The shady Glennane Gang, a secret informal alliance of loyalists who carried out killings of Catholics and nationalists, have been implicated in the killings. Members are thought to have acted as double agents for British military intelligence.

“We were targeted because the British wanted our government to seal the border so that the IRA wouldn’t be able to cross easily into the relative safety of the south after committing some sort of atrocity,” Mr Travers told the Belfast Telegraph.

He said the band would have been branded terrorists, with guns planted in the van, had the bomb not exploded early.

The Police Service of Northern Ireland’s historical inquiries team, which was disbanded in 2014, confirmed Mr Jackson’s involvement in the killings.

His fingerprints were found on a pistol used in the attack. But British army officer Robert Nairac was cleared of involvement.

Mr Travers, however, remains sceptical of the team’s findings, “because they were answerable to the British government.”

Nearly 50 years after the slaughter he hopes the new film will open the door to investigations into the killings.

“I’m not going to go away. I’m looking for the truth,” he said.

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On January 15, Theresa May’s no-deal/deal was overwhelmingly defeated by a 432 – 202 margin – the greatest rejection of a UK leader’s legislative aim in modern times.

As expected on March 12, parliamentarians again rejected her no-Brexit/Brexit deal by a 391 – 242 margin against it.

The vote followed May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s announced last-minute tweaking of the deal rejected in January. The Irish Times explained it as follows, saying:

“Theresa May on Monday night accepted from the EU a package of assurances, including enhanced legal commitments on the (Irish border) backstop (assuring no hard border between Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland), that she said would allow her to put the Brexit withdrawal agreement to MPs on Tuesday.”

They’ll be “no further changes,” Juncker warned. It’s “this deal or” no deal. Plan A and B were largely identical, last minute changes too insignificant to matter.

Irish backstop concessions offered are temporary, not a permanent guarantee against a hard border if Britain leaves the EU, what’s looking increasingly unlikely.

May agreed on a deal critics called capitulation to Brussels, economic powerhouse Germany having most say on its terms. They involve Britain remaining more in than withdrawn from the EU if Brexit occurs.

The deal calls for the UK remaining in the EU customs union, Brussels and Berlin retaining control. A number of May’s ministers resigned over her deal, refusing to support capitulation to EU authorities.

A March 29 deadline approaches – when negotiating a withdrawal agreement is supposed to end unless an extension is agreed on, what seems likely as time is running out.

Two additional votes are scheduled this week. On Wednesday MPs will vote up or down on whether to leave the EU without a deal – a so-called hard Brexit, virtually certain to be rejected.

On Thursday, a second vote will be held on extending the March 29 deadline for additional weeks (likely no later than completion of European Parliament elections on May 26) – subject to unanimous approval by EU member states.

What UK/EU negotiations failed to accomplish after most Brits voted to leave the bloc on June 23, 2016 isn’t likely to change in the coming weeks or months.

May is highly unlikely to seek a third vote on her twice-rejected no-Brexit/Brexit scheme. Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, UK Attorney General Geoffrey Cox called May’s Plan B virtually “unchanged” from Plan A, assuring its defeat by a wide margin.

Opposition Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn slammed May’s Plan B, saying

“(a)fter three months of running down the clock, the prime minister has, despite very extensive delays, achieved not a single change to the withdrawal agreement.”

How things play out in ahead remain uncertain. Despite expressing support for Brexit as prime minister, May opposed it as home secretary.

As things now stand, her no-Brexit/Brexit deal is the only option, twice rejected by parliament.

When the dust fully settles in the weeks and months ahead, the UK may remain an EU member – my best guess on what’s coming.

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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.

“Trudeau came out and asked for strong women, and he got them.” – Michelle Rempel, Conservative Party MP, The Atlantic, Mar 12, 2019

The gods have various roles, and most of them are intrusively irritating. They select humans, and drive them mad.  They select them for special missions, praise them and drive them to death.  They also select them to, if the time comes, commit foolish suicide.  The going might be good for a time, but they shall utterly be vanquished, mortal snots that they are.   

The situation with Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will either ensure his survival for some time, or his destruction.  For many, his looks, his manner and his sense of presence have been prime excuses for avoiding sternly critiqued policy, pushing him up charts of aesthetics and chat shows.  Like the Camelot of the Kennedys, the substantive nature of achievements have given way to a nimbus of awe and praise.  In an appropriate observation from Jesse Brown, Trudeau was a “social media savant”, “the political equivalent of a YouTube puppy video.  After your daily barrage of Trump and terror, you can settle your jangled nerves with his comforting memes.”  Serious issues could hang, and Canada could resist growing up and challenging the lies of its label.   

On some level, he was excused for simply being a half-decent, bearable presenter after nine years of the conservative Harper administration, one who caused the occasional flutter and quiver in appropriate audiences.  Tickling an audience will get you some way.  

He also, much like Tony Blair of the New Labour wave in Britain in the late 1990s, decided to fan progressive tendencies while caking them in the most god awful spin.  He preferred conciliatory approaches.  He ticked the boxes of the progressive report card, because ticks matter: go for a gender-balanced cabinet; chew over climate change policy; be sensitive to the First Peoples and seek their representation. 

In 2015, when asked why he felt his cabinet should be evenly divided in terms of gender (on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, he sported the fine distribution of 15 men and 15 women), his response reverberated on the tarted waves of social media.  “Because it’s 2015.”

Jody Wilson-Raybould, was one of the faces of that cabinet, appointed justice minister and attorney general, and the first indigenous person to attain that post.  Full marks were given to the new leader. He was walking, not just on water, but well.

That period of uncritical Trudeau-ism is over.  The dirt is coming in.  The brittle realities of politics have become apparent.  The glory boy has lost his shine, his coat looking that much more ragged.  Wilson-Raybould has resigned from the cabinet claiming interference from Trudeau in her efforts to prosecute engineering giant SNC-Lavalin, a company which has thousands of Canadians in its employ and a certain smell of bribery and corruption touching a number of Libyan business contracts.  (The Qaddafi era still casts its shadow.) 

Wilson-Raybould proved to be a true spoil sport to the Trudeau image.  Jobs were playing on the prime minister’s mind, and became a dominant intrusion.  Going heavy on the company for grounds of fraud or corruption would lead to job losses, notably in Quebec.  A criminal conviction would fetter the company from bidding on government contracts for a decade.  Best keep SNC-Lavalin up and running, in a fashion.  The company would be encouraged to confess, spanked with a manageable fine and be made to promise improvements.  Wilson-Raybould refused.  

On February 27, in extended testimony to members of the House of Commons Justice committee, the former Attorney General explained that between September and December 2018, she had “experienced a consistent and sustained effort by many people within the government to seek to politically interfere in the exercise of prosecutorial discretion [in her] role as the Attorney General of Canada in an inappropriate effort to secure a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with SNC-Lavalin.”

Her refusal to accede to the deferred agreement for SNC, she surmised, led to her shuffling out of her cabinet position on January 7 this year.  She duly resigned.  Before the committee, she reminded members of the role of the attorney general, one who exercises discretion to prosecute “individually and independently.”  Cabinet’s views on the matter were irrelevant in making such decisions.

The extensive cloud was irritating and morally vexing enough to compel another resignation, a certain capable Jane Philpott of the treasury board. 

“Unfortunately, the evidence of efforts by politicians and/or officials to pressure the former Attorney General to intervene in the criminal case involving SNC-Lavalin, and the evidence as to the content of those efforts have raised serious concerns for me.”

If there is nothing more pronounced in outrage, it is those who felt faith and lost it; who adored stupidly, idiotically, only to understand that politics has a habit of feeding, and promoting, certain acts of self-interested and damaging imbecility.  Trudeau’s actions were those of a person caught up, concerned at the loss of jobs and votes.  Accordingly, he massaged any principles.

Other parties have started to express interest at this fall from grace.  Investigations have been mounted by the Justice Committee and the federal ethics commissioner.  The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has expressed concern over the SNC-Lavalin affair, feeling that it poses a challenge to Canada’s reputation for upholding the rule of law.  NDP MP Charlie Angus insists that the perception of Canada on the “world stage” was at stake.  (Canada’s sense of virtue tends to assume a strained rhetorical quality at points.)  “If Canada is seen as a jurisdiction soft on corporate corruption, Canadians lose out.”

SNC-Lavalin may well be the undoing of the prime minister in every sense, starting with members of his own party, though he seems to have retained support – at least for the moment – within his caucus.  The two resignations did not precipitate movements for an imminent coup. 

If he had simply set his sights lower, clinging to the grime of politics and the arithmetic of amorality, the fall would not only have softened but be lower. Not so.  He felt better; elevated and irritatingly cocky, he could gaze from Olympus on the miscreants and assume that he had become exceptional in the frothy nonsense that is social media and goggle-eyed celebrity.  He could dabble in the world of moose shit and look puppyish and cute.  That time is at an end. 

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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]

On February 16, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika since 1999 announced his candidacy for a fifth term – despite unable to perform the duties of his office since becoming ill in 2005, especially after a debilitating 2013 stroke.

Large-scale daily protests followed his announcement. Others occurred last December against a fifth term in office.

Organized via social media in Algerian cities, protests rallied against him since mid-February. In the country’s Algiers capital, they’ve been the largest in many years – in a nation where street protests are banned.

According to human rights activists, around 800,000 rallied against him on February 22. On February 24, he was hospitalized in Geneva, Switzerland.

March 3 was the deadline for presidential aspirants to formally announce their candidacy for the nation’s highest office. On March 1, Dzair News television reported that around one million rallied in Algiers against Bouteflika’s candidacy.

Yet on March 3, he announced he’d stand for a fifth term despite strong public opposition. Large-scale protests against him continued, including calls for other candidates to withdraw.

Until March, Algerian media largely ignored street protests. When state TV covered them, protesters were criticized. France’s Le Figero called anti-Bouteflika demonstrations a humiliation for the president and his government.

On March 11 after returning from Geneva, he announced his withdrawal from the race, postponing the April 18 election indefinitely.

On the same day, the Algiers Herald reported the following, saying:

The nation’s “dictatorial regime has opted for the postponement of the election without setting a timeline for the next election, which will likely result in Bouteflika remaining president until his death,” adding:

Regime opponents consider his announcement “a constitutional coup.” The Algerian Constitution only permits postponing an election in time of war, not applicable to things in the country now.

Bouteflika’s announcement challenged popular sentiment, along with violating the country’s Constitution.

He nominated Noureddine Bedoui to serve as prime minister – perhaps his choice to succeed him as president when he formally steps down or dies in office.

On April 28, his legitimacy as president will end. Following Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights (LADDH)/National Committee for the Defense of the Rights of Unemployed (CNDDC) member Hadj Ghermoul’s demand for “no…fifth term” for Bouteflika, he was arrested and sentenced to six months imprisonment – part of an attempt to quash protests against another term in office.

He aims to retain power directly or indirectly until passing – despite popular sentiment opposing his “mandate of shame.”

Days before postponing the election indefinitely, a statement on his behalf said he “listened and heard the heartfelt cries of the demonstrators,” yet remains a “candidate for the next presidential election.”

Opposition elements mocked him, saying “(w)e have two plans: plan A, for Abdelaziz (his first name). And plan B, for Bouteflika!”

Plan C came on Monday, Bouteflika saying:

“There will be no fifth term. There was never any question of it for me. Given my state of health and age (82), my last duty towards the Algerian people was always contributing to the foundation of a new republic.”

He hasn’t made a public speech since 2013. Over 1,000 judges said they wouldn’t oversea the presidential election with him as a candidate.

Known as “the pouvoir (the power)” since 1999, his formal days in office may be numbered – wanting immunity for crimes in office from whoever succeeds him while still alive.

He governs like Turkey’s Erdogan and Egypt’s el-Sisi, though frail and incapacitated without without their vigor and public posture.

No matter. Underlings enforce his brutal rule though it’s unclear who’s really in charge given his precarious state. Algerians can be imprisoned for “offending the president, “insulting state officials,” or “denigrating Islam.”

Like the US, other Western nations and Israel, Algerian “democracy” is pure fantasy. Hardline regime rule runs the country under Bouteflika, whoever succeeds him in power, and the country’s military.

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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.

At his Monday press conference, Mike Pompeo said “we’ve asked (Congress to appropriate) up to $500 million…to restore the economy of the Venezuelan nation (sic) (and) help Juan Guaido.”

He failed to explain the ongoing Trump regime coup plot, nor that it’s all about replacing Bolivarian social democracy with US-controlled tyranny – DLT and hardliners surrounding him wanting control over Venezuelan oil, gas, gold, and other valued resources.

It’s what the scourge of imperialism is all about, Guaido an illegitimate US designated puppet, usurper in waiting, traitor to Venezuela and its people, belonging in prison longterm for his highest of high political crimes.

What the Trump regime calls “democratic transition” in the Bolivarian Republic and other targeted countries is all about gaining imperial trophies – intolerant of democracy everywhere, notably at home.

Trump’s dystopian FY 2020 budget proposal calls for 23% less State Department funding, USAID’s budget reduced from $52 billion to $40 billion, and other funding for Latin America cut by 27% from $158 million to $116 million.

At the same time, he wants half a billion dollars for regime change in Venezuela – certain to want more later for the same thing in Cuba and Nicaragua.

Claiming funds sought for intervention in Venezuela is also for “respond(ing) to the crisis,” Trump’s budget proposal failed to explain what’s going on in the country was largely made in the USA – by unlawful economic, financial and sanctions war.

Pompeo announced the withdrawal of remaining US embassy and consular staff from Venezuela, ominously saying their presence “has become a constraint on US policy” – likely indicating planned escalation of violence, bloodshed and chaos.

US point man for regime change in Venezuela, convicted felon Elliot Abrams, expanded on Pompeo’s remarks, saying it’s “prudent to take these folks out” because their presence makes it “more difficult for the United States to take the actions that it needed to do to support the Venezuelan people (sic).”

US proxy war is most likely ahead, short of direct Pentagon intervention other than support for anti-government guarimberos – thugs enlisted by Trump regime hardliners to do their dirty work.

When asked about possible US military intervention in Venezuela, the response by Trump, Pompeo, Bolton, and Abrams is always the same, saying: All options are on the table, meaning they intend doing whatever it takes to achieve their imperial objectives.

Abrams said the Trump regime intends imposing “some very significant” new sanctions on Venezuela “in the coming days,” targeting financial institutions supporting the Bolivarian Republic.

Pressure is being exerted on China, Russia, Turkey, and other countries opposing the Trump regime’s coup plot with no success so far. Around 50 countries back the scheme, the rest of the world community and UN against it.

On March 12, a State Department travel advisory said the following:

“Do not travel to Venezuela” because of the risks involved. “US citizens residing or traveling in Venezuela should depart” the country. Consular services in Caracas are no longer being provided.

Was warning US citizens in Venezuela to leave ahead of planned escalated Trump regime violence to topple Maduro? Are Pompeo, Bolton, and Abrams intending to turn the country into a virtual war zone – with Pentagon and CIA help?

Bolton warned the Bolivarian Republic separately, saying

“(w)e will continue to intensify our efforts to end Maduro’s usurpation of Venezuela’s Presidency (sic) and will hold the military and security forces responsible for protecting the Venezuelan people.”

At the same time, Trump regime policies aim to inflict maximum pain and suffering on them, aiming to enlist popular support for the coup plot, a failed scheme every time tried before in other countries.

Bolton also said insurance companies and flag carriers were put “on notice” to cease facilitating Venezuelan oil shipments.

He, Pompeo and Abrams are trying to form an anti-Bolivarian coalition for regime change, Bolton saying:

“We are trying to rally support for the peaceful transition of power (sic) from Maduro to Juan Guaido, whom we recognize as president (sic),” adding:

“I’d like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime (sic). That’s what we are trying to do.”

Days earlier, he said

“we’re not afraid to use the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine,’ ” adding Venezuela “is a country in our (sic) hemisphere. The US wants “to have a completely democratic hemisphere (sic).”

Republicans and undemocratic Dems abhor the notion at home and abroad, tolerating it nowhere, wanting it eliminated it wherever it exists, notably in Venezuela – a longtime threat of a good example US hardliners want prevented from spreading to other countries.

A Final Comment

On Tuesday, Venezuelan Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez said

“electricity supply had been restored almost completely throughout the whole national territory.”

Whether it’s sustainable is uncertain. Further cyberattacks on the electrical grid may happen if targeting it to cause economic harm is part of the Trump regime’s plan.

On Tuesday, Maduro said he’ll ask the UN, Russia, China, Iran, and Cuba for help in protecting against further cyberattack-caused blackouts.

He appointed a “special presidential commission to investigate” what happened. He seeks help from “international specialists,” adding:

Power nationwide was largely restored. “We now need to reinforce it, to make it reliable and impregnable again.”

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The US is so enamored of its role as sole world superpower that it thinks nothing of mistreating allies, never believing they might tire of the abuse and run away – into the arms of China, or – perish the thought – Russia.

The Trump administration has never met a failed policy it wouldn’t embrace, from attempting to ignite a color revolution in Iran (after stamping out actual democracy there half a century ago), to throwing good money after bad in the two-decade-long quagmire of Afghanistan. With a stranglehold on the world’s reserve currency, even the most expensive mistakes – and at $22 trillion in debt, a lot have been made – have largely theoretical consequences, and just as Wall Street is able to outsource risk to Main Street, the US can sleep well at night knowing the fallout of its bad decisions is unfolding largely outside its borders.

Bristling with nuclear enthusiasm after throwing aside the INF with a Strangelovian flourish, promising to take its bloated and over-equipped military to space “the better to menace you with,” brutalizing even its own citizens both physically and psychologically with constant surveillance, and wielding punitive sanctions against putative allies for daring to defy its petty economic vendettas, the US is the geopolitical equivalent of an abusive romantic partner. And its allies are finally waking up to the realization that perhaps it’s time to break things off.

The biggest indignity yet was the ludicrous demand that NATO allies pay to host the American troops permanently garrisoned there – to essentially bankroll their own occupations. Last week, it was reported the US would begin asking some of its most hospitable allies – those nations home to hundreds of thousands of soldiers – to foot the bill for the cost of keeping them “safe.” While the cost breakdown hasn’t been decided yet, it may include the actual salaries of the soldiers stationed there – which would make the “quartering” policy that helped set off the American Revolution look positively civilized in comparison. Over two-thirds of the residents of Okinawa, where the US wants to relocate a military base, voted against the plan in a referendum last month. Construction is going ahead anyway. With allies like these, who needs enemies?

Adding insult to this financial injury, those countries whose policies “align closely” with the US would get an unspecified “discount” on their occupation bill – while those countries who didn’t play ball would, presumably, face the prospect of hundreds of thousands of disgruntled, well-armed American troops on their soil. “Gee, that’s a nice country you got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.” The US has been accused of acting like a mafia state before, but prior to Trump, its leaders seldom embraced the designation with such zest. One has to respect his honesty, at least – as Ilhan Omar said (and then quickly tried to un-say), Barack Obama’s policies were almost indistinguishable, except they were delivered by a pretty face, with a smile capable of speaking in complete sentences.

And where would an abusive relationship be without gaslighting? The US insists, to all who will listen, that its puppet Juan Guaido is recognized the world over as the legitimate ruler of Venezuela, even though no more than 54 countries have fallen in line behind his self-appointed leadership. Even the mainstream US media – hardly a pack of truth-tellers – has come under attack by Sen. Marco Rubio, who accused CNN of Russian collusion for referring to Guaido as the “self-proclaimed” president of Venezuela. Not to be outdone, Abrams has threatened second-order sanctions against those nations that refuse to declare 2 + 2 = 5 and embrace the unelected frontman for another good old-fashioned South American resource-grab. Never mind international law – second-order sanctions are not, in fact, a thing – but almost three-quarters of the UN still backs Nicolas Maduro, the elected President of Venezuela.

*

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Helen Buyniski is a journalist and photographer based in New York City. Her work has appeared on RT, Progressive Radio Network, and Veterans Today. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

“Democracy Has Just Been A Word…Never Been An Act!” -Wall Graffiti / 2016 Thailand Military Coup.    

5:05 AM. February 4, 2012. It’s almost pitch dark. No one has slept this night. The only morning illumination comes from scores of dimly glowing dots of blues, greens, yellows, reds or orange inside a patchwork of hundreds of still standing tents. Most sit empty for the first time in months; a lamp left on during their vacancy. Nearby, the tall, jet-black and ornate sidewalk lamp poles lining the concrete walkways of McPherson Park here in Washington D.C. provide a few additional stage lights, their bright-white cones casting a single spotlight on their foreground.

Under these spotlights, peering nervously across this scene into the depths of the grey-on-black streaks of the approaching morning, many small groups of protesters stand huddled together, as if for warmth, against the brisk, sub-zero February morning as the first warning flashes of dank sunrise announce this day. The night’s silence is broken as the voices from these groups slowly rise. There is anxiety in the sound. Nervousness. And…

Fear. Fear of how bad this day would turn out to be. Yes, the tents were all still there, for now. The stalwarts had stayed out of principle. Their hearts and minds would not be swayed. This morning, they huddled, shoulder to shoulder in their groups, hot tea, coffee or a freshly light cig cupped in hand; finding support within their waning numbers. All knew as they glanced about the fringes of the park, second-by-second… today was going to be a very bad day.

The cops are coming.

*

In the next few hours, made-up of minutes that wore on in slow-motion horror, it would all be over. Finished. All that once was and could have been of the last outbreak of effective democratic American activism would be stripped bare; stomped into submission, its rattling bones, like the hundreds of nearby multi-coloured tents, cast into a huge trash can of US history thus offended. By the end of this day, American activism would be dead. Its leadership dead as our collective cause. The one we, who still stood our ground this morning, shivering, used as a nationwide rallying cry to everyone who could still hear and listen. For months we had shouted, often screamed that name, that dream, that goal, that one call to action. That threat. The one we all so defiantly called, “Occupy.”

Yeah, American activism would be dead this day. Dead as the American dream.

The one we were all trying to save.

The Last Victory for American Activism

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.” ―Ulrike Meinhof

This February morning, all had reason for fear. We all knew that we would not win on this day. The First Rule of Democracy – the numbers, the ratio-cops-to-activists– did not bode well for a victory in our nation’s capital this morning.  But, the First Rule had beaten them back, beaten them badly, once before. We knew that the cops remembered, as some of us did now, that turbulent morning aeons ago. Two months before.

Some of us huddled here shoulder-to-shoulder had first been in Los Angeles at America’s biggest Occupy camp at City Hall. Oh, the cops came to kick us out on that morning, too, and for the exact same reasons. But it took ‘em two tries to do it!

The memory of that great day: that incredible night until morning when we, those of us who finally stood up for ourselves, and for others, against what we knew was festering all around us. That one morning when… we finally won. There, under the lampposts, those of us who were there that day in L.A. told the fable of that glory day to those who had only heard about that Sunday. That day too long ago when we, together, kicked those cop’s fucking asses.

Without firing a shot or throwing a punch we, the Occupiers in LA, had showcased what Occupy actually stood for to our nation. A reminder of the First Rule of Democracy. That day, we used our collective middle fingers to give the bastards a whipping they would not forget.

Now, we shivered and prepared for what we all knew would be our own ass-kicking to come.

“They’ll have to drag me out…” was said again-and-again to draw courage on that morning, too. That story of LA brought needed smiles to nervous faces as it was told. All the while, all eyes darted about in the day’s slow illumination, watching. Listening.

*

It was the morning of that great day in November 2011. Driving south towards San Diego city, like so many other southern Californians, the news of the day’s eviction of the Los Angeles Occupy camp- the biggest in the nation- was broadcast over the car radio. Trouble was brewing and the cops were massing on the fringes of city Hall grounds to begin the threatened eviction.

Unless…?

Yes, on that Sunday Nov. 29,we, the people: the disaffected, the poor, the homeless and those of us who honoured our conscience and still believed in the possibility of changing our world for the better would, as one, look right through the grey-tinted face shields and into the eyes of 1000 black jacketed, riot-gear-clad cops. Not one of us backing up… one… single… inch.

The eviction notice of Occupy LA spread like a herald’s call to action. They came.

It was time.

Southern California flooded into Los Angeles City Hall. By noon over three thousand. By 4 PM four thousand. By the time the biggest General Assembly (GA) ever was convened on the city hall steps, the crowd swamped the City Hall grounds from centre stage of W. 1st Street to the side streets of N. Main and N. Spring., nearing 6000 strong. I was standing at the top of the massive stone entryway steps looking down at the milling crowd as the twilight of this night approached, taking pictures by the score and smiling so hard the edges of my mouth cramped.

This was a real protest.

Finally.

The energy was electric, infectious. The crowd was getting ever louder as calls for “Mic Check” were ignored, until calm was finally restored and the first speaker and the laborious Occupy democratic process was introduced to the crowd. “Shut the fuck up!” could be heard from many well-intentioned Occupiers demanding a return to civility and decorum- and silence- as others shared stern looks with the few remaining offenders until the message of respect was universally received. Quiet.

“The cops ain’t gonna be able to control this mob, tonight,” I heard a voice remark just off my right shoulder. This was a prescient comment indeed. It came from a City Hall cop standing right next to me. “Those cops move… it’s going to be a full-blown riot.”

Indeed.

He was referring to the hundreds of cops-over a thousand – with more arriving by the hour– all in full black riot gear, who lined all four streets all the way back to W. Temple. Standing almost shoulder to shoulder they surrounded the entire City Hall grounds and every side street and alleyway. Unlike the affable cop near me, these cops were here to evict everyone, by force. From the vicious, penetrating stares they provided to anyone within eyeshot, they were absolutely salivating at the chance to get started.

But there was just one problem. Actually six thousand problems… and growing. Those damn Occupiers, many who stood deliberately and directly in front of many a cop, just inches away, staring back. They were growing in number. And getting louder. Much louder. All waited for the moment when all those cops took their first step forwards. And, then…

No one was here to back down tonight.

It was time.

It had only been two months before that LA city council members were writing proclamations in favour of Occupy and singing its praises as a new form of non-violent, democratic protest. They had invited Occupy to stay on the city hall grounds. The Occupiers were welcome to come and stay…and protest, or so they said in glowing oratory. And the LA camp grew, becoming the biggest in America with over 1000 tents and 1500 Occupiers daily. Zuccotti in N.Y.C and McPherson and Freedom Plaza in DC were mere postage stamps by comparison.

Occupy within weeks became so much more than merely an opposition movement. Occupy became an example. By providing social services long since gutted from local society, the example Occupy showcased in many ways was the only example of society’s remaining obligation to the unfortunate. LA streets are a very unsafe place to sleep and the City deliberately provides little assistance in the failed hope that the homeless will finally move on. Somewhere. However, all were at least safe and could eat at the Camp. Despite the drug abuse, assorted low-lifes and nefarious side of the Occupy camps, violence was virtually unheard of. Non-violence, tolerance and diversity were embraced and preached as an integral part of Occupy. A communal spirit pervaded the camps and this included an educational component, as small symposiums, lectures and talks on assorted democratic principles were held throughout each day for any who chose to sit in and learn.

These were exciting days.

Sunday in the Park With Occupy

“Education is the Most Powerful Weapon One Can Use to Change the World” – Nelson Mandela

To understand the effectiveness and leadership that the Occupy camps so quickly provided nationally, all one needs to have done was stop into the camps, as so many did, on any Sunday morning.

Occupy camps had sprung up in more than a hundred cities and towns, big and small, across America. Zuccotti Park, New York City, got most of the press- and the money- during those crazy days when it seemed that activism had finally returned to leading the conscience of the nation. Every state Capital city had an Occupy Camp and local politicians sang the praises of the new populist form of inclusive democracy and non-violent opposition.

Yes, like LA, these camps were an amalgam of passionate activists, the homeless, drug abusers, and the temporarily interested. However, to a suddenly threatened Government not used to effective opposition, the Occupy camps were a much bigger problem than the Occupiers themselves realized. For these camps from sea to shining sea were, behind the scenes, just weeks away from having a new separate national Occupy political platform.

From the massive Los Angeles camp of well over one thousand to McPherson Park in D.C. down to the small camps of Austin, TX and San Luis Obispo, Calif, Sunday was the most special day of every week. The camps on these days were a true sign that the opposition Occupy had created was working. And, support was growing.

Beginning in the mornings each Sunday and continuing often until past dark, people came from everywhere. They came to the camps. Many said, they “had to.” Their obligation.

It was time.

Yes, they showed up at the camps. Every type of American. Race? Sex?  Religion? Didn’t matter. They came with food to share. Freshly baked cakes, cookies, little tarts. Hot soup. Cigarettes or a bit of weed to share. They came with clothes and donations. There were always extra coats and jackets available to newly arriving Occupiers.

Each and every visitor came in spirit. Looking across the camps, conversations in groups took place among the tents or on the sidewalks next to the monuments, lampposts, and street corners, the participants locked together in impassioned, but collegial discourse while others listened carefully. Many who were interviewed spoke of their personal need to be involved in any manner, even for one day, but also of their need for accurate information due to their distrust of the media. It was satisfying to see so many people coming together. The camp took on a conspiratorial, hushed, tone. This reporter interviewed many people at McPherson who went to work daily but stayed in their own heat-less tent- in February- every night.

Then there was the Occupy platform. Across the breadth of the nation’s camps, all were trying via the slow laborious machinations of Occupy democracy and inclusion of all, to effect a national platform that would be presented to all Occupiers for a national vote. And then?  A new political party. This, by the very nature of Occupy’s all-inclusive democratic proceedings, was a daunting task indeed. But one embraced with hope. Not the fake political kind. Real Hope.

From the vantage point of those venturing to the Camps, this was American society renewed. Discussion, disagreement, tolerance, inclusion, love and a spirit of cooperation for the good of all. Everyone.  All welcome. These societal tenets had been virtually destroyed by an ongoing capitalist set of self-serving US governments over the past forty years. There was now an optimism that pervaded the many impassioned conversations and it shined on the faces of those who roamed the camps on these Sundays.

We were starting to believe.

However, an Obama administration predisposed to the continued gutting of what little was left of American social responsibility, had a decidedly different view of Occupy. To the “primal forces of nature” thus challenged, this was not democracy renewed. This was not non-violent protest. No, in a nation of purchased leaders Occupy was to them a different example of leadership.

It was a threat.

*

With LA City having almost no food program for the homeless, it was the Camp that filled this fundamental role as well.  This November night, as the emotions of this night, rose and fell, I spent several hours in the company of Daniel T. as we watched for the cops to begin this night’s attack from our vantage point high up on the top of the City Hall steps. Dan, a thirty-year-old chef at a local restaurant proudly told me how he had organized the massive tent kitchen that lined the sidewalk of W.1^St. street and how he and forty plus volunteers were preparing and cooking a free breakfast and dinner for 1500 or more. Everyday. Anyone who was hungry was welcome.

This evening’s dinner had been cancelled.

Each morning he and his old yellow Toyota pick-up would be down at the LA Wholesale Produce markets of Central and Olympic Streets in downtown. There he spoke with dozens of wholesale vendors asking for bruised or slightly blemished produce. The response was tremendous, he said, and each morning he returned laden to gunwales with the day’s ingredients. Augmented by other food donations and a tiny donated budget, he and the other cooks turned this into a basic, but the nutritious meal, so that no one had to go hungry. Why? “Fuck man…it’s the right thing to do, right? That’s why I’m here.”

But as the winter closed in, the media did its job and echoed the many politicians who had already turned tail on Occupy. Yes, there were drugs. The camps were noisy and sleep was not always easy. Garbage collected despite volunteer details performing clean-up. The haphazard set-up of the hundreds of tents was a tattered assortment at best, but never once did I see a rat. Well, except for the ones who appeared on the City Hall steps asking us to now take our game of democracy and go home.

Then the eviction notices came out.

Typically, the cops arrived in the wee hours of Friday morning, posting the single page eviction notices on tents, trees, trash cans and street signs as they stole quietly through the Camp in groups of three. Then the alarm of the day went off. That morning everyone knew what they did not, all these weeks, want to admit would ever come: It was on!

The stated eviction deadline was Sunday at 5 PM. Everyone out. No exceptions. Out or be arrested.

Well… maybe.

That Powerful Sweet Smell in the Morning. Smells like… Victory!

“There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!”― Abbie Hoffman

The media which had also turned so quickly on Occupy was also, this day in LA, spoiling for some high news ratings and looking forward to some good old fashioned police brutality. Coverage of the pending eviction was all over the news and scores of reporters roamed the LA camp, acting cool, but didn’t give a shit about the truth of this national story. Well, that was their job. Their news copters hovered overhead until the cops cleared the skies in preparation.

But, all their coverage instead brought out the city and the surrounding counties. By Saturday, hundreds more had come down with their tents and donations. But, on Sunday when 1500 Occupiers seemed about to get very seriously worked by the ever-mounting police militia, for some of conscience and pent up outrage, this all was too much for one to stand by and merely watch-on in sympathy from afar.

That day and that longest of nights I talked with dozens who had driven to be at the camp that day for one simple reason: to finally say, “No!”  Like this reporter, they had made the first move, decided to do something, after far too long.

It was time.

*

That Sunday night seemed to last forever on a razor’s edge. One wrong move by a protester and the Cops would have devolved into an orgy of mace, batons and tasers. Guns? One attack by any one of the cops would have thrown all that pent-up and frenzied kinetic energy, outrage, and desperation of the 6000 Occupiers raining down on these political henchmen en mass.

As it approached 4 AM of Monday, the tete-a-tete remained nose to nose. Bullhorns from the cops attempted continually to intimidate the protesters into leaving, while bullhorns from the Occupiers and the banshee screams from the protesters answered their challenge. The morning was coming.

From atop the City Hall steps we all agreed that the cops were not going to let this night continue for long. The protesters still struggled out loud with their personal moral dilemma: whether to get out of camp beforehand, or continuing to stand in unison, using one historically successful democratic tactic: The First Rule of Democracy.

By now, the crowd undulated like some kind of massive wounded animal writhing in preparation for one last gasp of life before death. As cop cars screamed down the streets scores of bicycle riding protesters suddenly whirled towards them circling the grounds on the perimeter streets in renewed defiance, pedaling furiously. Small groups, getting bigger as they attracted participants, prepared for their own pending defensive actions. Couples boldly walked the perimeter sidewalks, arm in arm, showing the cops that they were scared of them no more.

Bullhorns bellowed from the phalanxes of cops. The perimeter boundaries on all four streets became solid; twenty deep with protesters on all sides as the defences of personal liberty squared off inches from the masked all-black pigs. The knife edge was literally drawn: The street gutter of oppression right before the grass-fringed sidewalk of resistance.

Now, one-by-one, Occupiers old and new linked hands, just feet from the police front lines in a show of solidarity- an unbroken chain- that surrounded the entire grounds.  More than a half-mile in circumference. Organizers called again and again for calm as the cops bellowed for them to leave… or else! On the four sidewalks, the front lines of the cops and the protesters stood inches apart, face to face, nose to nose. The cops played with their nightsticks or fingered their cans of mace threateningly. The protesters returned the threat with the one weapon so hated by every cop in attendance… the middle finger of a self-confident smile. Oh, they all wanted to beat all of us to a pulp and were begging to see the festivities begin in earnest. Some had been rooted to the same spot for hours, wordless, unsmiling… vicious.

Suddenly, 5:35 A.M.  A historic roar. Thousands, yes thousands, of spontaneous cheers erupting in unison across the grounds of City Hall. A cacophony echoing off the surrounding concrete buildings. The cheers of the thousands of us who had- that very moment- seen with our own eyes the unimaginable, what we had all thought was impossible that night. What we had all silently prayed for. These cops, after more than eighteen hours of intimidation and a monstrous show of force… they now turned on their heels in unison… they went backwards.

They went home!

Victory! Our victory! A national victory. For those, we were fighting for and the ideas we all shared. It was a very great morning. It was thrilling. It was unbelievable… to be able to “believe” in something once again. After so, so long.

On this crystal blue southern California morning, I walked through the crisp slowly warming air swinging in circles of joy around lamp posts and parking meters one-by-one on the long trip back to my car. The cops were still everywhere; on every side street and alleyway, all standing in clusters near line after line of cop cars of all shapes and sizes. They grimaced, staring at me as I paraded my reverie before their nasty faces. I considered my own middle finger as a final message before disappearing from their sight, but then instead laughed out loud, guffaws of satisfaction and happiness. For I realized that today, this day, we had all already given them- every single cop-  the best middle finger possible.

But, in the eternal optimism of that amazing morning, none of us could know that this victory would be the last- ever- for non-violent American activism.

Yeah, the LA cops came back on the Tuesday and stomped us real good. But they still proved the First Rule of Democracy. That day, the inverted ratio of cops to protesters was 4:1. The wrong way, this time.

They breezed through the camp on Tuesday in what could only be described as a full blown attack. Everyone got kettled or beaten, forced into huge groups, except for the wounded, and put on buses that then left for Dodger Stadium parking lot to sit, hour after hour in the heat of the day. No bathroom breaks, no news, just sitting there boiling in the sun.

All the while, the cops surrounded the dozens of buses, standing or leaning on their black-and-whites, glowering. And smiling.

The demise of the LA Occupy camp and the legend of that Sunday were the best advertising Occupy could have had. People across America were now following this leadership. Opposition was rising. City by city, it had found a place to fester and grow stronger. It had found fertile ground and its roots were growing far too quickly. The remaining camps nationwide continued to grow. Activism flourished.

It was time.

The Cold Dead Joke of the Late Night Comedian

“Politics is the only art whose artists regularly disown their masterpieces.” ― Raheel Farooq

Before Occupy became a household name splashed across the daily news cycle, Americans, particularly those whose cynicism had not lost a sense of humour, realized some other undeniable, important and yet often ignored rules about their national condition. One: Their government- from POTUS to Congress- is utterly controlled by capitalist corporations and a fear mongering military that holds complete sway of all their politicians. Two: The media cannot be trusted. Be it Newspaper, Radio, Television or Cable, the media, almost without exception serves the interest of the established regime.

Hence, a very new political affectation arose from a place never before considered as part of the News Media: the snarky, quick-witted late-night comedian as a pundit of popular opinion and a new voice of a disenfranchised nation. What news exec. would have thought that the tiny, struggling cable channel, Comedy Central, would suddenly take a prominent place within mainstream news media and steal ratings and respect from these increasingly propagandized news corporations?

Enter Jon Stewart and protege Stephen Colbert.

Stewart had spent years as host of “The Daily Show.” His acerbic wit and bold, direct – yet cuttingly humorous- interview style slowly manifested into his daily political commentary. From the opening monologue through his cutting duplicitous interview questions, he challenged his many guests, exposing them as being mere pawns in the system he regularly mocked to the growing glee of his attentive viewers. As the show grew in popularity Stewart’s rendition of the daily news and current events became a more trusted voice in the wind of media lies and propaganda. Not surprisingly, The Daily Show became one of the top-rated shows on cable TV with millions tuning in each evening. It became more than obvious that Stewart knew very well the power he had gained in honestly exposing the lies of the status quo and his nightly demeanour brimmed with confidence. But his was something more than that… something that became more and more apparent as the Daily Show sharpened its collective sword of political humour. Stewart’s persona was no longer mere comedy. It was, now, leadership.

Many forget that once Walter Cronkite, the career old-school journalist and decades-long anchor of the CBS evening news, was considered the most trusted man in America. In a by-gone era when news was based substantially on facts, on-scene reporting, two-sided analysis and competition among the big three networks, CBS, ABC and NBC, Cronkite exemplified the highest standard of news. Unlike, the teleprompter reading, make-up slathered, talking heads currently featured across all news media, in a long-gone world full of take-no-prisoners, gumshoe journalism, Cronkite had risen the top, and he had earned it the hard way. More important than Cronkite’s eventual legacy as an icon of American news, when he retired on air at the end of his final “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite,” the nation across the breadth of American media knew that “news” had lost more… it had lost a leader. Never to be replaced.

As trustworthy American journalism began its slow but steady transformation into one national American Völkischer Beobachter, the networks were replaced in prominence by cable news and then cable news dutifully descended into what it has become today: Entertainment propaganda for dullards designed to maintain wholesale ignorance and the authoritarian status quo control of same. Two decades on from the Cronkite era, what little intelligence that still remained in America was hungry for news that confirmed their growing suspicion that… we’re all fucked.

This left the news door open for Stewart and his political variety show to become a similarly trusted voice. Like Cronkite, a large portion of the nation gravitated to his words and political commentary because he, too, was offering the truth. Hell, it had to be the truth, ’cause no one else was saying it!

His eventual sidekick, Stephen Colbert, a man of incredibly gifted wit and a talent for spontaneous, unscripted, ad-lib humour worked his occasional hilarious five-minute political parodies into being a regular feature on Stewart’s show. Colbert was a different sort than Stewart and entered the show at a time when The Daily Show had already begun to morph into a political force and leadership that commanded ever-increasing viewership because of it. So the show was ready for Colbert and his brand of hilarious, deep cutting, if not hurtful, political brand of humour. Colbert’s style augmented Stewart’s shtick perfectly. Not surprisingly, Colbert’s very rare comedic talents earned him a show of his own, “The Colbert Report” which immediately followed The Daily Show. Stewart’s show became the set-up routine handed off to Colbert every evening.

Colbert showed real brass and was even more aggressive in destroying his interviewees. Arrogant political leaders using their standard talking points were excoriated by Colbert because he knew his subject well and his adversary better. His humour not only exposed them, it mocked them and what they had come to his show and try to stand for. Colbert took obvious delight as he left most of them quivering for mercy as the audience roared in guffaws of ridicule, and approval, of these political leaders, being thus stripped bare naked by their new hero.

Colbert was so politically effective, and funny, that his public destruction of so many politicians forced House Speaker John Boehner to advise, in writing, that Republicans avoid Colbert’s invitations to be on the show. His daily mockery of the American condition, like Stewart’s, was not limited to individual political hypocrisy or either political party. His ongoing factual examination of the results of the incredibly divisive Citizen’s United US Supreme Court decision- that made corporations into people in order to justify unlimited campaign financing- was some of the only correct commentary available from any media source. Like Stewart, Colbert had gone from comedian to political pundit and next to leader. He showed this as he regularly brought to his show people of impeccable credentials in their fields and offered them to his viewers as a counterpoint to the established MSM narrative. Many of the issues he tackled continued to be updated and expanded on week after week as his education and viewership on important current events continued to increase.

Both shows became so popular that there was a six-month waiting list for audience tickets. When visiting New York City in 2010, a line of young people hoping for a remaindered ticket stretched down the avenue for a hundred yards or more. Colbert and Stewart had become political rock stars. Acknowledgements, praise and awards came in as both hosts showcased their success, which they gladly acknowledged was due to their growing audience’s allegiance to them and their quest for alternative news. People and organizations paid tribute to them, their shows and what they had accomplished as the new mirror against growing American political oppression. And that popularity continued to grow as did the leadership that their shows offered to a waking portion of an outraged nation, a new voice of opposition deliberately inspired.

Then… they went too far.

*

It was early 2010. Building on the success of both shows, Stewart and Colbert began using their daily evening platforms to advertise a new milestone in their comedic leadership. Before Occupy exemplified the First Rule of Democracy, both understood that their nation needed a single gathering point for all those who wanted to make their own voices heard in Washington and across the nation. Hence, they booked the entire Washington Mall, the scene of great moments in US history. Its stated purpose was to provide a venue for attendees to be heard above what Stewart described as the more vocal and extreme 15–20% of Americans who “control the conversation” of American politics.  This would be a gathering of like minds and a symbol of protest to those dark minions housed in their fortifications close by. They called their call to action, “The Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear!”

The event was largely ignored by MSM and the networks as just another crackpot stunt, but in a sign of the popularity of both the shows, word spread and people came from everywhere. Interviewed during the month-long ramp-up to the event that would be broadcast live for three uninterrupted hours on Comedy Central on Oct 30, 2010, Stewart and Colbert said that they were hoping for, perhaps, 100,000 to attend.

So when both took to the huge elevated banner draped stage on that crisp and clear DC morning, the looks on their faces, as they started from side to side along the length of the huge mall, the smiles they wore said more than they could have imagined. There were not 100,000 in front of the stage; estimates actually approached 250,000. They had, like their government, completely underestimated the numbers and the outrage of the nation, one that had got off their couches that day, got in their cars and finally made a personal effort to make one personal statement. To finally say, “No!”

It was time.

All stood, laughed and cheered as both hosts and their guests that ranged from Ozzie Osborne to the recently arrested terrorist ex-musician Cat Stevens graced the stage and mocked, again and again, the lies, the distortions, the control and the manufactured fear created by politicians and their minions in their government and their media. Stewart spontaneously tried to quantify the surprising and overwhelming success of the protest by starting a human wave from across the stage front and sending it backwards through the crowd. The wave took so long to reach the back that Stewart began a second, then third wave. So, it became very obvious to Stewart, Colbert and a nation watching on a once very minor cable channel- and to the status quo- America was really pissed!

As these two leaders bid goodbye to these maddening throngs of rejuvenated Americans on that DC afternoon, admonishing them with more humour, to come together, work together and all get along together in this day’s final humorous salvo designed to re-propagate their goals for this day, the nation had suddenly taken an incredible step towards restoring Sanity and eliminating Fear. This day, Stewart and Colbert had taken what they had so slowly and methodically built for years and established their shows and themselves as true and effective leaders of a new opposition. They were ready for truly big results to come. They were doing what no others had managed to do in decades: The times… they were a-changing’!

Or that’s how it seemed on that glorious day, nearly a decade ago. Oh, yes! It seemed like a victory.

But…

In the nearby dark basement halls inhabited by the black-hearted practitioners of unlimited greed and American authoritarian capitalist control, this day’s successful event was not the comedy event of the decade. It was a horror show.

A year later, when the advent of Occupy philosophically echoed what Stewart and Colbert had helped start, giving a place for the opposition to ferment, both hosts paid homage to those Occupiers and Occupy camps that had now joined them on front lines of opposition. Daily, viewers tuned in to see them showcase this new focus of daily opposition. The ratings of both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, for the same reasons that had made the DC event on the Mall exceed all expectations, were still growing; as was their influence. The Occupiers, like Stewart and Colbert, were the new leaders of the opposition and everyone of like mind and desperation was welcome to join.

Sincere leaders, real leaders- those that lead on behalf and inclusion of others without demand for personal gain -are the greatest rarity in our modern world. These leaders, in the minds of established hypocrisy, avarice and greed, are the greatest threat. The vital ingredient to the First Rule. Something had to be done.

When it did, retribution happened oh, so quickly.

The Day American Activism Died

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being, first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.” ― Malcolm X

6:00 AM. February 4, 2012.  McPherson Park. “They’re here!” came the sudden shout of warning, snapping everyone at McPherson and camps across the nation, to attention. It was true. They were here. Cops. Hundreds.

They were coming our way.

On the western edge of McPherson Park, Khaki uniformed DC Park Service police combined with DC metro police. Near them, Yellow long sleeved Haz-Mat suited and gloved sanitation workers stood with huge trash bins near bigger trash trucks ready to raze this park, its tents and all the ideals that this park had stood for during the past four months, directly into the dust bin for US history. Vanquished.

Again, their bullhorns of oppression blared warnings to us to leave or be arrested. Most had left, many had stayed. In an interesting loophole of DC metro law, tents were actually OK. Sleeping in them was not. Thus, anyone having a tent and a sleeping bag had their tent summarily chucked into the rubbish bin. Anyone resisting was arrested. Without the numbers needed for effective opposition- like in LA- these hit men, the cops and the workers, roamed free, tossing the last vestiges of our hopes into bins, smashing them to pieces.

Under an ageing, four-sided, floppy, olive drab military tent, Mike,the camp librarian had spent months culling a very substantial collection of donated books that numbered in the thousands into a correctly categorized library on make-shift wooden shelves for all to use freely. His was a library in a tent and Mike slept elsewhere. This fact and the many remaining Occupiers made this clear. So, as the Camp became almost barren, the final spectacle of Mike and his library still stood as one last middle figure to the cops. There he stood as we yelled encouragement and the cops waited for him to finally fall asleep… to be arrested, all his books and their stores of knowledge to be burned at the stake of America’s capitalist pyre.

The final nightmare had begun.

Across the nation, on this day and the next, every remaining camp of any size or influence was crashed by the cops. Denver went down during a driving snowstorm. Philly got beat up pretty bad we were told. Zuccotti had already gone down, but their reappearance on the concrete rotunda was anticipated and put down brutally by New York’s finest. Small camps like San Luis Obispo, Calif and Austin, Texas were left alone to wither and die without support from the nation or their brothers in state capital Occupy camps.

By the end of the day, that terrible daylight years ago, we had all been defeated. Our leaders had been taken and our collective national Occupy political platform- so tantalizingly close to fruition- was left to twist in the wind for all to laugh at and forget.

Did we forget?

Yes, there was talk of how to regroup, to begin anew, but without the Camps that provided the gathering place for this opposition to grow and congregate the national Occupy camps were doomed to a Hooverville-like fate at the hands of a government once again threatened by non-violent public protest. Yeah, it was over quickly. Too quickly for a movement so close to success. All that was left of the government stopping we insurgents was mopping up what little remained of any potential future  leadership.

This day, come nightfall, American activism was stone dead.

Colbert went from political leader to political sell-out in no time, prostituting his skills and success in order to become the exact same political shill he had rallied against and encouraged his viewers to fight against. The last two years of the Colbert Report had almost none of the bite as before and interviewees were generally a milquetoast assortment. His reward for whoring out his legacy was the Late Show. Nowadays, four nights a week, Colbert spews scripted status quo pablum to the ignorant masses. Like the many other late night pundits who together could not ad lib a fart at a baked bean contest, he is paid lavishly – in Rachelle Maddow style- to help keep them in line.

Stewart had the sincerity to bow out before he was forced to sell-out. He is today rarely heard from, his legacy has faded into oblivion. He too, like Colbert, became the personification of one last, very sad, tasteless, and disgusting political joke: Not the one about what once was…the one about what might have been!

By 3 p.m., the southern half of McPherson Square had been mostly cleared out, with bulldozers clearing off the top layer of soil, which was removed by dump trucks.

And so it goes.

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Author’s Note: This concludes Part One of: “The Day American Activism Died – The First Rule of Democracy. Please see this News Site for Part Two: “Why Julian Assange Sits in Stir!”

Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 170 in-depth articles over the past eight years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to his many multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan’s Turkey and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene ((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk

All images in this article are from the author

An historical exhibit designed to examine various aspects of the life and people of the Monticello plantation in Virginia during the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries, which was owned by Thomas Jefferson, has prompted protests in Detroit.

Members of the Black Legacy Coalition (BLC) have held press conferences and made public statements objecting to the hosting of “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” by the Dr. Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History located in the Midtown district of the city.

On March 12, approximately 100 people picketed the Wright Museum demanding that the Jefferson exhibit be reconsidered. Participants carried a banner challenging the official narrative and characterization of Jefferson.

Others held placards denouncing enslavement and the treatment of Sally Hemings, a woman of African descent owned by Jefferson who bore several children by the plantation owner.

The BLC plans to protest every day at 11:00am until the exhibit opens. This midday manifestation gained press coverage from several media outlets.

The exhibit is scheduled to begin on March 15 amid continuing efforts by the BLC to have the display cancelled. Members of the BLC and others feel that the character of the exhibit attempts to cover up the horrors of African enslavement including the systematic sexual exploitation of African women.

In a press release issued on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day (Jan. 21) in Detroit held at the St. Matthew’s & St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church on Woodward Avenue, the BLC noted that:

“The Coalition stands on the immortal, sacred legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Charles H. Wright to preserve and protect the CHW  Museum against any effort to ‘romanticize’ the terrorism forced upon those forcibly enslaved, like Sally Hemings, or  the duplicitous depiction of a ‘patriarchal narrative’ to shroud the brutality and inhumanity of enslavers like Thomas Jefferson, who  ‘owned’  600 Africans while penning that ‘all men are created equal.’”

This exhibit began in 2012 at the Smithsonian American Museum of History in Washington, D.C. Over the last seven years it has been hosted by several cities including St. Louis, Philadelphia and Dallas.

Jefferson: Co-Author of the Declaration of Independence and early U.S. Politician

This issue is being raised during the 400^th anniversary of the enslavement of Africans beginning in the former British colony of Virginia in August 1619, which later became the U.S. Jefferson was a co-author of the Declaration of Independence and served as Governor of Virginia in the Continental Congress, secretary of state, secretary of war, minister of state to France and vice-president prior to becoming the third president of the U.S.

According to language in the “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty” promotional materials:

“As many as 70 members of the Hemings family lived in slavery at Monticello over five generations. Elizabeth Hemings  (1735–1807) and her children arrived at Monticello around 1774 as part of Jefferson’s inheritance from his father-in-law, John Wayles, who was likely the father of six of the children.” (See this)

The same document continues by pointing out:

“Members of the family eventually occupied the most important positions in Monticello’s labor force. They helped build the Monticello house, ran the household, made furniture, cooked Jefferson’s meals, cared for his children and grandchildren, attended to him in his final moments, and dug his grave. Elizabeth’s daughter Sally Hemings was likely the mother of four of his children. The nine people Jefferson freed in his lifetime and will were all members of the Hemings family.”

Although the brochure acknowledges the indispensable nature of slave labor in the operation of the plantation, it fails to categorically condemn the triangular trade as an economic system which eventually led to the development of industrial capitalism in both Western Europe and North America. By framing slavery as essentially a moral question, the exhibit neglects the principal role of the exploitation of African people in the growth and expansion of the U.S. into the leading imperialist power by the mid-20^th century. (See this)

Many accounts of Jefferson’s life extol his mastery of law, architecture, mathematics, agriculture and other professional fields. He signed the documents outlawing the importation of enslaved Africans into the U.S. in 1807, although the system continued long after his death and only ended with the Civil War fought during 1861-1865. As early as 1788 he was said to have banned the importation of enslaved Africans into the state of Virginia.

Detroit demonstration against Jefferson slavery exhibit on March 12, 2019

Nonetheless, his views on African people state clearly that he felt they were inherently inferior to whites in both beauty and intelligence. He did not believe that Africans could be integrated into U.S. society and supported the gradual training and freeing of Africans where they could possibly be sent to live in Santo Domingo. Jefferson believed that the ending of slavery would cause unrest in the U.S.

In one of Jefferson’s most widely read books, “Notes on the State of Virginia”, published in 1785, the leading politician and wealthy slave owner expressed the general fears among the ruling class that the potential for war between the races was highly probable. Therefore, he advocated the colonization of Africans on the continent or in other regions of the world.

One passage in “Notes on the State of Virginia” emphasizes:

“It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expense of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.” (See this)

By 1816, there was the formation of the American Colonization Society (ACS) which resettled thousands of willing Africans who felt there was no hope for an independent and free existence in the U.S., in the West African region which became known as Liberia. The country was declared independent in 1847. However, up until the modern era, Liberia has remained under the economic and political dominance of Washington.

Despite the purported prohibition on the Atlantic trade in African people after the first decade of the 19^th century, slavery expanded exponentially utilizing both “illegal” importations and domestic breeding, where by 1861 four million Africans were subjected to bondage.

General Demands of the BLC

The struggle over the Jefferson exhibit is part of broader demands related to the governance and programmatic character of the Wright Museum, which was the largest of its kind in the U.S. prior to the opening of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington during 2016.  The Wright Museum was the outgrowth of the decades-long work of Dr. Charles H. Wright, an area physician, who built the institution through memberships and eventual recognition by the City of Detroit government under its first African American Mayor Coleman A. Young.

BLC has called for the appointment of community members to the board of the Wright Museum. The Coalition is charging that the board has become corporate dominated and non-representative of the city of Detroit which has a more than 80% African American population.

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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

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Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) presented a bill on Tuesday before the US Congress in which they seek to prohibit the official recognition and rights of Cuban trademarks in the United States.

The bipartisan and bicameral legislation, named “No Stolen Trademarks Honored in America Act”, would affect trademarks supposedly linked with nationalized properties after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959. A companion bill was presented in the House of Representatives by the congressmen Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) and John Rutherford (R-FL).

Its purpose is to prohibit US courts from “recognizing, enforcing or validating” any assertion of rights by an individual of a trademark that was used in connection with a business or assets that were nationalized by Cuba, unless “the original owner of the brand has expressly consented.”

.@SenatorMenendez & I introduced the #NoStolenTrademarksHonoredInAmericaAct. This bipartisan, bicameral bill prohibits U.S. courts from recognizing trademarks that were used in connection w/ a business or assets that were confiscated by the Cuban regimehttps://t.co/Vw1zoNqR2q

— Senator Rubio Press (@SenRubioPress) March 12, 2019

To illustrate the case, Rubio mentioned, in a press release, the legal battle between the Bacardi against Cuba for the rights of the Havana Club trademark. In 1993, Pernod Ricard S. A. and Cuba Ron S. A. launched a joint venture in charge of the production, marketing and commercialization of the Havana Club brand throughout the world.

As a response, Bacardi filed for the right to use Havana Club in the U.S., which was registered since 1974, through the commercialization of a rum produced in Puerto Rico. However, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ignored this claim and in 2016 designated the state company Cubaexport as the legitimate international representative of the renowned rum, dismissing Bacardi.

The proposed bill would prohibit the joint venture Pernod Ricard / Cuba Ron from using the rights related to Havana Club, as part of a series of measures to increase the economic assault against the island.

Rubio and Menendez’ bill appears 23 years after the approval of the “Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act”, commonly known as Helms-Burton. The law was signed on March 12, 1996, in Bill Clinton’s Administration, with the objective of affecting foreign investment to the island and accentuating the economic effects of the embargo.

On the infamous anniversary, the President of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel, pointed out that the law is absurd and illegal, adding that “you can not legislate against the world, or ignore the sovereignty of each country. Cuba is an independent and sovereign nation that respects and demands respect. Imperialists learn at once: dignity is invincible #WeareCuba.”

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Featured image is from EFE

Groups behind BattleForTheNet.com pledge to call, text, and email constituents of lawmakers who fail to cosponsor net neutrality bill before leaving DC for recess.

Today, activists behind BattleForTheNet.com launched an updated Congressional “scoreboard” showing where every member of Congress stands on the Save The Internet Act to overturn the FCC’s repeal of basic open Internet protections. The announcement comes as Communications and Technology subcommittee members convene on Capitol Hill to discuss net neutrality legislation. The activists have given lawmakers until COB March 15th–right before they leave for the March in-district recess–to cosponsor the bill, otherwise groups promise to unleash a flood of calls, emails, and tweets from their district.

The updated scoreboard shows which members of Congress truly support net neutrality by cosponsoring the Save the Internet Act, and reveals how much they’ve taken in campaign contributions from telecom companies. The scoreboard is a project of BattleForTheNet.com, a net neutrality action site maintained by Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, and Free Press Action Fund.

Today’s announcement also comes on the heels of a new crowdfunding campaign launched by Fight for the Future late last night to put up a billboard in Phoenix targeting Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the only Democratic member of the Senate who has not cosponsored the bill.

“Enough is enough. There are absolutely no excuses for not supporting this bill,” said Evan Greer, deputy director of Fight for the Future (pronouns: she/her). “Voters from across the political spectrum are pissed off and have made it very clear that they want strong net neutrality rules back in place as soon as possible. At this point, members of Congress can consider themselves on notice: if you choose to put the telecom giants ahead of your constituents, we will make sure that every single one of your constituents knows you sold them out for cable money. You have until close of business on Friday, March 15th.”

“It is unreal that there is any member of Congress who is still on the wrong side of this issue,” said Free Press Action Fund Campaign Director Candace Clement.“The Save The Internet Act is exactly the right way to safeguard Net Neutrality. It draws on the overwhelming bipartisan support for real Net Neutrality, including support among vast majorities of Republican, Democratic and independent voters. And it fixes the Trump FCC’s massive mistake when it repealed the Open Internet Order in 2017. People, by the millions, protested that FCC decision, and they’ve rejected the empty rhetoric and lies of phone- and cable-industry lobbyists. It’s time every member of Congress did the same and joined us in support of the Save The Internet Act.”

“For lawmakers who claim to stand for their constituents and against special interests in Washington, supporting this bill should be one of the easiest things they do this year,” said Mark Stanley, director of communications for Demand Progress. “The Save the Internet Act restores strong net neutrality protections that benefit every person who depends on the open internet to access information, communicate, or run a small business. The tired attacks hurled at this bill and similar measures have proven to be based on industry-backed lies, time and again. Simply put, there’s no excuse — every lawmaker should get behind the Save the Internet Act to restore crucial and commonsense protections for their constituents.”

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All images in this article are from Fight for the Future

Major bilateral differences are over structural issues, the US trade deficit with China a minor one by comparison.

Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference vice chairman Zhang Qingli said

“China never wants a trade war with anybody…but we also do not fear such a war,” adding:

“The US side has disregarded a consensus with China after multiple rounds of consultations, insisting on waging a trade war against China, (threatening) to escalate it” if its demands aren’t met.

Multiple rounds of talks failed to resolve all major issues. According to economists and political analysts, bilateral trade differences are harming investment in both countries.

A Rhodium Group/Mercator Institute for China Studies report said investments by Chinese firms in EU countries declined by 40% last year.

Acquisition of US tech companies by Chinese firms declined by two-thirds in 2018, according to financial data company Refinitiv. US acquisitions of Chinese firms also declined sharply.

For these and overall economic reasons, ruling authorities of both countries want resolution of bilateral differences.

China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan said

“(t)he work team is still continuing to negotiate because we still have a lot to do.”

Xi and Trump won’t meet in late March or April unless able to formally sign off on a deal. Representatives of both countries may hold further talks in Beijing in the coming days, likely after China’s National People’s Congress ends on March 15.

A key area of dispute involves enforcement, along with the Trump regime insisting on its right to raise tariffs on Chinese imports if it claims Beijing violated agreed on terms – without retaliation by Xi, what his government considers an infringement of its sovereign rights.

How US tariffs will be rescinded if a deal is reached remains unresolved. China wants no delay in their lifting. The Trump regime wants it done gradually, both sides so far at an impasse over this issue and others – mainly structural ones.

Beijing wants no foreign restraints imposed on its ability and goal to develop economically, industrially and technologically. The Trump regime’s aim is polar opposite – the greatest obstacle to bilateral relations whatever may be agreed on ahead.

No meeting between Xi and Trump is scheduled so far. Without one, no deal is likely. China’s Commerce Minister Zhong Shan said

“(d)uring the last 90 days, the sides held three rounds of talks at the high level,” adding:

“Chinese Vice Premier Liu He has recently visited the United States for the talks as the head of a Chinese delegation. The process of consultations was extremely difficult and time-consuming.”

“Due to the difference in state systems, culture and the stages of development, the two countries are very different.”

Key issues remain unresolved.

On Sunday, China’s Global Times (GT) said bilateral trade talks are “poised on a knife-edge…(Trump) stressed that he wants either a good deal or no deal.”

No preparations are underway for a summit between both leaders. A key difference between both sides involves the Trump regime saying it’ll “impose punitive tariffs on Chinese products any time it feels that China does not fully implement the agreement while China should not retaliate. China believes this is an intrusion on (its) sovereignty and has rejected the proposition.”

Both sides resolved various differences. “But given the different opinions within the US and the capriciousness of US government as a whole, a highly sensitive period is expected before a final agreement is signed.”

Both sides know each other’s bottom lines, no major changes in their positions likely ahead. If talks fail, “the US will suffer more pain, and at a greater cost, than it is currently already suffering,” said GT, adding:

“Particularly when the economic perspective for the US in 2019 is not as optimistic as that for last year and the new election season is drawing near, the US is not any better than China at enduring the political pressure of a continuing trade war.”

A final deal must be fair to both sides. Neither country benefits by pushing the other too far. Will things be resolved in the weeks ahead?

It’s in the interest of both nations to forge an agreement – compromise and fairness the only way to achieve it.

Given Washington’s record of breaching deals agreed on, whatever Sino/US accommodation is reached will be tenuous at best.

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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.

Extorquir dinheiro a troco de protecção não é apanágio só da mafia. – Trump advertiu, ameaçadoramente, num discurso no Pentágono – “Os países ricos que estamos a proteger estão todos avisados: deverão pagar pela nossa protecção.”

O Presidente Trump – revela a Bloomberg – está prestes a apresentar o plano “Cost Plus 50” que estabelece o seguinte critério: os países aliados que hospedam  forças americanas no seu território terão de cobrir integralmente as despesas e pagar 50% de custos adicionais aos EUA, em troca do “privilégio” de albergá-los e, assim, serem “protegidos” por eles.

O plano prevê que os países anfitriões também paguem os salários dos militares USA e os custos da gestão dos aviões e navios de guerra que os Estados Unidos têm nesses países. A Itália deveria, portanto, pagar não só os salários de cerca de 12.000 soldados americanos estacionados aqui, como também os custos da gestão dos caças F-16 e de outros aviões instalados pelos EUA, em Aviano e Sigonella, e os custos da Sexta Frota, fundeada em Gaeta.

De acordo com o mesmo critério, também devemos pagar pela gestão de Camp Darby, o maior arsenal USA fora da mãe pátria, e pela manutenção das bombas nucleares USA, localizadas em Aviano e Ghedi. Não se sabe quanto os Estados Unidos pretendem pedir à Itália e aos outros países europeus que hospedam as suas forças militares, pois que nem se sabe quanto esses países pagam actualmente. Os documentos estão cobertos pelo segredo militar.

Segundo um estudo da Rand Corporation, os países europeus da NATO suportam, em média, 34% dos custos das forças e das bases USA presentes nos seus territórios. Não se sabe, no entanto, qual o montante anual que pagam aos EUA: a única estimativa – 2,5 biliões de dólares – remonta há 17 anos. Portanto, o valor pago pela Itália  também é secreto. Apenas se conhecem algumas referências: por exemplo, dezenas de milhões de euros para adaptar os aeroportos de Aviano e Ghedi ao caça F-35 dos EUA e às novas bombas nucleares B61-12 que os EUA começarão a instalar em Itália, em 2020, e cerca de 100 milhões para os trabalhos na Base Aérea americana, em Sigonella, também a cargo da Itália.

Em Sigonella, é financiada pelos EUA, só a NAS I, a área administrativa e recreativa, enquanto a NAS II, a dos departamentos operacionais e, portanto, a mais cara, é financiada pela NATO, ou seja, também pela Itália. No entanto, é certo – prevê um investigador da Rand Corp – que, com o plano “Cost Plus 50”, os custos para os aliados “disparem até às estrelas”. Fala-se de um aumento de 600%. Serão adicionados às despesas militares que, em Itália, atingem cerca de 70 milhões de euros por dia, destinados a subir para cerca de 100 milhões, de acordo com os compromissos assumidos pelos governos italianos na sede da NATO.

Trata-se de dinheiro público, que sai dos nossos bolsos, subtraído a investimentos produtivos e a despesas sociais. É possível, no entanto, que a Itália possa pagar menos pelas forças e bases norte-americanas instaladas no seu território. De facto, o plano “Cost Plus 50” prevê um “desconto por bom comportamento” a favor dos “aliados que se alinham de perto com os Estados Unidos, fazendo o que eles exigem”.

É certo que a Itália terá um grande desconto, pois que, de governo em governo, foi sempre mantida na peugada dos Estados Unidos.

Ultimamente, enviando tropas e aviões de guerra para a Europa de Leste, com a motivação de enfrentar a “ameaça russa” e favorecendo o plano dos EUA de abandonar o Tratado INF a fim de instalar na Europa, incluindo Itália, mísseis nucleares apontados para a Rússia. Sendo alvo de uma possível retaliação, precisaremos como “protecção”, de outras forças e bases USA. Teremos de pagá-las, mas sempre com desconto.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Sale alle stelle il prezzo della «protezione» UsaBy Manlio Dinucci, March 12, 2019

il manifesto, 12 de Março de 2019

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

VIDEO (PandoraTV) :

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Gimme Some Truth

John Lennon, The Plastic Ono Band

I’m sick and tired of hearing things from
Uptight short sided narrow minded hypocritics
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth
I’ve had enough of reading things
By neurotic psychotic pigheaded politicians
All I want is the truth, just give me some truth

No short-haired, yellow-bellied
Son of tricky dicky’s
Gonna mother hubbard soft soap me
With just a pocket full of hopes
Money for dope, money for rope 

John Lennon wrote that song in 1971, and its value as message resonates even better today. His lyrics refer to some as ‘uptight, short sided (he meant ‘sighted’?) narrow minded hypo critics (he may have even meant those in the media who ‘critique’ the news) ‘. How sad that almost 50 years have passed and our A) Mainstream Media B) Politicians  and C) The Corporate Consumer machine are still at it.

They are equal opportunity bullshit artists, undertaking the task of distorting the truth about what is affecting our society. Of course, behind the OZ curtain stand the wizards who control how we working stiffs should think, vote and shop. There was a cogent scene from Robert DeNiro’s  2006 film The Good Sheperd. In the film Matt Damon plays a CIA official who visits a Mafia leader (played by Joe Pesci), asking for some covert help. At the end of their visit, Pesci says (I am paraphrasing) ‘Let me ask you a question. Every group has something that they are known for. You know, the Niggers have their music, we Italians have the family… what do your people have?’ Damon looks at him and answers’ We have America, and you’re all just visitors.’

The brainwashing has been going on for so long that it’s tough for minds to be deprogrammed through basic human discourse. Case in point: This writer has written consistently about my idea for a 50% Flat Surtax on any income over and above $1,000,000 a year. The first one million would be taxed at the regular rate of around 37% (before deductions) and would have no bearing on the surtax. When I discuss the plan with many working stiffs out there, the overwhelming majority of them  tell me ‘Oh that’s too much! Why not start at $ 5 million?’ There you have it. The American Dream is alive and well in the psyche of our fellows. A good analogy to remember regarding the mainstream news outlets, electronic and print, is this:  You will know when you hear of a good, viable idea when the mainstream news rarely or hardly ever covers it. Ditto for our sacred elected officials. As far as our great Military Industrial Empire, stop believing the lies that are filtered out by both the Pentagon and of course the corporate world. Commercials as to our brave military that keeps us ‘ FREE’ , or commercials about how the ‘for profit’ health care industry cares about your wellbeing…. mute that boob tube! Folks, there is no ‘truth in advertising’!

March 19th will be the 16th anniversary of one of the most heinous acts by our government… right up there, most assuredly, with 9/11. In both cases, elements within the inner circles of the Bush/Cheney Cabal must have skewed all that they could to arrive at what transpired. The sacrifice of tens of thousands (in NYC and environs, what with the after effects of the towers being destroyed) and perhaps millions of Iraqi civilians, along with the destruction of one of the most modern countries in the Middle East, should give any decent person the desire, NO the drive, for truth. Those two actions by covert actors is why there is such a refugee crisis in Europe. It is also why there even is an ISIL or whatever our government calls those religious fanatics. If not for US imperialist (a word not used enough nowadays) actions in the Middle East, there would be maybe a few thousand fanatics in all those nations.

John Lennon was spot on in 1971. Without the mass of working stiffs demanding just that, TRUTH, our nation will continue to go down that rabbit hole.

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].

Information Commissioner rules that Brexit department must release names of European Research Group MPs, following openDemocracy Freedom of Information appeal

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There are few more powerful forces in British politics at present than the pro-Brexit European Research Group. The influential group of Tory MPs, led by Jacob-Rees Mogg, has pledged to torpedo Theresa May’s Brexit deal when it returns to the Commons on Tuesday. But just who the ERG are has long been shrouded in secrecy.

The ERG’s various spokespeople have long refused to name its members, or even confirm how many supporters it has – despite the group being funded by taxpayer money. In a ‘car crash’ interview with Channel 4 News in 2017, Tory MP Suella Fernandes said that a list of ERG members was “available if necessary”. No such list has ever been published.

Now that secrecy is set to end, after the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ruled that the Department for Exiting the European Union (DExEU) must release a list of ERG members. The move comes after openDemocracy appealed to the information watchdog when DExEU redacted the names of ERG members named in a 2017 email exchange with then Brexit minister Steve Baker.

Baker, a former ERG chair, became a minister in June 2017. Just weeks later, he offered a private briefing for the ERG on the so-called Great Repeal Bill, the parliamentary act for provides for leaving the European Union. One email noted how there is a “larger group” and “a smaller more senior one” within the ERG.

Following a Freedom of Information request, openDemocracy revealed the existence of Baker’s offer last year. But DExEU redacted the email correspondence so that the ERG members could not be identified.

However, the information commissioner has now rejected DExEU’s claim that releasing the names of ERG members included in Baker’s email would breach data protection laws.

“The names and parliament email addresses of the MPs, MEPs and Lords redacted from the emails disclosed should be provided,” the ICO ruled. The ICO added that ERG members’ names are “constantly placed in the public domain” and “they frequently use publicly accessible Twitter accounts to provide their views”.

The ERG, which has been described by Tory sources as ‘a party within a party’, has used hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money to fund its operations, but has repeatedly refused to make public the names of its members.

The ERG’s ranks have included a number of prominent cabinet ministers such as Michael Gove, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling. Steve Baker has emerged as among the most vocal critic of the prime minister’s Brexit deal since resigning from the government last year over May’s Chequers proposals.

‘Resisting transparency’

The ICO ordering DExEU to release the names of those redacted in the communications could shed further light on who exactly is attached the hardline pro-Brexit group.

Transparency International hailed the Information Regulator’s ruling as “very timely given the current political debate” and urged DExEU “to comply as a matter of urgency”.

“The gravity of decisions under ministerial consideration are almost incomparable in living memory. It is therefore of utmost importance that the public are not kept in the dark about how these are made and whose interests are in play. Resisting such transparency only raises the suspicion that there is something to hide,” said Steve Goodrich, senior research officer at Transparency International.

DExEU has around a month to release the list of ERG members. Responding to questions from openDemocracy, the department said:

“We are considering the ICO’s decision and will issue our response in due course.”

Liberal Democrat MP Tom Brake accused DExEU of a “shameless attempt” “to shroud in secrecy its meetings with the ERG” and of “a desperate ploy to conceal how a cabal of MPs are puppeteering spineless Minister.”

Labour MP Ben Bradshaw said that it was “completely unacceptable that we have to rely on the Information Commissioner” to discover the identity of the ERG’s core membership.

“These are the people who are currently holding our country to ransom and working to take us crashing over the Brexit cliff edge in two weeks’ time, yet they refuse to operate transparently and honour the accepted rules of democratic and political behaviour,” Bradshaw said.

‘Secretive yet influential’

The ERG is a secretive yet influential group composed of backbench Conservative MPs, many of whom have pushed for a no-deal Brexit. The group also has strong connections to pro-Brexit think tanks such as the Institute for Economic Affairs.

openDemocracy has previously revealed how the ERG operates a secret second bank account, despite taking at least a quarter of a million pounds of taxpayers’ money.

The ERG has also accepted a donation from the Constitutional Research Council – a secretive organisation that channelled a controversial £435,000 donation to the DUP’s Brexit campaign. The organisation is headed by Richard Cook, a former Conservative general election candidate implicated in illegal international waste shipments.

The ERG is classed as a parliamentary research service provider which produces materials for its members. This research is not made public. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) reviews the output produced by parliamentary research service providers, including the ERG.

Using Freedom of Information legislation, openDemocracy has requested that the parliamentary watchdog disclose research materials produced by the ERG that it holds. IPSA has so far refused, but openDemocracy will be arguing for the release of the materials at the Information Tribunal. The hearing scheduled to take place on May 2.

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Trump’s dead on arrival budget proposal to Congress is all about funding greater militarism and belligerence, along with serving corporate interests and high-net worth households – while gutting vital social programs.

It’s a proposal only Wall Street, the military, industrial, security complex, Big Oil, and monied interests could love.

Totaling $4.75 trillion, Trump wants an increase of $34 billion in war spending, euphemistically called “defense” – at a time sharp cuts are needed.

Washington’s only enemies are invented ones. No real ones exist. He wants $8.6 billion more for wall construction along the southern border with Mexico.

His priorities include slashing Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, housing assistance, student loans, and other essential social programs – along with big cuts in environmental protection programs.

He wants about $1.5 trillion cut from Medicaid spending in the next decade, $845 million less for Medicare over the same period, $25 billion from Social Security and disability spending, a 9% reduction in non-defense spending across the board – funds shifted to “defense” priorities, corporate handouts, and other initiatives benefitting high-net worth households.

Other proposed cuts over the next decade include $220 billion less for food stamps, $21 billion from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), $207 billion less for student loans, along with billions more cut from housing assistance and other social programs.

Note: In February 2017 during his first address to a joint congressional session, Trump pledged “no changes” to Social Security and Medicare.

He said

“America must put its own citizens first…Above all else, we will keep our promises to the American people…Our obligation is to serve, protect, and defend the citizens of the United States.”

He broke virtually every positive promise made to ordinary Americans, serving monied interests exclusively. His FY 2020 budget proposal calls for more of the same, disdainful of the general welfare he doesn’t give a hoot about.

He wants funding for renewable energy initiatives slashed by 70% – from around $2.3 billion to $700 million. He favors eliminating the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy altogether, wanting energy innovation left entirely to the private sector at its discretion.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,

“(e)ach of the past two Trump budgets has targeted benefits and services for individuals and families of modest means for deep cuts, even as it has supported tax cuts conferring large new benefits on those at the top of the income scale,” adding:

“If (his proposed FY 2020 budget is) enacted, these cuts would have increased poverty and hardship, leaving more people struggling to afford basics like food and rent.”

The type society Trump and hardline ideologues in his regime favor is all about serving privileged interests exclusively, wanting ordinary Americans left on their own sink or swim – social safety net spending abolished in their ideal world.

One way he aims to increase military spending for warmaking is by increasing a so-called overseas operations (slush) fund from $69 billion this year to $165 billion in 2020.

The budget includes $33 billion in greater “defense” spending to counter the “malign influence” of Russia China, Iran, North Korea, and other sovereign independent states. It calls for development of new land-based, sea, and aerial weapons, along with around $10 billion for cybersecurity.

Trump wants increased funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), along with more for Customs and Border Protection.

Article I, section 9, clause 7 of the Constitution states: “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…”

Spending bills originate in the House and Senate Appropriations  Committees. They need majority House and super-majority (60-vote) Senate approval to pass.

Presidents have veto power over appropriations bills, not so-called line-item authority – so congressional-adopted budgets must be signed into law entirely or vetoed. A two-thirds majority in each house is needed to override it.

Congress and the president have until September 30 (the fiscal year’s end) to agree on a budget for the following FY. Often used continuing resolutions keep government funded for a specified time period when agreements aren’t reached.

Otherwise, government shutdowns are triggered until bipartisan differences are resolved.

Trump’s request for $8.6 billion more for border wall construction alone assures another spending fight if he’s unbending on this issue.

According to a senior regime official, his budget proposes “more reductions in spending than any (previous US) president in history” – taking pride in what demands shame.

House Appropriations Committee chairwoman Nita Lowey slammed Trump’s proposal, saying the following:

He “managed to produce a budget request even more untethered from reality than his past two. With such misguided priorities, (his) budget has no chance of garnering the necessary bipartisan support to become law.”

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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 Strategic Culture Foundation

The Commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told the House Armed Services Committee just how “concerned” he is about China projecting its Silk Road influence from Gwadar to Africa through S-CPEC+ and consequently establishing a permanent naval presence in the western end of the Afro-Asian Ocean.

CPEC is increasingly being appreciated as the game-changing geostrategic megaproject that it is after the Commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told the House Armed Services Committee just how “concerned” he is about its terminal port of Gwadar being used as China’s launching pad for expanding its Silk Road influence into Africa and consequently establishing a permanent naval presence along the routes connecting several Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC) between them. This outlook isn’t a unique one and was most recently elaborated upon by the author last week in his piece about how “Pakistan’s Indian Sub Interception Proves The Importance Of The Country’s Navy”, but it appears to be the first time that a high-level American military official publicly confirmed the likelihood of this scenario unfolding and expressed “concern” about it. According to reports, Joseph Votel told the Committee that:

“As they develop that land route what they are attempting to do and then we expect then be looking for ports they can connect that to ports in southern Pakistan leading to ports in AFRICOM (US Africa Command), and for us it’s going to lead to a permanent presence of Chinese maritime military maritime activity in the region that we will need to be concerned with.” (author’s note: reproduced exactly as reported by The Times Of India, grammatical errors and all)

This brief statement is loaded with a lot of strategic significance. Firstly, it implies that the joint Indian-American Hybrid War on CPEC has failed and that the Chinese-built megaproject is proceeding apace in turning Pakistan into the global pivot state for facilitating transcontinental multipolar integration.

Secondly, it draws attention to the southern branch of CPEC’s logical expansion that the author earlier coined S-CPEC+. Thirdly, Votel is convinced that this will also take on military dimensions as China is compelled to defend its SLOCs all along this route, possibly through the clinching of LEMOA-like deals with Pakistan and coastal African countries. And finally, the fourth main point that can be drawn from the CENTCOM Commander’ s statement is that China’s CPEC-assisted expansion of influence into the western Afro-Asian Ocean poses a multidimensional cross-theater challenge to American hegemony in the Eastern Hemisphere.

What’s less clear, however, is how the US intends to counter this after the failure of the Indian-American Hybrid War on CPEC. Resorting to similar measures against the Horn of Africa and East African states might backfire for several reasons, not least of which is that the interests of the US’ partners overlap with China’s own in this space and would therefore be adversely affected by regional destabilization. It’s possible that the US might weaponize comparatively low-level chaos dynamics such as those embodied by al Shabaab but this could inadvertently create opportunities for Russia to export its “Democratic Security” model from the Central African Republic to the African coastland and actually safeguard the long-term strategic viability of S-CPEC+,  hence why non-kinetic methods will probably be relied upon at this point in time.

It’s very likely that the US will intensify its infowar against China’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), with specific focus being given to the narrative that Beijing is more interested in extracting resources through so-called “debt trap diplomacy” than in sincerely developing its partners’ economies. There might also be more underhanded efforts to incite mob violence against Chinese citizens in order to bait the People’s Republic into costly “mission creep” that it’s both militarily unprepared for and which could exacerbate some of the angry locals’ negative perceptions about it. In addition, the US could use economic pressure to dissuade African governments from signing LEMOA-like deals with China and entice them into embracing “Trumpism” instead of Silk Road-led Globalism. Fearmongering about China’s speculative military motives, the US might use this as the pretext for launching Indian-led multilateral “freedom of navigation” patrols.

The most likely outcome that the US hopes to achieve is to encourage “friendly competition” between BRI and the nascent Indo-Japanese “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” while manipulatively working behind the scenes to influence the “rules of the game” in such a way as to favor its proxies and their French and Emirati partners prior to using their multilateral economic platform as the basis for the creation of a new African-centric security bloc for more comprehensively “containing” China. Accordingly, it would be to the benefit of the emerging Multipolar World Order if China partnered with Pakistan, Turkey, and Russia to preemptively thwart this scenario, with the first protecting S-CPEC+’s SLOCS, the second sharing its widespread soft power in sub-Saharan Africa, and the last using its “Democratic Security” model to safeguard everything in the most ideal win-win arrangement between them all.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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.

For 60 years the Cuban Revolution has been in opposition to the most powerful nation of all time. America is a landmass almost 100 times larger in size than Cuba, is infinitely wealthier, stronger and boasts the largest and most advanced military on earth. There has hardly been a more unequal battle in world history than that of America against Cuba, yet the latter has taken the blows and is still standing.

Consecutive United States governments – dating to the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration of the late 1950s – were left increasingly perplexed and enraged by their country’s inability to either assassinate Fidel Castro or upend the Revolution.

Image on the right: Orlando Bosch (left) with Luis Posada Carriles in Miami. (Source: Havana Times)

US governments have implemented a range of attacks against Cuba in the form of a six-decade old embargo, an illegal invasion, artillery and gun assaults, chemical and biological warfare, employment of Cuban exile mercenaries and infamous figures like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Little of this receives even passing mention in common discourse on American-Cuban relations.

Posada and Bosch gained a sprinkling of notoriety as architects of the October 1976 destruction of a Cuban airliner, killing all 73 people aboard, including many teenagers. The CIA “had concrete advance intelligence” months prior to the attack but did nothing to prevent it. Perhaps this is not surprising, as Posada enjoyed extensive work as a CIA agent, while Bosch was also utilized as an American intelligence operative and had contact with the CIA dating to the early 1960s.

The Cuban airplane atrocity is merely the iceberg’s tip, so to speak; Posada and Bosch were responsible for countless other murderous acts across the Western Hemisphere, executed with the use of assault rifles, machine guns, revolvers, bombs, grenade launchers, a bazooka, etc.

Indeed, Posada and Bosch were two of the biggest international terrorists of the post-1945 age. During their long reign of terror they were protected by powerful American politicians, such as the Bush family. In the late 1980s, future presidential candidate Jeb Bush intervened directly on Bosch’s behalf, so as to allow this mass murderer to remain unhindered on American soil.

Bosch was thereafter granted US residency, and in July 1990 he was pardoned of all charges by US president George H. W. Bush, partly due to lobbying by his son Jeb. In April 2011, Bosch would die unmolested in Miami aged 84, surrounded by the Cuban-American mafia who call the area home.

Last May, the 90-year-old Posada also died a free man in Miami, and was never charged for his vast array of criminality. It is likely that many of Miami’s residents, along with visiting holidaymakers, have been entirely unaware of these terrorists walking uninhibited on the city’s fair streets.

Posada, who in the mid-1960s received training at the US Army post Fort Benning, had furthermore been shielded by George W. Bush’s administration earlier this century. Posada was granted sanctuary from America’s highest office while, in Guantanamo Bay, prisoners were held and tortured on far lesser charges, and others on mere suspicion. Previously, for a time in the mid-1970s, Bosch himself received additional guardianship in Chile under the US-instituted Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, and “lived quietly as an artist” in the South American country.

When Cuban leader Fidel Castro was questioned about these grotesque affairs over a decade ago, he replied,

“Posada Carriles and his accomplice Orlando Bosch are the most bloodthirsty exponents of imperialist terrorism against our nation. They have carried out dozens of horrific actions in numerous countries within the hemisphere, including even the territory of the United States. Thousands of Cubans and some citizens of other countries have lost their lives and been mutilated, as a consequence of those cowardly and abominable acts by governments of the United States”.

Castro also notes that Posada and Bosch have “always acted under the orders of American administrations and their special services, and have been illegally exonerated of all charges and possible punishment… Posada Carriles’ terrorist acts, including the bombings of tourist hotels in Havana and the assassination plans, have been financed by the United States through the unfortunately famous Cuban-American National Foundation, since its creation by Reagan and Bush in 1981. All of the money came from the United States. No one has ever acted with more deceit and hypocrisy”.

Elsewhere, those criticizing Cuba for “human rights violations” fail to put into context unprecedented threats the island nation has faced for decades, and continues to endure.

Should small counter-revolutionary cells present on Cuban territory (often covertly supported by the US) enact methods that undercut the socialist project, then the issue must surely be dealt with. The Revolution would simply never have lasted unless actions are taken to counter the subversive cliques.

In the majority of cases, Castro’s government handed out moderate prison sentences to the accused – which are then sometimes commuted – with the detainees upon release allowed to leave the country, many of course departing to America. In addition systematic acts of torture, widespread elsewhere, have not been committed within post-1959 Cuba.

For the meantime, should those few anti-socialist groups in Cuba begin their activities without government measures in response, the individuals would then become emboldened. In such a scenario, Washington inevitably senses blood while disingenuously announcing their concern for “democracy and human rights”, with the press leaping aboard the bandwagon.

Such cases have been witnessed elsewhere, in Iran last year and Venezuela recently, when protest marches were pounced upon by the White House and mass media. The fact that in Venezuela its president, Nicolás Maduro, has three times the number of people marching in support of him, by comparison to Washington stooge Juan Guaidó, receives smaller notice.

Unless swift action is initiated by Cuba’s government in response to the counter-revolutionary plans, America may gain a bridge hold in the country – as the superpower has succeeded in doing so with regard Venezuela and various other sovereign states, repeatedly violating the UN Charter. In Indonesia during the mid-1960s, direct US involvement enabled the Western-backed General Suharto and his forces to kill around a million people, rivalling Stalin’s purges.

In reports concerning Cuba conducted by often well regarded NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW), they have consistently failed to take into account the extraordinary extent of hostility towards the Caribbean island. Amnesty and HRW have undertaken some good work in other regions, but one must remember that the former is headquartered in London and the latter in New York. For this case, much of the Western NGOs’ coverage bears the hallmarks of having been skewed by years of blanket propaganda against Cuba, engineered by American and British institutions.

Moreover, Amnesty and HRW have betrayed an unfortunate tendency to focus on “pro-democracy activists” within Cuba, the most prominent of those this century being the so-called “Ladies in White”. The Ladies in White are in actual fact a US-funded proxy group. In August 2011 Wikileaks cables – which are invariably accurate – revealed that the Ladies in White have links to US government organizations. Despite such realities, Amnesty and HRW have continued to champion their motives in the name of “human rights”.

In 2018, HRW described the Ladies in White as “founded by the wives, mothers and daughters of political prisoners” – while Amnesty in their 2017/2018 analysis on Cuba outlined them as “a group of female relatives of prisoners detained on politically motivated grounds”. In these accounts, not a word has been written relating to the Ladies in White and their ties to American governments, or indeed the Wikileaks documents.

When claims of human rights breaches were put to Castro in an interview earlier this century, he responded that,

“The life expectancy of Cuban citizens is now almost 18 years longer than in 1959, when the Revolution came to power. We have made universal literacy possible, made it possible for every child to go to school, made it possible for every citizen to get an education. In the fields of education and health, there’s no country in the Third World, or even in the developed capitalist world, that’s done what we’ve done in those areas, for the good of the people”.

In relation to societal problems seen around the world, including in wealthy consumer nations, Castro highlighted that in Cuba,

“Begging and unemployment have been eradicated. Drug use and gambling have also disappeared. You won’t find children begging in the streets; we don’t have homeless beggars here… And I won’t go on too long about the aid we’ve given to dozens of countries in the Third World. There are Cuban doctors in over 40 countries, and they’ve saved thousands of human lives”.

Following the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster in northern Ukraine, Castro further outlined that,

“We’ve given free treatment to thousands of children from Chernobyl that no other country took in. I don’t think any place in the world has equalled the generosity to human beings that’s been shown by Cuba. And this is the country that people want to condemn for violations of human rights? Only through lies and calumnies can such profoundly dishonest accusations be made”.

Over elapsing years from the Chernobyl catastrophe, Cuba has now treated over 26,000 victims, more than 80% of whom are children.

Meanwhile, in August 2005, immediately after Hurricane Katrina laid waste to wide sections of America’s south-east, Cuba was among the first to offer medical assistance to the US – in the form of over 1,500 doctors along with dozens of tons of supplies. This act of generosity was forthcoming despite decades of the above-mentioned attacks. Hugo Chavez’ Venezuela was also quick in offering aid to America during the hurricane’s aftermath.

Both lifelines were rejected in silence by the Bush administration, who were loath to accept humanitarian relief from socialist governments they were seeking to undermine and overthrow. Had Cuban and Venezuelan support been welcomed by president Bush – sluggish himself in responding to the crisis and whose country was notably short of doctors – many lives like those lost in New Orleans would likely have been saved.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook.

On a global scale, the current events within Canada’s Justin Trudeau cabinet are not much more than the proverbial tempest in a teapot. While receiving saturation coverage on Canada’s CBC and some national newspapers, it is not totally noteworthy with global significance, other than some slipping and tarnishing of Trudeau’s halo with foreign media.

Having said that the problem’s within the Trudeau government do demonstrate a few political truths common to many governments and government parties. Concurrently it also reveals some problems deep – but not too deep – within Canada’s governance. Superficially it is a squabble internally within the Trudeau cabinet but it has threads and connections that incorporate much of what is wrong with Canadian governance.

It started innocently enough, at least on the surface, with the resignation of a cabinet minister for straightforward reasons. Positions were reassigned and shortly thereafter another resignation occurred, setting the current problems into motion – which is another way of saying the problems surfaced into the public sphere, old problems and new problems.

Canada’s Minister of Justice and the Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould was reassigned to a new position as Minister of Veterans’ Affairs, an assignment many considered was a demotion. MS Wilson-Raybould appeared to accept the change with equanimity. However, shortly thereafter, she resigned from that position, keeping her position guarded behind the inability to speak as per the legalities of client confidentiality and cabinet confidentiality.

It quickly became understood that the problem concerned her decision to allow the prosecution of a Canadian multinational corporation, SNC Lavalin, to proceed. Trudeau attempted to appease the situation but considering the strong character of Ms Wilson-Raybould and his own shifting explanations the media ran with the story, creating a significant impact across the country.

I watched Ms Wilson-Raybould’s presentation to the House of Commons Justice Committee, followed by presentations from Gerald Butts, Trudeau’s best friend and right hand man in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) and from Michael Wernick, Clerk of the Privy Council, one of the more powerful positions in the bureaucracy. Butts testimony seemed vague, more because he was not in attendance at many of the conversations discussed. Wernick was abrasive and abrupt, arrogant, and quite comfortable being so. He struck me as being someone who would be a partisan supporter of either the Liberals or the Conservatives, whoever was in power, as long as they followed the neoliberal agenda.

What I took away from all this so far are ramifications that spread throughout the Canadian political and business community, and indeed into the international community.

Jobs, jobs, jobs

The original problem stemmed from charges against SNC Lavalin for bribery of foreign officials that the Prosecutor’s Office were proceeding with. It quickly became mixed up with a hastily thought up and recently passed bill creating the possibility within the judicial system of a “deferred prosecution agreement” (DPA). Trudeau and the PMO argued publicly that a DPA would save many jobs, directly, and indirectly through service providers to SNC Lavalin. Ms Wilson-Raybould stood fast in Committee to her position that the prosecution should proceed.

There was no argument about the innocence of SNC Lavalin. The argument presented by the government concerned the usual political mantra used by all parties – “jobs, jobs, jobs.” Wernick argued that it was in the “public interest” while the overall testimony seemed to indicate it was purely political interest carrying the argument.

From my perspective it is not at all about jobs, and many good arguments were made in Committee indicating that employment and the economy were not the issue, at least not in the usual usage of the language. What struck me was that the PDA is another means by which corporations, their managers, and their shareholders, can escape responsibility for actions undertaken by the legality known as the “corporation.”

It is what corporations are designed for: to escape personal responsibility for errors, mistakes, illegal actions et al, and to maximize profits. The PDA, while excused as being something other countries have (which does not necessarily make it a good thing), is simply another layer to protect the managers and shareholders of SNC Lavalin from prosecution and responsibility for damages. With the PDA, a slap on the wrist, some form of promises and conditionalities to meet and then business will proceed as usual.

For true justice, corporate citizenship should be annulled and the managers and shareholders be held responsible for criminal actions and other damages created by the company. Certainly that creates problems on the shareholder side as many citizens are shareholders simply through the practice of pension and other investment pools being involved with the markets. I won’t sort that out here. SNC Lavalin’s directors, whichever one offered the bribe, should be held criminally responsible.

Neocolonialism and Canada’s Indian Act

Ms Wilson-Raybould has an undergraduate degree in political science and history, and a graduate law degree. She has served as B.C. Crown Prosecutor, a Treaty Commissioner, and a Regional Chief for the B.C. Assembly of First Nations. She speaks with the authority of a person well versed in European based law and well versed in First Nations traditions and governance. That introduces another broad thread to the story.

As a First Nation leader, Ms. Wilson-Raybould has consistently spoken against Canada’s Indian Act (1876), still in force with amendments. When the cabinet shuffle occurred, Trudeau offered her the position of Minister of Indigenous Affairs, a position she declined for obvious reasons of not wanting to be the ‘enforcer’ of an act she abhorred. In short, the Indian Act is one of the larger means to continue with Canada’s unstated political acts of maintaining the First Nations as subjugated people, a unilaterally imposed set of rules theoretically dealing with the various treaties made as European ‘civilization’ spread across the continent. Ms Wilson-Raybould does come from British Columbia, a province where the vast majority of the land has never been ceded by treaty.

Underneath Trudeau’s attempts at reconciliation for all the colonial depredations imposed on the indigenous people of Canada – land theft, imposition of reservations, many legal limitations, ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide – Canada remains a racist state. It is not overt and obvious to many, but it rests beneath the surface of Canadian civility. The Indian Act needs to be repealed and the federal government needs to negotiate with the First Nations in order to honour the treaties across Canada, and not impose unilateral regulations. Reconciliation should proceed to reparations – financial and territorial.

Resolution

How this affair resolves itself is an unknown. Beside the legal affairs of SNC Lavalin and the reconciliatory pretences of the Trudeau government, there is also the factor of Trudeau’s avowed feminism. After MS Wilson-Raybould’s departure, another high level and highly respected cabinet minister, Jane Philpott, resigned over the handling of the SNC Lavalin affair.

So far, both women are staying in caucus and are indicating they will run again in the approaching general election, October 21, 2019. Polls indicate Trudeau’s ratings have dropped considerably, while the Liberal party itself has already rebounded somewhat from an initial drop. With a weak opposition – a divided Conservative camp, and a wandering NDP, there may yet be time to straighten the halo, albeit with some tarnish.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Here are six of the media’s biggest lies about North Korea:

1–Did North Korea end the negotiations in Hanoi because Trump refused to lift sanctions?

No. That’s not what happened at all. Kim Jong un made a serious offer to permanently halt all long-range rocket and nuclear tests and to “completely dismantle all the nuclear production facilities” at Yongbyon (the DPRK’s primary nuclear enrichment facility) in exchange for the partial lifting of sanctions that targeted North Korean civilians. Kim did not present his offer as an ironclad demand from which he was unwilling to budge, but as a starting point for discussions just as one would expect during negotiations. But the Trump team never seriously considered Kim’s offer, instead–at the advice of neocon warlord, John Bolton — the Trump delegation surprised Kim with a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum that included the “elimination of the DPRK’s “chemical and biological weapons, “their ballistic missile program” along with complete denuclearization. Bolton said that no sanctions would be lifted until this comprehensive disarmament plan was implemented and verified by Washington’s weapons inspectors. These unrelated demands were not part of previous discussions nor were they contained in the earlier agreements in Singapore. They were concocted with the clear intention of sabotaging the summit and ensuring that no agreement between the sides would be reached.

2–Has the Trump administration honored the agreement it made at the Singapore Summit?

No. On June 12, 2018 President Trump signed a joint declaration agreeing to the following:

• The United States and the DPRK commit to establish new US-DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity.
• The United States and DPRK will join their efforts to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean Peninsula.
• Reaffirming the April 27, 2018 Panmunjom Declaration, the DPRK commits to work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula
• The United States and the DPRK commit to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified.

President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, walk together to their one-on-one bilateral meeting, Tuesday, June 12, 2018, at the Capella Hotel in Singapore. (Official White House Photo by Stephanie Chasez)

While Kim has taken a number of steps to normalize US-DPRK relations (including the cessation of all ballistic missile and nuclear weapon tests, the destruction of one former nuclear testing site, returning the remains of 55 US servicemen who were killed during the Korean War back to US custody, removing mines from the DMZ, and actively engaging in cultural and economic projects with leaders in the South) the Trump administration has done absolutely nothing aside from terminating the provocative large-scale joint military exercises that are used as a rehearsal for invading the North and toppling the government in Pyongyang. Trump has made no effort to normalize relations or to create a “stable peace regime” on the peninsula.

Also, last Thursday, the US violated the Singapore agreement by launching another round of joint-military drills called “Dong Maeng” (which means “alliance” in Korean). While the maneuvers have been ignored by the western media, they were excoriated by North Korea’s state-run news agency KCNA which blasted the drills as a “threat… to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”

3–Did Kim Jong un agree to decommission his nuclear arsenal and end his ballistic missile program BEFORE the Trump administration eased sanctions?

Not a chance. On September 18, 2018: Kim met South Korean President Moon Jae-in in Pyongyang where the the two leaders agreed to expand the “cessation of military hostilities”, advance economic, humanitarian and cultural cooperation and exchanges, pursue complete denuclearization on the Korean Peninsula. North Korea committed to dismantle the Dongchang-ri missile engine test site (which it has done) and promised to take additional steps, like the dismantling of the nuclear facilities in Yongbyon, if the United States “takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.”

The promise of denuclearization was never a commitment to unilaterally disarm while the US did nothing. The North expected both sides to make reciprocal gestures in order to build confidence. Instead, the Trump administration tightened sanctions which increased Pyongyang’s distrust.

In any event, the original agreement implied a gradual disarmament after there was (a) an improvement in relations and (b) the building of “a lasting and stable peace regime.”

4–Did the Trump administration agree to a “phased” or gradual disarmament similar to what was hashed out in Singapore?

Yes. On January 31, 2019, Special envoy for North Korea Stephen Biegun said the administration was prepared to move step-by-step towards complete denuclearization in parallel with working towards peace in Korea and that it is willing to defer a complete declaration of North Korea’s nuclear assets. Here’s an excerpt of Biegun’s comments at Stanford University:

“We have communicated to our North Korean counterparts that we are prepared to pursue simultaneously and in parallel all of the commitments our two leaders made in their joint statement at Singapore last summer.

Biegun’s statement was made in January, 2019. But two months later– on March 7th, 2019 –the US State Department issued a statement which completely rejected Biegun’s policy. The statement read:

“Nobody in the administration advocates a step-by-step approach. In all cases, the expectation is a complete denuclearization of North Korea as a condition for all the other steps being — all the other steps being taken.” (State Department)

So, what does this mean? Did Trump deliberately mislead Kim about the administration’s demands or has Trump’s position simply hardened over time? Typically, negotiations are not a one-way street: “You give me everything I want, and maybe I’ll lift sanctions.” That’s not the way negotiations work. What Trump and his hardline advisors want is capitulation, the complete and unconditional surrender of Pyongyang to its American overlords. That’s a strategy that’s bound to fail.

5–Did the Trump administration lie about canceling joint military drills with South Korea?

Yes, but a spokesman for the US tried to minimize the offense by stating that the exercises were greatly “scaled-back” from the drills that had been scheduled. (Why would that matter?) Naturally, the North Korean state media responded angrily saying:

“It is a violent violation of the joint declarations and statements that North Korea reached with the U.S. and South Korea. This also represents a frontal challenge to the aim and desires of all [Korean] people and the international community for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.”

6–Is Kim Jong un planning to break the commitments he made at Singapore by rebuilding his missile testing facilities so he can launch another ballistic missile?

No. The stories that have recently popped up in the media, suggesting that Kim is cheating on his prior agreements, are part of an elaborate and well-funded psychological operation (psy-ops) aimed at convincing the American people that Kim cannot be trusted. Some of these articles even invoke the specter of nuclear holocaust hoping to deter the administration from even considering future negotiations. The propaganda blitz has been hugely successful as a majority of Americans are only-too-eager to believe that Kim is the “brutal dictator” he is portrayed to be in the media (rather than another blameless target of Washington’s insatiable belligerence.) The Disobedient Media website has done some first-rate research and analysis on this latest fake news story (Kim’s “missile testing facilities”) Here are a few excerpts from one of the posts aptly titled: “The Media Is Lying About Construction At Sohae Launch Facility”, Disobedient Media:

“A March 8, 2019 report from National Public Radio (NPR) follows another by NBC News with sensational and misleading claims that satellite imagery released by private corporations with contractual ties to government defense and intelligence agencies show imminent preparations by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to engage in missile testing or the launch of a satellite from their facilities in Sanumdong, North Korea. An examination of the photos provided shows absolutely no indication of such activity……

(Repeat) there is absolutely no indication that several low resolution photos of a facility in North Korea have any activity in them outside of a few rusting vehicles that have sat without moving for some time….

NPR’s Sources Of Satellite Imagery Are Contractors For The CIA And Pentagon

The pervasive involvement of intelligence agencies and defense contractors in attempts to undermine negotiations with North Korea does not create confidence in the already shaky claims made by NPR regarding alleged preparations by the DPRK to participate in a missile launch. These contentions are not supported in substance by any tangible facts…..

Satellite Footage Of Sanumdong Facility Shows No Sign Of Imminent Launch…

NPR’s claims that the imagery shows “vehicle activity” occurring around the facility. Yet close inspection shows that the “activity” consists of a few inert vehicles, which appear to be a white pickup and white dump truck or flatbed parked in a permanent position next to piles of metal. The scene does not appear to be different from any number of sleepy yards of businesses that can be examined by members of the public on Google Maps….

NBC News Has Destroyed It’s Journalistic Integrity On North Korean Issues

The decision by NBC News to include a plethora of biased sources of analysis which appear to have intentionally been misrepresenting the nature of satellite footage of the DPRK’s Sohae Satellite Launching Station seriously calls their journalistic integrity into question. Their decision to represent satellite footage obtained from intelligence contractors and defense industry sources as “commercial” totally removes any remaining doubts that the recent reports of alleged North Korean activity after the breakdown of the Hanoi Summit are solely distributed with the intention of propagandizing not only the public but also President Trump himself. It is a pathetic effort to undermine the potential for peace and economic opportunity for the purpose of continued tensions that only benefit select special interests.”

“The Media Is Lying About Construction At Sohae Launch Facility”, Disobedient Media

These are excellent reports that should be read in full, but for our purposes, we’ll stop here.

Bottom line: The Trump administration deliberately sabotaged the Hanoi Summit, failed to honor its commitments under the terms of the Singapore Summit, lied about the termination of joint-military drills, did a complete 180 on its Special Envoy’s pledge for “phased disarmament”, and made no attempt to normalize US-DPRK relations or “build a lasting and stable peace regime.” On top of that, the media has launched another gigantic disinformation campaign aimed at garnering public support for tighter sanctions, more provocations, and war without end.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Zoom in Korea

March 11, 2019 is the 8th anniversary of the Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Meltdown, the first of a type of techo-natural disaster predicted in the 1990s by seismologist Ishibashi Katsuhiko. He coined the Japanese term genpatsu shinsai (原発震災, literally a nuclear power-earthquake disaster) to highlight the way a horrific natural disaster would be worsened by the co-occurrence of nuclear reactors melting down because of the earthquake.

I wasn’t physically or materially affected by the genpatsu shinsai, but it happened close enough to my home in Japan that it deeply affected me, and I was able to observe the way Japanese society reacted to it. Even at the time there was a wide range of reactions in society. Some people never thought twice about it. Others were devastated and angry, and they demanded that the national energy policy abandon nuclear energy. But this anger never transformed into a broader and more radical shift in politics. No one was connecting the issue to Japan’s attachment to the US military-economic alliance and the traditional export-driven capitalist model that requires infinite growth in a finite world.

I’ve always had a lot of sympathy for the people dislocated by the nuclear disaster, but I’ve also sensed something narrow and naïve about the way the problem is viewed. The victims should have expected a nuclear disaster, but they never should have expected anything different than the treatment they got. There are hundreds of disasters throughout the world that they could have looked to as examples of victims being abandoned. Few victims ever receive any kind of justice or a return to the life they once had. A nuclear accident is a rare and unique cause of an internal refugee crisis, but the plight of the refugees is not much different than that of others throughout the world who are uprooted because of natural disasters and war. Right after the genpatsu shinsai, large numbers of refugees began to enter Europe because of the destruction of the Libyan state and the war against Syria. Unfortunately, there was never a popular solidarity movement connecting Japan’s internal refugee crisis to the larger international crisis. In fact, during the aftermath of the genpatsu shinsai, the US government and the Japanese establishment were finishing off a soft coup against the elected Japanese government that had tried to challenge the status quo of the US-Japan alliance and the nature of the Japanese economy. No one was in the mood to keep fighting that battle.

I read and wrote about such things for five years after the disaster until I felt written out, or perhaps written into a corner. I felt trapped by the success of my self-education. If I wasn’t preaching to the converted, I was encountering people who disagreed and had a level of confidence in their opinions that was inversely proportional to their knowledge of the topic. They wanted to “debate” me for five minutes at a noisy social gathering, but they didn’t want to read a book on the topic (my reading list is at the end of this blog post) and talk to me about it afterwards. The same thing happened after I read several books on the history of the cold war and post-cold war era. Now instead of the pointless debates, people just shut me down. I have had to listen to people saying, “No, I don’t want to talk to you about Russia.” Who needs to have their views challenged when you can learn all you need to know from covers of the Economist?

I had once hoped that the genpatsu shinsai would change everything and make energy and environmental issues the top priority in politics. That’s why I made the effort to learn about it and talk about it, but the toxic legacy of the nuclear age remained on the margin of the margin of public consciousness as every nuclear state prepared to rebuild and upgrade its nuclear arsenal and nuclear energy facilities. Fukushima? You would think it never even happened.

Other blogs and news sites will be running stories about the 8th anniversary today, so I tried to think of something to discuss that wouldn’t be covered elsewhere. What follows is a short excerpt from a book of poems by a Japanese author, Kojima Chikara, who joined the anti-nuclear movement decades ago and wrote about it before and after the genpatsu shinsai. Many of his poems describe the era of nuclear expansion during which there were minor unreported accidents and radiation exposures of the invisible sub-contracted laborers. Their health problems were never tracked by regulators or the curious branch of science called “health physics.” These poems make it clear that the disaster really began when the reactors were first switched on.

This short sample has been reproduced here for the purpose of review (fair use claimed) and to help the author get some exposure for his work which is not well-known outside of Japan.

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A Selection of Poetry Works: My Tears Flow Endlessly

Forced out of House and Home by the Fukushima Nuclear Power Accident

by Kojima Chikara, translated by Noda Setsuko

Tokyo, Nishidashoten Publishing, ©2017

123 pages. Excerpt from pages 42-46.

The book was published with the original Japanese poems alongside the English translation.

Kojima and Noda are surnames, listed first here as in Japanese publishing style.

1.5 µSv around the entrance of my house

Where daisy fleabanes bloom.

1.7 µSv under the trees

Covered with overgrown vines in my garden

2.45 µSv on the surface of the ground

In my backyard where wet leaves pile up.

0.6 µSv around the heated table sunken into the floor

Which is no longer in use

Except during our short visits.

0.9 µSv in the sunroom

Looking out through the pane of class

0.8 µSv in the second floor bedroom

where nobody has slept since the accident.

We cleaned our house after an absence of a year and four months.

Wiping away the rat droppings on the tatami mats

And clearing all the dust in our house that day

We didn’t manage to return to our 0.05 µSv temporary house in Tokyo.

Near the sunken heated table

We placed floor cushions, each 0.7 µSv

And took blankets of 0.6 µSv out of the closet,

Which is now difficult to open and close.

We slept somewhere between 0.6 µSv and 0.7 µSv.

We slept shuddering in fear

Of being exposed to the radiation all night.

We slept with the knowledge

That we might not live in our house and homeland again.

Worrying about our future in the dark of night,

We slept.

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi  

From the very darkness at midnight

I can hear a faint sound.

It reverberates across the whole room.

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi 

The sound has continued non-stop

for about an hour since I was woken up.

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi  

As soon as I awoke I turned on the light

And identified the origin of the sound.

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi  

It’s a little young rat, not even as big as an egg.

I came home for a short visit after two months absence

And was enraged to see droppings all over the tatami mats.

I set a trap and it worked.

The rat scratched the edge of the cardboard with its rear claws

Because it was trapped with its belly glued to duct tape.

Rat, rat,

You are not hurt at all.

Besides, “There are no immediate effects on your health.”

I don’t want to help you,

Let alone pay you compensation, or give you donations.

I only listen to you struggling, not sleeping at all.

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi   

I must live in a temporary shack.

Somebody might really make a fool of me if I pity you

Snickering at me beyond the darkness.

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi  

Kashi, kashi, kashi     Kashi, kashi, kashi 

Half dead, Half dead    Half dead, Half dead  

Half dead, Half dead    Half dead, Half dead

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A Nuclear Age Reading List, 2011-2019.

Until now I have been too unassuming to stress all the reading and work I’ve put into learning about the nuclear age and the history of the 20th century. However, today I look back on several experiences when I had to tolerate people shutting me down or giving me their thinly supported opinions—people who were utterly uninterested in reading books on these subjects or listening to someone who does. I’ve also seen historians having similar experiences when they are interviewed on television, so I thought for once I would mention the fact that since the nuclear disaster, I’ve read the seventy books listed below cover to cover. I’m employed as an educator, so I have an advantage by having some extra time to do this research, but still I want to stress that anyone can start reading and learning again. When I was young no one thought I was special. I was a B student who struggled to get the occasional A. I kept reading because I turned off the TV and left my country. You may not be able to do both of these things, but you can at least do the former.

A.V. Yablokov, V.B. Nesterenko & A.V. Nesterenko, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment

Ace Hoffman, The Code Killers

Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: Crime without Punishment

Andrew Nikiforuk, The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude

Bruno Barrillot, Les irradiés de la République : Les victimes des essais nucléaires français prennent la parole

Buddy Levy, Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

Charles Forsdick & Christian Høgsbjerg, Toussaint Louverture: A Black Jacobin in the Age of Revolutions

Charles C. Mann

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Chris Hedges, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt

Christopher Boyce, Cait Boyce, Vince Font, The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman

David Graeber

The Utopia of Rules

Debt: The First 5,000 Years

David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA and the Rise of America’s Secret Government

Douglas Valentine, Hotel Tacloban

Edward Herman & David Peterson, Enduring Lies: The Rwandan Genocide in the Propaganda System, 20 Years Later

Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War

Eri Hotta, Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy

Eric Schlosser, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade

Gar Smith, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth

Gavan Daws, Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands

Gavan McCormack & Satoko Oka Norimatsu, Resistant Islands: Okinawa Confronts Japan and the United States

Gayle Greene, The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation

Gerard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe

Grover Furr, Blood Lies: The Evidence that Every Accusation against Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands Is False

Greg Poulgrain, Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesia Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles

James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters

Jared Diamond

Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Jim Albertini, Nelson Foster, Wally Inglis, Gill Roeder, The Dark Side of Paradise: Hawaii in a Nuclear World

Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins

Jim Harding, Canada’s Deadly Secret: Saskatchewan Uranium and the Global Nuclear System

John Reid, Ten Days that Shook the World

Joseph Mangano, Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment

Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico

Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon

Kate Brown

A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland

Dispatches from Dystopia: Histories of Places Not Yet Forgotten

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

Kristen Iversen, Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

Leon Siu, Ke Aupuni O Hawaii, The Basis for Restoration of the Hawaiian Kingdom

Matashichi Oishi, The Day the Sun Rose in the West: Bikini, the Lucky Dragon, and I

Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua et al, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty

NHK TV, Tokaimura Criticality Accident Crew, A Slow Death: 85 Days of Radiation Sickness

Nicolas Lambert, Avenir Radieux

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times

Oliver Stone & Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States

Penny Sanger, Blind Faith: The Nuclear Industry in One Small Town

Peter van Wyck, The Highway of the Atom

R.T. Howard, Power and Glory: France’s Secret Wars with Anglo-America

Richard Cottrell, Gladio, NATO’s Dagger at the Heart of Europe: The Pentagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis

Richard Rhodes

The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons

Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race

Robert J. Johnson, Romancing the Atom: Nuclear Infatuation from the Radium Girls to Fukushima

Robert Jacobs, The Dragon’s Tail: American’s Face the Atomic Age

Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenney, Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union

Roger Stone, The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ

Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda

Sheldon M. Stern, The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality

Stephanie Cook, In Mortal Hands: A Cautionary History of the Nuclear Age

Stephen F. Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War

Stephen Kinzer, The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and the Birth of American Empire

Susan Southard, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War

Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

Takahashi Hirose, Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster

Tom Zoellner, Uranium: War, Energy and the Rock that Shaped the World

William T. Vollman, Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan

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All images in this article are from Lit by IMAGINATION

The racism inherent in Western media’s reportage of African tragedy, such as the Ethiopian Airline disaster, once again shows how important it is for Africans to support their own media.

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Tragedy is a human experience that no one can escape from. Yet the manner in which Western media report on death involving Africans remains infused with racism. Reporting on the Ethiopian Airline flight ET302 crash has proven to be no exception. The doomed flight had 32 Kenyans on board – the largest group from one country to perish in the crash. But reporting by the Western media displays all the tropes of “Africa, the dark continent”, with media outlets such as Associated Press listing the countries of the victims in order of nationality, deliberately excluding Kenya and other African countries.

The reportage by The New York Times on the Dusit bomb attack in Kenya was equally layered in racist tropes. In addition, a newscast by TRT World tried to pin the crash on Ethiopian Airlines having a poor safety record, a claim that aviation analyst Alex Macheras was quick to dispute and correct. Macheras said,

“Ethiopian Airlines is an incredibly safe and trusted airline. This is not an airline with a poor safety record, as the presenter said.”

LIVE: Let’s be clear, @FlyEthiopian is an incredibly safe & trusted airline. This is not an airline with a “poor safety record” as the presenter said. #ET302 pic.twitter.com/jHAGqQLUSB

— Alex Macheras (@AlexInAir) March 10, 2019

Incidents like these once again emphasise how important it is for Africans to support their own media and to tell their own stories accurately and effectively. They also shows the need to strengthen Africa’s media in a continent where press freedom is still a big issue.

The names of the 32 Kenyans involved in the crash were released by Kenyan authorities. The names of other nationals in the crash were sent to their various embassies. A total of 19 staff members of United Nations affiliated organisations were on board. For now, Ethiopia (and other countries) has grounded all its Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft. Our deep condolences go to the loved ones of those lost in the crash.

BREAKING: Authorities say Canadians, Chinese, Americans, Italians, Indians, French, British, Egyptians among those killed in Ethiopian plane crash.

— The Associated Press (@AP) March 10, 2019

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Featured image: Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 aircraft. (Source: This Is Africa)

“Distance matters because time matters. And time matters because the faster commodities can be produced and exchanged, the greater the profits for individual firms. The answer? Mega infrastructure corridors.” – Nicholas Hildyard[1]

One of the world’s biggest e-commerce companies, Beijing-based JD.com, says it will soon be able to deliver fruit from anywhere in the world to the doorsteps of Chinese consumers within 48 hours. It takes highly integrated global infrastructure—connecting farms to warehouses to transportation to consumers—to achieve a goal like this. China’s new mega-infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), will help make JD.com’s vision a reality. It will also increase the concentration of global food production and distribution, potentially pushing small-scale farmers, fisherfolk, forest peoples and rural communities further to the margins. There are also serious concerns that BRI could worsen land grabs, human rights abuses, indebtedness, and environmental and health impacts in target countries.

Also known as One Belt One Road (OBOR), BRI was launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The largest infrastructure project ever embarked upon in world history, BRI focuses on promoting manufacturing, trade and investment, as well as the physical and digital integration of international markets. BRI provides a framework for Chinese investment to enhance existing infrastructure as well as build new production sites and trade routes to better connect China with the rest of the world.

BRI envisions a land-based “belt” connecting China with Europe and a sea-based “road” crossing the Indian Ocean to Africa up through the Mediterranean and reaching over the Pacific as far as Oceania and Latin America (see map). The initiative currently involves some 90 countries and is expected to cost more than US$1 trillion. Much of the funding comes from Chinese sources such as the China Development Bank and involves a combination of loans, bonds and equity investments. China also set up a special Silk Road Fund to finance BRI projects. International finance institutions such as the World Bank and the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, as well as private banks like HSBC, have also expressed support or established their own BRI focused funds.

Map of the BRI global infrastructure network. Source: Mercator Institute for China Studies, May 2018

Because of its vast geographic scale and massive investment, BRI could reconfigure large parts of Asia, Africa, Europe, and the seas in between, into production and distribution areas with warehouses, logistics terminals and export-import zones. BRI-associated projects have already undermined thousands of people and hundreds of millions more are likely to be adversely affected to make way for BRI’s planned roads, railways, seaports, dry ports and airports.

Many of BRI’s projects are promoted as win-win ventures that will bring much needed jobs, capital and technology to local economies. In reality, they are likely to further concentrate power in the global food system and undermine national food security, local food producers and rural communities.

How BRI impacts agriculture

Food security has always been a major concern for the Chinese government. Until recently, this meant trying to achieve and maintain national self-sufficiency, with the task falling almost entirely to China’s small-scale farmers. Now the government is shifting its approach, replacing peasant farms with large commercial agribusiness operations, investing in farm production abroad and opening up to more imports.[2]

China’s foreign agricultural investment is increasingly led by the private sector.[3] Over the past ten years, Chinese companies have invested US$43 billion in agricultural production outside China.[4] They have also gone on massive shopping sprees, buying up operations in global production chains like pork in the US and soybeans in Brazil, and gaining greater control over the global seed industry by taking on majority ownership of the Swiss-based seed giant Syngenta.

China is also a huge importer of soybeans, dairy, oilseeds, sugar and cereals. Its meat and dairy imports are surging, propelled in part by trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand. Given its reliance on the US for about 20% of its food imports, the new “trade war” launched by President Donald Trump against China has put pressure on Beijing to find new sources of food and livestock feed.

BRI is expected to boost China’s outward investments in agribusiness as well as baseline infrastructure spending to facilitate greater agricultural trade. The annex table of agricultural projects under BRI gives a sense of what is unfolding in various countries.

Read the Selected list of BRI-related agricultural projects here.

CPEC in Pakistan

Total agricultural trade between China and Pakistan reached US$652 million in 2013.[5] The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), signed in April 2015 and worth US$46 billion, aims to increase this. The project’s goal is to connect southwest China to the port of Gwadar in Balochistan province through roads, railways and other infrastructure. Along the way it will open up new mines, mills and communication systems—not to mention military capabilities. Agriculture is central to the agenda.

The long-term plan is to replace traditional Pakistani farming with high-tech farming and marketing systems and a large-scale agroindustrial complex. Towards this end, CPEC outlines ten key areas for collaboration and nine special economic zones.[6] Projects include the construction of a fertiliser plant with an annual output of 800,000 tons; large-scale vegetable and grain processing plants in Asadabad, Islamabad, Lahore and Gwadar; and a meat processing plant in Sukkur. Hundreds of thousands of hectares of farmland will be needed for these projects, with many farmers likely displaced.

CPEC is also facilitating the expansion of hybrid wheat, replacing farmers’ traditional wheat varieties to the benefit of Chinese agricultural input companies like Sinochem Group. The company has successfully grown Chinese hybrid wheat on a pilot area of 2,000 hectares in Pakistan and now plans to introduce it to other BRI countries like Uzbekistan and Bangladesh.[7]With wheat being one of Pakistan’s main staples, local communities fear these developments will negatively impact small farmers and lead to Chinese control over the country’s food supply, according to Roots for Equity.[8] CPEC is also bringing Chinese investment to the Pakistani dairy and seafood sectors for export to China, with cotton and rice also on the radar.[9]

BRI in Africa

East Africa is the first link in BRI’s connection to Africa. China is building ports and sea infrastructure to upgrade the route from South Asia to Kenya and Tanzania and then up to the Mediterranean via Djibouti. Inland railways are also being built. East African food and farming are bound to be undermined. For instance, China pledged to combine BRI with the longstanding Forum on China-Africa Cooperation to boost African agricultural productivity and increase its agricultural imports from Africa.[10] China already has agro-industrial parks in Mozambique, Uganda, Zambia and other countries, and is now expanding its agro-industrial investments under the banner of the BRI.

As for West Africa, President Xi Jinping visited the region for the first time in July 2018 with the intention of connecting the region to BRI. The Diamniadio International Industrial Platform, a new Chinese-funded special economic zone outside of Dakar, has established Senegal as a springboard for Chinese industry throughout West Africa. Since Senegal is a member of the African Growth and Opportunity Act, China can manufacture and export goods from the special economic zone to the US market using Senegal’s quota and duty-free privileges. The same holds for the EU market, where Senegalese goods can enter through the Everything But Arms trade arrangement.

Kazakhstan: Ground zero in Central Asia

Kazakhstan has been described as “ground zero” for China’s agricultural ambitions in Central Asia. A massive dry port, 49% owned by Chinese companies, has been built in the town of Korghos on the border between China and Kazakhstan to facilitate food trade. A railroad and a highway are being constructed across the country to connect China with Europe. And a trade corridor has been constructed which links Kazakhstan to Southeast Asia through the Chinese port of Lianyungang in Jiangsu province. BRI’s Silk Road fund alone has earmarked US$2 billion for Kazakhstan, much of it connected to agriculture.

Chinese interests are eyeing Kazakhstan as a new source of wheat, sugar, meat and vegetable oil. Authorities and foreign investors in Kazakhstan view China as a lucrative market for farm exports, especially beef, wheat and dairy. Kazakhstan is already on its way to tripling wheat exports to China by 2020. The country has also just broken into China’s soybean market and is building a new meat processing plant near the Chinese border focused on producing beef and lamb for the Chinese market.

In May 2016, the government of Kazakhstan announced that Chinese companies were proposing 19 new agroindustrial projects valued at US$1.9 billion under the banner of BRI. One year later, seven agreements worth US$160 million were signed at the Kazakh-Chinese Agriculture Investment Forum in Astana. With the exception of large-scale poultry and cattle farms, the projects focus more on processing than on primary production.

COFCO, China’s biggest food trader, is one of the Chinese players moving into Kazakhstan. COFCO has partnered with a Kazakhstani company to produce tomato paste for China and is starting to import beef from Kazakhstan through a freight train service opened in 2017. Another Chinese company, CITIC Construction, is investing in livestock production to generate beef for export to China. Meanwhile, Aiju Grain and Oil has started producing and exporting vegetable oil using farms that Aiju “either owns or invests in” in Kazakhstan. The list goes on, with Chinese companies partnering with Kazakhstani firms to venture into fruit and vegetable production, sugar processing, meat packing, oil processing, and flour and noodle manufacturing.

In 2016, protests erupted throughout Kazakhstan after the government announced it had revised a 2003 land law to extend the farmland lease period for foreigners from 10 to 25 years. As a result of the protests, the government postponed implementation of this measure until December 2021. Still, protests related to large-scale Chinese investments continue to rage, especially around labour issues.

Conflicts and controversies

There are a number of issues beginning to emerge from Chinese foreign investment in general, and BRI projects in particular. These revolve around debt and threats to national sovereignty, land grabbing, displacement, human rights abuses in conflict zones, environmental impacts, public health concerns and labour violations.

Poster for a Chinese high-speed train at the construction site for a bridge over the Mekong River near Luang Prabang, Laos. Photo: Adam Dean for The New York Times

Many BRI projects are financed by loans to recipient governments which can’t pay them back. The government of Sri Lanka, for instance, agreed to allow China to build a new port on its southern shore, but when Colombo couldn’t pay back the loan, the Chinese took over the port. Other BRI projects have led to similar concerns about debt repayment. In August 2018, Malaysia withdrew from a US$22 billion BRI project fearing it would be unable to pay for it. Indonesia’s President Jokowi is holding off on committing to BRI due to similar concerns.

Land is another controversial issue since BRI projects require large swaths of land on which to develop infrastructure and industrial zones. In Laos, for instance, a railway project (initiated before BRI but then placed under it) is grabbing the land of over 4,400 farming families, who are being displaced without compensation.[11] Many of the families have been waiting for compensation for more than two years and some have been forced to migrate to neighbouring countries to find work after losing their farms. A 2015 GRAIN report identified 61 land deals involving Chinese companies covering 3.3 million hectares in 31 countries.[12] It is unclear exactly how many of these deals are directly tied to BRI-associated projects, but BRI is certainly helping to increase China’s control over the world’s farmland.

BRI projects are also passing through conflict areas in several countries. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, for example, cuts through the disputed territory of Gilgit Baltistan, which is likely to exacerbate religious, geopolitical, military and land tensions between India and Pakistan. In Southeast Asia, planned trading networks between China and India include areas of longstanding conflict such as the historical persecution and displacement of the Rohingyas and other ethnic minorities in Rakhine State, Myanmar.[13] Both China and India have proposed to set up a special economic zone in Rakhine State to link trade between South and Southeast Asia under the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor. In addition, according to Community Care and Emergency Response and Rehabilitation Myanmar, numerous indigenous landholders who lived from agriculture were evicted when the persecution and expulsion of the Rohingya intensified in the area.

Another conflict area in Myanmar, Kachin State, has been targeted as a growing expansion area for banana plantations for export to China. Villagers in Myanmar report thousands of trucks coming in and out of the region transporting bananas. As a result, there have been growing protests against Chinese investments in Myanmar over the past year.

Finally, there are serious concerns about the public health, labour and environmental impacts of BRI projects. Chinese foreign agricultural investments in Southeast Asia have led to the increased use of chemical pesticides and fertilisers, causing health problems in communities.

This is especially well documented in the case of Chinese banana and rubber plantations in Laos and Myanmar. Water supplies are affected as water is polluted or diverted from communities to irrigate Chinese plantations. There are also reports of declining soil quality on Chinese plantations caused by input-heavy farming practices. Additionally, there are reports of forced labour being used on some Chinese plantations. [14]

Conclusion

More work is urgently needed to map out the reach and impacts of BRI-affiliated projects that are taking over farmland and resources with the aim of boosting agricultural production and trade with China. Not only are these projects having a negative impact on the livelihoods of small farmers and rural communities in target countries, they will also ultimately undermine peasant farmers in China by replacing them with industrial production and food imports. Instead of the large-scale industrial farming and expanded global trade that BRI envisions, we need to support the small farmers and resources involved in ecological food production for local markets.

Box 1. BRI accelerating climate disaster

BRI’s model of infrastructure-driven economic growth is based on grabbing large areas of land and territory to convert to economic corridors. This necessarily involves the loss of forests, ecosystems, traditional livelihoods and biodiversity. What’s more, all of BRI’s projects are high carbon-emitting initiatives: from building new roads, railway lines and ports in the Pacific and Indian Oceans to creating oil and gas pipelines to Russia, Kazakhstan and Myanmar to setting up plantations, large-scale farms and processing zones across Asia and possibly Africa.

While it pledges to cut coal use at home, China is opening new mines and building several large-scale coal power plants abroad: in Pakistan alone, Chinese coal investments reach more than US$10 billion.[15]  According to The Financial Times, BRI energy projects focus “disproportionately” on fossil fuels: “If new energy infrastructure investments in BRI countries follow patterns similar to the average emissions intensity observed in these countries in the past, roughly three quarters of the global energy-related carbon budget compatible with the Paris Agreement will be consumed by 2040.”[16]

An environmental assessment of BRI projects in Myanmar shows that forest degradation is another major risk from projects like the oil and gas pipeline from the Rakhine coastline up to China’s Yunnan province, the US$10 billion Kyaukphyu Special Economic Zone, and associated roads and railways.[17] Widespread deforestation in Myanmar due to these projects could impact 24 million people, with farmers most affected. Deforestation has also been cited as a cause of the landslides and floods that occurred in Myanmar in 2015, which led to the salinisation of valuable rice paddy land.

Lastly, most of the agriculture projects being developed under BRI are industrial and export-oriented. The industrial food system is already responsible for up to half of global greenhouse gas emissions. [18] The World Bank says that emissions from agriculture and food could account for as much as 70% of the greenhouse gas emissions the world can emit while still having a likely chance of limiting dangerous global temperature rise. Given its focus on expanding industrial agriculture and food trade, BRI could potentially accelerate the world into climate disaster even faster than experts predict.

Box. 2 BRI and trade deals

Trade agreements are expected to play an important role in lending legal strength to BRI projects. This is particularly the case with agreements setting out legal protections for investors, common food safety standards, intellectual property rules and market access arrangements. China already has trade deals with a number of countries involved in BRI projects including Pakistan, Maldives, Georgia, the Southeast Asian ASEAN bloc and the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union. It is also currently negotiating a massive regional trade deal (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership or RCEP) that includes India, as well as smaller bilateral pacts with key BRI partners like Sri Lanka and the Gulf States.

The agreement with the Eurasian Economic Union is significant because it directly links China with both Russia and Kazakhstan, major territories for BRI. It is, for the moment, a “light” agreement that open the door to formal cooperation without locking the countries into strong new commitments. But those openings could lead to stronger agreements about markets and investment down the line. RCEP could similarly upgrade China’s trade and investment opportunities in India and Southeast Asia, but it’s not clear whether and when consensus could be reached. In the coming years, we can expect China to push new trade deals with Pakistan and Bangladesh, among others.

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Notes

The transnational company Bayer said Wednesday that farmers in France and Germany were digging up thousands of hectares of rapeseed fields after traces of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are banned for cultivation, were found in seeds sold by the company.

In Europe, few varieties of GMO are authorized for growing, mostly due to environmental concerns. However, during a routine check, French authorities found out GMO seeds in three rapeseed seeds batches sold by Dekalb, a brand previously owned by Monsanto before the company was taken over by Bayer in 2018.

GMO crops are not authorized in Europe, although GMO could be imported for food and animal feed, Catherine Lamboley, Bayer’s chief operating officer for France, said and explained that the source of the contamination of rapeseed seeds, which were produced in Argentine GMO-free area, is not known yet.

Bayer issued a product recall but some of the seeds had already been sown, representing about 8,000 hectares in France and 2,500-3,000 hectares in Germany, which are in the process of being dug up.

Published on https://t.co/mRLw4kzIxB : Millions of bees die because of Neonicotinoid pesticides manufactured by Bayer and Syngenta and 94% of GMO corn in US is treated with either imidacloprid or clothianidin pesticides: #neonicotinoids #pesticides #honeybees #bees
… pic.twitter.com/6RyviIfMB8

— Erica Johannson (@OrganicErica) February 7, 2019

“We decided to immediately stop all rapeseed seed production in Argentina,” Lamboley said.

The overall cost of this GMO contamination is not known. However, Bayer offers US$2,278 per hectare as compensation to affected farmers, which suggest a US$23 million payout for both countries.

According to the transnational company, the amount will be enough to compensate for the economic losses caused to farmers in this season and the next, since they will not be able to cultivate crops as a precaution to avoid the GMO strain’s reappearance.

The order to destroy some crops is another blow for European rapeseed growers who had already cut sowings sharply due to dry weather.

Besides, the currently affected area is small compared to the total French winter rapeseed area, which the farm ministry, in December, forecast at 1.23 million hectares. The German crop area is believed to be close to 1 million hectares.

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It didn’t take long for Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s comments that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had “gone full gangster” to make the news rounds all the way from the U.S. to the Middle East, across the globe and back again. The Republican senator made his controversial comments during Retired Gen. John Abizaid‘s nomination hearing Wednesday in Washington to be the Trump administration’s first ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Despite increasing tensions between the two long-time allies, the U.S. has not had an ambassador to Saudi Arabia since Trump became president in January 2017. Abizaid is a retired four-star Army general who led U.S. Central Command during the Iraq war under the Bush and Obama administrations.

During the hearing, both Republican and Democrats pressed Abizaid over what they said were Saudi domestic repression, including lashings, electrocutions, beatings, whippings, sexual abuse, raids, the alleged detention and torture of activists and royal family members, the likely killing of Saudi dissident journalist, and U.S. resident, Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Turkey last October, as well as the recent alleged torture of a U.S. citizen.

Ruthless and reckless

Republican Sen. Jim Risch, the committee chairman, joined in, stating that “Saudi Arabia has engaged in acts that are simply not acceptable.” Another Republican, Sen. Ron Johnson reiterated Rubio’s “full gangster” remarks. Rubio added that

“He [bin Salman] is reckless, he’s ruthless, he has a penchant for escalation, for taking high risks, confrontational in his foreign policy approach and I think increasingly willing to test the limits of what he can get away with the United States.”

Senators also condemned Saudi Arabia’s conduct in the ongoing war in Yemen, which the Crown Prince has been instrumental in. Abizaid, for his part, paid his part skillfully, which should help ease concerns among senators whether he is fit or not for the high-profile diplomatic post. Though defending the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia as strategically important, he also called for accountability for the murder of Khashoggi, and support for human rights.

“In the long run, we need a strong and mature partnership with Saudi Arabia,” Abizaid told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “It is in our interests to make sure that the relationship is sound.”

Part of the unbridled criticism over recent alleged Saudi misbehavior comes from frustrated American lawmakers that want to see the Trump administration take a harder line over Saudi Arabia, while both the House and Senate have passed resolutions to that would end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. However, Trump has resisted such resolutions. Abizaid said that continued U.S. support “bolsters the self-defense capabilities of our partners and reduces the risk of harm to civilians.”

Significant take-aways

At the end of the day, several issues have to be examined. First, though lawmakers have the right to make such assertions at the hearing, the actions of Saudi Arabia are still the actions of a sovereign power beyond the scope of U.S. control. A comparison could even be made over human rights abuse claims, torture and other disconcerting claims in China, particularly in Tibet, where hundreds of thousands of citizens, mostly men, are detained for extended periods of time and endure what Beijing calls re-education. Yet, the U.S. relationship with China operates under different imperatives that the U.S.-Saudi relationship, so pressure over these alleged abuses isn’t being promulgated on the same scale.

The second take away from remarks made at Wednesday’s hearing centers on what can be called reality-geopolitics. The more than 70-year alliance between Washington and Riyadh that has survived World War II, being on the same side against Soviet expansion during the Cold War, surviving the fallout from both the 1967 and 1973 Arab oil embargo, managing Saudi angst at continued U.S. support of Israel, as well as now working together trying to reign in Iranian regional hegemony and support of terrorism – this fragile alliance has to be viewed through a different lens than other alliances.

Economic necessity

The U.S.-Saudi alliance is one born of necessity, mostly economic (global oil markets) as well as one of wrestling with middle eastern security. The two nations don’t share common values, like the U.S. does with the U.K. or with much of Western Europe, doesn’t share a similar history, whose values are derived from extremely a different religious history and perspective. The U.S. is the largest democracy in the world, while Saudi Arabia is a top-down authoritarian monarchy influenced in large part by its strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam.

Just the fact that two radically different nations can exist as allies for so long has to appreciate. Nonetheless, Senator Bob Menendez, the committee’s ranking Democrat, acknowledged the strategic importance of Saudi ties, amid threats from Iran. “But we cannot let these interests blind us to our values or to our long-term interests in stability,” he added.

However, another point to consider is growing U.S. energy independence, particularly as the country recent recently passed the 12 million barrels per day oil production mark, with that production amount projected to increase going forward to next year and beyond. Though U.S. crude is mostly light, sweet as opposed to heavier, sour crude mostly produced and imported from Saudi Arabia by U.S. refineries, growing U.S. global market share, reduced Saudi oil imports, could indeed lead to fracturing on the U.S.-Saudi alliance. It’s oil first and middle eastern security second, which often goes hand in hand, that is the glue that keeps this fragile alliance from falling apart.

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Tim Daiss is an oil markets analyst, journalist and author that has been working out of the Asia-Pacific region for 12 years.

Featured image is from OilPrice.com

During the past few days, Venezuela was suffering a major blackout that left the country in darkness. The crisis started on March 7 with a failure at the Guri hydroelectric power plant, which produces 80% of the country’s power. Additionally, an explosion was reported at Sidor Substation in Bolivar state.

Since then, the government has been struggling to solve the crisis with varying success.

President Nicolas Maduro says that the blackout is the reason of “the electric war announced and directed by American imperialism.” According to Maduro, electrical systems were targeted by cyberattacks and “infiltrators”. He added that authorities managed to restore power to “many parts” of the country on March 8, but the restored systems were knocked down after the country’s grid was once again attacked. He noted that “one of the sources of generation that was working perfectly” had been sabotaged and accused “infiltrators of attacking the electric company from the inside.”

Communication and information minister Jorge Rodriguez described the situation as “the most brutal attack on the Venezuelan people in 200 years”. He also described the situation as the “deliberate sabotage” on behalf of the US-backed opposition.

In own turn, the US continues to reject claims accusing it of attempts to destabilize the situation in the country. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even claimed that Washington and its allies would not hurt the “ordinary Venezuelans.” According to him, what’s hurting the people is the “Maduro regime’s incompetence.”

“No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro,” Pompeo wrote in Twitter, adding that “Maduro’s policies bring nothing but darkness.”

Unfortunately, the top diplomat did not explain how wide-scale economic sanctions imposed to wreck the country’s economic should help the “ordinary Venezuelans”.

The State Department attitude was expectedly supported by US-proclaimed Venezuelan Interim President Juan Guaido, who recently returned to country after an attempt to get more foreign support for US-backed regime change efforts. Guaido accused the “Maduro Regime” of turning the blackout during the night in a “horror movie” with his “gangs” terrorizing people.

Another narrative, which recently set the mainstream media on fire, is the alleged Cuban meddling in the crisis. According to this very version of the event, “forces of democracy” were not able to overthrow the Venezuelan government because its political elite is controlled by Cuban intelligence services. President Donald Trump even said Maduro is nothing more than a “Cuban puppet.”

Taking account already existing allegations about the presence of Hezbollah and Russian mercenaries in Venezuela and an expected second attempt to stage US aid delivery provocation on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, it becomes clear that chances of US direct action to bring into power own political puppet are once again growing.

The February attempt to stage a provocation failed and make a final step toward a regime change by force failed after it was publicly revealed that the US-backed opposition was intentionally burning “aid trucks” to blame the Maduro government. Furthermore, the military backed Maduro, and the scale and intensity of protests across the country were not enough to paralyze the government.

The blackout in Venezuela was likely meant to bring the country into disorder and draw off army and security forces. Therefore, an attempt to stage a new provocation to justify a foreign intervention to overthrow the Venezuelan government could be expected anytime soon.

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A report by a London based think tank that focuses on capital markets has published the most comprehensive analysis yet of the impact of Brexit on the banking and finance industry in London. It has determined that more than 250 firms in banking and finance have moved or are moving business, staff, assets or legal entities away from the UK to the EU – and these numbers are likely to increase significantly in the near future. In total, close to £1 trillion of assets have already been relocated – with much more expected.

With little more than two weeks to go until a potential ‘no deal’ Brexit, more bad news arrives, this time for the Financial Services industry.

The New Financial think tank has a membership made up of some of the biggest names in the financial services business, including the City of London Corporation, JP Morgan, Barclays, Lombard and the London Stock Exchange to name just a few. It has identified in its report that 275 firms in the UK have moved or are moving some of their business, staff, assets or legal entities from the UK to the EU to prepare for Brexit. Around 250 firms have chosen specific post-Brexit hubs for their EU business, and more than 200 firms have set up or are setting up new entities in the EU to manage their business.

“These moves are the inevitable consequence of Brexit. The political uncertainty since the referendum and failure to reach a deal has forced firms to prepare for the worst and put their contingency plans into action. Much of the damage has already been done and for many firms, Brexit happened sometime last year. This shift will chip away at London’s position as the dominant financial centres in Europe; increase cost, complexeity and risk in European financial services; reduce the UK’s influence in the banking and finance industry at a European and global level; and hit tax receipts and exports in financial services.”

The report found that:

Dublin is by far the biggest beneficiary with 100 relocations, well ahead of Luxembourg (60), Paris (41), Frankfurt (40) and Amsterdam (32).

The post-Brexit landscape is much more ‘multipolar’ than before: more than 40 firms are moving staff or business to more than one financial centre in the EU.

There is a wide range in how different sectors have responded: for example, nearly half of asset managers, hedge funds and private equity firms in our sample have chosen Dublin, while nearly 90% of firms moving to Frankfurt are banks or investment banks.

“The shift in underlying business is more significant than headlines about the number of staff: our conservative estimates shows that banks and investment banks are moving around £800bn in assets; asset managers have so far transferred more than £65bn in funds; and insurance companies have so far moved £35bn in assets.”

New Financial found that the impact of Brexit is bigger than expected and that they think the report actually understates the full picture. Many firms will have quietly moved parts of their staff or business below the radar, others will have held off making a formal move. They also think plenty of other firms aren’t yet ready and not yet moved.

The think tank report also clearly states an expectation that the headline numbers will increase significantly in the next few years as local regulators across the EU require firms to increase the substance of their local operations. Worse still, the report says that hundreds of firms will have to move something somewhere to retain access to EU markets but which haven’t yet done so.

“The scale of the shift is not to be underestimated either. Only a small number of firms have said what they are moving and already the numbers are very large: £800bn in bank assets is nearly 10% of the entire UK banking system. The final tally is likely to be much higher, which will reduce the UK’s tax base, supervisory influence and ultimately have an impact on jobs.”

This report adds weight to the mounting evidence that Brexit is and will be extremely damaging to the United Kingdom in the short, medium and long-term prospects of the country.

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Even as the Venezuelan government blamed the recent power outage on U.S.-led “sabotage,” the U.S. has long had a plan on the books for targeting the civilian power grid of adversarial nations.

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For nearly four days, much of Venezuela has been without power, bringing the country’s embattled economy to a near standstill. Though power is now returning, the outage saw U.S. officials and politicians blame the Venezuelan government for the crisis while officials in Caracas accused the U.S. of conducting “sabotage” and launching cyberattacks that targeted its civilian power grid as well as of employing saboteurs within Venezuela.

Although many mainstream media outlets have echoed the official U.S. government response, some journalists have strayed from the pack. One notable example is Kalev Leetaru, who wrote at Forbes that “the United States remotely interfering with its [Venezuela’s] power grid is actually quite realistic.”

Leetaru also noted that “timing such an outage to occur at a moment of societal upheaval in a way that delegitimizes the current government, exactly as a government-in-waiting has presented itself as a ready alternative, is actually one of the tactics” he had previously explored in a 2015 article detailing U.S. government hybrid warfare tactics “to weaken an adversary prior to conventional invasion or to forcibly and deniably effect a transition in a foreign government.”

In addition to Leetaru’s claims, others have asserted U.S. government involvement after U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is deeply involved in Trump’s Venezuela policy, appeared to have prior knowledge that the blackouts would occur when he tweeted about them only three minutes after they had begun.

While several journalists have pointed out that the probability that the Trump administration was responsible for the blackout is highly likely, few — if any — pointed out that the U.S. has long had highly developed plans involving the use of cyberattacks to attack critical power-grid infrastructure in countries targeted for regime change by Washington.

Indeed, the most well-known plan of this type, known by its codename “Nitro Zeus,” was originally created under the George W. Bush administration and was aimed at Iran. With so many former Bush officials now calling the shots in the Trump administration, particularly its Venezuela policy, the potential return of a “Nitro Zeus” virus, this time tailored to Venezuela, seems increasingly likely.

A little hammer to use when big hammers have been nixed

The “Nitro Zeus” plan first came to light in a November 2016 exposé published in the New York Times, which described it as an “elaborate plan” that was created for use against Iran were negotiations over its nuclear program to fail. That program targeted “Iran’s air defenses, communications systems and crucial parts of its power grid. At its height it “involved thousands of American military and intelligence personnel” and is believed to have cost tens of millions of dollars. The program intimately involved both the National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations unit and the U.S. Cyber Command.

Screengrab from The New York Times

The program was shelved when the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was established, though the Trump administration’s decision to unilaterally withdraw from the deal has led some to ask whether the Trump administration has been considering reviving the program. While they may not have revived it for use against Iran, they instead may have done so in Venezuela, if Venezuelan government assertions that a U.S. cyberattack is to blame for much of the country’s recent power outage are to be believed.

Indeed, Leetaru noted in his recent Forbes article that “given the U.S. government’s longstanding concern with Venezuela’s government, it is likely that the U.S. already maintains a deep presence within the country’s national infrastructure grid,” much as it did with Iran in connection with the Nitro Zeus program prior to its public revelation three years ago.

The Nitro Zeus program is not nearly as well known as its relative, the Stuxnet virus, which was co-developed by the U.S. and Israel and used to attack Iranian software controlling uranium enrichment centers. Yet Nitro Zeus, despite its relative lack of infamy, is notable for several reasons. First, it “took it [U.S. cyberwarfare] to a new level,” according to a former official involved in the project cited by the Times. This was because, prior to Nitro Zeus, “the U.S. had never assembled a combined cyber and kinetic attack plan on this scale,” and also because executing the program would have “significant effects on civilians, particularly if the United States had to cut vast swaths of the country’s electrical grid and communications networks.”

Another reason Nitro Zeus is notable, particularly in light of U.S. efforts to meddle in Venezuela, is the motive for its creation. Indeed, although Nitro Zeus became the “enormous, and enormously complex” program detailed by the Times during the Obama administration, work on the program had actually begun during the George W. Bush administration. According to a report in the Daily Beast, Bush had considered Nitro Zeus “a necessary tactical alternative after the Iraq War sabotaged his chances of starting another Middle East invasion.” In other words, after the Iraq War debacle made it more difficult for the U.S. to launch unilateral military interventions, the Bush administration opted to develop “non-kinetic” military tools that would avoid angering the U.S. public and U.S. allies abroad.

Furthermore, as Tyler Rogoway wrote at Foxtrot Alpha:

[Programs like Nitro Zeus] can be paired for synergistic effect, leaving its target country’s military blind and deaf and its population suffering. And all this can be had without ever dropping a bomb and even under the veil of plausible deniability.”

This, according to Rogoway, has led such programs to become “more and more a viable alternative to traditional forms of attack,” given that the U.S. can deny its involvement, avoiding potential diplomatic blowback, and because it can wreak havoc not just on a country’s military but its civilian population.

The logic behind the likelihood of U.S. cyber sabotage

While “Nitro Zeus” was never unleashed upon Iran, it’s likely that the program spawned similar attack plans on the power grids of other adversarial nations given the precedent it set. As the Times pointed out in its Nitro Zeus exposé:

The United States military develops contingency plans for all kinds of possible conflicts, such as a North Korean attack on the South, loose nuclear weapons in South Asia or uprisings in Africa or Latin America. Most sit on the shelf, and are updated every few years.”

This point was expanded upon by Rogoway, who noted:

Nitro Zeus is most likely one of a whole slew of plans to attack potential enemies via cyber weaponry. Plans surely exist for all of America’s potential adversaries, and some are likely to be far more elaborate and deadly than anything that has been disclosed to date.”

There are more than a few indications that many of the more aggressive “contingency plans” have moved to the top of the toolbox under the Trump administration. For instance, key former Bush officials that are now in the Trump administration, particularly John Bolton and Elliot Abrams, are known for their aggressive stances and willingness to promote extreme policies targeting adversaries, even those policies that harm or kill scores of innocent civilians. Thus, voices like those in the Obama State Department and National Security Council, who had warned of the potential adverse effects on civilians that a Nitro Zeus blackout could cause, are unlikely to influence the likes of Bolton and Abrams — who have an outsized role in creating the administration’s Venezuela policy.

Furthermore, such a plan would be considered valuable by Bolton and Abrams in the same way that Bush valued Nitro Zeus after his “hands were tied” following the Iraq War disaster. In regard to Venezuela, Bolton and Abrams similarly have their hands tied when it comes to military action, given that military intervention of any type has been resoundingly rejected by the U.S.’ allies in Latin America and elsewhere. Not only that but Abrams’ favored tactic of providing arms disguised as “humanitarian aid” to insurgents has also failed, limiting the aggressive actions that can be taken by the administration.

Unable to launch a military intervention — either overt or covert — a Nitro Zeus cyberattack would likely have been a top contender for a next step following the failed “humanitarian aid” stunt and the rejection of any type of military intervention by the U.S.’ Latin American allies.

In addition, many of those responsible for the creation of the Nitro Zeus program share connections with neoconservatives who are influential in the Trump administration. For instance, Keith Alexander — who was NSA director at the time the Nitro Zeus program began and for much of its development — is now the CEO of his new cybersecurity consultancy, IronNet Cybersecurity. Sitting on IronNet’s board of directors alongside Alexander is Jack Keane, a zealously pro-war retired general whom Trump valued enough to offer the position of Secretary of Defense, an offer Keane declined. Keane is a close associate of the neoconservative Kagan family and is currently chairman of the Institute for the Study of War, founded by Kimberly Kagan and financed by top U.S. weapons companies.

With Bush-era warmongers now dominating Trump’s Venezuela policy, it seems increasingly likely that efforts to revive the Bush/Obama-era Nitro Zeus program have taken place. Indeed, with such an enormous and complex program already on the books and the likely existence of spin-off programs that have developed over the past decade, it was likely the easiest route for another “aggressive” U.S.-backed measure targeting the Venezuelan government.

However, if the U.S. did conduct a cyber attack on Venezuela’s power grid, it would not be powerful neoconservatives in the administration who would ultimately be to blame, as only the U.S. president can authorize an offensive cyberattack. Thus, if any part of Venezuela’s current blackout was indeed U.S.-directed sabotage, it was President Donald Trump who gave the order to attack Venezuela’s civilian power infrastructure, a strange thing to do for someone who professes to care so much for the Venezuelan people.

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Whitney Webb is a MintPress News journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.

Featured image is from Axios

In 1981 when Israel officially annexed Syria’s Golan Heights after occupying it following the Six Day War, the United States under President Ronald Reagan voted unanimously with the UN Security Council to condemn the Israeli theft of around 1,800 square kilometers.

On December 15 1981, The New York Times reported:

The Reagan Administration said the annexation of the Golan Heights was inconsistent with the Camp David accords. A White House spokesman said the United States had been given no prior warning of the move.

Since that time, the situation has changed dramatically in Israel’s favor. 

Last November, the US voted with Israel against a UN resolution calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan. The resolution was passed by a 181-2 margin with only the US and Israel voting against. The US had abstained on previous resolutions calling for Israel to leave the Golan Heights. 

The record shows and the late IDF boss Moshe Dayan admitted Israel had engineered numerous provocations in a demilitarized zone on the Golan border of Syria prior to the war. 

This led to retaliatory strikes on Israeli kibbutzim and moshavim near the border which in turn prompted a response by Israel. In addition to its strategic significance, the Golan Heights has a bounty of fresh water. During the invasion and occupation of southern Lebanon, the Israelis planned to steal water from the Litani River and divert it to Israel. 

The Golan figures into the plan for a Greater Israel envisioned by David Ben-Gurion and other leading Zionists. According to Ben-Gurion, the frontiers of a future Israel would reach 

to the north, the Litani river, to the northeast, the Wadi ‘Owja, twenty miles south of Damascus; the southern border will be mobile and pushed into Sinai at least up to Wadi al-‘Arish; and to the east, the Syrian Desert, including the furthest edge of Transjordan. (Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians).

There is, however, a more practical and less ideological reason for annexing the Golan Heights—oil.

In early 2013, Israel granted the American corporation Genie Oil and Gas a permit to explore for oil and gas on a 153-square mile radius in the southern part of the Golan Heights. Genie Energy is advised by Dick Cheney and its shareholders include Jacob Rothschild and Rupert Murdoch. 

Bestselling author and strategic risk consultant F. William Engdahl writes in Golan Heights, Israel, Oil and Trump:

As I noted in a piece published on NEO [New Eastern Outlook] in 2015, Genie Energy is no “penny stock” run-of-the-mill oil company. Its board of Advisors includes Dick Cheney. It includes former CIA head and chairman of the above-mentioned Foundation for Defense of Democracies, James Woolsey. It includes Jacob Lord Rothschild of the London banking dynasty and a former business partner of convicted Russian oil oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Before his arrest Khodorkovsky secretly transferred his shares in Yukos Oil to Rothschild.

In 2015 it was announced a large oil deposit was discovered in the Golan. It is estimated the reserve contains billions of barrels, enough to satisfy Israel’s energy needs for decades. That same year drilling began north of Nahal El Al near Moshav Natur, a former kibbutz on the southern Golan Heights.

Earlier this month several Senate Republicans, led by failed presidential candidate Ted Cruz and the notorious neocon Tom Cotton, introduced resolutions calling for the US to officially recognize Israel’s annexation of the Golan, although the presence of vast oil reserves is not mentioned, not by Congress or a stenographic corporate propaganda media. There is a strong consensus on both sides of the aisle. Democrat House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer supports recognizing Israel’s “right” to keep the Golan and its reserve of oil. 

On March 7, World Israeli News reported Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad warned Kristin Lund, head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, that “Syria will attack Israel if it does not leave the Golan Heights.”

According to World Israeli News,

[M]ultiple Israeli political leaders have responded to Syria’s historic claim to the Israeli-occupied Golan and willingness to go to war over it. While speaking on a visit to the Golan Heights, Blue and White party politicians Gabi Ashkenazi, Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz [who may replace Bibi Netanyahu] and Moshe Ya’alon vowed, ‘It is ours and it will stay ours’—certainly a dominant sentiment that cuts across Israeli party lines.

Resolutions introduced by staunchly pro-Israel advocates in the US Senate follow a pattern. Venezuela, with the largest reserves of oil in the world, and Iran, with oil reserves coming in third behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, are now suffering under US-imposed economic sanctions.

The Trump administration argues Venezuela is a brutal socialist dictatorship and Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons and testing missiles that will be used against Israel.

All of this is window dressing for the real objective: neoliberal control of significant oil reserves and other strategic resources. Iran and Syria understand this and are determined to protect their national sovereignty and natural resources from the violent, resource-gobbling machinations of the United States and its apartheid client in the Middle East. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

What is Israel’s stake in east Syria? Has Israel influenced Washington’s decision to maintain a long-term military presence in Syria? How does Israel benefit from the splintering of Syria into smaller statelets and from undermining the power of the central government in Damascus? Did Israel’s regional ambitions factor into Trump’s decision to shrug off Turkey’s national security concerns and create an independent Kurdish state on Syrian sovereign territory? What is the connection between the Kurdish independence movement and the state of Israel?

The Pentagon does everything in its power to conceal the number and location of US military bases in a war zone. That rule applies to east Syria as well, which means we cannot confirm with absolute certainty how many bases really exist. Even so, in 2017, a Turkish news agency, “Anadolu Agency published an infographic on Tuesday showing 10 locations in which US troops were stationed. Two airbases, eight military points in PKK/PYD-controlled areas.”

According to a report in Orient.Net:

“The 8 military sites, according to the agency, host military personnel involved in coordinating the aerial and artillery bombardments of US forces, training Kurdish military personnel, planning special operations and participating in intensive combat operations.” (“AA’s map of US bases in Syria infuriates Pentagon”, orient.net)

The location of these bases is unimportant, what is important is that there has been no indication that Washington has any plan to close these bases down or to withdraw American troops. In fact, as the New York Times reported just weeks ago, the number of US troops has actually increased by roughly 1,000 since Trump made his withdrawal announcement in mid-December.

We think that is especially significant in view of Trump’s surprising comments last week, that he now agrees “100%” with maintaining a military presence in Syria. His sudden reversal shows that the opponents of the “withdrawal plan” have prevailed and the US is not going to leave Syria after all. It’s also worth noting that Trump administration has made no effort to implement the “Manbij Roadmap” which requires the US to coordinate its withdrawal with the Turkish military in order to maintain security and avoid a vacuum that could be filled by hostile elements. Ankara and Washington agreed to this arrangement long ago in order to expel Kurdish militants (who Turkey identifies as “terrorists”) from the area along the border. It appears now that Trump will not honor that deal, mainly because Trump intends to be in Syria for the long-haul.

But, why? Why would Trump risk a confrontation with a critical NATO ally (Turkey) merely to hold a 20 mile-deep stretch of land that has no strategic value to the United States? It doesn’t make sense, does it?

Now in earlier articles we have argued that influential think tanks, like the Brookings Institute, have played a critical role in shaping Washington’s Syria policy, and that indeed is true. Just take a look at this short excerpt from a piece by Brookings Michael E. O’Hanlon titled “Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war”. Here’s an excerpt:

“…the only realistic path forward may be a plan that in effect deconstructs Syria….the international community should work to create pockets with more viable security and governance within Syria over time… The idea would be to help moderate elements establish reliable safe zones within Syria once they were able….Creation of these sanctuaries would produce autonomous zones that would never again have to face the prospect of rule by either Assad or ISIL….

The interim goal might be a confederal Syria, with several highly autonomous zones… The confederation would likely require support from an international peacekeeping force… to help provide relief for populations within them, and to train and equip more recruits so that the zones could be stabilized and then gradually expanded.” (“Deconstructing Syria: A new strategy for America’s most hopeless war”, Michael E. O’Hanlon, Brookings Institute)

Strategic planners and think-tank pundits have long sought to break up Syria, that’s old news. What’s new is the emergence of powerful neocons operating in the White House and State Department (John Bolton, Jared Kushner, Mike Pompeo) who, we suspect, are using their influence to shape policy in a way that is sympathetic to Israel’s regional ambitions. It’s worth noting, that Zionist plans to dismember surrounding Arab states to ensure Israeli superiority, date back more than 30 years.

The so called Yinon plan was a fairly straightforward strategy to balkanize the Middle East’s geopolitical environment to enhance Israeli regional hegemony while “A Clean Break” was a more recent adaptation which emphasized “weakening, containing or even rolling back Syria” and “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” In any event, many right-wing Israelis seem to think that chopping up sovereign Arab states into smaller bite-sized pieces, governed by tribal leaders or Washington’s puppets, will unavoidably boost Tel Aviv’s power across the Middle East.

But how does the US military occupation of east Syria fit in with all this?

Well, the US occupation effectively creates an independent Kurdish state in the heart of the Arab world which helps to weaken Israel’s rivals. That’s why some have referred to emerging Kurdistan as a “second Israel”. Here’s how Seth Frantzman, a research associate at the Rubin Center for Research in International Affairs in Herzliya, explains it:

“Israel would welcome another state in the region that shares its concerns about the rising power of Iran, including the threat of Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq,” says Frantzman. “Reports have also indicated that oil from Kurdistan is purchased by Israel.” (“Why Israel supports an independent Iraqi Kurdistan”, CNN)

While its true that Kurdish oil may provide an added incentive for long-term occupation, the real goal is to block a “land corridor” from opening (that would connect Beirut, to Damascus, to Baghdad to Tehran) and to further undermine Iran’s growing influence in the region. Those are the real objectives. In fact, US military operations in Syria are actually part of a broader campaign directed at Iran, a campaign that undoubtedly has the full support of neocons Pompeo and Bolton.

Check out this lengthy quote from a piece by Rauf Baker at The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies which helps to put the whole Israel-Kurdistan issue into perspective:

“Since declaring “Rojava” in northern and northeastern Syria in 2013, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its military arm, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), both of which are linked to the PKK, have built a uniquely viable entity amid the surrounding bedlam. (Note: The PKK, is on the State Departments list of terrorist organizations and has been conducting a war on Turkey for more than 3 decades.)

The ancient proverb “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” could be useful to Israel in this grim scenario. The Syrian regime continues to uphold its traditional anti-Israel stance, and is in any case largely dependent on Iran, Hezbollah, and the other Shiite militias, all of which want Israel destroyed….

The Syrian Kurdish parties opposing PYD are openly linked to Ankara, which is ruled by a president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who is obsessed with power and whose ideology considers the entire State of Israel to be illegitimately occupied by Jews. Moreover, he has recently established a rapprochement with Tehran – a worrying development…

Iran is now closer than ever to securing a land corridor that will connect it to the Mediterranean through Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. This corridor will expand its sphere of influence from the Strait of Hormuz in the east to the Mediterranean in the west, and will ensure that Israel is surrounded by land and sea…

Should Israel strengthen its relationship with the Syrian Kurds, its gains would extend beyond strategic, political, and security benefits. Rojava’s natural resources, especially its oil, can contribute to Israel’s energy supply and be invested in projects such as an oil pipeline through Jordan to Israel. US troops are stationed at several military bases in Rojava, which could offer an alternative to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey...

It appears abundantly clear that the Kurds are the most qualified, if not the only, candidate in Syria on which Israel can count for support… Israel should act swiftly to support the emerging Kurdish region in Syria...

It is very much in Israel’s interest to have a reliable and trustworthy friend in the new Syria. If Jerusalem hopes, together with its ally in Washington, to prevent Tehran from establishing its long-sought land corridor, it will need to strengthen its influence in the Syrian Kurdish region to serve as a wall blocking Iran’s ambitions.” (“The Syrian Kurds: Israel’s Forgotten Ally”, Rauf Baker, BESA Center)

So, the question is: Whose interests are really served by the US occupation of east Syria: America’s or Israel’s?

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Mike Whitney is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Once the all-encompassing chittering and chattering about tariffs on Chinese imports by the western corporate media subsided, Trump, egocentric businessman rather than the President of the Empire, “out of the blue”, one could almost say, under the pretext of ‘unfair’ Chinese trading, launches a new ferocious and as usual totally illegal campaign of aggression against China’s fast-growing economy.

It’s an illicit campaign against Chinese competition, against Chinese unstoppable growth. It’s a tacit recognition of China’s emerging supremacy which the United States can only confront with fraud, deceit and illegal activities. And this only as long as Washington controls the western monetary system. This won’t be for much longer.

It’s an aggression against leading Chinese businesses and against China’s embracing a policy of a multi-polar world – through connection of entire continents, countries, cultures, joint research, education and agricultural, as well as industrial development – through transport lines, equal trade, respect for each other and recognition of people’s and countries’ comparative advantages by technical knowhow and bestowed by nature. It’s based on fair and equal interchanges. It’s the multi-trillion-yuan Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also called the New Silk Road; an initiative launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping during an official visit to Indonesia and Kazakhstan.

BRI consists by now of 6 land and sea routes, currently comprising some 152 countries and international organizations in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

This new Chinese economic behemoth is tentatively projected through the 2040’s. The BRI is all-inclusive and, thus, so strong, it was recently incorporated in China’s Constitution. However, it was largely ignored by the west, and especially by the western presstitute media – with the western “Vogel Strauss”politics of halfwits, ignore it and it will go away. Now the west realizes, it won’t go away – and it is tough competition for the falsely propagated west’s trade and economic superiority. Too late my friends. As I often said, by endless greed and thirst for power with impunity, of short-term rent seeking, of relentlessly provoked wars and conflicts, killing layers and layers of human societies throughout the world to bring opponents of this small diabolical elite to their knees, the west is committing slowly but surely suicide. This is nature. Nature will not only survive, but overcome and subordinate this luciferian approach to world domination. The future is in the east. Most definitely. There is no way back.

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Among the first steps of the US’s new generation of aggression against China is Washington’s ordering its northern vassal, Canada, to arrest Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Meng Wanzhou, in transit, at Vancouver airport on 1 December 2018.

Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. is a Chinese multinational telecommunications equipment and consumer electronics manufacturer, headquartered in Shenzhen. Huawei is the world’s 7^thlargest telecommunication corporation and was founded by Ren Zhengfei, a former military engineer in the People’s Liberation Army, in 1987. Ms. Meng Wanzohou is the founder’s daughter and deputy CEO. Ms. Wanzhou is now accused of breaking the totally illegal sanctions against Iran by doing business with Iran. Washington, unabashedly puts one illegal action of their own – sanctions – over another one – taking hostage a lead person of a strong Chinese competitor, to coerce Huawei to abide by an illegally US-imposed rule – sanctions. It is an unbelievable catch-22 story. But even more unbelievable is that the dictate of the abusive Washington policies is still followed and even worse, that there are hardly any protests.

This is only possible without most of the western world saying “beep”, because they all still recognize – for now – the US as the self-imposed exceptional nation – the nation that makes and breaks laws as it goes along. – But how much longer?

Ms. Wanzhou, still in Canadian custody, at risk of being extradited to US “justice” (sic), may face 30 years in prison, for absolutely no illegal infraction – only by acting against what the US made up as a law – sanctions – that everybody has to adhere to, or else, they will themselves be subject to sanction. Can you see how sick our western system has become?

It is now a war without bombs. It’s become a war of economics, recognizing that a war with bombs and missiles the US could not win any longer – not that they ever did! – since Russia and China have developed technically far superior military equipment. Hence, the United States’ last trump (no pun intended) – is working their fraudulent monetary system to the last ditch.

Venezuela, one of the west’s only true and last democracies, has been aggressed for the last 20 years, peaking now, because she refuses to bend to the rules of Washington, abandoning her socialist ideology, handing over her natural resources – the world’s largest oil and gas reserves, to the empire’s usurping corporations, the same that have been usurping and enslaving the Venezuelan people for hundred years before President Hugo Chavez came to power in 1999 – and started changing the rules for the people, dismissing the usurpers and nationalizing the country’s resources for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.

Today the empire is waging a war on Venezuela, a war without bombs, a financial and economic war, where – thanks to the fraudulent monetary system that western societies embrace and have been willy-nilly accepting, and even today they don’t dare to openly object to it, the empire is applying the international illegality of all illegalities, “sanctions”, interference in another country’s internal affairs, blocking trade, monetary transfers, confiscating – i.e. stealing – billions worth of Venezuelan assets abroad.

Washington is coercing and blackmailing so-called US allies into doing the same, commitingt lowly ‘highway robbery’. By now some US$ 40 to 50 billion equivalent throughout the world were blocked and essentially stolen, including 1.2 billion dollars of gold withheld in the London City of Money. By seizing Venezuela’s foreign assets and boycotting Venezuela’s hydrocarbon sales – Venezuela is in dire straits – but not in despair, not dying from famine as the western media would like you to believe. No – Venezuela manages with calm and pride – and solid solidarity.

A similar situation prevails in Syria, where the Syrian national army with the help of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah, has pretty much defeated the terror network of ISIS, Al Nusra et al. In other words, the US, NATO, western and Gulf states, vassal allies which have been – and still are – financing these terror organizations as proxies, have lost their war of bombs, their fight for ‘regime change’ – at least for now. We know, the empire won’t simply let go, only when it reaches its last breath. And that moment will come, sooner or later.

So, the bombs are replaced by economic shackles – blocking Syria from using the international monetary transfer system, from accessing international credit, from importing vital goods, medicine and medical equipment, food, industrial equipment and spare parts – all that a society needs to function, to rebuild their western-demolished infrastructure, all these vital goods and services are being embargoed by the west – while Syria has never done any harm to a western country – all to the contrary. Syria is the bedrock of western history, providing the west with brilliant intellects, scientists, university professors and offering a rich culture – the cradle of western civilization.

Syria is strategically placed – with access to five seas. President Assad’s “Five Seas Vision”, connecting strategically located Syria with the Mediterranean, Caspian, Black Sea, Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, “making Syria the unavoidable intersection of the world in Investments, transport and more”– this vision, plus the fact that President Assad is running Syria with a socialist philosophy and is as popular as always (70% – 80% of a highly educated Syrian population support their President), make Syria a perfect target for ‘regime change’. – Again, the continuation of a war without bombs, but killing all the same with a weaponized western economic system.

The most exasperating fact is – again – that the western allies, predominantly Europe, that is, their corrupt leaders (sic), participate in this atrocity in Syria, as well as in Venezuela – and throughout many other rebellious, non-submissive nations. This, largely against the will of the people. Though indoctrinated day in and day out by fake news, people start seeing the light.

Frankly – what else would you expect from Europe? – Europeans for hundreds of years have been exploiting, raping, abusing Asia, Africa and Latin America, killing hundreds of millions of people, while stealing their resources – which now can be seen transformed into European “culture”, religious monuments – castles of kings and queens and their dictators, who still walk this earth as parasitically as in ancient times.

When the European empires successively collapsed, they simply regrouped and transplanted their reign from the Old Continent across the Atlantic to build a new AngloZionist kingdom, but not before, again, massacring the original inhabitants of that once great land, called America. At that time the noble forefathers of this newly nascent empire felt secure between two shiny seas. But, hélas, times have changed. Attempting to emulate the grandeur of the Roman Empire, at one time calling their plan to Full Spectrum Dominance, “Pax Americana”, the association with “Pax Romana” became evident. Pax Romana were the three to four hundred bloodiest years of the Roman Empire, eventually collapsing under its own weight.

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The big danger for the US-driven western criminal monetary and debt-driven pyramid system, is China, because China’s economy is based on hard economic output, construction, manufacturing, intellectual and scientific development, as compared to the US-driven western neoliberal profit-maximizing dogma with inflated services, one that outsources hard production to low-wage countries, foregoes long-term economic gains and institutional memory, for a GDP of hot air, McDonalds-type jobs, consumption of cheap and useless imports; and, of course,  – a destructive war and killing industry.

That’s why Washington is hastily trying to elevate their lie and deceit campaign onto another level. Kidnapping Huawei’s Ms. Wanzhou, lambasting Europe to ban Huawei’s equipment form their markets, because it contains spyware, is just one example of a ruthless illicit approach to eliminating competition. On the other hand, Washington’s fading empire dares slandering President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative and, in a last desperate effort, blackmailing Europe, as well as African BRI-contenders, with more illegal sanctions – not to sign up to China’s New Silk Road. No matter that most of them have already done so. Italy clearly said they will soon sign an agreement with China to use Italian ports for BRI’s maritime routes. As to banning Huawei from Europe, Germany, for one, has already said they will not ban Huawei. Let’s hope others will follow Germany’s lead.

The Belt and Road Initiative is an unstoppable train – that left the station some five years ago and is on a projected route for the next 30-some years initiating peaceful socioeconomic development throughout the world. As a Chinese representative at the recent Cuban Conference for The Equilibrium of the World said – We are building bridges to connect people of all continents, while the west is building walls.

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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^stCentury; TeleSUR; The Vineyard of 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 FinanceTwitter

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is coming to Washington, D.C., on April 4. We’re organizing a peace festival to unwelcome them.

Wednesday, April 3 at St. Stephen’s Church, 1525 Newton St NW, Washington, D.C. 20010:
12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.: Screenprinting for Justice Workshop with The Sanctuaries DC, and Nonviolent Action Prep with Nadine Bloch of Beautiful Trouble (munch on vegan snacks, make art, and plan for the April 4 protest). If you’re a nonviolent activism trainer and want to help, please fill out this form.
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.: Keynote Speeches + Biting Comedic Entertainment with Lee Camp(Full list of speakers)
8:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.: Spoken word by Eleanor Goldfield and live music by Eric Colville& Ryan Harvey & Megaciph.
5:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.: Screenprinting, Art Exhibits & Activity Booths + Vegan Food & Drink

REGISTER TO RESERVE YOUR SPOT.

Thursday, April 4
Plans include a procession from the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial to a rally at Freedom Plaza, and nonviolent demonstrations outside the NATO meeting. Plans are subject to change when we learn when and where NATO is meeting. Tentatively, we plan to meet at the MLK Memorial at 11 a.m. and hear speakers until noon. At noon we will set off to Independence Ave, then up 17th Street to a right on Constitution Ave., up 15th Street to a right on Pennsylvania Ave, then two blocks to Freedom Plaza.  We will be there until 3 p.m. for a rally with speakers and music. (Full list of speakers)

Other No to NATO events in Washington DC:
Saturday, March 30 @ 1:00 p.m. Rally at Lafayette Park
Saturday, March 30 @ 7:30 p.m. Songs of Struggle
Sunday, March 31 Concert for Peace and to End War
Sunday, March 31 Anti-NATO Conference
Monday, April 1 Meeting of the International Network “No to War – No to NATO” at the AFSC Office 1822 R St. NW 10:00 to 3:00
Tuesday, April 2 No to NATO – Yes to Peace and Disarmament Counter-Summit
Thursday, April 4 7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m. Black Alliance for Peace program at Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ, 5301 N Capitol St., NE, Washington D.C. “No Compromise, No Retreat in the Fight to End Militarism and War”

Lodging for the nights of 2nd and 3rd is available.

Other No to NATO events elsewhere:
March 21-27: Solidarity trip to Belgrade
March 30: Conference and Rally in Saskatchewan
April 4: No to NATO action, Parliament Hill, Ottawa (details to be announced)
April 4: No to NATO events in Oslo, Norway
April 7: Conference in Florence, Italy
Monthly: NATO protests in Toronto

Why? NATO is coming to DC to mark 70 years since its creation on April 4, 1949. NATO is the largest military alliance in the world with the largest military spending (roughly three-quarters of the world total) and nuclear stockpiles. While claiming to “preserve peace,” NATO has violated international law and bombed Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Libya. NATO has exacerbated tensions with Russia and increased the risk of nuclear apocalypse. The notion that supporting NATO is a way to cooperate with the world ignores superior non-deadly ways to cooperate with the world.

Our Message: War is a leading contributor to the growing global refugee and climate crises, the basis for the militarization of the police, a top cause of the erosion of civil liberties, and a catalyst for racism and bigotry. We’re calling for the abolition of NATO, the promotion of peace, the redirection of resources to human and environmental needs, and the demilitarization of our cultures. Instead of celebrating NATO’s 70^th anniversary, we’re celebrating peace on April 4, in commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech against war on April 4, 1967, as well as his assassination on April 4, 1968.

The Case Against NATO:

While Donald Trump once blurted out the obvious: that NATO is obsolete, he subsequently professed his commitment to NATO and began pressuring NATO members to buy more weapons. So, the notion that somehow NATO is anti-Trump and therefore good would not only be silly and practically amoral on its own terms, it is also at odds with the facts of Trump’s behavior. We are planning an anti-NATO / pro-peace action at which opposition to the militarism of NATO’s dominant member is welcome and necessary. Here are the Top 10 Reasons Not to Love NATO no matter what Trump does.

NATO has pushed the weaponry and the hostility and the massive so-called war games right up to the border of Russia. NATO has waged aggressive wars far from the North Atlantic. NATO has added a partnership with Colombia, abandoning all pretense of its purpose being in the North Atlantic. NATO is used to free the U.S. Congress from the responsibility and the right to oversee the atrocities of U.S. wars. NATO is used as cover by NATO member governments to join U.S. wars under the pretense that they are somehow more legal or acceptable. NATO is used as cover to illegally and recklessly share nuclear weapons with supposedly non-nuclear nations. NATO is used to assign nations the responsibility to go to war if other nations go to war, and therefore to be prepared for war. NATO’s militarism threatens the earth’s environment. NATO’s wars fuel racism and bigotry and erode our civil liberties while draining our wealth.

NATO Expansion Over the Years:

We must say: No to NATO, Yes to peace, Yes to prosperity, Yes to a sustainable environment, Yes to civil liberties, Yes to education, Yes to a culture of nonviolence and kindness and decency, Yes to remembering April 4th as a day associated with the work for peace of Martin Luther King Jr.

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked, and rightly so, ‘What about Vietnam?’ They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” —MLK Jr.

“You can’t help people being right for the wrong reasons. This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity. It is an expression of a lack of self confidence.”—Arthur Koestler

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A pretendere il pizzo in cambio di «protezione» non è solo la mafia. «I paesi ricchi che stiamo proteggendo – ha avvertito minacciosamente Trump in un discorso al Pentagono  – sono tutti avvisati: dovranno pagare la nostra protezione».

Il presidente Trump  – rivela Bloomberg – sta per presentare il piano «Cost Plus 50» che stabilisce il seguente criterio: i paesi alleati che ospitano forze Usa sul proprio territorio ne dovranno coprire interamente il costo e pagare agli Usa un ulteriore 50% in cambio del  «privilegio» di ospitarle ed essere così da loro «protetti».

Il piano prevede che i paesi ospitanti paghino anche gli stipendi dei militari Usa e i costi di gestione degli aerei e delle navi da guerra che gli Stati uniti tengono in questi paesi.

L’Italia dovrebbe quindi pagare non solo gli stipendi di circa 12.000 militari Usa qui di stanza, ma anche i costi di gestione dei caccia F-16 e degli altri aerei schierati dagli Usa ad Aviano e Sigonella e i costi della Sesta Flotta basata a Gaeta.

Secondo lo stesso criterio dovremmo pagare anche la gestione di Camp Darby, il più grande arsenale Usa fuori dalla madrepatria, e la manutenzione delle bombe nucleari Usa dislocate ad Aviano e Ghedi.

Non si sa quanto gli Stati uniti intendono chiedere all’Italia e agli altri paesi europei che ospitano loro forze militari, poiché non si sa neppure quanto questi paesi paghino attualmente. I dati sono coperti da segreto militare.

Secondo uno studio della Rand Corporation, i paesi europei della Nato si addossano in media il 34%  dei costi delle forze e basi Usa presenti sui loro territori. Non si sa però quale sia l’importo annuo che essi pagano agli Usa: l’unica stima – 2,5 miliardi di dollari – risale a 17 anni fa.

È dunque segreta anche la cifra pagata dall’Italia. Se ne conoscono solo alcune voci: ad esempio decine di milioni di euro per adeguare gli aeroporti di Aviano e Ghedi ai caccia statunitensi F-35 e alle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12 che gli Usa cominceranno a schierare in Italia nel 2020, e circa 100 milioni per lavori alla stazione aeronavale statunitense di Sigonella, a carico anche dell’Italia.

A Sigonella viene finanziata esclusivamente dagli Usa solo la Nas I, l’area amministrativa e ricreativa, mentre la Nas II, quella dei reparti operativi e quindi la più costosa, è finanziata dalla Nato, ossia anche dall’Italia.

È comunque certo – prevede un ricercatore della Rand Corp. – che con il piano «Cost Plus 50» i costi per gli alleati «schizzeranno alle stelle». Si parla di un aumento del 600%.

Essi si aggiungeranno alla spesa militare, che in Italia ammonta a circa 70 milioni di euro al giorno, destinati a salire a circa 100 secondo gli impegni assunti dai governi italiani in sede Nato. Si tratta di denaro pubblico, che esce dalle nostre tasche, sottratto a investimenti produttivi e spese sociali.

È possibile però che l’Italia possa pagare meno per le forze e basi Usa dislocate sul suo territorio. Il piano «Cost Plus 50»  prevede infatti uno «sconto per buon comportamento» a favore degli «alleati che si allineano strettamente con gli Stati uniti, facendo ciò che essi chiedono».

È sicuro che l’Italia godrà di un forte sconto poiché, di governo in governo, si è sempre mantenuta nella scia degli Stati uniti. Ultimamente, inviando truppe e aerei da guerra nell’Est Europa con la motivazione di fronteggiare la «minaccia russa» e favorendo il piano statunitense di affossare il Trattato Inf per schierare in Europa, Italia compresa, postazioni di missili nucleari puntati sulla Russia.

Essendo queste bersaglio di una possibile ritorsione, avremo bisogno come «protezione» di altre forze e basi Usa. Le dovremo pagare noi, ma sempre con lo sconto.

Manlio Dinucci

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One of the lessons from our recent visit to Iran as a Peace Delegation is that Iran is a mature country. It is 2,500 years old, ten times as old as the United States and one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations with settlements dating back to 7,000 BC. It was an empire that controlled almost half the Earth for over 1,000 years. It is hard not to see the US-Iran relationship as one between an adolescent bully and a mature nation.

The root cause of the problems between the United States and Iran is not because Iran has oil, an Islamic government, nuclear weapons or Iran’s role in the Middle East — it is because in 1979, Iran ended 26 years of US domination. Foreign Minister Zarif explained to our Peace Delegation:

“…the U.S. difficulty with Iran is not because of the region, not because of human rights, not because of weapons, not because of the nuclear issue – it’s just because we decided to be independent – that’s it – that’s our biggest crime.”

US Peace Delegation to Iran February 2019 outside of Iran’s Foreign Ministry. From CODE PINK.

Since the 1979 Revolution, the US has sought to dominate Iran using sanctions and threats of military aggression. Iran has responded by seeking negotiation with the US. The Iran Nuclear Agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA), which took over ten years to finalize, was viewed by Dr. Zarif as a first step toward more agreements.

Although Iran fulfilled its side of the nuclear agreement, the US did not relieve the sanctions, as promised, and under the Trump administration, increased the sanctions and left the agreement. On our trip, we learned first hand about the impacts of these actions.

Facing The Ugly Realities Of US History With Iran

Correcting the relationship between the US and Iran begins with an honest review of US policy since 1953. It is a record for which the US should be ashamed and shows the need for a new approach.

Iran Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq.

The 1953 Coup

The August 19, 1953 coup was one the US denied for decades but has now been proven by documents released by the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The British government also released documents showing its involvement. Information has been made public over the decades, but even after 65 years, many documents about ‘Operation Ajax’ remain classified.

The coup was led by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt and cousin of President Franklin Roosevelt. The coup not only impacted Iran but the Middle East and was a model for US coups around the world, which continue to this day. As we write, we are on our way to Venezuela where a US-led coup just failed.

The 1953 coup was preceded by economic sanctions to destabilize the Mossadegh government and a Guaido-like fake Prime Minister. The coup initially failed on August 16 when the Shah fled to Baghdad and then to Rome. Before fleeing, he appointed former Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi as Prime Minister to replace the elected Prime Minister Mossadegh. Zahedi continued the coup with the military arresting Mossadegh at his home on April 19. When Operation Ajax succeeded, Zahedi became Prime Minister and the Shah returned to rule as a brutal dictator until 1979. Mossadegh was imprisoned until his death in 1967.

US Den of Espionage by Barbara Briggs-Letson

Installation Of The Brutal Shah

The Shah became the enforcer for the United States in the Middle East. His rule coincided with the US war in Vietnam when the US focused its military in Southeast Asia. When President Nixon came to office in 1969, Iran was the single-largest arms purchaser from the US. Nixon encouraged a spending spree and by 1972, the Shah purchased over $3 billion of US arms, a twenty fold increase over 1971’s record.

US weapons buying continued throughout the decade dwarfing all US allies including Israel. The weapons being sold required thousands of US military support troops in Iran. In 1977, President Carter sold more arms to Iran than any previous years. Carter toasted the Shah as “a rock of stability” during a visit to Tehran at the end of 1977.

The stability was not as rock solid as Carter imagined. Domestically, a conglomerate of western oil companies ran the oil industry taking fifty percent of the profits but not allowing Iran to audit the accounts or have members on the board of directors. The Shah recognized Israel and put in place modernization policies that alienated religious groups. In 1963, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was arrested for making a speech against the Shah after several days of protests. The Shah’s brutal secret police, the SAVAK, made mass arrests and tortured and killed political prisoners. The Islamic clergy, still headed by Khomeini living in exile since 1964, became more vociferous in its criticisms.

Mass protests and strikes struck Iran in 1978. On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the US Embassy and held fifty-two hostages for 444 days until January 1981. Khomeini returned from exile in February 1979. In December, a new Constitution creating the Islamic Republic was approved by referendum and Khomeini became the Supreme Leader.

Graves of martyr’s from the Iraq-Iran War at the central cemetery of Iran’s capital Tehran by Philipp Breu.

US Supports Iraq’s War Against Iran

The Iraq war would not have been possible without US encouragement and support in the form of money, naval assistance and weapons. The US also provided Iraq with the ingredients for the chemical weapons as well as intelligence on where to use them. More than one million people were killed and more than 80,000 injured by chemical weapons in the Iraq war.

The US Shoots Down A Civilian Airliner

The US also killed 289 Iranians when a US missile shot down a commercial Iranian airliner in July 1988. The US has never apologized for this mass killing of civilians. When we were in Iran, we visited the Tehran Peace Museum and our delegation did what our country should do, apologized.

Forty Years Of US Economic Sanctions

The US has imposed economic sanctions since the Islamic Revolution began. In 1980, the US broke diplomatic relations with Iran and Carter put in place sanctions including freezing $12 billion in Iranian assets and banning imports of Iranian oil. Every president since Carter has escalated sanctions against Iran. In response, Iran has developed a “resistance economy” where it has become more self-sufficient and built relationships with other countries.

Announcement of the Iran Nuclear Agreement between six world powers and Iran in the Swiss town of Lausanne. Photo from CBS News.

US Withdrawal From Nuclear Agreement And Increased Sanctions

The most recent atrocity is the failure to live up to the carefully negotiated nuclear agreement. Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif painstakingly negotiated the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal between China, France, Russia, the UK, Germany, the US, and the European Union for more than a decade. Iran complied with all the requirements of the agreement, but the US did not lift sanctions, as promised, and exited the deal under President Trump, leading to protests against the US throughout Iran.

The people of Iran were joyous when the JCPOA was finalized as it promised relief, i.e., the release of $29 billion in Iranian funds held abroad, allowing US exports of Iranian oil, allowing foreign firms to invest in Iran and allowing trade with the rest of the world through the global banking system.

Instead of abiding by the agreement, the US escalated sanctions against Iran. Trump’s escalation has been harsh as the US seeks “to isolate Iran politically and economically, by blocking its oil sales, access to hard currencies and foreign investments, along with more harsh sanctions and overall financial hardships on the country.” Sanctions include secondary sanctions on non-US corporations and nations doing business with Iran, which the International Criminal Court found to be illegal.

These sanctions are having a significant human impact. They are causing a rapid devaluation of Iranian currency resulting in increasing costs of basic goods, including a tripling of the cost of imported goods such as cars. When we were in Iran, we heard firsthand about the impact sanctions have on people’s lives, e.g. the inability to get life-saving medicines, make financial transactions, use apps or translate books from the US into Farsi. In a restaurant, the menu warned prices may not be as listed because of rapid inflation. We interviewed Dr. Foad Izadi of the University of Tehran on Clearing the FOG about the impact of the sanctions and how US policies are alienating youth.

We spent time at the University of Tehran with students and faculty in the American Studies department. They were excited to speak with people from the United States, as few people from the US are able to get visas, and they lamented not being allowed to travel to the US. We found that we have much in common and believe we would benefit from more exchanges with Iranians.

Ongoing US Destabilization Iran And Threats Of War

Sanctions are designed to destabilize the government but are instead uniting people against the United States. If anything, US actions will put in place a more anti-US government in upcoming elections. The US has a flawed understanding of Iranian politics and global politics around US unilateral sanctions. The Iran sanctions are likely to speed up the de-dollarization of the global economy and end US dollar hegemony and are illegal.

The US is also fomenting rebellion. The Trump administration has been seeking regime change through various actions including violence. It created a Mission Center in the CIA focused on regime change in Iran and spends millions of dollars to encourage opposition in Iran, working to manipulate protests to support a US agenda. The threat of war continues and becomes ever more likely in an administration dominated by Iran hawks, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.

US military bases around Iran.

Creating A Peaceful, Positive Relationship Between The US And Iran

The history of US behavior toward Iran cannot be ethically defended. The US needs to appraise this history and recognize it has a lot for which to apologize, then it must correct its policies.

A group of prominent Iranian-Americans recently sent an open letter to Secretary Pompeo, writing:

“If you truly wish to help the people of Iran, lift the travel ban [although no Iranian has ever been involved in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, Iran is included in Trump’s Muslim ban], adhere to the Iran nuclear deal and provide the people of Iran the economic relief they were promised and have eagerly awaited for three years.”

Until the US is ready to accept responsibility for its abhorrent actions, Iran will continue to build a resistance economy and relations with other countries. There is talk of US-sanctioned countries joining together as a countervailing force. Such countries include Russia, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Somalia, Belarus, Iraq, a number of African countries and more, as well as China with US trade tariffs. Building relationships through civil society, academia, professional societies, and government are needed to create a unified opposition to challenge US sanctions.

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

Featured image is from FAIR

Robin Philpot‘s acceptance speech of the Victoire Ungabire Umuhoza award in Brussels, translated from French

I would first like to thank the International Women’s Network for Democracy and Peace honouring me with this Award that bears the name of a great patriot and fighter for freedom, peace and democracy, Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza. But I would also like to congratulate the Network for its extraordinary work. Like Victoire, you and your work inspire us to keep the faith in this struggle. You are contagious and I thank very much for being so.

In less than a month we will be commemorating the 25th anniversary of what was the worst terrorist attack of the 1990s, and what has become the biggest political and media scandal of the last quarter of a century. It is a scandal that gets worse every day that goes by.

You know what I’m talking about: the shooting down on April 6, 1994 of the plane carrying two African heads of State and their entourage. If that plane had not been shot down, we would not be here; Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza would never have been jailed; and very likely Rwanda could have hoped to live in peace over the past 25 years, Rwanda and its neighbours, and particularly the Congo and Burundi.

Video: Robin Philpot’s Acceptance Speech (French)

The crime committed was threefold.

1) the shooting down of the plane;

2) the cover-up and the lies about that crime; and

3) the unspeakably devastating consequences.

When they killed Presidents Juvénal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994, the assassins killed all hopes of peace and a democratic resolution of the conflict that had paralysed the country since it was invaded on October 1, 1990. Peace that had been negotiated and signed supposedly with the guidance and goodwill for big powers. Peace that could have prevented so many deaths, so much suffering, peace that could have enabled a sharing of power in Rwanda.

In law, hiding a crime is also a crime. Covering up the truth, lying about that first crime is as devastating as the crime itself, because it allows the criminals to continue with their murderous scheme. Those guilty of the crime of covering up the truth include many individuals, institutions, countries and media.

Immediately after the presidential plane was shot down, the New York Times,the so-called “journal of record,” established the line. Allow me to quote it:

“the credible suspicion is that they were killed by Hutu hard-liners in Rwanda who oppose reconciliation with the Tutsi people.”

Believe it or not, 25 years on, we continue to wade through the same muddy lies about the shooting down of the plane on April 6. Yet all the necessary evidence is there to prove that it was the Rwandan Patriotic Front led by Paul Kagame that shot down the presidential plane. Suffice it to mention the evidence gathered by “National Team” under Michael Hourigan for the International Tribunal for Rwanda; the Bruguière investigation; documents revealed by Judy Rever; Carla Del Ponte’s declarations and removal; even the ICTR abandoned that theory shortly after it received its mandate—it simply had no evidence to bring to bear.

The evidence in fact leaves no doubt that the current president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, and his army shot the plane down. Their goal and that of their sponsors was, whatever the cost, to put an end to the Arusha Peace Accord, to eliminate any power sharing plan, and to establish a military powerhouse capable of dominating the entire region. Not for the well-being of the Rwandans, Burundians or Congolese, but of the well-being – or should I say wealth – of their sponsors and their agents in Rwanda. And who are those sponsors? The best indication came directly from the former Secretary General of the UN, Boutros Boutros-Ghali who told me in an interview: “The Rwandan genocide is 100 percent American responsibility,” adding that it was with the help of the United Kingdom.

The third crime is the consequences, but the time does not allow me even to summarize them properly. In short, the consequences include all the deaths in Rwanda; the exodus of millions of Rwandans, mainly towards the Democratic Republic of Congo; the killings by the current Rwandan regime in the Congo, including selective extraterritorial executions elsewhere; the regime’s unending and inhuman hunt and harassment of Rwandans who dare to doubt or challenge the regime’s version of the Rwandan tragedy. The regime in Kigali does this domestically in Rwanda but also throughout the world, and particularly in Belgium, France, Sweden, Canada and the United States (to mention only these countries), and they do it with the help of the legal systems in each of these countries. Their pretext is always the same: fighting impunity.

IMPUNTY: That is a word that has been in all the media and on everybody’s lips since the shooting down of the plane. Peace and reconciliation is impossible, they say, unless those responsible for the tragedy are punished.

To my knowledge never has a word been turned upside and emptied of its meaning like this one.

How have the political authorities in Rwanda their big power sponsors reacted to this triple crime? In short, total impunity has been granted to the real criminals and the wrong people have been criminalized.

• They have criminalized and imprisoned in penal colonies those who after the shooting down of the presidential plane tried to pick up the pieces and restore peace so as to end the killings and anarchy that prevailed after April 6.
• They have criminalized the women and men who, like the great leader whose name is on this award, wish to mourn all of the people killed in the wake of the shooting down of the plane.
• They have criminalized ICTR defense investigators and witnesses
• They have criminalized women who, like Victoire Ingabire Umuhoze or Diane Rwigara, decided courageously and in the name of democracy to run in presidential elections against the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame.
• They are trying to criminalize and they harass the men and women who investigate and search for the truth about the shooting down of the plane and its consequences and who speak out about it. Our friend Judi Rever is a perfect example.
• They even try to criminalize the very basic act of saying: “Just a minute, that is not what happened in Kigali (Ça ne s’est pas passé comme ça à Kigali).

Now speaking about ‘impunity.’  On the Twitter account of the International Criminal Court, the ICC, for Feb. 18, 2019, this is what you can read: “Productive meeting between ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and His Excellency Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda in the margins of Munich Security Conference.” Under the text is an all-smiles photo of the dictator Kagame shaking hands with Fatou Bensouda, the very person appointed to put an end to impunity.

But the world is changing rapidly; there are grounds for hope. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was freed. Diane Rwigara was freed. Elsewhere in Africa and in other parts of the world, the signs are positive. The times that allowed criminals like Kagame and his masters in Washington to call the shots in Africa and elsewhere are coming to an end.

There is a proverb that says: “He or she who combats the truth will be defeated.” The opposite is just as true. “He or she who defends the truth will be victorious.” Despite powerful forces, more and more people are searching for the truth, finding it and revealing it.

Armed with this truth, and with the courage, confidence and determination of people like Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, we will be capable of victory. And that victory will mean freedom, peace, and democracy for Rwanda and its neighbours.

Thank you.

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Three US service members were killed in an ISIS suicide bomber attack on a joint convoy of the US-led coalition and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) near Manbij in northern Syria on March 9, the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq claimed.

A suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device reportedly exploded near the convoy on a road in the outskirt of the town.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also reported that the suicide bomber targeted two vehicles of US and SDF forces, but said that only two SDF fighters were injured in the attack.

Less than two months ago, an ISIS suicide bomber blew himself inside a restaurant in Manbij town center killing four US personnel. This was the biggest casualty of the coalition since the beginning of its operation in Syria.

The US-led coalition and the SDF have not commented on the March 9 incident yet. Both sides avoid reporting such attacks, unless US personnel are injured or killed.

On the same day, a US air assault force carried out raids against ISIS cells near al-Azbah in northern Deir Ezzor and Tabqah in western Raqqah. According to local sources, the US unit supported by several helicopters arrested a group of local ISIS commanders and explosive experts.

Such developments confirm earlier assessments that despite formal statements by the US-led coalition and the SDF about a defeat of ISIS in northeastern Syria, this area is in fact full of ISIS cells and their supporters. The flow of ISIS-linked persons from the Euphrates Valley as well as the discriminatory policies of the Kurdish-dominated SDF towards the local Arab population are among the factors contributing to the growth of such security problems.

In the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert, ISIS cells attacked positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) near the town of al-Sukhnah. The terrorists injured one SAA soldier and captured 3 others. Following the ISIS attack, Russian and Syrian warplanes delivered strikes on detected ISIS positions in the Homs desert. Clashes were also reported near al-Dubiyat.

The captives were reportedly moved towards ISIS hideouts on the edge of the US-controlled area of al-Tanf. The US-led coalition prevents SAA operations there by striking any pro-government units, which attempt to enter the area. This situation does not allow the SAA to conduct a comprehensive security operation in the desert area, which would allow putting an end to ISIS presence there.

During the weekend, the Russian Aerospace Forces hit weapon depots and fortified positions belonging to militants in Idlib, including Mintar, Frikeh, Tell Khatab, Saraqib and Khab al-Subul. The strikes were delivered in response to the continued violations of the ceasefire regime by militants in southern Idlib and northern Hama. On March 8, Turkish forces started conducting patrols in the Idlib demilitarized zone, which a declared goal to prevent ceasefire violations. However, it seems that this convinced militants that they should not fear a military operation by the Damascus government and they continued their attacks.

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Trump Regime Electricity War in Venezuela More Serious than First Believed

By Stephen Lendman, March 11, 2019

On Thursday, Venezuela’s Guri dam hydroelectric power plant was cyberattacked at 5:00 PM during the late afternoon rush hour to cause maximum disruption.

We Are Being Lied into War Again

By Lee Camp, March 11, 2019

The mainstream media and nearly the entirety of the U.S. government tell us Juan Guaido is the “interim president,” even though he was never elected to that position and the current president is still leading the Venezuelan government and military.

NYT Denies that Venezuela Burned Aid Convoy

By Prensa Latina, March 11, 2019

An exclusive video quoted by The New York Times contradicts the US statement that the Venezuelan government set fire to an aid convoy last month on the border with Colombia.

US Is Pushing Venezuela to the Brink by Attacking Its Power Grid

By Andrew Korybko, March 11, 2019

The Hybrid War on Venezuela just took a dark turn – literally – after the US used cyber weapons and insider sabotage to attack the country’s power grid last week, cutting off most of its electricity and creating a chain reaction of negative consequences all throughout the Bolivarian Republic.

Venezuela: Public Disbelief that the US Is “Spreading Democracy”. Weaponizing “Fake News”

By Helen Buyniski, March 10, 2019

Lazy propaganda is largely to blame for the lapse in narrative superiority. The same tawdry psy-ops are recycled again and again, as we see now in Venezuela, where Iran-Contra felon and smirking genocide enthusiast Elliott Abrams has been wheeled out of cold storage to work his death-squad magic on a population we’ve already tried and failed to hypnotize with the promises of neoliberalism.

Venezuela’s Civilian-Military Union and the White Supremacist American 17th Century Pilgrims

By Arnold August, March 10, 2019

The nemesis which the US is facing started – in the current period – on February 23^rd on the Venezuelan border with Colombia. The US attempt to promote a mutiny among the military and a revolt within the people against Maduro in favour of the US hand -picked and self-proclaimed “president” failed miserably.

Corporate Media “Presstitutes” Turn Blind Eye to UN Report on Venezuela

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, March 09, 2019

Don’t you think it is a bit much for Washington to steal $21 billion of Venezuela’s money, impose sanctions in an effort to destabilize the country and to drive the Venezuelan government to its knees, blame Venezuelan socialism (essentially nationalization of the oil company) for bringing “starvation to the people,” and offer a measly $21 million in “humanitarian aid.”

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Featured image is from The Mantle

On Thursday, Venezuela’s Guri dam hydroelectric power plant was cyberattacked at 5:00 PM during the late afternoon rush hour to cause maximum disruption.

Up to 80% of the country was affected, damage done more severe than initially thought. Weeks or months of planning likely preceded what happened – US behind it? considerable expertise needed to pull it off.

On Friday, another cyberattack occurred, followed by a third one on Saturday, affecting parts of the country where power was restored, further complicating resolution of the problem, Maduro saying:

After power was restored to about 70% of the country, “we received another attack, of a cybernetic nature, at midday…that disturbed the reconnection process and knocked out everything that had been achieved until noon,” adding:

“(O)ne of the sources of generation that was working perfectly” was sabotaged again…infiltrators…attacking the electric company from the inside.”

Power is being restored “manually,” efforts continuing to learn precisely why computerized systems failed – things further complicated after a Bolivar state substation transformer exploded and burned, suggesting more sabotage.

What’s happening in Venezuela is similar to infecting Iran’s Bushehr and Natanz nuclear power facilities with a Stuxnet malware computer virus in 2010, a likely joint US/Israeli intelligence operation. Edward Snowden blamed them for what happened.

At the time, operations were halted indefinitely. Iran called the incident a hostile act. General Gholam-Reza Jalali said if the affected facilities went online infected, Iran’s entire electrical power grid could have been shut down.

It took months to fully resolve the problem. Following the summer 2010 attack, the malware continued to infect the facilities’ centrifuges, requiring their replacement.

An Institute for Science and International Security analysis said

“(a)ssuming Iran exercises caution, Stuxnet is unlikely to destroy more centrifuges at the (affected plants).”

“Iran likely cleaned the malware from its control systems. To prevent re-infection, Iran will have to exercise special caution since so many computers in Iran contain Stuxnet,” adding:

“Although Stuxnet appears to be designed to destroy centrifuges at (Iranian nuclear facilities), destruction was by no means total.”

“Stuxnet did not lower the production of low-enriched uranium (LEU) during 2010. LEU quantities could have certainly been greater, and Stuxnet could be an important part of the reason why they did not increase significantly.”

“(T)here remain important questions about why Stuxnet destroyed only 1,000 centrifuges. One observation is that it may be harder to destroy centrifuges by use of cyber attacks than often believed.”

Head of Bushehr’s nuclear power plant said only personal computers of staff were infected by the Stuxnet virus. Then-Iranian Telecommunications Minister Reza Taghipour said government systems experienced no serious damage.

Iran’s Information Technology Council director Mahmud Liaii said

“(a)n electronic war has been launched against Iran… This computer worm is designed to transfer data about production lines from our industrial plants to locations outside Iran.”

Deputy head of Iran’s government Information Technology Company Hamid Alipour said

“(t)he attack is still ongoing and new versions of this virus are spreading,” adding:

“We had anticipated that we could root out the virus within one to two months, but the virus is not stable, and since we started the cleanup process three new versions of it have been spreading.”

If malware similar to Stuxnet was used against Venezuela’s power grid, the problem could linger for months, parts of the country continued to be affected by outages for some time.

Maduro’s government will need to marshal considerable technical expertise to fully resolve things – the type cybersecurity/anti-virus/security software skills Russia-based multinational firm Kaspersky Lab can provide.

It can also identify the attack’s source and lay blame where it belongs – the US most likely responsible. It clearly has motive, opportunity and expertise – waging war on Venezuela by other means to topple its government and gain another imperial trophy.

If the malware infection is widespread, continued outages may happen until the problem is fully resolved.

Resolution may take months, disruption in the country persisting, clearly the motive behind the attack.

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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 Novinite.com

Michael Oliver (3 February 1945 to 2 March 2019) was a British academic, author, and disability rights activist. He was Emeritus Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Greenwich. His research focused on the social model of disability, and his activism centred on overcoming the systemic barriers disabled people confront in their daily lives. We present below a memoir of his contribution to building Disability Studies and a movement demanding inclusion and equality for disabled people.

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Mike Oliver, Emeritus Professor of Disability Studies at the University of Greenwich in England, has died at the age of 74 after a short illness. A long time wheelchair user since the age of seventeen, a sociologist by training and author of many books including his landmark texts, Social Work with Disabled People (1983) and the Politics of Disablement (1990), and (with Colin Barnes), The New Politics of Disablement (2012). Oliver played a pioneering role in developing, with others such as Vic Finkelstein, what has come to be known as the social model of disability. The model builds from the proposition that it is structural barriers, such as a lack of wheelchair ramps or a failure to provide sign language interpreters, which impede disabled people rather than the impairments themselves. In other words, systemic barriers constitute an ableist society that disables disabled people and keeps them largely unemployed and in poverty. In every advanced capitalist country, disabled people face tremendous barriers in housing, transportation and employment. These barriers are so widespread and comprehensive that most individuals do not give them a second thought.

The Social Model of Disablement

By establishing and popularizing what has become known as the impairment-disability distinction, Oliver convinced disabled people to view the discrimination that they face daily as a matter of rights rather than a personal tragedy or medical problem. In other words, the fact that Jill has broken her leg means that she has an impairment, but she cannot get to class because the school does not have a functioning elevator. The inaccessible school is a disabling barrier that has to be remedied. It is difficult to convey how revolutionary the social model of disability was in crystallizing the consciousness of disabled people. Individuals who had spent years regarding their daily difficulties as a matter of personal failure and were socialized by an array of physiotherapists, occupational therapists and physicians to focus on rehabilitation were suddenly politicized as they came to realize that disability was indeed a political issue. Sometimes this has been misinterpreted as an attack on the medical profession. However, Oliver is very clear that the social model is not anti-medicine where medical intervention is required. Rather he is against ‘medical imperialism’, a mode of thought that regards disabled people as irremediably broken.

Activists chose to prioritize different strategies. Many disabled people, more influenced by postmodern theories of language and the body, have tended to focus on cultural studies and the representation of disabled people in cinema, dance, and sports. Others have chosen to engage in law reform strategies such as advocacy for human rights legislation and test case litigation, with all its promise and perils, to seek social transformation. Still others have focused more directly on grassroots mobilization to challenge the austerity agenda of neoliberal governments – an anti-capitalist route. Certainly all have merits and, indeed, some have chosen to combine them but it is the last road that most closely corresponds to Oliver’s prescient vision of transforming the lives of disabled people for a better future.

Class Politics and Institutionalization

Oliver was deeply influenced by class politics and laid the basis for the still unfinished product of a materialist theory of disablement. He very much believed that the rise of capitalism and the factory system created disability. The requirements of wage labour as the dominant mode of production entailed the segregation and exclusion of disabled workers who could not maintain efficient production standards in an industrial society. As many scholars have noted, the very notion of time functioned differently in agrarian rural societies. Those who failed to conform and work at a pace set by Fordist factories were consigned to “workhouses, asylums, impairment-specific colonies and special schools and out of the mainstream of economic and social life” (Oliver and Barnes, p.55). Social Darwinism and eugenics provided an ideological justification for the exclusion of those individuals who could not conform to the requirements of industrial capitalism.

As many scholars of ‘Mad Studies’ have noted, the actual impairments were often irrelevant. People incarcerated in psychiatric institutions notoriously did not necessarily have a formal diagnosis. As Geoffrey Reaume has shown in his book, Remembrance of Patients Past (2000), some were simply housewives who refused to conform to gender norms or even individuals who were misdiagnosed because they had acted in an unusual manner and spoke foreign languages that authorities could not understand. By associating ability with productivity, the workhouses and asylums served as a warning to the able-bodied population and stigmatized those who fall outside the boundaries of normality. Theories of eugenics of course entailed both stigmatization of disability with racial classifications that sought to exclude immigrants who were a danger to society. At its nadir, this culminated in the eugenics policies of Nazi Germany where hundreds of thousands of disabled people were exterminated in accordance with instructions from Hitler in 1939 but it is often forgotten that early twentieth century social democratic politicians around the world were enthusiasts of eugenics measures.

In the twentieth century, Oliver showed how the state engaged in a neoliberal ‘de-carceration strategy’ that saw the closure of many institutional settings in Western countries. However, this was done in the context of inadequate services that did not allow disabled people to flourish. What remains to this day are massive and inflexible bureaucratic requirements for eligibility for social assistance. It is not uncommon for individuals to entail significant difficulty and repeated rejection in navigating a process that is designed to exclude as many people as possible.

The Role of Professionals

Oliver also played an important role in identifying the role of professionals who work with disabled people and build a career providing services that do little to empower them. He was particularly pointed in criticizing middle class professionals whom he felt exploited disabled people, created a culture of dependency, and systematically ignored their life experience. Hence the slogan of the disability rights movement: ‘nothing about us without us’. He also developed interesting insights on the need for disabled people to acquire a consciousness around disability politics. Unusually for an academic, he combined grassroots activism with his scholarly work and was influenced by the work of militant disability organizations such as the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), which was founded in 1974. Their 1976 manifesto, Fundamental Principles of Disability, articulated many of the distinctions between impairment and disability that Oliver would go on to develop. He fittingly became the first professor of disability studies in Britain.

Disability Rights Activism and the Left

His powerful ideas have influenced an entire generation of disabled people, particularly in the Commonwealth countries, despite the fact that the socialist Left has all too frequently ignored disability rights activism. I was privileged to hear him speak around 1994 at Carleton University in Ottawa in which he spoke about disability rights and referenced Gramsci. This is hardly surprising as Oliver has written eloquently on the ideological construct of individualism. In the disability context, this is manifested through medicalization, the requirements of normality and eugenics (Oliver and Barnes, p.79). While many have since questioned whether the social model adequately integrated identities such as race and gender and whether it adequately encapsulates the experience of those with chronic conditions that involve significant physical pain, the debates still relate back to Oliver’s pioneering work. There is no doubt that there were elements of pessimism in his later work. Oliver thought that the transformation of capitalism was not on the immediate agenda in the face of widespread neoliberal cuts.

That understandable pessimism does not diminish the immense value of his transformative model and his legacy. All the writing I have done since then, including my anthology in honour of the late American disability rights advocate Marta Russell, Disability Politics in a Global Economy (2016), and other topics, is predicated on the epistemic foundation established by Oliver. Marta Russell’s landmark book, Beyond Ramps (1998), has undoubtedly been better received in Britain and other countries than in Canada and the United States in part because Oliver’s materialist conception of disablement has wider currency. At the same time few scholars have developed a full-fledged historical materialist theory of disablement as postmodernism dominates current disability studies departments, despite significant contributions by Marta Russell, Sunny Taylor, Jim Charlton, and others.

Today disability rights advocates continue to play an important role in challenging austerity including vigorous protests in the American Congress against Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. As the Canadian Parliament continues to contemplate the passage of the – very limited and largely toothless – Accessible Canada Act (see the critique of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities), some thirty years after the passage of the more robust Americans with Disabilities Act in the United States. Disability rights advocates around the world owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Mike Oliver.

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Ravi Malhotra is a professor at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, Common Law Section, and a disability rights advocate. You can follow him on twitter at @RaviMalh.

All images in this article are from The Bullet

“You road I travel and look around!  I believe you are not all that is here!  I believe that something unseen is also here.”– Walt Whitman, Poem of the Road

Tragic

Jimmy C., age 9, died on the evening of Dec 28, 19** from a gunshot bullet to the heart.  He was shot by his seven-year-old brother Dennis, while, as The New York Times reported, “the two were playing with a rifle in a neighbor’s apartment in the northeast Bronx.”  The boys were visiting with their mother and found the rifle under a bed.  It was loaded and accidently fired, hitting Jimmy in the chest.

Another boy, age ten, was sitting on a closed toilet seat two miles away.  The bathroom was warm and steamy and the boy was talking to his father, for whom he was named. His father was shaving.  An only son with seven sisters, the boy adored his father, and, enclosed in this intimate setting, he felt embraced by his father’s love and protection.  For a young boy to watch his father shave and to converse with him alone about sports was pure heaven.

His father switched on a small transistor radio so they could hear basketball scores.  A report came over the radio that a young boy had been accidently shot and killed by his brother in the Bronx.  Then the names came. They were his brother’s sons. Heaven turned to hell.  His father, half-shaved, toweled his face and ran from the room.  The boy sat there stunned.  When he emerged from the bathroom, his father had already left to comfort and assist his brother, the father of the dead boy.

The ten year old could remember nothing of what followed. It all went blank and was never discussed, as if it never happened.  He was haunted by this void.

Bizarre

A professor was sitting with his secret lover in a college cafeteria.  It was winter and their table was deep into the room by tall windows.  There was snow on the ground.  They were talking about a mutual friend named John because he had been looking at them oddly in recent days and they suspected he might have realized that they were lovers.  Suddenly, John entered the dining hall at the far door.  He saw them and started walking toward their table.  As he approached, the professor said, “Well, look who’s here, if it isn’t the devil himself.  We were just talking about you, John.”

The bespectacled John laughed, said hello to the woman, and sat down next to the professor.  He was so close that when the professor turned to talk to him, he was looking into his right eye, as can happen at a close distance.

Suddenly, what sounded like a gunshot rang out and everyone all around turned toward the tall windows.  The professor quickly turned back to John and said, “I’m sorry, John, I didn’t mean to break your glasses.” The right lens in John’s glasses was shattered.  There was no gunshot, only the power of a look.  The three were stunned.  In the days that followed, John went about seeking answers from physicists and opticians. None could explain it.

Years later, the woman remembered the incident differently, perhaps because she was the odd one out, but the two men were certain that the professor had shattered John’s glasses. Both are still astounded.

John said he was at least glad that the look didn’t kill him.

Spectral

A few years later, a man was wandering around the diamond district in New York City.  It was a Sunday morning and the streets were deserted.  He had come to buy some books at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47^th St., whose slogan was “Wise Men Fish Here.”  Many a famous author had frequented the shop over the years – Eugene O’Neill, J. D Salinger, Dylan Thomas, et al.  It was a cultural treasure whose contents are now archived at the University of Pennsylvania.

The man had arrived too early and the store hadn’t opened, so he aimlessly wandered up and down the empty street, finally stopping to gaze into the window of a large, glass-enclosed jewelry store on the corner.  He walked into the entranceway and looked through the window when he spied a ghost-like figure staring at him through the glass windows from the street.  He tried to avoid looking at this spectral figure, but when he looked up the face was stock-still and staring at him through pale spectacles.  His hair was white and his face its equal.  It gave him a creepy feeling and so he walked out toward the street to confront this pale phantom.  When he got to the street, the strange man met him and, raising a tiny camera, shot him.

The victim of this photographic assault said, “Did I give you permission to take my picture?”

The ghost replied, “Well, you have an interesting face, and I shoot a lot of people.”

“Well, you also have an interesting face, but I didn’t give you permission.  What do you do, go around hunting for interesting people to shoot?”

Andy Warhol shrugged, turned, and faded wraithlike down the vacant street.

The man never saw the photo.  Perhaps it remained a negative.

So much of the past recedes as afterimages, while the road into the future opens out before us shrouded in mystery.

The old question stills applies. Quo vadis?

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Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Natural England and Natural Resources Wales have mysteriously given the go-ahead for protected species such as robins, starlings, blackbirds and bullfinches to be shot: Licences granted to kill multiple Red-listed species

I say mysteriously, because the reasons given are very strange.

When asked why these licences have been granted, Natural England simply claim the birds are a “threat to public health and air safety” and the slaughter is to “prevent serious damage to livestock”.

It’s somewhat hard to imagine how starlings and robins could ever be a danger to the public or herds of cows.

Of course, the fact that these protected nesting birds are one of the biggest problems facing property developers (*see information below) when they attempt to develop brownfield sites for residential housing is nothing at all to do with the decision.

As, I’m sure, is the fact that the Chair of Natural England, Andrew Sells, also happens to be one of the founders of Linden Homes, a property development business specialising in the development of brownfield sites for residential housing.

Tory government ministers chose Andrew Sells –  a venture capitalist with no experience of ecological or environmental matters – as the Chair of Natural England a few years ago.

A surprise decision which I’m sure was not at all influenced by the fact that Andrew Sells is a major Tory party donor and the fact that property developers in general are some of the Tories’ biggest donors.

No conflicts of interest at all then.

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Note

*All wild birds, their nests and young are protected throughout England and Wales by the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 (as amended). It is illegal to kill, injure or take any wild bird, or damage or destroy the nest or eggs of breeding birds.

If nests, whether completed or in the process of being built, are found on site, any works with the potential to damage or destroy the nest, eggs or young birds, must stop until the birds have completed breeding.

Birds may nest on machinery or scaffolding and other temporary site structures. If this happens the equipment cannot be used until the birds have finished nesting and such areas may need to be sealed off to prevent disturbance.

Breaking the law can lead to fines of up to £5000 per offence and potential prison sentences of up to six months. Vehicles implicated in an offence can be compounded and both the company, and/or the individual(s) concerned, can be held liable.

Featured image is from Pride’s Purge

“I will not comply with this, or any other grand jury.”  So explained Chelsea Manning in justifying her refusal to answer questions and comply with a grand jury subpoena compelling her to testify on her knowledge of WikiLeaks. 

“Imprisoning me for my refusal to answer questions only subjects me to additional punishment for my repeatedly stated ethical obligations to the grand jury system.” 

Manning, whose 35-year sentence was commuted by the Obama administration in an act of seeming leniency, is indivisibly linked to the WikiLeaks legacy of disclosure.  She was the source, and the bridge, indispensable for giving Julian Assange and his publishing outfit the gold dust that made names and despoiled others. 

The sense of dredging and re-dredging in efforts to ensnare Manning is palpable.  She insists that she had shared all that she knew at her court-martial, a point made clear by the extensive if convoluted nature of the prosecution’s effort to build a case. 

“The grand jury’s questions pertained to disclosures from nine years ago, and took place six years after an in-depth computer forensics case, in which I tesified [sic] for almost a full day about these events.  I stand by my previous testimony.” 

Before Friday’s hearing, she also reiterated that she had invoked the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment protections.

Grand juries have gone musty.  Conceived in 12^th century England as a feudalistic guardian against unfair prosecution, they became bodies of self-regulating and policing freemen (often barons with a gripe) charged with investigating alleged wrongdoing.  Doing so provided a preliminary step in recommending whether the accused needed to go court. The US Constitution retains this element with the Fifth Amendment: that no “person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury.”  

The independence of that body of peers has been clipped, modified and fundamentally influenced by the prosecutor’s guiding hand.  The federal grand jury has essentially become a body easily wooed by the prosecutor in closed settings where grooming and convincing are easy matters. The prosecutor can also be comforted by that level of procedural secrecy that keeps the process beyond prying eyes; Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 6(e) makes the point that the jurors and government attorneys “must not disclose a matter occurring before the grand jury.”  Sealed and confined, the participants accordingly forge a narrative that tends to encourage, rather than dissuade a finding, of guilt. 

That influence is hard to deny, leading to reluctance on the part of any empaneled grand jury to reject the plausibility of a prosecutor’s claims.  The US Bureau of Statistics, looking at 2010 figures on the prosecution of 162,000 federal cases, found that grand juries only failed to return an indictment in 11 cases.  As Gordon Griller of the National Centre for State Courts reasoned,

“The problem with the grand jury system is the jury.  The prosecutor has complete control over what is presented to the grand jury and expects the grand jurors to just rubber stamp every case brought before it.”

Manning’s other relevant point is that the grand jury process has, invariably, been given the weaponry to target dissenters and corner contrarians. 

“I will not participate in a secret process that I morally object to, particularly one that has been used to entrap and persecute activists for protected political speech.”

Manning explained to US District Judge Claude Hilton that she would (think Socrates, hemlock, the like) “accept whatever you bring upon me”.  When her defence team insisted that she be confined to home, given specific needs of gender-affirming healthcare, the judge was unconvinced.  US marshals were more than up to the task (how is never stated), though certain “details about Ms Manning’s confinement,” claim Alexandria Sheriff Dana Lawhorne, “will not be made public due to security and privacy concerns.”   

She will be confined till the conclusion of the investigation, or till she feels ready to comply with the subpoena.  Manning’s defence counsel Moira Meltzer-Cohen is convinced that the very act of jailing Manning is one of state-sanctioned cruelty.

There is a distinct note of the sinister in this resumption of hounding a whistleblower; yet again, Manning must show that the virtues of a cause and the merits of an open system demand a level of cruel sacrifice.  “This ain’t my first rodeo,” she told her lawyer with some reflection. 

This rodeo is one dogged by problems.  Manning’s original conviction was a shot across the bow, the prelude to something fundamental.  Journalists long protected for using leaked material under the First Amendment were going to become future targets of prosecution.  Such instincts have seeped into the US governing class like stubborn damp rot; consider, for instance, the remarks of Senator Dianne Feinstein in 2012 on the issue of leaks discussed in The New York Times.  Having published details of the Obama administration’s “Kill List” and US-orchestrated cyber-attacks against Iran, the paper had “caused serious harm to US national security and… should be prosecuted accordingly.”  While The Grey Lady might prefer to distance itself from WikiLeaks in journalistic company, prosecuting authorities see little difference.

This latest rotten business also demonstrates the unequivocal determination of US authorities to fetter, if not totally neutralise, the reach of WikiLeaks in the modern information wars.  Having been either tongue-tired or reticent, US officials, notably those in the Alexandria office, have revealed what WikiLeaks regarded as obvious some years ago: that a grand jury is keen to soften the road to prosecution.    

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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 Massoud Nayeri