Global Research

There are concerns about a potential nuclear ‘incident’ in Europe.

According to reports, small amounts of highly radioactiveradioisotope, iodine-131, of unknown origin, have been detected over large areas of Europe.

A nuclear ‘incident’ in the vicinity of the Arctic circle may have spread the mysterious radioactive leak during the past week.

According to IRSN ( Institut de Radioprotection et de Sûreté Nucléaire ), a French institute specialising in nuclear and radiological risks, Iodine-131 (131I), a radionuclide of anthropogenic origin, has recently been detected in tiny amounts in the ground-level atmosphere in Europe.

Iodine-131 was first detected over large areas of Europe in January.

Since the isotope has a half-life of only eight days, the detection is proof of a rather recent release, reports the Independent Barents Observe.

The source of the leak remains a mystery.

Zero Hedge reports:

The air filter station at Svanhovd – located a few hundred meters from Norway’s border to Russia’s Kola Peninsula in the north – was the first to measure small amounts of the radioactive Ionide-131 in the second week of January.  Shortly thereafter, the same Iodine-131 isotope was measured in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland. Within the next two weeks, traces of radioactivity, although in tiny amounts, were measured in Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain.

Norway was the first to measure the radioactivity, but France was the first to officially inform the public about it.

“Iodine-131 a radionuclide of anthropogenic origin, has recently been detected in tiny amounts in the ground-level atmosphere in Europe. The preliminary report states it was first found during week 2 of January 2017 in northern Norway. Iodine-131 was also detected in Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany, France and Spain, until the end of January”, the official French Institute de Radioprotection et de Süreté Nucléaire (IRSN) wrote in a press release.

Niveaux en Iode 131 (valeur +/- incertitude) sous forme aérosol dans l’air (µBq/m3)

No Health Concerns For Now

Mitigating some of the concerns, however, was the head of section for emergency preparedness at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Autority, Astrid Liland, who spoke to the Barents Observer and said the levels measured raise no health concerns. “We do measure small amounts of radioactivity in air from time to time because we have very sensitive measuring equipment. The measurements at Svanhovd in January were very, very low. So were the measurements made in neighbouring countries, like Finland. The levels raise no concern for humans or the environment.  Therefore, we believe this had no news value,” Astrid Liland answers when asked why the public was not informed.

She points to Norway’s nation-wide online network of 33 stations were people can check real-time measurements.

At Svanhovd, measurements in the period January 9-16 show levels of 0,5 micro Becquerel per cubic meter air (µBq/m3). In France, where authorities decided to publish the information, measured radioactivity were much lower, from 0,1 to 0,31 µBq/m3. Levels measured in Finland were also lower than in northern Norway with 0,27 µBq/m3 measured in Rovaniemi and 0,3 µBq/m3 in Kotka. Finland’s Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) decided to follow the French example and posted a press release about the increased levels of radioactivity.

But No Explanation Where The Radiation Came From

Finnish authorities also underscores that the levels measured are far from concentrations that could have any effect on human health. Neither STUK, nor IRSN speculate in the origin of the released Iodine-131.

Astrid Liland can’t either explain the origin of the radioactivity. “It was rough weather in the period when the measurements were made, so we can’t trace the release back to a particular location. Measurements from several places in Europe might indicate it comes from Eastern Europe,” Liland explains. “Increased levels of radioactive iodine in air were made in northern-Norway, northern-Finland and Poland in week two, and in other European countries the following two weeks, Astrid Liland says.

As the Barents Observers adds, Iodine-131 in the air could come from an incident with a nuclear reactor. The isotope is also widely used in medicine and for that purpose; many countries around the globe produce it.

All operators of nuclear reactors or institutions using Iodine-131 for medical purposes have detectors for external releases of radioactivity. In other words, as the Observer concludes, “Someone out there knows why the radioactivity was spread over larger areas of Europe.”

Nuclear installations in northwastern Europe, were the radioactivity was first discovered, includes nuclear power plants in Finland, Sweden and Russia, in addition to nuclear powered vessels on Russia’s Kola Peninsula and White Sea area. The source could as well come from even further away installations.

Constant Phoenix Deployed

Finally, adding an air of mystery to this alleged “incident” was the spotting of the “Constant Phoenix”, which on Friday arrived in the UK’s Mildenhall airbase after departing from Florida.

As the Aviationist explains, the WC-135 Constant Phoenix has been used in the past to determine whether nuclear tests or detonations have taken place in any given region. The WC-135 is a derivative of the Boeing C-135 transport and support plane. Two of these aircraft are in service today out of the ten examples operated since 1963. The aircraft are flown by flight crews from the 45th Reconnaissance Squadron from Offutt Air Force Base while mission crews are staffed by Detachment 1 from the Air Force Technical Applications Center.

The WC-135, known as the “sniffer” or “weather bird” by its crews, can carry up to 33 personnel. However, crew compliments are kept to a minimum during mission flights in order to lessen levels of radioactive exposure.

Effluent gasses are gathered by two scoops on the sides of the fuselage, which in turn trap fallout particles on filters. The mission crews have the ability to analyze the fallout residue in real-time, helping to confirm the presence of nuclear fallout and possibly determine the characteristics of the warhead involved: that’s why the aircraft is important to confirm the type of explosion of today’s test.

As Darin R. Pfaff, a former WC-135 aircrew member explained to us in a comment to a previous article on this aircraft: “airframes have two large supplemental charcoal filter packs, as well as HEPA/ULPA filters (we called them “lungs”) for their cabin air. When the instruments indicate contact with radioactive debris, the crew will also reduce cabin airflow to just maintain pressurization, and all personnel on board will go to 100% oxygen through their masks. They will stay on 100% O2 until activity readings drop back down into the safe levels. Everybody wears a dosimeter, and those records are monitored to prevent unsafe exposure.”

Along with monitoring nuke testing, the WC-135 is used to track radioactive activity as happened after the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in the Soviet Union in 1986 and Fukushima incident back in 2011.

So far there has been no official statement by any entity providing further details on the spike in Iodine levels, nor an explanation from the US military why the “Constant Phoenix” was deployed to Europe.

A European parliament delegation that attempted to enter the besieged Gaza Strip to assess the residual damage of Israel’s 2014 military offensive was denied entry by Israeli authorities today.

According to a statement released by the European Parliament’s Delegation for relations with Palestine, Israeli authorities told the group that their entry was denied owing to the fact that only humanitarian workers and diplomats accredited by the Israeli government or the Palestinian Authority (PA) are allowed access to Gaza, which has been under an Israeli military blockade for a decade.

The statement noted that the delegation has been denied entry since 2011.

The delegation’s statement decried the decision to refuse them access to Gaza, saying that the decision was based on “arbitrary grounds” and that the Israeli explanation was “unacceptable”.

“We had hoped that that visit had ushered in a new more cooperative era, but this has not been the case… What is there to hide from us? Our positions are well-known,” the statement read.

The delegation went on to demand the return of the PA to the Gaza Strip. “We urge all Palestinian forces to resume efforts towards reconciliation without delay, building on the latest unity deal reached in January,” the chairman of the delegation Neoklis Sylikiotis said.

He also called on the international community “to put pressure on Israel” in order to end the crippling Israeli siege on the Palestinian territory.

“On the ground in Gaza our aim is to assess the reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts to which the EU is the major donor. EU aid targets the promotion of employment and the poverty in Gaza. We are working to ensure the people in Gaza have access to basic necessities including potable drinking water, food, housing and schools,” Sylikiotis added.

Heading to Gaza:

• Four members of the European Parliament
• Margrete Auken (Denmark)
• Brando Benifei (Italy)
• Ivo Vajgl (Slovenia)
• Angela Vallina (Spain)

“I wasn’t the wrong person to become Jane Roe. I wasn’t the right person to become Jane Roe. I was just the person who became Jane Roe, of Roe v Wade.”— Norma McCorvey with Andy Meisler, I am Roe: My Life, Roe v Wade (1994)

The late Norma McCorvey changed US legal and political history as the plaintiff “Jane Roe” in the 1973 US Supreme Court decision Roe v Wade. The case has become the shorthand for bodily autonomy, dignity, shield of an expansive idea on privacy. The due process clause, so the judgment went, contained “a concept of personal liberty” while “the penumbras of the Bill of Rights” retained in its awe-inspiring mystery “a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy.”[1]

For the US women’s movement, it was more than just legal stardust: it was solid gold, providing nuggets for the rights revolution. In the wording of the decision, the privacy right was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy”.

As with anything, where there are rights, seething, sometimes irreconcilable conflict, exists. Even Roe was not absolute in its abstract renderings, with the judgment noting that States could still ban third-trimester abortions while also regulating abortion “in ways that reasonably related to maternal health” in the second. It was only for the first trimester that “the abortion decision and its effectuation [had to be] left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman’s attending physician.”

Rights, in short, are not seen as creatures born and isolated. Duties follow with weighted feet, reciprocally attaching themselves. In the US cosmology of rights, there was always going to be the indignant counter that duties also mattered, perhaps even more, and that the foetal cult would seek a counter-reformation.

That counter-reformation was reflected in the actions of the plaintiff herself. McCorvey had sued the state of Texas after seeking an abortion on falling pregnant again. “Back in 1973, I was a very confused 21 year-old with one child and facing an unplanned pregnancy.”

She had every reason to be, living through what the New York Times termed “a Dickensian nightmare.” She had been “the unwanted child of a broken home, a ninth-grade dropout who was raped repeatedly by a relative, and a homeless runaway and thief consigned to reform school.”[2] The poster child, it was implied, of American dysfunction: married at 16, bisexual though mainly lesbian, three children by three men, all given up. There were the rough jobs, the drugs, the alcohol.

It was the sort of confusion that provided carrion for pro-life movements eager to swoop in on doubt. One such emotional vulture was Jeanne Mancini, president of the March for Life, who suggested that McCorvey had been “coerced” and “encouraged to lie about the situation being the result of rape.”

By the 1990s, McCorvey’s rights perspective had morphed, transferring to the foetus on the wings of a newly found faith. Being harangued as a “baby killer” and an ample number of death threats did their trick. Abortions came to be seen as forms of sanctioned murder advanced by damaged and confused mothers easily influenced, aided by a judicial pronouncement of grim reaper selfishness.

Roe No More was established; McCorvey spent time working for Operation Rescue. She attended rallies, wrote books. God seemingly crept up on her with divine intrusiveness (pro-lifer goons helped), then captured her conscience with terribly sweet reminders of what amounted to crime, an afterlife more dramatic than a Hieronymus Bosch triptych. It was “upon knowing God, I realized that my case which legalized abortion on demand was the biggest mistake of my life.”

Guilt is hard to measure, but various desert religions obsessed by apoplectic moralism do their best to bring out calculations, however artificially generated. McCorvey, for Tom Peterson, president and founder of VirtueMedia, struggled with a heavy “heart that 50 million babies had died because of her participation in this case.”

With zeal, Peterson’s soul hunting outfit launched JaneRoe.com which runs on the rich fuel of confessions – from mothers who have regretted their abortions. Finding that mothers may be damaged from their experience, it is also appropriate to exploit them for it. (Monotheistic morality is such a treat.)

Fittingly, all matters of legal and social debate eventually become aggressive industries in the turbulent richness of US soil: the right to abortion, the right of the foetus, and guilt itself, transmuted into a market of regret, doom and the blessed promise of confession.

Praise from pro-life groups was abundantly heaped after word of McCorvey’s passing spread. “Ultimately,” claimed Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List, “Norma’s story after Roe was not one of bitterness but of forgiveness. She chose healing and reconciliation in her Christian faith.”[3]

Dannenfelser’s remarks are very much readied against the rights industry fashioned around abortion (“Norma suffered tremendously at the hands of those who cared more about the institution of abortion than this courageous woman’s life”), and in them is also contained the mania about liberty and notions of false emancipation. McCorvey “overcame the lies of the abortion industry and its advocates and spoke out against the horror that still oppresses many.”

The battle continues. States persist in campaigns that seek to impose regulatory burdens that are designed to eliminate the exercise of abortion altogether, less in name than form. Clinics and those providing abortions remain favourite targets. Needless cant, and moral rage, continues.

Even beyond Roe, there is a fundamental point about US legal identity, one irritably rife with dissent and theatre in using the court system. Great battles and poor law (for hard cases make bad law) have been the result, be it over guns or electoral campaign spending. But such cases can obliterate the individual, leaving in their stead a mythology of rights. There could be few better examples than McCorvey in her quest to litigate, then repent.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

Notes

[1] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/410/113.html
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/obituaries/norma-mccorvey-dead-roe-v-wade.html?_r=0
[3] http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/life-conversion-of-roe-v-wades-norma-mccorvey-remembered-35081/

El asedio mediático al que está sometido Donald Trump, tiene muchos puntos en común con los métodos que se utilizaron en la “guerra contra el terror” de Bush Junior. El uso sistemático de la mentira por parte de la CIA, la NSA y el FBI, transformó a esta agencias en una verdadera policía secreta. La presidencia de Trump se ve ahora amenazada por oponerse al programa que alimentó por décadas (con un gigantesco presupuesto) a estas agencias de inteligencia y a las políticas “neo-con” de hegemonía mundial en materia militar y de “seguridad nacional”.

En la práctica, tanto la CIA como la NSA están actuando como policía interna al esparcir falsas informaciones acerca de las “conexiones” de Trump con Rusia. El plan es sencillo, utilizar los medios de comunicación para obligar a Trump a dejar su cargo porque sus “conexiones” serían una amenaza para la seguridad de los Estados Unidos.

Actuar abiertamente contra un presidente recién elegido es un sorprendente acto de audacia que implica una enorme confianza o, una gran desesperación de las agencias de inteligencia. En la actualidad la CIA está cooperando abiertamente con la CNN en el “tratamiento periodístico” de especulaciones irresponsables y sin fundamentos. La cadena de televisión sostiene -como si es fuera un hecho fundado- que Trump está bajo la influencia de Rusia. Su única prueba es un “informe” producido por la CIA para el New York Times hace un par de semanas. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46476.htm

Es evidente que la CNN y la CIA consideran al pueblo estadounidense ingenuo y totalmente estúpido.

La siguiente es parte de una entrevista a Glenn Greenwald, periodista y abogado constitucionalista que publico en The Guardian las revelaciones Edward Snowden. La entrevista fue realizada por Amy Goodman para el Canal de Televisión de “Democracy Now”.

Habla Glenn Greenwald :

” Aunque no hay una definición precisa del “Deep State” (el estado profundo) esta noción esta referida a corporaciones de inteligencia con poder permanente en Washington. Mientras los presidentes elegidos van y vienen los agentes de inteligencia se mantienen en el tiempo y disfrutan del mando real. Ejercen su poder en secreto, en la oscuridad, y no están sujetos a ninguna responsabilidad democrática,

La CIA, la NSA, y otros cuerpos de inteligencia, fueron concebidos fundamentalmente para propagar mentiras, propaganda y desinformación. Pero, sus actividades no se limitan a la manipulación, también tienen un largo historial de atrocidades, torturas, escuadrones de la muerte y crímenes de guerra.

Gente como el neoconservador Bill Kristol y, también un montón de demócratas están empujando a las agencias del “Deep State” para que actúen como oposición y contra-poder a las autoridades políticas a las que deberían estar subordinadas.

Durante la campaña electoral, los principales miembros de la comunidad de inteligencia, incluyendo a Mike Morell, jefe de la CIA del presidente Obama, y Michael Hayden, mandamás de la NSA y de la CIA con George W. Bush, se declararon abiertamente partidarios de Hillary Clinton.

De hecho, Michael Morell se instaló en el equipo de dirección del New York Times, y Michael Hayden ocupo el mismo lugar en el Washington Post. El objetivo de ambos agentes era respaldar a Hillary Clinton y culpar a Donald Trump “ porque había sido reclutado por Rusia”.

La CIA y la comunidad de inteligencia apoyaron con vehemencia a Hillary Clinton y se opusieron vehementemente a Trump. ¿La razón? Estaban comprometidos con la política exterior de Hillary Clinton y se oponen sin descanso a la política de Donald Trump.

Durante los últimos cinco años una de las principales prioridades de la CIA ha sido la guerra en Siria. Para lograr la defenestración del régimen de Assad, Hillary Clinton fue muy crítica con Obama porque no le permitió agravar el conflicto. Clinton quería imponer una zona de exclusión aérea en Siria y enfrentar a los rusos.

Donald Trump asumió exactamente el punto de vista opuesto. Sostuvo, en campaña, que a “los Estados Unidos no le debe importar quien gobierna en Siria” ; incluso debe colaborar con los rusos para terminar con el ISIS y al-Qaeda. Por tanto, la política exterior de Trump, estaba en la antítesis de lo que pretendía la CIA. La CIA apoyo incondicionalmente a Hillary Clinton porque ella quería exactamente lo que la CIA demandaba.

En la campaña electoral las agencias de inteligencia trataron de socavar a Trump por todos los medios. Una vez que ganó, pretenden destruir su credibilidad con trascendidos sin fundamento real . Además, al retener información de inteligencia (con el argumento que el Presidente no es una persona de “confianza”) están actuando de manera sediciosa. En los hechos las agencias de inteligencia se arrogan la capacidad para imponer su propia política.

Ahora, que quede claro. yo creo que la presidencia Trump es extremadamente peligrosa. Usted ,en su noticiero, acaba de ofrecer muchos argumentos validos. Trump y sus políticas devastarán el medio ambiente. Eliminarán las redes de seguridad pública . Beneficiarán a los multimillonarios. Han puesto en marcha políticas intolerantes contra inmigrantes y musulmanes .

Es muy importante resistir estas políticas. Y, hay un montón de maneras de resistir. Es obligatorio contenerlos mediante el activismo ciudadano. Pero también es muy importante que el Partido Demócrata se haga una sería auto-crítica . Debe preguntarse, que puede hacer para ser una fuerza política significativa después de haberse derrumbado en todas partes”.

Sin embargo, el Partido Demócrata está muy lejos de una autocritica . No está haciendo nada para promover la resistencia popular. Lo que está haciendo es apoyar lo peor de Trump junto con empujar al “Deep State” y la CIA ( con todas sus historias de atrocidades) a participar en un golpe blando contra el presidente electo. Esa política es extremadamente peligrosa.

Si usted cree (al igual que yo ) que la CIA y el “Deep State”, por una parte, y la presidencia Trump, por la otra, son extremadamente peligrosos, estoy de acuerdo pero hay una gran diferencia entre estas opciones;.

Trump fue elegido democráticamente y está sujeto a controles democráticos, como lo han demostrado los tribunales y como lo están demostrando los ciudadanos movilizados. La CIA y sus agentes nunca han sido elegidos ni podrán ser elegidos por la gente. Y por tanto no están sujetos a ningún control democrático.

Así que instar a la CIA y la comunidad de inteligencia para que quebranten los poderes electos es un locura total. Es una receta para la destrucción de la democracia, bajo el pretexto de salvarla. Sin embargo, es lo que están haciendo los neoconservadores y sus aliados liberales del Partido Demócrata. Es lo que están reclamando. Su estrategia es increíblemente torcida y peligrosa. ” Http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46476.htm

Los Estados Unidos se encuentran en una extraña situación ; los llamados liberales progresistas están asociados con el “Deep State”. Los liberales progresistas presionan para destituir a un presidente que no ha cometido ningún delito censurable. Por su parte los neoconservadores se han manifestado claramente por un golpe de estado contra la democracia. Por eso los grandes medios de comunicación mantienen un bombardeo diario de mentiras, insinuaciones y desinformación. Mientras tanto la opinión pública despreocupada se “chupa el dedo” .

¿Qué puede hacer Trump? Debe limpiar las agencias de inteligencia y terminar las licencias concedidas a la CIA, por Bush y Obama, para llevar a cabo actividades inconstitucionales. Además, puede utilizar las leyes que prohíben los monopolios en los medios de comunicación que Clinton permitió conformar.

Si Bush y Obama utilizaron la detención indefinida a ciudadanos estadounidenses sin el debido proceso y si Obama ordenó asesinar con drones, lo menos que puede hacer Trump es utilizar las leyes de defensa de la competencia para poner fin a los grandes conglomerados de medios que hablan, en su contra, con una sola voz,.

Trump no tiene más alternativa que luchar. Debe acabar con el trabajo de policía secreta que están practicando las agencias de inteligencia y debe terminar con los grandes conglomerados de medios que han orquestado una campaña permanente de desinformación .

Descartar a Flynn fue un grave error. Trump debería haber mantenido a Flynn y debería haber actuado contra las “fugas información”. La NSA sabe quienes son los responsables de esas filtraciones. Trump debe llevar a cabo una limpieza en la corrupta gestión de la NSA y colocar a funcionarios que identifiquen los puntos de fuga. Con esa información debería procesar a los “filtradores” con todo el rigor de la ley.

Ningún presidente puede sobrevivir a organismos de inteligencia que ejercen de policía secreta y que están decididos a destruir su gobierno. Si los asesores de Trump no saben esto, Trump necesita desesperadamente nuevos asesores”.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Artículo original en inglés:

The Stakes for Trump and All of Us, publicado el 19 de febrero de 2017.

Traducido por Emilio Pizocaro.

La Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO) presentó 15 tendencias y 10 desafíos que sus países miembros deberán tener en cuenta hoy para enfrentar la crisis alimentaria mundial.

Situaciones y retos en los que están presentes desigualdades sociales, crecientes presiones sobre los recursos naturales y los intensos efectos del cambio climático, como prolongadas sequías y desertificaciones, los cuales ponen en peligro la capacidad de la humanidad para alimentarse.

Uno de los mayores desafíos identificados por el organismo mundial es lograr una gobernanza nacional e internacional coherente y eficaz, con objetivos claros de desarrollo y el compromiso para alcanzarlos, del cual depende encontrar soluciones a otros problemas.

En su informe preparatorio del Marco Estratégico y el plan 2018-2021, la FAO insta a una mejora sostenible de la productividad agrícola para satisfacer la creciente demanda con el debido cuidado a los recursos naturales.

Abordar el cambio climático y la intensificación de las amenazas naturales, erradicar la pobreza extrema y reducir la desigualdad; acabar con el hambre y todas las formas de malnutrición y hacer que los sistemas alimentarios sean más eficientes, inclusivos y resilientes, forman parte de los retos de la humanidad en las próximas décadas.

En el documento se señala, además, la necesidad de mejorar las oportunidades de ingresos en las zonas rurales y abordar las causas profundas de la migración; así como reforzar la capacidad de las personas para hacer frente a las crisis prolongadas, desastres y conflictos.

El escenario mundial exige cambios. Desde 1990 a nivel mundial el hambre y la pobreza extrema descendieron, pero aún unas 700 millones de personas, la mayoría de las zonas rurales, son extremadamente pobres.

De igual modo, bajó la tasa de subalimentación y mejoraron los niveles de nutrición y sanidad, pero sin embargo, aún cerca de 800 millones de personas padecen hambre crónica y otros dos mil millones tienen carencias de micronutrientes.

La pobreza generalizada obstaculiza los avances ante sistemas alimentarios de más alto coeficiente de capital, suministros e insumos concentrados en menos manos, y crecientes flujos migratorios, sobre todo de los hombres, hacia zonas urbanas, lo cual hace que la agricultura quede en manos de las mujeres.

Las crisis, conflictos y catástrofes naturales aumentan, son cada vez más peligrosos e impiden labrar la tierra y producir alimentos, en un ambiente donde prevalece la ausencia de servicios médicos y la protección social.

La FAO insiste en que no se puede producir a costa de la deforestación masiva, escasez de agua, agotamiento de los suelos y elevados niveles de emisiones de gases de efecto invernadero.

Propone, en tal sentido, establecer sistemas innovadores capaces de preservar los recursos naturales los cuales, a la vez, eleven la productividad con procesos transformadores y holísticos.

Estos incluyen la agroecología, la actividad agroforestal, la agricultura inteligente en función del clima y la agricultura de conservación, también basada en conocimientos tradicionales e indígenas.

La aplicación de los avances tecnológicos, reducciones drásticas del uso de combustibles fósiles en la agricultura y economía, ayudarían a enfrentar al cambio climático y los crecientes peligros naturales que dañan los ecosistemas y la vida humana son otras de las consideraciones de la institución.

Insiste, asimismo, en la urgencia de una mayor colaboración internacional para evitar surjan nuevas amenazas transfronterizas a los sistemas agrícolas y alimentarios, como plagas y enfermedades.

Las estrategias de crecimiento hacia los pobres deben asegurar el derecho a la tierra, participación en los mercados, inversiones agrícolas y otras medidas que les permitan generar ingresos, lo cual, junto a una adecuada protección social detendría sensiblemente las migraciones.

El secretario general de la ONU, Antonio Guterres, demandó la víspera una respuesta urgente de la comunidad internacional para salvar a más de 20 millones de personas amenazadas por la hambruna en Sudán del Sur, Yemen, Somalia y Nigeria.

Una clara evidencia de las amenazas futuras si no se actúa a tiempo. El Cuerno Africano es apenas una pálida crónica de una crisis anunciada.

Silvia Martínez

Trump’s first month in office proved nothing he said campaigning holds water. All politicians lie, saying whatever it takes to get elected, doing whatever they please once in office.

In short order, America’s 45th president surrendered to Wall Street and war-profiteers, gorging at the public trough – at the expense of humanity at home and abroad.

The hoped for antidote to Hillary appears no different when on policymaking – both subservient to monied interests at the expense of popular ones, both warriors, not peacemakers, both intolerant of challenges to America’s hegemonic aims, both hostile to all sovereign independent states, a deplorable situation, a dangerous one risking  possible nuclear war.

Hillary’s defeat didn’t dodge a nuclear bullet. It gave Trump the trigger, perhaps as willing to squeeze it to prove his machismo.

Both aspirants appear near two sides of the same coin, much alike on issues mattering most. It’s a tough judgment this soon into Trump’s tenure. Things sometimes change, though rarely, except for the worst, not better.

Trump calling NATO “obsolete” on the stump proved deceptive hyperbole. He fully supports the alliance, according to Vice President Pence, Defense Secretary Mattis, for sure hawkish National Security Advisor McMaster, and UK Prime Minister Theresa May.

Trump’s South China Sea saber-rattling risks confrontation with Beijing. Other administration figures speaking for him, demanding Russia end Kiev’s war on Donbass and relinquish its Crimea territory, is a prescription for no change in hostile US policy toward Moscow.

Threats made against Iran, North Korea and Venezuela risk more trouble, thinly veiled ones for regime change. All this going on in a few short weeks into Trump’s tenure is breathtaking and disturbing for a White House aspirant promising a different way.

There’s more. Additional US combat troops may be sent to Afghanistan to continue America’s longest war – instead of ending what never should have been waged in the first place.

Bipartisan members of Congress want a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) to wage phony war on terrorism – instead of demanding recision of the September 14, 2001 measure, three days post-9/11.

US Central Command head General Joseph Votel wants more US combat troops for Syria – not to fight terrorism, to support it.

The way to defeat ISIS and likeminded groups is by no longer providing them with weapons, funding, training and direction. They exist because of foreign backing. Without it, they’re a spent force once exhausting their supplies.

Trump directing “mad dog” Mattis to develop a preliminary plan on how to defeat ISIS appears more about designing a way to use these foot soldiers more effectively – continuing America’s war OF terror on humanity, not waging peace instead.

His campaign hoopla about draining the swamp was deceptive hyperbole. His agenda continues serving privileged interests at the expense of most others.

US imperial madness remains unchanged – world peace and stability as threatened as ever.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

The St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank study, “The End Is in Sight for the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis” states:

In the first half of August of 2016, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) located at Fort Benning, Georgia, invited almost 200 representatives from the defense industry to a meeting to discuss the desire to acquire a whole new type of vehicle.

The program was named “Mobile Protected Firepower” (MPF). The U.S Army has decided to dispense with its overly bureaucratic acquisition system of past decades, and has instead had the TRADOC, the command that is most knowledgeable of what the Army requires, sit down directly with industry professionals from the very start to design a vehicle that takes existing technologies and capabilities to design a workable solution at minimal cost. Apparently, the U.S. Army has learned something from past failed programs.

In concept, the MPF is seen as a highly mobile vehicle that is able to accompany and support Stryker Brigade Combat Teams and mobile and mechanized infantry formations, and aid reconnaissance-in-force missions. The MPF will be a fully tracked armored vehicle light and small enough to negotiate urban areas, and traverse poor roads and bridges in underdeveloped regions of the globe.

General Dynamics has already proposed the use of the chassis of its Ajax vehicle, being produced as an armored recon vehicle for the British Army, as a possible starting point for an acceptable MPF prototype. Named the Griffin, the vehicle mounts the XM-360 light weight 120mm rifled tank gun in a fully enclosed turret on the Chassis of the Ajax. The XM-360 gun was originally designed during the height of the FCS program. It is about 800 pounds lighter than the gun mounted on the M1 Abrams tank, is fitted with a muzzle break to reduce recoil, and is equipped with an autoloader to reduce the crew requirement by one man. Although still in the early stages of prototype development, the U.S. Army hopes to field an MPF vehicle by the mid-2020s.

The Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) program was initiated in March of 2013. BAE Systems was awarded the contract to supply the new vehicle in December of 2014, and unveiled the first production example in December of 2016. The AMPV is based on the M2 Bradley family of vehicle, and thus now shares many components with the Bradley and newly designed M190A6 Paladin. An M2 Bradley based vehicle to replace the M113 was extremely logical and offers many benefits over the older design. The new vehicle is much larger than the M113, offering 78% more internal volume.  Five variants are being produced; General Purpose, Mortar Carrier, Armored Ambulance, Mobile Medical Clinic and Mobile Command vehicle.

• General Purpose. This is an armored personnel carrier designed to move troops and materiel.
• Mortar Carrier. This vehicle provides fire support to mechanized units. A 120mm mortar will be carried.
• Armored Ambulance. This variant provides armored emergency transport of casualties to rearward medical facilities.
• Mobile Medical Clinic. Allows the forward positioning of medical services closer to the combat area.
• Mobile Command Vehicle. Providing commanders superior battlefield situational awareness and command and control capability when and where it is needed most.

Probably the most important procurement program of the last quarter of a century for the U.S. Army, the AMPV will modernize the lifeblood of the services mechanized units.

The Joint Light Tactical vehicle (JLTV) combines the utility of the HMMWV with increased mobility, armament, multiple modular armor protection packages, and the best IED defeating qualities of a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP). Oshkosh Defense, who produces the M-ATV for the U.S. military, was awarded the JLTV contract in the summer of 2015. The JLTV balances mobility, utility and protection in a proven combination of existing technologies. The vehicle can be equipped with machine guns, a grenade launcher, or a 30mm autocannon.

The U.S. Army seemed to acknowledge its own failures in recent years, and revised its acquisition process in a number of key areas. The AMPV, JLTV and MPS programs illustrate a more pragmatic approach, aiming for more realistic goals and relying on improving upon existing, proven technology. The U.S. Army is playing catch-up to acquire the armored vehicles desperately required to replace aged and outdated fleets. It remains to be seen how financial constraints will effect these programs, as a new Trump administration, which has vowed to strengthen and rebuild the U.S. military, takes over executive functions in January of 2017.

The leadership of the U.S. Army is faced with the challenge of maintaining a material and technological edge over its “Near-Peer” challengers, Russia and China. Both of these nations have developed impressive and capable armored vehicles during the years when the U.S. Army was throwing money down the drain. The battlefield accomplishments of the Russian T-90 MBT and TOS-1 Self-Propelled Rocket Artillery have been demonstrated in Syria, with the T-90 being the only advanced tank in theater proven to survive ATGM attacks on more than one occasion. New Chinese armored vehicles, though unproven in combat, are surely drawing the interested attention of the U.S. defense industry and the U.S. Army top leadership.

It appears that the U.S. Army has finally turned the page on its failed acquisition efforts, and is progressing in the right direction; however, it must rely on updated legacy systems for at least another decade before new vehicles start making their presence felt in significant numbers.

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Racial problems persists decades after African American literary awakenings

Review: I Am Not Your Negro

Filmmaker: Raoul Peck

Narration: Samuel L. Jackson

In the aftermath of World War II the African American people intensified their struggle against Jim Crow segregation for the acquisition of full equality and the right to political self-determination.

This resurgence in commitment towards realizing the objectives of previous generations from the period of slavery through Reconstruction, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression was exemplified on a literary level.

African Americans had utilized the pen as a method of protest and organization extending back into the 19^th century when luminaries such as Maria Stewart, Mary Ann Shadd, David T. Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper and Ida B. Wells-Barnett opened up avenues of expression and communications which had global impact.

James Arthur Baldwin, who was born in Harlem, New York on August 2, 1924, represented the reemergence of this literary and political tradition when he began to address the so-called “race problem” in the United States through both fiction and essays. With a string of books during the 1950s and early 1960s such as Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), Another Country (1962), Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961) and The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin became one the most sought after public intellectuals in the mid-20^th century.

“I am not Your Negro”: Trailer

The writer’s early life was marked by poverty and a rapidly growing awareness of institutional racism. Baldwin’s step-father was a minister which undoubtedly played a role when the author after a mystical experience took up the ministry at the age of 14. He would later reject preaching and Christianity as a religion and instead became a full-time writer and lecturer by the time he was a young adult.

He would soon move to Paris, France at the age of 24 in order to focus on his writing. He said that France provided him with the creative space to work as the racial situation of African Americans in the U.S. was fueling his personal rage.

I Am Not Your Negro

Raoul Peck’s treatment of Baldwin’s development and social impact utilizes archival television and film footage on both the subject of the documentary as well as productions which reflect the historical and cultural legacy of the U.S. The narration is taken from a manuscript Baldwin was working on at the time of his death entitled “Remember This House.”

The book was autobiographical in character where Baldwin looks into his own personal trajectory through the lives of three pioneering leaders within the African American freedom movement: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik Shabazz) and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. All three personalities were intricately involved in the struggle against national oppression and social injustice during the 1950s and 1960s. Evers, Malcolm X and Dr. King were all assassinated for their political beliefs and social practice.

Evers (July 2, 1925-June 12, 1963) as a organizer for the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) had played an important role in the investigation into the August 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American youth from Chicago who was brutally slain after allegation were made that he had dared make sexually suggestive comments to a white woman. Till was from Chicago visiting his great uncle near Money, Mississippi when he fell victim to the lynch mob. The two assailants, the husband and brother-in-law of the white woman who lied about Till, although claiming innocence during the trial, later confessed to the killing in a January 1956 interview with Look magazine for the sum of $4,000.

As a field secretary of the NAACP, Evers drew the ire of local white supremacists during the early 1960s. As the movement for Civil Rights escalated through mass demonstrations forcing federal government interventions, he was targeted for assassination on June 12, 1963. Evers was shot to death outside his home in Jackson by a member of the White Citizen’s Council, Byron De La Beckwith.

Malcolm X (May 19, 1925-February 21, 1965) was the national spokesperson for the Nation of Islam (NOI) under the leadership of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad. Baldwin had debated Malcolm X in 1961 over W-BAI radio in New York City on the role of the student sit-in movement and the character of the Civil Rights struggle in general. Baldwin in 1961 seemed to have been more in agreement with approach of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed by Dr. King.

Nonetheless, by 1963, Baldwin would publish his groundbreaking essay entitled “The Fire Next Time.” The book prefigured the rise of urban rebellions, revolutionary nationalism and the demand for Black political power in both the North and the South. By the time of Malcolm X’s assassination, after he had left the NOI and formed the Muslim Mosque, Inc., an orthodox Islamic group, and the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), patterned on the national liberation movements in Africa and the state-dominated Organization of African Unity (OAU), the Muslim leader and Baldwin were closer together ideologically. Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965 while preparing to address a public meeting in New York City.

Baldwin was also close friend and supporter of Dr. King and the SCLC. Nonetheless, he appeared to have rejected the nonviolent and direct action approach to the struggle voicing his rage through his books, lectures and media interviews. The SCLC leader was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 while he was providing support to striking sanitation workers seeking recognition as a labor union.

The documentary captures a segment of the late night ABC talk program then known as the Dick Cavett Show from June 13, 1968, when Baldwin is challenged by philosopher Paul Weiss who criticizes the author for placing too much emphasis on race a major factor in analyzing American society.

Baldwin says that within the U.S. African Americans are kept out of certain labor unions; they are segregated in ghettos by the real estate lobby; and that the school system provides inadequate and racist textbooks for substandard schools that Black children are forced to attend. He notes that this is the evidence of the history and contemporary situation in the country as of 1968.

He then raises the rhetorical question to Weiss emphasizing that this white academic is asking African Americans to believe in a set of ideals which do not reflect the reality of the social situation. Within the theater while the documentary was running people began to applaud Baldwin words which were spoken nearly five decades ago.

Race and the American Crisis in the 21^st Century

Consequently, the evoking of these searing questions still has much relevance for the current period in the U.S. The ascendancy of the Trump administration has made many whites comfortable to express their greatest fears through racist demagogy and practices.

This film by Peck makes an important contribution in fostering a dialogue about race, class and social justice. It is good to see Baldwin, who was a highly visible figure in the 1960s and 1970s both through the print media and mass communications outlets, almost resurrected through this documentary. Baldwin died from cancer in France on December 1, 1987.

Similar voices such as Baldwin’s are needed today. This film raises the question as to who are the public intellectuals in the America of the second decade of the 21^st century; those activists and thinkers that are immersed in the burning and pressing issues of the day.

This inquiry can only be answered by the younger generation which has recognized the need to continue the revolution to its completion. How this is to be done remains a chapter to be written for the annals of the future.

President Trump remained true to his customary flip-flopping on just about every issue when he stated during a joint press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu that he is “looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like… I can live with either one.” By stating so, Trump gave Netanyahu what he was hoping to get—a departure from the two-state solution.

To achieve that, Trump is reportedly looking at other options that would enlist the Arab states—who presently share mutual strategic interests with Israel to form a united front against their common enemy, Iran—to help broker a solution to the Palestinian problem.

To be sure, the two leaders who are both in trouble—Netanyahu is under multiple criminal investigations for corruption, and Trump is being attacked from just about every corner for his outrageous statements, contradictions, and self-indulgence—found comfort with one another.

Netanyahu went back home feeling triumphant, as he seemingly managed to sway Trump from the idea of two states, while Trump presented himself as a statesman thinking out of the box by looking at an Israeli-Arab comprehensive peace through which to fashion a solution to the Palestinian conflict.

Although CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with Mahmoud Abbas the day before the press conference, I was told by a top Jordanian official in Amman that Abbas was abundantly clear during the meeting that there is not and will never be an alternative to a two-state solution based on the Arab Peace Initiative (API). Moreover, Abbas indicated that Hamas’s position on a two-state solution is unequivocal, and in any case, Gaza and the West Bank must constitute a single Palestinian state.

While Netanyahu often pretended that he still believes in the two-state solution, during the many encounters he had with former Secretary of State John Kerry (including a joint meeting with Egypt’s President Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah in Aqaba in 2016) where he was presented with a comprehensive peace plan, he repeatedly changed his position.

Netanyahu habitually claimed that his extremist right-wing partners oppose the creation of a Palestinian state under any circumstances and that his government would collapse if he were to actively pursue the idea, as if he could not form a new government with the left and center parties who are committed to a two-state solution. Nevertheless, he continued to sing the song of two states for public consumption and to get the Obama administration off his back.

Regardless of what new ideas Netanyahu and Trump concocted, one thing remains certain: there is simply no other realistic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict other than two independent states, Jewish and Palestinian.

The viability of this solution does not only rest on preserving Israel as a democracy with a Jewish national identity while meeting the Palestinians’ aspiration for a state of their own. A careful scrutiny of other would-be alternatives floating around have no basis in reality.

Jordan is not and will never become a Palestinian state (as some Israelis advocate) because the Hashemite Kingdom will resist that with all its might; a binational state is a kiss of death to the Zionist dream; the establishment of a Palestinian state in Gaza while incorporating much of the West Bank into Israel is a non-starter; the creation of a federation between Israel, Jordan, and Palestine is a pipe dream; and finally, confining the Palestinians in the West Bank in cantons to run their internal affairs as they see fit, while Israel maintains security control, will be violently resisted by the Palestinians until the occupation comes to an end.

It is true that the Arab states view Israel today as a potential ally in the face of the Iranian threat, and there may well be a historic opportunity to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. This opportunity, though, can be materialized only in the context of the API.

The central requirement of the API is a settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on a two-state solution, which would subsequently lead to a regional peace. Indeed, only by Israel first embracing the API will the Arab states lend their support to a two-state solution by putting pressure on the Palestinians to make the necessary concessions to reach a peace accord.

Those who claim that the two-state solution has passed its time and new and creative ideas should be explored must know that many new ideas have been considered. None of them, however, could provide a solution that meets the Israelis’ or the Palestinians’ requirement for independent and democratic states enjoying Jewish and Palestinian national identities, respectively.

Netanyahu has found in Trump a co-conspirator. Both have a proven record of double talking, misleading, and often outright lying. Both are blinded by their hunger for power and are ready and willing to say anything to please their shortsighted constituencies. Neither has the vision or the courage to rise above the fray, and nothing they have uttered jointly meets the hardcore reality they choose to ignore.

What Netanyahu and Trump have demonstrated during their press conference was that both seem to revel in illusions where they find a zone of real comfort, while leaving Israelis and Palestinians to an uncertain and ominous future.

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.
[email protected]                            

Web: www.alonben-meir.com

Hydro in Ontario is a mess and rates are skyrocketing. The high number of people who have trouble paying or can’t pay their Hydro bills is growing by the day. Businesses are leaving the province and/or refusing to locate here because of high Hydro rates. A group that is especially being ignored is small and medium business including farmers (that’s from a former union activist!).

On 19 November 2016, Premier Kathleen Wynne said she made a “mistake on Hydro” and took “responsibility for it.” But it wasn’t just an accident that Hydro rates skyrocketed. Rates shot through the roof because they were structured that way through Provincial Government legislation. In actual fact, all three Provincial parties bear responsibility for the Hydro “mistake.”

It’s worth reviewing that history.

Shortly after the Mike Harris Conservatives took power in 1995, they commissioned an advisory committee to report on Hydro in Ontario. The report, A Framework for Competition: The Report of the Advisory Committee on Competition in Ontario’s Electricity System to the Ontario Minister of Environment and Energy, recommended breaking up the public monopoly and opening Hydro up to competition from private companies. Lorne Richmond from the law firm Sack, Goldblatt and Mitchell’s in-depth analysis of the Advisory report succinctly summarized it: “It looks like just a way to drag profit out of the public system.”

1998: End of Public, Non-Profit Hydro

The most significant piece of legislation affecting Hydro rates was Mike Harris’s Bill 35 in 1998, The Electricity Competition Act. It ended 94 years of public, non-profit, at-cost power in Ontario, where profits were given back to businesses and rate payers in the form of low and stable rates. On April 1st, 1999, all Municipal Hydro’s as well as Ontario Hydro were changed from non-profit, at-cost Commissions into for-profit corporations. Ontario Hydro was broken up into five Corporations, the two largest being OPG (Ontario Power Generation) and Hydro One. The Harris Tories conducted a massive advertising campaign on Hydro Deregulation promising that “A competitive deregulated electricity market, will lead to lower rates” [see “Harris certain Ontario power rates will drop”].

At public hearings then and all through the 2000s, as part of the campaign to maintain public hydro, the question repeatedly asked was “How do you get lower rates when you add in profits to generators, profits to distributors, profits to retailers, dividends to investors and commissions to commodities brokers?” When Tory Energy Minister Chris Stockwell was confronted with this question, he angrily left his own town hall meeting.

In 1998, the Conservatives set up a Market design committee. The main player on that committee came from ENRON, an American corporation that had recently committed one of the biggest corporate frauds in American history. It had designed electricity markets around the world including Alberta, California, and here in Ontario. Not surprisingly, Alberta had the same problems with high rates as we came to have here in Ontario. California subsequently had a major crisis with its electrical system after ENRON designed its electricity market and – in order to raise market rates – manipulated supply so low that it resulted in major blackouts. The deregulation that originated in the U.S. was the major cause of the 2003 blackout here in Ontario.

Ontario’s electricity market opened in the spring of 2002 but in November of that year Premier Ernie Eves had to close the retail market because the market price had spiked up to 49 times the rate during the summer months. The ENRON designed wholesale market – called the IESO (The Independent Electricity System Operator) remains open to this day and is one of the major reasons for price spikes in Ontario.

In April of 2002, CEP, CUPE and the Ontario Electricity Coalition stopped the Harris/Eves sale of Hydro One in court. During the court case Judge Gans asked the governments lawyer “Why did you separate the debt from the Bruce nuclear deal?” The Government Lawyer answered. “To make it easier to sell” [the ruling can be found here].

In June of 2002, after losing the court case to sell Hydro One, the Tories under Ernie Eves passed Bill 56 giving them the legal authority to sell Hydro One. But they didn’t dare do it. It is this legislation that Kathleen Wynne is using to sell Hydro One now. (In 2000, in a deal far worse than the sale of HWY 407, the Tories had privatized the Bruce nuclear station via a long term lease. The profits are privatized but the debt, the risks and decommissioning remain public). Tory leader Patrick Brown seems to have amnesia about the Tories’ actions and the Tory deregulation legislation that is the major part of skyrocketing hydro rates.

The ENRON designed IESO electricity market however remains open and hidden. The IESO submits a bill to the OEB (Ontario Energy Board), twice a year and the OEB “trues up” rates. That’s why for the last ten years, your Hydro bill has gone up every May 1st and November 1st. There is not an ENRON designed electricity market anywhere in the world where prices have not skyrocketed.

In the spring of 2002, part of the NDP’s energy plan was that “All new generation will be private.” (As well, during the early 1990s, Bob Rae’s appointee to head Ontario Hydro, Maurice Strong, was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the restructuring of Ontario Hydro for the Harris Tories). At the convention that year, leader Howard Hampton deleted that part of the NDP’s plan and he campaigned on Public Power in the 2003 provincial election.

On September 5, 2003, with Dalton McGuinty Liberals low in the polls, he took the main campaign plank of the NDP and promised Public Power. In an exclusive interview with the Toronto Sun‘s editorial board on that date, he declared: “Deregulation and privatization hasn’t worked and we can’t go back there. I’ve drawn a lesson from that. Number one, we’ve got to keep Hydro Public.” McGuinty is also on the record as saying, when Eves closed the retail electricity market, that “We don’t have any choice. I didn’t create this mess; My job is to clean it up. The market is dead, deregulation is dead, privatization is dead.”

The Liberals went on to win the election, broke their promise for Public Power, and continued to enact legislation which expanded Hydro deregulation and privatization. They passed Bill 100 in 2004 which changed regulations in favour of more deregulation. That year the Liberals introduced “time of use” pricing and Smart Meters with the promise that “Smart Meters will save you money.” McGuinty also said that Smart Meters were the primary tool for conservation. The Ontario Electricity Coalition said at the time that Smart Meters would not do anything for conservation. All “time of use” pricing and Smart Meters would do is funnel massive profits into the electricity market – a claim confirmed by the Auditor General’s 2014 report on Smart Meters.

The Liberals also won the 2007 Provincial election. Despite Public Power being the main campaign plank of the NDP in the 2003 election, the NDP never mentioned a word about Public Power during the entire 2007 election. The Liberals quickly went on to bring in the billion-dollar Integrated Power Supply plan promising more competition and increased efficiencies, and the Green Energy act in which the Liberal Government signed 20 and 30 year contracts with private green energy producers (wind turbines and solar farms) as high as 80 cents a Kwh, which forms the major part of that Global Adjustment Fee. In stark contrast, the price of power in 1998 was 4.3 cents a Kwh.

Since then, rates have soared as the Ontario Energy Board basically rubber stamps all applications for delivery (distribution) rate increases. Despite being touted as an independent watchdog, there is a revolving door for employment between the OEB and Hydro companies in Ontario.

In Toronto, since 2006, the OEB has approved $6-billion in rate increases with no effective oversight. How is it possible, in this day and age, for the CEO of Toronto Hydro to lie on his résumé (getting paid $1.2-million a year based on credentials he doesn’t have), lie under oath at regulatory hearings, raise rates by $6-billion, put a company $2-billion into debt with no scrutiny, and allow the Institutional knowledge required to run the utility to just walk out the door with no succession plan? When the OEB was presented with iron clad proof of the situation at Toronto Hydro, it did nothing.

Meanwhile small and medium businesses and citizens in Toronto suffered. Under deregulation, delivery or distribution charges went from about $6/month to as high as $120 in some rural areas, hitting farmers hard. There is much more to the story especially on the current sale of Hydro One. When the Liberals passed Bill 91 they removed all public oversight of Hydro One in order to make it easier to sell.

Rate Freezes

Once consistent, government response to rates going haywire because of deregulation has been to come in with a rate freeze to “protect” us – without in fact making any substantive change to deal with the underlying problem. Eves did it, McGuinty did it and now Wynne has done it. This latest round of rates freezes does nothing more than protect deregulation and the profits made by private energy producers.

Wynne is also financing the Global Adjustment fee which has greatly profited private green energy producers. Refinancing Global Adjustment fees just piles up more debt. Nor did Wynne close the IESO Electricity market. Market debt is also piling up; debt that must be paid by ratepayers… after the election.

In short, deregulation and privatization did not deliver on its promises of “lower rates,” or create “greater efficiencies.” Smart Meters did notsave you any money. In fact, Hydro deregulation has been a complete disaster for Ontario’s businesses, citizens and its economy. Deregulated electricity markets have not worked anywhere and never forget, the vested interests who profit greatly from the ENRON designed, IESO electricity market here in Ontario with do anything and everything to keep that market open.

How to Fix the ‘Mistake’

What needs to be done to fix Ontario’s electricity system and economy – it won’t be easy:

1. All privatization, mergers and the sale of Hydro One must immediately stop. (European countries like Germany are buying back their utilities. We must make a plan to buy back our Public utilities).
2. Deregulation didn’t work. Period. The IESO electricity market must be closed and deregulation legislation must be repealed.
3. Rates must be regulated. “Time of use” rates must be scrapped and replaced with a single rate. (Smart Meters can still be used for a single rate).
4. The entire Ontario Energy Board must be replaced and restructured to be a real public and democratic watchdog with real teeth so that it acts in the public interest not for the private few. A review should be conducted on the OEB’s decisions on delivery and distribution charges and some of the more glaring conflicts of interest.
5. We need green power. But in order for green power to be effective, conservation must be first. The planet is in trouble. Deregulation and private, for-profit power is never going to do what needs to be done. It is ten times cheaper to use less power than build new generation of any kind. Private electricity producers, green or conventional, are however not in the business of selling less power. There have been no real conservation measures under deregulation.
6. In order for Green power such as wind and solar to be successful, it must be owned locally, cooperatively and benefit the local community, not profit driven multinational corporations. The private sector does its job of making and manufacturing all the things we need for a Hydro system, wire, transformers, switches, poles connectors, relays etc. But – driven by their commitment to maximize profits for their shareholders – they do a terrible job of acting in the public interest. That’s the dividing line between public and private in the hydro industry.
7. Those long term agreements for private wind and solar power will have to be dealt with. This will be one of the most difficult issues. They will sue under NAFTA (As some of us predicted in 2002).
8. Make a plan and rebuild our public utilities. Ontario’s businesses, jobs for youth, the environment and the economy depend on that to happen. Returning these levers of control to local and provincial governments is critical.

If these things are not done, then our problems with high Hydro rates will remain. Some people are tired of hearing about Sir Adam Beck and his vision of Public Power. But… it is a fact. We did have 94 years of Public, non-profit power in Ontario. Sir Adam Beck wasn’t a socialist, he was a practical businessman backed by small and medium businesses and eighteen referendums in Ontario. His vision of Public Power made Ontario’s economy great. It made Ontario a great place to do business. On his death bed, Sir Adam Beck said “I wished I could have lived long enough to build a band of Iron around Hydro, to keep it safe from the politicians.” He might have added “And keep it safe from the profiteers.”

Conclusion: The 2018 Provincial Election

The people of Ontario never wanted private, deregulated power. They have always wanted regulated, public power. They now understand that rate freezes just delay the inevitable rate hikes after the election. They are ready to press for a fundamental change in how we deal with energy.

Ontario Tory Leader Patrick Brown has amnesia about the history and cause of high Hydro rates and is blaming Kathleen Wynne. Andrea Horwath’s NDP had the right campaign at the wrong time in 2003, but is now silent on Hydro deregulation and the ENRON designed IESO electricity market. Why is that? The NDP spent a ton of money on the Public Power campaign in 2003 and could claim that the NDP was right all along. Why isn’t she doing that?

The longer the delay to dump Hydro Deregulation, the worse our electricity problems will become. Whichever party has the courage to admit that Hydro Deregulation was a big mistake and deal with the electricity crisis with a plan to dump deregulation and regulate rates, will likely form the next Government in Ontario. •

Paul Kahnert was a Toronto Hydro worker and CUPE Local One member for 33 years. He was a spokesperson for the Ontario Electricity Coalition from 2001 to 2010. The Ontario Electricity Coalition and its members CEP and CUPE stopped the sale of Hydro One in a Province wide campaign and court case in the Spring of 2002.

The Cliff of Nuclear Annihilation: Humanity is on the Brink of Extinction! Thirty Seconds to Midnight

By Regis Tremblay, Helen Caldicott, Ray McGovern, David Vine, Chris Hedges, and Colonel Ann Wright, February 20 2017

Filmmaker Regis Tremblay states what few others dare to say. Humanity is on the brink of extinction! Nuclear power is not safe. 48 of America’s nuclear power plants are leaking and there is no way to get rid of nuclear waste. America’s reckless provocations of both Russia and China, two nuclear-armed countries, risk a nuclear holocaust from which no one survives. Climate change and global warming, if not mitigated immediately, will end the human experiment on earth sooner rather than later.

The “Counter-terrorism” Campaign in Syria is Fake. “Dark State” Manipulations Serve as Barriers to Peace

By Mark Taliano, February 19 2017

The recently-disclosed story about the U.S using depleted uranium ordnances in Syria is suspect – not because there is reasonable doubt that the U.S used them – but because the story is being conflated with the notion that the weapons were used against ISIS.

The Deep State Goes Shallow. “Reality-TV Coup d’etat in Prime Time”

By Edward Curtin, February 21 2017

It would not be hyperbolic to say that overthrowing democratic governments is as American as apple pie. It’s our “democratic” tradition – like waging war. What is less well known is that elements within the U.S. ruling power elites have also overthrown democratically elected governments in the United States.

A Tale of Two Realities: Donald Trump and Israel

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, February 20 2017

It was supremely wicked, and rapidly meandered into horse muddied waters. US President Donald J. Trump had openly expressed what many a US politician has felt but avoided for the sake of false decency: the two-state solution regarding Israel and Palestine was “a bad idea”. There was only one supremo in this fight, and it certainly did not entail the downtrodden in Gaza or the West Bank.

Analyzing the Emerging World Order: The Future of Globalism

By Levaughn Duran, February 19 2017

The global community today is clearly in a state of flux. This is not an aberration – we are in the midst of a normal and periodic global reordering. We shall briefly take a “big picture” look at this phenomenon and attempt to glean an understanding as to the direction that we are heading as citizens of a global society. It is my hope that these observations can foster a more in depth discussion between reasonable people; leading to the development of ideas which can then be implemented to improve the human condition.

The US Space Program and the Cold War, Historic Role of African American Women

By Abayomi Azikiwe, February 22 2017

Review: Hidden Figures – This feature film provides a glimpse into the role of African American women in the development of the United States space program during the early 1960s. These events coincided with the escalating struggle for civil rights and self-determination, a movement which dated back to the pre-Civil War era when even freed Africans were subjected to inhuman treatment despite their existence in a nation that professed equality for all men and later women.

Eric Zuesse, follow-up of version originally published at The Saker

Zerohedge’s “Tyler Durden” headlined on February 21st, “Bannon Breaks With Pence, Delivers Warning To Europe” and noted that before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis reassured European leaders this past weekend that the U.S. is as anti-Russian now as it was under Barack Obama, U.S. President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, had told European leaders “that he viewed the EU as a flawed construct and favoured conducting relations with Europe on a bilateral basis” — and that this fact supposedly raises a question regarding the Trump Administration, of “which axis is dominant: that of Trump/Bannon/Miller or Pence/Mattis/Haley.”

However, there is actually no such conflict: the Trump Administration, ever since at least February 14th’s White House press conference stating it firmly as President Trump’s policy, is and will remain anti-Russian. But this doesn’t deny that the Trump Administration also is going to be dealing not with the European Union as a government, but instead with the European nations individually. There is no contradiction between those two policies: America will be an enemy of Russia, and will support NATO in that regard, but America will not support the EU, but only its member-nations — to the extent that they increase their military spending (which is a decision that only each individual EU member-nation can make: there is no ‘EU’ market for weaponry, only 28 individual national markets there).

Donald Trump’s campaign statements that “NATO is obsolete” and that Russia and the U.S. “are not bound to be adversaries” were merely part of the candidate’s pitch to ‘anti-war’ voters, in a field of Presidential contenders who were ignoring them; but now that Trump is President, he is fully in line with the desires of America’s military-industrial complex, the owners of Lockheed Martin and other companies whose profits are heavily dependent upon selling nuclear missiles and other strategic weapons (in addition to the traditional weapons that those companies also want NATO member-nations to buy).

Thus far in his U.S. Presidency, Donald Trump has been serving not the American public but instead the American aristocracy, who loathed him and overwhelmingly preferred his Presidential-campaign competitor, Hillary Clinton. This fact — his serving the U.S. aristocracy instead of the public — is most starkly shown in Trump’s foreign policies, which might even be as strongly anti-Russian as hers were, even though he consistently throughout his campaign for the Presidency, promised that as President he would pursue a cooperative instead of a hostile U.S. relationship with Russia. In his policies toward Russia, thus far, he turns out to be far more Hillary Clinton than (the promised) Donald Trump. He might even be as likely to force World War III with Russia as she would have been as President.

Ever since Trump won the Presidency, the U.S. aristocracy (who control or outright own all of the U.S.-based international corporations whose sales-volumes depend upon increasing the nation’s and its’ allies’ ‘defense’ spending — and that requires restoring ‘the Cold War’) have been trying to abort his Presidency in any and every way they can. It’s a PR or marketing tactic. Above all, they have been trying to portray Trump as being secretly a Russian agent, a traitor. On February 14th, they clearly conquered him, and brought him fully into line (and not merely partially into line, as before, such as by his abolishing environmental and other regulations that reduce their profits). But did this happen because he is a coward, or instead because he is a fool? How did they conquer him? At the current time, this can be determined only by close examination of the way in which he capitulated. So, the February 14th event will be scrutinized here, in detail:

Trump made unequivocally clear, on February 14th, that the new Cold War between the U.S. and Russia will continue until Russia complies with two conditions that would not only be humiliating to Russia (and to the vast majority of its citizens), but that would also be profoundly immoral. One of these two conditions would actually be impossible, even if it weren’t, in addition, immoral. For Vladimir Putin to agree to either of these two conditions, would not only be a violation of his often-expressed basic viewpoint, but it would also cause the vast majority of Russians to despise him — because they respect him for his consistent advocacy of that very viewpoint. He has never wavered from it. The support of Russians for that viewpoint is virtually universal. (This article will explain the viewpoint.)

TRUMP’S DEMAND #1: “RETURN CRIMEA”

In order to understand the Russian perspective on the first of these two issues (which any American must understand who wants to understand the astounding stupidity of Mr. Trump’s position on this matter), which is the issue of Crimea (which had for hundreds of years been part of Russia, but was then suddenly and arbitrarily transferred to Ukraine in 1954 by the Soviet dictator — and the U.S. now demands that his dictat regarding Crimea must be restored), two videos are essential for anyone to see, and here they are:

The first video (click here to see it) (and no one should read any further here who hasn’t seen that video or at least the first twelve minutes of it, because it’s crucial) shows the U.S.-engineered coup that violently overthrew the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014, under the cover of ‘a democratic revolution’, which was actually nothing of the sort, and which had instead started being planned in the U.S. State Department by no later than 2011, and started being organized inside the U.S. Embassy in Kiev by no later than 1 March 2013. The head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor, has rightly called it “the most blatant coup in history”.

The second video (click here to see it) shows the massacre of Crimeans who were escaping from Kiev during the Ukrainian coup, on 20 February 2014, and which massacre came to be known quickly in Crimea, as “the Pogrom of Korsun,” which was the town where the fascists whom the Obama regime had hired were able to trap the escapees and kill many of them. That’s the incident which — occurring during the coup in Ukraine — stirred enormous fear by Crimeans of the rabid hatred toward them by the U.S.-installed regime.

Finally on the issue of Crimea, all of the Western-sponsored polls that were taken of Crimeans both before and after the plebiscite on 16 March 2014 (which was just weeks after Obama overthrew the Ukrainian President for whom 75% of Crimeans had voted) showed over 90% support by Crimeans for Crimea’s return to being again a part of Russia. Everyone agrees that there was far more than 50% support for that, among the Crimeans. Furthermore, even Barack Obama accepted the basic universal principle of the right of self-determination of peoples when it pertained to Catalans in Spain, and Scots in UK, and neither he nor anyone else has ever been able to make any credible case for applying it there and generally, but not in Crimea — especially under these circumstances.

So, on the first issue, Trump’s demand that Putin force the residents of Crimea to become subjects of the coup-regime that Obama had just established in Ukraine, it won’t be fulfilled — and it shouldn’t be fulfilled. Obama instituted the sanctions against Russia on the basis of what he called Putin’s “conquest of land” (referring to Crimea), but Russians see it instead as Russia’s standing steadfast for, and protecting, in what was historically and culturally a part of Russia not a part of Ukraine, the right of self-determination of peoples — especially after the country of which their land had been a part for the immediately prior 60 years (Ukraine), had been conquered three weeks earlier, via a bloody coup by a foreign power, and, moreover, this was a foreign power whom Crimeans loathed. Putin will not accept Trump’s demand. Nor should he.

TRUMP’S DEMAND #2: RUSSIA END THE UKRAINE-v.-DONBASS WAR

The way that this demand was stated on February 14th was that Russia must “deescalate violence in the Ukraine,” referring to Ukraine’s invasions of its own former Donbass region, which broke away from the Obama-installed Ukrainian regime shortly after Crimea did, but which Putin (after having already suffered so much — sanctions, etc. — from allowing the Crimeans to become Russians again) refused to allow into the Russian Federation, and only offered military and humanitarian assistance to protect themselves so that not all of the roughly five million residents there would flee across the border into Russia.

Donbass had voted 90% for the Ukrainian President that Obama illegally replaced in his coup.

Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel, and Vladimir Putin, had established the Minsk negotiations and agreements, to end the hottest phase of the (Obama-caused) war between Ukraine and Donbass; and a crucial part of the Minsk-2 agreement was that Ukraine would allow the residents of Donbass a certain minimal degree of autonomy within Ukraine, as part of a new Ukrainian Federation, but Ukraine’s Rada or parliament refuses to do that, refuses to allow it, and the United States and its allies blame the residents of Donbass for that refusal by their enemies, and blame the Donbassers for the continued war, or, as Trump’s press secretary referred to it on February 14th, “violence in the Ukraine.”

He’s demanding that Donbass stop the war, when Donbass is being constantly attacked by a Ukrainian regime that refuses even to fulfill a fundamental provision of the peace agreement that Hollande, Merkel, and Putin, had arranged, and that both Ukraine and Donbass signed. (Note: even Hollande and Merkel weren’t able to get the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Obama, to so much as participate in this effort for peace.)

A demand like that — for the victim to stop the fight — is impossible to fulfill. It’s like, in World War II, blaming the United States, Soviet Union, and UK, for their war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. It is a cockeyed demand, which requires only cockeyed credulous believers, in order for it to be taken seriously.

The way that Sean Spicer, President Trump’s press spokesperson, put this demand in his February 14th press conference, was:

 President Trump has made it very clear that he expects the Russian government to deescalate violence in the Ukraine and return Crimea.  At the same time, he fully expects to and wants to be able to get along with Russia.

To some people, that combination sounds idiotic. In any event, it’s not merely unrealistic; it is downright impossible. It’s not seeking peace with Russia; it is instead reasserting war against Russia.

Spicer said, with evident pride: “The President has been incredibly tough on Russia.”

A reporter at the press conference challenged that statement: “To me it seems, and I think to a lot of Americans it seems that this President has not been tough on Russia.” Spicer answered by referring to the statement that America’s new U.N. Representative, Nikki Haley, had made. She said at the U.N. on February 2nd:

I must condemn the aggressive actions of Russia. … The United States stands with the people of Ukraine, who have suffered for nearly three years under Russian occupation and military intervention. Until Russia and the separatists it supports respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, this crisis will continue. … The United States continues to condemn and call for an immediate end to the Russian occupation of Crimea. Crimea is a part of Ukraine. Our Crimea-related sanctions will remain in place until Russia returns control over the peninsula to Ukraine.

So, Spicer said that,

with respect to Russia, I think the comments that Ambassador Haley made at the U.N. were extremely forceful and very clear that until — Q    That was an announcement from Haley, not the President.MR. SPICER:  She speaks for the President.  I speak for the President.  All of us in this administration.  And so all of the actions and all of the words in this administration are on behalf and at the direction of this President.  So I don’t think we could be any clearer on the President’s commitment.

Trump is continuing Obama’s war against Russia, although he had not given America’s voters to expect anything of the kind. Some voters (this writer is one) had voted for him because Trump alleged that he strongly disagreed with his opponent Hillary Clinton about that — he outright lied to the voters, on the most important thing of all. He applied mental coercion — deceit — in order to win. But as it turns out, he’s not really opposed at all to Obama’s coup in Ukraine. Perhaps he is so stupid that he’s not even aware that it was a coup, instead of a ‘democratic revolution’ (the cover-story). Maybe he’s so stupid, that he believes Obama’s lies.

At least Hillary Clinton was honest enough to make clear that she was going to continue Obama’s policies (only worse). But she was so stupid that she couldn’t even beat Donald Trump.

Anyway, all of that is water over the damn, now.

Initially, it had seemed that the only way in which Trump was aiming to satisfy the U.S. aristocracy (owners of the military-industrial complex, among other things) about increasing the ‘defense’ budget, was going to be a buildup against Iran; but, now, that war might end up playing second fiddle.

The war with Russia can only escalate, unless or until President Trump reverses course and states publicly, and provides to the American people and the world, the clear evidence of, his predecessor’s perfidy, both in Ukraine, and in Syria. Unless and until he comes clean, and admits that the problem between the U.S. and Russia isn’t Putin, but instead Obama, it will continue escalating, right up to World War III; and here is why:

When it escalates to a traditional hot war, either in Ukraine or in Syria, the side that’s losing that traditional war will have only one way to avoid defeat: a sudden unannounced nuclear all-out blitz attack against the other side. A nuclear war will last less than 30 minutes. The side that attacks first will suffer the less damage, because it will have knocked out some of the other side’s retaliatory missiles and bombs. The military would score that as a ‘win’ (victory, even if nuclear winter results). The global public would score it as hell (regardless of which side ‘wins’). If Donald Trump were intelligent, then one could assume that he knows this. He’s not, so he doesn’t. He plods on, toward mutual nuclear annihilation. Perhaps, like Hillary Clinton, he believes that the U.S. has ‘Nuclear Primacy’ and so will ‘win’.

It’s all so stupid. But, even worse, it’s evil. And I’m not talking about Russia or Putin here. The real problem — on this ultimate issue, of avoiding a nuclear winter — is my own country: the United States of America. To call this a ‘democracy’ is not merely a lie; it is a bad joke. The American public are not to blame for this evil. The American aristocracy are. It’s an oligarchy gone mad.

Trump was never a principled person. He never really resisted, at all. He caved after only three weeks on the job. Clearly, then, he’s not only a psychopath; he is a fool.

Trump promised to ‘drain the swamp’. Instead, he’s feeding the alligators. He’s serving the higher powers, even though they despise and would like to destroy him. He’s obsequious for their support; he has decided that they control the public even more than the President of the U.S. can. He threw in the towel within his first three weeks on the job. Perhaps he’s just trying to avoid being overthrown. He never even tried the “bully pulpit.” The con is over, and he doesn’t know anything else than that tactic. He never really cared about the truth, nor about the public. Only the con. And it’s been failing.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

On Monday, on the eve of his 65th birthday, Russia’s UN envoy died – cause of death so far not announced, perhaps a heart attack, though given US hostility toward Russia, foul play remains a possibility unless forensic analysis rules it out.

Family, friends, colleagues and admirers like myself mourn his tragic loss. Vladimir Putin “express(ed) condolences to (his) family and friends, and to the entire Foreign Ministry following” his death. “The head of state highly valued Churkin’s professionalism and diplomatic talent,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained.

Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov called him “a rock against which attempts of our enemies to undermine all that makes the glory of Russia break.”

It will be impossible, very difficult to replace him as a symbol of Russia’s foreign policy and Russia’s voice on a key international platform in the Security Council.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakhavova said he was “admired not only by those who loved him. His opponents also admired him.”

A Foreign Ministry statement said he he “died suddenly in New York on February 20…The outstanding Russian diplomat died in harness.”

In early February, he said diplomatic positions are “much more hectic” than they used to be, very “stressful” because of instability worldwide.

On April 8, 2006, he was appointed Russia’s UN envoy, serving in this capacity honorably and effectively with distinction until his tragic death.

In 1981, he earned a doctorate in history from Soviet Russia’s Diplomatic Academy. After graduating from Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1974, he joined Soviet Russia’s Foreign Ministry as a translator.

From 1974 – 1979, he was a USSR Strategic Arms Limitation Talks staff member. From 1979 – 1982, he served as Foreign Ministry US desk third secretary.

From 1982 – 1987, he was USSR’s Washington embassy second, then first secretary. From 1987 – 1990, he served as Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) International Department staff member, then special advisor and press secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister Eduard Shevandnadze.

From 1990 – 1991, he was Foreign Ministry Information Department director. From 1992 – 1994, he served as Russian Federation deputy foreign minister, and special representative of Russia’s president to talks on the former Yugoslavia.

From 1994 – 1998, he was Russia’s ambassador to Belgium, then liaison ambassador to NATO and the Western European Union (WEU).

From 1998 – 2003, he served as ambassador to Canada. From 2003 – 2006, he was ambassador at large, along with other diplomatic responsibilities before his appointment as permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.

In February 2012, then President Dmitry Medvedev awarded him the Order of Merit to the Fatherland 4th class – Russia’s highest civilian honor.

Admired by allies and adversaries alike, he’s survived by his two children, Anastasia and Maksim.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

A (criminal war propaganda[1]) article dated February 19, 2017, and published by TheWeeklyNews.ca, entitled “Canadian military planes flying over Syria”, speaks volumes through omission.

Brig.-Gen. Shane Brennan reportedly disclosed that Canadian aircraft have flown between 20 and 30 missions over Syria in recent months.  He said “We have done work in Syria,” and that “(t)here’s lots of work to do in Iraq. We are looking at all of the areas.”

The article omitted a few important “details”.  The seemingly casual reference to doing “work in Syria” indicates Canada’s on-going support for the criminal U.S/NATO strategy – as outlined by Defense Intelligence Agency document 14-L-0552/DIA/287-293[2] – to use terrorists, including ISIS, to destroy the sovereign country of Syria and topple its legal government.

They used it all over Syria where these battles have been, but they also armed terrorists with depleted uranium weaponry.  The whole country now, where the battles have been whether on battlefields or in urban regions, are all contaminated. And that has to be cleaned up before they rebuild the cities, parts of Damascus, almost all of Aleppo, and villages too[3].

The West also used depleted uranium ordnances in Iraq, so its willful use in Syria, is even more heinous. British Radiation expert Dr. Chris Busby, Fellow of the University of Liverpool in the Faculty of Medicine and UK representative on the European Committee on Radiation Risk, claims that, “by illegally using hundreds of tons of depleted uranium (DU) against Iraq, Britain and America have gravely endangered not only the Iraqis but the whole world,” and that these weapons have released deadly, carcinogenic and mutagenic, radioactive particles in such abundance that-whipped up by sandstorms and carried on trade winds – there is no corner of the globe they cannot penetrate-including Britain.

For the wind has no boundaries and time is on their side: the radioactivity persists for over 4,500,000,000 years and can cause cancer, leukemia, brain damage, kidney failure, and extreme birth defects – killing millions of every age for centuries to come. A crime against humanity which may, in the eyes of historians, rank with the worst atrocities of all time.[4]

So, Canada’s willful engagement in the pre-planned, criminal invasion of Syria – including the criminal sanctions — appears to be ramping up. And the fake MSM media, guilty on all counts of committing war propaganda, continues to aid and abet these crimes against Syria, these crimes against international law, and these crimes against humanity.

Former high school teacher Mark Taliano is an author and independent investigative reporter who recently returned from a trip to Syria with the Third International Tour of Peace to Syria. In this book, he combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes mainstream media narratives about the dirty war on Syria.

**New Book: Voices from Syria**

Author: Mark Taliano

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-9-1

Year: 2017

Product Type: PDF File

List Price: $6.50

Special Offer: $5.00 

Click to order

Notes

The Syrian Air Force has inflicted major damage to Jund al-Aqsa linked to the ISIS terrorist group in the Idlib-Hama countryside. Syrian warplanes destroyed a Jund al-Aqsa gathering near Khan Sheikhoun and a convoy belonging to the terrorist group near Morek, destroying at least 30 militants and 16 units of military equipment including battle tanks.

Khan Sheikhoun and Morek was captured by Jund al-Aqsa earlier this month after a series of firefights with Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and other “moderate opposition” members. However, now Jund al Aqsa has reportedly made a peace deal with Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a Jabhat Fatah al-Sham-led coalition of various terrorists, to withdraw to the province of Raqqah after crossing the Ithriya-Khanasser highway.

Clashes between the Syrian army and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham were reported in Dayyat Al-Assad and Souq al-Jibs west of the city of Aleppo. Government troops had allegedly attempted to seize the al-Soura checkpoint in Dayyat Al-Assad. The situation remains tense.

200 militants have surrendered and withdrawn from the town of Serghaya near Damascus. As soon as the militant evacuation is done, the town will be under a full control of the army.

The so-called “Syrian Democratic Forces” (SDF, in other words rebranded fighters of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units), supported by the US Air Power and the US Special Forces, have seized the villages of al-Ferar, Kassar, Terfawiyah and Sabah al-Khayr from ISIS terrorists in the countryside of Raqqah. SDF units also attacked the ISIS-held areas of Mokha and Tell Shair.

Four Russian military servicemen were killed and two others were wounded in a car blast in Syria, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on February 20. The blast targeted a column of the Syrian troops en route from the Tiyas military airbase towards Homs, according to the statement.

The netflix movie “The White Helmets” may win an Oscar in the “short documentary” category at the Academy Awards on Sunday February 26.  It will not be a surprise, despite the fact that the group is a fraud and the movie is a contrived infomercial.

The White Helmets are a “feel good” story like a Disney hero movie: 90% myth and fabrication. Most of what is claimed about the Syrian rescue group is untrue. They are not primarily Syrian; the group was initiated by British military contractor James LeMesurier and has been heavily funded by the USA, UK and other governments.

They are not volunteers; they are paid. This is confirmed in the Al Jazeera video which shows some White Helmet “volunteers’ talking about going on strike if they don’t get paid soon. Most of the heavy funding goes to the marketing which is run by “The Syria Campaign” based in New York.

The manager is an Irish America woman Anna Nolan who has never been to Syria. As an example of its deception, “The Syria Campaign” website features video showing children dancing and playing soccer implying they are part of the opposition demand for a “free and peaceful” Syria . But the video images are taken from a 2010 BBC documentary about education in Syria under the Baath government.

When eastern Aleppo was finally freed from the armed militants, it was discovered that the White Helmets headquarters were alongside the headquarters of the Al Qaeda Syrian militant group. Civilians from east Aleppo reported that the White Helmets primarily responded when the militants were attacked. Soon after departing Aleppo in government supplied buses (!) the White Helmets showed up in the mountains above Damascus where they allied with terrorist groups in poisoning then shutting off the water source for five million people in Damascus.

The White Helmets’ claim to be neutral and independent is another lie. They only work in areas controlled by the rebel groups, primarily Nusra/ Al Qaeda.  Their leaders actively call for US and NATO intervention in Syria. Video shows White Helmet workers picking up the corpse of a civilian after execution and celebrating Nusra / Al Qaeda terrorist battle wins.

The movie is as fraudulent as the group it tries to heroize.

The film-makers never set foot in Syria. Their video footage takes place in southern Turkey where they show White Helmet trainees in a hotel and talking on cell phones. Thrilling. There is some footage from inside Syria but it looks contrived.  The opening scene depicts a White Helmet “volunteer” going to work and beseeching his son not to give mommy a hard time. Real or scripted?

The message is simple: here are people we can support; they are under attack by the brutal “regime”…shouldn’t we “do something” to stop it??!

Khaled Khatib is said to be the person who filmed the footage from inside Syria. He has reportedly received a US visa and will attend the Oscars. This will likely garner special media attention. Ironically, some of those who have exploited the refugee issue for their own fund-raising campaigns, like Human Rights Watch, are groups which promote the war which created the refugee crisis.

Khatib has tweeted the first video he took showing the White Helmets. It looks remarkably unrealistic, with a girl who was totally buried being removed without injuries or wounds or even much dirt. Is it really possible to rescue people that quickly? In the real world, rescue workers are told to work slowly so as to not damage or exacerbate body injuries. The original video has the logo of Aleppo Media Center (AMC) which was created by the Syrian Expatriates Organization.  Their address on K Street in Washington DC suggests this is yet another Western funded media campaign driven by political objectives.

In the past few days, with perfect timing for the upcoming Oscars, there is yet another “miracle” rescue …. another girl totally buried but then removed and whisked away in record breaking time – perfect for social media.  Is it real or is it contrived?

This raises a question regarding the integrity of the Oscar Academy Awards. Are awards given for actual quality, authenticity, skill and passion?  Or are Oscar awards sometimes given under political and financial influence?  There is political motivation to promote the White Helmets as part of the effort to prevent the collapse of the Western/Israeli/Gulf campaign to overthrow the Syrian government.

These same governments have given boatloads of money to fuel the propaganda campaign. Last week Syria Solidarity Movement reached out to three marketing firms in the LA area to request help challenging the White Helmets nomination.  Two of the firms declined and the third said they were already being paid to promote the nomination!

The true source and purpose of the White Helmets was exposed almost two years ago. More recently Vanessa Beeley has documented the fact there is a REAL Syrian Civil Defence which was begun in the 1950’s and is a member of the International Civil Defense Organizations. This organization is opposite to the group created in Turkey in 2013. According to on-the-ground interviews in Aleppo, terrorists began by killing real Syrian rescue workers and stealing their equipment.  Since then the White Helmets have been supplied, by the West through Turkey, with brand new ambulances and related rescue equipment.

Max Blumenthal has written a two part detailed examination of the “shadowy PR firm” behind the “White Helmets”. And Jan Oberg has written an overview survey of the “pro” and “con” examinations in his work “Just How Gray are the White Helmets”.

Yet mainstream media, and some ‘alternative’ media, continue to uncritically promote the myth of the “White Helmets”. The promoters of the group absolutely deserve an award for marketing and advertising.  This is a field where truth and reality is irrelevant; it’s all about sales and manipulation. On that basis, the “White Helmets” has been an incredible success. The group was started as “Syria Civil Defense”  in Turkey in 2013.

It was re-branded as the “White Helmets” in 2014. It was heavily used in 2014 and 2015 by Nicholas Krisof, Avaaz and others to campaign for all out aggression against Syria.  In 2016 the group received the Rights Livelihood Award and was seriously considered for a Nobel Peace Prize.  These facts show how corrupt and politically and financially influenced the Rights Livelihood Award and Nobel Peace Prize can be.

The White Helmets movie is a tactic in the ongoing campaign of distortion and deception around Syria.  It’s a fraud, just like the fake kidnapping of NBC reporter Richard Engel. The Oscars will be a demonstration of the integrity of the Academy Awards.  The reporting on the story will be a test of the integrity and accuracy of media outlets. Ironically, the Israeli mainstream TV program I24 presented both sides and titled the segment “White Helmets: Heroes or Hoax?”.  In contrast, the highly popular and widely respected DemocracyNow has  only broadcast a puff piece promoting the “White Helmet” disinformation.  The coming days will reveal more about the ongoing information war against Syria.  Meanwhile on online petition continues to gather signatures to NOT give the Oscar to the White Helmets deception.

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at [email protected]

Los dirigentes europeos tratan por todos los medios de aumentar la presencia de la OTAN en el este de Europa y sus capacidades de intervención en el sur. Así pretenden evitar un posible acercamiento entre Washington y Moscú y tratar a la vez de obtener todo lo que puedan antes de tener que aumentar su propia contribución a la alianza atlántica.

Los ministros de Defensa de la OTAN reunidos en Bruselas, en el marco del Consejo del Atlántico Norte, decidieron nuevos pasos para el «fortalecimiento de la Alianza», ante todo en el frente del este, con el despliegue de nuevas «fuerzas de disuasión» en Estonia, Letonia, Lituania y Polonia. Al mismo tiempo, decidieron aumentar la presencia de la OTAN en todo el este de Europa con la realización de ejercicios terrestres y navales. En junio, estarán completamente operativos 4 batallones multinacionales que deben desplegarse en esa región.

También se acrecentará la presencia naval de la OTAN en el Mar Negro. Se inició además la creación de un mando multinacional de fuerzas especiales, que inicialmente contará con unidades de Bélgica, Dinamarca y Holanda. Finalmente, el Consejo del Atlántico Norte felicita a Georgia por sus progresos en el proceso que llevará ese país a convertirse en miembro pleno de la OTAN, con lo cual se convertiría –junto a Estonia y Lituania– en el tercer miembro de la alianza atlántica directamente fronterizo con Rusia.

En el frente sur, directamente vinculado con el frente del este, sobre todo debido a la confrontación Rusia-OTAN-Siria, el Consejo del Atlántico Norte anuncia una serie de medidas para «contrarrestar las amenazas provenientes del Medio Oriente y del norte de África y para proyectar estabilidad más allá de nuestras fronteras».

En el Mando de la Fuerza Conjunto Aliada en Nápoles se creó el Polo hacia el Sur, cuyo personal se eleva a 100 militares y cuya misión consistirá en «evaluar las amenazas provenientes de la región y enfrentarlas junto a las naciones y organizaciones socias». Para ello dispondrá de aviones-espías AWACS y de drones que rápidamente entrarán en disposición operativa en la base de Sigonella, situada en Sicilia [Italia].

Para las operaciones militares ya está lista «Fuerza de Respuesta» de la OTAN, con 40 000 soldados, sobre todo su «Fuerza de Avanzada de Muy Alta Rapidez Operativa».

El Polo hacia el Sur, según explica el secretario general de la OTAN Jens Stoltenberg– aumentará la capacidad de la OTAN para «prevenir las crisis». En otras palabras, la OTAN podrá efectuar intervenciones militares «preventivas». La alianza atlántica adopta así, en conjunto, la doctrina del «halcón» Bush hijo sobre la guerra preventiva.

Los primeros en desear un reforzamiento de la OTAN, ante todo con objetivos anti-rusos, son, en este momento, los gobiernos europeos miembros de la alianza, que generalmente se presentan como «palomas». Su temor es que la administración Trump les coja la delantera o acabe marginándolos si decide abrir negociaciones directas con Moscú.

Particularmente activos están los gobiernos del este de Europa. Varsovia, que no se conforma solamente con la 3ª Brigada blindada estadounidense enviada a Polonia por la administración Obama, ahora solicita a Washington, por boca del influyente Kaczynski, la protección del «paraguas nuclear» estadounidense, o sea el despliegue en suelo polaco de armas nucleares estadounidenses que apunten hacia Rusia.

Kiev, por su parte, retomó en la región de Donbass la ofensiva contra los rusos de Ucrania recurriendo tanto a intensos bombardeos artilleros como al asesinato sistemático de líderes de la resistencia mediante atentados tras los cuales también se esconde la participación de los servicios secretos occidentales. Al mismo tiempo, el presidente Porochenko anunció un referéndum para incorporar Ucrania a la OTAN.

Y ¿quién corrió a respaldarlo? El primer ministro griego Alexis Tsipras, quien, de visita oficial en Kiev –los días 8 y 9 de febrero–, expresó al presidente Porochenko «el firme apoyo de Grecia a la soberanía, la integridad territorial y la independencia de Ucrania» y, por tanto, su no reconocimiento a lo que Kiev llama «la ilegal anexión rusa de Crimea». Según Tsipras, su encuentro con Porochenko creó las bases para «años de estrecha colaboración entre Grecia y Ucrania» y contribuirá a «alcanzar la paz en la región».

Manlio Dinucci

Manlio Dinucci: Geógrafo y politólogo.

Artículo original en italiano:

Le colombe armate dell’Europa

Edición del martes 21 de febrero de 2017 de il manifesto.

https://ilmanifesto.it/le-colombe-armate-delleuropa/

Traducido al Español por la Red Voltaire.

IMAGEN: Enrique García Rodríguez, economista y presidente ejecutivo de la Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF) por 25 años.

Para un economista latinoamericano con el recorrido de Enrique García, la irrupción de Donald Trump en Estados Unidos o el nuevo papel estratégico de China hacen que este sea “un momento para repensar la integración regional en América Latina”.

Veterano de muchas crisis, Enrique García está a punto de terminar su mandato de ¡veinticinco años! al frente de la CAF, el Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina al que llegó en 1991 después de ser ministro de Planeamiento en su país, Bolivia, y desempeñar puestos de gran responsabilidad en el Banco Mundial, el Fondo Monetario o el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo.

Dice que “el cuadro internacional es muy diferente y más complejo que hace unos años”, que “hay que ser cauteloso con Trump”, que “China es un jugador importante pero su ritmo de crecimiento no es el que tenía hace cinco años”, o que “los extremos (en política, en economía) no son nada buenos”…

Durante su entrevista con Efe, se le nota un lenguaje corporal tan prudente y sosegado como sosegado y prudente es su criterio, marcado siempre por una actitud templada, pragmática, cautelosa.

Aunque consciente de las medidas que está tomando el presidente Trump, García apunta que la estabilidad del sistema en Estados Unidos, la firmeza que equilibra los tres grandes poderes de la Unión -el Ejecutivo, el Legislativo y el Judicial- aconsejan no precipitar el juicio.

Y sin embargo opina que decisiones como las que afectan a México, por ejemplo, o a asuntos como el comercio o la inmigración son “señales” para que América Latina vaya tomando posiciones.

“Creo que es un buen momento para repensar la integración regional en América Latina; una integración que no está funcionando como se soñaba -es la verdad- pero que, en este punto de inflexión, se puede avanzar en aspectos concretos”.

Su idea es “identificar aquellos temas o cuestiones que hagan progresar a la región a un ritmo más acelerado; que la hagan más competitiva”.

García opina que “América Latina no está en crisis”, y puntualiza que “aunque algunos países tengan problemas, su potencial de crecimiento es alto”, y que la Alianza del Pacífico -México, Colombia, Perú y Chile- puede, a su juicio, acercarse al Mercosur “si se estabiliza la macroeconomía en ambas regiones”.

Aunque haya corrientes, tendencias políticas muy diversas en el ámbito latinoamericano, el aún presidente de la CAF (su mandato concluye el 31 de marzo) sostiene, tajante, que la macroeconomía no tiene ideología”. Números son números.

Insiste en que “los extremos no son nada buenos”, en que “ni estatismo ni neoliberalismo a ultranza”, en que “hay que buscar el equilibrio entre el Estado y el mercado”, principalmente porque hay cosas que aquél no puede hacer sin éste y viceversa.

Cuando habla de España, Enrique García entiende que su presencia política en América Latina -no la económica- fuera más limitada durante la crisis porque “tenía que mirar más hacia su problema interno”, aunque cree que “es momento de retomar la iniciativa ahora que la situación ha mejorado”.

Echando un vistazo a sus veinticinco años al frente de la CAF (con sede en Caracas), su presidente se queda con varios logros, entre ellos que este organismo haya pasado de estar formado por cinco países andinos a convertirse en una gran institución con 19 naciones de América Latina y el Caribe más España y Portugal.

La capacidad de préstamo de la CAF ha pasado durante su mandato de 400 millones de dólares a 12.000, y su situación financiera es tal que las agencias de calificación de riesgos (Standard and Poor’s, Fitch o Moody’s) han aumentado hasta catorce veces su nivel de solvencia.

García señala que la CAF ha podido desarrollar “una agenda integral centrada en la estabilidad macroeconómica, la eficiencia microeconómica, la equidad y la cohesión social, y el equilibrio medioambiental”.

Y, en fin, como problemas críticos que siguen amenazando al mundo, el veterano economista señala dos viejos conocidos: la falta de transparencia y la lacra de la corrupción.

Enrique García

Enrique García: Economista y presidente ejecutivo de la Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF).

Desde los años treinta, cada vez que el capitalismo entra en crisis, el liberalismo se desprende de los ropajes democráticos y regresa a sus feudos. Engañan a los pueblos buscando a alguien que diga con palabras escogidas lo que los pueblos golpeados quieren escuchar. Cada ciclo histórico, como si fuera una condena, los pueblos vuelven a votar a sus verdugos. Pero no todos. Esa es la disputa en América Latina. A los poderosos, no les resulta tan sencillo regresar. Por eso, para asustar a los que no convencen, encarcelan a los que protestan. Especialmente a quienes tienen cabeza y corazón. Por ejemplo, a Milagro Sala. En esa pelea andamos a ambos lados del Atlántico. Los amigos y los adversarios cruzan océanos y se encuentran. Por eso, nosotros, aquí, en España, nos sentimos encarcelados con Milagro.

Macri visita España, y Madrid tiene que saludarle como Jefe del Estado de un país hermano. Conocemos las reglas del protocolo, pero duele. Sabemos que Macri está haciendo sufrir a nuestras hermanas y hermanos argentinos. Sabemos que Macri prometió en campaña no tocar los programas sociales, pero está sembrando la Argentina de pobres e indigentes. Sabemos que Macri vuelve a matar simbólicamente a las víctimas del terrorismo de Estado y sabemos que Macri desprecia los derechos humanos. Sabemos que Macri forma parte de esa internacional conservadora que apoya golpes de Estado parlamentarios y que defiende la esclavitud por deudas de los países de la periferia, incluida la Argentina.

Sabemos que Macri está con los jueces y no con la justicia, que está con las empresas multinacionales y no con las cooperativas, que está con los que contaminan y no con los contaminados. Sabemos que Macri está con el lenguaje del imperio y no con las lenguas indígenas, que está con los torturadores y no con los torturados, que está con Satanás aunque siempre ha tenido una cuenta en algún banco del viejo Vaticano. Sabemos que está con Juan Pablo II pero no puede estar con el papa Francisco. Sabemos que Macri está con los que desahucian y no con los desahuciados, que está con los financieros y no con los hipotecados, que está con las petroleras y no con la Madre Tierra. Sabemos que Macri es un presidente manchado con el escándalo de los paraísos fiscales y sabemos que tiene el corazón donde descansa su cartera. Sabemos que Macri alza la voz defendiendo los derechos humanos en los países que intentan gobernar para las mayorías pero mantiene encarcelada injustamente a una mujer, Milagro Sala, porque no le tiene miedo a ese mundo dorado y podrido que representan los Macri de este mundo. Sabemos que Milagro está con el vaso de leche a los niños y Macri está con los fondos buitre. Sabemos que Milagro es la vida de la solidaridad y de los pobres y Macri un recuerdo torpe del Rey Midas al que nunca le enterraron con todo su oro. En España nos topamos con Macri pero nos acordamos de Milagro.

Y aquí, en Madrid, le recordamos al Presidente de la Argentina que los mandatarios pasan pero la solidaridad de los pueblos permanece, que él quedará en la historia como un triste momento de marcha atrás, mientras Milagro Sala vive en cada pueblo que no tiene miedo a los poderosos. Macri, como Rajoy, como Trump, como Temer son el fantasma lúgubre del  neoliberalismo y Milagro es la respuesta que siempre los heraldos de la muerte van a encontrar cada vez que toquen la dignidad del pueblo. Por eso estamos con Milagro. Por eso sabemos que Macri no es uno de los nuestros porque es, con toda la evidencia, uno de los de ellos. Uno de los de siempre.

Uno de los que nos ponen en marcha para evitar que nos vuelvan a robar la democracia.

Rafael Mayoral

Juan Carlos Monedero

Rafael Mayoral: Diputado de Podemos. 

Juan Carlos Monedero: Profesor de Ciencia Política y cofundador de Podemos.

Los tiempos no podían ser más desafortunados para recibir noticias negativas sobre la crisis en Grecia. Después de algunos meses en el congelador, el tema de la moratoria y de una posible salida griega de la esfera del euro vuelve a sembrar la alarma en Europa. Pero ahora esto se combina con los exabruptos de las primeras semanas de Trump en la Casa Blanca, así como con las peripecias sobre las negociaciones del Brexit y las perspectivas de las elecciones en Francia, Holanda y Alemania en los próximos meses. Este torbellino de acontecimientos corre el riesgo de entorpecer el desenlace de las negociaciones sobre el rescate en Grecia y sus consecuencias.

Las relaciones entre Vietnam y Rusia muestran hoy bases más sólidas tras la visita aquí de la presidenta del Consejo de la Federación, Valentina Matvienko, marcada por la reafirmación de la voluntad común de continuar ampliando los nexos.

El tema dominó los encuentros de la líder parlamentaria con el jefe de Estado vietnamita, Tran Dai Quang, el primer ministro, Nguyen Xuan Phuc, la presidenta de la Asamblea Nacional, Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan, y el secretario general del Partido Comunista, Nguyen Phu Trong.

De las coincidencias destaca la referida a la meta de elevar el comercio bilateral a 10 mil millones de dólares para 2020, que fue de tres mil 500 millones de dólares en los primeros 11 meses de 2016.

Al respecto, Dai Quang llamó a coordinar estrechamente para implementar de manera efectiva el Tratado de Libre Comercio entre Vietnam y la Unión Económica Eurasiática, a la que pertenecen también Armenia, Belarús, Kazajstán y Kirguistán, y aprovechar las ventajas de ese acuerdo para incrementar las exportaciones y las inversiones.

Ese tema estuvo presente en todos los encuentros de la visitante con las autoridades anfitrionas.

El presidente comunicó también a Matvienko el deseo de fomentar los vínculos de cooperación en defensa, seguridad, educación, cultura, turismo y ciencia-tecnología, así como entre localidades de las dos naciones.

Mientras, el jefe de gobierno precisó que además de los proyectos de colaboración en marcha en la industria petrolera, este país favorece las inversiones de la otra parte en áreas como energía renovable, incluida la hidroeléctrica, e infraestructura ferroviaria.

Por su parte, la presidenta de la Asamblea Nacional reiteró que Vietnam siempre prioriza el fortalecimiento de la asociación estratégica integral y desea perfeccionar la coordinación entre los dos países, legislaturas y localidades.

La posición del otro territorio en ese sentido se infiere de las declaraciones de Motvienko en sus pláticas con el presidente Dai Quang: reforzar la cooperación con Vietnam en todos los sectores es una prioridad absoluta en la política exterior de Rusia.

Añadió que el Consejo de la Federación y los parlamentarios rusos harán todo lo posible por contribuir al fortalecimiento de las relaciones bilaterales y señaló que su nación quiere importar más productos agrícolas de este mercado, al resaltar que el objetivo de su visita es profundizar los nexos bilaterales.

Para ello, entre las medidas con vistas a fortalecer la coordinación entre los dos órganos legislativos, se acordó intensificar el intercambio de delegaciones y de información, impulsar la supervisión del cumplimiento de los acuerdos gubernamentales y consolidar el apoyo mutuo en los foros multilaterales.

Además de los aspectos mencionados, estas relaciones tienen en el turismo un sector de creciente importancia, apreciable en la cifra de 430 mil viajeros rusos a la nación indochina el año pasado, lo que favorece el desarrollo de los nexos entre ambos pueblos.

Otro actividad destacada de los vínculos bilaterales tiene que ver con las frecuentes contactos de alto nivel.

En mayo de 2016 el primer ministro Xuan Phuc realizó una visita oficial a Rusia durante la cual se alcanzaron importantes acuerdos y cinco meses después el presidente Dai Quang se entrevistó con su homólogo Vladimir Putin en Lima, Perú, donde asistieron a la Cumbre del Foro de Cooperación Económica Asia-Pacífico.

Como Vietnam será la sede de igual cita del bloque este año, es muy posible que ambos estadistas dialoguen nuevamente en esa ocasión para beneficio de las relaciones entre los dos países.

Teresita Vives Romero

Fleeing to Canada is no longer an option

Liberals are supposed to be antiwar, right? I went to college in the 1960s, when students nationwide were rising up in opposition to the Vietnam War. I was a Young Republican back then and supported the war through sheer ignorance and dislike of the sanctimoniousness of the protesters, some of whom were surely making their way to Canada to live in exile on daddy’s money while I was on a bus going to Fort Leonard Wood for basic combat training. I can’t even claim that I had some grudging respect for the antiwar crowd because I didn’t, but I did believe that at least some of them who were not being motivated by being personally afraid of getting hurt were actually sincere in their opposition to the awful things that were happening in Southeast Asia.

As I look around now, however, I see something quite different. The lefties I knew in college are now part of the Establishment and generally speaking are retired limousine liberals. And they now call themselves progressives, of course, because it sounds more educated and sends a better message, implying as it does that troglodytic conservatives are anti-progress. But they also have done a flip on the issue of war and peace. In its most recent incarnation some of this might be attributed to a desperate desire to relate to the Hillary Clinton campaign with its bellicosity towards Russia, Syria and Iran, but I suspect that the inclination to identify enemies goes much deeper than that, back as far as the Bill Clinton Administration with its sanctions on Iraq and the Balkan adventure, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the creation of a terror-narco state in the heart of Europe. And more recently we have seen the Obama meddling in Libya, Yemen and Syria in so called humanitarian interventions which have turned out to be largely fraudulent. Yes, under the Obama Dems it was “responsibility to protect time” (r2p) and all the world trembled as the drones were let loose.

Last Friday I started to read an op-ed in The Washington Post by David Ignatius that blew me away. It began “President Trump confronts complicated problems as the investigation widens into Russia’s attack on our political system.” It then proceeded to lay out the case for an “aggressive Russia” in the terms that have been repeated ad nauseam in the mainstream media. And it was, of course, lacking in any evidence, as if the opinions of coopted journalists and the highly politicized senior officials in the intelligence community should be regarded as sacrosanct. These are, not coincidentally, the same people who have reportedly recently been working together to undercut the White House by leaking and then reporting highly sensitive transcripts of phone calls with Russian officials.

Ignatius is well plugged into the national security community and inclined to be hawkish but he is also a typical Post politically correct progressive on most issues. So here was your typical liberal asserting something in a dangerous fashion that has not been demonstrated and might be completely untrue. Russia is attacking “our political system!” And The Post is not alone in accepting that Russia is trying to subvert and ultimately overthrow our republic. Reporting from The New York Times and on television news makes the same assumption whenever they discuss Russia, leading to what some critics have described as mounting American ‘hysteria’ relating to anything coming out of Moscow.

Rachel Maddow is another favorite of mine when it comes to talking real humanitarian feel good stuff out one side of her mouth while beating the drum for war from the other side. In a bravura performance on January 26th she roundly chastised Russia and its president Vladimir Putin. Rachel, who freaked out completely when Donald Trump was elected, is now keen to demonstrate that Trump has been corrupted by Russia and is now controlled out of the Kremlin. She described Trump’s lord and master Putin as an “intense little man” who murders his opponents before going into the whole “Trump stole the election with the aid of Moscow” saga, supporting sanctions on Russia and multiple investigations to get to the bottom of “Putin’s attacks on our democracy.” Per Maddow, Russia is the heart of darkness and, by way of Trump, has succeeded in exercising control over key elements in the new administration.

Unfortunately, people in the media like Ignatius and Maddow are not alone. Their willingness to sell a specific political line that carries with it a risk of nuclear war as fact, even when they know it is not, has been part of the fear-mongering engaged in by Democratic Party loyalists and many others on the left. Their intention is to “get Trump” whatever it takes, which opens the door to some truly dangerous maneuvering that could have awful consequences if the drumbeat and military buildup against Russia continues, leading Putin to decide that his country is being threatened and backed into a corner. Moscow has indicated that it would not hesitate use nuclear weapons if it is being confronted militarily and facing defeat.

The current wave of Russophobia is much more dangerous than the random depiction of foreigners in negative terms that has long bedeviled a certain type of American know-nothing politics. Apart from the progressive antipathy towards Putin personally, there is a virulent strain of anti-Russian sentiment among some self-styled conservatives in congress, best exemplified by Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Graham has recently said “2017 is going to be a year of kicking Russia in the ass in Congress.”

It is my belief that many in the National Security State have convinced themselves that Russia is indeed a major threat against the United States and not because it is a nuclear armed power that can strike the U.S. That appreciation, should, if anything constitute a good reason to work hard to maintain cordial relations rather than not, but it is seemingly ignored by everyone but Donald Trump.

No, the new brand of Russophobia derives from the belief that Moscow is “interfering” in places like Syria and Ukraine. Plus, it is a friend of Iran. That perception derives from the consensus view among liberals and conservatives alike that the U.S. sphere of influence encompasses the entire globe as well as the particularly progressive conceit that Washington should serve to “protect” anyone threatened at any time by anyone else, which provides a convenient pretext for military interventions that are euphemistically described as “peace missions.”

There might be a certain cynicism in many who hate Russia as having a powerful enemy also keeps the cash flowing from the treasuring into the pockets of the beneficiaries of the military industrial congressional complex, but my real fear is that, having been brainwashed for the past ten years, many government officials are actually sincere in their loathing of Moscow and all its works. Recent opinion polls suggest that that kind of thinking is popular among Americans, but it actually makes no sense. Though involvement by Moscow in the Middle East and Eastern Europe is undeniable, calling it a threat against U.S. vital interests is more than a bit of a stretch as Russia’s actual ability to make trouble is limited. It has exactly one overseas military facility, in Syria, while the U.S. has more than 800, and its economy and military budget are tiny compared to that of the United States. In fact, it is Washington that is most guilty of intervening globally and destabilizing entire regions, not Moscow, and when Donald Trump said in an interview that when it came to killing the U.S. was not so innocent it was a gross understatement.

Ironically, pursuing a reset with Russia is one of the things that Trump actually gets right but the new left won’t give him a break because they reflexively hate him for not embracing the usual progressive bromides that they believe are supposed to go with being antiwar. Other Moscow trashing comes from the John McCain camp which demonizes Russia because warmongers always need an enemy and McCain has never found a war he couldn’t support. It would be a tragedy for the United States if both the left and enough of the right were to join forces to limit Trump’s options on dealing with Moscow, thereby enabling an escalating conflict that could have tragic consequences for all parties.

Numerosas tareas pendientes en el camino de la integración, iniciado por la Comunidad Caribeña (Caricom) hace 44 años, figuran en un extenso comunicado emitido por esa agrupación subregional al finalizar aquí su 28 Cumbre.

Con sede en esta capital, Caricom fue creada en 1973 para transformar la Asociación Caribeña de Libre Comercio en un Mercado Común y enfrentar los desafíos de sus 15 países miembros, fomentando el comercio y las relaciones económicas.

Irwin LaRocque, secretario general de la agrupación, expresó satisfacción por el desarrollo de la reciente cumbre (16-17 de febrero) y la marcha del proceso integracionista, pese a la necesidad de seguir avanzando. Más que nunca antes, resumió, debemos unir nuestros esfuerzos y nuestros recursos.

No es poca la incertidumbre y la preocupación reinante entre los caribeños, que insistieron en la necesidad de unirse para alcanzar el crecimiento económico y el desarrollo, particularmente debido a lo que algunos mandatarios definieron como un ‘hostil escenario global’.

Pese a ello, la conferencia de ocho jefes de Estado, cinco cancilleres y numerosos otros funcionarios, cerró con un llamamiento positivo, de orgullo caribeño, y la decisión de cumplir las tareas pendientes y de enfrentar colectivamente sus grandes retos.

El presidente de Guyana y de Caricom, David Granger, recordó la vulnerabilidad de estos países por sus reducidas dimensiones territoriales y poblacionales y el azote frecuente de violentos fenómenos naturales.

Se trata de 18 millones de personas que viven, como dijo, en siete mil cayos, islas, islotes y arrecifes diseminados en 2,4 millones de kilómetros cuadrados de mar. Fuentes internacionales estiman que una cantidad similar, pero no precisada, de caribeños radica en Estados Unidos, Canadá y Reino Unido, entre otros países.

El mandatario guyanés subrayó: ‘estamos viviendo en un escenario económico revuelto. Muchas de nuestras mercancías y servicios quedaron deprimidas en el mercado internacional en los dos últimos años… Nuestra primera preocupación ahora es la economía’.

Por ello, la cumbre de dos días abarcó números temas, pero se concentró en tres grandes capítulos: la economía y el pretendido establecimiento del mercado único subregional (CSME); la criminalidad y seguridad, no como problemas nacionales sino de toda la región; y las relaciones internacionales de Caricom.

Los mandatarios indicaron que tomarán prontas medidas para enfrentar prácticas de bancos globales, que perciben al Caribe como una zona de riesgo y pretenden retirarle sus servicios de corresponsalía, lo cual afectará el comercio, las inversiones, el turismo y las remesas.

Trascendió también que persiste la expectativa por los lazos comerciales y económicos de la región, especialmente con Estados Unidos, potencia que -al igual que el Reino Unido- acaba de dar un nuevo rumbo a su política exterior.

Varios líderes caribeños manifestaron en privado y en público su esperanza de que los lazos de Caricom con ambos países continúen como los desarrollados con sus anteriores administraciones.

El actual problema migratorio fue abarcado bajo el titulo ‘un análisis de la comunidad caribeña a la luz de los hechos políticos en Estados Unidos’, que incluyó su impacto en los países de la subregión.

El primer ministro de Granada, Keith Mitchell, quien asumirá la presidencia rotativa de Caricom en julio próximo, precisó que sigue la incertidumbre ante las medidas migratorias anunciadas por Washington. Tenemos que esperar y ver, comentó, respecto a la huella que dejará esa política en el Caribe.

Ralph Gonsálves, primer ministro de San Vicente y las Granadinas, por su parte, dijo a Prensa Latina desconocer detalles de la nueva política migratoria, pero opinó que ‘tiene potencial para un impacto negativo. Dependerá de cuán grande sea la red cuando caiga. Pero, sin duda, no es algo que instintivamente nos inspire a inclinarnos a apoyarla’.

Durante la cumbre, se realizaron varios encuentros bilaterales y se firmaron algunos acuerdos puntuales, sobre seguridad, comercio, turismo, cultura, infraestructura, transporte y el traslado de personas y mercancías dentro de la comunidad.

Figuraron también la proyectada regulación de servicios tecnológicos de información y comunicación, las relaciones con República Dominicana, la situación en Surinam, los temas fronterizos Belice-Guatemala y Guyana-Venezuela y un importante acuerdo comercial Cuba que otorga mutuas concesiones arancelarias para numerosos productos.

Paralelamente, las esposas de los jefes de Gobierno sostuvieron una reunión para denunciar problemas como el embarazo juvenil, la violencia contra mujeres y niños y el tráfico de personas, así como la transmisión de HIV de madre a hijo en el Caribe.

Jorge Luna

Obama was notoriously called America’s “deporter-in-chief” for conducting sweeping Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids nationwide – expelling record numbers, more than all his predecessors combined.

He largely targeted undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans, averaging over 1,000 deportations daily – people in the United States because destructive NAFTA and DR-CAFTA trade deals destroyed their jobs at home, or sought asylum from domestic violence and chaos.

Trump appears bent on exceeding Obama’s viciousness. Thousands of new ICE and border patrol agents are being hired. Stepped up sweeping raids will follow, more than already.

Family members will be separated, including spouses from each other and children from parents.

Under new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) guidelines, ICE agents have broad latitude to arrest and detain undocumented and legal immigrants with offenses on their record as minor as traffic violations or alleged long ago inconsequential misdemeanors.

New guidelines cover interior and border enforcement. Immigrants of color have cause for concern, especially Latinos.

According to the Migration Policy Institute, over half of nearly two million immigrants legally in America have past offenses on their records – in many cases minor infractions or wrongful charges.

US prisons hold mostly nonviolent offenders – either wrongfully convicted, incarcerated for illicit drug related charges, or other minor ones  most developed countries punish by small fines or community service, not hard time locked in cages.

DHS guidelines prioritize deporting immigrants who’ve allegedly abused public benefits, or “in the judgment of an immigration officer,” misrepresented themselves or “otherwise pose a risk to public safety or national security.”

ICE agents are being given sweeping authority to target, arrest, detain and abuse immigrants for their ethnicity and race ahead of mass deportations.

Millions are vulnerable to police state mistreatment. DHS will “no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”

The Department will no longer afford Privacy Act rights and protections to persons who are neither US citizens nor lawful permanent residents.

“…ICE is committed to arresting and processing all removable aliens.” Many details remain to be determined. Roundups and deportations will be expedited.

Expect lots of immigrants to be harmed, including many here lawfully, because sweeping arrests grab legal and undocumented individuals alike, besides separating family members.

How dozens of so-called sanctuary cities will be affected remains to be seen. Their authorities refuse to help round up undocumented immigrants.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals still protects them from deportation – young people referred to as Dreamers.

Trump promised an enhanced get tough on immigrants policy. Millions potentially are vulnerable.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Let us stop debating what newly-elected US President Trump is doing or might do and look at him in terms of historical importance. Put simply, Trump marks the end of an American cycle!

Like it or not, for the last two centuries the entire planet has been living in an Anglophone-dominated world. First there was Pax Britannica (from the beginning of the 19th century when Britain started building its colonial empire until the end of the Second World War, followed by the United States and Pax Americana with the building of the so-called West).

The United States emerged from the Second World War as the main winner and founder of what became the major international institutions – from the United Nations to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – with Europe reduced to the role of follower. In fact, under the Marshall Plan, the United States became the force behind the post-war reconstruction of Europe.

As winner, the main interest of the United States was to establish a ‘world order’ based on its values and acting as guarantor of the ‘order’.

Thus the United Nations was created with a Security Council in which it could veto any resolution, and the World Bank was created with the US dollar as the world’s currency, not with a real world currency as British economist and delegate John Maynard Keynes had proposed. The creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – as a response to any threat from the Soviet Union – was an entirely American idea.

The lexicon of international relations was largely based on Anglo-Saxon words, and often difficult to translate into other languages – terms such as accountability, gender mainstreaming, sustainable development, and so on. French and German disappeared as international languages, and lifestyle became the ubiquitous American export – from music to food, films and clothes. All this helped to reinforce American myths.

The United States thrust itself forward as the “model for democracy” throughout the world, based on the implied assertion that what was good for the United States was certainly good for all other countries. The United States saw itself as having an exceptional destiny based on its history, its success and its special relationship with God. Only US presidents could speak on behalf of the interests of humankind and invoke God.

The economic success of the United States was merely confirmation of its exceptional destiny – but the much touted American dream that anyone could become rich was unknown elsewhere.

The first phase of US policy after the Second World War was based on multilateralism, international cooperation and respect for international law and free trade – a system which assured the centrality and supremacy of the United States, reinforced by its military might,

The United Nations, which grew from its original 51 countries in 1945 to nearly 150 in just a few decades, was the forum for establishing international cooperation based on the values of universal democracy, social justice and equal participation.

In 1974, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States – the first (and only) plan for global governance – which called for a plan of action to reduce world inequalities and redistribute wealth and economic production. But this quickly became to be seen by the United States as a straitjacket.

The arrival of Ronald Reagan at the White House in in1981 marked an abrupt change in this phase of American policy based on multilateralism and shared international cooperation. A few months before taking office, Reagan had attended the North-South Economic Summit in Cancun, Mexico, where the 22 most important heads of state (with China as the only socialist country) had met to discuss implementation of the General Assembly resolution.

Reagan, who met up with enthusiastic British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, stopped the plan for global governance dead in its tracks. I was there and saw how, to my dismay, the world went from multilateralism to the old policy of power in just two days. The United State simply refused to see its destiny being decided by others – and that was the start of the decline of the United Nations, with the United States refusing to sign any international treaty or obligation.

America’s dream and its exceptional destiny were strengthened by the rhetoric of Reagan who even went as far as slogan sing “God is American”.

It is important to note that, following Reagan’s example, all the other major powers were happy to be freed of multilateralism. The Reagan administration, allied with that of Thatcher, provided an unprecedented example of how to destroy the values and practices of international relations and the fact that Reagan has probably been the most popular president in his country’s history shows the scarce significance that the average American citizen gives to international cooperation.

Under Reagan, three major simultaneous events shaped our world. The first was deregulation of the financial system in 1982, later reinforced by US President Bill Clinton in 1999, which has led to the supremacy of finance, the results of which are glaringly evident today.

The second was the creation in 1989 of an economic vision based on the supremacy of the market as the force underpinning societies and international relations – the so-called Washington Consensus – thus opening the door for neoliberalism as the undisputed economic doctrine.

Third, also in 1989, came the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the “threat” posed by the Soviet bloc.

It was at this point that the term “globalisation” became the buzzword, and that the United States was once again going to be the centre of its governance. With its economic superiority, together with the international financial institution which it basically controlled, plus the fact that the Soviet “threat” had now disappeared, the United States was once again placing itself at the centre of the world.

As Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once said, “Globalisation is another term for U.S. domination.”

This phase ran from 1982 until the financial crisis of 2008, when the collapse of American banks, followed by contagion in Europe, forced the system to question the Washington Consensus as an undisputable theory.

Doubts were also being voiced loudly through the growing mobilisation of civil society /the World Social Forum, for example, had been created in 1981) and by the offensive of many economists who had previously remained in silence.

The latter began insisting that macroeconomics – the preferred instrument of globalisation – looked only at the big figures. If microeconomics was used instead, they argued, it would become clear that there was very unequal distribution of growth (not to be confused with development) and that delocalisation and other measures which ignored the social impact of globalisation, were having disastrous consequences.

The disasters created by three centuries of geed as the main value of the “new economy” were becoming evident through figures showing an unprecedented concentration of wealth in a few hands, with many victims – especially among the younger generation.

All this was accompanied by two new threats: the explosion of Islamic terrorism, widely recognised as a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the phenomenon of mass migration, which largely came after the Iraq war but multiplied after the interventions in Syria and Libya in 2011, and for which the United States and the European Union bear full responsibility.

Overnight, the world passed from greed to fear – the two motors of historical change in the view of many historians.

And this is brings us to Mr. Trump. From the above historical excursion, it is easy to understand how he is simply the product of American reality.

Globalisation, initially an American instrument of supremacy, has meant that everyone can use the market to compete, with China the most obvious example. Under globalisation, many new emerging markets entered the scene, from Latin America to Asia. The United States, along with Europe, have become the victims of the globalisation which both perceived as an elite-led phenomenon.

Let us not forget that, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ideologies were thrown by the wayside. Politics became mere administrative competition, devoid of vision and values. Corruption increased, citizens stopped participating, political parties became self-referential, politicians turned into a professional caste, and elite global finance became isolated in fiscal paradises.

Young people looked forward to a future of unemployment or, at best temporary jobs, at the same time as they watched over four trillion dollars being spent in a few years to save the banking system.

The clarion call from those in power was, by and large, let us go back to yesterday, but to an even better yesterday – against any law of history. Then came Brexit and Trump.

We are now witnessing the conclusion of Pax Americana and the return to a nationalist and isolationist America. It will take some time for Trump voters to realise that what he is doing does not match his promises, that the measures he is putting in place favour the financial and economic elites and not their interests.

We are now facing a series of real questions.

Will the ideologue who helped Trump be elected – Stephen Bannon, chief executive officer of Trump’s presidential campaign – have the time to destroy the world both have inherited Will the world will be able to establish a world order without the United States at its centre? How many of the values that built modern democracy will be able to survive and become the bases for global governance?

A new international order cannot be built without common values, just on nationalism and xenophobia.

Bannon is organising a new international alliance of populists, xenophobes and nationalists – made up of thee likes of Nicholas Farage (United Kingdom), Matteo Salvini and Beppe Grillo (Italy), Marine Le Pen (France) and Geert Wilders (Netherlands) – with Washington as their point of reference.

After the elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany this year, we will know how this alliance will fare, but one thing is clear – if, beyond its national agenda, the Trump administration succeeds in creating a new international order based on illiberal democracy, we should start to worry because war will not be far away.

Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister has said the kingdom is prepared to send ground troops to Syria to fight the Islamic State group [IS], as US Senator John McCain met with the Saudi King.

Adel al-Jubeir told the German Press Agency on Tuesday that Saudi forces could battle IS alongside US special forces assisting US-backed Kurdish-Arab fighters.

The minister said the aim of the deployment would be to ensure that “liberated areas did not fall under the control of Hizballah, Iran or the regime,” adding that recaptured areas could be handed over to rebels.

Jubeir has recently expressed optimism that US President Donald Trump will be more engaged in the region, particularly in containing Iran which backs Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Last February, a Saudi military spokesman said the kingdom was ready to send ground troops to Syria provided coalition leaders agreed.

Ahmed Asiri said that Saudi Arabia has taken part in coalition airstrikes against IS since the US-led campaign began in September 2014, but could now provide ground troops.

Jubeir said at the time that the US had welcomed the plan to deploy Saudi ground troops.

Saudi Arabia has long provided military and financial support to rebels fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

In December, the US announced that some 200 US troops would be sent to Syria to help a Kurdish and Arab fighters seize the IS bastion of Raqqa.

The new batch of fighters complemented 300 US special forces already in Syria to assist the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF].

Also on Tuesday, influential US Senator John McCain, a critic of Trump, held talks with Saudi Arabia’s King Salman.

McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, arrived in Riyadh after talks on Syria with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Saudi Press Agency gave no details of McCain’s meeting at Salman’s office, except to say that the friendly ties between their two countries were discussed.

McCain’s visit comes two days before Syria’s government and the opposition gather in Geneva on Thursday for a new round of United Nations-brokered talks aimed at ending six years of fighting.

The West’s “humanitarian interventionists” howl over bloody conflicts when an adversary can be blamed but go silent when an ally is doing the killing, such as Saudi Arabia in Yemen, reports Jonathan Marshall.

Only a few months ago, interventionists were demanding a militant response by Washington to what George Soros branded “a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions” — the killing of “hundreds of people” by Russian and Syrian government bombing of rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Aleppo.

Billionaire currency speculator George Soros. (Photo credit: georgesoros.com)

Leon Wieseltier, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former New Republic editor, was denouncing the Obama administration as “a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” asserting that its failure to “act against evil in Aleppo” was like tolerating “the evil in Auschwitz.”

How strange, then, that so many of the same “humanitarian” voices have been so quiet of late about the continued killing of many more innocent people in Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have died and 12 million people face famine. More than a thousand children die each week from preventable diseases related to malnutrition and systematic attacks on the country’s food infrastructure by a Saudi-led military coalition, which aims to impose a regime friendly to Riyadh over the whole country.

“The U.S. silence has been deafening,” said Philippe Bolopion, deputy director for global advocacy at Human Rights Watch, last summer. “This blatant double standard deeply undermines U.S. efforts to address human rights violations whether in Syria or elsewhere in the world.”

Official acquiescence — or worse — from Washington and other major capitals is encouraging the relentless killing of Yemen’s civilians by warplanes from Saudi Arabia and its allies. Last week, their bombs struck a funeral gathering north of Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, killing nine women and a child and injuring several dozen more people.

A day earlier, officials reported a deadly “double-tap” airstrike, first targeting women at a funeral in Sanaa, then aimed at medical responders who rushed in to save the wounded. A United Nations panel of experts condemned a similar double-tap attack by Saudi coalition forces in October, which killed or wounded hundreds of civilians, as a violation of international law.

The Tragedy of Mokha

On Feb. 12, an air strike on the Red Sea port city of Mokha killed all six members of a family headed by the director of a maternal and childhood center. Coalition ground forces had launched an attack on Mokha two weeks earlier.

Xinhua news agency reported, “the battles have since intensified and trapped thousands of civilian residents in the city, as well as hampered the humanitarian operation to import vital food and fuel supplies . . . The Geneva-based UN human rights office said that it received extremely worrying reports suggesting civilians and civilian objects have been targeted over the past two weeks in the southwestern port city . . . Reports received by UN also show that more than 200 houses have been either partially damaged or completely destroyed by air strikes in the past two weeks.”

The U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator further reported that “scores of civilians” had been killed or wounded by the bombing and shelling of Mokha, and that residents were stranded without water or other basic life-supporting services.

That could be Aleppo, minus only the tear-jerking photos of dead and wounded children on American television. However, unlike Syria, Yemen’s rebels don’t have well-financed public relations offices in Western capitals. They pay no lip service to the United States, democracy, or international human rights. Their foe Saudi Arabia is a friend of Washington, not a long-time adversary. In consequence, few American pundits summon any moral outrage at the Saudi-led coalition, despite findings by a United National Panel of Experts that many of its airstrikes violate international law and, in some cases, represent “war crimes.”

Aiding and Abetting

The United States hasn’t simply turned a blind eye to such crimes; it has aided them by selling Saudi Arabia the warplanes it flies and the munitions it drops on Yemeni civilians. It has also siphoned 54 million pounds of jet fuel from U.S. tanker planes to refuel coalition aircraft on bombing runs. The pace of U.S. refueling operations has reportedly increased sharply in the last year.

Billionaire currency speculator George Soros. (Photo credit: georgesoros.com)

Saudi King Salman bids farewell to President Barack Obama at Erga Palace after a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

The Obama administration initially supported the Saudi coalition in order to buy Riyadh’s reluctant support for the Iran nuclear deal. Over time, Saudi Arabia joined with anti-Iran hawks to portray Yemen’s rebels as pawns of Tehran to justify continued support for the war. Most experts — including U.S. intelligence officials — insist to the contrary that the rebels are a genuinely indigenous force that enjoys limited Iranian support at best.

As I have documented previously, all of the fighting in Yemen has damaged U.S. interests by creating anarchy conducive to the growth of Al Qaeda extremists. They have planned or inspired major acts of terrorism against the West, including an attempt to blow up a U.S. passenger plane in 2009 and a deadly attack on the Parisian newspaper Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. The Saudis tolerate them as Sunni allies against the rebels, in the name of curbing Iran.

Though the Obama administration is gone, the Trump administration is flush with ideologues who are eager to take a stand against Tehran through Yemen and look tough on “terrorism.” Within days of taking office, President Trump approved a commando raid targeting an alleged Al Qaeda compound in central Yemen that went awry, killing an estimated 10 women and children. The administration has also diverted a U.S. destroyer to patrol Yemen’s coast.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, to his credit, has cited “the urgent need for the unfettered delivery of humanitarian assistance throughout Yemen,” according to a department spokesman. But no amount of humanitarian aid will save Yemen’s tormented people from the bombs made in America and dropped from U.S.-made warplanes, with little protest from Washington’s so-called “humanitarian interventionists.”

Jonathan Marshall is author of many recent articles on arms issues, including “Obama’s Unkept Promise on Nuclear War,” “How World War III Could Start,” “NATO’s Provocative Anti-Russian Moves,” “Escalations in a New Cold War,” and “Ticking Closer to Midnight.”

On President’s Day, The Washington Post published a front-page article about Thomas Jefferson’s mansion, Monticello, finally restoring Sally Hemings’s room, which was next door to Jefferson’s bedroom, a further grudging acknowledgement that Hemings was his concubine.

Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States.

But the Post could not bring itself to state the obvious. It described Jefferson imposing himself sexually on his female slave as a “relationship,” rather than a serial rape that apparently began when Hemings was around 14 years of age.

The Post reported that in 1941, the caretakers of Monticello transformed Hemings’s room into a restroom as “the floor tiles and bathroom stalls covered over the story of the enslaved woman, who was owned by Jefferson and had a long-term relationship with him.”

But – as grotesque as it may be to erase her room by installing toilets – it is equally grotesque to describe as a “relationship” an older powerful man having sex with a young female slave who had little choice but to submit to his predations and bear his children.

It may be hard for the American people to accept but the evidence increasingly indicates that the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States was a pedophile and a rapist.

That is the story that Jefferson’s many apologists have most desperately tried to obscure along with his wretched record on race, including the sickening racism in his Notes on the State of Virginia, that includes his pseudo-science of assessing physiological and mental traits of African-Americans to prove that all men were not created equal.

For generations, the apologists also have challenged slave Sally Hemings’s late-in-life remembrance to one of her sons, Madison Hemings, describing how Jefferson had imposed himself on her sexually in Paris after she arrived in 1787 as a teen-age slave girl attending one of his daughters.

According to Madison Hemings’s account, his mother “became Mr. Jefferson’s concubine [in Paris]. And when he was called back home she was enciente [pregnant] by him.” Jefferson was insistent that Sally Hemings return with him, but her awareness of the absence of slavery in France gave her the leverage to insist on a transactional trade-off; she would continue to provide sex to Jefferson in exchange for his promise of good treatment and the freedom of her children when they turned 21, Madison Hemings said.

Smearing Hemings

The traditional defense of Jefferson was to portray Sally Hemings as a promiscuous vixen who lied about her relationship with the Great Man to enhance her humble standing. After all, whose word would you believe, that of the estimable Jefferson who publicly decried race mixing or a lowly African-American slave girl?

Thomas Jefferson’s mansion at Monticello near Charlottesville, Virginia.

For decades, the defenders stuck to that dismissive response despite the curious coincidence that Hemings tended to give birth nine months after one of Jefferson’s visits to Monticello and the discovery of male Jefferson DNA in Hemings’s descendants.

Still, the Jefferson apologists raised finicky demands for conclusive proof of the liaison, as if it were absurd to envision that a relatively young man then in his mid-40s, a widower since his wife died in 1782, would have initiated a sexual relationship with an African-American female, even an attractive light-skinned mulatto like Hemings (who was the illegitimate daughter of Jefferson’s father-in-law and thus Jefferson’s late wife’s half-sister).

Though it’s true that unequivocal evidence does not exist — Hemings did not save a semen-stained blue dress so it could later be subjected to DNA analysis — historians have increasingly come to accept the reality of Jefferson’s sexual involvement with his young slave girl who was only 14 when she moved into Jefferson’s residence in Paris.

So, with this ground shifting under Jefferson’s defensive lines, his apologists retreated to a new position, that the relationship was a true love affair and/or that Jefferson’s behavior fit with the moral behavior of the times as slave owners frequently raped their female slaves (and thus Jefferson’s behavior should not be judged adversely).

Hemings was transformed into a kind of modern-day independent woman making her own choices about matters of the heart. However, given her age and her status as Jefferson’s property the relationship could be more accurately described as serial rape.

But the reality may be even worse. Recent historical examinations of records at Jefferson’s Monticello plantation have provided support for contemporaneous accounts of Jefferson having sex with at least one other slave girl beside Hemings and possibly more.

Fathering of Slaves

Some scholars, such as historian Henry Wiencek in his 2012 book, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, give credence to old reports about Jefferson having a direct role in populating Monticello by fathering his own dark-skinned lookalikes.

An artist’s depiction of Sally Hemings.

“In ways that no one completely understands, Monticello became populated by a number of mixed-race people who looked astonishingly like Thomas Jefferson,” wrote Wiencek. “We know this not from what Jefferson’s detractors have claimed but from what his grandson Jeff Randolph openly admitted. According to him, not only Sally Hemings but another Hemings woman as well ‘had children which resembled Mr. Jefferson so closely that it was plain that they had his blood in their veins.’

“Resemblance meant kinship; there was no other explanation. Since Mr. Jefferson’s blood was Jeff’s blood, Jeff knew that he was somehow kin to these people of a parallel world. Jeff said the resemblance of one Hemings to Thomas Jefferson was ‘so close, that at some distance or in the dusk the slave, dressed in the same way, might be mistaken for Mr. Jefferson.’”

During a dinner at Monticello, Jeff Randolph recounted a scene in which a Thomas Jefferson lookalike was a servant tending to the table where Thomas Jefferson was seated. Randolph recalled the reaction of one guest: “In one instance, a gentleman dining with Mr. Jefferson, looked so startled as he raised his eyes from the latter to the servant behind him, that his discovery of the resemblance was perfectly obvious to all.”

In the 1850s, Jeff Randolph told a visiting author that his grandfather did not hide the slaves who bore these close resemblances, since Sally Hemings “was a house servant and her children were brought up house servants so that the likeness between master and slave was blazoned to all the multitudes who visited this political Mecca” and indeed a number of visitors did make note of this troubling reality.

Even Jefferson admirer Jon Meacham accepted the truth of the Hemings liaison in Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power. Meacham cited a quote from Elijah Fletcher, a visitor from Vermont: “The story of Black Sal is no farce — That he cohabits with her and has a number of children by her is a sacred truth and the worst of it is, he keeps the same children slaves an unnatural crime which is very common in these parts This conduct may receive a little palliation when we consider that such proceedings are so common that they cease here to be disgraceful.”

Meacham observed that Jefferson “was apparently able to consign his children with Sally Hemings to a separate sphere of life in his mind even as they grew up in his midst.

“It was, to say the least, an odd way to live, but Jefferson was a creature of his culture. ‘The enjoyment of a negro or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, delicacy or shame is made about the matter,’ Josiah Quincy Jr. of Massachusetts wrote after a visit to the Carolinas. This was daily reality at Monticello.”

Family Doubts

This “daily reality” was also a troubling concern among Jefferson’s white family though the Great Man would never confirm or deny his parentage of a number of Monticello’s slaves.

In the Broadway musical “Hamilton,” actor Daveed Diggs (left) who played Thomas Jefferson (as something of a hypocrite) and the musical’s creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who played Alexander Hamilton (who was Jefferson’s adversary during the first years of the Republic).

“Frigid indifference forms a useful shield for a public character against his political enemies, but Jefferson deployed it against his own daughter Martha, who was deeply upset by the sexual allegations against her father and wanted a straight answer Yes or no? an answer he would not deign to give,” wrote Wiencek.

Before his death, Jefferson did free several of Sally Hemings’s children or let them run away presumably fulfilling the commitment made in Paris before Hemings agreed to return to Monticello to remain his slave concubine.

“Jefferson went to his grave without giving his family any denial of the Hemings charges,” Wiencek wrote.

The historical record increasingly makes Jefferson out to be a serial rapist, exploiting at least one and possibly more girls who were trapped on his property, who indeed were his property, and thus had little choice but to tolerate his sexual advances.

Whipping the Children

The evidence of Jefferson’s sexual predations must also be viewed in the context of his overall treatment of his slaves at Monticello. Though Jefferson’s apologists pretend that he was a kind master distressed over the inequities of a slave system that he could somehow neither correct nor escape, the latest evidence much of it concealed for generations to protect Jefferson’s image reveal him to be a cruel slave-owner who carefully calculated the net worth that his human chattel provided him and having boys as young as 10 whipped.

Some of Jefferson’s mistreatment of his slaves derived from another of his hypocrisies, his views about simplicity and solvency. As historian John Chester Miller wrote in his 1977 book, The Wolf by the Ears, “To Jefferson, the abandon with which Americans rushed into debt and squandered borrowed money upon British ‘gew-gaws’ and ‘trumpery’ vitiated the blessings of peace.

“From Paris an unlikely podium from which to sermonize Jefferson preached frugality, temperance, and the simple life of the American farmer. Buy nothing whatever on credit, he exhorted his countrymen, and buy only what was essential. ‘The maxim of buying nothing without money in our pocket to pay for it,’ he averred, ‘would make of our country (Virginia) one of the happiest upon earth.’

“As Jefferson saw it, the most pernicious aspect of the postwar preoccupation with pleasure, luxury, and the ostentatious display of wealth was the irremediable damage it did to ‘republican virtue.’”

But Jefferson himself amassed huge debts and lived the life of a bon vivant, spending way beyond his means. In Paris, he bought fancy clothes, collected fine wines, and acquired expensive books, furniture and artwork. It was, however, his slaves back at Monticello who paid the price for his excesses.

“Living in a style befitting a French nobleman, his small salary often in arrears, and burdened by debts to British merchants which he saw no way of paying, Jefferson was driven to financial shifts, some of which were made at the expense of his slaves. In 1787, for example, he decided to hire out some of his slaves a practice he had hitherto avoided because of the hardship it wreaked upon the slaves themselves,” Miller wrote.

Exploiting His Slaves

Upon returning to the United States, Jefferson reinvented himself as a more modestly attired republican, but his tastes for the grandiose did not abate. He ordered elaborate renovations to Monticello, which deepened his debt and compelled his slaves to undertake strenuous labor to implement Jefferson’s ambitious architectural designs.

Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States.(in a 1788 portrait by John Trumbull, credit: Thomas Jefferson Foundation)

Needing to squeeze more value from his slaves, Jefferson was an aggressive master, not the gentle patrician that his apologists have long depicted.

According to historian Wiencek, Jefferson “directed his manager, Nicholas Lewis, to extract ‘extraordinary exertions’ of labor from the slaves to stay current with his debt payments. Some slaves had endured years of harsh treatment at the hands of strangers, for to raise cash, Jefferson had also instructed Lewis to hire out slaves. He demanded extraordinary exertions from the elderly: ‘The negroes too old to be hired, could they not make a good profit by cultivating cotton?’”

Jefferson was callous as well toward his young slaves. Reviewing long-neglected records at Monticello, Wiencek noted that one plantation report to Jefferson recounted that the nail factory was doing well because “the small ones” ages 10, 11 and 12 were being whipped by overseer, Gabriel Lilly, “for truancy.”

His plantation records also show that he viewed fertile female slaves as exceptionally valuable because their offspring would increase his assets and thus enable him to incur more debt. He ordered his plantation manager to take special care of these “breeding” women.

“A child raised every 2. years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man,” Jefferson wrote. “[I]n this, as in all other cases, providence has made our duties and our interests coincide perfectly.”

According to Wiencek, “The enslaved people were yielding him a bonanza, a perpetual human dividend at compound interest. Jefferson wrote, ‘I allow nothing for losses by death, but, on the contrary, shall presently take credit four per cent. per annum, for their increase over and above keeping up their own numbers.’ His plantation was producing inexhaustible human assets. The percentage was predictable.”

To justify this profiting off slavery, Jefferson claimed that he was merely acting in accordance with “Providence,” which in Jefferson’s peculiar view of religion always happened to endorse whatever action Jefferson wanted to take.

Part of that “Providence” presumably supplied him with comely slave girls such as Sally Hemings and allowed Jefferson to do his part in “breeding” his slave stock and assuring more compound profits from his investments.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Film examines how civil rights and advances in space technology took the United States into unexplored realms of space and societal transformation

Review: Hidden Figures

Director: Theodore Melfi

This feature film provides a glimpse into the role of African American women in the development of the United States space program during the early 1960s.

These events coincided with the escalating struggle for civil rights and self-determination, a movement which dated back to the pre-Civil War era when even freed Africans were subjected to inhuman treatment despite their existence in a nation that professed equality for all men and later women.

At the same time, as revealed somewhat in the film, starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae, the U.S. was involved in a political and military struggle with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the People’s Republic of China and other non-capitalist countries over which social system would become dominant in the proceeding decades.  The fact that the U.S. had never been true to its projected image of a free and equitable society provided the socialist world with an ideological weapon against capitalism and imperialism.

The three women in the film were portraying mathematicians and physicists such as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, Mary Jackson and Dr. Christine M. Darden whose calculations and verifications were essential components in the capacity of the U.S. to both launch and maintain its space program. This film is based on a book of the same name written by Margo Lee Shetterly published in 2016.

Johnson began her career at Langley Research Center in 1953. Her tasks were numerous including co-authoring a report on the trajectory equations needed for placing a spacecraft into orbit around the Earth. The film depicts Johnson’s role surrounding the orbital launch of John Glenn, a historical turning point in the technological competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

2017 represents the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia which led to the founding of the USSR some five years later in 1922. Even though the Soviet Union collapsed twenty five years ago, the level of anti-Russian propaganda has reached new heights of both political absurdity as well as dangerous military encounters.

In addition to the continuing hostility towards Moscow, there is also a threat of military conflict with China over the south seas of the Pacific where Washington is attempting to maintain its presence as a superior military force. The decline in capitalism as an economic system exemplified by the Great Recession of the previous decade and the burgeoning levels of income and wealth inequality, places the West in a very vulnerable position amid the rapid trajectory of Beijing which could become the leading world power in a matter of a few years.

The Space Program and the Cold War

After the successive launching of the Sputnik I satellite on October 4, 1957, it established the-then superiority of the socialist system as it related to scientific inquiry and technological development. The event was of world significance since it exposed the false notions promoted by capitalism that socialism provided no material incentives which were essential in promoting scientific innovations and social progress.

Within a year the National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) was formed at the aegis of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. NASA was created through the liquidation of the previous aviation program known as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) which was established on March 3, 1915 during World War I.

As revealed by the NASA website: “The Sputnik launch changed everything. As a technical achievement, Sputnik caught the world’s attention and the American public off-guard. Its size was more impressive than Vanguard’s intended 3.5-pound payload. In addition, the public feared that the Soviets’ ability to launch satellites also translated into the capability to launch ballistic missiles that could carry nuclear weapons from Europe to the U.S. Then the Soviets struck again; on November 3, Sputnik II was launched, carrying a much heavier payload, including a dog named Laika.” (https://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/)

This same entry continues noting: “Immediately after the Sputnik I launch in October, the U.S. Defense Department responded to the political furor by approving funding for another U.S. satellite project. As a simultaneous alternative to Vanguard, Wernher von Braun and his Army Redstone Arsenal team began work on the Explorer project.”

Consequently, the space program had a distinctly military imperative. While socialism as a political ideology and economic system was challenging the hegemony of capitalism and imperialism, there was the emergence of the national liberation movements throughout Africa, Asia and Latin America which both the socialist camp and the West were attempting to win over to the respective world outlooks.

African Americans objectively had no real material interest in maintaining capitalism and imperialism. The system of exploitation and world conquest had been made possible as a result of the capital accrued from the profits generated from the Atlantic Slave Trade and the rise of colonialism.

Hidden Figures addresses this dilemma by focusing on the role of Jim Crow as a facilitator of racial capitalism and social containment. Nonetheless, it was the African American people themselves who opened up the challenge to institutional racism in the U.S.

The character portrayed by Kevin Costner was purely fictional. The struggle against racism was influenced by the overall international situation and the self-emancipatory role of the African American people. Costner, who the film falsely depicts as Al Harrison, becomes a reluctant ally of the Black women. In the movie Harrison is shown as taking a sledge hammer and knocking down the signs for separate restrooms at Langley.

Renee Graham wrote in the Boston Globe that: “Unfortunately, this rousing moment is as phony as the Bowling Green massacre — yet not at all uncommon in Hollywood films. In ‘Hidden Figures,’ a movie where African-American women are the clear heroines, the filmmakers still felt compelled to make up a white male savior who literally strikes a blow against 1960s segregation. Without fail, such unnecessary scenes are condescending, insulting, and patronizing to their audiences, regardless of race.” (Feb. 19)

African Americans, many of whom had studied at Hampton Institute and other Historic Black College and University (HBCU), began to work in larger numbers at the Langley Center during World War II and its successive years. Mary Jackson was the first African American woman engineer at NASA beginning in 1958. Dorothy Vaughn assisted in the pioneering of the transformation of human computers, largely women, to the main frame machines which would later dominate the industry well into the 1970s.

Science and Societal Transformation

Shetterly notes in her book that it was the military necessities of the Second World War that created opportunities for African American women at the NACA Langley Center. She emphasizes: “The black female mathematicians who walked into Langley in 1943 would find themselves at the intersection of these great transformations, their sharp minds and ambitions contributing to what the United States would consider one of its greatest victories.”

The breaking down of some aspects of segregation at NACA and later NASA was mirrored within the broader society. Nonetheless, institutional resistance to African American advancement was rooted in the system of national oppression and economic exploitation.

NASA has promoted the societal benefits of the space program ranging from contributions in the areas of communications, road safety, military affairs, food safety, etc. However, these purely scientific advances have not brought about the total liberation of the African American people and other oppressed nations in the U.S.

The capitalist relations of production are reflected in the increasing concentration of wealth among smaller numbers of multi-national corporations and financial institutions.  The imperialist system has enhanced class divisions and consequent militarization on a global scale.

Moving towards the conclusion of the second decade of the 21^st century, economic and social inequality is increasing at a phenomenal rate. The advent of the first self-identified president of African descent, Barack Obama, did not fundamentally change the realities of disempowerment and state repression.

Scientific inquiry and application must be designed to foster the elimination of inequality among people within society. These are the stark lessons of the space program and the proliferation of computerized technology.

A revolution within society is essential for the liberation of humanity. African Americans must continue to play their historic role in this transformative process.

It was recently announced that US President Donald Trump selected US Army Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster as his National Security Adviser.

The New York Times in their article, “Trump Chooses H.R. McMaster as National Security Adviser,” would report:

President Trump appointed Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as his new national security adviser on Monday, picking a widely respected military strategist known for challenging conventional thinking and helping to turn around the Iraq war in its darkest days.

In reality, what President Trump has done, is select a man who will bring very little of his own thoughts with him to the position. Instead, he will – verbatim – repeat the talking points, reflect the agenda of, and serve the interests driving the collection of corporate-financier funded think tanks that devise – and have devised for decades – US-European foreign policy.

What General McMaster Represents

In a talk given at one such think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies – funded by corporations such as ExxonMobil, Hess, Chevron, and Boeing and chaired by individuals including President Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson and representatives from Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Betchel – General McMaster provides a well-rehearsed pitch collectively reflecting the worldview hashed out by not only the CSIS itself, but admittedly the worldview and objectives of the Brookings Institution, the Council on Foreign Relations, and a myriad of other special-interest driven policy think tanks.

The talk, published on CSIS’ YouTube channel in May of 2016, features General McMaster in his military uniform accusing Russia of “invading Ukraine” and China of  “challenging US interests at the far reaches of American power.” When describing China’s “challenging” of US interests, he presents a map of China itself and the surrounding South China Sea – quite decidedly nowhere near the United States or any logical or legitimately proximal sphere of influence Washington could justify in maintaining.

General McMaster predicates allegations that Russia and China pose a threat to “US interest” abroad – not US national security itself – by challenging the post World War 2 international order – an order admittedly created by and for the US and its European allies, granting them military, sociopolitical, and financial unipolar hegemony over the planet.

He predictably lists North Korea and Iran as threats to the US as well, despite neither nation attacking the US nor possessing a desire or capability to do so. He accuses Iran in particular of “fighting a proxy war against us since 1979,” referring to when Iranians finally, successfully overthrew the US-installed and buttressed brutal dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1979.

General McMaster accuses Iran of “building militias” beyond the control of Middle Eastern governments to both support them but also to use as leverage against them – not unlike what the US has done both through occupation forces deployed across the region and state sponsored terror groups armed, funded, trained, and directed by the US and its Persian Gulf allies everywhere from North Africa to the Middle Eastern nations of Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon.

During his 2016, McMaster then moved on to address the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” (ISIS). He presents a slide of ISIS’ territorial holdings clearly depicting supply lines running directly out of NATO-member Turkey, leading deep into Syria and Iraq, with a lesser line emanating out of US-ally Jordan. He makes no mention of the source of ISIS’ fighting capacity, depicting the conflict in the similarly cartoonish manner US-European media presents it to the general public.

General McMaster presents to his audience a defense strategy based on “deterrence by denial, and deterrence at the frontier to ratchet up the cost [for] potential adversaries at the frontier,” referring to regions of the planet thousands of miles from US shores where the US seeks to either maintain or reassert it power and influence, or to project its power into regions hitherto independent of Wall Street and Washington’s influence.

Seamless Continuity of Agenda 

President Trump’s pick of General McMaster as National Security Adviser ensures that national security remains dominated by the corporate-financier funded think tanks that have devised, determined, and dominated US foreign policy for decades. Policy papers General McMaster repeatedly cites in every talk he gives, at one corporate-financier funded think tank after another, are the products of these very think tanks.

That General McMaster identifies Russia, China, and Iran as “threats” to the United States, not because they seek to harm the US within its territory or within any logical proximal sphere of influence, but simply for attempting to secure their own respective proximal spheres of influence from systematic and overt US subversion, influence, and encirclement, means a continuation of the destructive global spanning warfare seen under the administrations of numerous other presidents, including Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush Sr. Reagan, and even Carter.

While the United States poses as a “democratic” nation, driven by the interests of its people, it is apparent that special interests on Wall Street and in Washington have a singular agenda that transcends both the presidents the people “elect,” and the policies they believe they elected these presidents to carry out. That President Trump’s supporters labor under the delusion that he will roll back US aggression and regime change worldwide, only to put in place General McMaster as his National Security Adviser – a man who openly and repeatedly supports the pursuit of American global hegemony – indicates that yet again the people have been deceived and that this singular agenda will move forward unabated.

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

For 15 years, the Middle East “peace process” initiated by the Oslo accords has been on life support. Last week, United States president Donald Trump pulled the plug, whether he understood it or not.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu could barely stifle a smile as Mr Trump demoted the two-state solution from holy grail. Instead, he said of resolving the conflict: “I am looking at two states or one state … I can live with either one.”

Given the huge asymmetry of power, Israel now has a free hand to entrench its existing apartheid version of the one-state solution – Greater Israel – on the Palestinians. This is the destination to which Mr Netanyahu has been steering the Israel-Palestine conflict his entire career.

This week it emerged that at a secret summit in Aqaba last year – attended by Egypt and Jordan, and overseen by US secretary of state John Kerry – Mr Netanyahu was offered a regional peace deal that included almost everything he had demanded of the Palestinians. And still he said no.

Much earlier, in 2001, Mr Netanyahu was secretly filmed boasting to settlers of how he had foiled the Oslo process a short time earlier by failing to carry out promised withdrawals from Palestinian territory. He shrugged off the US role as something that could be “easily moved to the right direction”.

Now he has the White House where he wants it.

In expressing ambivalence about the final number of states, Mr Trump may have assumed he was leaving options open for his son-in-law and presumed peace envoy, Jared Kushner.

But words can take on a life of their own, especially when uttered by the president of the world’s only superpower.

Some believe Mr Trump, faced with the region’s realities, will soon revert to Washington’s playbook on two states, with the US again adopting the bogus role of “honest broker”. Others suspect his interest will wilt, allowing Israel to intensify settlement building and its abuse of Palestinians.

The long-term effect, however, is likely to be more decisive. The one-state option mooted by Mr Trump will resonate with both Israelis and Palestinians because it reminds each side of their historic ambitions.

The international community has repeatedly introduced the chimera of the two-state solution, but for most of their histories the two sides favoured a single state – if for different reasons.

From the outset, the mainstream Zionist movement wanted an exclusive Jewish state, and a larger one than it was ever offered.

In late 1947, the Zionist leadership backed the United Nations partition plan for tactical reasons, knowing the Palestinians would reject the transfer of most of their homeland to recent European immigrants.

A few months later they seized more territory – in war – than the UN envisioned, but were still not satisfied. Religious and secular alike hungered for the rest of Palestine. Shimon Peres was among the leaders who began the settlement drive immediately following the 1967 occupation.

Those territorial ambitions were muffled by Oslo, but will be unleashed again in full force by Mr Trump’s stated indifference.

The Palestinians’ history points in a parallel direction. As Zionism made its first inroads into Palestine, they rejected any compromise with what were seen as European colonisers.

In the 1950s, after Israel’s creation, the resistance under Yasser Arafat espoused a single secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine. Only with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Palestinians’ growing isolation in the early 1990s, did Arafat cave in and sign up for partition.

But for Palestinians, Oslo has entailed not just enduring Israel’s constant bad faith, but also created a deeply compromised vehicle for self-government. The Palestinian Authority has split the Palestinian people territorially – between Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza – and required a Faustian pact to uphold Israel’s security, including the settlers’, at all costs.

The truth, obscured by Oslo, is that the one-state solution has underpinned the aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians for more than a century. It did not come about because each expected different things from it.

For Israelis, it was to be a fortress to exclude the native Palestinian population.

For Palestinians, it was the locus of national liberation from centuries of colonial rule. Only later did many Palestinians, especially groups such as Hamas, come to mirror the Zionist idea of an exclusive – if in their case, Islamic – state.

Mr Trump’s self-declared detachment will now revive these historic forces. Settler leader Naftali Bennett will compete with Mr Netanyahu to take credit for speeding up the annexation of ever-greater blocs of West Bank territory while rejecting any compromise on Jerusalem. Meanwhile, Palestinians, particularly the youth, will understand that their struggle is not for illusory borders but for liberation from the Jewish supremacism inherent in mainstream Zionism. The struggle Mr Trump’s equivocation provokes, however, must first play out in the internal politics of Israelis and Palestinians.

It is a supremely clarifying moment. Each side must now define what it really wants to fight for: a fortress for their tribe alone, or a shared homeland ensuring rights and dignity for all.

Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist in Nazareth.

President Trump’s first National Security Advisor Mike Flynn got kicked out of office for talking with Russian officials. Such talks were completely inline with Trump’s declared policies of détente with Russia. (I agree that Flynn should have never gotten the NSA job. But the reasons for that have nothing to do with his Russian connections.)

Allegedly Flynn did not fully inform Vice-President Pence about his talk with the Russian ambassador. But that can not be a serious reason. The talks were rather informal, they were not transcribed. The first call is said to have reached Flynn on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Why would a Vice-President need to know each and every word of it?

With Flynn out, the war-on-Russia hawks, that is about everyone of the “serious people” in Washington DC, had the second most important person out of the way that would probably hinder their plans.

They replaced him with a militaristic anti-Russian hawk:

In a 2016 speech to the Virginia Military Institute, McMaster stressed the need for the US to have “strategic vision” in its fight against “hostile revisionist powers” — such as Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran — that “annex territory, intimidate our allies, develop nuclear weapons, and use proxies under the cover of modernized conventional militaries.”

General McMaster, the new National Security Advisor, gets sold as a somewhat rebellious, scholar-warrior wunderkind. When the now disgraced former General Petraeus came into sight he was sold with the same marketing profile.

Petraeus was McMaster’s boss. McMaster is partially his creature:

He was passed over for brigadier general twice, until then-Gen. David Petraeus personally flew back to Washington, D.C., from Iraq to chair the Army’s promotion board in 2008.

When Petraeus took over in the war on Afghanistan he selected McMaster as his staff leader for strategy,

McMaster was peddled to the White House by Senator Tom Cotton, one of the most outlandishRepublican neocon war hawks.

McMaster’s best known book is “Dereliction of Duty” about the way the U.S. involved itself into the Vietnam War. McMaster criticizes the Generals of that time for not having resisted then President Johnson’s policies.

He is the main author of an Army study on how to militarily counter Russia. McMaster is likely to “resist” when President Trump orders him to pursue better relations with Moscow.

Trump has now been boxed in by hawkish, anti-Russian military in his cabinet and by a hawkish Vice-President. The only ally he still may have in the White House is his consigliere Steve Bannon. The next onslaught of the “serious people” is against Bennon and especially against his role in the NSC. It will only recede when he is fired.

It seems to me that Trump has been rolled with the attacks on Flynn and the insertion of McMaster into his inner circle. I wonder if he, and Bannon, recognize the same problematic development and have a strategy against it.

This morning I listened, with a lot of frustration, to the usually very informative and usually quite balanced morning radio interview program “On Point Radio with Tom Ashbrook”

(http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2017/02/14/depression-teens-girls-study).

The program “revealed” supposedly new information about the high incidence of so-called “clinical depression” among American girls. The two guests on the program were actually academic psychiatrists who had recently had their research published in the Journal of Pediatrics.

The high incidence of long-lasting sadness and behavioral dysfunction among girls is actually very old news and the fact that it is getting worse should come as no surprise. 99% of our celebrity-worshipping and excessively fashion-conscious American girls are trying to survive in a junk culture while simultaneously being mal-nourished, sleep-deprived, over-stressed, over-drugged, over-vaccinated, sexually-harassed, sexually-abused, and screen time- and pornography-toxified all the while trying to pretend to be happy and not emotional distressed! Impossible!

Here is the bulk of my letter that I emailed to host Tom Ashbrook:

Tom, at the end of the radio program this morning, many of you listeners will surely have come to the mistaken conclusion that the solution to the vast problem of pervasive adolescent female sadness isn’t to logically address the obvious potentially preventable causes of mental ill health. I got the impression that the solution was to get them seem by a prescribing psychiatrist and “get them treated with drugs!”

Nothing that was said from your guests put much emphasis on anything other than drug treatment. I noticed that there were no call-ins from the millions of folks who surely have experienced psychiatric drug-induced suicidality, homicidality, psychosis, worsening depression, etc, etc.

What wasn’t mentioned this morning was that a person who is sad or anxious because he or she is a victim of cyber-abuse should NOT be given dangerous psych drugs!! The guests did not mention that most psych drugs haven’t been FDA-approved for use in the under-18 age group!

Nor are potentially addictive, potentially brain-damaging drugs the cure when someone’s abnormal thinking and/or behaviors have been caused by being a victim of poverty, racism, sexism, xenophobia, psychological trauma, malnutrition, living in a war zone or just living in a junk culture that teaches junk values! The cure can only come when root causes are addressed.

The first step that all doctors are taught in med school when starting therapy with ANY patient is a PROLONGED, flexible intake history that will examine ALL aspects of the patient’s past, including details of pre-natal life, infancy, childhood, adolescence and adulthood, including psychological traumas, neglectful or abusive parenting, toxic environmental exposures, drug use, nutritional status through the life cycle, toxic interpersonal relationships, and even, in the face of the new evidence of cumulative vaccine toxicity and the fairly recently described ASIA syndrome – of which psychiatrists, pediatricians and most physicians are studiously ignorant.

Although the enormously over-looked vaccine injury issue is a huge topic that can’t be thoroughly discussed here, it is important to point out that repeated exposures to the intramuscularly injected and highly neurotoxic metals that are in most vaccines (especially mercury, aluminum and the many other metallic vaccine contaminants) are not appreciated for being the central nervous system and DNA toxins that they are, and therefore the neurological disorders that they can cause are usually mis-diagnosed and therefore mis-treated as mental illnesses.

If they have active clinical practices at all, academic psychiatrists such as your two guests usually only see tertiary patients who have already been mis-diagnosed with a mental illness of unknown etiology and therefore mis-treated with drugs and perhaps even electroshocked. Surely most of them will have been neurologically sickened by the over-drugging for years and they may even have suffered withdrawal syndromes over that time that also may have been mis-diagnosed as relapses.

By the time such potentially doomed patients come to see academic psychiatrists (or even non-academic psychiatrists) they will likely have developed psychiatric drug-induced brain disorders that can make them appear or act like they have a mental illness. But rather than being diagnosed with a mental illness “of unknown etiology”, these tertiary patients actually have an iatrogenic disorder (doctor-caused or prescription drug-caused), namely, a psychiatric drug-induced brain disorder. It is important at this point to understand that America’s large numbers of iatrogenic illnesses are not to be discussed in polite company and are therefore covered-up with another diagnosis that claims to be “of unknown etiology”.

The underlying motivation of your two guests seemed to me to be to get everybody alarmed that these girls are being inadequately diagnosed with mental illnesses and therefore are being insufficiently “treated” (read “drugged with psychiatric medications”).

Therefore, I implore you and your producers to arrange a series of interviews with a number of the authors listed in the bibliography at the end of the article below. They will convincingly refute much of the Big Pharma propaganda that your guests were able to spout without a dissenting voice.

Your guests were obviously firmly in the pro-Big Pharma camp. It is well-known that most psychiatrists reflexively prescribe cocktails of psych drugs to 99+% of their patients, and they usually do it in an alarmingly unscientific trial and error manner. And what should be truly alarming it that those cocktails have never been proven to be safe in either animal labs or in clinical trials.

It is also well known that most academic psychiatrists have heavy financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry, and, of course, most physicians have deep professional conflicts of interest (and thus they often blindly – and obediently – follow the community standards of care that have been set up by authorities that may also have been under the influence of corporate powers that may have undeclared conflicts of interest).

It seemed obvious to me that your guests were not-so-subtly promoting the specialty psychiatric industry (and thus indirectly promoting the increased use of Big Pharma’s lucrative brain-disabling drugs).

The publication of their research in the Journal of Pediatrics, probably means that the psychiatric industry must be trying to promote the diagnosing and drugging of more and more so-called mental illnesses by pediatricians (and therefore indirectly attracting more referrals to psychiatrists). One of the negative consequences for increased diagnosing and increased prescribing of potentially addictive psych drugs to more and more kids is that most of these kids may only have temporary symptoms that may spontaneously disappear or be cured by good psychotherapy. Starting kids on drugs almost always has seriously negative long-term consequences, including psych drug-induced dementia.

It needs to be pointed out that the first of your guests, Dr Mark Olfson, was a major player in the now-discredited TeenScreen program that, unbeknownst to most parents at the beginning of the program, was allowed into middle schools and high schools and then tried to convince very suggestible, otherwise normal kids, that they were mentally ill and should consult with a professional. TeenScreen was conceived, funded and promoted by BigPharma, and Dr Olfson was deeply involved. His bio at Columbia makes it sound like he is still proud of that effort!

Enough said. Tom, I want to say that I think that your show is one of the best on radio, but I hope, in the interest of balance, that you and your staff will study the following article about why Big Psychiatry’s pro-corporate agendas desperately need exposure.

Otherwise your listeners will become accomplices to and promoters of the over-diagnosing and over-drugging of vulnerable American children.

Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN

(Many of my articles that enlarge upon and provide the documentation for the statements above are archived at: http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2,)

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. In the decade prior to his retirement, he practiced what could best be described as “holistic (non-drug) and preventive mental health care”. Since his retirement, he has written a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly magazine.

His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American imperialism, friendly fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, and the dangers of Big Pharma, psychiatric drugging, the over-vaccinating of children and other movements that threaten American democracy, civility, health and longevity and the future of the planet. 

Part Two of Three Parts

(Part One is here.)

The Sauds pay undisclosed sums, amounting perhaps to billions of dollars annually, to support the U.S. CIA, and especially to finance U.S. training and weapons to Al Qaeda and other jihadists in Syria for the overthrow of Assad, and they have for decades financed efforts to overthrow and replace Syria’s secular non-sectarian government. The Sauds’ contribution, according to The New York Times, is «by far the largest from another nation to the program to arm the rebels against President Bashar al-Assad’s military». They hire us — and not only for the Syrian operation.

After the bloody CIA coup that had replaced democracy with fascism in Chile in 1973, and the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee hearings revealed how evil the CIA is and the CIA thus became subjected to some public scrutiny for a brief period, the Sauds took up much of the slack, filling in for the CIA until the matter faded from the headlines. «In the late 1970s, the Saudis organized what was known as the ‘Safari Club’ — a coalition of nations including Morocco, Egypt and France — that ran covert operations around Africa at a time when Congress had clipped the C.I.A.’s wings over years of abuses». This program continued: «In the 1980s, the Saudis helped finance C.I.A. operations in Angola, where the United States backed rebels against the Soviet-allied government». Moreover, «Prince Bandar bin Sultan [al-Saud]… directed Saudi spies to buy thousands of AK-47 assault rifles for Syrian rebels». Such is ‘The Western Alliance’ of ‘the free world’ of ‘the democracies’, who work for the Sauds. And what’s publicly known about it, is only the most palatable part of the reality.

For this reason, President Obama vetoed a bill that would allow America’s victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue in U.S. courts the government of Saudi Arabia, including the Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar, and his wife, both of whom had been regularly paying thousands of dollars to the Saudi officials who were paying the 9/11 terrorists during the immediate lead-up to 9/11. Obama’s argument for their being above the law was that if the Sauds were to be held liable for what they did to produce 9/11, then the U.S. President and other U.S. officials could be held liable for what they do (bombings, coups, invasions, etc.) to other countries. Obama’s argument was the Medieval concept of ‘sovereign immunity’, or ‘the king can do no wrong’. However, since Congress was up for re-election at the time, it overrode Obama’s veto. «‘I would venture to say that this is the single most embarrassing thing that the United States Senate has done, possibly, since 1983,’ [White House] press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters» on that occasion. For the first time ever, Congress had voted against the Saud family. Obama, like Bush before him, did all he could to protect his masters; but, finally, it could no longer be enough. Even a king can’t always get what he wants.

Within a day after America’s September 17th bombing of the Syrian government’s soldiers at Der Zor, enough details of the operation became known so that Russia’s government was already saying, in essence, that Obama had been negotiating in bad faith and that Russia’s attempts to work cooperatively with him on Syria were ended — not because of Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry’s having had any ill intent or lying in the negotiations, but because «The White House is defending Islamic State. Now there can be no doubts about that». It was «the White House», not the Secretary of State (and not ‘the Pentagon’), who sabotaged those peace talks. Obama ditched Kerry on Syria, just like he had earlier ditched him on Ukraine (the other flashpoint, with regard to Russia).

The independent German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer managed to get a video interview with an ISIS commander («NF»), and Todenhofer headlined his interview on 26 September 2016, «Inside IS». The following passage from it (Todehofer is fluent both in German and Arabic, and here is my translation of his German translation of it into English) was typical, regarding America’s back-stage support not only of Al Qaeda, but even of ISIS — the group that Obama’s bombing of the Syrian army at Der Zor on September 17th was helping — and of all of the other jihadist groups in Syria:

JT: Is this only true for «Jabhat al Nusra» or also for the allies of «Jabhat al Nusra» here. 

NF: This is valid for all groups, who are our allies. 

JT: Islamic Front, Islamic Army?

NF: They are all with us. We are all the «Al Nusra-Front». A group is formed and calls itself «Islamic Army» or «Fateh Al Scham». Each group has its own name, but the belief is uniform. The overall name is «Al Nusra-Front» (Jabhat al Nusra).

For example, one person has 2000 fighters. Then a new group is formed from there an calls itself «Ahrar Al Scham» — brothers, whose faith, thoughts and aims are identical with the «Al Nusra-Front».

As Steve Chovanec had aptly summarized, on 4 March 2016, Obama’s position in negotiations with Russia on Syria: «Please Don’t Attack Al-Qaeda». Obama kept that position till the end of his Presidency (though Kerry did not). Eliminating Assad was far more important to him than was eliminating Al Qaeda; it even caused him to fire or otherwise sideline any of his top national-security officials who didn’t share his passion in this regard.

Seymour Hersh reported on 4 April 2014:

The former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently «painful» to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’.

Gareth Porter reported on 16 February 2016:

Information from a wide range of sources, including some of those the United States has been explicitly supporting, makes it clear that every armed anti-Assad organization unit in those provinces is engaged in a military structure controlled by Nusra militants. All of these rebel groups fight alongside the Nusra Front and coordinate their military activities with it.

Christina Lin noted, on 8 April 2016:

Reports say some American-backed jihadi groups are being equipped with US-made MANPADS. Indications are they’re obtaining these advanced weapons either directly or indirectly from the US or its Mideast allies in connection with a recent escalation in the fighting in Syria.

Izat Charkatli headlined on 12 August 2016, «Nusra commander defects to ISIS with his battalion», and reported:

The leader of Jabhat Al Nusra’s, now Jabhat Fath Al-Sham, Barraq Battalions, defected from the Al-Qaeda affiliated terror group and joined the notorious ISIS group.

Nominally, Obama was opposed to ISIS in Syria, but he wasn’t even nominally opposed to Al Nusra (except publicly to American audiences): he instead insisted that during the peace negotiations, there would be no bombing allowed against any of the anti-Assad forces except ISIS — especially Nusra and its allies were being treated by Obama as ‘moderate rebels’, ‘freedom fighters against Assad’; and he insisted that, during the peace negotiations, only ISIS could still be bombed. Russia always refused to accept that condition. Russia insisted that no exception be made for Al Nusra and the other non-ISIS jihadist groups. Russia insisted to be allowed to continue bombing all jihadists that don’t put down their arms during the negotiations — that there be no cease-fire against any of them that don’t. Russia’s minimal demand was that the existing bombing and other attacks by Russia and Syria against Nusra be allowed to continue while the peace talks continue. Finally, Kerry managed to get Obama nominally to agree to that minimal condition; but, within less than a week thereafter (the September 9th agreement went into force on September 12th, and Obama bombed the Syrian army post on September 17th), Obama’s bombers killed over 60 Syrian soldiers at Der Zor — the attack that terminated the peace-talks. This was in such blatant violation of the September 9th agreement, so that, since then, the U.S. has been out of the picture: the talks resumed with only Syria, Russia, Iran, and Turkey, as governmental participants.

The tactic of using jihadists against Russia had started late in the 1970s, as a means of weakening the Soviet Union, during America’s war against communism.

The U.S., and the royal family of Saudi Arabia, had created Al Qaeda back in 1979, to be their «boots on the ground» against the Soviet Union, and used them not only in Afghanistan but also in Russia’s own Chechnya region, to weaken, first the Soviet Union itself, helping to break it up, and then, after the Cold War ended on the Russian side in 1991 when the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended, America and the Sauds continued arming and funding Al Qaeda, so as to create terror in Russia and to overthrow Russia’s allies abroad, such as Assad. Perhaps communism wasn’t the reason for the Cold War but merely the excuse for the Cold War; but, certainly, this has been and is the case after communism ended but America’s war against Russia didn’t. Only the excuse is gone. The U.S. subterranean policy since the termination of the Soviet Union and of its communism and of its Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1991 has been to continue the Cold War now against Russia, by bringing its former Warsaw Pact allies, and even the other states that had been parts of the Soviet Union, into America’s anti-Russia military club, NATO. Syria had never been a part of the Soviet Union, nor of the Warsaw Pact, but it had been an ally of the Soviets and then of Russia, and the Sauds wanted to take it over and bring it into ‘The Western’ fold.

Whereas NATO is the European wing of America’s continuing war against Russia, the African or southern wing of America’s permanent (meaning: until conquest) war against Russia is led by the Saud family, who dominate their Gulf Cooperation Council of other Arabic royal families. So: whereas the U.S. aristocracy leads the anti-Russia war in Europe, the Saudi aristocracy leads it in Africa (basically in the other countries that are owned by the other fundamentalist-Sunni Arab royal families). On 15 December 2015, the Saud family announced that they had created and gotten 34 nations signed onto their new «Islamic Military Alliance», but the Sauds’ main ally remains the U.S. aristocracy.

Those two aristocracies — U.S. and Saudi — control The West. The U.S. controls the dollars, and the Sauds and their fundamentalist-Sunni allies control enough of the oil and gas, so that between them the petrodollar-era has been the American-Saudi Empire; and, after the end of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Sauds have been doing all they can to crush all challengers but especially Russia and its allies including Iran and Syria — two Muslim-majority countries that refuse to subordinate themselves to the Saud family and its Wahhabist-Salafist clergy.

So, the U.S. government sometimes arms, and sometimes arms against, Al Qaeda (a joint U.S.-Saudi product, fundamentalist-Sunni like the Sauds themselves): it all depends on where, but basically it depends upon whether Al Qaeda is fighting against Russia (which both the U.S. and the Saudi aristocracies want to become conquered — that aim is Al Qaeda’s original reason for being). Whereas the U.S. sometimes is against Al Qaeda, and at other times is arming Al Qaeda, Russia is always against Al Qaeda and against all of the Sauds’ other terrorist groups (such as the ones Al Qaeda leads in Syria).

(Part Three is here.)

Novos passos no “fortalecimento da Aliança” foram decididos pelos ministros da Defesa da Otan, reunidos em Bruxelas no Conselho do Atlântico Norte.

Antes de tudo, na frente oriental, com o deslocamento de novas “forças de dissuasão” para a Estônia, Letônia, Lituânia e Polônia, em conjunto com uma acrescida presença da Otan em toda a Europa oriental com exercícios terrestres e navais. Em junho estarão plenamente operacionais batalhões multinacionais que se instalarão na região.

Ao mesmo tempo, aumentará a presença naval da Otan no Mar Negro. Igualmente, começa a criação de um comando multinational das forças especiais, formado inicialmente de forças belgas, dinamarquesas e holandesas. Enfim, o Conselho do Atlântico Norte, felicita a Geórgia por seus progressos no caminho que a fará entrar na Aliança, tornando-se o terceiro país da Otan (com a Estônia e a Letônia) diretamente fronteiriço com a Rússia.

Na frente meridional, diretamente ligada à oriental em particular através da confrontação Rússia-Otan na Síria, o Conselho do Atlântico Norte anuncia uma série de medidas para “enfrentar as ameaças provenientes do Oriente Médio e o Norte da África e para projetar uma estabilidade para além de nossas fronteiras”.

Junto ao Comando da força conjunta aliada em Nápoles, foi constituído o Hub para o Sul, com um  pessoal de cerca de 100 militares. Ele terá por missão “avaliar as ameaças provenientes da região e enfrentá-las juntamente com as nações e organizações parceiras”. Disporá de aviões espiões  Awacs e de drones que se tornarão rapidamente operacionais em Sigonella (Sicília).

Para as operações militares já está pronta a “Força de resposta” da Otan de 40 mil soldados, em particular sua “Força de ponta com elevada rapidez operacional”.

O Hub para o Sul – explica o secretário geral Stoltenberg – aumentará a capacidade da Otan para “prever e prevenir as crises”. Em outros termos, uma vez que o Hub “preveja” uma crise no Oriente Médio, no Norte da África ou em outra parte, a Otan poderá efetuar uma intervenção  militar “preventiva”. Desse modo, a Aliança Atlântica adota completamente a doutrina do “falcão” Bush sobre a guerra preventiva.

Os primeiros a querer um fortalecimento da Otan, totalmente com funções anti-Rússia, são neste momento os governos europeus da Aliança, estes mesmos que se travestem de “pombas”. De fato, eles temem ser ultrapassados ou marginalizados se a administração Trump abrir negociações diretas com Moscou.

Os governos do Leste são particularmente ativos. Varsóvia, não contente com a 3ª Brigada blindada enviada à Polônia pela administração Obama, demanda agora a Washington, pela boca do influente Kaczynski, ser coberta pelo “guarda-chuva nuclear” estadunidense, ou seja, ter em seu território armas nucleares estadunidenses apontadas para a Rússia.

Kíev relançou a ofensiva no Donbass contra os russos da Ucrânia, seja através de pesados bombardeios, seja através do assassinato sistemático de chefes da resistência nos atentados por trás dos quais se encontram também os serviços secretos ocidentais. Ao mesmo tempo, o presidente Porochenko anunciou um referendo sobre a adesão da Ucrânia à Otan.

E o primeiro-ministro grego Alexis Tsipras foi dar-lhe um forte aperto de mão: em visita oficial a Kíev em 8 e 9 de fevereiro, ele expressou ao presidente Porochenko “o firme apoio da Grécia à soberania, integridade territorial e independência da Ucrânia” e, em consequência, o não reconhecimento do que Kíev chama de “ilegal anexação russa da Crimeia”. O encontro, declarou Tsipras, lançando as bases para “anos de estreita colaboração entre a Grécia e a Ucrânia”, contribuirá para “alcançar a paz na região”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Le colombe armate dell’Europa

il manifesto, 21 de fevereiro de 2017

Tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho para Resistência

Ulteriori passi nel «rafforzamento forzamento dell’Alleanza» sono stati decisi dai ministri della Difesa della Nato, riuniti a Bruxelles nel Consiglio Nord Atlantico. Anzitutto sul fronte orientale, col dispiegamento di nuove «forze di deterrenza» in Estonia, Lettonia, Lituania e Polonia, unito ad una accresciuta presenza Nato in tutta l’Europa orientale con esercitazioni terrestri e navali.

A giugno saranno pienamente operativi quattro battaglioni multinazionali da schierare nella regione. Sarà allo stesso tempo accresciuta la presenza navale Nato nel Mar Nero. Viene inoltre avviata la creazione di un comando multinazionale delle forze speciali, formato inizialmente da quelle belghe, danesi e olandesi. Il Consiglio Nord Atlantico loda infine la Georgia per i progressi nel percorso che la farà entrare nella Alleanza, divenendo il terzo paese Nato (insieme a Estonia e Lettonia) direttamente al confine con la Russia.

Sul fronte meridionale, strettamente connesso a quello orientale in particolare attraverso il confronto Russia-Nato in Siria, il Consiglio Nord Atlantico annuncia una serie di misure per «contrastare le minacce provenienti dal Medioriente e Nordafrica e per proiettare stabilità oltre i nostri confini». Presso il Comando della forza congiunta alleata a Napoli, viene costituito l’Hub per il Sud, con un personale di circa 100 militari. Esso avrà il compito di «valutare le minacce provenienti dalla regione e affrontarle insieme a nazioni e organizzazioni partner».Disporrà di aerei-spia Awacs e di droni che diverranno presto operativi a Sigonella.

Per le operazioni militari è già pronta la «Forza di risposta» Nato di 40mila uomini, in particolare la sua «Forza di punta ad altissima prontezza operativa».

L’Hub per il Sud – spiega il segretario generale Stoltenberg – accrescerà la capacità della Nato di «prevedere e prevenire le crisi». In altre parole, una volta che esso avrà «previsto» una crisi in Medioriente, in Nordafrica o altrove, la Nato potrà effettuare un intervento militare «preventivo». L’Alleanza Atlantica al completo adotta, in tal modo, la dottrina del «falco» Bush sulla guerra «preventiva».

I primi a volere un rafforzamento della Nato, anzitutto in funzione anti-Russia, sono in questo momento i governi europei dell’Alleanza, quelli che in genere si presentano in veste di «colombe». Temono infatti di essere scavalcati o emarginati se l’amministrazione Trump aprisse un negoziato diretto con Mosca. Particolarmente attivi i governi dell’Est. Varsavia, non accontentandosi della 3a Brigata corazzata inviata in Polonia dall’amministrazione Obama, chiede ora a Washington, per bocca dell’autorevole Kaczynski, di essere coperta dall’«ombrello nucleare» Usa, ossia di avere sul proprio suolo armi nucleari statunitensi puntate sulla Russia.

Kiev ha rilanciato l’offensiva nel Donbass contro i russi di Ucraina, sia attraverso pesanti bombardamenti, sia attraverso l’assassinio sistematico di capi della resistenza in attentati dietro cui vi sono anche servizi segreti occidentali. Contemporaneamente, il presidente Poroshenko ha annunciato un referendum per l’adesione dell’Ucraina alla Nato.

A dargli man forte è andato il premier greco Alexis Tsipras che, in visita ufficiale a Kiev l’8-9 febbraio, ha espresso al presidente Poroshenko «il fermo appoggio della Grecia alla sovranità, integrità territoriale e indipendenza dell’Ucraina» e, di conseguenza, il non-riconoscimento di quella che Kiev definisce «l’illegale annessione russa della Crimea». L’incontro, ha dichiarato Tsipras, gettando le basi per «anni di stretta cooperazione tra Grecia e Ucraina», contribuirà a «conseguire la pace nella regione».

Manlio Dinucci

The volume of international transfers of major weapons has grown continuously since 2004 and increased by 8.4 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16, according to new data on arms transfers published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Notably, transfers of major weapons in 2012–16 reached their highest volume for any five-year period since the end of the cold war.

The flow of arms increased to Asia and Oceania and the Middle East between 2007–11 and 2012–16, while there was a decrease in the flow to Europe, the Americas and Africa. The five biggest exporters—the United States, Russia, China, France and Germany—together accounted for 74 per cent of the total volume of arms exports.

Asia: major increases for some states

Arms imports by states in Asia and Oceania increased by 7.7 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16 and accounted for 43 per cent of global imports in 2012–16.

India was the world’s largest importer of major arms in 2012–16, accounting for 13 per cent of the global total. Between 2007–11 and 2012–16 it increased its arms imports by 43 per cent. In 2012–16 India’s imports were far greater than those of its regional rivals China and Pakistan.

Imports by countries in South East Asia increased 6.2 per cent from 2007–11 to 2012–16. Viet Nam made a particularly large jump from being the 29th largest importer in 2007–11 to the 10th largest in 2012–16, with arms imports increasing by 202 per cent.

‘With no regional arms control instruments in place, states in Asia continue to expand their arsenals’, said Siemon Wezeman, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘While China is increasingly able to substitute arms imports with indigenous products, India remains dependent on weapons technology from many willing suppliers, including Russia, the USA, European states, Israel and South Korea’.

Middle East: arms imports almost double

Between 2007–11 and 2012–16 arms imports by states in the Middle East rose by 86 per cent and accounted for 29 per cent of global imports in 2012–16.

Saudi Arabia was the world’s second largest arms importer in 2012-16, with an increase of 212 per cent compared with 2007–11. Arms imports by Qatar went up by 245 per cent. Although at lower rates, the majority of other states in the region also increased arms imports. ‘Over the past five years, most states in the Middle East have turned primarily to the USA and Europe in their accelerated pursuit of advanced military capabilities’, said Pieter Wezeman, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘Despite low oil prices, countries in the region continued to order more weapons in 2016, perceiving them as crucial tools for dealing with conflicts and regional tensions.’

Arms exporters: the USA accounts for one-third of total

With a one-third share of global arms exports, the USA was the top arms exporter in 2012– 16. Its arms exports increased by 21 per cent compared with 2007–11. Almost half of its arms exports went to the Middle East.

‘The USA supplies major arms to at least 100 countries around the world—significantly more than any other supplier state’, said Dr Aude Fleurant, Director of the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘Both advanced strike aircraft with cruise missiles and other precision-guided munitions and the latest generation air and missile defence systems account for a significant share of US arms exports.’

Russia accounted for a 23 per cent share of global exports in the period 2012–16. 70 per cent of its arms exports went to four countries: India, Viet Nam, China and Algeria.

China’s share of global arms exports rose from 3.8 to 6.2 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. It is now firmly a top-tier supplier, like France and Germany which accounted for 6 per cent and 5.6 per cent, respectively. The ongoing lower rate of French arms export deliveries may end soon because of a series of major contracts signed in the past five years. Despite a spike in arms exports in 2016, German arms exports—counted over a five-year period—decreased by 36 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. 

Other notable developments

• Algeria was the largest arms importer in Africa with 46 per cent of all imports to the region.
• The largest importers in sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia—are all in conflict zones.
• Total arms imports by states in the Americas decreased by 18 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. However, changes in import volumes varied considerably. Colombia’s arms imports decreased by 19 per cent, while Mexico’s arms imports grew by 184 per cent in 2012–16 compared with 2007–11.
• Imports by states in Europe significantly decreased by 36 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. Initial deliveries to Europe of advanced combat aircraft as part of major contracts started in 2012–16 and further deliveries will drive import volumes up in the coming years.
• Imports by Azerbaijan were 20 times higher than those of Armenia in 2012–16.

The SIPRI Arms Transfers Database contains information on all international transfers of major weapons (including sales, gifts and production licences) to states, international organizations and armed non-state groups from 1950 to the most recent full calendar year, 2016. SIPRI data reflects the volume of deliveries of arms, not the financial value of the deals. As the volume of deliveries can fluctuate significantly year-onyear, SIPRI presents data for 5-year periods, giving a more stable measure of trends.

For information or interview requests contact Stephanie Blenckner ([email protected],  or Harri Thomas ([email protected].

The volume of international transfers of major weapons has grown continuously since 2004 and increased by 8.4 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16, according to new data on arms transfers published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). Notably, transfers of major weapons in 2012–16 reached their highest volume for any five-year period since the end of the cold war.

The flow of arms increased to Asia and Oceania and the Middle East between 2007–11 and 2012–16, while there was a decrease in the flow to Europe, the Americas and Africa. The five biggest exporters—the United States, Russia, China, France and Germany—together accounted for 74 per cent of the total volume of arms exports.

Asia: major increases for some states

Arms imports by states in Asia and Oceania increased by 7.7 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16 and accounted for 43 per cent of global imports in 2012–16.

India was the world’s largest importer of major arms in 2012–16, accounting for 13 per cent of the global total. Between 2007–11 and 2012–16 it increased its arms imports by 43 per cent. In 2012–16 India’s imports were far greater than those of its regional rivals China and Pakistan.

Imports by countries in South East Asia increased 6.2 per cent from 2007–11 to 2012–16. Viet Nam made a particularly large jump from being the 29th largest importer in 2007–11 to the 10th largest in 2012–16, with arms imports increasing by 202 per cent.

‘With no regional arms control instruments in place, states in Asia continue to expand their arsenals’, said Siemon Wezeman, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘While China is increasingly able to substitute arms imports with indigenous products, India remains dependent on weapons technology from many willing suppliers, including Russia, the USA, European states, Israel and South Korea’.

Middle East: arms imports almost double

Between 2007–11 and 2012–16 arms imports by states in the Middle East rose by 86 per cent and accounted for 29 per cent of global imports in 2012–16.

Saudi Arabia was the world’s second largest arms importer in 2012-16, with an increase of 212 per cent compared with 2007–11. Arms imports by Qatar went up by 245 per cent. Although at lower rates, the majority of other states in the region also increased arms imports. ‘Over the past five years, most states in the Middle East have turned primarily to the USA and Europe in their accelerated pursuit of advanced military capabilities’, said Pieter Wezeman, Senior Researcher with the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘Despite low oil prices, countries in the region continued to order more weapons in 2016, perceiving them as crucial tools for dealing with conflicts and regional tensions.’

Arms exporters: the USA accounts for one-third of total

With a one-third share of global arms exports, the USA was the top arms exporter in 2012– 16. Its arms exports increased by 21 per cent compared with 2007–11. Almost half of its arms exports went to the Middle East.

‘The USA supplies major arms to at least 100 countries around the world—significantly more than any other supplier state’, said Dr Aude Fleurant, Director of the SIPRI Arms and Military Expenditure Programme. ‘Both advanced strike aircraft with cruise missiles and other precision-guided munitions and the latest generation air and missile defence systems account for a significant share of US arms exports.’

Russia accounted for a 23 per cent share of global exports in the period 2012–16. 70 per cent of its arms exports went to four countries: India, Viet Nam, China and Algeria.

China’s share of global arms exports rose from 3.8 to 6.2 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. It is now firmly a top-tier supplier, like France and Germany which accounted for 6 per cent and 5.6 per cent, respectively. The ongoing lower rate of French arms export deliveries may end soon because of a series of major contracts signed in the past five years. Despite a spike in arms exports in 2016, German arms exports—counted over a five-year period—decreased by 36 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. 

Other notable developments

• Algeria was the largest arms importer in Africa with 46 per cent of all imports to the region.
• The largest importers in sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria, Sudan and Ethiopia—are all in conflict zones.
• Total arms imports by states in the Americas decreased by 18 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. However, changes in import volumes varied considerably. Colombia’s arms imports decreased by 19 per cent, while Mexico’s arms imports grew by 184 per cent in 2012–16 compared with 2007–11.
• Imports by states in Europe significantly decreased by 36 per cent between 2007–11 and 2012–16. Initial deliveries to Europe of advanced combat aircraft as part of major contracts started in 2012–16 and further deliveries will drive import volumes up in the coming years.
• Imports by Azerbaijan were 20 times higher than those of Armenia in 2012–16.

The SIPRI Arms Transfers Database contains information on all international transfers of major weapons (including sales, gifts and production licences) to states, international organizations and armed non-state groups from 1950 to the most recent full calendar year, 2016. SIPRI data reflects the volume of deliveries of arms, not the financial value of the deals. As the volume of deliveries can fluctuate significantly year-onyear, SIPRI presents data for 5-year periods, giving a more stable measure of trends.

For information or interview requests contact Stephanie Blenckner ([email protected],  or Harri Thomas ([email protected].

US President Donald Trump named Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster as his new national security adviser Monday, one week after firing retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the previous head of the National Security Council. The replacement of one general by another underscores the dominant role of the military in the Trump administration.

McMaster’s appointment does not require Senate confirmation, so he assumed his new duties as soon as he accepted the position. He will reportedly not retire from the Army but rather take a leave of absence for the duration of his stint at the White House.

Retired or active-duty military brass hold four top positions: Secretary of Defense James “Mad Dog” Mattis and Secretary of Homeland Security John F. Kelly are both retired Marine Corps major generals. McMaster will head the NSC, and retired Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who had been acting head during the week since Flynn’s dismissal, will resume his position as NSC chief of staff, now as McMaster’s deputy.

While McMaster’s appointment does not increase the number of generals in the top ranks of the administration—since he replaces General Flynn—his elevation to head the NSC could well signal a shift in the foreign policy orientation of the Trump administration, and represent a concession to the anti-Russian campaign being waged by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic Party and sections of the Republican Party.

The appointment was backed by many of those who have been denouncing Trump for his alleged “softness” on Russia. The ultra-right magazine National Review hailed the appointment, comparing it to the nomination of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, and writing that “Trump’s key generals—James Mattis, John Kelly, and now H.R. McMaster—represent the best of modern military leadership. Their presence in the government is deeply reassuring. It’s now incumbent on President Trump to heed their counsel and give them the level of authority that they have earned.”

Senator John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, fresh from a speech to the Munich Security Conference in which he portrayed the new administration as a potential threat to world stability, praised the nomination as well. “I give President Trump great credit for this decision, as well as his national security cabinet choices,” McCain said in a statement. “I could not imagine a better, more capable national security team than the one we have right now.”

Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and NSA who supported Hillary Clinton for president, described McMaster as “a big-picture thinker. And he stands up for what he believes. What a perfect choice for this administration.” Representative Adam Smith, the senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, called McMaster “obviously very well qualified,” adding, “to say that he’s an improvement over Mike Flynn is an understatement.”

Herbert Raymond McMaster, 54, is leaving a position as commander of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCINC), where he was responsible for strategic planning for the “army of the future.” He was a tank commander in the first Persian Gulf War, in 1991, and commanded a combat brigade during the occupation of Iraq, where he came to the attention of General David Petraeus as the first commander to successfully recruit local Sunni tribal leaders to assist military operations against insurgent groups.

McMaster’s tactics in the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar were the model for the surge of US forces in 2006-2007, and McMaster became closely associated with Petraeus in his subsequent rise through the upper echelons of the Army.

The appointment has special significance in terms of policy towards Russia because McMaster has been engaged in a major military project to study the conflict in Ukraine and the lessons to be drawn by US military planners preparing for war in Eastern Europe against the Russian army and air force. He said in 2016 that the Ukraine conflict has “revealed that the Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of UAVs [drones] for tactical effect.”

According to a report last year in Politico, “McMaster is quietly overseeing a high-level government panel intended to figure out how the Army should adapt to this Russian wake-up call.” He told a Senate committee, “Russia possesses a variety of rocket, missile and cannon artillery systems that outrange and are more lethal than US Army artillery systems and munitions.” He called for developing advanced weapons to replace the two main Army armored vehicles, the Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle.

This background suggests that McMaster will be aligned with Secretary of Defense Mattis in viewing Russia as the main strategic adversary of US imperialism in both the Middle East and Europe. That accounts for the widespread praise for his selection by those who have been spearheading the anti-Russian campaign on behalf of the US military-intelligence apparatus.

McMaster first came to public attention in 1997 as the author of a volume analyzing the Pentagon command performance during the early stages of the war in Vietnam, from 1963 through 1965. The book’s title, Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chief s of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, suggests a more critical attitude to the Vietnam War than the author actually espouses. He indicts the lies that the civilian and military leaders of the day told each other, not the lies they both told to the American people.

A wide range of political commentators praised the book, ranging from Rush Limbaugh on the ultra-right to historian Stanley Karnow to journalist Peter Arnett, a critic of the war. It provides a detailed analysis of the day-to-day relations between the Pentagon brass and the Johnson White House, based on documents then newly declassified.

More significant from the standpoint of his current position is the attitude McMaster adopted towards social and political constraints on the military. His book strongly attacked the Joint Chiefs of Staff of that period, 1963-1965, for failing to demand the all-out mobilization of up to 700,000 troops they believed necessary to win the war. They did not press these demands because Johnson was committed to a strategy of limited war in order to provide resources for domestic social reforms such as Medicare, Medicaid and the “war on poverty.”

Such an approach suggests that General McMaster, like Trump himself, would favor the plundering of social programs in order to pay for the rapid and extensive military buildup that both have advocated, preparing for an explosion of American militarism on a scale that would dwarf both Vietnam and the current wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.

The American ruling class is locked in a ferocious internal conflict centered on issues of foreign policy and war. The Democratic Party, along with a section of Republicans and most of the media, is conducting a hysterical campaign against Donald Trump for his supposed conciliatory attitude toward Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. These forces are fronting for the intelligence establishment, which is determined to prevent any retreat from the policy of aggressive confrontation with Moscow carried out by the Obama administration.

Trump, for his part, speaks for elements in the ruling elite and the state who view Iran and China to be the more immediate targets for US provocation and preparations for war, and would like to tamp down the conflict with Russia for now so as to peel it away from Tehran and Beijing.

There is not an ounce of democratic content on either side of this struggle between reactionary and war-mongering factions of US imperialism. The Democrats, however, are seeking to use unsubstantiated allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election to hijack popular opposition to the Trump administration and corral it behind the drive to war with Russia.

For months, the front pages of leading newspapers have featured “news” stories, based on the alleged statements of unnamed officials, about supposed meddling by Russia in the political affairs of the US and other countries. Nationally syndicated columnists have denounced Putin as a dictator, tyrant and murderer bent on dominating Europe and subverting American democracy.

Members of congress have declared Russia’s alleged intervention in the US election an “act of war” (in the words of John McCain) and vowed to “kick Russia’s ass” (Lindsey Graham).

This campaign takes place in the context of a major buildup of US and NATO military forces—troops, tanks, heavy weapons—on Russia’s western border, and an imminent military escalation in Syria, where US-backed “rebel” militias are fighting Syrian government forces supported by Iranian troops and Russian war planes and military advisors.

Whether in the Baltics or the Middle East, conditions are present for a clash between US and Russian forces, even if unintentional, to spark a full-scale war between the world’s two biggest nuclear-armed powers.

Yet neither the media nor the politicians agitating for a more aggressive posture toward Moscow discuss where their policy is leading, much less the likely consequences of a war between the US and Russia.

How many people would die in such a war? What are the odds that it would involve the use of nuclear weapons? On these life-and-death questions, the commentators and politicians, who drone on endlessly about Trump’s supposed softness toward Putin, are silent.

Behind the scenes, however, the intelligence agencies and Pentagon, along with their allied geo-strategic think tanks, are engaged in intense discussions and detailed planning premised on the possibility, indeed inevitability, of a major war with Russia. Plans are being laid and preparations made to wage and “win” such a war, including through the use of nuclear weapons.

One does not have to look far to find the people who are heading up the war planning. Yesterday, President Trump appointed Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, an army strategist, as his new national security advisor.

The selection of McMaster is broadly seen as a concession to Trump’s anti-Russia critics in the political and intelligence establishment. He is the leading figure in an Army project called the Russia New Generation Warfare study, whose participants have made repeated trips to the battlefields of eastern Ukraine to study Russia’s military capabilities and devise strategies and weapons systems to defeat them. McMaster has called on the US to prepare for high-intensity conventional war with Russia, involving not only long-range missile systems and stealth aircraft, but also “close” combat.

Beyond conventional warfare, US think tank strategists are discussing what it would take to “win” a nuclear war. The Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) recently put out a 140-page report, “Preserving the Balance: A US Eurasia Defense Strategy,” which discusses this issue in detail. The CSBA is headed by Andrew Krepinevich, the report’s author, and includes on its Board of Directors figures such as former Under Secretary of the Army Nelson Ford, former CIA Director James Woolsey and retired general Jack Keane.

“There is a need to rethink the problem of limited nuclear war in which the United States is a direct participant, or between other parties where the United States has a major security interest,” Krepinevich writes. “As opposed to the global apocalypse envisioned in the wake of a superpower nuclear exchange during the Cold War, there will very likely be a functioning world after a war between minor nuclear powers, or even between the United States and a nuclear-armed Iran or North Korea. US forces must, therefore, be prepared to respond to a range of strategic warfare contingencies along the Eurasian periphery.”

In an earlier report entitled “Rethinking Armageddon,” Krepinevich argued that the use of a “small number” of battlefield nuclear weapons should be included among the appropriate responses by a US president to conventional threats from Russia.

During the Cold War, the “limited” use of nuclear weapons was seen as an invitation for a full-scale nuclear exchange and the destruction of the planet. Now such discussions are considered “respectable” and prudent.

These plans are being realized in the US military arsenal. The US is currently in the midst of a $1 trillion nuclear weapons modernization program commissioned under Obama. The program centers on the procurement of lower-yield, maneuverable nuclear weapons that are more likely to be used in combat. However, the Defense Science Board, a committee appointed to advise the Pentagon, recently called on the Trump administration to do more to develop weapons suitable for a “tailored nuclear option for limited use.”

What would be the human toll from such an exchange? Numerous Pentagon war games conducted during the Cold War concluded that the “limited” use of nuclear weapons would not only cause millions of civilian casualties, but quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear exchange that would destroy major cities.

A 1955 war game titled Carte Blanche, which was responding to a Russian invasion of German territory with the use of a “small” number of battlefield nuclear weapons, resulted in the immediate deaths of 1.7 million Germans, the wounding of 3.5 million more, and millions more dead as a result of fallout radiation.

In one 1983 war game code-named Proud Prophet, NATO initiated a limited nuclear first strike on Soviet military targets. But rather than backing down, the USSR initiated a full-scale nuclear retaliation, prompting the US to reply in kind. When the proverbial dust had settled, half a billion people were dead and European civilization destroyed.

More contemporary studies have shown similarly disastrous outcomes. A 2007 report by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War suggested that a “limited” nuclear exchange could lead to the deaths of over a billion people, mostly as a result of widespread climate disruption. The US National Academy of Sciences concluded that a “large-scale nuclear war” would lead directly to the deaths of up to four billion people.

The eruption of such a war at the hands of the nuclear arsonists who preside over crisis-ridden American capitalism is a real and present danger. In fact, as the McCarthyite-style anti-Russia agitation indicates, absent the independent and revolutionary intervention of the working class in the US and around the world, it is an inevitability.

Such is the criminality and recklessness of the American ruling elite and its political representatives on both sides of the aisle. Escalating war is a conspiracy of the elites, into which the masses of people are to be dragged and sacrificed.

Anyone who doubts that the American ruling class is capable of such acts should look to the historical record. The United States dropped nuclear bombs, which today would be considered “low-yield” and even “tactical,” on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to warn off the Soviet Union. Truman and company killed over 100,000 people on the day the bombs were dropped, and another 100,000 died from radioactive poisoning over the ensuing four months.

Today, when the United States faces economic and geopolitical challenges far greater than those of an earlier period, it will operate all the more ruthlessly and recklessly.

The growing movement in opposition to the Trump administration must be inured against any and all efforts of the Democratic Party to infect it with the virus of imperialist war-mongering. The ongoing protests against Trump’s billionaire cabinet and his attacks on immigrants and democratic rights are only the heralds of a movement of the working class. It is necessary to politically arm this emerging movement with the program of socialist internationalism and the understanding that the fight against war and dictatorship is the fight against capitalism.

Last year, President Rafael Correa said he wouldn’t seek a third term after 10 years in office.

In December 2015, Ecuador’s constitution was amended to permit unlimited re-election runs, including for president – term limits eliminated after May 24, 2017, following this year’s general elections, held on February 19, including for five regional MPs, 137 federal lawmakers, the nation’s president and vice president.

With nearly 90% of votes counted as this is written, Lenin Moreno, Correa’s former vice president, leads right-wing banker Guillermo Lasso by a 39.11 – 28.28 percent margin – close to the 40% threshold needed to avoid a second round runoff.

Ecuador’s National Electoral Council said final results may take several more days as results trickle in from isolated areas, Ecuadoreans abroad, bureaucratic delays, and inconsistencies in some ballots.

Six other candidates competed. Moreno, a paraplegic, was nominated for the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize because of his advocacy for handicapped people.

In 1998, he was seriously wounded in a Quito robbery attempt, paralyzed, unable to walk. Years of therapy restored his ability to move around in a wheelchair, able to continue working in the public sector.

He promotes humor and joy as a way to overcome serious physical limitations. It worked for him, a remarkable story, especially if he becomes Ecuador’s next president.

As vice president, he increased the federal budget for disabled people manyfold. Hundreds of thousands are helped.

Guillermo Lasso is a banker, businessman, running for president after losing to Correa decisively in 2013.

As Banco de Guayaquil president and largest shareholder, he coordinated right-wing attacks on Correa’s agenda. During former Ecuadorian president Lucio Gutierrez’s neoliberal tenure, he developed relations with US business elites.

Pre-election, Moreno was favored to win. His lead over Lasso makes him most likely to become Ecuador’s next president.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Zagreb sold a record amount of aging weapons and ammunition to Saudi Arabia in 2016, ignoring evidence the arms are regularly being diverted to Syria.

Croatia has drastically increased its sales of decades-old arms and ammunition to Saudi Arabia despite mounting evidence that the deliveries are being diverted to Syria in breach of European Union (EU) and international law.

The Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, part of the Free Syrian Army, using a Croatian-made RAK-12 in April 2016. Credit: YouTube

Though it has one of the best and most expensively equipped armies in the Middle East, the Gulf Kingdom imported US$ 81.7 million in aging ammunition, including bullets, mortars, rockets, and rocket and grenade launchers worth $5.8 million from Croatia during the first nine months of 2016. This total is already double Croatia’s sales to Saudi Arabia over the previous four years, and the final value will likely be higher, as figures for the last quarter have not yet been published.

Igor Tabak, a Croatian defense analyst, said that the country does not currently produce ammunition. “It is quite likely that the exports come from old ammunition,” he said, “possibly from the inventory of the former Yugoslavia and Eastern [Bloc] production.”

2012 Report by the Croatian Ministry of Defense
2013 Report by the Croatian Ministry of Defense
2014 Report by the Croatian Ministry of Defense

While Croatia has consistently refused to acknowledge that it is profiting from liquidating its old stocks on the Syrian battlefields, defense ministry documents reviewed by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) show a major surge in sales from its stockpile coinciding with the start of the civil war in 2012.

According to those reports, the Ministry of Defense, which has a stockpile of around 18,000 tons, sold at least 5,000 tons of surplus ammunition in 2013 and 2014—as much as it had sold in the preceding decade.

A still photo on the left from a video posted by Sword of al-Sham on May 18, 2016, shows Croatian-made RAK-12 rockets marked “AL.” The right photo shows a Croatian soldier with an identical rocket showing the same markings.

The Ministry of Defense did not respond to a request for additional information on who bought the armaments and whether additional sales were made in 2015 and 2016.

Arms Exports: A State Secret

Croatia was among the first countries to supply weapons to Syrian rebels in the winter of 2012. The shipment was routed via Jordan with logistical support from the CIA and paid for by Saudi Arabia, according to a 2013 investigation by the New York Times.

Following a flurry of embarrassing news coverage, Croatia abruptly started removing key information, such as the final destination of its exports, from official reports in an attempt to keep the details of this trade out of the headlines.

A still from a video published by the Fist Coastal Division on August 5, 2015, shows a box containing RAK-12 rocket marked KS (believed to indicate the defunct Koncar factory in Sesvetski Kraljevec, Croatia) produced in 1995. Credit: YouTube

The Ministry of Economy, which is responsible for issuing import/export licenses for weapons and ammunition, told BIRN and OCCRP that a 2012 law on personal data protection prohibits it from giving out this information. This is disputed by the Croatian Data Protection Agency, which said the legislation applies only to individuals, not to companies or governments.

Five non-governmental organizations described the removal of information as a “troubling decline in transparency” in their submission to a United Nations (UN) Human Rights Panel on Croatia in March 2015.

Reporters, however, obtained the data via a little-known UN database, Comtrade, which contains annual international trade statistics from more than 170 countries.

The UN database revealed that Croatia exported $36 million worth of ammunition to Jordan in the two years since the Syrian conflict began in 2012. After Croatia’s role became public, Saudi Arabia took over importing more than $124 million worth of ammunition since 2014 – two thirds in the first nine months of 2016 alone.

A still from a video published by the Fist Coastal Division on June 16, 2015, shows a RAK-12 rocket marked KS (believed to indicate the defunct Koncar factory in Sesvetski Kraljevec, Croatia) produced in 1994. The photo also shows a RAK-12 multiple rocket launcher, also produced in Croatia. Credit: YouTube

The two countries also imported more than $21 million in weapons, including rocket and grenade launchers, since 2012.

Prior to 2012, the arms trade between Croatia, Jordan and Saudi Arabia was virtually nonexistent. Since 2012, all but a few hundred thousand dollars of Croatia’s ammunition sales have gone to Jordan or Saudi Arabia.

A spokesperson of the Croatian Ministry of Economy said that the latest exports took place in accordance with licenses approved in 2015. He also added that some export licenses to Saudi Arabia were rejected in 2015, and none were issued in 2016 but refused to provide any further detail.

An earlier investigation by BIRN and OCCRP revealed that Croatia approved $302 million worth of arms export licenses over this period. Unless these licenses are revoked, millions of dollars in future exports are approved to go forward.

Falling Into the Wrong Hands

While experts have previously highlighted video and photographic evidence of Croatian-made RBG-6 grenade launchers and RAK-12 multiple-launch rocket systems in Syria, Croatian officials have disputed their origin, pointing out that similar weapons are produced elsewhere.

However, new analysis by BIRN and OCCRP of the social media profiles used by brigades fighting in Syria, as well from online enthusiasts who monitor the spread of weapons, provide clear evidence that these weapons are Croatian-made.

Among the weapons and ammunition identified in large quantities in Syria are the RBG-6 grenade launchers and RAK-12 multiple-launch rocket systems, as well as rockets and mortar shells manufactured in the mid-1990s, after Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia:

• Two videos of arms stashes captured from rebels by Syrian government troops – filmed in December 2016 by Russia Today – reveal unused Croatian-made mortar shells and rockets.
• Three images shared on Twitter in 2015 and 2016 show grenade-launchers marked RBG-6 in use or for sale in Syria. This model is made only in Croatia.
• Two videos also show the First Army and the Noureddine Zanki movement, which are moderate, US-backed factions in Syria, using rocket launchers with RAK visible on their sides. Croatia was the only producer of RAK-12s.

But so-called moderate Syrian opposition groups are not the only military formations to have secured Croatian-made weaponry. “We’ve now seen groups like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra using these weapons, although how they acquired them is unclear,” said Eliot Higgins, a London-based citizen journalist.

“[These weapons] could have been looted from other groups, sold between groups, or provided directly (…)” he said. Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, which uses open source information and social media to track weapons in conflict areas. He was one of the first to identify Balkan-sourced armaments in use in the Syrian war.

Both Amnesty International and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy reported that ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra obtained Croatian and Yugoslav-made rocket and grenade launchers as early as 2013.

Government Denials

Darko Kihalic, head of Croatia’s arms licensing department at the Ministry of Economy, told BIRN and OCCRP that Zagreb has no qualms about selling arms to Saudi Arabia as long as it provides the correct documents.

He said there were no restrictions on exporting to Saudi Arabia and Croatian firms have a right to earn an income.

A photo from a December 28, 2016 RT report about a captured rebel arsenal shows a RAK-12 rocket marked KS (believed to indicate the defunct Koncar factory in Sesvetski Kraljevec, Croatia) produced in 1993. Credit: Youtube

Asked whether he was aware that Croatian weapons bought by Saudi Arabia were turning up in Syria, Kihalic said: “There is nothing more for us to check, as the [export] document says their ministry of defense or police forces [in Saudi Arabia] will use it [the weapon] and that they won’t resell it or export it.”

Human rights groups dispute Kihalic’s view. Patrick Wilcken, an arms researcher for Amnesty International, said that Croatia is obliged to take measures to prevent both weapons from being diverted to another country, and from being used to commit serious human rights violations. Given the mounting evidence of the systematic diversion of arms from Saudi Arabia to armed groups in Syria, Croatia’s failure to take due diligence to prevent further diversion could result in a breach of the EU Common Position and the Arms Trade Treaty.

Bodil Valero, a Green Party member of the European Parliament from Sweden and the parliament’s rapporteur on arms, criticized Croatia and called on the EU to tighten its grip on its members’ arms exports.

“Croatia has used Saudi Arabia as it is not allowed to export to Syria, and it ends up in the hands of ISIS and the Kurds,” she told BIRN and OCCRP. “We have to do much more.”

The number of nuclear weapons in the world has declined significantly since the Cold War: down from a peak of approximately 70,300 in 1986 to an estimated 14,900 in early-2017.

Government officials often portray that accomplishment as a result of current arms control agreements, but the overwhelming portion of the reduction happened in the 1990s. Moreover, comparing today’s inventory with that of the 1950s is like comparing apples and oranges; today’s forces are vastly more capable. The pace of reduction has slowed significantly. Instead of planning for nuclear disarmament, the nuclear-armed states appear to plan to retain large arsenals for the indefinite future.

Despite progress in reducing Cold War nuclear arsenals, the world’s combined inventory of nuclear warheads remains at a very high level: approximately 14,900 warheads as of early-2017. Of these, roughly 9,400 are in the military stockpiles (the rest are awaiting dismantlement), of which more than 3,900 warheads are deployed with operational forces, of which nearly 1,800 US, Russian, British and French warheads are on high alert, ready for use on short notice.

Approximately 93 percent of all nuclear warheads are owned by Russia and the United States who each have roughly 4,000-4,500 warheads in their military stockpiles; no other nuclear-armed state sees a need for more than a few hundred nuclear weapons for national security:

The United States, Russia and the United Kingdom are reducing their warhead inventories, but the pace of reduction is slowing compared with the past 25 years. France and Israel have relatively stable inventories, while China, Pakistan, India and North Korea are increasing their warhead inventories.

All the nuclear weapon states continue to modernize their remaining nuclear forces and appear committed to retaining nuclear weapons for the indefinite future. For an overview of global modernization programs, see this 2014 article.

Read Complete FAS article

El diálogo y la paz están entronizados hoy como las prioridades esenciales de los venezolanos, pese a que el mazo pretende aplastar al olivo que el gobierno extiende a sus adversarios internos y externos.

Contra esta nación sudamericana está en marcha una campaña de muchos años donde confluyen operaciones políticas, diplomáticas y económicas, y un actor nada solapado ganó protagonismo en los últimos días, la cadena estadounidense de televisión CNN con sus ataques al gobierno y al vicepresidente ejecutivo Tareck El Aissami.

Este lunes el presidente de la República, Nicolás Maduro, sostuvo un encuentro con el expresidente de España, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, uno de los acompañantes internacionales que ven en las conversaciones la única alternativa para evitar males mayores en momentos en que aumentan las presiones contra la paz.

En la cita en el Palacio de Miraflores, en Caracas, estuvieron presentes la ministra para Relaciones Exteriores, Delcy Rodríguez; el coordinador del diálogo por parte del Gobierno Nacional, Jorge Rodríguez; y la ministra para el Despacho de la Presidencia, Carmen Meléndez, aunque no trascendió el contenido de las pláticas.

En octubre del 2016 la oposición venezolana aceptó la convocatoria del Presidente para trabajar juntos en una mesa de diálogo por la paz del país pero, desde entonces a la fecha poco hacen los integrantes de la llamada Mesa de la Unidad Democrática (MUD) para acercar posiciones e insisten en acciones que muchos califican de ‘traición a la patria’.

Luego de un primer encuentro en el cual se conformaron cuatro mesas temáticas: 1. Paz, Respeto al Estado de Derecho y a la Soberanía Nacional; 2. Verdad, Justicia, Derechos Humanos, Reparación de Víctimas y Reconciliación; 3. Económico-Social; 4. Generación de Confianza y Cronograma Electoral, poco se avanzó.

Ante esta situación, tanto Zapatero como los demás acompañantes, el expresidente dominicano Leonel Fernández y el panameño Martín Torrijos, la Unión de Naciones del Sur y El Vaticano, insisten en que se necesitan más encuentros entre quienes piensan diferente a fin de encontrar puntos en común imprescindibles para la reconciliación de las partes.

Sin embargo, hay que ver qué hacen algunos miembros de la MUD para favorecer algo que Aristobulo Istúriz, ministro para las Comunas, calificó este lunes de guerra global.

Recientemente Maduro denunció que Julio Borges, Freddy Guevara y Luis Florido, son los principales responsables de que exista una intervención contra Venezuela, plan que tratan de vender en Washington, en el Senado colombiano y en reuniones secretas con funcionarios de la embajada estadounidense en Bogotá, según fuentes de crédito.

Venezuela sufre una guerra global, subrayó Istúriz, al referirse a las acciones realizadas por la oposición que busca ante organismos internacionales y en ‘otras puertas’ que el país sea blanco de una agresión.

Es llamativo que los parlamentarios de la MUD, Julio Borges, Freddy Guevara y Luis Florido, abusen de su inmunidad buscando que triunfe el mazo contra el olivo y provocando una acción del gobierno contra ellos por promover una intervención contra Venezuela, algo que en otro país muy probablemente sería un delito de alta traición.

Según Istúriz, ellos van a abrirle las puertas a una intervención criminal del imperio, en cualquier país del mundo es delito, frente a nuestra Constitución es traición a la Patria, las instituciones tienen que accionar más temprano que tarde, el pueblo pide justicia, dijo el dirigente bolivariano.

Ojala impere la cordura, y los tambores de la guerra no acallen el clamor favorable a las negociaciones pacíficas, esperan la mayoría de los venezolanos que la apoyan, según las encuestas.

Luis Beaton

El presidente Donald Trump cumple hoy un mes en el cargo con un nivel de popularidad muy bajo, escándalos, renuncias de algunos consejeros, litigios judiciales y un enfrentamiento ininterrumpido con los medios de prensa.

Una encuesta reciente de la empresa Gallup mostró que apenas 38 por ciento de los estadounidenses aprueba la labor de Trump, mientras el promedio de sondeos que elabora el sitio RealClearPolitics le otorgó 45 por ciento de apoyo entre los ciudadanos y 50,2 por ciento de rechazo.

Las cifras lo convierten en el mandatario con menor aceptación en la historia norteamericana a un mes de su inauguración, de acuerdo con estudiosos del tema, a lo que se une una cobertura negativa de los medios frente a sus polémicas decisiones y planteamientos.

El bloqueo en los tribunales federales a la orden ejecutiva para evitar la entrada a Estados Unidos de ciudadanos de Irán, Iraq, Siria, Yemen, Somalia, Sudán y Libia fue de acuerdo con criterio de expertos, el acto más controversial del mandatario hasta la fecha.

En ese sentido, recibió dos golpes decisivos, el primero cuando el juez James Robart, del occidental estado de Washington, congeló dicho decreto y después en el momento en que esa decisión la ratificaron tres jueces de la Corte de Apelaciones del Noveno Circuito, en San Francisco, California.

Uno de los reveses más significativos para Trump en las últimas semanas fue la renuncia del exgeneral Michael Flynn, asesor de Seguridad Nacional, ante alegaciones de que no informó de manera apropiada sobre sus conversaciones con el embajador ruso en Washington, Sergey I. Kislyak.

Entre los logros de Trump en el período, publicaciones especializadas señalan la confirmación en el Senado de la nueva secretaria de Educación, la multimillonaria Betsy DeVos, y de Scott Pruitt, quien estará al frente de la Agencia de Protección del Medio Ambiente.

También dio luz verde a la reanudación de las obras de los oleoductos Keystone XL y Dakota Access, a pesar de las protestas de los ambientalistas y la oposición de los demócratas.

Durante un acto celebrado este sábado en Melbourne, Florida, el gobernante volvió a su habitual tono de campaña, y logró reunir allí a más de nueve mil personas, de acuerdo con estimaciones de la policía local.

En su discurso, Trump afirmó que ‘la Casa Blanca funciona muy bien’, una afirmación que según medios de prensa contradice los reportes de sus propios ayudantes, aliados y adversarios.

Trump mencionó en Melbourne un número de supuestos enemigos: los demócratas, terroristas, jueces, miembros de bandas y carteles de la droga, desconocidos que llegan desde otros países y sobre todo los periodistas.

El jefe de la Casa Blanca prometió allí reducir los impuestos a las grandes corporaciones, aumentar los gastos militares, disminuir las regulaciones destinadas a proteger el medio ambiente; así como reemplazar la Ley de Salud Asequible (Obamacare), aprobada en 2010 por el presidente Barack Obama.

Algunos señalan que el principal problema de Trump es que está más interesado en participar en campañas proselitistas que en dirigir el país, y según sus propios consejeros, es incapaz de centrarse en asuntos de Gobierno durante períodos prolongados, pues prefiere ver la televisión o llamar a sus amigos en Nueva York.

Las posiciones cambiantes y los frecuentes twits de Trump en diferentes aspectos de la vida política y económica del país, obstaculizan el control de la estructura del poder federal y la concreción de las medidas que debe adoptar, estima Josh Dawsey en un artículo publicado este lunes en RealClearPolitics.

Según, Niall Stanage, el presidente Trump conmemora su primer mes en la Casa Blanca golpeado por una serie de controversias, pero con una posición inflexible al aseverar que está cumpliendo las promesas que lo llevaron a la victoria electoral en las presidenciales del 8 de noviembre pasado.

Stanage recordó este lunes en el diario The Hill que la credibilidad del nuevo gobernante sufrió un fuerte daño, incluso el día de su estreno el 20 de enero, cuando el Secretario de Prensa de la Casa Blanca, Sean Spicer, insistió, en que la audiencia asistente a la inauguración de Trump fue la más grande en la historia del país, a pesar de las evidencias en sentido contrario.

Prensa Latina

Bolivia y en Ecuador los movimientos sociales se han cansado de tumbar a gobiernos neoliberales y han decidido, finalmente, fundar sus propios partidos y lanzar candidatos a la presidencia de la nación. Mientras tanto, en el marco del Foro Social Mundial, o al lado de él, ONGs, algunos movimientos sociales e intelectuales de Europa y América Latina se oponían a esa vía y proponían la “autonomía de los movimientos sociales”. Esto es, no deberían meterse en política ni con el Estado, menos todavía con la  política. 

En Argentina, frente a la peor crisis económica, política y social de su historia, los movimientos renunciaron a lanzar candidaturas a la presidencia de la República con el slogan: “Que se vayan todos”. El resultado: Menem ganó en la primera vuelta, prometiendo que iba a dolarizar definitivamente la economía argentina, con lo cual llevaría a la ruina sin retorno no sólo a la Argentina, sino a todos los procesos de integración latinoamericana.

La ilusión despolitizada y corporativa del “Que se vayan todos” dejaría el campo libre para esa monstruosa operación menemista, con los efectos negativos en toda la región. La ilusión era la de que ellos se irían, sin que se los hicieran irse, sin que fueran derrotados con un proyecto superador del neoliberalismo. Felizmente apareció Néstor Kirchner, que asumió la presidencia del país, para iniciar el rescate más espectacular que Argentina haya conocido de su economía, de los derechos sociales de los trabajadores y del prestigio del Estado.

Mientras tanto, movimientos que habian adherido a la tesis de la autonomía de los movimientos sociales, como los piqueteros argentinos, simplemente desaparecieron. En México, después del enorme prestigio que habían tenido, al asumir una posición semejante –”Cambiar el mundo sin tomar el poder”, de John Holloway y Toni Negri, quien condenaba a los Estados como superados instrumentos conservadores–, los zapatistas han desaparecido de la escena política nacional, recluidos en Chiapas, el estado más pobre de México. Más de 20 años después, ni Chiapas, ni Mexico fueron transformados sin tomar el poder, hasta que los zapatistas han decidido lanzar a una dirigente indígena a la presidencia del país. Aun sin decir que van a transformar el país con una victoria electoral, pero saliendo de su aislamiento en Chiapas para volver a participar de la vida política nacional de México, abandonando sus posiciones de simple denuncia de las elecciones y de abstención.

Mientras tanto, Bolivia y Ecuador, rompiendo con esa visión estrecha de restringir a los movimientos sociales solamente a la resistencia al neoliberalismo, han fundado partidos –MAS en Bolivia, Alianza PAIS en Ecuador–, presentaron candidatos a la presidencia –Evo Morales y Rafael Correa–, han triunfado y pusieron en práctica los procesos de mayor éxito en la transformación económica, social, política y cultural de América Latina en el siglo XXI. Han refundado sus Estados nacionales, impuesto el desarrollo económico con distribución de la renta, se han aliado a los procesos de integración regional, al mismo tiempo que han integrado las más amplias capas del pueblo a los procesos de democratización política.

Al contrario del fracaso de las tesis de la autonomía de los movimientos sociales, que han renunciado a la disputa por la hegemonía alternativa a nivel nacional y de lucha por la construcción concreta de alternativas al neoliberalismo, bajo la dirección de Evo Morales y de Rafael Correa, Bolivia y Ecuador han demostrado como solamente la articulación entre la lucha social y la lucha política, entre los movimientos sociales y los partidos políticos, es posible construir bloques de fuerza capaces de avanzar decisivamente en la superación del neoliberalismo.

Las tesis de Toni Negri sobre el fin del imperialismo y de los Estados nacionales fueron rotundamente desmentidas ya desde la acción imperialista después de las acciones del 2001, mientras que los gobiernos sudamericanos han demostrado que solamente con el rescate del Estado es posible implementar políticas antineoliberales, como el desarrollo económico con distribución del ingreso. La pobreza persistente en Chiapas puede ser comparada con los avances espectaculares realizados, por ejemplo, en todas las provincias de Bolivia, para demostrar, también por las vias de los hechos, cómo la acción desde abajo tiene que ser combinada con la acción de los Estados, si queremos efectivamente transformar al mundo.

Otras tesis, como las de varias ONG o de Boaventura de Sousa Santos, de optar por una “sociedad civil” en la lucha en contra del Estado, no puede presentar ningún ejemplo concreto de resultados positivos, aun con las ambiguas alianzas con fuerzas neoliberales y de derecha, que también se oponen al Estado y hacen alianza con ONGs y con intelectuales para oponerse a gobiernos como los de Evo Morales y de Rafael Correa, pero también en contra de otros gobiernos progresistas en América Latina.Tienen en común visiones liberales del mundo.

Además del fracaso teórico de las tesis de la autonomía de los movimientos sociales, se les puede contraponer los extraordinarios avances económicos, sociales, políticos, en países como Argentina, Brasil, Venezuela, Uruguay, además de los ya mencionados, como pruebas de la verdad de las tesis de la lucha antineoliberal como la lucha central de nuestro tiempo.

Emir Sader

Emir Sader: Sociólogo y científico político brasileño, es coordinador del Laboratorio de Políticas Públicas de la Universidad Estadual de Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).

Aunque hasta ayer no se conocía el resultado definitivo de los comicios presidenciales del domingo pasado en Ecuador, las tendencias sobre 88.75 por ciento de los votos escrutados indican que el candidato oficialista, Lenin Moreno, se quedó a unas décimas del 40 por ciento de los votos requeridos para ser proclamado presidente electo, por lo que el país andino habrá de ir a una segunda vuelta, que deberá disputarse entre Moreno y el opositor derechista Guillermo Lasso.

Es pertinente recordar que, según las leyes electorales ecuatorianas, para que un aspirante presidencial pueda ganar en primera vuelta debe obtener, además del 40 por ciento de los votos válidos, diez puntos de ventaja sobre su rival más cercano. Este segundo requisito podría cumplirse, habida cuenta de que hasta el cierre de esta edición Lasso, con cerca del 28.31, estaba por debajo de esa diferencia.

Lo cierto es que, aun si Alianza País, el partido progresista del presidente saliente Rafael Correa, logra conservar el gobierno en una segunda vuelta, Ecuador experimenta el reflujo de los programas políticos similares que fueron desalojados del poder el año pasado, en elecciones en Argentina y por medio de un golpe de estado parlamentario en Brasil.

Al desgaste lógico del ejercicio de la presidencia debe sumarse el retroceso económico experimentado en los últimos años por la región, pero acaso también el sistemático golpeteo oligárquico en contra del gobierno de Correa y las desavenencias en la izquierda por el respaldo de éste a los sectores extractivistas, que generó un malestar inocultable en pueblos indígenas y movimientos ambientalistas.

ONU Mujeres está profundamente preocupada por la brutal violencia sexual y el asesinato de mujeres y niñas que ha sido recientemente señalada por las mujeres en Argentina y que repercute en toda América Latina y más allá.

Esta es una forma de terror íntimo que ha sido normalizada en su magnitud y a través de la aceptación de su inevitabilidad en algunas partes. Pero no es normal y no puede continuar. Más allá de los costos personales inaceptables, se revelan profundos y perjudiciales fallos de la sociedad que últimamente tienen un alto costo en la pérdida de progreso en cada país. Unimos nuestras voces a todos aquellos que dicen “Ni una menos” y llamamos a acciones urgentes en todos los niveles, desde los gobiernos hasta las personas que impulsan cambios, para prevenir que no haya ni un solo asesinato más.

La violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas debe parar. Primero de todo, el reciente caso de femicidio de una adolescente en Argentina y el asesinato de una niña de 9 años en Chile no deben quedar sin castigo. Globalmente, la impunidad es un elemento clave en la perpetuación de la violencia y la discriminación contra las mujeres.

Si los hombres pueden tratar a las mujeres tan mal como quieran con pocas o ninguna consecuencia, ello niega todos los esfuerzos para construir un mundo que sea seguro para las mujeres y las niñas y en el que ellas puedan florecer. Globalmente, unas 60.000 mujeres y niñas son asesinadas cada año, con frecuencia como una escalada de violencia doméstica. Estudios nacionales en Sudáfrica y Brasil estiman que cada seis horas una mujer es asesinada por su compañero íntimo.

El hogar no es un refugio y es arriesgado para las mujeres denunciar a sus agresores. Salir al exterior también comporta peligros. Estudios recientes en Brasil indican que el 85 por ciento de las mujeres tienen miedo a salir a la calle. En Port Moresby, Papúa Nueva Guinea, en torno al 90 por ciento de mujeres y niñas han experimentado alguna forma de violencia sexual cuando acceden al transporte público. Como comunidad internacional hemos articulado fuertemente su espacio propio para una población pujante de mujeres y niñas, y las múltiples formas en que esto es mejor para todos.

Desde la Agenda 2030 para el Desarrollo Sostenible adoptada en septiembre de 2015 hasta la Nueva Agenda Urbana adoptada esta semana, está claro que debemos acabar con la violencia y prevenir su repetición. Ello requiere de leyes y políticas públicas, ciudades seguras, transporte público, mejores servicios y el compromiso de hombres y niños en la construcción de una cultura que acabe con todas las formas de discriminación contra las mujeres y niñas y que lleve al fin del femicidio.

El cambio debe suceder a muchos niveles, tanto en las estructuras culturales como físicas de nuestras sociedades. Trabajamos de cerca con la sociedad civil y el movimiento feminista, que han sido actores clave en la denuncia de la violencia, impulsando el cambio de políticas y proponiendo soluciones. Para recoger más información y apoyar el fin de la impunidad, junto a la Oficina del Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Derechos Humanos (OACNUDH), hemos desarrollado un modelo de protocolo que permite investigar este tipo de crímenes adecuadamente para acabar con la impunidad, además de identificar las brechas en la cadena de investigación para lograr prevenir los femicidios.

Vamos a usarlo inicialmente para la investigación del femicidio en América Latina, donde el número de países con altas tasas de femicidio está creciendo. Estamos alineadas con la Relatora Especial de Naciones Unidas para la Violencia contra las Mujeres, sus causas y sus consecuencias, que ha llamado al establecimiento de un observatorio global de femicidio con un panel interdisciplinario de expertos para recolectar y analizar datos sobre femicidios. Existen algunos progresos alentadores: en América Latina, 16 países —casi la mitad de los países en la región— han adoptado legislación para asegurar que el femicidio es adecuadamente investigado y castigado. Esto debe ser una tendencia global.

No es la responsabilidad de un solo sector, pero sí un esfuerzo colectivo y coordinado. Llamamos a que los gobiernos reconozcan la magnitud y las implicaciones de la violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas, y se comprometan a recoger datos con los cuales cuantificarla y no sólo a proveer servicios para las sobrevivientes y víctimas, sino a incrementar sustantivamente una fuerte acción judicial para lograr el cierre de casos y las respectivas condenas; además de esfuerzos constructivos y creativos para prevenir y castigar todos los crímenes violentos contra las mujeres y las niñas.

A nivel mundial, el año pasado suscribimos el objetivo de igualdad de género y eliminación de todas las formas de violencia contra las mujeres y las niñas. Lograr esto no es solo el fin de una terrible violación de los derechos humanos, es la clave para la construcción de un mundo mejor y más equitativo —un planeta 50–50.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka: Directora Ejecutiva de ONU Mujeres.

Vitaly Churkin was one of the wisest voices in international diplomacy.  His voice will no longer echo in the halls of the United Nations. Articulate, polite yet commanding, wise yet affable, he oversaw some of Russia’s and the world’s most important events in a position he occupied since 2006.

Churkin had to face a great deal of hostile criticism from both the Bush and Obama administrations during his time at the UN, but he always did so with grace. He never failed to explain the Russian position with the utmost clarity.

Standing next to some of his colleagues, he often looked like a titan in a room full of school children.

His death, a day before his 65th birthday, is a tragedy first and foremost for his family, friends and colleagues. It is also a deeply sad day for the cause of justice, international law and all of the principles of the UN Charter which Churkin admirably upheld in the face of great obstacles.

His death however raises many uncomfortable questions…

Here are 5 things that must be considered:

1.  A Macabre Pattern Has Emerged

Beginning in 2015, there were several deaths within the Russian Diplomatic corps and a special Russian Presidential adviser.

–LESIN

First there was Russia’s RT founder and special adviser to President Putin, Mikhail Lesin. He died in November of 2015 in his hotel room. Reports said that he appeared discombobulated during his last sighting before he died. Later it emerged that he died of a blunt head trauma. Drinking was blamed, but many questions were left unanswered.

–MALANIN

Earlier last month, Andrei Malanin, a Senior Russian Diplomat to Greece was found dead in his bathroom. The causes of death remain unknown.

–KADAKIN

Just last month, Russia’s Ambassador to India, Alexander Kadakin, an always prestigious role, died of a heart attack, although no one was aware of any previous health issues.

–KARLOV

In December of last year Russia’s Ambassador to Turkey was assassinated by a lone jihadi gunmen in an art gallery.  There was no effective security as the killer simply walked up to Ambassador Andrei Karlov and shot him multiple times in the back.

–CHURKIN

Vitaly Chirkin is the highest profile member of Russia’s diplomatic corps to die in recent years.

2. A Motive For Foul Play?

Each of the recently deceased Russian Ambassadors were high profile targets for miscreants and criminals, whether state actors, mercenaries or fanatics.

Lesin was a instrumental in the creation of RT, a news outlet which has come under constant attack from the western establishment.

Malanin had overseen a period of warming fraternal relations between Greece and Russia at a time when Greece is feeling increasingly alienated from both the EU and NATO.

Karlov is said to be responsible for helping to facilitate the rapprochement between Presidents Erdogan and Putin.

Kadakin oversaw a period of renewed tensions between India and Pakistan at a time when Russia was trying to continue its good relations with India whilst building good relations with Pakistan.

On the 31st of December, 2016, Churkin’s resolution on a ceasefire in Syria passed in the UN Security Council after months of deadlock. The resolution is still in force.

Anyone who wanted to derail the diplomatic successes that the aforementioned men achieved for Russia would have a clear motive to extract vengeance.

3. Who Stands To Gain?

In the matter of Karlov, any derailment of restored Russo-Turkish relations would be good for those happy for Turkey to continue her support of jihadists in Syria rather than moving towards accepting a Russian and indeed Iranian brokered peace process which respects the sovereignty of Syria as Russia and Iran always have, but Turkey has not.

In the case of Lesin, anyone wanting ‘vengeance’ for RT’s popularity would be able to say that a kind of former media boss was taken down.

For Malanin, many fear that if ‘Grexit’ happens, Russia will become an increasingly important partner for Greece. The EU would not like one of its vassal states enjoying fruitful relations with Russia, a country still under sanctions from Brussels.

For Kadakin, it is a matter of interest for those wanting Pakistan to continue favouring western powers and not wanting Russia to be able to mediate in conflict resolutions between New Delhi and Islamabad.

Churkin had come to dominate the UN in ways that his counterparts on the Security Council simply could not. No one really stood a chance in a debate with Churkin. His absence leaves open the possibility for a power vacuum that would makes other peoples’ jobs easier.

4. Where The Deaths Took Place

Each death took place on foreign soil. Mr. Karlov’s killing in particular, exposed the weakness of his security contingent. If security was that weak in a comparatively volatile place like Turkey, it goes without saying that security in states considered more politically stable would be even more lax.

Again it must be said that a non-biased detective might say that the only pattern which has emerged is that many people in the Russian diplomatic corps and related institutions have heart attacks. Maybe they eat fatty foods every day and drink and smoke too much. But if this was this case, why are the heart attacks all on foreign soil?

If all of the former Ambassadors except Karlov were really in bad health, is it really just a coincidence that none of these men had a health scare on Russian soil? Again, a pattern has emerged.

5. The Ethics of Speculation?

Many will say that it is too early to suspect foul play. Indeed, I must make it clear that this is simply speculation based on a pattern of tragic and at times unexplained events, combined with the objective reality that because of Russia’s recently elevated profile as a born-again geopolitical superpower, Russia is a bigger target for international criminals than it was in the broken 1990s or the more quiet early 2000s.

When such events happen, one’s duty is to speculate so that better health and  safety precautions are taken to ensure the wellbeing of Russia’s important diplomats. Furthermore, if foul play is a factor, it means that such seemingly unrelated events must be investigated more thoroughly.

Russia has historically suffered from invasion, revolution and more recently from immense international pressure. The Russian people, like Russia’s ambassadors are entitled to the peace and long lives deserved by any member of a country that has suffered for too long.

It is not a secret that on January 25, 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump proposed to set up so-called “safe zones” in Syria. In addition, recently, he said that Gulf States would pay for them.

Nowadays, it is unclear whether these plans are directed to the benefit of the Syrian people, or it is just another maneuver to delay the process of the peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis.

Talking about the reasons of his proposal, Donald Trump confined himself to a massive influx of refugees from Syria and Iraq in the EU. According to him, “safe zones” are able to defend Europeans from terrorists, who sneak into Europe disguised as migrants.

According to Reuters, Trump is expected to order the Pentagon and the State Department in the coming days to come up with a plan for the zones. However, it isn’t clear, what these safe zones mean for Trump. If this is the territory, in which the civilian population would be guaranteed safety, it is one matter. If this plan includes the establishment of no-fly zones, it is a different one.

After Trump’s statement about his plans to establish a so-called “safe zone” in Syria, foreign media reported that Donald Trump intends to establish no-fly zones in it. In addition, the protection of these areas is likely to require the deployment of the U.S. military in the region. Barack Obama once tried to avoid this for fear of getting bogged down in the Syrian conflict.

Apparently, in any case, it is not allowed to set up such zones in places, where the Syrian Army conducts combat operations against terrorists. This will eliminate the possibility of effective fighting against extremists, who may take shelter from the air strikes in these zones.

However, the initiative of the U.S. president on the establishment of “safe zones” was supported by Turkey. In addition, according to reliable sources, a few days ago, the United States and Turkey made arrangements for joining efforts to establish such zones.

Meanwhile, it should be mentioned that the King of Saudi Arabia, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, during a telephone conversation with Donald Trump, also supported the establishment of “safe zones” in Syria and Yemen. So, why did Saudi Arabia support this idea? What is its real aim? It is known that Saudi Arabia financed and armed terrorists in Syria throughout the conflict.

Apparently, the idea of “safe zones” only seems like a step aimed at the settlement of the issue of refugees. In fact, there are many pitfalls, which the U.S. administration prefers not to talk about.

It’s most likely that the idea about the establishment of the “safe zones” was suggested because of the desire of some countries to continue to provide support to illegal armed groups, and to slow down the process of political settlement of the Syrian crisis as much as possible. It is possible that the establishment of such zones means that it can actually be created an enclave, where militants and terrorists will be under the protection of their powerful patrons on the territory of Syria.

Two days ago the Takfiri Islamist leader Omar Abdul-Rahman , the so called “Blind Sheik”, died in a U.S. prison. He had been found guilty of involvement in the 1993 attempt to bring down the World Trade Center in New York and of other crimes.

The obituaries of Omar Abdul-Rahman in U.S. media are an example of white washing of the U.S. exploitation of radical Islamism for its imperial purposes. While extensively documented in earlier media and official reports the CIA’s facilitation and involvement with Abdul-Rahman is seemingly stricken from history.

Since the 1970s Omar Abdul-Rahman was involved in the growth of radical Sunni Islamism:

Founded in 1976, Faisal Islamic Bank of Egypt (FIBE) is part of the banking empire built by Saudi Prince Mohammed al-Faisal. Several of the founding members are leading members of the Muslim Brotherhood, including the “Blind Sheikh,” Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman.

Financed by Saudi sources Abdul-Rahman created various groups of radicals in Egypt and gets deeply involved with Al-Qaeda, recruiting fighters for Afghanistan in cooperation with the CIA and the Pakistani secret services. He was the ideological leader of Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, an Islamic radical organization in Egypt responsible for several terrorist attacks. He traveled to the U.S. several timed between 1986 and 1990 to further his violent ideology. His visas were issued by CIA agents despite his appearance on a State Department terrorism watch list. In 1990 he moves to the U.S. where he preached his violent Islam and continued to recruit fighters for radical causes.

In December 1990 the New York Times reported:

The 52-year-old religious leader, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, entered the country more than five months ago despite being on a State Department list of people with ties to terrorist groups, the authorities said. He illegally obtained a tourist visa from a consul in the United States Embassy in Khartoum, the Sudan, in May, according to records of the Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service and State Department officials.

In July 1993 the NYT reported that “illegally obtained tourist visa” was not illegal at all:

Central Intelligence Agency officers reviewed all seven applications made by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman to enter the United States between 1986 and 1990 and only once turned him down because of his connections to terrorism, Government officials said today.
…
Mr. Abdel Rahman helped to recruit Arab Muslims to fight in the American-backed war in Afghanistan, and his lawyer and Egyptian officials have said he was helped by the C.I.A. to enter the United States.
…
American officials had acknowledged last week that the diplomat at the United States Embassy in Khartoum who signed the May 1990 visa request that allowed Mr. Abdel Rahman to enter the United States was in fact a C.I.A. officer.

Several attempts to remove Abdel-Rahman from the U.S. mysteriously failed. In 1991 he was inexplicably granted a Green Card despite still being blacklisted.

His involvement in the 1993 WTC bombing was a typical “blowback” from the CIA’s chronic support of radical takfiri Islamism, supported by Saudi Arabia, whenever it helps its “regime change” plans here or there. Over the last years such CIA support led to the growth of Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

After the recent death of Omar Abdul-Rahman several obituaries appeared in U.S. media. But none of them mention or dig into his deep and long CIA connections and the continuing CIA support for radical Islamism.

There is zero mentioning of the CIA and the visa shenanigans in his NYT obit, despite its earlier reporting. Neither the Associated Press nor AFP mention any connection to the CIA. The British service Reuters buries the visa story in one sentence in the 12th paragraph.

That the deep involvement over the years of the CIA (and FBI) in the crimes Omar Abdul-Rahman is now swept under the carpet and forgotten is not just coincidentally. It is a distinct feature of U.S. political culture.

The British poet Harold Pinter referred to this in his 2005 Nobel lecture:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.

I have called this chronic forgetfulness the concept of immaculate conception of U.S. (foreign) policy. There never is an acknowledged history of U.S. misdeeds that may have led to this or that current blowback. When there is one it immediately gets buried, pushed out of sight, never to be talked about. The same applies to partisan policies within the U.S.

Currently the fake “resistance” against a Trump presidency blasts his policy of seeking better relations with Russia, his temporary travel ban reference to seven specific countries and his words against media leaks. But it was the Secretary of State Clinton who initiated a “reset” with Russia, it was the Obama administration that set a ban on those seven countries and it was the Obama justice department that used the espionage act against journalists for publishing leaked material. That all is now forgotten and not to be talked about.

Likewise the deep CIA connection with Omar Abdul-Rahman is now scrubbed from any of the semi-official media reporting. This at the same time the CIA continues its involvement with radical Islamists in Syria and elsewhere.

Pinter continued his lecture:

The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
…

To not be taken in by the “immaculate conception” mechanism I recommend to reread or watch Pinter’s lecture every once a while.

One hardly expects a story of political struggle to feature a team of intemperate young women racing their cars around a dusty, fenced-in track. But in a Palestinian context, everything is political. Even if the new film Speed Sisters  doesn’t chronicle an explicit struggle, it’s a portrait of a people whose determination will remind Israelis that resistance to their occupation is not moribund.

My January review of Ghada Karmi’s memoir Return, points to inexorable expressions of what it means to be Palestinian, how memories ofPalestine are inexhaustible. Surely a half century of pursuits by writers, journalists, artists, lawyers, and three generations of boys-with-stones testify to the compelling Palestinian narrative, propelled by the unquenchable energy of these people and the virtue of their mission.

Some stories are tragic, some heroic (and at the same time tragic), some little more than nostalgia, and others simply facts-on-the-ground. Some, like Return, are forlorn and, grudgingly, sadly honest.

Filmmaking too documents the unfolding, always unfolding, story of Palestine. There was The Wanted 18, Amer Shomali’s 2014 animated Palestinian film told from the viewpoint of dairy cows deemed a threat to Israeli security. Elia Suleiman’s productions (Chronicle of a Disappearance, Divine Intervention, The Time That Remains) are augmented by Nida Sinnokrot’s documentary Palestine Blues, focusing on the destiny of a farm tractor. Mai Masri, director of nine films, continues a distinguished career with a new production, “3000 Nights”, now opening in several US cities.

Veteran filmmaker Masri is joined by a notable new generation of mainly women, among them Palestinians Annemarie Jacir (Salt of the Sea), and Cherien Dabis (Amreeka). Canadians Ruba Nadda (Cairo Time) , and Nadine Labaki (Caramel and Where Do We Go Now? ) are well established feature filmmakers. Among newcomers are Rola Nashef (Detroit Unleaded) and Amber Fares, director of Speed Sisters opening inNew York this month. A new twist on the Palestinian experience, these ‘speed sisters’ are four feisty women and their team captain. They’re race car drivers spinning and screeching their vehicles through courses inBethlehem,Jericho, and their hometown Ramallah. In sync with these women, the film is a fast-paced, raucous adventure that follows their pride, their energy and their drive to win.

Fares sets her camera sometimes from within the women’s vehicles, sometimes in the middle of the dusty course as the racer spins and roars around her, sometimes in her home, sometimes among youths cheering her on from the bleachers, all this within sight of ubiquitous Israeli troops. (All spaces here are militarily occupied.)

Car racing started in Palestine in 2005 and women joined the sport hardly a year later. One can’t help admiring these women. Each snaps on her helmet and grits her teeth, jaws set firmly on victory even against competing teammates. We have the firm impression that each knows what she’s doing and knows what she wants. Director Fares interweaves raucous racing scenes into the women’s encounters with military occupation—passing through checkpoints en route toJerusalem, slipping away for a day at the beach near Tel Aviv, courting a tear gas attack when they playfully approach an Israeli patrol.

If we as viewers remove ourselves from the excitement of the chase and the energy of each racer’s personality, we might ask: where could this thrilling hobby possibly lead, for the individual women, and for Palestinian political aspirations?

On her drive to Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem to pray, team captain Maysoon is assaulted by young boys selling balloons. In the moments when the camera catches their stubborn exchange with Maysoon, we can feel the boldness of those boys, the same resolve that infuses these women racers. Their life is really tough, and they won’t give up. You don’t want to mess with this crowd.

Barbara Nimri Aziz, a New York-based anthropologist and writer, hosted RadioTahrir on Pacifica-WBAI in New York City for 24 years. Her 2007 book Swimming Up the Tigris: Real Life Encounters with Iraq is based on her 13 years covering Iraq. Aziz’ writings and radio productions can be accessed at www.RadioTahrir.org.

The petition: 

Canada’s military mission to Ukraine expires in March. For several reasons, it shouldn’t be renewed.

First, the present Ukrainian government, installed in a coup orchestrated by Washington, isn’t  worthy of our support. According to the BBC, former US Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, admitted that the U.S.A. spent $5 billion over a number of years to instigate regime change in Ukraine.

Second, the agents of regime change recruited by Nuland were none other than gangs of thugs from several fascist parties, remnants of the very same Ukrainian fascists allied to Hitler in WW 2. They fought soldiers and police in the main squares of Kiev and other cities.  Canadian veterans might be surprised to learn that the Trudeau government is considering renewing Canada’s military mission to a country with the same fascists they fought in WW 2.

Third, the Ukrainian junta immediately implemented divisive policies, such as banning some of the country’s most popular political parties as well as the use of the Russian language. It seems logical that Crimea would have been less likely have voted to leave and rejoin Russia, and Eastern Russian-speaking regions would been much more hesitant to seek independence if a more moderate and tolerant government took office in the proper constitutional methods.

A fourth reason is the reaction of the Ukrainian government to the brutal Odessa massacre of May 2, 2014. On that day, over 40 peaceful anti-government protesters were killed and some 200 injured when pro-government thugs set fire to the Trade Union House in which they had taken shelter. This incident has not been properly investigated and no culprits arrested or punished.

The fifth reason to be against renewal of Canada’s military mission is that contrary to the promises made to the last Soviet president, Mikhaill Gorbachev, NATO expansion continued to the east, along with a continuing military build up along its western borders, even bringing in former Soviet republics into NATO. It is understandable why the Russians would think there is an attempt to encircle them, especially now with the possibility of Ukrainian membership in NATO. We should remember that Russia was invaded twice in the twentieth century from the West costing tens of millions of Russian lives and huge devastation. A major war, possibly WW 3, could develop from western war games and aggressive expansion along the Russian frontier and being involved in conflict zones in Eastern Ukraine.It’s time that the Trudeau government broke with aggressive Harper-era policies and dealt fairly and diplomatically with the Russian Federation.

For this reason, it would be far wiser for the Trudeau government not to extend the military mission to Ukraine and to pull its troops and equipment out of all the frontier states with Russia. Indeed, Canadians would benefit from cutting ties with NATO altogether and pursuing instead a peaceful, humane, and independent foreign policy.

The petition has garnered 96 signatures in four days.

The HCSW intends to lobby local MP’s on the issue and co-ordinate with anti-war groups across the country to do the same.

For further information, please contact Ken Stone at 905-383-7693 or [email protected].

Pro-Turkish militants and the Turkish army have still been facing difficulties in breaking ISIS defenses around al-Bab. Turkey-led forces have failed to seize Qabasin and Bzaah, and retreated from almost all areas seized inside al-Bab. Intense fighting is ongoing.

Meanwhile, the Syrian army, supported by the Russian Aerospace Forces, continued its operation against ISIS terrorists east of the Kuweires Airbase, outflanking Deir Hafer from the northern direction.

The Syrian army has liberated a number of sites along the Homs-Palmyra highway from ISIS and is now in about 13km from the Palmyra triangle, an important logistical site near the western gates of Palmyra. However, government forces still have to liberate at least Jazar fields, the Hamrah Mount and the Hayal Mount in order to at least partly secure their flags before the storm of Palmyra.

Fighting has been ongoing in the Manshiyah neighborhood of the city of Daraa in southwestern Syria. According to pro-militant sources, 30 government troops, including 12 officers, had been killed, 2 battle tanks, two 23mm guns and a buldozer belonging to the Syrian army had been destroyed. The joint forces of the Free Syrian Army’s Southern Front and Jabhat Fatah al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) had allegedly captured a 14,5mm gun and tank projectiles. However, the militant advance faced a deadlock and now sides are engaged in a positional warfare in an urban area.

Turkey has suggested to the United States two plans of an operation to “liberate” the city of Raqqah from ISIS, the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet reported on Saturday. According to the report, the Turkish military chief Hulusi Akar had submitted the proposals to his US counterpart Joseph Dunford. Then, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım said that Turkey will not get directly involved in an operation to liberate Syria’s Raqqa from ISIS, but instead it will provide tactical support. “The United States, Turkey along with local forces, civilian forces, the FSA and other militias… they are at the forefront while we are at the back,” Yıldırım told reporters in Munich where he is attending a security conference. In other words, Turkey’s involvement in the operation remains unclear.

Turkey launched a military intervention in Syria in August 2016, deploying troops and heavy military equipment, backed up by warplanes across the border in an operation allegedly aimed against ISIS terrorists. However, another clear goal of this move was to prevent expansion of the Kurdish YPG in northern Syria along with the Turkish border. This creates significant tensions between US-backed Kurdish forces involved in the ongoing operation against ISIS in the Raqqah countryside and Turkish forces.

The Writers Guild Awards on Sunday night took a cue from the rest of awards season in being fairly Trump-heavy, including several shots at the commander-in-chief. But Oliver Stone, who was on hand at the WGAW ceremony to accept the Laurel Award, gave a more bipartisan critique of America in an impassioned message to young filmmakers.

After being introduced by James Wood, Stone told reminded filmmakers that “you can be critical of your government and your society.”

You don’t have to fit in,” the Oscar-winner went on. “It’s fashionable now to take shots at Republicans and Trump and avoid the Obamas and Clintons. But remember this: In the 13 wars we’ve started over the last 30 years and the $14 trillion we’ve spent, and the hundreds of thousands of lives that have perished from this earth, remember that it wasn’t one leader, but a system, both Republican and Democrat. Call it what you will: the military industrial money media security complex. It’s a system that has been perpetuated under the guise that these are just wars justifiable in the name of our flag that flies so proudly.

DAVID BUCHAN/VARIETY/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

 

Stone continued that our “country has become more prosperous for many but in the name of that wealth we cannot justify our system as a center for the world’s values. But we continue to create such chaos and wars. No need to go through the victims, but we know we’ve intervened in more than 100 countries with invasion, regime change, economic chaos. Or hired war. It’s war of some kind. In the end, it’s become a system leading to the death of this planet and the extinction of us all.”

He concluded with advice based on his own experiences. “I’ve fought these people who practice war for most of my life. It’s a tiring game. And mostly you’ll get your a– kicked. With all the criticism and insults you’ll receive, and the flattery too, it’s important to remember, if you believe in what you’re saying and you can stay the course, you can make a difference,” he said.

I urge you to find a way to remain alone with yourself, listen to your silences, not always in a writer’s room. Try to find not what the crowd wants so you can be successful, but try instead to find the true inner meaning of your life here on earth, and never give up on your heart in your struggle for peace, decency, and telling the truth.

Stone has never been one to shy away from politics — to say the very least. During a speech at the Gotham Independent Film Awards in November, the “Snowden” director made a point to reference national security under a Trump administration. “The surveillance state, ‘1984,’ cyberwarfare, drone warfare is with us,” he said at the time. He’s been open about his political beliefs, and voted for Jill Stein in the 2016 presidential election.

Pentagon wars and capitalist exploitation at the root of instability and dislocation

Members of the United States government spoke in Germany at the Munich Security Conference (MSC) held from February 17-19 in an effort to assuage growing fears in Europe over the apparent escalating official and public disaffection from the administration of President Donald Trump.

Vice President Mike Pence told the MSC that the U.S. commitment to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was “unwavering.” Pence later said that the Russian Federation would be held accountable for actions internationally dispelling the myth that a Trump White House will lessen tensions with Moscow.

Republican Senator John McCain, however, raised questions about the stability of the current regime in Washington assessing that the Trump presidency was in “disarray and had a lot of work to do.” He cited the recent scandal and departure of National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn as firm evidence for his viewpoint on the White House.

Everyday across the U.S. there are demonstrations being held against Trump’s policies which are being enacted through executive orders and presidential memorandums.

From the concerns over escalating military tensions with Iran and China to the domestic protests against the targeting of Muslims, immigrants, women, African Americans, etc., people have come out in the millions to register their opposition. At the same time, high-ranking Democratic Party spokespersons have sought to blame unverified claims of interference from the Russian Federation into the 2016 national presidential elections for the contradictions in the present administration.

Excessive propaganda against Moscow has reached levels not seen since the years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Socialist states of Eastern Europe. Trump is falsely portrayed by the corporate media as being too close to Russia while at the same time his appointees within the administration are continually voicing hostilities towards the Kremlin.

Sanctions enacted against Russia by former President Barack Obama remain in effect. The Pentagon military buildup within the NATO states in the closing days of the previous administration has not been withdrawn.

These are some of the factors that are fueling speculation over the stability and internal consistency of the Trump White House. During the period leading up to his inauguration, Trump held a conversation with the Taiwanese leader indicating a possible shift in the “one China” policy which has been in operation since 1979. Nevertheless, in recent days it has now been reported that Trump engaged in a conversation with the People’s Republic of China government saying that the “One China” policy is still enforce.

Background to the Munich Security Conference

The annual gathering of the MSC brings together officials and analysts to discuss the major questions surrounding the continuing hegemony of imperialism. Amid economic difficulties and massive population shifts throughout Africa, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and Europe, the capitalist ruling class of Europe and North America are concerned over the impact of these developments.

This meeting was not only addressed by officials of the leading western imperialist states in Europe and North America. Contrastingly, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov spoke as well calling for the creation of a ‘Post-West World Order.” He described NATO as a relic of the cold war which is not serving the interests of peace and stability.

People’s Republic of China Foreign Minister Wang Yi utilized the summit to express the Asian nation’s opposition to the U.S. defense missile system known as Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD). The Republic of Korea government is scheduled to deploy the system by the end of 2017 ostensibly in response to missile developments taking place in the neighboring Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).

In a post on its website, the MSC says: “Over the past five decades, the Munich Security Conference (MSC) has become the major global forum for the discussion of security policy. Each February, it brings together more than 450 senior decision-makers from around the world, including heads-of-state, ministers, leading personalities of international and non-governmental organizations, as well as high ranking representatives of industry, media, academia, and civil society, to engage in an intensive debate on current and future security challenges.”

This same entry goes on noting that: “In addition to its annual flagship conference, the MSC regularly convenes high-profile events on particular topics and regions and publishes the Munich Security Report. All its activities aim at offering the best possible platforms for a frank and open exchange of ideas and opinions.”

Nonetheless, there is a seemingly unease between the White House and the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany combined with the Brussels-based and U.S.-directed NATO military alliance.

Moreover, Merkel has clashed with other European states of the former socialist bloc such as Hungary in a dispute over the influx of migrants from Africa, the Middle East and Asian-Pacific countries. Pressure is emerging strongly from right-wing political parties not only in Germany but many other states including the Netherlands, Britain and France who are saying that the existing governments are not going far enough in curtailing immigration from these above-mentioned nations along with Eastern Europe.

In this MSC context what is often not discussed in detail are the reasons behind the current instability and dislocation around the world. The wars of occupation and genocide waged against the peoples of Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Libya, Syria and Yemen are to blame in part for the current crisis.

At the same time the role of international finance capital is also responsible for the mass poverty and economic underdevelopment. Over the last two years the impact of the over production of oil and natural gas has triggered problems of declining growth rates, growing unemployment and poverty. People are fleeing their home countries due to the horrendous social conditions that are in existence.

Several years prior, reports abounded of the phenomenal economic growth that was taking place in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America. However, the dependence upon oil revenues in countries such as Venezuela, Brazil, Ecuador, Russia, Nigeria, Angola, etc., has plunged millions back into poverty and uncertainty.

Domestic War Against People in the U.S.

Simultaneously huge sections of the U.S. population are being targeted for political and economic reasons by the administration.

A travel ban on people from seven African and Middle Eastern states was temporarily halted as a result of mass demonstrations and court actions. The Federal Court of Appeals in the Ninth Circuity unanimously upheld a temporary restraining order on the implementation of the ban placed by a lower Federal Court in Washington State.

These efforts by the Trump administration represent the continuation of U.S. military policy against Africa and the Middle East. The populations of these states have been displaced by the war and economic policies of the imperialist governments led by the U.S. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNRA) has declared that the degree of displacement internationally is the worst on record so far in history.  Approximately 75 million people have been driven from their homes both internally and outside of their geographic borders.

Compounding the domestic attacks against people from Sudan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iran and Iraq, the administration has intensified its targeting, detention and deportations of people from Mexico and other Central and South American countries. Many of these migrants have been displaced as well due to the economic policies of Washington which has made agricultural production and energy extraction largely non-viable industries within their national economies.

Trump administration Secretary of Homeland Security Gen. John Kelly stated in a draft memorandum that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) along with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will hire 10,000 new agents to pursue, detain and deport so-called “criminal aliens” from the U.S. Other reports which have been denied by the White House advance proposals which will federalize 100,000 National Guard troops to assist in the search and remove policy towards people considered as undesirables.

These policy initiatives are related to the promise made by Trump during the national presidential elections of 2016 to construct a wall along with border between the U.S. and the Republic of Mexico. Trump insists that the funding taken from the tax dollars of working families to build the wall will be authorized by Congress. Nonetheless, he says that a tariff on imported goods to Mexico will serve as a reimbursement for the expenses related to the building of the wall.

Any reasonable observers within the European Union (EU) member-states as well as the Russian Federation realize that the situation inside the U.S. is quite politically fluid. The burgeoning hostility towards the administration from various sectors of the population is bound to influence the attitudes of governments and civilian organizations in Europe.

Update: according to Reuters, Vladimir Putin was deeply upset to learn of the death of Vitaly Churkin, Russian news agencies cited Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov as saying on Monday.

“The head of state highly valued Churkin’s professionalism and diplomatic talent,” Peskov said.

* * *

Vitaly Churkin, who served as Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations since 2006, “died suddenly” in New York, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced. Churkin died one day before his 65th birthday. Russia’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Vladimir Safronkov, told AP that Churkin became ill and was taken to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, where he died Monday.

Churkin was at the Russian embassy on East 67th Street when he became sick with a “cardiac condition” around 9:30 am, sources told the New York Post. A Russian Embassy spokesperson told CBS News that they believe Churkin died of a heart attack but they do not yet have official word on the cause of death.

As the AP adds, Churkin has been Russia’s envoy at the United Nations for a little over a decade and was considered Moscow’s great champion at the U.N. He had a reputation for an acute wit and sharp repartee especially with his American and Western counterparts. He was previously ambassador at large and earlier served as the foreign ministry spokesman.

Colleagues took to social media to react to Churkin’s death, starting with Churkin’s old nemesis Samantha Power:

The announcement “of Churkin’s passing this morning” was met with shock when it was delivered during a session at the UN headquarters. “He was a dear colleague of all of us, a deeply committed diplomat of his country and one of the finest people we have known,” a UN official who delivered the news to her colleagues said.

The Russian foreign ministry gave no details on the circumstances of his death but offered condolences to his relatives and said the diplomat had died one day before his 65th birthday. Here is the statement issued moments ago from the Russian Foreign Ministry:

 A prominent Russian diplomat has passed away while at work. We’d like to express our sincere condolences to Vitaly Churkin’s family.

The Russian Foreign Ministry deeply regrets to announce that Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin has died suddenly in New York on February 20, a day ahead of his 65th birthday.

“He was an outstanding person. He was brilliant, bright, a great diplomat of our age,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said, adding that the news of Churkin’s death was “completely shocking.”

According to Sputnik, Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Yevgeniy Zagaynov said about Churkin that he kept working “till the very end.” The representative of the UN Secretary-General said that the UN was shocked by the news, extending their condolences to Moscow.

Perhaps the best known Russian diplomat alongside Sergey Lavrov, Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin was born in Moscow in 1952. He graduated from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in 1974, beginning his decades-long career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs shortly.

Ambassador Churkin, who held a Ph.D in history, served as Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations since 2006, where he has clashed on numerous occasions with opposing members of the Security Council whose decisions Russia has vetoed more than once. Prior to this appointment, he was Ambassador at Large at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation (2003-2006), Ambassador to Canada (1998-2003), Ambassador to Belgium and Liaison Ambassador to NATO and WEU (1994-1998), Deputy Foreign Minister and Special Representative of the President of the Russian Federation to the talks on Former Yugoslavia (1992-1994), Director of the Information Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the USSR/Russian Federation (1990-1992).

Churkin is survived by his wife and two children.

Uno de los principales factores en que se apoyó Donald Trump en campaña –y que ahora usa para justificar absurdas medidas anti-inmigrantes, altos impuestos a las importaciones y otras– fue la promesa de reducir la pérdida de empleos.  Sin embargo, según las estadísticas oficiales de Estados Unidos, la mayor parte de la pérdida de empleos en Estados Unidos se debió al aumento de automatización y robotización de las industrias.

Estados Unidos produce ahora 85 por ciento más bienes de los que producía en 1987, pero con una planta laboral de dos tercios de la que existía entonces (FRED Economic Data). La proyección es que con mayor uso de sistemas de inteligencia artificial, la automatización se expandirá a más industrias y sectores, eliminando más puestos de trabajo.

Las industrias que anunciaron recientemente que se quedarán o relocalizarán plantas a Estados Unidos, como Ford y General Motors, ya tienen una parte importante de su producción automatizada y van por más. Gran parte de los supuestos nuevos “puestos de trabajo” que crearán serán en realidad realizados por robots. General Motors se ufana de ser la empresa automotriz que más ha invertido en nuevas tecnologías, incluyendo el desarrollo de vehículos no tripulados, lo cual también redundará en menos puestos de trabajo (choferes, distribución de productos y otras ramas).

Carrier, que anunció que dos plantas de producción de equipos de aire acondicionado se quedarán en Estados Unidos en lugar instalarse en México (lo cual se presenta como logro de Trump) reconoció a la prensa que los incentivos fiscales que Trump le prometió, serán usados para aumentar notablemente la automatización de sus plantas, con lo cual aumentará sus ganancias a mediano plazo, pero reducirá los puestos de trabajo.(Business Insider 5/12/16)

Ya como presidente electo, el New York Times le preguntó a Trump si los robots iban a remplazar a los trabajadores que votaron por él. Trump reconoció alegremente “Lo harán, pero nosotros vamos a construir los robots también”. (NYT, 23/11/16  https://tinyurl.com/juymes5).

Sólo que por ahora, el país con mayor fabricación de robots industriales en el mundo es China, que ya ha realizado grandes inversiones para ser además el primer productor global de robots aplicados a la agricultura y a nuevos campos de manufactura industrial. (NYT 25/1/17  https://tinyurl.com/hwmd4p6).

El traslado de grandes plantas de manufactura industrial a México y otros países del Sur en las últimas décadas se debió a que las trasnacionales encontraron así formas de aumentar exponencialmente sus ganancias, explotando una situación de bajos a ínfimos salarios, pésimas condiciones y derechos laborales y terreno impune para la contaminación y devastación ambiental, además de ahorrarse el pago de impuestos en su sede. Todo lo cual fue asegurado y aumentado con los tratados de libre comercio. La vuelta de algunas plantas industriales a Estados Unidos se basa en una reevaluación de sus ventajas comparativas a partir de las crisis actuales. Seguramente, la amenaza de Trump de colocar altos impuestos a las importaciones es un componente, pero la nueva ola de automatización “inteligente” juega un rol clave. Si Trump, como prometió a las empresas, les subvenciona con dinero del erario un desarrollo más rápido hacia la nueva generación de automatización inteligente, esto sin duda forma parte de la ecuación de ganancias de esas empresas. Claro que también le sirve a Trump como supuesta demostración de fuerza y como imagen de que está revirtiendo la pérdida de empleos.

Pero las predicciones sobre la cantidad de empleos que se perderán por la aplicación industrial de nuevas formas de robótica e inteligencia artificial en ese país varían de 9 a 47 por ciento, según el estudio que se tome de referencia.  A nivel global, recientes reportes de la OCDE, la Universidad de Oxford y el Foro de Davos –entre los más citados en el tema– todos prevén mayor pérdida neta de empleos que la que ya ha ocurrido, una tendencia que afirman se ha acelerado desde el año 2000. UNCTAD, el organismo de Naciones Unidas sobre comercio y desarrollo, prevé que en los llamados países en desarrollo hasta dos tercios de los empleos pueden ser sustituidos por robots (UNCTAD 2016, https://tinyurl.com/zu2r3vc)

Pero la automatización y la robótica están lejos de ser novedades. La “novedad” es el salto exponencial en el desarrollo de la inteligencia artificial y la convergencia con esa y otras nuevas tecnologías, como nano y biotecnología, que se está expandiendo más allá de la fabricación industrial, a la agricultura y alimentación, transporte, comunicación, servicios, comercio, industrias extractivas, entre otros sectores claves; con múltiples impactos ambientales, a la salud, y también sobre el empleo.

Un proceso de convergencia que en el Grupo ETC llamamos BANG desde 2001 (bits, átomos, neuronas, genes) y que el Foro de Davos desde 2016 llama “cuarta revolución industrial”.  La automatización de las últimas décadas ha significado un aumento de la productividad, pero no mayor bienestar social, sino lo contrario: estancamiento de salarios y aumento de la desigualdad. Nótese que de los ocho hombres más ricos del planeta ­–que concentran más riqueza que la mitad de la población mundial– la mayoría son empresarios informáticos o cuya actividad está fuertemente vinculada a la digitalización y robotización.

Y según los reportes mencionados, la expansión de la nueva ola de automatización “inteligente” eliminará más empleos de los que generará, afectando también sectores distintos de los que ya venían siendo sustituidos por ella. Cómo intentará Trump resolver esa contradicción, es un enigma.

Silvia Ribeiro

Silvia Ribeiro: Investigadora del Grupo ETC.

Annual Munich security conferences have been held since 1963. It’s the most important world forum on current and future security issues and challenges.

Numerous heads of state, other senior government officials, high-ranking military ones, along with business, media and other private sectors figures attend.

This year’s conference began Friday, continuing on Saturday. Sergey Lavrov will speak later today, presenting Russia’s views on international security, followed by a Q & A session.

Foreign ministers from Normandy contact group members Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine will discuss renewed conflict in Donbass on the sidelines of the conference.

Lavrov will also hold several bilateral meetings. On Friday, he met with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. The US dominated alliance maintains adversarial relations with Russia.

Bilateral cooperation was suspended over Ukraine. Hostile policy toward Russia remains in place. Trump so far hasn’t changed things – other than express lip service intentions.

In February 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered a memorable straight talk address at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy.

“(S)ecurity for one is security for all,” he said, quoting Franklin Roosevelt at the onset of WW II, saying “(w)hen peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger.”

Cold War thinking remains, he explained – at the same time denouncing unipolarity, saying “it refers to one type of situation, namely one centre of authority, one centre of force, one centre of decision-making.”

It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

And this certainly has nothing in common with democracy. Because, as you know, democracy is the power of the majority in light of the interests and opinions of the minority.

…Russia – we – are are constantly being taught about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves. I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today’s world.

He said Washington turned the OSCE “into a vulgar instrument of ensuring the foreign policy interests of one country.”

Powerful words not going down well in Washington or other Western capitals. Putin called unipolarity flawed, unacceptable in today’s world, creating global human tragedies and tensions.

Endless wars rage. “Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of (military) force,” a world of permanent conflicts, making political settlements difficult to impossible.

Fundamental principles of international law are violated, Putin explained, naming America as the world’s leading offender, leaving humanity unsafe.

Putin stressed the urgency to step back from the brink, reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles, wage peace, not war.

He stressed the importance of multi-world polarity, warned against the militarization of space. He called NATO expansion “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.”

“(A)gainst whom is this expansion intended,” he asked? Russia seeks cooperative relations with all other countries, “a fair and democratic world order that would ensure security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for all,” he concluded.

Since he spoke, Washington raped and destroyed Libya, Syria and Yemen. It continued endless aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, along with partnering with three Israeli wars on Gaza and aiding Kiev putschists wage war on Donbass.

The world is less safe today than when he spoke. His warnings went unheeded. Bilateral relations with America are as fraught with dangers as at any time during the Cold War era.

The risk of nuclear war by design or accident remains real.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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