Global Research

UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s attack on refugees in Calais and Dunkirk, France as a “bunch of migrants” during Prime Minister’s Question Time in parliament Wednesday was deliberately inflammatory.

Some 9,000 people—most fleeing wars and instability instigated and fanned by British imperialism in their home countries-are currently trapped in the French ports. Refused entry to France and Britain, many live in make-shift shanty towns, eking out an existence on “charitable” handouts, or trying to make often life-claiming attempts to cross the Channel to the UK.

In the furore that followed Cameron’s comment, many pointed to the fact that it was made on January 27, Holocaust Memorial Day, as if it were an unfortunate coincidence. It is nothing of the sort.

Just as in the 1930s, capitalism in crisis threatens to drag humanity into a new and even greater catastrophe, poisoning the atmosphere with nationalist and racist filth in order to legitimise the turn to war and dictatorship.

Cameron’s remark must be placed in the context of the demand of European governments for the sealing of borders with armed guards, and the resort to other police-state measures. Only last week, under the banner of clamping down on migration and tackling “extremism”, Cameron announced that he intended to introduce a “language test” for all migrants and said that Muslim women should be forced to remove face veils, like hijabs and niqabs, when asked by public officials.

Cameron presented this as less draconian than the blanket ban enforced in France, but this week the chief inspector of schools announced that schools could be marked as “inadequate” if they allow staff or pupils to wear veils in the classroom. This induces head teachers to implement a ban, lest their school be penalised and placed in special measures.

As for Cameron’s reference to the Calais migrants, he is known to prepare carefully with a team of advisers for Prime Minister’s Question Time every Wednesday at midday, with his responses scripted to achieve the maximum effect.

All of which makes the full content of his response politically revealing.

Cameron was answering a question from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn on the tax settlement reached by Her Majesty’s Revenues and Customs (HMRC) with Google. Seven years after HMRC began investigating its complex tax arrangements, the internet giant has agreed to pay a paltry £130 million on years of back taxes.

At the equivalent of a 3 percent tax rate, the deal has been condemned by other European governments who regard it as proof that the UK is setting itself up as a tax haven.

More fundamentally, the arrangement has caused public anger after seven years of government-mandated austerity that includes savage cuts in vital social and welfare provision. On the same day as Cameron’s questioning, a legal challenge in the High Court to the “bedroom tax”–the withdrawal of housing benefit for those deemed to have “too many” bedrooms–exposed how people face losing their homes as a consequence.

In parliament, Corbyn cited a question from “Geoff, a working man over the age of 30” who wanted to ask the prime minister if “there is a scheme that I can join that has the same rate of tax as Google?”

Criticising HMRC for failing to get a better deal, Corbyn went on, “Many people will say this: ‘Why is there one rule for big multinational companies and another for ordinary self-employed people and small businesses’?”

Refusing to answer the question, Cameron retorted instead, pointing at Corbyn and Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, that the

“idea that those two right honourable gentlemen would stand up to anyone in this regard is laughable. Look at their record over the last week.

“They met with the unions and gave them flying pickets. They met with the Argentineans, they gave them the Falkland Islands. They met with a bunch of migrants in Calais, they said they could all come to Britain. The only people they never stand up for are the British people and hardworking taxpayers.”

Cameron’s answer makes plain that anti-immigrant propaganda is an integral part of his government’s defence of corporate interests based on austerity and militarism. In bringing together in one attack the “hot button” issues of the far right, he underscored that these interests are inseparably bound to the mobilisation of the most reactionary social layers. And, in raising the spectre of “flying pickets”, last seen in Britain in the 1984-85 miners’ strike, he exposed the secret fear of the bourgeoisie–an insurrectionary movement of the working class.

All of which makes Labour’s mealy-mouthed protestations over the prime minister’s remarks even more pathetic.

Yvette Cooper, who leads Labour’s taskforce on refugees, complained that Cameron’s lack of “statesmanship like language” risked undermining “cross party consensus on such a sensitive issue.”

This consensus only exists because, outside of rhetoric, little separates Labour’s policy on migration from that of the Tories. The policy of Labour, the Liberal Democrats and organisations such as Save the Children, is to pressure Cameron to allow just 3,000 unaccompanied children to be admitted to the UK.

In fact, visiting the French camps at the weekend, Corbyn pointedly refused to put a figure on the number of refugees he believed should be admitted to the UK. While arguing for politicians “to be a bit more human,” he said only that Britain should do more to process the asylum claims of those with a British family connection.

Corbyn’s actual statement on “flying pickets” is also a fudge. Cameron was referring to the Labour leader’s remark that he would repeal aspects of the anti-trade union legislation first introduced under the Conservative-administration of Margaret Thatcher should Labour win office. Corbyn said that “sympathy” strike action should be allowed, while stating that a Labour government would leave “closed shop” laws—where every worker must be a union member—in place. Asked if he would support the use of flying pickets as a part of this sympathy action, Corbyn avoided answering directly, implying that the issue was irrelevant as “the number of strikes [is] actually very small.”

Pressed on whether he would support other workers in the National Health Service joining the junior doctor’s strike—currently suspended—the Labour leader again refused to be drawn.

As for the Malvinas/Falkland Islands, which Thatcher went to war over in 1982, Corbyn has merely called for “dialogue” with Argentina over their fate–suggesting a “Northern Ireland-style power-sharing deal” that would supposedly accommodate the interests of all sides.

Such pronouncements make clear the dangers posed to working people by the claim—promoted by the pseudo-left—that Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party provides a means of defending workers’ interests.

While the bourgeoisie determinedly marshals its resources, Corbyn—in the rotten time-honoured tradition of the Labour “left”—acts to demobilise workers and youth by concealing the real state of class tensions beneath soothing homilies of how everything can be resolved peacefully and to the satisfaction of all if only notions of “human decency” and wiser heads can prevail.

A little less than five years after launching a war against Libya on the “humanitarian” pretext of preventing a supposedly imminent massacre, the United States and its European allies are preparing a new military assault against the oil-rich North African country under the bloodstained banner of the “war on terrorism.”

Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook confirmed Wednesday that Washington is “looking at military options” in relation to Libya and acknowledged that US special operations troops are operating on the ground there in a bid to “get a sense of who the players are, who might be worthy of US support and support from some of our partners as we go forward.”

The Pentagon spokesman’s remarks echoed earlier comments by the US military’s senior commander. “It’s fair to say that we’re looking to take decisive military action against ISIL [the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria] in conjunction with the political process” in Libya, Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last Friday. “The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.”

As for the presence of special operations troops, that story too was no secret, though largely blacked out by the corporate media. A photograph posted on the Facebook page of the Libyan air force last month showed about 20 American commandos dressed in civilian clothes and carrying automatic weapons. According to the caption that accompanied the photograph, the Libyan forces in charge of the air base “refused their intervention, disarmed them and forced them off Libyan lands.”

Pentagon officials confirmed the incident, while telling NBC News that similar US units have been “in and out of Libya” for “some time now.”

The “human rights” pretext foisted on the public in 2011 and the “terror” pretext being employed today are equally fraudulent. They are both designed to conceal the predatory objectives of military interventions carried out with the aim of imposing US semi-colonial hegemony over countries and regions sitting on top of vast energy resources—in Libya’s case the largest oil reserves on the entire African continent.

It is, however, a measure of the uninterrupted growth of American militarism and the corresponding degradation of American democracy that, while in 2011 Obama delivered a televised speech to the nation providing his phony justifications for the war and then secured a UN Security Council resolution as a legal fig leaf for naked aggression, in 2016 a Marine Corps general casually remarks that he has the authority to launch a new war whenever he sees fit.

In 2011, the story was put out that Libya’s longtime ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, was on the brink of carrying out a wholesale massacre of “peaceful political protesters” in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Only Western intervention could save lives, Obama and his NATO allies insisted, and there was no time to waste.

These assertions were echoed and amplified by an entire coterie of pseudo-lefts. Some of them, like the French New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) embellished upon the arguments of the imperialist powers, insisting that the defense of the “Libyan revolution” was the paramount issue. In the words of the NPA’s prominent spokesman, academic Gilbert Achcar, “You can’t in the name of anti-imperialist principles oppose an action that will prevent the massacre of civilians.”

Similarly, the University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, whose “left” credentials stemmed from his rather qualified opposition to the Iraq war, declared, “To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions.” For emphasis, he added, “If NATO needs me, I’m there.”

With such support, US imperialism and its European allies, invoking the neocolonialist doctrine of “R2P” (responsibility to protect), turned the UN’s resolution authorizing a no-fly zone to prevent the bombardment of Benghazi into a carte blanche for a war for regime change that saw massive US-NATO bombardments, the deaths of some 30,000 Libyans and the lynch mob torture and murder of Gaddafi in October 2011.

After it was all over, NGOs and human rights groups like the International Crisis Group and Amnesty International acknowledged that there were no factual grounds for claiming that Benghazi had been threatened with a “massacre.”

In the five years that have followed, however, the Libyan people have been plunged into a real and hellish humanitarian catastrophe. As many as two million Libyans, roughly a third of the prewar population, have been forced into exile in neighboring Tunisia and Egypt. Those who remain face catastrophic conditions, with hundreds of thousands internally displaced by the fighting that has raged between rival militias ever since the toppling of Gaddafi.

Human Rights Watch, which supported the US-NATO war of 2011, reported this month that the militias that rule the country have “indiscriminately shelled civilian areas, arbitrarily seized people, tortured and looted, burned, and otherwise destroyed civilian property in attacks that in some cases amounted to war crimes.” It adds that these forces “attack, abduct and disappear, and forcefully displace people from their homes,” while “[t]he domestic criminal justice system collapsed in most parts of the country, exacerbating the human rights crisis.” Thousands of Libyans, as well as foreigners, are imprisoned without charges or trials, many since 2011, in a system of militia-run jails where torture is endemic.

No one, of course, is invoking “R2P” today, under conditions that are indescribably worse than what existed in March of 2011. On the contrary, the pretext for the war now being prepared is combating the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has established a stronghold in the coastal city of Sirte, the former hometown of Gaddafi that was largely demolished in a protracted siege in 2011.

Those within the political establishment and the media who bother connecting the growth of ISIS in Libya to the US-NATO intervention of 2011 habitually present the matter as a sin of omission: Washington and its allies failed to follow up the bombing campaign with a “nation-building” occupation.

This is, of course, a deliberate cover-up for very real crimes that were committed. ISIS is not some accidental beneficiary of chaos in Libya. Its own growth and development were intimately bound up with the US-NATO war, in which similar Al Qaeda-linked Islamist militias were lavishly armed and funded to serve as ground troops.

After the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi, these same elements, along with vast quantities of arms looted from Libyan government stockpiles, were funneled into Syria as part of a CIA-orchestrated effort to stoke a war for regime change in that country. This operation greatly strengthened ISIS and similar outfits, while Libyans who had been sent to fight in Syria returned home, resulting in the Islamist group’s spread along Libya’s northern coastline.

Thus, the source of the supposed ISIS terrorism threat in Libya—which is the pretext for yet another war—is the endless and escalating succession of military interventions by US imperialism itself, which have plunged the entire region into bloodshed and chaos, while threatening to ignite a global conflagration.

Featured image: Riad Hijab, the coordinator of the so-called High Negotiations Committee ©AFP

The Syrian “opposition’s” High Negotiations Committee (HNC), announced from the Saudi capital Riyadh that it would not participate in the peace talks in Geneva on Friday. The announcement came as the Syrian government reasserts sovereignty over large swaps of territory previously held by various foreign-backed insurgencies. The HNC is an umbrella organization for a number of political and militant organizations, including Al-Qaeda franchises. 

It is the second time within a week that the HNC boycotts the talks in Geneva. On Monday, January 26, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry announced “from Laos” that the talks scheduled for Monday had been delayed. Kerry said that a new date would be announced within 24 – 48 hours.

The boycott of the talks in Geneva on January 29 sabotages the first attempt within two years to find a political settlement to the five-year-long war.

Making an announcement from the Saudi capital Riyadh, the HNC stressed that it would certainly not attend any talks before it had seen “signs of goodwill”; That is, an end to airstrikes, blockades, as well as a number of other guarantees. The HNC had among others “expected” U.N. guarantees of steps including a halt to attacks on civilian areas, a release of detainees, and a lifting of blockades.

These steps have been stipulated in UN Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2254 (2015) adopted on December 18, 2015. Late Thursday George Sabra, a member of the HNC, said:

“For certain we will not head to Geneva and there will not be a delegation from the High Negotiations Committee tomorrow in Geneva.”

Other HNC members noted that the HNC could be ready to attend talks within three or four days after its demands had been met.

Realities on the Ground make it impossible to meet HNC Demands

The realities on the ground in Syria are making it impossible to meet the HNC’s demands. The HNC demands an end to the bombing of and siege against civilian areas. Meanwhile, insurgents associated to the HNC continue launching attacks from civilian areas. This includes the shelling of residential areas of Damascus and other cities. Weapons, munitions, insurgents and other material continues to flow across the Jordanian, Turkish and Iraqi border, necessitating air strikes. Weapons, logistics and fighters also flow into Syria via the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan.

Air strikes and other operations are also necessary to stop the trafficking of Syrian oil. Stolen oil is either smuggled directly to Turkey or “laundered” via the semi-autonomous northern Iraq. It is noteworthy that the European Union’s decision on April 22, 2013, to lift the ban on the import of Syrian oil from “rebel-held territories” continues to “fuel the war”. The current conditions are making it virtually impossible for the Syrian government to implement a ceasefire without risking that Al-Qaeda and ISIL linked brigades assert control over large swaps of territory.

The HNC’s decision to boycott the talks in Geneva until all of the conditions outlined in UNSC Resolution 2254 (2015) plus additional demands have been met increase the likelihood that the war will continue and will have to end with a military solution. The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) supported by National Self Defense Units, Lebanese Hezbollah units, Iranian “advisers” , Russian Air Forces and according to some well-informed local sources known to nsnbc some Russian special forces, continue regaining control over previously “opposition” held territories. Last week the SAA recaptured the strategically important cities of Rabia and Salma in Latakia, from Jabhat Al-Nusrah and Free Syrian Army units. Rabia is no more than 13 kilometers from the Syrian – Turkish border.

HNC and Jaysh Al-Islam – Foreign-backed Mercenaries in New Drag

Special U.N. Envoy De Mistura described the HNC’s boycott of the talks as “a bitter blow”. De Mistura expressed his hope that the talks could be launched within the next few days. The HNC represents political and armed groups including the Islamist Jaysh al-Islam. Jaysh al-Islam is an umbrella for, among others, the Syrian Al-Qaeda franchise Jabhat Al-Nusrah. Jaysh al-Islam also absorbed Liwa-al-Islam, which was responsible for carrying out the chemical weapons attack on Eastern Ghouta in August 2013. The HNC also represents the remnants of the largely defunct Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The majority of FSA fighters have, over the last years, either joined Jabhat Al-Nusrah, ISIL, and other Islamist brigades. Some former FSA fighters, including officers, have reconciled with the Syrian government and the Syrian Arab Army after it became obvious that regional and international players aimed at the long-term destabilization of the region with radical Islamist mercenaries.

 The presence of UN troops in Haiti is to give the impression Haiti is violent and in constant civil strife of its own making.

It is a documented fact that Haiti is one of the least violent nations in the Western Hemisphere. I want human rights organizations and investigative journalists to dispute that statement if it is wrong. Haiti is in constant strife only when the masses, after enduring unspeakable colonially-supported dictatorship and foreign interference, push back and mostly with peaceful civil disobedience. I want human rights organizations and investigative journalists to dispute that statement if it is wrong.

It is also a documented fact that whenever Haitians peacefully, through voting or massive but unarmed protests, expose the colonial violence of the Western powers in Haiti, they come in, under the guise of impartial peacemakers, to  murder the people into silence. As a human rights lawyer I’ve spent my entire career making this case. (Read, The ABCs of Election Violence in Haiti and The October 25th US election masquerade in Haiti.)

The imperial bloodbath is escalating again. Because the Haitian people have, mostly with peaceful means, stopped the US-sponsored fake elections of August 9, Oct 25th and all its scheduled run-offs. They demand that Martelly leave office when his term is up on February 7th, if not before. Local stakeholders have set a transitional means for the people to hold free, fair and inclusive elections without foreign interference. But empire won’t back off, or withdraw its foul UN/PMSC proxies. It has started to pay for pro-imperialist (that is pro-government) counter protests demonstrators, spreading millions of dollars around to fabricate consent to occupation, dictatorship and fake elections.

We’re back to the Andre Apaid era and more image and perception manipulations to manufacture world indifference and consent to UN-US-EU-OAS-NGO terror in Haiti. Yet, the only reason the corrupt and raunchy Michel Martelly is still in office is because of their powerful tyranny against the majority poor in Haiti. (Read, Torture to Silence Dissent in Haiti Is Paid for with US Tax Payers Money.)

Martelly’s son Olivier Martelly is indicted on drug/money laundering charges but no media publishes this. That’s like Barack Obama’s children getting indicted and held in Russian, but it’s kept secret from the American public.
My whole career, I’ve defended Haitians against the wrath of empire. I don’t want to see what the OAS, the UN and CORE group are about to do in Haiti to get their way to preserve Michel Martelly’s unilateral decrees and land giveaways to foreigners these last five years. Empire wants Haiti lands, islands, strategic position, deep water ports, rare iridium, its gold and underwater riches. They have the racist colonial narrative, billions of dollars they’ve siphon off the world’s poor they oppress and weapons to terrorize the planet. I write today to remind everyone that for five years, since 2011, Haitians peacefully demonstrated against Michel Martelly’s rule. In this last year, they’ve stopped his fake elections. Empire is livid. They won’t let go.

Haiti riches are the reasons for the white men’s rapacious and deadly greed. This is why the US-EU representatives in Haiti are desperate for fake elections in Haiti to put in another Gerald Latortue or Michel Martelly replica.
To understand the level of predatory white supremacy’s evilness, rapacious greed and reprehensible colonial stealth, recall that the Haitian revolutionaries abolished slavery in 1804 by beating the French at the Battle of Vertieres. French General Rochambeau was beaten. The white man is such a sore loser, such an absolutely neanderthal  degenerate that 200 years later, in 2004, the French troops that invaded Haiti with the US and Canada, to take down the duly elected Haiti government and usher in this occupation behind a UN front and fake elections was called the “Rochambeau mission.”

That Rochambeau mission is what Haiti faces under the leadership of Barack “General Laplume” Obama. I want journalists to make note of the heretofore peaceful revolution and empire’s bloodshed to come now that they’ve lost and can’t accept it. To recall that from 2004 to 2006, under another Martelly-like, US-citizen leadership in Haiti, the Internationals murdered-by-proxy, from 14,000 to 20,000 Haitian civilians. That US citizen was Gerald Latortue. A former career, UN employee, that George W. Bush imposed to lead Haiti after the United States, France and Canada had financed the Guy Philippe death squads, sweatshop king Andre Apaid, opposition NGOs and the Makout-GNBiste to create civil and social havoc in Haiti. They’re about to ramp it up again, unless the world stands for something decent and good. Spread the truth. Help the Haiti majority stop the US-EU ruling predators – the CORE Group – and their sycophants. You’ll easily recognize them. They’re dressed in sheep’s clothing and are the self-proclaimed friends of Haiti. The internationally acclaimed lovers of justice, fairness and democracy. The truth is the opposite. Always has been.

The Conservative government have blocked access to legal documents that may show the impact of a controversial ‘free trade’ agreement on the NHS.

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, known as TTIP, is a US-EU trade deal currently under negotiation, and is avidly supported by the likes of David Cameron and Barack Obama.

The blocked legal documents, campaigners have cautioned, may contain the extent to which, under TTIP,  private NHS contractors could sue the government for introducing policies that negatively impact their profits.

The Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) is the most controversial element of TTIP. It allows corporations to sue governments or public bodies before an arbitral tribunal, for policies that are perceived as harmful to their profits. An ‘arbitral tribunal’ is an international hearing, out of the courts and behind closed doors, which decides how much money these companies should get.

The supposed motive is to encourage foreign investment, despite there being no empirical evidence for this (there is no ISDS in any trade agreements Brazil has, or between the US and China).

ISDS is exclusive to foreign investment; US companies gain the right to these international arbitration tribunals, but EU companies must stick to national courts. Thus, ISDS can discriminate in favour of US companies.

The cost of legal proceedings is usually to the tune of millions of dollars, meaning it is only affordable for big business, despite medium to large companies amounting to only half the investors.

On the contrary, favouring American big business would disrupt free competition.

Furthermore, accrediting authority to international tribunals doesn’t fair well for democracy; should decisions about the constraints on national sovereignty take place behind closed doors? Governments have a transparency obligation to their citizens, especially when it’s private companies after public money.

To top it off, there can be a dubious selection of panel members by law firms who specialise in international arbitration. There is a possibility they would choose people who are not impartial. It’s hard to say how far multinational billion dollar US giants have disseminated their influence.

ISDS in Action:

The El Salvadorian government is being sued for $300 million by OceanaGold for revoking permission for a gold mine, after public concern that it risked contaminating water supplies through an ISDS clause. They are being chastised for daring to put clean water before profit.

The Ecuadorian government has been ordered to pay $1.77bn for expropriating its oil reserves at a loss to American oil giant Oxy. This is after the indigenous people in the oil-rich Ecuadorian-Amazon region accused the company of exploiting the resources, with no benefit to the poor and local communities. The US group also sold a part of an oil field without proper authorisation to Canada’s Alberta Energy Corp. Shame on them for exercising sovereignty over their own resources for the good of the residents.

Argentina was sued by international utility companies for imposing a freeze on people’s energy and water bills. It was these companies’ large charges that had prompted the government to act in the first place.

Big tobacco – Phillip Morris – is  using a trade agreement between Australia and Hong Kong to sue Australia for replacing cigarette packet branding with gruesome anti-smoking images. In the UK, MPs voted in favour of bringing in standardised plain cigarette packaging for May this year. If TTIP had already been implemented, big tobacco would have been able to sue the UK taxpayer for millions, for the government putting public health before private profit.

TTIP and the removal of ‘red tape’

ISDS is just the tip of the iceberg. Currently, when updates of Cameron’s EU negotiations are broadcast on the BBC, they speak of the removal of ‘red tape’. What they are referring to is the abolition of regulations, often concerning the environment or public health. TTIP is the homogenisation of ‘non-tariff measures’ in the US and the EU, with the aim of economic growth; i.e. abolishing regulation so we adhere to American standards of ‘free-trade’.

For example, the ‘precautionary principle’: in the EU if there is a suspected risk that an action or policy can cause harm to the public or the environment, science must then say otherwise. There is no such regulation in the US.

Essentially, our governments have taken a look at the world and decided that less regulated capitalism is what we need. The idea that freedom means putting the profit of international corporations before things like public health, the environment and local business is ludicrous. Besides, transatlantic trade is already relatively free. There are not many regulations left.

Does ‘free-trade’ even correspond to economic growth? Who does this growth benefit? NAFTA is a trade deal between Mexico and the US that began in 1994. From 1994- 2014 the income per person increased only by 1% annually.

But, would it have done worse without NAFTA? From 1960-80 Mexico’s GDP per capita nearly doubled (before the neo-liberal handling of the 1980 debt crisis), if that had continued the country would have European living standards today. This is what happened in South Korea. Of course, Mexico is an entirely different scenario to the EU, but this does prove that ‘free-trade’ does not necessitate economic growth for citizens.

The NHS

ISDS could cement present NHS privatisation, making it very costly to reverse, while proceedings are closed off from public scrutiny in kangaroo courts.

And while the ISDS clause could stall the reverse of existing NHS privatisation, the TTIP agreement itself could open it up to further privatisation.

In response to a freedom of information request made to see the legal documents, business secretary Sajid Javid said civil servants need:

space in which to seek candid advice from their lawyers. They are less likely to seek such advice if there is an expectation that it will subsequently be disclosable.

The government also stated:

Transparency in the decision making process and access to the information upon which decisions have been made can enhance accountability particularly over significant trade deals such as this.

Yet, this decision is ultimately suspicious. If it weren’t for vast campaigning TTIP would not even be known to the public.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said:

If this trade deal is supposed to benefit all of us, why has it been so secretive? The documents we have seen so far have mostly come from Wikileaks or after intense pressure from campaign groups.

“…Denmark is now in competition for the title to be the least attractive country for asylum seekers.” – Michala Bendixen, The Guardian, Jan 27, 2016.

On Tuesday, the Danish Parliament made its position on refugees more than crystal clear.  Had it been eased or modified?  Hardly.  European states have seemingly embarked on a competition of the worst. Instead of hunting for innovative solutions on how to deal with the refugee crisis, the unilateralists have continued to steal the argument.

The unilateralist seizure of the refugee conundrum is an ongoing one best exemplified by the Australian response to the MV Tampa in August 2001. Kept at sea for almost two weeks, and the basis for what would become the Pacific solution, keeping refugees off the Australian mainland, it was indifferent to international law.  A textbook policy has developed as a result: ignore international protocols, embrace sovereign imperatives and securitise the issue.

The new Danish law has a few ghoulish provisions worth nothing.  A seizure provision permits authorities to confiscate assets exceeding $1,450 (10,000 kroner) to cover the upkeep of a migrant’s stay in the country.  Exemptions are made for items of “sentimental value” such as wedding or engagement rings.

The application period for resettled refugees applying for family members to join them is extended from one year to three, though such restrictions have tended to be common after 2013, part of the two and fro of populist reactions.

Danish Foreign Minister, Kristian Jensen, and Immigration and Integration Minister, Inger Støjberg, made the case before the European Parliament on Monday. The bill, so went the argument, was adapted to both maintaining the Danish welfare state and toeing the line of international law.

Progressive German politician Cornelia Ernst, in saying that such a law went “in the wrong direction” failed to see how it could have been appropriately adapted.  “Refugees completely liquidate their households – if they even still have one – and take their last money and valuables with them, which you now confiscate.  How can you ensure there is proportionality there?”

Støjberg’s justification was heavily reductionist, suggesting that people who flee conflict should still be regarded as economically capable.  Put another way, the conflict is virtually irrelevant to the context, mere background noise.  Rather than being deemed exceptional for their suffering, refugees are ordinary persons to be assessed as subjects of financial means, with pocketbooks at the ready.  “When you have such a broad, universal welfare system as the Danish one, this is also based on this basic principle that if you can support yourself you have to do so.”[1]

The restrictions on reunifying family members is similarly reductionist. A ruinous conflict and the crisis it precipitates against families has been cast aside as inconsequential to the issue of reunification.  So what if asylum is granted to an applicant?  It hardly means the others should follow in tow.

Those dumping on this piece of heavy-handed legislation should also remember that the Danish Parliament has been at this before, moving the pendulum on refugee policy to the right over the last three years.  The latest law simply extends the line.

In 2015, the same body passed a regulation that reduced social benefits by up to 50 percent for new refugees, marketing it as an “integration benefit”.  Foreign nationals granted a temporary residence permit would not have the right to bring their family to Denmark within the first year.  A five year waiting period for the grant of permanent residence would be enforced, and language requirements behind obtaining such a residence would also be policed.

All these points became part of an advertising campaign on the part of the Danish government. “Denmark has decided to tighten the regulations concerning refugees in a number of areas,” went the advertisement.  Lebanese papers such as The Daily Star ran the whole complement of changes, reducing the asylum seeking issue to a matter of pure economics: do not come to Denmark, getting welfare, and your family over here, will be a tall order.[2]  Three Arabic-language newspapers also ran the advertisement, and the Immigration and Integration minister made much fanfare about it via Facebook.

The numbers seeking asylum have jumped from 2013 (7,557), doubling the following year, and moving to 21,000 in 2015.[3] These still do not compare to countries which have received greater numbers by far, be there Germany to the south, and the more popular Scandinavian neighbour, Sweden, though Denmark has a higher per capita rate.

Part of the arguments can be made along steely rational lines, though they always come down to the same thing: what we do is our business. The welfare state, funding, as it does, free education and healthcare, does so within a compact of assumptions and understandings.  Civic understanding does not necessarily extend to those not within that community.

Frozen out, non-citizens are condemned to exceptional treatment, marginalisation and distancing.  Humanitarianism is only shown on the off chance.  Nothing typifies this more than the Danish policy on relocating refugees from urban settings to camps, a point that shifts “the focus of government immigration policy to repatriation rather than integration”.[4]  Refugees are to be reminded that they are the unwanted.

The Danish reaction typifies this more than most.  Within its territorial confines, the liberal welfare state can operate at will, with the moralists happy to pontificate about a vile world. Bodies such as the Danish Refugee Council can engage in refugee activism overseas – as long as those refugees remain in other forums.  When the problem comes home, attitudes tend to change – dramatically.

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

Notes:

With ever-growing hysteria, the Establishment is begging, cajoling and warning American voters not to elect a rogue President from the Right or the Left, neither Donald Trump nor Bernie Sanders, but to accept instead one of the “sane” mainstream options. Yet, the unspoken truth is that the American Establishment has been off its rocker for decades.

It was, after all, Official Washington’s Establishment – led by the neoconservatives and their sidekicks, the liberal interventionists – that embraced President George W. Bush’s catastrophic invasion of Iraq in 2003. However, as costly as that decision was in terms of blood and money and cascading chaos – now destabilizing Europe – the Wise Men and Women imposed virtually zero accountability on themselves or other chief culprits.

Indeed, many of the same neocons who architected the Iraq disaster are listed as top foreign policy advisers to the “sane” candidates, such as Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. And Hillary Clinton not only voted for the Iraq War but seemed to learn no lessons from what she only grudgingly acknowledged was a “mistake.” As Secretary of State, she sided with Democratic “liberal interventionists” to engineer another “regime change” in Libya that has led to another failed state, further spreading chaos across the region.

A “sane” Establishment, one that truly cared about the interests of the American people, would have undertaken a serious self-examination after the Iraq War. Yet, there was none. Rather than cleaning house and banishing the neocons and liberal interventionists to the farthest reaches of national power, the Establishment rewarded these warmongers, ceding to them near-total control of American foreign policy thinking.

Image: David Brooks, conservative columnist at The New York Times.

If anything, the neocons and liberal hawks consolidated their power after the Iraq War. By contrast, the foreign policy “realists” and anti-war progressives who warned against the invasion were the ones cast out of any positions of influence. How crazy is that!

It was as if supporting the Iraq War was the new initiation rite to join the Establishment’s elite fraternity of worthies, a kind of upside-down application of rewards and punishments that would only make sense at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice’s Wonderland.

In a sane world, the publishers of The New York Times and The Washington Post would have purged their lead editorial writers who had advocated for the catastrophe. Instead, the Post retained its neocon editorial page editor Fred Hiatt – and nearly all of its pro-war columnists – and the Times even promoted liberal interventionist Bill Keller to the top job of executive editorafter it became clear that he had been snookered about Iraq’s WMD.

Similar patterns were followed across the board, from The New Yorker on the Left to The Wall Street Journal on the Right. Pro-Iraq War writers and commentators continued on as if nothing untoward had happened. They remained the media big shots, rewarded with book contracts and TV appearances.

The same held true for the major think tanks. Instead of dumping neocons, the center-left Brookings Institution went off in search of neocon A-listers to sign, like Robert Kagan, a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century. The ultra-Establishment Council on Foreign Relations recruited its own neocon “stars,” Max Boot and Elliott Abrams.

And what did this year’s “sane” presidential candidates do as the deadly and dangerous consequences of neocon thinking spread from the Middle East into Europe? They pledged fealty to more neocon strategies. For instance, Establishment favorite, Sen. Marco Rubio, is advocating more “regime change” tough talk and more expansion of U.S. military power.

‘Stay Sane’

Nevertheless, when New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks urges Americans to “stay sane,” he is calling on them to support the likes of Rubio and reject the likes of Sen. Bernie Sanders, who had the sanity to vote against the Iraq War, and billionaire Donald Trump, who also questioned the wisdom of the war.

Brooks lamented that his favorite Rubio had resorted to some populist rhetoric of his own recently, but added: “Marco Rubio has had a bad month, darkening his tone and trying to sound like a cut-rate version of Trump and [Ted] Cruz. Before too long Rubio will realize his first task is to rally the voters who detest or fear those men. That means running as an optimistic American nationalist with specific proposals to reform Washington and lift the working class.”

Image: Graphic in Sen. Marco Rubio’s plan for spending more on a U.S. military build-up.

Yet Rubio led the parade of dancing candidates who performed at the so-called “Adelson primary,” seeking to win the favors of gambling billionaire Sheldon Adelson by vowing to fully sync U.S. policies in the Middle East with positions favored by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whereas Trump refused to toe that line). And Rubio’s warmed-over right-wing, trickle-down economic orthodoxy is sure to do little to help working- and middle-class Americans.

Brooks offers some dubious history, too, writing

“In every recent presidential election American voters have selected the candidate with the most secure pair of hands. They’ve elected the person who would be a stable presence and companion for the next four years. I believe they’re going to do that again.”

It’s unclear how far back in time Brooks is going. Is he acknowledging that the American voters actually favored Al Gore in Election 2000 although the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court decided to give the White House to the untested and unreliable George W. Bush? Is Brooks saying that Bill Clinton had more “secure” hands than George H.W. Bush in 1992 and that the radical right-winger Ronald Reagan was more “stable” than Jimmy Carter in 1980?

Indeed, the rapid divide of the United States into a land of haves and have-nots can be traced back, in large part, to Reagan’s economic policies of massive tax cuts primarily favoring the rich – and thus incentivizing greed – and his disparaging the role of democratic governance, which is the only force that can truly counter the power of the wealthy elites.

Since Reagan’s presidency, Republican orthodoxy has been to enact ever more generous tax cuts for the rich while freeing them from government regulation or “red tape.” Republicans along with Establishment Democrats – most notably President Bill Clinton – also favored “free trade” that led major corporations to shift their industrial jobs to Third World low-wage countries.

This combination of tax cuts for the rich, “free trade” for multinational corporations and disdain for “big government” intervention to protect average citizens – along with technological advances – has savaged the Great American Middle Class, which was largely created by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and the major infrastructure investments after World War II. Under President Dwight Eisenhower, the top marginal tax rate for the richest Americans was 90 percent, essentially enforcing an American egalitarianism.

Image: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a press conference.

The abandonment of those hard-earned lessons from the Great Depression — a reversal accomplished  primarily by Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush — returned U.S. income inequality to levels not seen since the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

The Trump phenomenon can only be understood by factoring in the frustration and fear of the white working class that has shifted Republican since the 1960s because of anger over the Democrats supporting equal rights for blacks and other minorities. But those working-class whites now sense that the GOP leadership is selling them out, too, by favoring the ultra-rich donor class and willing to sacrifice their sons and daughters to implement unrealistic neocon foreign-policy schemes.

So these downwardly mobile white Americans are in rebellion and have embraced billionaire Trump, who rejects politics as usual and understands something of their blue-collar mindset because of his experience on popular reality TV shows.

Democratic Populism

Something similar is happening on the Democratic side through another imperfect vessel, Bernie Sanders. Democratic progressives see the consequences of a steady retreat by mainstream liberals on economic and foreign policy issues since Reagan’s election.

Rather than fight to convince the white working class about the need for democratic governance, Bill Clinton and other neo-liberals fashioned a strategy of catering to Wall Street and other rich donors by offering “free market” financial deregulation and “free trade” deals on manufacturing.

Sanders represents the first candidate for president in recent memory who has offered a full-throated defense of government as a necessary counter-balance to the power of the rich over both the economy and the electoral process (though President Obama has paid some lip service to those principles).

By contrast, Hillary Clinton represents a continuation of the cozy relations between the so-called New Democrats and the wealthy power centers of high finance and big corporations. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Clintons’ Paid-Speech Bonanza.”]

Image: Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at a Democratic presidential debate sponsored by CNN.

She also advocates foreign military interventions in line with what the neocons have sought as they demand U.S. fealty to Israeli interests. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Clinton Seeks Neocon Shelter.”]

As a senator, Clinton voted for the Iraq War – and as Secretary of State, she sided with the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies in escalating the war in Afghanistan, in engineering a bloody “regime change” in Libya, and in pushing for a direct U.S. military intervention in the Syrian civil war (via the creation of so-called “safe zones”).

Though Sanders’s foreign policy positions can be something of a muddle, he is generally more skeptical about U.S. military adventures than Clinton.

So, who are the crazy ones here? Does it make more sense to follow Hillary Clinton’s Establishment-friendly positions on issues from Wall Street regulation to Syrian military intervention or to support Bernie Sanders’s more aggressive strategy against income inequality and less aggressive approach toward foreign conflicts?

Similarly, on the Republican side, is it nuttier to back Rubio and other Establishment favorites who would effectively let Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu set U.S. policy in the region, even if that means invading Syria and accepting permanent warfare – or Trump who suggests letting the Russians and Iranians share the burden of battling Islamic extremists?

Clearly, the Establishment would have a stronger case if it hadn’t led the United States into one catastrophe after another, while refusing to hold its own representatives accountable.

There is the old line about insanity being defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. What David Brooks and other Establishment figures are demanding is that the American voters keep electing the same system-approved neocon/neolib presidents again and again and expecting something better for the nation.

Is that “staying sane” or “staying insane”?

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

Much coverage of the Greek debt crisis has focused on the ‘troika’ of international creditors and German chancellor Angela Merkel – a striking image of parasitic foreign powers scapegoating the country for personal gain.

In some corners of the Left, this narrative has fueled the demand for ‘Grexit’ (a Greek exit from the eurozone) under the impression that such a move would create a more favorable environment for a break with austerity. This animated the Left Platform’s disagreements with Syriza’s bargaining-table approach and their later metamorphosis into Popular Unity.

Jannis Milios, once Syriza’s chief economic adviser, aligns neither with Syriza nor with Popular Unity. He views Syriza’s current program as a reversal of its original radical one. Yet his alternative to Greek president Alexis Tsipras’s approach is not Grexit, but a confrontation with Greece’s domestic capitalists. Athens-based journalist Alp Kayserilioğlu recently sat down with Milios to discuss the history of Syriza, the purpose of the eurozone, and the power of the country’s domestic bourgeoisie.*

Alp Kayserilioğlu (AK): How would you characterize Syriza, and how would you explain their swift rise the last years, which culminated in their election to government?

Jannis Milios (JM): To understand the situation of the Greek left today, you have to look back into history. There was a big split in the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) in 1968. One part of the KKE, the so-called KKE Interior, more and more developed into a very pro–status quo, conservative Eurocommunist party while the other, KKE, over time turned into a post-Stalinist, pro-Moscow communist party.

A dockworker in Greece. Vagelis Poulis / Flickr.

But both shared similar reformist and gradualist thoughts on making Greece “less dependent” through more economic growth (of Greek capitalism, of course), which was conceived as a transition phase to an anti-monopolist democracy, before gradually the transition to socialism could be completed.

It is this very shift in their ideological and practical stance that made possible the foundation of Synapismos in 1989, which was originally an alliance of the former KKE Interior (at that time renamed to Greek Left-EA) and the KKE with other non-communist political groups or cadres.

The shift toward these type of alliances explains the decision of both communist parties to join a “caretaker” government under the leadership of Nea Demokratia, or New Democracy (ND) in 1989; that proved to be a disaster since it fully stabilized and legitimized neoliberal ideology and policies.

When the KKE left the caretaker government and Synapismos in 1990, many of its cadres remained, constituting another split in the KKE. That’s when it adopted its massively sectarian and isolationist stance, well-summarized by its old slogan of “Five parties, two policies” (i.e. KKE versus everybody else).

On the other hand, following this split in the KKE and Synapismos, Synapismos was transformed from an alliance into a political party in 1991. Synapismos was then the main driving force in founding Syriza in 2004, initially an alliance of Synapismos with several other political groups of the Left including at least four of the “revolutionary extra-parliamentarian Left.”

After 2004, with the support and strength of these new political organizations, Syriza secured somewhere around 4 to 5 per cent in parliamentary elections (half as much as KKE). They became more and more involved in the movements. The majority of its members were radicalizing, adopting the radical left’s political positions.

In 2006 they played a decisive role in the struggle of students against the privatization of the universities. In December 2008 when Alexandros Grigoropoulos was murdered [a student shot by police in Athens], Syriza was the only major party that didn’t simply condemn the violent mass uprisings that took place afterwards, but raised the question about the causes of the unrest. And Syriza was attacked for this non-condemnation, especially from the side of the KKE.

However, the major turning point was the square movements. Around 25 to 33 per cent of the population across Greece joined these movements from March 2011 to February 2012. That was the movement that tipped the balance in favor of Syriza. Immediately its electoral support rose, first capturing 16.8 per cent of the vote in May 2012, then 26.89 per cent only six weeks later, in June 2012, definitively becoming the second most powerful party.

As for the internal composition of Syriza, while Synapsismos (itself derived from the KKE tradition) constituted their main body, as it approached government in the wake of 2012, a part of its leadership began taking on a social-democratic reformist stance; on the other hand, it attracted members and groups from the alter-globalization movement and the spirit of Genoa 2001.

The latter part gave the coalition a more radical edge. Tsipras himself is a former member of the radical youth organization of Synaspismos, which was an element of the more radical part of the coalition. However, the majority of the Synapismos leadership started to push Syriza toward the center left, especially after the electoral success of 2012; this sped up after the 2014 elections for the European Parliament, and they managed to change Tsipras along the way.

Around the time of Syriza’s 2012 success, internal democratic workings of the party were becoming irrelevant and the leadership more and more took on an autonomous stance. This trend deepened after the elections for the EU parliament in 2014: in these elections, Syriza was the top party with 26.57 per cent of the votes. All the documents that were published in this time, like the programs of 2012, the political resolution of the first congress of Syriza in 2013 and so on, they were just fig leafs hiding the center-left turn of Syriza’s leadership.

AK: One can discern the change in the documents themselves. The resolution of the first congress of Syriza in 2013 expresses the party’s two souls: it talks about socialism of the twenty-first century, but also about a mixed economy, productive reconstruction, and so on.

JM: Yes, yes, exactly. A part of the Syriza leadership had already made compromises with the Greek bourgeoisie; people like [Deputy Prime Minister] Yannis Dragasakis cared about being portrayed in mass media as responsible guys who care about productive reconstruction and competitiveness of the economy (i.e. of Greek capitalism). And Syriza began flirting with center-left politicians and small center-left parties like Dimar, a former split from Syriza.

And the ideological shift that took place within Syriza is exactly how you described it: slowly the main focus shifted from wealth redistribution, taxing the rich, building up a social economy, and so on toward more supposedly neutral terms like growth, productive reconstruction, combating the humanitarian crisis, etc. that portrayed the society and the economy as something where we all share the same interests and where we aren’t divided along class lines.

All these political and ideological shifts manifested themselves in the Thessaloniki Program of September 2014, which dropped many of the original demands and slogans of Syriza and was deprived of anything that could’ve been understood as anticapitalist.

By December 2014 – before Syriza became the government – I had already decided not to participate in the elections or in the Syriza government that was going to be formed. I made my decision public on December 31, 2014, and when Tsipras called me one day after the elections in January 2015 and told me that he had good portfolios to offer me I thanked him and repeated my arguments about why I had decided not to be a minister in the new government.

I hoped that by staying out of the parliament and the government I could more effectively influence the party’s base to resist this shift from the party’s original radical program.

What I mean is that when Syriza became the government the shift had solidified. They were playing the lesser-evil game, a new memorandum with less austerity and more room to make decisions. Yanis Varoufakis accepted 70 per cent of the memoranda – whatever that means – right after becoming finance minister and signed a preliminary agreement on February 20 that inscribed a continuation of the logics of the memoranda.

Syriza then put forward its supposed red lines as a fig leaf to conceal the compromises they made: maintenance of the existing neoliberal framework as it had been shaped in the four years of austerity memoranda though without any further reductions of wages and pensions, hikes in the VAT, insisting on ending the humanitarian crisis and so on.

In the process of the negotiations and with the third memorandum in July 2015 most of those “red lines” were completely cast aside, but the rhetoric of “we fought with all our forces but were defeated by a stronger enemy” could be retained in a plausible manner.

And Tsipras was reelected in September 2015 precisely on the grounds of him being able to convince the people of the notion that he had fought hard and that he is the lesser evil, that he follows the austerity memoranda only because he was beaten by stronger foreign forces.

I actually do think that we have better chances of reorganizing again as long as people voted for Tsipras and Syriza thinking “at least we have kept the really bad outside.” Because with time, as they see that Syriza is doing exactly what every other party since the memoranda also did, they will intensify the struggle against the neoliberal austerity framework and the state, since they will see that even the lesser evil is evil enough.

AK: And what do you think is to be done now after the complete defeat of Syriza? To me there seems to prevail a spirit of resignation and surrender.

JM: What we need to do now is to start from the beginning. We are now in a situation as it was, let’s say, around 2000. We need to reconstruct an alternative from below and any idea of a progressive left government is at the moment, because of Syriza, dead. We need completely new and different slogans and different ways now to begin again. We cannot use the old concepts, methods, and slogans – they just won’t work anymore.

AK: So you don’t think that the new party, Popular Unity, is going to succeed?

JM: Yes indeed, I think that’s precisely why they haven’t succeeded so far and won’t succeed in the future. You know, my main problem with Lafazanis, Lapavitsas, and LAE is that they are way too similar to Syriza in its “original,” more radical form, with the addition of the focus on exiting the eurozone and/or the EU.

Lafazanis does the same as Tsipras did: he has this style of “vote me into government and I will solve the problems” instead of shifting the focus toward “look, you people should fight and I will assist you in your struggles.” It’s this classical étatist or governmentalist stance of the traditional Greek left.

On the other hand, Greeks, despite the crisis, have some wealth in form of deposits, cars, apartments, and the like, and they naturally fear a devaluation of a new currency if Greece would quit the eurozone. People won’t go for a straightforward exit of the eurozone, which is a very difficult venture if they don’t see why they should do so.

Our main tactics and our focus should not be on the question of the eurozone and the EU but on an anticapitalism that is based on developing methods of self-management of the people. We can only pose the question of leaving the eurozone or EU if it’s based in constructing alternative modes of self-management and economy that have an anticapitalist drive.

If we see that while engaging in our anticapitalist struggles the eurozone and the EU become a fetter, then we can pose the question of leaving both. But we shouldn’t do it the other way round as LAE does – that is, to first pose the question of exiting the eurozone (in order to supposedly promote “growth”) and then caring about the social struggles and a possible anticapitalist edge of the same.

There is this obsession with exiting the eurozone and/or EU and rescuing Greece within this part of the Left. This, however, is because of a peculiar and persistent patriotic trend within the Greek left. In the two phases of the Civil War (1944–45 and 1946–49), the Left, including the National Liberation Front (EAM) and the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), claimed to be more patriotic and authentic Greeks over their collaborationist and monarchist opponents. This was emphasized more than their communist or socialist identity.

They saw Greece as a dependent colony that is kind of colonially exploited by imperialism and has to be rescued from the fetters of imperialism and colonialism first so as to then, some day, go forward toward socialism. This kind of patriotic left identity continues to have a strong effect today.

AK: Pasok came out of former Prime Minister Papandreou’s Panhellenic Liberation Movement (PAK), a organization resisting the military dictatorship. PAK saw Greece as an “industrial and military satellite of the USA” under “neocolonial domination,” necessitating an armed anti-imperialist national liberation movement.

JM: Exactly! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. To name a characteristic example, you have Markos Vafiadis, an old ELAS chief commander, a communist, who was an MP of the old “radical” Pasok, which was stuck on this national liberation discourse that neglected domestic class antagonisms – and Greece was in a time of massive capital profitability and growth.

It is this tradition of Greek left-wing patriotism which continues today when, for example, Lafazanis keeps talking of Greece as a debt colony or of Germany alone dominating Greece and similar things. In reality the EU ascension process was a strategic choice of the dominant factions of Greek capital to upgrade and reinforce their own position domestically against labour and internationally in the international division of labour.

The institutional framework of the EU and the eurozone should be understood as a framework that enforces neoliberalism for the sake of the collective capitalists of all the countries that join these frameworks instead of as a mere colonial project of Germany or whatever.

AK: I get your point. But don’t you think that there is some kind of a material basis for an argument concerning very unequal power relations between Greece and Germany within the EU? That Greece as a minor imperialist or sub-imperialist power is dependent in ways Germany, as a major imperialist power, is not?

Greece did lose much of its agricultural and industrial basis in the EU ascension, which makes it very vulnerable. You can cope without importing solar cells from China for some time, but you can’t cope without importing food if your economy is dependent on this – which is the case with Greece. This was obviously used as leverage against the Syriza government.

JM: Well of course Greece is a small country compared to Germany, but what is the big difference between Greece and other small countries in the EU like Denmark or Finland? There was indeed a major deindustrialization process, but that happened across European countries.

Greece’s strong industrial sectors are oil processing, petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, and basic metals. Apart from that Greece has restructured into a capitalist service economy focusing especially on shipping, tourism, software, and lottery. Did you know that Greek ship owners possess more than 20 per cent of the world’s tanker commercial fleet? We do have big capitalists in Greece.

AK: OK. So what do you say should’ve been done under Syriza?

JM: They should’ve focused on changing social relations inside Greece. First of all start taxing the rich, make them pay for their massive profits, which they fully protect through low taxes, tax exemptions, and tax evasion. Then stop the payments to the troika and tell them: “Sorry, but we can’t pay right now. You are not giving us the tranches you owe us. So how can we pay you back? Let’s see if we can after we have managed our economy. Until then, no payments.”

Contrary to popular opinion I don’t think that this would’ve been classified as default. Standard and Poor’s, among other rating agencies, even said that they wouldn’t classify such a move by Greece as an act of default. Third, start installing capital controls before a bank run occurs, so as to stop capital from fleeing the country or any other actions that would destabilize the economy.

AK: Well don’t you think that exactly these kind of moves would’ve induced a very strong reaction by the Greek bourgeoisie and the EU at the same time? Wouldn’t being prepared to battle the EU then also be a part of fighting the Greek bourgeoisie itself? And shouldn’t a left alternative seek to reconstruct parts of Greece’s agricultural and industrial potential to reduce unequal dependence?

JM: Of course it would’ve induced a very strong reaction by the EU, and yes, that fight would also entail fighting the Greek bourgeoisie. I just say focus on the class relations within Greece.

We should have done a radical left, Jacobin-style politics: throw in anything you got, issue IOUs if necessary, terrorize the bourgeoisie with taxes, capital controls, whatever means you can mobilize. And all the while foster workers control in the workplaces, build up closed cooperatives, and so on.

And of course we need to reconstruct our agricultural and industrial potential, but with the workers and citizens initiatives playing a decisive role in it. But this again is also partly a struggle that is to be fought primarily within Greece.

For example look at the agricultural land. Banks by now possess so much agricultural land because of farmers that went bankrupt. You should go and seize those lands and give them to big cooperatives under workers control and reconstruct the agricultural potential and also the industrial potential in this manner.

And within this framework of a clearly class-based politics, changing social relations within Greece, you confront the pressure by the EU and if necessary announce a referendum on the relation with the eurozone and/or the EU. It would’ve been better to go on the offensive as I just outlined and fail and be voted out of office again than to not have even tried out your own way.

That means that while you still operate within capitalism, you use the state as a means of doing class politics and strengthen labour in the economy and society. I do think that there are only two systems – capitalism and communism – but there is no simple hop between them. You have an in-between that is socialism, which is a mixture of capitalism and communism.

I mean, just look at the Soviet Union or the struggle of the Left in Latin America. If Syriza would’ve followed what I just proposed, they would’ve arrived at a compromise within, of course, the capitalist system but one which would have had a much stronger position and counter-hegemony of labour on which you could base yourself to push ever more forward. You need to go for a process of constantly revolutionizing social conditions to achieve communism – there is no single hop.

Anyway, the point with Syriza was that it followed the typical social-democratic rationale according to which workers and capital have some common interests like growth, productive reconstruction, and so on, and that’s why they didn’t go on the offensive. Which, I think, would have been possible.

Just look at the massive street participation with the referendum of July 5. And then again the vote was clearly divided along class lines: you would often have an “oxi” of around 70 to 80 per cent in working-class quarters and a “nai” around 70 to 80 per cent in the quarters of the bourgeoisie. It was clearly a class-based referendum, and you could see the mass potential for engaging in a social offensive in the inland.

AK: Don’t you also think that one of the major problems of Syriza was its conception as a classical bourgeois party? That is to say: the party represents the popular will in the parliament while the movements make a little noise on the streets to support the struggle of the parliamentary party – unlike the Bolshevik party model of a fighting party that in the first instance takes part in the forefront of all progressive social struggles to push them forward and uses the parliament only as a tribune or tool?

JM: Exactly, that’s the classical governmentalism of the Greek left. I’d add to this what I’d call the rationalist chimera. They really thought that the issue was one of epistemological mistakes; that the troika, the EU, etc. made mistakes and could be convinced by rational arguments to do the right thing.

Syriza completely misunderstood that austerity is all about strengthening capital and that there is no “right” or “wrong” in this but class interest. And from this point of view, Varoufakis clearly was a very good choice as finance minister.

On the one hand he was already a semi-neoliberal guy. You remember he said that “we agree with 70 per cent of the reforms or commitments that have already been laid out in the memorandum” once he became finance minister. But then again he had that “radical communication style” that made it look as if Syriza was putting up a really serious fight, which was their main argument when they accepted the third memorandum: “we tried our best, but they were too strong.”

AK: In one of your essays, you say that counting on Russia and China is political exotism or wishful thinking of the extreme right wing. What exactly do you mean by that? If you ask me, I’d go for closer relations with Russia and China if I were in government. Not because I find either of them sympathetic – on the contrary – but because I’d need to substitute the trade relations with other European countries, which would probably break apart due to the conflicts our radical class-based program would create with the EU.

JM: But I’d still need to import very important goods as long as I haven’t reconstructed my agriculture and industry. And I think it’s a good idea to build trade relations with capitalist countries that are hostile to the EU bloc; they’ll give you better trade conditions because they also have an interest in harming the EU bloc. I’d of course also go for closer relations with Venezuela and Cuba, for on top of the aforementioned arguments they’re also ideologically and politically much closer to my alternative.

On Venezuela, as an example among others, I’d agree. Concerning Russia, apart from it being a very conservative and imperialist power which makes any closer relations rather difficult from my point of view, I think that it has very sensitive relations with the EU and Germany and can’t risk harming them more. The EU is a very big player and nobody, not even China, would want to go into direct confrontation with it.

Also I think that the central issues are not the trade relations but finance. It’s the banks that are your Achilles heel, not trade relations. But concerning trade relations, I’d say that trade with Russia and China could only help out in the short run. They won’t substitute for trade relations with EU or other advanced economies.

What is true is that, for example, the port of Piraeus is one of the best in the world, and it has a comparative advantage of five to six hours versus Italian ports in international transportation of goods to central and northern Europe.

With the planned Chinese investment this would rise to two to three days. But then again the problem with the Chinese investment into Piraeus is that it will be privatized to Chinese entrepreneurial interests, instead of being restructured on a public and cooperative basis. Again, something you wouldn’t prefer to do as a left alternative in power.

Concerning me calling a perspective on Russia and China political exotism and wishful thinking of the extreme right wing: this has something to do with political matters and conflicts in Greece. On the one hand you have the fascists of the Golden Dawn. They are connected with Russian far-right forces and thus speak in favor of Russia. Contrary to most of their European peers they, for example, are not at all supporting the Ukrainian fascists but are strongly on the side of Russia.

On the other hand you would have some people who still think that the Soviet Union continues to exist, i.e. Russia is an anti-imperialist power that by definition will support left or democratic governments or political parties in Western Europe. This I do not find a serious argument.

Alp Kayserilioğlu is a freelance communist journalist in Greece. Jannis Milios is Syriza’s former chief economic adviser.

OAS you’re not welcome in Haiti, Haiti does not need another OAS electoral coup detat like 2010

Haiti stands as one with this one message to the new OAS mission that has invited itself  to Haiti – “No. The OAS has no credibility in Haiti. The OAS is part of the problem not the solution.”

“Nou konnen byen ke Etazini kontrole OEA. Yo te deja voye John Kerry, Kenneth Merten, Peter Mulrean e Samantha Powers pou fè presyon sou pèp Ayisyen, Jude Celestin epi sa pa byen pase pou yo. Se rans. Pa okipe yo. Aba OEA, Aba LONU, Aba CORE GROUP. Viv Ayiti.”

The Organization of American States (“OAS”) with the Hillary Clinton State Department and Cheryl Mills, adjusted the votes in 2010 to place Michel Martelly into the runoff that propelled him into office. Clinton email – https://goo.gl/JwSd4S .)

This electoral fraud committed by the Hillary Clinton State Dept with the OAS caused five years of political gridlock and instability in Haiti. Martelly’s lack of legitimacy not to mention his disqualification to be president because he once held a U.S passport set Haiti democracy back decades, just as the US-supported 1991 and 2004 coup detats did.

For four years, Martelly ruled unofficially by decree and formally by decree since Jan 12, 2015. His authoritarianism and dictatorship was supported and upheld by the International community – from the CORE GROUP to the OAS. These Internationals lorded over our heads and enabled Martelly, his degenerate rule and destruction of Haiti institutions – including the Parliament and Judiciary for five years.

After an immense and peaceful struggle, the people of Haiti have ousted Michel Martelly and the clock is running out for his term to expire on February 7, 2016.

Yesterday, January 27, 2016, the OAS decided to authorize a special mission to come to Haiti, supposedly to “help the troubled nation find a way out of a simmering political crisis and set a new date for a runoff election.”

The OAS is not welcome in Haiti to come and cause another five years of hell for the people with a Martelly replica or an Opont replica. Local Haiti has an exit plan in place for after Martelly leaves to conduct free and fair elections. The G8 group has adopted the recommendations of the Electoral Evaluation Commission and set forth proposals to be discussed only among Haitian stakeholders and the Haitian people. Haiti has had enough of the CORE Group, UN, EU and OAS interference.

They’ve acted as tyrants but are good at writing boiler plate rhetoric outlining their self-proclaimed neutrality, professionalism or impartial position. Hillary Clinton’s emails reveal a different scenario. Their partner in crime, Pierre Louis Opont himself, the president of the Haitian electoral council both in 2010 and in 2015, has publicly testified that he gave the Internationals one result and returned a different one. These emperors are naked. The evidence of their perfidy, immorality, illegality, corruption and unwelcome interference in Haiti affairs is glaring.

There even a former OAS official named Ricardo Seitenfus who has detailed in articles and books how the OAS and international communities doctored the Haiti elections in 2010. Pierre Louis Opont said Cheryl Mills and the OAS adjusted the results to place Martelly in power. This OAS has no credibility in Haiti. The OAS mission is not welcome to insert itself in the new transitional government discussions that is being put together by the people of Haiti mostly to fix the mess the OAS left in Haiti in 2011 with Martelly. The OAS is not welcome to conduct another electoral coup detat in Haiti. (Pierre Louis Opont Explained How Hillary Clinton Ordered Reversal of Haiti 2010 P. E. Results. Watch the video here.)

The United States has already sent John Kerry, Kenneth Merten, Peter Mulrean and Samantha Powers to manipulate the 2015-16 electoral process for the benefit of foreign interests. Haiti said no. But they’ve been pressuring poor Haitians for months now. Haitians die to ways, slowly fighting imperialism and its minions in Haiti their whole life, or quickly from a US-paid bullet in the hands of US-trained police. Haitians reject the US-Martelly Makout mindset. So, the US is now cloaking itself in the form of the OAS to continue terrorizing the people of Haiti who have stood as one and said

“Martelly must go. Martelly does not represent the people’s will and the people did not vote for his handpicked successor, Jovenel Moise.”

Too many Haitians have suffered and died for Haiti to get this truth out. The OAS is coming NOT to mediate. It’s already in Haiti as the CORE GROUP causing havoc. The OAS is about strengthening imperialism, colonization, occupation and Martelly’s hand and keeping the people off the streets to demobilize their resistance to imperialism and fake elections. Nou pap okipe yo. Nou pap demobilize. Mateli gen 2 chwa: pran exzil avan 7 Fevriye ou prizon aprè 7 Fevriye.

Martelly and his legal bandits are called to account. The international community is called to account. Haitians refuse to be further disrespect by the CORE Group no matter what their guise.

The OAS is US-controlled and part of the Core Group in Haiti. The OAS saddled Haiti with an illegitimate president in 2011 that is the root of today’s crisis. The OAS is not neutral, professional or impartial position. It cannot appoint itself over the head of Haitian lawmakers and the G8. Tell Obama, that is not happening.

Haiti’s Doctored Elections, Seen from the Inside: An Interview with Ricardo Seitenfus

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/haitis-doctored-elections-seen-from-the-inside-an-interview-with-ricardo-seitenfus

Martelly and his handlers have committed crimes against humanity: The details and Haiti Resistance” https://goo.gl/btPCsQ

Obama, Stop Supporting Martelly and a DEA-Wanted Fugitives In Haiti https://plus.google.com/113304004460540…/posts/SPisZGpTauT

Le Forum Economique du Secteur Privé exige la démission de Pierre-Louis Opont, Jan 27, 2016

http://www.scoopfmhaiti.com/6568/le-forum-economique-du-secteur-prive-exige-la-demission-de-pierre-louis-opont/

OAS to send special mission to Haiti amid political crisis By DAVID McFADDEN Jan. 27, 2016

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/32b4208d899849a78906a95f1a0d6d02/oas-send-special-mission-haiti-amid-political-crisis

This is why they are rigging the elections

His super-wealth, demagogic style, outlandish views, support for wealth and power, and likely business as usual agenda if elected president aside, Trump so far masterfully outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outfoxed other presidential aspirants, besting professional politicians, beating them at their own dirty game.

He’s no flash-in-the-pan. He proved he’s a force to be reckoned with. Polls show he’s way ahead of Republican rivals, appearing unstoppable, party bosses and media scoundrels frantic to derail his campaign, their efforts futile so far.

He appeals to voters against politics they deplore, business as usual campaigning and governance, promising change, delivering betrayal, ignoring popular needs – even though don’t expect him to change things if elected.

He didn’t become super-rich by being a nice guy. People needs aren’t his concern. US policy won’t change with him in charge – notably its permanent war agenda, corporate favoritism, scorn for social justice, and intolerance of efforts to change things.

Efforts to dent his impregnability don’t quit. Media pundits relentlessly attack him. Last month, New York Times editors accused him of “br(inging) his party and its politics to the brink of fascism” – ignoring police state rule under Bush and Obama, state-sponsored ruthlessness, waging war on humanity at home and abroad.

Trump’s candidacy caused “serious damage…to the country, to its reputation overseas,” Times editors absurdly claimed.

“The time to renounce (his) views was the day he entered the race,” they added – mindless of an array of deplorable Republican and Democrat aspirants all supporting endless wars, Israeli barbarism, corporate favoritism and harsh crackdowns on nonbelievers.

In late November, Washington Post editors urged Republicans “to stand up to Trump’s (so-called) Bullying,” saying:

The growing ugliness of (his) campaign poses a challenge to us all. We have seen the likes of him before…spreading lies, appealing to fears and stoking hatred.

“Such people are dangerous.” Post editors like their Times counterparts ignored longstanding bipartisan US wars on humanity – raping one country after another, turning US streets into battleground in Black and Latino communities, serving wealth and power interests exclusively.

Trump “lack(s) the qualifications, experience or knowledge to be president,” WaPo editors blustered.

Bush I’s presidency was W’s only qualification, achieving at best a gentleman C average overall academically at Yale and Harvard, often skipping classes.

Obama was chosen solely as a front man for imperial adventurism, as well as Wall Street and other corporate interests at the expense of ordinary Americans who elected him.

His only qualification was and remains following the agenda assigned him, causing more harm to more people than his predecessors.

“Republican leaders should speak up” against Trump, WaPo editors ranted. “The only way to beat a bully is to stand up to him.”

The American way involves endless global “bully(ing)” to achieve unchallenged worldwide dominance – an agenda WaPo editors wholeheartedly endorse without admitting it.

Last November, Wall Street Journal editors violated Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment about “not speak(ing) ill of any fellow Republican.”

They quoted Trump, calling himself “a free trader,” then blasted his criticism of the nightmarish Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), calling it a “terrible (trade) deal.”

Journal editors claim he doesn’t understand what’s in it, mischaracterizing TPP as a new “standard for trade under freer Western rules.”

TPP is a hugely one-sided corporate giveaway, nightmarishly anti-consumer, anti-labor, anti-environmental sanity. The full text revealed last November showed it’s worse than most critics feared.

Trump’s opposition has nothing to do with it’s handing business interests a huge bonanza. He expressed concern over its failure to deal with alleged Chinese currency manipulation, even though he knows Beijing isn’t part of the deal.

On January 21, the right-wing National Review published an anti-Trump issue – an effort to derail his campaign, featuring almost two dozen neocons and other hardliners bashing his candidacy.

Editor Rick Lowry is a notorious right-wing extremist. Contributors to his anti-Trump diatribe included Glenn Beck, Cruz supporter Brent Bozell, hawkish columnist Mona Charen, neocon Project for the New American Century (PNAC) co-founder William Kristol, Fox News favorite Dana Loesch, hard-right Club for Growth president David McIntosh, former Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese, former GW Bush attorney general Michael Mukasey, and notorious right-wing extremist John Podhoretz, among others.

Campaign season is in full swing, the Iowa caucus scheduled for February 1, followed by New Hampshire’s primary on February 9.

Regardless of individual contest outcomes, Trump’s lead looks insurmountable. He’s proved skillful in maintaining it, despite continued media flack targeting him.

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.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

On October 30, 2015 the NY Times published an in-depth article on the heroin epidemic, focused on New Hampshire, which saw the greatest increase in deaths from drug overdoses (74%) in the US between 2013 and 2014.  New Hampshire is a bucolic place, where villages of tidy white capes and saltboxes lie sprinkled among the mountains and pine forests. 

Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city, has a population of 110,000.  In one 6 hour period on September 24, Manchester police responded to 6 separate heroin overdoses. Manchester saw over 500 overdoses and over 60 deaths between January 1 and September 24, 2015.

At presidential campaign stops throughout the state, candidates were forced to respond to the problem when New Hampshire citizens demanded answers.  Hillary has a $10 billion dollar plan for prevention and treatment of abuse.  Chris Christie prefers treatment to jail time for first offenders. Obama announced a $5 million initiative in August to combat heroin addiction and trafficking. NH has designated a drug czar. NH Senator Ayotte says “We’ve got to reduce the stigma.”  Narcan, an opiate antidote that has been made widely available, is admittedly a band-aid.  It saves lives from acute overdoses, but does absolutely nothing to stem the tide of abuse.

The solutions being touted by politicians and the media include “working together:” police, citizens, and health-care facilities–though to what end is unclear; educating; reducing the stigma of heroin use (now that users are predominantly white and middle class we can relabel addiction a disease, not a crime); adding treatment facilities; and adding more police.

I call this salutary–but almost entirely missing the mark.

Overdose deaths and heroin users are at an all time high in the United States. Between 2 and 9 of every thousand Americans (0.2-0.9% of the population) is currently using heroin. In Maine, 8% of babies are born “drug-affected”–a stratospheric rise from 178 babies in 2006 to 995 babies in fiscal 2015.

Despite what you have heard, the cause of our current heroin epidemic is not as simple as doctors overprescribing narcotics.

While nationally, heroin overdoses jumped from 1.0 per 100,000 in 2010 to 3.4 per 100,000 in 2014, the number of prescribed narcotics held steady over the same period.  A 2015 UN document noted that “A recent [US government] household survey in the United States indicated that there was a significant decline in the misuse of prescription opioids from 2012 to 2013″ (page 46).

According to CDC itself, “CDC has programmatically characterized all opioid pain reliever deaths (natural and semisynthetic opioids, methadone, and other synthetic opioids) as ‘prescription’ opioid overdoses.” That means illegally produced drugs in these categories are being designated as prescription drugs, when they are not. A further confounder is that heroin metabolizes to morphine, which is a prescription drug. So if fully metabolized at the time of autopsy, a death due to heroin will be labeled as due to a prescription narcotic.

The true cause of the current heroin epidemic is massive amounts of heroin flooding into the US, exceeding what can be sold in our large cities, and now finding its way into even the tiniest hamlets.

Here’s the problem with the NY Times’ and the politicians’ solutions:  neither fifty individual states nor thousands of towns and villages can treat, educate, exhort, investigate or imprison their way out of the heroin maelstrom. There are nowhere near enough police, social workers, prisons, treatment facilities or sources of funding.  Narcan and clean needles don’t cut the mustard. There is only one possible solution, and that is stemming the supply. 

In my September 7 blog post, I showed that 96% of US heroin does not come from Mexico and Colombia, as claimed by US government sources. Mexican and Colombian production is inadequate to supply even half the US market.

At least Canada knows where its heroin comes from:

 “According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police National Intelligence Coordination Center, between 2009 and 2012 at least 90 per cent of the heroin seized in Canada originated in Afghanistan.” (page 46)

If one wants to get into the weeds on this issue, a 2014 RAND report titled What America’s Users Spend on Illegal Drugs: 2000-2010 is a good place to start.  The  report, performed under contract for DHHS and released by the White House, looks at multiple databases and identifies many problematic issues with estimates of heroin country-of-origin.

It shows that while Colombian opium was allegedly supplying 50% of a growing US heroin market between 2001 and 2010 (pages 82-83), Colombian production actually sank from 11 metric tons in 2001 to only 2 in 2009.

Furthermore, US government estimates for the 2000-2010 decade of Mexican production relied on a claimed 3 growing seasons per year, while in reality there were only two. RAND admits Mexican production estimates were inflated. Mexico historically produced lower quality, “black tar” heroin, used west of the Mississippi, while the influx of heroin to the US has been of higher quality white powder, and the greatest increases in use have been in the eastern US, far from the Mexican border.

Meanwhile, according to RAND:

“in recent years, there have been no [heroin] seizures or purchases from Southeast Asia [Myanmar, Laos, Thailand] by DEA’s Domestic Monitoring Program.”

Back in 1992, DEA estimated that 32% of US heroin came from Southwest Asia (mainly Afghanistan). Since then, Afghan opium production has tripled. But in the years 1994 through 2010 only 1-6% of US heroin had a southwest Asian origin, according to DEA’s Domestic Monitoring Program. Yet Afghan production accounts for 90% of the world heroin supply.

It is undeniable: there has been profound, systematic deception regarding the amount of heroin reaching the US from Mexico and Colombia by the US government, presumably to conceal and protect the actual source(s) of most US heroin.

We know where and how to look for heroin:  Afghanistan and Myanmar are the world’s #1 and #2 producers.   Historically, heroin bound for the US leaves these countries by air. There are a manageable number of flights departing Afghanistan and Myanmar.  We could put all the needed personnel in place, today, to fully inspect every flight and every airport.

The fact that we have looked the other way and pointed in the wrong direction is itself the smoking gun.

 Meryl Nass, M.D.  is  a board-certified internist and a biological warfare epidemiologist and expert in anthrax. Nass publishes Anthrax Vaccine.

Sharply lower global equity markets since last August reflect years of Fed-led central banks’ money printing madness, running headlong into economic contraction and instability.

China when thriving is a key engine of world economic growth, a depressant when declining. Official numbers conceal how much, at best a small fraction of its earlier annual double-digit increases.

Its plunging equity markets are flashing red on near-and-perhaps longer-term growth prospects.

Noted Gloom, Boom & Doom editor Marc Faber sees grim prospects ahead, saying “I can’t see another bull market in my lifetime.” He’s 69-years-old.

Former PIMCO CEO, current Allianz Capital Partners chief economic advisor Mohanmed El-Arian believes markets are in full-scale contagion, central banks out of ammunition to revive things.

Noted hedge fund investor Ray Dalio says the debt super-cycle of the last 50 -75 years is ending – along with the short-term one usually lasting 8 – 10 years.

In Davos at the World Economic Forum, George Soros said “China has a major adjustment problem. I would say it amounts to a crisis.”

“When I look at the financial markets, there is a serious challenge which reminds of the crisis we had in 2008.”

Low oil prices reflect weak demand and oversupply. On Thursday, crude prices surged, following a rumor about OPEC considering a possible 5% production cut.

Some member states aren’t aware of a meeting to discuss it. Saudi Arabia has been hardline on maintaining current levels.

Mixed reports about Russia surfaced. Tass reported its Energy Minister Alexander Novak’s readiness to cooperate with OPEC in discussing a possible production cut, saying:

Currently the OPEC member-states are trying to convene a meeting with participation of other OPEC (member-states) and non-(member-states) in February.

Certain countries have come forward with this initiative. Currently the issue is being worked out with the countries. On our part, we’ve confirmed our potential participation in such a meeting.

There’s been an invitation to meet at the ministerial level. In fact, there is no final agreement yet.

It will be held at the ministerial level if all ministers confirm (their participation), and in case they don’t, (the meeting will be held) at the level of experts.

When last discussed, discussion focused on all oil-producing countries cutting output by 5%. The idea was rejected.

An unnamed senior Russian official said “(t)here are not any measures on possibly cutting production being discussed now.”

A second unnamed senior Russian source said it’s “impossible to coordinate the process and stop production in Russia.”

Moscow holds regular discussions with other oil-producing countries. On Wednesday, a Kremlin source said no plans for coordinated cuts exist as of now.

Last week at the Davos World Economic Forum, Saudi state-owned Aramco chairman Khalid al-Falih said plans are to maintain current productions levels. He expects higher prices later this year.

OPEC members and non-members are divided. Some want production cut. Others fear losing market share.

Most need all the revenue they can get by continuing output at current levels – because of low prices and economic weakness.

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.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

The Department of Defense “is moving forward with the development of its insider threat and personnel security reform efforts,” wrote Michael G. Vickers, then-Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence) in an April 2015 report to Congress that was released last month under the Freedom of Information Act. “The Department recognizes the magnitude and complexity of these challenges, the need for multi-agency solutions, and is marshalling needed resources,” he wrote.

An insider threat is defined as someone who uses his or her authorized access to damage the national security of the United States, whether through espionage, terrorism, unauthorized disclosures of classified information, or other harmful actions.

The Department of Defense “is directing multiple pilots and concept demonstrations using both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ capabilities to conduct CE [continuous evaluation] on approximately 100,000 military, civilian and contractor personnel” in an effort to identify potential insider threats, the April 2015 DoD report to Congress said.

The overall, government-wide insider threat program is advancing rather slowly, judging by the program’s latest Quarterly Report (for the 4th quarter of FY 2015) that was just published. Several anticipated program milestones have been missed or deferred, the Report indicates.

The most effective way to limit the insider threat may be to reduce the number of “insiders.” If so, substantial progress has been made in that direction, with the elimination of 800,000 security clearances at the Department of Defense between FY2013 and the 3rd quarter of FY 2015, according to the Report. (The very latest security clearance totals have not yet been published.)

The 2016 Omnibus Appropriations bill passed by Congress last month included a provision requiring expanded reinvestigations of security clearance holders, Federal News Radio reported last week (“Agencies directed to use social media in security clearance reviews” by Nicole Ogrysko, December 28).

“The enhanced personnel security program of an agency shall integrate relevant and appropriate information from various sources, including government, publicly available and commercial data sources, consumer reporting agencies, social media and such other sources as determined by the Director of National Intelligence,” the legislation instructed.

Numerous advocacy and whistleblower defense organizations this week wrote to the Intelligence Community Inspector General urging him to investigate whether the insider threat program “has been improperly used to target or identify whistleblowers. Additionally, we ask that you lead the initiative to properly distinguish between whistleblowing and insider threats.”

Image left: Professor Tim Anderson, distinguished author and senior lecturer of political economy at the University of Sydney, Australia

Global Research Publishers is launching Professor Tim Anderson’s timely and important book on Syria. 

The E-book is available for purchase from Global Research 

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

No other text brings together all the major accusations and their effective refutation.

This text is essential reading for all peace and justice activists.  -James Petras, Author and Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Tim Anderson’s important new book, titled “The Dirty War on Syria” discusses US naked aggression – “rely(ing) on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory,” he explains.

ISIS is the pretext for endless war without mercy, Assad the target, regime change the objective, wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing Syrian sovereign independence.

There’s nothing civil about war in Syria, raped by US imperialism, partnered with rogue allies. Anderson’s book is essential reading to understand what’s going on. –Stephen Lendman, Distinguished Author and Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Host of the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Professor Anderson demonstrates unequivocally through carefully documented research that America’s “Moderate Opposition” are bona fide Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists created and protected by the US and its allies, recruited  and trained by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, in liaison with Washington and Brussels.

Through careful analysis, professor Anderson reveals the “unspoken truth”: the “war on terrorism” is fake, the United States is a “State sponsor of terrorism” involved in a criminal undertaking. Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Professor of Economics (Emeritus), University of Ottawa.

Click here to purchase Tim Anderson’s Book (pdf) 

Excerpts from the Preface of Professor Anderson’s book

Although every war makes ample use of lies and deception, the dirty war on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. The British-Australian journalist Philip Knightley pointed out that war propaganda typically involves ‘a depressingly predictable pattern’ of demonising the enemy leader, then demonising the enemy people through atrocity stories, real or imagined (Knightley 2001). Accordingly, a mild-mannered eye doctor called Bashar al Assad became the “new evil” in the world and, according to consistent western media reports, the Syrian Army did nothing but kill civilians for more than four years. To this day, many imagine the Syrian conflict is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or some sort of internal sectarian conflict. These myths are, in many respects, a substantial achievement for the big powers which have driven a series of ‘regime change’ operations in the Middle East region, all on false pretexts, over the past fifteen years.

Click image to purchase Tim Anderson’s Book (pdf) 

This book is a careful academic work, but also a strong defence of the right of the Syrian people to determine their own society and political system. That position is consistent with international law and human rights principles, but may irritate western sensibilities, accustomed as we are to an assumed prerogative to intervene. At times I have to be blunt, to cut through the double-speak. In Syria the big powers have sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies while demonising the Syrian Government and Army, accusing them of constant atrocities; then pretending to rescue the Syrian people from their own government. Far fewer western people opposed the war on Syria than opposed the invasion of Iraq, because they were deceived about its true nature.

In 2011 I had only a basic understanding of Syria and its history. However, I was deeply suspicious when reading of the violence that erupted in the southern border town of Daraa. I knew that such violence (sniping at police and civilians, the use of semi-automatic weapons) does not spring spontaneously from street demonstrations. And I was deeply suspicious of the big powers. All my life I had been told lies about the pretexts for war. I decided to research the Syrian conflict, reading hundreds of books and articles, watching many videos and speaking to as many Syrians as I could. I wrote dozens of articles and visited Syria twice, during the conflict. This book is a result of that research.

I would go so far as to say that, in waging the Dirty War on Syria, western culture in general abandoned its better traditions: of reason, the maintenance of ethical principle and the search for independent evidence at times of conflict; in favour of its worst traditions: the ‘imperial prerogative’ for intervention, backed by deep racial prejudice and poor reflection on the histories of their own cultures. That weakness was reinforced by a ferocious campaign of war propaganda. After the demonisation of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad began, a virtual information blockade was constructed against anything which might undermine the wartime storyline. Very few sensible western perspectives on Syria emerged after 2011, as critical voices were effectively blacklisted.

In that context I came to write this book. It is a defence of Syria. This is a resource book and a contribution to the history of the Syrian conflict. The western stories have become self-indulgent and I believe it is wasteful to indulge them too much. Best, I think, to speak of current events as they are, then address the smokescreens later. I do not ignore the western myths, in fact this book documents many of them. But I lead with the reality of the war.

Click here to purchase Tim Andersons’s Book (pdf) 

Chapter Overview:

Chapter 1, ‘Syria and Washington’s ‘New Middle East’’ puts Syria in context of the US plans for a ‘New Middle East’, the latest chapter in a longer history of US attempts to dominate the region.

Chapter 2, ‘Barrel Bombs, Partisan Sources and War Propaganda’ addresses the problem of reporting and reading the Syrian crisis. Media channels have shown a hyperreliance on partisan sources, committed to the war and denigrating the Syrian Army. This is the key barrier to understanding the controversies around chemical weapons, civilian massacres and the levels of support for or opposition to President Assad.

Chapter 3, ‘Daraa 2011: Another Islamist Insurrection’ reconstructs, from a range of sources, the Saudi-backed Islamist insurrection in Daraa in March 2011. Those armed attacks were quite distinct from the political reform rallies, which the Islamists soon drove off the streets.

Chapter 4, ‘Bashar al Assad and Political Reform’ explains the political reform movement from the time Bashar assumed the presidency in the year 2000 to the beginning of the crisis in 2011. From this we can see that most opposition groups were committed to reform within a Syrian context, with virtually all opposing attacks on the Syrian state. The chapter then reviews the role of Bashar as a reformer, and the evidence on his popularity.

Chapter 5, ‘The Empire’s Jihadis’ looks at the collaboration between Salafist political Islam and the imperial powers in the Middle East. Distinct from the anti-imperial Islamic currents in Iran and south Lebanon, Salafist political Islam has become a sectarian force competing with Arab nationalism across Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and drawing on long standing collaborative relations with the big powers. This history provides important background to the character of Syria’s Islamist ‘revolution’, and its various slogans.

Chapter 6, ‘Embedded Media, Embedded Watchdogs’ identifies the propaganda techniques of media channels and the network of ‘human rights’ bodies (Human Rights Watch, Avaaz, etc) which function as megaphones and ‘moderators’ for the Washington agenda. Many have become fierce advocates for ‘humanitarian war’. A number of newer western NGOs (e.g. The Syria Campaign, The White Helmets) have been created by Wall Street agencies specifically for the dirty war on Syria. A number of their fabrications are documented here.

Chapter 7, ‘The Houla Massacre Revisited’ considers in detail the evidence from the first major massacre designed (following success of the technique over Libya) to influence UN Security Council consideration of military intervention. While the first UN inquiry group, actually in Syria, found contradictory evidence on this massacre, a second UN group outside Syria and co-chaired by a US diplomat, tried to blame the Syrian Government. Yet more than a dozen witnesses blamed Farouq FSA Islamists, who killed pro-government villagers and took over the area, holding it for some months. Several other ‘false flag’ massacres are noted.

Chapter 8, ‘Chemical Fabrications: the East Ghouta Incident’ details the second major ‘false flag’ incident of international significance. This incident in August 2013, which nearly sparked a major escalation involving US missile attacks on Syria, was used to accuse the Syrian Government of killing hundreds of civilians, including children, with chemical weapons. Within a fairly short time multiple sources of independent evidence (including North American evidence) disproved these accusations. Nevertheless, Syria’s opponents have repeated the false accusations, to this day, as though they were fact.

Chapter 9 , ‘A Responsibility to Protect and the Double Game’ addresses a recent political doctrine, a subset of ‘humanitarian intervention’ popularised to add to the imperial toolkit. The application of this doctrine in Libya was disastrous for that little country. Fortunately the attempts to use it in Syria failed.

Al Kindi hospital (Aleppo) as it was being demolished by two truck bombs, December 2013. The operation was carried out by Jabhat al Nusra (see logo top right) and its FSA partners. Afterwards the Islamist-linked ‘Physicians for Human Rights’ tried to blame the Syrian Government for this destruction. Photo: Jabhat al Nusra

Chapter 10, ‘Health and Sanctions’ documents the NATO-backed Islamist attacks on Syria’s health system, linked to the impact of western economic sanctions. These twin currents have caused great damage to Syrian public health. Such attacks carry no plausible motive of seeking local popular support, so we must interpret them as part of an overall strategy to degrade the Syrian state, rendering it more vulnerable to outside intervention.

Chapter 11 ‘Washington, Terrorism and ISIS: the evidence’, documents the links between the big powers and the latest peak terrorist group they claim to be fighting. Only evidence can help develop informed opinion on this contentious matter, but the evidence is overwhelming. There is little ideological difference between the various Salafi-Islamist groups, and Washington and its allies have financed and armed every one of them.

Chapter 12, ‘Western Intervention and the Colonial Mind’ discusses the western cultural mindset that underlies persistent violations of the rights of other peoples.

Chapter 13 ‘Towards an Independent Middle East’, considers the end-game in the Syrian crisis, and its implications for the Middle East region. At tremendous cost the Syrian Arab Republic, its army and its people, have successfully resisted aggression from a variety of powerful enemies. Syria’s survival is due to its resilience and internal unity, bolstered by support from some strong allies. The introduction of Russian air power in late September 2015 was important. So too were the coordinated ground forces from Iran, Iraq and Lebanon, in support of an independent Syria.

When the attacks on Syria abate the Middle East seems set to be transformed, with greater political will and military preparedness on the part of an expanded Axis of Resistance. That will signal the beginning of the end for Washington’s 15 year spree of bloodshed and ‘regime change’ across the entire region.

Click here to purchase Tim Anderson’s Book PDF

Below is the interview of Andrew Korybko to the Macedonian NetPress agency, published in English by Oriental Review.

Andrew Korybko reveals the most likely scenario to be implemented by the US to  destabilize the Balkan state of Macedonia and bring their puppet, Zoran Zaev, to power in Skopje.

According to Korybko, these plans are doomed for failure…

***

Q: After the failed Colored revolution attempt in Macedonia, via wiretappings and destabilization attempts (terrorist attack and violent opposition protests), all of which was prevented thanks to the patriotism of the Macedonians and the appropriate reaction of the authorities, the latest opinion polls continue to show that the ruling party of VMRO-DPMNE has a double lead over the Western-sponsored opposition led by SDSM.

It seems that all this effort and the millions of dollars that were poured into the pro-Western mercenaries in Macedonia didn`t work in achieving their results, and now, understandably, they don`t want to go to the upcoming early elections in April, on which upon they have agreed earlier. In our last interview we talked about the upcoming second round of the Colored revolution attempt and it’s incredible how you predicted the situation back then, when you said that most probably they will organize protests trying to push the country over the edge of destabilization and it seems that the opposition has already started threating with the so called “street democracy”.

The premeditated violence that they had planned for didn’t break out last time, so what do you think will happen in the upcoming protests?

First off, it’s essential to point out just how weak the “opposition” currently is. They had over half a year to expand their social infrastructure and promote their regime change agenda, yet all the polls indicate that VMRO is twice as popular as they are. Clearly, they failed to gain new adherents to their cause, and it looks like some previously misguided voters discovered the error of their ways and have defected to the ruling party.

What we can gather from this is that patriotic Macedonian activists and their related media have been very successful in educating the public about the Hybrid War threat facing their country, including the contracting of certain internal “opposition” elements to this cause. As a result, Macedonians are more patriotic than ever before, firmly standing behind their government because they understand the enormity of what’s at risk if they don’t. Regardless of one’s political disposition, nobody wants to see a foreign-supported “opposition” leader come to power in their country, and this is why there’s barely any support for SDSM when compared to VMRO. It doesn’t matter what country it is, what parties are involved, nor what the leaders’ names are – no patriotic citizen wants a foreign puppet controlling their country on behalf of some unseen forces, it’s as simple as that.

Macedonia opposition leader Zoran Zaev

Confronted with barely any public support and guaranteed to lose the upcoming elections, Zaev and his cohorts sought to compensate for this pathetic state of affairs by courting as much international backing as possible. Being a “democrat” in name only and an asset of foreign governments, Zaev personally doesn’t care whether the people support him or not. All that matters to him is accomplishing his mission and seizing power by one way or another. Instead of the support of the Macedonian people, he’d rather have the support of the US government, convinced that it’s the decisive factor that he needs in order to retain relevancy and have a chance at gaining power. The childish drama that unfolded with the SDSM saying they’ll boycott the early elections that they themselves had previously agreed to is part of this scheme, but it’s such an obvious ploy that nobody is falling for their gimmicks.

The idea is for Zaev and his followers to not participate in the elections so that when VMRO wins, as everybody expects and all the polls indicate, then they can say that it was an “unfair” and “unfree” election because the main ‘opposition’ party didn’t’ take part. Never mind that the only reason for this would have been Zaev’s immature antics, but the point here is that this false rhetoric would be enough to attract the US’ attention (as planned) and have it voice “concerns” over the vote. Basically, Zaev is cooperating with American strategists in coordinating his actions so that they create the ‘plausible’ conditions that are necessary for the US to deepen its formal diplomatic interference in Macedonia’s affairs and formally speak out against the government.

Earlier, it was thought that his refusal to take part in the elections would engineer a scenario that Prime Minister Gruevski remains in office until a new election date is set, which then would have given the US ‘probable cause’ to label him a ‘power-hungry dictator’ and start publicly working against him, which is what they’ve been wanting to do for over a year now anyhow. VMRO didn’t fall for this trap, and that’s why they decided to go forward with the political transition and hold early elections as planned.

The only thing that Zaev can do now is resort to anti-democratic tactics to take power, since there’s no way that SDSM will win the early elections even if they decide to take part at the last minute. Because there’s declining support for the regime change movement that he leads and most people are aware of the foreign plot that he’s supporting, he can’t count on tricking as many people as he did last time and in having them be his ‘human shields’ in a forthcoming Color Revolution demonstration. There will still be some who take part, make no doubt about it, but nowhere near the number that did so last May (which even then wasn’t all that large anyhow). The ‘opposition’ can thus proceed along one of the following two scenario routes: boycott the elections and stage demonstrations right before, during, and/or afterwards; or partake in the elections, lose as expected, and protest afterwards against imaginary “irregularities”. No matter which path they take, their on-the-ground actions will be the same.

They’ll bring sympathetic foreign media such as CNN so that they can film everything from a misleading angle that conveys the false perception that their movement is a lot larger than it actually is. At the same time, they’ll likely engage in provocative and aggressive behavior, hoping that they can goad some of the patriotic elements of society into a brawl that can then be broadcast by CNN and others as “pro-government street aggression”. They may also conceivable target security personnel in order to create a similar provocation. Their goal, then, isn’t to “democratically demonstrate”, but to provoke violence that can then be purposefully misreported as “dictatorship violence against pro-democratic protesters”. It’s of the utmost importance that patriotic citizens exercise restraint and refrain from being provoked into any kind of fight, and a constructive suggestion in avoiding any tempting response to their antics is to video record every public thing that they do and establish concrete evidence of their aggressive actions. Exposing them for the violent provocateurs that they are can help to shift international sympathy among broad segments of the domestic and international populations that are made aware of this information.

Moving on, as I explained above, Zaev and his patrons know that they can’t reach the pinnacles of power through the democratic process, hence why they must resort to illegal methods and the support of key Western actors. In line with these scenarios, the US would then denounce the legitimate Macedonian authorities and work towards implementing a sanctions regime against them, pressuring the compliant and “refugee”-blackmailed EU to follow suit. It’s highly probable that the Greek leadership, completed indebted to the EU and desperate to do anything for a handful of Euros, will take on a leading role in some capacity or another in dealing with what the Western mainstream media would then label as the “Macedonian Crisis”, finding one way or another to invent ‘reasons’ for why it’s all ‘Russia’s fault’.

Additionally, it can’t be discounted that a repeat of the Kumanovo terrorist incident won’t happen again either during this time. Remember, the Albanian-affiliated terrorists there had planned to launch their attacks concurrent with the “opposition’s” Color Revolution destabilization, suggesting a very high degree of strategic coordination between the two regime change forces. Thankfully, the security services were able to stop this plot before any civilians were killed, but tragically a few heroes lost their lives that day in order to keep the rest of the Republic safe. Unlike what the US and some of its allies had planned, ethnic Albanians did not take the ‘bait’ and use the incident as a signal to rise up against the government and carry out copy-cat terrorist attacks, this despite the fact that American and other affiliated media had intentionally and inaccurately framed the event as “ethnic clashes” and as “state-sponsored violence” against the Albanian minority.

This time around, however, Albania is facing a heightened domestic crisis, one which began as a severe economic one but is now taking on a political form. The riotous opposition protests in Tirana in early December sent a strong message to the Albanian establishment that public discontent is reaching a dangerous breaking point and must be dealt with in some way or another. Historically, the Albanian elite have redirected the masses’ anti-government hostility towards furthering the dream of militant Albanian irredentism and repeating the fascist-era annexations of neighboring territories. It’s no coincidence that Albania’s 1997 unrest was followed by a strong and concerted campaign backing the Albanian terrorists in the Serbian Province of Kosovo, culminating in the dramatic 1999 NATO War on Yugoslavia. Similarly, nowadays just like at the end of last century, Albania is on the cusp of a serious domestic crisis, and its elite might feel pressured to once more summon the demon of “Greater Albania” in a bid to save their own careers and redirect the public’s seething rage against a foreign so-called “enemy”, all with the full backing of the US.

A Wahhbi element might even be involved too, whether the Albanian authorities plan it this way or the US ‘surprisingly’ inserts this variable on its own (which is more likely), especially when one considers that some ethnic Albanians are fighting side-by-side with ISIL right now and the terrorists’ strong recruiting network in that country and the NATO-occupied Serbian Province of Kosovo. One can’t also forget that ISIL terrorists already infiltrated France via the Balkan route by posing as “refugees”, and there’s no quantifiable way to tell how many more of these individuals passed through the region and might have burrowed their sleeper cells into the country. If “refugee”-disguised terrorists link up with their Albanian affiliates in Macedonia and decide to cooperate in unleashing havoc, then they might find a way to lure as many genuine refugees into their demonstration as possible in order to hide behind a group of ‘human shields’. Any reaction by the security forces to violent provocations from the actual refugees and their imposter controllers would instantaneously be broadcast worldwide by CNN and other Soros-affiliated media networks as a “right-wing dictatorship killing Muslim refugees”, even though that certainly wouldn’t be the case in any manner at all. However, this sneaky information warfare ploy would engender near-universal condemnation against the Macedonian government by its American and European counterparts and be used as an excuse for escalating international involvement in the country’s Western-orchestrated Hybrid War crisis.

If there’s an outbreak of Albanian- or ISIL-affiliated terrorism around the same time as the early elections and predicted “opposition” protests, then the country might risk being thrown into turmoil. The US understands this very well and could facilitate this grand scenario for a variety of reasons, but chiefly to obstruct the Balkan Silk Road and Balkan Stream projects. In the event that the “opposition” and/or terrorists carry out some sort of provocation or violent act, it’s highly advisable that the patriotic citizens follow the guidance of their government and avoid being led into any sort of retributive trap. Attacking “opposition” members or ethnic Albanians in response to whatever might happen would only feed into the cycle of violence that the US would want to prompt, whereas allowing the authorities to handle it, as they so adroitly did last year, is the best way to mitigate the US’ chaos-driven plans. However, with or without any sort of disruption around the elections, there’s nothing bad about having large-scale patriotic demonstrations like the ones that took place last May. This would be a very effective way to show the rest of the world, and specifically the audiences that the American and Western media try to mislead, that there is widespread public support for going forth with the elections as scheduled and that the people are eager to end the “opposition’s” political games and return their country’s situation to normalcy.

Q: It’s now clear that victory for the opposition is mission impossible, but let`s stop for a bit to analyze how it would have been if the opposition leader Zoran Zaev was the new Prime Minister. What perverse and dark scenarios for Macedonia were being directed by the Western factor, with the opposition as their statists and marionettes?

The first thing that Zaev and his handlers want is for Macedonia to relinquish its identity and settle for a “compromise” name in order to immediately be accepted into NATO and the EU. Interestingly enough, even if this were to happen, neither organization might be keen in formally expanding right away, dictating instead that Macedonia must first join the anti-Russian sanctions regime and perhaps apply behind-the-scenes pressure for it to cut ties with China’s Balkan Silk Road project. Zaev would do all of these things immediately – change the country’s name, sanction Russia, and pull out of China’s regional high-speed rail plans –and the Macedonian people wouldn’t receive a single positive benefit from any of this. That isn’t to say that there won’t be any ‘rewards’ for such submissive behavior, but that they’ll only go into the laps of Zaev and his buddies (even a dog needs a treat once in a while). Whatever criticisms some might level at the present government would absolutely pale in comparison to the corruption and nepotism of a Western-imposed Zaev regime, and all economic, social, and geopolitical advances from the past decade will be completely reversed.

The only relevant comparison that can be made is how Yeltsin and his cronies totally undermined Russia with their buffoonery, corruption, and absolute incompetence. The West applauded him and his henchmen every time they did something against Russia’s interests, cheering with orgasmic glee that they finally had a clique in power that would do their bidding. Oligarchism was the law of the land and inequality skyrocketed as most social benefits were severely curtailed or outright abolished. The same thing would happen to Macedonia if Zaev and his people came to power, and just like with Yeltsin and his crew, the West would pat them on the back and reassure them that they’re behaving like “good democrats” and “freedom-lovers” with every new round of damage that they inflict on their country. There’s a modified scenario of this that might have happened as well, which would be Zaev obsessively trying to consolidate absolute power and becoming a second iteration of Milo Djukanovic. We all know how notoriously corrupt the Montenegrin ruler is, but the tiny seaside country had comparatively less wealth to steal than Macedonia does with its factories, farms, and robust service industry. Zaev would probably beat Djukanovic as the most corrupt politician in the Balkans in less than a year or so, but the pro-Western media would self-interestedly label him as a “reforming democrat” that’s “opening the economy” to Macedonia’s “fellow NATO and EU allies”.

The last national nightmare that Zaev could unleash in his capacity as the Western-imposed leader of Macedonia is to totally reformat the country’s domestic political system, perhaps as ‘payback’ to any Albanian terrorists that support his violent battle for power. The Ohrid Agreement is alive and well in Macedonia and has already been implemented, but regular “opposition” and Soros-supported rhetoric is to allege that a lot of work still has yet to be completed. This is nothing more than a euphemism for not only courting Albanian support and condescendingly doing it in as demeaning of a way as possible, but in hinting that the Republic needs to become a federation in order to “fully resolve” the issue. This line of thinking is attractive to the expansionists in Tirana that are eager to deflect rising public resentment against their rule, and it’s also a coded means for Zaev and the Soros-affiliated networks to reach out to the general Albanian community in the region.

Thankfully, the Albanian community in Macedonia is well aware that a strong, stable, and unified Republic of Macedonia is the only way to achieve win-win benefits for every citizen, both Macedonian and Albanian, and that a fracturing of the state along ethnic lines would weaken the central government and undo the leadership cohesiveness that is attributable to the country’s success in the past decade. Still, the idea of a “shadow Kosovo” inside Macedonia is intriguing to some Albanians, especially gullible and easily misled youth, who mistakenly believe that they can somehow succeed where “Kosovo” failed. That’s an absolute fallacy because any artificial Western-created geopolitical entity in the Balkans, including a “federative Macedonia”, will by its very nature remain a fractured and weakened force incapable of asserting any semblance of sovereignty aside from its own flag, anthem, and Western international ‘recognition’.

Zaev knows this quite well, and it’s his goal to bring Macedonia to its knees and make it as divided as possible so as to facilitate his envisioned decades-long Djukanovic-like rule. The two most traitorous actions that he could do would be to change the constitutional name of the Republic of Macedonia and freakishly metamorphasize the country into an ethno-religious ‘federation’. By pitting Macedonians against one another over their country’s name and agitating ethno-religious tensions between Orthodox Macedonians and Muslim Albanians, Zaev would be fulfilling the two most dramatic things that he could do to divide the country and turn fellow citizens against one another.

As they fight amongst themselves, Zaev could then request ‘emergency’ US and NATO assistance (likely in the form of intimidating ‘peacekeepers’, which in reality would be occupiers) in militarily centralizing his power and defeating all forces opposed to his rule. In a Zaev-controlled Macedonia, the only hope for a positive future would be for the patriotic citizenry to resist him in every single way possible. There is no future for the Republic of Macedonia otherwise, because by the time he’s done destroying the country, the entity that remains will probably have a Greece- and Albanian-“compromised” name as ridiculous as the “Federation Of Vardar Albania” but approved with wild applause by its NATO and EU ‘partners’.

To be continued…

Although during her tenure in the White House as first lady Hillary enjoyed the benefit of 8 years of organic non-GMO food by virtue of her residency in the White House, 2016 candidate Clinton has been perhaps the most vocal proponent of GM food to yet enter the race.

According to Global Research writer Stephen Lendman, nearly all the food produced for the Clinton White House was obtained from local growers and suppliers, GMO-free, pesticide-free, and with a preference for organic.[1] That, preference, however, is not to be afforded the American people and the people of the Third World for whom Hillary is pushing every toxic GM variety known to man.

Hillary’s Big-Agra ties go back quite a long ways. As far back as the 1980s, Hillary was working at high levels within the Rose Law Firm, a law firm that itself was tied to a number of scandals. Although not a scandal at the time, it is now important to note that the Rose Law Firm, at which Clinton was a partner, maintained Monsanto and Tyson Foods as clients.[2]

Yet a mere association between law firms and such food giants was by no means the depths of Clinton’s connection to these institutions and the industry of Genetically Modified Organisms and “biotechnology.”

It has been speculated by many that Hillary’s ties to Monsanto and Tyson as a result of her career with Rose was yet another link in the chain pulling biotech giants together with the Bill Clinton administration in the 1990s. Indeed, Clinton’s disastrous presidency resulted in seeing a number of former-biotech giant employees being hired and appointed to the FDA, USDA, and other relevant regulatory posts within the US government. While being careful not to ascribe the blame of Bill Clinton’s either years of treachery to Hillary, it is nevertheless worthwhile to ask whether or not Hillary served as a middleman of sorts for major government-corporate collusion of this type.

After all, when Clinton became US Secretary of State, she acted as Monsanto’s promoter both domestically and across the world, continuing a policy of GMO promotion that preceded and, apparently, continued even after she left the office.

In December, 2010, WikiLeaks released sizable number of cables, about ten percent of which revealed that the US State Department was essentially acting as the marketing wing for biotech companies and “biotech” products across the world. The thousands of cables that were released spanned over 100 embassies and were, unfortunately, released just before Christmas. As a result, the story faded into the holiday madness.[3]

Thankfully, in 2013, the watchdog organization Food and Water Watch delved into the cables and released a report entitled “Biotech Ambassadors: How The U.S. State Department Promotes The Seed Industry’s Global Agenda.” According to Food and Water Watch, their study “reveals a concerted strategy to promote agricultural biotechnology overseas, compel countries to import biotech crops and foods they do not want, and lobby foreign governments — especially in the developing world — to adopt policies to pave the way to cultivate biotech crops.”[4]

Food and Water Watch wrote,

Food and Water Watch closely examined five years of State Department diplomatic cables from 2005 to 2009 to provide the first comprehensive analysis of the strategy, tactics and U.S. foreign policy objectives to foist pro-agricultural biotechnology policies worldwide. Food & Water Watch’s illuminating findings include:

The U.S. State Department’s multifaceted efforts to promote the biotechnology industry overseas: The State Department targeted foreign reporters, hosted and coordinated pro-biotech conferences and public events and brought foreign opinion-makers to the United States on high-profile junkets to improve the image of agricultural biotechnology overseas and overcome widespread public opposition to GE crops and foods.

The State Department’s coordinated campaign to promote biotech business interests: The State Department promoted not only pro-biotechnology policies but also the products of biotech companies. The strategy cables explicitly “protect the interests” of biotech exporters, “facilitate trade in agri-biotech products” and encourage the cultivation of GE crops in more countries, especially in the developing world.[5]

The State Department’s determined advocacy to press the developing world to adopt biotech crops: The diplomatic cables document a coordinated effort to lobby countries in the developing world to pass legislation and implement regulations favored by the biotech seed industry. This study examines the State Department lobbying campaigns in Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria to pass pro-biotech laws.

The State Department’s efforts to force other nations to accept biotech crop and food imports:The State Department works with the U.S. Trade Representative to promote the export of biotech crops and to force nations that do not want these imports to accept U.S. biotech foods and crops.[6]

FWW also provides a few Hillary quotes demonstrating the State Department’s push for GM crops worldwide such as her statements linking GMOs to solving “climate change” and world hunger.[7]

“We believe that biotechnology has a critical role to play in increasing agricultural productivity, particularly in light of climate change,” Clinton is quoted as stating.[8]

“[W]e want to shift our focus to agricultural sustainability, focusing on the small producers, helping them understand the value of GMOs — genetically modified organisms,” she also said while serving as Secretary of State.[9]

Clinton also extolled the virtues of GE technology upon her visit to Kenya when she stated that “With Kenya’s leadership in biotechnology and biosafety, we cannot only improve agriculture in Kenya, but Kenya can be leader for the rest of Africa.”[10]

While the FWW report can scarcely be dealt with in any reasonable detail within the scope of this article, it is recommended that the reader take advantage of the fact that it is freely available online at this link: http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Biotech_Report_US.pdf

It should be mentioned that, as Secretary of State, Hillary also helped promote the USAID –funded program “Feed the Future,” an initiative that promotes and introduces Round-up Ready®products all over the world.[11]

Yet, even as Hillary was acting as Monsanto and Big-Agra’s PR woman as Secretary of State, the Clinton Global Initiative was receiving sizable donations from Monsanto and Dow Chemical. As Judy Frankel of the Huffington Post writes in her article “Hillary vs. Bernie On Frankenfood,”

How is Hillary personally involved in supporting big agriculture? The Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), which gathers leaders to solve the world’s problems, promotes Monsanto, the maker of RoundUp® and RoundUp Ready® seeds. Hugh Grant, Monsanto’s Chairman and CEO spoke at the Clinton Global Initiative conference in September, 2014. Ms. Clinton’s top campaign advisor, Jerry Crawford, was a lobbyist for Monsanto for years and is now the political pro for her Super PAC, “Ready for Hillary.”[12] Clinton spoke in favor of the government’s Feed the Future (FtF) program, a USAID funded, corporate-partnered program that brings RoundUp Ready® technology to the most vulnerable populations of the world.[13] Monsanto and Dow Chemical support Hillary and Bill’s ‘Clinton Foundation’ with generous donations.

Last year, at a San Diego biotech conference, Hillary coached her audience in messaging. “Genetically modified sounds Frankensteinish. Drought-resistant sounds like something you’d want. Be more careful so you don’t raise that red flag immediately.”

It’s also highly unlikely for Hillary Clinton to stand up against her benefactors, saying she favors a review of RoundUp, 2,4-D, and the even more toxic poisons used by farmers worldwide when she has friends in the industry telling her that they will “feed the world” someday with their agricultural methods.[14]

According to Stephen Lendman,

Monsanto gave the Clinton Foundation from half a million to one million dollars – Ag giant Dow Chemical from one to five million dollars, according to Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation disclosures.

Numerous other corporate giants contributed large sums. Expect them donating handsomely to Hillary’s presidential campaign.[15]

The Washington Times echoes Lendman’s claims by stating that “Monsanto gave the foundation between $501,250 and $1 million. Dow Chemical Company, which is among the top GMO players, gave between $1 million and $5 million, according to financial disclosures by the Clinton Foundation.”[16]

Candidate Clinton is no better than Secretary, Senator, or First Lady Clinton. In fact, she may even be worse considering that, even when faced with election woes stemming from her support of GM foods, she is still stalwart and vocal in her support of them, going so far as to openly raise funds from Big-Agra donors and attend Big-Agra lobbying initiatives.[17]

Candidate Clinton in 2008 was bad enough. Back then, Clinton was supported by a group called Rural Americans For Hillary, an organization closely connected to the lobbying firm of Monsanto.[18]

Clinton’s “adviser” for her campaign for Secretary of State, 2008 Presidency, and both Senate runs was Mark Penn, a close adviser to Clinton as well as PR rep for Monsanto via his PR firm Burson-Marsteller. [19] [20] [21]

Linn Cohen-Cole suggests that it was Hillary Clinton who was the brainchild (at Penn’s instruction) to appoint notorious Monsanto henchman Michael Taylor to the position of head of the FDA, a man whom Bill Clinton had once appointed to the FDA and USDA.[22]

In 2015, when Hillary began assembling her 2016 campaign team, she tapped Monsanto lobbyist Jerry Crawford to act as an “adviser” to the Ready For Hillary Super PAC. Crawford was also co-chair of her 2008 campaign.[23]

As Zaid Jilani wrote for Alternet,

Before joining Clinton’s campaign in 2008, Crawford served in a variety of high-profile political roles. In addition to a variety of local positions, he served as the Iowa chair for the presidential campaigns of Mike Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry—each one the more conservative candidates in their Democratic presidential primaries.

So it was a natural fit for Crawford to sign up for the Hillary campaign. But after Clinton’s 2008 loss, Crawford spent his days at Crawford Muaro, his law and lobbying firm.[24] While there, he represented a variety of corporate clients, including Kraft and Altria (the parent company of Philip Morris USA). He also served as a lawyer for Jack DeCoster, a factory farm tycoon who infamously supplied eggs that led to a salmonella outbreak. His most prominent client, however, was Monsanto.[25]

Stephen Lendman also points out that Crawford was involved in fighting small farmers through the court system on behalf of Big-Agra.[26]

Hillary’s long history with Big Agra should have foretold the glowing praise she would leap upon GM crops and big Biotech companies at the world’s largest trade organization of biotechnology firms in San Diego in late June 2014.[27]

“I stand in favor of using seeds and products that have a proven track record,” Hillary said. She also added that pro-GMO advocates need to continue to hammer at those more skeptical of frankenfoods. “There is a big gap between what the facts are, and what the perceptions are,” she said, echoing a typical Big Agra talking point designed to be appealing to trendies and hipsters.[28]

Clinton also gave some marketing advice to the participants regarding how they present GM food to the public. “‘Genetically modified’ sounds Frankensteinish. ‘Drought resistance’ sounds really – something you want. So how do you create a different vocabulary to talk about what it is you’re trying to help people do,” she said.[29]

She also stated

We talk about drought-resistant seeds, and I’ve promoted them all over Africa. By definition, they have been engineered to be drought-resistant, I mean that’s the beauty of them. Maybe somebody can get their harvest done and not starve, and maybe there’s some left over to sell. And yet I’ve been involved in a lot of the political debates in other countries about whether or not to accept certain kinds of seeds.

. . . . .

We created a program called Feed the Future, which is trying to help the farmers be educated enough to know that drought-resistant seeds, for example, are not going to hurt them. And this is painstaking work, doesn’t get solved overnight. You have to be working at the top with the departments of agriculture, with finance ministries, with prime ministers and presidents’ offices, and you have to be working from the bottom up. I don’t see the short cut for it.

. . . . . .

I don’t want to see biotech companies or pharma companies moving out of our country simply because of some perceived tax disadvantage and potential tax advantage somewhere else.[30]

See: https://youtu.be/Hypwb_SYaAc[31]

Clinton’s 2016 race has, as mentioned, gotten off to a great start thanks to donations from Monsanto lobbyists in the form of bundlers – fundraisers who are able to skirt election donation laws by convincing their contacts and associates to donate to a political candidate.

Jerry Crawford, the famed Iowa-based Monsanto lobbyist, has already raised $35,000 for Clinton.[32]

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 600 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.

This article (Hillary Clinton: The Bride Of Frankenfood) can be republished under this share-alike Creative Commons license with attribution to Brandon Turbeville, the article link and Natural Blaze.com.

Notes:

[1] Lendman, Stephen. “Hillary Clinton Endorses GMOS. White House Meals Are Organic.” Global Research (Centre For Research On Globalization). May 25, 2015.http://www.globalresearch.ca/hillary-clinton-endorses-gmos-white-house-meals-are-organic/5451481 Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[2] Gerth, Jeff; Van Natta, Jr., Don (2007). Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton. New York: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 0-316-01742-6. p. 60.

[3] Hatfield, Leslie. “New Analysis Of Wikileaks Shows State Department’s Promotion Of Monsanto’s GMOs Abroad.” Huffington Post. July 20, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-hatfield/new-analysis-of-wikileaks_b_3306842.html Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[4] “Biotech Ambassadors: How The U.S. State Department Promotes The Seed Industry’s Global Agenda.” Food and Water Watch. May, 2013.http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Biotech_Report_US.pdf Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[5] U.S. Department of State (U.S. DoS). “FY 2008 biotechnology outreach strategy and department resources.” Cable No. 07STATE160639. November 27, 2007.

[6] “Biotech Ambassadors: How The U.S. State Department Promotes The Seed Industry’s Global Agenda.” Food and Water Watch. May, 2013.http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Biotech_Report_US.pdf Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[7] Biotech Ambassadors: How The U.S. State Department Promotes The Seed Industry’s Global Agenda.” Food and Water Watch. May, 2013.http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Biotech_Report_US.pdf Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[8] U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee. Hearing on the President’s FY2009 War Supplemental Request. April 30, 2009.

[9] Lauritsen, Sharon Bomer, Executive Vice President of Food and Agriculture at BIO. Letter to Professeur De Schutter, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. May 29, 2009 at 14.

[10] Clinton, Hillary. Remarks at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute. August 5, 2009

[11] Biotech Ambassadors: How The U.S. State Department Promotes The Seed Industry’s Global Agenda.” Food and Water Watch. May, 2013.http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/Biotech_Report_US.pdf Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[12] Jilani, Zaid. “Hillary’s Pick For Her Political Fixer In Iowa Is A Classic Illustration Of America’s Political Corporate Insider Problem.” Alter Net. March 9, 2015. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillarys-pick-her-political-fixer-iowa-classic-illustration-americas-political Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[13] Ishii-Eiteman, Marcia. “U.S. Looks To Monsanto To Feed The World.” Ground Truth. February 2, 2011. http://www.panna.org/blog/us-looks-monsanto-feed-world Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[14] Frankel, Judy. “Hillary Vs. Bernie On Frankenfood.” Huffington Post. June 23, 2015.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judy-frankel/hillary-vs-bernie-on-fran_b_7638846.htmlAccessed on September 2, 2015.

[15] Lendman, Stephen. “Hillary Clinton Endorses GMOS. White House Meals Are Organic.” Global Research (Centre For Research On Globalization). May 25, 2015.http://www.globalresearch.ca/hillary-clinton-endorses-gmos-white-house-meals-are-organic/5451481 Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[16] “Hillary’s Agribusiness Ties Give Rise To Nickname In Iowa: ‘Bride Of Frankenfood.” Washington Times. May 17, 2015. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/17/hillary-clinton-gmo-support-monsanto-ties-spark-ba/?page=1 Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[17] “Hillary’s Agribusiness Ties Give Rise To Nickname In Iowa: ‘Bride Of Frankenfood.” Washington Times. May 17, 2015. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/may/17/hillary-clinton-gmo-support-monsanto-ties-spark-ba/?page=1 Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[18] Parker, Jennifer. “Yee-Haw.” ABC News. December 17, 2007.http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2007/10/yee-haw.html Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[19] Sarich, Christina. “’Bride Of Frankenfood’ Hillary Clinton’s GMO Ties Spark Backlash In Iowa.” Natural Society. May 28, 2015. http://naturalsociety.com/bride-of-frankenfood-hillary-clintons-gmo-ties-spark-backlash-in-iowa/ Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[20] Johnson, Luke. “Mark Penn All But Out For Potential Hillary Clinton 2016 Run.” Huffington Post. May 20, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/mark-penn-hillary-clinton_n_3305808.html Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[21] Scarehuman. “Mark Penn, Taking A Break From Monsanto To Run Hillary Clinton’s Campaign.” Daily Kos. March 17, 2008. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/03/17/458386/-Mark-Penn-taking-a-break-from-Monsanto-to-run-Hillary-Clinton-s-campaign Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[22] Cohen-Cole, Linn. “Monsanto And Hillary Clinton’s Redemptive First Act As Secretary Of State.” OpEdNews. February 9, 2009. http://www.opednews.com/articles/Monsanto-and-Hillary-Clint-by-Linn-Cohen-Cole-090209-290.html Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[23] Terris, Ben. “Jerry Crawford Has Two Goals: Delivering Iowa For Hillary Clinton And Winning The Kentucky Derby.” Washington Post. March 2, 2015.https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/hillary-clintons-iowa-horse-whisperer-jerry-crawford-aims-for-caucus-kentucky-derby/2015/03/02/9c93b638-be23-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[24] “Jerry Crawford.” Crawford Mauro Law Firm.” Crawford bio.http://www.crawfordlawfirm.com/attorneys/view.cfm?id=20 Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[25] Jilani, Zaid. “Hillary’s Pick For Her Political Fixer In Iowa Is A Classic Illustration Of America’s Political Corporate Insider Problem.” Alter Net. March 9, 2015. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hillarys-pick-her-political-fixer-iowa-classic-illustration-americas-political Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[26] Lendman, Stephen. “Hillary Clinton Endorses GMOS. White House Meals Are Organic.” Global Research (Centre For Research On Globalization). May 25, 2015.http://www.globalresearch.ca/hillary-clinton-endorses-gmos-white-house-meals-are-organic/5451481 Accessed on September 1, 2015.

[27] Lim, XiaoZhi. “Video: Hillary Clinton Endorses GMOs, Solution-focused Crop Biotechnology.” Genetic Literacy Project. July 3, 2014. http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/07/03/video-hilary-clinton-endorses-gmos-solution-focused-crop-biotechnology/ Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[28] Ocean, Max. “Hillary Clinton Goes To Bat For GMOs At Biotech Conference.” Common Dreams. July 3, 2014. http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/03/hillary-clinton-goes-bat-gmos-biotech-conference Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[29] Ocean, Max. “Hillary Clinton Goes To Bat For GMOs At Biotech Conference.” Common Dreams. July 3, 2014. http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/07/03/hillary-clinton-goes-bat-gmos-biotech-conference Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[30] Lim, XiaoZhi. “Video: Hillary Clinton Endorses GMOs, Solution-focused Crop Biotechnology.” Genetic Literacy Project. July 3, 2014. http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/07/03/video-hilary-clinton-endorses-gmos-solution-focused-crop-biotechnology/ Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[31] “Hillary Clinton At BIO Convention 2014.” Youtube. Posted by Ken Stone. June 27, 2014. Hillary Rodham Clinton, answering questions as if a presidential contender, speaks to thousands at the BIO International Convention on June 25, 2014, at the San Diego Convention Center. She was interviewed by Jim Greenwood, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Industry Organization.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hypwb_SYaAc&feature=youtu.be Accessed on September 2, 2015.

[32] Brody, Ben. “Lobbyists For Monsanto, ExxonMobil Raise Money For Hillary Clinton.” Bloomberg, July 17, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-17/lobbyists-for-monsanto-exxon-mobile-raise-money-for-hillary-clinton Accessed on September 2, 2015.

(Originally published in April 2015)

To the memory of Stepan Shaumyan, Armenian Bolshevik leader of the Baku Commune in 1918, and of Hrant Dink, Armenian socialist intellectual from Istanbul who, until his assassination in 2007, exerted a Herculean effort to bring the genocide into the centre of attention in Turkey.

April 24, 1915, hundreds of Armenian intellectuals, politicians and community leaders were rounded in Istanbul (or Constantinople as it was then called in the West) by the Ottoman state, to be subsequently sent to exile from which most never returned. This was the signal that set off a chain of events that ended in a tragedy the like of which has rarely been witnessed in the annals of modern history. The Armenians, who had been living in the eastern part of the Anatolian plateau from time immemorial, were forcibly deported from their homes in almost every city in what is now Turkey, ostensibly to their destination Dar ez Zor in the Syrian desert. Up to a million and a half died in the process. Women were abducted, raped and killed. Young children were sent to orphanages and forcibly Islamized. All the property belonging to Armenians, houses and gardens, farms and orchards, cattle and sheep, workshops and tools, trade houses and factories were seized by the state or simply grasped by the Turkish ruling strata. Churches were made into warehouses or left to rust and community hospitals and schools were taken away.

On the eve of World War I, different estimates and censuses put the Armenian population of Anatolia between 1.2 million and close to 2 million. At the end of the war, the only sizeable Armenian population was left in Istanbul and the overall figure had fallen below a mere 100 thousand. What was to become present-day Turkey was thus “cleansed” of its Armenian population. The Turks had entered Anatolia as a result of the victory obtained by the Seldjukides over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. They cohabited with the autochthonous Armenians for close to a millennium. The Ottoman Empire regarded the Armenians as the “loyal nation,” and yet it was this very same state that betrayed them, massacred them and extirpated them from their homes and their motherland.

Implications for the Future of the Middle East

There is not a shred of doubt that this was genocide of the worst kind. Of course, the concept may sound like an anachronism in this context since it was first coined as a legal concept in the aftermath of World War II. However, we do not approach the question of the Armenian genocide from a legalistic viewpoint. Our concern is to re-establish friendship and trust between the workers and labourers of Turkey and Armenia. For us this is first and foremost a political question that has to do with the prospect of revolution in the region. All social upheavals in the Eurasian land mass from 1905 and 1917 to the period 1989-1991 passing through World War I witnessed massacres involving the Armenians, the Turks and the Azeris, the latter being the ethnic brethren of Anatolian Turks inhabiting the Caucasus. On the other hand, the Armenians and the Kurds each claim roughly the same geographic territory as their historic motherland. So the fate of the revolution in the Caucasus, Anatolia and Mesopotamia hinges upon the relationships established between these four peoples. Proletarian revolution cannot succeed here unless it sets in motion a process that culminates in the Socialist Federation of the Caucasus and in parallel the Socialist Federation of the Middle East, where Turk and Armenian and Kurd will have to cohabit. Hence the debate on the Armenian genocide is by no means a futile exercise on a long bygone historic event, but really concerns the future of the revolution in this whole region.

The Turkish state and those historians and intellectuals who act as its mouthpiece have consistently denied the genocide. Their arguments range from the minimization of casualties (the lowest figure cited being 320 thousand as against the 1.5 million put forward by many Armenian and other historians) to the claim that the massacres were reciprocal. They forget two simple facts. First, the Armenian population of eastern Anatolia was almost totally eradicated from the face of Anatolia. So to count the numbers of the dead is only a part of the genocide debate. Secondly, state power was in the hands of the Turkish dominant nation, which renders all talk about mutual carnage empty chatter.

Genocide as Class Struggle

The classical explanation offered for this barbaric cruelty by liberal historiography in Turkey and nationalist historiography of the Armenians both in contemporary Armenia and the Diaspora has been that it was the outcome of the “construction of Turkish identity” or of “Unionist mentality,” the latter implying the world outlook of the Committee of Union and Progress, the party then in power. These are, of course, philosophically idealistic approaches that beg the question of why the identity or the mentality in question became dominant specifically at that historical juncture. But there is worse. It is a very widespread view among Westerners, Armenians and Westernized Turks that somehow the Muslim or the Turk or both partake of some kind of evil, that it is from the nature of the religion or the ethnicity in question that this barbarism proceeds. This kind of racist characterization is hardly ever pronounced in writing or in public nowadays, but it is still voiced in private conversation.

Our view on the determinants of the Armenian genocide is fundamentally different from almost all commentators. We assert that what lay behind the Armenian genocide was class struggle of several orders. The vicious attacks against the Armenians had its earliest roots in the looting of the surplus product of the Armenian peasantry by the ruling stratum of Kurdish tribes, which shared the same geographical territory with the Armenians. The later but stronger and more radical drive came from the urge for primitive accumulation on the part of the nascent Turkish bourgeoisie at the turn of the century fighting against the economic dominance of the non-Muslim moneyed classes in Ottoman society. It was this class fraction that was represented by the Unionists in power and dispossessed the Armenian and, in a different manner, Greek population of Anatolia to amass capital in its own hands. Marx’s remarks on primitive accumulation in Capital sound prophetic in regard to the Armenian genocide: “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” In Turkey the blood and dirt of primitive accumulation took the form of genocide.

These domestic factors were reinforced by the support extended to the Turkish bourgeoisie by the German imperialist bourgeoisie, instrumentalizing the power of the Ottoman state in its intra-class struggle against the other imperialist bourgeoisies of Europe, that is, British, French and Russian.

The Importance of German Complicity

This last fact is of utmost importance. Germany was the ally and protector of the Ottoman state during World War I. The commanders of the Ottoman-Turkish army were German field marshals, generals and admirals. It is absolutely impossible for the genocide to have taken place without German consent, even positive encouragement. The German Kaiser and the Reich were already responsible for the genocide of the Herrero people in what was then called German Southwest Africa, what is present-day Namibia. Hence, there is no reason to rule out even a scenario in which Germany may have instigated the ruling Union and Progress Committee and its strong man Enver Pasha to implement this “final solution” to the Armenian question. Enver Pasha was a personal protégé of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The latter is notorious for his secretive and personalized management of foreign and military affairs. The Kaiser’s government expected the Ottomans to threaten both Russia and Britain in their Asian backyards by propagating a simultaneously pan-Turkist and pan-Islamist political onslaught. The Armenians stood in between the Ottomans and the Muslim and Turkic peoples of Asia. Hence, in an objective sense, the Armenian genocide served the wartime aims of German imperialism.

Of course, all this does not necessarily mean the German government was involved as an accomplice in the genocide. However, it is only through a study of the archives, including top secret documents, that the truth of this matter can be discovered.

Where does the significance of all this lie? Let us start with a general proposition. Recognition of the genocide is the primary act in the direction of redressing the suffering of the Armenian people and of rekindling a modicum of fraternity and trust between the peoples of the region. The problem is that, left on their own, Turkey and the Armenians, both Armenia proper and the Diaspora, have locked horns for a very long time. The Turkish state and those historians and intellectuals who act as its mouthpiece have consistently denied the genocide. The absurd concept of the “Turkish thesis,” denoting full denial of the genocide, is testimony to the stubborn position of the Turkish state. The titanic effort of Hrant Dink, an Istanbul Armenian formerly a revolutionary socialist, to create an awareness of the question throughout Turkish society in the 1990s and early 2000s created an immense breach in the wall of silence that had earlier been imposed. Hrant Dink was assassinated in 2007 through a conspiracy prepared by the so-called “deep state” of Turkey, but his legacy lives on. If we are today able in Turkey to discuss this question openly, most of the credit goes to the Herculean work carried out by Hrant Dink and his still extant bilingual weekly Agos. However, the overall situation cannot be said to have changed irreversibly. The genocide is still mentioned in the media perforce as “the so-called genocide.”

The question of the recognition of the genocide cannot be resolved by the ill-conceived pressures of the state organs of some imperialist countries and is positively harmed by such irresponsible theatrics such as that of the Pope in early April, conspicuous for its lack of modesty coming from the head of an institution wholly immersed in the Holocaust. However, for the reasons explained above Germany is the exception.

It is a noteworthy fact that although many European governments and parliaments (including France, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden etc. and the European Parliament recently for a second time) have recognized the 1915 events as genocide and called on Turkey to do likewise, Germany has remained very much in the shadows on this question. This fact glares with significance.

We believe that it is the duty of the German socialist and working-class movements and German democrats to press for the complete opening of German archives relevant to that historical period. We summon them to press the German government to recognize and condemn the Armenian genocide.

If Germany does recognize the Armenian genocide, with documents in hand, the Turkey-Armenia polarization will be cast in a new light and the obscurantism of the “Turkish thesis” will receive a fatal blow. This is the only way to fraternity and trust between the peoples of the region.

Needless to say, the real effort to make the Turkish government recognize the genocide falls on the shoulders of the Turkish and Kurdish left.

Sungur Savran is based in Istanbul and is one of the editors of the newspaper Gercek (Truth) and the theoretical journal Devrimci Marksizm (Revolutionary Marxism), both published in Turkish, and of the web site RedMed.

America’s richest investors are betting trillions of dollars that the US economy will stay lousy for years to come.

Who are these wealthy investors?

Bondholders. And their views on the state of the economy are reflected in the yields on long-term US Treasuries. At present, the yields on long-term debt are very low which means that investors think the economy will continue to underperform while inflation remains in check.

This pessimistic outlook is not new for bondholders, in fact, yields have remained stubbornly low since the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, which means that investors were never swept up in the hype about “green shoots” or an “economic recovery”. They knew it was baloney from the get-go and their opinion hasn’t changed. There’s no sign of recovery anywhere except for the fake government payroll numbers that don’t jibe with any of the other data. By any rationale measure, the economy is stuck in a long-term slump that shows no sign of relenting anytime soon. Bondholders seem to grasp that fact and have made a ton of dough betting on crappy growth and perennial stagnation, which are the logical corollaries of the Fed’s goofy monetary policies. (Stephen Roach explains low yields on 30-year USTs here.)

In any event, bond yields are a heckuva lot more helpful in forecasting the future than the cheerleading pundits on the business channel. Yields–which are the amount of return that bondholders receive for lending the government their money–reveal investors expectations of future economic activity and inflation. They are a barometer for measuring the health of the economy. If growth is strong and the future looks rosy, yields will rise as the demand for money increases and the prospects of higher inflation seem more likely. But if investors expect growth to fall-short and disappoint, then yields are going to drop reflecting lower expectations for future activity. The fact that the yields on 30-year USTs are below 3 percent at this phase of the game suggests that policymakers either don’t understand how the economy works or simply refuse to initiate the changes that will spur growth. Either way, it’s a damning indictment of the Central Bank’s role as steward of the system.

At present, (Jan 26) the yield on benchmark 10-year Treasuries is just a whisker below 2 percent at 1.98 percent. That means that investors will get 1.98 dollars annually per every $100 invested, which is nearly nothing. Think of it this way: Let’s say your buddy Ernie wants to borrow $5,000 to open a Gelato stand in Granite Falls. So you’re wondering how much you need to charge him above the price of the loan to be fairly compensated for the risk you’re taking. (since Ernie has had a few bad ideas in the past that blew up in his face.) If you decide to charge him 2 percent per year, then you’re barely making ends meet since inflation is currently running at roughly 1.5 percent. So you need to charge something above 2 percent or you won’t even break-even.

The point is, when you lend your money to the USG for a paltry 1.98 percent, you’re basically getting bupkis on your investment. The only upside to the deal is that you can be reasonably certain that the government will pay you back, unlike Ernie.

The focus on interest rates as the only means for fixing the economy should have run its course by now, but, of course, it hasn’t because the Big Money that runs the country likes things the way they are. Low rates and easy money mean bigger profits for Wall Street regardless of their impact on the real economy. What matters most to bondholders is not growth or inflation, but policy. That’s what keeps the boodle flowing into the coffers. Policy. And as long as they’re confident that the Fed’s “accommodative” policies are going to be coupled with fiscal belt-tightening (which has been adopted by both Dems and Republicans), then they can rest assured that the economy will continue to sputter while bonds “rip the cover off the ball”.

But the Fed’s loosey goosy monetary policies do come at a cost, and that cost is borne by businesses and working people alike. For example, there was an op-ed in last week’s WSJ about the knock-on effects of low rates on capital investment by Michael Spence and Kevin Warsh. The title of the article tells the whole story: “The Fed Has Hurt Business Investment.” Here’s an excerpt:

“Extremely accommodative monetary policy, including the purchase of about $3 trillion in Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities during three rounds of “quantitative easing” (QE), pushed down long-term yields and boosted the value of risk-assets. Higher stock prices were supposed to drive business confidence and higher capital expenditures, which were supposed to result in higher wages and strong consumption. Would it were so.

Business investment in the real economy is weak … In 2014, S&P 500 companies spent considerably more of their operating cash flow on financially engineered buybacks than real capital expenditures for the first time since 2007 … We believe that QE has redirected capital from the real domestic economy to financial assets at home and abroad. In this environment, it is hard to criticize companies that choose “shareholder friendly” share buybacks over investment in a new factory. But public policy shouldn’t bias investments to paper assets over investments in the real economy.” (The Fed Has Hurt Business Investment, Michael Spence And Kevin Warsh, Wall Street Journal)

This is a fairly typical complaint, that the Fed’s policies have lifted asset prices but hurt business investment which requires strong demand for their products. The fact is, businesses can’t grow unless people are employed, wages are rising, and money is exchanging hands. None of that is happening currently, in fact, according to the Atlanta Fed, the Forth Quarter (4Q) GDP is expected to come in below 1 percent. (.06 percent) which means the US economy should probably be wheeled down to the morgue ASAP so the embalming process can begin pronto. For all practical purposes, the economy is kaput.

Of course, President Obama rejects that type of negativity outright. In the State of the Union Speech in January, Obama waved his finger threateningly at the teleprompter saying: “Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”

Fiction?? Not according to economist James Hamilton. Here’s what he said this week on the Oil Price website:

“The global economy is slipping into recession. The evidence is showing up in all the usual ways: slowing output growth, slumping purchasing-manager indexes, widening credit spreads, declining corporate earnings, falling inflation expectations, receding capital investment and rising inventories. But this is a most unusual recession– the first one ever caused by falling oil prices.” (Could Low Oil Prices Cause A Global Recession?, Oil Price)

And then there’s this from the Wall Street Journal:

“Every U.S. recession since World War II has been foretold by sharp declines in industrial production, corporate profits and the stock market. Industrial production has declined in 10 of the past 12 months, and is now off nearly 2% from its peak in December 2014. Corporate profits peaked around the summer of 2014 and were off by nearly 5% as of the third quarter of last year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 7.6% so far this year…

unlike past declines in industrial production, today’s decline has been driven primarily by the collapse in the oil industry…. mining output has fallen over 10%, driven by a 62% decline in oil- and gas-well drilling…

“Manufacturing tends to lead the economic cycle and it tends to be an indicator of the swings,” said Thomas Costerg, senior economist at Standard Chartered. “Manufacturing is struggling.” (Recession Warnings May Not Come to Pass, Wall Street Journal)

The truth is that the economy is still very weak and the Fed’s monetary hanky-panky hasn’t produced the credit expansion that was expected. Adding excess reserves at the banks was supposed to boost lending which would lead to stronger growth, but it hasn’t happened mainly because households and consumers aren’t borrowing like they did before the crisis. Instead they’re setting more money aside and trying to pay down their debts. Take a look at the chart on bank loans which illustrates how lending is basically flatlining. (See here.)

No bank loans means no borrowing. No borrowing means no credit expansion. No credit expansion means no new activity, no new spending, no new hiring, no new business investment, no stronger growth. Nomura’s chief economist Richard Koo summed it up succinctly saying, “When no one is borrowing money, monetary policy is largely useless.”

Bingo. It is useless. We know that now. Neither QE nor zero rates promote growth. The ‘Grand Experiment’ has failed. Keynes was right and (Milton) Freidman was wrong. Here’s Keynes:

“For my own part I am now somewhat skeptical of the success of a merely monetary policy directed towards influencing the rate of interest. I expect to see the State, which is in a position to calculate the marginal efficiency of capital-goods on long views and on the basis of the general social advantage, taking an ever greater responsibility for directly organizing investment; since it seems likely that the fluctuations in the market estimation of the marginal efficiency of different types of capital, calculated on the principles I have described above, will be too great to be offset by any practicable changes in the rate of interest.” (John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, marxists.org, 2002)

Keynes is just stating the obvious, that you can’t pull the economy out of a severe slump by tinkering with interest rates or pumping up bank reserves. It doesn’t work. What’s needed is ‘good old fashion’ fiscal stimulus mainlined into the economy through ambitious federal infrastructure programs that stimulate activity, boost employment and keep the economy moving forward until private sector balance sheets are repaired and personal spending returns to normal.

The Fed has wasted the last seven years trying to reinvent the wheel when the solution was always right under its nose. Are we really going to waste another seven implementing the same failed strategy?

At a meeting in Amsterdam this week, European interior and justice ministers sought to outdo each other with suggestions as to how the influx of desperate refugees from the Middle East could be stopped. No measure was too brutal for consideration.

Proposals ranged from the hermetic sealing off of borders to the stationing of Frontex troops, even against the will of national governments, as well as the erection of concentration camps for hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Greece came under sustained attack from several ministers who called for its expulsion from the Schengen zone, which guarantees free movement within the European Union, if Athens did not reduce the number of refugees transiting the country into Europe.

A large proportion of the refugees from the Middle East risk the dangerous and often deadly journey from Turkey to the Greek islands close by before crossing Greece and leaving the EU at the Macedonian border. After travelling through Macedonia and Serbia, they enter the EU again through Hungary, Croatia and Slovenia, with many seeking access to Germany.

Despite freezing winter weather and rough seas, up to 2,000 refugees are still crossing the Aegean Sea daily to the Greek islands. According to EU figures, by January 23, 44,000 people had already reached Europe from Turkey in this way in 2016. The number of refugees counted as dead or missing was 149. During the night of January 22 alone, 42 people drowned trying to make the journey, including 18 children.

This route is to be shut down. Ministers demanded a significant strengthening of Greece’s northern border with Macedonia by Frontex forces, and agreed to strengthen the border controls within the Schengen zone until the end of 2017.

Greece was given an ultimatum to restrict the number of refugees or face expulsion from the Schengen zone. German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said after the meeting, “We require a permanent, noticeable and sustained reduction of the numbers of refugees, and this must be visible in the coming weeks.”

It must be made clear, de Maizière continued, that the border protection agency Frontex could act in place of a member state to secure the border. Germany’s interior minister did not exclude the expulsion of Greece from the Schengen zone. “We will put pressure on Greece to do its homework,” he threatened.

Theo Francken, Belgium’s state secretary for asylum and immigration, raised the possibility of a “closed facility” in Greece for 300,000 refugees. It would have to be under EU administration, because Greece’s “state structures [were] obviously too weak,” the Belgian politician said.

Francken’s proposal amounts the transformation of Greece into a giant concentration camp, with the creation of a ghetto for refugees on the scale of a medium-sized city. Nothing comparable has been seen in Europe since the end of the Nazi era.

Sealing the Macedonia-Greece border with assistance from Frontex forces was supported by Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who for months has been demanding the establishment of a massive border fence on Greece’s northern border. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico also gave his backing. According to a report by Der Spiegel magazine, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have already deployed their own police forces to this border and Hungary has supplied extensive materials for the construction of a permanent fence.

On Tuesday, the Danish parliament passed legislation to confiscate asylum seekers’ valuables. Police will now be able to seize assets from refugees worth more than 10,000 kroner (€1,340) to cover housing and food costs. The original proposal was to confiscate everything above the value of 3,000 kronor. In addition, the period migrants will have to wait before applying for relatives to join them will be extended from one year to three, temporary residence permits will be shortened and the conditions for obtaining a permanent permit toughened.

With comparisons being made to measures taken against Jews during World War II, the Danish government responded by explaining that this was how unemployed Danish citizens were already treated! Denmark is, however, far from alone in taking such fascistic measures.

Switzerland seized assets from 100 people in 2015 under rules similar to Denmark’s, but set even lower at €900. Southern states in Germany are already implementing similar measures, with Bavaria confiscating all property in excess of €750 and Baden-Württemberg in excess of just €350.

The Syriza government in Greece has already done the bidding of the EU in imposing savage austerity measures against working people. It is now being told to act with similar brutality against refugees.

Greek Immigration Minister Ioannis Mouzalas responded by declaring that some EU members were of the opinion that the refugees should drown, while Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias made clear he understood what was expected when he complained to Germany’s TAZ newspaper, “If we want to stop the refugees, we would have to wage war against them. We would have to bombard them, sink their boats and let the people drown.”

The crossing of the Greece-Macedonia border is already a traumatic experience for refugees. Immigrants are regularly bullied and beaten by the police. A recent report from the German refugee support organisation ProAsyl showed that the sealing of borders in the Balkans had destructive and even deadly consequences for refugees. The Amsterdam meeting made clear that this outcome is desired and in line with the methods being considered.

According to the report, tens of thousands of refugees are already being sent back to Greece from Macedonia, where they are left with nothing and forced to live on the streets.

In Athens itself it is almost impossible to register as an asylum seeker. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was aware of only 1,150 accommodation places in Athens for an average of 10,000 asylum applications per year. Those who do not register an asylum claim risk being arrested and detained in a Greek deportation camp.

Athens has blamed the government in Ankara for the number of people crossing the Aegean Sea, while the Turkish government has declared that it does not have the capabilities to secure the entire coast. The EU has been trying for some time to encourage Turkish cooperation in the refugee question and has promised €3 billion in aid, which has yet to be paid.

There are currently 2.5 million people in Turkey who have fled the wars in the Middle East and North Africa. Only around 250,000 of these are in already existing camps. Turkey does not fully recognise the Geneva Refugee Convention and refugees cannot work there or send their children to school.

Millions of people in Europe today are superfluous and unwelcome. Politicians and journalists are discussing openly how best refugees can be deterred, detained, channelled and pushed from one place to another, as if they were discussing animals or freight. They are, in fact, conspiring against people who see flight as the only way out of the misery created by imperialist wars carried out by the US and its European allies that have devastated the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa.

As the water crisis in Flint, Michigan continues to occupy national headlines in the United States, scientists and environmental officials have revealed a dirty secret of American life: the poisoning of drinking water with toxic chemicals is not unique to Flint, Michigan, but takes place all over the country.

Counties in Louisiana and Texas, as well as the cities of Baltimore, Maryland; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Washington D.C. and Boston, Massachusetts all reported that substantial numbers of children have been exposed to elevated lead levels, largely through municipal drinking water.

This week, the head environmental regulator in the state of Ohio called national water regulations “broken,” saying that they dramatically understate the true scale of lead poisoning in American cities. As Virginia Tech researcher Marc Edwards put it, “Because of the smoke-and-mirrors testing, Flint is meeting the standard even as national guardsmen walk the street.”

Many water pipes in the United States are over 100 years old, and a large number of cities still have 100 percent lead plumbing.

The reasons are not hard to find. According to the Congressional Budget Office, public capital investment in transportation and water infrastructure, already underfunded for decades, has been slashed by 23 percent since its peak in 2003.

The year 2003 is significant as it coincides with the beginning of the illegal invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration. The “war on terror” has entailed a vast expansion of the military at the same time that spending on anything not directly related to the accumulation of wealth by the financial aristocracy has suffered from continual cutbacks.

The response of the political establishment to the poisoning of tens of thousands of people in Flint and potentially millions more throughout the United States has been characterized by indifference. The politicians responsible, from Michigan Governor Rick Snyder to local Democratic Party officials and the Obama administration, pull long faces, pretend to take responsibility or seek to shift blame, while doing nothing to address the issue.

Nowhere is there a single politician who has responded to the disaster by demanding what is clearly required: the immediate allocation of a relatively modest sum, $273 billion according to the Environmental Protection Agency, to replace all of the municipal lead pipes in the US. This is equivalent to the annual spending on the US Army, just one of the four branches of the US military. There is simply “no money” for such a proposal to be considered, much less approved.

While politicians pore over any allocation of resources for social spending with a fine tooth comb, almost unimaginable sums are made available to the military without a second thought. How many know that the US military is shelling out over a trillion dollars to defense contractor Lockheed Martin to fund its beleaguered F-35 program? Or that it is spending another trillion dollars to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal by making atomic bombs smaller and more maneuverable?

The US spends more on its military, as Obama boasted in his most recent State of the Union address, than the next eight countries combined. Yet more is continuously demanded.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recently evaluated the Defense Department’s so-called pivot to Asia, in which military hardware has been either procured or restationed in the Western Pacific to counter the economic and military rise of China. Strikingly, the CSIS report gave the US military a failing grade. It called for the expansion and development of every aspect of US military capacity in the Pacific if it was to maintain superiority in the event of a shooting war with China.

Since the early 1990s, the US military has operated on the basis of a strategic doctrine that it will allow the existence of no other power that can challenge its military authority on even a regional level. That means that the US must be able to field such overwhelming military force that it would be able to defeat another major power, such as China, in a conventional war far away from the borders of the US.

This is a recipe for the bleeding white of American society in an insane attempt to maintain its military dominance, which can only end in catastrophe for the population of the US and the entire world.

Of course, it would be simplistic to say that war is the only cause of America’s social problems. The most conspicuous element of life in the US continues to be the vast chasm between the rich and the poor. However, the rise of war and militarism are interrelated and have a common root.

In response to the the longterm decline in the global position of American capitalism, the American ruling class responded on the one hand by promoting a wave of financial speculation, mergers and acquisitions, wage cuts, and the transfer of social wealth from the great majority of the population to its own pockets. On the other hand, it has sought to use its predominant military power to counteract the consequences of its economic decline by force.

In the insane and socially destructive priorities of the American ruling class, one sees in concentrated form the inextricable connection between war and capitalism, and at the same time the inextricable connection between the fight for all the social rights of the working class and the struggle against imperialism.

Israel is complicit with Washington’s war on Syria, directly aiding ISIS and likeminded terrorist groups, profiting hugely from Daesh smuggled oil. More on this below.

On Tuesday from Athens, after meeting with his Greek counterpart Panos Kammenos, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon [pictured left] said:

“As you know, Daesh enjoyed Turkish money for oil for a very, very long period of time. I hope that it will be ended.”

“It’s up to Turkey, the Turkish government, the Turkish leadership, to decide whether they want to be part of any kind of cooperation to fight terrorism. This is not the case so far.”

Last year, Russia presented detailed maps and satellite images, showing ISIS smuggled oil convoy routes from Syria and Iraq into Turkey – for refining and black market sales.

Evidence indicates Erdogan, his family and other top Turkish officials profiting hugely from illicit sales.

Syrian UN envoy Bashar al-Jafari accused Erdogan of “involvement in the smuggling of stolen Syrian oil by ISIS into Turkey and the smuggling of weapons and materiel by Turkey to terrorists in Syria.”

Ankara  denies what clear evidence proves. So does Washington, considering Erdogan a key partner in its regional war OF terror, raping one country after another.

Israel is the main buyer of stolen Iraqi and Syrian oil. Last November, al-Araby al-Jadeed (The New Arab) UK-based English language news site headlined “Raqqa’s Rockefellers: How Islamic State oil flows to Israel,” saying its investigative work shows:

“IS sells Iraqi and Syrian oil for a very low price to Kurdish and Turkish smuggling networks and mafias, who label it and sell it on as barrels from the Kurdistan Regional Government.”

“It is then most frequently transported from Turkey to Israel, via knowing or unknowing middlemen…”

The New Arab “obtained information about how IS smuggles oil from a colonel in the Iraqi Intelligence Services who we are keeping anonymous for his security.”

“The information was verified by Kurdish security officials, employees at the Ibrahim Khalil border crossing between Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan, and an official at one of three oil companies that deal in IS-smuggled oil.”

The news service provided detailed information on how smuggling operations work, supplies to Israel delivered to its Ashdod port city from “Turkish port cities of Mersin, Dortyol and Ceyhan.”

Israel has limited refining capacity. It sells smuggled oil to Mediterranean countries – where it “gains semi-legitimate status.”

Transactions are in US dollars. “Israel (is) the main marketer of IS oil. Without (its involvement), most IS-produced oil would have remained going between Iraq, Syria and Turkey,” said The New Arab.

“(M)ost countries avoid dealing in” smuggled ISIS oil, unwilling to provide the group support.

Last August, the Financial Times reported Israel importing up to 75% of its oil from Iraqi Kurdistan – about 240,000 barrels daily, shipped from Turkish ports, without explaining its smuggled source.

Israel directly aids ISIS, providing weapons, munitions and medical treatment for its wounded fighters, along with intermittently bombing Syrian targets. It’s complicit with Obama’s regional wars, including by profiting from stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil.

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.

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Nigerian society has undergone various experiences in its social, economic and political history in the past one and half decades of civil rule. These experiences are situated within the context of global developments. In spite of the enormous resources in the country since independence, Nigerian society has not gone beyond the rudimentary state of nationhood.

Working people and the youth have continually been the sacrificial lamb for the failure and inability of the capitalist and pro-capitalist ruling classes before, during and after independence, to break Nigeria from the stranglehold of imperialism-orchestrated underdevelopment. The emergence of civil rule since 1999, which the capitalist class, both local and international, promised will allow for flourishing of democratic activities, and engender economic prosperity, has not changed things fundamentally. On the contrary, it has made working people and youth continue to live in misery in the midst of inexhaustible wealth.

However, working people have not accepted this fate, but have challenged the capitalist ruling class and the capitalist state that superintend over this situation. Between 1999 and 2007 alone, at least seven general strikes were called by the central labour unions, Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), especially over incessant hike in fuel prices. This is aside several student protests, community actions and isolated workers’ mass actions at local, industrial and sectorial level.

Many of these actions have won some minimal concessions from the ruling class at various levels. However, they have not changed the general course of degeneration of the Nigerian society. For instance, in spite of the mass struggles and protests as exemplified in not just the seven general strikes mentioned earlier, but more importantly the uprising against hike in fuel price in January 2012, fuel prices have not been reversed substantially; neither have they stopped other attacks on the working people. Education sector, in spite enormous struggles undertaken by students and education workers over years, has seen further decline in funding, standard and quality, while fees across tertiary institutions have been increased by an average of over 5000% since the emergence of the civil rule. Moreover, poverty rate has increased substantially since the end of the military era.

The missing link in this process is the absence of pan-national resistance platform with clear-cut anti-capitalist agenda. While there are central labour centres and national students’ platform, NANS; the practical absence of a revolutionary anti-capitalist and socialist programmes for these platforms have limited the capacity of these platforms to challenge the basis of generalized misery in the country. In the real sense, these platforms have collapsed ideologically, while as a result of lack of full democracy in the running of these platforms, inability to produce radical leadership, even in the period of rise in popular consciousness, has entrenched the ideological and structural degeneracy in these platforms.

The other aspect of this is the absence of a working class political structure to aggregate various struggles of the working and oppressed people by seeking permanent political solutions to the seemingly eternal underdevelopment of the country. This has meant that various struggles of the working class have no political expression in terms of working people translating their anger to political power. The implication of this is that various struggles of the working people have been appropriated by various sections of the rotten capitalist class in Nigeria in furtherance of their class interests.

Aside creating political confusion for working class people and disorienting them, it has also helped various ruling political class to get away with massive mismanagement and corruption. Working and young people have been made mere sideline cheering crowd for various sections of the bankrupt capitalist political class, who, while seemingly fighting over who will control the spoils, are united in their collective commitment to anti-poor capitalist policies that are detrimental to the interests of the working people. This was clearly depicted by the fact that all sections of the capitalist political class and their big business partners have been united at one time or the others, and under various platforms in defence of their united class interests.

The 2015 elections that have been touted as that of “Change” has not fundamentally and cannot fundamentally change the under-development status of the country. In the past seven months of Buhari presidency, there has not been any serious change in economic and political orientation. Mere basic transparency in terms of public declaration assets has become herculean task for the “Change” politicians. Even the president and his vice had to be pressured until late into the government’s third month before declaring their assets. Other politicians in the ‘change’ party, All Progressives Congress (APC) have refused to declare their assets. The party itself was more of a congregation of power seekers, from various political affiliations, who want to dislodge the equally bankrupt, highly corrupt and inept Jonathan presidency and the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP). There is no structural or political, not to mention ideological, alternative programme to the PDP. This is not accidental as the APC party, aside not being ideologically, politically and structurally different from PDP, is indeed a conglomeration of all sections of the corrupt ruling class, disgruntled or left out from the central privilege distribution.

While it is true that the Buhari administration is undertaking some form of fight against graft, the reality is that this is more of spasmodic and haphazard action than any serious campaign against graft and corruption. Of course, some of those involved in graft under the highly-corrupt Jonathan administration are being tried, but this seems more like a déjà vu. The Obasanjo administration between 1999 and 2007 also spearheaded a so-called “anti-corruption war” that saw many politicians, mostly from his ruling PDP dragged before courts.

In fact, aside the fact that Obasanjo government established the current anti-corruption agencies such as Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC), high profile elements such as the chief of police, Tafa Balogun, were publicly humiliated. Billions of dollars were recovered. However, the Obasanjo government turned out to the pacesetter in systematic graft and looting of public funds. Money seemingly recovered including more than a billion dollars from Abacha looted funds found their ways back to the private account political officers. Many of these political officers are now in the ruling party. Also, the Yar’Adua government carried out bank sanitization that saw the arrest and prosecution of fraudulent bank chiefs. Interestingly, the same Yar’Adua was not only propped up by corrupt elements but was sustained by them. Elements from Obasanjo’s government who mobilized votes for Yar’adua but were involved in the pilfering of public resources, held major stake in Yar’Adua government, while James Ibori, a major pillar of Yar’Adua was shielded from prosecution by the government. It took the intervention of British court to found Ibori guilty and jailed, while Nigerian courts and the anti-graft agencies were compromised.

All of these show that it is more than mere grandstanding about fighting corruption to stop graft. The whole system needs to be overhauled. For instance, why should a government be claiming to be fighting corruption while public officers’ wealth are shrouded in secrecy; while no one knows the asset worth of officers supposedly fighting corruption. Yet, Nigerians are told when they complain about pro-government officials’ corrupt tendencies, to produce evidence. More than this, the whole political establishment is totally corrupt. For instance, two former governors, who are now senior and super ministers under Buhari administration, Raji Fashola and Rotimi Amaechi, presided over more than N10 trillion ($50 billion) as governors within eight years; yet there are clear evidences that most of these monies have been squandered and looted through various schemes. But these two individuals as governors provided part of the huge funds that went to the emergence of Buhari both as candidate of the ruling APC, and as president. In fact, virtually all the state governments, under the PDP and APC, are currently bankrupt. But all of these governors contributed huge funds of their resources to various party elections, including presidential elections.

Therefore, while the current so-called “anti-corruption war” may give some sense of fighting graft, the reality is that it cannot seriously or fundamentally move the country forward, inasmuch as the current neo-colonial capitalism is being practiced in the country. For instance, all those who have looted and are looting public funds, hold major stakes in Nigeria’s economic and political structures. Unless these set of people are routed and the economic and political structures overhauled to take economic and political power away from these people, and democratically plan on the basis of the resources of the country and needs of the people, there cannot be any serious way out. Even on a practical basis, the anti-graft agencies cannot undertake the least fraction of anti-corruption fight, as thousands of those currently in political and economic structures in the country will be affected. In fact, the government is finding it difficult to prosecute those who stole about a $2.1 billion of defence funds, which is just a tiny fraction of who is stolen under Jonathan administration, and a tinier fraction of what was stolen in the past four years but politicians across all structures of government.

Worse still, the government is not moving away from the past. The 2016 federal budget, aside showing the gluttonous character of politicians in power as reflected in tens of billions of naira budgeted for personal upkeep of the executives and national assembly members, is also aimed at satiating the profit-motive of the big business and political class. For instance, while government is borrowing almost two trillion to fund so-called capital projects in the budget, this money will be handed over to private contractors, many of whom have financial and political backers and investors. Also, more than a trillion naira will be handed over to private financial institutions and money class – local and international – who invested in government’s debts, and are going to loan the government the money the same money. It is a known fact most of Nigerian billionaires and multibillionaires are made through government dole-outs, bailouts, waivers, contracting, tax breaks and evasion and looting. Therefore, by just enforcing tax on these billionaires and their multibillion-dollar projects, and increasing income tax of the rich, trillions of naira will be recouped to rebuild the economy, develop the country and expand infrastructures.

Rather than do this, the Buhari government is enforcing austerity on the poor. While petrol price, at N87 is still above its 2011 price of N65, despite crude oil price falling from over $100 in 2011 to around $25 per barrel, kerosene, a domestic fuel for most households, has been hiked from N50 per liter to N83. Government is planning to increase Value Added Tax that will affect the poor the more and lead to further inflation. On the other hands, government in its Mid-Term Economic Framework (MTEF) has placed embargo on salary increase and pegged salaries to the current poverty wage of N18, 000 naira ($90) per month. Interestingly, many states and private sector employers have reduced this wage, while a state like Osun is paying half salaries. These are just fractions of attacks that the government will launch on the people under the guise of revamping the economy. Interestingly, government is using anti-corruption propaganda to divert attention of the mass of people from its anti-poor, pro-rich economic policies. Meanwhile, the belt-tightening has not affected the rich few and politicians in power as explained earlier.

But, without a socialist planning and control of the economy, even such monies recouped from politicians through progressive tax on the rich will find their way back to the private pockets of these people, the same way the monies got there. Only an alternative economic agenda and paradigm through socialist programmes can stop continued and cyclical pillaging of the country’s wealth. Unfortunately, the labour movement that should play the central role in this regard is lost in ideological illusion that the Buhari administration can solve the country’s problems.

As said early, the development in Nigeria is linked with capitalist geopolitics and global economic system. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall and end of the Cold War in the late 1980s to very early 1990s, capitalist ruling classes globally have been more vociferous in driving through stronger capitalist relations aimed at increasing profitability through further exploitation of the working class and reduction of labour share in global wealth. This new system of capitalism liberalizes the market for capitalist vampires to extracts more profits from the working class; take away their hard-won rights and living standard as a way of forcing them to work more. Along with this is the politics of global imperialism that gave the US and her European capitalist allies the leadership role in world politics and strategy, in the defence of capital. This has meant further militarization of society, increased weaponry and more and more wars, meant to not only conquer territories, but also salvage capitalism by destroying some section of created capitals (infrastructures, industries, etc.), as a way of rejuvenating structurally-dying global capitalist system. At the other side of this new imperialism is mass destruction of lives and waste of huge human and material potential. From Gaza to Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Africa, the imprint of post-Cold War global capitalist imperialism, through heaps of dead bodies and rivers of blood can be seen and felt.

Various countries fit into this new Global Capitalist Disorder based on their historical role in global politics and economics. Nigeria and Africa, as latecomers to the orbit of global capitalism, are tied to the apron string of global capitalism. Local ruling class in Nigeria and Africa are not prepared to challenge global capitalism and build a new future for the country, as this task is beyond them: their economic interests are tied to the running of global capitalism. Unless they are prepared to commit class suicide or undertake great sacrifice that will see them losing part or most of the current wealth, they cannot challenge imperialism. More than this, it will require a strong state, or semi-fascist, if not outright fascist state, which aside destroying a section of capitalist class, will also annihilate working class movement, to carry this task. The other alternative is a social revolution to create a government that represents the working and oppressed people; a government that is not tied to global capitalism, and thus can create a new society.  It is this social revolution and working class alternative that working class movement should be campaigning for.

While new capitalist imperialism wrought its destructive tendencies, working people and youth have not kept mum. The global economic crisis that started in late 2007 has set a new template for the global mass resistance that started in the Seattle Movement against Capitalist Globalization in 1998, and the anti-war movement of 2003 and beyond. From the Occupy Movement in US to revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and now new mass movements that are taking political shape in Europe, US, Asia and Africa, glaringly what is lacking is not mass movement, but genuine mass revolutionary platforms with clearly socialist programmes and policies to deepen the root of these movements and transform them into real change. The globalization of politics, communication and economy has made contagiousness of uprising and mass movement against capitalism not only a reality but also a necessity.

 Finally, this writer centrally argues for a socialist society premised on collective ownership of the society’s wealth under democratic public control. It, on this basis, call for the rebuilding of mass working people and youth resistance platforms against capitalist rule in Nigeria and globally, and by extension call for building of mass political parties of the working people, youth and oppressed people in general, in Nigeria, Africa and globally. This should start with building and rebuilding the working class resistance platforms such as labour movement, and student/youth movements against austerity and capitalist policies.

This essay is an edited version of the Preface to Kola Ibrahim’s latest book, Revolutionary Pen: Collected Essays on Nigeria and Global Political Economy, published in November, 2015. This book seeks to serve as a repository of ideas, experience, perspectives and history for the working people, youth, working class, other resistance platforms and intellectual community)

Featured image: Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff waves next to Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa ahead of the CELAC head of states meeting in Quito, Ecuador, Jan. 26, 2016. | Photo: EFE

The heads of State of the 33 nations Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) met in Quito, Ecuador, on Wednesday. On the agenda are increased cooperation, Latin American unity, social justice, mitigating extreme poverty, inter-connectivity, safeguarding national sovereignty, economy, and conflict resolution.

The CELAC summit is the fourth since the establishment of the regional organization in 2010. One of the goals with the establishment of the block was to establish an alternative to the Organization of American States (OAS), which is widely perceived as dominated by the United States. Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa, who is pro tempore president of CELAC noted that:

“The CELAC should replace the OAS, we have no need to discuss our issues in Washington. … That his country is not afraid to think, propose, dream and even get it wrong in this proposal because the OAS is now more anachronistic than ever.

The agenda of the CELAC summit was established at a meeting of the 33 country’s foreign ministers on Tuesday. The summit will also focus on the eradication of poverty and the reduction of inequality in the region. Some Latin America and the Caribbean countries are among those with most inequality in the world. The summit will focus on an action plan for 2016 that will also address this pressing issue. With 614.4 million people, the region represents 8.6 percent of the world’s population of which 28 percent live in poverty.

The summit also aims at working toward five points of the 2020 Agenda during this fourth summit. These are, the reduction of extreme poverty and inequality; the development of science, technology and innovation; a strategy against climate change; the establishment of infrastructure and connectivity and financing for development.

Mitigating extreme poverty, bridging the wealth gap, working toward greater inter-connectivity and other of the goals set forth by CELAC has become a greater challenge due to the plunging oil prices. The CELAC – OAS “competition” is in part mirrored in terms of bilateral relations between respective member States, depending on changing governments. That is, governments that are either leaning towards a more socialist or a more neo-liberal or conservative policy and economy.

A statement of Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño exemplifies the CELAC – OAS competition, saying that there is a need for the region to create a different economic model to capitalism. He said Latin American countries should invest their wealth in their people to “advance social and economic development.”

The landmark handshake between Juan Manuel Santos and Timoshenko, with two helping hands from Cuban President Raul Castro. (Justice for Colombia).

The landmark handshake between Juan Manuel Santos and Timoshenko, with two helping hands from Cuban President Raul Castro. (Justice for Colombia).

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa will transfer the pro tempore chairmanship of the bloc to his Dominican counterpart Danilo Medina. The Ecuadorean head of state said his country is delivering a bloc that has all the ability to address conflicts like the one in Colombia. “CELAC has the ability to support the verification of cease-fire and surrender of weapons in Colombia,” he said and recalled that the region was declared a “peace zone” in 2014.

CELAC members Cuba and Venezuela have been playing leading roles in brokering the bilateral ceasefire between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – Peoples’ Army (FARC-EP) and the Colombian government.

The ceasefire came into effect on January 1, 2016. Peace talks have been held in the Cuban capital Havana since 2012. Both the FARC-EP and the Colombian government aim at signing a final peace accord in 2016. Both sides agree that the main threat to peace and security in Colombia and beyond today comes from right-wing neo-paramilitaries like Los Urabenos.

CELAC was established in 2010 under the primary initiative and patronage of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. The block gathers 33 countries that represent 17 percent of the United Nations member states.

Image: AP/Press Association Images

A security exercise gone wrong saw tempers flare in a Paris airport, after fake explosive devices were discovered by FedEx workers in a ripped package, sources told AFP.

Employees of the American courier service at Charles de Gaulle airport were shocked to find a pressure cooker filled with nuts and bolts inside a package in transit from the US to Tunisia.

On further inspection they discovered a container of other similar devices, along with what appeared to be detonators, said Frederic Petit, who represents the company’s employees for the CGT union.

The staff alerted authorities of “imminent danger,” and officials arrived to test the device using sniffer dogs and X-ray machines.

A security source at the airport said the devices were actually decoys bound for the US embassy in Tunisia that were being used for a training exercise.

“This type of delivery is not common, but sometimes takes place,” the source told AFP. “This is just the first time that a package has been opened.”

But Petit slammed the exercise as “irresponsible,” given the heightened security concerns since the Paris attacks in November, when jihadists killed 130 people.

“Nobody was aware of this cargo,” he said, adding that FedEx employees want to see such parcels banned from transit through France.

On Jan. 27 the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies captured hilltops of Tal Hamad and Tal Koum in the Sheikh Miskeen countryside expanding a security zone around this city. The clashes with Al-Nusra, Jaysh Al-Islam and the Free Syrian Army (FSA) are continuing in this area. The town of Nawa is the next expected target of the loyalists’ offensive. If it’s captured, the Syrian army will be able to continue the advance in direction of Jassim.

Following the fierce clashes, the SAA is continuing to push ISIS back from the ground West from the Kuweires airbase. The village of Wadi’ah and its surroundings have been liberated by the pro-government forces.

The Syrian warplanes targeted at least six bases, including a training camp, in al-Tayibeh farms, As Sin and Barlehiya in the Eastern countryside of the Aleppo city. The militant groups’ fortified strongholds in al-Enjlisiyeh graveyard region and al-Jandoul were also targeted by the Syrian Air Force.

The SAA’s artillery and warplanes heavily bombarded the militant groups’ defense lines and strongholds near the town of Kinsabba in the Latakia province. The pro-government sources argue that the militants suffered a heavy death toll in these attacks.

Russian officers have reportedly met with Syrian Kurdish officials in northeastern Syria to hold talks on military coordination during the possible offensive of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) on Jarabulus located on the Turkish border. The Russian Aerospace Defense Forces have already provided support to the Kurds’ advances against ISIS. However, the Russian mission reinforces the narrative that Russia is enhancing ties with the YPG and other armed groups, such as Assyrian and Arab militias, in the north.

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Onion staffers may think twice before they produce more stories like Hillary Clinton Tries To Woo Voters By Rescinding Candidacy, Hillary Clinton To Nation: ‘Do Not Fuck This Up For Me,’ Hillary Clinton: The Merciless, Unrelenting March To The Presidency, or the signed Hillary Clinton editorial titled I’m Weighing Whether Or Not I Want To Go Through The Hell Of Appealing To You Idiotic, Uninformed Oafs.

Many news outlets covered Univision Communications’ purchase last week of a stake in The Onion, the world’s leading news publication. According to NPR, Univision bought a 40 percent controlling interest in the company, and also acquired the option to buy the remainder of The Onion in the future.

But what’s gotten no attention at all is that Haim Saban, Hillary Clinton’s biggest fan and financial supporter, is Univision’s co-owner, chairman, and CEO. Saban and his wife, Cheryl, are Hillary Clinton’s top financial backers, having given $2,046,600 to support her political campaigns and at least $10 million more to the Clinton Foundation, on whose board Cheryl Saban sits. The Sabans are also generous supporters of the overall Democratic Party infrastructure, donating, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a total of $16.1 million since 1989 to Democratic and liberal candidates, party committees, leadership PACs, and federally focused 527s.

Saban badly wants Hillary Clinton to be elected president this year, vowing to provide “as much as needed” to see it happen, since “she would be great for the country and great for the world,” and “on issues I care about, [Clinton] is pristine plus.”

An extensive New Yorker profile of Saban recalls how Saban publicly described his “three ways to be influential in American politics” in 2009. One was political donations. Another was establishing think tanks (he founded the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in 2002). And the third was controlling media outlets.

Univision also owns The Root, and Saban has made attempts to buy the Los Angeles Times and, he says, the New York Times.

Hillary Clinton at Saban Research Institute with Cheryl and Haim Saban in 2003. Photo: Bob Riha Jr/WireImage

Saban is not shy about throwing his weight around. In 2001, when Brazilian regulatory approval became a roadblock to the sale of Fox Family, the company he founded with Rupert Murdoch, he asked Bill Clinton to call the president of Brazil to push for a quick approval. When the deal went through, Saban personally made $1.5 billion; the next year he gave a “record-breaking” $7 million to the Democratic Party for a new national headquarters and $5 million to Clinton’s presidential library.

The New York Times reported in 2009 that Saban was apparently part of a scheme before the 2006 Democratic takeover of Congress in which Saban would threaten then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi that he would withhold donations if Pelosi didn’t make then-Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., chair of the House Intelligence Committee. (In return, according to the Times report, which was based on telephone calls intercepted by the National Security Agency, Harman would lobby the Bush administration for leniency for two pro-Israel lobbyists under investigation for espionage. Harman denied ever speaking to the Justice Department about the case, but did not address whether she contacted any White House officials.)

And according to a high-ranking official of the Young Democrats of America, during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary Saban offered to donate $1 million to the YDA if the organization’s two super delegates committed to Hillary Clinton.

Beyond Saban’s deep connections to the Clintons, Onion staffers likely have taken note of his statement that “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

The Onion, in the past, has published articles like Israel: Palestinians Given Ample Time To Evacuate To Nearby Bombing Sites, Israel Vows To Use Veto Power If Chuck Hagel Confirmed As U.S. Secretary Of Defense, and Israel Calls For Increase In U.S. Taxes To Fund Attacks On Gaza.

Saban said in 2014 that if Israel believed the anticipated international nuclear deal with Iran “puts Israel’s security at risk,” then Israel should “bomb the living daylights out of these sons of bitches.”

The Onion’s lead story the day its sale to Univision was announced was Iranian Nuclear Scientists Hurriedly Flush 200 Pounds Of Enriched Uranium Down Toilet During Surprise U.N. Inspection. (To be fair, The Onion has long been uncharacteristically ignorant and unfunny on Iran, running stories like Iranian Team Openly Working On Bomb In Negotiating Room.)

Onion writers have in the past described repeated battles with its advertising side over what it publishes, culminating with the company’s president sitting the editor-in-chief down to demand “good taste and good sense” in its issue after Hurricane Katrina.

The Onion declined to answer any questions about its change in ownership beyond providing a previously released memo from its CEO to its staff. Saban was not available to comment.

UK soldiers facing charges of unlawful killing during Iraq War operations will not face further investigation after the internal military process was abandoned.

Reports of UK war crimes in Iraq, confirmed by the International Criminal Court, led to the establishment of the Iraq Historic Allegation Team, which was presented with 1,000 alleged criminal acts by British troops ranging from murder, rape and other forms of violence.

However, the ministry of defence has announced that the inquiry will drop the 57 cases of “unlawful killing” being considered.

David Cameron had spoken out against the legal process alongside national newspapers and military figures who opposed the charges.

The army’s ex-legal adviser in Iraq, Nicholas Mercer, accused the government of “hijacking” the legal process.

“Clearly this isn’t just one or two bad apples, as they have been characterized, this is on a fairly large and substantial scale,” he told Channel 4.

The UK military paid out £20m in compensation relating to mistreatment by soldiers in Iraq.

In one case Iraqi hotel worker Baha Mousa died after 36 hours of abuse and beatings by British soldiers.

On 9 February 2006 International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo wrote, in reference to military operations in Iraq, that: “After analysing all the available information, it was concluded that there was a reasonable basis to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court had been committed, namely wilful killing and inhuman treatment.”

In 2014 the International Criminal Court re-opened its preliminary inquiry into the UK for war crimes. The UK Government promised that stringent internal investigations would take place.

Since the start of 2016, there has been a proliferation of downbeat prognoses about the dire state of China’s economy in the Western media. Respected organs such as The Economist and The Wall Street Journal have opined that it is a question not of if but when China’s economy will suffer a sharp downturn.

The Wall Street Journal gives China five more years before everything collapses. The Economist states that Beijing has mismanaged the Chinese economy, in particular by seeking to control its currency the yuan (RMB) for too long.

To add to these pessimistic prognostications, investment bank Goldman Sachs has advised its clients to abandon the sinking Chinese ship and get their money safely out.

It goes so far as to claim that “China risks an unsustainable increase in its debt-to-GDP ratio, which could push the country past the tipping point into economic and, in all likelihood, political instability.”

Elsewhere, influential pundits such as George Soros have placed the blame for global economic woes squarely on Beijing’s shoulders.

Soros, in a Bloomberg Business interview direct from Davos, Switzerland, where the World Economic Forum is staging its annual meeting, states that China is already in the middle of a “hard landing” and that things are only going to get worse.

The difference between the financial crisis of 2008 and today’s emerging problems, according to Soros, is that in 2008 Western financial institutions were to blame, due to submerging themselves in dodgy debt, particularly US subprime mortgages. This time, however, it is the fault of the Chinese government, which has let public debt balloon out of control and created a bubble economy that is soon due to deflate.

Soros is right that the 2008 crisis was due to flaws in the structures of Western economies and financial institutions. What he does not take account of is in the years since the subprime meltdown those flaws have not been fixed.

Like over-burdened pack animals, developed countries such as Japan and the US are still limping along with ever-growing mountains of unsustainable debt on their backs and minimal or zero growth. Large amounts of cash have been injected in order to keep these laboring beasts alive.

So how has the global economy managed to keep staggering along these last few years? For the most part, on the back of Chinese, export-led growth.

But instead of being grateful for the ride, now that Chinese growth is slowing, as it inevitably must, Westerners point their fingers to say, “It’s all your fault, nothing to do with us.”

In essence, it is Western capitalist economics that have put the world where it is today. But instead of accepting responsibility for the mess, Westerners seek to pass the blame onto China.

Of course, China has its problems, and they are serious ones. China has severe industrial over-capacity, a housing bubble, excessive debt, over-reliance on exports, and so on.

But the Chinese government knows all this full well, and has therefore been seeking to transform the economy for the last several years.

It is trying to do this by switching to a more services-based model domestically and developing overseas initiatives such as the “One Belt, One Road” initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in order to generate productive work for Chinese companies that will also stimulate other economies, especially untapped developing ones.

The necessary transformation of the Chinese economy is going to be very difficult to achieve because of its immense size.

This does not mean that it is automatically going to fail or that Chinese leaders do not understand how to accomplish it. It means that there are inevitably going to be mistakes made on the way and a lot of major bumps on the road.

So why are so many Western pundits and media outlets so intent on talking China down?

Precisely because, although they are right that China is facing some serious problems and is highly likely to go through hard times at some point in the next few years (as all developing economies inevitably do at some point), it is in their interest to pin responsibility for any coming slowdown, which the law of economic gravity suggests must come sooner or later, on China rather than themselves.

Jeremy Garlick is lecturer in international relations, Jan Masaryk Centre for International Studies, University of Economics in Prague. [email protected]

Ask Haitians on the street why they have put their wiry bodies in the paths of the bullets and tear-gas canisters of Haiti’s various mercenary forces, foreign and domestic, and they will tell you it is because they want to end the foreign occupation. They might add that they cannot make a living, care for their parents, send their children to school, get food to eat or even clean water to drink. In all likelihood, the word election will not come up. Yes, the fraudulent elections of August 9 and October 25, 2015 were an insult, but they are far from being the worst one, which is the more than decade-long foreign rule of the world’s first black republic by a coalition of colonial powers and their lackeys, with genocidal intents. Haiti’s more astute politicians look as though they are running ahead of the crowds, but they are checking back all the while, to make sure they follow the popular will.

Haiti is in the midst of a new iteration of its continuing revolution. The predatory international community has not quite decided whether it should behave more like a rat skittering away from a sinking ship or a rabid dog foaming at the mouth in its final stand. For days, a C17 cargo plane has been parked in Port-au-Prince’s international airport, threatening to carry off Haiti’s opposition, waiting to transport a cargo of fleeing colonists, or both. The bloodthirsty former paramilitary goon, Guy Philippe, has been returned to the country. He is supposed to frighten the population, but he merely reminds everyone that he could be quickly made to run into exile again with his tail between his legs. The opportunistic non-governmental organizations (NGO), which depend on the status quo to guarantee their tax-free salaries, have already changed their rhetoric to attack Michel Martelly and his surrogate Jovenel Moise, and discuss them in the past tense. No one is fooled.

• For too many years in Haiti, people’s lands have been appropriated from the north, the coasts, and the offshore islands.
• For too many years, farmers, fishermen, and ranchers have been herded into fluorescently lit boxes from which their 45-cent-per-hour labor could be harnessed.
• For too many years, middle-class educated Haitian men have been shipped at the rate of 75 a day to Brazil for degrading and dangerous slave labor.
• For too many years, unidentified bandits on motorcycles have systematically assassinated Haitian leaders and intellectuals.
• For too many years, Haitians have been pariahs in the world because they have lacked a government to represent them.
• For too many years, Haiti’s servile politicians have not even bothered to disguise their loyalty to the foreign occupation and treated with disdain the citizens of their own country.
• For too many years, those treacherous politicians have worried only about their cuts of the profits while they have watched the international community make war on Haitians.

Simultaneously with a dismantlement of Haiti’s municipal-water systems, the United Nations has infected Haitians with cholera, not once, but at least twice: first with cholera from Nepal in 2010 and then with cholera from Bangladesh in 2015. The savage eradication of the creole pig and flooding of the Haitian market with Clinton’s subsidized Arkansas rice were not enough; the millet crop had to be destroyed too. It was contaminated in November 2015 with a fungus, probably the notorious blast fungus Magnaporthe grisea, to trigger a famine. Exactly how much can a people take? This is not about elections.

Only recently, Haiti looked like such an appetizing morsel: a new Batista’s Cuba with tropical climate, proximity to Florida, and plenty of sin and corruption. But Haiti is stuck down the throat of the international community in this Hillary Clinton election year. The historical moment is now. If Haiti scuttles the Clinton election, it will do the world a big favor. In this David-Goliath fight, it is not one bit sentimental to bet on David. As in 1803, the choice between independence and death is an easy one, because Haitians have nothing left to lose. If the mercenaries come, their eagerness to risk their lives for their masters will be tested. As ever, Haitians will follow their own path. No colonist will be allowed to take Haiti and re-enslave Haitians. Bring in more cargo planes, because a whole lot of humanitarian imperialists will soon need an airlift.

Dady Chery is the author of We Have Dared to Be Free. | Photo one, Vodou ceremony by Billtacular; all other photos are of the January 2016 protests in Haiti: two, three, and six by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP; four from STF; five from US News.

A major priority for Canada’s new prime minister is to reset the relationships with both the U.S. and Mexico. There is a real opportunity for all three countries to recommit to building a North American community. This includes expanding political, security and economic cooperation, as well as greater coordination on issues such as energy and the environment. Further deepening Canada-Mexico ties is one of the keys to strengthening continental relations. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which builds on the commitments of NAFTA could also help take North American trilateral integration to the next level.

During a foreign policy speech before he became Prime Minister, Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau emphasized the importance of North America and outlined his plans to improve Canada’s relationship with its NAFTA partners. He discussed some of the problems facing Mexico and how Canada could help solve them. Trudeau noted, “In many areas, Canadians have the necessary expertise to address Mexico’s needs, from the building of public institutions to infrastructure development to civil policing. We should see in Mexico opportunities to develop our relations and our economies.” He went on to say, “What does this mean for Canada and the Canada-U.S. relationship? In my view, it means that we must once again look at the relationship in a continental context. We must see our own future in the future of North America.” Trudeau also proposed creating a special cabinet committee to manage Canada-U.S. relations and promised to work towards reducing barriers to trade and commerce between both countries. Furthermore, he pledged to push for a North American agreement on clean energy and the environment.

In June 2015, the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade issued its report, North American Neighbours: Maximizing Opportunities and Strengthening Cooperation for a More Prosperous Future. The policy paper recommended, “The Government of Canada explore opportunities for Canada-Mexico cooperation on governance, security and rule of law issues of mutual interest, such as law enforcement and judicial capacity building.” It also identified energy, supply chain infrastructure and harmonizing regulations as some of the areas that should be addressed trilaterally. A news release described how, “Trilateral cooperation between Canada, the United States and Mexico on issues of mutual interest holds great promise for increasing North America’s future competitiveness and prosperity.” At the same time, the Committee conceded, “Geographic, linguistic and other factors have prevented the Canada-Mexico relationship from reaching its full potential. Canada’s relationship with Mexico should be an important focus.” They concluded that, “A stronger partnership with Mexico is a key way to strengthen the trilateral approach to North American relations.”

After becoming Canada’s new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his commitment to building better continental relations. Some of the key objectives highlighted in the Minister of International Trade Mandate Letter are to, “strengthen our relationship with our North American partners, advance bilateral and trilateral initiatives to reduce impediments to trade between our countries and to strengthen North America’s global competitiveness.” An important part of the Canada-U.S. relationship is the Regulatory Cooperation Council and the Beyond the Border deal, which promotes economic competitiveness and a perimeter approach to security. In March 2015, both countries signed an Agreement on Land, Rail, Marine, and Air Transport Preclearance, but it has yet to be implemented. Trudeau will get an opportunity to discuss border security, energy, climate change and trade, along with other bilateral issues when he meets with President Barack Obama on March 10 in Washington.

Some of the important priorities listed in the Minister of Foreign Affairs Mandate Letter are to, “Improve relations with the United States, our closest ally and most important economic and security partner, and strengthen trilateral North American cooperation.” This includes working to lift the Mexican visa requirement, which was imposed by the previous Conservative government and deeply resented in Mexico. Also high on the agenda is developing a continent-wide clean energy and environment agreement, as well as preparing for the next trilateral leaders summit that will be hosted by Canada sometime this year. At the 2014 North American Leaders Summit, the U.S., Canada and Mexico agreed to enhance energy collaboration, develop a continental transportation plan and establish a North American trusted traveler program. Last year, they announced an agreement to expand trusted traveler programs, which is the first steps toward the creation of a North American Trusted Traveler network. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper was scheduled to host the 2015 leaders summit, but he postponed the meeting amid tension between Canada and the U.S. over the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which was pending at the time.

On November 6, 2015, President Obama formally rejected the Keystone XL Pipeline, arguing that project would not serve the country’s national interests and how it would undercut U.S. climate global leadership. While Obama admitted Prime Minister Trudeau was disappointed by the decision, he also pointed out how both leaders, “agreed that our close friendship on a whole range of issues, including energy and climate change, should provide the basis for even closer coordination.” A statement by Prime Minister Trudeau insisted, “The Canada-U.S. relationship is much bigger than any one project and I look forward to a fresh start with President Obama to strengthen our remarkable ties in a spirit of friendship and co-operation.” Although the decision is a setback in enhancing North American energy integration, it does nevertheless provide an opportunity for both countries to reset relations. Just days after TransCanada was denied a permit for the Keystone XL, they were awarded a contract to build the Tuxpan-Tula Pipeline in Mexico. The company also recently launched a lawsuit over the Keystone decision. Under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, corporations have the power to challenge governmental laws and regulations that restrict their profits.

Before the Obama administration rejected Keystone, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton came out against the pipeline. She stressed that, “Building a clean, secure, and affordable North American energy future is bigger than Keystone XL or any other single project.” Clinton followed this up by unveiling her, Vision for Modernizing North American Energy Infrastructure, which links the continent’s energy and climate objectives. If elected president, she has vowed to, “launch negotiations with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to secure a North American Climate Compact that includes ambitious national targets, coordinated policy approaches, and strong accountability measures.” With the creation of the Trilateral Working Group on Climate Change and Energy back in May 2015, the North American partners have already laid the foundation for closer cooperation on energy and the environment.

During his presidency, George W. Bush pursued deeper North American ties through the Security and Prosperity Partnership. Now the Bush Institute’s Economic Growth program is continuing with this agenda. They’ve launched a North America Competitiveness Initiative, which aims to further strengthen continental economic integration. In November 2015, they released the North America Competitiveness Scorecard, “as a tool to compare the competitive position of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as a region, relative to other major economic regions and countries with large economies.” While North America earned a B+, the scorecard also identified areas where improvements could be made. A working group is currently developing a list of policy recommendations on issues regarding energy, human capital, and border infrastructure. The Bush Institute’s Director of Economic Growth Matt Rooney stated, “The key to the prosperity and security of the American people lies in a closer North American economic relationship — in embracing the de facto North American community that has long existed and shaping it to ensure that it continues to enhance our security and prosperity.”

As part of efforts to encourage trilateral cooperation at a state and provincial level, the first-ever Summit of North American Governors and Premiers was held in October 2015. Mexican State Governor, Eruviel Avila Villegas acknowledged, “We are living at an historic juncture, where local governments are becoming key transformation agents and the source of international cooperation efforts. The origin of this summit represents a big step toward the building of a North American community.” When the event was first announced, a press release explained that the summit would, “focus on promoting economic development and trade through improvements and innovations in infrastructure and supply chain management, education, energy technology and culture.” Regional collaboration is already taking place through forums such as, the Council of the Great Lakes Region and the Annual Conference of New England Governors and Eastern Canadian Premiers. In an effort to expand economic relations and advance cross-border trade, U.S. ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman has sent letters to the governors of all 50 U.S. states urging them to visit Canada. In the coming years, subnational governments will play a even greater role with respect to North American integration.

On October 5, 2015, negotiations concluded on the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the U.S., and Vietnam. The massive Pacific Rim trade pact is scheduled to be formally signed on February 4 in New Zealand, but it will still need to be ratified by each of the member nations. Like other trade agreements that have come before it, the TPP will ultimately fail to deliver on the promise of economic growth and prosperity. The controversial deal poses significant threats to internet freedom, food safety, public health and the environment. It includes NAFTA-style investor rights that allows corporations to sue governments over decisions that may affect their future profits. The agreement contains thousands of pages of legal text and technical language, which covers a lot more than just trade. With the U.S., Canada and Mexico all a part of the TPP, it amounts to a complete renegotiation of NAFTA through the backdoor.

The TPP marks another step towards greater regional cooperation and integration. The U.S.-driven trade deal changes how member countries manage their economies and businesses. It sets the rules for a new global economic order, which would further erode national sovereignty. The TPP together with the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are part of plans to merge North America with Asia and Europe.

Dana Gabriel is an activist and independent researcher. He writes about trade, globalization, sovereignty, security, as well as other issues. Contact: [email protected]. Visit his blog at Be Your Own Leader

The modern world has shown us sufficient examples of nations that have broken up because too many of their citizens have had shrivelled hearts and dwarfish minds. Benedict Anderson, Jakarta, 1999

Nationalism has often had a deservingly bad press. Ernest Gellner, for instance, suggested in Thought and Change(1971) that nationalism “invents nations where they do not exist.” It was a means of deception, an existence engineered under false pretences.

Benedict Anderson, who died last December in Indonesia, saw things differently. For years, he spent his time understanding nationalism’s other functions. He found it particularly useful as a counterpoint in explaining how various communist states – fraternal, at least on the paper of revolution – could war against each other. The 1978-9 wars between Vietnam, Cambodia and China piqued his curiosity; Marxist analysis on such conflicts simply would not do, since it dismissed the notion of nationalism as essentially a symptom of “false consciousness”.

Imagined Communities (1983) was the analytical product, dealing with nationalism as a global phenomenon. It was could not be dismissed as entirely negative; indeed, it could also be integrative in unitary form, rather than one specifically based “in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism”. Nationalism could even “inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love.”

As for the nature of such a community, it is “imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives an image of their community.”

From that imaginary staple, the desire to associate and be connected, come concrete, and, argues Anderson, reassuring offspring in the face of “ebbing religious belief”. The poets and prose writers busy themselves with filling libraries of record; musicians compose tracts for posterity; the artists of the plastic arts create. Instead of diving into European examples to justify his case, Anderson sought American examples, arguing that it was Creole communities who developed “so early concepts of nation-ness – well before most of Europe”.

But one striking manifestation of an imaginary community stands out: reading the newspaper. The example from the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, who claimed that newspapers had become a modern substitute for morning prayer, was hard to avoid. While the act was conducted in “private ceremony”, it was one “incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar.”

This is “print capitalism” in action, solidarity of the word through press and discourse. These days, one would have to find new variants of this community, a form, argues T. J. Clark, of “screen capitalism” and its various technics.[1] Little wonder, then, that critics have suggested that more is needed to explain collective identities than reading newspapers.

And thus, with two words, Anderson had captured an immortal combination, though he would write with irritation about “the vampires of banality” which had “sucked almost all the blood” of IC by the 2006 edition.

It was seemingly fitting that Anderson would write about nationalism with such clarity, having himself been a varied product of numerous national experiences. An Irishman born in Kunming, son to Veronica (nee Bigham) and Shaemas Anderson of the Chinese Maritime Customs service, he found being “English” difficult. “Though I was educated in England [at Eton] from the age of 11, it was difficult to imagine myself English.” Nor was being Irish itself an elementary assumption. The New Republic even went so far as to suggest that he was a “man without a country”.[2]

The 1956 invasion of Suez, engineered as an indulgent, last gasp of Anglo-French colonialism against the regime of General Gamal Nasser, pushed Anderson into a more radical fold. Reading classics at King’s College, Cambridge, he found himself in sympathy with the politicised south Asian students protesting the measure.

On invitation, he became a teaching assistant at Cornell University, and a graduate student of George Kahin. This was what Anderson was waiting for, a light to shine on south-east Asian nationalism. Indonesia would become his love interest, one which he absorbed linguistically, culturally and politically. “Traditional Javanese culture”, as he termed it, captivated him, but it was also such culture in resistance to Dutch colonialism that mattered.

Injecting culture into the study of political behaviour shook the establishment, not merely those from the dry settings of traditional political science, but the Marxist scholars themselves. Having attempted to subscribe to some Marxist interpretation of the Indonesian resistance, Anderson found himself looking more intensely at the role of culture, using his language proficiency in Indonesian, Javanese, Tagalog and Thai. The result was The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture (1972).

His focus on Indonesia should also be remembered from another perspective: that of political interrogator and sceptic. 1965 and 1966 were brutal years for Indonesia, and emotionally crushing for Anderson. Numbers of the slaughtered in the Suharto-directed purge against communists and left-wing sympathisers vary, though half-a-million is often cited as a figure. While the Central Intelligence Agency had backed the response in the name of Cold War consistency, its own scribblers would admit in 1968 that it was “one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century.”[3]

Anderson was also shaken by a very personal experience regarding the general secretary of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), whose 1967 show trial and July 21 testimony before a Special Military Tribunal he witnessed. Anderson would subsequently make the testimony of the doomed Sudisman available via translation.

In the distorting context of Cold War debates, Anderson and his co-contributor Ruth McVey attempted to provide a balancing account in “The Cornell Paper” about what transpired in the October 1965 coup. The thrust of the argument was sensible enough: the PKI had been the convenient scapegoat for internal disagreements within the Indonesian military.

Written as a confidential working paper, it was leaked to The Washington Post in 1966. Published in full, and without amendments in 1971, it would see Anderson banned from Indonesia. Papers sympathetic to the New Order, as a US-backed Suharto termed it, wasted no time targeting the publication, with the weekly magazine Chas running the headline: “Cornell Scholars: Useful Idiots.” The New Order would brutalise and strangle Indonesia for over three decades.

It was only with the fall from power of General Suharto in 1998 that Anderson could return, allowing him to give an “eye-popping” lecture, as the Time Literary Supplement termed it, to his audience of generals, journalists, professors, former students and the generally curious.[4] “We can see that the entire ‘opposition’ today,” he chided, “is not fundamentally a real opposition to the Dry-Rot Order and that the Indonesia they wish to build will, consequently, still have a mountain of skeletons buried in its cellars.”

This was theory rendered into practice – or at the very least an effort to throw Imagined Communities at audience and policy makers. But such projects in nationalism tend to be difficult ones to achieve. The line between an open, celebrated nationalism, and one that insists on pious, dedicated bloodletting, is a fine one indeed.

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

Notes

[1] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/tj-clark/in-a-pomegranate-chandelier

[2] https://newrepublic.com/article/125706/benedict-anderson-man-without-country

If you are in some way critical of genetically modified food and agriculture or have some concerns that remain unaddressed, here is a brief interpretive (satirical) guide for navigating the seedy world of pro-GMO spin.

1) We are pro-science and objective.

Meaning: We are industry supported and dismiss out of hand this type of anti-GM nonsense that suggests our science is somehow tainted.

2) Our critics are anti-science Luddites.

Meaning: Unlike us, they rely on ‘pseudo science’, labelled as such because it is not funded by the industry and its conclusions challenge the commercial interests of it.

3) Our critics are human haters because they deny GM food to the hungry.

Meaning: We learned to say this in our seminars about ‘dealing with anti-GMO campaigners’.

4) We are humanitarians, while they are ideological elitists.

Meaning: We learned this also in our strategy seminars and meetings.

5) This academically unqualified anti-GM gang are hurting the poor.

Meaning: Critics of GM with valid concerns are hurting profit margins.

6) “All that people like you know is to stop progress and US agriculture is doing fine and thanks to the absence of scientists like Seralini and Pushpa Bhargava. These two so-called scientific jokers will not allowed set foot in the real world of science in North America . They have a heyday in countries like India because of ignoramuses” (Shanthu Shantharam in comments thread here).

Meaning: Poisoned, de-nutrified food,degraded soil and unsustainable agriculture is ideal and anyone who challenges this will be ridiculed and smeared.

7) These anti-GM campaigners are “murdering bastards.” (Patrick Moore)

Meaning: Can’t hold an objective debate? Insults will suffice.

8) You are presenting “anti-capitalist twaddle.”

Patrick Moore‏@EcoSenseNow

@colin_todhunter @GMWatch How about “anti-capitalist twaddle” or “anti-globalization twaddle” or “Occupy-twaddle”?

11:33 AM – 11 Apr 2015

Meaning: Who needs rational debate when baseless clichés will suffice? I don’t want to hear about the destruction of indigenous agriculture by the West with its ‘aid’, ‘structural adjustment’ and agribusiness companies because this analysis does not suit with my agenda (the above tweet was in response to this analysis).

9) Glyphosate is harmless and I will drink it.

Meaning: No it isn’t and I won’t, but you are a “jerk” for calling my bluff.

10) I don’t take money from Monsanto.

Meaning: OK, maybe it happened but they were advised not to make the cheque out to me.

11) You are just victimising me and I am scared.

Meaning: I got caught out but will play the sympathy card.

12) Preventing GM will hold back Indian agriculture and the availability of cheap food.

Meaning: I spout uninformed personal opinion but my expertise as a molecular biologist qualifies me to speak as ‘an expert’ on anything.

13) People with authoritarian personality types anda political agenda are harming the poor by imposing their views on everyone – similar attitudes have killed millions under totalitarian regimes.

Meaning: Highly emotive. But, hey, as a molecular biologist, I am a self-appointed expert on psychology, politics and history.

14) There is a scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs.

Meaning: No there isn’t, but if I repeat the mantra often enough people will believe it.

15) The debate on GM is over.

Meaning: No it isn’t, but if I repeat the mantra often enough people will believe it (instruction to lobbyist: employ same tactic regarding no risks, better yields, GM is no different from conventional and so on).

16) With so much land under GM, farmers are actively choosing this technology.

Meaning: We love ‘free’ market platitudes about ‘choice’ and everyone should just ignore US intimidation tactics to get GM into countries, the closing-off of choice as GM becomes the only available option, strings-attached loans in Ukraine to force through GM agriculture, the buying-up of seed companies , financial incentives to plant GM, etc.

17) We care about the poor and hungry.

Meaning: Benefits for the poor should be cut and these people should rely on food stamps and food banks… but we really, really do care about the poor in Africa or India!

18) Labelling GM food will confuse people and send out the wrong impression.

Meaning: People do not have any right to know what they are eating – if they knew, they wouldn’t buy it!

This article discusses the corporate spin behind GMO and this one is another satirical take on the GM lobby.

Our men . . . have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of 10 up… Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to “make them talk,” and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later. .. stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.: Philadelphia Ledger newspaper in 1901, from its Manila [Philippines] correspondent during the US war with Spain for the control of the Philippines (ICH)

The 45^th World Economic Forum – WEF – was hosted again by Switzerland and took place from 20-23 January 2016 – again in Davos, an 11,000-soul remote but lush mountain resort in the south-eastern part of the Swiss Alps. The elite summit was attended by some 2,500 hi-flying politicians, corporate execs, celebrities, and so-called social network movers and shakers – most of them billionaires – accompanied by 500 journalists and some 600 staffers fully equipped with social media gear.

The Davos WEF happening is perhaps the most prominent and most visible one of a series of the globe’s elitist events – most of them secret, of the Bilderbergers, the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the British Chatham House, to name just a few. Their memberships are overlapping and comprise the crème de la crème of the crop of the world elite.

They keep setting the standards for wars and conflicts, for who is to live and who is to die. They use highly civilized language in public, but their decisions behind closed doors eventually prompt such atrocities, as took place more than 100 years ago in the Philippines and later in Vietnam (see box), and were repeated since then all over the world umpteen times over, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine — and before during hundreds of years of European colonialism and plunder, torture and rape of Africa, Latin America and Asia, for resources and domination.

The only place you and I disagree . . . is with regard to the bombing. You’re so goddamned concerned about the civilians, and I (in contrast) don’t give a damn. I don’t care.”. . . “I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. . . Does that bother you? I just want you to think big.” : Richard Nixon to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on the Watergate tapes (ICH)

Human lives mean nothing to the ruling elite – which in Davos and elsewhere walk the talk of ‘political correctness’, about the world’s inequalities and its dangers. The more astute ones, even talk about social justice that would bring peace and stability. Words are cheap. They have of course no interest whatsoever in changing anything. Never had and never will. Their growing mountains of privileges are sacrosanct. The profits from wars and conflicts, from the weapon industry, are astronomical.

They talk about imminent climate change and its dangers, yet they fly into the Davos summit in hundreds of private jets, totally oblivious to the carbon footprint they paint in the sky.

A few days before the WEF event, Oxfam published a telling report, “Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More”, including some significant statistics. In 2015, 62 families owned US$ 1.76 trillion, more than the bottom half of the world’s population, 3.6 billion people. The wealth of the poorest half of the globe’s population has fallen by 41% since 2010, while the riches of the wealthiest 62 families has increased by half a trillion dollars. The gap is growing at breath-taking speed. According to a Credit Suisse report the world’s total wealth in 2015 was estimated at US$ 250 trillion. By 2016, with ongoing trends, 1% of population will own more wealth than 99% of the world’s populace; and the 1% (some 72 million people) would own more than half of the world’s wealth, meaning about US$ 130 trillion. The trend is alarming, pointing to an ever faster increase of social misery.

Now – given these growing inequalities, will the glaring injustice bring more social upheavals, protests, conflicts? Will it bring the World Order down? Will our corrupt system collapse or will it not – that is the question? – The question has to be asked for rhetoric and credibility’s sake. But be aware, nobody in power wants the system to collapse. As long as the powers that be – the Masters of the Universe, those behind the scene, those who pull the strings and send their emissaries of CEOs, politicians and celebrities to events like Davos; as long as this white collar murderous scum* (see box) is in place and ticking – and we the 99.99% look on in awe and fear, fear from invented terror, as long as we allow this injustice to prevail, the system will not collapse. They – the Masters of the Universe and their ambassador stooges – have us under their fingernails and can crush us at will. After all, they live from permanent conflicts and wars. As the Washington Post so honestly proclaims, wars are profitable. There is no soap in the world strong enough to cleanse their blood-stained hands.

*White collar murderous scum – You may be shocked at my calling these smooth elitists assassins. Aren’t people who decide on wars, on invading countries, on sending drones to kill – leaders who direct torture camps around the globe, or who sit on top of financial institutions that starve entire segments of people to death, or deprive them of vital medical and social services, people who direct corporations that knowingly and willingly contaminate the environment and poison the waters of entire communities, making them sick and killing them – aren’t these people murderers by any definition of the term?

The perpetuation of these rotten WEF-type elite is precisely what drives inequality, what causes insecurity through widening rich-poor gaps, prompting wars, atrocities, endless chains of refugees, famine, misery, discrimination. These elite carry the stamp of poverty with which they brand the vast majority of the population like cattle. Their ultimate goal is to reduce the world population to some 500 million to 1 billion people to be used as their serfs. A reduced world population might allow an ever shrinking and ever richer elite to live longer in splendour and luxury with Planet Earth’s overexploited resources, what’s left of them. In the 1960s we, the western world, crossed the critical threshold of the resources balance. Today, the west with its steadily growing consumption and growth fetish, (ab)uses by a rate of about 4 times the generous resources Mother Earth provides.

The elite have seen the writing on the wall. In the 1950s Henry Kissinger was appointed as a Board Member of the CFR, a Rockefeller creation. He soon started propagating a reduction in world population. In 1974, Kissinger, then head of the US National Security Council, commissioned a classified 200-page study on “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” which concluded proposing population-reduction programs using food as a weapon, i.e. food shortages would induce massive famine and death – genocide by famine  (http://www.larouchepub.com/other/1995/2249_kissinger_food.html). Genetically modified food by Monsanto is the direct result of Kissinger’s quest, “Control the oil, and you control nations. Control the food, and you control the people. Control money and you control the world.”

What does this have to do with the WEF? – Everything. The WEF is led by the invisible hands of the Masters of the Universe – the clandestine powers to which belong the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgan Stanleys and many of the military industrial complex and pharmaceutical leaders – and to which the criminal mind of Kissinger’s is a helpful advisor (Who Really Controls the World http://www.globalresearch.ca/who-really-controls-the-world/5445239). Forefathers of world history, including Mahatma Gandhi, Presidents Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy, as well as British PM Winston Churchill have warned of the looming ascension of this occult power to the detriment of world peace.

They, the Masters of the Universe, pull the strings by sending their billionaire puppets to Davos to confuse the obedient listeners, spectators and serfs, i.e. the world at large, with wise and politically correct but totally hollow speech, “will there be more crises ahead?” – “Will the current World Order collapse?” – “Will it survive? “- “How will climate change affect our future?” And of course, “what will the markets do and say?” – The markets, the epitome of the Washington Consensus doctrine, will never be forgotten in this neoliberal, neo-fascist western world, whose creation and simultaneous destruction, we, the 99.99%, have not only tolerated but facilitated. The answers to these questions were as diverse and empty as were the questions themselves. However, there was one common theme permeating everything: Money rules the world.

Switzerland is the epicentre of neoliberalism in Europe; the archetype of what the western world calls democracy, where parliamentarians have the legal right to sit on several boards of directors of corporations and financial institutions representing in Parliament their corporate and financial interests rather than those of the people who elected them; a truly built-in lobby in the name of democracy, unique among OECD countries.  Who would be better placed than the Swiss to host again and again shamelessly this notorious Davos event for the super-super rich – politicians, corporate CEOs, celebrities and so-called social change-makers (who change of course absolutely nothing for the betterment of society), clogging Swiss airports with their fleet of private jets?

The Swiss government mobilized over 5,000 military police plus countless Police officers from around the country to protect this international nobility. Rooftop snipers in their winter gear looked like ISIS in white.

They provided airspace and highway protection above and around Davos. The total cost to Swiss tax-payers of protecting WEF attendees is not published, but must be astronomical.

The conference centres were fenced-off by steel barriers; all to defend the self-styled luminaries from imaginary ‘terror threats’ and protesters. If not in the news, because these illustrious and notorious personalities, including at least 40 heads of state, are not to be unnecessarily scared, lest they may not come – what a loss that would be!

Terror is seamlessly built-into today’s societies’ thought processes. Never mind, that those who pretend to defend the populace are the same that cause and create the terror, hence justifying militarization and eventually police states – soon inscribed in the Constitutions of Washington’s European vassals. France’s Hollande and his PM Mr. Valls, are asking the French Parliament to approve such legislation by declaring a permanent state of emergency; all justified by the January and November 2015 (false flag) attacks in Paris.

A few days after the sun set on WEF 2016, Europol, giving no foundation whatsoever, announces increasing ‘terror threats’ throughout Europe, justifying a rapid increase of militarization of Europe. People will ask for it, for fear – as they have been thoroughly brainwashed by the lie and propaganda and corrupted mainstream media. Their brains are waning, as rapidly as the police state is taking over.

Despite these measures to increase security for the rich, hedge fund managers are reportedly buying airstrips and farms in such remote areas as New Zealand, because they think they need a getaway.  

TeleSUR suggests that the WEF’s claim to make the world a better place is a joke. That might be an understatement considering who the WEF’s partners are. Nestlé, the Swiss food giant, whose CEO, Peter Brabeck, recently stated that considering water as a fundamental human right is “extreme”. Nestlé’s human rights and environmental abuses abound. They are accused of forced child labor on their cocoa plantations in the Ivory Coast. Nestlé’s water CEO, Tim Brown, has refused to stop bottling water in Sacramento, California, despite the extreme drought. While farmers were ordered to stop pumping water to irrigate their crops, Brown retorted, “If I could increase (bottling water) I would.”

Other disreputable WEF partners include Chevron which dumped allegedly over 16 billion gallons of oil and toxic waste in the pristine forests of Ecuador’s Amazon, affecting 30,000 indigenous residents, some with cancer and early death. They won a US$ 9.5 billion law suit for damages which Chevron never paid.

There is also Coca Cola with water conflicts throughout Latin America, including in a northern El Salvador municipality, where the beverage giant affects the lives of tens of thousands of residents with contaminated water they say poisons them and kills their animals. Elsewhere in Latin America, Coca Cola allegedly hires paramilitaries for intimidation, torture and murder of unionists in Colombia and Guatemala.

Social justice activist Susan George calls the Davos gang “predatory”, running the west’s major institutions. She sums the conference up as an organization of dirty partners, from polluting miners, to money-laundering banks and community-destroying corporations. Yet, the populace is made believe that the WEF is “committed to improving the state of the world.”

As long as the Masters of the Universe are in charge – and they have been for the last at least 150 years – there is no chance for a world of harmony and peace. They have decided the fate of the Middle East and the world – next Syria and eventually Iran must fall. The following targets are Russia, then China through Central Asia and the South China Sea. The well-paid WEF morons in Davos are ordered to deceive and confuse, time and again, as they have done throughout the 45 annual WEF summits – all adapted to the ‘current dangers and fears’. It is high time that we, The People, the 99.99% wake up and open our eyes to an uncomfortable reality

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a former World Bank staff and worked extensively around the world in the fields of environment and water resources. He writes regularly for Global Research, ICH, RT, Sputnik, PressTV, CounterPunch, TeleSur, The Vineyard of The Saker Blog, and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.

The PM is right to draw a line in the sand, to protect the freedom with which the military has to operate… – General Lord Dannatt, ex-Chief of Staff

Prime Minister David Cameron is getting himself all wound up about the nasty slurs on ‘our brave boys’; ‘our brave servicemen and women who fought in Iraq’; ‘the people who risk their lives to keep our country safe’; the veterans of Britain’s illegal invasion of Iraq. Of course, they must ‘act within the law’ etc… Except they didn’t.

The said ‘brave servicemen’ are in danger of being taken to court over their abusive treatment, and in some cases murder, of Iraqi detainees during the invasion of Iraq. Hundreds of complaints have been lodged with the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) which was investigating between 1300-1500 cases. Many are simple complaints of ill treatment during detention, but some are far more serious:

• Death(s) while detained by the British Army
• Deaths outside British Army base or after contact with British Army
• Many deaths following ‘shooting incidents’

According to Cameron, ‘Our armed forces are rightly held to the highest standards…’ One wonders what standards he’s thinking of, seeing that it has been proved more than once that the UK military has not complied with international humanitarian law. Britain has a long and ignoble history of practicing torture, as documented by Ian Cobhain in his book Cruel Britannia.

Curiously, or perhaps not, just two days after Cameron launched his assault, IHAT announced it was dropping no less than 58 inquiries into unlawful killings by army veterans. And while so many rushed to the defence of the soldiers accused of abuse, absolutely no one has mentioned another example of the culture of violence within the armed forces which resurfaced just a few days earlier: the ‘notorious’ Deepcut Barracks.

The two law firms pursuing the claims on behalf of Iraqis and their families, Public Interest Lawyers, and Leigh Day, have been labelled ‘ambulance chasers’ and ‘tank chasers’ by much of the loud, right-wing media. Other insults include ‘money-grubbing or grabbing lawyers’. Naturally, goes the refrain, they want to get as many cases into court as possible so they can make a fortune in lawyers’ fees. It’s what you do if you’re defending humanitarian law.

One of the law firms involved, Leigh Day, is now the subject of an intended action by the government, who want to sue it for failing to supply documents to the al-Sweady inquiry, documents which ‘proved that alleged innocent victims (of abuse by UK armed forces) were actually enemy insurgents.’

But Cameron, like other occupants of Number 10, refuses to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was illegal. And as UK armed forces were in Iraq illegally, any Iraqis who fought them were not ‘enemy’ insurgents, but citizens legally resisting the invaders of their country. Thus, ‘enemy insurgents’ could be, and in this case were, also innocent victims of illegal treatment, treatment did not comply with international law.

International law covering ‘enemy’ soldiers (in uniform) or insurgents (in any old clothing) ensures proper, humane treatment of any prisoners. No beating, no slapping about, no prevention of sleep by using loud noise, no withholding of food or water, no forced stress positions, no sandbags over their heads, no deliberate extremes of temperature, all techniques which British soldiers were witnessed employing.

Even worse, despite these practices having been banned more than once by Parliament, prior to the invasion soldiers were (as evidence at the Baha Mousa inquiry demonstrated) being taught these practices and being encouraged to use them in Iraq by the Ministry of Defence. Only one soldier ended up with any kind of a sentence after the killing of Baha Mousa (Corporal Donald Payne, one year in prison and dismissal from the Army), but when the inquiry into Mousa’s death was held the evidence that came out was utterly damning.

General Lord Dannatt, once Chief of Staff, is one of those backing Cameron’s stance. Appearing on theBBC’s Today programme on 22 January, he defended the high standards of our wonderful army, and spoke of the greed of “lawyers with less integrity than others”. Of course British forces should “act within the law”, he said, but many of these claims are “spurious and cannot be substantiated”. Not, of course, until they have been tested in court, a point that seems to have escaped the noble lord.

One lawyer with real integrity defending the legal action being taken on behalf of abused Iraqis is Lt Colonel Nick Mercer who, at the time of the invasion was the Army’s chief legal officer in Iraq. He was out in Basra, he saw the abuse, he complained to his superiors and he gave strong and disturbing evidence to the Baha Mousa Inquiry. As he said, “It was my job to protect British commanders and make sure they kept to the right side of the law.” But the MoD was ‘resistant to human rights’.

The MoD’s view was that the government position prevailed over Mercer’s interpretation of international law. In 2009 the Supreme Court ruled that the advice he had tried to give the MoD in 2003 was correct. But it was not until 2010 that UK military intelligence interrogators were trained in international law and human rights. Whether that has made any real difference to their standards of practice is as yet unknown. In 2011 the MoD was hit by more claims of mistreatment, when Iraqi victims won the right to an inquiry in the Court of Appeal.

Again and again the MoD had tried to gag Mercer, threatening to report him to the Law Society, and in 2007 he was suspended for conducting a case in Cyprus in a way that disagreed with MoD views. He has now left the Army and is an Anglican priest, his principles and defence of the law as strong as ever. He has come out fighting in defence of Leigh Day and Public Interest Lawyers, saying it was beyond doubt that British soldiers tortured Iraqi prisoners.

He emphasises that he and others raised their concerns at the time the mistreatment of prisoners was going on; that the International Committee of the Red Cross had raised their concerns with the government; that the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights has also raised its concerns – with the International Criminal Court. This is not just about ‘money-grabbing lawyers’ against the rest of the nation. There are too many others who were and are concerned about the abuse that have no financial motives, says Mercer, and it was wrong to try and polarise the debate in this way.

He points to the fact that the MoD has already paid out £20 million in compensation for 326 cases. “Anyone who has fought the MoD knows they don’t pay out for nothing, so there are 326 substantiated claims with almost no criminal proceedings to accompany that. And you have to ask why.”

Lord Dannatt said that only 3 of all these cases have been proven – another point he seems to have missed: that the MoD paying compensation prevented the cases coming to court. Dannatt’s version of this is that the MoD “opted on the side of generosity rather than try to fight these cases in court”.

Cameron says these allegations of abuse are ‘spurious legal claims’ that must be stopped, ‘spurious’ being a word that is now used by all those on the MoD’s side. Cameron is a master of spurious claims. He produces one or two almost every week in Parliament, during Prime Minister’s Questions. A recent example, which earned him a great deal of ‘non-credibility’, came during the parliamentary debate on whether the UK should bomb Syria.

He said that there were 70,000 moderate fighters in Syria – a claim that the MoD reportedly asked to have removed from his statement. His ministers are masters of the spurious as well, constantly being corrected for their statements that the government has done this or that, given extra funding for this or that, when, for instance, the ‘extra funding’ turns out to be less than the amount they cut a Ministry’s budget the year before.

But Britain has to face the fact that not only do we have a spurious* government, but that ‘our brave soldiers’ have consistently broken both UK and international law, have been encouraged to do so by their masters and that the government will fight tooth and nail to prevent them being taken to court. For the sake of all of those abused, here and abroad, it is time there was a full and independent inquiry into the MoD’s non-compliance with international humanitarian law.

*spurious: pretending to be that which it isn’t

One of the major issues that have emerged in the global politics since the early 2000 is the issue of religious terrorism[1]. The end of the Cold War, rather than end wars, conflicts and destabilization, has further opened a new ‘vista’ of crises and strife globally. Third world countries have become a major victim of this New World Disorder. While religion-oriented terrorism has been in existence prior to the early 2000; the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States (US) signaled a new phase to the rise of religious terrorism. The US ruling class alongside its European allies saw the terror attack as opportunity to remodel the global politics and political economics in its contrived project of US-led capitalist hegemony. The War on Terror, started by George Bush (Jr.), saw not just destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and partly Pakistan, but has also led to more destabilization of not just Middle East and Africa but the whole world.

The destabilization of the world through the War on Terror has, rather than end terrorism, aggravated it. More than ever before, state terrorism has also accentuated. The current rise of Islamic State (IS), after a seeming decimation of Osama bin Ladin’s Al Qaeda, has again shown that terrorism itself is propped up and sustained by global capitalist politics, and will continue to exist as long as the current capitalist hegemonic system continue to rule. Western imperialism, in an attempt to derail the revolutions that started in the Middle East and North Africa in 2010, and adapt it towards global capitalist interests, sponsored many obscure forces otherwise called Opposition against Barshar Al Assad regime in Syria. Syria was turned into the theater of imperialist politics, with various hawks in US, Europe, Saudi, Russia, etc. turning Syria into their laboratory of geopolitics. The result is over 250, 000 dead, about a quarter population displaced, social and economic destruction, and arming and germination of ultra-violent Islamic State (which was a creation US War in Iraq) and its clones like Ansaru. The so-called IS has earlier been created in Iraq, no thanks to US War in Iraq that saw the destruction of the country’s political and social fabrics. In Libya, the destabilization of the country by western imperialism, and the murder of Moamar Gaddafi, in the wake Libyan revolution, opened up fissures in not only Libya but also throughout Africa, while also leading to disintegration of Libya. US became a victim of her action with the killing of its diplomatic staff about three years ago.

The rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria cannot be explained outside of the global political economy and, the political history of Nigeria. Since 2009, Boko has become a feature in Nigeria’s politics and policy formulation. In 2015, Boko Haram became a major factor in electoral debates and politics. Since its reemergence in 2010, more than 17, 000 people have reportedly died due to Boko Haram insurgency; more than 1.5 million people have been displaced while several billion-dollar worth of properties and state funds have been wasted in defeating this terror group. But these kinds of losses are not new to Nigeria. According to International Crisis Group (ICG), between 1999 and 2002, over 8, 000 lives were lost to sectarian and religious related conflicts, while over 14, 000 lives were lost to communal and ethno-religious conflicts in six years from 1999. All this have a common link: the colonial and neo-colonial nature of Nigerian polity.

The defunct Jonathan government, while it might not have started it, allowed the Boko Haram crisis to fester and linger through its actions and inactions, engineered by pervasive corruption in government affairs. This meant that Boko Haram crisis became a pot of soup for elements in government. The recent revelations from the new Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government about how over $2.1 billion and over N600 billion (that is together more than trillion naira or one fifth of 2015 budget) were looted from the public purse under the guise of fighting Boko haram or defence budget, clearly underscores the point we have contually raised about the primitive character of Nigeria’s capitalist political class. Meanwhile, several lives of soldiers were wasted while tens of rank-and-file soldiers who refused to be drafted to war without arms and ammunitions were court-marshaled and are now in jail.

When it became clear that Boko Haram would be a major factor in the 2015 general election, the same Jonathan government that was lackadaisical towards the menace, stepped up action on the terrorists within a month to the elections. This led to recovery of some communities, held by Boko Haram for its Islamic Caliphate State. This means that the Boko Haram menace was allowed either directly or otherwise to fester for so long through actions and inactions of government, ostensibly to draw out money from public purse to serve private interests of those in power.

The kidnap of over 200 school girls in Chibok in Borno State saw global outrage against the sect and the Jonathan government which handled the issue shoddily. Western imperialist governments were falling over each other to intervene. However, these interventions did not show any sign of altruism. Aside the fact that the same western imperialist governments contributed towards the germination of terrorism worldwide, the reality is that no serious interests were shown towards eradication of Boko Haram by western imperialist governments prior to this time, despite the fact that the terror gang was killing hundreds not only in Nigeria, but other neighbouring West African countries. On the contrary, you have France paying million-dollar ransome to Boko Haram, ostensibly through the Cameroonian government, in order to free some captive French citizens. Even if western government showed interests in fighting Boko Haram, it will end up turning the country to an outpost of imperialism, and theater of terrorist campaign, as the cases of Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. have shown.

However, the Buhari government that took over from Jonathan since June 2015 in an important election that saw the victory of the then opposition APC party over then ruling PDP party[2], has not shown any serious sign of being different in terms of its fundamental approach to the Boko Haram menace. While some minimal actions such as changing the leadership of the military command, exposing the massive graft in the defence sector under Jonathan and shifting the military command centre to Borno State have been taken, there has not been any fundamental policy direction to fighting Boko haram. It is the same ‘military might’ approach of the Jonathan government that has been employed. Even the minimal effort whereby locals were mobilized through the Civilian JTF (a vigilante group in communities that fought Boko Haram) has not been sustained; in fact it seems to have died a natural death. Also, the idea of relying on imperialist forces such as US has been renewed by Buhari government.

The first visit of Buhari after inauguration was to US to seek support for its war against Boko haram. The president has also visited other West African countries such as Chad, Cameroun and Niger, in order to build a Lake Chad regional effort against Boko Haram. Aside the fact that this is a repudiation of Buhari’s campaign point that Nigeria does not need any collaboration to fight Boko Haram; this effort in itself without addressing the fundamental social, political, economic and military factors underlining the rise and sustenance of terror group like Boko Haram, will come to naught. Nothing exemplifies this than the fact that in the first five months of Buhari’s government, more than 1, 600 lives have against been lost to Boko haram insurgency, while regular attacks, including suicide bombings, planted bombings, attack on communities are still rampant.

Reflecting the government’s poor understanding of the causes and stage of Boko Haram, Buhari, who seems to be fetish about military capacity, gave the military command, three months to end Boko Haram. While the three months has lapsed, Boko Haram, which has pledged allegiance to and secured the support of IS, is still carrying out attacks on communities in the north. Of course the Buhari government claimed, in an attempt to justify its December 2015 deadline to end Boko Haram, to have decimated the group. However, this clearly underlines the neo-colonial character of the government. The reality on ground is that the government is underreporting the Boko Haram attacks, while showcasing the ‘military’ victory over the group.

This may help government to boost its rating and image, but the reality is that such approach tends to undermine the very campaign to end Boko Haram terrorism. The capacity of Boko Haram is poorly understood by the public, which can be deceptive to the public and the armed forces. For instance, the following day that Buhari’s Information Minister, Lai Muhammed claimed that Boko Haram has been decimated, scores were killed in violent suicide bombings in Borno and Adamawa States. Also, in a December, 2015 documentary on Boko haram on Doha-based Al Jazeera network, it was glaring that the Boko Haram group is still potent, as the army could not go far into the Sambisa forest where the group is domiciled. In fact, the armed military men had to hurriedly leave the forest when they sensed impending movement of Boko Haram fighters. Therefore, it is safe to conclude that the Buhari government, just like the previous government may be using Boko Haram issue as political and propaganda tool to boost the government’s popularity. But this cannot go far.

All this shows the reality that the ruling capitalist class in Nigeria, of all hues and coloration are not prepared and are not cut out for undertaking needed radical political and economic programmes to end the basis of ultra-rightwing and violent tendencies current represented by Boko Haram. Even the very least challenging task of organizing a Sovereign National Conference to discuss Nigeria’s nationality and political problems is too herculean for ruling class in Nigeria. While Jonathan, at the twilight of his regime, organized a sham called national conference, the reality is that it was just an attempt to shore up his support base for electoral purposes. Even the least important of the conference recommendations were not implemented by Jonathan, neither were the recommendations subjected to popular referendum, as most of the members of the conference were undemocratically selected. In fact, the conference itself was more of jamboree as it reflected mere elite in-fighting and did not represent the vast majority of the working and poor people of Nigeria, who have become and are victims of poor governance. At the end, over seven billion naira was wasted on this jamboree.

As stated earlier, Boko Haram, while it may be one of the wildest, is just a part of litany of ethno-religious crises that have defined Nigeria since its independence, and which have been accentuated since the reemergence of civil rule in 1999. Even if the military is able to curtail it for now, a worse and more terrible form of ethno-religious and/or religious crises will emerge sooner than later, inasmuch as the underlining factors are not addressed. Already, new fissures on Nigeria’s political landscape are already showing with the Biafra protests and crisis, mass killing of hundreds of members of Ibrahim El Zakzakky-led Shiite group and the rising unrest in the Niger Delta.   On the economic front, the country seems to be heading for the cliff-edge as oil wealth; the basis of government’s revenue has shrunk due to fall in crude oil price in the international market. This should have provided the basis for reengineering Nigerian economy on a radical direction.

Unfortunately, the Buhari government is stuck to the old, worn-out but ruinous neo-colonial capitalist arrangement that has put Nigeria in its current mess. This is reflected in the 2016 budget that saw increased allocation to debt repayment and contract-based projects (that benefit the rich). As history has severally shown, economic dislocation for the majority is a potent factor in the germination of social crises including ethno-religious conflagration. It is thus not accidental that most of tens of thousands of Biafran supporters in the South-eastern Nigeria, who have participated in the major protests for separate Biafra, are young people, who have been made idle for years. Moreover, the bourgeois political class still utilizes the ethnic and regional card to win support. Jonathan got his biggest block votes from the South-east and South-south, playing the ethnic card, while Buhari’s major support came from the North-west and North-east, with religion partly playing a role.

In 2009, in an article in the wake of the massive crackdown on Muhammed Yussuf-led Boko Haram, we warned that, on the basis of the manner the group was suppressed, Nigeria might be sowing the seed of more dangerous ethno-religious crises. This was borne out just a year after when the Shekau-led Boko Haram emerged. It was the contention of the writer that the working class movement would have to step in and act decisively if terrorism is to be defeated. This position is still very relevant to the discourse on terrorism and ethno-religious crisis in Nigeria today. This is because there is no way we can talk about addressing the terrorism and ethno-religious divisions and crises without addressing the economic foundation and political configuration of Nigeria. Without the economy and the huge resources of the country being central and democratically owned by the mass of people themselves through public ownership, the few rich who are holding on to the nation’s patrimony will continue to utilize divisive tool of ethnicity and religious in order to access political power, which is the lever for economic control. Only when the working people, youth and the poor, through their organizations come to the arena of political struggle, not as spectators and passive participants but active members of the movement to change the political and economic landscape of the country, will Nigeria start to build a country free of poverty, want, misery and strife.

This essay is an edited version of the Preface to Kola Ibrahim’s latest book, Boko Haram in Nigeria: Historical and Political Economic Exploration, published in November, 2015. This book traces the rise of religious fundamentalism and ethno-religious crisis to the economic, political and neo-colonial background of Nigeria. The book also proffered a working class and socialist solutions to ending Boko haram menace. It is an important material for activists, trade unionists, students, researchers, academics, journalists and public intellectuals, searching for an alternative narrative on the rise of ethno-religious forces and tendencies in Nigeria.

Notes:

[1] Terrorism involves the use of force and violence to bring about enforcement of an ideology, ideal, philosophy and political change on people, community, group or nation. Therefore, terrorism can be carried out by individual, group, sects, tribe, a government or nation (against another nation). Religious terrorism involves the use of terror act, violence and fear to enforce religious doctrine and religious political change.

US policymakers have long conspired to broker what would be meant to appear as a historic deal with the political order in Tehran. It would be a deal almost unreasonably compromising for the United States, in order to enhance the illusion that the West sought every means to integrate Iran peacefully back into the “international community” before resorting to armed and direct military aggression.

Knowing that Iran will never exist within Washington, Wall Street, London, and Brussels’ “international order” as an obedient client state, a prescription for regime change in Tehran has long been formulated. Best summarized in the 2009 Brookings Institution paper titled, “The Path to Persia: Options for a New American Strategy toward Iran” (.pdf), this regime change formula includes absolutely everything from economic sanctions and US-backed political upheaval, to the use of terrorism and proxy war to undermine and overthrow Iranian sociopolitical stability and eventually the Iranian state itself.

In the lengthy 220 page document, Brookings policymakers acknowledge the necessity to first neutralize Syria before moving against Iran itself. It also prescribes the delisting of US State Department foreign terrorist organizations in order for the US to then arm and back them in a proxy war against Tehran. Among the terrorist organizations mentioned was Mojahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), a terrorist organization guilty of years of violence including the kidnapping and murder of American service members and American civilians. MEK has also continued carrying out terrorist attacks against political and civilian targets in Iran up to present day.

It should be noted that these 2009 “suggestions” eventually manifested themselves as the current, ongoing conflict in Syria and Iraq where US, Saudi, and Turkish-backed terrorists are waging war against Syrian, Iraqi, Iranian, and Russian backed political and military fronts, as well as the eventual delisting of MEK.

It is clear then, that the Brookings paper was more than a collection of mere suggestions. It was an anthology of various operations arrayed against Tehran either ongoing or in the planning stages as of 2009.

The only scenarios that have not yet been implemented were those dealing with full-scale war by the West against Tehran predicated on either a staged provocation, or a “superb offer” the Iranians “rejected” or failed to fulfill that justified direct Western – including Israeli – aggression.

Brookings’ “Superb Offer…” 

Brookings policymakers themselves openly admitted in “Which Path to Persia?” that (emphasis added):

...any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.

Considering that every other option in the Brookings paper has either been openly tried since 2009, or is in the process of being executed currently, it would be folly for readers to believe that this “superb offer” is not in reference to the “nuclear deal,” and that it is not somehow going to play out precisely as US policymakers have schemed for years.

For those that do doubt the “nuclear deal” is anything but a “superb offer” US policymakers fully plan to use against Tehran in the near to intermediate future, evidence that the West has no intention of accommodating Iran’s current political order or accept its growing geopolitical influence across the Middle Eastern and North African region (MENA), can be seen in neighboring Syria and amid the ongoing conflict still raging there. Skeptics can also consider the war in Yemen, and continued meddling by the US everywhere from North Africa to Central Asia – particularly in Afghanistan which lies along Iran’s eastern border.

Syria in particular has long been acknowledge to be a proxy war between the West and Iran, and to a greater extent, between the West and Russian-Chinese influence.

As early as 2007 – a full 4 years before the 2011 “Arab Spring” and the war in Syria would begin – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh in his New Yorker article titled, “”The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” would warn specifically (emphasis added):

To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.

Continued Western involvement in the Syrian conflict is a constant affirmation of the West’s true intentions of undermining and overthrowing Iran. Rapprochement is at best a clumsy, tired ploy being used to coax Iran entirely out from behind its existing strategy and its regional alliances, as well as to split Iranian society internally with promises of wealth and prosperity in the wake of this so-called “nuclear deal.”

Other nations have been lured out into the open with such promises – nations like Libya.

The Ghosts of Libyan Rapprochement 

It would be hoped that Iran understands that it is by no means “exceptional,” and that no matter how tempting the West’s “superb offer” may seem, that Tehran would prepare fully for betrayal, suddenly and completely, by those brokering it. This hope for Iranian caution would be based on the assumption that Tehran watched and understood the full process of Libya’s destruction.

Libya too was promised rapprochement with the West if only it abandoned its traditional alliances, released thousands of dangerous prisoners – members of terrorist organizations that would later be arrayed against Tripoli – and “cooperate” with the West in a variety of economic and military endeavors. With Libya lured out into the open, the West quickly armed and funded the very prisoners it convinced Tripoli to release, provided them with NATO aircover, and systematically destroyed the nation of Libya.
In the end, Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi was cornered with the help of French and American military assets, and brutally killed at roadside by militants who would later form the foundation of the so-called “Islamic State” (ISIS) in Libya. Today, Libya as a functioning nation-state no longer exists. After genocidal purges and continued internal war, the country is divided with two “governments” and hordes of armed groups existing in anarchy.

With the nation divided and destroyed, the US and its European allies are incrementally invading and occupying what is left, taking over oilfields with the intention of pilfering what is left of Libya’s once vast wealth and resources. Libya, as it exists today, will likely remain weak and subjugated by Western control for decades to come – not unlike Libya under European control (British, Italian, and French) before Libya achieved independence.

Iran too has followed a similar path – from being subjugated directly by Anglo-American interests or ruled by Western-controlled client states, to an independent nation besieged by its former colonial masters seeking to regain their lost holdings. Like Libya, Iran is being lured out into the open.

By lifting sanctions, Iranian hydrocarbons will flood international markets, further weakening Iran’s allies in Moscow and Beijing. When the time is right, the “nuclear deal” will be turned against Tehran, and without Moscow or Beijing in a position to aid Tehran, it will fall just as Libya did.

US policymakers have literally penned, signed, and dated documented conspiracies to use a “superb offer” as a means not of restoring ties with Iran, but of undermining and destroying it. US policymakers have demonstrably done precisely this to both Libya, and in many ways, to Syria. The US is to this day still arming, funding, and backing a terrorist army in neighboring Syria with the intention of destroying several of Iran’s most crucial allies – not only the government in Damascus, but also Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The US is still engaged in military operations along Iran’s eastern borders in Afghanistan.

In the game of geopolitics, Iran’s current predicament could not be any more obvious, nor any more dangerous. This is not the beginning of a new and hopeful chapter between Iranian and Western relations. It is but a shift in tactics and public perception that will bring with it a new array of challenges for Tehran and its allies to navigate.

Western backed terrorists surging in Syria and Iraq, form the very same dagger once aimed at Libya’s back. This “superb offer” by the US seeks to take down Iran’s guard so this dagger can be sunk fully into the Iranian state.

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

Ban exclusively serves Western interests, a loyal imperial servant throughout his tenure, taking no action against US-led NATO or Israeli high crimes.

Addressing Security Council members on Tuesday, his comments rang hollow – calling Israel’s settlement activities “provocative acts.”

Specifically, he addressed approved plans for 150 new housing units, saying “increas(ing) the growth of settler populations further heighten(s) tensions and undermine(s) prospects for a political road ahead.”

Israel’s settlement project has been ongoing for nearly half a century. Over 600,000 settlers live on stolen Palestinian land – in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Throughout Ban’s tenure as UN secretary-general, thousands of illegal housing units were built. He did nothing to oppose them – effectively endorsing Israel’s illegal project, ignoring Palestinians ethnically cleansed to permit it.

His Tuesday criticism was muted and meaningless – on the one hand, citing “Palestinian frustration under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process.”

On the other, accusing them of

“(s)tabbings, vehicle attacks and shootings…targeting Israeli civilians” – ignoring virtual daily Israeli extrajudicial executions, nearly 170 cold-blooded murders since October 1, including defenseless women and children, along with collectively punishing an entire population.

Twenty Israelis were killed, only six by stabbings. Vehicle attacks are rare. Shootings almost never happen, soldiers and militarized police alone using guns and other weapons as instruments of state terror against defenseless Palestinians.

During over nine years as UN secretary-general, Ban did nothing for Palestinian rights, nothing to demand Israeli accountability for high crimes, violating his sworn mandate to support fundamental human rights in all nations, according to inviolable international law.

Throughout his tenure, empty words substituted for meaningful action. Telling Security Council members “(t)he parties must act – and act now – to prevent the two-state solution from slipping away forever” ignored reality on the ground.

Israel’s settlement project prevents Palestinian self-determination. So does hardline rogue state policy. The only viable solution is one state for all its people. It’s too late for other options.

Years ago, two states were possible. No longer. Israel controls most of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including its resources and most valued land.

More is stolen daily, Palestinians increasingly ghettoized, isolated in bantustans. Sovereign viability under these conditions is pure fantasy.

Ban knows what he won’t admit. Netanyahu responded as expected, saying “(t)he secretary-general’s remarks provide a tailwind for terrorism.”

“There is no justification for terrorism. Those Palestinians who murder do not want to build a state. They want to destroy a state, and they say this openly.”

“They want to murder Jews for being Jews and they say this openly. They do not murder for peace, and they do not murder for human rights.”

“The United Nations long ago lost its neutrality and its moral force, and the secretary-general’s remarks do not improve its standing.”

Fact: Netanyahu is a world-class thug, an unindicted war criminal, heading Israel’s Arab-hating fascist regime.

Fact: Terrorism throughout the Occupied Territories is entirely state-sponsored, Palestinians wrongfully blamed for decades of Israeli high crimes.

Fact: Palestinians want peace, stability and respect for their fundamental rights. Netanyahu claiming they openly say they want to kill Jews is a bald-faced lie.

Fact: The UN never was a moral or neutral force. It’s a longstanding agent of US-led Western imperialism.

It’s complicit with Israel in blocking Gaza reconstruction, almost no rebuilding underway, large areas still in rubble, 18 months after Netanyahu’s 2014 premeditated war of aggression – 80% of the population dependent on international aid to survive.

On January 14, Press TV said the UN’s database, compiled under its Gaza Reconstruction Mechanism (GRM) containing personal information about potential aid recipients, provides Israel with targets for future attacks.

GRM violates Gazans’ “right to life,” according to Law Professor Nigel White. It breaches fundamental international law. It reinforces Israeli control over Gaza – holding 1.8 million Palestinians hostage to suffocating conditions, White stating:

“The UN, by becoming party to the GRM, is itself contributing to the maintenance of the blockade and, therefore, is committing as well as aiding and assisting violations of international law.”“If the UN persists in aiding and assisting the implementation of the GRM, it will be jointly  responsible (along with Israel) for the injuries and losses caused to the people of Gaza.”

The September 2014 UN- brokered GRM blocks its reconstruction – Ban Ki-moon complicit with Israel’s suffocating blockade, its war crimes, and efforts preventing Gazans from rebuilding.

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.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Real leftists should not support Bernie Sanders for the simple reason that he is not actually a socialist. When asked about socialism he is very quick and eager to point out that he is no Marxist, but rather a “democratic” socialist. It sounds less threatening, I suppose, to your average ignorant American raised on anti-communist propaganda to put the “democratic” qualifier in there; whatever the hell that means.

Besides making excuses for his cute, watered-down version of socialism, Bernie makes it clear that he does not deign to represent the interests of the working class. Almost without fail he frequently uses the terms “middle class,” “working people,” or “working families” instead.

Bernie is no internationalist, either. This is a key component of real socialism, by the way. Several times in the most recent Democratic debate he referred to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria as a “terrible dictator.” He has also been quick to badmouth President Vladimir Putin, condemning his “invasion” of Ukraine and initially (before later changing course as politicians are wont to do) criticizing Russia’s intervention in Syria, saying that “Mr. Putin is going to regret what he is doing.”

Sanders has stated that he is attempting to lead a “political revolution,” not a social revolution. He does not want to fundamentally reshape American society. He’s here to save the capitalist system from itself, kind of like FDR did back in the 30’s with the New Deal. In an audience before the DNC in August of last year he made it quite clear that he considered himself to be a Democrat through and through. In his comments he indicated that his campaign would be an effort to bring voters back into the Democratic Party fold who had become disillusioned and disgusted with it over the years. His twofold concern (which does not seem to include actually winning the presidency) can be summed up by these statements from his DNC talk:

“I think you’re looking at the candidate who can substantially increase voter turnout all across the country.”

“If the question is, ‘Can we defeat the Republicans?’ I think the answer is that, yes, we can.”

Some have reasoned that if, against all odds, Bernie is actually elected President, then he will very likely sell out or otherwise be ineffective. However, the theory goes, this will provide absolute proof to the yearning masses, through painful but necessary experience, that the system is hopelessly rigged against them. This is expected to spur them to action to move the revolution forward.

Flawed thinking like this only proves why historians are so helpful to society and especially to progressive social movements. The thing is, we’ve had this experience before. We don’t need to go through this trauma again.

The most recent and obvious example of how the system is rigged happened in the period of 2006 – 2010. In the 2006 congressional elections the Democrats promised that if they got control of Congress and the Senate that they would do all in their power to end the Iraq war. They did nothing. In 2008 Obama campaigned as the peace candidate who would put an end to the wars and close down Guantanamo. He did nothing of the sort.

For two years the Democrats had a large majority control in both houses of congress and they held the presidency. They had the power to do practically anything they wanted, maybe even make amendments to the constitution, but they did absolutely . . . nothing!

Let it be clearly understood that Bernie has always caucused with the Democrats, he is running as a Democrat, and he always has been, in essence, a Democrat. The Democratic Party is a key part of the political establishment and they will never, ever lead a revolt or even a significant reform movement against the status quo.

Comrades, do not be tempted to support Bernie Sanders in any way! Don’t vote for Bernie! In fact, I urge you not to vote at all!

Joseph Waters is a political activist. He operates the blog, Proletarian Center for Research, Education and Culture (Prole Center).

For a long time, as he campaigned for president, a wide spectrum of establishment media insisted that Bernie Sanders couldn’t win. Now they’re sounding the alarm that he might.

And, just in case you haven’t gotten the media message yet — Sanders is “angry,” kind of like Donald Trump.

Elite media often blur distinctions between right-wing populism and progressive populism — as though there’s not all that much difference between appealing to xenophobia and racism on the one hand and appealing for social justice and humanistic solidarity on the other.

Many journalists can’t resist lumping Trump and Sanders together as rabble-rousing outliers. But in the real world, the differences are vast.

Donald Trump is to Bernie Sanders as Archie Bunker is to Jon Stewart.

Among regular New York Times columnists, aversion to Bernie Sanders has become more pronounced in recent days at both ends of the newspaper’s ideological spectrum, such as it is. Republican Party aficionado David Brooks (whose idea of a good political time is Marco Rubio) has been freaking out in print, most recently with a Tuesday column headlined “Stay Sane America, Please!”

Brooks warned that his current nightmare for the nation is in triplicate — President Trump, President Cruz or President Sanders. For Brooks, all three contenders appear to be about equally awful; Trump is “one of the most loathed men in American public life,” while “America has never elected a candidate maximally extreme from the political center, the way Sanders and Cruz are.”

That “political center” of power sustains huge income inequality, perpetual war, scant action on climate change and reflexive support for the latest unhinged escalation of the nuclear arms race. In other words, what C. Wright Mills called “crackpot realism.”

Meanwhile, liberal Times columnist Paul Krugman (whose idea of a good political time is Hillary Clinton) keeps propounding a stand-on-head formula for social change — a kind of trickle-down theory of political power, in which “happy dreams” must yield to “hard thinking,” a euphemism for crackpot realism.

An excellent rejoinder has come from former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. “Krugman doesn’t get it,” Reich wrote. “I’ve been in and around Washington for almost fifty years, including a stint in the cabinet, and I’ve learned that real change happens only when a substantial share of the American public is mobilized, organized, energized, and determined to make it happen.”

And Reich added:

“Political ‘pragmatism’ may require accepting ‘half loaves’ — but the full loaf has to be large and bold enough in the first place to make the half loaf meaningful. That’s why the movement must aim high — toward a single-payer universal health, free public higher education, and busting up the biggest banks, for example.”

But for mainline media, exploring such substance is low priority, much lower than facile labeling and horseracing… and riffing on how Bernie Sanders sounds “angry.”

On “Morning Edition,” this week began with NPR political reporter Mara Liasson telling listeners that “Bernie Sanders’ angry tirades against Wall Street have found a receptive audience.” (Meanwhile, without anger or tirades, “Hillary Clinton often talks about the fears and insecurities of ordinary voters.”)

The momentum of the Sanders campaign will soon provoke a lot more corporate media attacks along the lines of a Chicago Tribune editorial that appeared in print on Monday. The newspaper editorialized that nomination of Trump, Cruz or Sanders “could be politically disastrous,” and it declared: “Wise heads in both parties are verging on panic.”

Such panic has just begun, among party elites and media elites. Eager to undermine Sanders, the Tribune editorial warned that as a “self-declared democratic socialist,” Sanders “brandishes a label that, a Gallup poll found, would automatically make him unacceptable to nearly half the public.”

A strong critique of such commentaries has come from the media watch group FAIR, where Jim Naureckas pointed out that “voters would not be asked to vote for ‘a socialist’ — they’d be asked to vote for Bernie Sanders. And while pollsters don’t include Sanders in general election matchups as often as they do Hillary Clinton, they have asked how the Vermont senator would do against various Republicans — and he generally does pretty well. In particular, against the candidate the Tribune says is ‘best positioned’ to ‘capture the broad, sensible center’ — Jeb Bush — Sanders leads in polls by an average of 3.0 percentage points, based on polling analysis by the website Real Clear Politics.”

In mass media, the conventional sensibilities of pundits like Brooks and Krugman, reporters like Liasson, and outlets like the Chicago Tribune routinely get the first and last words. Here, the last ones are from Naureckas:

“When pollsters match Sanders against the four top-polling Republican hopefuls, on average he does better than Clinton does against each of them — even though she, like Bush, is supposed to be ‘best positioned’ to ‘capture the broad, sensible center,’ according to the Tribune.

“Actually, the elements of Sanders’ platform that elite media are most likely to associate with ‘socialism’ — things like universal, publicly funded healthcare and eliminating tuition at public colleges — are quite popular with the public, and go a long way to explain his favorable poll numbers. But they are also the sort of proposals that make Sanders unacceptable to the nation’s wealthy elite — and to establishment media outlets.”

Norman Solomon is the author of “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” He is the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder of RootsAction.org.

El histórico fin de la era del dinero barato que operó la Fed (Reserva Federal de Estados Unidos) en forma unilateral mediante el alza de un cuarto de punto de las tasas de interés repercute con cataclísmicos daños colaterales e implicaciones geopolíticas profundas al restante del catatónico planeta, en particular a América Latina (AL).

The Haitian people’s furious resistance to yet another fraudulent presidential election has scuttled U.S. plans to replace “Sweet Mickey” Martelly with another flunky named the “Banana Man.” The aborted fraud is a reminder that Secretary of State Clinton was an imperial bully who rigged the previous presidential election in Haiti and stole the country blind, along with her accomplice and husband, Bill. Those chickens may yet come home to roost.

The island nation of Haiti is on the verge of finally ejecting the criminal President Michel “Sweet Mickey” Martelly, the dance hall performer and gangster who was foisted on the Haitian people by the United States through the bullying of then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, back in 2011. Martelly’s term is up, and he is constitutionally required to leave office by February 7. Martelly and his American, French and Canadian backers had hoped to use rigged elections and strong-arm tactics to install another puppet politician, Jovenel “The Banana Man” Moise, in the presidential palace. The “Banana Man” – who wants to turn Haiti into a real banana-exporting republic, to the further impoverishment of its small farmers – came in first in an October election that was so blatantly stolen, even the thoroughly corrupt Haitian elite could not endorse the outcome.

In fact, virtually no one in Haitian society except the “Banana Man” and “Sweet Mickey” and the tens thousands of Haitians who were paid to vote, repeatedly, at different polling places in October, considered the election to be valid. Jude Célestin, the candidate that came in second in the October electoral farce – and who was also cheated of victory by “Sweet Mickey” Martelly in the election five years ago – refused to go along with the travesty. Célestin said he would not take part in the bogus run-off election that was scheduled for this past Sunday – meaning, the “Banana Man” would have been the only candidate.

But, even the prospect of a one-man contest could not stop the Americans from insisting on going ahead with the run-off. The U.S., which pays for the Haitian elections and, therefore, believes it has the right to decide who wins and who loses, growled that Haiti should go along with the fraudulent process. The Americans were upset that they might have no reliable replacement for their loyal puppet, “Sweet Mickey.” Plus, the discrediting of the elections would also reflect very badly on presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who claims to have brought stability to Haiti when she was at the State Department but, in fact, is culpable for all of the Haitians who were murdered by the Martelly regime. The truth is that Hillary and Bill were the Bonnie and Clyde of Haiti, robbing the country for their own and other corporate criminals’ benefit. The teams of FBI agents that are now matching Hillary’s emails with contributions to the Clinton Foundation are tapping a Mother Lode of corruption that may yet bring her down before Election Day in the United States.

If that happens, the Haitian people will deserve some of the credit for saving the U.S. from another period of rule by the Crooked Clintons, in the process of saving Haiti’s sovereignty and self-respect. The Haitians’ furious grassroots resistance forced the cancellation of Sunday’s run-off election; “Sweet Mickey” is slated to leave office in less than two weeks; and negotiations are underway to form an interim government that would hold clean elections. The struggle now is for Haiti’s poor majority to make its voice heard above the growling of the U.S. imperialist occupiers and their hired Haitian flunkies – some of whom are real killers, whose names aren’t funny at all.

For Black Agenda Radio, I’m Glen Ford. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.com.

Stream the radio show here

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

Around 17,000 Syrians desperate to flee the violent civil war in their country are marooned in a remote and barren area in no-man’s land near a military base on the southern border with Jordan, in what a Jordanian official has described as a “de facto refugee camp.”

More than 4.5 million people have fled Syria, the vast majority to neighbouring countries, since the start of the proxy war led by the United States, its European and Gulf allies and Turkey to topple the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in 2011. The exodus intensified in the wake of US airstrikes that started in September 2014 and Russian air strikes that began at the end of September 2015, with more than one million having fled since September 2014.

The number now stranded on the border is growing as Syria’s civil war enters its fifth year and neighbouring countries are preventing Syrians from entering.

Lebanon, which according to its government hosts around 2 million refugees, has effectively sealed its borders by requiring Syrians to have an embassy appointment, a flight out of Beirut airport, or a guarantor—a citizen who takes responsibility for their residency—almost impossible conditions for the vast majority.

Turkey, which hosts around 1.8 million refugees, has tightened its entry requirements for those who arrive by air or sea. Earlier this month, some 400 Syrians were stranded at Beirut airport when cancelled flights to Istanbul meant they missed the chance to land before the new policy was enforced. They were forced to fly back to Syria.

Jordan has for the last two years strictly controlled the number of refugees coming into the kingdom, which has fallen from several thousand a day in 2012 to just 50-100 a day, and on some days, none at all, as the daily reports in the local newspapers show. Most of these are emergency cases.

While the government in Amman has justified this with concerns about “security,” it wants to limit the Syrian refugee population, particularly those of Palestinian origin, so as not tip the demographic balance further towards Jordan’s Palestinians and away from its pre-existing and largely indigenous Bedouin population.

Following Amman’s closure of the border, refugees began massing in the desert north of the border in makeshift tent cities at Rukban and Hadalat. In many cases, they had paid smugglers hundreds of dollars to drive them from the north of the country controlled by Islamist militias through government-held territory to the eastern desert in a journey that can take days with little food or water.

Aid workers and Jordanian officials say that this sudden rise in refugees is a consequence of Russia’s bombing of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS)-controlled areas in Homs, Palmyra and Raqqa, contradicting US claims that Russia is not targeting ISIS.

As the number of refugees on the border has grown, so has the need for supplies such as water, food, medicine, tents, medical aid and logistical support that the aid agencies are struggling to provide. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned in December that health conditions were deteriorating, with the emergence of diarrhoea, vomiting and acute malnutrition among children. According to aid officials cited by theFinancial Times, “tens” of Syrians—mostly the elderly or children—have died there. Many of the women are pregnant, and at least five babies have been delivered at the border, according to the Red Cross.

Jordan’s King Abdullah sought to justify the border closure in an interview with CNN earlier this month, saying, “Part of the problem is that they have come from the north of Syria, from Al Raqqa, Hasaka and Deir Ezzor, which is the heartland of where [Islamic State in Iraq and Syria] is. We know there are [ISIS] members inside those camps.”

European officials, determined to prevent any refugees reaching Europe, have pressed Jordan to open its borders. But a senior European diplomat added, “These people are not fleeing ISIS. They are seeking safety on Jordan’s border away from coalition bombing.” He added that the large group in Rukban came “from Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] areas and will not be let in.”

Jordan hosts about 1.4 million Syrian refugees, about 20 percent of its entire population. To put this into perspective, this is equivalent to nearly 64 million refugees in the US, which in contrast has allowed just 2,647 Syrian refugees to settle—just 0.06 percent of the 4.5 million who have fled the country since 2011.

The Syrian refugees follow the generations of Palestinians, Iraqis and more recently, Libyans, who have sought refuge in Jordan. According to a World Bank official, “one in every three persons [is] … a refugee” in Jordan, making Jordan the world’s second largest host of refugees per capita following Pakistan, and host to the fifth-largest refugee population in absolute terms.

According to the World Bank, there are 2.7 million registered refugees in Jordan, including 2.1 million Palestinians, although the UNHCR has only about 700,000 persons from 41 nationalities registered as refugees in Jordan.

Of the Syrian refugees, only about 600,000 have registered with the UNHCR, with some 120,000 living in refugee camps in Zaatari and Azraq. Zaatari has become Jordan’s fourth-largest “city” and the second-largest refugee camp in the world. Since July 2014, refugees have been unable to leave the camp without sponsorship from a Jordanian citizen and the payment of a fee, rendering them virtual prisoners.

The vast majority are living outside camps, with only 68 Jordanian dinars ($100, 87 euros) a month in support from the aid agencies. Forced to work illegally in the informal sector, they face the constant threat of being transferred to the refugee camps where only the poorest of the poor live or sent back to Syria.

Jordan estimates each Syrian refugee costs around US$280 per month. Jordan has a public debt to GDP ratio of 85 percent, growing unemployment officially running at about 15 percent (unofficially about 30 percent), rising living costs and an estimated budget deficit of 10 percent of GDP in 2016.

There has been a huge shortfall in the aid pledged at donor conferences, with only $272 million of the pledged $1.2 billion actually paid out. Last September, European Union leaders agreed a miserly $1.1 billion for Syrian refugees in the Middle East, in contrast to the $3 billion bribe to Turkey to ensure it stops the flow of refugees to Europe. In late 2015, Jordan appealed for $7.99 billion for its costs for 2016-18, having received barely a third of the $3 billion it estimates it needs this year to pay for the humanitarian costs of the Syrian crisis.

Last year, Washington announced it would increase annual aid to Jordan to $1 billion from $660 million, although it was unclear how much was of this was military support.

Most of the aid goes to United Nations agencies and the international NGOs that work in the camps, although the majority of the refugees are living in some of Jordan’s poorest municipalities. Local authorities that manage public services get little or no support, exacerbating already overstretched services such as education and healthcare, and infrastructure, particularly water and waste management, where the build-up of waste is highly visible. According to the US Agency for International Development, the total fiscal cost of the refugee crisis for municipal governments was around $25.4 million in 2013 and $33.0 million in 2014.

Schools are forced to operate two shifts, leading to an increase in the proportion of students attending double-shifted schools from 7.6 percent in 2009 to 13.4 percent in 2014. Nearly half of all schools in Amman and Irbid have classes of 40-50 pupils. Following the ending of free primary and secondary health care for registered Syrian refugees in November 2014, previously eradicated communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, polio and measles have re-emerged.

The US military plans to maintain a presence of thousands of US forces in Afghanistan for “decades,” unnamed senior US military officials told theWashington Post Tuesday.

“The US was supposed to leave Afghanistan by 2017. Now it might take decades,” unnamed US military leaders cited by the Post said.

The confirmation of long-term US troop deployments to Afghanistan has been prompted by the instability of the US-backed regime in Kabul, whose tenuous hold over the capital is threatened by insurgent forces including the Taliban, al Qaeda and ISIS, the US officials said.

Current Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is a US and NATO stooge imposed through a managed election geared to deflect popular hatred of the previous US- backed ruler, Hamid Karzai. Ghani was described by the US officials as a “willing and reliable partner” who can “provide bases to attack terror groups not just in Afghanistan, but also throughout South Asia for as long as the threat in the chronically unstable region persists.”

US officials added, “There’s a broad recognition in the Pentagon that building an effective Afghan Army and police force will take a generation’s commitment, including billions of dollars a year in outside funding.”

The US-NATO intervention in Afghanistan will also require “constant support from thousands of foreign advisers on the ground,” the officials said.

“We’ve learned that you can’t really leave,” an unnamed Pentagon official said. “You’re going to be there for a very long time.”

Unnamed Obama administration officials confirmed the White House’s support for the plans, saying that the US intervention is analogous to that in South Korea, where Washington has deployed tens of thousands of soldiers since the end of the Second World War to cement its domination over the Pacific Rim.

The Post report, which amounts to a de facto US government press release, comes amid a broader upsurge of escalatory moves by the US military in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Last week the Obama administration signed orders authorizing the US military to expand its military operations in northeast Afghanistan in the name of targeting the Islamic State. US Department of Defense chief Ashton Carter announced further deployments of US ground forces to Iraq, pledging to put “boots on the ground.” US Vice President Joseph Biden declared that Washington is prepared to seek a “military solution” in Syria.

On Friday, US General Joseph F. Dunford said that the US is on the verge of launching “decisive military action” in Libya, in coordination with a NATO coalition.

Dunford’s statements have signaled “the opening of a third front in the war against the Islamic State,” according to a New York Times editorial Tuesday. The new US war in Libya “could easily spread to other countries on the continent,” the Times admitted, before calling for the US Congress to pass a new authorization to use military force.

With the US and European powers engaged in a competitive scramble over the redivision of the world, the announcement that US forces will remain in Afghanistan for untold decades underscores the centrality of the Central Asian region in the strategic calculations of US imperialism.

The US ruling class and military establishment seek to utilize Afghanistan as a permanent military outpost for operations throughout South and Central Asia. Washington is determined to project power throughout the entire Eurasian landmass as part of its campaign to destabilize Russia and China and foster conditions more suitable to US control over the world’s decisive economic centers.

On Sunday, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent US think tank, noted, “Major geopolitical shifts and internal dynamics are setting the stage for possible increased great-power competition in Central Asia.” The Carnegie report calls for the US to “prioritize regional engagement with Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan” and “harness Russian and Chinese actions to advance US interests.”

The US military presence in Afghanistan is a key component in the global struggle against Moscow and Beijing, as US imperialism’s strategists openly state. As a result of increased involvement by Russia and China, “the region is becoming less hospitable to the projection of US power,” the Carnegie Endowment wrote.

Last April, the Obama administration released a plan, “An Enduring Vision for Central Asia,” laying out provisions to deepen US security and military ties to the region and build up “human rights” organizations.

US Secretary of State John Kerry followed up on the White House’s “vision” by visiting the region in November for talks with leaders of five Central Asian governments, establishing a new forum known as the C5+1 to streamline the collaboration of US-aligned forces in the region.

Central Asian states “have aided in the War on Terror and have the potential to serve as a bulwark to Russian and Chinese influence,” George Washington University’s International Affairs Review noted last week in a report, “Achieving America’s Vision for Central Asia.”

China’s energy-rich western province of Xinjiang has also increasingly become a focus for US imperialism’s network of State Department-backed NGOs. “Xinjiang Seethes Under Chinese Crackdown,” the New York Times warned at the beginning of January.

The Chinese ruling elite has sought to deepen its own involvement in Afghanistan, spurred on by the crisis of the US-backed regime. Beijing strives to insert itself into the US- and Pakistan-backed Afghanistan Peace Process, as part of its efforts to construct a Eurasian-wide economic and political alliance to counter efforts by the US to isolate the Chinese economy.

Afghanistan’s foreign ministry arrived in Beijing on Monday for week-long talks aimed at a political deal that would integrate sections of Afghanistan’s economic elite into the commercial and infrastructure network being developed by the Chinese government.

“A stable Afghanistan could become a critical transportation hub and market for Chinese goods, and another investment opportunity for President Xi Jinping’s grand economic plans for Central Asia,” the Times wrote in a report Sunday, “China Considers Larger Role in Afghanistan Peace Process.”

“The big backdrop is that the United States will have withdrawn most of its troops from Afghanistan with the antiterrorism mission unfinished,” Du Youkang of Shanghai’s South Asia Studies Center at Fudan University in Shanghai told the Times on Sunday. The Post report is a statement from the Obama administration and the military that, in fact, the US has no intention of withdrawing its forces.

Se presenta aquí un resumen de la conferencia ofrecida por Éric Toussaint en el Parlamento Europeo el 14 de enero de 2016, durante la reunión internacional organizada por el grupo parlamentario de la izquierda europea GUE/NGL. El tema general del encuentro tenía por título «El BCE: un gobierno no elegido de Europa» (véase el programa completo en http://www.guengl.eu/news/article/the-ecb-europes-unelected-government).

Éric Toussaint dio esta conferencia en el marco de un panel moderado por Dimitris Papadimoulis, eurodiputado de Syriza, en el que también intervinieron Marika Frangakis, miembro del secretariado político de Syriza y responsable de su departamento económico, y Pearse Doherty, portavoz para temas financieros del partido irlandés Sinn Fein. Durante esta jornada, consagrada al BCE, se realizaron otros paneles en los que intervinieron Gabi Zimmer, eurodiputada de Die Linke, presidente de la GUE/NGL, Fabio Di Masi eurodiputado de Die Linke, Miguel Urbán, eurodiputado de Podemos, Harald Schumann, quien realizó un excelente documental dedicado a la Troika (véase en: http://www.arte.tv/guide/fr/051622-000/puissante-et-incontrolee-la-troika ). El conjunto de intervenciones se puede ver en un vídeo disponible en: http://www.guengl.eu/news/article/the-ecb-europes-unelected-government

1.- Jean-Claude Trichet, presidente del BCE durante la preparación del memorando impuesto a Grecia en mayo de 2010, amenazó con reducir la liquidez que necesitaban los bancos griegos si Grecia pedía una reducción de su deuda.

Panagiotis Roumeliotis, representante de Grecia en el FMI entre marzo de 2010 y diciembre de 2011, antes de ser vicepresidente del Piraeus Bank, declaró durante la audición ante el Comité para la verdad sobre la deuda pública griega: «Mr. Trichet, en esa época presidente del BCE, estaba entre los que combatieron una reestructuración de la deuda, amenazando a Grecia con cortarle la liquidez. En realidad, ¡Mr. Trichet fanfarroneaba para salvar a los bancos franceses y alemanes!» Véase http://cadtm.org/Audition-de-Panagiotis-Roumeliotis

Lo que hizo el BCE en 2015 bajo la presidencia de Mario Draghi, constituye la concreción de la amenaza pronunciada por su predecesor Jean-Claude Trichet.

2.- El BCE participó en mayo de 2010 en la creación de la Troika. Ésta impuso unas medidas que violaron los derechos fundamentales de los ciudadanos y ciudadanas griegas. El informe del Comité para la verdad sobre la deuda griega recopiló una larga lista de medidas dictadas por la Troika (en la que el BCE tuvo y tiene todavía un papel clave) que tuvieron por efecto la violación de los derechos fundamentales.

Los préstamos acordados a Grecia en el marco del memorando sirven para proteger los intereses de los grandes bancos privados franceses, alemanes y griegos, a pesar de que fueron los responsables de la creación de una burbuja especulativa del crédito, que comenzó a explotar en 2009.

3.- En el marco del programa SMP (programa de compra de deuda soberana), el BCE compró en 2010-2011-2012 títulos griegos con un importante descuento.

Durante el periodo 2010-2012, el total de compras de títulos griegos a los bancos privados alcanzó los 55.000 millones de euros. A comienzos de 2016, el BCE todavía posee cerca de 20.000 millones de euros en títulos comprados durante ese periodo y que Grecia deberá reembolsar, normalmente, hasta el año 2018.

Al recomprar los títulos griegos en el mercado secundario, el BCE ayudó a los bancos franceses, alemanes y griegos, y otros bancos privados a deshacerse de esos títulos con el fin de evitar el recorte que se produciría en 2012. Además, la compra por el BCE de cantidades significativas de títulos en el mercado secundario tuvo por efecto aumentar el precio de esos instrumentos financieros. Eso permitió a los bancos franceses, alemanes y griegos reducir sus pérdidas en el momento de la reventa.

En 2012, el BCE rechazó participar en la reestructuración de la deuda, y en 2015 exigió el reembolso a precio facial, durante los meses de julio y agosto, de la suma de 6.700 millones de euros.

Entre 2011 y 2015, el BCE recibió intereses muy importantes debido a los títulos griegos (véase más adelante).

La manera en que el BCE, en el marco de la Troika, organizó la reestructuración de 2012 fue totalmente escandalosa y marcada por una evidente ilegitimidad.

Los grandes bancos franceses y alemanes se vieron librados de esa situación ya que habían sido advertidos de que se estaba preparando un recorte del valor de los títulos. Los bancos chipriotas que habían comprado una cantidad enorme de títulos griegos estuvieron directamente afectados por ese recorte. Pero, aún más grave, los fondos de pensiones griegos, los pequeños tenedores griegos de títulos de la deuda, los trabajadores de Olympic Airways fueron las víctimas directas de dicho recorte. El sistema griego de pensiones todavía no se ha recuperado. Los fondos buitre, por el contrario, fueron librados de esa reducción del valor de los títulos.

El BCE compró deuda griega pero impuso unas condiciones drásticas. En algunos momentos, cuando las autoridades griegas no cooperaron lo suficiente en la implementación de las medidas dictadas por la Troika, el BCE suspendió sus compras de títulos a modo de chantaje.

Los beneficios obtenidos por el BCE a costa del pueblo griego

Si bien el endeudamiento de Grecia con el BCE es de menor importancia que el de Italia o España, el BCE percibe de Grecia más intereses que de esos dos países. Para el año 2014, el gobierno griego pagó 298 millones de euros de intereses por los préstamos del BCE, monto que representa el 40 % de los 728 millones de euros de ingresos que el BCE percibió de cinco países involucrados en el SMP, aunque la deuda griega con el BCE represente solo el 12 % del total.

Deuda con el BCE de países involucrados en el SMP (febrero de 2015)

Las ganancias que obtendrá el BCE gracias a los títulos griegos se elevarán a más de 7.700 millones de euros de aquí a 2018, cuando los últimos títulos no reestructurados hayan sido reembolsados por Grecia. La posibilidad de restituir a Grecia los beneficios abusivos realizados por el BCE, se utilizó siempre como un medio de chantaje sobre Grecia. Durante los primeros seis meses del gobierno de Tsipras, el BCE rechazó la devolución a Grecia de las ganancias abusivas que había obtenido desde 2012. Después de la capitulación del gobierno griego del 13 de julio de 2015, los beneficios fueron en parte restituidos pero con la condición de que sirvan para pagar a los acreedores. Esas ganancias restituidas a Grecia no benefician para nada a la población griega. |1|

Aquí abajo se puede ver un extracto de un documento oficial de julio de 2015:

“Total SMP and ANFA profits until July 2018 amount to EUR 7.7 bn. 

If agreed by Member States, the SMP profits of 2014 and 2015

(totalling EUR 3.3 bn), although insufficient, could be used

in July to repay arrears to the IMF and other upcoming payments.

SMP profits of 2016, 2017 and 2018 could also be used for subsequent

programme financing. Over the July 2015-July 2018 period, Greece is expected to receive EUR 2.7 bn in SMP profits (excluding the 2014 and 2015 profits used for urgent debt payments) and EUR 1.7 bn in ANFA profits from the other Member States and the BoG, reducing financing needs accordingly.” Voir : http://ec.europa.eu/economy_finance/assistance_eu_ms/documents/2015-07-10_greece_art__13_eligibility_assessment_esm_en.pdf page. 10

El BCE y el fondo de estabilización financiera griego encargado de la recapitalización de los bancos griegos (Hellenic Financial Stability Fund –HFSF–)

Entre los miembros del Consejo General del Fondo de Estabilidad Financiera, |2| se encuentra Pierre Mariani |3| que es corresponsable del fracaso y del desastre financiero del banco Dexia. Ese banco franco-belga-luxemburgués tuvo que ser rescatado tres veces por las autoridades belgas, francesas y luxemburguesas. Las grandes pérdidas registradas por Dexia entre 2008 y 2012 no impidieron que el Sr. Mariani se hiciera votar unos substanciales aumentos en su remuneración. Sin embargo, el BCE no encontró nada mejor que designarlo como uno de los dirigentes del Fondo de Estabilidad Financiera a cargo de la recapitalización de los bancos griegos.

¿Es aceptable que se ponga en la dirección de un organismo encargado de gestionar la recapitalización de los bancos griegos a alguien que tuvo una gran responsabilidad en el desastre de un gran banco como Dexia? Este banco vendió miles de millones de euros en préstamos tóxicos a administraciones públicas francesas y su quiebra impactó fuertemente en las finanzas públicas de Bélgica, de Francia y de Luxemburgo. ¿Acaso es prudente continuar confiando en Pierre Mariani? Cuando Dexia fue rescatada por el Estado belga, Pierre Mariani tuvo que abandonar el banco debido a su calamitosa gestión, y, sin embargo, tuvo derecho a un dorado finiquito de un millón de euros. Durante el año 2012. Dexia le pagó 1,7 millones de euros. |4| Y ahora este señor está en Grecia para participar en el saneamiento de los bancos griegos.

Entre los otros miembros del Consejo General del Fondo se encuentra Wouter Devriendt. Este consejero de Bélgica en materia bancaria, desempeñó importantes funciones en dos bancos que tuvieron que ser rescatados de la quiebra en 2008: Fortis, auxiliado por el gobierno belga y revendido a BNP Paribas, y ABN-Amro, nacionalizado por el gobierno holandés. Wouter Devriendt figura, como Pierre Mariani, entre los responsables de la crisis bancaria en Europa.

No se puede concluir este punto sobre la composición del Consejo General del HFSF sin mencionar a Steven Franck, quien también desempeñó importantes funciones en el banco estadounidense Morgan Stanley, y luego en el BNP Paribas entre 2006 y 2009, en el periodo en el que este banco contribuía activamente a la creación de una burbuja especulativa del crédito privado en Grecia y se veía envuelto en el mercado de las subprime y de los productos estructurados en Estados Unidos. Hay que señalar que Steven Franck también trabajó para la presidencia de Estados Unidos en la Casa Blanca y que sirvió en la aviación de la marina de guerra de Estados Unidos.

Planteemos la cuestión: ¿Es normal que los intereses de los ciudadanos griegos y del país se confíen a personajes de este tipo? La composición del órgano de dirección encargado de la recapitalización de los bancos griegos acaso no ilustra perfectamente la naturaleza de la intervención del BCE y de la troika en general como son la defensa y la promoción de los intereses del gran capital y de las grandes potencias.

El chantaje permanente del BCE con respecto al gobierno de Tsipras en lo que concierne al acceso a la liquidez de los bancos griegos.

El BCE tiene la obligación de suministrar liquidez a los bancos de la zona euro. Durante las pruebas de estrés a la que los bancos debieron someterse en 2014, el BCE y las autoridades de control afirmaron que los bancos griegos eran suficientemente sólidos. Por consiguiente, el BCE debía actuar para suministrar liquidez al sistema bancario griego. Empero, durante los 6 primeros meses del gobierno Tsipras, el BCE realizó de forma constante declaraciones que desestabilizaron al gobierno griego y suscitaron las peores dudas sobre lo que iba a ocurrir con los depósitos bancarios. Eso catalizó gravemente la retirada de una parte significativa de depósitos (cerca de 40.000 millones de euros entre enero y julio de 2015). El BCE mantuvo abierto el grifo de la liquidez de urgencia, dejando entender que en cualquier momento lo podría cerrar. Lo que finalmente hizo a fines de junio de 2015, cuando el gobierno de Tsipras organizó un referéndum para el 5 de julio de 2015. En consecuencia, los bancos griegos estuvieron cerrados a partir del 28 de junio durante un periodo de tres semanas.

En el momento en que el BCE limitó la liquidez de urgencia, el gobierno pensó que los bancos podrían tener acceso a los 28.000 millones suplementarios de la liquidez de urgencia. El BCE claramente no cumplió con sus obligaciones tales como las previstas en los Tratados europeos. El bloqueo del sistema de pagos de Grecia constituye una violación clara de las disposiciones previstas en el artículo 127 del Tratado de Funcionamiento de la Unión Europea (TFUE).

Señalemos también que en la política de desestabilización del gobierno de Tsipras, el BCE rechazó la compra de títulos griegos en 2015. Sin embargo, desde enero de 2015, en el marco del Quantitative Easing, el BCE compró títulos de otros Estados de la zona euro por cerca de 60.000 millones de euros por mes. Ahora que el gobierno griego se ha sometido a un tercer memorando, el BCE piensa en comenzar a comprarle los títulos de deuda siempre y cuando el gobierno griego respete las imposiciones neoliberales que atacan de nuevo las pensiones, siguen con las privatizaciones, etc.

El BCE y el referéndum del 5 de julio de 2015

El BCE actuó para cerrar los bancos griegos a partir del 28 de junio.

El 29 de junio de 2015, Benoit Cœuré, miembro del directorio ejecutivo del BCE, en una entrevista en el diario Les Echos declaró que «una salida de la zona euro, hasta el presente totalmente teórica, no puede desgraciadamente ser excluida», agregando que se trata de una consecuencia de la decisión de Atenas de romper las negociaciones. Diciendo a continuación que si los griegos votaban “sí” en el referéndum, no habría ninguna duda en que las autoridades de la zona euro encontrarían una solución para Grecia. Por el contrario, si ganara el “no”, «el diálogo sería muy difícil». |5|

El 3 de julio de 2015, el vicepresidente del BCE, Vitor Constancio anunció que no podía confirmar que el BCE dispusiera de liquidez de urgencia (Emergency liquidity assistence – ELA–) para los bancos griegos en el caso de que los griegos votasen No el domingo siguiente. «Se tratará de una decisión del Consejo de gobernadores del BCE. Deberemos esperar y ver cómo el Consejo analiza la situación» dijo en una conferencia de prensa después de su participación en una conferencia destinada al sector financiero. |6|

El 14 de septiembre de 2015, en una entrevista ofrecida a la agencia Reuters, VitorConstancio respondió a la cuestión «¿Cuáles fueron las dudas que planteó el euro?» de la siguiente manera: «Solamente los mercados tuvieron dudas en cuanto a una eventual salida de Grecia de la zona euro, pero la mayoría de los Estados miembros nunca se lo planteó. Nosotros pensamos que el euro es irreversible. Ningún país puede legalmente ser objeto de una expulsión. Por lo tanto, esa perspectiva jamás fue una seria amenaza».

La situación de los bancos griegos

Diversas administraciones públicas se convirtieron en accionistas principales de los 4 principales bancos griegos desde 2010 por expreso pedido del BCE. Sin embargo, aunque no pueden ejercer realmente el poder ya que solo disponen de acciones preferenciales que no les otorgan el derecho de voto que, en cambio, permiten las acciones ordinarias.

La concentración bancaria aumentó. Los cuatro bancos principales absorbieron otros siete desde 2010. Una gran parte de los 45.000 millones de euros inyectados en los bancos griegos está repartida por el extranjero y sirvió a los accionistas privados de los bancos a aumentar su poder económico.

Un elemento clave de la mala salud de los bancos griegos reside en la cantidad de préstamos dudosos (Non Performing Loans – NPL–).

En diciembre de 2015, el BCE empujó al Eurogrupo a una operación financiera sobre los non performing loans, al favorecer, especialmente, una vez más el interés particular del sector privado. Por consiguiente, los fondos de inversiones podrán comprar una parte de los NPL y sacar un beneficio de ello. Una de las consecuencias de esta operación será la reducción de una parte del capital que poseen los gobiernos.

El Comité para la verdad sobre la deuda pública griega que había sido creado por la presidente del Parlamento griego en abril de 2015, y que fue disuelto por el nuevo presidente de dicho Parlamento en noviembre de 2015, prosigue sus trabajos teniendo en cuenta el nuevo contexto definido por el tercer memorando. Este Comité publicó un documentó sobre la situación de los bancos griegos haciendo un balance crítico de la manera en la que los bancos habían sido recapitalizados.

Tendremos la ocasión de presentar ese documento en el Parlamento Europeo el 1 de marzo de 2016.

Como conclusión, y por las razones que acabo de exponer, el Comité para la verdad sobre la deuda pública griega consideró, en su informe publicado en junio de 2015, que las deudas reclamadas a Grecia por el BCE deben ser consideradas ilegítimas, ilegales, odiosas e insostenibles.

Eric Toussaint

Véase http://cadtm.org/Informe-preliminar-del-Comite-de

http://www.auditamosgrecia.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/3MOU_v4.pdf

Autor

Eric Toussaint es maître de conférence en la Universidad de Lieja, es el portavoz de CADTM Internacional y es miembro del Consejo Científico de ATTAC Francia. Es autor de diversos libros, entre ellos: Procès d’un homme exemplaire, Ediciones Al Dante, Marsella, 2013; Una mirada al retrovisor: el neoliberalismo desde sus orígenes hasta la actualidad, Icaria, 2010; La Deuda o la Vida (escrito junto con Damien Millet) Icaria, Barcelona, 2011; La crisis global, El Viejo Topo, Barcelona, 2010; La bolsa o la vida: las finanzas contra los pueblos, Gakoa, 2002. Es coautor junto con Damien Millet del libro AAA, Audit, Annulation, Autre politique, Le Seuil, París, 2012. Este último libro ha recibido el premio Prix du livre politique, otorgado por la Feria del libro político de Lieja. Ultimo livro : Bancocracia Icaria Editorial, Barcelona 2015.

Es coordinador de las publicaciones Comisión de la Verdad Sobre la Deuda.

Equipos forenses españoles han iniciado el pasado 19 de enero la excavación de una fosa común en España, en busca de los restos mortales (ver nota de El País) solicitados por los familiares de Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá. En el año 1939, las fuerzas franquistas lo fusilaron aduciendo “auxilio a la rebelión” y lo enterraron con 22 cuerpos más. A una semana de iniciada la exhumación, los expertos han confirmado que la fosa común excavada es la de Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá (ver  nota  de ABC del 26 de enero del 2016).

Breve puesta en contexto

Esta exhumación se debe a una acción llevada ante la justicia de Argentina por los familiares de la víctima, debido a los obstáculos encontrados ante el aparato judicial español (Nota 1). En efecto, pese a incesantes reclamos de víctimas, familiares de víctimas, colectivos de abogados y ONG españolas, la falta de investigaciones y la impunidad campean en la materia (Nota 2). En noviembre del 2015, una asociación canaria de víctimas (denominada ACVF) presentó una denuncia con 1800 nombres, que se incorporará al expediente tramitado ante el Juzgado Nacional en lo Criminal y Correccional Federal número 1 de Buenos Aires, Argentina (ver  nota  de prensa).

Con relación a las víctimas del régimen franquista, en mayo del 2013, España suspendió una videoconferencia acordada por la justicia argentina desde Buenos Aires con varias de ellas en España, aduciendo que para realizar este tipo de diligencias, se debe aplicar “el tratado bilateral de extradición y asistencia judicial en materia penal de 3 de marzo de 1987, requiriendo, de acuerdo con lo previsto en los artículos 30 y 41, la solicitud debidamente cursada mediante comisión rogatoria dirigida al Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores, como Autoridad Central, tal y como ha sido el caso respecto a diligencias similares practicadas con anterioridad” (ver  nota  de El País). No se tiene seguridad que las “diligencias similares practicadas con anterioridad” refirieran a recabar los testimonios de víctimas del franquismo ante un juez argentino.

En donde en cambio hay una gran certeza es con relación a las exhumaciones de las fosas comunes españolas: la primera exhumación de una víctima de la guerra civil en España fue realizada directamente por familiares, sin intervención judicial alguna (ni de ninguna autoridad estatal) en octubre del año 2000. Los restos encontrados de Emilio Silva Faba, fusilado en 1936, fueron confirmados por análisis de ADN de laboratorios en el 2003 (ver  nota  de El País del 2003). En aquel momento, el nieto de esta víctima del franquismo, quién fundó posteriormente la Asociación por la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH), señaló: “Sólo se cierra un ciclo personal, se abre el colectivo“.

Desde su creación,  la ARMH (ver  sitio ) ha establecido una importante red en el territorio español para recabar información y para proporcionar ayuda a los familiares de víctimas de la guerra civil y del franquismo. Se lee en su sitio que: “A raíz de fuerte repercusión mediática que tuvo la exhumación en Priaranza del Bierzo (León), cientos de cartas, llamadas y correos electrónicos llegaron a los responsables de los trabajos. En ese punto y dado el volumen de casos de asesinatos extrajudiciales y desapariciones llegados desde todo el país y siempre con el mismo patrón: secuestro-asesinato-desaparición. Se decide crear por primera vez en España una Asociación civil que canalice todos esos casos y que intente dar respuesta a unas preguntas que el estado español nunca ha dado”.

Esta primera exhumación en el año 2000 de una víctima fusilada en 1936 durante la guerra civil española se dio durante el segundo período del Gobierno de José María Aznar en España: a diferencia del primer período (1996-2000), para el segundo período (2000-2004), Aznar contó con una mayoría en las elecciones de marzo del 2000. Difícilmente el Estado español acompañaría con algún tipo de reforma legislativa o con algún cambio de actitud por parte de sus autoridades, el clamor de las víctimas del franquismo. En el 2002, la precitada ARMH exigió al jefe del Ejecutivo español una declaración política de condena del franquismo y de ayuda para los familiares de las víctimas (ver  nota  de prensa de noviembre del 2002), sin mayor éxito. Años después, se oiría de este personaje de la política española que: “Tenemos que recuperar un espíritu de concordia y unidad perdido en gran medida (…) nacido en la transición española. Que eso no se hace removiendo tumbas ni removiendo huesos ni tirándose a la cabeza, se hace trabajando todos los días seriamente, pensando en el futuro del país” (ver nota de prensa sobre declaraciones recientes particularmente duras de alcaldes en España sobre las víctimas del franquismo, y video en Youtube que recoge las cuestionables declaraciones del susodicho personaje).

Familiares y abogados persistentes

Ante el hermetismo de las entidades públicas españolas, la perseverancia y la insistencia de los descendientes de Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá llevaron a sus abogados a interponer una demanda en Argentina en el 2010. La jueza argentina María Servini de Cubría obtuvo de las autoridades judiciales de España, en aplicación del principio de jurisdicción universal, que sea exhumada esta fosa común ubicada en Guadalajara, ubicada a unos 50 kilómetros de Madrid.

La solicitud hecha en el 2014 por la jueza desde Argentina precisaba (ver  nota ) que: “Líbrese exhorto diplomático al Titular del Juzgado Territorial, que por razones de turno corresponda, con jurisdicción en Guadalajara (…) a fin de solicitarle arbitre los medios necesarios para que en presencia de quien suscribe se proceda a la exhumación del cuerpo sin vida que se encontraría inhumado en la fosa n° 2, ubicada en el patio n° 4 del cementerio de Guadalajara, ocupando el penúltimo lugar, comenzando de arriba hacia abajo, o segundo lugar de abajo hacia arriba, de diecisiete cuerpos que se hallarían apilados en forma vertical“. Se indica en este  sitio  sobre la memoria histórica en Guadalajara que el ayuntamiento español respondió al juez español a cargo de tramitar la solicitud argentina que: “El informe, fechado el 27 de junio de 2014 y remitido al Juzgado de Instrucción Número 1 de Guadalajara, explica que la fosa en la que fue enterrado Timoteo es una fosa común cuyo primer enterramiento data del 16 de noviembre de 1939 y el último el 9 de septiembre del mismo año. En la fosa se enterraron, según consta en el informe, 22 o 23 personas ejecutadas por el Juzgado Especial de Ejecuciones, según los distintos registros“. El documento elaborado por el ayuntamiento de Guadalajara y sus diversos anexos están disponibles en esta  nota .

Pese a la información muy detallada proveída por el ayuntamiento, la primera respuesta de la justicia española a la petición proveniente de Argentina fue negativa: en su escrito de enero del 2015, se alegó por parte de la jueza española incertidumbre sobre la localización exacta del cuerpo para ordenar una exhumación. Según se lee en esta nota de prensa, para la jueza española María Lourdes Platero “de la inspección ocular realizada y de las manifestaciones efectuadas no queda acreditado fehacientemente que en la fosa nº2 del patio 4 del Cementerio de Guadalajara se encuentre el cuerpo sin vida de D. Timoteo Mendieta”.

Una segunda solicitud enviada desde Argentina en marzo del 2015 logró finalmente que se procediera a la exhumación, iniciada en esta tercera semana del mes de enero del 2016. Resulta oportuno precisar que esta exhumación ha contado con una inédita presencia de autoridades españolas esta vez: “En el cementerio de Guadalajara se hicieron presentes hoy un juez y un fiscal, algo poco habitual” se lee esta  nota  periodística de Telam (Argentina).

Algunas consecuencias de principios adoptados en el plano internacional

En España, se estima a unos 150.000 los desaparecidos durante la guerra civil española. En la precitada  nota  de El País del año 2003, “Priaranza se convirtió en el primer pueblo de España donde, tras la recuperación de la democracia, se abría la tierra para sacar a los muertos republicanos de las cunetas y llevarlos a los cementerios”.

Según el mapa oficial de fosas comunes elaborado después de la adopción de la ley sobre la memoria histórica en el 2007, existen más de 2000 fosas comunes en el territorio español (ver mapa). En el año 2011, se adoptó un “Protocolo de actuación en exhumaciones de víctimas de la guerra civil y la dictadura” (ver  texto  publicado en el Boletín Oficial del Estado del 27 de septiembre del 2011). A enero del 2012, se lee que las exhumaciones de 278 fosas comunes en busca de víctimas de la guerra civil española entre  el 2000 y el 2011 se habían realizado directamente por parte de familiares y organizaciones civiles, sin intervención judicial de ningún tipo (Nota 3).

Cabe recordar que la ley del 2007 se aprobó en España a pocos años de la resolución  60/147  sobre “Principios y directrices básicos sobre el derecho de las víctimas de violaciones manifiestas de las normas internacionales de derechos humanos y de violaciones graves del derecho internacional humanitario a interponer recursos y obtener reparaciones” (adoptada en diciembre del 2005 por la Asamblea General de Naciones Unidas,  ver  texto ). En el 2006, se adoptó además un instrumento vinculante: la Convención Internacional para la protección de todas las personas contra las desapariciones forzadas (aprobada por la Asamblea General en su resolución 61/177, de 20 de diciembre de 2006). Este instrumento internacional, que cuenta en la actualidad con un centenar de firmas y solo unas 50 ratificaciones, fue suscrito por España en septiembre del 2007 y ratificado en septiembre del 2009 (ver  estado oficial  de firmas y ratificaciones).

De la misma manera, el Protocolo antes mencionado sobre exhumaciones en España se dio a pocos años de la adopción de la resolución 12/12 aprobada en el 2009 por el Consejo de Derechos Humanos sobre el derecho a la verdad (ver  texto ): esta resolución encuentra su origen en una resolución adoptada por la Comisión de Derechos Humanos (Resolución 2005/66 “El derecho a la verdad”) adoptada en abril de 2005 en Ginebra, a iniciativa de Argentina.

Notemos que estos esfuerzos del Estado español fueron precedidos por iniciativas en algunas comunidades autónomas: por ejemplo,  Cataluña adoptó en junio del 2009  la  Ley 10/2009 “sobre la localización e identificación de las personas desaparecidas durante la Guerra Civil y la dictadura franquista, y la dignificación de las fosas comunes” (ver  texto ). En septiembre del 2009, fue la Junta de Andalucía la que adoptó la “Orden de 7 de septiembre de 2009, por la que se aprueba el Protocolo Andaluz de actuación en exhumaciones de víctimas de la Guerra Civil y la Posguerra” (ver  texto ). En septiembre del 2011, pocos días antes de que España adoptara un Protocolo, el País Vasco adoptó un “Protocolo de Actuación en materia de Exhumaciones en el País Vasco” (ver  nota  de prensa y texto del Protocolo en el Anexo I (pp. 22-28) de este  documento  oficial del Gobierno Vasco titulado “Plan Vasco 2015-20 de investigación y localización de fosas para la búsqueda e identificación de personas desaparecidas durante la Guerra Civil”).

La situación de las víctimas y sus familiares ante la justicia en España

Si bien existen algunos tímidos avances en materia legislativa en España (como la ley del 2007 y el protocolo del 2011), y regulaciones adoptadas por varias comunidades autónomas, la justicia en España se ha mostrado extremadamente reservada con relación a investigar y a sancionar a los crímenes perpetrados durante la guerra civil española. Las interpretaciones restrictivas sobre el alcance de las cláusulas de los instrumentos internacionales aplicables a la materia han impedido que una simple solicitud de acceder a restos mortales por parte de familiares reciba algún tipo de respuesta.

En esta  nota  de prensa se puede leer la percepción que tiene de la justicia española la hija de Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá, Ascensión Mendieta Ibarra, y que posiblemente comparten muchos familiares de víctimas españolas: “En España no ha habido justicia para las víctimas ni solidaridad, lo ha impedido la tan cacareada ley de amnistía, que en realidad a quien amnistió fue a los personajes que participaron en las atrocidades que se cometieron contra los ciudadanos de este país” /…/, y añade que las víctimas de la dictadura no tienen “un estatuto jurídico como sí otras víctimas, por ejemplo las del terrorismo, que me alegro mucho por ellas, pero hemos viajado muy solitos“.

En una  entrevista  del 2013, el juez que se puede considerar como el más conocido fuera de las fronteras españolas, Baltasar Garzón Real, declaró: “Me da mucha pena que tenga que ser en Argentina donde se investiguen estos crímenes porque España en su día paralizó el proceso, cuando me suspendió y con el auto posterior del Tribunal Supremo que cerraba todas las vías para las víctimas“.

El examen reciente ante Naciones Unidas

Ante el Comité sobre Desapariciones Forzadas de las Naciones Unidas (establecido mediante la precitada Convención Internacional para la protección de todas las personas contra las desapariciones forzadas), una coalición de ONG españolas detalló en años recientes (ver  nota ) el panorama actual en España: “Los datos son elocuentes: más de 150.000 desaparecidos, más de 30.000 niños robados, al día de hoy, y más de 2.232 fosas documentadas de las que sólo 390 han sido abiertas. Un dato que convierte a España en el segundo país en el mundo en número de fosas comunes. Y todo ello sin ningún procedimiento judicial abierto en demanda de verdad, justicia y reparación, y no por falta de voluntad de afectados, sean familiares o ciudadanos interesados en ello”.

En sus observaciones al informe oficial presentado por España al Comité de Naciones Unidas sobre Desapariciones Forzadas en diciembre del 2012, la fundación Baltasar Garzón hizo ver el error interpretativo de las autoridades españolas, al indicar que: “A este respecto, debe ponerse de manifiesto que España incurre en un grave error de interpretación cuando afirma que la fecha a partir de la cual debe informar al Comité, es la de entrada en vigor de la norma, es decir, el 23 de diciembre de 2010. El Estado español realiza una interpretación en detrimento de las decenas de miles de víctimas de desapariciones forzadas cometidas durante la guerra civil y el franquismo, en nuestro país. La interpretación que aporta, quebranta clamorosamente el principio internacional consolidado de no impunidad de este crimen, máxime cuando ha sido cometido en forma sistemática y contra sectores de la población civil y como parte de la política del Estado (crímenes contra la humanidad)” (ver   informe  de la Fundación Baltasar Garzón, p. 2).

En sus observaciones al informe presentado por España (ver  informe CED/C/ESP/CO/1, dado a conocer en diciembre del 2013), el Comité sobre Desapariciones Forzadas de Naciones Unidas le señaló a España que: “12. El Comité, teniendo en consideración el régimen de prescripción vigente en España en relación con los delitos de carácter permanente, insta al Estado parte a que vele por que los plazos de prescripción se cuenten efectivamente a partir del momento en que cesa la desaparición forzada, es decir, desde que la persona aparece con vida, se encuentran sus restos o se restituye su identidad. Asimismo, lo exhorta a que asegure que todas las desapariciones forzadas sean investigadas de manera exhaustiva e imparcial, independientemente del tiempo transcurrido desde el inicio de las mismas y aun cuando no se haya presentado ninguna denuncia formal; que se adopten las medidas necesarias, legislativas o judiciales, con miras a superar los obstáculos jurídicos de orden interno que puedan impedir tales investigaciones, en particular la interpretación que se ha dado a la ley de amnistía”.

En noviembre del 2013, los integrantes de otro mecanismo de Naciones Unidas, el Grupo de Trabajo sobre las Desapariciones Forzadas o Involuntarias, luego de realizar una misión a España (ver  informe ) concluyeron, entre otros,  que: “Adicionalmente, no se ha tenido en cuenta que el carácter de delito de lesa humanidad de las desapariciones cometidas durante la Guerra Civil y la dictadura. Esta interpretación es contraria a las obligaciones internacionales de España y se recomienda su modificación. El Grupo de Trabajo insta al Estado español a juzgar las desapariciones forzadas a la luz de estas obligaciones internacionales y a establecer legislativamente la imprescriptibilidad de las desapariciones forzadas o la determinación de que la prescripción solo puede comenzar a computarse a partir del cese de la desaparición forzada”.

En otro informe sobre España del año 2014, (ver documento A/HRC/27/3/Add.1, disponible  aquí ), el Relator Especial de Naciones Unidas sobre la promoción de la verdad, la justicia, la reparación y las garantías de no repetición, consideró en sus conclusiones (punto 102) que: “El Relator Especial nota que varios representantes del Gobierno en las reuniones que mantuvieron enmarcaron las discusiones en el siguiente esquema: “o todos concluimos que ya estamos totalmente reconciliados o la única alternativa es el resurgir de odios subyacentes, lo cual implicaría un riesgo demasiado alto”. En opinión del Relator Especial, esta posición no le hace justicia a los avances logrados durante el proceso de democratización en España. Recalca que, considerando la fortaleza de las instituciones y la ausencia de riesgos para la estabilidad del orden democrático, resulta especialmente sorprendente observar que no se haya hecho más en favor de los derechos de tantas víctimas”. En el párrafo 99 de su informe, se precisa por parte del experto de Naciones Unidas que: “El Relator Especial alienta al Estado a retomar cuanto antes este análisis y reitera su disposición para acompañar este proceso en el marco de su mandato. Recalca que estudios comparados de otras experiencias de países que han enfrentado retos similares, incluyendo en el contexto europeo, como Alemania, pueden resultar sumamente provechosos”.

En marzo del 2015, a raíz de una decisión de España de no extraditar a 17 ciudadanos españoles acusados por la justicia argentina de ser responsables de violaciones de los derechos humanos cometidas durante el régimen franquista, un grupo de expertos de Naciones Unidas denunció nuevamente a España. Externaron, en una carta pública, que las autoridades españolas tienen la obligación de extraditar a estas personas, mientras no se tomen medidas en España para garantizar el acceso a la justicia y el derecho a la verdad de las víctimas ante las instancias legales españolas. En este  comunicado de prensa  de Naciones Unidas, se precisa, por parte de los expertos internacionales que: “La denegación de la extradición deja en profundo desamparo a las víctimas y a sus familiares, negando su derecho a la justicia y a la verdad”.

Un breve balance

Como se puede apreciar, son muchos y muy variados los señalamientos hechos al Estado español por parte de organismos de la sociedad civil y asociaciones de familiares de víctimas en España; en el 2008, a raíz de una maniobra de la justicia para inhibirse de conocer la causa de las víctimas del franquismo planteadas ante los juzgados españoles, Amnistía Internacional circuló un  comunicado  denominado “Para pasar página, primero hay que leerla“, reuniendo la firmas de diversos  especialistas y juristas españoles y de América Latina. En el  texto  se puede leer que “España tiene el deber  de poner fin a la prolongada injusticia de la que han sido objeto las víctimas de desaparición forzada y otros crímenes y sus familiares, llevando a cabo las investigaciones  necesarias para dar con el paradero de los restos de estas personas, y esclarecer las circunstancias en que tan graves abusos se produjeron”. También los firmantes expresaron sin ninguna contemplación para el Estado español que: “Los que suscriben el presente manifiesto ya observaron, con motivo de la aprobación de la Ley 52/2007, por la que se reconocen y amplían derechos y se establecen medidas a favor de quienes padecieron persecución o violencia durante la guerra civil y la dictadura, que en ella no quedaban plasmados los estándares internacionales fijados en materia de desapariciones, exhumaciones y recuperación de cuerpos. No existe antecedente alguno en que un Estado haya trasladado a las familias de las víctimas las tareas, costos y responsabilidades de dichas acciones”.

Como lo hemos brevemente reseñado, en los últimos años, los señalamientos sobre los incumplimientos por parte de España han también provenido de expertos y de entidades de Naciones Unidas internacionales encargadas de velar por el debido cumplimiento de las obligaciones contraídas por el Estado español.

A diferencia de los procesos realizados en América Latina sobre graves violaciones de los derechos humanos ocurridas en el pasado, que han dado lugar a una variada experiencia en el plano nacional y a una extensa jurisprudencia elaborada por la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos (desde sus primeros fallos contra Honduras en los años 80) (Nota 4), el Estado español se ha mostrado extremadamente reacio a replicar algunas de estas experiencias. Para las víctimas y sus familiares, el sistema judicial español no tiene cómo implementar y desarrollar figuras jurídicas tales como el derecho a la verdad, la obligación de investigar y de sancionar a responsables de cometer graves violaciones ocurridas en el pasado, o garantizar a los familiares de las víctimas el denominado derecho al duelo o derecho al luto (Nota 5).

En este  artículo  de Página12 (Argentina) sobre el caso de Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá, las lágrimas que brotaron en los ojos de Ascensión Mendieta Ibarra, al momento de ser informada del “sí”, dado en el 2015 por la justicia española para proceder a la exhumación de los restos de su padre, ilustran el dolor lacerante de muchas familias en España: “–¿Por qué llorás? –preguntó la abogada argentina. –Lloro porque pienso en él; toda la vida bajo tierra –respondió. En opinión de la letrada, esa expresión revela el sufrimiento del familiar de un desaparecido, al que no ha visto morir ni sabe dónde está. “Para el familiar, el desaparecido no está muerto hasta que ve sus restos”.

Ante esta permanente y apremiante incertidumbre con la que convive diariamente un familiar en estos casos, y ante la ausencia de respuestas a las solicitudes de exhumar las fosas comunes españolas, el tiempo ha transcurrido sin que la justicia española logre superar las resistencias que se mantienen desde su interior. Desde el 2010, (ver  nota  de El País) se advirtió que los “tiempos” del único juez español interesado en investigar los crímenes del franquismo estaban siendo “manejados” por el Tribunal Supremo, lo cual culminó con la separación del juez Baltasar Garzón Real de la judicatura española el 10 de febrero del 2012 ( ver sobre el particular esta  nota  de El País). Menos sutil, el rechazo (sin mayor sustento) a la primera solicitud de la jueza argentina del 2014 evidencia el profundo temor del aparato judicial español.

Más allá del plano estrictamente jurídico, la sociedad española sigue manteniendo una histórica deuda consigo misma y con todas las víctimas del franquismo que exigen que se haga justicia. Sobre las razones dadas para aplazar una y otra vez el debate en España sobre este delicado tema, una reciente publicación del Centro de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad de Deusto, explica sobre este punto preciso que: «[d]urante la guerra civil y la dictadura, no era el momento para que los familiares de desaparecidos reclamaran saber dónde estaban ni tampoco justicia, pues su seguridad e integridad estaba en peligro. Durante el proceso de transición de la dictadura a la democracia, tampoco fue el momento de tratar y solucionar el problema de los desaparecidos. Han pasado casi treinta años desde la transición, y ya es hora de que estos familiares, como víctimas también de violaciones de derechos humanos, tengan “su” momento» (Nota 6).

Esta misma publicación termina con una frase poco halagadora para las víctimas españolas y para sus familiares: “A fecha de hoy ya han pasado más de esos treinta años, y en lo que respecta a la inmensa mayoría de los tribunales de justicia en España, todo indica que «su momento» ni ha llegado aún, ni probablemente llegará”. Era sin contar con la perseverancia de la familia Mendieta.

Conclusión

La exhumación del cuerpo de Timoteo Mendieta Alcalá permitirá a sus familiares, en particular a su hija Ascensión, una incansable mujer de 90 años, acceder a sus restos mortales: desde sus 13 años, edad que tenía cuando su padre fue fusilado, anhelo toda su vida ese momento. Se lee en esta nota de prensa del pasado 21 de enero que: “A mi padre lo enterraron de los primeros, debe estar al final de todo… Ahora lo voy a tener conmigo. Me voy tranquila, feliz”.

La tenacidad de Doña Ascensión viene ahora a interpelar ante los ojos de España y del mundo el sistema judicial español y ponerlo a prueba. Esta exhumación bien podría convertirse en un emblemático precedente para muchas otras víctimas de la guerra civil española y para sus familiares. También podría contribuir a relanzar el debate en el seno de la sociedad española sobre la pesada deuda que mantiene con su pasado.

Nicolás Boeglin

Notas

Nota 1: Remitimos al lector al artículo siguiente: LÓPEZ LÓPEZ P., “Los crímenes del franquismo y el derecho internacional”, Vol. 20, Revista Derecho y Realidad (2013), pp. 279-318. Artículo disponible  aquí .

Nota 2: Véase la obra siguiente sobre el particular: CABRERA MARTÍN M., La impunidad de los crímenes cometidos durante el franquismo. Obligaciones del Estado español bajo el derecho internacional, Asociación Española para el Derecho Internacional de los Derechos Humanos (AEDIDH), 2014. Texto integral de esta obra disponible  aquí .

Nota 3: En un artículo publicado en España en el año 2012 se lee que:”… es bien sabido que las exhumaciones de la Guerra Civil en España no están siendo realizadas bajo la tutela judicial a excepción de algunos casos puntuales que han sido investigados desde los respectivos juzgados de instrucción…”: véase ETXEBERRIA GABILONDO F., “Exhumaciones contemporáneas en España: las fosas comunes de la guerra civil”, Número 18,  Boletín Galego de Medicina Legal e Forense (enero 2012), pp. 13-28, p. 19. Artículo disponible  aquí . Los gráficos incluidos (pp.14-15) por el autor permiten tener una idea del número de individuos encontrados y la repartición geográfica de los trabajos de exhumación en España realizados entre el 2000 y el 2011.

Nota 4: Con relación a los Estados del hemisferio americano pesan estas y muchas más obligaciones, tal y como lo señaló la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos en un  informe  del 2014 titulado “Derecho a la verdad en América” (sus conclusiones en páginas 115-117 precisan los desafíos existentes en la región en cuanto a su debida implementación). En un reciente artículo en el que se analiza el caso de las negociaciones de paz en Colombia, se concluye por parte del autor que: “El caso colombiano es ilustrativo de la posición prudente que asume la Corte Interamericana frente a contextos de justicia transicional. Sin embargo, es en el marco de ese caso particular donde serán desarrollados los futuros debates sobre la compatibilidad de las medidas y mecanismos implementados para la terminación negociada de un conflicto armado interno con las obligaciones estatales emanadas del derecho internacional”: véase GUTIÉRREZ RAMÍREZ L.M., “La obligación internacional de investigar, juzgar y sancionar graves violaciones a los derechos humanos en contextos de justicia transicional”, Vol. 16, Estudios Socio-Jurídicos (2014), pp.23-60, en  pp.53-54. Artículo disponible aquí.

Nota 5: En un caso contra Bolivia (caso de detención, tortura y desaparición forzada de José Carlos Trujillo Oroza),  la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos indicó en el 2002 en su sentencia sobre reparaciones que: “115. En este sentido la Corte considera que la entrega de los restos mortales en casos de detenidos-desaparecidos es un acto de justicia y reparación en sí mismo. Es un acto de justicia saber el paradero del desaparecido, y es una forma de reparación porque permite dignificar a las víctimas, ya que los restos mortales de una persona merecen ser tratados con respeto para con sus deudos y con el fin de que éstos puedan darle una adecuada sepultura” (ver  texto  de la sentencia del 27 de febrero del 2002, Caso Trujillo Oroza Vs. Bolivia).

Nota 6: Véase CHINCHÓN ÁLVAREZ J., El tratamiento judicial de los crímenes de la Guerra Civil y el franquismo en España. Una visión de conjunto desde el Derecho internacional, Universidad de Deusto, Bilbao, Número 67, Cuadernos Deusto de Derechos Humanos (2012), p. 142.  Texto integral disponible aquí.

Nicolás Boeglin : Profesor de Derecho Internacional Público, Facultad de Derecho, Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR)

Nome in codice «Timber Sycamore»: così si chiama l’operazione di armamento e addestramento dei «ribelli» in Siria, «autorizzata segretamente dal presidente Obama nel 2013»: lo documenta una inchiesta pubblicata domenica dal «New York Times». Quando è stata incaricata dal presidente di effettuare questa operazione coperta, «la Cia sapeva già di avere un partner disposto a finanziarla: l’Arabia Saudita».

Insieme al Qatar, «essa ha fornito, armi e diversi miliardi di dollari, mentre la Cia ha diretto l’addestramento dei ribelli».

La fornitura di armi ai «ribelli», compresi «gruppi radicali come Al Qaeda», era iniziata nell’estate 2012 quando, attraverso una rete predisposta dalla Cia, agenti segreti sauditi avevano comprato in Croazia e nell’Europa orientale migliaia di fucili da assalto Ak-47 con milioni di proiettili e i qatariani avevano infiltrato in Siria, attraverso la Turchia, missili portatili cinesi Fn-6 acquistati sul mercato internazionale.

Poiché la fornitura di armi avveniva a ruota libera, alla fine del 2012 il direttore della Cia David Petraeus convocava gli alleati in Giordania, imponendo un più stretto controllo dell’Agenzia sull’intera operazione.

Pochi mesi dopo, nella primavera 2013, Obama autorizzava la Cia ad addestrare i «ribelli» in una base in Giordania, affiancata da una in Qatar, e a fornire loro armi tra cui missili anticarro Tow. Sempre con i miliardi del «maggiore contribuente», l’Arabia Saudita. Non nuova a tali operazioni.

Negli anni Settanta e Ottanta, essa aiutò la Cia in una serie di operazioni coperte.

In Africa, in particolare in Angola dove, con i finanziamenti sauditi, la Cia sosteneva i ribelli contro il governo alleato dell’Urss.

In Afghanistan, dove «per armare i mujahiddin contro i sovietici, gli Stati uniti lanciarono una operazione del costo annuo di milioni di dollari, che i sauditi pagarono dollaro su dollaro attraverso un conto della Cia in una banca svizzera».

In Nicaragua, quando l’amministrazione Reagan varò il piano segreto per aiutare i contras, i sauditi finanziarono l’operazione della Cia con 32 milioni di dollari attraverso una banca delle Isole Cayman.

Attraverso queste e altre operazioni segrete, fino all’attuale in Siria, si è cementata «la lunga relazione tra i servizi segreti degli Stati uniti e dell’Arabia Saudita».

Nonostante il «riavvicinamento diplomatico» di Washington all’Iran, non gradito a Riyad, «l’alleanza persiste, tenuta a galla su un mare di denaro saudita e sul riconoscimento del mutuo interesse».

Ciò spiega perché «gli Stati uniti sono riluttanti a criticare l’Arabia Saudita per la violazione dei diritti umani, il trattamento delle donne e il sostegno all’ala estremista dell’Islam, il wahabismo, che ispira molti gruppi terroristi», e perché «Obama non ha condannato l’Arabia Saudita per la decapitazione di Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, il dissidente religioso sciita che aveva sfidato la famiglia reale».

Si aggiunge il fatto, di cui il «New York Times» non parla, che il segretario di stato John Kerry, in visita a Riyad il 23 gennaio, ha ribadito che «nello Yemen, dove l’insurrezione Houthi minaccia l’Arabia Saudita, gli Usa sono a fianco degli amici sauditi».

Gli amici che da quasi un anno fanno strage di civili nello Yemen, bombardando anche gli ospedali, aiutati dagli Usa che forniscono loro intelligence (ossia indicazione degli obiettivi da colpire), armi (tra cui bombe a grappolo) e sostegno logistico (tra cui il rifornimento in volo dei cacciabombardieri sauditi).

Gli stessi amici che il premier Renzi ha ufficialmente incontrato lo scorso novembre a Riyad, garantendo loro il sostegno e le bombe dell’Italia nella «comune lotta al terrorismo».

Manlio Dinucci

In response to world condemnation of his decision to authorise yet more illegal houses for Israelis on Palestinian land, Netanyahu strikes out against the severe criticism by the UN Secretary General.

We agree about acts against civilian life. That is why the original terrorist act that murdered 92 people in the bombing of the King David Hotel in  Jerusalem in 1946 by Irgun Zvai Leumi, the militant group to which a certain Benzion Netanyahu was closely associated, was such a heinous act which tragically established
such a terrible precedent for the Middle East and the world.

The current Likud Party is the direct political successor of the Irgun terrorists of 1946.

It is unfortunate that certain traits appear to run in families, particularly in respect of political allegiances.

In August 2015 the CBC reported the results of a study from Statistics Canada showing risk of avoidable death for First Nations peoples twice that (in some cases five times that) of non-natives. On January 15th, 2016, it featured a plea by the Ontario First Nations Regional Chief, Isadore Day, that Canadians deal with the fact of inadequate health care for aboriginal peoples.

The CBC notes that according to the Ministry of Health TB rates are five times the general population for First Nations people, and fifty times the general population for the Inuit. If verifiable these disastrous figures would show something of an improvement.

In 2009 Night’s Lantern reported UNICEF‘s findings that noted the tuberculosis rate among Canadian aboriginal people was 90 times the national average for the years 2004 to 2006.

In 2013 Night’s Lantern noted news reports of the rate of Inuit tuberculosis as 186 times that of native born non-aboriginals. Sources of reliable information concerning damages to Canadian First Nations were intentionally removed by the Harper government in 2012 when the Conservative government de-funded the National Aboriginal Health Organization (NAHO). Studies linking TB rates to Canada’s poverty levels are also not easily available.

Lack of transparency raises issues of the government’s enduring intentions. Historically both disease and lack of adequate health care have been used as a weapon. To my understanding, aboriginal communities of North Western Ontario do not have resident doctors. The CBC noted last October that 10 First Nations in Ontario’s North West have gone without safe tap water for ten years, while citing a Canadian Journal of Rural Medicine report of “dramatic increase in invasive disease.” The recent rate of sepsis and pneumonia is estimated as about 20 times that of Calgary. The rate of rheumatic fever is reported as 75 times higher than Canada’s general population.

The statistics are so far outside the norm that a continuing lack of normalization implies intent by the government and calls into force Article II b and c of the Convention on Genocide. Despite occasional highly placed political appointments, a genocide warning for Canadian Aboriginal people remains in effect.

Partial sources online:

“First Nations adults more than twice as likely to die from avoidable causes,” Aug. 19, 2015, CBC News; “First Nations leaders cite deplorable health conditions, urge action,” Kristy Kikup The Canadian Press, Jan. 15, 2016, CBC News; “Bad water in First Nations leads to high rate of invasive infection, doctor says,” Jody Porter, Oct. 26, 2015, CBC News; “Rheumatic fever rates in some Ontario First Nations 75 times higher than rest of Canada,” Jody Porter, Oct. 22, 2015, CBC News.

Haiti is no stranger to adversity, anguish and overwhelming human misery.

It endured over 500 years of severe repression, slavery, despotism, colonization, reparations, embargoes, sanctions, deep poverty, starvation, unrepayable debt, overwhelming human suffering and destructive natural disasters.

Democracy is pure fantasy – Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s tenure the exception to the longstanding rule.

Elections when held are farcical, populist candidates excluded or marginalized to insignificance. Brazen disenfranchisement, ballot box stuffing, massive state-sponsored fraud and other irregularities are standard practice.

Except for the Aristide years, last October’s first-round presidential vote was no different from earlier ones – fraudulent, illegitimate by any standard.

Current president Michel Martelly won the same way, governing illegitimately. Hillary Clinton as Obama’s Secretary of State rigged things to install him.

October 2015 elections produced no majority winner. The December 27 runoff between ruling Farmers’ Response Party candidate Jovenel Moise and Jude Celestin was indefinitely postponed.

On January 1, Martelly announced it would be held on January 17, days later changing the date to January 24.

On January 20, Celestin pulled out, saying whoever “participates in this (runoff) is a traitor to the nation.”

Last Sunday’s process was again postponed, Haiti’s Provisional Electoral Council (CEP) president Pierre-Louis Opont duplicitously called the decision “an effort to protect the life of voter, of the CEP personnel, the institution itself, particularly school buildings placed at the disposal of the CEP.”

No new runoff date was set. Haitians began protesting massive electoral fraud last year, highlighting their subjugation under US dominance, given no say on how their country is run, exclusively serving US, Canadian, other Western and local monied interests.

On Sunday, former anti-Aristide coup leader, fugitive drugs trafficker Guy Philippe endorsed the US-supported regime candidate, threatening war to “divide the country,” saying:

“We are ready for war. I call on my supporters and my soldiers across the country to get ready.”

Last weekend, thousands of Haitians protested in Port-au-Prince, demanding Martelly and prime minister Evans Paul resign, an interim government replacing them.

Things remain in flux. Washington controls Haiti’s political process, assuring business as usual always wins.

On January 26, New York Times editors headlined “Democracy on Hold in Haiti,” knowing none exists, supporting indefinite postponement of its runoff instead of explaining its rigged electoral process.

A January 24 State Department statement lied, saying “(t)he United States reaffirms its support for credible, transparent and secure elections that reflect the will of the Haitian people.”

Martelly rules by decree. The terms of most so-called elected officials expired long ago. His term ends February 7.

Nothing in prospect suggests relief for long-suffering Haitians.

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.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

The Russian air grouping in Syria carried out 169 sorties and hit over 484 terrorist targets in the last three days, the Russian General Staff reported on January 25. 18 combat sorties were carried out by Russian Tu-22M3 Backfire strategic bombers. Since the Russian airstrike began in September 30, 2015 in Syria, the Russian warplanes made nearly 6000 sorties destroying significant terrorist positions and their assets.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the National Defense Forces (NDF) reportedly took full control of the Arbid Al-Judaydah district located near Kweiris Airbase in the northern province of Aleppo. The liberation of the district came after the SAA and the NDF liberated the strategic villages of Qatar and Tal Hattabat late last week. The Syrian troops are reportedly preparing a massive attack on al-Nusra militants in the coming days to break the siege of the Shiite-populated towns of al-Zahra and Nubl in northwestern Aleppo.

In the West Ghouta region of rural Damascus, the SAA and the NDF liberated the last road controlled by the terrorists of Ajnad Al-Sham and Al-Nusra. The road links the two towns of Al-Mo’adhimiyah and Darayya. Folowing a series of clashes, the militants retreated west towards Mo’adhimiyah’s southeastern district.

Having lost their advantage in western parts of the country, ISIS command has now decided to concentrate its forces on trying to seize the city of Deir ez-Zor, the largest city in the eastern part of Syria. According to the intelligence sources, up to 2,000 heavily armed militants have been redeployed by ISIS to the region.

On Jan. 26, ISIS militants stormed the SAA’s defenses at Al-Jazeera University, Al-Firat Hotel, and the Al-Rawad Hill, striking from several flanks to find a weakness in the Al-Baghayliyah District’s southern sector. 2 suicide bombers were used by ISIS near Al-Jazeera University. The SAA repel these attacks. However, heavy clashes are continuing.

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ИН4С портал – Вијести Црна Гора | Србија | Српска | Русија | Хроника | Политика | Регион

Israel, it seems, has found a new weapon against Palestinian attacks – the humble cucumber seed.

Soldiers have been handing out seeds at checkpoints with advice to Palestinians – a nation of farmers until their lands were swallowed up by Jewish settlements – to stop their recent knife attacks on Israelis and invest in a peaceful future.

Palestinians were not fooled. The seeds, the packets revealed, were produced by the very settlements that corralled them into their urban enclaves.

Israel’s image-laundering is directed at western nations that have propped up the occupation – economically and diplomatically – for decades. As ever, Israel hopes to persuade outsiders that the occupation is benevolent.

The futility of its PR, however, is highlighted by the latest initiative of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

New legislation is designed to intimidate and silence Israeli human rights organisations – the international community’s eyes and ears in the occupied territories. These groups are to be defined as “moles”, or agents of foreign governments. Justice minister Ayelet Shaked warned that such foreign intervention “endangers democracy”.

The problem is that the governments funding the human rights activity are not Israel’s enemies, but some of its staunchest supporters – European states.

Israel treats Europe’s support for human rights as malign interference, but it welcomes the vast sums channelled its way via the European Union’s special trade agreement and the billions in US military aid. It is this kind of foreign intervention that sustains the occupation.

The new legislation, however, risks leaving the EU and US exposed. Removing the minimal restraints imposed on the Israeli army by monitoring activity, the crimes of occupation – and western complicity in them – will be all the starker.

Western governments have made a show of their retaliation. They warn that, without a two-state solution, Israel is hurtling towards a binational reality and comparisons with apartheid.

Seeking to bolster the EU’s recent feeble move to recommend labelling settlement products, its foreign ministers passed a resolution last week requiring all agreements with Israel to exclude the settlements.

Europe has hinted that other penalties are in the pipeline.

The United States echoes Europe. Its ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, last week broke with US protocol and admitted that Israel has two standards of law in the West Bank, distinguishing between Palestinians and Jewish settlers.

It was the nearest Washington has dared to suggest that Israel already enforces an apartheid system in the territories.

Unused to having the US wash its dirty linen in public, Israel fumed. One of Netanyahu’s former aides even hurled an anti-Semitic insult at Shapiro, calling him a “little Jewboy”.

Israeli officials are reported to believe that the US and Europe are acting in concert to arm-twist Israel back into negotiations. Europe, they argue, is carrying out Washington’s “dirty work”.

They may not be far off the mark. A report last week by Human Rights Watch, a US group with ties to the State Department, added to the pressure, warning companies in the occupied territories that they are violating international law.

Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian co-founder of the movement to boycott Israel, called the report “ground-breaking”. It floated the idea that the US and Europe should deduct funding to Israel “equivalent to its expenditures on settlements and related infrastructure in the West Bank”.

As Barghouti noted, that skates close to calling for western sanctions against Israel.

Netanyahu did not sound alarmed at Sunday’s cabinet meeting by the various admonishments. He focused instead on praising “courageous” settlers who had evicted Palestinian families next to the flashpoint of the Ibrahimi Mosque in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

This week, the first new plans for settlement-building in 18 months were announced.

Netanyahu knows that the likelihood of the US, or Europe, truly penalising Israel is still far off.

The terrible truth for those who support the Palestinian cause is that these last months of the Obama administration are likely to be as bad as it gets for Israel. Whoever follows – whether Hillary Clinton or any of the current crop of Republicans – will almost certainly tone down Washington’s criticisms, and rein in Europe.

Last year, one of Obama’s Middle East aides promised that Washington would “always have Israel’s back”. Illustrating that commitment, US officials due in Israel this week are expected to offer new weapons systems as a reward for Israel’s silence on Iran.

The struggle for two states appears finished. As Netanyahu averred recently, Israel would prefer to “live forever by the sword” than concede territory to the Palestinians. The message of the dovish opposition leader, Isaac Herzog, is softer but the same. At the weekend he told the French president, Francois Hollande: “Now is not the time for a Palestinian state.”

The US and EU can keep chasing the chimera of a two-state solution. But Israel is busy cultivating – not cucumbers, but the fruits of an occupation without a visible end.

Saudi Arabia is bombing civilians with U.S.-made bombs, which violates both U.S. and international law. Saudi Arabia has engaged in war crimes, and the United States is aiding and abetting them by providing the Saudis with military assistance. In September 2015, Saudi aircraft killed 135 wedding celebrants in Yemen. The air strikes have killed 2,800 civilians, including 500 children. Human Rights Watch charges that these bombings “have indiscriminately killed and injured civilians.”

This conflict is part of a regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are bombing Yemen in order to defeat the Houthi rebels, who have been resisting government repression for a long time. Iran has been accused of supporting the Houthis, although Iran denies this. Yemen is strategically located on a narrow waterway that links the Gulf of Aden with the Red Sea. Much of the world’s oil passes through this waterway.

A United Nations panel of experts concluded in October 2015 that the Saudi-led coalition had committed “grave violations” of civilians’ human rights. They include indiscriminate attacks; targeting markets, a camp for displaced Yemenis, and humanitarian aid warehouses; and intentionally preventing the delivery of humanitarian assistance. The panel was also concerned that the coalition considered civilian neighborhoods, including Marra and Sadah, as legitimate strike zones. The International Committee of the Red Cross documented 100 attacks on hospitals.

Yemen has become one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises following the Saudi-led intervention in 2015. | Photo: EFE

Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits the targeting of civilians. It provides that parties to a conflict “shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.”

Saudi Arabia is also engaging in serious individual human rights violations.

In January 2016, the Saudi government executed 47 people, including a prominent pacifist Shia cleric, who had been a leader of the 2011 Arab Spring in Yemen. Many of those executed were tortured during their detention and denied due process. Most were beheaded. This horrifies us when ISIS does it. Yet State Department spokesman John Kirby protested weakly, “We believe that diplomatic engagement and direct conversations remain essential in working through differences.”

Also in January 2016, Palestinian artist and poet Ashraf Fayadh, a Saudi citizen whose family is from Gaza, was sentenced to death by beheading. His alleged crimes: “apostasy,” or renouncing Islam, and photographing women. “Throughout this whole process,” Amnesty International UK found, “Ashraf was denied access to a lawyer – a clear violation of international human rights law.”

Both Saudi Arabia and the United States are parties to the Geneva Conventions, which define as grave breaches willful killing, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and torture or inhuman treatment. Grave breaches are considered war crimes. Also prohibited are “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.”

Although neither the United States nor Saudi Arabia are parties to the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, that statute sets forth standard aider and abettor liability provisions. It says that an individual can be convicted of war crimes if he or she “aids, abets or otherwise assists” in the commission or attempted commission of the crime, “including providing the means for its commission.”

The U.S. government is the primary supplier of Saudi weapons. In November 2015, the U.S. sold $1.29 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia. It included more than 10,000 bombs, munitions, and weapons parts manufactured by Raytheon and Boeing, as well as bunker busters, and laser-guided and “general purpose” bombs. A month earlier, the United States had approved a $11.25 billion sale of combat ships to Saudi Arabia. The U.S. also provides intelligence and logistical support to the coalition. During the past five years, the U.S. government has sold the Saudis $100 billion worth of arms. These sales have greatly enriched U.S. defense contractors.

Why has the United States “usually looked the other way or issued carefully calibrated warnings in human rights reports as the Saudi royal family cracked down on dissent and free speech and allowed its elite to fund Islamic extremists,” in the words of New York Times’ David Sanger? “In return,” Sanger writes, “Saudi Arabia became America’s most dependable filling station, a regular supplier of intelligence, and a valuable counterweight to Iran.” Saudi Arabia, and close U.S. ally Israel, opposed the Iran nuclear deal.

In April 2015, the U.S. government prevented nine Iranian ships loaded with relief supplies from reaching Yemen. President Barack Obama also sent an aircraft carrier to the area to enforce the Saudi embargo on outside supplies. According to UN estimates, 21 million people lack basic services, and over 1.5 million have been displaced. UNICEF notes that six million people don’t have enough food.

Moreover, the U.S. government seeks to prevent scrutiny of Saudi human rights abuses in Yemen. In October 2015, the United States blocked a UN Security Council sanctions committee proposal that would have required the committee’s chair to contact “all relevant parties to the conflict and stress their responsibility to respect and uphold international humanitarian law and human rights law.”

The U.S. government is also violating domestic law by providing the Saudis with military aid. The Leahy Law prohibits U.S. assistance to foreign security forces or military officers “if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), for whom the law was named, told Foreign Policy: “The reports of civilian casualties from Saudi air attacks in densely populated areas [in Yemen] compel us to ask if these operations, supported by the United States, violate” the Leahy Law.

Furthermore, 22 U.S.C. section 2304 provides that “no security assistance may be provided to any government which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.”

The Arms Trade Treaty obligates member states to monitor exports of weapons and make sure they do not end up being used to commit human rights abuses. Although the U.S. has not ratified the treaty, we have signed it. Under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, a signatory is prohibited from taking action inconsistent with the object and purpose of the treaty.

The U.S. government should immediately halt arms transfers and military support to Saudi Arabia and support an independent investigation into U.S. arms transfers and war crimes in Yemen. The United States must stop participating in and call for an end to the de facto blockade so that humanitarian assistance can reach those in need, engage in diplomatic efforts to end the conflict, and ratify the Arms Trade Treaty.

In an interesting twist, the Saudis contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation before Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State. In 2011, the year after the State Department had documented myriad serious human rights violations by Saudi Arabia, Hillary oversaw a $29 billion sale of advanced fighter jets to the Saudis, declaring it was in our national interest. The deal was “a top priority” for Hillary, according to Andrew Shapiro, an assistant secretary of state. Two months before the deal was clinched, Boeing, manufacturer of one of the fighter jets the Saudis sought to acquire, contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation.

Hillary now says the U.S should pursue “closer strategic cooperation” with Saudi Arabia.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her most recent book is “Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.” See www.marjoriecohn.com.

Is a new arms race inevitable? Compared to the cautious optimism at the end of the Cold War, when the prospects for disarmament and a substantial peace dividend were universally welcomed, the rhetoric now is one of confrontation and existential threat.

Some extracts from the opening pages – subtitles added:

Under the Bush/Blair axis, with its determination to use military force to secure access to oil and other resources, the West embarked ona disastrous and illegal policy of invasion and occupation. Hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraqand Afghanistan were either killed or suffered serious injury as a direct consequence of military intervention and social breakdown,while millions more faced a bleak future as exiles and refugees.

If that legacy demonstrates anything it is that, however much the rhetoric remains one of defence to protect ourselves against dangerous enemiesand to encourage democratic governance, the reality is an aggressive militarism that has been an abject failure. Yet, decisions are being taken by the UK government that will reinforce our subordination to the United Statesbecause the very expense of the next generation of nuclear and conventional weapons makes us ever more dependent on US technology.

Common security offers the possibility fora much-needed and fundamental re-appraisal of the UK’s role in the world. Two essential criteria are disarmament and the release of resources from military spending for international economic and environmental programmes that address fundamental security issues around poverty and climate change.

This agenda can be tracedback to the very founding of the United Nations and its inspirational charter. Quite simply, the objective was to end the scourge of war after the most destructive conflict in world history. UN disarmament initiatives were based on the recognition that any new arms race must be vigorously opposed since the build-up of forces, in itself, was a major cause of instability, feeding the demand for further military preparations in an ever-increasing cycle of confrontation.Resources squandered on armaments could then be used for social priorities that addressed the growing gap in wealth and power between rich and poor and the underlying economic and social causes of conflict.

Since its founding, the UN has also been a leading body highlighting environmental concerns and the growing security threat from climate change

Such is the scale of the crisis that there are growing calls for the rapid transition to a post-carbon economy,leaving coal, oil and gas supplies in the ground and satisfying future requirements through renewable energy matched by energy-efficiency technologies to reduce overall demand. The scale of investment is one that has only previously been mobilised for arms production and war. The challenge is to mobilise on the same scale for common security and peace.

We are living through a neo-liberal political and economic experiment that is increasing, rather than reducing income inequalities and is punishing the poor for the profligacy of the banks

There should be no illusions about the barriers to any progressive alternative. Economic growth and prosperity are seen in terms of unfettered corporate power and further exploitation of non-renewable resources, underpinned by Western military force, even where this might lead to confrontation and war.

The idea of a internationally coordinated disarmament and development programme around climate change and common security would be anathema to the range of elite groupsin the military-industrial-complex that have direct access to political power and decision-making.

A climate of fear is being inculcated. Russia is now being re-established as a major threat on the scale of the former Soviet Union, while Islamic State is represented as a new form of terrorism that could use its territorial base in Syria and Iraq to build a network dedicated to the destruction of Western societies. The threat of war, therefore,far from receeding is now muti-faceted and the world is becoming ever more dangerous.

Yet the United States and its allies refuse to take any responsibility for the deterioration in relations between the West and Russia. The policy of military encirclement and its support for corrupt and anti-democratic regimes in the Ukraine gave the Putin leadership a simple cause through which to mobilise domestic support for its own military build up, leading to the annexation of Crimea. Nor will the United States take any responsibiligy for the chaos of post-invasion politics and economics in the Middle East and, more recently North Africa, in which extremist groups can gain support.

To argue for a de-escalation of military confrontation, therefore,is not an act of weakness but an act of strength if it is linked to common security policies that help transform the international system offering both environmental and economic security.

Read the full paper, Common Security – Progressive Alternatives to the New Arms Race:

http://www.lessnet.co.uk/docs/arms-race-alternatives.pdf

Dr Steven Schofield wrote this paper following the Defence and Security Review in order to highlight the common security framework as an alternative to the new arms race.

We hear about the hazards of lead. We know that lead poisoning can cause severe mental retardation.

Lead has been clearly linked with Alzheimer’s disease. We have been told to avoid lead in our homes and in our water, and to clean up lead pollution of our environment. But we have not been told how to remove it from our bodies. Vitamin C megadoses may be the answer.

Dr. Erik Paterson, of British Columbia, reports:

When I was a consulting physician for a center for the mentally challenged, a patient showing behavioral changes was found to have blood lead levels some ten times higher than the acceptable levels. I administered vitamin C at a dose of 4,000 mg/day. I anticipated a slow response. The following year I rechecked his blood lead level. It had gone up, much to my initial dismay. But then I thought that perhaps what was happening was that the vitamin C was mobilizing the lead from his tissues. So we persisted. The next year, on rechecking, the lead levels had markedly dropped to well below the initial result. As the years went by, the levels became almost undetectable, and his behavior was markedly improved.

How much vitamin C?

Frederick Robert Klenner, M.D., insisted that large amounts of vitamin C are needed to do the job. One old (1940) paper got it wrong, and Dr. Klenner comments:

The report by Dannenberg that high doses of ascorbic acid were without effect in treating lead intoxication in a child must be ignored, since his extremely high dose was 25 mg by mouth four times a day and one single daily injection of 250 mg of C. Had he administered 350 mg/kg body weight every two hours, he would have seen the other side of the coin.

Here is what 350 milligrams of vitamin C per kilogram body weight works out to in pounds, approximately:

Although these quantities may seem high, it must be pointed out that Dr. Klenner administered such amounts every two hours.

Vitamin C may be given intravenously if necessary. Oral vitamin C may be given as liquid, powder, tablet or chewable tablet. Toddlers often accept powdered, naturally sweetened chewable tablets, which may be crushed up between two spoons and added to a favorite food. Infants do well with liquid vitamin C. You can make this yourself by daily dissolving ascorbic acid powder in a small dropper bottle and adding it to fruit juice. Dr. Klenner recommended daily preventive doses, which he described as one thousand milligrams of C per year of a child’s age, plateauing at 10,000 mg/day for teens and adults.

“Vitamin C? But . . .”

Common questions from readers are likely to include these, to which we have provided the briefest of answers.

“Why so much?” Because too little will not be effective. Dr. Klenner, as well as Robert F. Cathcart, M.D., Hugh D. Riordan, M.D., Abram Hoffer, M.D. and many other highly experienced nutritional physicians have all emphasized this.

“Is it safe?” Year after year, decade after decade, national data shows no deaths at all from vitamin C. Vitamin C does not cause kidney stones, either. Read up so you know what you are doing. Work with your doctor. And make sure your doctor has read what you’ve read.

“Is ascorbic acid really vitamin C?” Yes. Linus Pauling, double Nobel-prize winning chemist, said so. He ought to know. Almost all successful medical research on vitamin C therapy has used plain, cheap, you-can-buy-it-anywhere ascorbic acid. Other forms of C will also work well.

“That’s it?” Certainly not. All sources of lead contamination must be addressed and eliminated. Vitamin C has an important role to play in so doing, and should be publicly advocated by the medical professions, government, and the media.

Immediately.

To learn more:

Dr. Klenner’s quote is from “The Significance of High Daily Intake of Ascorbic Acid in Preventive Medicine,” p. 51-59, Physician’s Handbook on Orthomolecular Medicine, Third Edition, Roger Williams, PhD, ed.) 
http://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/197x/klenner-fr-j_int_assn_prev_med-1974-v1-n1-p45.htm

You can read Dr. Klenner’s Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C free of charge. It is posted in its entirety at http://www.whale.to/a/smith1988.html and also athttp://www.seanet.com/~alexs/ascorbate/198x/smith-lh-clinical_guide_1988.htm

Many free-access papers on vitamin C therapy are posted at http://www.whale.to/v/c/index.html

“Vitamin supplements help protect children from heavy metals, reduce behavioral disorders.” Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, Oct 8, 2007.http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v03n07.shtml

All OMNS articles are archived here: http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml Many discuss the most frequently asked questions about vitamin dosages, safety, forms, and proper administration.

Dannenberg’s paper, mentioned by Klenner: 
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1160080 
Only part appears to be free access. [Dannenburg, A.M., et al (1940) Ascorbic acid in the treatment of chronic lead poisoning. JAMA. 114: 1439-1440.]

Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA), Editor and contact person. Email:[email protected] This is a comments-only address; OMNS is unable to respond to individual reader emails. However, readers are encouraged to write in with their viewpoints. Reader comments become the property of OMNS and may or may not be used for publication.

From June 2008 to the depth of the Wall Street financial crash in early 2009, U.S. domestic crude oil lost 70 percent of its value, falling from over $140 to the low $40s. But then a strange thing happened. Despite weak global economic growth, oil went back to over $100 by 2011 and traded between the $80s and a little over $100 until June 2014. Since then, it has plunged by 72 percent – a bigger crash than when Wall Street was collapsing.

The chart of crude oil has the distinct feel of a pump and dump scheme, a technique that Wall Street has turned into an art form in the past. Think limited partnerships priced at par on client statements as they disintegrated in price in the real world; rigged research leading to the dot.com bust and a $4 trillion stock wipeout; and the securitization of AAA-rated toxic waste creating the subprime mortgage meltdown that cratered the U.S. housing market along with century-old firms on Wall Street.

Pretty much everything that’s done on Wall Street is some variation of pump and dump. Here’s why we’re particularly suspicious of the oil price action.

Price of West Texas Intermediate Crude Oil Before and After the 2008 Crash

Americans know far too little about what was actually happening on Wall Street leading up to the crash of 2008. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission released its detailed final report in January 2011. But by July 2013, Senator Sherrod Brown, Chair of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection had learned that Wall Street banks had amassed unprecedented amounts of physical crude oil, metals and other commodity assets in the period leading up to the crash. This came as a complete shock to Congress despite endless hearings that had been held on the crash.

On July 23, 2013, Senator Brown opened a hearing on this opaque perversion of banking law, comparing today’s Wall Street banks to the Wall Street trusts that had a stranglehold on the country in the early 1900s. Senator Brown remarked:

There has been little public awareness of or debate about the massive expansion of our largest financial institutions into new areas of the economy. That is in part because regulators, our regulators, have been less than transparent about basic facts, about their regulatory philosophy, about their future plans in regards to these entities.

Most of the information that we have has been acquired by combing through company statements in SEC filings, news reports, and direct conversations with industry. It is also because these institutions are so complex, so dense, so opaque that they are impossible to fully understand. The six largest U.S. bank holding companies have 14,420 subsidiaries, only 19 of which are traditional banks.

Their physical commodities activities are not comprehensively or understandably reported. They are very deep within various subsidiaries, like their fixed-income currency and commodities units, Asset Management Divisions, and other business lines. Their specific activities are not transparent. They are not subject to transparency in any way. They are often buried in arcane regulatory filings.

Taxpayers have a right to know what is happening and to have a say in our financial system because taxpayers, as we know, are the ones who will be asked to rescue these mega banks yet again, possibly as a result of activities that are unrelated to banking.

The findings of this hearing were so troubling that the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations commenced an in-depth investigation. The Subcommittee, then chaired by Senator Carl Levin, held a two-day hearing on the matter in November  2014, which included a 400-page report of hair-raising findings.

Read complete article

The world is undergoing a populist revival. From the revolt against austerity led by the Syriza Party in Greece and the Podemos Party in Spain, to Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise victory as Labour leader in the UK, to Donald Trump’s ascendancy in the Republican polls, to Bernie Sanders’ surprisingly strong challenge to Hillary Clinton – contenders with their fingers on the popular pulse are surging ahead of their establishment rivals.

Today’s populist revolt mimics an earlier one that reached its peak in the US in the 1890s. Then it was all about challenging Wall Street, reclaiming the government’s power to create money, curing rampant deflation with US Notes (Greenbacks) or silver coins (then considered the money of the people), nationalizing the banks, and establishing a central bank that actually responded to the will of the people.

Over a century later, Occupy Wall Street revived the populist challenge, armed this time with the Internet and mass media to spread the word. The Occupy movement shined a spotlight on the corrupt culture of greed unleashed by deregulating Wall Street, widening the yawning gap between the 1% and the 99% and destroying jobs, households and the economy.

Donald Trump’s populist campaign has not focused much on Wall Street; but Bernie Sanders’ has, in spades. Sanders has picked up the baton where Occupy left off, and the disenfranchised Millennials who composed that movement have flocked behind him.

The Failure of Regulation 

Sanders’ focus on Wall Street has forced his opponent Hillary Clinton to respond to the challenge. Clinton maintains that Sanders’ proposals sound good but “will never make it in real life.” Her solution is largely to preserve the status quo while imposing more bank regulation.

That approach, however, was already tried with the Dodd-Frank Act, which has not solved the problem although it is currently the longest and most complicated bill ever passed by the US legislature. Dodd-Frank purported to eliminate bailouts, but it did this by replacing them with “bail-ins” – confiscating the funds of bank creditors, including depositors, to keep too-big-to-fail banks afloat. The costs were merely shifted from the people-as-taxpayers to the people-as-creditors.

Worse, the massive tangle of new regulations has hamstrung the smaller community banks that make the majority of loans to small and medium sized businesses, which in turn create most of the jobs. More regulation would simply force more community banks to sell out to their larger competitors, making the too-bigs even bigger.

In any case, regulatory tweaking has proved to be an inadequate response. Banks backed by an army of lobbyists simply get the laws changed, so that what was formerly criminal behavior becomes legal. (See, e.g., CitiGroup’s redrafting of the “push out” rulein December 2015 that completely vitiated the legislative intent.)

What Sanders is proposing, by contrast, is a real financial revolution, a fundamental change in the system itself. His proposals include eliminating Too Big to Fail by breaking up the biggest banks; protecting consumer deposits by reinstating the Glass-Steagall Act (separating investment from depository banking); reviving postal banks as safe depository alternatives; and reforming the Federal Reserve, enlisting it in the service of the people.

Time to Revive the Original Populist Agenda?

Sanders’ proposals are a good start. But critics counter that breaking up the biggest banks would be costly, disruptive and destabilizing; and it would not eliminate Wall Street corruption and mismanagement.

Banks today have usurped the power to create the national money supply. As the Bank of England recently acknowledged, banks create money whenever they make loans. Banks determine who gets the money and on what terms. Reducing the biggest banks to less than $50 billion in assets (the Dodd-Frank limit for “too big to fail”) would not make them more trustworthy stewards of that power and privilege.

How can banking be made to serve the needs of the people and the economy, while preserving the more functional aspects of today’s highly sophisticated global banking system? Perhaps it is time to reconsider the proposals of the early populists. The direct approach to “occupying” the banks is to simply step into their shoes and make them public utilities. Insolvent megabanks can be nationalized – as they were before 2008. (More on that shortly.)

Making banks public utilities can happen on a local level as well. States and cities can establish publicly-owned depository banks on the highly profitable and efficient model of the Bank of North Dakota. Public banks can partner with community banks to direct credit where it is needed locally; and they can reduce the costs of government by recycling bank profits for public use, eliminating outsized Wall Street fees and obviating the need for derivatives to mitigate risk.

At the federal level, not only can postal banks serve as safe depositories and affordable credit alternatives, but the central bank can provide is it just a source of interest-free credit for the nation – as was done, for example, with Canada’s central bank from 1939 to 1974. The U.S. Treasury could also reclaim the power to issue, not just pocket change, but a major portion of the money supply – as was done by the American colonists in the 18^th century and by President Abraham Lincoln in the 19^th century.

Nationalization: Not As Radical As It Sounds

Radical as it sounds today, nationalizing failed megabanks was actually standard operating procedure before 2008. Nationalization was one of three options open to the FDIC when a bank failed. The other two were (1) closure and liquidation, and (2) merger with a healthy bank. Most failures were resolved using the merger option, but for very large banks, nationalization was sometimes considered the best choice for taxpayers.  The leading U.S. example was Continental Illinois, the seventh-largest bank in the country when it failed in 1984.  The FDIC wiped out existing shareholders, infused capital, took over bad assets, replaced senior management, and owned the bank for about a decade, running it as a commercial enterprise.

What was a truly radical departure from accepted practice was the unprecedented wave of government bailouts after the 2008 banking crisis. The taxpayers bore the losses, while culpable bank management not only escaped civil and criminal penalties but made off with record bonuses.

In a July 2012 article in The New York Times titled “Wall Street Is Too Big to Regulate,” Gar Alperovitz noted that the five biggest banks—JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs—then had combined assets amounting to more than half the nation’s economy. He wrote:

With high-paid lobbyists contesting every proposed regulation, it is increasingly clear that big banks can never be effectively controlled as private businesses.  If an enterprise (or five of them) is so large and so concentrated that competition and regulation are impossible, the most market-friendly step is to nationalize its functions. . . .

Nationalization isn’t as difficult as it sounds.  We tend to forget that we did, in fact, nationalize General Motors in 2009; the government still owns a controlling share of its stock.  We also essentially nationalized the American International Group, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, and the government still owns roughly 60 percent of its stock.

A more market-friendly term than nationalization is “receivership” – taking over insolvent banks and cleaning them up. But as Dr. Michael Hudson observed in a 2009 article, real nationalization does not mean simply imposing losses on the government and then selling the asset back to the private sector. He wrote:

Real nationalization occurs when governments act in the public interest to take over private property. . . . Nationalizing the banks along these lines would mean that the government would supply the nation’s credit needs. The Treasury would become the source of new money, replacing commercial bank credit. Presumably this credit would be lent out for economically and socially productive purposes, not merely to inflate asset prices while loading down households and business with debt as has occurred under today’s commercial bank lending policies.

A Network of Locally-Controlled Public Banks

“Nationalizing” the banks implies top-down federal control, but this need not be the result. We could have a system of publicly-owned banks that were locally controlled, operating independently to serve the needs of their own communities.

As noted earlier, banks create the money they lend simply by writing it into accounts. Money comes into existence as a debit in the borrower’s account, and it is extinguished when the debt is repaid. This happens at a grassroots level through local banks, creating and destroying money organically according to the demands of the community. Making these banks public institutions would differ from the current system only in that the banks would have a mandate to serve the public interest, and the profits would be returned to the local government for public use.

Although most of the money supply would continue to be created and destroyed locally as loans, there would still be a need for the government-issued currency envisioned by the early populists, to fill gaps in demand as needed to keep supply and demand in balance. This could be achieved with a national dividend issued by the federal Treasury to all citizens, or by “quantitative easing for the people” as envisioned by Jeremy Corbyn, or by quantitative easing targeted at infrastructure.

For decades, private sector banking has been left to its own devices. The private-only banking model has been thoroughly tested, and it has proven to be a disastrous failure. We need a banking system that truly serves the needs of the people, and that objective can best be achieved with banks that are owned and operated by and for the people.

Having written about the Egyptian revolution and the ensuing political twists and turns since the 2011 uprisings, five years later I look on and wonder about the sum gains and costs. In 2011 I wrote about the importance of coupling any type of street protests and reactionary political momentum with behind the scenes, long term strategic and ideological planning for what comes after the “revolutionary moment.”

While numbers and street protests play a part in popular uprisings, without strategic planning for what comes next (i.e., plans and alternatives for the post-revolutionary trajectory) people’s uprisings can be easily co-opted and revolutionary hopes thwarted. As I noted in an article last year, “the Egyptian revolution originally began with calls for ‘bread, freedom, social justice and human dignity.’ Nowhere in this popular discourse were there demands for greater religiosity or increased state force” [1]. Yet this is the trajectory that the revolution took, with the Muslim Brotherhood co-opting the people’s uprising and coming to power in 2012, to later be ousted by the Mubarak-esque military regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, which, for many, has thus far been as draconian as that of former president Hosni Mubarak. 

While, from an anti-imperialist perspective, Egypt’s current president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi may have a better foreign policy— seemingly less acquiescent to western imperial interests and the US than both Mubarak and Morsi—to many Egyptians his regime means more of the same. Internally many Egyptians, especially dissidents and journalists, fear the police state tactics, such as repressing and preemptively preventing dissent and government criticism, that Sisi’s government has been accused of, especially in the lead up to the 2016 anniversary of the uprisings [2]. Perhaps worse than the internal situation, has been the broader picture for Egypt and the region in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. Taken as a whole, the region is far more violent, polarized and destabilized than before the Arab Spring phenomena.

One unfortunate and bizarre general outcome of the Arab Spring was the rise to power—albeit only briefly in some states—of Islamist groups and governments. This is very strange given that religious extremism and/or a lapse into religious orthodoxy is arguably the opposite of progressive or forward moving change.  Despite hopes for change and democracy in the region, the Arab Spring seemed to usher in religious extremism and orthodoxy—sewing the seeds of violent division and sectarianism—in countries that were once secular, diverse and relatively peacefully integrated.

Oddly, the same can be said for the global war on terrorism as well as certain western humanitarian interventions. While the war on terror was sold as a mission against global Islamic terrorism, it has done much to—directly or indirectly—take down or attempt to undermine secular regimes and leaders such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Similarly, humanitarian intervention in the region has often led to the ouster or attempted ouster of secular leaders, such Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and, more recently, Syria’s Bashar al Assad.

Secular regimes tend to mean less Islamic terrorism, simply for the reason that they generally display less socio-political tolerance for sectarian division and radical extremism. Ironically, both the war on terror and the Arab Spring have ushered in less secularization, more sectarian conflict and an increase in terrorism, globally.

With respect to Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s short stint in power—which was applauded by western governments and predatory capitalist imperialist institutions like the IMF and World Bank—created conditions that helped to usher in regional terrorist groups like Daesh (ISIS), and the associated violence and destabilization of the area. This is in addition to the exponential economic costs and loss of infrastructure that came out of the Arab Spring uprisings and related conflicts. The same is true for certain neighbouring countries that saw Islamists rise to power.

All of this raises the question: are the sum costs greater than the sum gains? On whole, for the people of Egypt and the region, it appears to be a loss. But for certain other parties and interests the situation may unsurprisingly prove to be a benefit. This question will be explored in greater depth and detail in future articles.

Ghada Chehade is a writer and performance poet. She holds a PhD from McGill University. She expresses her views and opinions through spoken word poetry and written commentaries. 

Notes

[1] http://www.globalresearch.ca/something-is-wrong-in-the-cradel-of-the-arab-spring-reflections-on-egypts-revolution-three-years-later/5366218

[2] http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/01/25/five-years-after-tahrir-square-egypts-police-state-worse-ever

Saudi Arabia, one year after king Salman acceded to the throne and 9-months after appointing his favourite – young and inexperienced – son, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) Deputy Crown Prince (DCP), is grappling with not merely an increasingly relentless power struggle, compounded by an unprecedented devastating plunge in oil prices,  but far more ominously the ruinous implications of a highly aggressive foreign policy that has ultimately led to a full-blown costly yet futile war against the Houthi-rebels in Yemen, and has increasingly fuelled proxy sectarian wars in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

The Saudi regime has made no secret that the overarching goal of its newly adopted muscular foreign policy, which is aggressively spearheaded by MbS, is to counter what it perceives as Iran’s growing yet highly perilous influence. Surprisingly, however, the German Foreign Intelligence BND publically acknowledged, on Dec 2, that Saudi Arabia at the behest of MbS – who is frantically accumulating more powers as he resolutely strives to become the next King – is increasingly shifting to an impulsive and interventionist foreign policy, swiftly turning Riyadh into a major destabilising force in the Middle East. Amid the mounting fear of further terrorist atrocities in European cities by ISIL, following the Nov 13 Paris terrorist attacks, the German Vice-Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel, on Dec 6, scathingly scolded the Saudi regime for funding extremists in the West and around the world by building and funding radical Wahhabi Mosques.

The Head of the SPD group in the German Parliament Thomas Oppermann, went even further, forcefully emphasizing that Wahhabism the formal religion of Saudi Arabia has offered a comprehensive ideology for ISIL and Al Qiada. Although the German Government rapidly scrambled to distance itself from the report, however, the BND’s assessment has unquestionably gained added weight by MbS’s highly impulsive declaration, on Dec 15, of forming a 34-nation anti-terror Islamic military coalition – which strikingly resembles the Saudi-led Arab coalition in Yemen in terms of its starkly anti-Shia sectarian nature and the way it was introduced by MbS in March 2015 – without consulting the overwhelming majority of countries mentioned. MbS’s highly controversial declaration came, a day after Obama’s call – at the U.S. National Security Council – on Saudi Arabia to focus more on confronting ISIL rather than on Yemen.

Saudi Arabia ushered out 2015 with 157 executions, breaking all records since 1995. It herald the beginning of 2016 by executing a record number of 47 people, sending out a chillingly barbarous message to the people of Saudi Arabia: All those who dare to defy, oppose or merely demand an end to Riyadh’s medieval dictatorship, whether through terrorism like Al Qaida and ISIL or via peaceful nonviolent protests like Shiekh Nimr Baquer Al-Nimr – who was undeniably the driving force behind the 2011 popular uprising, clamouring for democracy and an end to virulently sectarian discrimination against the Shia – would beyond doubt have their heads chopped off and their dead bodies crucified as they would at the hands of ISIL.  But, even more menacingly is the inescapable reality that such monstrous punishments are issued, in both Saudi Arabia and under ISIL rule, by religious courts adhering to the extremist hard-line Wahhabi Salafi idiology, propagated and exported by Saudi Arabia’s government-funded Wahhabi Salafi Religious Establishment.

The Saudi regime’s highly unusual step of executing a prominent religious leader like Al-Nimr was deliberately intended to spark spontaneous outrage and thereby provoke an uncalculated retaliation, from above all Iran. Hence, effectively turning Riyadh into the main victim of the crisis. As such, the storming of the Saudi embassy in Tehran was music to the Saudi ears, prompting it, on Jan 3, to cut off not only diplomatic and economic ties, but more significantly to the Saudi regime, preventing its Shia citizens from travelling to Iran.

As Salman acceded to the throne, on Jan 23, after the death of his half-brother King Abdullah, he swiftly scrambled to shore up his position by:

First, ripping the power base of Abdullah’s son – Metab – apart by dismissing his father’s chief of the Royal Court and his two brothers.

Second, elevating Muqrin from DCP to Crown Prince (CP), despite his knowledge that Muqrin was specifically appointed DCP by Abdullah to ensure that he returns the throne to Metab. In essence, Salman’s decision was driven by fear that ousting Muqrin would rock the boat.

Third, securing the internal front while also appeasing the U.S. by determining that Mohammed bin Nayef ( MbN ), who is the Interior Minister and also considered U.S.’s most trusted ally, should be the first among the Grandsons of Abdulaziz – usually called Ibn Saud – in line to the throne. Fourth, bolstering his young son’s MbS power, by appointing him Defence Minister and Head of the Economic and Development Council.

But as It became increasingly evident that the war unleashed by MbS, in Mar 2015, in Yemen, which was partly aimed at rapidly propelling him to prominence, was a spectacular failure, and amid MbS’s profound worries that his father’s – who is in poor health – death would terminate his ambitions. Consequently, on Apr 29, Salman ousted Muqrin, while promoting MbN to become CP and defiantly promoting MbS to DCP. Yet, paradoxically, Salman’s move has not only irrefutably amplified MbS’s vulnerability by practically demonstrating that a new king does not have to stick with his predecessor’s choice of DCP, but far more critically, deepening the distrust between MbS and MbN and thereby injecting new urgency to MbS’s strenuous drive to dislodge MbN.

And although Salman’s highly divisive declaration  infuriated the royal family, it was however incontestably, his first formal visit, in early Sept 2015, to the U.S. accompanied by his son MbS – who was fervently welcomed by Obama and top U.S. officials – that pushed the long-simmering power struggle to perilously destabilising levels, prompting senior members of the royal family, on Sept 28, to uncharacteristically throw caution to the wind, forcefully calling for a palace coup to depose Salman, MbN and MbS. To make matters worse, this coincided with a double disaster at Mecca, essentially exacerbating an increasingly pervading atmosphere of an inherently incompetent leadership that is conspicuously incapable of adequately managing the hajj pilgrimage, from which it draws its ultimate legitimacy in leading the Islamic world.

Riyadh’s decision to push the sectarian tension to boiling point was internally intended to: First, stave off an internal uprising in the Sunni heartland by trumpeting the patently deceitful myth that Saudi Arabia is still the guardian of Sunni Islam and above all, is heavily engaged in combating an existential threat posed by the Shia, namely Iran. Second, with tumbling oil prices and an unimaginable budget deficit, compelling Riyadh to raise taxes and also to compensate for its inability to rely heavily – as both King Abdullah during the Arab Spring and King Salman when acceding to the throne – on its most potent weapon to head off and curb popular dissent: vast oil revenue. Third, lending credence to its claims of facing an immensely serious national security threat, enabling Salman and MbS to call into question the very patriotism of those challenging their authority and therefore severely undermine the growing campaign, spearheaded by senior members of the younger generation of the royal family, to replace Salman with his full Sudairi brother, 73-years-old Ahmed.

While externally Riyadh aimed to: First, sabotage, or at the very least, discredit the Nuclear deal signed, on Jul 14, between Iran and the P 5+1, – which Riyadh has tenaciously resisted every inch of the way, insisting that the U.S.’s overriding priority should persistently be isolating and containing Iran – by practically highlighting to the U.S. and its allies that Iran is utterly unreliable. Indeed, the lifting of sanctions imposed on Iran, on Jan 16, was by far the most devastating blow to the Saudi regime. But, to add insult to injury, even Riyadh’s staunchest allies in the GCC -except Bahrain which was invaded and still occupied by Saudi Arabia since the Arab Spring – and among Arab countries – except Sudan and Jeboty – have fiercely resisted severing diplomatic ties. Second, resurrect MbS’s 34-nation Islamic alliance – which has so far failed to materialise – and also reviving MbS’s faltering Arab alliance in Yemen, by employing the highly incendiary sectarian confrontation as the perfect pretext to rally sectarian support for such emphatically anti-Shia coalitions. Third, critically undermine the painstakingly negotiated Russian-U.S. roadmap, unanimously endorsed, on Dec 18, by UN-Security Council resolution number 2254, explicitly stressing that Syria’s president Bashar Al Assad’s future must be exclusively decided by the Syrian people.

In the eyes of Riyadh this clearly marked a severe blow to its implacable campaign to topple Assad. Riyadh’s invitation to Syrian opposition groups, on Dec 8, was designed to thwart resolution 2254, by signalling that it is the one calling the shots by forming, monopolising and incorporating representatives of terrorist organisations within the opposition’s negotiating team. Indeed, Riyadh has consistently been blaming Obama’s administration for its indecisive leadership while also furiously lashing out against the highly effective Russian air-campaign backed up by unflinching Iranian support, which has decisively turned the tide against terrorist organisations like ISIL, JN, Ahrar Al Sham and Jaish Al Islam, all of which have shamelessly been armed and financed by Saudi Arabia, according to U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s assertion, in Oct 2014.

As ISIL dramatically broadens its strategy from being a regional to an increasingly international threat, targeting US and western citizens around the world. It is high time for the American people to cast their decisive vote on whether the best way of promoting U.S.’s interests is by covering up Saudi Arabia’s abhorrent record of escalating human rights violations, of exporting its extremist Wahhabi Salafi ideology and bloodthirsty jihadists, of promoting radical preachers of death giving religious legitimacy to monstrous atrocities against Shias, Christians, Jews and moderate Sunnis, of arming and funding ISIS, JN, and Taliban and of spreading tyranny and dictatorship in the Middle East.