Global Research

A month since the May 2016 polls, the electoral battle rages on in many provinces and cities.

MANILA, Philippines – It has been a month since the May 2016 elections, but the fight is not yet over in many provinces and cities.

At least 42 election protest cases (EPC) in connection with local polls have been filed before the Commission on Elections (Comelec) as of Friday, June 10.

These were filed against 6 provincial governors, 3 vice governors, the regional governor of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM), 21 city mayors, and 4 city vice mayors. One protest questioned the results for a seat in the Antique provincial board, while 7 cases involved city council elections.

One electoral protest contested the victories of both the governor and vice governor of Sulu.

In Metro Manila, losing mayoralty candidates in the cities of Manila, Caloocan, Makati, Muntinlupa, and San Juan filed electoral protests against the proclaimed mayors.

Elsewhere, Cebu City mayor-elect Tomas Osmeña is likewise facing an electoral protest filed by his closest rival Michael Rama. In Cagayan de Oro City, reelected Mayor Oscar Moreno’s qualification to assume office is questioned by Vicente Emano.

The narrowest vote margin involved in these protests was in the South Cotabato vice gubernatorial election. Independent candidate Bernie Palencia lost by only 144 votes (or 0.35%) against Vic de Jesus of the Nationalist People’s Coalition (NPC).

Other protests with vote margins less than 5% in the official election results were:

• Mayor, Manila – Alfredo Lim (38.17%) vs Joseph Ejercito Estrada (38.54%)
• Mayor, Marawi City, Lanao del Sur – Omar Ali (49.66%) vs Majul Gandamra (50.28%)
• Mayor, San Jose del Monte City, Bulacan – Reynaldo San Pedro (49.26%) vs Arturo Robes (50.15%)
• Mayor, San Juan City – Francis Javier Zamora (48.91%) vs Guia Gomez (51.08%)
• Mayor, Cabuyao City, Laguna – Julio Alcasabas (31.57%) vs Rommel Gecolea (34.28%)
• Vice Governor, Tarlac – Pearl Angel Pacada (37.63%) vs Carlito David (41.04%)
• Governor, Cagayan – Cristina Antonio (34.68%) vs Manuel Mamba (38.20%)

Click the icons on the map below for details on each of the 42 EPCs filed before the Comelec as of June 10, 2016.

Due to devastating environmental factors North Cotabato declared their province under a state of calamity on January 20, 2016.  This took place while Cabanatuan City, Zamboanga City and Oriental Mindoro had declared their state of calamity earlier.

There was no rice and there was no food.

Thousands of North Cotabato peasants marched to the capital at Kidapawan City at the end of the month of March to push for the release of the calamity funds from the provincial government. The farmer protesters were members of the national confederation of farmers organizations in the Philippines known as the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP; Movement of Peasants in the Philippines).

At the third day of protest (April 1 2016), a composite team of police and military forces sprayed bullets to the protesting farmers that immediately killed two and wounded a hundred others of the poor and hungry farmers.

The protest was violently dispersed thereafter.

While only a count of two deaths were reported, many were injured and  70 protesting citizens were illegally detained. Trumped up charges on assault against the police were charged against the 70 that included pregnant women and senior citizens as old as 78 years. They were eventually release on bail at P12,000.00.

The detained farmers appealed to lower bail at P2,000.00.  They got their appeal approved at P6,000.00.  However, because these are poor and hungry farmers facing economic hardship, the problem remains to be how to raise the amount needed by them to pay their bail money.  To resolve the issue, friends and various sympathetic organizations raised the amount to pay bail.

When the exact amount was raised, another issue was raised by authorities. This time about authorities demanded identification documents from the poor farmers who do not have identification cards, including PhilHealth cards and other documents necessary to comply with the government requirements for release order, because they cannot afford the costs that are demanded by officials for these IDs.

None of this is new to the Philippines, and so the fight of the farmers in North Cotabato and elsewhere continues.

Prof. Phoebe Sanchez is a sociologist, professor, and life-long community activists in the Philippines.

Due to devastating environmental factors North Cotabato declared their province under a state of calamity on January 20, 2016.  This took place while Cabanatuan City, Zamboanga City and Oriental Mindoro had declared their state of calamity earlier.

There was no rice and there was no food.

Thousands of North Cotabato peasants marched to the capital at Kidapawan City at the end of the month of March to push for the release of the calamity funds from the provincial government. The farmer protesters were members of the national confederation of farmers organizations in the Philippines known as the Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas (KMP; Movement of Peasants in the Philippines).

At the third day of protest (April 1 2016), a composite team of police and military forces sprayed bullets to the protesting farmers that immediately killed two and wounded a hundred others of the poor and hungry farmers.

The protest was violently dispersed thereafter.

While only a count of two deaths were reported, many were injured and  70 protesting citizens were illegally detained. Trumped up charges on assault against the police were charged against the 70 that included pregnant women and senior citizens as old as 78 years. They were eventually release on bail at P12,000.00.

The detained farmers appealed to lower bail at P2,000.00.  They got their appeal approved at P6,000.00.  However, because these are poor and hungry farmers facing economic hardship, the problem remains to be how to raise the amount needed by them to pay their bail money.  To resolve the issue, friends and various sympathetic organizations raised the amount to pay bail.

When the exact amount was raised, another issue was raised by authorities. This time about authorities demanded identification documents from the poor farmers who do not have identification cards, including PhilHealth cards and other documents necessary to comply with the government requirements for release order, because they cannot afford the costs that are demanded by officials for these IDs.

None of this is new to the Philippines, and so the fight of the farmers in North Cotabato and elsewhere continues.

Prof. Phoebe Sanchez is a sociologist, professor, and life-long community activists in the Philippines.

Global Research Publishers has launched the print version of Professor Tim Anderson’s essential book on Syria. 

This important and timely book is available for pre-order now

Reviews:

Tim Anderson  has written the best systematic critique of western fabrications justifying the war against the Assad government. 

Orlando Shootings: Terrorism or False Flag?

By Stephen Lendman, June 13 2016

It’s too soon to know whether Sunday’s Orlando incident was terrorism or false flag deception.  Yet it has distinct earmarks of the latter, likely the latest example of domestic state terror, another fear-mongering pretext for out-of-control militarism, endless wars of…

US Law Enforcement Knew Florida Gay Club Shooter BEFORE Shooting

By Tony Cartalucci, June 13 2016

If this sounds like a familiar narrative, that’s because virtually every high-profile “terrorist attack” carried out in North America and Europe in recent years has been done so by suspects long under investigation by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

The 2015 Ciccolo Affair: Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI

By Dan Froomkin, June 13 2016

This 2015 report by The Intercept sheds light on FBI procedures pertaining to the recent shootings in Orlando, Florida: U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then…

How America’s Mass Shooters Now Use Weapons of War

By Mark Follman, June 13 2016

America is in a fog of grief, anxiety, and rising partisan rancor as the nation comes to grips with the deadliest mass shooting in its history. But when it comes to the most basic question of how the massacre took…

False Flag Terrorism and Class Struggle: From Paris to Abidjan

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin, June 13 2016

As the Euro championship games draw thousands of supporters to the French capital, social tensions remain high as workers continue to take to the streets in protest against the Government’s proposed reforms of labour laws. The entire French nation is…

What is a Conspiracy Theory? What is the Truth?

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 12 2016

A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. We must go after the bad guys. War is peace. The ‘big lie’ has now becomes the truth … and the truth has become a ‘conspiracy theory’. Those who are committed to the Truth are categorized as “Terrorists”.

The launching of the European missile defense system (Aegis) by the United States in May has repeatedly been criticized by Russia as an attempt by the US to take away first mover advantage in the event that the US ever decided to attack.

While Russia has already indicated that the deployment of of Iskander missile systems would be one certain response to neutralize the the anti-ballistic missile defense system, Russia has wasted no time in developing future responses.

Russia’s new Yu-74 ultra-maneuverable hypersonic glide vehicles may be the next response that will be unveiled. Russia has been developing hypersonic weapons during the past few years, and as Sputnik reports, those weapons would have a speed between 3,840 mph (Mach 5), and 7,680 mph (Mach 10). The system uses sophisticated technologies for maneuvering against a wide range of missile defense systems, and allows precise and rapid delivery of warheads.

Although the system specifications are top secret, reports say that the gliders are developed to be loaded onto onto Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat, the state of the art heavy liquid propelled ICBM which is currently being developed for the Russian Army. The RS-28, which has been given the codename “Satan” by NATO, has been in development since 2009 and is alleged to render all current missile defense systems obsolete.

Designed to carry up to 24 nuclear-loaded Yu-74 gliders, each Sarmat ballistic missile will be able to hit any target located within a 6.2 thousand mile radius in one hour. Each glider can be equipped with a nuclear warhead, electronic warfare (EW) applications (disruption of communication systems), or false target simulators.

“These features guarantee penetration of any existing and prospective missile defense system of a potential adversary. By adopting such systems, Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces will significantly increase their efficiency” said one analyst.

Last year, Russia conducted a series of tests of the Yu-71 hypersonic attack aircraft. The Yu-71 is part of a secret missile program codenamed “Project 4202”, and the during the tests the glider was said to reach speeds of up to 7,000 mph. Furthermore, Russia has reportedly successfully tested the Yu-74 as well. The glider was launched from the Dombarovsky missile base in the Orengburg region and hit a target located at Kura Missile Test Range in northern Kamchatka region, the Russian far east.

French journalist Victor Ayoli noted that Russia is taking NATO’s saber rattling in Eastern Europe very seriously and will do whatever it takes to secure Russia’s borders.

“Russians are ordinary people. They are afraid of war and they really want to avoid it. The last one cost [the Soviets] more than twenty-eight million lives. But once lured into war, they fight it to the bitter end. This unique trait of the Russian national character the West has misunderstood countless times in the last 1,000 years,” Ayoli emphasized.

* * *

As the US led NATO continues to play around with Russia, it is crystal clear that when Russia announced that it will respond to NATO’s actions “Totally Asymmetrically“, they very well meant it.

Climate change is a complex phenomenon involving unknown changes in planetary biophysical systems.  However, there is now scientific consensus, that climate change is caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Fossil fuel combustion is considered the primary cause of carbon emissions and climate change worldwide. Scientists warn that unless we are able to bring down carbon emissions rapidly to below 350 ppm in this century, the effects on planetary life will be catastrophic. We are at 400 ppm (parts per million molecules) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and are adding 2 ppm of carbon dioxide every year. NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) reports that last month, April 2016, was the warmest month recorded and that 2016 is likely to be the hottest year ever, surpassing the previous annual record of 2015, by the largest historical margin.

We are seeing the realities of climate change: rising temperatures, declining Arctic sea ice, extreme weather events, heatwaves wildfires, floods, droughts, stronger storms and hurricanes and so on. The number and range of species on Earth are expected to decline greatly as temperatures continue to rise. Biodiversity is declining at a rate of more than 100 per million species every year with as many as 30 to 50 percent of all species possibly headed towardextinction by mid-21st century. Due to rising sea levels, five islands in the South Pacific have sunk. The Pacific islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean are also preparing for extinction seeking to relocate their populations.

Given intimate connection of their livelihoods to their ecosystems, indigenous people and farming communities worldwide are the most vulnerable to climate change. According to UN estimates, there will be 1 billion ‘climate refugees’, i.e. victims of disasters induced by climate change in the world by 2050. India is now experiencing the highest temperatures ever with a heatwave and drought which has left many people with little access to water. Bangladesh got pummeled again by heavy rains leaving two million people homeless. Sri Lanka which has experienced significantrise in sea levels in recent years just faced unprecedented floods and landslides which have left some 500,000 people homeless and over 200 families buried in the landslides. Those most affected by climate change are those least responsible: the poor nations and communities of color that have historically provided the natural and human resources for the enrichment of the privileged classes in the industrialized nations. While responsibility for climate change is spread across the global society, the industrialized and rapidly industrializing countries account overwhelmingly for carbon emissions.  In 2011, China, the USA and the EU account for more than 50% of total global carbon emissions: China, 28%, USA 16% and the EU 10%.

Fossil Fuel Economy

The extraction, refining and distribution of fossil fuels is an enormous industry representing the engine for global economic production and growth. Five of the top six companies in the Fortune Global 500 including BP, ExxonMobil and Shell are in the petroleum refining industry. As a July 2015 Report by the Union of Concerned Scientists points out, the fossil fuel industry’s concentration is as remarkable as its size. Almost two thirds of the world’s industrial carbon emissions over the past two and a half centuries is attributable to just 90 coal, oil, and natural gas companies which have produced and marketed fossil fuels and cement (which has very high carbon intensity). Almost 30 % of all industrial emissions since 1850 is traced to just 20 investor and state owned companies. Even more significantly, the Report by the Union of Concerned Scientists points out that

“…more than half of all industrial carbon emissions have been released into the atmosphere since 1988, after major fossil fuel companies indisputably knew about the harm their products were causing to the climate”.

Based on an eight month investigation of internal documents of the major fossil fuel corporations, the environmental publication, Inside Climate News has revealed that the fossil fuel companies, especially Exxon which was doing cutting-edge climate research, were already aware of the connection between fossil fuel combustion and global warming by the late 1970s.Inside Climate News argues that without revealing what their own scientists confirmed, the world’s largest fossil fuel companies sought to ‘manufacture uncertainty’ and deceive the public about climate change. The companies put in place a massive campaign to fund climate denial scientists and organizations (many fake ‘astroturf’ groups) and lobby Congress to block climate action. Corporate funding, lobbying and the silence of the mainstream media have enabled polluting companies to project an environmentally friendly public image while at the same time contributing to derailing legislation for emissions reduction. Indeed, there is still no comprehensive U.S. federal policy to address climate change.

Notwithstanding growing demands for corporate accountability and government action, the U.S. and other governments are providing massive subsidies to companies for fossil fuel production and exploration. According to July 2014 estimates of the activist group, Oil Change International, the U.S. fossil fuel subsidies were $37.5 billion annually. Multilateral Banks including the World Bank which is backed by governments also provide billions of dollars each year to oil, gas and coal production internationally. According to the latest 2016 estimates of Oil Change International, global fossil fuel subsidies are between $775 to $1 trillion annually. Since 2011 a number of proposals have been made in the U.S. Congress, such as, the ‘Big Oil Tax Subsidies Act’ and the ‘End Polluter Welfare Act’ to cut tax payer handouts to fossil fuel companies, But, none of them have passed.

The U.S. is estimated to spend anywhere from $10.5 to $500 billion annually to militarily defendits oil interests overseas. As US energy experts point out, military activity is a ‘direct production component’ of the trade and as ‘necessary for imports as are pipelines and supertankers’. Oil is an important driver of U.S. military force in the Persian Gulf, the political destabilization and loss of lives in the region being casualties of the relentless pursuit of oil. Heavy use of jet fuel for military activities is a major source of carbon emissions worldwide. The Pentagon is estimated to be the “largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general,” but is exempt from all international climate agreements.

The short-term costs of ending dependence on fossil fuels are significantly less compared to the staggering long-term environmental and social costs of accelerating climate change. However, the international policy frameworks  in place are far from adequate to address the urgency of the climate crisis.

International Policy Frameworks

The Kyoto Protocol, linked to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Changeadopted in 1997, though flawed and never fully implemented, committed parties to internationally binding emission reduction targets. Recognizing that developed countries are principally responsible for the high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, it placed a heavier burden on developed nations based on the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities.”

In the decades following the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol, conflicts intensified between the global North and South. Even minimal efforts to address climate change became derailed by international economic competition. Industrializing countries such as China, India, and Brazil wanted the “rich, powerful and deeply fossil-fuel addicted” countries in the Global North to take the lead in drastic emissions reductions allowing them room to industrialize and advance economically. Fearing loss of their economic edge, the Global North wanted to move away from the targets and obligations to which they had previously agreed. Lobbied heavily by the fossil fuel industry, The United States government never even ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

Pointing out that the ability of populations to adapt and mitigate against climate change are shaped by political and economic realities, civil society organizations mostly from the global South declared the Bali Principles of Climate Justice in 2002. It framed the climate crisis as apolitical and ethical issue, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=3748not simply an environmental and physical phenomenon. The countries of the global South demanded the rich Northern nations to pay their ‘climate debt’, that is, compensation for their historically disproportionate emission of greenhouse gases which has contributed to extensive environmental and societal damage in poor countries.

The global South, however, is not a monolithic group. Emissions from developing nations now exceed those of developed countries, with China being the largest contributor of greenhouse gases. Heavy polluters like China and India have refused to take on specific reduction goals while the poorest and most vulnerable countries have demanded them. The lack of a coherent set of tactics and strategy towards climate justice has also created confusion and differences within the global civil society movement over climate action.

Given these on-going contentions, the U.S. China bilateral Climate Deal of November 2014 has been welcomed as an important achievement by the two most polluting nation states. Unfortunately, however, this Deal is merely a statement of aspirational goals: it has no binding targets, no specific plans to cut emissions and no penalties for non-compliance. According to this Deal, China will not begin reducing emissions until as late as 2030. While the US agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 26%-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 is significant, it is not considered sufficient to reach the target of below 2 C increase in temperature by the end of the century. There is no guarantee that President Obama’s successor who will have to implement the deal will do so. Likewise, the multilateral Paris Climate Agreement adopted in December 2015 fails to provide the significant changes in energy use required for climate stabilization.

Paris Climate Agreement

The Climate Treaty signed in Paris in December 2015 is hailed as a historic achievement in international consensus and a turning point in climate policy. Practically all countries in the world opted to sign agreeing to hold the increase in the global average temperature increase to 1.5 ˚C.175 countries have already signed the Agreement which will go into effect in 2020. US Secretary of State John Kerry signed on behalf of the United States holding his little granddaughter in his arms.

Symbolism and rhetoric aside, the Paris Agreement, unlike the previous Kyoto Protocol,provides no detailed timetables or country-specific goals for emissions reduction. It leaves every country to decide its own cuts in pollution (so-called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions”) according to its own criteria. It provides no clear, measurable targets, no accountability no legal obligations. Each country that ratifies the agreement will be required to set a target for emission reduction, but the amount will be voluntary. There will be neither a mechanism to force^, a country to set a target by a specific date nor enforcement measures if a set target is not met.

The Agreement was a victory for the United States given its opposition to mandatory emissions reduction targets and the Kyoto Protocol. It was, however, a failure for the smaller nations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change who wanted to include stricter emissions targets and enforcement mechanisms.  Apparently, the U.S. gained their compliance through backdoor diplomacy and offers of international funding for climate adaptation. The United States also succeeded in ensuring that the Agreement was not legally binding and countries were not open to litigation for non-compliance of the Agreement.

The Paris Agreement will not be binding on its member states until 55 parties who produce over 55% of the world’s greenhouse gases ratify it. Thus far, only 17 countries, overwhelmingly vulnerable small island nations, have ratified the Agreement. There is doubt that given global economic competitiveness if some countries, especially high polluters, such as, China, the US, India, Brazil, Canada, Russia, Indonesia and Australia will do so. There is also no guarantee that the developed countries will honor the pledge to mobilize $100 billion per year for climate financing for the poor countries starting in 2020.

The Paris Climate Agreement does not even mention fossil fuels let alone the need to leave 80% of it in the ground which many experts consider a requirement to mitigate climate change. It does not address the need to cut government fossil fuel subsidies, military expenditures, air travel, shipping, etc. as keys to global de-carbonization. Hardly anyone expects countries to do much for climate protection under this arrangement. No wonder fossil fuel companies were thefinancial backers of the Paris Climate Conference which was dominated by market based solutions to climate change, notably emissions trading.

Carbon Trading

Carbon trading, which constitutes the bulk of emissions trading was introduced as the main mechanism for meeting emissions reduction targets under the Kyoto Protocol. Within this system, a country  having more carbon emissions can purchase the ‘right’ to pollute more if it exceeds its cap by purchasing the permits of less polluting countries. As Carbon Trade Watchexplains: “emissions trading partitions and privatizes the atmosphere and institutes the buying and selling of ‘permits to pollute’ just as any other international commodity”. This strategy for commodification of emissions was pushed by the US in response to heavy corporate lobbying.

Critics argue that there have not been measurable reductions in carbon emissions attributable to the mechanisms established under the Kyoto Protocol. They point out that the two most important carbon markets, the EU Emissions Trading System and the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism have essentially failed. They argue that the market-based cap and trade system, designed to reduce carbon emissions has http://www.carbontradewatch.org/downloads/publications/PathsBeyondParis-EN.pdfactually aggravated the problem by giving unfair financial advantages to major polluters to continue polluting while putting the onus of climate protection and maintenance of carbon sinks on the poorer countries and inhibiting their economic development. Moreover, emissions trading takes attention away from the search for less complicated strategies, such as, a straightforward carbon tax on polluters and changes in patterns of economic production and energy use.

Despite these problems, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change still strongly supports carbon trading. International financial interests are now gearing up to expand carbon trading under the new Paris Agreement. They see a huge new market and business opportunity in carbon trading. The World Bank has established a Carbon Finance Unit to create an international system to price carbon. The World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim recently stated that there is an ‘obvious consensus’ among World Bank economists studying the problem, and that ‘putting a price on carbon pollution is by far the most powerful and efficient way to reduce emissions’ Christine Legarde, the director of the International Monetary Fund has called carbon pricing the ‘crown jewel’ of efforts to mitigate climate change.

Many environmental justice activists, however, are deeply concerned about the possible effects of this approach motivated by profit. As scholar-activist Patrick Bond from South Africa states, carbon trading will lead to increasing ‘financialization of nature’, the commodification of everything that can be seen as a carbon sink, especially forests but also agricultural land and even the ocean’s capacity to sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) for photosynthesis via algae’.  The Pope’s June 2015 Encyclical also voices the grave concerns that many people have over the status-quo’s push for carbon trading:

“The strategy of buying and selling carbon credits can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather it may simply be a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”

The limits and failures of the dominant neoliberal approach requires that we look beyond the climate crisis at the broader trajectory of global political and economic development and its underpinning consciousness and values.

Global Political Economy

The capitalist economy has advanced since the Industrial Revolution integrating the entire world within one interconnected market and technological system. Driven by private accumulation and modern technology this economic system has now become a monolithic global “market fundamentalism.” Trade liberalization in the last few decades has led to a consolidation of corporate control in every sector of the global economy contributing to deepening economic inequality. A few large transnational corporations control greater shares of global wealth and resources and wield more power over people’s lives and the environment than most nation states.  So-called, ‘world empires of the 21^st century’, they have increasingly ‘captured’ governments and multilateral institutions compelling governments to adjust their policies to suit corporate interests, as in the case of the fossil fuel industry.

The capitalist system has brought forth tremendous advances in material development but without balanced human inner development. When corporate profit prevails over social, environmental and ethical criteria, production and marketing of goods and services with negative use values become common. Thus, defense has become the biggest sector of the global economy and fossil fuel extraction continues despite overwhelming evidence of its harm to life on the planet. Even when solutions are sought to problems created by market expansion, economic growth and the profit motive prevail as evident from the trade in carbon pollution poised to become a highly profitable financial sector.

As the market values seep into all areas of life, the environment and humanity increasingly become mere resources and outlets for production and consumption. (Figure 1.1 in Bandarage,Sustainability and Well-Being).The modern economy disrupts and dissects the natural integration of planetary life seeking instead to reintegrate, recreate and control human society and the environment through modern science, technology, and the market. The extension of this approach is clearly evident in current technological and market developments to redesign life and to create, what some scientists call a ‘post-nature’, ‘post-human’ world.

Genetic modification is projected to become the norm as more and more bioengineered transgenic fruits, vegetables, trees, and animals are released into the environment. According to some scientists, in 50 years there could be more lab-created forms of plant and animal life on the planet than those identified in nature. Is this, then, the technological and market based solution to species extinction resulting from climate change, deforestation and other human induced changes to the environment?  Likewise, as earth-based indigenous people and communities in low lying coastal areas are extinguished from the face of the Earth, genetic engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence and other new types of cognitive tools are being utilized by some scientists to design a new human species increasingly merged with technologyand more and more divorced from nature.

As the environment and humanity become mere resources and appendages of technology and the economy, we face an existential crisis of what it means to be human in nature. The visions of technological domination over nature fail to recognize that if the climate is not stabilized, we will unleash long term planetary forces far beyond our capacity to control. Human induced natural forces, such as droughts, wildfires and floods will once again come to dominate and radically curtail our activities, as they appear to be doing already. As Karl Polyani warned in The Great Transformation: “ To allow the market mechanism to be the sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment…would result in the demolition of society.”

The contemporary global crisis, however, is more than a crisis of capitalism, a competition between capitalism and socialism, or a clash between modernity and tradition. Our challenge today is not merely political, but human and ecological—how we see and conduct ourselves personally and collectively toward both the environment and each other.

Technology and the market per se are not the problems. It is the underlying consciousness and the intention that determine their advancement. Is the motivation, profit for a few or the sustainability and well-being of all? At the root of the crisis we face is the disjuncture between the exponential growth of the profit-driven economy and the lack of an equivalent development in human consciousness, ethics and morality, compassion, generosity and wisdom.

Psycho-Social Change

The environment—planet Earth—encompasses human society and the economy within its fold. The economy, the production and distribution of the material means of existence, is only one subsystem of society (Figure 1.3 in Bandarage, Sustainability and Well-Being). The environment has primacy over the human-created spheres of society and the economy. The natural world does not need humanity for its survival, but humanity cannot survive without the natural environment, the soil, water, air, sunlight, etc. The central idea of the ecological approach is that we are part of the Earth, not apart and separate from it. This does not negate the fact that in the process of adaptation and evolution humanity has made a great impact on the environment.

Today, “ego consciousness” and its ethics of individualism, domination, and competition is the driving force at the personal level as well as at the societal levels of nations, ethno-religious groups, and in how humans relate toward other animal and life forms.  This myopic consciousness is leading to massive destruction of the environment, widening economic disparities and social conflicts. The alternative to ego consciousness, rooted in the psychology of fear and ‘self vs. other’ mentality, is a universal consciousness grounded in the truth of unity within diversity. This higher consciousness sees the other as an extension of the self and the well-being of the self and the other as inherently interdependent. It contributes to an ethic of partnership.

The challenge today is not to tear apart the dominant social and economic system through left or right political extremism but to shift to an ethical, balanced and sustainable path that upholds genuine climate protection, environmental sustainability, social justice and democracy. We need to shift to a path of socio-economic development grounded on compassion, courage and generosity instead of fear, anger and hatred. The dominant egoistic consciousness overlooks the capacity of the human mind for conscious transformation. Even Charles Darwin who popularized the idea of the survival of the fittest, paid homage to the importance of empathy and altruism in human evolution.

Instead of attempting to dominate and subsume society and the environment within the logic of unbridled economic growth (Figure 1.1 in Bandarage, Sustainability and Well-Being), the components of the economy—technology, property relations, the market, and finance—must be redesigned to serve the needs of environmental sustainability and human well-being. Rather than upholding and extending the extremist growth oriented system through new strategies, such as, carbon trading, the world’s economic structures must be transformed so that the exploitation of people and plunder of the Earth and the relentless pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere are replaced by systems that honor environmental sustainability and social justice. The Green Party of the United States succinctly sums up the kinds of changes required for a transition to renewable energy:

‘…a complete reorientation of our national energy priorities, beginning with the elimination of subsidies for petroleum and coal energy, divestment from fossil-fuel companies, enactment of carbon fees and dividends to reflect the true cost of fossil fuel extraction, and phasing out of off-shore drilling, mountaintop removal mining, hydrofracking, and new pipeline construction. Ending dependence on fossil fuels requires massive investment in hybrid and electric vehicles, low-cost public transportation and new ecologically sound electricity transmission infrastructure. We must develop safe and clean energy technologies — excluding nuclear power, which has its own risks — and retrofit homes and buildings for energy efficiency…

There is plenty of evidence that the shift to solar, wind and other renewable sources of energy can be achieved soon. Leading scientists and organizations have put forward plans for transforming the United States from dependence on fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable energy by 2050. Germany, which is the fourth largest economy in the world has a plan in place to obtain 45% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030, showing that other countries too can make the shift.

Such changes do not come by themselves but through increased citizen participation. It is only by building social movements and strengthening political will that the required qualitative changes can be achieved. As the climate reporter and activist, Johann Hari puts it:

“At least we know now: scientific evidence and rationality are not going to be enough to persuade our leaders …Nobody is going to sort this out – unless we, the population of the warming-gas countries, make them…The time for changing light bulbs and hoping for the best is over. It is time to take collective action….The cost of trashing the climate needs to be raised.’

It must be emphasized that while the shift to renewable energy is most urgent, it will not suffice for addressing the interrelated environmental and social crises. Ecological worldviews and environmentally progressive legislation have coexisted with social class, ethnic and gender oppression in modern times including in Nazi Germany. We have to be careful that eco-fascist views and movements do not gain ground as economic conditions deteriorate and social and environmental dislocations worsen around the world. Changes towards renewable energy has to be accompanied with changes in the control over resources and production and access of wider groups of people to economic opportunities. Bioregionalism, local entrepreneurship and other approaches to economic decentralization, economic diversity and democracy carry within them a critique of corporate monopoly capitalism and unsustainable technological growth. However, the strategies for broader social and economic restructuring require much greater exploration from a climate justice perspective.

Social Movements 

There is growing fear, anger, despair among people about the political and economic realities and the future of our planet. Some of it is undoubtedly misplaced and expressed in violent and destructive ways as ethno-religious fundamentalism and hatred towards others. There is also climate denial, climate fatigue, emotional paralysis and escapist behavior on the part of some people who are numbed by excessive exposure to the combined effects of consumerism, technology and the modern media.

Still, there are also thousands of organizations and people all around the world engaged in positive nonviolent and collective action. Indigenous people have been at the forefront of struggles to protect Mother Earth from the very beginning of their encounter with European colonization. There are hundreds of indigenous environmental struggles around the world, from the US and Canada to Central and South America and Asia and Africa, resisting fossil fuel and other corporations from building pipelines, mining terminals and other controversial projects. Indigenous people have faced and continue to face backlash, often violent reprisals, in protecting their land and natural resources. For example, there has been a spate of killings of environmental activists in Honduras following the U.S. backed regime change there in 2009, which calls for international attention.

Climate consciousness and the global movement for climate protection have expanded greatly since the historic People’s Climate Mach which brought hundreds of thousands of people to New York City in September 2014. President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL Pipeline in November 2015 was a historic victory for the climate movement. One of the most catalytic global movements today is 350.org which is focused on solving the climate crisis by reducing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere to the 350 ppm threshold. The movement uses online campaigns, grassroots organizing, and mass public actions in nearly every country in the world to bring bottom-up pressure to cut down fossil fuel usage.

In the face of dramatic recent acceleration in the warming of the planet, the failure of the Paris Agreement to address divesting from fossil fuel and the support of governments for new fossil fuel projects, climate action is intensifying around the world. The small Himalayan kingdom ofBhutan has committed itself to a carbon neutral policy in its constitution setting an important global precedent. The largest global civil disobedience on behalf of the climate justice concluded in May 2016 after 12 days of action in six continents. Under the banner of ‘Break Free from Fossil Fuel’,

‘Tens of thousands of activists took to the streets, occupied mines, blocked rail lines, paddled in kayaks and held community meetings in 13 countries, pushing the boundaries of conventional protest to find new ways to demand coal, oil and gas stay in the ground’

As a Nigerian activist from the Health of Mother Earth Foundation put it, “Breaking free from fossil fuels is a vote for life and for the planet”. The fossil fuel industry is being ‘weakened by financial and political uncertainty’ and the revelations that it knowingly hid the scientific evidence linking fossil fuels and global warming from the public for many decades. Currently, there areinvestigations underway in the US by the Attorney Generals of 17 states including New York, California, Massachusetts and the Virgin Islands on Exxon’s role in the alleged climate deception. The US Department of Justice has also requested the Federal Bureau of Investigation to determine if ExxonMobil violated federal laws by publicly denying climate change for decades.

Activists are confident that just as the struggle against the tobacco industry, which hid the connection between smoking and health from the public, was won, the people’s struggle against the fossil fuel industry can also be victorious. We must believe that the larger goals of environmental sustainability and social justice can be achieved and that ‘Another World is Possible’ if we work together to ‘Change the System, not the Climate’.

Asoka Bandarage, Ph.D. is the author of Sustainability and Well-Being: The Middle Path to Environment, Society and the Economy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013) and many other publications. She serves on the Board of the Interfaith Moral Action on Climate.    This article is based on her presentation at the Embrace the Earth Conference in San Francisco in May 2016. www.bandarage.com

An earlier abridged version of this post was published by Middle East Eye under a different title on June 5, 2016. The focus is upon the misuse of anti-Semitism by those defending Israel to deflect a rising tide of civil society activism and public criticism of Israeli policies and practices.

Zionism as Racism? Zionism and the State of Israel

8 Jun 2016 – More than 40 years ago the UN General Assembly adopted controversial resolution 3379 by a vote of 72-35 (with 32 abstentions), determining “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” This resolution was bitterly opposed by Israel and its friends in 1975. According to Zionists and others this resolution was an unacceptable assault on the dignity of the Jewish people, a blatant expression of anti-Semitism, exhibiting hurtful insensitivity to the long dark shadow cast by horrific memories of the Holocaust.

The Israeli ambassador at the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, was unsparing in his denunciation: “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value.” The American Ambassador, with a deserved reputation as an outspoken diplomat, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was hardly less severe. In the debate preceding the vote Moynihan used exaggerated language of denunciation: “The UN is about to make anti-Semitism international law..The [US] does not acknowledge, it will not abide by, it will never acquiesce in this infamous act..a great evil has been loosed upon the world.”

Such harsh language was an effective tactical maneuver by Israel and the United States to mislead as to the purpose of the anti-Zionist resolution by waving the red flag of anti-Semitism. With a few notable exceptions, the governmental supporters of the initiative at the UN were never motivated by hatred of Jews, although the resolution was an unwise way to exhibit anger toward Israel because it was so susceptible to being discredited as unacceptable due to its anti-Semitic overtones. The primary backers of the resolution were seeking to call attention to the fact that Israel as a state was proceeding in a racist manner by its treatment of the indigenous Palestinian population. In fact, the focus on Zionism rather than Israel reflected a continuing commitment by the main representatives of the Palestinian people and their allies to accept, however reluctantly, the reality of Israel as a state, while rejecting certain of its policies and practices that were being attributed to the Zionist ideology that did shape Israel’s governing process.

The context of the resolution is also important. It came after a decade of international frustration concerning the refusal of Israel to withdraw from the Palestinian (and Syrian) territory occupied in the 1967 War in the manner prescribed in the unanimously passed iconic UN Security Resolution 242. By 1975 it seemed that Israel had no serious intention of ever withdrawing fully or soon. True, there were interpretative ambiguities surrounding the exact conditions of withdrawal, yet Israel’s expansion of the metropolitan area of Jerusalem together with its annexation combeined with the establishment of settlements in occupied Palestine was generally perceived in UN circles as confirming this suspicion that Israeli ambitions far exceeded the scope of what had been agreed upon in 1967 at the Security Council. Subsequent developments have only hardened the perception the belief that Israel will defy international law and UN authority whenever it suits their purposes.

Inappropriately and ineffectively, the anti-Zionist resolution was seeking to mobilize the international community in 1975 around the idea that Palestinian suffering and humiliation resulted from illegitimate Israeli behavior that would not be overcome by statecraft or UN diplomacy, both of which had been tried and failed. Over time this interpretation of the situation has given rise to a growing skepticism about whether any inter-government effort, including even that undertaken by the Palestinians themselves, will secure the Palestinian right of self-determination, as long as the balance of forces is so strongly in Israel’s favor. Against this background it is not surprising that the Palestinian struggle increasingly relies upon civil society militancy currently epitomized by the BDS Campaign to correct this imbalance.

Asserting its geopolitical muscle over the years Israel finally managed to induce the General Assembly to reverse itself in 1991 by Res. 46/86. This single sentence text simply revokes the earlier resolution condemning Israel without offering any explanation for the new posture. Israel secured this vote by making conditional its participation at the Madrid Peace Conference that same year, insisting on a formal repudiation of the 1975 resolution.

In retrospect, the General Assembly had made a serious mistake by equating Israel with Zionism. It should been earlier realized that Zionism is a political project devised by Jews in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, and while responsible for the world movement that successfully established Israel against great odds, it does not represent the Jewish people as whole, nor is it an authoritative expression of Judaism whether conceived as a religion or an ethno-historic tradition. From the inception of Zionism, Jews as individuals held wildly divergent, even contradictory, views about the wisdom of Zionism in theory and practice as well as about the validity of its relations with Judaism. Zionism was never institutionalized as the governing ideology of the Israeli state, and many Jewish critics of Israel emphasized the failure of the state to live up to Zionist ideals and Judaic traditions.

Among the most fundamental of these disagreements related to whether Jews should aspire to a state of their own in Palestine, or should limit themselves to the Balfour pledge of support for a homeland in historic Palestine. The whole idea of an ethnic state is problematic given the geographic intermingling of ethnicities, and can be reconciled with the ideal of protecting the human rights of every individual only by artifice. In practice, an ethnic state, even if its activities are constitutionally constrained, dominates the governing space and discriminates against those with other ethnic identities. And so has been the case with Israel despite Palestinian voting rights and participation in the Knesset. Again, Zionism championed Israeli statehood as the fulfillment of the vision of a Jewish homeland, but the state that emerged is a political actor whose behavior needs to be appraised by its policies and practices, and not by its founding ideology.

Such general speculation raises somewhat different issues than posed by the anti-Zionist resolution. Now the much more difficult issue is raised in the form of allegations that Israel as of 2016 has become a racist or apartheid state, most clearly with respect to its oppressive and discriminatory administration of the West Bank and Gaza. To be clear, it is not Zionism as an ideology that should be evaluated as racist or not, despite its ethnic exclusivity, but Israel as a state subject to international law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination(1966) and the International Convention on Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973).

BDS as Anti-Semitism?

At this time, complaints about anti-Semitism have taken an entirely different course, although emanating from a similar source. Instead of deflecting criticism at the UN by angry claims of institutional bias verging on anti-Semitism, Israel is now actually invoking the prestige of the UN to carry on its fight against the BDS Campaign and an alleged delegitimation project aimed at discrediting and isolating, if not destroying, the state of Israel. On May 31,^, 2016 Israel convened a day-long conference under the willfully misleading title, “Ambassadors Against BDS—International Summit at the UN.” Invited speakers were limited to pro-Israeli extremists who took turns deploring BDS as a political initiative and denouncing its activist supporters as vicious anti-Semites. The Israeli ambassador, acting as convenor of the conference and known mainly as an inflammatory leader of the settlement movement, Dani Danon, set the tone of the event with these words: “BDS is the modern incarnation of anti-Semitism,” spreading an “..ideology of hate.”

The program was unabashedly one-sided. The conference sponsored by a series of leading Jewish organizations. The audience consisted of more than 1500 invited guests who possessed strong anti-BDS credentials and were encouraged to be militant in their opposition to BDS activities. The conference call relied on language that highlights the political significance of this extraordinary initiative: “The BDS movement continues to make strides in their campaign to delegitimize the State of Israel. They are gaining increased support on campuses around the world as they promote initiatives on local and national levels calling to divest and boycott the Jewish state.” Such a statement accurately recognizes that BDS has become the main vehicle of a rapidly strengthening global solidarity movement that aligns itself with the Palestinian national movement, is effectively mobilizing beneath the BDS banner, and has been shaped since its inception in 2005 when endorsed by 170 Palestinian NGOs and a wide spectrum of civil society activists.

It should be clarified that the so-called anti-BDS ‘summit,’ appearances not withstanding, was not a UN conference, nor did it have the blessings or participation of top UN officials. It was an event organized by the Israeli delegation at the UN that was allowed to make use of UN facilities. Calling itself ‘Ambassadors Against BDS” is deceptive, suggesting some kind of collective diplomatic undertaking by the international community or at least its Western segment.

Contrariwise, and more to the point, several European governments normally supportive of Israel, including Sweden, Ireland, and even the Netherlands have recently officially indicated that support for BDS is a legitimate political activity, entitled to the protection of law in a democratic state, and its supporters should be treated as exercising their right to freedom of expression in a lawful manner.

The BDS goals are set forth clearly in its founding document and do not include the delegitimation of Israel as a state: (1) withdrawal of Israel forces from Arab territories occupied in 19 67, including the Syrian Golan Heights as well as West Bank, Jerusalem, and Gaza; (2) respect for the right of return of Palestinian refugees in accordance with General Assembly Resolution 194; (3) protection of the human rights of Palestinians living in pre-1967 Israel on the basis of full equality. Without question the BDS movement endorses an ambitious program, but it does not question Israeli sovereignty over pre-1967 Israel, despite its territorial control of 78% of the Palestine mandate, which is far more than what the UN considered fair in 1947 that was about 45%, and was rejected by the Palestinians as being grossly unfair given the demographics at the time.

In a growing reaction to the growing influuence of BDS, Israel and pro-Israeli civil society actors have been pushing back in a variety of settings with tactics that violate the written and unwritten rules of democratic society. Among those most salient of these tactics have been the successful efforts of the organized Jewish community in Britain to have an academic conference at Southampton University canceled for two consecutive years, the frantic defamatory assault on Penny Green, the distinguished British criminalist who had been proposed as the first choice to be the next UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, a travel ban imposed by Israel on Omar Barghouti, the widely admired worldwide leader of BDS, and sundry outrageous efforts throughout the United States to have as many state legislatures as possible pass laws that criminalize BDS by associating its advocacy and activity with anti-Semitism.

Above all, this ugly effort to stigmatize BDS represents a double shift in the essential battlefield of the Israel/Palestine struggle. The first shift is from armed struggle to a series of symbolic encounters concerning the legitimacy of Israel’s policies and practices. The second interrelated shift is away from inter-governmental diplomacy and toward civil society militancy. It is possible that the second shift is temporary or provisional, having as its objective the revival of normal diplomacy at a future time under conditions where both sides are treated equally, and the process facilitated by a genuinely neutral intermediary. In effect, an authentic peace process in the future must correct the flaws that doomed the diplomacy undertaken within the Oslo Framework of Principles to failure, and what is worse operated to enable a steady dynamic of Israeli expansionism at Palestinian expense. One way of thinking of BDS is as a corrective to this failed diplomacy of the past.

In the meantime, both Israel and its civil society adversaries will reflect their contradictory agendas with respect to a variety of struggles centering on what is legitimate.

In important respects the double shift should be welcomed. The BDS Campaign concentrates on university campuses, churches, and labor unions. To challenge the legality and propriety of its tactics is to attack the most fundamental values of constitutional democracy. BDS-bashing also lends indirect credibility to those who argue that only political violence can achieve justice for the Palestinian people that alone can end their unspeakable ordeal. It is reasonable, of course, to question whether BDS is effective, or to argue over its proper scope and tactics, but attacks on BDS as a valid political instrument should be rejected.

Comparing Anti-Zionism in 1975 and Anti-BDS in 2016

This deadly dance between Zionism and the UN has now come full circle. In the 1970s Zionism was condemned by the General Assemly at the UN, and the condemnation was sharply criticized by Israel as being so anti-Semitic as to contaminate the Organization as a whole. In 2016 Israel in a dramatic turnabout relies on the stature and access associated with its UN membership to empower Zionist forces throughout the world to engage in BDS-bashing. In the end, we should appreciate that neither Zionism nor BDS are racist as such, and any serious inquiry should be directed at the behavior of Israel as a member of the UN obliged to respect international law with respect to race and on the actual claims and initiatives of BDS as a transnational civil society initiative seeking the implementation of international law and fundamental human rights.

It was a mistake to play the anti-Zionist card in 1975 as the real grievances of Palestinians and the UN were obscured behind the smokescreen of a false debate about whether or not deep criticisms of Israel were anti-Semitic. It is an even bigger mistake to play the anti-Semitic card in the current global setting as a way of evading the demands set forth by BDS, which seem on their face in accord with international law and morality, and have as a principal virtue the clear commitment to pursue political ends by peaceful means.

The scale of this mistake is enlarged by blurring the boundaries between a proper concern with anti-Semitism as a virulent form of ethnic hatred that has given rise in the past to bloody persecutions and fascist extremism, and most abhorrently to the Holocaust. Opposing BDS on its pragmatic or normative merits is an entirely reasonable posture for those who disagree with its premises, methods, and goals. What is not acceptable is to engage in these provocative efforts to discredit and punish the proponents of BDS, and to threaten adherents with punitive pushback as happens when tenure is abrogated or steps are taken to brand activists by name as targets for vilification and intimidation.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author, co-author or editor of 40 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in thePalestinian territories occupied since 1967.” Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies, and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. His most recent book is Achieving Human Rights(2009).

A surprisingly small number of corporations control massive global market shares. How many of the brands below do you use?

It’s a Small World at the Top:

Banking
Largest banks hold a total of $25.1 trillion:[1]
1.) ICBC, China, $2.95 trillion in assets, over 18,000 outlets, 108 branches globally
2.) HSBC holdings, UK, $2.68 trillion in assets, 6,600 offices in 80 countries, 55 million customers
3.) Deutsche Bank, Germany, $2.6 trillion in assets, 2,963 branches, 70 countries, 46 million customers
4.) Credit Agricole Group, France, $2.58 trillion in assets, 60 countries, over 21 million clients
5.) BNP Paribas, France, $2.51 trillion in assets
6.) Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan, $2.49 trillion in assets
7.) Barclays PLC, United Kingdom, $2.41 trillion in assets
8.) JPMorgan Chase & Co., U.S., $2.39 trillion in assets
9.) China Construction Bank Corp., China, $2.36 trillion in assets
10.) Japan Post Bank, Japan, $2.12 trillion in assets
Enough to fund the federal U.S. government for over 7 years.[2]
Or roughly $3500 per person on earth.

Media 
1.) Comcast Corporation: $62.5 billion revenue, $6 billion in profit
Owns:
MSNBC
NBC Universal
MLB Network
E! Entertainment
Golf Channel
Xfinity
AT&T Broadband

2.) The Walt Disney Company:$42 billion revenue, $5.5 billion in profit
Owns:
ABC
ESPN
Pixar
Marvel Comics
Touchstone Pictures
Lucasfilm
Walt Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Disney Music Publishing
The Baby Einstein Company
50% of A&E Networks

3.)Time Warner Company
Owns:
HBO
Time (Southern Living, Sports Illustrated, Time, Golf Magazine, Health, Entertainment Weekly)
IPC Media
Grupo Editorial Expansion
Turner Broadcasting (TNT, TruTV, TBS, TCM, NBC, Cartoon Network, March Madness, CNN)
Warner Bros. Picture Group
4.) Viacom $15 billion revenue and $2 billion profit
Owns:
Paramount Pictures
MTV
VH1
BET
Nickelodeon
Spike
Comedy Central

5.) News Corporation, $34 billion revenue, $1.1 billion profit
Owns:
Fox
Wall Street Journal
Times of London
Barron’s
Harper Collins

Food and Beverage Companies
1.) PepsiCo Inc
Makes:
Gatorade
Propel
Pepsi
Aquafina
Sobe
Mountain Dew
Sierra Mist
Cheetos
Doritos
Frito Lay
Funyun’s
Lay’s
Ruffles
Tostitos
Quaker
Amp Energy
Lipton
Rockstar Energy
Seattle’s Best Coffee
Starbucks: Doubleshot, Frappucino, Iced Coffee

2.) Tyson Foods Inc–World’s largest Chicken Processor
Supplies:
KFC
Taco Bell
McDonalds
Burger King
Wendy’s
Wal-Mart
Kroger
IGA
Beef O’Grady’s

3.) Nestle (U.S. And Canada)
74 brands of water
38 brands of ice cream:
including Haagen-Dazs
Dreyer’s
And Nestle Drumstick
Frozen food:
Stouffers
Lean Cuisine
Hot Pockets
Tombstone Pizza
DiGiorno Pizza
California Pizza Kitchen
Candy:
Wonka brands,
Baby Ruth
Chips Ahoy!
Goobers
Icebreakers
Pet Food:
Alpo
Beneful
Fancy Feast
Friskies
Gourmet
Mighty Dog
ONE
Pro Plan
Purina
Tidy Cats
Cosmetics:
30% share in L’Oreal, Garnier, Maybelline, and Lancome, and The Body Shop Stores

4.) JBS USA–Subsidiary of the world’s largest beef processor
Beef Brands:
Swift
G.F. Swift 1855 Brand Premium Beef
Aspen Ridge Natural Beef
Swift Black Angus
Cedar River Farms
5 Star Beef
Chef’s Exclusive
Showcase Premium Ground Beef
Chicken Brands:
Pilgrim’s
Pierce Chicken
Wing Dings
Wing Zings
Speed Grill
Country Pride
To-Ricos
Pork Brands:
1855 Premium Pork
Swift Premium Dry Rubbed Pork
Swift Premium Natural Guaranteed Tender Pork
Swift Premium Natural Pork
Swift La Herencia Natural Pork

5.) Anheuser-Busch InBev
Over 200 beer brands made in 30 countries
Sold in 130 countries
Including:
St. Pauli Girl
Stella Artois
Spaten
Rolling Rock
Michelob
Hoegaarden
Busch
Budweiser
Bud Light
Beck’s
Bass

Oil
The top five oil producing companies produce almost twice what the US’s refined petroleum product consumption per day is.
1.) Saudi Aramco
Saudi Arabia
12.5 million barrels a day
$1 billion plus in DAILY revenue
2.) Gazprom
Russia
9.7 million barrels per day
$40 billion a year profits
3.) National Iranian Oil Co.
Iran
6.4 million barrels per day
State owned
4.) ExxonMobil
America
5.3 million barrels per day
$40 billion in profit
5.) PetroChina
China
4.4 million barrels per day
$21.93 billion in profits

Notes:

1. Bankrate, 10 largest banks of the world
2. WIkipedia, 2013 United States Federal budget
3. Wikipedia, ICBC
4. HSBC
5. Deutsche Bank
6. Deutsche Bank at a Glance
7. Assets Owned by Comcast
8. Assets Owned by Disney
9. Assets owned by Time Warner
10. Assets Owned by News Corp
11. Food processing Top 100
12. Tyson Acquisitions
13. Nestle Brands
14. JBS US Beef Brands
15. JBS US Pork Brands
16. JBS US Chicken brands
17. InBEv Brands
18. Forbes, top oil producers
19. US Oil Consumption
20. What Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy Infographic

America is in a fog of grief, anxiety, and rising partisan rancor as the nation comes to grips with the deadliest mass shooting in its history. But when it comes to the most basic question of how the massacre took place in Orlando early Sunday morning, the picture couldn’t be clearer: America’s mass shooters increasingly are using weapons of war.

What the data shows is stark: There have been nine mass shootings in the United States over the past year alone. (The one-year anniversary of the slaughter at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church is this Friday.) In at least eight of these attacks the killers used guns that they obtained legally. (Authorities have yet to disclose the source of the firearms in one case.) And two-thirds of these mass shooters, including the Orlando attacker, wielded AR-15s, AK-47s or the equivalent—semi-automatic rifles that were designed to be used in military battle.

This continues a long-running pattern. According to our database of mass shootings in America going back to 1982, most of the perpetrators got their guns legally—in at least 65 out of 81 cases, including Orlando. This now includes six of the seven deadliest attacks carried out since 2012, as the accompanying graphic shows. (The graphic is from a new investigation into America’s gun industry thatMother Jones will publish online soon.)

In addition to semi-automatic rifles, many mass shooters have used semi-automatic handguns. But perhaps most consequential with regard to their weapons of choice is this: In a majority of cases the attackers used their guns in combination with high-capacity magazines, which can hold 15, 30, or even as many as 100 rounds.

Such ammunition devices enable attackers to maximize the number of bullets they can fire before stopping to reload. The perpetrator who struck in Tucson in 2011 squeezed off 31 shotsfrom a Glock handgun in 30 seconds. In a matter of minutes at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the attacker there used an assault rifle to strafe schoolchildren and their teachers withmore than 150 bullets. The killers who struck in San Bernardino fired upwards of 75 shots at their victims, and roughly as many at police who pursued them.

It may not be clear for days yet how many rounds were fired inside the Pulse nightclub in Orlando; investigators there face a daunting crime scene to process. But the ghastly body count already tells us more than we need to know. As one veteran ATF special agent described it to me after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, the weaponry taken up by most of America’s mass shooters—in many cases easily purchased by them in stores—is well-suited for their purpose: “It turns a killer into a killing machine.”

This article was first published by Who What Why 

Both Republicans and Democrats have expressed concern about entrusting presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump with the country’s nuclear codes. Some have wondered aloud if the ultimate weapons of mass destruction should be under the control of someone so erratic and vindictive.

The prospect of Trump’s finger on such a trigger makes a lot of people across the globe uneasy. But the truth is, no matter who serves as commander-in-chief, a nuclear holocaust has always been closer than we think — because of faulty equipment, dumb accidents and apparently irreducible human error.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has now put together a list of some of the near misses the world has survived. Each one is hair-raising. Taken together, they are utterly terrifying.

Road marker in Eureka, NC, commemorating the 1961 B-52 crash.
Photo credit: RJHaas / Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Bombs on a Plane

Putting nuclear weapons on manned airplanes has led to near disasters several times. In 1966, a bomber carrying four nuclear warheads collided with a refueling plane and crashed over Spain (the link will take you to a Pentagon memo detailing 32 accidents involving nuclear weapons from 1950-1980).

Two of the bombs exploded but neither nuclear warhead was triggered. Another bomb landed in a riverbed and was recovered, while the fourth fell into the Mediterranean and was not secured for several weeks.

While none of the nuclear warheads went off, some plutonium was released at the crash site, which remains contaminated to this day.

Five years earlier, a B-52 bomber broke apart in flight and the two nuclear weapons it carried dropped on North Carolina. The arming sequence of both bombs began, and one slammed into the ground after its parachute failed. While the chute of the other nuclear weapon deployed, five of its safety devices failed and the one that prevented the bomb from going off was later found to be defective in other nuclear bombs.

A uranium-containing part of one of the bombs was never recovered.

The horror stories of close calls do not end in the 1960s. Less than ten years ago, a bomber was mistakenly loaded with six nuclear-armed cruise missiles and sat unguarded at an Air Force base in North Dakota overnight. Then the plane took the weapons to Louisiana, where they were once again left unguarded until a maintenance crew realized that it held live nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Command and Control System
Photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy from DoD Inspector General

Faulty Chips and Crossed Wires

But nuclear weapons are not just a risk while in the air. There have been many instances in which things went mind-numbingly wrong on the ground.

In 1961, the US assumed it was under attack and ordered all bombers to prepare for takeoff.

The assumption was based on an inability to reach either an early warning radar system in Greenland or the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD), which led officials to think that an attack might be underway.

It was later determined that a faulty AT&T switch was to blame and that the company had not installed a backup system — even though it said it had.

Nearly two decades later, at a high point of tension between the US and the Soviet Union, a defective computer chip costing less than 50 cents caused US missile-defense officials to believe that the Soviet Union had launched more than 2,000 nuclear missiles.

It took six minutes to correct the mistake. Had this incident not taken place in the middle of the night, it is conceivable that the US could have “retaliated.”

In 2010, there was another significant malfunction: the launch control center at Warren Air Force Base lost contact with 50 nuclear missiles for an hour. The reason: an incorrectly installed circuit card.

North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD).
Photo credit: MSGT Hiyashi / Wikimedia

Wrenches, Bears, and Simulations

And then there are the cases that seem stranger than fiction.

In 1979, NORAD computers showed a massive Soviet attack on the US — with missiles raining down from mobile launch sites and silos alike. American bombers were readied for a retaliatory strike that was only called off when US early warning stations and satellites could not confirm the inbound missiles.

What had happened? A technician had mistakenly loaded a tape with a training exercise onto an operational computer.

Another time, a maintenance worker dropped the socket from a socket wrench into an underground missile silo, releasing the missile’s propellant. Despite efforts at containment, the fuel exploded and the nuclear weapon shot up in the air and crashed near the entrance of the base. That particular warhead was more powerful than all bombs used in World War II combined.

In another incident, a bear breached the perimeter fence at a base in Minnesota — and was mistaken for a saboteur.

All surrounding bases were alerted that a Soviet sabotage effort might be under the way. Because the alarm at Wisconsin’s Volk Field was wired incorrectly, nuclear-armed fighters there were ordered to take off. As they were sitting on the runway waiting for clearance, a staffer rushed out to alert the pilots that they should stay put. He saved the day by flashing the headlights of his truck — because the base had no control tower!

Some of these stories might qualify as slapstick-comical if they had not nearly resulted in the deaths of thousands — or even the end of the world as we know it. And these are only the incidents we know about on the US side.

Not surprisingly, the Soviet Union has had plenty of near misses, which the Union of Concerned Scientists also details.

While many of these cases show that it does matter whose finger is on the trigger, together they add up to unblinkable evidence that the mere existence of nuclear weapons — combined with poor regulation and an ever-fertile fund of human stupidity — constitutes a clear and present danger to us all.

America’s political process is notoriously corrupt, electoral fraud rife at the federal, state and local levels. 

Democracy is pure fantasy. Monied interests control everything. Back room deals decide things. Has the winner of November’s run for the White House already been decided?

Clinton is the establishment favorite, Trump the outsider, reluctantly accepted at best by GOP power brokers after going all-out to undermine his campaign – media scoundrels largely in lockstep against him.

Dubious primary and caucus practices suggest what’s perhaps coming. Clinton stole Iowa by rigged coin-flips,Massachusetts, Nevada and Arizona by old-fashioned fraud – New York and California likely the same way.

Tactics include mass voter disenfranchisement. Around 18 million California residents were registered to vote last week.

Yet only six million votes were counted – the process tainted by widespread voter purges, rigged voting machines and involuntary party affiliation changes.

Sanders wasn’t included on the state’s mail-in ballot as a Democrat candidate. Clinton won California before the first vote was cast and counted. Will she beat Trump in November the same way?

Investigative journalist Greg Palast called California’s primary “grand theft,” voters “by the tens of thousands” disenfranchised.

The steal (was) baked into the way California handles No Party Preference (NPP) voters (independents).

In counties throughout the state, it’s hard or impossible for them to participate in the Democrat primary. In some areas, they get “ballot(s) without the presidential race.”

Nearly half of Californians vote by mail. According to Palast, “(m)ost NPP voters don’t realize that to vote in the Democratic (sic) primary…they must bring in their NPP ballot with the envelope and say…’I want to surrender my ballot in return for a Democratic (sic) crossover ballot.’ “

Otherwise you’re disenfranchised. Lots more shenanigans make things worse. On the one hand, Palast said no smoking-gun evidence links them to the Clinton campaign.

On the other, “the voting system is run mostly by the Democratic (sic) party which is totally in Hillary’s pocket.”

Is a money-controlled bipartisan conspiracy planned to anoint her president-elect in November? Will an unindicted racketeer, war criminal, Sino/Russian hating, anti-populist Wall Street tool succeed Obama?

Will unthinkable WW III follow, perhaps in her first year in office?

The extreme danger of a Clinton presidency should terrify everyone worldwide – an unstable neocon with her finger on the nuclear trigger.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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

Dear Mr. President Xi Jinping,

Dear Mr. President Vladimir Putin,

The re-emerging specter of nuclear catastrophe is once again haunting the world.

The West is trying to isolate and provoke two great, proud, powerful and sovereign countries; China and Russia. It appears that the pathological desire to gain (or more precisely, re-gain) full control over the entire world is fully restraining all remaining flickers of rationale and humanism inside the brains of the politicians and business ‘elites’ in Washington, London and elsewhere.

The danger is real. It is enough to take a brief look at the map depicting the world at the beginning of the 20^th Century, to realize that the West is capable of enslaving almost the entire Planet, by forcing through its colonialist and imperialist designs.

Western imperialism has already exterminated hundreds of millions of human beings, in all corners of the globe. And even now, it is still murdering millions, directly and indirectly.

Both China and Russia experienced the horrors of Western invasions. On several occasions, both nations had to turn to steel, in order to resist and to survive. And both nations are now, once again, standing tall, proudly facing those who are trying to break them, to force them into submission.

It is becoming clear now that China and Russia will not back up. It is because they both want, above all, peace and justice for this world. They suffered terribly from the invasions and wars. They know how high the price of freedom and independence is. But if attacked, they will not yield. They will fight, no matter how high the cost. They would fight to defend their own people, and to defend the humanity, as they already have done on several occasions, losing millions, but in the end always defeating evil!

*

China and Russia are not alone! They have allies all over the world. Some allies are simple people in the oppressed countries; others consist of entire countries from different parts of the World, like South Africa, Iran, Syria or Cuba.

Until very recently, almost the entire Latin America stood by China and Russia and vice-versa. Great changes were taking place in Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and elsewhere. Politically and economically, many South American countries began moving close, closer, towards Beijing and Moscow. The war against imperialism (re-) gained its new front.

Attempts to destabilize Latin American revolutions arose almost immediately. The West began ‘organizing and then supporting the opposition movements’; funding hostile NGO’s, plotting and financing coups, demonizing new governments through propaganda and indoctrination campaigns.

Treasonous and morally corrupt local ‘elites’ quickly joined forces with Washington; their loyalties were, for centuries, with Europe and then with North America, as well as with multi-national companies.

I have been living and working in Latin America for many years. I know some of the continent’s greatest thinkers and revolutionaries, but I am also familiar with their oligarchs and feudal rulers. South American elites have no mercy with their common people. They cannot even be called “nationalists”. Just as the Western imperialists, they would easily sacrifice millions of innocent “un-people” (to borrow Orwell’s definition), in exchange for maintaining their privileges.

As happened in Chile before the 1973 US-sponsored coup against the socialist President Salvador Allende, the local elites are now, once again, determinedly ruining the local economies all over South America, ‘creating shortages’, organizing and mobilizing right-wing unions, while withdrawing billions of dollars from their countries. For them it is no longer about business or making profits (they have plenty of money stored abroad) but about retaining control over their countries, often on behalf of the West.

Recently, Argentinian socialism collapsed, and the neo-fascist President Macri gained power. Brazil was hit by a coup, which gave corrupt, mostly evangelical, and right-wing pro-Washington politicians, de-facto control over the country. Both Argentina and Brazil began dismantling their social policies, signing ludicrous deals with the North, including those that will soon allow the United States to build military bases in Tierra del Fuego and elsewhere.

The West is achieving its goal; to torpedo BRICS, to weaken the anti-imperialist global alliance, and to discredit the Latin American model through its indoctrination channels.

Almost overnight, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and Cuba had lost two of their economically most powerful Latin American allies.

And the West will not stop. Venezuela is next on its mafia-style hit list, as well as Ecuador, most likely followed by Bolivia!

I have just returned from South America. Argentina is waking up to a horrible nightmare. Brazilian people feel that they were swindled, fooled. There are protests shaking Argentinian and Brazilian cities. But many feel almost hopeless, faced by such Machiavellian, complex and ‘perfectly’ organized operations of their West and the local ‘elites’.

I have also worked, recently, in Ecuador, where I got convinced that the West would never give up its attempts to destroy all progressing governments and regain full control over what it believes is its ‘backwater’.

The tactics that are used to destabilize entire countries are the same everywhere. For many years I have been travelling to virtually all corners of the world, wherever the Empire has been trying to break the will of the people: from Ukraine and China, to Zimbabwe, Eritrea, Iran, South Africa, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, to mention just a few most ‘obvious’ places. My latest book: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”, is more than 800-pages ‘heavy’, and full of examples of how those tactics are applied, on all continents.

But in South America, the West is now attacking almost the entire continent, and it does it openly, with no shame.

*

To defend the independence of this continent – South America – is essential for the survival of our humankind.

This is the frontline now! But it is the frontline where one nation after another is collapsing, under the terrible pressure of destructive, mainly foreign forces. It goes without saying that if the Empire wins here, it will try ‘not to lose momentum’; it will immediately move to another part of the world that is still standing. The destructive work will continue, (while hundreds of millions lives get ruined) until the Empire’s final victory, or until it gets decisively confronted and stopped!

In Caracas, Quito and La Paz we are now witnessing an epic fight for the entire continent, but also indirectly for Moscow, Beijing, as well as for those still defenseless countries scattered all over the world.

It is because the fight is essentially for the survival of the basic principles of humanism, decency and solidarity. It is a battle against the most cynical and oppressive forces on Earth! In short, it is a battle against ‘imperialism’, which is synonymous to ‘fascism’!

*

Venezuela is still standing, but it is screaming, suffering, and in terrible pain.

It cannot go on like this for too long; it cannot survive alone!

It either receives some substantial help, or it will eventually collapse.

The economic scavengers are already encircling its weakened body; even speculating and betting on its foreign debt. The ‘opposition’ is so sure of its upcoming macabre victory that it is already allocating to its members, posts in future governments.

The point has reached when Venezuela cannot defend itself alone, anymore. For years it topped the hit list of the Empire. For years no effort to ruin it was spared: coups, assassinations, economic blackmail, and a media war!

And still, for so many years, Venezuela has been showing great solidarity with the rest of the world. It has stood at the vanguard of the fight against imperialism. It was spreading foreign aid all over the world, while it was flying (via TeleSUR) those optimistic and inspiring voices of the Latin American revolution, to all corners of our Planet (I made five documentary films for TeleSUR, in several conflict zones of the world, under almost impossible circumstances; something that makes me, until now, immensely proud).

Like China and Russia, Venezuela refused to crack even under tremendous pressure.

It began building a new, great and united South American fatherland, returning optimism, zeal and hope to the people of the continent that has been, for centuries, tormented and continuously raped by the West/North.

Not everything was done ‘perfectly’, but nothing in this world is or should be expected to be perfect. Venezuelan (Bolivarian) Revolution is called the process; it is a long and complex journey, but a breathtaking journey nevertheless – from slavery to freedom, to internationalism and social equality.

Venezuelan people are now paying an immense price for not abandoning their principles. They are castigated mercilessly by the Empire, for making their own choices, for defending their freedom, and for refusing to return to subservience. But above all, they are punished for returning hope to others, for inspiring others, millions of others, all over the world!

Because hope is what the Empire tries to strangle, mercilessly.

Venezuela clearly demonstrated that a different world is possible, that solidarity is still alive, and that the revolution can serve the people.

If Venezuela dies, at least it would die standing.

“Here, nobody surrenders!” These were words of Hugo Chavez, printed on the iconic election poster, after his death. Here Chavez, already gravely ill, with his face covered by raindrops, was defiantly clenching his fist.

When the poster appeared, I was in Caracas. I stood there, in front of it, for at least one hour, in the middle of the square, unable to move. I thought, as many others most likely did: “A true revolutionary should go all the way! If he doesn’t dare to, he should better stay where he is and go nowhere at all.”

Chavez went all the way and Venezuela followed him – a true revolutionary and his remarkable Bolivarian motherland.

Yes, if it would have to die, Venezuela would die standing. But it should never be allowed to perish!

*

I have both Russian and Chinese blood in my veins. I was born in Russia. And I spent many years in Latin America, writing, making films, covering wars and then revolutions. And followed then, by the Western subversions!

For me an alliance, and even some sort of unity between China, Russia and South America, is the essential pre-condition for the survival of the humanity.

The West knows that such an alliance would break its monopoly on power; that all three models are now inspiring billions of people all over the world. These models may be different to some extent, but the bottom line is always the same: putting the people first, while trying to deter neo-colonialism and imperialism.

If that bottom line were to prevail, that would mean the end of a long and bloody period of Western global dictatorship. It is that simple!

The West would rather murder billions than to accept its defeat. Because ‘defeat’ would mean that its countries would have to finally behave as equals towards the rest of the world, something culturally and psychologically unacceptable to most of North Americans and Europeans.

The world has to finally defend itself. It has to defend its people. Too many lives have already been lost, too many nations plundered and ruined. Now countries under the attack should embrace each other, help each other, and not to allow each other to fall.

The Western propaganda machine is spreading sinister but very effective lies that “all large countries are the same, that they have identical imperialist tendencies”.

The only way to contradict such fabrications is to offer concrete and bright examples to the contrary.

The world has been drowning in the cynicism and nihilism administered by the Empire. In order to snap out from depression, in order to erect the great flags of the resistance again, people need a substantial dose of emotions, optimism, poetry, and human warmth. They also need true leadership.

They need big and powerful countries like China and Russia to show the way.

To inspire the world, it is not enough to do “economically well”, or to be “strong” (although those are essential pre-conditions for progress and even for survival). What people all over the world are longing for, are solidarity, social commitments and internationalism.

Both China and Russia are offering exactly those, and have already been for many decades. But it is often done in a subdued and modest way. And therefore, for the lackey Western mass media, which still controls the flow of information in most parts of the world, it is still easy to omit, and even to deny the truth.

To bail out, to rescue Venezuela, would send a powerful message to both the Empire and to the rest of the world.

It would be a truly positive message, full of optimism, decency and pride.

In Russia, a country that suffered immensely from countless foreign invasions, there is one important term – “наши” (“ours”). The world is clearly divided between those who are “ours” (our loved ones, our comrades, compatriots, friends and allies), and enemies.

By nature, the Russian people are immensely loyal to those whom they have already accepted as their close ones, as “ours”. They are loyal to their comrades to the point that they would, without even blinking, die defending them or give them their last shirt or a piece of bread. There is no limit to the generosity towards those that Russian people love.

And Chinese solidarity is legendary as well. Otherwise, how could this enormous country lift almost all of its citizens out from poverty?

If Venezuela is defended and saved, the message to the Empire and to the world would be powerful and clear: “Do not touch ‘our’ brothers and sisters! If you harm them, you would be confronted.”

*

In Russia, during the old days, the rallying cry, the call to battle was often “they are beating our people!”

And this is exactly what is happening now. “They are beating our people!” Venezuela, our beautiful and proud sister, our comrade, our ally, is being tortured, humiliated and devastated!

Let us stand up. Let us not allow Venezuela to be violated.

I have lost all my hope for the hypocritical, toothless Western “Left”. With some bright exceptions, it will do nothing, absolutely nothing practical to help! As it did nothing to rescue Cuba when Cuba was bleeding. It had to be China, after all, which extended its powerful hand across the seas towards Havana saving the revolution!

And now, again, only Beijing and Moscow would be able to make that decisive and powerful epic gesture!

As was demonstrated when China rescued Cuba, and is now being shown where Russia is fighting for Syria; these two great and brave nations are willing to get engaged when the time is ripe, and therefore capable of saving Venezuela!

*

President Xi Jinping, President Vladimir Putin, I am writing this letter with great respect for both of you personally, and with profound admiration for your countries. In many ways I also belong to both Russia and China, despite my determined internationalism, and my perpetual lack of “home”.

I also write this with great hope.

I do not know how to resolve the situation practically – how to save Venezuela in a sensible but also truly determined way. I cannot offer any practical political advice to the two of you – great leaders of two enormous countries.

I have merely outlined the global situation, the murderous drive of the Empire and the plight of Latin America, the continent, which is so deeply engraved in my heart.

And I am stating the obvious: now it is only China and Russia that can save Venezuela. And I am also repeating what we all already know, in South America, in China and in Russia: “Only if united, we will never get defeated!”

With great respect,

Andre Vltchek

*

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. His latest books are: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire” and  “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  Discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. Point of No Return is his critically acclaimed political novel. Oceania – a book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about Indonesia: “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. Andre is making films for teleSUR and Press TV. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and the Middle East. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.

Attorney Hassen Abdellah, my colleague and erstwhile radio co-host (www.RadioTahrir.org) had just returned from the jenazah service for Muhammad Ali in Louisville. Abdellah and I plan an hour-long radio special this Wednesday at 7pm on a local radio station (www.wjffradio.org). It would be an opportunity to share Hassen’s testimony, to talk about sports and social activism, and to dialogue with listeners about the great, departed Muhammad Ali.

Now what?

The full impact of Sunday’s mass shooting at an LGBT club in Florida has not yet hit America’s public consciousness; be assured however, it will soon be taken over by the monster anti-Muslim anti-immigrant machine here. That horrible and saddening event in Orlando will surely feed Donald Trump’s alarmism and his campaign against Muslims. It will provoke even the most tolerant and patient to reassess their positions.

Before Wednesday evening, our WJFF station director may cancel the planned program. If not, how can we proceed with our celebration of Muhammad Ali in what will doubtless be a volatile atmosphere when the media begin their attacks? I am unsure how we can handle it.

Most troubling is how this kind of disruption, interruption and diversion from our essential activist and educational agenda occurs with awful regularity month after month for decades. Whether a dictator’s dangerous whims, or a raging Zionist campaign, The Hague tribunal’s pursuit of selected war criminals, a careless remark by an inarticulate member of our community or by a Muslim head-of-state, a lop-sided TV debate with a media-illiterate Arab spokesman, a PLO miscalculation, a school textbook with too much truth about Palestinian history, humdrum statements by our talented writers decrying violence and reminding the public what we are not –always what we are not— never getting to what we are; daily bombings in our homelands, young talented journalists assigned to cover war and suffering rather than education, architecture or literature, relentless accounts of hardships endured by any Muslim woman, kidnapped schoolgirls, flogged journalists.

It’s so hard to maintain our noble agenda— to follow the sisters’ proud declarations at last week’s beautiful memorial: “I Am Muhammad Ali”.

Stay tuned Wednesday evening (www.wjffradio.org). Pray that Allah awards us the patience and journalistic prowess we so need moving forward.

Meanwhile consider setting aside a few hours to view the 2 hour, 15 minute procession of Ali’s final journey through his hometown in Kentucky

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5ZDZMLfgqY

and the full 3 hour memorial service

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bYFb97j7Ro&feature=youtu.be&app=desktop

(now distributed –co-opted, as always–by NYT but originally filmed, I believe, by Fox10 TV Phoenix, Arizona).

Then decide for yourself what Muhammad Ali signifies and can still give meaning to.

Germany’s Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) is playing an increasingly prominent role in the NATO deployment in Eastern Europe, which is openly preparing for war against Russia.

As part of the current Anakonda 2016 manoeuvres, the largest NATO military exercise since the end of the Cold War, German combat engineers, along with British soldiers, built a 300-plus metre amphibious bridge over the Vistula on Thursday. A short time later, heavily armoured NATO tanks rolled over the bridge on their way east, towards the Russian border.

For days, the Bundeswehr web site has carried propaganda articles and videos documenting the move of German troops into Eastern Europe. They have titles such as, “Exercise Anakonda 2016—Minden Pioneers on the way to the Vistula”; “On the final straights to the NATO summit”; “Dragoon Ride II—Dragoons ride into the Baltic”; “By convoy into the Baltic—Advance to the Saber Strike exercise” and “Howitzers into the Baltic—The transfer begins”.

The reports provide an overview of the growing German contingent in the east. As part of the “Persistent Presence” manoeuvre, on May 30, “the 3rd Battery of Artillery Battalion 295, under the command of Captain P., left for exercises and training in Lithuania”. In the current naval exercise “BALTOPS” in the Baltic Sea, which includes a total of 45 vessels, 60 aircraft and 4,000 troops from 14 countries, the German Navy is involved with nine units, including the combat support ship “Berlin”, the frigate “Sachsen” and the P-3C “Orion”, a maritime patrol aircraft designed for hunting submarines.

The “march diary” of a certain Captain Bumüller of the 12th armoured brigade in Amberg provides an insight into the provocative “Dragoon Ride II”, described as a “massive land march via Poland” to Estonia, where the Bundeswehr is participating with 16 vehicles. According to media reports, the Bundeswehr is dispatching a total of 5,000 soldiers to Eastern Europe this year alone.

The historical and political significance of the German deployment cannot be exaggerated. June 22 marks the 75th anniversary of Operation Barbarossa, the attack by Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union that claimed the lives of 40 million Soviet citizens and was conducted throughout Eastern Europe as a war of extermination. Every square metre over which German tanks and soldiers are once again trampling recalls dark memories of the past crimes of German imperialism. The Nazis initially used occupied Poland as a staging area for the invasion of the Soviet Union. Later, they constructed their extermination camps there.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, and after the full scope of the Holocaust became known, Germany was forced to observe military restraint for a long time. This began to change with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification twenty-five years ago. In the last two years, the German ruling class has completely dropped its flowery post-war pacifist phrases. It has returned to an aggressive foreign policy with ominous parallels to that of 1941.

According to a report in Die Welt, a new Defence White Paper, which provides for the deployment of the Bundeswehr domestically and for other missions abroad, no longer describes Russia as a “partner”, but rather as a “rival”. Of particular concern to the German government is the increasing use “of hybrid instruments for the targeted blurring of the boundary between war and peace”, and the “subversive undermining of other states”.

This narrative has nothing to do with reality. Moscow’s militaristic behaviour is not progressive and increases the danger of war. But in Eastern Europe, it is not Russia that is the aggressor and that “undermines states” and “blurs the boundary between war and peace”, but the Western powers. In Ukraine, Washington and Berlin organized a coup against the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych in early 2014, working closely with fascist forces. Since then, Germany has used the predominantly defensive reaction of Russia in order to systematically beef up its military and go on the offensive.

The decisions of the last few weeks to increase defence spending by 130 billion euros and the army by at least 7,000 soldiers are just the beginning. The stated goal of the German government is to gradually increase military spending to two percent of gross domestic product, as required by NATO.

News weekly Der Spiegel anticipated that Germany’s defence budget would have to “increase by five and a half billion euros year on year, by the 2024 target date”. The magazine concluded, “In the end, Germany would be the largest military power on the continent by far. Not all European neighbours will like that”.

At present, the German offensive is supported by the United States. Only last weekend, the New York Times published an ode to the return of German militarism. It wrote:

“It has taken decades since the horrors of World War II, but Berlin’s modern-day allies and, it seems, German leaders themselves are finally growing more comfortable with the notion that Germany’s role as the European Union’s de facto leader requires a military dimension”. All this comes “perhaps none too soon”, according to the Times. “The United States and others—including many of Germany’s own defense experts—want Germany to do even more for Continental security and to broaden deployments overseas”.

Although Berlin is presently stepping up its defence spending within the framework of NATO, and is deploying its troops to the East as part of the US-led offensive against Russia, there can be no doubt that the future struggle for control of Eurasia, as well as the Middle East and Africa, will lead to violent tensions and conflicts between the imperialist powers, as happened before in the First and Second World War.

A current strategy paper of the German Council on Foreign Relations by Joseph Braml, published in business daily Handelsblatt on May 17, accuses the US of following the “motto of the Roman Empire ( divide et impera )”, dividing the world into blocs “in order to better control them”. The editorial culminates with the demand: “Europe, especially the leading European power Germany, should in its own interest, prepare for the United States’ ever clearer concept of the enemy”.

At the end of May, writing in Die Zeit under the headline “What unites Obama and Trump”, Theo Sommer railed against American forces in Europe. “The main purpose of their continued presence” is “hardly the defence of Europe”, he complained. “Only the smallest part of their deployment serves the deterrence of Russia”, with the rest aimed at “the protection or assertion of American interests elsewhere in the world”.

Sommer added:

“Without their upstream positions in Europe, without the ports, air bases, hospitals and command centres in Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey, the Americans would be as good as operationally incapable in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean, in the Arctic”. The same applies to Africa, he added, and one could also “ask why America’s Africa Command was based in Stuttgart”.

Sommer, the long-time editor of the liberal weekly Die Zeit, and Braml, formerly a legislative adviser in the US House of Representatives, have traditionally held a more transatlantic orientation. Their editorials are an indication of the ferocious tensions that are developing below the surface again between the post-war allies, as the imperialist redivision of the world enters a new and dangerous phase.

This 2015 report by The Intercept sheds light on FBI procedures pertaining to the recent shootings in Orlando, Florida

*        *        *

U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns.

ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.”

But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

The big twist in this story: Local media in Massachusetts are saying Ciccolo was turned in by his father, a Boston Police captain. The FBI affidavit says the investigation was launched after a “close acquaintance … stated that Ciccolo had a long history of mental illness and in the last 18 months had become obsessed with Islam.”

According to the affidavit, Ciccolo first talked to the FBI informant about attacking two bars and a police station. Later, he spoke of attacking a college campus with a homemade pressure-cooker bomb like the one used in the Boston Marathon terror attack; he also talked about using guns and a lot of ammo. Ciccolo, according to the affidavit, then “ordered the firearms from a confidential human source (“CHS”) working with the FBI.”

“You get the rifles, I’ll get the powder,” Ciccolo allegedly told the informant. “The next time we meet I want us to have at least those two things.”

The FBI then surveilled Ciccolo as he bought a pressure cooker at a Walmart. When the  informant showed up with the guns, Ciccolo had no black powder. He was, however, soaking Styrofoam strips with motor oil in an apparent attempt to make explosive “Molotov cocktails,” the affidavit alleged.

The Justice Department’s press release referred to these as “Terrorist Attack Plans,” and alleged that he was a supporter of the Islamic State. But Ciccolo was notably not charged with any of the actual terror charges, such as use of weapons of mass destruction or providing material support to terrorists, that are most commonly employed by the Justice Department.

Our thoughts are with the families of the victims. (M. Ch. GR. Editor)

Recent Bloodbath Looks Almost Identical to FBI-Staged Entrapment Cases in 2015.

A horrific mass shooting unfolded in Florida claiming the lives of at least 52 with scores more injured. The British Independent would report in its article, “Omar Mateen: Orlando gay club gunman identified by police,” that:

Police have identified the gunman in the mass shooting at a gay club in Florida as 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan. 

Authorities in Orlando said they were investigating the shooting as an act of terrorism, as the death toll rose to 50 with a further 53 wounded.

At face value – it appears to be another senseless tragedy perpetrated by a “terrorist” inspired by militant groups the US claims to have been fighting for now nearly two decades. However the Independent reports another fact further down in the body of its article, claiming that:

ABC News reported he had been on police’s “radar”, though not subject to an investigation.

If this sounds like a familiar narrative, that’s because virtually every high-profile “terrorist attack” carried out in North America and Europe in recent years has been done so by suspects long under investigation by US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

CNN’s article, “50 killed in Florida nightclub, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance,” would further elaborate on Mateen’s background, stating: 

Two officials tell CNN that the FBI had investigated Mateen at some point for possibly having ties to or sympathizing with Islamic extremism. A law enforcement official said there were two cases opened involving Mateen but the probes didn’t result in enough evidence to charge him with anything.

In the past two weeks Mateen legally purchased a Glock pistol, found at the shooting scene, from a St. Lucie County area gun store, a law enforcement official said.

What CNN fails to mention is the long history the FBI has of taking “sympathizers” through a series of steps to acquire “enough evidence,” including posing as terrorists and providing suspects with weapons and plans for attacks precisely like the one that just unfolded in Florida.

To understand the implications of yet another high-profile terror attack involving a suspect already known to law enforcement agencies, one must examine previous examples of admittedly set up attacks “foiled” at the last moment by the FBI, as well as attacks that have been carried out by individuals tracked for years and even arrested multiple times by Western police and intelligence agencies only to be let go time and time again until finally carrying out “the big one.”

ISIS Inspired? Or FBI Inspired? FBI Set Up Multiple Attacks in 2015 Almost Exactly Like the Florida Shooting

A terror suspect armed to the teeth storming a public place and killing scores is actually a very familiar script. The FBI wrote several such scripts in 2015 alone, including entrapping and arresting a mentally-ill suspect after providing him with an arsenal of deadly weapons almost identical to the arsenal recently employed in Flordia.

The Intercept would report in its article, “Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI,” that:

U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns. 

ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.” 

But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

The Intercept would also reference the FBI’s affidavit (.pdf), stating (emphasis added):

According to the affidavit, Ciccolo first talked to the FBI informant about attacking two bars and a police station. Later, he spoke of attacking a college campus with a homemade pressure-cooker bomb like the one used in the Boston Marathon terror attack; he also talked about using guns and a lot of ammo. Ciccolo, according to the affidavit, then “ordered the firearms from a confidential human source (“CHS”) working with the FBI.”

The list of weapons provided to the mentally-ill suspect by the FBI informant is shocking. Revealed in the official FBI affidavit (.pdf), the weapons included a 9mm Glock 17, a 10mm Glock 20, a .223 Colt AR-15 rifle, (referred to by the media as an “assault rifle”), and a 556 Sig Arms SG550 rifle (also often referred to as an assault rifle). Also included in the affidavit is the same hysterical rhetoric encouraged by FBI informants now evident in the recent actions of terror suspect Omar Mateen in Florida.

The FBI literally provided a mentally-ill man they helped plan a terrorist attack together with, an arsenal of deadly weapons – arresting him just before he committed his crime. The only factor that prevented the 2015 entrapment of Ciccolo from becoming a live Florida shooting-style attack was the fact that the FBI arrested Ciccolo before he carried out his planned attack – while those following Mateen did not arrest him.

The role of the FBI in Mateen obtaining his weapons will never be known since Mateen is now – conveniently – dead. Even if he purchased them “legally” at a gun store, it should be noted that in other FBI entrapment cases, suspects were encouraged to purchase weapons themselves, with the FBI arresting them only after they left gun stores with their newly acquired arsenal.

Image: Another patsy set up by the FBI in 2015 was allowed to purchase two
semi-automatic rifles at a gun store before being arrested upon leaving with the weapons. 

NBC Cincinnati affiliate WLWT5 would report in their 2015 article, “FBI: Cincinnati man bought rifles, planned to attack U.S. Capitol,” that (emphasis added):

Agents said that on Tuesday and Wednesday Cornell met with the informant the final time to plan their trip to D.C. to execute their plan. He purchased two Armalite M-15 5.56 mm semi-automatic rifles Wednesday morning, along with 600 rounds of ammunition, and was arrested. 

Cornell bought the rifles at the Point Blank gun store on Harrison Avenue in Colerain Township. He passed a background check and paid $1,900 in cash, $700 for each rifle and about $400 for the ammunition. 

The gun store owner, John Dean, said FBI agents notified him that Cornell was going to come in to buy the guns about 10 minutes before he entered the store. 

Dean said the agents told him to allow the purchase and agents would stop Cornell after he left the store.

What if agents didn’t stop him after he left the store? He had two semi-automatic rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition – more than enough to carry out a Florida shooting-style attack. Some may be immediately tempted to conclude that the FBI would never allow an attack they played a role in planning to go “live.” However, they would be wrong.

A Notorious FBI-Staged Attack that Went Live

The FBI in fact was presiding over the terrorists who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The role of the FBI leading up to the deadly attack would most likely have gone unreported had an FBI informant not taped his conversations with FBI agents after growing suspicious during the uncover operation. The New York Times in their article, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” reported:

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars.

The FBI and other US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies “accidentally” failing to stop terror suspects they have long-known about and have even arrested multiple times has since become endemic. In recent years, virtually every suspect has either been known by such agencies beforehand, or has been involved in a history of crime and terrorism before carrying out their final acts of grand terrorism.

Such was the case in the various French attacks. Many from the network that carried out the French attacks were then directly involved in the Belgium attacks. To explain away the fact that virtually all the suspects had been within European security agencies’ grasp for years but were still able to carry out their deadly attacks – the Western media has attempted to cite a lack of resources.

In reality, what is playing out is an engineered strategy of tension using both the threat of terrorism and actual terrorism to create hysteria, fear, division, and ultimately obedience and capitulation across Western populations.

It should be remembered that Al Qaeda itself began as a US-Saudi joint venture to fight proxy warfare against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan where conventional Western forces could not go. It should also be pointed out that since then, Al Qaeda and its more recent affiliate, the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” have enjoyed logistical support from the US and NATO for years in proxy wars ranging from Libya to Syria to Iraq and the frontiers of Iran, southern Russia, and western China.

More recently it has been admitted even within the Western press that the “Islamic State” is being resupplied and reinforced from NATO territory itself, with the UK Telegraph admitting in its article, “US-backed Syrian opposition forces surround Isil in key city and cut off main supply route,” that:

…Syrian opposition forces have completely surrounded the Islamic State-held stronghold of Manbij and cut off the group’s main route to the outside world….. 

The loss of Manbij will be a huge loss to the group. It had been a waypoint on an Isil supply line between the Turkish border and the extremist group’s de facto capital, Raqqa. 

Again, we see that while the US claims to fight the “Islamic State,” its NATO partner Turkey is quite literally the source of the terrorist organization’s fighting capacity, with US forces permanently stationed in Turkey for decades and Turkey having been a NATO member since the 1950s. Despite open acknowledgments that the “Islamic State” is operating out of Turkey, the US has used the presence of the terrorist organization inside Syria as a pretext for intervening in the war directly.

Were the US truly interested in stopping the “Islamic State,” it and its allies in Ankara would be easily able to wield maximum force within Turkey’s territory to cut the group off before it even reached Syrian territory.  That both Washington and Ankara are feigning an inexplicable inability to do this, and insist instead that the war must be fought inside Syria exposes the cynical nature with which the West uses – not fights – terrorism to further its geopolitical and domestic political agendas.

As special interests attempt to leverage this latest terrorist attack – all of these actual facts must be kept in mind to ground us to a reality Western politicians and media outlets will attempt to detach us from in the coming days and weeks.

The best reporting on the depth of America’s dictatorship is probably that being done by Atlanta Georgia’s NBC-affiliated, Gannett-owned, TV Channel “11 Alive”, WXIA television, “The Investigators” series of local investigative news reports, which show, up close and at a cellularly detailed level, the way things actually work in today’s America. Although it’s only local, it displays what meets the legal standards of the US federal government in actually any state in the union; so, it exposes the character of the US government, such that what’s shown to be true here, meets America’s standard for ‘democracy’, or else the federal government isn’t enforcing federal laws against it (which is the same thing as its meeting the federal government’s standards).

The links to three of these local TV news reports will be provided, along with a summary of each of the videos; and then the broader context will be provided, which ties the local picture in with the national, and then the resulting international, picture. So, this will be like a zoom-lens view, starting with three selected close-ups, and then broadening the view to wide-angle, showing the context in terms of which what’s happening in that fine detail (those close-up views) makes sense.

The central video will be the second of the three, which deals with the impact that the national organization called ALEC plays in creating the entire situation in the US, and which ties the Georgia-state reality in with the reality of the US federal government.

Here are the three videos, and their respective summaries:

Georgians are prohibited from seeing Georgia’s laws unless they pay over $300 to buy the law books. (Thus, for example, Georgians get arrested, then charged, then judged, then perhaps imprisoned, according to laws they can’t even so much as see beforehand.)

Georgia’s laws are written in secret by the Kochs’ and other billionaires’ ‘charity’ (like NGOs but operating only within a nation, not internationally) called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), which pays legislators to approve the laws that it writes, and which requires them to pass these laws (or else they’ll lose their legislative seats as being ‘representatives of the people’).

NOTE: Perhaps because of the explosive nature of news reporting such as this, that TV station prohibits the Web Archive, web.archive.org, from archiving their investigative reports, but this particular TV report was also recently posted by someone to YouTube.

This TV report’s transcript also was once available at another of Gannett’s Georgia TV stations, and that station didn’t block web-archiving, so this transcript, though no longer online, was web-saved and will thus permanently be available.

Georgians have no way of knowing who or what will be charged to them on their medical bills. Patients who have a medical emergency are especially flying blind into deep indebtedness and possible bankruptcy, over which they’ve got no control.

He signals to the Sheriff’s deputy.
I’m a guest of the hotel sir.
Not for long, not for long.
I’m here – I’m a paying guest of this hotel sir.

We’ll take care of that.
Let me escort you up to your room to get your things.
Did we violate some law or something? I mean, are we violating a law here?…
WXIA Reporters say they filed half a dozen open records requests with Georgia legislators including the speaker of the house – asking for receipts and reimbursements to ALEC events – but had their requests denied because the general assembly exempted themselves from the Georgia Open Records law.

This, then, is the reality in the nation that now is trying to impose upon the entire world the same corporate type of government that already exists in America. This is what, in the West, is now the reality of its ‘democracy’. It is Newspeak ‘democracy’, not what used to be called “democracy”.

And, so, it was with remarkable honesty, courage, and frankness, that the best-known living Georgian, America’s former President Jimmy Carter, said recently of the US government:

Now it’s just an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or being elected president. And the same thing applies to governors, and US Senators and congress members. So, now we’ve just seen a subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect, and sometimes get, favors for themselves after the election is over… At the present time the incumbents, Democrats and Republicans, look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves. Somebody that is already in Congress has a great deal more to sell.

And that’s what we just now saw in practice at the state level, in that middle video.

Former President Carter was describing there the ‘democracy’ that now presents itself to the global public as being the model that the entire world must copy– or else!

According to this government, the nations that resist, do it because they are “corrupt” and “not democracies”. America, and NATO, and its allies (including Saudi Arabia, etc.?), demand to be obeyed, on that basis– as being the world’s opponents of corruption and of dictatorship. For this, their enemy nations (e.g., Iraq, Libya, Syria, and– via a coup in February 2014 – Ukraine) are being invaded, to impose compliant governments: millions are killed, and tens of millions are forced to flee and become unwanted refugees. And America and its allies then blame other nations, especially Russia (their favorite bogeyman), for that. By contrast, ‘the West’ is supposed to stand for clean government, ‘transparency’, and ‘democracy’.

So, how corrupt is America? It’s become corrupt enough to threaten to take over the entire world. And, perhaps soon after the NATO Summit on 8-9 July, we’ll know whether or not the national aristocracies that are subordinate to the US aristocracy, are, indeed, willing to join the American aristocracy’s willingness to use nuclear weapons to achieve the objective.

Washington wants Latin and Central America recolonized, US-controlled tyranny replacing sovereign independence throughout the hemisphere.

At an Association of Caribbean States summit last week in Havana, Cuban President Raul Castro expressed alarm about Latin American and Caribbean “turbulence,” calling it the result “of an imperialist and oligarchic counteroffensive against popular and progressive governments.”

Washington orchestrated Brazil’s coup, wrongfully impeaching President Dilma Rousseff, forcing her to step down for 180 days, facing Senate trial controlled by right-wing fascists sure to convict her – despite no legitimate grounds. She committed no crimes.

Washington wants neoliberal harshness replacing Venezuelan Bolivarian fairness. Its tactics include making its economy scream, causing enormous hardships for ordinary people, orchestrating violent street protests, and wanting President Nicolas Maduro ousted by coup, recall referendum or perhaps assassination if other methods fail.

A previous article explained the following. Article 72 of Venezuela’s Constitution states

(a)ll magistrates and other offices (including the president) filled by popular vote are subject to revocation.

Once half (their) term of office…has elapsed, 20% of (registered) voters (by petition may call for) a referendum to revoke such official’s mandate.

When a number of voters equal to or greater than the number of those who elected the official vote in favor of revocation (provided the total is 20% or more of registered voters), the official’s mandate shall be deemed revoked…

Things aren’t as straightforward as they seem. Verifying the authenticity of signatures collected precedes any further action.

According to Venezuela’s National Electoral Council (CNE) president Tibisay Lucena, rampant fraud was discovered. Over 605,000 signatures were found defective and disqualified – including thousands belonging to deceased Venezuelans, others to minors too young to vote, as well as people with nonexistent identity cards.

An investigation into massive fraud may follow. Venezuelans wishing to withdraw their names may do so. Others will have their fingerprints checked for authenticity.

At that point, CNE authorities have 20 working days to determine if opposition elements may move on to try collecting signatures from the required 20% of the electorate needed to hold a recall referendum.

If gotten and verified, a process requiring months to complete, one will be organized within 90 days. Removing Maduro requires support from more than the 50.6% of voters supporting his 2013 election.

On Saturday, he ruled out a referendum this year, saying if its “requirements are met, it will be (held) next year, and that’s it.” Otherwise, no recall vote will be held.

Timing is important. If held by January 10, 2017, a new election will be called if Maduro loses. If things go against him after this date, Vice President Aristobulo Isturiz will serve as president until January 2019, when his term expires.

A recall petition submitted on May 2 got 1.8 million signatures, over one third so far disqualified as fraudulent or ineligible. Verifying the remaining numbers must be completed before taking any further action, months of effort required.

Dark forces in Washington and Venezuela may not wait. Past coup attempts against Hugo Chavez and Maduro failed. Perhaps Obama intends another before leaving office.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

There is something so fundamentally wrong about equating the joy and genius of scientific discovery with profit and markets. Initial discoveries in quantum physics had nothing to do with the idea of pursuing a remorseless “bottom line” or some specious market concept.  The results of such discoveries were, however, gargantuan.  Eventually, applications arise, with various economic benefits.  Patience, however, is a golden virtue in that regard.

Australia’s scientific management (these comprise scientists who attempt to straddle the world of practice and business, and petty bureaucrats) have not taken kindly to the field of pure scientific endeavour.

The Turnbull government has continued what the previous government did: savage the fund lines, turning off the taps.  Australia’s core scientific institution risks becoming a rump, while other countries pour money into theirs with intoxicating enthusiasm.

The climate change modelling unit at the main scientific organisation, CSIRO, has been devastated, with the government feeling that sufficient work has been done in the area.  Having tooted the Australian horn of achievement, Turnbull and scientific management feel that money might be better spent elsewhere.

The entire sense of Australian science as business can be gathered by a skirt through the website.  The reader stumbles across the “Operating Model” which was obviously written by a technocrat versed in painful MBA jargon: “Our operating model underpins the successful execution of our strategy and delivery of our goals.”[1]

The language is cold and uninspiring.  There is a reminder where the body comes from, notably the provisions of the Science and Industry Research Act 1949.  The message from the minister speaks about government “providing the catalyst for collaboration and transformation of our industries while capitalising on the depth of our innovative and highly skilled workforce.”[2]

There is nothing in the minister’s statement of 2015 (that of Ian Macfarlane of Industry and Finance) that reflects the deeper values of the scientific enterprise as science per se. Scientists are encouraged to foster business acumen, charging into brave futures with bright advertising credentials.

The idea is to reward Australian “industry” rather than add to the annals of discovery. What is sovereign is never in dispute.  It is made clear that CSIRO “had a central role in the translation of science and technology into products and services that benefit our nation and enhance our productivity and our prosperity.”

Policy documents that would have sat very comfortably in a Soviet government ministry have been produced, proclaiming strategic directions and aspirations.  Strategy 2020: Australia’s Innovation Catalyst, is one such ghastly product, glowingly administrative and heavily managerial.

CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall’s statement from 2015 uses all the language of spin in his vision.  There are “inputs”; there are “crowd sourced ideas from more than 7000 of our creative people, customers, thought leaders and the public”.  There is that word that Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has made a Tibetan mantra: innovation.

For Marshall, the CSIRO is a business mechanism with a purpose.  The body must “help reinvent existing industries and strive to create a new industry for a changing Australian economy.”  His message is delivered like a party official in full regalia.  “Australia must be a high performing innovation economy.”

This is emphasised in the CSIRO’s overview of “global megatrends”.  Some mention is made about scarcity and resources, the issue of water, mineral and food resources.  Climate change is briefly mentioned as part of the changes in earth systems “from global to microbial”.  (Such vagueness is typical in business speak.)

Economic worth makes a far more prominent appearance, to such an extent there is a mention of the “silk highway” (an insertion of Chinese influence?) seeing fast “growth of emerging economies, urbanisation, geopolitical change and the transition from industrialisation into technologically advanced service sectors.”

Employees of CSIRO have also been caught off guard by the organisation’s greater insistence that they strap on their entrepreneurial boots and seek out prospects to “partner” with business.  “The CSIRO,” as the organisation statement asserts, “invests in an evolving portfolio of businesses to deliver on our mission.”

Australia’s tertiary sector is also milking this tendency, creating a hybrid graduate interested in both scientific trends and business.  The University of Technology Sydney, the University of New South Wales, and the Queensland University of Technology are among such institutions.

The assumption here is that such hybrid degrees and combinations are automatic, and while it would be incorrect to ignore that science has economic and social applications, it is also a very narrow way of viewing the world.

Marshall’s money-driven overview is a reminder about how subordinate science can become. It continues to prove central to the military industrial complex. It continues to fund projects of biosecurity that involve mass extermination of undesirable species (undesirable, in that sense, being determined as a matter of agrarian economy).  University departments, strung along by industry grants, have also fallen victim to this cycle of production and discovery.

Farewells have been made to genuine, speculative science. If an Einstein was to appear at the doorstep of CSIRO these days, he would be turned back with disdain.  That is modern innovation for you.

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

Notes

 [1] http://www.csiro.au/en/About/Strategy-structure/Operating-model

[2] http://www.csiro.au/strategy/

Syria is on the front lines against the dictatorship of a globalizing economic ideology that favours the dominance of capital/markets over people and nation-states.

Wahhabi Saudi Arabia., the Gulf Monarchies, Israel, and NATO are trying to impose the hidden driver of imperialism, “International Capital”, on Syria.

Robin Mathews describes our own capture by international capital in “The Trans Pacific Partnership: Canada and Imperial Globalization”:

A characteristic of Imperial Globalization is criminal manipulation of people and events for the profit of a few. It includes massive ‘disinformation’ about equality, benefits, social development, law, improved standards of living, etc.  The disinformation is spread by ‘authoritative’ news sources.  In the hands of gigantic, wealthy, private corporations, globalization is a process which works to erase sovereign democracies and replaces them with ‘treatied’ sub-states, economic colonies ruled by faceless, offshore, often secret, unaccountable powers.

Whereas Canadians are led to believe that we live in a free and democratic society, we are increasingly engineered to accept the dictatorship of transnational capital as expressed through international banking institutions (as opposed to publicly-owned banking) and “free trade” agreements, all of which subordinate elected polties and serve the interests of an international oligarch class, to the detriment of Canadians.  Both domestically and internationally, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few.

So how did Syria, free from terrorists prior to the pre-planned, criminal, imperialist “interventions”, earn the distinction of being on the front lines against the West?

Syria insists on choosing its own path, as per international law, and refuses to be a vassal of US led forces of predatory capitalism that siphons the world’s resources for the benefit of a transnational oligarch class.

Supremacists, on the other hand, view international law as a disposable commodity.

Countries are opened up for the extraction of human and natural resources.  Transnational banksters pry open previously sovereign countries with usurious loans bundled Structural Adjustment Plans that privatize and loot public assets for the benefit of the publicly bailed-out “private” Market.

When all else fails, when sanctions haven’t killed and demoralized enough innocent civilians – the “other” — non-compliant civilized nations — face Empire’s foot soldiers — the likes of which include ISIS, and al Qaeda/al Nursra Front in Syria.

Zafar Bangath, director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought (ICIT), and president of the Islamic Society of York Region, Toronto, ON., explains that Empire is seeking to install a compliant puppet government in Syria; that it is seeking to destroy Syria; and that it seeks to protect Israeli supremacy.  Already, he notes, the aggressors have inflicted about $100 billion worth of damage on the battered country.

His assessment errs on the side of caution. A study by The Lancet, “Syria: end sanctions and find a political solution to peace” indicates that by the end of 2014, the cost of illegal sanctions imposed on Syria stood at US $143.8 billion, and that 80% of the population was living in poverty.

Meanwhile, President Assad is well aware of the imperial forces behind the mercenaries invading his country.  In a speech to the newly elected members of the People’s Assembly, he elaborated upon the modus operandi of the invaders.

• They seek to attack the constitution by means of a so-called  “transition” stage
• They seek to destroy the two pillars of the government: the army, and the diverse national, pan-Arab and religious identity of Syrians
• They seek to rebrand the savage terrorists as “moderates” and then to eternally provide them with a cover of legitimacy
• They seek to create chaos, sectarianism, ethnic enclaves that turns the people’s commitment from the homeland to conflicting groups that seek help from foreigners against their own people
• They seek to be branded as “humanitarian” and “protectors” to save the people from (externally engineered) conflict and misery.

By imposing economic and armed terrorism on the people, by waging a phony war against their own proxies, and by destroying a countries infrastructure, the imperialists seek to be seen as saviours, humanitarians, protectors, who can then introduce the “free market” of international capital, which will be the coup de grace to effect the final destruction of the host country.

We’ve seen the same script play out most recently in Libya and Iraq.

Stephen Gowans explains in “Aspiring to Rule the World: US Capital and the Battle for Syria”:

Significantly, every country in which the United States has intervened militarily either directly or through proxies, or threatened militarily, since WWII has had a largely publicly owned economy in which the state has played a decisive role, or has had a at democratized economy where productive assets have been redistributed from private (usually foreign) investors to workers and farmers, and in which room for US banks, US corporations and US investors to exploit the countries’ land, labor, markets and resources has been limited, if not altogether prohibited. These include the Soviet Union and its allied socialist countries; China; North Korea; Nicaragua; Yugoslavia; Iraq; Libya; Iran; and now Syria. We might expect that a foreign policy dominated by a wealthy investor class would have this character.

Syria, then, is opposing international forces of Capital that threaten its very existence. These imperial forces are trying to impose a globalized dictatorship of Capital that expresses itself externally in the economic sanctions and the invading terrorists ravaging Syria, even as expresses itself through “internal imperialism” in Western countries such as Canada, where public resources are increasingly looted for the benefit of international investors, and oligarch classes, foreign and domestic.

Instead of worshipping at the altar of transnational predatory capitalism, which is spreading war and poverty throughout the world, we should be embracing “Life Capital”, and the forces of economic and political democracy that accompany it.

The 13th report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Ukraine between 16 November 2015 and 15 February 2016, when the Minsk Agreements were in force, has come as a shock to Kiev.

According to the UN, more than three million people live in the areas directly affected by the conflict. The exact number of people who have left Ukraine-controlled territory is still unknown, although rough estimates range from 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. The Ukrainian government has estimated that more than a million people have left southeast Ukraine for Russia, Belarus and Europe. This figure does not match that of the Russian federal migration service, however: in 2015, around four million Ukrainians crossed the border, with nearly 2.6 million settling in Russia. More than a million people have arrived from southeast Ukraine. Residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are permitted to live freely in Russia.

The discrepancy in the figures clearly shows that Ukraine is not interested in keeping track of its citizens, whether within the country or abroad. This means that one of the aims of the military campaign launched in the east of the country is to displace the population from the area of conflict, predominantly to Russia. Given that refugees from the republics to Ukraine are facing discrimination in access to public services, according to the UN report, the authorities in Kiev do not seem to want the residents of Donbass either.

The UN also states that those living close to the contact line (nearly 800,000 people) are particularly suffering, and the lives of these people are constantly at risk. The UN mission believes that the assistance being given to the residents of Donbass is insufficient, even given Russia’s humanitarian convoys, although the fact that it was Ukraine that shut down all the social programmes and introduced the ‘blockade’ unfortunately remained beyond the scope of the report.

The UN believes that the permit regime introduced by Ukraine and the disorder at checkpoints are negatively reinforcing the isolation of those living in the DPR and LPR. Queues of up to 300-400 cars waiting on either side of the checkpoints are observed on a regular basis and this recently ended in tragedy. Due to the fact that the Ukrainian checkpoint is not open at night, civilians who had been queuing in their cars overnight were fired at by the Ukrainian side using illegal-calibre weapons (122 mm), resulting in the deaths of five people, including a pregnant woman.

During the period covered in the report, the Ukrainian armed forces have advanced even further into populated areas and the numerous attacks on the residential areas of Horlivka, Shakhtarsk and Debaltseve are also mentioned in the report.

Since the Minsk ceasefire agreements entered into force (i.e. since 15 February 2015), there have been 843 civilian casualties – 235 killed (216 adults and 19 children) and 608 injured (554 adults and 44 children). At the same time, the UN mission notes that it is unable to attribute some of the victims to either side of the conflict. It also emphasises that the real number of those killed and injured could be higher than that given in the report.

The number of people missing is particularly shocking. The Ukrainian side has reported 741 persons missing, while the DPR has registered 420 missing persons. In addition, the UN mission has ascertained that approximately 1,000 bodies held in morgues in government-controlled territory have still not been identified.

And once again the numbers are crying out that the Ukrainian government does not believe people to be important. The number of persons that Kiev has declared missing is a third less than the number of unidentified bodies! And the numbers also ignore the mortal remains in areas where hostilies took place – search operations are virtually non-existent. As the UN report states, there is not even a dedicated mechanism in place to gather statements from the relatives of missing persons.

The UN mission has also not taken into account the number of unmarked graves in cemeteries. The overwhelming majority of missing persons should not be looked for in the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, but among the thousands of bodies that have already been quietly buried or are still lying in morgues. It is possible that the official number of those who will never return has been hugely underestimated.

The efforts of the Ukrainian side aimed at searching for and identifying those killed and those missing are referred to in the UN report using the word «inaction».

Kiev cannot admit that to avoid responsibility, it is secretly carrying out a policy of ‘unidentified bodies’. It is also being suggested to relatives that missing persons are being held captive by DPR and LPR ‘separatists’.

The report concedes that some people recorded as missing may be alive, but are being held in secret places of detention either in the republics or in Ukrainian-controlled territory.

The UN mission has finally figured out that the secret prisons and torture in Ukraine are an established system that has become part of the state and its policies. Of the 1,925 criminal investigations launched into allegations of torture in 2015, 1,450 were closed.

The report has also provided yet more evidence that it is not a civil war. It is a war between those who seized power by means of a military coup and the people of Ukraine, a war that is hypocritically being referred to as an ‘anti-terrorist operation’.

As noted in the report,

throughout the country, OHCHR continued to receive allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, and torture and ill-treatment of people accused by the Ukrainian authorities of ‘trespassing territorial integrity’, ‘terrorism’ or related offenses, or of individuals suspected of being members of, or affiliated with, the armed groups.

People are not just being tortured, but are also being executed without trial. In Sloviansk, for example, the basement of the local college is being used for this purpose. A basement used for torture and summary executions was also discovered by UN inspectors in Izium, Kharkiv district. In addition, «a network of unofficial places of detention, often located in the basement of regional SBU buildings, have been identified». The SBU also has such basements in Odessa and Kharkiv. In February 2016, between 20 to 30 people were detained in the basement of the Kharkiv regional SBU building, and the vast majority of prisoners were not arrested in accordance with legal procedures and were not charged.

The report also notes that the SBU obtains confessions of terrorism using torture, and those who sign the confessions are told that should they complain, then their families, including their children, will also be made to suffer. The Security Service of Ukraine refers to such methods as the use of «proportional» and «justified» force.

The 13th report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Ukraine appeared on 3 March 2016, but it is only now that the information bomb has exploded following an article in The Times, in which Ivan Simonovic, UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, talks about the report and also about five secret SBU prisons that a delegation of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture was not allowed access to, resulting in the delegation cutting short its visit to Ukraine…

The 13th report also completely destroys the myth that there are thousands of prisoners in the DPR and LPR. There is no trace of the thousands – in February 2016, the SBU gave the UN mission a list of 136 people who are allegedly being detained in custody in the republics, but nothing is known about this for sure. The list provided by the DPR authorities, however, looks completely different. «Some 1,110 persons were detained by the Government of Ukraine, including 363 members of the armed groups. This includes 577 people arrested for ‘their political views’ and 170 civilians ‘who have nothing to do with the conflict’», says the UN report. The SBU has gone overboard by essentially creating a system of concentration camps. The UN report likens the actions of the SBU to the seizure of hostages.

It has been impossible to keep the scandal hushed up, but while this regime exists in Ukraine, investigations into its criminal activities will be carried out along the same lines as the investigations into the people burned alive in Odessa on 2 May 2014. Namely that the executioners will remain free or under house arrest while the victims are imprisoned. For years.

Amid rising concerns over global economic growth, global bond prices surged to a record high on Friday in a “flight to safety” as equity markets in Japan and Europe experienced their worst day since the turbulence at the start of the year.

Yields on German, UK and Japanese government bonds, which move in an inverse relationship to their price, all reached new depths, with the yield on the German 10-year Bund, regarded as a benchmark for the euro zone, going as low as 0.01 percent.

The head of sovereign capital markets at Citigroup, Philip Brown, said to see the yield on the Bund so low was “shocking.” “Equities are falling and fixed income is rallying in a flight to quality—there are real fears in markets about global growth.”

The surge in government bond prices came as the European Central Bank began buying corporate bonds in addition to its purchases of government debt of €80 billion a month. The extension of debt purchases, the result of an ECB decision last March to step up its quantitative easing program aimed at pumping trillions of euros into the financial system, has been accompanied by deepening criticism from Germany.

The bond-buying program, which started on Wednesday, had been expected to only involve high-grade bonds. While the ECB has not disclosed which corporate bonds are being purchased, market analysts quickly discerned those involved. Contrary to expectations some of them are of “speculative grade” status.

One of the most prominent was Telecom Italia Spa, whose bonds are listed as below investment grade status by two of the major credit rating agencies and only qualified because of the higher grade status afforded them by the Fitch rating agency.

The new phase of ECB action was greeted with a 12-page report by Deutsche Bank chief economist David Folkerts-Landau denouncing the central bank’s program. The criticisms have been voiced before but the latest report is the most strident yet.

Folkerts-Landau said the ECB had “lost the plot” and its desperate actions—bond purchasing programs and the establishment of negative interest rates—raised the risk of a “catastrophic” mistake.

“ECB policy is threatening the European project as a whole for the sake of short-term financial stability,” he wrote.

“The benefits from ever-looser policy are diminishing while the litany of distortions, perversions and disincentives grows by the day. Savers are punished and speculators rewarded. Bad companies survive while good companies are too scared to invest.”

The report compared the ECB’s mistakes to the German Reichsbank in the 1920s which printed money, leading to hyperinflation and economic collapse. “That was a hundred years ago but mistakes keep happening despite all the supposed improvement in central banking.”

Tracing out the evolution of the ECB policy, he said that after the failure of the lowest interest rates in 20 generations to boost investment, the central bank embarked on a massive program of purchasing euro zone member government debt. But the sellers of that debt did not use the money to invest but just placed their money at the central bank, after which the ECB went to the “next logical extreme” by imposing negative interest rates on deposits. He noted that almost half of euro zone sovereign debt was trading with a negative yield, meaning that a bond purchaser who held it to termination would make a loss on the investment.

Folkerts-Landau also bought into a political row that erupted in April. At that time, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said the impact of the negative interest rate regime on small savers was at least 50 percent responsible for the rise of the right-wing German populist party, AfD, which made considerable gains in recent regional elections.

“The longer policy prevents the necessary catharsis,” Folkerts-Landau wrote, “the more it contributes to the growth of populist or extremist policies.”

These comments point to the underlying reasons for the strident opposition within the German financial system to the ECB policies. A large portion of the German financial system consists of smaller regional banks whose business model, based on investment in secure government debt, is being hammered by negative rates. The operations of these regional banks form a part of the social base of the ruling party, the CDU.

The criticism of the ECB goes beyond Deutsche Bank. This week Commerzbank, which is partly government-owned and second only to Deutsche Bank, indicated it was looking at the possibility of hoarding its cash rather than placing its funds with the ECB where it is charged at a negative interest rate of minus 0.4 percent. As one commentator noted, such an action “would be the most flagrant bank protest against central bank policy yet seen.”

The policy agenda of Deutsche Bank and much of the German financial establishment was indicated in Folkerts-Landau’s indictment. Despite its “good intentions,” he wrote, the ECB had removed the incentive for euro zone government to revamp their policies through “structural reform.” Together with the reference to a “necessary catharsis,” this points to the growing clamour in financial circles for the initiation of further sweeping attacks on the social and employment conditions of the working class across Europe—a deepening of the measures which the French government is seeking to implement through its new labour laws.

The official rationale for the actions of the ECB and other central banks is that lower interest rates are needed to boost inflation and investment. But the euro zone remains in the grip of deflation and the ECB has lowered its own 2018 forecasts for growth in the region.

Opposition to present policies is not confined to criticism of the ECB. This week the Fitch rating agency reported that negative yielding government debt globally had now risen to more than $10 trillion following a 5 percent increase in bonds with a sub-zero yield. This means that the price of the underlying bond is rising, as yields and the price move in an inverse relationship.

Initially negative yields only affected the shortest-term bonds but the phenomenon is spreading and now encompasses seven-year German Bunds and 10-year Japanese government bonds. This is impacting heavily on insurance companies and pension funds which rely heavily on positive rates on government bonds to finance their operations.

Commenting on the $10 trillion mass of negative yielding sovereign debt, Bill Gross, the former head of the world’s largest bond trading firm, tweeted: “Global yields lowest in 500 years of recorded history … This is a supernova that will explode one day.” This refers to a situation in which interest rates begin to rise, leading to a fall in the price of bonds, thereby creating massive losses for investors who have purchased them at inflated prices.

Gross is by no means the only one warning of a possible financial catastrophe. Capital Group, which manages about $1.4 trillion in funds, has warned that negative interest rates are distorting financial markets and might lead to “potentially dangerous consequences.”

The head of the Los Angeles-based bond house DoubleLine, Jeffrey Gunlach, recently described negative interest rates as “the stupidest idea I have ever heard of” and warned that the “next major event” for financial markets could be when the ECB and the Bank of Japan cancel the experiment.

Larry Fink, the head of BlackRock, one of the world’s biggest hedge funds, recently wrote in a note to investors, that there had been plenty of discussion about how low interest rates had contributed to the inflation in asset prices. But, he continued, “not nearly enough attention has been paid to the toll these low rates—and now negative rates—are taking on the ability of investors to save and plan for the future.”

In other words, out of the horse’s mouth so to speak, comes the warning that the parasitic policies which have proved so beneficial to the hedge funds and other multi-billion dollar financial speculators are undermining the central foundations on which the financial system has rested for decades.

Nas palavras da jornalista canadense Naomi Klein, “se olharmos para a história dos primeiros lugares onde o neoliberalismo foi imposto, ele foi imposto exatamente no oposto [do que nos é dito]: foi necessária uma derrubada da democracia para que ele se desenvolvesse”.

Por outro lado, políticas sociais são aplicadas exatamente como socorro às crises profundas geradas pela maximização do livre-mercado. Casos emblemáticos são o New Deal norte-americano do presidente Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pós-Grande Depressãoiniciada pela quebra da Bolsa de Valores de Nova Iorque em 1929, e os Estados de Bem-Estar Social europeus pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial.

Os países nórdicos, berço da social-democracia, sempre foram exemplos neste sentido, nos dias de hoje abrindo-se ao Consenso de Washington ao diminuir a influência estatal, e, como sempre ocorreu na história, tornar as economias mais vulneráveis.

Enquanto tal modelo gera horror em setores reacionários pautados pela mídia predominante defensora dos interesses das grandes corporações que a sustentam, que chegam a ponto (não raras vezes) de qualificá-lo de “comunismo diabólico”, por outro lado a intervenção estatal de Bush filho em 208, maior da história destinada ao socorro aos bancos criminosos, exatamente os geradores da depressão econômica de então (não sanada até hoje), o qual ultrapassou 1,8 trilhão de dólares, e dois anos depois o plano de salvação de Barack Obama à indústria automobilística acima da casa dos 60 bilhões de dólares, acomodam os espíritos mais conservadores das sociedades.

Vale apontar que no atual festival da despolitização tupiniquim que tirou da Presidência uma das únicas políticas sem acusação nem sequer sendo investigada por corrupção, para colocar no poder, nas palavras de Noam Chomsky (intelectual mais respeitado do mundo) “uma corja de ladrões” sob forte influência e aplausos midiáticos, as classes média e alta brasileiras têm apoiado agora e historicamente o model neoliberal, com a típica raiva caçadoras de bruxas anti-comunistas presente na ridícula votação pelo impedimento da presidente Dilma Rousseff (assim observado por todos os meios de comunicação mundiais), e nestas semanas subsequentes.

Apontado neste sentido, da excessiva ignorância baseada na ditadura do mercado que relega todo o aparato do Estado e a própria sociedade à lógica do lucro (que é ilógica) e da profunda despolitização, baseadas em desenfreada competitividade, no ódio às diferenças e nos preconceitos étnicos, regionais, sociais, sexistas e de gênero, é a cara perfeita da sociedade brasileira, de seu estilo e de sua estatura moral e intelectual, este público ataque gospel-reacionário da jurista Janaína Paschoal na Faculdade de Direito da USP, no início de abril capaz de gerar desconforto até em seus colegas e alunos reacionários – portanto, nada dotados de grande senso do ridículo e de consideráveis capacidades intelectuais.

Famosas internacionalmente pela essência corrupta, pela fortíssima discriminação, pela agressividade e pela incapacidade organizacional que, no país do carnaval e do futebol decadente, dia a dia se superam, que se creem sábias ao mesmo tempo que, na ausência de autonomia reflexiva, são capazes de caírem no engodo de personagens como Temer, Sarney, Calheiros, Eduardo Cunha e da mesma mídia sabidamente manipuladora e historicamente golpista, bem como devota das própria retórica de “liberdade” baseada na lei do mercado, as mentalidades elitistas brasileiras (que não escolhem classe social) podem ter a condição de prostração intelectual e de falência moral refletida com perfeição nas palavras de Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: “Ninguém está mais desesperadamente escravizado, que aquele que falsamente acredita ser livre”.

E em não raros casos, certamente, é ainda mais sofrível ter-se consciência da escravidão econômica, social e política passivamente por medo, por interesse ou por uma patética combinação de ambos. Para os setores reacionários nacionais, imbecilizados pela grande mídia oligárquica pertencente a cinco famílias e financiada diretamente por Washington (fato comprovado documentalmente por WikiLeaks), pode o FMI e todas as evidências, atuais e históricas, apontar contrariamente a suas ideias pré-concebidas que tudo será em vão e tudo seguirá como está. A história mostra isso, e hoje e só esperar para ver.

Edu Montesanti

Debunking the Stubborn Myth that War Is Good for the Economy

The 2016 general election of the Republic of the Philippines resulted in the most widely followed electoral period in Philippine political history. Officially starting on February 9, 2016, a hodgepodge of candidates, political parties, coalitions, and electoral alliances campaigned for multiple levels of executive and legislative government positions across the officially unitary—but in practice semi-unitary—polity of the Philippines on Monday, May 9, 2016. Without question, the most watched electoral races were those for the offices of the president and vice-president.

Aside from the presidency and vice-presidency, heated contests were waged over most of the legislative seats in the bicameral Congress of the Philippines. Half of the 24 seats in the Senate—the upper chamber of the Philippine Congress—and almost 300 seats in the House of Representatives—the lower chamber of the Philippine Congress—were contested. Furthermore, the Cotabato City-based executive and legislative regional government posts of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (ARMM)—formed by the Mindanaoan provinces of Basilan, Lanao del Sur, Maguindanao, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi—consisting of the ARMM governorship, ARMM vice-governorship, three ARMM deputy governorships, and regional representatives in the unicameral ARMM Regional Legislative Assembly were all campaigned for.

Other local contested government offices were: the gubernatorial executive and legislative posts of governor, vice-governor, and Provincial Board legislator in the eighty-one Philippine provinces; and the country’s mayoral, vice-mayoral, and councilor offices forming the local government units for the highly urbanized component cities, independent component cities, component cities, and municipalities formed by the towns and townships of the Philippines.

The Media Centrality to 2016’s General Election

What made the 2016 election season and its campaigns unique is the integral role that the media played. The 2016 campaign period received widespread public attention and scrutiny due to the intense media coverage and the dependency of the candidates on different modes of communication and mass communication technologies, specifically the internet and social media. From the presence of the electoral candidates on social media to the mammoth advertisement campaigns they conducted and the heavy coverage provided to them by the largest news networks and newspapers in the Philippines, 2016 has been a multimodal media extravaganza par excellence for Philippine politics. From blogs, Twitter, Facebook, the online comment sections of news outlets, and public forums to community spaces and religious congregations across the Philippines, the public sphere has been abuzz. Public discussions focused on political dynasties, corruption, change, patronage, clientelism, constitutionalism, embezzlement, fraud, integrity, morality, the rule of law, and the future of the peoples of the Philippines. Despite the continued societal cynicisms about political corruption, this has led to a renewal of popular interest in Filipino politics. The supporters of all the candidates were active participants replicating the political messages and discourse(s) of those that they supported; even when campaigning was supposed to be stopped, supporters continued campaigning for their candidates on social media and in their daily exchanges.

The series of heated debates purportedly managed by the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) that Filipinos and Filipinas from all over the country watched and listened to on their televisions, radios, computers, or smart phones added greatly to the public debate(s) about who should administer the next government of the Philippines. Millions of Filipinos and Filipinas listened and watched the live broadcasts of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates debating one another. The insults and accusations that the presidential contenders—Vice-President Jejomar Cabauatan Binay (the United Nationalist Alliance candidate), Senator Miriam Defensor-Santiago (the People’s Reform Party candidate), Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte (the Philippine Democratic Party–People’s Power candidate and the winner of the election), Senator Mary Grace Natividad Sonora Poe Llamanzares (running as an independent), and Manuel Araneta Roxas II (the Liberal Party candidate from Wall Street and himself a secretary in President Benigno Aquino III’s cabinet until September 14, 2015)—hurled and leveled at one another during the live broadcasting captivated and enthralled Filipino and Filipina audiences from Cagayan Valley, Mimaropa and Central Visayas to Zamboanga, ARMM, and Soccsksargen. In Cebu City, the presidential candidates even delayed the debate when they began arguing backstage for approximately an hour over the rules of the debate. Eventually Mayor Duterte and Senator Poe would enter the stage, followed by Mar Roxas and Vice-President Binay; Senator Defensor-Santiago was absent due to her cancer treatment.

Symbolically choosing the three different regional groupings formed by the archipelago of the Philippines, the presidential candidates participated in three different debates, which were called the 2016 PiliPinas Debates. The first installment of the 2016 PiliPinas Debates was held at Capitol University in Cagayan de Oro, the capital of Misamis Oriental, in Mindanao on February 21, 2016. The second 2016 PiliPinas Debate was held at the University of the Philippines Cebu in Cebu City, Visayas on March 20, 2016. The last part of the 2016 PiliPinas Debates was held at the University of Pagasinan in the City of Dagupan in Luzon on April 24, 2016.

In between the second and third legs of the debates by the presidential candidates, their running-mates and vice-presidential candidates—Senator Alan Peter Schramm Cayetano (Duterte’s running-mate), Senator Francis Joseph Guevara Escudero (Poe’s running-mate), Senator Gregorio Ballesteros Honasan (Binay’s running-mate), Senator Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos (Santiago’s running-mate), Representative Maria Leonor Gerona Robredo (the running-mate of Roxas), and Senator Antonio Fuentes Trillanes IV—held their own debate at the University of San Tomas in Manila on April 10, 2016. As an added note, in the interest of full disclosure, this author was among the audience members at the University of the Philippines Cebu Performing Arts Hall during the Visayan leg of the 2016 PiliPinas Debates.

COMELEC appeared to be very hands-off in its approach to the 2016 PiliPinas Debates, instead opting to let private media enterprises do the managing. This not only highlights the important role of the media in 2016’s general election, but also the influence of private capital over state bodies and national institutions in the Philippines. Each one of the different PiliPinas Debates respectively had designated “media partners” from the major television networks and newspapers of the Philippines that played central roles in the management and organization of the debate program and its coverage. GMA Network and Philippine Daily Inquirer were responsible for the first presidential candidate debate held in Mindanao, which GMA broadcasted under its “E16: Eleksyon 2016” (E16: Election 2016) special campaign season programming. TV5, Philippine Star, and BusinessWorld were responsible for the second presidential candidate debate held in Visayas, which TV5 broadcasted as part of its “Bilang Pilipino: Boto sa Pagbabago 2016” (Count Filipino: Vote for Change 2016) campaign programming. In Luzon, CNN Philippines and BusinessMirror were responsible for the vice-presidential candidate debate, whereas ABS-CBN and Manila Bulletin were responsible for the third presidential candidate debate, which were respectively broadcasted by CNN Philippines as part of its “The Filipino Votes” special coverage, and by ABS-CBN as part of its “Halalan 2016: Ipanalo ang Pamilyang Pilipino” (Election 2016: Winning the Filipino Family) special coverage.

Red Flags: Candidates Overspent on Advertisements

During the campaign season, it was reported that the candidates in the Philippines spent sensational amounts on their advertising. It was even reported that Philippine candidates even outspent their US counterparts with regards to their campaign advertising expenditures (Cabacungan and Santos). During the period of January to November, Binay, Poe, and Roxas respectively spent 63.2 million, 63.1 million, and 70.4 million Philippine pesos per month in 2015 (Nielsen cited in ibid.). US candidates like neurosurgeon Benjamin S. Carson, billionaire businessman Donald Trump, and Senator Rafael Edward Cruz respectively spent the equivalent of approximately 33.6 million, 13.5 million and 33.6 million Philippine pesos per month in 2015, during the seven-month period of January to July, whereas Binay, Poe, and Roxas respectively spent an average of 99.4 million, 99.2 million, and 110.6 Philippine pesos per month during a period of seven months in 2015 (Ibid.; figures calculated by author using Nielsen’s dataset).

The spending contrasts between US and Philippine candidates is staggering since the US has a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of approximately 17.42 trillion US dollar, according to 2014 statistics (World Bank), and a population of 321.77 million people in mid-2015 (UN 2015) compared to the Philippines, which had a GDP of 284.77 billion US dollars, according to the same 2014 statistics (World Bank), and a population of 100.69 million people in mid-2015 (UN 2015). Citing figures from the US Federal Election Commission to contrast the advertising expenditures of presidential campaigns in the US to the larger advertising expenditures of the candidates in the Philippines, senatorial candidate Walden Belo described this as part of the “corruption of the political process” (Cabacungan and Santos).

What is important to be cognizant about is the pre-election advertisement spending of the candidates and their attempts to circumvent electoral spending laws and COMELEC caps. COMELEC regulations stipulate that every presidential candidate may spend only 10 Philippine pesos per voting citizen. This is a total of 545 million Philippine pesos for the projected fifty-four and a half million eligible Filipino voters that can participate in the 2016 general-election. COMELEC’s spending restrictions are mandated by Article 9, Section 2(7) of the 1987 Constitution of the Philippines to “ensure the enforcement of the fair-and-equal exposure rule for political parties and their candidates” and to prevent “a strong party or candidate from taking undue advantage of the weakness of others” (De Leon 2005:299).

In an attempt to circumvent COMELEC’s spending cap, according to Nielsen Media (as cited by Mangahas et al.), many politicians and parties ran “social concern” advertisements, which cost 7.75 billion Philippine pesos, from the period running from January 1, 2015 to January 31, 2016. The advertisements were aired during prime time on Filipino television and during the timeslots of the country’s most popular programs; 86.7 percent of these advertisements (accounting for 6.7 billion Philippine pesos) featured the candidates that would run in the general-election (Ibid.). Despite their pledges against corruption, many of these candidates disregarded the law with impunity before they even got sworn into office. Binay, Poe, and Roxas all spent approximately 1 billion Philippine pesos on their presidential campaign advertisements. According to the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, “even the more affluent” candidate should have become bankrupt because of the costs of their pre-campaign advertisements (Mangahas).

It is worth quoting the inference that Senator Defensor-Santiago made when she heard that her rivals had spent over one billion Philippine pesos in 2015 for their presidential bids before they were even legally allowed to begin their advertising campaigns. She rhetorically asked how these politicians paid for the scandalous amounts of their advertisements, especially since whoever becomes the president of the Philippines will make only 120,000 Philippine pesos a month (or 8.64 million in their six-year term). She then answered her own question for voters. “The simple answer is that they will steal from public funds, or will at least be tempted to do so. An alternative would be to give favors to rich contributors, to the detriment of public interest,” she reacted (Adel).

Although the regulations of COMELEC, which has been described as “a haven for fixers who deliver fictitious votes to the moneyed and the powerful” (Quimpo 2009:348), have been violated, COMELEC has not taken any substantive action. Unfortunately, this is business as usual in the Philippines. As the communications scholar Campbell (2002) points out, the Philippines is a place that is known for ineffective regulatory institutions and controls. Like most the other members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), either on their own or collectively as a regional bloc, in the Philippines there is a major gap between declarations and regulations, on the one hand, and performance and implementation, on the other (Roberts 2012).

Electoral Irregularities and Abuses

During voting day there were multiple irregularities, abuses, and infringements. Ahead of the voting on May 9, it is widely known that the governing Liberal Party distributed money to buy votes. The same behavior was replicated with the country’s civil servants by the Liberal Party when government workers were given pay for a “fourteenth month” as a form of enticement to vote for Mar Roxas and the Liberal Party’s other candidates.

At the polls, the names of many voters were missing from the voting lists, while other voters were oddly moved from one voting cluster to another without explanation by COMELEC, which may possibly be part of an attempt to redistribute voters in a de facto form of gerrymandering. The names of dead people were included in the voting lists of different precincts, such as in Manila. The former ambassador of the Philippines to the United Arab Emirates Roy Villareal Señeres—the presidential candidate that died in the hospital on February 8, 2016, just three days before withdrawing his bid for the presidency on February 5, 2016—was kept on the ballots by COMELEC and got at least 22,726 votes by the time the ballots in approximately 87 percent of the precincts had been counted, according to report by Rappler published on May 10, 2016.

Procedural rules were not followed on voting day. As observed by the author in Central Visayas, the polling clerks did not check the identification cards of voters. Candidates did not even stop their campaigning as COMELEC required them to do one day before the vote on May 8, 2016. The voting cards that the candidates distributed to voters had political advertising that, if not outright, in spirit violated the COMELEC regulations requiring politicians to end their campaigning. While on average 33.7 percent or one-third of registered voters in the Philippines will not vote or will never be able to vote (Panao 2016:2), even worse, many Filipinos and Filipinas were disenfranchised from voting because they could not access voting stations or pay for government documents, which they need to register for voting.

Media Filters: Constructing and Framing Philippine Electoral Issues

The media has played an important role in framing the direction and discourse of the election campaigns. It not only has the power to inform voters, but it can mislead and distract voters, which makes it important to material processes (physical action). Media organizations and those operating them directly as owners and managers, or indirectly as sponsors and sources of funding, decide which voices will be ignored, reported, exposed, and given importance. In this respect, the media can function as a filter and inform and distort the perception(s) of voters. This means that the media is not only being constructed, but helping construct the opinions of voters. This process is largely based on the stance of the media, which is based on political and social attitudes and the beliefs of media ownership and those reporting and producing the information that people consume.

Philippine society’s most important issues went largely ignored or have been under-reported by Philippine media. In the process, the 2016 general election was transformed—if not in whole, then in part—into an entertaining circus. The policy platforms of the presidential and vice-presidential candidates were largely overlooked and disregarded by the media, albeit the candidates were mostly indistinguishable from one another in their political platforms and agendas (or absence thereof); the main Philippine political parties “are built around personalities, rather than around” platforms, and “ideologies and platforms are just adornments for them” (Quimpo 2007:277). Laying testimony to this were the cross-cutting electoral alliances that were exhibited by posters of Liberal Party candidates alongside Duterte, such as Cebu City’s Liberal Party mayoral candidate Tomas de la Rama Osmeña.

Trying to compensate for the missing substance, the media focused instead on the personal attacks of the candidates directed against one another’s characters, albeit the candidates themselves in general neither focused on analyzing the shortcomings of one another’s policies nor presented any real policies of their own in their campaign advertisements. Because of this, the presidential and vice-presidential election campaigns largely became daily doses of television dramas or, as they are more popularly called by Filipinos and Filipinas, Pinoy telenovelas and teleseryes.

Aside from the consistent barrage of controversial performances by former professional boxer Emmanuel Dapidran Pacquiao and Rodrigo Duterte—dubbed as the “Filipino Donald Trump” because of his heated comments during the elections that paralleled those of Donald Trump (Yap and Lopez; Thomas)—and the continuous revelations of corruption among the different candidates, the saga behind Grace Poe’s eligibility was a key focus of the media.

Just as Mar Roxas began courting Grace Poe on the last days of the campaign, Vice-President Binay and his camp tried to court Poe in the heydays of the 2016 general-election. When Senator Poe and Binay did not make any agreement in 2015, Poe’s problems about her residency and citizenship began when United Nationalist Alliance Representative Tobias Tiangco challenged her eligibility for the presidency. Questions about Poe being able to meet the ten-year residency qualification for the presidency were all over the news.

Poe was forced to go on the defensive and get a team of lawyers to defend her. According to Senator Poe, she denounced her Filipina citizenship on October 18, 2001 for a US citizenship. She would then become a citizen of the Philippines again on July 7, 2006, but would continue to enter and leave the Philippines with a US passport until she finally bothered to get her Philippine passport on October 13, 2009 (Rufo). After an electoral campaign for the Senate, Poe then renounced her US citizenship when she took office on October 21, 2010. After a stretched out drama, the Senate Electoral Tribunal and Supreme Court of the Philippines would eventually rule in her favor, allowing her to campaign for the presidency.

Disregarded and Overlooked Issues

The continued land struggle in the Philippines was largely absent from the political discourse at the top. This struggle between the wealthy land-owning economic oligarchs—mostly the descendents of the ilustrados (Mestizo landowners) that collaborated with the US when it invaded and occupied the Philippines (Reid 2007:1007)—and their development companies, on one side, and, on the other side, substantially larger strata of Philippine society—ranging from farmers in rural areas to squatters and low-income laborers in the country’s expanding urban environs—at best received lip service during the elections. Philippine farmers and citizens in poor neighborhoods in the country’s urban hubs frequently face threats, acts of violence, and appropriation of their property. They have become destitute, having their homes demolished, and their livelihood lost. As the country’s agricultural base is eroded, social inequality grows, and social unrest is fuelled by policies of marginalization, in the long-term this will have severe consequences for the economic health and political stability of the Philippines. This trend is epitomized by the tragic deaths and injuries of the farmers in Kidapawan that gathered to protest a lack of governmental assistance from North Cotabato on March 30, 2016. More of this can be expected in the future as desperation grows among the farmers, the urban and rural land struggles inside the Philippines intensify, and socio-economic disparity escalates.

No serious critique or analysis about the economic path of the Philippines was presented either by the vast majority of candidates. According to Japanese financial holdings company Nomura, the dependence of the Philippine economy on remittance from Filipinos and Filipinas working overseas has increased (de Vera). There is also the issue of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI); the increased FDI in the Philippines has simplistically been presented as an indicator of economic growth without any mention of the larger returns and outflows that are expected from the FDIs.

Additionally, largely missing from the political discourse was the subject of the dispute in the South China Sea or, as it is called in the Philippines, the West Philippine Sea and what the ramifications of an escalation of the dispute with Beijing would mean for the Philippines. The winners of the general-elections will have to work with Washington in a time where there is increasing tensions between the US and the People’s Republic of China. The US has a major interest in using the dispute in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea to justify its so-called “Pivot to the Asia-Pacific” and to isolate Beijing. This could entangle the Philippines in a wrestling match between China and the US. Despite the importance of the subject, there has been little critical coverage about the territorial dispute in the South China Sea/West Philippine Sea and the only politician who publicly admitted that he went to talk about the issue with the US Embassy in Manila was Rodrigo Duterte (Ramirez).

Duterte’s Winning Discourse: Tough on Crime, Anti-Corruption, and Federalism

Instead of addressing serious issues in a direct manner, the politics of blame were used. In this context, the 2016 election season saw a large and frustrated portion of the lower strata of Philippine society unite under the banner of Rodrigo Duterte and his anti-corruption and anti-crime discourse that pledged to be hard on crime and to challenge “Imperial Manila” as the parasitic political center of the Philippines. “What he lacks in policymaking interest or experience he made up for during the campaign with the showmanship that had been absent from national politics. ‘Many Filipinos loved it,’” was how an Economist article described Duterte after his victory.

During the campaigning, Duterte became a conceptual representation (Kress and van Leewen 1996), who no longer was viewed in terms of his actions, but in terms of a representation of the frustrated lower strata of the Philippines. This reached the point where support for Duterte transcended local political loyalties in much of the Philippines; for example, in the Camotes Islands, the resident Liberal Party candidates were elected locally while most the population supported Duterte for the presidency. Even the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to Duterte or the last minute reports about the billions of Philippine pesos in his shared Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) account with his daughter Sara Duterte-Carpio or the YouTube video released by Kilab Multimedia showing Duterte indulgingly speaking to Jose Maria Canlas Sison—the Netherlands-based exiled founder of the Communist Party of the Philippines—over an internet video chat failed to undermine him.

Analyzing the semiotics behind Duterte’s campaigning, the fist it used represents the symbol of the strongman that he represents and his overtly tough on crime position. His anti-corruption and anti-crime discourse, however, falls short of addressing the dilemmas of the Philippines; it is mostly populist rhetoric. Duterte’s campaign failed to address the roots of the problem or even to articulate a clear policy agenda. His rhetoric was also contrary: while Duterte pledged to make the rule of law supreme in the Philippines, he paradoxically disclosed that he intended to do so by working outside of the rule of law.

Duterte’s federalist discourse and demands need further critical analyses. The idea of federalism put hand-in-hand with the Duterte transitional team’s announcements that his administration intends to increase FDI in the Philippines should not be overlooked. Mixing the two together can be a lethal economic cocktail. According to a Philippine Daily Inquirer post-election report (published on May 13, 2016), after winning the election, Duterte said he will increase FDI by removing the protective constitutional barriers that prevent foreign ownership or foreign-owned shares above a figure of 40 percent for nationally important and strategic sectors, such as in telecommunications, aviation, pharmaceuticals, and domestic shipping. Along with federalism, this could equate to the fracturing, de-regulating, and auctioning of the economy by the provincial oligarchs.

Philippine Media as an Accessory to Corruption?

In Bocaue, Bulacan, coin tossing was used to break an electoral tie and decide who becomes mayor. The coin tossing in Bocaue meant that the election results for mayor were ultimately decided by chance, which is an act that can strongly be said to emasculate voting. It was justified, however, by a proviso in Philippine law. This event epitomizes the nature and contradictions of the 2016 general-elections, where undemocratic political traditions have been positioned within a democratic political framework, just like how political dynasties have used political parties and lists to safeguard their interests in a system of non-substantive democracy filled with illusions of democracy that are sustained by democratic rituals that are void of authenticity.

In the last few years the Philippines has increasingly been described as “a patrimonial oligarchic state, a weak state preyed upon and plundered by different factions of the elite, who take advantage of, and extract privilege from, a largely incoherent bureaucracy” (Paul Hutchcroft cited by Quimpo 2007:282) According, to Hutchcroft, “it is not just one person and his/her cronies but the oligarchic elite as a whole that engages in plunder” in the Philippines (Ibid.). Others apply the predatory state description of Peter Evans (cited by Quimpo 2009:337) to the Philippines, which describe the Philippines as a state that “preys on its citizenry, terrorizing them, despoiling their common patrimony, and providing little in the way of services in return.” Others, like Quimpo (Ibid.), began defining the Philippines as a predatory regime under the administration of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo. This trend has not reversed and instead it has been facilitated by the Philippine media’s pattern(s) of reporting.

The foundations of good governance in a society are established on the abilities of its voters to hold elected officials accountable. One of the tools for this is the media. Analyzing the vocabulary chains used in the 2016 general-election, economic development and fighting corruption were major themes of the different candidates. There were, however, no substantial explanations about how this would be done, which largely means that the discourse was predominately lip service and rhetoric. In many cases the media reported passively about this with declarative reporting that did not probe deeper or challenge the candidates to clarify how exactly they intended to do the things that they promised.

Discourse is much more important in the Philippines and the rest of the world than it was during the past. According to Norman Fairclough (2004:104), “language may have a more significant role in contemporary” sociological, economic, and political developments “than it had had in the past.” In this context, the Philippine media is supposed to play a role in informing citizens, but instead it has largely been involved in sensationalist reporting and the dramatization of Filipino politics as Pinoy telenovelas. By ignoring serious newsworthy issues and refusing to probe deeper into important questions, this pattern of reporting has largely helped keep the oligarchs of the Philippines in power and aided corruption and political malfeasance.

Works Cited

“An election in the Philippines: The dangers of Duterte Harry.” 14 May 2016. Economist. Accessed on 16 May 2016: <http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21698648-return-bad-old-ways-under-rodrigo-duterte-dangers-duterte-harry>.

Adel, Rosette. 10 January 2016. “Miriam: Candidates’ ad overspending ‘red flag for corruption.’” Philippine Star. Accessed on 1 April 2016: <http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/01/10/1541192/miriam-candidates-ad-overspending-red-flag-corruption>.

de Vera, Ben. 26 February 2016. “Faster remittance growth seen in 2016.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed on 13 May 2015: <http://business.inquirer.net/207466/faster-remittance-growth-seen-in-2016#ixzz40xnZNoVZ>.

Cabacungan, Gil C., and Tina G. Santos. 7 January 2016. “PH presidential candidates outspend billionaire Trump.” Philippine Daily Inquirer. Accessed on 16 May 2016: <http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/753234/ph-presidential-candidates-outspend-billionaire-trump>.

Campbell, Consuelo. 2002. “Private and State Ownership in Telecommunications: A Comparative Analysis of São Paulo, Brazil and Manila, Philippines.” Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 64(4):371-383.

De Leon, Hector S. 2005. Textbook on the Philippine Constitution. 8th ed. Quezon City: Rex Printing Company.

“Despite his death, Roy Señeres picks up presidential votes.” Rappler. May 10, 2016. Accessed on 10 May 2016: <http://www.rappler.com/nation/politics/elections/2016/132506-roy-seneres-presidential-votes >.

“Duterte team unveils 8-point economic plan.” 13 May 2016. Philippine Daily Inquirer. A1+

Fairclough, Norman. 2004. “Critical Discourse Analysis in Researching Language in the New Capitalism: Overdetermination, Transdiscpinarity and Textual Analysis.” Pp.103-122 in Systemic Functional Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Studies in Social Change. Lynne Young and Claire Harrison, eds. NYC: Continuum.

Kress, Gunther and Theo Leeuwan. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London, UK: Routledge.

Mangahas, Malou. 9 March 2016. “Net worth vs P6.7-B pol ads bill: Top bets in debt, deficit spending?” Philippine Star. Accessed on 16 May 2016: <http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/03/09/1561207/net-worth-vs-p6.7-b-pol-ads-bill-top-bets-debt-deficit-spending>.

Mangahas, Malou, et al. 7 March 2016. “Pre-Campaign Ads: P6.7B. Bribery, tax evasion, impunity?” Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism. Accessed on 1 April 2016: <http://pcij.org/stories/bribery-tax-evasion-impunity/>.

Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. 2007. “The Philippines: Political Parties and Corruption.” Southeast Asian Affairs 2007:277-294.

Quimpo, Nathan Gilbert. 2009. “The Philippines: predatory regime, growing authoritarian features.” The Pacific Review 22(3):335–353

Panao, Rogelio Alicor L. 2016. University of the Philippines Forum 17(1):1-2.

Ramirez, Robertzon. 8 March 2016. “Duterte to meet with US embassy officials.” Philippine Star. Accessed on 1 May 2016: <http://www.philstar.com/headlines/2016/03/08/1560733/duterte-meet-us-embassy-officials>.

Reid, Ben. 2006. “Historical Blocs and Democratic Impasse in the Philippines: 20 years after ‘people power.’” Third World Quarterly 27(6):1003-1020.

Roberts, Christopher B. 2002. ASEAN Regionalism: Cooperation, Values, and Institutionalization. London, UK: Routledge.

Rufo, Aries. 13 July 2015. “Grace Poe and Pandora’s box: Legal issues in her candidacy.” Rappler. Accessed on 12 April 2016: <http://www.rappler.com/newsbreak/in-depth/99144-grace-poe-pandora-box-legal-issues-presidency>.

Thomas, Sylvia. 6 May 2016. “Rodrigo Duterte, the Filipino Donald Trump, favoured to win presidential race.” CBC News. Access 6 May 2016: <http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/rodrigo-duterte-philippines-1.3566738>.

United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. 2015. World Population 2015. NYC: United Nations Publications.

World Bank. n.d. “GDP at market prices (current US$).” Accessed on 27 April 2016: <http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD>.

Yap, Karl Lester M., and Ditas B Lopez. 25 April 2016. “Duterte Widens Lead in Philippines Race Despite Rape Comment.” Bloomberg. Accessed 6 May 2016: <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-25/duterte-widens-lead-in-philippines-race-despite-rape-comments>.

Would Allen Dulles have resorted to assassinating the President of the United States to ensure the achievement of  his ‘Indonesian strategy’?

This is the central question addressed by Greg Poulgrain in his extraordinarily important book, The Incubus of Intervention: Conflicting Indonesian Strategies of John F. Kennedy and Allen Dulles.

Two days before President John Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, he had accepted an invitation from Indonesian President Sukarno to visit that country the following spring.  The aim of the visit was to end the conflict (Konfrontasi) between Indonesia and Malaysia and to continue Kennedy’s efforts to support post-colonial Indonesia with economic and developmental aid, not military.   It was part of his larger strategy of ending conflict throughout Southeast Asia and assisting the growth of democracy in newly liberated post-colonial countries worldwide.

He had forecast his position in a dramatic speech in 1957 when, as a Massachusetts Senator, he told the Senate that he supported the Algerian liberation movement and opposed colonial imperialism worldwide.  The speech caused an international uproar and Kennedy was harshly attacked by Eisenhower, Nixon, John Foster Dulles, and even liberals such as Adlai Stevenson.  But he was praised throughout the third world.

Of course JFK never went to Indonesia in 1964, and his peaceful strategy to bring Indonesia to America’s side and to ease tensions in the Cold War was never realized, thanks to Allen Dulles.  And Kennedy’s proposed withdrawal from Vietnam, which was premised on success in Indonesia, was quickly reversed by Lyndon Johnson after JFK’s murder.  Soon both countries would experience mass slaughter engineered by Kennedy’s opponents in the CIA and Pentagon. Millions would die. Subsequently, starting in December 1975, American installed Indonesian dictator, Suharto, would slaughter hundreds of thousands East-Timorese with American weapons after meeting with Henry Kissinger and President Ford and receiving their approval.

Dulles’s Secret

What JFK didn’t know was that his plans were threatening a covert long-standing conspiracy engineered by Allen Dulles to effect regime change in Indonesia through bloody means. The primary goal behind this plan was to gain unimpeded access to the vast load of natural resources that Dulles had kept secret from Kennedy, who thought Indonesia was lacking in natural resources.  But Dulles knew that if Kennedy, who was very popular in Indonesia, visited Sukarno, it would deal a death blow to his plan to oust Sukarno, install a CIA replacement (Suharto), exterminate alleged communists, and secure the archipelago for Rockefeller controlled oil and mining interests, for whom he had fronted  since the 1920s.

Dr. Poulgrain, who teaches Indonesian History, Politics and Society at the University of Sunshine Coast in Australia, explores in very great detail historical issues that have critical significance for today.  Based on almost three decades of interviews and research around the world, he has produced a very densely argued book that reads like a detective novel with fascinating sub- plots.

The Importance of Indonesia

Most Americans have little awareness of the strategic and economic importance of Indonesia.  It is the world’s 4^th most populous country, is situated in a vital shipping lane adjacent to the South China Sea, has the world’s largest Muslim population, has vast mineral and oil deposits, and is home to Grasberg, the world’s largest copper and gold mine, owned by Freeport McMoRan of Phoenix, Arizona.  Long a battleground in the Cold War, it remains vitally important in the New Cold War launched by the Obama administration against Russia and China, the same antagonists Allen Dulles strove to defeat through guile and violence.  Just recently the Indonesian government, under pressure from the army that has stymied democratic reforms for 18 years, signed a defense agreement with Russia for the sharing of intelligence, the sale of Russian military equipment, including fighter jets, and the manufacturing of weapons in Indonesia.  While not front page news in the U.S., these facts make Indonesia of great importance today and add to the gravity of Poulgrain’s history.

The Devil in Paradise 

His use of the word “incubus” (an evil spirit that has sexual intercourse with sleeping women) in the title is appropriate since the sinister character that snakes his way through this historical analysis is Allen Dulles, the longest serving Director of the CIA and Kennedy’s arch-enemy.  While contextually different from David Talbot’s portrayal of Dulles in The Devil’s Chessboard, Poulgrain’s portrait of Dulles within the frame of Indonesian history is equally condemnatory and nightmarish.  Both describe an evil genius ready to do anything to advance his agenda.

Reading Poulgrain’s masterful analysis, one can clearly see how much of modern history is a struggle for control of the underworld where lies the fuel that runs the megamachine – oil, minerals, gold, etc.  Manifest ideological conflicts, while garnering headlines, often bury the secret of this subterranean devil’s game.

His story begins with a discovery that is then kept secret for many decades:  “In the alpine region of Netherlands New Guinea (so named under Dutch colonial rule – today, West Papua) in 1936, three Dutchmen discovered a mountainous outcrop of ore with high copper content and very high concentrations of gold.  When later analyzed in the Netherlands, the gold (in gram/ton) proved to be twice that of Witwatersrand in South Africa, then the world’s richest gold mine, but this information was not made public.”

The geologist among the trio, Jean Jacques Dozy, worked for the Netherlands New Guinea Petroleum Company (NNGPM), ostensibly a Dutch-controlled company based in The Hague, but whose controlling interest actually lay in the hands of the Rockefeller family, as did the mining company, Freeport Indonesia (now Freeport McMoRan, one of whose Directors from 1988-95 was Henry Kissinger, Dulles’s and the Rockefeller’s close associate) that began mining operations there in 1966.  It was Allen Dulles, Paris-based lawyer in the employ of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, who in 1935 arranged the controlling interest in NNGPN for the Rockefellers.  And it was Dulles, among a select few others, who, because of various intervening events, including WW II, that made its exploitation impossible, kept the secret of the gold mine for almost three decades, even from President Kennedy. JFK “was never informed of the ‘El Dorado’ he had unwittingly taken out of Dutch hands with the result that (once the remaining political hurdles in Indonesia were overcome) Freeport would have unimpeded access to its mining concession.” Those “political hurdles” – i.e. regime change – would take a while to effect.

The Indonesia-Cuba Connection

But first JFK would have to be eliminated, for he had brokered Indonesian sovereignty over West Papua/West Irian for Sukarno from the Dutch who had ties to Freeport Sulphur.  Freeport was aghast at the potential loss of “El Dorado,” especially since they had recently had their world’s most advanced nickel refinery expropriated by Fidel Castro, who had named Che Guevara its new manager.  Freeport’s losses in Cuba made access to Indonesia even more important. Cuba and Indonesia thus were joined in the deadly game of chess between Dulles and Kennedy, and someone would have to lose.

While much has been written about Cuba, Kennedy, and Dulles, the Indonesian side of the story has been slighted. Poulgrain remedies this with an exhaustive and deeply researched exploration of these matters. He details the deviousness of the covert operation Dulles ran in Indonesia during the 1950s and 1960s.  He makes it clear that Kennedy was shocked by Dulles’ actions, yet never fully grasped the treacherous genius of it all. Dulles was always “working two or three stages ahead of the present.”  Having armed and promoted a rebellion against Sukarno’s central government in 1958, Dulles made sure it would fail (shades of the Bay of Pigs to come).

Yet the end result of CIA interference in Indonesian internal affairs via the 1958 Rebellion was depicted as a failure at the time, and has consistently been depicted as a failure since that time.  This holds true only if the stated goal of the CIA was the same as the actual goal.  Even more than five decades later, media analysis of the goal of The Outer Island rebels is still portrayed as a secession, as covert US support for ‘rebels in the Outer Islands that wished to secede from the central government in Jakarta’.  The actual goal of Allen Dulles had more to do with achieving a centralized army command in such a way as to appear that the CIA backing for the rebels failed.

 The Need for Assassinations

Dulles betrayed the rebels he armed and encouraged, just as he betrayed friend and foe alike during his long career.  The rebellion that he instigated and planned to fail was the first stage of a larger intelligence strategy that would come to fruition in 1965-6 with the ouster of Sukarno (after multiple unsuccessful assassination attempts) and the institution of a reign of terror that followed.  It was also when – 1966 – Freeport McMoRan began their massive mining in West Papua at Grasberg at an elevation of 14,000 feet in the Alpine region.  Dulles was nothing if not patient; he had been at this game since WW I.  Even after Kennedy fired him following the Bay of Pigs, his plans were executed, just as those who got in his way were.  Poulgrain makes a powerful case that these included JFK, U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold (working with Kennedy for a peaceful solution in Indonesia and other places), and Congolese President Patrice Lumumba.

His focus is on why they needed to be assassinated (similar in this regard to James Douglass’s JFK and the Unspeakable), though with the exception of Kennedy (since the how is well-known and obvious), he also presents compelling evidence as to the how.  Hammarskjold, in many ways Kennedy’s spiritual brother, was a particularly powerful obstacle to Dulles’s plans for Indonesia and countries throughout the Third World.  Like JFK, he was committed to independence for indigenous and colonial peoples everywhere, and was trying to implement “his Swedish-style ‘third way’ proposing a form of ‘muscular pacifism’.”

Had the UN Secretary General succeeded in bringing even half these countries to independence, he would have transformed the UN into a significant world power and created a body of nations so large as to be a counter-weight to those embroiled in the Cold War.

Poulgrain draws on documents from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Chairman Archbishop Desmond Tutu to show the connection between South Africa’s “Operation Celest” and Dulles’s involvement in Hammarskjold’s murder in September 1961.  While it was reported at the time as an accidental plane crash, he quotes former President Harry Truman saying, “Dag Hammarskjold was on the point of getting something done when they killed him.  Notice that I said, ‘When they killed him’.”

Dulles sold his overt Indonesian strategy as being necessary to thwart a communist takeover in Indonesian. Cold War rhetoric, like “the war on terrorism” today, served as his cover.  In this he had the Joint Chiefs of Staff on his side; they considered Kennedy soft on communism, in Indonesia and Cuba and everywhere else. Dulles’s covert agenda was to serve the interests of his power elite patrons.

Dulles and George de Mohrenschildt

Poulgrain adds significantly to our understanding of JFK’s assassination and its aftermath by presenting new information about George de Mohrenschildt, Lee Harvey Oswald’s handler in Dallas.  Dulles had a long association with the de Mohrenschildt family, going back to 1920-21 when in Constantinople he negotiated with Baron Sergius Alexander von Mohrenschildt on behalf of Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.  The Baron’s brother and business partner was George’s father.  Dulles’s law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, “was virtually the front desk for Standard Oil.”  These negotiations on behalf of elite capitalist interests, in the shadow of the Russian Revolution, became the template for Dulles’s career: economic exploitation was inseparable from military concerns, the former concealed behind the anti-communist rhetoric of the latter.  An anti-red thread ran through Dulles’s career, except when the red was the blood of all those whom he considered expendable.  And the numbers are legion.

“It was through Standard Oil that a link existed between Dulles [who controlled the Warren Commission] and de Mohrenschildt, and this should have been brought to the attention of the Warren Commission but was not made public when Dulles had so prominent a role.”  Poulgrain argues convincingly that De Mohrenschildt worked in “oil intelligence” before his CIA involvement, and that oil intelligence was not only Dulles’s work when he first met George’s father, Sergius, in Baku, but that that “oil intelligence” is a redundancy. The CIA, after all, is a creation of Wall Street and their interests have always been joined. The Agency was not formed to provide intelligence to US Presidents; that was a convenient myth used to cover its real purpose which was to serve the interests of investment bankers and the power elite.

While working in 1941 for Humble Oil  (Prescott Bush was a major shareholder, Dulles was his lawyer, and Standard Oil had secretly bought Humble Oil sixteen years before), de Mohrenschildt was caught up in a scandal that involved Vichy (pro-Nazi) French intelligence in selling oil to Germany.  This was similar to the Dulles’s brothers and Standard Oil’s notorious business dealings with Germany.

It was an intricate web of the high cabal with Allen Dulles at the center.

In the midst of the scandal, de Mohrenschildt, suspected of being a Vichy French intelligence agent, “disappeared” for a while.  He later told the Warren Commission that he decided to take up oil drilling, without mentioning the name of Humble Oil that employed him again, this time as a roustabout.

“Just when George needed to ‘disappear’, Humble Oil was providing an oil exploration team to be subcontracted to NNGPM – the company Allen Dulles had set up five years earlier to work in Netherlands New Guinea.”  Poulgrain makes a powerful circumstantial evidence case (certain documents are still unavailable) that de Mohrenschildt, in order to avoid appearing in court, went in communicado in Netherlands New Guinea’s in mid-1941 where he made a record oil discovery and received a $10,000 bonus from Humble Oil.

“Avoiding adverse publicity about his role in selling oil to Vichy France was the main priority; for George, a brief drilling adventure in remote Netherlands New Guinea would have been a timely and strategic exit.”  And who best to help him in this escape than Allen Dulles – indirectly, of course; for Dulles’s modus operandi was to maintain his “distance” from his contacts, often over many decades.

In other words, Dulles and de Mohrenschildt were intimately involved for a long time prior to JFK’s assassination. Poulgrain rightly claims that “the entire focus of the Kennedy investigation would have shifted had the [Warren] Commission become aware of the 40-year link between Allen Dulles and de Mohrenschildt.” Their relationship involved oil, spying, Indonesia, Nazi Germany, the Rockefellers, Cuba, Haiti, etc.  It was an international web of intrigue that involved a cast of characters stranger than fiction, a high cabal of the usual and unusual operatives.

Two unusual ones are worth mentioning: Michael Fomenko and Michael Rockefeller.  The eccentric Fomenko – aka “Tarzan” – is the Russian-Australian nephew of de Mohrenschildt’s wife, Jean Fomenko.  His arrest and deportation from Netherlands New Guinea in 1959, where he had travelled from Australia in a canoe, and his subsequent life, are fascinating and sad. It’s the stuff of a bizarre film. It seems he was one of those victims who had to be silenced because he knew a secret about George’s 1941 oil discovery that was not his to share. “In April 1964, at the same time George de Mohrenschildt was facing the Warren Commission – a time when any publicity regarding Sele 40 [George’s record oil discovery] could have changed history – it was decided that electro-convulsive therapy would be used on Michael Fomenko.” He was then imprisoned at the Ipswich Special Mental Hospital.

Equally interesting is the media myth surrounding the disappearance of Michael Rockefeller, Nelson’s son and heir to the Standard Oil fortune, who was allegedly eaten by cannibals in New Guinea in 1961. His tale became front-page news, “a media event closed off to any other explanation and the political implications of his disappearance became an ongoing tragedy for the Papuan people.”  To this very day, the West Papuan people, whose land was described by Standard Oil official Richard Archbold in 1938 as “Shangri-la,” are fighting for their independence.

Poulgrain offers most interesting takes on these two characters and shows how their stories are connected to the larger tale of intrigue.

This is a very important and compelling book.  Difficult and dense at times, more expansive at others, it greatly adds to our understanding of why JFK was murdered.  With its Indonesian focus, it shows us how Allen Dulles’s sinister purview was wide-spread and long-standing; how it included so much more than Cuba, Guatemala, Iran, etc.; specifically, how important far-distant Indonesia was in his thinking, and how that thinking clashed with President Kennedy’s on a crucial issue.  It forces us to consider how different the world would be if JFK had lived.

The Incubus of Intervention sheds new light on Indonesian history and America’s complicity in its tragedy.  It is essential reading today when Barack Obama is executing his pivot to Asia and promoting conflict with China and Russia.  Although not explored in Poulgrain’s book, it’s interesting to note that Obama’s Indonesian step-father, Lolo Soetero, left Obama and his mother in Hawaii in that crucial year of 1966 when mass killings were underway to return to Indonesia to map Western New Guinea (West Papua) for the Indonesian government.  After Dulles’s regime change was accomplished and Suharto had replaced Sukarno, he went to work for Unocal, the first oil company to sign a production sharing agreement with Suharto.  Strange coincidences, bitter fruit.

Is Poulgrain correct?  Did Allen Dulles direct the assassination of President Kennedy to ensure his, rather the Kennedy’s, Indonesian strategy would succeed?

We know the CIA coordinated the assassination of President Kennedy.  We know that Allen Dulles was involved.  We know that Indonesia was one reason why.

Was it “the reason”?

Read this wonderful book and decide.

Edward Curtin is a writer who has published widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

GR Editor’s Note

Please note that the authenticity of the alleged “Venezuela Freedom” document by US Southern Command has not been verified. Quoted by the NYT, “The document, titled “Venezuela Freedom-2 Operation,” is bogus, a said Col. Lisa Garcia, a spokeswoman for the United States Southern Command.” 

*       *      *

Recently a document from the American South Command was released in which 12 steps for destabilising and bringing about an abrupt end to Nicolas Maduro’s government are laid out: steps which are being carried out now and were begun some time ago.

The uncounted ballots would put the total number of voters at around 8.5 million, or around 47 percent of all registered voters

While the results are unlikely to impact Clinton’s win in the state, Bernie Sanders said Thursday he expected the final tally would show a closer race.

More than 2.5 million ballots from California’s June 7 primary are still uncounted, sparking questions about the results of the presidential contest in which Hillary Clinton emerged the winner and leaving the fate of local races in the air as poll workers continue to grapple with reports of voter difficulties.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the uncounted ballots would put the total voter turnout at around 8.5 million, or around 47 percent of all registered voters. While the results are unlikely to impact Clinton’s win in the state, Bernie Sanders said Thursday he expected the final tally would show a closer race—one more in keeping with polls that predicted a nail-biter.

While the results are unlikely to impact Clinton’s win in the state, Bernie Sanders said Thursday he expected the final tally would show a closer race. (Photo: hjl/flickr/cc)

More than 2.5 million ballots

“I look forward to the full counting of the votes in California, which I suspect will show a much closer vote than the current vote tally,” Sanders said after a meeting with President Barack Obama, who then went on to endorse Clinton.

On Thursday, French defense ministry officials confirmed the deployment of French special forces in northern Syria with the announced purpose of advising Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the recapturing of the city of Manbij from Daesh; however Russian military experts told the Russian media what might really be behind the move.

“The offensive at Manbij is clearly being backed by a certain number of states including France. It’s the usual support — it’s advisory,” AFP quoted one French defense ministry official as saying, without giving further details on the deployment. The official especially stressed that French special forces will not intervene militarily themselves and are not supposed to engage in combat with Daesh militants.Last Friday French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian also commented on the issue saying that the French troops were helping operations at Manbij “through weapons supplies, air presence and advice.”

Armed men in uniform identified by Syrian Democratic forces as US special operations forces ride in the back of a pickup truck in the village of Fatisah in the northern Syrian province of Raqa on May 25, 201

According to AFP reports, the SDF, a US-backed Kurdish-dominated alliance, are on the northern edge of Manbij, a strategic town held by Daesh that serves as a waypoint between the Turkish border and the jihadists’ stronghold of Raqqa.Russian military experts provided their own explanations what might lie behind the move.‘

Thus the French President Can Announce He is Fighting Against Terrorism’ 

Leonid Ivashov, retired General Colonel, former chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union’s Ministry of Defense and currently the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs says that the French forces are not taking part in the fighting directly. “The French units, more likely, are conducting reconnaissance and acting as air controllers. They also support contacts with the terrorist groups, among others, in the hope of being able to influence the overall situation in the region,” he said in an interview with Svobodnaya Pressa (Free Press).

The retired General Colonel also noted that such a group (about 100 people) could not play an important role in the conflict, but these activities serve as training for the French military in peaceful time but in combat conditions, what he described as a “run-in test” for the special forces.He added that the French presence in Syria is also important from the political point of view, because in this case President Hollande can announce that the authorities are actively participating in the fight against terrorism.This announcement will be reported by the mass media, hailing the president’s decision.

France Better Use These Forces at Home While It Hosts European Football Cup

However, Middle East expert Abdel Bari Atwan is convinced that this move might turn out to be a counterproductive one and serve no good to France itself. “I was surprised by the news about the deployment,” he said in an interview with RT.“First, why the French special forces,” he questioned. “Secondly, why now?”“I think that the move might turn out to be counterproductive and serve no good to France, which is currently hosting the European Football Cup.He also suggested that the French might want to look involved in the military successes in Syria, which are currently owed to the Syrians, Russians and Iranians.The expert also added that he does not see any sense in the move as it is already too late

‘It is All About Gas Pipelines’

However Anatoly Nesmiyan, Russian military expert and blogger, better known by his username el_murid, provided a completely different point of view.

“Once Syria was France’s mandate territory and the French continue watching carefully over the situation in the country,” he said in an interview with Svobodnaya Pressa.

“However the problem is that the Americans are now trying to create a transit Kurdish corridor, but not against Daesh, but to ensure the transit of Iranian gas,” he suggested.“

In other words, the idea of two gas pipelines, which what the Syrian war is all about, is still hanging in the air: the first pipeline was to be from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey further into Europe; the second one, known as the “Islamic Pipeline” was supposed to run Iran-Iraq-Syria and further through Mediterranean Sea into Europe,” he explained.The expert added that the failure of the Qatar project has not discouraged the ‘game players’ and the project might be revived, taking into account the thaw in relations with Iran and active Kurdish position.In this case, he explained, the recapture of Manbij is of key interest, as there meet the interests of the US and Europe.

The recapture will enable control of the border city of Jerablus, which is essential to the unification of the Kurdish cantons of Afrin and Kobani.The Turks are against this scenario, he said, but it seems that nobody is listening to them. The problem however is that the SDF have encircled the city, which was not very difficult due to the open landscape and the aerial support of the US-led coalition.But the Kurds are unable to enter the city on their own, this is beyond their potential. They don’t have such special forces which could efficiently fight in a city. Besides, Daesh has relocated some of its forces from the border city of Azaz to Raqqa and to Manbij, seriously reinforcing their positions there. This could be one of the main reasons why the French forces appeared near Manbij, where the American and British special forces are already operating.

There are some reports, the expert said, the Belgians will join them in the near future. And taking into account the importance of the city, the expert did not rule out that the Americans and the Europeans will be in the first ranks of an offensive on Manbij.‘

It is All About Division of Syria

‘Semyon Bagdasarov, Director of the Moscow-based Center for Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies is convinced that the move will lead to the division of Syria.“The French now want to settle in Syria, and the simplest way is to do it in the north-east of the country, together with the Americans,” he said in an interview with Svobodnaya Pressa.The expert also noted that in March the Kurds announced the creation of a federal region in the north of Syria. They also set up a council which united not only the Kurds, but also Arabs, Assyrians, Christians and Turkmen.

“It is a typical western vision of democracy – to unite everyone. What it will lead to, is another question, but, without any doubt, it is all about the division of Syria,” he said.

He also stressed that taking into consideration the interest of Turkey in the north-west of the country – near the city of Azaz and near Aleppo – Ankara was given the freedom of action, so to say, if the Turks with the help of rebels and their special forces can take Aleppo under its full control, this quasi-state will remain in their domain. The rest of the territory will be controlled by Damascus.

I haven’t written a single word about this non-event, precisely because it is a non event. It’s an artificially created argument, with the mainstream reasoning used on both sides, being equally fallacious. A gigantic deception played out with all the pomp and circumstance of a Royal Wedding and just about as empty.

Nevertheless, as pointless as I know it to be, as the result is pretty much a fait accomplis, I will be voting to leave the EU. And in any case, just like a recent referendum in Ireland that went the ‘wrong’ way, if ours too, goes the ‘wrong’ way then the State will just do it all over again until it gets the ‘right’ result.

Others have summed up the many reasons why, so I’ll leave it to them to explain. But here’s an apposite quote from one of the only two, yes two articles I’ve read on the subject which make any sense to me as a socialist:

In effect, the left-wing Remainers will have given the establishment (in particular the Tory party) a firm helping hand in supporting the EU, and though Michael Chessum and Owen Jones will cry out about how the EU needs to be reformed and challenged on its own terms, the dominant forces of parliamentary reaction will simply argue (correctly) that the majority of the political establishment and a large number of progressive campaigns from a number of distinct causes and sectors gave Britain’s post-referendum EU membership a resounding sign of approval. From that vantage point, Cameron and the right-wing media will simply be able to drown out calls for more radical EU reforms and gloat about how the Remain vote secures their position and augments their authority. With the corporate world, mainstream media, military, City of London, arms trade and the majority of the political Right and Centre supporting Remain, a vote for Leave isn’t just a vote against the neoliberal forces of the Troika: It is also a vote against our own ruling classes. — ‘Another Tamriel is Possible: Brexit Proposals vs Solutions’ by Elliot Murphy http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/07/another-tamriel-is-possible-brexit-proposals-vs-solutions/

Elsewhere, a less polite voice has spelt out the reasons that underpins the above:

While the European Union tries to “kettle” refugees in Turkey, turn them back to Libya before they reach international waters, struggles to reign in Italy and its navy which has committed the unpardonable sin, according to the EU, of upholding the law of the sea by insisting on rescuing people at risk on the sea, even where and when those people are of darker skin and a different religion than the EU finds admissible; while the European Union contorts and distorts its own refugee policy to deny safe haven to those fleeing barrel bombs, militias, armies, automatic weapons, air strikes waged, supplied, supported in part, by the very same countries that make up the EU; the big worry, apparently, for some socialists in the United Kingdom is that a majority of people in Great Britain might actually vote to leave this confederation of capitalists; this union of exploiters; this common market designed to flatten every particular impediment to the accumulation of capital. — ‘Little Ado About Something’ By S. Artesian

http://thewolfatthedoor.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/little-ado-about-something.html

The so-called Leftie Remainers all appear to be suffering from some kind weird delusion about their capabilities to transform the EU but then this is a symptom of the disease that Lenin called Social Imperialism that I prefer to call straight-up opportunism.

Pretty much all the stuff I’ve read from Leftie Remainers about why to stay goes on about ‘uniting the progressive forces of the EU’ and forming some kind of transnational something or other. Talk about delusions of grandeur! And aside from Greece (where even when in government, the ‘Left’ made a complete hash of it and finally capitulated to the forces of Capital, and in the process, sold out the people who voted them in!), the rest, especially here in the UK, couldn’t organise a Garden Party, let alone a transnational political movement. And all, as Elliot Murphy above points out, without explaining anything at all about how this state of Leftie Nirvana will be achieved.

So I think these two quotes make it perfectly clear why I will commit the fruitless exercise of voting on the 23 June, in the vain hope that enough people will see sense and tell the European ‘Union’ to, F…K OFF! Well I can dream can’t I?

Opinions to the contrary are welcome, as long as they’re reasonably cogent and of course, intelligent.

Polls show most US voters want neither candidate elected president. One or the other will succeed Obama, continuing his deplorable agenda, likely exceeding his contempt for democratic values and rule of law principles – including four more years of endless imperial wars at home and abroad.

Comments the presumptive candidates made in Friday speeches signaled what’s shaping up as likely the nastiest rough and tumble campaign in memory.

They focused on pejoratives, each calling the other unfit to serve – likely a rare truthful comment either aspirant will make throughout the summer/fall campaign.

“When Donald Trump says ‘(l)et’s make America great again,’ that is code language for let’s take America backward,” Clinton blustered.

She ignored her unaccountable high crimes of war and against humanity as first lady, US senator, and secretary of state, as well as the Clinton crime family’s foundation, a racketeering operation masquerading as a charitable NGO.

Will Trump raise these issues in the weeks ahead? Failure to highlight them so far suggests not, featuring pejorative mudslinging instead.

Pretending to support progressive issues her public record shows otherwise, Clinton blasted Trump, saying he’ll “take us in the wrong direction on so many issues that we care about.”

She consistently ignores her longstanding pro-war, pro-Wall Street, pro-business, anti-labor, anti-populist agenda – including her deplorable record as arguably America’s worst ever secretary of state.

Trump was largely restrained, addressing an evangelical conference, mostly sticking to prepared remarks, using a teleprompter he usually spurns.

“Hillary Clinton has jeopardized, totally jeopardized, national security by putting her emails on a private server all to hide her corrupt dealings,” he told attendees.

“Bill and Hillary made $153 million, giving speeches to special interest groups since 2001. These donors own Hillary Clinton,” saying he spent $55 million of his own money on his campaign to date.

He defended Washington’s indefensible war on Islam, calling it “radical Islamic terrorism,” ignoring its US creation and support, an agenda he’ll follow if elected president.

“We will defend Christian Americans,” he blustered – for emphasis repeating “Christian Americans.”

Clinton will appoint “radical judges who will legislate from the bench…abolish the Second Amendment and destroy the rule of law.”

Trump ignored today’s federal courts stacked with right-wing extremists, notably America’s Supremes, mostly pro-dirty business as usual, largely likeminded under Democrat and Republican administrations since the Warren court, progressive jurists excluded from consideration.

Trump claiming “(w)e’re going to bring our nation together” belies a bipartisan system run by monied interest, self-serving oligarch governance, benefitting themselves exclusively, popular needs and concerns increasingly ignored.

Trump v. Clinton in November highlights fascist tyranny’s triumph over democratic rule. Continuing the worst of Bush/Obama awaits – possible WW III if war goddess Clinton wins.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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

As Hillary Clinton climbs to become the first female major US party presidential nominee, more and more incidents from the notorious email scandal are being revealed. This time it turns out she used her cell phone to approve drone assassinations in Pakistan and many other countries.a

According to a new FBI report, during 2011-2012, Hillary Clinton, who served as a Secretary of State at the time of events, used her cell phone to approve of drone strikes that killed as many as 1,000 civilians, including up to 200 children in Pakistan alone.

The drone strikes, conducted in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, and other countries, were the CIA’s responsibility. However, an extremely high number of civilian casualties eventually made some Pakistani officials stand up against the drone strikes, which led to the US State Department choosing intervene. In fact, the State Department criticized the CIA’s timing of the attacks. No objections to the choice of targets were made.  

Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton checks her PDA upon her departure in a military C-17 plane from Malta bound for Tripoli, Libya, in this October 18, 2011, file photo

This led to a situation where State Department officials were notified by the CIA before the time of attack, sometimes only half an hour or so. Thus, Hillary Clinton, as a head of Department of State, and her aides, effectively became the ones who authorized the attacks.

According to FBI reports, Clinton’s aides forwarded some of these notifications to her personal email server, and that’s how the FBI discovered the whole scheme.The short time window, during which State Department had to react, led Clinton to use her own smartphone, because it was, obviously, faster and more convenient method of communication, but it was also far from being secure. This is remarkable given the CIA treats the drone program with the highest levels of secrecy, explicitly prohibiting any discussion of the program in public or outside secure channels of communication.The use of a smartphone, in combination with home personal email server, is in fact mishandling of classified information — basically a crime, some argue.

The White House acknowledged in a press briefing on Thursday, the day that President Obama endorsed Clinton as a Presidential nominee, that the FBI probe into Clinton’s handling of classified information is a “criminal investigation.” The FBI is expected to interview Clinton this summer about the scandal, but law-enforcement officials doubt that criminal charges will be filed against her, as using less-than-secure channels of communication is a widespread practice among US agencies when it comes to time-sensitive information.The investigation is complicated by the fact that, according to reports, the forwarded emails were “vaguely worded” and contained no references to drones, the CIA, or information about the targets. Which, in turn, makes one wonder: how could State Department authorize an attack they knew almost nothing about?

GR Editor’s Note:  We bring this controversial viewpoint to the attention of GR readers. Global Research does not necessarily endorse this statement.

*       *      *

We, the undersigned, are Russians living and working in the USA. We have been watching with increasing anxiety as the current US and NATO policies have set us on an extremely dangerous collision course with the Russian Federation, as well as with China. Many respected, patriotic Americans, such as Paul Craig Roberts, Stephen Cohen, Philip Giraldi, Ray McGovern and many others have been issuing warnings of a looming a Third World War. But their voices have been all but lost among the din of a mass media that is full of deceptive and inaccurate stories that characterize the Russian economy as being in shambles and the Russian military as weak—all based on no evidence. But we—knowing both Russian history and the current state of Russian society and the Russian military, cannot swallow these lies. We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. 

Let us take a step back and put what is happening in a historical context. Russia has suffered a great deal at the hands of foreign invaders, losing 22 million people in World War II. Most of the dead were civilians, because the country was invaded, and the Russians have vowed to never let such a disaster happen again. Each time Russia had been invaded, she emerged victorious. In 1812 Nepoleon invaded Russia; in 1814 Russian cavalry rode into Paris. On June 22, 1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe bombed Kiev; On May 8, 1945, Soviet troops rolled into Berlin.

But times have changed since then. If Hitler were to attack Russia today, he would be dead 20 to 30 minutes later, his bunker reduced to glowing rubble by a strike from a Kalibr supersonic cruise missile launched from a small Russian navy ship somewhere in the Baltic Sea. The operational abilities of the new Russian military have been most persuasively demonstrated during the recent action against ISIS, Al Nusra and other foreign-funded terrorist groups operating in Syria. A long time ago Russia had to respond to provocations by fighting land battles on her own territory, then launching a counter-invasion; but this is no longer necessary. Russia’s new weapons make retaliation instant, undetectable, unstoppable and perfectly lethal.

Thus, if tomorrow a war were to break out between the US and Russia, it is guaranteed that the US would be obliterated. At a minimum, there would no longer be an electric grid, no internet, no oil and gas pipelines, no interstate highway system, no air transportation or GPS-based navigation. Financial centers would lie in ruins. Government at every level would cease to function. US armed forces, stationed all around the globe, would no longer be resupplied. At a maximum, the entire landmass of the US would be covered by a layer of radioactive ash. We tell you this not to be alarmist, but because, based on everything we know, we are ourselves alarmed. If attacked, Russia will not back down; she will retaliate, and she will utterly annihilate the United States.

The US leadership has done everything it could to push the situation to the brink of disaster. First, its anti-Russian policies have convinced the Russian leadership that making concessions or negotiating with the West is futile. It has become apparent that the West will always support any individual, movement or government that is anti-Russian, be it tax-cheating Russian oligarchs, convicted Ukrainian war criminals, Saudi-supported Wahhabi terrorists in Chechnya or cathedral-desecrating punks in Moscow. Now that NATO, in violation of its previous promises, has expanded right up to the Russian border, with US forces deployed in the Baltic states, within artillery range of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest city, the Russians have nowhere left to retreat. They will not attack; nor will they back down or surrender. The Russian leadership enjoys over 80% of popular support; the remaining 20% seems to feel that it is being too soft in opposing Western encroachment. But Russia will retaliate, and a provocation or a simple mistake could trigger a sequence of events that will end with millions of Americans dead and the US in ruins.

Unlike many Americans, who see war as an exciting, victorious foreign adventure, the Russians hate and fear war. But they are also ready for it, and they have been preparing for war for several years now. Their preparations have been most effective. Unlike the US, which squanders untold billions on dubious overpriced arms programs such as the F-35 joint task fighter, the Russians are extremely stingy with their defense rubles, getting as much as 10 times the bang for the buck compared to the bloated US defense industry. While it is true that the Russian economy has suffered from low energy prices, it is far from being in shambles, and a return to growth is expected as early as next year. Senator John McCain once called Russia “A gas station masquerading as a country.” Well, he lied. Yes, Russia is the world’s largest oil producer and second-largest oil exporter, but it is also world’s largest exporter of grain and nuclear power technology. It is as advanced and sophisticated a society as the United States. Russia’s armed forces, both conventional and nuclear, are now ready to fight, and they are more than a match for the US and NATO, especially if a war erupts anywhere near the Russian border.

But such a fight would be suicidal for all sides. We strongly believe that a conventional war in Europe runs a strong chance of turning nuclear very rapidly, and that any US/NATO nuclear strike on Russian forces or territory will automatically trigger a retaliatory Russian nuclear strike on the continental US. Contrary to irresponsible statements made by some American propagandists, American antiballistic missile systems are incapable of shielding the American people from a Russian nuclear strike. Russia has the means to strike at targets in the USA with long-range nuclear as well as conventional weapons.

The sole reason why the USA and Russia have found themselves on a collision course, instead of defusing tensions and cooperating on a wide range of international problems, is the stubborn refusal by the US leadership to accept Russia as an equal partner: Washington is dead set on being the “world leader” and the “indispensable nation,” even as its influence steadily dwindles in the wake of a string of foreign policy and military disasters such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and the Ukraine. Continued American global leadership is something that neither Russia, nor China, nor most of the other countries are willing to accept. This gradual but apparent loss of power and influence has caused the US leadership to become hysterical; and it is but a small step from hysterical to suicidal. America’s political leaders need to be placed under suicide watch.

First and foremost, we are appealing to the commanders of the US Armed Forces to follow the example of Admiral William Fallon, who, when asked about a war with Iran, reportedly replied “not on my watch.” We know that you are not suicidal, and that you do not wish to die for the sake of out-of-touch imperial hubris. If possible, please tell your staff, colleagues and, especially, your civilian superiors that a war with Russia will not happen on your watch. At the very least, take that pledge yourselves, and, should the day ever come when the suicidal order is issued, refuse to execute it on the grounds that it is criminal. Remember that according to the Nuremberg Tribunal “To initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Since Nuremberg, “I was just following orders” is no longer a valid defense; please don’t be war criminals.

We also appeal to the American people to take peaceful but forceful action to oppose any politician or party that engages in irresponsible, provocative Russia-baiting, and that condones and supports a policy of needless confrontation with a nuclear superpower that is capable of destroying America in about an hour. Speak up, break through the barrier of mass media propaganda, and make your fellow Americans aware of the immense danger of a confrontation between Russia and the US.

There is no objective reason why US and Russia should consider each other adversaries. The current confrontation is entirely the result of the extremist views of the neoconservative cult, whose members were allowed to infiltrate the US Federal government under President Bill Clinton, and who consider any country that refuses to obey their dictates as an enemy to be crushed. Thanks to their tireless efforts, over a million innocent people have already died in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, the Ukraine, Yemen, Somalia and in many other countries—all because of their maniacal insistence that the USA must be a world empire, not a just a regular, normal country, and that every national leader must either bow down before them, or be overthrown. In Russia, this irresistible force has finally encountered an immovable object. They must be forced to back down before they destroy us all.

We are absolutely and categorically certain that Russia will never attack the US, nor any EU member state, that Russia is not at all interested in recreating the USSR, and that there is no “Russian threat” or “Russian aggression.” Much of Russia’s recent economic success has a lot to do with the shedding of former Soviet dependencies, allowing her to pursue a “Russia first” policy. But we are just as certain that if Russia is attacked, or even threatened with attack, she will not back down, and that the Russian leadership will not “blink.” With great sadness and a heavy heart they will do their sworn duty and unleash a nuclear barrage from which the United States will never recover. Even if the entire Russian leadership is killed in a first strike, the so-called “Dead Hand” (the “Perimetr” system) will automatically launch enough nukes to wipe the USA off the political map. We feel that it is our duty to do all we can to prevent such a catastrophe.

Evgenia Gurevich, Ph.D.
http://thesaker.ru

Victor Katsap, PhD, Sr. Scientist
NuFlare Technology America, Inc.

Andrei Kozhev

Serge Lubomudrov

Natalya Minkovskaya

Dmitry Orlov
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com

Irina Petrova, RP

The Saker (A. Raevsky)
http://thesaker.is

“When the sheepdog inevitably folds in the late spring or early summer before a November election, there’s no time remaining to win ballot access for alternative parties or candidates, no time to raise money or organize any effective challenge to the two capitalist parties. At that point, with all the alternatives foreclosed, the narrative shifts to the familiar “lesser of two evils.” Every sheepdog candidate surrenders the shreds of his credibility to the Democratic nominee in time for the November election. This is how the Bernie Sanders show ends, as the left-leaning warm-up act for Hillary Clinton.” –Bruce A Dixon, May 6, 2015

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Length (59:02)

Click to download the audio (MP3 format) 

In the wake of the June 7 primaries, it is quite apparent that Hillary Rodham Clinton, former First Lady, former New York Senator, and former Secretary of State has effectively clinched the Democratic Party’s nomination for President of the United States.

Hillary Clinton is currently under a FBI criminal investigation over her use of a private email server to conduct government business.

The first woman to run as a major party’s nominee for President of the US has also racked up $28 million dollars in Wall Street money over the current election cycle alone. According to data from the NGO watchdog Open Secrets, roughly 90% of Clinton’s top contributors over the course of her career since 1999 include banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, corporations like Time Warner and Microsoft, and corporate law firms like DLA Piper and Skadden, Arps. Et al.

What is more, Clinton’s record in government, includes her backing of the War in Iraq (2003), the coups in Honduras (2009) and Ukraine (2014), and the military assault on Libya (2011).

 “I don’t think there has ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.” – President Barrack Obama, June 9, 2016 

Indeed it is hard to reconcile this background with commitments to Wall Street reform, yet her Democratic Party rival Bernie Sanders seems poised to be aligned with Republican and neocon Robert Kagan, in the desire to frustrate Donald Trump’s White House bid.

What will become of the movement Bernie Sanders helped to inspire over the course of the last year? Can the movement Bernie Sanders helped catalyze surmount the systemic barriers put in place to protect elite corporate control of Washington?

This week’s Global Research News Hour attempts to address these questions by first examining the rise of what appears to be a genuine voice for social democratic reform in the UK, in the person of Jeremy Corbyn.

In September of 2015, Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time anti-war and labour activist, and self-described socialist, secured the leadership of Great Britain’s Labour Party running on promises to nationalize the railways, increase taxes on the wealthy, eliminate nuclear weapons, and make university free for all. Corbyn is, in some respects, Bernie Sanders’s counterpart in the UK. Melbourne-based Binoy Kampmark gives us an overview of Corbyn and his politics in the first half hour.

In the second half hour, we welcome Stephen Lendman back to the show to share his thoughts about the past week’s election campaign, his less than glowing assessment of Sanders, and how meaningful political change in the US will have to be achieved outside the formal political process.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College in Cambridge and is currently a Senior Scholar at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia.

Stephen Lendman is a prolific writer and host of the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. He was editor and contributor to the recent book “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” His blog site is sjlendman.blogspot.com. He is a frequent contributor to the Global Research site and is based in Chicago.

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Length (59:02)

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . The show can be heard on the Progressive Radio Network at prn.fm. Listen in every Monday at 3pm ET.

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia Canada. – Tune in every Saturday at 6am.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

The economy of the state of Israel that enables it to treat the international community with such contempt, is dependent entirely upon its trade with the EU single market. And that, apart from any other consideration, is another important reason for the UK to vote to leave the European Union.

The position of the EU as Israel’s primary trading partner is enabled under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, notwithstanding that Article 2 of that Agreement very clearly states:

“Relations between the parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this agreement.”

It is a blatant fact that Israel – as illegal occupier of the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been in gross breach of this provision since the very inception of the Agreement and yet the EU has turned a blind eye to the continuing violations that include the illegal settlement of over a half a million Israelis on Palestinian soil in a deliberate effort to prevent the establishment of an independent state for the largest indigenous people of the region.

The reason for this intolerable state of affairs is unquestionably the influence of the lobbyists embedded within the councils and committees of the European Union at virtually every level in Brussels and elsewhere, who exert a corrupting effect upon EU political and economic policy in order to skew EU political decisions, funding and bilateral trade to the favour of the (non-member) Israeli state.

A vote to divorce the United Kingdom from the EU would clearly indicate British rejection of such artificial and dangerous ‘arrangements’ that have such an adverse impact upon both regional and world peace.

With the democratic nomination now officially all but certain (Sanders, quite obviously, never had a chance), the Guardian has thrown their full editorial weight – such as it is – into a pre-emptive defence of Hillary’s record and an hysterical celebration of the “progress” that the election of this particular bank-backed, corporate-bought, war-hawk would (apparently) demonstrate.

US duopoly power replaced the eras of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. No JFKs exist, President Kennedy as we recall was a peacemaker assassinated for opposing war, urging nuclear disarmament and the normalization of relations  with the Soviet Union.   

New Deal, Fair Deal and Great Society programs are heading for history’s dust bin. 

Bipartisan neocons infesting Washington want social justice ended, neoliberal enslavement replacing it, fascist police state harshness enforcing it. 

America is a gangster state, criminals running it – beginning in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, hardened under George W. Bush, institutionalized under Obama, certain to worsen no matter who succeeds him.

US voters in November get to choose between two deplorable, unacceptable choices – Clinton the most recklessly dangerous presidential aspirant in US history, Trump a billionaire, racist demagogue, both self-serving, mindless of popular needs and concerns.

Four more years of endless imperial wars are certain. America will resemble Guatemala before they end, its people impoverished, terrorized by police state harshness, constitutional rights replaced by full-blown tyranny.

Most disturbing is how uninformed and indifferent most Americans are about a ruthless system destroying their lives, welfare and futures.

Elections accomplish nothing, rigged to sustain continuity, benefitting wealth, privilege and power exclusively over progressive governance of, by and for everyone equitably.

The nation I grew up in from the 1930s through the 60s no longer exists, unfit and unsafe to live in since neocons usurped power – Hillary Clinton their current standard bearer.

Will November’s election (sic) be rigged to install her? Corporate controlled electronic voting machines make it simple. So does disenfranchising millions of unwanted voters.

Green party presidential aspirant Jill Stein blasted the Democrat party, calling it “a disgrace…blatantly rigging the system” for Clinton, the corrupted media establishment supporting her, an unindicted racketeer, war criminal, major threat to world peace.

Late in my life, I can’t shake a deep foreboding for what I fear is coming, dangers threatening everyone, youths with no futures, endless wars on a slippery slope toward possible mass annihilation.

Poet TS Eliot once mused about the world one day ending “not with a bang but a whimper.” Thermonuclear weapons in the hands of neocons like Hillary Clinton risk otherwise.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Local sources in Syria’s Southern Quneitra province revealed that terrorist organizations had been distributing Israeli-made foodstuffs to the locals in the areas under their control.

This has been happening almost monthly, according to the sources which indicated that Israeli-made food items have flooded the areas controlled by terrorists in Quneitra countryside.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the food aid from Israel proves the level of coordination between Israel and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorist organization in the southern region.

Observers see that the proliferation of Israeli goods in the areas where terrorists are present envisages a future that terrorist organizations want for Syria.

Al-Nusra terrorists in the southern region and Israel seem to be bound by longstanding relations. As a sign of staunch support, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described terrorists in Syria as “heroes” when he visited some of them while they were receiving medical treatment in Israeli hospitals.

Counter-Revolution in Brazil and United States Imperialism

By Abayomi Azikiwe, June 09 2016

President Dilma Rousseff of the Brazil Worker’s Party (PT) was suspended from office on May 12, 2016 amid an impeachment proceeding in the national parliament. Rousseff is the first woman president of this vast and heavily populated South American country…

Saudi Arabia Killing Children: United Nations Complicit in Crimes against Humanity

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, June 10 2016

“It appears that political power and diplomatic clout have been allowed to trump the UN’s duty to expose those responsible for the killing and maiming of more than 1,000 of Yemen’s children.”  Sajjad Mohammad Sajid, Oxfam Director in Yemen, Jun…

Bernie Sanders’ Position Concerning the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

By Dr. Alon Ben-Meir, June 09 2016

Following the 2016 US presidential elections, the next administration must adopt a new and realistically balanced policy toward Israel and the Palestinians to bring an end to their conflict in the context of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace based on the…

Syrian Women Denounce USAID Funded ‘White Helmets’ in Syria

By Prof. Tim Anderson, June 09 2016

A range of Syrian women have denounced the US-UK funded group the ‘White Helmets’, led by a former British soldier and recently revealed to be financed by USAID. They come from all the country’s communities (e.g. Sunni, Alawi, Druze, Christian)…

War Party Leader Obama Endorses War Goddess Clinton

By Stephen Lendman, June 10 2016

Obama, Clinton and bipartisan neocons infesting Washington explain the deplorable state of America today – a democracy in name only, enriching the privileged few at the expense of most others, waging endless wars on humanity, leaving its fate up for…

Canada’s Pro-Israel Lobby Attempts to Shut Down “Peaceful Pressure” against Israel’s Systematic Violations of International Law

By Prof Michael Keefer, June 10 2016

The latest attempt of the Zionist lobby in Canada to shut down attempts to organize peaceful pressure against the state of Israel’s systematic violations of international law came at what must have seemed an opportune moment. On May 17, the…

Thursday, June 9 proved to be a trying day for combat ground forces around Aleppo. Syrian Arab Army (SAA) units and anti-government forces, including the Faylaq Al-Sham, or the so-called ‘Sham Legion’ engaged each other in multiple fronts in villages around Aleppo.

In northern Aleppo, pro-government Tiger Forces, National Defense Forces and Liwa al-Quds were reported to have stormed Mallah Farms in an attempt to wrest control from the anti-government Sham Legion. The assault ultimately failed, and there have been a reported 15 deaths on the pro-government side.

The Sham Legion reported a number of victories with video evidence, including TOW missile attacks in Khalasah, southern Aleppo, which destroyed SAA armor and anti-aircraft units. The SAA also suffered the loss of a missile team of their own when the so-called “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) forces attacked a 9M113 Konkurs team with a TOW missile.

A combined terrorist assault force comprised of the Sham Legion, FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra engaged pro-government forces in al-Humayra, southern Aleppo. An FSA TOW missile team destroyed what appears to be an SAA or Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) tank, while Sham Legion drone footage appears to show IRCG forces retreating from the same village.

Jaysh al-Fatah briefly reported the capture of Zaytan, a village in southern Aleppo. However, pro-militant pages have admitted that Jaysh al-Fatah had to retreat from Zaytan.

The “Syrian Democratic Forces”, supported by US-led coalition warplanes, cut off the least major ISIS supply line to in the area of Manbij: the Al-Bab-Manbij highway. Meanwhile, the QareQowzaq bridge has been repaired . Now it allows to send more reinforcements and suppliies to SDF units, battling for Manbij.

A little noticed 2008 email from former Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, raises serious questions about his official narrative on the collapse of Lehman Brothers. We’ll get to the email in detail, but first some necessary background. 

A lot of eyes rolled on Wall Street last October when Ben Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve in the lead up to and during the financial collapse in 2008, released his memoir of the financial crisis with the title: “The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and its Aftermath.” Many Wall Street observers felt the title would have more correctly captured the facts on the ground had it read: “The Lack of Fed Courage to Supervise Mega Banks Led to an Epic Collapse.” (In the leadup to the crisis, the Fed allowed Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill and JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, to sit on the Board of its Federal Reserve Bank of New York, among numerous other conflicts of interest.)

Throughout his memoir, including Chapter 12 titled “Lehman: The Dam Breaks,” Bernanke goes to great pains to paint a portrait of the Fed and himself as being intensely on top of the situation at Lehman Brothers from March 2008 forward, following the Bear Stearns collapse and its absorption by JPMorgan Chase.

For example, Bernanke reveals that the Fed had placed bank examiners at Lehman Brothers, writing as follows:

After JPMorgan Chase bought Bear, the New York Fed staff conferred frequently with the SEC and Lehman – up to three times per day. We would eventually send a small number of bank supervisors to Lehman and the other remaining investment banks.

We also know that Bernanke was briefed in great detail on the Lehman situation by Fed economist Patrick M. Parkinson on July 20, 2008, almost two months before the Lehman bankruptcy, because Parkinson’s email was included among the thousands of pages of text and exhibits of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report, the official analysis of the crisis. In that email, Parkinson wrote:

…Focusing for the moment on LB’s [Lehman Brothers] vulnerable tri-party borrowings, as of July 14 it was financing $200 billion of collateral. Of that amount, all but $12.8 billion was PDCF-eligible [PDCF was an emergency loan program set up by the Fed]. Of the non-PDCF-eligible, $8.7 billion was equities. JPMC [JPMorgan Chase], LB’s clearing bank, is likely to be the first to realize that the money funds and other investors that provide tri-party financing to LB are pulling back significantly. If some morning it fears that the investors are unlikely to roll their repos, it may threaten not to unwind LB’s previous night’s repos. If it did that, LB would be done because the tri-party investors would control its securities inventory. The investors presumably would promptly liquidate the $200 billion of collateral and there is a good chance that investors would lose confidence in the tri-party mechanism and pull back from funding other dealers. Fear of those consequences is, of course, why we facilitated Bear’s acquisition by JPMC. We could try to dissuade JPMC from refusing to unwind by pointing out that if the investors don’t roll the repos LB can borrow from us through the PDCF. Even if we did so, for two reasons JPMC might still balk. The first is the non-PDCF collateral. We could address that concern by making the equities and other non-PDCF collateral eligible. Or we could try to get LB to wire $12.8 billion of cash into JPMC to cover the rollover risk. The other reason is a fear that LB could be placed in bankruptcy intra-day, before the next day’s tri-party repos and any PDCF loans are settled, in which case JPMC would be stuck with $200 billion in secured loans to LB. I’m not sure that this is at all likely, but JPMC and BNYM [Bank of New York Mellon] are sufficiently concerned that they have arranged a meeting Monday afternoon with SIPC [Securities Investor Protection Corporation that insures brokerage accounts]. (LB’s PD [Primary Dealer] is a SIPC member (as are some but not all of the other PDs) and its bankruptcy would be administered by SIPC.) Board staff plan to sit in on this meeting. But even if we are willing to extend as much as $200 billion of financing to LB, absent an acquirer our action would not ensure LB’s survival… [Information in [ ] brackets has been inserted by Wall Street On Parade.]

Read complete article

The story of Muhammad Ali’s trip to “rescue American hostages” is back in the media since the June 3 death of this unique individual: boxing’s greatest fighter, and perhaps one of the most beloved and inspiring figures of the 20th century.

President Obama’s comments on the Iraq trip were republished in a USA Today article that ran immediately following the news of the champ’s death: “We admire the man who has never stopped using his celebrity for good — the man who helped secure the release of 14 [sic] American hostages from Iraq in 1990,” wrote President Obama.

Gone but a week and Ali’s courage in the face of government opposition is quickly being re-written by the same forces that he stood up against. His legacy and courage demand that history be recounted truthfully.

I was the central organizer of Muhammad Ali’s peace delegation that traveled to Iraq in 1990, the delegation to which Saddam Hussein released 15 American hostages.

The delegation arrives in the Amman, Jordan airport with the hostages. The bombing of Iraq started shortly afterwards.

The idea for the delegation came from former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who asked me to be the organizer of the trip on his behalf. Other anti-war activists joined us.

Unfortunately the current telling of this story largely misses or obscures the main point of Ali’s trip to Iraq, what happened there and why.

Ali’s trip to Iraq was in fact vehemently opposed by the George H.W. Bush administration. The mass media castigated and ridiculed him at the time. He went to Iraq in defiance of the U.S. government and not on its behalf.

Our delegation arrived in Baghdad on November 23, 1990, and left for Jordan on the way back to the United States, with the 15-released hostages, on December 2, 1990.

The delegation Ali led to Baghdad was organized by the U.S. anti-war movement that was at that time bringing thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands, of people into the streets in an ever-growing mass street protest movement throughout the United States in 1990 and 1991.

I was one of the organizers for those protests. The Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East (our admittedly unwieldy name) was made up of hundreds of grassroots peace and community organizations. Ramsey Clark had allowed his downtown Manhattan law office to be used rent-free as the headquarters and mobilization center of these anti-war organizers and volunteers who over-ran that small office from August 1990 during the entire carnage known as the first Gulf War that finally ended on February 28, 1991.

It was from these offices and under Ramsey Clark’s leadership that the Muhammad Ali peace delegation was conceived and initiated. Ramsey and Muhammad were good friends. That too was a story that contained an element of irony since Ramsey was the U.S. attorney general in 1967 when Ali was indicted on federal charges for his refusal to be drafted into the U.S. military. But later Ramsey worked in assisting on the successful Supreme Court legal appeal that overturned Ali’s conviction in 1971.

Ali’s delegation arrived in Baghdad and met with Saddam Hussein at about the same time George H.W. Bush arrived in Saudi Arabia to take Thanksgiving pictures and make patriotic speeches to the U.S. troops that were about to be sent into combat. In fact, that was why we went to Iraq at that particular moment: We were hoping to have contrasting images of Ali “talking” with Iraq while Bush was insisting on war with that country.

It took guts for Muhammad Ali to go to Iraq in 1990. He wanted to help prevent a war with Iraq but he was worried because we were going against the tide.

Our trip to Iraq was filled with unexpected surprises, some of which were truly bizarre. Much of what happened could not have been anticipated, at least by me.

When we first arrived in Baghdad on November 23, 1990, we were taken to Iraq’s most famous hotel, the Al-Rashid. It was early evening and we went straight to the dining area.

Al- Rashid’s 5-star dinner hall was packed with people feasting on the finest food. Most were not Arabs. They looked like they were from western countries. I remember remarking to someone at the buffet table that I didn’t expect so many western media people to be there, to which the person replied, “Most of these people are not media, they are hostages.”

What? We had been reading and watching lurid stories about the immense suffering of western hostages who Saddam Hussein wouldn’t let leave the country in an effort to hold off air strikes.

I couldn’t believe it. These were hostages? I went up to one table of 30-somethings who looked European. “Are you hostages?” They all laughed and told me they were indeed hostages. They were nurses from Ireland who were working in an Irish-run medical facility in Baghdad. They asked me if I wanted to join them for drinks at a bar following dinner.

It was surreal. We all went drinking and they told me their story. Iraq had confiscated their passports so they couldn’t leave the country, but they didn’t want to leave anyway. They were making very good salaries, better money than in Ireland and really enjoying themselves. I asked them if they were scared about being caught up in a war. They were completely dismissive. “There is no way there will be a war,” they told me. They were certain that all the war talk was just a prelude to a negotiated exit of Iraq from Kuwait and a resolution of outstanding issues between Iraq and Kuwait. I told them that the U.S. government doesn’t send hundreds of thousands of troops halfway around the world to negotiate. I think that our conversation was the very first that they held with someone who was convinced that war was really coming to Iraq.

Ali came to the bar too. He didn’t drink of course but he entertained the European hostages and the bar staff by doing magic tricks, including one that he had really mastered where he appeared to levitate at least two inches off the floor.

Magic tricks and jokes aside, Ali was deeply concerned.

As he told me numerous times during the trip, he was concerned not about what would happen to us in Iraq, but rather about retribution when we got home from the media and especially the U.S. government that had demonized him and sentenced him to prison for refusing to go to Vietnam.

He was especially concerned that unless he returned with American hostages that he would be figuratively crucified by the media for cavorting with the enemy at a time when the patriotic drums of war were being beaten at an increasingly feverish pitch. He was right to be worried.

Unlike the European “hostages” who were eating at 5-star hotels and going to bars, the American hostages were facing a much more unpleasant reality. The Iraqi government placed them in government houses and compounds located at strategic military sites. They were placed there as deterrents against the expected U.S. attack. Saddam thought that the United States would not be able to start bombing because these men, who were both workers and business subcontractors doing business in either Iraq or Kuwait, would be right in the line of fire.

While Saddam calculated, or miscalculated — as he regularly did when it came to military questions — that holding westerners in Iraq would serve as a deterrent to a U.S. bombing campaign, the truth is that the Washington “we-need-to-go-to-war again” lobby was thrilled that Saddam took hostages. It played fully into their demonization campaign and war preparations.

Anyone who opposed a war with Iraq was labeled as either an apologist for the hostage-taking Saddam or as a half-wit. Ali was treated as both by the government and the media.

Ali is cited now as a hero for having rescued the U.S. hostages but he and our delegation were treated with scorn and contempt at the time.

Huffington Post writer Andy Campbell succinctly captured the actual attitude towards our trip in his June 4, 2016, post-mortem piece “5 Stories You Didn’t Know About Muhammad Ali”:

Ali was instantly criticized, taking flak from the likes of then-President George H.W. Bush and The New York Times, both of whom expressed concerns that he was fueling a propaganda machine. Speaking about Ali’s Parkinson’s disease, the Times wrote:

Surely the strangest hostage-release campaign of recent days has been the ‘goodwill’ tour of Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion . . . he has attended meeting after meeting in Baghdad despite his frequent inability to speak clearly.

When we left from Iraq on December 2 with the American hostages, our delegation was greeted in Amman, Jordan, by State Department representatives. This was no happy greeting or celebration of freedom. Instead, the mood was grim. The U.S. government was infuriated that Ali had demonstrated that “talking” worked and moreso that it was the anti-war movement that had led the way in defiance of the government.

U.S. government representatives huddled with the hostages and tried to convince them that they leave Ali’s delegation and return on a plane provided by the State Department. One of the men told me they felt pressure from the U.S. government to abandon Ali even though they were immensely grateful for his effort.

In the end, I believe that six of the 15 stayed with us to JFK airport, where we had scheduled a press conference to speak about our trip. We insisted that Ali’s trip proved that “talks and negotiations” were clearly available as a means to prevent war. Of course, the George H.W. Bush administration wanted none of that. They did not want peace.

Muhammad Ali’s delegation to Iraq was considered a threat, and not an asset, by the Bush administration and the media, which was marching in lock-step with the Pentagon, just as it could be relied upon to do 12 years later in the lead up to the second Bush administration’s shock-and-awe invasion. The actual historical context is necessary to understand the “threat” posed by such a delegation in 1990.

Hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, bombers and cruise missiles were being put into place in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf for a war against Iraq. The atmosphere was very tense. We were not from the government but from the anti-war movement. By the time Ali met with Saddam on November 29, 1990 – in fact, on that very day –  the U.S. government browbeat the UN Security Council into authorizing a war against Iraq. This was to be the first time in history that the United States was planning to launch a war and send U.S. troops into real military action in the Arab World. The stakes could not have been higher.

The biggest problem facing the U.S. war lobby (don’t forget Dick Cheney was then Secretary of Defense) was not Iraq’s military. Iraq was small and the Pentagon knew Iraq’s military weaknesses inside and out because it embedded U.S. officers and assets inside Iraqi units during the Iran-Iraq war that had only ended two years before.

The real problem facing policymakers was huge uncertainty about U.S. public opinion. The so-called “Vietnam Syndrome” was the consequence of the last major U.S. war that ended with its troops being driven from the battlefield in Southeast Asia while U.S. cities, high schools and college campuses became centers of intense social and political protest. This, not Iraq’s military, was what the Bush administration was worried about as it was readying the population for war.

To overcome the problem of still-deep anti-war feelings at home, the Bush government relied on a new tactic: a highly personalized demonization campaign in the mainstream media of the leader of the targeted country. Saddam Hussein was an easy target. “The greatest tyrant since Hitler” was the mantra. The media whipped up sensationalized anti-Saddam stories 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

This was the real context of Muhammad Ali’s trip to Iraq. It explains the animus he felt from the media and government. Ali went to meet directly with Saddam Hussein (aka the demon) in a trip that was not authorized by the U.S. government. It was organized by the very people who were organizing mass street protests at home aimed at arousing public opinion in a desperate bid to constrain the government from initiating the first-ever U.S. war in the Arab World – before it started.

Aside for the 15 very-grateful men who were released, Ali received practically no kudos or shout outs for saving the American hostages. This trip was considered subversive by policymakers who were wholly committed to the war drive and actually cared very little about the release of the hostages who had been caught in the middle.

A few weeks after we left Baghdad, Iraq agreed to allow all the other westerners to leave the country.

On January 16, 1991, the war that Muhammad Ali and millions of Americans wanted to stop began with a massive aerial destruction of the country. The U.S.-led air campaign dropped 88,500 tons of explosives on Iraq. Today, 26 years later, U.S. planes are still bombing Iraq. This is the fourth successive U.S. administration to drop bombs on Iraqi cities and towns.

The era of endless U.S. conflict in the Middle East, with all of its attendant human suffering in the Muslim world and beyond, began in 1991 despite Muhammad Ali’s courageous actions to do what he could to hold back the dogs of war. As the politicians eulogize Muhammad Ali, while artfully stripping his legacy of many of the courageous political positions that made him the target of the government when he was alive, we should remember what he really stood for.

Brian Becker is the National Coordinator of the anti-war ANSWER Coalition and the host of the daily news show “Loud & Clear” on Radio Sputnik.

[ALSO: Listen to a special one-hour show of Loud & Clear with Brian Becker about the legacy of Muhammad Ali. He is joined for the full hour by scholar and historian Dr. Anthony Monteiro, Askia Muhammad, Final Call journalist and news director of Pacifica Radio’s WPFW station in Washington, DC., and by activist and author Eugene Puryear.]

Robert Parry says in his latest piece that while the Democrats have been “a reluctant war party” since 1968, by nominating Hillary Clinton, they have once again become an “aggressive war party”.

Noam Chomsky notes that indeed, Hillary Clinton would be more “adventurous”, ie aggressive, than Trump or Sanders in terms of foreign policy, but he and other analysts, like John Pilger, disagree with Parry that the Democrats were, during the period Parry suggests, and perhaps any other, what a rational person would call “reluctant” to kill.

Looking back briefly at a couple of examples of Democratic initiatives, as well as who formed the Democratic party, we see that when it comes to butchering people, the Democrats have never been shy.

John Pilger points out in a recent article that “most of America’s wars (almost all of them against defenceless countries) have been launched not by Republican presidents but by liberal Democrats: Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama.”

Kennedy began the US genocide against the people of Vietnam, demanding bombings and attacks with chemical weapons like napalm, and began a terrorist campaign against Cuba that continues to date.

Johnson, who viewed the Vietnamese people as “barbaric yellow dwarves”, continued the genocide in Vietnam and Indochina.

Carter supported numerous genocides and terrorist campaigns.

Bill Clinton, among many horrific acts, committed a major genocide against the people of Iraq, and helped lay the foundation for today’s nuclear war tension by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders.

One of Hillary Clinton’s many crimes was to continue this expansion by supporting a US-backed, neo-Nazi and neo-con integrated coup in Ukraine while referring to the president of Russia as “Hitler” – by far the most aggressive stance towards Russia of any US candidate.

See Pilger’s article for some of Obama’s crimes, which in several ways are uniquely extreme.

Truman defied his military advisers and many others and carried out mass nuclear executions of civilians as a way to influence the government of Japan (and likely the Soviet Union), then followed his nuclear attacks by further targeting Japanese civilians with the biggest TNT-based mass-execution of civilians in human history up to that point. Executing civilians was a prominent part of his ‘Democratic’ philosophy. He publicly stated that “the German people are beginning to atone for the crimes of the gangsters whom they placed in power and whom they wholeheartedly approved and obediently followed.” His logic, an example of the standard definition of “terrorism”, would suggest that Israelis, who support almost entirely their state’s illegal annexation and massacres of Palestine, should be targeted and killed until they “atone” for what their government is doing, and that US civilians who supported the sanctions against or invasion of Iraq (etc.) should likewise be punished until they “atone”. This is also the principle behind the 9/11 attacks, though US citizens who support terrorism committed by their own state are quick to engage in the “wrong agent” –genetic– fallacy when this is pointed out.

Looking back further than Truman, we find the Democrats comprised the bulk of the pro-chattel-slavery bloc. As noted at Pbs.org, “after the Civil War, most white Southerners opposed Radical Reconstruction and the Republican Party’s support of black civil and political rights. The Democratic Party identified itself as the “white man’s party” and demonized the Republican Party as being “Negro dominated,” even though whites were in control. Determined to re-capture the South, Southern Democrats “redeemed” state after state — sometimes peacefully, other times by fraud and violence. By 1877, when Reconstruction was officially over, the Democratic Party controlled every Southern state. The South remained a one-party region until the Civil Rights movement began in the 1960s. Northern Democrats, most of whom had prejudicial attitudes towards blacks, offered no challenge to the discriminatory policies of the Southern Democrats.”

Backing up again, we see that in fact the Democratic party was founded by supporters of the sadistic genocidaire Andrew Jackson, who enjoyed making clothing from the skin of people who were exterminated in service of expanding the un-free world.

Are Republicans therefore a superior ogranization? Of course not. The two parties check and balance each other to maintain and expand the world’s leading terrorist state.

As we can see, it is nothing new or different for the Democrats to be a party of expansionist gangsters. What is remarkable of Clinton, then, is that even against this gory and tyrannical backdrop, she stands out as especially evil, corrupt, and extremist in her US religio-national supremacism. As Professor Johan Galtung notes, two countries today (and occasionally their proxies) continue to wage aggressive war, thanks to their belief that they have been anointed by their gods: the US and Israel. And Hillary Clinton is as fundamentalist as they come.

As Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky, among others, have recently noted, US elections are “a carnival… a way of making people passive, submissive objects”. Rather than petering out and cowering to the Democratic party, Chomsky says, Sanders supporters should “sustain the ongoing movement, which [should] pay attention to the elections for 10 minutes but meanwhile do other things.” However, at the moment, “it’s the other way around. It’s all focused on the election. It’s just part of the ideology. The way you keep people out of activism is get them all excited about the carnival that goes on every four years and then go home, which has happened over and over.”

Robert Barsocchini is an internationally published author who focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Updates on Twitter. Author’s pamphlet ‘The Agility of Tyranny: Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter’.

The ongoing criminal probe surrounding Hillary’s email server has been marked by opacity and lack of virtually any disclosure, not to mention a major turf war between the FBI and the DOJ, which is why many were surprised when overnight the WSJ revealed that at the center of the probe over Hillary’s handling of classified information are a series of emails between American diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington about whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.

As the WSJ writes, the 2011 and 2012 emails were sent via the “low side’’—government slang for a computer system for unclassified matters—as part of a secret arrangement that gave the State Department more of a voice in whether a Central Intelligence Agency drone strike went ahead, “according to congressional and law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe.” Note the last and recall that two months ago we noted that according to Chuck Grassley, an FBI “source” may leak what the FBI has uncovered so far, to wit:

 Is there going to be political interference? If there’s enough evidence to prosecute, will there be political interference?” Grassley wondered aloud on Friday. “And if there’s political interference, then I assume that somebody in the FBI is going to leak these reports and it’s either going to have an effect politically or it’s going to lead to prosecution if there’s enough evidence.

It appears that this is precisely what may have happened, and the “source” used the WSJ as the distribution platform.  And now that we (don’t) know the “who”, here is the “what.”

The CIA drone campaign in Pakistan, though widely reported in Pakistan, is treated as secret by the U.S. government. Under strict U.S. classification rules, U.S. officials have been barred from discussing strikes publicly and even privately outside of secure communications systems. The State Department said in January that 22 emails on Clinton’s personal server at her home have been judged to contain top-secret information and aren’t being publicly released.Many of them dealt with whether diplomats concurred or not with the CIA drone strikes, congressional and law-enforcement officials said.

As the WSJ adds, some of the [drone-related] emails were then forwarded by Clinton’s aides to her personal email account, which routed them to a server she kept at her home in suburban New York when she was secretary of state, the officials said. Investigators have raised concerns that Clinton’s personal server was less secure than State Department systems.

 The vaguely worded messages didn’t mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about the militant targets, officials said. The still-secret emails are a key part of the FBI investigation that has long dogged Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, these officials said. They were written within the often-narrow time frame in which State Department officials had to decide whether or not to object to drone strikes before the CIA pulled the trigger, the officials said.

This is an issue, and potentially a criminal one, because “law-enforcement and intelligence officials said State Department deliberations about the covert CIA drone program should have been conducted over a more secure government computer system designed to handle classified information. State Department officials told FBI investigators they communicated via the less-secure system on a few instances, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials. It happened when decisions about imminent strikes had to be relayed fast and the U.S. diplomats in Pakistan or Washington didn’t have ready access to a more-secure system, either because it was night or they were traveling.”

There is also the question whether leaked emails may have tipped off drone strike targets about an imminent CIA assassination attempt.

The WSJ adds that emails sent over the low side sometimes were informal discussions that occurred in addition to more-formal notifications through secure communications, the officials said.

One such exchange came just before Christmas in 2011, when the U.S. ambassador sent a short, cryptic note to his boss indicating a drone strike was planned. That sparked a back-and-forth among Clinton’s senior advisers over the next few days, in which it was clear they were having the discussions in part because people were away from their offices for the holiday and didn’t have access to a classified computer, officials said.

Another interesting tangent: the turf war between the CIA and the State Department at the time. WSJ has more:

In 2011, Pakistani officials began to push back in private against the drone program, raising questions for the U.S. over the extent to which the program still had their consent. U.S. diplomats warned the CIA and White House they risked losing access to Pakistan’s airspace unless more discretion was shown, said current and former officials. Within the administration, State Department and military officials argued that the CIA needed to be more “judicious” about when strikes were launched. They weren’t challenging the spy agency’s specific choice of targets, but mainly the timing of strikes.

The CIA initially chafed at the idea of giving the State Department more of a voice in the process. Under a compromise reached around the year 2011, CIA officers would notify their embassy counterparts in Islamabad when a strike in Pakistan was planned, so then-U.S. ambassador Cameron Munter or another senior diplomat could decide whether to “concur” or “non-concur.” Mr. Munter declined to comment. Diplomats in Islamabad would communicate the decision to their superiors in Washington. A main purpose was to give then-Secretary of State Clinton and her top aides a chance to consider whether she wanted to weigh in with the CIA director about a planned strike.

With the compromise, State Department-CIA tensions began to subside. Only once or twice during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure at State did U.S. diplomats object to a planned CIA strike, according to congressional and law-enforcement officials familiar with the emails. U.S. diplomats in Pakistan and Washington usually relayed and discussed their concur or non-concur decisions via the State Department’s more-secure messaging system. But about a half-dozen times, when they were away from more-secure equipment, they improvised by sending emails on their smartphones about whether they backed an impending strike or not, the officials said.

The time available to the State Department to weigh in on a planned strike varied widely, from several days to as little as 20 or 30 minutes. “If a strike was imminent, it was futile to use the high side, which no one would see for seven hours,” said one official.

Adding to those communications hurdles, U.S. intelligence officials privately objected to the State Department even using its high-side system. They wanted diplomats to use a still-more-secure system called the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Community Systems, or JWICs. State Department officials don’t have ready access to that system, even in Washington. If drone-strike decisions were needed quickly, it wouldn’t be an option, officials said.

The big question, of course, is whether any of these emails were intercepted, and leaked, tipping off locals about upcoming air strikes:  “U.S. officials said there is no evidence Pakistani intelligence officials intercepted any of the low-side State Department emails or used them to protect militants.” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said the agency “is not going to speak to the content of documents, nor would we speak to any ongoing review.’’

In other words, a potential leak could have come at just the worst possible time, and potentially tipped off the target of CIA strikes.

As is widely known, the email issue has dogged Clinton for more than a year. Despite her success in nailing down the Democratic presidential nomination, polls show many voters continue to doubt her truthfulness and integrity. Her campaign manager has acknowledged the email matter has hurt her. Republican rival Donald Trump has attacked Clinton repeatedly on the issue, calling her “Crooked Hillary,’’ saying what she did was a crime and suggesting the Justice Department would let her off because it is run by Democrats.

So is this a criminal offense? According to the WSJ, several law-enforcement officials said they don’t expect any criminal charges to be filed as a result of the investigation, although a final review of the evidence will be made only after an expected FBI interview with Clinton this summer. One reason is that government workers at several agencies, including the departments of Defense, Justice and State, have occasionally resorted to the low-side system to give each other notice about sensitive but fast-moving events, according to one law-enforcement official.

When Clinton has been asked about the possibility of being criminally charged over the email issue, she has repeatedly said “that is not going to happen.’’ She has said it was a mistake to use a personal server for email but it was a decision she made as a matter of convenience.

But what may be the punchline, is that as the WSJ writes, beyond the campaign implications, the investigation exposes the latest chapter in a power struggle that pits the enforcers of strict secrecy, including the FBI and CIA, against some officials at the State Department and other agencies who want a greater voice in the use of covert lethal force around the globe, because of the impact it has on broader U.S. policy goals.

While Hillary’s fate is yet to be determined, this episode reveals something else about the future of US usage of drone strikes:

Under pressure to address critics abroad, Mr. Obama pledged to increase the transparency of drone operations by shifting, as much as possible, control of drone programs around the world to the U.S. military instead of the CIA. An exception was made for Pakistan. But even in Pakistan, Mr. Obama recently signaled a shift. The drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour last month was conducted by the military, not the CIA, and the outcome was disclosed.  While the CIA still controls drones over the tribal areas of Pakistan near Afghanistan, the pace of strikes has declined dramatically in recent years. U.S. officials say there are fewer al Qaeda targets there now that the CIA can find.

And now we eagerly look forward to whatever the next batch of emails the “law-enforcement officials briefed on the Federal Bureau of Investigation probe” reveal in the coming weeks.

US intelligence agencies have ramped up their operations intended to remove Bolivian President Evo Morales from office. All options are on the table, including assassination. Barack Obama, who sees the weakening of Latin America’s “hostile bloc of populist states” as one of his administration’s foreign-policy victories, intends to buoy this success before stepping down. 

Washington also feels under the gun in Bolivia because of China’s successful expansion in the country. Morales is steadily strengthening his financial, economic, trade, and military relationship with Beijing. Chinese businesses in La Paz are thriving – making investments and loans and taking part in projects to secure a key position for Bolivia in the modernization of the continent’s transportation industry. In the next 10 years, thanks to Bolivia’s plentiful gas reserves, that country will become the energy hub of South America. Evo Morales sees his country’s development as his top priority, and the Chinese, unlike the Americans, have always viewed Bolivia as an ally and partner in a relationship that eschews double standards.

The US embassy in La Paz has been without an ambassador since 2008. He was declared persona non grata because of his subversive activities. The interim chargé d’affaires is currently Peter Brennan, and pointed questions have been raised about what agency he truly works for. He was previously stationed in Pakistan, where “difficult decisions” had to be made about assassinations, but most of his career has been spent handling Latin American countries. In particular, Brennan was responsible for introducing the ZunZuneo service into Cuba (an illegal program dubbed the “Cuban Twitter”). USAID fronted this CIA program, under the innocent pretext of helping to inform Cubans about cultural and sporting events and other international news. Once ZunZuneo was in place, there were plans to use this program to mobilize the population in preparation for a “Cuban Spring”. When reading about Brennan one often encounters the phrase – “dark horse”. He is used to getting what he wants, at any cost, and his tight deadline in Bolivia (before the end of Obama’s presidency) is forcing Brennan to take great risks.

Previously, Brennan (right) had “distinguished himself” during the run-up to the referendum on allowing President Evo Morales to run for reelection in 2019, as well as during the vote itself. To encourage “no” votes, the US embassy mobilized its entire propaganda machine, roused to action the NGOs under its control, and allocated considerable additional funds for the staging of protests. It is telling that many of those culminated in the burning of photographs of Morales wearing his presidential sash. A record-setting volley of dirt was fired at the president. Accusations of corruption were the most common, although Morales has always been open about his personal finances. It would have been hard to pin ownership of “$43 billion in offshore accounts” on him, as was done to Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro.

Brennan also has agreements in place with Washington about other operations to compromise the Bolivian president. An attack was launched by the CIA agent Carlos Valverde Bravo, a well-known TV journalist and former agent with Bolivia’s security services. In his Feb. 3 program he accused Morales’s former companion, Gabriela Zapata, the commercial manager of the Chinese company CAMC Engineering Co, of orchestrating shady business deals worth $500 million. Insinuations simultaneously began circulating on the Internet about the Bolivian president’s involvement in those, although Morales completely broke ties with Zapata back in 2007 and has spared no individual, regardless of name and rank, in his battle against corruption.

The “exposés” staged by the US embassy continued until the day of the referendum itself on Feb. 21, 2016. The “no” votes prevailed, despite the favorable trend that had been indicated in the voter polls. Morales accepted defeat with his Indian equanimity, but in his statements after the referendum he was clear that the US embassy had waged a hostile campaign.

The investigation into Gabriela Zapata revealed that she had capitalized on her previous relationship with Morales to further her career. She was offered a position with the Chinese company CAMC and took possession of a luxury home in an upscale neighborhood in La Paz, making a big show of her “closeness” to the Bolivian leader, although he played no role in any of this. This was the same reason she tried to initiate a business and personal relationship with the president’s chief of staff, Juan Ramón Quintana. He has categorically denied having ever met Zapata.

Gradually, all the CIA’s fabricated evidence disintegrated. Zapata is now testifying, and her lawyer has holed up abroad because his contacts with the Americans have been exposed. The American agent Valverde Bravo has fled to Argentina. Accusations against Morales are being hurled from there with renewed vigor. The attack continues. It’s all quite logical: a continually repeated lie is an effective weapon in this newest generation of information warfare. The latest example was the ouster of Dilma Rousseff, who was accused of corruption by officials whom her government had identified as corrupt!

The US military has been increasing its presence in Bolivia in recent months. For example, Colonel Felando Pierre Thigpen visited the department of Santa Cruz, where there are strong separatist leanings. Thigpen is known to be involved in a joint program between the Pentagon and CIA to recruit and train potential personnel for American intelligence. In commentary by Bolivian bloggers and in publications about Thigpen, it is noted that the colonel was dispatched to the country on the eve of events related to “the impending replacement of a government that has exhausted its potential, as well as the need to recruit alternative young personalities into the new leadership structure.” Some comments have indicated that Thigpen is overseeing the work of diplomats Peter Brennan and Erik Foronda, a media and press advisor at the US embassy.

The embassy responded by stating that Thigpen had arrived in Bolivia “at his own initiative”, but it is no secret that he was invited to “work with youth” by NGOs that coordinate their activities with the Americans: the Foundation for Leadership and Integral Development (FULIDEI), the Global Transformation Network (RTG), the Bolivian School of Heroes (EHB), and others. So Thigpen’s work is not being improvised, but is rather a direct challenge to Morales’s government. Domestically, the far-right party Christian Democratic Party provides him with political cover.

The US plans to destabilize Bolivia – which were provided to Evo Morales’s government by an unnamed friendly country – include a step-by-step chronogram of the actions plotted by the Americans. For example: “To spark hunger strikes and mass mobilizations and to stir up conflicts within universities, civil organizations, indigenous communities, and varied social circles, as well as within government institutions. To strike up acquaintances with both active-duty and retired military officers, with the goal of undercutting the government’s credibility within the armed forces. It is absolutely essential to train the military for a crisis scenario, so that in an atmosphere of growing social conflict they will lead an uprising against the regime and support the protests in order to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy.”

The program’s first fruits have been the emergence of social protests (recent marches by disabled citizens were staged at the suggestion of the American embassy), although Evo Morales’s administration has evinced more concern for the interests of Bolivians on a limited income than any other government in the history of Bolivia.

The scope of the operation to oust President Morales – financed and directed by US intelligence agencies – continues to expand. The Americans’ biggest adversary in Latin America has been sentenced to a fate of “neutralization”. Speaking out against Evo Morales, the radical opposition has openly alluded to the fact that it has been a long time since the region has seen a really newsworthy air crash involving a politician who was hostile to Washington…

A United States Treasury official on Thursday said donors located in the Gulf remain an important source of revenue for Al Qaeda.

“Donors located in the Gulf have traditionally been an important source of revenue for AQ. This remains the case, but we are making strides in cutting off their financial networks,” Daniel Glaser, assistant secretary for terrorist financing at the US Department of Treasury, said at a hearing. 

He said the Gulf countries have taken a wide range of actions, and called Saudi Arabia a “regional leader” in combating terrorist financing, amid suspicions in Congress the kingdom is not doing enough to choke off support for terrorists.

“All Gulf countries have now passed counter-terrorism laws that criminalize terrorist financing, and have enhanced financial controls across the charitable sector to ensure that funds intended for humanitarian objectives do not benefit terrorist activity,” he said.

“In particular, Saudi Arabia has emerged as a regional leader within the Gulf and has joined us in a targeted designations,” he said.

Still, Glaser said despite progress, there is “more work to be done” to ensure the entire Gulf financial system is a hostile environment to Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, particularly to Nusrah Front — Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria.

Criticism of Saudi Arabia has mounted in recent weeks on Capitol Hill, after one of the authors of a congressionally-commissioned report on the 9/11 terrorist attacks called for the declassification of 28 pages he says show that the kingdom was involved.

Here we go again. Earlier this year, some were surprised to see Project For The New American Century (PNAC) co-founder and longtime DC fixture Robert Kagan endorse former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for president.

They shouldn’t have been. As is now clear from a policy paper [PDF] published last month, the neoconservatives are going all-in on Hillary Clinton being the best vessel for American power in the years ahead.

The paper, titled “Expanding American Power,” was published by the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party-friendly think tank co-founded and led by former Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy. Flournoy served in the Obama Administration under Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and is widely considered to be the frontrunner for the next secretary of defense, should Hillary Clinton become president.

The introduction to Expanding American Power is written by the aforementioned Robert Kagan and former Clinton Administration State Department official James Rubin. The paper itself was prepared in consultation with various defense and national security intellectuals over the course of six dinners. Among the officials includes those who signed on to PNAC letters calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, such as Elliot Abrams, Robert Zoellick, Craig Kennedy, Martin Indyk, Dennis Ross, and Flournoy herself, who signed on to a PNAC letter in 2005 calling for more ground troops in Iraq.

The substance of the document is about what one would expect from an iteration of PNAC. The paper cites a highly revisionist history of post-World War II American policymaking, complete with a celebration of America’s selfless motives for every action. Left out is any mention of overthrowing democratically elected and popular governments for US business, or the subsequent blowback for such actions in Latin America, the Middle East, and elsewhere.

For the neocons and liberal interventionists at the Center for a New American Security, the United States has always acted for the benefit of all.

The paper primarily focuses on the economy and defense budget, and American security interests in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Supporting the Trans-pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are considered the highest priority, as they will bind the main drivers of the US-led “liberal world order”—the US and Europe—closer together.

According to the paper, “Even in a world of shifting economic and political power, the transatlantic community remains both the foundation and the core of the liberal world order.” In other words, the West must maintain control of the planet, for the good of all, of course.

Part of the European concerns are a rise in nationalist sentiment in eastern Europe and the United Kingdom, for which the paper blames Russia, even bizarrely claiming that Russian funding is the cause of the disunity within the European Union—a claim without foundation, especially in the UK’s case.

The revisionist history continues, as the paper makes an astonishingly absurd claim on the US role in Asia, stating, “U.S. leadership has been indispensable in ensuring a stable balance of power in Asia the past 70 years.” No mention of the calamitous US war in Vietnam or its reciprocal effects in the killing fields of Cambodia. Nor is the US role in the genocide in East Timor dispensed with anywhere.

Then we come to the Middle East, where things really get slippery. The paper breezes past the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with a sorry, not sorry statement: “Despite recent American misjudgments and failures in the Middle East, for which all recent administrations, including the present one, bear some responsibility, and despite the apparent intractability of many of the problems in the region, the United States has no choice but to engage itself fully in a determined, multi-year effort to find an acceptable resolution to the many crises tearing the region apart.”

And with that, the paper demands regime change in Syria and that “Any such political solution must include the departure of Bashar al-Assad (but not necessarily all members of the ruling regime), since it is Assad’s brutal repression of Syria’s majority Sunni population that has created both the massive exodus and the increase in support for jihadist groups like ISIS.” Left out is the US role in destabilizing Iraq and arming jihadist rebels in Syria.

The paper goes on to regurgitate alarmingly facile claims about regional tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia that could have been written by the government of Saudi Arabia itself, such as, “We also reject Iran’s attempt to blame others for regional tensions it is aggravating, as well as its public campaign to demonize the government of Saudi Arabia.” It also states that “the United States must adopt as a matter of policy the goal of defeating Iran’s determined effort to dominate the Greater Middle East.”

If that appears like a commitment to more reckless regime change in the Middle East, that’s because it is.

But the overriding concern of the entire paper, with all its declarations about bipartisanship and universal altruism, is a concern with the American people being increasingly apprehensive towards the empire, and that concern leading to further defense budget cuts and unwillingness to support adventurism abroad.

The authors of the paper hope an improved economy can help change the current situation. “Ensuring that the domestic economy is lifting up the average American is still the best way to ensure support for global engagement and also contribute to a stronger, more influential America,” they write, though they see no end in sight, regardless of public support, claiming, “the task of preserving a world order is both difficult and never-ending.”

That this is what a think tank closely associated with Hillary Clinton is openly claiming should be concerning to all. While such analysis and declarations no doubt please the Center for a New American Security’s defense contractor donors, the American people are less-than-enthused with perpetual war for perpetual peace.

Former Secretary Clinton already affirmed her belief in regime change during the campaign, but now it looks like those waiting in the wings to staff her government are anxious to wet their bayonets.

The European Parliament has had a great week, writes Molly Scott Cato MEP – for those who oppose GMOs in food and farming. MEPs voted on five occasions to say no to GMOs, and gave their support to agroecology as the only sustainable way to feed the world.

This week’s European Parliament plenary saw five different votes on GMOs. Altogether, they give a good idea of the Parliament’s opinion on GMOs – a resounding NO.

With corporations playing an increasing role in our food systems, Greens argue that GMOs are simply a means to profit from our plates, detrimental to smaller-scale farmers and thoroughly damaging to biodiversity.

Recently proposed mergers of big agrochemical multinationals give further cause for concern – Dow with Du Pont, Syngenta with ChemChina, perhaps even Bayer with Monsanto.

As a member of both the Agriculture and Economics Committees in the European Parliament, I am concerned about the corporate capture of our food production; endorsing monocultures, putting patents on life – and packaging it with a pesticide.

The problems of industrial agriculture will not be solved through GMOs or fancy technological tools, but by converting to agro-ecological approaches to farming. The EU should fund research on classical plant breeding adapted to these systems, rather thanpouring 67% of its agriculture research budget into biotechnology.

‘Old’ GMOs out of the door, but ‘new’ GMOs knocking?

A pro-agribusiness report on ‘technological solutions for sustainable agriculture’, initiated by Conservative MEP Anthea McIntyre, was heavily amended by MEPs who refused to open the door to untested, unlabelled GMOs in the EU.

As Green spokesperson for this report, I remain critical of its misguided ‘solutions,’ which push us further into input-intensive, industrial agriculture. Another report by MEP Jan Huitema on ‘innovation in farming’ faced similar rebuttals.

Over the last three years, the agroindustry has been arguing that their new biotechnologies (which they call ‘new breeding techniques‘) don’t need to be controlled under the current GMO regulation. But the products of these techniques clearly meet the definition of ‘genetically modified organisms’, and carry similar and additional risks to those posed by current GMOs (transgenesis).

Fortunately, keeping agriculture and not agribusiness in mind, MEPs intend to call a spade a spade – and voted against the attempts to sneak new GMOs past the regulators. This also sends the Commission a strong warning over its decision in April to bow to US pressure on the issue in the TTIP negotiations.

No to GMO imports! No GMOs in Africa!

Two objections to the authorisation for import of a GM carnation and a GM maize (Maize Bt11 × MIR162 × MIR604 × GA21) were voted through on Wednesday. These were the 5th and 6th objections submitted to the plenary since December 2015, all initiated by the Greens/EFA.

Clearly, MEPs don’t want GMOs imported into the EU – so it is only logical that they oppose their promotion elsewhere. Hence their vote criticizing the so-called ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa’ (NAFSN).

This public-private partnership claims to leverage private investment in agriculture, to improve food security and nutrition in Sub-Saharan Africa. But NGOs have repeatedly attacked this misconceived scheme for fostering land grabbing, stopping farmers from saving and reproducing their own seeds, and also for forcing GMOs on African farmers.

An overwhelming number of MEPs voted in favour of a Green report critiquing this initiative this week, which included opposition to any promotion of GMOs in Africa with European taxpayers’ money.

The draft report had prompted accusations of neo-colonialism from Monsanto – ironic, given that the industry has been exploiting the New Alliance in order to change African legal frameworks on land ownership, seeds and GMOs for their own benefit – facilitating the privatisation of land, water and seeds, and stripping African farmers of the right to save, sell, buy, exchange, plant and breed the seeds they have developed over millennia.

Which prompts the question: who are the real neo-colonialists?

Molly Scott Cato is Green MEP for the South West of England, elected in May 2014. She sits on the Economics and Monetary Affairs Committee and Agriculture and Rural Development Committee in the European Parliament. She is Green Party speaker on economy and finance and has published widely, particularly on issues related to green economics. Molly is formerly Professor of Strategy and Sustainability at the University of Roehampton.

For more than three years we have watched the COMEX very closely. The initial clue to begin watching were the waterfall events where the amounts of paper gold and silver sold simply dwarfed what was being mined. I have said many times after the smackdowns, “first, no one has this much (gold or silver), second, no trader would ever sell in this fashion and destroy the price he will receive for the sale. Clearly the sales were done to affect price downward”. Each time I have written on this topic and suggested it would ultimately end with a delivery default I have been trolled. It looks very much like we will soon find out a default of delivery is not only possible but highly probable.

Starting with gold, last month (May) saw 221,000 ounces stand for delivery.

This amount actually grew during the month which is highly unusual as the amount standing has ALWAYS dropped during delivery periods, this is the first time to my knowledge that the amount standing actually increased. For comparison, May 2015 delivered only 2,500 ounces. Looking back at June of 2015, the amount standing on first notice day was 509,000 ounces. The final amount delivered was 295,000. As I have written and questioned before, who would fully fund their account 100% to take delivery …and then “go away”? The answer of course is someone willing to accept a “premium” as a bribe to not take delivery.

This June as you know does look to be quite interesting. The initial amount standing was 49.119 tons or over 1.5 million ounces. The amount dropped on day two by about 4 tons but has since gained back nearly all of it to stand at 49.11 tons. (If I am not mistaken, this month is the largest month of gold contracts ever standing for delivery.) Over 40 tons have already been served so we know these longs could not be persuaded to “go away”. We have seen no evidence of delivery for March, April or May. If we add these together with June, we have 65.813 tons standing with only 51.12 tons of registered gold.

My point is this, someone very real and very big is standing for gold. This “someone” would not be bribed to go away last month and does not look like they will go way this month!

Who is this long who all of a sudden cannot be bribed to stand down? As you know, I have speculated the Chinese (and Russia) have been positioning themselves to abandon the dollar as the reserve currency. I theorized nearly two years ago it was the Chinese who held the long month after month and rolled them …until they won’t and then demand delivery. I still believe this is the case as the open interest in silver has stayed so high, only pockets as deep as a sovereign could have sustained the losses. It also needs to be said again, no market has ever seen open interest expand to all time record highs …while the price was plumbing multi year lows. A reconciliation will come at some point, either open interest needs to be washed out or price skyrockets, one or the other.

Looking specifically at silver, we have a true potential atomic bomb in the works for July. COMEX claims to have 22,482,000 ounces registered and available for delivery. This number is an ALL TIME low for “registered” ounces. To put this number in perspective, it is less than $400 million dollars and only about 10 days of global production. Also in perspective, customers have already withdrawn 12,244,000 ounces of silver in just the first 8 days of June! Finally, the real shocker is the July contract. First, the open interest for July of over 107,000 contracts is more than 50% of the entire open interest.

This represents over 536 MILLION OUNCES! Do you realize this amounts to over 60% of total global production on just one bourse and in just one single month? Obviously there will not still be 536 million ounces standing for delivery by July 1st, but as it stands now there are contracts open to deliver 24 ounces for every 1 ounce registered for delivery.

So, is a delivery default here and now in June or July? I am sure I will hear “they will never default, they will cash settle”. “Cash settlement” IS default, please do not delude yourself into thinking it isn’t. If you believe cash settlement is OK, what will you think AFTERWARDS when your cash will not buy metal? There is no way to tell if it is here and now but it certainly looks possible. Something has definitely changed. The longs of the past who would stand on first notice day only to mysteriously disappear during the delivery period seem to have changed or …are now different entities. It is clear by looking at past deliveries and current inventories that COMEX is not meant to be a major delivery hub. It has been “used” to “price” gold even though very little real metal changed hands.

I believe this is about to change as actual gold being traded will become the pricing mechanism. The about face in the price action over the last six months and now the amounts standing tell you something very big is afoot. We already know that physical metal has been moving from West to East for years. I believe we are about to find out the pricing mechanism itself is being moved from West to East.

Stay tuned!

Though President Barack Obama and his State Department nixed the northern leg of TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline in November, the Canadian pipeline company giant has continued the fight in a federal lawsuit in Houston, claiming the Obama Administration has violated the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

As the NAFTA lawsuit works its way through pre-trial hearings and motions — and as Keystone XL has become a campaign talking point for Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump — TransCanada has quietly consolidated an ambitious North America-wide fracked gas-carrying pipeline network over the past half year.

Since Keystone XL North got the boot, TransCanada has either won permits or announced business moves in Canada, the United States and Mexico which will vastly expand its pipeline footprint and ability to move gas obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to market.

Oh Canada

North of the U.S. border, TransCanada landed the last permits it needed from the British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission on May 5 to build its proposed Coastal GasLink pipeline project. Coastal GasLink aims to carry gas obtained via fracking from the Montney Shale westward to LNG Canada’s proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility in Kitimat, B.C.

“This is a significant regulatory milestone for our project, which is a key component of TransCanada’s growth plan that includes more than $13 billion in proposed natural gas pipeline projects which support the emerging liquefied natural gas industry on the British Columbia Coast,” Russ Girling, TransCanada’s CEO said in a press release.

Coastal GasLink awaits a final investment decision from LNG Canada by the end of the year. If it gets the green light, pipeline construction of the 416-mile line will begin in early 2017.

Build Them or Buy Them?

In the U.S., while TransCanada’s NAFTA lawsuit drags on, the corporation also announced a major $13 billion buy-out acquisition of pipeline behemoth Columbia Pipeline Group on March 17.

Columbia maintains a gargantuan 15,000-mile network of gas pipelines running across the U.S., with a crucial hub ofcrisscrossing pipelines based in the prolific Marcellus Shale basin, an epicenter for fracking in the northeast, particularly Pennsylvania. In a press statement announcing the deal, Girling pointed out just how big his company’s gas-carrying pipeline capacity has become in the U.S. and its nascent potential ability to carry that gas to U.S.-based LNGexport terminals.

“The acquisition represents a rare opportunity to invest in an extensive, competitively-positioned, growing network of regulated natural gas pipeline and storage assets in the Marcellus and Utica shale gas regions,” Girling said in the company’s press release announcing the Columbia deal. “The assets complement our existing North American footprint which together will create a 91,000-kilometre (57,000-mile) natural gas pipeline system connecting the most prolific supply basins to premium markets across the continent. At the same time, we will be well positioned to transport North America’s abundant natural gas supply to liquefied natural gas terminals for export to international markets.”

The deal has yet to be sealed, however, awaiting both a final shareholder vote on June 22 and antitrust approval by the U.S.Federal Trade Commission. Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs acted as the financial adviser for the sale.

Kevin Allison, global resources columnist at Reuters Breakingviews, pointed to the acquisition of Columbia by TransCanada as an example of its shifting business strategy post-Keystone XL (even though the lawsuit, most certainly, is also part of the company’s business strategy). Rather than focusing on building new lines, he says TransCanada increasingly sees profit margin opportunities in buying ones already permitted and pumping oil and gas, like those owned by Columbia.

TransMexico

As a general rule, oil and gas related developments in Mexico — helped along by the privatization of the country’s energy and electricity sectors, itself spearheaded by the U.S. Department of State under Hillary Clinton — have flown under the radar as compared to its neighbors to the north in North America. TransCanada’s pipeline moves south of the U.S. border,documented here on DeSmog days after Obama’s November Keystone XL announcement, also have garnered far less attention than Keystone XL.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation took note of these dynamics in a recent article.

“The regulatory oversight and environmental opposition is a fraction of what it is in Canada and the United States for a company looking to construct new pipelines,” wrote the CBC. “Mexico is proving to be a low-risk, high-reward business venture at a time when the pipeline company is struggling to construct new projects elsewhere in North America.”

Since November, when the company announced its victory in a bid from Mexico’s government to build the 155-mile Tuxpan-Tula pipeline set to carry fracked gas from the U.S. to supply Mexico’s electricity grid, TransCanada has announced other key maneuvers in Mexico. All of them, it turns out, connect to Tuxpan-Tula.

For example, on April 11, the Mexican government chose TransCanada to build, own and operate the 261-mile long Tula-Villa de Reyes pipeline in Mexico. Tula-Villa is slated to connect to the existing 81-mile long Tamazunchale Pipeline.

Further, on May 20, Infraestructura Marina del Golfo (IMG) — a joint venture between the Sempra Energy subsidiary company IEnova and TransCanada — submitted a bid to operate the Sur de Texas-Tuxpan gas pipeline, which would connect to the Tuxpan-Tula pipeline (and to which the Tula-Villa de Reyes pipeline would connect). The 500-mile Sur de Texas-Tuxpan would carry gas initially obtained via fracking from Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale basin underwater through the Gulf of Mexico, into the other Mexico-based TransCanada pipelines and then flood Mexico’s energy grid with fracked gas.

BNAmericas has reported that the Mexican government will announce the winner of that bid later this month.

The U.S. Commercial Service, an arm housed within the U.S. Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration, promoted both Tuxpan-Tula and Tula-Villa de Reyes as potential business opportunities for U.S. corporations on its website.

Image Credit: U.S. Commercial Service

Girling, TransCanada’s CEO, sees Mexico as the land of business opportunity for his company moving forward. And understandably so, given all of the company’s recent gas pipeline bid victories there, totaling 916 miles in length.

“Mexico has been a very good place for us to do business,” he told CBC. “I have a very positive long-term view of the growth of Mexico and its position in North America. We foresee there will be more opportunities on the horizon in Mexico.”

The 916 miles of fracked gas pipeline TransCanada has carved out for itself in Canada amounts to just 250 miles shy of the length of the originally slated Keystone XL pipeline and longer by nearly an order of two than the 485-mile operational southern leg of Keystone XL (now called the Gulf Coast Pipeline).

And that’s not even counting the mileage obtained from the Columbia purchase or British Columbia’s Coastal GasLink pipeline. That aside, it’s safe to say that TransCanada is quickly morphing into “TransMexico” and more broadly into a North American fracked gas pipeline empire.