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Donald Trump is pursuing what appears to be a new business deal in the Dominican Republic despite pledging no new foreign deals – a deal which may be in violation of the U.S. Constitution

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Essay by security expert Professor Zhang Wenmu gives a glimpse of China’s geostrategic outlook, from the ‘Western Pacific Chinese Sea’ to the far side of the moon

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The top story of 2019 – and the years ahead – will continue to revolve around the myriad, dangerous permutations of the economic ascent of China, the resurgence of nuclear superpower Russia and the decline of the US’s global hegemony.

Two years ago, before the onset of the Trump administration, I sketched how the shadow play might proceed in the New Great Game in Eurasia.

Now the new game hits high gear; it’s the US against the Russia-China strategic partnership.

Diplomatic capers, tactical retreats, psychological, economic, cyber and even outer space duels, all enveloped in media hysteria, will continue to rule the news cycle. Be prepared for all shades of carping about authoritarian China, and its “malign” association with an “illiberal” Russian bogeyman bent on blasting the borders of Europe and “disrupting” the Middle East.

Relatively sound minds like the political scientist Joseph Nye will continue to lament the sun setting on the Western liberal “order,” without realizing that what was able to “secure and stabilize the world over the past seven decades” does not translate into a “strong consensus … defending, deepening and extending this system.” The Global South overwhelmingly begs to differ, arguing that the current “order” was manufactured and largely benefits only US interests.

Expect exceptionalists to operate in condescending overdrive, exhorting somewhat reluctant “allies” to help “constrain” if not contain China and “channel” – as in control – Beijing’s increasing global clout.

It’s a full-time job to “channel” China into finding its “right” place in a new world order. What does the Chinese intellectual elite really think about all this?

Never fight on two fronts

An unparalleled roadmap may be provided by Zhang Wenmu, national security strategy expert and professor at the Center of Strategic Studies of the University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Beijing, who wrote an essay published in August 2017 in the Chinese magazine Taipingyan Xuebao (Pacific magazine), that was translated recently into Italian by Rome-based geopolitical magazine Limes.

“Geopolitics” may be an Anglo invention, arguably by Sir Halford Mackinder, but it has been studied in China for centuries as, for instance, “geographic advantage” (xingsheng) or “historic geography” (lishi dili).

Wenmu introduces us to the concept of geopolitics as philosophy on the tip of a knife, but it’s mostly about philosophy, not the knife. If we want to use the knife we must use philosophy to know the limits of our power. Call it a Sino-equivalent of Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer.

As a geopolitical analyst, Wenmu cannot but remind us that the trademark Roman or British empires’ ‘divide and rule’ is also a well-known tactic in China. For instance, in early 1972, Chairman Mao was quite ready to welcome Richard Nixon. Later, in July, Mao revealed his hand:

“One must profit from the conflict between two powers, that is our policy. But we must get closer to one of them and not fight on two fronts.”

He was referring to the split between China and the USSR.

Wenmu gets a real kick out of how Western geopolitics usually plays things wrong. He stresses how Halford Mackinder, the Englishman regarded as one of the founders of geostrategy, “influenced World War II and the subsequent decline of the British Empire,” noting how Mackinder died only five months before Partition between India and Pakistan in 1947.

He destroys George Kennan’s theory of the Cold War, “directly based on Mackinder’s thinking,” and how it led the US to fight in Korea and Vietnam, “accelerating its decline.”

Even Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former US national security advisor, “saw the decline of the American empire,” as he died recently, in May 2017.

“In that moment, China and Russia gave life to a strategic collaboration always closer and invincible.” Wenmu is positively gleeful. “If Brzezinski was still alive, I think he would see the ‘great defeat’ of the Western world – the opposite of what he wrote.”

Why Tibet matters

Chinese geopolitics predictably pays close attention to the tension between sea powers and land powers. Wenmu notes how, in the Indian Ocean, the British Empire enjoyed more naval power compared to the Americans “because it occupied the homonymous continent. And because it dominated the seas, the United Kingdom also threatened the Russian Empire, which was a land power.”

Wenmu quotes from Alfred Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History on the reciprocal influence between control of the seas and control of the land. But, he adds:

“Mahan did not analyze this relation on a global level … Based on the priorities of the United States, he concentrated most of all on distant seas.”

Wenmu crucially stresses how the Pacific Ocean is the “obligatory passage of the Maritime Silk Road.” Even though China “developed its naval capacity much later, it enjoys [a] geographical advantage in relation to the UK and the US.” And with that, he brings us to the essential Tibet question.

One of Wenmu’s key points is how “the Tibetan plateau allows the People’s Republic to access the resources respectively of the Pacific Ocean to the east and those of the Indian Ocean in the west. If from the plateau we look at the American base in Diego Garcia [in the center of the Indian Ocean] we can’t have any doubts about the natural advantage of Chinese geopolitics.” The implication is that the UK and US must “consume a great deal of resources to cross the oceans and develop a chain of islands.”

Wenmu shows how the geography of the Tibetan plateau “links in a natural way the Tibetan region to the dominant power in the Chinese central plains” while it does “not link it to the countries in the South Asia subcontinent.” Thus Tibet should be considered as a “natural part of China.”

China is supported by the continental plaque, “which it controls along its coast,” and “possesses technology of medium and long-range missile attack,” guaranteeing it virtually a “great capacity of reaction in both oceans” with a “relatively powerful naval force.” And that’s how China, as Wenmu maps it, is able to compensate – “to a certain extent” – the technological gap relative to the West.

Wenmu’s most controversial point is that “the advantage that only China enjoys of linking to markets of two oceans crashes the myth of Western ‘naval power’ in the contemporary era and introduces a revolutionary vision; the People’s Republic is a great nation who possesses by nature the qualification of naval power.” We just need to compare “how industrial development allowed the West to navigate towards the Indian Ocean” while China “arrived on foot.”

Get Taiwan

President Obama was keen to exhort at every opportunity the status of the US as a “Pacific nation.” Imagine the US confronted by Wenmu’s description:

“The Western Pacific is linked to the national interests of the People’s Republic and is the starting point of the New Maritime Silk Road.”

In fact, Chairman Mao talked about it way back in 1959:

“One day, it does not matter when, the United States will have to retire from the rest of the world and will have to abandon the Western Pacific.”

Extrapolating from Mao, Wenmu elaborates on a “Western Pacific Chinese Sea” uniting the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea. “We can use the formula ‘southern zone of the Western Pacific Chinese Sea’ to describe the part that falls under Chinese sovereignty.”

This suggests a combination of Chinese forces in the South China Sea, the East China Sea and the Yellow Sea under a sole Western Pacific naval command.

It’s easy to see where all this is pointing: reunification with Taiwan.

Under such a system, as delineated by Wenmu, Taiwan “would return to the motherland,” China’s sovereignty over its coastline “would be legitimated” and at the same time “would not be excessively extended.”

Beijing’s supreme goal is to effectively move the “Chinese line of control” to the east of Taiwan. That reflects President Xi Jinping’s speech earlier this week, where he referred to Taiwan, for all practical purposes, as the great prize. Wenmu frames it as an environment “where Chinese nuclear submarines are able to counter-attack, the construction of aircraft carriers can progress and products made in continental China may be exported effectively.”

The barycenter of Asia

One of the most fascinating arguments in Wenmu’s essay is how he shows there’s always a natural proportion – a sort of ‘divine’ or ‘golden ratio’ between the three strategic powers in Eurasia: Europe, Central Asia and China.

Cue to a fast tour of the rise and fall of empires, with “history showing how in the main zone of the continent – between 30 and 60 degrees of north[ern] latitude – there can be only 2.5 strategic forces.” Which means one of the three major spaces always becomes fragmented.

In modern times it has been rare that one of the three powers “managed to expand to a 1.5 ratio.” Before, only the Tang empire and the Mongol empire came close. The British Empire, Tsarist Russia and the USSR “invaded Afghanistan and entered Central Asia, but success, when it happened, was short-lived.”

That paved the way to Wenmu’s clincher:

“The law of the aurea section [Latin for ‘golden’ section] as the base of strategic power in Eurasia helps us to understand the causes of alternate rise and decline of powers in the continent and to recognize the limits of expansion of Chinese power in Central Asia. To understand it is the premise of mature and successful diplomacy.”

Although this cannot be seriously depicted as a roadmap for “Chinese aggression,” Wenmu cannot help but direct another hit at Western geopolitical stalwart Mackinder:

“With his genius imagination, Mackinder advanced the wrong theory of the ‘geographic pivot’ because he did not consider this law.”

In a nutshell, China is key for the equilibrium of Eurasia.

“In Europe, the fragmented zone originates in the center, in Asia, it is around China. So that presents China as the natural barycenter of Asia.”

Dark side of the moon

It’s easy to imagine Wenmu’s essay provoking ballistic responses from proponents of the US National Security Strategy which labels China, as well as Russia, as a dangerous “revisionist power.”

Professional Sinophobes are even peddling the notion that a “failing China” might eventually “lash out” against the US. That’s a misreading of what Rear Admiral Luo Yuan said last month in Shenzhen:

“We now have Dong Feng-21D, Dong Feng-26 missiles. These are aircraft carrier killers. We attack and sink one of their aircraft carriers. Let them suffer 5,000 casualties. Attack and sink two carriers, casualties 10,000. Let’s see if the US is afraid or not?”

This is a statement of fact, not a threat. The Pentagon knows all there is to know about ‘carrier killer’ danger.

Beijing won’t stop with carrier killers, the rebranded Western Pacific and reunification with Taiwan. It is planning the first artificial intelligence (AI) colony on earth – a deep-sea base for unmanned submarine science and defense ops in the South China Sea.

The landing of the Chang’e 4 lunar probe on the far side of the moon could even be interpreted as the most extreme extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

These are all pieces in a massive puzzle bound to reinforce the grip of a new – Sinocentric – map of the world, already in use by the Chinese navy and published in 2013, not by accident the year when the New Silk Roads were announced in Astana and Jakarta.

Wenmu ends his essay stressing how “Chinese geopolitics must distance itself from the idea that ‘one cannot open his mouth without mentioning Ancient Greece’.” That’s a reference to a famous Mao speech of May 1941, when the Chairman criticized certain Marxist-Leninists who privileged Western history – of which Ancient Greece is the ultimate symbol – over Chinese history.

Thucydides trap? What trap?

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Trump Escalates Confrontation over Federal Shutdown

By Patrick Martin, January 08, 2019

With the partial shutdown of the federal government in its third week, and 800,000 workers facing the prospect of a payless payday Friday, President Trump has stepped up his campaign to spread fear and whip up bigotry against immigrants and refugees.

Crisis in Ukraine: Religious Schism and War

By Christopher Black, January 08, 2019

The signing of the Tomos or note of Autocephaly for the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine is not a church but a political act which may have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine.

As Trump Orders US Out of Afghanistan, Notorious CIA-Backed Units Will Remain

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, January 08, 2019

As the US military kills civilians in Syria and CIA-led Afghan forces continue to commit war crimes, it appears Trump is doing the right thing in pulling out military troops. But the CIA will remain and grow stronger after the US troops leave.

Bolton Threatens Syria: US Troop Withdrawal “On Hold”. Permanent US Military Base on Syria-Iraqi border

By Stephen Lendman, January 07, 2019

On Friday, a State Department official said “(w)e have no timeline for our military forces to withdraw from” the country. Delay may turn out to be not at all.

Trump’s “Anti-Terrorist Strike” in Yemen Serves Domestic and International Purposes

By Andrew Korybko, January 07, 2019

The world is safer now that there’s one less Al Qaeda terrorist inhabiting it, but Trump’s successful strike against USS Cole bomber Jamal al-Badawi in central Yemen also served several tangential domestic and international purposes, too.

US Secretary of State Pompeo Enlists Allies to ‘Return Democracy’ to Venezuela

By Ricardo Vaz, January 07, 2019

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with allies in a tour of Latin America this week, in which he talked about stepping up US-led efforts against Venezuela.

Afghanistan in Photos: When a US Strike Hits a Family Home

By Andrew Quilty, Abigail Fielding-Smith, and Jessica Purkiss, January 07, 2019

The doors of Emergency Hospital in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, swung open: Ehsanullah, 14, his face a swollen mess of flesh, was the first to be wheeled in.

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The signing of the Tomos or note of Autocephaly for the newly created Orthodox Church of Ukraine is not a church but a political act which may have catastrophic consequences for Ukraine.

So said the head of the Russian Federation Council’s international affairs committee, Konstantin Kosachev, on Saturday January 6, the day the document was issued.

“This is a new move towards destroying the unity of Orthodoxy, the consequences of which will be catastrophic, first of all for Ukraine itself and its people.”

One of the worst crises in the history of Christianity was the split between the Church centred in Rome and the Church centred in Constantinople, between the west and east regions of the old Roman Empire, that took place in the year 1054. Today, the NATO military alliance and its vassals in the Kiev regime in Ukraine have forced a further split within the Eastern or Orthodox Church by setting up a separate Orthodox church in Ukraine that rejects the age old authority of the Moscow Patriarchate with authority over the churches in Ukraine and purports to set up a separate Orthodox Church in Kiev.

This is not just a side issue in the Christian world or world politics. It is a key element of the NATO plan to use all forms of warfare in all realms of life to further their ambition of crushing the power of Russia. It is designed to engender hostility among the Slavic peoples, to reduce Russia’s prestige and Moscow’s reputation as the third Rome, to further divide the Ukrainian people against themselves and harden the artificial division between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. But to understand the new division we have to review some history.

The split or schism within the Christian church had many complex causes which neither I, nor the reader, have the patience to enter into. Some of the causes were theological, some cultural, others political. To avoid boring you I will provide only what is essential from the past to understand the present.

For centuries the emperors in control of the eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople, favoured Rome’s supremacy in Church matters because they wanted to safeguard the universality of the Empire and their claims to Italy. The separation of the churches in the two parts of the Empire evolved gradually over the centuries and reflected the long rivalry between Latins and Greeks, between Rome and Constantinople. But the Roman popes steadily expanded their control across Europe along with their spiritual and temporal power that the authorities in the second city of the Empire resented and feared. The eastern Romans, who considered their emperor as an equal of the apostles, and who believed that matters of church doctrine could be resolved only through the Holy Ghost speaking through the Ecumenical Council, were shocked by the pope in Rome, who to them was just first among equals among all the church patriarchs, yet claimed he could formulate dogma and had spiritual and temporal supremacy over all the other churches and patriarchs; for in the early Church and for a long period, spiritual authority was deemed to be held equally between the patriarchs of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Aleppo.

The major split took place in 1054 when the Normans attacked some cities in southern Italy, defeated the army sent to stop them, and detained the Roman pope who was furious that the emperor in Constantinople had not come to his rescue. The patriarch and the Emperor in Constantinople tried to smooth things over but tempers and insults flared and the papal legates visiting Constantinople for the purpose of resolving the dispute only inflamed matters and ended their mission by excommunicating the eastern patriarch who in turn anathematised them.

This sequence of events resulted in the lasting separation of the eastern and western churches. The split need never have occurred. More goodwill, less bigotry, cooler tempers could have resolved all the issues but, as is the case now, ill will prevailed. Though the split of 1054 was not complete, for there were attempts in the 13th and 15th centuries to cement the two churches back together and an another attempt in 1965 at the Ecumenical Council, the injury could not be healed, has long festered and now has begun to bleed once again, but this time within the eastern church itself and within the context of a threatened general war.

When the Turks took Constantinople in 1453 they permitted the Orthodox Christians to remain and it was Mehmet the Conqueror, acting as a Roman emperor, who designated a new Patriarch for the city. Today the Istanbul patriarch claims authority over the scattered Greek Orthodox churches in Western Europe, the Americas and Australia and the eastern orthodox churches in Russia, the Balkans, Greece, Asia and Africa, though he has very few adherents in modern Istanbul.

As Christianity spread further east, first Kiev then Moscow became the important centres of the Orthodox Church and set up their own patriarchates or divisions of the

Church. But, partly as a result of the Mongol invasions and other complicated events Moscow assumed a more authoritative and primary role resulting in the Patriarchate in Constantinople assigning the Moscow patriarchate with authority over the eastern churches, including Ukraine, in 1686. This has been the situation more or less up to the present.

But on October 15, 2018 the Russian Orthodox Church announced that it would break off all relations with the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, the claimed leader of Eastern Orthodoxy, after he agreed on October 11, 2018, to the April request of Kiev leader Poroshenko, and his minions in the church in Kiev, to grant autocephaly, or self-governance, to what they are calling the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, not to be confused with the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that does not recognize this action, the sole objective of which is to attempt to divide Ukrainians from the historical influence of the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia.

Poroshenko who, along with NATO, backed this action, stated that this step “finally dispelled the imperial illusions and chauvinistic fantasies of Moscow.”

Ukraine currently has three Orthodox denominations, the largest of which is the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. That branch remained subordinate to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and contains more than 12,000 parishes. This is a third of all parishes under the Russian Orthodox Church, and Ukraine contains some of the most symbolic ones, such as the monastery Kiev-Pechersk Lavra and its catacombs. The other two denominations are the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kiev Patriarchate, with 4,800 parishes, and the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church, with 1,000 parishes, which adds to the confusion when trying to grasp what is going on here.

But Russia has long been unhappy with Constantinople’s first-among-equals status and has sought to challenge and erode its role since the Moscow patriarchate sees itself as the dominant bastion of Eastern Orthodoxy. The Russian Orthodox Church alone has more than 150 million followers, half of the world wide adherents and the two patriarchates also differ on some points of doctrine, with Constantinople seeking closer alignment with the Pope in Rome, while the number of Christians in Istanbul can no longer support the claim of that city’s Christian leader to be head of the eastern church.

After Patriarch Bartholomew’s decision, which he probably had no authority to make, Patriarch Filaret in Kiev stated that he would call a council of the leaders of the

Ukrainian Orthodox Church to choose a leader for this newly created church of Ukraine. The move marked the beginning of the establishment of an independent church in Ukraine, outside the control of Moscow and its patriarch, Kirill. It is also a self-serving decision because it serves to weaken the Russian Orthodox Church and strengthen the almost irrelevant Church in Constantinople that has long been under the sway of the NATO powers and serves their interests. It also is designed to destroy the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and force people to join this new church.

This has wider dimensions since Russian allies, Serbia and Belarus, already have backed the Moscow Patriarchate and condemned the granting of autocephaly to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The split in the church may have other and more violent consequences arising from disputes over holy sites as several of Ukraine’s most holy sites and churches will be claimed by both the Russian and established Ukrainian churches and this upstart church. The Kiev Patriarchate has already laid claim to the famous 11th century Kiev Monastery of the Caves and the Holy Dormition Monastery in Pochayiv. Both sites are now controlled by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate and could face protests and vandalism.

Poroshenko has said,

“If you see people who call for seizing Lavra or a monastery or church by force, you should know that they are Moscow’s agents. The Kremlin’s goal is to ignite a religious war in Ukraine.”

Vadym Novinskyi, an opposition bloc member of parliament, predicted a “civil war and clashes over property “in every village and every town.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated,

“If the developments spiral into abusive practices, of course, Russia will protect Orthodox Christians’ interests, just like Russia protects the interests of ethnic Russians and the Russian-speaking population everywhere.”

There have already been reports of problems over the Christmas period.

It was reported in Tass that,

‘with deep indignation and disbelief that we have to inform the public that on December 9, 2018, the Ukrainian authorities prevented the incumbent head of the Donetsk and Marioupol Eparchy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church Metropolitan Hilarion from crossing the disengagement line through the Novotroitskoye checkpoint to attend a scheduled prayer meeting”.

On December 26th Patriarch Kiril of Moscow and All Russia stated,

“that the creation of a new autocephalous church in Ukraine and the persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) could have dangerous consequences for the whole world.”

“I believe the developments in Ukraine will undoubtedly have very dangerous effects in the lives of many countries. What is happening in Ukraine can be used as a precedent. That means that everything, which ensured inter-religious peace, religious freedom and human rights will, in all likelihood, stop to be untouchable, particularly, if these values stand in the way of solving certain political problems.”

Already priests in Ukraine face persecution arising out of this development. Over the past few weeks, Ukraine’s Security Service, the SBU, has conducted searches in the Ovruch diocese in Ukraine’s Zhitomir Region. This resulted in 20 clerics of the UOC’s Rovno and Sarny dioceses being summoned for questioning. Searches were also conducted in the apartment of Metropolitan Paul, Abbot of Kiev Pechersk Lavra. According to the SBU, these police actions were part of a criminal case on inciting inter-confessional strife opened against him, but no doubt are meant to harass and intimidate. Some already face criminal charges.

The tensions being stoked within the Church and the broader society by Poroshenko and the NATO intelligence services will no doubt be used as fuel for the fire as Kiev ratchets up its military actions against the peoples of east Ukraine in the Donbass republics and can lead not only to arrests and detentions of religious leaders and their supporters but also assassinations of those opposing their maneuvers, for on top of all the other problems faced by Ukrainians has been placed the bloody thorn of religious persecution, a Christmas gift from NATO.

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO

The line from James Mattis that seemed to stand out the most was “Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects, I believe it is right for me to step down from my position.”

Mattis spent the prior paragraphs of his resignation letter describing the threats of terrorism, the importance of US military alliances, and the perceived danger of Russia and China. He then dropped the subtly worded bombshell sentence, indicating that Trump did not share these views which are considered to be the standard perspective of the global situation by US mainstream media.

The Mattis resignation coincided with the announced withdrawal of US troops from Syria and Afghanistan. Mattis is reported to have disagreed with the President’s decision. Shortly after the resignation, Trump visited US troops in Iraq and infuriated the military by signing “Make America Great Again” hats and announcing, falsely, that he had increased the troop’s pay by 10%.

The mainstream of American politics went into overdrive denouncing Trump for “giving a huge gift to Putin” and “abandoning the women” of Afghanistan. US Senator Lindsey Graham said “The only reason they’re not dancing in the aisles in Tehran and ISIS camps is they don’t believe in dancing.” Those who are familiar with contemporary US history should realize that Trump seems to be in an increasingly dangerous position as he has apparently earned the scorn of the Pentagon brass.

The struggle between the elected President as “commander-in-chief” of the US military and its uniformed brass is quite longstanding. Abraham Lincoln famously fired General George McLellan with the historic rebuff “If General McClellan does not want to use the Army, I would like to borrow it for a time.” Truman fired General Douglas Macarthur for threatening to drop atomic bombs on China without Presidential authorization.

The Pentagon and the Presidency

John F. Kennedy’s assassination can be widely interpreted in the context of a rivalry between the intelligence community and the Pentagon. Kennedy refused to send in the US military into Cuba after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion by exiled anti-Communists. Kennedy refused to escalate the Vietnam War and increasingly argued that the best way to defeat Communism was with a foreign policy of good will and charity.  After Kennedy’s assassination his successor, Lyndon Johnson, did indeed escalate the Vietnam War, and eventually resigned as the war became unpopular.

While Jimmy Carter’s presidency is remembered as an era of Peace, it was also an era in which the intelligence agencies had the upper hand. With the United States public still traumatized by the Vietnam War, Carter presented a liberal, nearly pacifist image. However, Carter called openly himself a student of Zbeignew Brzezinski, the mastermind anti-communist who worked with the CIA to foment protest among the eastern bloc intellegensia and pioneered the use of Wahabbi terrorists as proxy fighters in Afghanistan.

Carter was loved by Langley, but hated in the Pentagon. The US Senate blocked Carter from ratifying the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks 2 agreement of 1979, with retired Generals and military linked voices in the media denouncing him as “soft.” Carter was also accused of having “lost” Iran after the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Pentagon loathed Carter’s soft-power approach and seemed almost unanimously behind Ronald Reagan who trounced him in the 1980 election. Reagan raised military spending. According to the Washington Post:

“Reagan came along and brought…. an infusion of money. Defense spending hit a peak of $456.5 billion in 1987 (in projected 2005 dollars), compared with $325.1 billion in 1980 and $339.6 million in 1981, according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Most of the increase was for procurement and research and development programs. The procurement budget leapt to $147.3 billion from $71.2 billion in 1980.”

Trump: On The Outs With Both Intel & the Generals?

The mutual distrust between Trump and the intelligence agencies has been apparent from early on. The media largely credits intel agencies with the steady stream of leaks to the media. Trump’s speech to the CIA shortly after taking office was described by New Yorker magazine as a “vainglorious affront.”

Trump echoed the Pentagon’s mantra of “Peace Through Strength” on the campaign trail. He raised military spending, and even let the Pentagon utilize the largest non-nuclear explosive device, the infamous MOAB, in Afghanistan. Trump arranged for Saudi Arabia to increase its purchases from US military contractors.

In the old feud between intel agencies and the Pentagon, Trump seemed solidly with the Pentagon. But in December, a series of bizarre tweets criticizing US military spending were apparently foreshadowing the withdrawal of forces from Syria and Afghanistan. With Mattis out, and Trump’s Iraqi holiday visit widely criticized, it now appears Trump is on the outs with the US military.

One particular passage from Mattis resignation letter is striking:

“It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model – gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions – to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies. That is why we must use all the tools of American power to provide for the common defense.”

This statement is loaded with hypocrisy and projection. Russia and China are rather loose and free societies compared to many US-aligned regimes such as Saudi Arabia or South Korea. Meanwhile, both Russia and China have been working to develop and eradicate poverty in neighboring countries. The Eurasian Economic Union and the One Belt, One Road initiative have involved massive spending by Russia and China to stabilize and raise living standards in nearby countries, not “promote their own interests” at their “expense.”

However, the structure of Mattis’ letter seems to indicate on some level that Trump does not agree with his assessment, and perhaps has another view of Russia and China and their role in the world.

This raises many questions, not just about what kind of conversations are taking place behind closed doors within the White House, but what the future of the current administration will be. After all, the US military and those who manufacture its weapons and tools are an extremely powerful constituency.

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Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from NEO

With the partial shutdown of the federal government in its third week, and 800,000 workers facing the prospect of a payless payday Friday, President Trump has stepped up his campaign to spread fear and whip up bigotry against immigrants and refugees.

The White House has requested time from the national television networks for a speech Tuesday night in which Trump is expected to make his case for the building of a wall along the US-Mexico border by portraying refugee families fleeing violence and poverty in Central America as terrorists and criminals. The three cable news networks, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, and the four main broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, have all agreed to air the speech.

Trump administration spokesmen, effectively previewing the speech, fanned out on the Sunday network interview programs to press for the border wall, each parroting the flat-out lie that 4,000 terrorists were apprehended attempting to enter the country from Mexico last year.

The bogus character of this claim has been widely exposed. Even Fox News rebutted it, as interviewer Chris Wallace pointed out to White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders that 4,000 was the figure for everyone on government watch lists apprehended attempting to enter the country, most of them at airports, not the US-Mexico border.

NBC News reported that the actual number of such “terrorist” detentions at the US-Mexico border in the first half of 2018 was six people, not the thousands invoked by the White House as justification for a border wall.

On Sunday, the White House sent a formal request to the House of Representatives and the US Senate, seeking $5.6 billion for construction of the border wall as well as $800 million to house, feed and provide medical care for refugee families already in custody or expected to be imprisoned in the first nine months of 2019.

Trump administration representatives portrayed the $800 million as a “concession” to the new Democratic-controlled House, which has voted repeatedly to reopen the federal departments that are wholly or partially shut down, although each bill passed by the House has been blocked from consideration in the Republican-controlled Senate by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

The implied threat in the negotiations is that if Trump does not get the $5.6 billion he is demanding for the wall, he will declare a state of national emergency, circumvent Congress and order the military to build the wall using funds already appropriated to the Pentagon. This would represent an unprecedented step in the direction of a presidential dictatorship.

The Democrats, for their part, are not opposing Trump’s fascistic vendetta against immigrants or the adoption of increasingly authoritarian forms of rule. They say next to nothing about Trump’s mass imprisonment of immigrant families and children, his deployment of troops to the border, the administration’s Gestapo-like workplace raids or its attack on the right to asylum. A year ago, they offered to support $25 billion to build the border wall in return for limited protection from deportation for so-called “dreamers”—undocumented immigrants brought into the US as children. Now they quibble over calling expanded border installations a “wall” or “fencing.”

While Trump appeals to his fascistic base to establish authoritarian forms of rule, the Democrats support the buildup of the powers of the military and intelligence agencies and an intensification of internet censorship.

As Yale Law Professor Bruce Ackerman pointed out in an analysis published in the New York Times over the weekend, a declaration of a state of national emergency would fall under the provisions of the 1976 National Emergencies Act, passed in the wake of the Watergate crisis to limit politically motivated assertions of presidential power.

Under this law, any such declaration could be voted on immediately by the House of Representatives, now under Democratic control. If the House voted to overturn it, the Senate would be required to vote with 15 days. The declaration would also be subject to review in the courts. In other words, far from settling the issue, the state of emergency declaration would escalate the political conflict within the US ruling elite to an unprecedented degree.

Tuesday is a crucial day in the shutdown, not just because of Trump’s scheduled speech or the return of Congress from a weekend recess, but because if no action is taken to restore funding, it will be too late to avoid a payless payday on January 11. Some 800,000 workers will receive nothing, about half of them on furlough, half compelled to work without pay.

Those designated as “essential” include most federal employees of agencies of police repression such as the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But it also includes 52,000 mostly low-paid workers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), who conduct passenger and baggage screenings for air travel. Included as well are air traffic controllers and many other highly skilled workers.

A movement is developing among TSA workers, whose salaries average only $30,000 a year, to refuse to work without pay. Increasing numbers of TSA workers are calling in sick, an action that is entirely spontaneous and opposed by the union that supposedly represents them, the American Federation of Government Employees.

Press reports suggest that some of the largest airports have been hit, with 150 TSA screeners calling in sick at JFK Airport in New York City and an increase in sick calls at Dallas-Ft. Worth of 75 to 100 percent since Christmas.

Conditions are deteriorating in the national parks, where 16,000 out of 19,000 staff are furloughed, including most rangers and search-and-rescue crews. The Trump administration has chosen to keep the parks open anyway in an effort to minimize the shutdown’s effect on the public. In the course of this public relations exercise, at least seven people have died. Accidental deaths have been reported at Glen Canyon, Yosemite and Great Smoky Mountains national parks. The other four deaths were suicides.

If the shutdown extends into February, with further payless paydays in view on January 25 and February 8, there is certain to be growing support among federal workers for rejecting work without pay. The main federal employee unions have already filed lawsuits pointing out the obvious fact that compulsory labor without pay is a form slavery and in violation of the US Constitution. But the unions oppose any action by federal workers to actually defend their rights.

A shutdown into February would also directly threaten the survival of millions of families on food stamps, since the program is run by the Department of Agriculture, one of the departments affected by the shutdown, and that depends on annual appropriations from Congress. From the standpoint of the political sadists in the White House, however, plunging millions of working-class families into hunger is a welcome development, since they have long sought to destroy the program.

The largest union of commercial pilots, the Air Line Pilots Association, sent a letter to Trump urging him to bring an immediate end to the shutdown, warning that it was threatening “the safety, security, and efficiency of our national airspace system.” Besides TSA screeners and air traffic controllers, the Federal Aviation Administration also employs maintenance personnel and operates a school to train air traffic controllers, which has been closed, cutting off the flow of new personnel into the control towers, under conditions where thousands of controllers are reaching retirement age.

Reporters for the World Socialist Web Site spoke with workers in the Washington DC area about the impact of the shutdown, outside a station on the Washington Metro transit system.

“The situation is awful. The government shouldn’t be leveraging the pay of federal workers in order to build the border wall,” said Kathy, a municipal worker in the Washington suburbs.

Sharron, a metro transit worker, also expressed disgust.

“There are so many things wrong with holding up peoples’ pay over the wall,” she said. “Even if the government does end up with a wall, what’s it going to change? Nothing.”

“Everyone in this country is an immigrant,” Sharron added, rejecting the claim that immigrants are responsible for “stealing” American jobs.

“The situation is really frustrating,” said Lynn, a federal employee who is being forced to work without pay. “You’re not going to solve any problems by holding federal workers hostage. I have colleagues that can barely pay bills right now. They’re living check-to-check.

“I’ve been a federal worker for 35 years; my husband is retired from the Navy. At this point, neither of us wants our son to serve. The way things are, it is not encouraging to young adults to want to serve in any capacity for the government, whether that means as a teacher, a social worker or in the military.”

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Featured image is from Becker1999/Flickr/cc

The Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today to prohibit nearly all uses of pesticides in areas designated as critical habitat for endangered species, including whooping cranes and Puget Sound orcas.

The petition calls for the federal agencies to use their authority under the Endangered Species Act to put in place measures to protect endangered wildlife from harmful pesticides. It comes after decades of intransigence by the Environmental Protection Agency, which has refused to comply with the legal mandates of the Endangered Species Act to protect the nation’s most imperiled species from highly toxic pesticides like chlorpyrifos and atrazine that are known to harm wildlife.

“Pesticides pose a devastating danger to endangered wildlife, from coast to coast,” said Lori Ann Burd, the Center’s environmental health director. “If the EPA isn’t going to do what’s needed to protect America’s endangered species from pesticides, federal wildlife agencies need to step in.”

The National Marine Fisheries Service and Fish and Wildlife Service have long recognized that pesticides pose extensive threats to endangered species. Recovery plans for 250 endangered species specifically identify pesticides as a known threat and obstacle to their recovery.

The EPA has approved about 1,100 pesticides. A December 2017 “biological opinion” study by the Fisheries Service for just three of them — chlorpyrifos, malathion and diazinon — found that they jeopardize the continued existence of Puget Sound killer whales and 37 different salmon and sturgeon species.

Yet the EPA has refused to implement a single on-the-ground conservation measure to protect any of those imperiled species.

Today’s petition asks the two federal wildlife agencies not to wait on the EPA but to initiate conservation measures like those found in the biological opinion, which include restricting pesticide use in critical habitat and creating spray buffers.

“The EPA’s track record on Endangered Species Act compliance for pesticides over the past 30 years is just abysmal,” said Burd, who sits on the EPA’s pesticide program federal advisory committee. “This is having the very real effect of pushing species closer to the edge of extinction. It’s quickly becoming a case of ‘now or never’ for species like the Fenders blue butterfly and California red-legged frog.”

Background

More than 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used in the United States each year, causing acute and subacute harm to the plants and animals that rely on the fields, forests and waterways where the toxins end up.

In 2014 the Center entered into a legal settlement with the Fish and Wildlife Service under which the agency agreed to analyze the impacts of five organophosphate pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, on endangered species by Dec. 31, 2018.

But after Dow Chemical donated $1 million to President Trump’s inauguration, Trump political appointees made it a top priority to thwart the EPA and Fish and Wildlife Service from completing a biological opinion assessing the harms chlorpyrifos, malathion and diazinon pose to endangered wildlife.

In May 2017 the EPA informed its pesticide program federal advisory committee that it was about to release the draft biological opinion of the pesticides’ harms to protected species. But in fact it never released the document, and the agency now states it cannot provide even an estimated deadline for completion.

Public documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show both that the draft biological opinion was essentially completed in the spring of 2017 and that it determined these three pesticides jeopardize the continued existence of endangered species.

In recent years pesticides were specifically identified as threats that helped spur Endangered Species Act protection for four butterflies in 2014 (the Florida leafwing, Bartram’s hairstreak, Poweshiek skipperling and Dakota skipper); the rusty patched bumblebee in 2017; and a fish called the trispot darter, which was protected under the Act just a week ago.

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Featured image: Whooping crane photo by Brett Hartl, Center for Biological Diversity

Stand at a certain point along the dusty highway on the northern outskirts of Puerto Maldonado, a town in the Peruvian Amazon, and you’ll see trucks transporting huge quantities of wood regularly pulling up and stopping.

Sometimes there are as many as five or six trucks there, some carrying unprocessed logs, some sawn timber. The drivers, often with a wad of paperwork in one hand, climb down and potter off towards a nondescript regional government office.

This can happen all day, some days more than most, depending on the season. The wood is cut from logging concessions, indigenous communities and other harvest areas to the north – the heart of Peru’s great Madre de Dios region stretching all the way to Bolivia and Brazil. 

Widespread illegalities 

What the truck drivers are doing, there in a district called El Triunfo, is calling at a timber sector control post run by the regional government. They need to have their paperwork stamped by an official. Various exceptions aside, no wood in Peru should ever be transported unless it is accompanied by permits stating its point-of-origin, among other things.

At least, that’s the theory. But what if the permits have been falsified and the wood doesn’t really come from where they say it does? That means the wood is illegal and laundered: it appears to come from point A, perhaps a logging concession or indigenous community, when actually it comes from point B, C or D, such as a national park, communal reserve or a logging concession where no permission to log has been granted. 

For the last ten years, the only people consistently in a position to know if wood hasn’t come from where the transport permits say has been an independent government agency called the Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales y de Fauna Silvestre (OSINFOR).

That is because OSINFOR inspectors, unlike anyone else, have regularly travelled into the Amazon to visit the harvest areas where the wood is purportedly extracted and to find the specific locations where each tree was standing, according to the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinates given in the harvest areas’ operating plans. How otherwise can you tell if the wood is really legal or not?

In making these inspections, OSINFOR has done more than anyone to expose the widespread illegalities and laundering that have dominated Peru’s timber sector for decades – and generated some powerful, well-organised and sometimes violent opposition.

Stripped of independence 

The statistics – up there on OSINFOR’s website for all to see – make for fascinating reading: thousands of inspections made, over 130,000 trees effectively “faked” in operating plans, and at least 2.5 million cubic metres of “unauthorised” wood identified.

Earlier this year it reported that 67 precent of the timber purportedly from the harvest areas that it inspected in 2016 and 2017 was “unauthorised” – down from a previous figure of almost 90 percent. 

The result of such impressive endeavours? To be stripped of its independence – so crucial to its effectiveness – by president Martin Vizcarra last month when he signed a Supreme Decree moving OSINFOR to the Ministry of Environment, following several years of such a threat knocking around.

This is arguably illegal under Peruvian law and violates the country’s so-called “Trade Promotion Agreement” (TPA) with the US, which states that OSINFOR must be “independent and separate.”

The timing couldn’t have been more ironic. 2018 marked the ten-year anniversary of OSINFOR becoming independent, and the Decree was emitted at the same time as the United Nations climate change talks were taking place in Poland. Earlier in the year, UN Climate Change’s first Annual Report stated that deforestation and forest degradation “account for approximately 17 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, more than the transport sector.”

Punitive measures 

No doubt about it, this has happened precisely because of what OSINFOR has been exposing. It is a major step back in protecting the Peruvian Amazon – the fourth biggest tropical forest worldwide after Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia. 

But might Vizcarra et al backtrack? And how might the US respond? A statement by various organisations including the Environmental Investigation Agency and Global Witness – for whom I was working as a consultant until recently – is calling on “the Peruvian government to reconsider its decision and restore OSINFOR’s independence, while strengthening it in order to guarantee that no similar attempt will succeed in the future.”

Politicians in the US are making similar calls. Just before Christmas, six Democrats, including John Lewis and Richard Neal, wrote to the US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer urging him to “insist that this brazen, bad faith decision be reversed formally”, describing it as a “flagrant attack” on the US-Peru TPA.

According to the Associated Press on 4 January, Lighthizer has responded to Neal by calling the decision “unacceptable” and saying the US has “forcefully communicated” its position to Peru. This case, the AP claims, “could mark a first for the US in taking potential punitive measures against an international partner accused of violating environmental protections in a free trade deal.”

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David Hill is a freelance journalist focusing on human rights and environmental issues across Latin America.

Featured image is from The Ecologist

Politicians and pundits alike have roundly criticized Donald Trump for stating he will pull our troops out of Syria and cut US forces in Afghanistan by half. James Mattis immediately resigned as secretary of defense, writing in a letter to Trump, “you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours.”

As the US military kills civilians in Syria and CIA-led Afghan forces continue to commit war crimes, it appears Trump is doing the right thing in pulling out military troops. But the CIA will remain and grow stronger after the US troops leave.

“[A]s American military forces are set to draw down, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency is only likely to grow in importance,” according to The New York Times.

On December 31, The Times described a CIA-sponsored Afghan strike force that operates “unconstrained by battlefield rules designed to protect civilians, conducting night raids, torture and killings with near impunity.” In the article, journalist Mujib Mashal cites an October 2018 United Nations report that raised concern about “consistent, credible accounts of intentional destruction of civilian property, illegal detention and other abuses.”

Mashal reports that the abuses by the CIA “are actively pushing people toward the Taliban” and when few US military troops remain, “the [CIA-led] strike forces are increasingly the way that a large number of rural Afghans experience the American presence.” Indeed, Mohibullah, whose relative was killed when his home was attacked by a strike force, told The Times he saw “no difference between the CIA-sponsored force and the Islamic State if the result was to be attacked with no warning.”

International Court: Reasonable Belief of US War Crimes in Afghanistan

Last fall, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Fatou Bensouda, asked the court’s Pre-Trial Chamber to open a formal investigation into the possible commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by parties to the war in Afghanistan, including US persons.

Bensouda’s preliminary examination found “a reasonable basis to believe” that “war crimes of torture and ill-treatment” had been committed “by US military forces deployed to Afghanistan and in secret detention facilities operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, principally in the 2003-2004 period, although allegedly continuing in some cases until 2014.”

Bensouda noted these alleged crimes “were not the abuses of a few isolated individuals,” but rather “part of approved interrogation techniques in an attempt to extract ‘actionable intelligence’ from detainees.” She concluded there was “reason to believe” that crimes were “committed in the furtherance of a policy or policies … which would support US objectives in the conflict in Afghanistan.”

Like its predecessor, the Trump administration is adamant that US war criminals escape justice. In response to Bensouda’s referral, National Security Adviser John Bolton told the right-wing Federalist Society the United States would punish the ICC if it mounts a full investigation of Americans for war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

Trump issued a statement saying that in the event the ICC opens a formal investigation, he might negotiate “even more binding, bilateral agreements to prohibit nations from surrendering United States persons to the ICC.” Trump threatened to prohibit “ICC judges and prosecutors from entering the United States, sanction their funds in the United States financial system, and, prosecute them in the United States criminal system.” He would consider “taking steps in the United Nations Security Council to constrain the Court’s sweeping powers.”

But Bensouda will not be bowed. After Bolton’s speech, she stated that the ICC is “an independent and impartial judicial institution” based on the principle of complementarity, where the ICC will step in only if the accused’s home country does not. Bensouda added,

“The ICC, as a court of law, will continue to do its work undeterred, in accordance with those principles and the overarching idea of the rule of law.”

Meanwhile, the ICC has received an astounding 1.7 million allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan during a three-month period ending in January 2018. Some accusations encompass entire villages.

The US Should Completely Withdraw From Afghanistan and Syria

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) is one of the few Congress members who favor pulling US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan. She told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow,

“I think it is right to get our troops out of Syria ― and let me add, I think it’s right to get our troops out of Afghanistan.”

Warren, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said she disagrees with the “foreign policy establishment” position that US troops should “stay forever” in Afghanistan.

Robert D. Kaplan, senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a bipartisan think tank, wrote in The New York Times that the United States should withdraw from Afghanistan.

“No other country in the world symbolizes the decline of the American empire as much as Afghanistan,” he opined. “There is virtually no possibility of a military victory over the Taliban and little chance of leaving behind a self-sustaining democracy — facts that Washington’s policy community has mostly been unable to accept … It is a vestigial limb of empire, and it is time to let it go.” While Kaplan writes, “it may soon be time to for the United States to get out of the country altogether,” he presumably includes CIA, as well as military, forces in that withdrawal.

Regardless of Trump’s motivation in pulling out of Syria, it is the correct decision, says international law scholar Richard Falk. But, he adds, Trump should also end the air strikes and use the money saved by terminating military operations to help Syria recover from the humanitarian disaster wrought by seven years of war.

Falk slammed “Mattis’ geopolitical hubris” for writing in his resignation letter that “the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world.” Falk wrote,

“Really. Such an opinion is not widely shared in most parts of the world. Many people and foreign leaders now worry far more about what the United States does than they do about China and Russia.”

The “near-universal condemnation by Democrats and Republicans alike” of Trump’s announcement that he will withdraw US forces from Syria “says less about Trump than it does about the US foreign policy establishment’s blinkered vision,” Columbia Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs wrote at Project Syndicate. Sachs disputes the notion that the United States has “been in Syria (or Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, the Horn of Africa, Libya, and elsewhere in the region) because of ISIS.” Sachs sees ISIS as “more a consequence than a cause of the US presence.”

Sachs disabuses us of the notion that the United States — from Obama to Trump — has sought to overthrow Syrian president Bashar al-Assad for the purpose of bringing democracy to Syria, citing US support for the undemocratic Saudi Arabia. “The real purposes,” Sachs astutely notes, “have been US regional hegemony; and the real consequences have been disastrous.”

In a statement following Trump’s announcement, Veterans for Peace (VFP) lauded the goal of a total removal of US troops from Syria, hoping it would lead to the complete withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan and the Saudi-led war in Yemen as well.

“It is high time to unwind all these tragic, failed and unnecessary wars of aggression, domination and plunder,” VFP stated. “It is time to turn a page in history and build a new world based on human rights, equality and mutual respect for all. We must build momentum toward real and lasting peace. Nothing less than the survival of human civilization is at stake.”

Indeed, the United States should withdraw all of its forces, including the CIA, from Afghanistan. All US troops should be removed from Syria and all bombing must end. And the US government should make reparations for the devastation it has wreaked in both of those countries.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. Her latest book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was recently published in an updated second edition. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is from CPL. ALEJANDRO PENA / US MARINE CORPS

More than 33,000 teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District are set to strike Thursday in what would be the largest walkout by educators in the US since last year’s statewide strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona. Like the previous struggles, the battle in the nation’s second largest school district centers on the fight by educators against the assault by both the Democratic and Republican parties on the right to public education.

Teachers are demanding pay raises, smaller class sizes and increased funding to hire more nurses, librarians, counselors and other critical support staff. They are also opposing the school authorities’ use of standardized tests to scapegoat teachers for educational problems caused by the defunding of education and the deterioration of social conditions. In Los Angeles, as in other school districts, the shutting down of “failing schools” has been used as the justification for a vast expansion of for-profit charter schools, which siphon off an estimated $600 million from LA public schools each year.

While last year’s statewide strikes largely pitted educators against Republican-led state governments, in Los Angeles teachers are fighting directly against the Democratic Party, which controls the school district and the local government, holds the governor’s seat, and wields a super-majority in both houses of the state legislature.

Students and teachers march in downtown LA last month (Source: WSWS)

While the teachers’ unions in California and nationally have falsely promoted the Democrats as allies of teachers and defenders of public education, the Democratic Party has proven to be just as ruthless an enemy as the Republican Party. Decades of bipartisan funding cuts have reduced California schools, once known as the best in the nation, to 43rd in the US in per-pupil spending.

The state is expecting a $15 billion budget surplus, but the new governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom, has declared that any proposals for increased K-12 school funding will have to be “whittled down” because “we all” have to “live within in our means.” After a meeting with state Democrats, he told the Sacramento Bee last month, “We’re not going to deviate from being fiscally prudent”—a reference to his predecessor Jerry Brown’s austerity measures.

Yet both corporate-controlled parties have showered Silicon Valley and the entertainment and finance industries with endless tax cuts. California is home to the largest number of billionaires—144—in the nation.

The school district, headed by the multi-millionaire former investment banker Austin Beutner, has refused to budge. It is demanding that the paltry three percent raise it is offering be contingent on cutting the health care benefits of future teachers. School officials are also rejecting out-of-hand the teachers’ demands for increased school funding and hiring, and a curtailment of charter schools.

An article in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times (Beutner is the newspaper’s former publisher and CEO), complained that teachers are demanding “more control over how money is spent at schools, how much time is given over to standardized testing and how space on district campuses is allocated to charter schools.” The article continued:

“District officials question whether such demands are proper bargaining topics and oppose them almost universally as interfering with their management of the school system.”

Beutner got his start in the privatization of public assets when he was tapped by the Clinton administration to head the State Department’s collaboration in the dismantling of state-owned property in the Soviet Union and its sell-off to criminal asset strippers. Backed by powerful corporate interests pushing for more for-profit charter schools, Beutner, a Democrat and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles, hopes to inflict a devastating defeat on the teachers and accelerate the privatization of public education.

In the face of this all-out assault, the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), which is affiliated with both national teacher unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—has kept teachers on the job without a new contract for a year-and-a-half, including months of state mediation and fact-finding. In so doing, the union ignored a near unanimous strike mandate by rank-and-file teachers.

In a last-ditch effort to prevent a walkout, UTLA officials are meeting with school authorities on Monday. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece Sunday, UTLA President Alex Caputo-Pearl wrote:

“We will engage in whatever talks are possible before Jan. 10 to avert a strike. But for talks to be successful, the district needs to commit to improve public schools.”

This vague formula appears to invite the district to offer some cosmetic change in its position in order to block a strike.

If the UTLA is unable to prevent a strike, it plans to follow the pattern of the NEA and AFT in 2018 in West Virginia and other states where the unions worked to isolate the teachers and then cut deals with the political establishment that abandoned educators’ demands for substantial improvements in pay and school funding. The unions did everything they could to prevent the spread of strikes across the US and prevent the movement of educators from developing into a political confrontation with the Democratic Party.

Instead, they sought to channel the opposition of the teachers behind the campaign of the Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections under the banner of “Remember in November.” The outright treachery of this policy is already becoming evident to the teachers in LA.

In his comment in the Times, Caputo-Pearl tried to boost illusions that teachers could achieve their aims by lobbying for increased funding from the Democrats in the state capital in Sacramento. The UTLA president also promoted a Democratic-backed initiative on the 2020 ballot that includes a modest increase in capital gains taxes.

The unions peddled the same illusions and lies last year in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, with the result that none of the supposed funding guarantees have been honored and no significant increase in school funding has occurred.

A court ruling by a federal judge over the weekend, which denied the district’s efforts to compel special education teachers to work during a strike, indicates that the state is looking to the union to quickly shut down a walkout before it can escalate into a broader movement of teachers and the working class more generally.

But that is exactly what is needed. If the LA teachers are to mount a serious fight, they must take the conduct of the struggle into their own hands through the formation of rank-and-file action committees in every school and community. These committees must formulate their own demands, including a 30 percent increase in wages, the reconversion of all charter schools to public schools and a vast increase in funding.

To conduct this fight, LA teachers must join their struggle with that of educators in Oakland and other school districts and fight for a statewide strike to defend the right to high quality public education. The fight of teachers must be linked to broader sections of workers as part of an assault on the fortunes of the super-rich and the fight for a radical redistribution of wealth to meet social needs.

Los Angeles educators who spoke to the WSWS Teacher Newsletter expressed their determination to fight. Lamisha, a school counselor in her fifth year with the district, said,

“I travel to an elementary school one day, a middle school another day, and a high school another day, and so on. Things are getting worse because of the social crisis, and we have no support.

“Everything is on a minimum level for maximum problems. We need more counselors who can work with kids with anger management and other problems. If a child is homeless, they’re experiencing trauma. How can they learn? We need to get to the root of the problems, and no one’s tackling that one.”

“The teachers have got to speak out now,” Barbara, a special education assistant since 1999, told the WSWS. “Almost everybody I know is working two jobs to make ends meet. The three percent they’re offering the teachers is nothing. It used to be that you’d automatically get a three percent raise, like a cost-of-living raise. Then you’d get a real raise on top of that. Even people working at In ‘n Out and McDonalds are getting better raises.”

Barbara, who is member of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, added,

“Our union has thrown us under the bus. We were told that if we attended the training in June, we would get an additional five percent in pay. That never happened. Our contract was violated. I don’t understand why we can’t go out in support of the teachers. All my local said we’re going to do is wear red. That’s all.”

“I have been teaching for over 25 years and every year teachers have been mandated to do more with less,” an LA teacher posted in the comment section of a local news outlet. “The evidence is in my classroom and in the school. The school grounds are unkempt, as you can see scuff marks, trash across the campus, dirty restrooms, dusty windows, because the district has downsized custodial staff. My kindergarten students and I sweep the room and pretend to ‘ice skate’ with baby wipes while listening to music to mop the room.

“Our library is neglected because we only have a librarian every other week and the library is closed the week she is not there. There are less resources and teachers are treated like children. We have to justify why we need a learning tool or why we need certain books to meet students’ needs. Many of us either swallow the cost and buy what we need or we just make do with what we have—which is not enough.

“Sometimes I think it’s a miracle I still try to engage my students despite all the obstacles I encounter every day. I enjoy teaching my students and I value them. That’s why I think the course we’re on as a district is not sustainable. I cannot continue to subsidize my students’ education and it’s getting harder and harder for me and my colleagues to pretend that everything is okay. It’s not. That’s why I’m willing to strike—so that my students and I get the respect we deserve.”

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This article was originally published by GR in November 2017.

For almost 2 decades, the US pursued a list of ‘enemy countries’ to confront, attack, weaken and overthrow. 

This imperial quest to overthrow ‘enemy countries’ operated at various levels of intensity, depending on two considerations:  the level of priority and the degree of vulnerability for a ‘regime change’ operation.

The criteria for determining an ‘enemy country’ and its place on the list of priority targets in the US quest for greater global dominance, as well as its vulnerability to a ‘successfully’ regime change will be the focus of this essay.

We will conclude by discussing the realistic perspectives of future imperial options.

Prioritizing US Adversaries

Imperial strategists consider military, economic and political criteria in identifying high priority adversaries.

The following are high on the US ‘enemy list’:

1) Russia, because of its military power, is a nuclear counterweight to US global domination.  It has a huge, well-equipped armed force with a European, Asian and Middle East presence.  Its global oil and gas resources shield it from US economic blackmail and its growing geo-political alliances limit US expansion.

2) China, because of its global economic power and the growing scope of its trade, investment and technological networks.  China’s growing defensive military capability, particularly with regard to protecting its interests in the South China Sea serve to counter US domination in Asia.

3) North Korea, because of its nuclear and ballistic missile capability, its fierce independent foreign policies and its strategic geo-political location, is seen as a threat to the US military bases in Asia and Washington’s regional allies and proxies.

4) Venezuela, because of its oil resources and socio-political policies, challenge the US centered neo-liberal model in Latin America.

5) Iran, because of its oil resources, political independence and geo-political alliances in the Middle East, challenge US, Israeli and Saudi Arabia domination of the region and present an independent alternative.

6) Syria, because of its strategic position in the Middle East, its secular nationalist ruling party and its alliances with Iran, Palestine, Iraq and Russia, is a counterweight to US-Israeli plans to balkanize the Middle East into warring ethno-tribal states.

US  Middle-level Adversaries :

1)  Cuba, because of its independent foreign policies and its alternative socio-economic system stands in contrast to the US-centered neo-liberal regimes in the Caribbean, Central and South America.

2) Lebanon, because of its strategic location on the Mediterranean and the coalition government’s power sharing arrangement with the political party, Hezbollah, which is increasingly influential in Lebanese civil society in part because of its militia’s proven capacity to protect Lebanese national sovereignty by expelling the invading Israeli army and helping to defeat the ISIS/al Queda mercenaries in neighboring Syria.

3) Yemen, because of its independent, nationalist Houthi-led movement opposed to the Saudi-imposed puppet government as well as its relations with Iran.

Low Level Adversaries

1) Bolivia, because of its independent foreign policy, support for the Chavista government in Venezuela and advocacy of a mixed economy;  mining wealth and  defense of indigenous people’s territorial claims.

2) Nicaragua, because of its independent foreign policy and criticism of US aggression toward Cuba and Venezuela.

US hostility to high priority adversaries is expressed through economic sanctions military encirclement, provocations and intense propaganda wars toward North Korea, Russia, Venezuela, Iran and Syria.

Because of China’s powerful global market linkages, the US has applied few sanctions.  Instead, the US relies on military encirclement, separatist provocations and intense hostile propaganda when dealing with China.

Priority Adversaries, Low Vulnerability and Unreal Expectations

With the exception of Venezuela, Washington’s ‘high priority targets’ have limited strategic vulnerabilities. Venezuela is the most vulnerable because of its high dependence on oil revenues with its major refineries located in the US, and its high levels of indebtedness, verging on default.   In addition, there are the domestic opposition groups, all acting as US clients and Caracas’ growing isolation within Latin America due to orchestrated hostility by important US clients, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico.

Iran is far less vulnerable: It is a strong strategic regional military power linked to neighboring countries and similar religious-nationalist movements.  Despite its dependence on oil exports, Iran has developed alternative markets, like China, free from US blackmail and is relatively safe from US or EU initiated creditor attacks.

North Korea, despite the crippling economic sanctions imposed on its regime and civilian population, has ‘the bomb’ as a deterrent to a US military attack and has shown no reluctance to defend itself.  Unlike Venezuela, neither Iran nor North Korea face significant internal attacks from US-funded or armed domestic opposition.

Russia has full military capacity – nuclear weapons, ICBM and a huge, well-trained armed force – to deter any direct US military threat.  Moscow is politically vulnerable to US-backed propaganda, opposition political parties and Western-funded NGO’s.  Russian oligarch-billionaires, linked to London and Wall Street, exercise some pressure against independent economic initiatives.

To a limited degree, US sanctions exploited Russia’s earlier dependence on Western markets, but since the imposition of draconian sanctions by the Obama regime, Moscow has effectively counteredWashington’s offensive by diversifying its markets to Asia and strengthening domestic self-reliance in its agriculture, industry and high technology.

China has a world-class economy and is on course to become the world’s economic leader.  Feeble threats to ‘sanction’ China have merely exposed Washington’s weakness rather intimidating Beijing.  China has countered US military provocations and threats by expanding its economic market power, increasing its strategic military capacity and shedding dependence on the dollar.

Washington’s high priority targets are not vulnerable to frontal attack: They retain or are increasing their domestic cohesion and economic networks, while upgrading their military capacity to impose completely unacceptable costs on the US for any direct assault.

As a result, the US leaders are forced to rely on incremental, peripheral and proxy attacks with limited results against its high priority adversaries.

Washington will tighten sanctions on North Korea and Venezuela, with dubious prospects of success in the former and a possible pyrrhic victory in the case of Caracas. Iran and Russia can easily overcome proxy interventions.  US allies, like Saudi Arabia and Israel, can badger, propagandize and rail the Persians, but their fears that an out-and-out war against Iran, could quickly destroy Riyadh and Tel Aviv forces them to work in tandem to induce the corrupt US political establishment to push for war over the objections of a war-weary US military and population. Saudi and Israelis can bomb and starve the populations of Yemen and Gaza, which lack any capacity to reply in kind, but Teheran is another matter.

The politicians and propagandists in Washington can blather about Russia’s interference in the US’s corrupt electoral theater and scuttle moves to improve diplomatic ties, but they cannot counter Russia’s growing influence in the Middle East and its expanding trade with Asia, especially China.

In summary, at the global level, the US ‘priority’ targets are unattainable and invulnerable.  In the midst of the on-going inter-elite dogfight within the US, it may be too much to hope for the emergence of any rational policymakers in Washington who could rethink strategic priorities and calibrate policies of mutual accommodation to fit in with global realities.

Medium and Low Priorities, Vulnerabilities and Expectations

Washington can intervene and perhaps inflict severe damage on middle and low priority countries.  However, there are several drawbacks to a full-scale attack.

Yemen, Cuba, Lebanon, Bolivia and Syria are not nations capable of shaping global political and economic alignments.  The most the US can secure in these vulnerable countries are destructive regime changes with massive loss of life, infrastructure and millions of desperate refugees . . . but at great political cost, with prolonged instability and with severe economic losses.

Yemen

The US can push for a total Saudi Royal victory over the starving, cholera-stricken people of Yemen.  But who benefits?  Saudi Arabia is in the midst of a palace upheaval and has no ability to exercise hegemony, despite hundreds of billions of  dollars of US/NATO arms, trainers and bases.  Colonial occupations are costly and yield few, if any, economic benefits, especially from a poor, geographically isolated devastated nation like Yemen.

Cuba

Cuba has a powerful highly professional military backed by a million-member militia.  They are capable of prolonged resistance and can count on international support.  A US invasion of Cuba would require a prolonged occupation and heavy losses.  Decades of economic sanctions haven’t worked and their re-imposition by Trump have not affected the key tourist growth sectors.

President Trump’s ‘symbolic hostility’ does not cut any ice with the major US agro-business groups, which saw Cuba as a market. Over half of the so-called ‘overseas Cubans’ now oppose direct US intervention.

US-funded NGOs can provide some marginal propaganda points but they cannot reverse popular support for Cuba’s mixed ‘socialized’ economy, its excellent public education and health care and its independent foreign policy.

Lebanon

A joint US-Saudi economic blockade and Israeli bombs can destabilize Lebanon.  However, a full-scale prolonged Israeli invasion will cost Jewish lives and foment domestic unrest.  Hezbollah has missiles to counter Israeli bombs.  The Saudi economic blockade will radicalize Lebanese nationalists, especially among the Shia and the Christian populations.  The Washington’s ‘invasion’ of Libya, which did not lose a single US soldier, demonstrates that destructive invasions result in long-term, continent-wide chaos.

A US-Israeli-Saudi war would totally destroy Lebanon but it will destabilize the region and exacerbate conflicts in neighboring countries – Syria, Iran and possibly Iraq.  And Europe will be flooded with millions more desperate refugees.

Syria

The US-Saudi proxy war in Syria suffered serious defeats and the loss of political assets.  Russia gained influence, bases and allies.  Syria retained its sovereignty and forged a battle-hardened national armed force.  Washington can sanction Syria, grab some bases in a few phony ‘Kurdish enclaves’ but it will not advance beyond a stalemate and will be widely viewed as an occupying invader.

Syria is vulnerable and continues to be a middle-range target on the US enemy list but it offers few prospects of advancing US imperial power, beyond some limited ties with an unstable Kurd enclave, susceptible to internecine warfare, and risking major Turkish retaliation.

Bolivia and Nicaragua

Bolivia and Nicaragua are minor irritants on the US enemy list. US regional policymakers recognize that neither country exercises global or even regional power.  Moreover, both regimes rejected radical politics in practice and co-exist with powerful and influential local oligarchs and international MNC’s linked to the US.

Their foreign policy critiques, which are mostly for domestic consumption, are neutralized by the near total US influence in the OAS and the major neo-liberal regimes in Latin America.  It appears that the US will accommodate these marginalized rhetorical adversaries rather than risk provoking any revival of radical nationalist or socialist mass movements erupting in La Paz or Managua.

Conclusion

A brief examination of Washington’s ‘list of enemies’ reveals that the limited chances of success even among vulnerable targets.  Clearly, in this evolving world power configuration, US money and markets will not alter the power equation.

US allies, like Saudi Arabia, spend enormous amounts of money attacking a devastated nation, but they destroy markets while losing wars.  Powerful adversaries, like China, Russia and Iran, are not vulnerable and offer the Pentagon few prospects of military conquest in the foreseeable future.

Sanctions, or economic wars have failed to subdue adversaries in North Korea, Russia, Cuba and Iran.  The ‘enemy list’ has cost the US prestige, money and markets – a very peculiar imperialist balance sheet.  Russia now exceeds the US in wheat production and exports.  Gone are the days when US agro-exports dominated world trade including trade with Moscow.

Enemy lists are easy to compose, but effective policies are difficult to implement against rivals with dynamic economies and powerful military preparedness.

The US would regain some of its credibility if it operated within the contexts of global realities and pursued a win-win agenda instead of remaining a consistent loser in a zero-sum game.

Rational leaders could negotiate reciprocal trade agreements with China, which would develop high tech, finance and agro-commercial ties with manufacturers and services.  Rational leaders could develop joint Middle East economic and peace agreements, recognizing the reality of a Russian-Iranian-Lebanese Hezbollah and Syrian alliance.

As it stands, Washington’s ‘enemy list’ continues to be composed and imposed by its own irrational leaders, pro-Israel maniacs and Russophobes in the Democratic Party – with no acknowledgement of current realities.

For Americans, the list of domestic enemies is long and well known, what we lack is a civilian political leadership to replace these serial mis-leaders.

Trump’s deployment of 80 military personnel to Gabon last week on the basis of preparing for a response to “violent protests” in the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo might have been a ruse designed to cover up America’s complicity in the Gabonese coup attempt that just took place at the beginning of this week, which was actually an ingenious AFRICOM power grab in the strategic Gulf of Guinea that aims to give the US a base of operations from which to carve out an expanded “sphere of influence” for itself in the region irrespective if this regime change ploy succeeds or not.

Just a day after confirming the assassination of the USS Cole bomber in Yemen, Trump tried to score a second foreign policy success in yet another “Global South” nation, this time the Central African state of Gabon. The news just broke that some members of the country’s armed forces attempted to stage a coup against President Ali Bongo, who’s been recovering in Morocco over the last few months after suffering a stroke back in October, though the government claims that most of the conspirators have been arrested and that the “situation is under control”. Even though it appears as though the state succeeded in thwarting this plot, the US is still poised to geopolitical profit from it by manipulating the outcome to its AFRICOM favor.

Background Basics About Gabon

Bongo narrowly won reelection by less than 6,000 votes, which was used by the opposition as their excuse to torch their parliament in the historically peaceful country and bring it to the brink of Hybrid War chaos. The author wrote about the developing crisis at the time in his piece about “What’s Going On With The Hybrid War On Gabon”, in which some important domestic and foreign policy basics about the country were also described. Gabon had been ruled by the Bongo family since the President’s father took power in 1967, or in other words, 7 years after its independence. It had previously been regarded as one of France’s most prized neo-colonial “possessions” in the continent and was known to be very rich in natural resources, which is why it was an OPEC member from 1975-1995 before returning again in 2016, one year after it interestingly joined the Saudis’ “anti-terrorist coalition”.

It might sound strange to many that a majority-Christian nation on the Atlantic Coast of sub-Saharan Central Africa would join this Mideast-based military organization, but one of the reasons might be because Bongo is a member of Gabon’s Muslim minority and that he might have fallen sway to the Saudis’ “personal diplomacy” in wooing his country over to their side. Another complementary explanation could also simply be that Gabon had begun “rebalancing” its foreign policy during that time too, having transitioned from being a French neo-colonial “possession” to a more sovereignty-minded state following its post-Old Cold War partnership with China, though prudently understanding the need for a third strategic partner in order to maintain the best possible “balance” between Africa’s two most important non-regional countries during the opening stages of the New Cold War.

Apart from its energy, fishery, and forestry resources, Gabon is also very important for geostrategic reasons, too. As the author wrote in his previously mentioned piece when describing why France retains nearly 1,000 troops in this tiny country, “Paris is able to keep troops on standby for snap-response deployment to Central African hotspots such as the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Additionally, because of its location, Gabon provides France with a midway location between the two rising African powers of Nigeria and Angola, a position which Paris could leverage to maximum effect if need be.” Presciently, it was for the “official” purpose of responding to “violent demonstrations” that might break out in the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (which is the world’s largest producer of cobalt) after its latest elections that Trump deployed 80 US troops there last week.

The Purpose Of The American Deployment

In hindsight, his signaling about these soldiers being in the Central African nation to supposedly respond to “violent demonstrations” in the DRC might have been nothing more than a ruse to cover up their role in trying to deter the same in Gabon following what is more than likely the AFRICOM-assisted coup attempt that just took place in the country. The true state of the situation still remains unclear, though it’s beginning to look like the government did indeed arrest most of the conspirators and that everything is now under control. Nevertheless, the domestic strife that Gabon experienced two and a half years ago during its last elections could have also been in the process of simmering over once more following rumors about Bongo’s health, which might have prompted the armed forces to preemptively act in the first place seeing as how the organizers declared their sympathy with the opposition supporters who were killed during those riots.

The presence of US soldiers on the superficially plausible pretense of preparing to evacuate Americans from the DRC in the event that the nearby conflict-prone country re-erupts into violence following the impending announcement of its election results might just have been to signal the US’ tacit support to the plotters and deter Bongo loyalists from reacting, the latter purpose of which seems to have failed. The US didn’t want to get too directly involved because it wagered that it could leverage its position in the country irrespective of the coup’s outcome. As such, this event is of supreme significance for AFRICOM because the US now has a reason to further embed itself in this strategically positioned country along the energy-rich Gulf of Guinea, which is also surrounded by several weak but similarly strategic states presided over by long-serving elderly leaders and each of which have recently experienced different degrees of domestic unrest.

To put it another way, the US deployment might have been ‘bait’ to encourage the coup plotters to go ahead with their attempt, after which the US could take advantage of its outcome one way or another in order to get Gabon to function as AFRICOM’s long-desired base in the continent. On the one hand, had the coup succeeded, then the US could have partnered with the “pariah” government that would have naturally been shunned by the African Union and most other international actors, helping it stabilize the domestic situation and resume a sense of “normality” as soon as possible. On the other, despite the apparent success of the government forces in quelling this coup, this dramatic incident might have shown the state that its domestic political tensions are still simmering and now affecting part of its “deep state” apparatus, thus necessitating the need for another security partner such as the US to maintain stability in case something like this happens again.

Either way, the US is poised to profit from what happened in order to pursue its regional agenda.

Here’s What Gabon Has Going For It

In The Middle Of All The Action:

Like it was mentioned earlier in pertinence to the author’s previously cited piece on Gabon, the country is in very close proximity to rising African Great Powers Nigeria and Angola, as well as the mineral-rich DRC. Furthermore, it’s also just a short distance away from the Central African Republic (CAR), which has taken on more importance over the past 12 months since Russia’s UNSC-approved “mercenary” intervention there, which forms the core component of Moscow’s “balancing” strategy in Africa. Given that France has all but lost CAR as a neo-imperial colony and could very well be in the process of losing Gabon too following the coup, it can be said that the “Scramble for Africa” that the author predicted would intensify this year is leading to profound geopolitical changes in the Central African region whereby the former extra-regional hegemon of France is being squeezed out by Russia, the US, and China.

Surrounded By Aging Leaders:

Another crucial point to keep in mind is that the surrounding countries of Cameroon, the Republic of the Congo (ROC), and Equatorial Guinea are led by aging leaders who have recently come under different forms of regime change pressure. The first-mentioned is led by Paul Biya (who has been in office for 36 consecutive years) and is unofficially in a state of civil war between the central government and the Anglophone region astride part of the Nigerian border, the second is led by Denis Nguesso (who has been in office for 34 non-consecutive years – 13 years and 21 years, with a 5-year interim break) and only recently reconsolidated peace in the restive southern Pool region outside the capital, while the last-mentioned is led by Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo (who has been in office for 39 years) and recently thwarted a mercenary-led coup attempt last year.

Hybrid War Staging Ground:

In terms of regional Hybrid War dynamics, Gabon is therefore the perfect place for the US to encourage and guide regime change movements all throughout Central Africa, ultimately carving out an exclusive “sphere of influence” for itself in the eastern Gulf of Guinea from which to exert further influence into the West, Central, and Southern African countries of Nigeria, DRC, and Angola if it’s successful in turning the country into AFRICOM’s base of operations on the continent. Should that happen, then the newly imposed authorities will probably justify this move on the basis of “balancing” even though it’ll obviously be pivoting towards the US and away from France, China, and Saudi Arabia. AFRICOM doesn’t even have to be formally invited into the country either for this to happen, the US just needs to keep its proverbial ‘foot in the door’ and the rest might ‘naturally’ follow.

Concluding Thoughts

The Gabonese coup attempt caught a lot of observers off guard, but in hindsight, the “writing was on the wall” the whole time and two important signals were sent beforehand that could have tipped people off about it. Bongo’s New Year’s address to the people, recorded from Morocco where he’s currently recovering from his October stroke, showed that he’s still somewhat physically incapacitated and unable to rule the country following his controversial razor-thin reelection in 2016 that represented almost a full half-century of dynastic rule by his family. The dispatch of 80 US troops there late last week on the pretense of preparing to respond to post-election violence in the nearby DRC was clearly a ruse because Gabon doesn’t even border the country in question, with it now looking that those soldiers’ very presence was designed to encourage the plotters and deter the state from reacting.

Although the latest reports suggest that the government has reestablished full control over the situation, the coup attempt in and of itself is still a success for American foreign policy irrespective of its outcome because the US is now poised to manipulate its result in order to advance its own interests. A “revolutionary government” would have been internationally shunned and fully dependent on the US, while the recovering state might see the US as an important security partner that plays a crucial role in its “balancing” strategy. In both cases, the deepening US-Gabonese relationship would amount more to a pivot than an evolution of the Central African state’s “balancing” act, as an embedding of the US’ military forces in the country will inevitably have regional repercussions.

While a comparatively prosperous and resource-rich country of approximately two million people is a strategic prize in and of itself for any Great Power to “capture” in the New Cold War’s “Scramble for Africa”, Gabon’s deeper significance lays in its geopolitical position in between the rising African Great Powers of Nigeria and Angola, its proximity to the conflict-prone DRC and CAR (where the US’ Chinese and Russian rivals are the predominant patrons of those states, respectively), and its location in the middle of three weaker countries under the leadership of aging presidents who have experienced varying degrees of domestic unrest lately. It’s too early to say whether the Gabonese coup attempt will be a game-changer or not, but it’s obvious that American strategists intend for it to be for the aforementioned reasons, which if successful in full or even part would signify the return of Africa to the US’ international focus.

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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.

Featured image is from US Air Force

The prospect of Washington turning a page for peace in Syria is highly unlikely. Syria remains in the eye of the storm.

On Friday, a State Department official said “(w)e have no timeline for our military forces to withdraw from” the country. Delay may turn out to be not at all.

On Sunday, a senior Iraqi parliamentarian said

“(t)he  Americans have built a military base in Erbil (in) the Iraqi Kurdistan region to use…against Iraq’s neighboring countries, in particular Iran and Syria.”

Iraqi media said the Pentagon has 14 military bases in the country – along with a reported 18 in Syria. The US is highly unlikely to abandon them, especially ones considered most strategically important.

An earlier report indicated the Pentagon intends establishing a permanent base along the Iraqi border with Syria. Turkey reportedly established one or more military bases in northwestern Aleppo.

On Saturday, a senior Trump regime official said US forces may remain indefinitely at the (illegally established) al-Tanf base in southeastern Syria near the Iraqi and Jordanian borders.

On February 7, officials from countries comprising the so-called US Middle East war “coalition” will attend a conference in Washington to discuss what follows Trump’s Syria pullout announcement.

Whatever the disposition of US forces in Syria and everywhere else, its permanent war agenda remains unchanged.

Last summer, John Bolton warned Damascus, saying

“(j)ust so there’s no confusion here, if the Syrian (forces) use chemical weapons, we will respond very strongly, and they really ought to think about this a long time.”

Not a shred of evidence suggests government forces used Chemical Weapons (CWs) at any time throughout years of US-led naked aggression against the Syrian Arab Republic.

Plenty of evidence indisputably proves that US-supported terrorists used CWs many times, mainly against civilians, Damascus falsely blamed for their high crimes.

On Saturday, Bolton threatened Syria again, saying

“there is absolutely no change in the US position against the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime and absolutely no change in our position that any use of chemical weapons would be met by a very strong response, as we’ve done twice before.”

The Pentagon notoriously uses banned weapons in all its war theaters, flagrantly violating international laws time and again – including the Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention), the Nuremberg Principles, the UN Charter, Fourth Geneva, and numerous UN resolutions.

Banned US weapons include use of incendiary, cluster, and radiological munitions, biological and chemical agents, depleted uranium, and other toxins.

An earlier Pentagon statement said

“(a)s a matter of policy, (it) will not publicly discuss the use of specific weapons and munitions in operations.”

It lied claiming

“every weapons system in the US inventory undergoes a legal review to ensure the weapon complies with the Law of Armed Conflict.”

Since the near-extermination of Native Americans in expanding the nation “from sea to shining sea,” US forces used banned weapons, the same thing ongoing in all its active war theaters.

Claims otherwise are bald-faced lies, wanting its high crimes of war and against humanity concealed – including US support for ISIS and likeminded jihadists, along with their use of CWs, falsely blamed on Syrian forces.

On Saturday, Bolton arrived in Israel for talks with Netanyahu. He confirmed no timeline exists for withdrawing US forces from Syria.

Pentagon troops at al-Tanf are likely to stay, Israel pushing for this. On Friday, Netanyahu and Putin spoke, Israel reportedly afforded no concessions by Russia’s leader to continue aggressive aerial operations against Syria.

On Tuesday, Bolton will meet with Turkey’s Erdogan and other regime officials in Ankara, Syria a key topic to be discussed.

This week, he and Pompeo will be meeting with officials from various regional countries, including Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and others – discussing US strategy following Trump’s pullout announcement.

A Final Comment

On Sunday, Bolton equivocated on the pullout of US forces from northern Syria, claiming withdrawal depends on a firm commitment by Turkey not to attack Kurds in the area, saying:

“Timetables or the timing of the withdrawal occurs as a result of the fulfillment of the conditions and the establishment of the circumstances that we want to see,” adding:

“It’s not the establishment of an arbitrary point for the withdrawal to take place as President Obama did in the Afghan situation…The timetable flows from the policy decisions that we need to implement.”

To withdraw or not to withdraw US forces from Syria may turn out to be more of the latter than the former – Trump U-turning like he’s done before.

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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.

 

War with China is on the drawing board of the Pentagon. China has responded to US threats and military deployments in the Indo-Pacific region. President Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for a possible war.

Addressing China’s Central Military Commission, Xi said

“(a)ll military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle.”

“The world is facing a period of major changes never seen in a century, and China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development.”

Xi ordered stepped up military training and exercises, saying China’s armed forces must “prepare for a comprehensive military struggle from a new starting point”, adding:

“Preparation for war and combat must be deepened to ensure an efficient response in times of emergency.”

Days earlier, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily editorial stressed there’s “no time for slackening in war preparation.”

Part of what’s going on is what Xi called his aim for “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan. Beijing considers the island state a breakaway province, reunification inevitable, by force if “democratic consultations” fail to “reach transitional arrangements for the peaceful development of cross-strait ties,” adding:

“Chinese don’t fight Chinese,” while saying his government “makes no promise to renounce the use of force and reserves the option of taking all necessary means” for reunification, stressing no tolerance for “foreign intervention.”

“(O)ne country, two systems” is the way forward, he said, the approach adopted in reunification with Hong Kong and Macau.

Xi’s remarks followed enactment of the US Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA), discussed in a separate article – legislation authorizing funding for Washington’s imperial Indo/Pacific agenda, mainly by its military footprint in a part of the world not its own, the way it operates globally.

Retired PLA colonel Yue Gang said Xi’s remarks were in response to Sino/US geopolitical differences – too world’s apart to resolve, my comment, not his.

“China is increasing its military (preparedness) so that it has the best solutions for the worst outcomes, either related to the US or” Taiwan, he added.

According to military analyst Ni Lexiong, Xi’s remarks were “intended as a warning to those who sought to obstruct the mainland’s plans for the reunification of Taiwan,” notably the US.

China’s Global Times said Beijing “should expect more US provocations” ahead, adding “the country has sufficient power to make Washington pay an unbearable price if the US infringes on China, so as to form a powerful deterrent against the White House.”

China and Russia alone are able to challenge Washington’s aim for global dominance, especially united.

Military confrontation ahead may be inevitable, the ominous possibility of nuclear war assuring losers, not winners, if waged.

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Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

On December 13, the United States Senate made history with a vote invoking the 1973 War Powers Act to stop America’s military participation in, and support of, the unauthorized and immoral war against the desperate people in Yemen.

Never before had a vote of this nature passed the Senate. The measure passed with 56 senators voting in support and 41 voting against. It marked the first time the Senate has been able to put the breaks on our involvement in Yemen, a war that was never authorized by Congress, as is required by our Constitution.

Meanwhile, Speaker Paul Ryan went to extraordinary lengths to forestall a vote on a similar motion in the House of Representatives.

The history here is worth noting.

The 1973 War Powers Act was written to protect such motions from political shenanigans. However, in 2017, the leadership killed House Concurrent Resolution 81, using parliamentary trickery to table the motion without a vote. In November 2018, the House Rules Committee, controlled by Ryan and company, slipped a rule into the Wolf Protection Act to de-privilege H.Con.Res.138 so that a vote would again be thwarted. When the measure was brought up again in December, the Rules Committee inserted a rule on Res.142 into the farm bill, which again prevented Congress from voting on the issue.

Why so much effort on Capitol Hill to protect and perpetuate an illegal war that has brought the 14 million people of Yemen to the brink of starvation? Why so much support for enabling the Saudi government’s inhumane naval blockade and bombing campaign, which are intentionally designed to starve the Yemenis and prevent other supplies, particularly medicines, from coming into Yemen?

When queried, the typical supporter of this horror tells us we have to support the Saudis because they are “our friends.” But how can we call those who willfully perpetrate such unthinkable misery “our friends”? For many years, our political, military, and press leadership have intoned the “our friends” mantra. Why? Exactly who benefits from this so-called friendship?

Ben Freeman at the Center for International Policy’s Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative has identified many of the American firms that receive vast sums of money from the Saudis. This money is laundered through these firms and into the campaign coffers of our political leaders.

It is difficult to imagine how a country that has spent billions of dollars both around the world and in America supporting a virulently anti-American jihadist ideology can be considered a friend. Adherents of this ideology, Saudis, comprised the leadership, the funders, the operatives, and 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked us on September 11, 2001, killing 3,000 Americans. Yet Riyadh has not stopped funding madrassas overseas that teach extremism (despite a recent pledge to do just that), enabling these schools to breed and train new terrorists for the last five decades. America’s leadership has turned a blind eye in order to continue to protect their money flow.

Our national leaders also tell us that selling weapons to the Kingdom gives us the benefit of jobs in our country. This is somewhat deceptive. To paraphrase TAC columnist Doug Bandow: we do have people working to make the weapons, but we do not fully benefit from the export of arms because we do not benefit from them here. Instead, the products are sent overseas, often at our expense.

Also, due to this shortsighted practice, our technology and resources end up in dangerous and unstable regions where our own weapons are often used against our troops. The arms bonanza also raises serious questions about arming a bunch of nations that are hospitable to terrorist organizations. What is in it for America besides large sums of money for lobbyists and politicians?

Laughably, the defense industry suggests that the price of weapons, planes, and services will cost the taxpayers less money to purchase if the Military Industrial Complex mass produces the equipment for export. They forget to point out in this fairy tale that U.S. troops often end up fighting the terrorist networks to which America provides those same military-grade weapons. That forces us to spend even more resources to protect our troops from our own weapons. This has cost American lives and trillions in taxpayer dollars since 2001.

Americans would fare much better if the defense industry charged taxpayers more per plane, precision missile, and bombs—and then kept our weapons and troops home to defend U.S. interests. We could forego the inevitable trench warfare that kills and injures U.S. soldiers and wastes treasure and instead rebuild America’s infrastructure.

And don’t think the American public would be averse to holding back such aid. In a poll commissioned by the Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy in 2017, 57 percent of those surveyed thought giving weapons and other military aid to Saudi Arabia was “counterproductive.”

The Saudis are good friends to those who benefit from their lobbying largesse and military contracts. But they’re not so good for the rest of us who have to pay the human, social, and financial costs, and suffer under a corrupted political process.

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George D. O’Neill, Jr., an artist, is the founder of The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy and a board member of The American Ideas Institute, the parent of The American Conservative. He and his wife reside in Florida.

Featured image is from Almigdad Mojalli/Voice of America

A number of prominent Jewish-American leaders are funding covert, anonymous campaigns targeting pro-Palestinian student activists, The Forward has found. The Jewish daily newspaper, which has been publishing valuable information concerning the source of funding for these hyper-aggressive and shadowy groups – which spearhead coordinated hate campaigns against critics of the Zionist state – has uncovered the identities of those behind hidden social media accounts.

Community heads and prominent Jewish organisations with a carefully-crafted, respectable public profile have donated millions to fund secret projects targeting students and lecturers, the report has found. On a number of occasions, their blind support for Israel has seen them bankroll far-right and anti-Muslim hate groups.

The latest pro-Israeli group to be exposed by The Forward is the campaign targeting the pro-Palestinian campus network Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). SJP is said to be the most well-known advocate of the Palestinian cause on US campuses. It has been the target of a pro-Israel group known as SJP Uncovered, which anonymously attacks student activists affiliated with SJP across the country. With more than 100,000 followers on Facebook, SJP Uncovered has gone after pro-Palestinian students by maintaining a veil of anonymity that is said to be all-but impenetrable.

Until now, the source of funding for SJP Uncovered had been a mystery. The Forward has now been able to shed light on the organisation to reveal that the site is a secret project of the Israel on Campus Coalition (ICC), a Washington DC-based pro-Israel organisation tied to most mainstream funders and organisations in the Jewish community.

On its official website, the ICC says that its vision is to create a campus environment where “dialogue and ideas are freely exchanged about Israel”. Publicly, the ICC presents a respectable face typical of nearly all pro-Israeli groups, but privately it is funding one of the most aggressive and shadowy student groups responsible for hateful campaigns against critics of the Zionist state. The Forward revealed that the ICC paid over $1 million in the 2016/2017 fiscal year to SJP Uncovered, in that time also running vicious campaigns against students with the aid of political consulting firms.

Until around 2014, the ICC is said to have been a standard pro-Israel advocacy group receiving donations from the largest and most mainstream Jewish-American foundations. In 2015, its operations changed to “covert, anonymous campaigns targeting pro-Palestinian student activists, often with the help of top-tier paid professional political consultants,” according to the investigative report.

Describing the change in focus, one former pro-Israeli campus official said: “It was clear that the old way of doing business […] was not making the cut, and was not enough, and there was a totally new offensive approach to things.” He added:

The overall framing was [that] the pro-Israel community is no longer going to sit back and let things happen, they are going to go on the offense […] It was very clear that going on the offensive to them meant going after students and the organizations that were bringing BDS.

With the change in emphasis in 2015 towards more aggressive campaigns, the ICC began hiring paid political consultants – including opposition researchers – to work on campuses. It transformed itself into a cog in what is often described as Israel’s secret global war against pro-Palestinian activists, which is operated by a dedicated ministry in Tel Aviv known as the Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Its main function is to spearhead Israel’s overt and covert efforts to smear the nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement that is modelled on the global campaign that helped end Apartheid in South Africa. In November, the Electronic Intifada published in full an undercover Al Jazeera documentary that revealed some of the ministry’s tactics. The documentary was censored, allegedly after Israel lobby pressure on Qatar, which funds Al Jazeera.

SJP Uncovered is one of many pro-Israel organisations to emerge from a new consensus within sections of the Jewish-American community. They believed that defeating the global BDS movement was a key priority, which could only be achieved through aggressive means. Such tactics, however, not only risked falling foul of the rules of respectable public institutions, it was bad for their image.  The solution for Zionist and pro-Israel groups, both in the US and Israel, was to adopt secretive and clandestine tactics against their targets in an effort to protect their reputation. One of the best known of these operations is the formerly-anonymous website Canary Mission, which posts political dossiers on college students. The site went live in 2015, and has since grown to include dossiers on thousands of students.

A series of Forward exposés in October revealed that a foundation controlled by the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, a major Jewish charity with an annual budget of over $100 million, had donated $100,000 to the website, whose work has drawn comparisons to a McCarthyite blacklist. An Haaretz profile of the Canary Mission found that, for three years, the website had spread fear among undergraduate activists by posting more than a thousand political dossiers on student supporters of Palestinian rights. At the same time, the website had gone to great lengths to hide the digital and financial trail connecting it to its donors and staff. Registered through a secrecy service, the site had been untraceable until recently.

While the federation had assured that it was a “one-time grant” that would never happen again, the uncovering of a publicly respectable pro-Israel organisations giving funds to operate clandestine hate campaigns against pro-Palestinian activists triggered further investigations. The Canary Mission was just the tip of the iceberg, as tax filings seen by the magazine +972 showed that there was a pattern of systemic financing of radical right-wing and anti-Muslim groups.

Why was 2015 pivotal to this shift in strategy? Jewish leaders in the US, says Forward reporter Josh Nathan-Kazis, decided to spend significant communal resources attacking college students in that year because there was a coming-together of Israel’s spy culture and Jewish-American mega donors like Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban. Both felt that the work being carried out by mainstream Jewish organisations was unsatisfactory. Wanting to shift the entire tenor of the Jewish communal approach to fighting anti-Semitism and BDS, major Jewish organisations were called to a secret meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada.

During this 2015 meeting, there was a consensus for a push towards more aggressive responses to BDS. A new initiative, named after Jewish guerrilla warriors Maccabees, was formed. On its website, the Maccabee taskforce – which claims that the BDS movement is spreading anti-Semitism across the world – says it is “determined to help students combat this hate by bringing them the strategies and resources they need to tell the truth about Israel”.

Strategies developed by Israeli think tanks like the Reut Institute became the playbook for the aggressive tactics that is said to have come into maturity during that period. These tactics, Nathan-Kazis explains, called for pro-Israel advocates to “out, name and shame” harsh critics of Israel, and to “frame them […] as anti-peace, anti-Semitic, or dishonest purveyors of double standards”. They talked about “establishing a ‘price tag’” for attacks on Israel and “isolating” advocacy groups that attack Israel, while “organizing regular meetings of pro-Israel networks”.

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The world is safer now that there’s one less Al Qaeda terrorist inhabiting it, but Trump’s successful strike against USS Cole bomber Jamal al-Badawi in central Yemen also served several tangential domestic and international purposes, too.

The news just broke that Trump successfully took out USS Cole bomber Jamal al-Badawi after ordering a strike on the terrorist’s position in the mountainous Yemeni heartland, which is a cause for celebration among those who remember the attack that he masterminded in 2000. The world’s definitely much safer with one less Al Qaeda terrorist inhabiting it, but the President also accomplished a few other tangential domestic and international objectives through this assassination even if they weren’t part of the reason why he gave the go-ahead for this strike.

On the international front, Trump showed that the US is still very involved in the Yemeni conflict in spite of the criticism about it coming from some factions of his government in the aftermath of Khashoggi’s killing. Instead of directly aiding the Saudis with their aerial campaign, however, the US is now signaling that its involvement also has a crucial anti-terrorist component to it as well. Importantly, by striking deep in the Yemeni heartland, it’s also showing just how far its military reach extends and reminds everyone that it has intelligence on the ground capable of giving it an accurate idea of what’s happening there too.

There’s a chance that this terrorist’s location in his native country might be seized upon by Trump’s domestic “deep state” rivals and the Saudis’ international enemies to highlight the fact that Al Qaeda has experienced a resurgence in Yemen as a result of the Kingdom’s nearly four-year war on it, therefore adding further pressure on the President to distance himself from his allies. That said, Trump might also have an opportunity to retort that the 2000 USS Cole bombing preceded the country’s civil war by 15 years in an attempt to deflect one of the most popular criticisms of the Saudi campaign.

Either way, Jamal al-Badawi’s assassination brings an “exotic country” to the forefront of Americans’ attention amid the “controversial” government shutdown, potentially serving as a “convenient” distraction for Trump and also allowing him to reassure his people that their international security needs are still being attended do in spite of the budget crisis. This highly symbolic kill will surely be celebrated by both parties because there’s no way that even the Democrats can deny this “victory” to Trump, though they’ll probably try to downplay it for obvious reasons.

All told, Trump will assuredly attempt to leverage his successful anti-terrorist strike in Yemen to his international and domestic advantage to promote his reputation as being “tough on terror”, which can win him political points both at home and abroad, albeit for different reasons. This symbolic event probably won’t remain in the news for long, however, given the multitude of other more important events that are taking place around the world, but it’ll at least give him a temporary respite from the negative news cycle that he regularly has to deal with.

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

Starting from January 4th, the Russian Aerospace Forces carried out a series of airstrikes on terrorists’ positions in the Idlib de-escalation zone. The airstrikes targeted Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces in the towns of Darat Izza, Kafrnaha, Jamiat al-Rahal, Urum al-Kubra and the 111th Regiment base in the western Aleppo countryside.

HTS’ news network Iba’a said that the group responded by shelling positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the district of al-Rashidin in the outskirt of the city of Aleppo, claiming that 7 service members were killed, but pro-government sources doubted the claim.

On January 4th, a group of Turkish-backed militants defected and handed over their positions in the district of Jamiat al-Arman west of the city of Aleppo to HTS. After imposing control of Jamiet al-Arman, HTS advanced on the opposition-held part of the western Aleppo countryside and captured the towns of Sinkar, al-Hota and the 111th Regiment base. HTS also entered the town of A’wejel after reaching an agreement with the local council there.

On January 5th, HTS announced that its fighters had captured several battle tanks and armored vehicles while Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movements remnants were trying to smuggle them in the Turkish-occupied Afrin area.

Despite the support from the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL) and Syrian National Army (SNA), the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement in fact lost almost all of its positions to HTS in merely a few days of limited clashes. According to reports, the remaining members of the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement are now fleeing the Idlib de-escalation zone to Afrin.

On January 5 and January 6, HTS continued attacks on Turkish-backed militant groups. HTS captured the towns of Deir Sim’an and Atarib in the opposition-held part of Aleppo province. Atarib was under the control of two Turkish-backed groups Thuwar al-Sham and Byariq al-Islam. As a result both Turkish-backed groups were dissolved.

This week, HTS will contribute steps in order to consolidate its recent gains and prepare for further expansion within the opposition-held area. If the NFL and the SNA fail to undertake real steps to stop this expansion, this will confirm that Turkey also failed to turn the myth of the “moderate armed opposition” into reality and the only capable “opposition force” is al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.

On January 4th, the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) media wing released a video showing the on-going anti-ISIS operation in the Euphrates Valley. The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), of which YPG is the core, are storming ISIS positions in the town of Ash-Shafah. On January 5, the SDF imposed control on the districts of al-Razazah, al-T’as, al-Ramtha, Marzuq, al-Sur and Hawi al-Sur inside the town. Despite that, SDF is yet to enter its southern part and the nearby areas of al-Muh and al-Basatin. ISIS still controls this area.

According to the SDF, US-led coalition warplanes supported the advance conducting 129 airstrikes on ISIS positions, vehicles and gatherings. As a result of the airstrikes and the clashes on the ground, more than 71 fighters of ISIS were reportedly killed.

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A truth about movements is, they move. They morph, evolve and move around a country or even around the globe. This occurs over months and often over years.

The US Occupy encampment era occurred ten months after the Arab Spring and six months after the Spanish Indignado movement – early versions of occupy. It started in New York and then spread across the United States and to other countries. It was a global revolt against the 1% that changed politics in the United States and continues to have impacts today.

The Yellow Vest (Gilets Jaunes) movement in France is having a major impact and gaining international attention, already spreading to other nations, with some nations like Egypt banning the sale of yellow vests to prevent the protest from spreading there. The movement is showing that disrupting business-as-usual gets results. Will it come to the United States? What form would it take here? What could spark the equivalent of the Yellow Vests in the US?

Social Movements Create Global Waves Of Protest

It is common for a protest to develop in one part of the world and move to another country. This is even more common in modern times as the economy has become globalized and communication across different countries has become easier.

The US revolution against Great Britain was part of the Age of Enlightenment, which questioned traditional authority and emphasized natural rights of life, liberty, and equality as well as sought self-government and religious freedom. The French Revolution followed 13 years after the US in 1789. It led to political changes in the UK, Germany and across Europe. This coincided with the Great Liberator, Simon Bolivar, freeing colonies from the Spanish Empire including Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and Peru. They became independent and briefly united as a single nation.

The democratic revolutions of 1848, known as the Springtime of Peoples, were part of a widespread revolutionary period that impacted 50 nations in Europe, beginning in France and spreading without any evident coordination. The issues were about democratic and worker rights, as well as human rights and freedom of the press. It led to the abolition of serfdom in some nations and ended monarchy in Denmark. The French monarchy was replaced by a republic, constitutions were created, and empires were threatened by countries seeking sovereignty.

In the era of Decolonization of Africa and Asia, 1945 and 1960, three dozen new states achieved autonomy or outright independence from their European colonial rulers. In Africa, a Pan-African Congress in 1945 demanded an end to colonization. There were widespread unrest and organized revolts in both Northern and sub-Saharan colonies. Protests, revolutions and sometimes peaceful transition ended the era of colonization.

The 1960s were an era of protest that peaked in 1968 around the world. Multiple issues came to the forefront including for labor rights and socialism, the feminist movement, protests against war and militarism, and against racism and environmental degradation. Protests occurred in the United States, Europe, the Soviet Bloc, Asia, and Latin America.

More recently, economic globalization and the Internet have accelerated global protests. An example of this is the anti-globalization movement itself. As corporations took control of trade agreements and began to write trade for transnational corporate profits, people around the world saw how this impacted their communities and fought back.

The Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico on January 1, 1994, was an uprising that coincided with the beginning of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Zapatista Army of National Liberation was an uprising by the indigenous, local population against being exploited by global trade. Their action was an inspiration to others and an anti-NAFTA movement developed in the United States, growing into an anti-globalization movement.

Join The No NAFTA-2 National Call-In Day On Tuesday, January 8.

The 1997 financial crisis in Southeast Asia, followed by the International Monetary Fund restructuring the debt in ways that brought austerity, led to protests across the region in Korea, Indonesia, and Thailand against economic globalization and the undue influence of transnational capital.

These combined into the Battle for Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meetings where 50,000 people from the US and around the world protested on the streets of Seattle for four days shutting down the meetings. This was a movement of movements moment that united many single-issue groups into a force too powerful for the elites to overcome. WTO meetingssince then have been met with mass protests as have IMF and other economic meetings. This evolved into making it very difficult to pass corporate trade agreements in the United States, e.g. the people stopped the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trump will have difficulty getting NAFTA-2 approved. Join the campaign to stop Trump Trade’s NAFTA-2.

The Yellow Vest Movement

The French Yellow Vest movement is made up of working people who are protesting the unfair economy every Saturday.  The 8th “Act,” held this Saturday, was larger than expected as the government and media were claiming the movement was dying down over the holidays, despite the movement saying they were not over and were just getting started.

The movement began as a protest against a gasoline tax, but it quickly became evident that this was just the final straw against a series of policies that have made people economically insecure.  President Macron has aggressively pursued a neoliberal agenda on behalf of the wealthy, lowering their taxes while cutting social services.

Macron has responded with the elimination of the fuel tax, raising the minimum wage, and cutting taxes on pensioners, but they continue to call for the “president of the rich” to step down. Macron’s popularity is down into the twenties in polls, while a majority of French people want the Yellow Vest protests to continue. The movement is exposing contradictions in France that cannot be solved by the current economic and political systems.

Macron, while making concessions, has also called the protesters thugs and agitators. Police tactics have been aggressive and violent, in the face of mostly nonviolent protests. They arrested a Yellow Vest participant, Eric Drouet, who the media has labeled a “leader,” on flimsy charges of protesting without a permit, stoking more outrage. The media calls him a leader while saying the leaderless movement will fail because it lacks a leader. This reminds us of similar treatment during Occupy.

The movement has blown up political divides because there are people from the extreme left, extreme right and everywhere in-between participating. It includes young and old, male and female. It shows people uniting in a revolt over the unfair economic system and its impact on workers.  They are also calling for participatory democracy by demanding citizen initiatives where people can vote on legislation, firing political appointees or even changing the constitution if they gather enough signatures. The Yellow Vests are showing system-wide problems that require both the economic and political systems to change.

Source: Popular Resistance

Will ‘Yellow Vest’ Protests Come to the United States?

Many of the problems the French people suffer are also felt in the United States. The US economy has been designed for the wealthy for decades and billionaire President Trump-era policies have made that reality worse. People never fully recovered from the 2008 economic collapse when millions lost houses and jobs, got lower income and higher debt.

The globalized economy that has been designed for transnational corporations has not served the people in the United States well.  The fly-over states of the Midwest have been left hollowed out. Rural hospitals are closing as the economy disappears. In urban areas across the country, decades of neglect and lack of investment have created impoverished conditions. Racist and violent policing have been used to prevent rebellion and contain the unrest. People are struggling. Addiction and suicide rates are up. There is vast hopelessness and despair.

An economic collapse is on the horizon. As Alan Woods writes in New Year, New Crisis, “The question is not if it will happen, only when.” The US economy is dominated by Wall Street, which ended the year in crisis. Citigroup’s share price declined 30 percent from where it started the year, Goldman Sachs declined 35 percent, Morgan Stanley 24 percent, Bank of America 18 percent and JPMorgan had a 10% loss. Woods points to China’s economy slowing as is Germany’s and problems in other European nations all point to a global slow down, which those in power do not have tools to respond to as interest rates are already low and government debt is already high.

When the recession hits, the economic insecurity of the people will worsen. Like the people in France, the rich are getting obscenely richer and avoiding taxes by hiding billions offshore. And, the government is doing the opposite of what is needed, e.g. reducing taxes on the wealthy when there should be a millionaire’s tax of 70%, and blocking the Green New Deal.

And, when the economic crisis hits, people will blame Trump. Many voters supported him because he promised to break from a system that is designed to favor the wealthy. They will know from their own experience that he did the opposite. Stop Trumpism! will become an even louder rallying cry and a president whose popularity always hovered around 40% will find himself in polls at 30% or lower, as a presidential campaign kicks into high gear.

The economy is often the trigger event, as it was for Occupy, and we already know there are going to be mass teacher strikes in 2019, indeed plans to strike in LA are expected to escalate more broadly. The GM workers who lose their jobs when four US factories close could be facing losing their homes and have other economic stresses causing them to revolt. Congress refusing to take National Improved Medicare for All seriously when tens of thousands of people are dying every year simply because they are uninsured could light the spark.

People in the US might not be wearing yellow vests, but we know from other recent protest movements, people are willing to shut down streets and highways and stop business as usual. More may participate if a radicalizing moment ensues now that they have seen the model work in France.

There are many triggers that are likely to spark aggressive mass protests in 2019. Get ready.

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

The doors of Emergency Hospital in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, swung open: Ehsanullah, 14, his face a swollen mess of flesh, was the first to be wheeled in.

His younger brother Hedayat, 4, was next. He had deep wounds up and down both legs, a skull injury and a bubble of intestine was protruding from a small hole in his abdomen. Then came Noor Ahmad, 7, and Parwana, 9, whose face was spider-webbed with blood from a wound on the crown of her head. All arrived totally silent, muted by the shock. And still more kept coming.

Within a few minutes, 13 members of the same extended family had been admitted to the hospital – ten children, an elderly man, and two women, one of whom was pregnant.

They had been struck by munitions from an American aircraft as they sheltered in their house on November 24. Alongside the 13 injured, two members of the family had died at the scene – 15-year-old Esmatullah and his father Obaidullah.

Ehsanullah (14) arrived at the Out Patient Department missing one eye, while the other was ruptured and would later need to be removed. He had numerous other shell injuries from head to toe.Andrew Quilty

Parwana (9) who had a head and leg wound, and Malali (age unknown, background) wait to be treated in the Emergency Hospital Out Patient Department.Andrew Quilty

A nurse helps an extremely reluctant and in-pain Noor Ahmad (7) back into bed after an attempt to walk for the first time since suffering his injuries, in the female and children’s ward. Andrew Quilty

Just days later, US ordnance struck another building, with even greater civilian casualties – 23 people were killed, many of them children, in Helmand’s Garmsir District.

It raises questions about what the US is trying to achieve in Afghanistan especially since President Trump’s announcement that he is going to pull back half the American troops who are in country and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s resignation in protest against that policy change and the withdrawal of US forces from Syria.

Civilian casualties resulting from US military operations had declined significantly after measures were taken to stop them in 2009. This trend began to change after US airstrikes picked up pace again in 2015, and the last year has seen a particularly acute reversal of it.

New data shows that many of the most recent strikes appear to be hitting buildings, despite US rules placing significant restrictions on such strikes because of the risks to civilians.

The Bureau recently reported on how more than 60 buildings were destroyed by US airstrikes in Afghanistan in October (only the second month that target information had been released). This analysis came after a report that month from the UN mission in Afghanistan found the number of US strikes leading to civilian casualties had doubled.

The US military told the Bureau that the problem was that the Taliban were using civilians as human shields, and that it was often “difficult to discern” when non-combatants are inside buildings that fighters are firing from. It says the rules on targeting buildings have not been relaxed.

Seeing what these policies look like on the ground is hard to do – many attacks happen in highly contested areas. But the Bureau has been able to gather detailed evidence of an attack on a building, and its consequences for one family.

Hedayat, 4, is placed in a wheelchair before being wheeled to his mother in the female ward after he cried for her throughout the morning in the hospital’s sub-Intensive Care Unit.Andrew Quilty

Qarara and her son Hedayat recover in the female and children’s ward at Emergency Hospital.Andrew Quilty

Surgeons clean dead and damaged tissue from Ehsanullah’s wounds. They explained this was necessary on all traumatic war wounds in Afghanistan because of the highly contaminated environment and the likelihood of resulting infection.Andrew Quilty

Ehsanullah’s mother Qarara (50) and uncle Sardar Wali (30) inside Emergency hospital. Sardar Wali couldn’t tell Qarara that her son’s eyes had ruptured and that he would never see again.Andrew Quilty

The village of Loy Manda lies less than ten miles outside of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Afghanistan’s restive Helmand province.

As Afghan government forces—with the help of the Americans—retook territory the Taliban had controlled since 2016, Loy Manda became the frontline. Afghan troops took up positions on the edge of the village in the lead-up to operations aimed at retaking it from the Taliban.

An Afghan army commander called Toryalai was stationed at a frontline checkpoint along the main road outside the village that day. He told the Bureau that he didn’t know a 20 vehicle strong convoy of Afghan and US Special Operations forces were travelling through the area until he heard the sound of it coming under fire.

On hearing the sound, the Ishaqzai family hurried inside their home and closed the doors. Soon after, two Taliban fighters ran into their yard from the street. Ehsanullah’s mother Qarara said that her husband, Obaidullah, begged them to leave. They did, she says, but only after taking some shots at the the passing convoy.

In another part of the village, Obaidullah’s nephew Saifullah was working at his pharmacy. He heard the distinctive second-long bursts from the Gatling Gun of an A-10, a fixed-wing aircraft used for close air-support by the US military in Afghanistan. Looking out, he could see dust and smoke rising above the trees from the direction of the house his family shared with his uncle Obaidullah’s family. He hurried over.

By the time Saifullah arrived at the family compound, two bodies were lying on the ground, their faces covered in scarves. It was Obaidullah and his 15-year-old cousin, Esmatullah. Their clothes were torn and bloody.

More than a dozen others, mostly children, screamed as the American soldiers bandaged the worst of their wounds. More than two hours passed before they arrived at Emergency.

In the days following the strike, the survivors rested in bed between surgeries and occasionally, outside in the hospital’s rose gardens.

Qarara, with a thatch of steel pins holding her shattered left leg together, had so many crying children throughout the hospital that they had to be brought to her in shifts, in wheelchairs, to be calmed.

When her eldest, Ehsanullah, was brought to her by his uncle Sardar Wali, the top half of his head was wrapped in thick bandages. One of his eyes had been torn out in the attack. The other had ruptured and would need to be surgically removed.

Sardar Wali couldn’t bring himself to tell Qarara that her son would never see again.

Ehsanullah lost one eye while the other was ruptured and had to be removed. He also had several leg and abdominal injuries. His uncle, Sardar Wali, sits and weeps beside him in the garden at Emergency hospital.Andrew Quilty

Rahmatullah (8) recovers in a ward at the hospital.Andrew Quilty

Ehsanullah and Rahmatullah spend time in the hospital’s garden with their uncle.Andrew Quilty

Hedayat with his sister Parwana and mother Qarara (foreground), in the sub-Intensive Care Unit. Qarara was often required at her childrens’ side to calm them.Andrew Quilty

The remaining members of Obaidullah’s family are still incredulous. Saifullah doesn’t understand how the Americans could not have realised they were hitting a family home, pointing to the fact that brightly coloured women’s clothes had been hung to dry on a line in the yard.

“We know US forces, accompanying their Afghan security partners, called in self-defence air support against a building from which the Taliban were shooting,” a US military spokesperson told the Bureau. “Too often the Taliban use civilians as hostages and human shields.”

Sardar Wali, Ehsanullah’s uncle, is angry at both sides. He told the Bureau that blame for the incident “belongs to both the Americans and the Taliban.”

After the Americans left the scene of the attack, friends and relatives of Obaidullah’s family, and several Taliban fighters, gathered at the house to clean up and assist with the dead.

A village elder, Haji Zahir, drew the scarves away from the two bodies still lying outside, asking them with bitter irony: “Did you fire on the Americans?”

Then he turned to the insurgents. “Look what you brought to us,” he said angrily. “This is your jihad?”

The Taliban, rifles slung over their shoulders, stood in silence.

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Featured image: The view from the Afghan National Army checkpoint, on the front-line between government and Taliban forces in eastern Loy Manda in Nad-i Ali District, Helmand Province, toward a house that was struck in an airstrike one week prior, on November 24, 2018.Andrew Quilty

When independent news outlets focus on 9/11, they are immediately branded by the mainstream media and so-called ‘fact-checkers’ as conspiracy theorists. The BBC makes this point precisely in a 2018 article that starts like this –

“On 11 September 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked by radical Islamist terrorists – almost 3,000 people were killed as the aircraft were flown into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Just hours after the collapse of New York’s Twin Towers, a conspiracy theory surfaced online which persists more than 16 years later.”

The entire article is dedicated to all the ‘conspiracy theories’ involved in 9/11 and makes a mockery of anyone or anything that questions the official government line. They even heavily mock the brother of one man killed in 9/11 and frankly, true or not, the BBC’s report itself is rather sickening to read.

And yet, here we are, all these years later and it’s hardly surprising the theories of a conspiracy continue.

A 2016 study from Chapman University in California, found more than half of the American people believe the government is concealing information about the 9/11 attacks. This is in part because, large sections of the official US government report were redacted for years – and is still missing to this day.

The big problem is that the government is withholding crucial evidence. And then there’s other evidence the state and mainstream media refuse to even consider.

Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist and former United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan. Roberts was an associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and has received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.

Roberts wrote this really interesting piece of information just a few days ago that the mainstream media has been completely silent about:

“Although the United States is allegedly a democracy with a rule of law, it has taken 17 years for public pressure to bring about the first grand jury investigation of 9/11. Based on the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth led by Richard Gage, first responder and pilots organizations, books by David Ray Griffin and others, and eyewitness testimony, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has presented enough hard facts to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York to force his compliance with the provisions of federal law that require the convening of a federal grand jury to investigate for the first time the attacks of September 11, 2001. https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org

This puts the US Justice (sic) Department in an extraordinary position. There will be tremendous pressures on the US Attorney’s office to have the grand jury dismiss the evidence as an unpatriotic conspiracy theory or otherwise maneuver to discredit the evidence presented by the Lawyers’ Committee, or modify the official account without totally discrediting it.

“What the 9/11 truthers and the Lawyers’ Committee have achieved is the destruction of the designation of 9/11 skeptics as “conspiracy theorists.” No US Attorney would convene a grand jury on the basis of a conspiracy theory. Clearly, the evidence is compelling that has put the US Attorney in an unenviable position.”

If the Lawyers’ Committee and the 9/11 truthers trust the US Attorney to go entirely by the facts, little will come of the grand jury. If the United States had a rule of law, something as serious as 9/11 could not have gone for 17 years without investigation.”

Three weeks before Roberts’ made this statement a letter was published by Off-Guardian about a Huffington Post hit piece about an academic teaching journalism. Its first paragraph explains entirely its own position.

An academic teaching journalism students at one of the UK’s top universities has publicly supported long-discredited conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terror attack, HuffPost UK can reveal.

This entire article, like that of the BBC’s, vigorously attacks any individual or organisation that has the temerity to question the ‘official’ narrative on any major incident as offered up by the state, such as the Skripal poisonings, Syria’s chemical weapons, Iraq and Chilcot Report.

HuffPost even uses an unnamed former head of MI6 and an unnamed former Supreme Commander of Nato to dispel such challenges to this narrative and then attacks other sources of news such as RT as nothing more than Russian propaganda irrespective of the source. As a rule, TruePublica does not publish news sourced by RT but that does not make all of its content propaganda.

David Ray Griffin, a retired American professor and political writer who founded the Center for Process Studies which seeks to promote the common good by means of the relational approach found in process thought was the co-author of the book ‘9/11 Unmasked’ – part of the attack piece was centred on by the HuffPost hit piece.

The head of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, the other co-author, responded to the HuffPost.  For information, the goal of the Consensus Panel is to “provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.”

That letter is as follows:

Jess Brammer, UK Huffington Post
Chris York, UK Huffington Post

Dear Ms. Brammar and Mr. York:

I was the head information specialist serving the Medical Health Officers of British Columbia, Canada, for 25 years.

Your attack piece on Professor Piers Robinson and on the scholarly work of Dr. David Ray Griffin is the least accurate and the lowest quality published article I have ever seen.

I have assisted Dr. Griffin with 10 of his investigative books into the events of 9/11. In 2011 we decided to create the international 9/11 Consensus Panel to review and evaluate the official claims relating to September 11, 2001. The Panel we formed has 23 members, including people from the fields of physics, chemistry, structural engineering, aeronautical engineering, piloting, airplane crash investigation, medicine, journalism, psychology, and religion (For the full list, see here).

In seeking a consensus methodology, I was advised by the former provincial epidemiologist of British Columbia to employ a leading model that is used in medicine to establish the best diagnostic and treatment evidence to guide the world’s doctors using medical consensus statements.

The Panel methodology has produced, seven years later, 51 refutations of the official claims, which were published as 911 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation in September, 2018.

Each Consensus Point, now a chapter in this book, was given three rounds of review and feedback by the Panel members. The panelists were blind to one another throughout the process, providing strictly uninfluenced individual feedback. Any Points that did not receive 85% approval by the third round were set aside.

The Honorary Members of the Panel include the late British (and longest-serving) parliamentarian Michael Meacher, the late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, and the late Honorary President of the Italian Supreme Court, Ferdinando Imposimato.

The Huffington Post drastically lowered its standards to publish this hit piece, and what influenced it to do so is a question worth pursuing.

Yours truly

Elizabeth Woodworth, Co-author with Dr. David Ray Griffin
9/11 Unmasked

It is over 18 years now since the world-changing event of 9/11. One wonders when the information held by the American government, that continues to anger so many people affected by it will ever emerge.

However, one reason why such questions persist is precisely that of the actions of the US government itself. One should not forget those so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ that actually came true that continues to pour petrol on the flames of doubt.

For example, the American government killed thousands by poisoning alcohol to prove its point that alcohol was bad for the general public during prohibition. This was a ‘conspiracy theory’ that went on for decades – until it was proven to be true.

Then, you can take your pick of the lies government tells when it comes to starting wars – how about the lie the Saddam Hussain and Iraq had WMD ready to fire at Western targets. Total deaths exceeded 1 million. Yet another classic American lie was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, as a pretext for escalating the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War that killed 60,000 American soldiers. Total deaths racked up 1.35 million, all based on a lie. That incident only came about because of an unintentional declassification of an NSA file in 2005.

Edward Snowden proved with his revelations in 2013 that the government was spying on everyone when the government had denied they had ever done so. It took a whistleblower to let us all know. The UK government has been found by the highest courts in the land to have broken numerous privacy and surveillance laws as a result of mass civilian surveillance systems.

Operation Mockingbird was a US government operation where journalists were paid to publish CIA propaganda, only uncovered by the Watergate scandal. It took a thief to unknowingly capture secret documents and recordings for the public to find out.

The list goes on and on – just as 9/11 will, so it will be interesting to see how the US Attorney, presented with evidence from so many prominent professionals will bury yet more 9/11 evidence. Don’t hold your breath though, the same questions will, no doubt, still be being asked in another 18 years time.

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Featured image is from TP

Bolivia and Uruguay have rejected interventionist declarations made by the Lima Group against the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Bolivian President Evo Morales posted on Twitter on Saturday:

“Democracy is based upon peace, dialogue and self-determination of peoples.

“We praise the democratic government of Mexico for defending the principle of non-interventionism and declining to back the diplomatic conspiracy led by the United States through the ‘Lima Group’ against Venezuela.

“We regret resurgence of the ideology of racist supremacy (KKK), as a replica of xenophobia of the government of the United States.

“In the face of intolerance and discrimination, Indigenous peoples promote respect and integration.”

We praise the democratic government of Mexico for defending the principle of non-interventionism and declining to back the diplomatic conspiracy led by the US through the "Lima Group" against Venezuela. Democracy is based upon peace, dialogue and self-determination of peoples

— Evo Morales Ayma (@evoespueblo) January 5, 2019

Uruguay’s Foreign Affairs Ministry also rejected the Lima Group‘s position.  President Tabare Vazquez said he would advocate for a “peaceful solution” based on “dialogue.”

On Friday, the Mexican government, led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), refused to sign the joint declaration by the Lima Group, opting to maintain good diplomatic relations with Venezuela.

“Mexico firmly promotes dialogue with all involved parties to find peace and reconciliation, for which we reiterate our rejection of any initiative that includes measures that obstruct a dialogue to face the crisis in Venezuela,” an official statement issued by Mexico’s foreign ministry reads.

The Venezuelan government, through a statement of his Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Arreaza, warned against interventionism. Arreaza said he regrets that the members of the Lima Group “agreed to foster a coup in Venezuela” by “not recognizing the democratically elected government” after “receiving instructions from the U.S. government through a video conference.”

#Venezuela's Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza has released a statement warning against interventionism after several member countries of the so-called Lima Group declared the Venezuelan government of #NicolasMaduro "illegitimate." pic.twitter.com/51pqsTUjG6

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) January 5, 2019

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On September 30, 2018, a month after the U.S. and Mexico moved toward replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada joined to produce a new continental trade agreement. The new pact, as highlighted in the article below (written just after Canada signed on) focused especially on securing automotive jobs in the U.S. and Canada. The two governments celebrated the agreement, joined especially by the leadership of Unifor, representing Canadian autoworkers. The American autoworker’s union, the UAW, was more cautious and the Mexican government was relieved that the pressures to limit production in Mexico were restrained. Within weeks, General Motors (GM) dramatically confirmed the limits of the agreement, announcing the closure of four plants in the U.S. and the remaining GM facility in Oshawa.

Autoworkers in Canada and U.S. were furious with GM, yet the solutions proposed focused on identifying Mexico, with its low wages, as the problem. When NAFTA was being negotiated in the mid-1990s, the great promise to Mexico was that it would bring pervasive economic development, with rising wages and incomes that brought workers and farmers into the ‘middle class’. Mexico did receive a great deal of U.S. investment in certain sectors as a result of NAFTA, but as in the U.S. and Canada, the promises of free trade were overwhelmingly not fulfilled. Like working people to the North, neither the investments of private corporations, nor free trade pacts (which have been more about corporate freedoms and guarantees), nor the cynical policies and assurances of governments, brought Mexican workers richer lives and hopeful futures for their children.

The point for workers in all three countries is to escape the repeated false promises of recent  decades and keep our eye on the failures of our own economic and political elites. The challenge is to learn from the experience  of worsening insecurity and class inequality and – finally – to start addressing the larger, radical changes we will need to make at home and in our relationship to international capital if we want better lives.

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When Donald Trump declared the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to be “the worst deal” in American history (and the worst deal ever signed “by any country”), those who had themselves long opposed NAFTA found themselves in a bind. They could hardly side with Trump and be identified with the imperial nationalism of “America First” and Trump’s thinly disguised racism.

Concerns in Canada and Mexico that any new deal would surely be worse than NAFTA for their countries didn’t justify defending the trade deal they had earlier so roundly condemned. The position that any free-trade agreement should be opposed had some appeal, as resistance always does. But that in itself would still leave untouched the twin realities shaping our lives: the dominance of corporate economic and financial power within Canada and Canada’s extreme economic dependence on the USA.

Stymied by the limited options, the broad left – unions, social movements, those concerned with social justice, equality, and a substantive democracy – ended up being sidelined in this crucial debate. This stood in sharp contrast to the impressive mobilizations that had occurred in the lead-up to the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the precursor to NAFTA. Yet even then, the response of the left was too modest to deal with the new aggressiveness they faced. The ideological and organizational weakening of unions and social movements since then, and the lowering of expectations that followed, makes it all the harder to build an effective counter-movement today.

How to make sense of the present moment? Was the push to renegotiate NAFTA only about Trump playing to his base? Was Trump reacting to an alleged decline in the American empire? Was it about moving away from multilateral to bilateral agreements where U.S. strength weighs heavier? Is the narrowing of options that the renegotiation of NAFTA exposed just about free-trade agreements, or does it point to a more general characteristic of capitalism today?

It’s useful to begin by briefly reviewing what the renegotiation of NAFTA did and didn’t change. We then step back to consider some of the larger issues that any oppositional movement will have to address. We conclude with some observations on what an alternative orientation might entail.

Trumping NAFTA, Trumpeting the USMCA

After trashing NAFTA, Trump predictably proclaimed that its replacement, the USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement), was a “wonderful new deal … a historic transaction.” Trudeau chimed in that it would “create jobs and grow the middle class.” What did the USMCA actually change?

The focus on renegotiating NAFTA emerged out of Trump’s obsession with trade deficits. When NAFTA was first negotiated, Mexico had a small overall trade deficit with the U.S. This was transformed into the largest trade surplus with the U.S. of any country other than China. That surplus is almost entirely driven by Mexico’s emergence as a major global site of automotive production: of Mexico’s $71-billion surplus with the U.S. in 2017, $63-billion was in auto. Over and above automotive parts, Mexico has, since the start of NAFTA, received some 90% of new automotive capacity (Canada has actually seen its capacity decrease).

The flow of automotive products was consequently central to the renegotiation of NAFTA. The USMCA led to the following changes in automotive-sector trade.

1. The rules of origin (how much of an automobile’s content must be manufactured within North America to qualify for duty-free flow of vehicles and parts between the three countries) were increased from 62.5% to 75%.

The U.S. had called for 85%, but settled on 75%. Most of the assembly plants that operate under NAFTA (now USMCA) are close to the 75% target, and, though this may increase parts purchases in North America somewhat, it will not dramatically change industry employment numbers. Moreover, the additional content under this rule doesn’t have to be in the U.S.; it can locate in Mexico or Canada. The U.S. wanted, but did not get, a special provision that it alone should have a specific national content rule.

2. To qualify for USMCA, at least 40–45% of the content (varying for assembly and parts) must originate in facilities with average wages of over $16 per hour.

Intriguing as this is, it too will have minimal impact. In general, the vehicles Mexico ships to the U.S. already comply with 40% of the content being sourced in the U.S. and Canada, and thus already paying wages above that average. Moreover, no company is going to triple (or more) the wages they pay in Mexico when the penalty on cars coming into the U.S. is only 2.5%; they’ll just accept the penalty instead. And if they’re paying the penalty anyway, they may even reduce overall content in North America. The penalty on trucks (25%) is another matter. But by far, most of Mexico’s vehicle exports are cars, and the amount of U.S.-Canadian content in Mexican truck exports is generally significantly higher than cars and exceeds the 40% condition.

All this leaves aside the hypocrisy of the U.S. calling for stronger Mexican labour standards, even as it oversees the profound weakening of its own working class, and while, on the Canadian side, the new Ontario premier seems about to roll back even the minimal gains workers were about to get after decades of shameful mistreatment.

3. If the U.S. imposes restrictions on exports on grounds of national security, $2.6-million in annual car exports from Canada, as well as Mexico, would be excluded, and so would certain levels of parts exports from each country.

For Canada, this ceiling will not be biting. Trucks are excluded from any limit, and Canadian car exports could increase by some 45% relative to 2017 before the ceiling is reached – i.e., it is unlikely ever to happen. The ceiling on parts imports is also far above what Canada currently ships to the U.S. That ceiling is, however, relevant for Mexico, and may encourage a cap on new assembly plants there. The point is that after Mexico’s great auto boom, its main fear was that some of the past gains would be rolled back, so escaping that fate is considered by Mexico as a clear win.

Note that this clause legitimates the right of the U.S. to use the reason of “national security” to impose any trade restrictions it desires. This was also reinforced by the agreement not doing away with the “national security” tariffs imposed on steel and aluminum. (Trump had earlier indicated that if a replacement to NAFTA was reached, those tariffs could end, but this went the way of other Trump declarations.)

While auto was the defining issue, there were other noteworthy changes:

Chapter 19: This called for independent adjudicators to deal with conflicts of interpretation. The U.S. wanted to do away with this and leave adjudication to domestic laws. For Canada to accept a continuing vulnerability to American law would plainly mock the very idea of a supposedly “international” agreement. The U.S. eventually dropped this demand. Nevertheless, Trump’s arbitrariness with regard to trade serves as a warning that the U.S. always can, when it deems it necessary, “renegotiate” the rules. This suggests that corporations, particularly in the tightly integrated auto sector, may have a future defensive bias toward locating new investments in the U.S. rather than with its “partners.”

Chapter 11: This chapter applied an expanded version of the U.S. ‘regulatory takings’ doctrine to all of North America. It essentially allowed corporations the authority to sue states that introduced measures which not only directly but indirectly impacted on corporate property rights, including intangible property rights such as future profits (identifying this as a form of ‘taking’ or ‘expropriation’). This crass placing of private interests against the policies of elected governments was, surprisingly, removed from the new agreement in the U.S.-Canada talks. This was, however, not so much at the initiative of Canada but of the U.S. which, though very much concerned with the needs of capital in general did not itself want to be beholden to any particular corporation. Notably, for Mexico, Chapter 11 remains in force in energy and telecommunications, constraining Mexican policy in those sectors.

Dairy Market: The U.S. administration was adamant about opening up Canada’s dairy market. Canada had already made concessions on this through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the U.S. ended up stepping away from, and it was largely a foregone conclusion that Canada would make the same or, as it turned out, very slightly higher concessions in the USMCA. (Trudeau has promised to find ways to compensate farmers for this.)

Drug Patents: NAFTA had protected pharmaceutical patents for eight years. This was increased to ten years, meaning that generic drug makers can’t step in as early as before. This adds significant additional costs to individuals and puts greater pressure on negotiated drug plans and the healthcare system. In spite of the characterization of free-trade agreements as opening up competition, this change demonstrates the extent to which a higher priority has been protecting property rights.

New Side Agreements on Labour and the Environment: Free-trade agreements are based on minimizing the impact of “non-trade” social issues like labour and environmental standards. The erosion, since the NAFTA side agreements, of labour rights and environmental conditions should give us proof enough of how empty such clauses are.

The “China Clause”: Article 32.10 of the agreement provides that if a party to the agreement intends to negotiate a free-trade agreement with a “non-market” country (a designation any of the partners can make) it must first notify and gain the approval of the other parties. This clause is clearly intended to reference China, and highlights what may seem obvious: the U.S. right to veto any such discussions. (NAFTA had contingencies for such cases, so this article wasn’t technically necessary, but its imperial attitude toward both China and Canada carries important symbolic significance.)

Energy Proportionality: NAFTA and its precursor had put limits on Canada’s right, during an energy crisis, to divert oil exports normally going to the U.S. to other parts of Canada. This scandalous clause was removed. But in light of Canada’s strong desire for U.S. markets for its oil, and its political sensitivities to U.S. counter-reactions, this may not mean anything in practical terms. Even the petroleum industry, which had earlier been instrumental in bringing this clause into existence, now declared that the clause had “no impact” – that it “was never invoked and was never really needed.”

The USMCA added some other bells and whistles, but is far from being a game-changer in terms of dramatically shifting trade benefits to the U.S. This is not surprising; to truly “fix” the problem with Mexico would have meant radical steps that could overflow into undermining globalization, something Trump was loath to do. The U.S. deficit will persist, and there will not be a significant upsurge in the manufacturing jobs that Trump promised the American Midwest.

In short, the Canadian and Mexican governments are basically relieved that Trump didn’t carry through with his more extreme protectionist threats. The continental auto industry is pleased that its supply chains and assembly plants in Mexico will not be interrupted. Canadian autoworkers considered the agreement a “victory,” because the most threatening U.S. proposals faded away. U.S. workers saw some positives, but hardly a solution to their job concerns. Mexican workers had virtually no voice in the process. U.S. dairy farmers are marginally happier at the expense of their Canadian counterparts, and the drug companies are smiling. The wall to keep Mexican immigrants out of the U.S. was not mentioned.

The Bigger Context: Ten Observations

There are a number of broader issues that must be taken on board in thinking about and responding to free-trade agreements. We can’t elaborate on them here, but may present some summary observations. First, The main issue in these misnamed “trade agreements” has become the free flow of capital and the protection of business property rights. These agreements essentially give corporations internationally sanctioned constitutional guarantees against the possible actions of future elected governments. This, of course, includes access to supplies and markets for their investments, but as for tariffs, these have already fallen dramatically over the years: the trade-weighted average of U.S. tariffs is now in the order of 2%, a level dwarfed by shifts in exchange rates (the Canadian dollar, for example, has fallen by 12% from where it was a decade ago).

Second, repeated “discoveries” that the U.S. economy and U.S. empire are in decline are simply wrong. Working people may be suffering, but that is distinct from how American capitalism is doing. It’s not just that the U.S. economy is outperforming other developed countries and that U.S. corporations are doing incredibly well in terms of profits and continuing to extend their reach globally. Though the U.S. economy has certainly seen a great many jobs and sometimes entire economic sectors and regions laid waste, it has demonstrated a capacity to move upstream to dominate strategic high-tech manufacturing (aerospace, health sciences, pharma, nanotechnology, computer and communication systems), as well as the services so critical to the global economy (finance, engineering, accounting, legal, consulting, computer software, communication, and culture). Moreover, the U.S. remains, in spite of very significant setbacks, by far the prime military power in the world, while the U.S. state continues to act as the world’s central bank and the dollar remains the world’s principal currency.

Third, supporters of the thesis of inter-imperial rivalry have, since the 1960s, looked to Japan as the new rival of the American empire, later turning to Germany and Europe, and now identify China as the new challenger of American dominance. But both the profound global integration of capitalism and the resilience of the U.S. economy and state suggest powerfully that the contradictions in capitalism are not to be found in inter-imperial rivalry.

Fourth, China has neither the interest nor capacity to replace the role the U.S. plays in superintending global capitalism; its concern is rather with renegotiating its status within the hierarchy of global capitalism. Like other states, it is anxious that the U.S. act as a “responsible” global leader. Yet the Trump administration seems to have shifted American geopolitical concerns from Russia toward a new economic cold war with China. It will be interesting to see whether Trump’s aggressive imposition of high tariffs against China are a negotiating tactic to leverage China to open up its financial and high tech-sectors, thereby strengthening globalization, or part of a longer drive to push key U.S. companies out of China and thereby limit China’s technological expansion (in any case, those U.S. subsidiaries would in large part more likely move elsewhere in Asia rather than return those supply chains to the USA).

Fifth, the most relevant contradictions lie within the U.S. itself. Though the U.S., of course, derives great benefit from its international position, it also comes with burdens. Those burdens range from diverting critical resources from welfare-state expenditures to the military, to absorbing a disproportionate share of world exports when markets abroad falter, to losing jobs to Asia as corporations restructure globally, and include workers facing competitive pressures from low-wage competitors abroad. It is such burdens, particularly in periods of domestic austerity, that create the frustrations that were so instrumental to the rise of Trump and a committed far-right base. These internal contradictions have international repercussions, some of which may be unintended.

Sixth, there is a degree of relative independence behind the actions of the American president. Trump has given corporations massive tax breaks and delivered on deregulation, but is not necessarily following their bidding on trade. On the other hand, there are also limits on what an American president can do (his/her power is “relative”). As a columnist for the Wall Street Journal noted: “The new deal shows the limits to Mr. Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda and an underlying resilience to the existing order…. The resistance Mr. Trump encountered from Congress, business, his own advisers and U.S. trading partners circumscribed his leverage.”

Seventh, we need a more nuanced understanding of notions such as “neoliberalism,” “nationalism,” and “protectionism.” Neoliberalism is not about reducing the role of the state, but rather of the state deepening capitalist discipline and strengthening the weight of markets by shifting the balance of class forces toward increasing corporate profits – think of the state’s leading role in free trade, privatization, weakening unions. Adolph Reed has succinctly captured this notion by characterizing neoliberalism as capitalism without an effective working-class opposition.

As for nationalism, there is the nationalism of reproducing U.S. economic dominance, but there is also a left nationalism that challenges U.S. penetration and the restrictions on the capacity to pursue national goals of economic development and solidarity. The same goes for protectionism. Somehow, protecting the rights and property of corporations is called “free trade,” while protecting workers from the compulsion to compete for their jobs with lower-wage jurisdictions brings accusations of an unjustified and anti-social “protectionism.”

Eighth, we must be careful in supporting “sovereignty” in the abstract. It has, after all, been states themselves, as Leo Panitch has argued, that have been the main authors (rather than victims) of trade agreements like NAFTA. The loss of sovereignty we need to be worried about is not that of states per se, but of the popular ability to democratically improve our lives in the face of the introduction of “unchallengeable” rules.

Ninth, globalization also involves the movement of people. In this case, some argue that the free borders offered to corporations should be extended to “free borders” for people. This is not necessarily a good thing. For one, immigration is increasingly biased toward those with high education and assets (more than half of Canadian immigration is now directed to bringing in high-tech talent from Asia as opposed to desperate workers from Latin America). This means that immigration may involve a brain drain and resource shift from the global south to the richer countries; that is, it may aggravate inequalities between countries. Second, U.S. foreign policy, in which our own government is often complicit, has contributed to people being pushed out of their home communities rather than simply wanting to move abroad. Shouldn’t we therefore put as much energy into challenging those foreign policies as dealing with their consequences?

Can we ignore concerns about the impact of immigration on our social services without questioning why, even as the wealth of our country increases, social programs like health and education are cut independent of immigration? Can we really win the battle for completely open immigration, which tends to cause a backlash even from sympathetic Canadians, as opposed to regulating immigration in a way that is sympathetic to desperate refugees and supports a higher but planned level of immigration, as well as providing the services they need?

Tenth, justice is international, as must also be – for strategic reasons – the struggle. This, demands having the base at home to make “international solidarity” more than a well-meaning slogan. The painful truth is that we haven’t even built solidarity in our own countries between autoworkers and steelworkers, public- and private-sector workers, low-wage workers and those still lucky enough to have relatively decent, full-time jobs.

Conclusion

The outcome of the “Trump moment” is likely, for all its protectionist rhetoric, to end up further legitimatingfree trade. Already, many of those opposed to Trump have jumped on the bandwagon of free trade as the progressive alternative. This perversion has a lot to do with the inability of the left to place free trade into a larger context.

That larger framework involves twin constraints emphasized earlier as barriers to a fuller life and greater solidarity: our domestic dependence on the undemocratic decisions of private corporations and financial institutions, and our deep integration into the American empire. The latest free-trade agreement, like the earlier ones, consolidates both those dependencies. We can’t simply reject free-trade agreements unless it is also part of a larger strategy. What we confront and what must shape how we respond is both capitalism and Canada’s place within capitalism. Taking this on is certainly pie-in-the-sky as an imminent goal. But if we see it as a long-term necessity – one that we must start building toward now – it can give us new political life.

This requires speaking confidently about an orientation that sees our collective needs, especially but not only those linked to the fundamental threat to the environment, as only achievable through democratic planning, not markets. It means thinking in terms of production for use, not profits, and in terms of a society based on solidarity, not competition. And it involves replacing the fetish of exporting as much as we can with a bias, as Greg Albo has emphasized, for inward development, but with a place for planned international economic relations.

We live in an era of polarized options. The sober truth is that anything short of a truly radical agenda condemns us to floundering through defeats. The radical, in this sense, is not something beyond the realm, but something that has in fact become the only approach that is now practical.

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This article was originally published in Canadian Dimension Volume 52, Issue 3, Fall 2018.

“Your heart
is too small to hold
this many people”
— lyrics to a song of the Yellow Vests addressed to Macron

“I am not a seed of Chance
I, the moulder of the new life
I am a child of Need
and a mature child of Wrath…
…Listen to the voice of the winds
For thousands of years!
Inside my word
all humanity hurts…”
Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974), The Guide (Ο Οδηγητής) (*)

On the evening of 14 July 1789, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt woke King Louis XVI to inform him about the storming of the Bastille.

“Why, is this a rebellion?” the King wondered.

“No Sir. It’s a revolution”, replied the Duke.

What is happening today in France is one of the most significant political developments on the European continent after the collapse of the Soviet Union almost thirty years ago.

It is one of the most radical, deepest and dynamic challenges to modern European capitalism in decades, both in terms of method – the direct, mass mobilisation of people, of the “masses”, their dramatic entry on to the stage of history – as well as in terms of the depth of the movement, as in its demands, which directly question the political and, implicitly but clearly, the social regime.(**). In particular, it is evenly spread throughout France, rather than being restricted to the capital.

If we wanted to find a revolutionary movement in Europe reassembling that of the Yellow Vests in terms of massiveness and depth we would probably have to look back to the period 1965-75 or, as a maximum, to 1985.

That is, we would look back to the general revolutionary strikes in France and Italy (1968-1969), the ‘Prague Spring’ (1968), the Carnation Revolution in Portugal (1974-1975), the Solidarity revolution in Poland (1979-1981) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, to the long, militant strike of British miners (1984-85).

These are all movements which, each one in its own way and despite the differences between them, have profoundly changed how we perceive the world. All were characterised by the same direct form of action, with millions of simple people directly participating, and by the fact that they all questioned the foundations of economic and social organisation and the power system in the countries in which they broke out. All these movements, without exception, were, in one way or another, accompanied by demands for the democratisation of society, self-management and direct participation of people.

The momentum of these movements was later halted by the capitulation of Mitterrand’s Socialists, the triumphs of Neo-liberalism in capitalist Europe (the Thatcher-Reagan-Friedman factor),the collapse of the Soviet regime and the “counter-revolutions” in Eastern Europe: “counter-revolutions” which, although advanced through “democratic” slogans, did not lead anywhere, but merely to the economic and political power changing hands from “socialist bureaucracies” to  quite authoritarian, oligarchic and sometimes clearly Mafiosi elites, masquerading as democratic governments – “social Darwinists” in the service of International Capital and the US.

The Yellow Vests now seem to be picking up in their own way from where the European movements of 1965-85 left off their core fundamental demands, and they are doing so in their attempt to respond to a policy of systematic destruction of French society and, even more so, of its lower and poorer strata.

They are doing it within the context of today’s European and global conditions, which differ substantially from those of that period, both in “subjective” and “objective” terms.

French and European crises and global economic crisis

The French revolution – the term ‘revolution’, we think, being more appropriate, because what is happening in France does not constitute simply a rebellion, as we will attempt to show later – is the direct product of the multifaceted, complex “European” crisis; a crisis which, in its turn, is the product and consequence of two factors: the deep economic crisis into which world capitalism entered in 2008, and the very way in which the European Union has been built and operates.

It is important to properly diagnose the root cause of the crisis,and the factors which provoked it, the global and the European one. Because if we assume that the whole problem is due to the Euro and the EU, ignoring the structural crisis of modern world capitalism, then we would come to the conclusion that all a country needs to do is to leave the EU, thereby solving all the problems. Of course, this does not mean that a given country should not attempt to leave the EU, if this is what is required for saving itself. But it means, however, that it must be aware that even by leaving, it will still be confronted by all the problems thrown up by the tremendous power that globalised capitalism and international finance have acquired.

Most criticisms of the EU, from various side, are correct. But this is not the main strategic problem. The main question is what is to be the European order of tomorrow and how to ensure that the order which shall be established after the EU will be better and not worse; what is the policy and strategy that, as of now, within the context of the existing EU, can serve better the purpose of creating a radically different and radically better European order tomorrow.

This is because a European country, in particular a medium-sized country such as France, may initiate a course of liberation from the bonds of globalised capitalism. But it will not beeasy for any country, even the strongest in Europe, to achieve this on its own in the long-term.

The international impact of the French revolutionary movement will be of crucial, vital significance, not only in the long-term, but also in short run, for both the movement itself and for the situation in all of Europe.

Any victory or defeat of the Yellow Vests movement depends heavily on its ability to expand and find immediate support in the rest of Europe.

On the other hand, the entire European situation will be directly and decisively affected by what will happen in the coming weeks and months in France.

However, we have not yet seen any of the forces which wish to self-identify as “radical leftist” in Europe -from the left-wing of Die Linke to the left-wing of the Labour Party-realising fully the significance of what is happening in France; adjusting their activity accordingly, giving absolute priority to the organisation of support to the French people, explaining to their people what is happening in France or even imitating the French movement through the initiation of campaigns in their countries, appropriate and adapted of course to the respective conditions they are facing in every country. We have not seen them attempting to create programmatically, politically and organisationally a united European front, not only of the radical left but also of all the forces that would be willing to commit sincerely to fighting the totalitarian dictatorship of financial capital in Europe.

What we mostly see are various groups, parties, and aspiring leaders ,the usual strangers to modesty, narcissist stars of “international radicalism and progress”, prominent “intellectuals of the Self-evident”, who, at a moment when one of the most significant revolutions in Europe in the last fifty years is unfolding, are making micro-political electoral calculations in view of the European elections; calculations which too shall prove to be irrelevant within the context of a Europe that continues to be shaken to its very foundations by its crisis.

A direct result itself of the 2008 global economic crisis, the European crisis has so far generated, before the current developments in France, the destruction and “betrayed revolt” of Greece, the Indignados and the Podemos in Spain, the left government in Portugal, the BREXIT vote, the surge of the radical right in Italy, the rise of AfD in Germany, the “clinical death” of the German Social Democratic and the French Socialist Party, the rise of Le Pen and Mélenchon in France.

However, the developments in France are now taking us to another level, because of twofactors of fundamental significance. The French people, having spent a number of decades hoping in vain for some improvement through the processes of elections and referenda, has now moved to the phase of direct, dynamic and mass mobilisation of the people. Secondly, the French movement is for the first time directly questioning the political and, indirectly but clearly, the social regime.

The financial oligarchy which is currently governing Europe together with its employees – the European politicians and bureaucrats – has no answer to the issues raised by the Greeks,  Spanish, British, Italians and, even more so, by the French now.

For this and for other reasons that we will explain, the French crisis is only the beginning of a course of events, which, of course, we cannot predict and prescribe; nor can we foresee where it will lead; however, we can say with certainty already from now that they will radically change Europe and the world.

The developments in France not only coincide with and partly reflect the continuing deep crisis of the EU, a crisis threatening its very existence. The developments are taking place, most probably, on the eve of a new exacerbation of the economic crisis of 2008,against which states now have much fewer means to use for defending themselves than in 2008.

And as if all this were not enough, at the international level we also note a rapid deterioration of all the significant global concerns, including the re-emergence of the risk of nuclear war and, most importantly, the near certainty over the end of human life through climatic change and environmental destruction; such defining issues require immediate radical measures that go far beyond the limitations and capabilities of the existing economic, social and international system.

Realism and Romanticism

The other day a friend, albeit in a well-meant and tactful way, accused me of a sort of “revolutionary romanticism”, referring to my most recent article about the developments in France. I will leave aside the fact that, as it soon transpired from our conversation, he was not aware of the most elementary information such as what are the main demands of the Yellow Vest movement; instead he perceived as real not what is really happening in France – of course for this the media is more to blame for not giving out all the information – but what he himself thought is likely to be happening!

Living in Greece he thought that in France, too, politicians could throw some “revolutionary buzzwords” just to gather votes, as it so often is the case with Greek politicians. So he was trying to interpret the French movement from the point of view of our current moral and intellectual misery, which is the result of our overwhelming defeat of 2015 and the way it has come about. It may also be that deep inside, he could find difficult, and even be annoyed by the comparison between the current grandeur of a revolting people with our own, now humiliated and defeated, miserable and servile, individual, social and national existence.

However, the important point is something different, and I told him so.  Romanticism is not to hope for the advancement of humans and people at the forefront of the historical process. They did it in the past and hence they can do it again in the future. Romanticism, even a potentially deadly illusion, is to bestow upon those who today govern the world, the ability to prevent the destruction of humanity!

Realistically speaking, the only chance that humanity has to save itself is to consciously take its own action to this effect and, indeed, to do so very quickly.

The May 1968 slogan “Imagination to the Power” is today the only viable realism. The “revolution”, in the meaning of a radical transformation of the dominant system, regardless of the way in which it may happen, is a precondition for the survival of humanity. This sort of thing is no longer taught by social and philosophical theories or by our morality; it is rather determined by the merciless clarity and accuracy of the mathematical and physics equations of climate science.

Besides, great revolutions often happen when no one expects them. And no one expects them, because when they happen a system is “completed”; it is, in a way, “closed”, having left no room for any “reform” or “self-correction”. The same factor that makes Revolutions seem impossible and even inconceivable is rendering them also unavoidable!

The global human consciousness owns this knowledge, despite the constant efforts of the dominant and possessors to erase it. This is the reason why we honour the memory of those who were “defeated” in history, of those who “lost”, such as Jesus Christ and Spartacus, and we pay no tribute to those who crucified them to protect and preserve the public order and the power of their time.

It is precisely at this moment, when the system has “closed”, does not allow any progress and is threatening with destruction, that the god of Necessity unearths from the depths of the souls of ordinary people, from the soul of the great “anonymous” crowd, the moral superior human qualities, namely the drive towards freedom and dignity, the expression of the mortal being’s need for meaning in his life.  It is then, at those privileged moments of history, that simple people, free from the usual burdens and hypocrisies of professional politicians and intellectuals, employ the superior brain functions of humans, reason and the imagination, in order to find solutions to the problems they encounter, as the French have been doing for nearly two months now.

All revolutions may look similar to each other, but each one is different. This one, the revolution that is now struggling to force its way out of its mother’s belly – the European crisis- has an incomparable advantage over the Great French Revolution of 1789 and over the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.The people who revolted now have significantly higher intellectual weapons, more knowledge to rely upon than what was available to the sans-culottes and the Russian workers of the past revolutions. Moreover, they have the experience of the achievements, but also of the degeneration and tragedies that accompanied all the great revolutionary movements of history.

But it is impossible to cover such a subject in one article. In our next article, we will examine the way the French people were led to take the course they have, and the structure of their demands, at the centre of which is the question of popular sovereignty, the possibility of the people to exercise power or, at least, to be able to control in an effective way how state power is exercised.

The same fundamental question remains, albeit in a new form, presented, but not solved in a satisfactory way, by the Great French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and many other popular uprisings in Europe and the world.

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Notes

(*) This is an improvised translation by the author of a portion of a poem by Kostas Varnalis (1984-1974), one of the greatest poets and writers of modern Greece. A communist, a Marxist and a member of the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Greece, he was persecuted for his ideas.

(**) It is quite difficult to write an article about France addressed to people who are not living in France. The reason lies with the fact that Western Media doall that they can, indeed with a certain degree of success, in order to play down, distort and conceal the events in France and, most importantly, their significance. Their aim is to present them as some sort of the usual “social upheavals”, without highlighting the underlying causes which have driven the people of one of the most important countries in Europe to revolt against the political system in power.

During the military dictatorship in Greece, I was a schoolboy. I remember that the press at that time was full of propaganda, but, at the same time, it was publishing all the basic facts necessary to form an opinion. Through this censored press, controlled by the “black colonels”, Greeks nevertheless knew better what was happening in France during the May ’68 Revolution or with the Vietnam War, than they know now about social and political problems in other EU countries or about the reality of a dozen wars in the Middle East!

The “Empire of Finance” which controls the media and most “intellectuals”, the “Space of Ideas” in our societies, in a way that is unprecedented in the history of capitalism, has a vital interest in doing so, as it trembles at the prospect of the “French virus” spreading outside France, as happened in 1789, 1848 and 1968.

Besides, even if they wanted to transmit the real meaning of these processes, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Journalism follows democracy on the path to demise. In their efforts to control all information, they have isolated almost all journalists with the knowledge and critical thinking skills that are required to analyse and describe the meaning of a revolution such, as the one that now seems to be unfolding in France. Nowadays, it is often the case that the media do not even choose journalists of their own liking, asking instead political parties and financial lobbies to “accolade” these and appoint “journalists”.

The suffocating and total control of the sphere of ideas have led to the creation of a class of “political professionals”, intellectuals, scientists, advertisers and pollsters who have ended up believing their own propaganda and are now unable, to a large extent,to analyse what is happening in the real world, even if this is needed by the class of interests they serve. George Orwell has been proven right.

Perhaps this is why the French Le Monde decided to send 70 scientists across France on a quest to understand what’s going on in the country – probably the largest “press expedition” in history!

Featured image: Fuel tax protestors in France (Source: WSWS)

France’s yellow vests, coming together in informally organised groups, took just one month to challenge policies on taxation, education, transport and environment, and make the Macron government back down.

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December 15, place de l’Opéra, Paris. Three yellow vests read out an address ‘to the French people and the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron’ saying:

‘This movement belongs to no one and to everyone. It gives voice to a people who for 40 years have been dispossessed of everything that enabled them to believe in their future and their greatness.’

The anger provoked by a fuel tax produced, within a month, a wider diagnosis of what ails society and democracy. Mass movements that bring together people with minimal organisation encourage rapid politicisation, which explains why ‘the people’ have discovered that they are ‘dispossessed of their future’ a year after electing as president a man who boasts he swept aside the two parties that alternated in power for 40 years.

Macron has come unstuck. As did previous wunderkinder just as young, smiling and modern: Laurent Fabius, Tony Blair, Matteo Renzi. The liberal bourgeoisie are hugely disappointed. His French presidential election win in 2017 — whether it was a miracle or a divine surprise — had given them hope that France had become a haven of tranquillity in a troubled West. When Macron was crowned (to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy), The Economist, that standard-bearer for the views of the international ruling class, put him on its front cover, grinning as he walked on water.

But the sea has swallowed up Macron, too sure of his own instincts and too contemptuous of other people’s economic plight. Social distress is generally only a backdrop to an election campaign, used to explain the choice of those who vote the wrong way. But when old angers build and new ones are stirred up without consideration for those enduring them, then, as the new interior minister Christophe Castaner put it (1), the ‘monster’ can spring out of its box. And then, anything becomes possible.

France’s amnesia about the history of the left explains why there have been so few comparisons between the yellow vest movement and the strikes of 1936, during the Popular Front, which prompted similar elite surprise at the workers’ living conditions and their demand to be treated with dignity. Philosopher and campaigner Simone Weil wrote: ‘All those who are strangers to this life of slavery are incapable of understanding what has proved decisive in this situation. In this movement it is not about this or that particular demand, however important … After always having submitted, endured everything, accepted everything in silence for months and years, it is about daring to straighten up, to stand up. To take your turn to speak’ (2).

Click here to read full article.

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Mike Pompeo removes any doubt about the purpose of the administration’s Iran policy of regime change in all but name:

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that “the sanctions on Iran have an ultimate goal” of “creating an outcome where the Iranian people could have better lives than they have today under this tyrannical regime”.

In other words, the sanctions are intended to create so much misery and upheaval that they cause the regime to collapse. That means there is nothing that the Iranian government could do short of abolishing its current political system that would satisfy the administration so that they would agree to lift the sanctions that they illegitimately reimposed last year. We know Iran’s government isn’t going to do that. Contrary to what Pompeo claims here, this wouldn’t lead to “an outcome where the Iranian people could have better lives.” It threatens to plunge their country into disorder if it “works,” and it promises economic ruin for tens of millions of people no matter what happens to the government. There is no realistic scenario where the Iranian people aren’t left worse off at the end than they were before the sanctions were reimposed.

We also know that the sanctions primarily harm the civilian population by ravaging their economy, impeding their ability to import basic goods, destroying their savings, driving up their cost of living, bankrupting their businesses, and taking away their jobs. Were it not for the reimposed sanctions, many Iranians would already be enjoying somewhat better lives as a result of foreign investment and trade following the successful negotiation of the JCPOA. Because of the sanctions, that prospect of a moderately better future has been cut off for many years to come. The idea that the people responsible for the Iran sanctions actually desire “better lives” for the population that they are strangling is a sick joke, and news outlets that don’t acknowledge the obvious contradiction between administration rhetoric and the effect that administration policies are having on the civilian population in Iran are failing in their reporting.

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

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with allies in a tour of Latin America this week, in which he talked about stepping up US-led efforts against Venezuela.

The Trump administration has been increasingly hostile towards the Caribbean nation, escalating sanctions and even threatening a military “option.”

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is due to start his second term on January 10, having won re-election on May 20, but Washington and several right-wing regional governments have refused to recognize the election and may look to further isolate Caracas in coming days. For its part, Venezuela has repeatedly denounced what it terms US-led destabilization efforts.

Tensions have likewise heightened with some of Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors, especially Brazil and Colombia, with flashpoints surrounding Venezuelan migration and an increased military presence along the shared borders.

Pompeo’s tour, which was also meant to address concerns about China’s growing presence in the region, started in Peru. Following a meeting with Peruvian Foreign Minister Nestor Bardales, the former CIA director stressed the need to “increase pressure” on the Venezuelan government.

Pompeo then flew to Brasilia for the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro. In meetings with Brazil’s new president and Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo, he discussed joint efforts against the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Pompeo later told the press that he and his Brazilian allies shared a “deep desire to return democracy” to Venezuela.

A former army captain during Brazil’s military dictatorship, ultra-right Bolsonaro took office on January 1 following his election victory in October. In his first speech as president, he vowed to “value Judeo-Christian traditions” and that Brazil would be free from “socialism, a giant state and political correctness.”

Venezuela featured prominently in Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign, in which the politician repeatedly accused the center-left Workers Party of seeking to bring “Venezuela-style socialism” to Brazil. Most recently, Bolsonaro’s vice-president, retired general Hamilton Mourao, commented in December that a coup would take place in Venezuela and that Brazil would lead a “force for peace.”

Pompeo’s latest stop was the Colombian city of Cartagena, where he held a meeting and joint press conference with Colombian President Ivan Duque.

The US official stated that the discussions had centered on how to collaborate in order to help Venezuelans “recover their democratic heritage,” while adding that Colombia was a “natural leader” in these efforts.

Kurt Tidd, head of U.S. Southern Command meets with Colombian President-elect Ivan Duque in Doral, Fla., July 14. 2018. Photo | SOUTHCOM

For his part, Duque stated that “all countries that defend democracy should unite to reject Venezuela’s dictatorship,” adding that humanitarian assistance was required to deal with Venezuelans arriving in Colombia. According to UN figures, 2.6 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015, with over 1 million heading to Colombia.

A protegé of former president Alvaro Uribe, Duque has repeatedly met with US officials to discuss efforts to increase pressure on Venezuela. Venezuela and Colombia do not have diplomatic relations since Duque refused to appoint an ambassador to Caracas after being elected in June 2018.

In addition, Bolsonaro and Duque reportedly held a phone conversation in which one of the topics was the need to cooperate in search of “solutions” to the Venezuela crisis.

In response, the Venezuelan government blasted Pompeo’s tour as another instance of US meddling in its internal affairs. In a Foreign Ministry communiqué released on Wednesday, the Venezuelan executive “categorically rejected Secretary Pompeo’s interventionist attitude.”

Caracas likewise slammed Pompeo’s meeting with Duque, denouncing US efforts to“subjugate the sovereignty and self-determination of the Venezuelan people” and warning against the possible use of Colombian territory to launch an aggression against Venezuela.

Venezuelan authorities also took aim at Duque’s controversial statement thanking the US for their “crucial” support for Colombia’s independence 200 years ago, despite historians having yet to corroborate this alleged historical detail.

President Maduro commented on the current state of Latin American relations during a recent interview with Ignacio Ramonet on state broadcaster VTV. Maduro claimed that right-wing projects in the region are “not viable,” and lamented that Bolsonaro was “handing Brazil over to US transnationals on a silver platter.”

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Ricardo Vaz is a writer and editor at Venezuelanalysis. His articles have appeared on Investig’Action, Monthly Review, Truthout, Counterpunch, and other alternative media.

Featured image: Colombian President Ivan Duque hosted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Cartagena this week. (Colombian Presidency)

An explosive CBC expose Friday on the Jewish National Fund should be the beginning of the end for this powerful organization’s charitable status. But, unless the NDP differentiates itself from the Liberals and Conservatives by standing up for Canadian and international law while simultaneously opposing explicit racism, the JNF may simply ride out this short bout of bad publicity.

According to a story headlined “Canadian charity  used donations to fund projects linked to Israeli military”, the JNF has financed multiple projects for the Israeli military in direct contravention of Canada Revenue Agency rules for registered charities. The organization has also funded a number of projects supporting West Bank settlements, which Global Affairs Canada considers in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The story also revealed that the Canada Revenue Agency, under pressure from Independent Jewish Voices and other Palestine solidarity activists, began an audit of the state-subsidized charity last year.

After detailing the above, (which provoked hundreds of mostly angry comments from readers) the story notes that the “JNF has had strong relations with successive Conservative and Liberal governments.” The CBC published a picture of politicians congregated at the Prime Minister’s residence above the caption “Laureen Harper poses with JNF Gala honorees during a group visit to 24 Sussex Drive in 2015.”

But the JNF, like all good lobbyists, has hedged it political bets and the story could have noted that the social democratic opposition party was represented at this JNF gala as well and has dutifully supported the dubious “charity”. NDP MP Pat Martin spoke at the JNF event Harper organized to “recognize and thank the people that have helped to make JNF Canada what it is today.” In 2016 NDP foreign critic Hélène Laverdière participated in a JNF tree planting ceremony in Jerusalem with JNF World Chairman Danny Atar and a number of its other top officials. The president of the Windsor-Tecumseh Federal NDP riding association, Noah Tepperman, has been a director of JNF Windsor since 2004 and has funded the organization’s events in London, Ontario.

In 2015 Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath published an ad in a JNF Hamilton handbook and offered words of encouragement to its fundraiser while Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter planted a tree at a JNF garden in 2011. Manitoba NDP Premier Gary Doer was honoured at a 2006 JNF Negev Dinner in Winnipeg and cabinet minister Christine Melnick received the same honour in 2011. During a 2010 trip to Israel subsequent Manitoba NDP Premier Greg Selinger signed an accord with the JNF to jointly develop two bird conservation sites while water stewardship minister Melnick spoke at the opening ceremony for a park built in Jaffa by the JNF, Tel Aviv Foundation and Manitoba-Israel Shared Values Roundtable. (In 2017 Melnick won a B’nai Brith Zionist action figures prize for writing an article about a friend who helped conquer East Jerusalem and then later joined the JNF).

Besides NDP support for this dubious “charity”, the story ignored the JNF’s racist land-use policies. The JNF owns 13 per cent of Israel’s land, which was mostly taken from Palestinians forced from their homes by Zionist forces in 1947-1948. It discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel (Arab Israelis) who make up a fifth of the population. According to a UN report, JNF lands are “chartered to benefit Jews exclusively,” which has led to an “institutionalized form of discrimination.” Echoing the UN, a 2012 US State Department report detailing “institutional and societal discrimination” in Israel says JNF “statutes prohibit sale or lease of land to non-Jews.”

Indicative of its discrimination against the 20% of Israelis who aren’t Jewish, JNF Canada’s Twitter tag says it “is the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners — Jewish people everywhere.” Its parent organization in Israel — the Keren Kayemet LeYisrael — is even more open about its racism. Its website notes that “a survey  commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens.” While such exclusionary land-use policies were made illegal in Canada seven decades ago, that’s the JNF’s raison d’être.

An organization that recently raised $25 million  for a Stephen Harper Bird Sanctuary, JNF Canada has been directly complicit in at least three important instances of Palestinian dispossession. In the late 1920s JNF Canada spearheaded a highly controversial land acquisition that drove a 1,000 person Bedouin community from land it had tilled for centuries and in the 1980s JNF–Canada helped finance an Israeli government campaign to “Judaize” the Galilee, the largely Arab northern region of Israel. Additionally, as the CBC mentioned, JNF-Canada build Canada Park on the remnants of three Palestinian villages Israel conquered in 1967.

A map the JNF shows to nine and ten-year-olds at Jewish day schools in Toronto encompasses the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza, effectively denying Palestinians the right to a state on even 22 percent of their historic homeland. Similarly, the maps  on JNF Blue Boxes, which are used by kids to raise funds, distributed in recent years include the occupied West Bank. The first map on the Blue Box, designed in 1934, depicted  an area reaching from the Mediterranean into present-day Lebanon and Jordan.

The JNF is an openly racist organization that supports illegal settlements and the Israeli military. Many NDP activists understand this. The party’s MPs now have a choice: If they stand for justice and against all forms of racism, for the rule of international law and fairness in the Canadian tax system, they will speak up in Parliament to keep this story alive. The NDP needs to set itself apart from the Liberals and Conservatives by following up on the CBC’s revelations to demand the Canada Revenue Agency rescind the JNF’s charitable status.

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Featured image is from Middle East Monitor

RT: Kosovo wants to establish an army and has received several Humvee armoured vehicles from the USA. Although there was official NATO restraint, how much is the establishment of a Kosovo Army a fixed development?

Rio de Janeiro’s state governor Wilson Witzel – an ally of Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro – is reported to have said that Brazil “needs its own Guantanamo”:

Brazil “needs its own Guantanamo” to lock up criminals, Rio de Janeiro’s state governor Wilson Witzel, an ally of new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, said Thursday, referring to the US military base in Cuba used as an extraterritorial prison.

“We need to put terrorists in places where society is completely free of them,” Witzel said in a speech to police in the city of Rio.

The new governor, who took office this week as part of an electoral wave favoring far-right politicians that elevated Bolsonaro to the presidency, is given to making controversial statements.

For instance, just after being elected in October last year, he suggested police snipers could kill armed “criminals” — including anybody spotted carrying weapons, even if no-one was being threatened.

He and Bolsonaro have pledged to crack down on crime that is plaguing Brazil. The country in 2017 recorded nearly 64,000 murders.

With his Guantanamo comment, Witzel was referring to a US military base leased from Cuba where suspects from America’s “war on terror” launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001 are kept in a sort of detention limbo, without access to the US legal system.” (AFP)

Commenting, Maya Foa, Director of Reprieve, which represents men held in Guantanamo, said:

“Since it opened in 2002, Guantanamo has become a byword for injustice and gross violations of human rights. Nearly 17 years on, the US is still detaining forty men at the prison, having subjected them to prolonged torture. 31 of the men do not face charges and have no chance of a trial. The world is certainly not safer as a result of these injustices. It is shocking that President Bolsonaro’s allies are calling for Brazil to open its own version of this hell hole, and shows what toxic influence Guantanamo continues to have in the world. President Trump must close the prison at once.”

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Featured image is from Folha PE

A wide-scale Washington-driven aggression against Venezuela is underway, imperialist and anti-democratic at its core, and it has the full backing of the British government.  British meddling in Venezuela is packaged in human rights and democracy rhetoric, the same way it was in aggressions against Iraq, Libya and Syria, but behind it the real agenda is not hard to spot.

The British Foreign Office funds the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), a British government think tank, ‘dedicated to supporting democracy around the world’to work inside the Venezuelan parliament. The WFD claims it works to support the National Assembly’s ‘Modernisation Committee,’ and paints a picture of being unbiased, democratic and disinterested in party ideology

 “…Westminster Foundation for Democracy works with all political parties on the National Modernisation Committee in the National Assembly of Venezuela and the parliamentary staff that support it.”

However, the Modernisation Committee, is made up of members from the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), a coalition of members from right-wing opposition parties.  The MUD was created to challenge the Chavez government and the Bolivarian revolution.   It consists of First Justice, whose leader, Julio Borges, is living in self-exile in Colombia under the protection of the right-wing government of Ivan Duque, and is accused of authoring the assassination attempt on President Maduro in August last year.  It consists also of the far-right Popular Will party that has seen various members of its leadership arrested or self-exiled, accused of acts of terrorism carried out during violent protests against the government.  These are the parties assisted by the UK Foreign Office in Venezuela, deliberately engaged because they aim not just to undermine, but overthrow the Venezuelan government.  To explain its operations in the Venezuelan parliament, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy insinuates it is there to help mend the rift between the Venezuelan government and the people

“Following the 2015 Parliamentary elections in Venezuela, political polarisation increased and led to a deadlock that has eroded the public’s trust in politics during a time of deep economic crisis, hyperinflation and episodes of violence against the civil population.”

It then encourages the notion that it is working in collaboration with the government by claiming to work with all sides of the ‘political divide’

WFD works on a cross-party basis, seeking to engage all sides of the political divide while supporting democratic institutions in the country.

The WFD claims to do this in a number of ways

“…legislation, inclusion, representation, public budget, oversight and parliamentary administration. Implementation of recommendations for each area is currently underway.”

This would suggest that the elected government, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), accused by the Foreign Office of violent repressive activity against its own people, and a target of UK sanctions, has invited the Foreign Office into its heart to help produce its own legislation.

A look through the legislation by the National Assembly shows how unlikely this is. The National Assembly systematically and methodically produces documentation to attack the Maduro government almost on a weekly basis. This is because the National Assembly is in most part, made up of opposition seats won in the 2015 parliamentary elections.  Since 2016 it has had little power as it has been held in contempt of court for swearing in legislators under investigation for voter fraud.  A political gridlock followed, which resulted in Maduro invoking a Constituent Assembly in 2017 to produce a functioning legislative body, and a new constitution.  He did this in accordance with the 1999 Constitution,  announcing it would resolve violent anti-government protests by unifying all sections of society.  The opposition then boycotted the elections, claiming the invoking of a Constituent Assembly was illegal, despite advocating for one in 2014.  The opposition incited violent protests at polls during which a number of people died, including an election candidate.   Delegates were voted in and the Constituent Assembly was formed in what has been described by some as the mobilising of the population against rising fascism.

Therefore, the narrative that the British Foreign Office is supporting the Venezuelan government in mending rifts with its own people through legislation, or any other activity within the Venezuelan National Assembly, does not hold water.  It is more likely that the Foreign Office is working to enable right-wing parties and fascists to overthrow the Venezuelan government.  It is not known to what extent National Assembly documentation content is influenced by the Foreign Office, but a collaboration with such authors of anti-Maduro publications is a useful tool.

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s credibility that it is helping to re-establish the trust between the Venezuelan government and its people, is dependent on the narrative that Venezuela has a failing democracy with corrupt elections.  To this end, the UK government has continued to discredit elections in Venezuela, backed by British mainstream media to drive the ‘rigged’ narrative, despite recognition by international inspecting bodies of fair and proper electoral practice. It has used this narrative as a pretext to further destabilise the country through sanctions, in alliance with the EU and the Trump administration, all stakeholders in a regime change in Venezuela.

To validate its role, Westminster Foundation for Democracy uses academic ‘experts on democracy’ to produce strategy frameworks for ‘fragile countries’ such as Venezuela. Rubber-stamping with Oxbridge insignia continues to be a practice for manufacturing approval for government intervention, whether it is through the self-promoting antics of theorists selling strategy for commercial reasons or the co-opting of the impressionable and idealistic young onto the fake human rights platforms of the British government and its US ally as they deliver democracy overseas. Such was the purpose of the visit by Luis Almagro, head of the Organisation of American States (OAS), to Oxford University last year.

President Nicolás Maduro is rigging an election in Venezuela. The BBC headline tells us that he “won”. Find out how to pull of this neat trick here, curtesy of @ForeignPolicy and our new book #howtoriganelection pic.twitter.com/4PJusDlf8Q

— Prof Nic Cheeseman (@Fromagehomme) May 21, 2018

Grateful for the invitation to @UniofOxford. Yesterday I had an insightful and engaging conversation with the faculty and students of the LatAm and Caribbean on the role of the @OAS_official in the ongoing political crises in the region. pic.twitter.com/ktTWVoLohG

— Luis Almagro (@Almagro_OEA2015) October 9, 2018

 

The OAS is heavily funded by the USand is considered by the Venezuelan government to be a mouthpiece for Washington.  The head of the OAS, Luis Almagro, is vehemently opposed to the Maduro government, and has supported US and EU sanctions. He has also given his support for a military coup in Venezuela.

But theWestminster Foundation for Democracy and establishment academic strategists are just a small part of the multimillion-pound military, business and intelligence machine that ‘innovates’ for democracy in Venezuela, much of which is connected through Chatham House.

It is theSister institute to the influential US foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where America’s imperialists and militarists network, and many US foreign policies are grown.  Chatham House has its own imperialists  and receives funds from the British Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Department of International Development, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence, demonstrating its value as a think tank tool for policymaking and intelligence matters.

Chatham House and the CFR attract the same calibre of imperialist.  While Richard Haass was advising Colin Powell going to war on Iraq in 2003, British chief advisor David Manning was doing the same for Tony Blair. Haass went on to become director of CFR while Manning is a senior advisor at Chatham House.  But as well as being a natural home for regime change strategists, these think thanks are where the oil, gas and weapons industries network, as  David Manning’s comments to Condoleeza Rice three months before the invasion of Iraq show

“It would be inappropriate for HMG [Her Majesty’s government] to enter into discussions about any future carve-up of the Iraqi oil industry. Nonetheless it is essential that our [British] companies are given access to a level playing field in this and other sectors.”

Manning went on to become a director of the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, that profited from the Iraq war. He also became the director of BG oil, taken over by Shell in 2016 in a multibillion-pound deal.

Ever better relations with Argentina and spoke today at Chatham House along with their Foreign Minister @jorgefaurie. Also Venezuela is collapsing, regional action desperately needed. https://t.co/iLCX4WgiZ8

— Sir Alan Duncan MP (@AlanDuncanMP) October 25, 2018

Tory MP Alan Duncan, who spoke at a closed meeting at Chatham House on Venezuela in October 2018, is another regime change tactician.  For years Duncan worked as a consultant in oil, with links to Vitol, a corporate member of Chatham House.  In 2011 Duncan’s oil contacts became useful in the overthrow of Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, when Duncan was Minister for the Department of International Development (DfID). The Guardian reported

“The government has admitted that the international development minister, Alan Duncan, took part in meetings between officials operating a Whitehall cell to control the Libyan oil market and Vitol – a company for which Duncan has previously acted as a consultant.”

“The “Libyan oil cell” involved a group of officials working in the Foreign Office since May waging a quiet campaign against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime by controlling the flow of oil in the country.”

Interviewed in 2016 at a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry on how the UK invasion led to a failed Libyan state, Duncan distanced himself from the operations in Libya and diminished his role. There was no mention of his involvement with a cell engineering passage of oil to jihadists, and the misery inflicted by the UK government on Libya was put down to staffing issues at the  Home Office and tribal wars, NATO’s military adventurism and funding of Islamist groups vying for power forgotten.  However, in 2011 the Telegraph described the transport of oil to jihadist ‘rebels’ as ‘vital’

“Supplies of diesel, petrol and fuel kept creaking power stations under rebel control from grinding to a halt and ultimately proved vital to efforts to overthrow Gadaffi. The trade was even more audacious because the rebels had no means of paying up front so Vitol agreed to provide it on credit.”

This suggests that Duncan’s role in regime change in Libya was more significant than suggested in the inquiry.  Now, as Minister for the Americas, Duncan has turned his attention to Venezuela.   Vitol,  meanwhile, under the chairmanship of Ian Taylor, Duncan’s friend and Tory sponsor, has been named in corruption cases in Venezuela and Brazil.

Through his Chatham House speech, Duncan has indicated his allegiances to oil networks remain firm,  music to the ears of Shell Oil,  looking to resolve its current problems in Venezuela

“We cannot talk about Venezuela without understanding the central role played by oil since the early 20th Century, I speak as a former oil trader myself.”

“The revival of the oil industry will be an essential element in any recovery, and I can imagine that British companies like Shell and BP, will want to be part of it.”

His comments take us back to the rape of Libya, but also to the planned carving up of Iraq. It is clear that Duncan would reprise his role; he has the connections, the resources, the knowledge and the experience in how to use oil networks to overthrow governments.  He has the British mainstream press behind him, as it was behind Cameron for the NATO bombing of Libya, providing fake human rights abuse narratives as shown in the Parliamentary inquiry report.

Duncan’s comments on sanctions against Venezuela make it clear that the UK will stick to this same strategy, as used in Iraq and Syria, where the catastrophic effects from sanctions have been seen.  No end of suffering through sanctions will deter the British government from its geopolitical goals. It has shown its commitment to back Washington’s goal to overthrow Maduro and destroy the Bolivarian revolution.  The UK’s refusal to return Venezuela’s gold, held at the Bank of England, a much-needed resource for the struggling Venezuelan economy, is further proof.

Meanwhile, unlike most concerned that a far-right president has come to power in Brazil, Duncan, so concerned about democracy in Venezuela, has welcomed Bolsonaro. In a recent meeting at the House of Commons, Duncan, in his role as Minister for the Americas, was asked

“What assessment he has made of potential risks to (a) democratic institutions, (b) the rule of law, (c) freedom of the press and (d) human rights in Brazil as a result of the election of Jair Bolsonaro as that country’s President.”

In answer, Duncan had seen no reason to make assessments

“Brazil is Latin America’s largest democracy. It has strong institutions to guarantee the rule of law, freedom of the press and human rights with the clear separation of powers protected by the constitution. This has not been changed by the election of Jair Bolsonaro. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.”

Met this morning with Latin American Ambassadors and Canadian High Commissioner. Followed by meeting with new Brazilian Ambassador. Broadly like-minded on the unfolding political and economic disaster in Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/5pvI28Uva0

— Sir Alan Duncan MP (@AlanDuncanMP) October 18, 2018

Duncan is likely to be engineering an alliance with Bolsonaro’s government, far-right ideology overlooked, with the aim of regime change in Venezuela.

As well as pushing sanctions, and pursuing diplomatic alliances, Duncan has also promoted the Lima Group as a mechanism for regional intervention. The Lima Group was created with the sole purpose of attacking the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly and is made up of a coalition of Washington’s Latin American allies.  It is a US asset with no legitimacy for interfering in the internal politics of an individual sovereign nation

“We are fully behind the Lima Group of countries in their efforts to seek a regional solution to the crisis.”

This is a strategy also promoted by Washinton via the CFR

“…there are some efforts the United States could make in a supporting role to the Lima Group. Colombia has called for a reconstruction plan for Venezuela; the United States should encourage a Latin American conference to develop that plan with clear U.S. commitments.”

Ironically, the recent spotlight on Duncan over FO funding of the Integrity Initiative designed to ‘counter Russian disinformation’ reveals the hypocrisy and fake agenda of the British government, that works to overthrow democratically elected governments while claiming it will not tolerate political interference on its own territory. Were the Venezuelan government to fund activities inside Westminster aimed at overthrowing Theresa May’s government, it would be viewed with outrage.  Yet the Foreign Office appears entitled in its plotting against Venezuela’s elected government.  This same culture of entitlement is apparent in the Integrity Initiative operations, where the discrediting of the democratically elected leader of British government opposition, is designed to undermine his threat to the British establishment.  These growing and more frequent attacks on democracy by Britain’s elite, expose a self-serving class and network who think they can carve up and profit from whatever group, land, or resource they feel entitled to, whatever the cost to any population, whether at home or in Venezuela.

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Sources

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Venezuela-In-Exclusive-Interview-Expert-Explains-Constituent-Assembly-Process-20170917-0014.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-44187838 rigged elections

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Venezuela-Borges-Opposition-Leader-Behind-Failed-Assasination-Attempt-20181017-0035.html

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13491 popular will far right party

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13487 popular will violence

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12881 more pw violence

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13487 freddie guevara self-exiled

https://venezuelanalysis.com/files/attachments/%5Bsite-date-yyyy%5D/%5Bsite-date-mm%5D/general_electoral_accompaniment_report_may_2018.pdf

https://www.voanews.com/a/maduro-wins-venezuela-election/4402735.htmlus sanctions

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2018-11-09.189833.h&p=10179  Alan Duncan Venezuela sanctions

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13276 voting centers attacked national constituent assembly elections

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14118 rising fascism

https://www.rt.com/news/446809-integrity-initiative-third-leak-uk/

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13322 AN claim setting up ANC was a coup

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Why-Does-Venezuela-Have-a-National-Constituent-Assembly–20170820-0021.html contempt of court

http://misionverdad.com/MV-IN-ENGLISH/why-does-venezuela-have-a-national-constituent-assemblycontempt of court

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/venezuelas-pro-government-assembly-moves-to-take-power-from-elected-congress/2017/08/18/9c6cd0a2-8416-11e7-9e7a-20fa8d7a0db6_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.53b91adb259e

http://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=S-020/17 almagro on venezuela

https://www.rt.com/uk/446695-labour-mp-statecraft-institute/

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/70 1999 Constitution

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13280 following the constituent assembly elections – what happened during elections and press reaction,

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-statement-on-venezuela condemned by uk foreign office despite being constitutionally legal and sovereign decision

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13096 announcement of constituent assembly

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‘The Decision Is Taken’: Brazil to Move Its Embassy to Jerusalem, Says Bolsonaro

By Middle East Eye, January 06, 2019

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has confirmed that the South American country will move its embassy to Jerusalem, following an earlier statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Brazil this week to attend the new Brazilian leader’s swearing-in.

Within Hours of Taking Office, “Trump of the Tropics” Starts Assault on the Amazon

By Andy Rowell, January 06, 2019

Within hours of taking office, the Trump of the Tropics, aka the new President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, launched an all-out assault against the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities yesterday, potentially paving the way for large scale deforestion by agricultural, mining and oil companies.

Japan to Push for WWII-Era Peace Treaty with Russia

By Telesur, January 06, 2019

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday he intends to move towards a World War II peace treaty with Russia during a summit in Russia later this month. The treaty has been hindered for decades by a territorial dispute.

Global Research New Hour: Global Economy, Geo-Politics, Militarization. The Most Significant Stories of 2018, Projections for 2019

By Michael Welch, Rick Rozoff, Andy Lee Roth, Dr. Jack Rasmus, and Dmitry Orlov, January 05, 2019

At the start of the year, we witnessed nuclear sabre-rattling between U.S. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. There was the poisoning (and recovery) of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury UK, in which the Russian government was implicated.

Iraq Rejects Iran Sanctions and US Troop Presence

By Jim Carey, January 05, 2019

Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali al-Hakim laid out the latest step on the path to independence for Baghdad from the US concerning sanctions on Iran by Washington.

Nicaragua and the Corruption, Co-optation of Human Rights

By Stephen Sefton, January 05, 2019

Like Venezuela previously, Nicaragua has been targeted by the US dominated Organization of American States using local US and European funded non-profit proxies inside Nicaragua and Western corporate dominated non-governmental organizations.

Has Trump Been Outmaneuvered on Syria Troop Withdrawal?

By Richard H. Black, January 04, 2019

Following the outcry after President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was pulling U.S. troops from Syria, it appears that Trump may be succumbing to political pressure.

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This writer just loves it when our USA mainstream (embedded in empire) media, and of course our Two Party/One Party politicians, rant and rave about dictators. They lash out at the preposterous comical assertions by the leaders of many countries, who win re-elections with 90% to 100% of the vote, that those nations are democracies. Shame on them! Shame on our nation’s corporate and political entities who keep trading (and financially aiding) those countries. These men (not too often women) who are quite honestly dictators, always make sure that there is little or no opposition to them. What cracks this writer up is when (so called) Socialist Bernie Sanders said “Hugo Chavez is just a dead Communist dictator.” Yet, Chavez won election and two re-elections as Venezuela’s president against formidable candidates. The last time being in 2012 when he won 55% to 45%. Is that what our empire’s lemmings would call a dictatorship?

Here’s the skinny on our so called democracy and ‘free elections’ in Amerika. The Fat Cats who are the wizards behind the OZ sure are shrewd. For close to a century they have made sure that their concoction AKA Two Party System stayed intact. Folks, anyone else just could not get through the door. The powerful money behind both of the empire’s parties just keeps on splashing out of the spigot! Any semblance of a third party movement is squashed before it can get legs! Or… one of the two parties (usually today’s Democrats) just co opts the new movement, and places it under its Big Tent. Finally, most elections, for president especially, sees a majority of the voting public (which is usually around 50% of eligible voters… why is that?) not voting for one candidate, but in reality voting against the other! Trump, to this writer’s way of thinking and logic, won because of the powerful backlash against Hillary Clinton. My joke has been that if the Democrats ran Donald Duck against Donald Trump they would have won!

So, bottom line is that we do have a dictatorship right here in good ole Amerika. It is a much more sophisticated one whereupon the suckers (we who actually vote) get to choose from as Ralph Nader labeled it: Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee! The Two Party/One Party con job will differ on certain issues like abortion, gay rights, Medicaid funding… gee I’m having difficulty finding more key issues… but never on what really matters to our survival as a republic: obscene military spending, overseas wars and occupations, Big Banks controlling everything, Amerikan corporations running roughshod on workers at home and abroad… and the piece de resistance: The notion that this corporate capitalist ‘free enterprise’ system really works for all. Mr. Trump may think of himself as a semi- dictator, but he is not! The powerful forces who even allowed someone with his ‘closet filled with skeletons’ to achieve our highest office, they call the shots. The last time someone stood up to them, or thought he surely had the ‘will of the masses’ behind him, wound up in a deadly ‘triangular crossfire’ in Dallas Texas.

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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, 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].

Featured image is from NEO

Increasing gasoline taxes drove the now aggrieved French Yellow Vest movement into the streets to protest the Macron government responding to climate change at the expense of the already economically struggling. Instead, we need to shape climate solutions to improve the lives and livelihoods of citizens. The good news is there are market fixes that are not carbon taxes to quickly and painlessly affect the supply and demand for fossil fuels.

Poorly thought out and imposed plans have negative consequences. You can screw anything up, both markets and planning—markets that do not include the cost of externalities become ecosphere destroying machines; planning that shifts the costs on those less able to pay without plans for countervailing payments or credits.

Far better is to approach stopping and reversing climate change within the context of social and economic justice. When you add yet another tax on already sky high European gasoline prices, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Market means that are not just another imposition placed by the rich upon the poor, but are part of comprehensive pursuit of ecological and social justice must be our guide for the conduct of global ecological economic growth.

Ecological and social justice is not, in spirit or in fact, reduced to a redistribution of resources from rich to poor. It is much more an expression of a common local and global pursuit of both freedom and community as the interdependent basis for an ecological civilization. Ecological civilization as an expression of freedom and community, of democratic equality, not simply of markets, capitalist or otherwise. The economic and market means we consider here are meant to be viewed through the lens of freedom and community, of social and ecological justice.

Markets are supposed to be all about supply and demand determining price. Ideally, we would seamlessly decrease both the supply and demand for fossil fuels with efficient renewables replacing fossil fuels at lower prices. Thus, carbon emissions decline and prices decline.

The Magic Formula

The magic formula in this case is to mandate the 15 year phase out of all gasoline powered cars and phase in electric vehicles and hydrogen powered vehicles with an equivalent fuel cost of around $1.00 a gallon savings a typical driver $1,500 a year in fuel costs.

A fifteen thousand mile a year driver of a 30 mile per gallon gas car using four dollar a gallon gasoline would spend $2,000 a year for 500 gallons of gas. The electric vehicle would cost $500. An annual savings of $1500 plus additional savings from no oil changes and savings on gas engine repairs since electric motors are more reliable and suffer much less wear and tear than internal combustion engines.

Government and regulatory policy is not just to set the rules and stand back. Government also needs to:

• Support infrastructure development for EVs and Hydrogen fuel cells cars;
• Green bank low interest long term loans for charging infrastructure. Charging is an extremely lucrative local business to replace gas stations once a significant percentage of cars are electric. Making sure charging infrastructure is available is key.
• Training and retraining workers for jobs in electric/hydrogen vehicle/solar/ wind/charging industry.
• Government auctions off local charging infrastructure franchises for street charging just as it auctions off electro-magnetic spectrum with 50% guaranteed for local and cooperative ownership.
• Implement building codes and zoning that require ability to plug in electric vehicles to homes and businesses to both provide energy allowed by battery charge levels, and serve as storage grid back up for the grid;
• Tax credits on EVs and hydrogen cars focused on lower cost vehicles
• Requirements phased quickly in that classes of commercial vehicles such as taxis, zip cars, rental cars, self-driving cars must be EVs or hydrogen, tax credit for ride hailing service driver like Uber and Lyft to use EVs or hydrogen.
• Cap and escalating annual reduction in production of fossil fuels
• Import duties on fossil fuels by producers who have not implemented gasoline replacement ;
• Support of renewably powered public and mass transit to reduce need for and use of private cars including buses, mass transit, national high speed rail network as major infrastructure priority.

What’s needed is to accelerate the phase out of gasoline power vehicles with meeting 2030 carbon reduction targets in mind and government support of electric and hydrogen powered vehicle charging and fueling infrastructure. Electric charging will be a highly profitable activity. Its installation could be speeded up by auctioning of limited but non-exclusive franchises by government similar to the way cell phone spectrum is marketed. What makes sense to me is that charging be considered a semi-utility with government contracting on a bid basis to install and then to operate an electric car charging network. The batteries of EVs would also prove to be a crucial part of electric system storage.

Increasing the price at the pump from a carbon tax on gasoline drove Yellow Vest protestors into the streets against one more burden imposed upon economically struggling workers. Carbon taxes without a tax and dividend scheme, which I believe is unnecessary, is not the best way to pursue carbon reductions and social and ecological justice.

The carbon tax is an economically signaling means beloved by many economists that by raising prices of carbon impacted goods you will help the development of non-carbon replacements. In general when there are replacements for carbon impacted goods and services that are cheaper non-polluting replacements cap and replace rules, like those for electric vehicles are far superior,

Supply and demand measures can help lead the way toward an ecological transformation that emphasizes reducing consumer costs and putting money in people’s pockets. After all, if saving civilization from ecological collapse makes you money, what’s the problem of departing from fossil fuels beyond the desire of the fossil fuel empire to sell their global reserve to the last drop or at least until the moment of collapse in an overheated world.

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Roy Morrison builds solar farms. His next book is Global Ecological Economic Growth: How to Stop and Reverse Climate Change forthcoming in 2019.

President Donald Trump declared his right as president to unilaterally build a border wall on “national security” grounds during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden Friday. He spoke after a meeting with congressional leadership on the ongoing deadlock that has led to the partial government shutdown, now entering its third week.

“I may do it,” Trump told reporters. “We could call a national emergency and build it very quickly. That’s another way to do it. But if we can do it through a negotiated process, we’re giving that a shot.” He glibly declared that this wasn’t a “threat hanging over the Democrats,” insisting, “I’m allowed to do it.”

Such an action would be a flagrant violation of the Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 7 reads in part: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…” Spending money appropriated to the Pentagon to build a wall on the US-Mexico border would be an impeachable offense, although whether the congressional Democrats would take such an action is doubtful.

Trump’s threat to take the action is effectively a threat of presidential dictatorship, since the Pentagon budget, already appropriated, would become a slush fund to pay for any repressive action demanded by his fascistic base, such as mass roundups of immigrants, the establishment of concentration camps to imprison them, and the deportation of millions of working people.

Trump also confirmed at the press briefing that he told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier in the day that he was prepared to keep the government closed indefinitely until his demands of $5 billion in wall funds were met by the Democrats, who now hold a majority in the House of Representatives.

While Trump declared that the shutdown could last “months or even years” without a deal on congressional funding for a wall along the southern border, ABC News reported that sources in the administration confirmed that options are being considered to circumvent the legislative branch, including redirecting funds already appropriated to the Department of Defense.

A Department of Defense spokesman told ABC that the Pentagon is already “reviewing available authorities and funding mechanisms to identify options to enable border barrier construction.”

NBC News also reported that while options for building the wall without congressional approval have been raised within the administration previously, they are now being seriously considered.

“Depending on the severity of crisis, it’s always been an option. Now that things are getting worse, we are looking at how that could be operationalized and used to confront the crisis,” an anonymous official told NBC.

In an indication that the Trump’s threat to declare a state of emergency was not just an off-the-cuff remark, the White House sent each member of Congress a copy of a presentation on the supposed “invasion” of US borders by asylum seekers that DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tried to deliver to congressional leaders on Wednesday. Schumer and Pelosi declined to sit through the propaganda pitch, but Trump decided to bypass the congressional leaders and send it directly to the entire membership of Congress.

Last month Trump threatened to deploy the military to build the wall without congressional approval, tweeting,

“If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall.”

Trump has already deployed thousands of active-duty soldiers to the southern border to erect barriers, string razor wire and assist border patrol agents in the detention of immigrants. NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has requested thousands more troops to militarize 160 miles of the border in California and Arizona, a project which is expected to last through September. Trump’s initial deployment announced in October had been scheduled to expire this month.

Pelosi and Schumer made the trek to the White House Friday to press Trump to accept a deal that would fully reopen the government, provide funding for federal agencies not including the DHS through September, and then allow for a separate debate over funding for the wall. The Democrats have been seeking a climbdown by Trump, offering him $1.6 billion for “border security” but not a wall.

While Pelosi described the meeting as “contentious,” Trump claimed it had been “very productive,” though, when pressed by reporters, he refused to discuss if the Democrats had moved toward his position on the wall.

“I don’t want to get into that. I don’t want to put them [Pelosi and Schumer] in a position where they have to justify things to a lot of people they have to make happy,” Trump remarked.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed that staff-level talks over a resolution to the shutdown would continue through the weekend.

“The president agreed to designate his top people to sit down with all the leaders’ staffs this weekend to see if we could come up with an agreement to recommend back to us, to him and to the various leaders,” he told reporters.

During his Friday press conference, Trump absurdly claimed that most federal employees support the shutdown and the construction of a border wall because it would provide them with economic security:

“The safety net is having a strong border, because we’re going to be safe. I’m not talking economically but ultimately economically.”

Some 800,000 employees who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay will miss their first full paycheck January 11 if an agreement between Trump and the Democrats is not reached soon.

The Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior and Transportation have been shut down and most employees forced to stay home. The Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State have also been affected.

While the National Parks remain open, some 21,000 employees have been furloughed, meaning that trash has begun to pile up and that road and trail maintenance has been put off at parks across the country. Without any rangers on the job, local funding and volunteers have tried to keep popular spots such as the Statue of Liberty in New York and Joshua Tree National Park in California clean.

Meanwhile, those employees deemed “essential,” including Transportation Security Administration security officers, federal prison guards and border patrol agents, are being compelled to work without pay. Meteorologists employed by the National Weather Service as well as air traffic controllers are also required to report to work without pay. Late Friday, the TSA acknowledged that an increasing number of passenger screening workers were calling in sick rather than report to work without pay, but the agency said no flights had yet been disrupted.

The shutdown has resulted in the closure this week of the Smithsonian Institute’s 19 museums and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell monument in Philadelphia have also been closed to the public. The closures have severely slowed business for small shops and restaurants around these areas, which cater to tourists and federal employees.

Native Americans who reside on one of the country’s many reservations have seen services funded by federal money guaranteed in treaties threatened or entirely cut off. Approximately 1.9 million American Indians and Alaskan Natives are affected. The New York Times reported that the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is spending $100,000 of its own funds to keep clinics and food pantries open. Without federal funding, roads have gone unplowed after snow storms across New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, trapping residents in their homes.

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Featured image: Border wall stretches for miles into the rolling landscape on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. This kind of fencing is impassable to most wingless wildlife. Photo by Rebecca Kessler for Mongabay.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has confirmed that the South American country will move its embassy to Jerusalem, following an earlier statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Brazil this week to attend the new Brazilian leader’s swearing-in.

“The decision is taken,” Bolsonaro said late on Thursday in an interview on Brazil’s SBT television, as reported by AFP.

“It’s only a matter of when it will be implemented,” he said.

The comment confirmed an earlier statement by Netanyahu, who said on Sunday that Bolsonaro said it was a matter of “when, not if” the Brazilian embassy would move to Jerusalem.

Brazil is following in the footsteps of the United States, which moved its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv last year, a move that caused a surge of anger among Palestinians.

Bolsonaro, a far-right former paratrooper intent on forging close ties with the US and Israel, said in early November he intended to go through with the embassy move.

He quickly reversed course, however, saying “it is not yet decided”, apparently responding to fears from Brazil’s powerful farming businesses that an embassy move could put at risk $1bn in meat exports to Arab markets.

But in his SBT interview, Bolsonaro minimised that risk, saying:

“A large part of the Arab world is aligned or aligning itself with the United States. The Palestinian issue is already overloading people in the Arab world for the most part.”

He said that “the only weighty voice speaking out against me is Iran”.

Some of the “more radical” Arab nations “might adopt some sort of sanction – I hope only economic ones – against us,” he added, without specifying which countries he was referring to.

Bolsonaro’s plans to move the embassy to Jerusalem would be a shift in Brazilian foreign policy, which has traditionally backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Arab League had told Bolsonaro that moving the embassy would be a setback for relations with Arab countries, according to a letter seen by Reuters in December.

The decision is controversial because Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital while Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Most countries agree that Jerusalem’s status can only be defined through Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

So far, only the US and Guatemala have broken with that consensus by opening embassies in Jerusalem.

Paraguay backtracked on a decision last year to move its embassy, while Israel and the US have talked with Honduras about its embassy moving to Jerusalem.

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Featured image: Jair Bolsonaro holds an Israeli flag during the 26th March for Jesus in São Paulo, Brazil. Photo | Alexssandro Loyola

Within hours of taking office, the Trump of the Tropics, aka the new President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, launched an all-out assault against the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities yesterday, potentially paving the way for large scale deforestion by agricultural, mining and oil companies.

Startling many commentators by the speed of his action after his inauguration, Bolsonaro signed an executive order or decree, which immediately shifted responsibility for indigenous land demarcation from FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indigenous Affairs office, to the pro-agribusiness Ministry of Agriculture.

More worryingly, it could eventually pave the way for the dismantling of the indigenous reserve system, which would allow mining and oil interests to move in unchallenged.

Indigenous communities were rightly outraged at the move. Sônia Gujajajara, president of the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), one of Brazil’s leading indigenous groups, tweeted:

“The unravelling has begun … Does anyone still doubt that he [Bolsonaro] will carry out his electoral promises to exclude us [indigenous people from our constitutional rights]?”

Another indigenous leader, speaking with NGO Survival International, asked:

“Is this President Jair Bolsonaro a real human being? I think not. The first thing he’s done is to mess with indigenous rights. I ask: who were the first inhabitants of this country?”

Dinaman Tuxá, the executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous People of Brazil (Apib) added:

“There will be an increase in deforestation and violence against indigenous people. Indigenous people are defenders and protectors of the environment. We will go through another colonisation process, this is what they want.”

We need to call out the threat to Brazil’s indigenous community for what it is: genocide.

As Fiona Watson, from Survival International states:

“Indigenous peoples are frequently regarded as obstacles to the advance of agribusiness, extractive industries, roads and dams. As more rainforest is invaded and destroyed in the name of economic ‘progress’ and personal profit, uncontacted tribes become targets – massacred over resources because greedy outsiders know they can literally get away with murder. These are silent, invisible genocides, with few if any witnesses.”

We must all bear witness to what is happening in the Amazon. For the sake of its people, for the sake of the forest as well as for the sake of the climate.

According to the Mongabay website

“The potentially resulting wholesale deforestation could be a disaster to indigenous peoples, biodiversity, and even the regional and global climate.”

It adds:

“Bolsonaro’s proposed Amazon policies, if carried out, could ultimately help dash the world’s hopes of achieving the global climate goals agreed to in Paris, a failure that could lead to climate chaos.”

Leading Brazilian researchers, from the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), have calculated that Bolsonaro’s policies could triple deforestation in the Amazon from present levels of 6,900 square kilometers (2,664 square miles) annually, to 25,600 square kilometres (9,884 square miles) per year by 2020.

And if that happens, the so-called lungs of the world, will collapse. And that will affect us all.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Newly inaugurated Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro lives up to the label “Trump of the tropics” in many ways, including his misogynistic comments and a racist streak that surfaces in his disparaging treatment of minorities. But the similarity that is likely to have the broadest and most destructive effects is his disregard of the danger of planetary catastrophe through climate change. The presidency of Brazil is an especially important office in this regard because of its power over the fate of most of the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro has long made clear his intention to destroy more of the forest, supposedly in the name of economic development and with visions of ever more cattle ranches and soybean farms. He has wasted no time in using his powers to that end. On his first full day in office, he issued an executive order giving the agriculture ministry authority to dispose of lands claimed by indigenous peoples. This measure clearly is a first step toward greater exploitation of the Amazon region by agribusiness. Besides reflecting Bolsonaro’s lack of concern for the environment, it also reflected his disdain for the native peoples of the region. He sees no value in protecting their cultures and way of life.

The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest. It is an enormous carbon sink that breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out twenty percent of the world’s oxygen. There is no other single ecosystem that is as important in preventing a runaway planetary greenhouse effect. Although parts of the rainforest are in other South American countries, sixty percent of it is in Brazil.

Much destruction preceded Bolsonaro. Earlier deforestation has meant that the great carbon sink already is absorbing significantly less carbon than it did as recently as a decade ago. Some previous Brazilian administrations gave serious attention to the problem and slowed the pace of deforestation. But in more recent years enforcement against deforestation has lapsed amid political turmoil that included the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff.

The current precariousness of the Amazon rainforest stems not only from the cutting and burning that already has taken place but also from feedback loops in which reduction of the forest sets in train natural processes that lead to further reduction. As the term “rainforest” might suggest, the jungle makes much of its own weather. Less rainforest means less rain. Further deforestation is likely to lead to dry savanna, not to something that is as green and wet as the existing jungle.

The lushness of the rainforest disguises how fragile the ecosystem is in other respects. The biological richness is confined to a thin layer, and the soil underneath is mostly poor and infertile. Would-be growers of crops and of grass for livestock come to realize that. But by the time such realization is great enough to have political impact, it may be too late to save the rainforest.

Earlier experience has provided some lessons in this regard that should have been heeded, including lessons involving North Americans. In the 1920s the industrialist Henry Ford established an operation in the Brazilian rainforest intended to produce rubber for the tires on automobiles the Fort Motor Company manufactured. The company cleared jungle to construct an entire town, known as Fordlandia. Among the problems the company encountered was the difficulty in industrializing the relevant botanical process. Rubber trees in the wild do well when widely scattered among other species; when put close together on Ford’s plantation they were easy prey for pests and disease. Ford abandoned the project after just a few years, without producing any rubber for those tires back in the United States.

Trumps of both the tropics and temperate zones have assaulted in various ways what is often called the international order, and the assault has been destructive. But that order, important as it is, does not offer an effective means of global governance when it comes to planetary patrimony such as the Brazilian rainforest, which history and line-drawing have placed under the control of a single government. Unfortunately, Bolsonaro answers politically not to the planet or to all its current and future inhabitants, but rather to a far smaller political base that his populist rhetoric sufficiently swayed to win him the presidency.

The “butterfly in Brazil” concept comes from the branch of mathematics known as chaos theory and concerns how small changes in initial conditions can lead to much larger systemic effects. The idea is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could be part of what leads to a tornado in Texas. Bolsonaro in Brazil threatens to have climatic effects far worse than one tornado in Texas.

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Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday he intends to move towards a World War II peace treaty with Russia during a summit in Russia later this month. The treaty has been hindered for decades by a territorial dispute.

Abe is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 25th summit where they are expected to end a disagreement over a collection of islands seized by Soviet troops in the final days of the war.

“I’ll visit Russia later this month and intend to push forward with discussions towards a peace treaty,” he said, adding that there had been “absolutely no progress” on the issue for more than 70 years.

Abe said that, while there were no guarantees of an agreement, the two nations had been cooperating over issues concerning the islands, as well as economic issues, over the past two years “as never before.”

Putin caught Abe off guard in September when, on stage with the Japanese leader at a conference in Vladivostok, he suggested signing a peace treaty by year-end “without any pre-conditions.”

Abe later rejected the proposal, repeating Japan’s stance that the countries must resolve a question of sovereignty.

After the two met again in Singapore in November, the Japanese prime minister said they had agreed to advance negotiations based on a 1956 joint statement in which Moscow agreed to transfer the two smaller islands to Japan after a peace treaty was established.

Putin may be open to a deal now with the expectation that better ties will act as a counter-balance to China and draw more Japanese investment and technology, some experts say.

However, others doubt whether Putin really wants an agreement, partly because many Russian citizens are opposed to returning any of the islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the Southern Kurils.

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Featured image: Shinzo Abe and Vladimir Putin. September 10, 2018 © Sergey Mamontov © Sputnik

“When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no turning backwards” (Michel Chossudovsky) 

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Also please consider a tax-deductible donation to host radio station CKUW during our February 2019 Fundrive.

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The year 2018 was one dominated with several dramatic twists and turns on the international stage.

At the start of the year, we witnessed nuclear sabre-rattling between U.S. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. There was the poisoning (and recovery) of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury UK, in which the Russian government was implicated. Israeli Defense Forces’ violent attacks against demonstrators at the Gaza-Israel border wall. The May 8 withdrawal by the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and subsequent re-imposition of sanctions against Iran. The turbulent Mid-Term U.S. elections. The Khashoggi killing. The Central American migrant caravan. The election of Jair Bolsanaro, considered by many to be a full-blown fascist, to the leadership of one of the world’s largest economies: Brazil. A new North American trade deal to replace NAFTA. An apparent assassination attempt on the life of the Venezuelan President, and massive migration of people fleeing the country in the wake of a humanitarian crisis. And a Christmas present for many anti-war Americans in the form of a promised withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria.

Of course, there is also the never-ending melodrama surrounding allegations of Russian collusion with Trump in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election.

The focus of this week’s instalment of the Global Research News Hour, and a general theme of this radio show, is to look at the big stories behind the attention-grabbing headlines. The hope is that a look at bigger picture issues can provide some platform for meaningful political discussion and action, rather than leave members of the global community distracted and spell-bound.

A regular annual feature since the show’s inception, Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored, elaborates on some of the 25 most significant stories of the year that got little to no attention from the corporate press. These include:

• Big Pharma’s Biostitutes: Corporate Media Ignore Root Cause of Opioid Crisis (22)
• People Bussed across US to Cut Cities’ Homeless Populations (19)
• Digital Justice: Internet Co-ops Resist Net Neutrality Rollbacks (15)
• FBI Paid Geek Squad Employees as “Confidential Human Source” Informants (14)
• The Limits of Negative News and Importance of Constructive Media (13)
• ICE Intends to Destroy Records of Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants (12)
• FBI Racially Profiling “Black Identity Extremists” (10)
• Congress Passes Intrusive Data Sharing Law under Cover of Spending Bill (8)
• “Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders (2)

Roth also briefly discusses Project Censored’s latest publication of censored stories and media analysis. (Find the complete list for 2019 at this link.)

In the final half hour, we hear from three analysts who provide their takes on the most significant stories and developments from the past year.

Jack Rasmus outlines some of the fundamentals plaguing the U.S. and global economy, and looks at how signature events from the past year, including Trump’s tax cuts, is likely to affecta fiscal landscape of expanding financial bubbles.

Rick Rozoff takes a look at international geo-strategy and the growing tensions between NATO and rivals like Russia. Rozoff also examines the prospects for pressures within and outside NATO to contain the threat of full-blown conflict.

Dmitry Orlov believes that as a result of events over the past year, “the U.S. military-industrial complex has been neutralized.” He justifies this position, while also detailing how the global energy picture and the prospect of climate change is likely to impact the various players on the world stage.

One further note: one of the most important stories of 2018 has been Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council, resulting in the purging of several pages and sites promoting anti-war and anti-establishment narratives, as well as the general suppression of political thought in a new McCarthyesque era. This is an important story which will be given much more thorough treatment in the weeks ahead.

Andy Lee Roth, is the Associate Director of Project Censored, a media research program which fosters student development of media literacy and critical thinking skills as applied to news media censorship in the United States.

Dr. Jack Rasmus, Ph.D Political Economy, teaches economics and politics at St. Mary’s College in California. He hosts the program ‘Alternative Visions’ every Friday at 2pm on the Progressive Radio Network, and blogs at jackrasmus.com. His books include ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Rope? Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, as well as the upcoming ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: U.S. Policy from Reagan to Trump.’

Rick Rozoff is a journalist and anti-war activist. He also manages the STOP NATO list-serve. Many of his articles have been published at Global Research.

Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American writer, blogger and geopolitical analyst based in Moscow. He has degrees in Computer Engineering and Linguistics and has worked in the fields of high energy physics, internet commerce, advertising and network security. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects and Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on the Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-sufficiency and Freedom. His blog site is cluborlov.com.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 243)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

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Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali al-Hakim laid out the latest step on the path to independence for Baghdad from the US concerning sanctions on Iran by Washington. Although Iraq currently has a 90-day waiver to trade with Iran issued on December 20th, Hakim let reporters know Iraq would be pursuing their own policy on Iran should the waiver not be renewed.

Hakim explained to reporters that

“These sanctions, the siege, or what is called the embargo,” imposed by the US is “unilateral, not international,” and Iraq is “not obliged [to follow] them.”

This is a big step for Baghdad to take in the face of pressure from Washington for Iraq to become “energy independent” with the help of US corporations exploiting their oil and gas resources. Instead, as explained by Hakim, Iraq would rather choose their own options for energy, even if that includes continuing the annual $12 billion in trade between Iraq and Iran flowing over US objections.

There are also discussions ongoing concerning increasing the amount of trade between Baghdad and Tehran despite US pressure. Iraqi President Barham Salih and his Iranian President Hassan Rouhani even doubled down on this during a recent meeting where Rouhani said that Tehran was willing to increase trade with Baghdad from the $12 billion a year mark to $20 billion.

Hakim assured reporters Iraq is already thinking of “solutions” to counteract any US threats to increased trade with Iran. According to Hakim, there are multiple options open to Baghdad “including dealing in Iraqi dinars in bilateral trade” as opposed to US dollars.

Iraqi Sovereignty: From Sanctions to Bases

This defiance to US sanctions is only the latest step in Iraq declaring independence from Washington. Another sign that the US is losing their grip on Baghdad was also made apparent last week when, after Trump made a surprise visit to US troops in Iraq, fueling outrage among Iraqi politicians.

Many Iraqi leaders called Trump’s surprise visit to their country a violation of their nation’s sovereignty. This has ended up leading to a wider backlash and resulted in multiple Iraqi politicians demanding a complete end to the US military presence in the country.

This all comes as the Trump regime is attempting to cement new positions in the Middle East by way of new bases on the Iraq-Syria border. According to some Iraqi MPs such as Badr al-Zaidi who has said that the new bases violate “agreements between Iraq and the US were on the pullout of foreign forces from Iraq after 2013.”

Even US-ally and supporter of the NATO occupation, former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi rejected the “method of Trump’s visit,” saying “it was not appropriate to diplomatic mores and to relations with sovereign states.”

These insults to Iraq have led to a wave of Iraqi lawmakers demanding more than an apology and saying the Iraqi government would move to make a “parliamentary decision to expel (Trump’s) military forces” in the words of Qais Khazali, an Iraqi politician. Much like with the rejection of the Iran sanctions, Khazali also promised his faction of the government (backed by Shia militias) also had creative “solutions” to dealing with US pressure on Iraq including “experience and ability to get them out in another way that is well known to your forces, which were forced to withdraw in humiliation in 2011.”

All of these events paint a picture of a growing movement in Iraq to reject US control of the government there that has been in place since the fall of the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003. All the parties that opposed both Saddam and the US occupation are moving closer to the levers of power in Iraq and Baghdad is no longer under Washington’s thumb. The question now for Donald Trump is, will he leave Iraq like he is Syria or will this case take more convincing by the forces of resistance in Iraq?

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Featured image is from Geopolitics Alert

Although the United States is allegedly a democracy with a rule of law, it has taken 17 years for public pressure to bring about the first grand jury investigation of 9/11. Based on the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth led by Richard Gage, first responder and pilots organizations, books by David Ray Griffin and others, and eyewitness testimony, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has presented enough hard facts to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York to force his compliance with the provisions of federal law that require the convening of a federal grand jury to investigate for the first time the attacks of September 11, 2001. (See this)

This puts the US Justice (sic) Department in an extraordinary position. Every informed person is aware that elements of the US government were involved either in the perpetration of the 9/11 attacks or in a coverup of the attacks. There will be tremendous pressures on the US Attorney’s office to have the grand jury dismiss the evidence as an unpatriotic conspiracy theory or otherwise maneuver to discredit the evidence presented by the Lawyers’ Committee, or modify the official account without totally discrediting it.

We can have hopes that the United States can establish the true story of its own Reichstag Fire, but I am not holding my breath that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York can stand up to the powerful elements in the Deep State that perpetuated or covered up the 9/11 false flag attacks or that he is inclined to try.

What the 9/11 truthers and the Lawyers’ Committee have achieved is the destruction of the designation of 9/11 skeptics as “conspiracy theorists.” No US Attorney would convene a grand jury on the basis of a conspiracy theory. Clearly, the evidence is compelling that has put the US Attorney in an unenviable position.

The likely result will be comparable to the US Congress’ belated investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. No expert or informed person believed the obviously false story that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. All evidence pointed to a plot by the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and Secret Service whose right-wing leaders had concluded that President Kennedy was too “soft on communism” to do what was necessary for the US to prevail in the contest with the Soviet Union. Expert and public disbelief of the official story was so great that in 1976, 13 years after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress investigated. The real culprits were, of course, not identified, but two important results were forthcoming. One was the conclusion by the Select Committee on Assassinations that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy and not of a lone gunman. The other was the release of the top secret Project Northwoods, which revealed the Joint Chiefs’ plan presented to President Kennedy for the US government to kill US citizens and shoot down US airliners and place the blame on Castro in order to gain public acceptance for an invasion of Cuba.

The conclusion that a conspiracy, although unidentified, was involved in Kennedy’s assassination was the sop thrown to those who disputed the official lone gunman account. The revelation of Project Northwoods created awareness of a previously unknown US government plot that drew attention away from Kennedy’s assassination.

If the Lawyers’ Committee and the 9/11 truthers trust the US Attorney to go entirely by the facts, little will come of the grand jury. If the United States had a rule of law, something as serious as 9/11 could not have gone for 17 years without investigation.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, almost 30 years ago, abuse and debasement of human rights concerns have served increasingly to create pretexts promoting Western dominance around the world. From former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to Iraq and Sudan, to Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria, to Myanmar and Ukraine, Western governments have used non governmental human rights organizations and abuse of the United Nations system to attack countries resisting the demands of US and allied elites and the governments they control. In Latin America, that dynamic has long targeted Cuba, more recently Venezuela, now Nicaragua and will soon attack Bolivia and probably Mexico too, if the new progressive government there shows too much independence. The US and European elites have stepped up their efforts at regime change in Latin America and the Caribbean so as to guarantee access to and control of the region’s abundant natural resources, because Chinese and Russian influence is blocking their accustomed control of the majority world in Eurasia and Africa.

Like Venezuela previously, Nicaragua has been targeted by the US dominated Organization of American States using local US and European funded non-profit proxies inside Nicaragua and Western corporate dominated non-governmental organizations. They have manipulated international and regional human rights institutions so as to violate fundamental precepts of international law like self-determination and non-intervention. Just as in the 1980s in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, and now both Venezuela and Nicaragua again, violent armed non-governmental actors have been used to destabilize the country and create a context allowing false reporting of human rights concerns so as to discredit revolutionary governments.

As independent US writer Max Blumenthal pointed out in an interview in July last year,

“… how I know that there was a regime change operation afoot – and when I say “regime change operation,” I mean an attack not just on a government but on the nation-state, a plan to reduce a country to a failed state like Libya – is that Ken Roth surfaced after the Nicaraguan government had essentially won and removed the roadblocks, allowing the economy which had bled $500 million to start functioning again, allowing citizens to start moving around. Ken Roth, the dictator of Human Rights Watch, who has been in the same position for 25 years, catering to a small cadre of billionaires and elite foundations with almost no constituency base, blamed the government for every single death.  Meaning that zero Sandinistas died according to Ken Roth.”

Blumenthal’s insight into the inextricable relationship between human rights NGOs and Western corporate elites suggests a series of points which categorically undermine glib acceptance of false human rights accusations against Nicaragua. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are all guilty of extreme bad faith, non-compliance with basic norms and adherence to long discredited theoretical nostrums. In effect they are themselves all accomplices to very serious human rights violations by Nicaragua’s US supported armed oppposition. Four main considerations apply.

Firstly, on technical grounds none of these organizations have adhered even to the Huridocs guidelines, a tool created by and for Western government and corporate funded human rights organizations. The guidelines propose concepts and good practice in relation to fact-finding, documentation and monitoring of human rights violations. The IACHR, the UNOHCHR. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have categorically failed to comply with  the HURIDOCS guidelines. In terms of fact finding they systematically omit sources and facts that contradict or exclude their preferred finding. In terms of documentation they systematically exclude abundant documentation from Nicaraguan government ministries, from the public prosecutor’s office, from the legislature’s Truth and Justice Commission, from the Institute of Legal Medicine and from the Office of the Procurator for Human Rights.

All that information to a greater or lesser extent contradicts the bogus fact finding of the OAS, the UN and foreign NGOs. In terms of monitoring the situation in Nicaragua, all those institutions and organizations depend exclusively on virulently politically biased local media, NGOs and opposition activists. So even on their own terms, their methodology does not comply with basic concepts and standards and, thus, the kinds of cases they have built to justify their findings would never stand up to impartial legal scrutiny. One farcical aspect of their approach has been to accuse the Nicaraguan government of repressing local media when their main sources by far are abundant citations of false reports from those same local media relayed via dishonest local human rights NGOs.

Secondly, in theoretical terms, the approach of the IACHR, the UNOHCHR and foreign NGOs like Amnesty International has been to exclude violations by non-State actors, exactly the same faithless alibi they all used during the Cold War. But that theoretical framework has been outdated since 1993 when the UN Human Rights Convention in Vienna explicitly recognized the role of non-State actors in human rights abuses (thus recognizing how the US government and its allies used irregular forces, like the Contra in Nicaragua, RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, to apply systematic terrorism against civilian populations). As Carlos Emilio Lopez a leading Nicaraguan human rights activist and legislator has pointed out:

“In 1993, with the approval of the Vienna Declaration of Human Rights, the subject of respect for human rights was re-conceptualized. For many years it was considered that only States should respect human, rights but that understanding is already out of date. The reconceptualization of human rights is that States must respect human rights but companies, churches, organizations must also do so, social organizations, oligopolies, the media, people as individuals. In other words, we are all obliged to respect human rights, not only State institutions.”

Thus, every time Amnesty International or the IACHR claim their remit excludes non-State actors they are appealing to a theoretical framework 30 years out of date deliberately so as to wash their hands of abuses by political actors with whom they sympathize.

Thirdly, specifically with regard to Amnesty International, their organization has been corrupted and co-opted over many years now by corporate influence via links through their senior personnel with corporate globalization advocates whose explicit aim is to undermine and diminish the role of sovereign national states. Amnesty International’s Secretary General and senior directors, their International Board and its Secretary General’s Global Council freely advertise their background working either directly with multinational corporations, or with corporate funders  or with other heavily corporate funded non profits. In this Amnesty International, like Human Rights Watch, is very similar to the Purpose/AVAAZ corporate human rights conglomerate. Their human rights activities are guided by emphatic neoliberal hostility to nation-State governments, such that their reporting deliberately sets out to exclude or discredit information from government or other official sources.

More broadly in Latin American and Caribbean, accompanying the encroaching cooptation of NGOs by corporate predators like Purpose, the overtly political Atlas network supports NGOs promoting extreme right wing policies across the region, thus facilitating the ascent to power of fascists like Jair Bolsonaro.

Fourthly, that corporate corruption and cooptation of Sean MacBride‘s original vision of the role and work of Amnesty International and similar organizations, is clearly manifest in their demonstrable bias in favor of US and allied coutnries foriegn policy priorities. In that regard, Professor Francis Boyle, among many others, has been an authoritative and trenchant critic of Amnesty International’s role in Palestine and elsewhere, whereby it downplays or minimizes violations by States allied to NATO countries. On the other hand, institutions like the IACHR and the UNOCHR and organizations like Amnesty international systematically exaggerate and even invent violations in countries targeted by NATO member country governments. Thus in Latin America, the current horrific record of human rights violations in Colombia and, until AMLO, in Mexico was played down and minimized, while events in Cuba, Venezuela and now Nicaragua have been systematically misrepresented.

All these concerns about the practical bad faith, theoretical dishonesty, corporate co-optation and outright political bias of human rights institutions and organizations should give any intellectually honest person of progressive views pause. People genuinely concerned about human rights should reassess what they think they know about Nicaragua and about Venezuela too. The US and allied elites are determined to use the governments, institutions and NGOs they have bought to destroy resistance to their domination in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the 60th anniversary this year of Cuba’s revolution, together with the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the 20th anniversary of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution suggest they will not have things all their own way.

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Disproportionate numbers of First Peoples are in Canadian prisons. The society arranges this fact to not seem that extraordinary. It could be argued that aboriginal peoples are political prisoners in North America, in or out of prison. Or that this is true for all minorities. Or that as the war on terror proceeds all Canadians may find themselves in a political prison.

Privilege and prejudice are clarified when we note that aboriginal men and women damaged in government (police) custody are not often plaintiffs in trials for damages. And properly, this account would run to several thousand pages listing the individual cases of First Peoples’ imprisonment, rising out of a society which feels compelled to treat the education of, the medical care of, the social services for, the nourishment of, the housing of, the remuneration for, First Peoples unjustly.

Unlike the U.S. Canada hasn’t used extreme long term incarceration of Indigenous leaders to discourage Indigenous movements’ protest actions. In the U.S. Leonard Peltier was sentenced to two life imprisonment terms for a crime he likely didn’t commit. Non-Indigenous U.S. leaders of the people such as the Kennedy’s, Dr. King and Malcolm X, were simply shot, as Canada’s historical icon of revolt Louis Riel was simply hung. The many indigenous leaders in Canada maintain relatively low profiles and are more diffusely represented in these vast spaces of the land.

Image on the right: Omar Khadr

The only group of Canadian political prisoners which approaches the length of sentences of U.S. political prisoners is currently Canadians who are Muslim and who have been treated poorly in domestic prisons or left to the dogs in the custody of foreign agencies. In some cases Canada’s security agencies seemed to be outsourcing torture for information. Of Canadian Muslims damaged in custody, Maher Arar was awarded 11.5 million dollars in an out of court settlement concerning the Canadian government’s responsibility for his torture in Syria. Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin settled for about half of what each asked, 31.25 million apiece because of Canada’s assistance to the Syrian government in having them falsely arrested and tortured. Omar Khadr was to receive 10.5 million for Canada’s cooperation with the U.S. at Khadr’s incarceration and torture as minor child at Guantanamo.

One of the suits by Abousfian Abdelrazik whom the Canadian government left in the hands of Syrian torturers was settled out of court in 2017. In 2015 the Canadian government settled out of court a suit by Benamar Benatta whom it turned over to the FBI as a terrorist suspect: he was imprisoned 5 years before they decided he wasn’t a terrorist. Daniel Ameziane who sought political asylum in Canada from Algeria is suing Canada for 40 million dollars, after his torture in U.S. Guantanamo which he alleges was reliant on Canadian supplied information. and yielded the Canadians in turn information obtained by his torture (Ameziane, denied asylum in Canada was subsequently arrested in Pakistan by a bounty hunter and sent to Guantanamo). The five Muslim men detained (arrested without charge) for varying lengths of time in extreme conditions, under the mechanism of Canadian Security Certificates, were not found guilty of any crime and have not as far as I know initiated suits to compensate them for their arbitrary loss of rights, their suffering and the government’s attempts to ruin their lives.

What is unusual about the Canadian persecution of Canadian Muslims is that they have some chance for redress in Canadian courts for severe violations of their human rights. Here I’ll try to update several cases Night’s Lantern has encountered in the past, and these of Muslims, targeted under the U.S./ NATO programs of the wars on terror and Muslim countries. The cases suggest a domestic application of an aggressive foreign policy which has the intention of corporate resource acquisition by force.

Entirely ignored by the media is the case of Said Namouh who was arrested in 2007 and is serving a sentence of life imprisonment with parole possible after ten years (yet facing deportation if paroled). The charges against him were for participating in terrorist activities. But he committed no crime of violence against anyone. There was no evidence linking him to alleged bomb-making or making real the prosecution’s suppositions of active terrorism. The star witness against him was an Israeli CEO of a U.S. defense industry intelligence provider who analyzed Namouh’s computer hard drive. Namouh’s “crimes” were primarily of internet communication, personal declarations, extremist associations, in other words – his beliefs, convictions. This case puzzles innocents because it is entirely legal to have beliefs and convictions and it is legal to share them. In 2018 Namouh was denied his first application for parole; the parole board noted his record in prison wasn’t exemplary, and it wasn’t but he didn’t try to kill anyone and he didn’t steal anyone’s dessert. The parole board (“La Commission des libérations conditionnelles”) isn’t likely to hear his case again until 2023. Yet there is a forfeit of the prisoner’s human rights and civil rights here, not because Namouh’s beliefs are unwise, unsafe, in some instances illegal, or against Canadian security interests, but because the punishment is the same as a mass murderer’s. He was in no way proven guilty of mass murder or any act of violence. His was a propaganda trial with a propaganda punishment.

Another level of shame is reached in the more obvious injustices of Canadian Security Certificates. One recognizes Stasi or Gestapo tactics which aren’t Canadian practices, and the government has restrained itself from using the certificates since early in the new millennium. All five of the Muslim men arrested under Canadian Security Certificates back in 2000 to 2003 have been released from prison through the efforts of their lawyers in one trial after another. Despite government challenges Canada’s judicial system has safeguarded some of humanity’s progress since the dark ages. The government’s attempts to justify in court application of Canadian Security Certificates has cost Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars. Mohamed Harkat, former Canadian Security Certificate detainee, imprisoned without a charge against him in 2002, now lives at home protected from prison by judicial decisions, with his Quebec born Canadian wife of nearly twenty years. Their lives are under threat every day with complete disruption by the government’s continuing intention to deport him to Algeria, where it’s believed he is in danger of torture or death.

Aside from the label of suspected terrorist assigned him by Canada’s security agencies, any refugee returned to Algeria is known to be at risk. In June 2018 Al-Jazeera reported 13,000 migrants left by Algeria in the Sahara desert within the last 14 months, subject to forced marches without water and food. The ordeal of Mohamed Harkat’s arrest without charges or public evidence against him has lasted year after year, placing him in prison, in solitary, on hunger strike, in house arrest with court ordered regimens, has subjected his wife to suffering and police abuse, subjected the family to legal expenses debts and charity without compensation. (Summary). If one wanted to inflict the conditions of a lasting torture on a family, either to obtain information or as one more threat to encourage the Muslim community to cooperate with government policies bordering on genocide in several Muslim countries, one might imagine inflicting on them the lives of Mohamed and Sophie Harkat. In a report to the UN Human Rights Council last Spring, Nils Melzer (the UN Special Rapporteur on torture) noted:

“Whenever States failed to exercise due diligence to protect migrants, punish perpetrators or provide remedies, they risk to become complicit in torture or ill-treatment.”

The injustices inherent in the government’s prosecution of a group branded the “Toronto 18” in 2006 by the press are less clearly defined and are difficult to explain. People are afraid to ask obvious questions about the group of minors and young men who were quite possibly guided into a horrible conspiracy by the several police agents among them to plan and organize a series of terrorist acts beyond the abilities of any in the group who weren’t police agents, to execute.

As soon as early reporting of the arrests entered court, the judge placed a gag order on reporting details of the trial or revealing the defendants’ names. Portions of the ban protecting minors seem to remain in force. The mechanism has also provided a means to keep out of public scrutiny any low-profile informants and the role they played in a “conspiracy” which some of the defendants were unwilling to recognize. The alleged crimes the “conspiracy” was charged with were horrific and frightening, particularly to a population with misgivings about U.S. and Canadian wars against Islamic countries, crimes against international law, guilt from Canada’s role in “Operation Desert Storm,” the initial US and Coalition bombing of Iraq, the destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, depriving the country’s children of a future. By the time the US and its coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 Canada refused full participation. Canada’s commitment to fighting in Afghanistan may also be considered complicity in a war of aggression and a number of the “Toronto 18” expressed anger at Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. So the script for the “Toronto 18” was noticeably muzzy, vague except in the allegations of dastardly plots and plans, and the curiousness that young Canadian citizens who were in other respects bright students and entrepreneurs could be manipulated into over-expressing their imaginations and feelings about injustice.

In court eleven Canadian citizens accused were sentenced to prison. Charges against others were dropped or withdrawn. Of the accused, most just pleaded guilty. Four claimed their innocence but were convicted. Interestingly each case was different which one would not expect of a conspiracy. Charges relied heavily on the actions and testimony of a police informant (one is featured in official narratives) considered by some to have been a causative agent. The convicted did not have the knowledge or means to execute the terrorist actions they were found guilty of, and their actions required the professional help of the police informant(s). This troubled my own understanding of the case as it was revealed in the press, and the presence of this basic injustice may explain why post sentencing information about members of the “Toronto 18” remains scarce.

The justice of their trials in 2009-2010 may be further questioned after a recent ruling in Vancouver BC which found the RCMP basically responsible for the terrorist acts committed by John Nuttall and Amanda Korody. The couple were recent converts to Islam and recovering drug addicts, guided into a terrorist plot and supplied the knowledge and materials to commit terrorist crimes by RCMP undercover. A three judge appeals court affirmed the decision of the lower court that the RCMP had basically entrapped the defendants, who were then freed. The RCMP’s case was found to be “a travesty of justice.”. To begin to gather then this disparate group of the “Toronto 18” I mention eight of the eleven who were found guilty and sentenced:

Arrested when he was 18, Saad Gaya pleaded guilty in court in 2010 and was sentenced to 12 years in prison with pre-sentencing imprisonment of 3.5 years credited double. Gaya was to serve a remaining 4.5 years but was parole eligible in 18 months.

However the Crown was able to increase his sentence to 18 years. In 2016 the National Post reported he was granted day parole to attend graduate school.

Mohamed Dirie convicted for weapons smuggling in the “Toronto 18” plot he was sentenced to seven years including pre-sentencing time served. He was released in 2011, and is reported to have died fighting for “an extremist group” in Syria, 2013. Unconfirmed.

Zakaria Amara pleaded guilty in 2009 to charges in the “camp plot” conspiracy and to charges in the “bomb plot” conspiracy. In 2010 he was sentenced to 21 months in addition to time served for the first, and for the second, life imprisonment. He was incarcerated in Quebec and eligible for parole in ten years. In 2013 the Supreme Court of Canada refused to review his sentence.

Fahim Ahmad, sentenced to 16 years with double credit for pre-sentencing time served, was previously denied parole but will have completed his sentence and should be freed in 2018, according to The Toronto Star, and released early in 2018 according to the National Post. By 2019, I’ve found no notice of his release.

Shareef Abdelhaleem who maintained that he “had no intention of causing injury or bodily harm” and asked the judge to sentence him as the judge would a white Catholic…, was sentenced to life in prison, and with pre-sentencing time included, was parole eligible in ten years. His father was an engineer with Atomic Energy of Canada who had posted bail for Mohammad Mahjoub, the Security Certificate detainee. The father’s implication in the “conspiracy” was attempted. Of his son, the prisoner, Wikipedia quotes him: “I am the last person to be a threat…this whole thing was staged to impress the public, to give them fear.”

Steven Vikash Chand, a former Canadian forces reservist and new convert to Islam was found guilty of participation and advising a financial fraud to assist a terrorist group. He was sentenced to 10 years including time served, yielding a release in 2011.

Despite a recognized lack of serious involvement with the conspiracy group, Asad Ansari was sentenced in 2010 to six years five months for participating/contributing to a terrorist group, which amounted to time served. Like several others in the “Toronto 18” group, the government’s threat to withdraw his Canadian citizenship was canceled under a change in government and Royal Assent granted to Bill C-6 June 19, 2017.

Saad Khalid pled guilty in 2009 to intending to cause an explosion and was sentenced to 14 years in prison including 7 years served. He was said to be radicalized in prison and the Crown increased his sentence from 14 to 20 years.

These are long sentences in mens’ lives. This listing leaves three of the accused and found guilty prisoners uncounted, as well as the seven of those arrested and one way or another released. We can guess that most of those found guilty have by now served their time or reaching their parole date were quietly released. No one asks why children and young adults who were so normal in other respects leading the lives of innocents, imagined such horrific responses to their country’s crimes against innocent men women and children abroad.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Night’s Lantern.

Sources

“Canadian terrorist handed life sentence,” Les Perreaux, Feb. 17, 2017 / May 2, 2018, The Globe and Mail;

“Pas de libération conditionnelle pour Saïd Namouh,” Louis Cloutier, Feb. 7, 2018, TVA Nouvelles / MédiaQMI;

“B.C. Court of Appeal: Couple convicted in Victoria terror case entrapped by RCMP,” Amy Smart, Canadian Press, Dec. 19, 2018, Vancouver Sun;

“Bomb plotter sentenced to 12 years,” Michael Friscolanti, Jan. 18, 2010, Macleans;

“Toronto 18 member released on day payrole in middle of 18-year sentence,” The Canadian Press, Jan. 2, 2016, CBC News;

“‘Toronto 18’ convict granted day parole so he can go to graduate school,” Jan 1, 2016, National Post;

“Man convicted as part of Toronto 18 plot reportedly killed in Syria,” The Canadian Press Sep 26, 2013, Macleans;

“Canada revokes citizenship of Toronto 18 ringleader using new anti-terror law,” Sept. 26, 2015, National Post;

“Toronto 18 plotter reflects on a decade in prison,” Michelle Shephard, May 29, 2016, Toronto Star;

“Toronto 18 terror leader denied parole after telling psychologist he wants to fight ISIL,” Stewart Bell, May 30, 2017, National Post;

“Deported by Algeria, migrants abandoned in the Sahara Desert,” Victoria Gatenby, June 25, 2018, Al-Jazeera;

“Migration policies can amount to ill-treatment and torture, UN rights expert warns,” UN Human Rights Council, March 1, 2018, Reliefweb;

“Justice for Mohamed Harkat: stop his deportation to torture,” current [access:< http://www.justiceforharkat.com/news.php >;

“Guantanamo: Ex-inmate sues Canada for alleged torture,” Jillia n Kestler-D’Amours,” Nov. 10, 2017, Al-Jazeera;

“Canada and the politics of Islamophobia,” J. B. Gerald, Feb. 5, 2017, nightslantern.ca.

In early January 2019, the military situation in Syria continued to develop in the framework of the existing trend with the terrorist threat in the Idlib de-escalation zone and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict as two main sources of tensions.

Over the past week, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has made a fresh push to expand its influence over Turkish-backed groups in western Aleppo, southern Idlib and northwestern Hama. After accusing the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement of assassinating 4 HTS members, HTS launched an attack on Darat Izza along with several nearby settlements. Then, Hayat Tahir al-Sham expanded its activity into southern Idlib and northwestern Hama, where it captured the settlements of Faqie, Tramla, Arnaba, Shahranaz and Shir Mughar from Turkish-backed militant groups.

According to reports, the so-called National Front for Liberation (NFL), which is the main alliance of Turkish-backed militant groups in the area, was able to repel a HTS attack in southern Idlib, to recapture Tremla and Al-Ghadfah but has not been able to push back HTS near Ma’arat Al-Nu’man.

According to the Lebanese TV channel al-Mayadeen, over 180 militants have been killed in the fighting. Furthermore, both sides actively use mortars and other heavy weapons thus causing civilian casualties.

Even if the NFL with help from Ankara solves the current round of tensions within the militant-held area in northwestern Syria, the issue will remain while Hayat Tahrir al-Sham operates in the area. HTS is officially excluded from the de-escalation zone agreement, but Turkey and its proxies either unable or unwilling to neutralize it because it remains the most capable military force of the so-called opposition.

In its own turn, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seeks to expand its influence in the area further in order to limit chances that it would become a non-useful tool of the Turkish foreign policy whereby it would become more profitable to eliminate it than to tolerate its existence.

A group of internally displaced persons left the al-Rukban refugee camp and returned to the government-held town of Mahin in southern Homs, the Sham FM radio station reported on January 3 citing Syrian officials. According to the report, the first group of IDPs consisted of 209 civilians, mainly women, children and elders. More people are expected to return from the camp in the upcoming few weeks. The al-Rukban refugee camp is located within the 55km de-escalation zone around the US-led coalition base in al-Tanaf. After the formal announcement of US troops withdrawal, a panic appeared among US-backed militant groups there. This allowed to facilitate the return of civilians from the refugee camp where a humanitarian crisis has been developing.

Another point of tensions is the area of Manbij. A large force of Turkish proxies is still deployed near the area despite reports about their alleged withdrawal. The further development of the situation will depend on the schedule of the expected withdrawal of US troops and the result of ongoing negotiations between Damascus and the YPG.

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The worm has gotten into Apple, and is feasting with some consistency.  Revenue has fallen. Chief executive Tim Cook is cranky.  The celebrated front of Apple’s wealth – the iPhone with its range of glittering models – has not done as well as he would have hoped.  Dreams of conquering Cathay (or, in modern terms, the Chinese market) have not quite materialised.

In a letter to Apple’s investors, Cook explained that “our revenue will be lower than our original guidance for the quarter, with other items remaining broadly in line with our guidance.”  This somewhat optimistic assessment came with the heavily stressed caveat:

“While it will be a number of weeks before we complete and report our final results, we wanted to get some preliminary information to you now.  Our final results may differ somewhat from these preliminary estimates.”

The reasons outlined were various, but Cook, in language designed to obfuscate with concealing woods for self-evident trees, suggested that the launches of various iPhone types would “affect our year-to-year compares.” That said, it “played out broadly in line with our expectations.”  While Cook gives the impression of omniscience, he is far from convincing.  Why go for the “unprecedented number of new products to ramp”, resulting in “supply constraints” which led to limiting “our sales of certain products during Q1 [the first quarter]”?  Such is the nature of the credo.

Screengrab from Apple

Where matters were not so smooth to predict were those “macroeconomic” matters that do tend to drive CEOs potty with concern.  While there was an expectation that the company would struggle for sales in “emerging markets”, the impact was “significantly greater… than we had projected.”  China, in fact, remained the hair-tearing problem, singled out as the single biggest factor in revenue fall.

“In fact,” goes Cook’s letter of breezy blame, “most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPhone.”

The slowing of China’s economy in the second half of 2018, with a slump in the September quarter being the second lowest in the last 25 years, deemed a significant factor.

The irritating tangle of world politics also features; as ever, Apple can hardly be responsible for errors or misjudgements, and prefers, when convenient, to point the finger to the appropriate catalyst.  The United States has not made matters easy for the Apple bottom line in its trade war spat with Beijing.

“We believe that the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States.”

While it is never wise to consult the view of economists without caution (their oracular skills leave much to be desired), the feeling among the analysts is that a further contraction is nigh.

“We expect a much worse slowdown in the first half, followed by a more serious and aggressive government easing/stimulus centred on regulating the property market in big cities,” claims chief China economist at Nomura, Ting Lu.  But chin up – a rebound is bound to happen in the latter part of 2019.

The Apple vision is, however, dogmatically optimistic, an indispensable quality to any cult.  China remains customary dream and object, a frontier to conquer.  It is stacked with Apple friendly innovators (“The iOS developer community in China is among the most innovative, creative, and vibrant in the world.”) and loyal customers who have “a very high level of engagement and satisfaction.”

Product fetishism only carries you so far.  The iPhone models are not exactly blazing a trail of enthusiasm in other countries either.  Users in Brazil, India, Russia and Turkey can count themselves as being more reluctant.

Some of this dampening is due, in no small part, to a certain cheek on the part of the tech giant, one nurtured by years of enthusiastic, entitled arrogance.  In late 2017, for instance, the company revealed that it was slowing down iPhones with old batteries in an attempt to prevent undesired shutdowns.  But the company did not feel any great desire to inform users of this fiddling, and it took the published findings of an iPhone user to replace his iPhone 6’s battery, thereby restoring performance to accepted levels, to kick the hornets’ nest.

As Chris Smith explains,

“The fix was implemented via an update last January [2017], but Apple didn’t accurately inform users of what was going to happen to chemically aged batteries.”

Class action suits followed in the United States; Brazilian authorities insisted that the company inform iPhone users on how to have their batteries replaced within 10 days.

The bite on Apple has had its predictable shudder on the markets.  Investors ran off some $75 billion on the company’s stocks.  The Nasdaq fell by 3 percent; the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.8 percent.  An environment of chaos has greeted us in 2019, and fittingly, Apple remains at the centre of it, a company as responsible for modern technological worship as any.  As with any central dogma, disappointments are bound to happen, an irrepressible function of misplaced belief.

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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]

Many years ago, I came across a pre-Islamic Arabic poem describing a camel running across the desert. Suddenly, the camel freezes in mid-stride. First, it looks backward in fear of what it was running from, and then it turns its glance forward – also in fear – toward the unknown that is its destination. It was this image that came to mind as 2018 came to an end and I sat down to write about the year that was and what we expect might unfold in the new year.

By any measure, 2018 was a tumultuous year, in no small way owing to President Trump’s unpredictable behavior. He has been, in a word, exhausting.

We began and ended 2018 with a short government shutdown owing to Trump’s insistence that Congress agree to fund the wall on the Mexican border, despite opposition from Democrats and some leaders in his own party. When Democrats offered the White House partial funding of the wall in an effort to secure a compromise on immigration reform, Trump balked and upped the ante demanding, in addition to his wall, an end to the diversity lottery and family unification – making disparaging remarks about immigrants from the African continent in the process. He also dramatically reduced the number of refugees admitted to the US and imposed new hardships on those seeking asylum. Added to this has been the Administration’s “family separation” policy which produced the nightmarish result of thousands of little children being taken from their parents at the border and sent to far-away locations. At year’s end, we once again have a government shutdown, no wall, and no indication that the White House is willing to compromise.

Image on the right: President Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong Un shake hands in summit room, June 12, 2018. (Office of the President of the United States/Public Domain)

In 2018, Trump also repeatedly upset international relations alienating allies both East and West. He frustrated Europe by unilaterally walking away from the Iran nuclear deal; outraged Arabs by moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; imposed stiff new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum; once again acted unilaterally with a bizarre “love fests” with North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin causing unease with NATO and South Korea and Japan; and then, at year’s end, surprised everyone by announcing that he was pulling all US forces out of Syria and drawing down US forces in Afghanistan.

2018 also witnessed upheaval within the Administration, itself. Trump lost or fired his Secretaries of State, Defense, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Interior, the Attorney General, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Security Advisor, the United Nations Ambassador, the White House Chief of Staff, Legal Counsel, and Director of Communications, and a dozen other senior White House officials.

During all this time, Trump spent the year besieged by the growing threat to his presidency posed by the investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller probe and ancillary investigations have thus far taken a hefty toll. Five individuals who worked with the Trump campaign have been found guilty of crimes ranging from conspiracy to making false statements under oath. Add to this, Trump’s long-time personal attorney pleaded guilty to a number of financial crimes in which he implicated Trump. And the investigation is still underway.

If this were not enough, the President has compounded the exhaustion with his incessant tweeting. Each morning a wary public awakens to see what outrageous charges, defamatory rants or insults Trump has to offer. The news networks have unfortunately been accommodating since they spend the better part of each day amplifying his tweets discussing them as if they were “Breaking News.”

In the midst of this chaos, Trump has been successful in pursuing his agenda of undoing much of President Obama’s accomplishments. There was: a tax cut that resulted in a massive upward redistribution of wealth; a dismantling of regulations that protected consumers, the environment, natural resources, air and water, health and safety; an end to Obama-era education-related policies; and the gutting of Obama’s signature legislation reforming health insurance – which is now in danger of completely unraveling.

Not everything has been bad news. Trump did lend his support to a significant criminal justice reform bill that passed with bipartisan support. And he did renegotiate a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.

Despite these accomplishments, some good, mostly bad, it is the chaos that has dominated the news – and for this, the President can only blame himself. I am reminded of a line in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” where he describes the faces of passengers on the London Underground being “distracted from distractions, by distractions.” This has been our fate in 2018. We are almost unable to focus on one crisis before our attention is diverted by yet another: a mass shooting (once again in 2018, there has been almost one a day); upheaval in the White House; new Mueller indictments; or an incendiary Trump tweet. The result has been a near perpetual state of nervous anxiety.

So much for looking backward at the year we are leaving behind. The problem, of course, is that, like that camel in the poem, we can only feel apprehension as we now run head-long into the year that awaits us – 2019.

I learned a long time ago, that the true test we face in life is not how we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves, but how we confront the unexpected challenges that lay before us. We can only predict some of what 2019 will bring.

Democrats will be in control of the House of Representatives and they will not give Trump an easy time. They will begin the year with an inherited government shutdown and a president still insisting that they find $5 billion in the budget to build his wall (the one he had insisted would be paid for by Mexico). Any compromise they may reach with the White House will still need to be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The New Year will also bring forward the results of Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign collusion with the Russians during the 2016 election and whether or not Trump attempted to obstruct justice by impeding the investigation. Whether or not Democrats want to hold hearings on White House activities related to these or other matters, the Congress will, of necessity, have to react to the Mueller findings or to the Administration’s reactions to it (for example, by firing Mueller or attempting to bury his report).

The immigration crisis on our southern border will not let up, nor will the challenges to health care reform resulting from a number of court decisions which have put the stability of the current system in limbo.

Then there are crises in the world with which we’ll have contend. These we can’t predict. Will Turkey take advantage of the US departure to attack Kurdish forces in Syria? Will Israel attack Lebanon? Will the unconscionable behavior of the Iranian-backed militias in recently “liberated” areas of Iraq provoke a resurgence of Daesh2.0? Will the Taliban see the US draw-down as an opportunity and launch a Spring offensive? Will Netanyahu win again, will he be indicted, and will Palestinians react to the unbearable pressure they face at the hands of the Israeli occupation? Will the “Deal of the Century” ever see the light of day? And will Congress, as expected, continue to apply pressure Saudi Arabia, and what impact will that have on the continuing devastating war in Yemen? And then there’s China’s expansionist moves, Iran’s regional meddling, Russia’s continuing aggression in Ukraine, and what about Brexit?

The list of challenges is by no means complete, but it’s enough to cause us to know that we are hurtling into an uncertain future with good reason to be filled with apprehension.

Along the way, there will be distractions aplently. We’ll have the expected announcements of what may as many as three dozen Democratic presidential aspirants – each announcement will provide “Breaking News” for the networks. And, yes, there will be the endless stream of Trumpian tweets.

I understand the camel and I’m nervous and not a little exhausted.

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The US will withdraw her troops from Syria. Will they really? – Let’s take Trump at his word, just for argument’s sake. Though in the meantime, RT reports that the withdrawal may be slower than anticipated, to allow Erdogan making his own “strategic arrangements”, while US troops depart. During his flash visit to the US troops in Iraq on Christmas Day, Mr. Trump already indicated that any US intervention – if necessary– would be launched from Iraq. Of course.

The US will not let go of such a strategic country with access to Four Seas, as promoted by President Bashar al-Assad, linking the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf into an energy network. Washington had the full dominion of Syria in mind as the pivotal country in the Middle East, already when Washington first attempted to “negotiate” with Bashar’s dad, Háfez al-Ásad, in the late 1990s, and then after his death in 2000, the secret gnomes of Washington continued the process of coercion with Háfez’s son and heir, Bashar. To no avail, as we know.

Therefore, the question, “Will Syria ever Become a “Normal” Country Again?” – sounds almost rhetorical. Syria is one of those predestined countries to “fall”, decided by the empire, long before the ascension to the throne by Mr. Trump. Others include and are well outlined in the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) – Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon – and Iran. As we see, the plan is progressing nicely – and letting go of any of the ‘milestones’ within this plan – is simply not in the cards.

Deviations are not tolerated. That’s presumably why James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense upon Trump’s announcement to withdraw from Syria. The Pentagon has its mandate, given by the Military Industrial Complex.

So, war or peace (and war it is) has become full spectrum Pentagon territory, not to be meddled with. It has nothing to do with terrorism, or saving the world from terrorism – it is pure and simple ´calcule’for profit from the war machine, from stolen and confiscated oil and gas and, ultimately but not lastly, for full power dominance of the world. The Middle East is one of those focal points of the empire that needs to be plunged into eternal chaos.

Peace is never an option. Unless empire falls. But until then, the Middle East is a multi-purpose ‘gold mine’, in terms of resources, a test ground for the East-West arms race, a terrain for almost endless destruction – and reconstruction – and a bottomless source of a continuous and destabilizing flow of refugees to Europe. It’s all planned. No human suffering is able to halt this project – and we can but hope that Russia and China see clear on this, that they won’t fall for promises of peace, for make-believe withdrawals, for lies and deceit.

Will Syria ever become a ‘normal’ country again? – I opt for yes. But empire must fall. And fall it will. It’s a question of time and maybe strategy? – For hundreds of years, the Kurds are an ethnicity of between 25 and 35 million people. They inhabit a mountainous region straddling the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and a tiny bit of Armenia. They make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but they have never obtained a permanent nation state.Wouldn’t this rearrangement of power in Syria due to the apparent US troop withdrawals be an opportunity to find a solution for the century old Kurdish “problem”?

President Assad might seize the opportunity to accept the Kurds ‘invitation’ to enter the city of Manbij, the current Kurdish stronghold in Syria. And this despite the fact that the Kurds have often fought against the Syrian military, either alongside the US/NATO forces or alongside ISIS. It’s time to rethink geopolitics in the Middle East, beginning with Syria. After all, Manbij is Syrian territory, and Turkey has no legitimate claim on any land within Syria. Except in the case of a possible land swap.

On these grounds Syria might want to initiate negotiations with Turkey, Iraq and Iran to finally establish within the borders of Syria and Iraq (and Iran, as it were), some kind of a Kurdish territory which might over time become a fully autonomous Kurdish Homeland, what today is already called, Kurdistan. Much like Israel was carved out of Palestine, except that Israel was an artificial creation, commanded by outside forces, with the specific purpose already 70 years ago to destabilize the region. Whereas Kurdistan would be a stabilizing factor, a natural process facilitated by the countries within the region.

There are, of course, other players with high stakes in this peace process, like Russia, Turkey and Iraq – and the two rogue nations, paradoxically bound together, Israel and Saudia Arabia. Two nations that have no right whatsoever to even come close to Syria. But they continue having US support, even with the apparent US withdrawal from Syria, or because of it, as they will now play the role of US proxies in fighting Mr. Assad’s legitimate regime.

Russia would most likely prefer no Turkish interference in Syria, for example the occupation of Manbij, but would rather see Syrian control of Syrian territory with negotiated land swap deals with neighboring countries, especially Turkey and Iraq, to bring eventually the Kurdish question to a solution. That is of course just the beginning. The easy part.

The current semi-offical Kurdistan is one of the oil richest territories of the region. At present these oil resources are divided more or less along the border divisions of Kurdistan, i.e. Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. For these countries hydrocarbon is a key factor in their economy. Therefore, the creation of an autonomous region within Syria, Iraq and Iran, called Kurdistan, might require not only an honest process and equitable division of the Black Gold, but also a withdrawal of Trukey from Kurdistan, i.e. through a land swap. The development towards a sovereign Kurdistan – no time frame might at this point be suggested – would require Kurdish concessions. In other words, peace and homeland have a price. However, this price will never even come close to the benefits of independence and peace.

At present, Kurdistan’s oil reserves are estimated at 45 billion gallon, almost a third of Iraq’s total untapped 150 billion gallons of petrol. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), with her capital, Erbil in Iraq (pop. about 900,000), would of course prefer becoming an independent state. But that is just not going to happen out of the blue. Therefore, peace in the region and a Kurdish Homeland is worth a negotiated land and petrol concession. And when would be a better moment for such thoughts and negotiations than NOW?

There are other signs that Syria is in the process of becoming a “normal” country again. The re-opening of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) embassy in Syria, may be considered a major public step to welcoming Bashar al-Assad back into the fold of the Arab League, from which Syria was banned at the beginning of the 2011 CIA induced war on Mr. Assad’s government. Bahrain has also announced it will reopen shortly diplomatic relations with Damascus. Is this move by the UAE and Bahrain the first step of a new “Arab solidarity”? – In any case, it signals a new recognition of Syria under President Assad.

With Syria becoming a fully autonomous and sovereign country again, where diplomatic missions are being re-established and where refugees return to help rebuild their nation, and where a new Kurdistan, may just be the dot bringing peace and stability to the region. Though that may succeed only without any Atlantist interference – being handled only as a regional project.

A last thought for those who are shaking their heads in disbelief, because of the political and economic volatility of Kurdistan, due to her exorbitant oil riches which are currently spread among four countries – listen! – peak oil is a thing of the past.

Hydrocarbons are rather rapidly being replaced as the key energy provider by alternative sources of energy, of which the Middle East also has plenty, but which cannot be stolen – solar energy. The East, foremost China, is rapidly developing new and more efficient ways of transferring sun light into electricity, with the appropriate storage technology that may make it possible to largely phase out hydrocarbons within the next generation.

Hence, the momentum is NOW – US troop withdrawals – to create a stabilizing Kurdistan and make Syria a “normal country again.

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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.

The year 2019 begins with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 2.0 already standing exposed as another corporate trade agreement with no one, including union leaders, having paid attention to what has just happened with respect to it. Specifically, the highly praised Labour chapter to the new trade agreement (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) that was formally signed in Buenos Aires on November 30 concluded with the following declaration. “It is the expectation of the Parties that Mexico shall adopt legislation described above before January 1, 2019. It is further understood that entry into force of the agreement may be delayed until such legislation becomes effective.”

The legislation described above in the Labour chapter would make sweeping improvements to Mexico’s labour laws and practices. It would give all Mexican workers meaningful free collective bargaining rights and the right to belong to labour organizations truly of their own and which would negotiate transparent collective bargaining agreements subject to their ratification. These anticipated improvements would end the prevalent ‘yellow’ unionism in Mexico in which fake unions legally exist in workplaces but do the bidding of their employers via protection contracts imposed on the workers they illegitimately claim to represent.

Promises made. Promises unkept.

No new labour legislation has been passed into law as of January 1, 2019 in Mexico let alone legislation making such sweeping, positive changes. Worse still, there are no indications whatsoever that Mexico’s new, ostensibly leftist government has any plans to enact such new legislation at any time in the foreseeable future. The implications of this are quite revealing and far reaching.

That this has not occurred nor is about to occur anytime soon is in fact wholly in line with the entirety of the provisions set out in NAFTA 2.0’s Labour chapter. This is readily apparent precisely because the Labour chapter is effectively meaningless and in practice represents a continuation of what was in the original NAFTA which came into force at the beginning of 1994. This destroys Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s facile claim that NAFTA 2.0 has some of the strongest labour provisions of any trade agreement Canada has ever signed.

The 1994 NAFTA had both labour and environmental side agreements. These agreements were mere window dressing. They only committed the parties to the agreement to live up to the requirements of their respective labour laws and they failed to do that. Those, like members of the San Antonio, Texas based Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, who filed complaints under these NAFTA side agreements learned that filing a complaint was a worthless exercise in futility.

Window Dressing

The same can be expected with respect to the provisions of the Labour chapter in NAFTA 2.0. This is the case because the provisions set out in it are effectively no more than guidelines. No mechanism has been put in place for ongoing monitoring of the chapter’s guidelines and if these guidelines are violated there is no mechanism in place to meaningfully enforce them let alone swiftly enforce them. In effect, the provisions are again window dressing for a trade agreement which does what the same corporations whose interests were so well served by the 1994 NAFTA really want. It guarantees these corporations their highly desired access to a North American market subject to rules that generally serve them well. Accordingly, it is no wonder that NAFTA 2.0 has earned the praise of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland.

The provisions of the Labour chapter provide for the creation of a Labour Council. This misnamed Labour Council will be comprised of senior representatives of the three governments which are signatories to NAFTA 2.0. The council is formally tasked with ostensibly overseeing and administering the provisions of the Labour chapter. But it is telling indeed that this body given these tasks is only expected to meet every two years unless the Parties decide otherwise.

Most significantly, the Labour chapter stipulates that all of its decisions and reports “shall be made by consensus.” This could not be more revealing. This effectively means that any dispute that might go before it can only be resolved by consensus among the parties including whichever party or government the dispute is made against. If there ever was a procedural formula for contentious issues to quietly go away and die on the vine this is it.

As was the case with the 1994 NAFTA this assurance, in practical terms, of non-enforcement goes hand in hand with each party again only being expected to comply with and enforce its own labour laws. The prohibition of anything beyond that is explicit. The Labour chapter states in no uncertain terms, “Nothing in this Chapter shall be construed to empower a Party’s authorities to undertake labour law enforcement activities in the territory of another Party.” Consequently, if Mexico’s labour laws are not overhauled, as the Labour chapter anticipated they would be, and continue, as they have since 1994, to be widely unenforced thereby benefiting employers, nothing really can or will be done about it. Simply stated, this is a prescription for more of the same of what workers across North America have experienced since NAFTA went into effect in 1994.

Auto Sector Provisions

These pronounced shortcomings of NAFTA 2.0 cast a long, dark shadow over the auto provisions of the trade agreement which some have naively claimed comprise great progress for autoworkers. Canadian autoworkers should find it particularly hard to take NAFTA 2.0’s auto provisions seriously given that the Canadian government has also signed onto the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which contains a weak 45% automotive content provision. Indeed, no one has yet clarified either how this 45% automotive content provision can be reconciled with the higher automotive content provisions of NAFTA 2.0 or if they cannot be reconciled which of the two agreements provisions will take precedence. These are critically important questions that demand answers. To date they have been met with deafening silence by all concerned.

More specifically, quite unlike the TPP, NAFTA 2.0 provides for a 75% North American content requirement as opposed to the 62.5% content requirement in the NAFTA of 1994 with North America including Mexico. Even if this increase is adhered to, it is quite modest. For example, had NAFTA 2.0 already been in place the new, higher North American content requirement would have not been an obstacle to GM’s current plans to close auto assembly plants (four in the USA and one in Canada) while not affecting any of their Mexican facilities. In the face of this hard reality Chrystia Freeland’s declaration that NAFTA 2.0 assures Canadian auto producers “preferential access to the U.S. market” must ring rather hollow for the workers at GM of Canada who are about to lose their jobs.

Then there is the claim that by 2024 40% of cars and 45% of trucks must be sourced from high wage facilities in North America meaning facilities where workers are paid $16.00 (U.S.) an hour. Assuming this is done it is worth pointing out that $16.00 (U.S.) an hour will be worth substantially less by 2024 given certain increases in the cost of living over the next five years. Even then who is to say that Mexican auto employers will not be inclined to pay the nominal 2.5% tariffs on cars entering the U.S. rather than sharply increasing the wages of their workers. Furthermore, in the absence of the anticipated labour law changes necessary to truly empower Mexican workers and end yellow unionism how will Mexican auto and auto parts workers ever be able to strive for wages equivalent to $16.00 (U.S.) an hour? They simply will not be able to.

A Better Deal for Who?

Arguably this can be said to be a better deal for some, like American dairy producers, who are gaining substantially more access to Canadian markets and to pharmaceutical corporations who will reap more profits from the extension of drug patents. But it does nothing for workers. To the contrary, it perpetuates the trade regime which has so adversely affected workers in all three countries over the last 25 years.

In view of these things, and measures like the indefinite continuation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, there is no reason for workers to support NAFTA 2.0. Accordingly, a failure to seriously resist NAFTA 2.0’s passage into law in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will amount to capitulation and the acceptance of an agreement that by design, like the original NAFTA, intrinsically serves the interests of Capital. There must be nothing less than coordinated and protracted resistance to NAFTA 2.0 across North America to stop it.

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Bruce Allen is a former Vice-President of CAW Local 199 (now Unifor).

Featured image is from The Bullet

Wednesday night, as he went to Paris’s Concord Square to light candles to commemorate “yellow vest” protesters who have died during the movement, police arrested Eric Drouet. The pretext for this arrest, which tramples underfoot the constitutionally protected right to protest, was that this gathering had not been declared previously at the police prefecture. Drouet had called for a gathering on Concord Square in a Facebook video.

Surrounded by sympathizers, Drouet was first trapped and then grabbed by the police and finally carted off amid cries of “Shame!”, “Dictatorship!” and “Bastards!” from the crowd. He was placed in preventive detention, while other protesters were arrested for identity checks.

Drouet’s lawyer Khéops Lara denounced “a completely unjustified and arbitrary arrest,” which leaves Drouet facing up to six months in jail and a €7,500 fine. Lara explained:

“His ‘crime’ was to place candles (…) on Concord Square in Paris to commemorate the fallen ‘yellow vests’ who died from various causes during protests and blockades of highway intersections. Then he wanted to come together with a few friends and loved ones in a private area, a restaurant, to discuss and share viewpoints.”

The Paris prosecutor’s office alleges that Drouet organized “a demonstration without prior notification.” Junior Minister Olivier Dussopt told BFMTV:

“When you don’t play by the rules, it’s normal to pay the price.”

These accusations are absurd and point to the malignant growth of the police state in France. Drouet was not organizing a mass demonstration, which are often declared in police prefectures, but a meeting of a few individuals—which the state now is asserting it can ban.

Lara demanded an end to Drouet’s preventive detention, which the prosecutor’s office refused, and added:

“With the propaganda campaign against Eric Drouet vomited up by the police, the media and the politicians, the men and women of France’s lower classes are being insulted.”

The ruling class is indeed launching a signal: it intends to persecute all acts of genuine political opposition, even those protected by law, with its police machine. Faced with rising social anger among workers in France and internationally, who also oppose the union bureaucracies that have traditionally controlled and strangled working-class protests and strikes, the ruling class is reacting with repression. Beyond hordes of riot police and armored vehicles, it is using the pseudo-judicial lynching of prominent opposition figures.

Drouet has served as a spokesman for sections of the “yellow vest” movement opposed to French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to strangle the movement with sterile offers of talks. With Priscilla Ludosky, Drouet met Ecology Minister François de Rugy on November 28 to represent the “yellow vests” in talks with the government. Drouet brought down on him the hatred of the government and the media by turning down de Rugy’s offer, saying it did not satisfy the demands of the “yellow vests.”

Since then, Drouet has been the target of escalating police repression that is aimed ultimately at crushing and sidelining all members of the movement who emerge as obstacles to the state’s attempts to break up and demoralize the protests with offers of fruitless talks.

Drouet’s latest arrest provoked broad anger among the “yellow vests.” Already they have organized crowd-funding campaigns to finance Drouet’s legal expenses in the various cases concocted against him by the security forces.

In early December, as the growing movement faced ferocious repression of the Saturday protests, Drouet was placed in preventive detention and his home was targeted for a police search. He was accused of “provocation of the commission of a crime or misdemeanor” and “organizing an illicit protest.” The sole basis for these charges was that he had declared, during an interview with journalists on BFMTV, that he would like to go into the Elysée presidential palace.

On December 8, Drouet was arrested during the fourth weekend of protests in Paris, supposedly for “bearing a banned weapon of category D,” that is, a piece of wood, according to press reports, and for “participation in a grouping formed to commit violence or damages.” Drouet is to be tried for these charges on June 5.

This relentless targeting of Drouet underscores yet again that Macron and the European Union have no intention of responding to the demands of the “yellow vests” or of workers in struggle across Europe. The Macron government, isolated and hated by masses of workers, is terrified by the “yellow vest” movement. Yet in response, it is proposing only to step up the policies of austerity and militarism that intensify social inequality and provoked the opposition of the “yellow vests.”

In his New Year’s wishes on December 31, Macron insisted he would continue his social cuts targeting pensions, unemployment insurance and public sector wage levels. He also denounced the criticisms of his presidency formulated by the “yellow vests,” lecturing the French people: “Dignity, my dear fellow citizens, is also respecting everyone. And I must say, I have seen unimaginable things in recent times and heard the unacceptable.”

This is the dictatorial language of a banker-president who claimed at the time of his election that France lacks a king, and who now seems to want to apply for that position, despite the opposition of an overwhelming majority of the French population to his policies.

The task of defeating the persecution of Drouet falls to the working class. More than 70 percent of French people support the “yellow vests,” who have evoked broad sympathy from workers around the world. But the established political parties and the union bureaucracies, totally integrated into the state and already furious that the “yellow vests” have outflanked them, are violently hostile. They aim to nip in the bud the struggles in the working class that break out against Macron.

The way forward is to take the struggle out of their hands, mobilizing ever-larger sections of workers independently of, and against, the union bureaucracies in France and across Europe, in defense of democratic and social rights.

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Featured image is from WSWS

This week I published a column on how the Democratic Party seems to have jettisoned many of its defining values to simply become the anti-Trump party. The best example of that transformation is the automatic opposition to Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria and other countries. At the same time, liberal media outlets like CNN and MSNBC have been airing continual experts denouncing the “hasty” withdrawal.

Now veteran NBC award-winning journalist William Arkin has resigned in protest of what he says is the unrelenting support of the network for endless wars. He notes that the anti-Trump agenda at the network has overwhelmed what used to be critical coverage of “the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness.” Now the reflective anti-Trump response at the network has overwhelmed all such considerations, according to Arkin. While Arkin calls Trump “an ignorant and incompetent impostor,” he cites the transformation of NBC into an opposition network as the main reason for his departure.

In my recent speech at the Newseum, I raised the same issue over the change in national media coverage. While praising the investigative reporting of various outlets, I objected to the raw advocacy that you now see from hosts in being live and immediate opposition talking points against new developments in the Administration.

Arkin objected to the same pattern at NBC. In his email, Arkin states that he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years” as a military analyst and became “an often lone voice that was anti-nuclear and even anti-military, anti-military for me meaning opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers.” He added;

He specifically notes the reflective opposition to Trump as pushing NBC into the role of an advocate for endless war:

I do not know Arkin but his email again raises a rarely acknowledged concern in the mainstream media over the change in the tenor and balance of our coverage. Trump has changed not just the Democratic Party but the media — untethering both from core defining values.

Click here for William M Arkin’s full email.

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Trump’s possible backtracking on withdrawal from Syria means he may have been once again outmaneuvered by the Deep State, says Virginia State Senator Dick Black. 

Following the outcry after President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was pulling U.S. troops from Syria, it appears that Trump may be succumbing to political pressure. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) visited the White House on Dec. 30 and afterward told reporters:  

“We talked about Syria. He told me some things I didn’t know that made me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria,” Graham said.  Trump’s withdrawal plans are “slowing down in a smart way,” Graham said, according to NBC News.

The Washington Post added:

”‘Graham described Trump’s decision as ‘a pause situation’ rather than a withdrawal, telling reporters, “I think the president’s taking this really seriously.”  

Graham said:

“He promised to destroy ISIS. He’s going to keep that promise. We’re not there yet. But as I said today, we’re inside the 10-yard line, and the president understands the need to finish the job.”

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The mainstream media refuses to acknowledge that the hardest fighting against ISIS and al Qaeda has been done by Syria and its allies.  Indeed, we label Iran’s fight against Syrian terrorists as “malign activity,” ignoring the fact that al Qaeda in Syria [al Nusra] is the progeny of the al Qaeda force that highjacked jets and flew them into the Twin Towers and Pentagon, killing 3,000 Americans on 9-11.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Seymour Hersh, wrote that a Defense Intelligence Agency review of Syrian policy in 2013 revealed that clandestine CIA Program Timber Sycamore, had degenerated into a program that armed all terrorists indiscriminately, specifically including ISIS and al Qaeda.  I seriously doubt that this was merely a program failure.  There is strong evidence that the U.S. planned to overthrow Syria in 2001; the U.S. Embassy in Damascus issued a detailed strategy to destabilize Syria in 2006–long before the so-called “Arab Spring;” and that our focus has consistently been on toppling the duly elected, constitutional and UN-recognized government of Syria.

It’s sickening to hear these clowns repeatedly claim that “Assad murdered 500,000 of his people,” as though the U.S.-backed terrorists have played no role in the killings.  I’ve viewed hundreds of beheadings and crucifixions online but none committed by Syria troops–all were proudly posted by the hellish filth that we’ve recruited, armed and trained for the past eight years.  Major war crimes, like beheading 250 Syrian soldiers after running them across the desert in their underpants, were scarcely mentioned by the MSM.

During a five-hour drive across liberated Syria this September, I spoke with many people, from desert shepherds, to nuns and Muslim religious.  There were palpable expressions of joy that the Syrian armed forces had liberated them from the terrorists.  That was coupled with broad-based, unequivocal support for President Bashar al Assad and the Syrian Armed Forces.

This disastrous war would never have occurred without American planning and execution.  And it would have ended years and hundreds of thousands of casualties ago had we closed our training and logistics bases in Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  The Syrian War had little to do with the “Arab Spring” and much to do with clandestine actions of CIA, MI-6, Mossad, Turkish MIT, French DGSE, Saudi GID and others, working with the savage Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.  We trained and recruited far more terrorists than we killed, and we will encounter those survivors again, at other times and places.

It is instructive that, despite President Donald Trump’s strong directive on a rapid Syrian pull-out, apparently not one soldier or Marine has departed Syria.  And the argument that they’re tied up with fighting ISIS doesn’t hold water.  On Syria’s southern border, across from Jordan, lies the U.S. base at al Tanf.  ISIS is nowhere around.  Al Tanf’s sole purpose is to hold and defend the sovereign territory of Syria (using a 55 km no-fly zone).  It denies Syria the right to restore order and provide aid to starving Syrians trapped in the American zone.

Al Tanf is the canary in the Syrian coal mine.  If Trump’s pullout has any credibility, the 800 or so troops and equipment assigned there could be withdrawn across the Jordanian border within 24 hours.  Their failure to do so suggests duplicity by our foreign policy shadow government.  The Pentagon seems unresponsive to the Commander-in-Chief, and he has surrounded himself with advisors whose allegiance does not lie with him–or with the American people.

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Republican Senator Richard H. Black represents the 13th district of Virginia, encompassing parts of both Loudoun and Prince Williams Counties in northern Virginia.

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It is customary to speak of Western countries as democracies. In actual fact, the countries are oligarchies in which voting, which conveys the semblance that government is accountable to the people, seldom changes anything as elected officials are constrained by the power of organized interest groups. President Trump is the latest example. He has been blocked in his goal of reducing tensions with Russia.

The European Union has been an anti-democratic undertaking from the beginning. Deception was the method. At first it was a free trade zone. Then a common currency. Then unified fiscal policies which means centralization and political union with formerly sovereign countries becoming provinces in a European government. Countries that voted down joining were subjected to threats and browbeating and forced to vote again by which time the media had convinced the people that they had no alternative to joining or they would be “left behind” in a backwater existence.

Despite the facts, politicians maintained the fiction that EU member countries remained democratic and responsive to the will of their citizens. German Chancellor Merkel, who ended her career by her unilateral decision to impose a million or more illegal Third World immigrants on Germans and Germans’ resources, destroyed this fiction.

Merkel clearly does not care what the German people think. She revealed again her total distain for democracy at a recent event of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin where she condemned those who think political leaders should listen to the will of the people. The German people, she said, are just “individuals who are living in a country; they do not define the German people.” The German people are whoever migrates to Germany as a result of the UN Migration Pact that she signed despite its rejection by the German citizens of Germany. “Nation states,” Merkel declared, “must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty.” Politicians must not listen, she said, to the will of their citizens when it comes to questions of immigration, borders, and sovereignty.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, backed her up. Macron declared that French “nationalism is treason.” In other words, it is treason to think that France is French. Patriotism, Macron said, is inclusion of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into France. The way for the French to gain sovereignty is to surrender their sovereignty to the EU in Belgium and give up all control, not that any currently exists, over foreign affairs, migration, and budetary and fiscal policy.

Merkel and Macron speak of the submission of Germany and France to the New World Order, but they do not say what they understand the New World Order to be. Their words indicate that one of its features is the replacement of the German and French populations and cultures with those of the Third World, as in The Camp of the Saints.

In the US the New World Order means US hegemony over the world. The neoconservatives, who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime, believe that the US is “the indispensable nation” with the right and the responsibility to impose its ways on the world.

The globalist corporations understand the New World Order to be their immunity to laws of sovereign countries.

Others see the New World Order to be a Rothschild or other Jewish conspiracy to control the world economy and bleed it for their profits.

With so many different meanings, it is difficult to see which conspiracy against national existence is the threat. Or is it all of them?

Nevertheless, in the Western world, nationalism, the traditional basis of patriotism, now means, thanks to Identity Politics, “white supremacy.” According to Identity Politics, the ruling ideology in the US, white people must be disempowered and subjected to punishments for the assortment of crimes attributed to them.

Therefore, the views in the US, France, and Germany come to the same conclusion: white people are guilty and must give up their country to others. Any protests of this outlandish requirement is proof that whites should be strung up, and they likely will be with the support of their own governments. Do we see the first signs of it here? Will this, and this, and this, lead to this?

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Sources

https://www.kas.de/veranstaltungsberichte/detail/-/content/-das-herz-der-demokratie-

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-27/angela-merkel-nation-states-must-give-sovereignty-new-world-order

https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/11/merkel-nation-states-must-today-be-prepared-to-give-up-their-sovereignty/

Featured image is from Vox

Two terrible wars, two mighty destructions, but two absolutely opposite outcomes.

In Syria, it may be autumn now, but almost the entire country is blossoming again, literally rising from ashes. Two thousand miles east from there, Afghanistan is smashed against its ancient rocks, bleeding and broken. There, it does not really matter what season it is; life is simply dreadful and hope appears to be in permanent exile.

Damascus, the ancient and splendid capital of Syria, now the Syrian Arab Republic, is back to life again. People go out until late at night, there are events; there is music and vibrant social life. Not all, but many are smiling again. Checkpoints are diminishing, and now one does not even have to go through metal detectors in order to enter museums, cafes and some of the international hotels.

The people of Damascus are optimistic, some of them are ecstatic. They fought hard, they lost hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, but they won! They finally won, against all odds, supported by their true friends and comrades. They are proud of what they have achieved, and rightly so!

Humiliated on so many occasions, for so long, the Arab people suddenly rose and demonstrated to the world and to themselves that they can defeat invaders, no matter how powerful they are; no matter how canny and revolting their tactics are. As I wrote on several previous occasions, Aleppo is the ‘Stalingrad of the Middle East’. It is a mighty symbol. There, fascism and imperialism were stopped. Unsurprisingly, because of its stamina, courage and aptitude, the center of Pan-Arabism – Syria – has become, once again, the most important country for the freedom-loving people of the region.

Syria has many friends, among them China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. But the most determined of them, the most reliable, remains Russia.

The Russians stood by its historical ally, even when things looked bad, almost hopeless; even when the terrorists trained and implanted into Syria by the West, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, were flattening entire ancient cities, and millions of refugees flowing out of the country, through the all seven gates of Damascus, and from all major cities, as well as towns and villages.

The Russians worked hard, often ‘behind the scenes’; on the diplomatic front, but also on the frontlines, providing essential air support, de-mining entire neighborhoods, helping with food supplies, logistics, strategy. Russians died in Syria, we do not know the precise numbers, but there definitely were casualties; some even say, ‘substantial’. However, Russia never waved its flag, never beat its chest in self-congratulatory gestures. What had to be done, was done, as an internationalist duty; quietly, proudly and with great courage and determination.

The Syrian people know all this; they understand, and they are grateful. For both nations, words are not necessary; at least not now. Their deep fraternal alliance is sealed. They fought together against darkness, terror and neo-colonialism, and they won.

When Russian military convoys pass through Syrian roads, there is no security. They stop at local eateries to refresh themselves, they talk to locals. When Russian people walk through Syrian cities, they feel no fear. They are not seen or treated as a ‘foreign military force’. They are now part of Syria. They are part of the family. Syrians make them feel at home.

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In Kabul, I always face walls. Walls are all around me; concrete walls, as well as barbed wire.

Some walls are as tall as 4-5 storey buildings, with watchtowers on every corner, outfitted with bulletproof glass.

Local people, pedestrians, look like sleep-walkers. They are resigned. They are used to those hollow barrels of guns pointed at their heads, chests, feet, even at their children.

Almost everyone here is outraged by the occupation, but no one knows what to do; how to resist. The NATO invasion force is both brutal and overwhelming; its commanders and soldiers are cold, calculating, and merciless, obsessed with protecting themselves and only themselves.

Heavily armored British and US military convoys are ready to shoot at ‘anything that moves’ even in a vaguely hostile fashion.

Afghan people get killed, almost all of them‘surgically’ or ‘remotely’. Western lives are ‘too precious’ for engaging in honest man-to-man combat. Slaughtering is done by drones, by ‘smart bombs’, or by shooting from those monstrous vehicles that crisscross Afghan cities and the countryside.

During this outrageous occupation, it matters nil how many Afghan civilians get killed, as long as the US or European lives get spared. Most of the Western soldiers deployed in Afghanistan are professionals. They are not defending their country. They are paid to do ‘their job’, efficiently, at any price. And of course, “Safety First”. Safety for themselves.

After the West occupied Afghanistan in 2001, between 100,000 and 170,000 Afghan civilians have been killed. Millions were forced to leave their country as refugees. Afghanistan now ranks second from the bottom (after Yemen) in Asia, on the HDI list (Human Development Index, compiled by UNDP). Its life expectancy is the lowest in Asia (WHO).

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I work in both Syria and Afghanistan, and consider it my duty to point at the differences between two countries, and these two wars.

Both Syria and Afghanistan were attacked by the West. One resisted and won, the other one was occupied by mainly North American and European forces, and consequently destroyed.

After working in some 160 countries on this planet, and after covering and witnessing countless wars and conflicts (most of them ignited or provoked by the West and its allies), I can clearly see the pattern: almost all the countries that fell into the ‘Western sphere of influence’are now ruined, plundered and destroyed; they are experiencing great disparities between the tiny number of ‘elites’ (individuals who collaborate with the West) and the great majority of those who live in poverty. Most of the countries with close ties to Russia or China (or both), are prospering and developing, enjoying self-governance and respect for their cultures, political systems, and economic structures.

It is only because of the corporate mass media and biased education system, as well as the almost fully pro-Western orientation of the ‘social media’, that these shocking contrasts between two blocs (yes, we have two major blocs of countries, again) are not constantly highlighted and discussed.

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During my recent visit to Syria, I spoke to many people living in Damascus, Homs, and Ein Tarma.

What I witnessed could be often described as“joy through tears”. The price of victory has been steep. But joy it is, nevertheless. The unity of the Syrian people and their government is obvious and remarkable.

Anger towards the ‘rebels’ and towards the West is ubiquitous. I will soon describe the situation in my upcoming reports. But this time, I only wanted to compare the situation in two cities, two countries and two wars.

In Damascus, I feel like writing poetry, again. In Kabul, I am only inspired to write a long and depressing obituary.

I love both of these ancient cities, but of course, I love them differently.

Frankly speaking, in the 18 years of Western occupation, Kabul has been converted into a militarized, fragmented and colonized hell on earth. Everybody knows it: the poor know it, and even the government is aware of it.

In Kabul, entire neighborhoods already ‘gave up’. They are inhabited by individuals who are forced to live in gutters, or under bridges. Many of those people are stoned, hooked on locally made narcotics, the production of which is supported by the Western occupation armies. I saw and photographed a US military base openly surrounded by poppy plantations. I heard testimonies of local people, about the British military engaging in negotiations, and cooperating with the local narco-mafias.

Now the Western embassies, NGO’s and ‘international organizations’ operating in Afghanistan, have managed to intellectually and morally corrupt and indoctrinate a substantial group of local people, who are receiving scholarship, getting ‘trained’ in Europe, and are tugging the official line of the occupiers.

They are working day and night to legitimize the nightmare into which their country has been tossed.

But older people who still remember both the Soviet era and socialist Afghanistan, are predominantly ‘pro-Russian’, mourning in frustration those days of Afghan liberation, progress, and determined building of the nation. ‘Soviet’ bread factories, water channels, pipelines, electric high-voltage towers, and schools are still used to this day, all over the country. While, gender equality, secularism, and the anti-feudalist struggle of those days are now, during the Western occupation, de facto illegal.

Afghans are known to be proud and determined people. But now their pride has been broken, while determination has been drowned in the sea of pessimism and depression. The Western occupation did not bring peace, it did not bring prosperity, independence of democracy (if democracy is understood as the ‘rule of the people’).

These days, the biggest dream of a young man or woman in Kabul is to serve the occupiers – to get ‘educated’ in a Western-style school, and to get a job at a US embassy or at one of the UN agencies.

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In Damascus, everyone is now talking about the rebuilding of the nation.

‘How and when will the damaged neighborhoods be rebuilt? Is the pre-war construction of the metro going to resume anytime soon? Is life going to be better than before?’

People cannot wait. I witnessed families, communities, restoring their own buildings, houses and streets.

Yes, in Damascus I saw true revolutionary optimism in action, optimism which I described in my recent book Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”. Because the Syrian state itself is now, once again, increasingly revolutionary. The so-called ‘opposition’ has been mostly nothing else other than a Western-sponsored subversion; an attempt to take Syria back to the dark days of colonialism.

Damascus and the Syrian government do not need tremendous walls, enormous spy blimps levitating in the sky; they do not need armored vehicles at every corner and the omnipresent SUV’s with deadly machine guns.

On the other hand, the occupiers of Kabul need all those deadly symbols of power in order to maintain control. Still they cannot scare people into supporting or loving them.

In Damascus, I simply walked into the office of my fellow novelist, who happened to be the Syrian Minister of Education. In Kabul, I often have to pass through metal detectors even when I just want to visit a toilet.

In Damascus, there is hope, and life, at every corner. Cafes are packed, people talk, argue, laugh together, and smoke waterpipes. Museums and libraries are full of people too. The Opera House is performing; the zoo is flourishing, all despite the war, despite all the difficulties.

In Kabul, life stopped. Except for the traffic, and for traditional markets. Even the National Museum is now a fortress, and as a result, almost no one can be found inside.

People in Damascus are not too familiar with what goes on in Kabul. But they know plenty about Baghdad, Tripoli and Gaza. And they would rather die than allow themselves to be occupied by the West or its implants.

Two wars, two fates, two totally distinct cities.

The seven gates of Damascus are wide open. Refugees are returning from all directions, from all corners of the world. It is time for reconciliation, for rebuilding the nation, for making Syria even greater than it was before the conflict.

Kabul, often rocked by explosions, is fragmented by horrid walls. Engines of helicopters are roaring above. Blimps with their deadly eyes monitoring everything on the ground. Drones, tanks, huge armored vehicles. Beggars, homeless people, slums. Huge Afghan flag flying above Kabul. A ‘modified flag’, not the same as in the socialist past.

In Syria, finally the united nation has managed to defeat imperialism, fanaticism and sectarianism.

In Afghanistan, the nation got divided, then humiliated, then stripped of its former glory.

Damascus belongs to its people. In Kabul, people are dwarfed by concrete walls and military bases erected by foreign invaders.

In Damascus, people were fighting, even dying for their country and their city.

In Kabul, people are scared to even speak about fighting for freedom.

Damascus won. It is free again.

Kabul will win, too. Perhaps not today, not this year, but it will. I believe it will.

I love both cities. But one is now celebrating, while the other one is still suffering, in unimaginable pain.

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Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from NEO

It did not take long for the market to flush today, when after a tentative drop following last night’s AAPL revenue guidance cut and the FX multi-flash crash, stocks took lows with the Dow plunging over 650 points this morning following the abysmal ISM Manufacturing report which showed that US mfg sentiment in December tumbled the most since October 2008.

Today’s drop has pushed the Dow to below the Dec 26 closing level, which preceded the historic 1000 point Dow move on December 27. Come to think of it, we are about 350 points from another 4-digit move in the Dow Jones, only this time to the downside.

While the S&P 500 fell more than 2%, today’s broad-based drop is being led by the Nasdaq, which is down over 3%, largely due to the Apple fiasco, which dragged the stock more than 10% lower, its biggest drop in over 5 years.

Other notable decliners include (per Bloomberg):

• All 30 chipmakers in the Philadelphia Semi index fell, with Qorvo, Skyworks and Broadcom off at least 4.5 percent.
• 3M, Caterpillar and DowDuPont dropped at least 3 percent.
• Bristol-Myers plunged 12 percent, while Celgene jumped 28 percent.
• Carmakers reported monthly sales; GM and Ford both retreated.
• Airlines tumbled after Delta cut its revenue forecast. American was off 9.5 percent.

“That Tim Cook and his company mentioned China as the reason behind the downturn in the company’s outlook seemed to hit exactly the pressure point traders and investors were already alarmed over,” Greg McKenna, markets strategist at McKenna Macro wrote in a client note. “That is, the China and global slowdown which seems to have been confirmed by Wednesday’s global manufacturing PMI data” and Thursday’s US ISm report.

A modest boost to stocks from Bristol-Myers’ bid to buy Celgene and a strong ADP print quickly faded after the dismal ISM report hit at 10am.

Stocks weren’t the only thing in freefall: so are Treasury yields led by the belly, with the 10Y tumbling below 2.60%, and down the 2.57% last, the lowest level since January 2018. In fact, today’s sharp move can best be compared to a car crash, if only for the TSY shorts.

Meanwhile, the 1Y yield is just 2bps away from surpassing the yield on the 10Y in today’s curve inversion watch.

Finally, with US recession fears front and center, the US Dollar is also tumbling while gold is surging.

And with everything going to hell in a hand basket, gold is just waiting for the right moment to pounce.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge

Macron terms yellow vest leaders ‘hateful mob’ in combative New Year’s address

Emmanuel Macron last night delivered a combative New Year’s address, vowing to push forward with economic reforms despite two-month long protests from what he termed a “hateful mob”.

The French President, whose televised address was broadcast from the Elysee Palace, acknowledged that “anger over injustices” lay behind the yellow vest movement that has scarred his second-year in office.

He said: “Ultraliberal and financial capitalism, too often guided by short term interests, is heading towards its demise.”

Read more here.

France: ‘Yellow Vests’ call protest on New Year’s Eve

]

Source: Ruptly

Les Gilets Jaunes fêtent le nouvel an 2019 sur les Champs Élysées.

Source: TV Patriotes

Yellow Vests and Police Share New Year’s Hugs in Paris

Source: Storyful Rights Management

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Our thanks to Defend Democracy Press which brought these reports to our attention

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Dear Readers,

More than ever, Global Research needs your support. Our task as an independent media is to “Battle the Lie”.

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While “Truth” is a powerful instrument, “the Lie” is generously funded by the lobby groups and corporate charities. And that is why we need the support of our readers.

Search engines and social media categorization highlight the corporate media narrative at the expense of critical analysis, which means that our content in their search results and news feeds is being pushed down.

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Syria: The Western Rogue States Must Confess Their Crimes Against Humanity and be Held Accountable

By Vanessa Beeley, January 03, 2019

The West and its allies in the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel have waged an eight year war against the Syrian people. The West has besieged, starved and deprived the Syrian people of humanitarian aid while pouring “aid” into the areas controlled by their extremist sectarian proxy armies.

More Reckless Behavior by Israel: Netanyahu Plays by His Own Rules. Christmas Day Air Raids against Syria

By Philip Giraldi, January 03, 2019

As has become the normal practice, Christmas Day’s air raid by Israel directed against targets near Damascus was largely ignored by the US media. Given the fact that Israel has bombed Syria more than two hundred times, the attack itself, which wounded three soldiers at a warehouse, was not particularly notable.

Liberté, Égalité, Impérialisme! Vive la France in Black Africa!

By Ann Garrison, January 03, 2019

Geopolitics trumped international justice again—just in time for Christmas. On December 21, a French court closed the long-running case against Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his inner circle for assassinating Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994, when a surface-to-air missile downed their plane over Rwanda’s capital Kigali.

The Atomic Bombing of Japan, Reconsidered

By Alan Mosley, January 03, 2019

Harry Truman never expressed regret publicly over his decision to use the atomic bombs. However, he did order an independent study on the state of the war effort leading up to August of 1945, and the strategic value of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Trump Bows to Domestic Pressure by Delaying His Withdrawal from Syria; A Storm Is Gathering in the Levant

By Elijah J. Magnier, January 03, 2019

In response to domestic pressure, Trump agreed to extend the deadline for withdrawal of thousands of US troops from the northeaster Syrian province of al-Hasaka from the initial 30 days previously announced until April this year.

Why France’s Yellow Vest Protests Have Been Ignored by “The Resistance” in the U.S.

By Max Parry, January 03, 2019

In less than two months, the yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowing President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Hidden Structure of US Empire

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, January 03, 2019

The flags flying over the guard gate of the prison in Lukavica were those of Bosnia and the European Union, and the US was officially involved in the imprisonment of the men there only through diplomatic channels, generous funding and the assistance of American trainers and advisers.

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The West and its allies in the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel have waged an eight year war against the Syrian people. The West has besieged, starved and deprived the Syrian people of humanitarian aid while pouring “aid” into the areas controlled by their extremist sectarian proxy armies.

The West has violated international law and it has enabled the destruction of Syria’s history, heritage and cultural footprint. The West has behaved as a collective rogue state without conscience and without pity for a people its media has systematically dehumanised to enable such a crime to take place.

Christmas 2018 in Damascus, Old City, without mortars from Eastern Ghouta since its liberation in April 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Despite this war of attrition and despite battling disproportionate force, the Syrian people have refused to capitulate or to abandon their secularism in favour of an extremist tyranny that would destroy their society and persecute the minority communities into extinction. Christmas 2018 has demonstrated the victory of Syrian unity over the regime change project incubated in the West which is now a failed campaign lying in tatters at the feet of the self determination of the Syrian people, the valiant defence by the Syrian Arab Army and the steadfastness of the Syrian Government and its President, Bashar Al Assad.

In Aleppo I spoke with Pastor Ibrahim Nseir of Aleppo’s Presbyterian Church, whom I had also interviewed in 2017.  The following is a mixture of quotes and paraphrase from our conversation on New Year’s Eve 2018/19.

Image on the right: Reverend Ibrahim Nseir, Presbyterian Church, Aleppo. December 31st 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

The Presbyterian Church in the Old City of Aleppo was destroyed by the Western-backed terrorist groups in November 2012. An article in the Mennonite World Review in July 2018 described the destruction of the church – “In the old city of Aleppo, Syria, Ibrahim Nseir stands on the pile of rubble that used to be his church. The building where his congregation worshiped is now broken stones and dust. It’s a sunny day, the bright sky a stark contrast to the destruction on the ground.”

After eight years of resistance against the threat of persecution and mass exodus of Christians from Aleppo, Nseir remains defiant and upbeat about the future of Aleppo and Syria. Of the 300,000 Syrian Christians in Aleppo, only 30,000 remain. This is the legacy of sectarian oppression that has been imprinted upon Syria by Western hegemony and it will take generations for it to be turned around.

Nseir described the rebuilding process for the Presbyterian Church as difficult but he insisted that it would be rebuilt from its original stones to preserve its historical identity. For Nseir the priorities for Aleppo and Syria are to address the economic situation which has clearly taken a hit on many levels and is suffering in a typical post-war slump. Education is another top priority for this intelligent and enthusiastic Reverend. The intention is to create a center for retreats and conferences at the current Presbyterian Church offices in the center of Aleppo, including a student dormitory.

“We will increase educational capacity by 1000 in the very near future and continue to build upon this progress” Nseir told me.

Education, according to Nseir, is the greatest weapon against extremism and is the only way to re-habilitate children who spent seven of their formative years under occupation of extremist and sectarian factions who worked hard to brainwash almost an entire generation of Syria’s children.

“Ethically the West and the East are responsible for Syria’s destruction. This is not a “Christian” issue, it is a World issue.” Nseir insisted.

The role of the Western media in manufacturing consent for the collective punishment of the Syrian people was clearly a primary cause of the devastation that Nseir and other faith leaders across Syria are now dealing with:

“Western media played more than a negative role, they literally urged the terrorists to take action against the Syrian people by providing false information and blinding people in the West to what was really happening in Syria for eight years. This should never be forgotten.”

Nseir stressed that the healing process for children traumatised by the war would not be easy.

“How do you erase the hatred and horror planted in the brains of 7-10-year-old children by these fanatics? What do you expect from children who have played football with the head of a Syrian Araby Army soldier or who have witnessed the violent abuse of their mother by these terrorists or have seen their father executed by the armed groups? This is the greatest challenge for Humanity and for Syria to put right these terrible wrongs.”

Nseir spoke of the shocking estimated figures of 82,000 children whose father is unknown, referring to the huge number of young women raped or forced into multiple marriages by the terrorist groups and their fighters. How do these children regain their identity and re-integrate into Syrian society? The rebuilding of schools and hospitals must be a priority. The terrorists destroyed “the most developed hospital in the Middle East, Al Kindi” in 2013 and since then, and the destruction of more hospitals across Syria by the terrorist groups, Nseir told me Syria has seen an increase in Cancer and new diseases. Nseir also suggested that this may be attributed to the weapons used by the US Coalition proxies and the U.S itself, which include depleted uranium.

Another important challenge, according to Nseir, is the environnmental one. Syria needs to rebuild its natural environment which has also been hugely affected by the conflict. 100,000 trees have been destroyed in Aleppo alone which could lead eventually to desertification of the province if not dealt with. The Governor of Aleppo has recently planted 2,000 new trees but this is an issue that must be addressed with urgency for Nseir.

Nseir strongly believes that Western people should come to Syria independently to see the truth for themselves and report the truth as they see it without any agenda. The Church and the media in the West have maintained a sectarian, divisve narrative which is confusing for people in the West and far from reality.

Nseir addressed the position and status of Syria in the Middle East and described how it has not changed, all that has changed is the perception of Syria portrayed by the media and world leaders who have aligned themselves with the West’s criminal project to partition Syria into sectarian statelets and to remove the elected Syrian government from power by force:

“What has changed since 2011 in reality? Nothing. Syria has always been the protector of the Middle East before 2011, during the conflict and now. The only thing that has changed is the positions of those who turned against Syria, betrayed Syria and who now wish to come back to Syria for protection. We see the Gulf States now change their stance and the UAE has re-opened its embassy in Damascus. The Arab League will welcome Syria back into its fold. Nothing has changed, Syria has remained the same while others have been opportunists and traitors.”

The fact that Syria will forgive its betrayers is testament to what has given Syria victory over its enemies throughout history. With regards to the West, Nseir is not so forgiving:

“The West must go beyond simply stopping its financing of terrorism and the supply of weapons. The West must confess to its crimes against the Syrian people in order to be forgiven. The West must lift the economic sanctions which are a siege upon the Syrian people and it must allow the Syrian people to rebuild in peace without meddling in their affairs. The Syrian people will rebuild according to what the Syrian people want not what the East or the West want. The West has sold the idea that this war was against President Assad but in reality it was against the will of a nation and the people of that nation must be respected”.

Nseir confirmed that the western NGOs are nothing more than political instruments and devices who further the cause of war but he insisted that the West must effectively pay reparations to Syria and expect nothing in return. This is the only way the West can be forgiven by Syria.

Nseir told me that his church will be establishing a medical and health center in the coming months which will be open to everyone in Aleppo to offer medical check-ups and treatment for free. Staff will be trained to deal with the children afflicted by the effects of the war and the terrorist occupation and the plan is to eventually set up special schools to continue the work of rehabilitation for these children. This will enable the coming generations to stand against radicalism and terrorism in the future.

“The West has a duty to respect our dignity and territorial integrity. The Syrian Arab Army has saved the image of our God of Peace, Love and Unity – this has been a spiritual war in Syria not only a military war. The God of love has been embodied by the SAA and our allies and has been victorious over the God of terrorism and hatred. The whole world will change after this war and after Syria’s victory. Syria will be a transformational catalyst for all of Humanity. Syria was never going to be defeated, you only have to study our history to know this. Our society has always embraced diversity and this is the essence of our country. Fanaticism was never going to survive breathing the pure oxygen of our humanity. Actually this demonstrates the stupidity of leaders in the West – to even imagine that extremism has a place in our culture”.  Nseir told me.

Nseir ended our talk by stating that the crisis in Syria must be an alarm bell for the country and for its leaders.

“We must re-prioritise our schedule, our agenda and make sure it is not only political but that we address all issues – religious, educational, health care. We must rethink our priorities to ensure a future of peace and stability. At the end I believe strongly that all the negative consequences of this terrible war will be transformed into positive consequences if we address them in the right way. Out of adversity are born the greatest opportunities for the future of Syria and Humanity.”

Horse rides on offer at the foot of the Citadel in the Old City of Aleppo. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

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This article was originally published on 21st Century Wire.

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. Please support her work at her Patreon account.