Global Research

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.

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

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.

Both politicians kept in power by huge transfers of money: one from the Saudi Arabian royal family, the other from the AIPAC lobby-led, US congress. Neither has apparently committed any crime by the acceptance of these sums but to call such activity ‘democratic’ is to call a pork chop, kosher.

Such sums are routinely used to irrevocably damage the democratic principle of ‘government by the people, of the people and for the people’. In these two instances, it is government by the people but for Riyadh and Washington respectively. That is not democracy but a travesty of the democratic process perpetrated by vested business and political interests.

For one state, or a cabal within a state, to seek to influence the choice of government of another state by the direct transfer of funds calculated to direct the result of a national election, should be designated a criminal activity. It is banned in European democratic elections – but neither Malaysia nor Israel are in Europe and nor, of course, is Saudi Arabia or America. More’s the pity. Then the world would not have had to deal with the ineptitude of the pathetic US president, George Bush, and similar results of corrupted democratic process.

Both politicians kept in power by huge transfers of money: one from the Saudi Arabian royal family, the other from the AIPAC lobby-led, US congress. Neither has apparently committed any crime by the acceptance of these sums but to call such activity ‘democratic’ is to call a pork chop, kosher. Such sums are routinely used to irrevocably damage the democratic principle of ‘government by the people, of the people and for the people’. In these two instances, it is government by the people but for Riyadh and Washington respectively.

That is not democracy but a travesty of the democratic process perpetrated by vested business and political interests. For one state, or a cabal within a state, to seek to influence the choice of government of another state by the direct transfer of funds calculated to direct the result of a national election, should be designated a criminal activity. It is banned in European democratic elections – but neither Malaysia nor Israel are in Europe and nor, of course, is Saudi Arabia or America. More’s the pity. Then the world would not have had to deal with the ineptitude of the pathetic US president, George Bush, and similar results of corrupted democratic process.

On January 25th, which was the date when peace talks on Syria were to start, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted that the organization founded by Osama bin Laden admirer, Zahran Alloush, represent the anti-Assad forces in the upcoming Syrian peace talks, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov very reluctantly accepted.

Alloush had founded and led the jihadist organization, Jaysh al-Islam.

“Jaysh al-Islam ex-leader Zahran Alloush gave a speech on the merits of Hajj in 2013 and praised Usama bin Laden, addressing him by the honorific ‘Sheikh’ and the honorific ‘rahimahu Allah. … Alloush addressed the Al-Qaeda organization Jabhat al-Nusra as ‘our brothers’.”Wikipedia

Al-Nusra had helped in carrying out a U.S.-Turkish-Saudi-Qatari arranged sarin gas attack in August 2013 that President Obama blamed on Assad and that Obama still cites as his reason and justification for bombing Assad’s army. Even when Obama entered the White House in 2009, he was aiming to find a way to remove Syria’s President, Assad, from power. Setting up this gas-attack (and blaming it on Assad) turned out to be the way to make that possible.

Al Jazeera announced on 25 December 2015 that “Russian Air Raids Kill Prominent Rebel Commander” Alloush. Both Russia and Assad now will have to negotiate with Mohammad Alloush, his survivor. Even French leader Francois Hollande supports Alloush — despite the recent jihadist attacks in France. Apparently, anything to get rid of Russia’s ally Assad is okay with Western leaders.

The Saud family actually required Alloush to head the anti-Assad delegation. The Sauds were insisting on it even back in early December 2015. Kerry and the rest of the West weren’t entirely comfortable with that demand. A ‘compromise’ was reached: there will be two heads: Alloush, and another figure supported by the Sauds: Asad al-Zoubi. This is yet another example of the Saud family’s leadership of the Western alliance against Russia and its allies.

Thus, on the one side of these peace talks will be Assad (the non-sectarian Shiite leader who is supported by the vast majority of Syrians and is also supported by Russia and by Iran); and, on the other side will be Zaroush and al-Zubi, two favorites of the Saud family (supported by the West, which is led by the Saud family, who financed Al Qaeda).

Lavrov faced a bad choice: either take the blame for preventing the peace talks, or else accept the Saud family’s ‘compromise’ position; and he chose the latter.

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

On Jan. 3, 1966, a 21-year-old activist from Tuskegee, Alabama, Samuel Leamon “Sammy” Younge, Jr. [pictured left] was shot and killed at a gas station for attempting to use a white only restroom.

During the period in the southern United States prior to the late 1960s, African Americans were by law denied equal access to public and private accommodations. It was not only until the summer of 1964 that a comprehensive Civil Rights bill was passed aimed at ending the Jim Crow system of strict racial segregation.

In August 1965, a Voting Rights Act was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the aftermath of the repression meted out against the people of Alabama, who were merely attempting to enforce previous legislation and the 14^th and 15^th Amendments of the U.S. Constitution ostensibly guaranteeing due process and the franchise to all who were born and naturalized citizens of the country.

Lynch Law Still Prevalent in the 1960s

The blatant character of the killing of Sammy Younge, Jr. prompted the historic statement of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) against the war in Vietnam issued on January 6, becoming the first major Civil Rights organization to do so. Younge had worked with SNCC and the University-based Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL), which led many of the campaigns in the state during 1965 aimed at voting rights and independent political organization.

Prior to Younge’s intervention in the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Past website said of his origins that “Between September 1957 and January 1960 Younge attended Cornwall Academy, a college preparatory school for boys in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a town famous as the birthplace of W.E.B. DuBois. Younge graduated from Tuskegee Institute High School in 1962 and enlisted in the U.S. Navy.” (blackpast.org)

This website goes on to say “Soon after his enlistment Younge served on the aircraft carrier USS Independence during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the vessel participated in the United States blockade of Cuba.  After a year in the Navy, Young developed a failing kidney that had to be surgically removed.  He was given a medical discharge from the Navy in July 1964.”

After the Selma Campaign of early 1965, an area where SNCC had worked since 1962, organizers spread out to neighboring Lowndes County where the first Black Panther organization was formed by the soon-to-be SNCC Chairman Stokely Carmichael (after 1979 known as Kwame Ture) and his comrades, working in close collaboration with local activists in the area. Younge, whose parents were professional African Americans connected with Tuskegee Institute and the segregated public school system, saw SNCC and TIAL as avenues of expression designed to win full equality and self-determination for the African American people.

After returning from the U.S. Navy, Younge enrolled in Tuskegee Institute and joined both SNCC and TIAL. He participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery March held during March 21-26, 1965.

Both organizations were engaged in voter registration efforts as well as challenging segregated facilities which proliferated even after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964-65.

Martyrdom Sparked Heightened Resistance

Younge’s racist murder at a Standard Oil Gas Station run by its elderly white night attendant, Marvin Segrest, came as he was working as a volunteer in a voter registration campaign in Macon County.

The murder led to a variety of protests.  Younge’s death served as a symbol of why people had to intensify the struggle to expose the false notions of fighting for freedoms abroad that were routinely denied in the U.S.

Student protests erupted in Tuskegee when white county officials initially declined to indict Segrest and even later after the all-white jury, in a majority African American county, deliberated only one hour and ten minutes delivering a verdict of not-guilty for Segrest in his December 1966 show trial.

SNCC was in the process of transitioning its program to Black Power and revolutionary nationalism in 1965-66 and its views on the war drew widespread attacks on its activists across the South. The statement issued by the organization drew the ire of the administration of the-then President Lyndon B. Johnson along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and a wide spectrum of politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

This statement by SNCC read in part as follows:

“The murder of Samuel Younge in Tuskegee, Alabama, is no different than the murder of peasants in Vietnam. For both Younge and the Vietnamese sought and are seeking to secure the rights guaranteed them by law. In each case, the United States government bears a great part of the responsibility for these deaths. Samuel Younge was murdered because United States law is not being enforced. Vietnamese are murdered because the United States is pursuing an aggressive policy in violation of international law. The United States is no respecter of persons or law when such persons or laws run counter to its needs or desires.”

SNCC activist Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia state legislature in late 1965 and was slated to take office in early 1966. He was denied his seat for two years because he refused to distance himself from the SNCC position on the war.

SNCC called for not only the end of the U.S. war against Vietnam but the abolition of the draft. Their stance sent shock waves through the ruling class particularly with the dozens of urban rebellions which erupted during the spring and summer of 1966.

In June 1966 during the “March Against Fear” through the state of Mississippi, the slogan Black Power was advanced by SNCC field secretary Willie Ricks (now known as Mukasa Dada) and Carmichael who was elected chairman of SNCC just the month before. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the leader and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), left the emerging Chicago Freedom Movement to march alongside SNCC, Floyd McKissick, the-then executive secretary of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), which had also adopted the Black Power slogan, in solidarity with the youth and farmers of Mississippi to the capital of the state in Jackson.

Civil Rights, Black Power and Opposition to the Vietnam War

SCLC had not taken a formal position against the war even after the statement issued by SNCC in early January. Nonetheless, King later admitted in March and April of 1967 that he was no longer prepared to refrain from speaking against what the Johnson administration was doing to the people of Vietnam and its relationship to the failure of Washington to adequately address poverty and racism in the U.S.

On March 25, 1967 in Chicago, King and other anti-war activists including Dr. Benjamin Spock, the noted pediatrician and author, led a demonstration of hundreds of thousands of people calling for a comprehensive halt to hostilities against North Vietnam and the revolutionaries fighting for the national liberation of the south of the country. Just ten days later, the SCLC leader would deliver his historic speech labelled “Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam” at Riverside Church in New York City.

A cacophony of condemnation poured in against King’s views on Vietnam. On April 15 he would participate in another march from Central Park to the United Nations in New York condemning the bombing of Hanoi and the need to withdraw U.S. forces from the country.

Just one year later King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 while he was assisting an African American sanitation workers’ strike seeking recognition as a labor organization under AFSCME. His combined efforts in the areas of Civil Rights, opposition to U.S. militarism and imperialism as well as the demand for the elimination of poverty sealed his fate with the ruling class.

 Author’s note: For more detailed information on the life and times of Sammy Younge, Jr. see the book “Sammy Younge, Jr.: The First Black College Student to Die in the Black Liberation Movement”, by James Foreman, 1968.

Abayomi Azikiwe edits the Pan-African News Wire

British Prime Minister David Cameron is all pent up about another crusade, this time about rescuing Muslim women.  The latest idea is a £20m language-learning scheme suggesting that a lack of competence in English and extremism are somehow linked. (The PM has obviously not been keeping up with the radical recruits for ISIS.)

Women are the primary focus, with Cameron claiming that 190,000 British Muslim women, or 22 percent, speak little or no English.  Muslim men were ever in the background spreading “backward attitudes” and exercising “damaging control” over their female relatives.[1] Such a view prompted Baroness Sayeeda Warsi to make the point that, “Women should have the opportunity to learn English full stop. Why link it to radicalisation/extremism?”[2]

Western advocates from various parts of the political spectrum simply cannot leave them alone.  Liberating the down trodden Muslim woman is a condition of Western consciousness, one of those obsessive imperatives that occupies mission and purpose.  Cameron’s funding policy provides, as Madeleine Bunting scoffed, “a new twist on an old colonial story.”[3]

From a political perspective, Islamic women make excellent public relations opportunities, equipping the messianically inclined with gendered themes for liberation that can be slotted in for the next invasion, or reform program.  They supply the basis for purported change as capably as any lethal weapon.

The US First Lady Laura Bush chose to do exactly that on November 17, 2001.  The country was giddy with war fervour a few months after the attacks on US soil by al-Qaeda, and the flag of emancipation had been woven.  Taliban-governed Afghanistan was the first choice, obvious only because of some flexible reasoning on the part of the White House.  “Because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan,” suggested the First Lady, “women are no longer imprisoned in their homes.  They can listen to music and teach their daughters without fear of punishment.”

The radio address had one overarching tendency: obliterating concepts, mashing terms.  The Taliban and terrorists became, as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod noted, “a kind of hyphenated monster identity”.[4]  And this was not all. Women’s causes were bound together with the broader mission against the Taliban, be it malnutrition, poverty, and ill-health on the one hand, and their employment, schooling and “joys of wearing nail polish” on the other.  As Laura Bush explained, “The fight against terrorism is also the fight for the rights and dignity of women.”

This appropriated theme – whether Muslim women need saving – is an old one indeed. It tends to bubble to the surface as a matter of strategic interest rather than genuine concern, though there is little doubt that some people have believed it.  When the Taliban was in the US State Department’s good books, and the treasury was readily forking out to the theocratic opium opportunists, down trodden women, segregation, and limited schooling, were of little interest.

Such precedents of manipulation stack the annals of misguided history.  Sociologist Marnia Lazreg had also noted that French colonialism made use of women towards such ends.  Muslim women were unveiled in choreographed ceremonies, one which took place on May 16, 1958 in Algeria.  The event had been organised by French generals steadfastly opposed to the country’s liberation, a spectacle which involved a few thousand local men been taken by bus from nearby villages, and various women set for the unveiling.  They were suitable bodies, strategically used and deployed in the broader story about French freedom.

Afghanistan provided a similar battleground five decades later.  The US Central Intelligence Agency’s public relations boffins felt that oppressed women in the Islamic faith would provide excellent material for the US-led cause.  WikiLeaks, ever useful, provided material to that end.  A classified document shows that, when interest in Afghanistan was flagging in 2010 on the part of various contributing countries, notably France and Germany, the motif of oppressed women would come to the rescue. This was particularly the case with France.

The CIA Red Cell memorandum (“Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission – Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough”, 11 March 2010), stemming from a section charged by the Director to “provoke out-of-the-box” approaches, is a deliciously cynical piece of advice.[5]

Far from being out-of-the-box, the memorandum is distinctly within it, noting how leaders have used public apathy “to ignore voters” and drive up commitments to the conflict.  French and German respondents did not see Afghanistan as necessarily a primary issue; politicians had capitalised, sending more troops and supplies to the ISAF mission.  For all that, “Casualties Could Precipitate Backlash.”

The response, then, would be to massage, or “leverage” guilt, noting the “adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians” to French (and other European) states.  Girl’s education, for instance, “could provoke French indignation, and become a rallying point for France’s largely secular public”.

The authors of the memorandum make the blatant suggestion that, “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s inability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory.”  Media opportunities would be made available for articulating the cause.

This was bound to smack of imperialist reflection – noble native women, incapable of articulating their plight, used to idealise an invasion against obscurantist forces. It ended up playing out what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would suggest during a moment of unusual coherence in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak’?”: a story of white men saving brown women from brown men.[6]

While the Washington snowstorm dominated news coverage this week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was operating behind the scenes to rush through the Senate what may be the most massive transfer of power from the Legislative to the Executive branch in our history. The senior Senator from Kentucky is scheming, along with Sen. Lindsey Graham, to bypass normal Senate procedure to fast-track legislation to grant the president the authority to wage unlimited war for as long as he or his successors may wish.

The legislation makes the unconstitutional Iraq War authorization of 2002 look like a walk in the park. It will allow this president and future presidents to wage war against ISIS without restrictions on time, geographic scope, or the use of ground troops. It is a completely open-ended authorization for the president to use the military as he wishes for as long as he (or she) wishes. Even President Obama has expressed concern over how willing Congress is to hand him unlimited power to wage war.

President Obama has already far surpassed even his predecessor, George W. Bush, in taking the country to war without even the fig leaf of an authorization. In 2011 the president invaded Libya, overthrew its government, and oversaw the assassination of its leader, without even bothering to ask for Congressional approval. Instead of impeachment, which he deserved for the disastrous Libya invasion, Congress said nothing. House Republicans only managed to bring the subject up when they thought they might gain political points exploiting the killing of US Ambassador Chris Stevens in Benghazi.

It is becoming more clear that Washington plans to expand its war in the Middle East. Last week the media reported that the US military had taken over an air base in eastern Syria, and Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said that the US would send in the 101st Airborne Division to retake Mosul in Iraq and to attack ISIS headquarters in Raqqa, Syria. Then on Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden said that if the upcoming peace talks in Geneva are not successful, the US is prepared for a massive military intervention in Syria. Such an action would likely place the US military face to face with the Russian military, whose assistance was requested by the Syrian government. In contrast, we must remember that the US military is operating in Syria in violation of international law.

The prospects of such an escalation are not all that far-fetched. At the insistence of Saudi Arabia and with US backing, the representatives of the Syrian opposition at the Geneva peace talks will include members of the Army of Islam, which has fought with al-Qaeda in Syria. Does anyone expect these kinds of people to compromise? Isn’t al-Qaeda supposed to be our enemy?

The purpose of the Legislative branch of our government is to restrict the Executive branch’s power. The Founders understood that an all-powerful king who could wage war at will was the greatest threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That is why they created a people’s branch, the Congress, to prevent the emergence of an all-powerful autocrat to drag the country to endless war. Sadly, Congress is surrendering its power to declare war.

Let’s be clear: If Senate Majority Leader McConnell succeeds in passing this open-ended war authorization, the US Constitution will be all but a dead letter.

“WHAT ARE YOU doing? Why are you here?”  The soldier asks. “I’m keeping an eye on the children getting to and from school” I replied. The soldier blinks in disbelief.  “Do children not go to school in Ireland?”. “Of course they do” I replied, “But not in the presence of an army. Not in the presence of tear-gas, rifles and jeeps”.

“Ah”. A smile crept across his face as he looked down, shaking his head. “So you’re watching me”.

I’ve been in the West Bank for nearly 40 days, travelling from Ireland as an ecumenical accompanier (human rights monitor) with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). In this piece of land, smaller than Galway, the abnormal has become normal, the wrong has become right, and the profound beauty of the land has been muted by sirens, demolitions, stabbings and shootings.

My days are filled with travel and sweet tea.  I accompany children to school, and collect stories of military incursions, night raids, and settler attacks – filling report after report, which are shared with UN bodies, and others needing such testimonies.

Soldier stands at the entrance to As-Sawiya School.

Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank is more than 40 years old and continues to hurt both Palestinians and Israelis to this day. EAPPI believes it is the keystone to the long-term resolution of conflict in the region.

The Oslo Accords of the early 1990’s, an interim agreement for the establishment of a Palestinian state, are now 23 years old and 17 years overdue, and are seen by many Palestinians as the second occupation. With the Accords’ establishment of Areas A, B and C, the hope of achieving a functioning contiguous Palestinian state has never seemed further from reality.

Israeli soldiers establish checkpoint for the children collecting exam results, As-Sawiya School, West Bank.

Since 1993, the number of Israelis living in settlements in the West Bank, has more than tripled from just over 200,000 at the beginning of the 1990’s to over 650,000 today. Settlements are Israeli-only towns and villages and are illegal under international law. Land continues to be seized for the expansion of these settlements and the more fundamentalist, ideological settlers have raised their profile within society, assuming top positions of power in Israel’s government.

EAPPI is committed to supporting all those working nonviolently for peace and one of the difficult things to witness is the distress many Israeli peace organisations and activists are feeling under the policies of their government. These Israelis know that their country’s future relies on a lasting peace and a just end to the occupation.

The more these organisations work for peace from within Israel, the more that their government tries to stimmy their efforts. This can be seen in the Bill currently before the Israeli Knesset (parliament) that seeks to curtail the access and viability of international and national NGOs operating within Israel and the Occupied Palestinian territory.

Palestinians I meet in the West Bank, all insist that their problem is not with Israelis, or even the state of Israel. Their issue is with being under a military occupation:  restrictions to movement through a series of checkpoints (solely within the occupied West Bank, not within Israel); a separation barrier  that is not built on the internationally agreed Armistice Line but one that snakes into and annexes private Palestinian land; and almost daily harassment and humiliation.

Take for example, the use of collective punishment procedures that see the family homes of Palestinian attackers being demolished and the family sent the bill.

Mosque, Huwwara Village, West Bank.

It’s no wonder that many young people here ask me: “For a Palestinian in the West Bank, what’s the difference between being dead and being alive?”

In stark contrast, many of the young people I speak with in West Jerusalem or Tel Aviv shy away from the subject of the occupation – slipping through the conversational trap door of: “I’m not interested in politics” or “You’d understand if you lived here”.

Maybe now, in our centenary year, whilst we’re spending time with our own history in a way we haven’t done before, we may meaningfully seek an end to the occupation in the West Bank.

It’s now 13 months since both houses of the Oireachtas called upon the government in an unopposed private members bill to recognise the State of Palestine along the UN’s 1967 borders. Recognition is not a radical step. We’ll be joining a club that has over 130 members, some of which are close neighbours.

Perhaps now, more than ever, is the time to act on recognition, supporting the campaign of SADAKA in Ireland, pursuing an end to the occupation and a just peace for all.

Alex J Dunne is currently serving in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a human rights observer with the Ecumenical Accompaniment Programe in Palestine and Israel (EAPPI). Instagram: alex.j.dunne

With Syria “peace talks” ostensibly set to begin in Geneva today, Washington has ratcheted up threats of US military escalation throughout the region. In the past few days, top US civilian and military officials have declared that they are prepared to seek a “military solution” in Syria, put “boots on the ground” in Iraq and launch another US-NATO war in Libya.

The talks themselves, which are being convened under the auspices of the United Nations, are not expected to begin as scheduled because of continuing sharp differences over what forces will be invited to attend and how the proposed agenda for a “political transition” will affect the future of Syrian President Bashir al-Assad.

The US and its regional allies, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, are insisting that the delegation representing the Syrian opposition be limited to a so-called High Negotiations Committee, an alliance dominated by Islamist militias that was formed under the auspices of the Saudi monarchy.

Russia has opposed the participation in the talks of Salafist militias linked to Al Qaeda, which Washington and its allies have attempted to pass off as “moderate rebels.” It has also backed the participation of the Kurdish YPG militia that has seized substantial territory from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which all sides claim to be fighting.

Meanwhile, Turkey has indicated that it will boycott the talks if the Kurds are allowed to participate.

Underlying the bitter disputes over who will attend the so-called peace talks are the sharply divergent interests of the US, which, together with its regional allies, has backed the Islamist militias with arms and funding in a bid to topple the Assad government, and Russia, which counts this government as its principal ally in the Middle East. For its part, Turkey, while claiming to oppose ISIS, is principally concerned with overthrowing Assad and quelling the rise of a Kurdish territory on its southern border.

The Obama administration is determined to use the talks as an instrument for furthering its goal of regime change in Syria and, more broadly, the assertion of US imperialist hegemony throughout the Middle East. It insists that any political transition must include the speedy removal of Assad.

It faces being thwarted in these efforts, however, by Russia’s military intervention. The bombing campaign initiated by Moscow has begun to produce significant military gains by the Syrian army and allied militias against the Islamist forces backed by the US and its allies.

Backed by Russian airstrikes, Syrian government troops and local militias Sunday took back the strategic city of Rabia in western Latakia province, which had been under control of so-called “rebels,” including the Al Nusra Front, Al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, since 2012. The Syrian army has been making major gains as well in the north of Latakia, near the Turkish border, where Turkey staged its shoot-down of a Russian warplane. These advances threaten to cut off a principal supply route for the Western-backed Islamists.

The US has responded to the events in Syria with a flurry of visits to its closest regional allies and key sponsors of the Al Qaeda-linked militias in Syria, along with a steady drumbeat of threats.

Secretary of State John Kerry traveled to Riyadh over the weekend, barely three weeks after the Saudi monarchy sparked international outrage and revulsion with the mass beheadings of 47 prisoners, including Nimr al-Nimr, a Muslim cleric and leading spokesman for Saudi Arabia’s oppressed Shiite minority. Uttering not a word of criticism of the savagely repressive and viciously sectarian absolute monarchy, Kerry declared that the US maintained “as solid a relationship, as clear an alliance and as strong a friendship with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as we have ever had.”

Vice President Joseph Biden, meanwhile, visited Turkey where he solidarized himself with the brutal crackdown by the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan against the country’s Kurdish minority that has seen tanks firing on neighborhoods and has cost the lives of hundreds of civilians.

Biden declared that Washington and Ankara were engaged in a “shared mission on the extermination of” ISIS. In reality, the Turkish government has been one of the main pillars of support for ISIS and other Islamist militias. It has directed its fire principally at Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria, the same forces that the US has employed as proxy ground troops in its air war.

Biden said that Washington was determined to press ahead with the talks in Geneva, adding, “But we are prepared if that is not possible to having a military solution to this operation.”

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter indicated that the Pentagon is also preparing an escalation of its military intervention in Iraq, declaring at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that the US is “looking for opportunities to do more, and there will be boots on the ground—I want to be clear about that—but it’s a strategic question, whether you are enabling local forces to take the hold, rather than trying to substitute for them.”

The Obama administration had repeatedly foresworn US “boots on the ground” in the region, referring to the deployment of large numbers of combat troops. Now it is deliberately employing the same phrase to justify the steady escalation of the deployment of “advisers” and “trainers” who are becoming ever more directly involved in combat operations.

At the same time, the US military is preparing to invoke the spread of ISIS as the pretext for intervening for the second time in less than five years in Libya.

“It’s fair to say that we’re looking to take decisive military action against ISIL in conjunction with the political process” in Libya, Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday. “The president has made clear that we have the authority to use military force.”

In other words, President Barack Obama, has, without a word of warning to the American people, handed the Pentagon brass authorization to launch “decisive military action,” i.e., yet another war, whenever it sees fit.

The growth of ISIS in Libya, as in Iraq and Syria, is a direct product of US imperialist interventions in the region that have claimed over a million lives and turned millions more into refugees.

The US-NATO war in Libya toppled and murdered Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, smashed the country’s governmental and social infrastructure, and triggered a protracted civil war between the various Islamist militias—including those now affiliated to ISIS—that the US used as proxy forces in the 2011 war.

These same Libyan Islamist elements were funneled, together with large Libyan arms stockpiles, into Syria to wage the US-orchestrated war for regime change in that country. Now many of them have returned, bringing with them thousands of so-called foreign fighters.

Another war by the US and the European powers in Libya will not be aimed at smashing ISIS, any more than the last one was directed at defending “human rights” and “democracy.” Its principal objective will be the imposition of a puppet regime that will place the country’s huge oil reserves firmly under Western control.

Behind this region-wide eruption of American militarism there exist sharp differences within the US ruling establishment and Washington’s sprawling military-intelligence apparatus. The conflict is between those demanding a major new escalation in the Middle East and those opposing a large commitment of troops and materiel, insisting instead on a “pivot” to confront US imperialism’s major strategic rivals, principally China and Russia.

In the end, however, American imperialism is driven by its crisis to attempt to assert its control over the entire planet, and the so-called war against ISIS in the Middle East and North Africa becomes indissolubly linked with the buildup toward war with Russia and China. The increasingly frenetic interventions in Syria, Iraq and Libya could provide the spark for a global conflagration.

Over the past several decades, China has risen to become a prominent player on the world stage with global operations and interests far from its shores. The People’s Liberation Army reorients itself toward China’s evolving priorities in all spheres from weapons acquisitions to the army organization. The growing competition in the Indo-Asia-Pacific with the United States and its allies means that it is urgent for China to increase its military’s ability to conduct seamless joint operations.

The PLA has already upgraded its hardware and devoted an increasing share of resources to the navy, air force and the Rocket Force. The recent round of China’s military reforms was launched in 2016 and aimed to design military structures that can coordinate combined arms on the battlefield and to increase command and control, situational awareness and precision. Implementation of technological networking should raise China’s People’s Liberation Army to conduct successfully joint and  operations and to protect Chinese interests in a complex environment of the modern world.

Following the current wave of reform, the Central Military Commission will be in charge of setting and executing the overall policies of the military while the commanders of unified battle zones will be charged with combat. The service headquarters will focus mainly on force development.

This has to improve the PLA’s ability to function as a joint force and avoid the confusion caused by the convoluted command chain. The very same time,  the commanders of the reformed battle zones should accept additional authority if they are to be effective. These improvements will allow the PLA to become a force truly capable to meet the challenges of modern warfare from organizational side. Still, the reforms alone won’t be sufficient to fully meet the Chinese goals. Despite the increasingly large joint training exercises, the PLA still has a lack of real experience. However, this would be solved with expected growth of Chinese involvement in humanitarian, anti-terrorist and other missions over the world.

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Washington tolerates no governments it doesn’t control, wanting pro-Western vassal states replacing sovereign independent ones – notably Russia and China, both countries targeted for regime change.

Neocon/super-hawk former US Deputy Defense Secretary and World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz [pictured left] earlier explained Washington’s “first objective is prevent(ing) the re-emergence of (rival states), either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.”

America seeks unipolar/New World Order dominance, pursuing a policy of state terrorism globally, wanting control over all other nations, threatening world peace, stability and security.

Russia knows what it’s up against. America is not “ally” or “partner”. On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was notably frank, saying:

“The policy of restraining Russia continues, though it is high time to drop this policy and file it in the historical archives.”

Washington remains intractably hostile, wanting all nations operating under its rules, serving its interests exclusively, posing no challenge to its hegemonic aims.

US administrations “attempted to impose agreements on us, respecting the interests of either the European Union or (America) in the first place, trying to convince us that they will not damage our interests. That’s over now,” said Lavrov.

Moscow seeks “close, constructive cooperation” with all nations, based on mutual solidarity and trust – “without interference (in any country’s) internal affairs,” respecting their sovereign independence.

Washington imposes its will on other nations politically, economically and militarily, seeking “one-sided benefits, (attempting) to punish us for conducting an independent international policy,” Lavrov explained.

Russia responds appropriately, prioritizing its interests and national security. Lavrov highlighted Washington’s “counterproductive and dangerous policy…”

“(B)uilding up (US-dominated NATO’s) military (presence) near our borders and the creation of global European and Asian segments of a global US missile system” threatens world peace and security.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday clock stands at three minutes to midnight, reflecting the “high” probability of “global catastrophe.”

Last January, BAS said “unchecked climate change, global nuclear weapons modernizations, and outsized nuclear weapons arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity.”

“World leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe. These failures of political leadership endanger every person on Earth.”

Since established in 1947, the clock was adjusted 18 times, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 after America and Russia tested thermonuclear bombs to 17 minutes in 1991 – following Washington and Moscow’s Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and Soviet Russia’s yearend dissolution.

On Tuesday, BAS will announce whether its Doomsday Clock is closer, further distant from or unchanged from potential disaster.

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.

Note from the editor of Tikkun.org: Rabbi Arik Ascherman [pictured left] is one of our great contemporary heroes. His work to save the Israeli Bedouins from being obliterated by the Israeil government deserves your fuill support.

Please read his call to you below! Standing up for the humanity of everyone on the planet is part of the goal of Tikkun magazine and our interfaith and secular-humanist welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives. To keep up with developments in the US and around the world, you are invited to receive (for FREE) updates through our Tikkun Daily Blog at www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/join-tikkun-daily/— Rabbi Michael Lerner

As you read this, JNF bulldozers are preparing the first stage of building the Jewish community of “Hiran” on the rubble of the Israeli Negev Bedouin community of “Umm Al-Hiran.”  The government plans to expand the Yatir forest to overrun Atir.  A week ago, the Israeli High Court removed the last legal hurdle preventing the immediate expulsion of over 1,000 men, women and children from their homes. The mayor of the artificial Bedouin township of Hura, where the Israeli government wishes to move them, says he has that Hura’s inadequate zoning plan leaves no place to put them. 

You can act, and also read more background regarding Umm Al-Hiran and Atir, at www.dontdemolish.com.  Here is some more general background about the Negev Bedouin.

While the world focuses on the Occupied Territories, the plight of Israel’s Bedouin citizens goes unnoticed, or is deemed an “internal matter.”  For people of conscience, there can be no “internal matter,” and these approximately 250,000 Israeli citizens are also created in God’s Image.

Until 1948 the Negev served as home to 65,000-100,000 Bedouin who inhabited, worked and claimed ownership to somewhere between 2 and 3 million dunams of land (four dunam to an acre), as documented by the pre-State Zionist movement in 1920 In almost every case, the proofs of ownership cited were traditional Bedouin documents based on their internal system of land ownership. Although the Ottomans, British, pre-State Zionist movement and the early State recognized these claims, today the State does not. Israeli courts do not accept Bedouin documents as proof of ownership. Whether one chooses to view this dispute as a boldfaced attempt to take over Bedouin lands, and/or as cultural imperialism unwilling to recognize the land ownership system of a traditional culture, the end result has been massive dispossession.

When I am in the Negev, I often reflect upon the Biblical story of Abraham and his nephew Lot recounted in Genesis 13: 5-12. A conflict arises between Abraham’s shepherds and Lot’s shepherds because they were living together and there wasn’t enough pasture. Abraham is the senior, and can clearly lay down the law.  He doesn’t.  Rather, he bends over backwards to avoid conflict within the family.  “Let there be no strife between you and me, between my shepherds and ours, for we are brothers.  Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate if you go north, I will go south, and if you go south, I will go north.” We, the descendents of Abraham struggle mightily to claim the land he bequeathed us. Were we to exert a fraction of the efforts we invest in fighting over that physical inheritance in living up to the moral example Abraham bequeathed us, Israel/Palestine would look much different than it does today.

After the 1948 War only about 10% of the Bedouin population remained, living under a military regime unti 1966. The Bedouin were moved out of the Western Negev in the 1950’s, and into a triangle between Beersheva, Arad and Yeroham.  In the 1960’s-1980’s Israel created 7 townships that radically alter the Bedouin lifestyle and destroy their social fabric.  These townships have become magnets for poverty, crime, drugs and despair.

In the 1970’s the State of Israel allowed the Bedouin to submit claims of land ownership. Perhaps there were those who thought that Bedouin know nothing about land ownership, and that the results would be so jumbled that it would be easy to dismiss them.  The some 3,100 claims submitted fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. The Bedouin asserted they owned about 1,250,000 dunams of land. Of those, about 500,000 dunams of communal pastureland were immediately taken off the table. Subsequently somewhere between 200,000 to 350,000 dunams have been resolved in court or through arbitration. They Bedouin have always lost because their proofs of ownership aren’t recognized.  About 650,000 dunams of land remain unresolved.

Today  approximately  120,000 live in the seven Bedouin townships. The rest of the community lives in 11 “recognized” villages and 35 “unrecognized” villages.  While most of the unrecognized villages existed before the State of Israel, and the remainder are located where the State moved them, they are literally not on the map.  For the most part they have no water, electricity, schools or master building plans allowing them to build legally.  Over 1,000 homes are demolished every year. Crops are destroyed.  When the village Khassim Zannih went to court to stop a planned highway from destroying it, the State’s response was “What village? There is no village there.”

A series of plans of how to deal with the Bedouin have been promulgated since 2008.  The latest was the Begin Bill,  that we believe would have led to the demolition of tens of villages, the transfer of some 40,000 additional Bedouin into the townships, and the loss of most of their remaining lands. It was frozen in 2013 not only because the Bedouin and their supporters opposed it, but because the Israeli right thought it to be too generous!

Subsequently, the Israeli government has been implementing elements of the Begin Bill without legislation. Over 1,000 Bedouin homes are demolished yearly, even as the State plans tens of new Jewish communities in the Negev and intends to move most of Israel’s army bases there.

“Hiran” is one of ten new planned Jewish communities that are part of the “Arad Area Development Plan.’ It is the first that was literally planned on the rubble of an existing Bedouin community, but not the only one. Again, you can find more information about Umm Al-Hiran and Atir, and send a letter to Prime Minister Netanyahu, at www.dontdemolish.com.

The tensions created by this injustice are harmful to both the Jewish and Bedouin residents of the Negev. Mistreatment also sends a message to Palestinians that they have nothing to expect from Israel if this is the way Israel treats her own citizens.  There is another way. An Israeli television movie documented the identification of Bedouin with the State in the mostly recognized villages in northern Israel, versus the anger and rage in the Negev.  You can click here for a brief clip from the movie with subtitles

In 2013, Rabbis For Human Rights conducted a poll demonstrating showing that 90% of Israeli Jews subscribe to the statement that “The Bedouin are taking over the Negev.” Some 70% believed that the Bedouin claimed at least 25% of the Negev. The median was 43/9%.  When informed that if remaining Bedouin land claims were recognized and honored, they come to only 5.4% of the Negev, the majority said, “We are not sure we believe you, because that is not what we have heard in the media.  However, if that is the case, that sounds fair.”

Have we Israelis all too often in our short history been oppressors, transferors and dispossessors? Sadly, yes.  Is it who we are in our souls? No.  This poll is one of the pieces of evidence that gives me hope, and allows me to maintain my faith in the goodness and decency of my fellow Israelis, even as my job is to deal on a daily basis with the darkest corners of the society I am a part of and the people I love.  It teaches me that our job is not to rub the nose of the naughty puppy in the mess they have made, but to hold up a mirror and say, “We know that you are good and decent people striving to do justly. However, you need to look in the mirror, in order to get back on track.” Our word in Hebrew for prayer is “tefillah,” a reflexive verb meaning to “judge one’s self.” Created in God’s Image, God is in the mirror into which we gaze in order to look deeply into ourselves, and understand what we must do in order to return to our highest and truest selves.  Tikkun Olam is partnering with God by helping to hold up the mirror.

Please help hold up the mirror by sending a letter now. You can use the letter we’ve prepared at www.dontdemolish.com

For more information, please go to the Bedouin section on the RHR website

Or to the website of the Negev Coexistence Forum

Rabbi Arik Ascherman is the President and Senior Rabbi of Rabbis For Human Rights.  He is currently on trial for standing with the “unrecognized” village of El-Araqib when Israeli forces the demolished structures built inside their cemetery fence in June 2014, because the cemetery perimeter had been sacrosanct during the tens of previous demolitions.

Nome de código “Timber Sycamore”: assim se denomina a operação de armamento e treinamento dos “rebeldes” na Síria, “autorizada secretamente pelo presidente Obama em 2013”. É o que documenta uma investigação publicada no domingo (24) pelo New York Times.

Quando foi encarregada pelo presidente de efetuar esta operação encoberta, “a CIA já sabia que tinha um parceiro disposto a financiá-la: a Arábia Saudita”. Com o Catar, “esta forneceu armas e bilhões de dólares, ao passo que a CIA dirigiu o treinamento dos rebeldes”. O fornecimento de armas aos “rebeldes”, inclusive os “grupos radicais como Al Qaeda”, tinha começado no verão de 2012 quando, através de uma rede disposta pela CIA, agentes secretos sauditas tinham comprado na Croácia, na Europa Oriental, milhares de fuzis de assalto AK-47 com milhões de projéteis, e quando os catarianos infiltraram na Síria, através da Turquia, mísseis portáteis chineses FN-6 comprados no mercado internacional. Como o fornecimento de armas era feito livremente, no fim de 2012 o diretor da CIA David Petraeus convocou os aliados na Jordânia, impondo-lhes um controle mais estrito por parte da Agência sobre o conjunto da operação. Alguns meses mais tarde, na primavera de 2013, Obama autorizou a CIA a treinar os “rebeldes” em uma base na Jordânia, e em outra no Catar, e a lhes fornecer armas incluindo mísseis antitanques TOW. Sempre com os bilhões do “maior contribuinte”, a Arábia Saudita. Nenhuma novidade nesse tipo de operações.

Nos anos 1970 e 1980, esta ajudou a CIA em uma série de operações secretas. Na África, notadamente em Angola, onde, com financiamento saudita, a CIA apoiou os rebeldes contra o governo aliado à URSS. No Afeganistão, onde “para armar os moudjaedins contra os soviéticos, os Estados Unidos lançaram uma operação ao custo anual de milhões de dólares, que os sauditas pagaram dólar por dólar em uma conta da CIA num banco suíço”. Na Nicarágua, quando a administração Reagan lança o plano secreto para ajudar os contras, os sauditas financiaram a operação da CIA com 32 milhões de dólares por intermédio de um banco nas Ilhas Cayman. Com essas operações e algumas outras, secretas, até a atual na Síria, cimentou-se a “longa reação entre os serviços secretos dos Estados Unidos e da Arábia Saudita”. Apesar da “reaproximação diplomática” de Washington com o Irã, não apreciada em Riad, “ a aliança persiste, mantida à tona sobre um mar de dinheiro saudita e sobre o reconhecimento de seus interesses mútuos”. Isto explica por que “os Estados Unidos são reticentes em criticar a Arábia Saudita sobre a violação dos direitos humanos, o tratamento às mulheres e o apoio à ala extremista do Islã, o wahabismo, que inspira numerosos grupos terroristas”, e por que “Obama não condenou a Arábia Saudita pela decapitação do Sheik Nimr al-Nimr, o dissidente religioso xiita que tinha desafiado a família real”.

Acrescenta-se o fato, sobre o qual o New York Times não fala, de que o secretário de Estado John Kerry, em visita a Riad em 23 de janeiro, reafirmou que “no Iêmen onde a insurreição Houthi ameaça a Arábia Saudita, os EUA estão do lado de seus amigos sauditas”. Os amigos que desde há quase um ano massacram civis no Iêmen, bombardeando até mesmo hospitais, com a ajuda dos EUA que lhes fornecem indicações (ou seja, mostrando os alvos a atingir), armas (inclusive bombas de fragmentação) e um apoio logístico (incluindo abastecimento em voo dos caças-bombardeiros sauditas). Esses mesmos amigos que o primeiro–ministro italiano Renzi encontrou oficialmente em novembro último em Riad, garantindo-lhe o apoio e as bombas da Itália na “luta comum contra o terrorismo”.

Manlio Dinucci

Fonte: Il Manifesto

http://ilmanifesto.info/lasse-segreto-usa-arabia-saudita/

Traduzido por José Reinaldo Carvalho para o Blog da Resistência

Manlio Dinucci é jornalista e geógrafo.

Writing in India’s Deccan Herald newspaper on 26 January 2016, Kalyan Ray places great store in a flawed year-old British Parliament document to promote a pro-GM agenda. According to Ray, the document ‘Advanced Genetic Techniquesfor Crop Improvement: Regulation, risks and precaution’ from the House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee reflects several arguments in favour of GM crops that certain Indian scientists have been voicing for years.

He asserts that the weight of peer-reviewed scientific evidence has shown the EU-adopted ‘precautionary principle’ towards GM to be misguided. In his view, where genetically modified crops have been shown to pose a risk, this has invariably been a result of the trait displayed — for example, herbicide tolerance — rather than the technology itself. Ray adds that no inherent risks have so far been identified to human or animal health from this consumption or to the environment from their cultivation. 

Rays seems to concur with the report’s conclusion that Europe’s precautionary GMO regulation is preventing the adoption of GM crops in the UK, Europe and the developing world.

He says:

“Worldwide, over 175 million hectares are dedicated to GM crop, accounting for 12 per cent of arable land. No inherent risks have so far been identified to human or animal health from this consumption or to the environment from their cultivation.”

Implicit in this claim is a common tactic: the industry does not have to prove safety (in its view), but now GM has been fraudulently (see Steven Druker’s book) released onto the market, the onus is placed on everyone else to prove it is unsafe  – regardless of the fact that clear, serious safety issues were downplayed or silenced back in the 1990s when GM was being forced onto the US public (again, see Druker).

Moreover, the implication of the above quote is that farmers are freely choosing to plant GM. This is based more on free-market ideology than actual fact. Aside from employing coercive tactics to try to get GM into countries, the closing off of alternatives plays a major role in influencing adoption of certain technology (see this for how the Gates Foundation is supporting agro dealer networks to push chemical intensive agriculture in Africa, this on Bt cotton in India and this on Monsanto’s game plan in Ukraine).

Ray’s claim about GM technology not posing unique risks to health or the environment is not only wrong (for example, see this and this), but any implications derived from this claim that GM is no different from conventional breeding techniques is also incorrect and needs to be challenged. Furthermore, it is conventional breeding techniques that are delivering on the promises that GM has thus far failed to deliver on (see page 8 of this document) and which the GM industry often attempts to pass off as its own successes.

However, Ray’s biggest mistake is relying on a seriously flawed report to try to make a case for GM.

“Shocking ignorance” being use to promote GM

Dr Rupert Read, reader in philosophy at the University of East Anglia, condemned the report’s “shocking ignorance of scientific logic and the nature of risk” and said it confused “inconclusive evidence of harm from GMOs with conclusive evidence of safety.” The prominent risk expert Nassim Nicholas Taleb called the report “an insult to science.”

The Select Committee report claims that scientific evidence supporting the safety of genetically modified crops is very strong. But, as Claire Robinson from GMWatch says, the evidence cited is the EU Commission report, ‘A decade of EU-funded GMO research’. Although this EU report did conclude that GMOs were “not, per se, more risky than… conventional plant breeding technologies,” she argues it is a baseless conclusion because it presents no data that could provide evidence to support that conclusion – for example, from long-term feeding studies in animals.

Robinson notes that of the small handful of animal feeding studies carried out under the project, none tested a commercialised GM food; none tested the GM food for long-term effects; all found worrying differences in the GM-fed animals, including alterations in blood biochemistry and immune responses; and none were able to conclude on the safety of the GM food tested, let alone on the safety of GM foods in general. Indeed, the purpose of the EU report was not to test any GMO food for safety but to focus on developing safety assessment “approaches.”

The resulting report provides only a few references to published papers, which are listed randomly on some pages, with no clue provided as to which of the report’s claims they are supposed to support.

What’s more, the Select Committee displays an uncritical reliance on a published meta-analysis by Klümper and Qaim, which claims that GM crops have “reduced chemical pesticide use by 37%, increased crop yields by 22%, and increased farmer profits by 68%.”

This meta-analysis is being widely cited by lobbyists who want to push Europe down the GMO path, according to Robinson. But it relies on outdated data from the early 2000s – before herbicide-resistant superweeds and Bt resistant pests made GM herbicide-tolerant and Bt insecticidal traits less effective and caused higher costs and inconvenience to farmers. Charles Benbrook’s analysis is based on more up-to-date USDA data and shows that GM crops in North America have increased overall pesticide use by 7%.

Robinson further notes that Klümper and Qaim’s meta-analysis also ignores the fact that Bt crops are in themselves pesticides, with the total pesticide content in the plants’ cells often being many times greater than the volume of chemical spray pesticides that are supposed to be replaced. Also, the Bt toxins in GM crops are not the same as the natural Bt long used as an insecticide spray by organic and conventional farmers – they are structurally different and have a different mode of action, which could explain why they have been found to be toxic to non-target insects and mammals in some studies.

Regarding yields, Klümper and Qaim’s meta-analysis uses suspect data collected from Monsanto field trials. The real picture on GMO yields comes from a study published in 2013 by Jack Heinemann and his team. It looked at 50 years’ worth of data from the US and Europe, before and after GM was introduced in the US. It found that yields for staple crops in the US – which are largely GM – have declined since GM has been adopted, and are lagging behind those of Europe, where production is mostly non-GM. Europe also uses less pesticides.

GM traits do not confer higher yields but tolerance to herbicides or an insecticidal toxin trait. A high-yielding GM crop is a crop with high-yielding background genetics achieved by conventional breeding, into which GM traits for herbicide tolerance or insecticidal proteins have been inserted.

In conclusion, Robinson states that the Select Committee relies on outdated and discredited data to paint a fantasy picture of the success of GM crops, while ignoring more up-to-date and relevant data that threaten that picture.

GM unwanted and not needed in India

According to Kalyan Ray, good risk management requires the potential benefits of an action to be thoroughly considered alongside the risks. It also requires a consideration of the risk of failing to act. He implies that hold-ups in allowing GM crops into India is preventing Indian agriculture from progressing.

In what way is India’s agriculture not progressing one might wonder. Indian farmers already produce bumper harvests (despite policies that make it difficult to operate and cause them economic distress), have achieved self-sufficiency in a number of food staples and use traditional, indigenous varieties of crops that seem to be more resilient in the face of pest management or climate change.

Ray quotes the UK Select Committee report that says:

“We are convinced by the evidence provided to us that this suite of technologies is a potentially important tool, particularly in the developing world, which should not be rejected unless there are solid scientific evidence those technologies may cause harm.”

Of course, the report’s opinion is in sharp contrast to report after report recommending support for conventional agriculture, agroecology and local economies, especially in the global south. Critics of GM therefore want to know where is the advantage in India adopting GM and why the government is experimenting given all the attendant risks.

To make the case for non-GM agriculture, campaigner Aruna Rodrigues cites the World Bank-funded International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge and Science for Development Report, which India signed in 2008. That report is the work of over 400 scientists, took four years to complete and was twice peer reviewed. The report states we must look to small-holder, traditional farming (not GMOs) to deliver food security in the global south through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable.

Despite this, based on a flawed UK select committee report, Ray advocates regulatory reforms to smooth the entry of GM to India are essential.

There is a credible body of evidence that GMOs were placed on the US market due to fraud and the bypassing of scientific procedures and ignoring evidence pertaining to risk, as described in Steven Druker’s book ‘Altered Genes, Twisted Truth’. It thus might appear strange that someone would rely on a seriously questionable report to try to make a case for GM, especially when a series of official reports in India have come out against the introduction of GM to India: the ‘Jairam Ramesh Report’ of February 2010, imposing an indefinite moratorium on Bt Brinjal, overturning the apex Regulator’s approval to commercialise it; the Sopory Committee Report (August 2012); the Parliamentary Standing Committee (PSC) Report on GM crops (August 2012) and the TEC Final Report (June-July 2013).

What supporters of GM technology like to ignore is that it is an extension of the overhyped  ‘green revolution’, which has arguably been a disaster for India (see Bhaskar Save’s views and Raj Patel’s analysis). They also like to overlook the fact there is no scientific consensus on the safety or efficacy GM (contrary to the much-publicised pro-GM public relations machine that claims otherwise).

But while side-lining these concerns, they like to promote GM as the answer to hunger. But, as Viva Kermani says:

“When our people go hungry, or suffer from malnutrition, it is because their right to safe and nutritious food that is culturally connected is blocked. That is why it is not a technological fix problem and GM has no place in it.”

Too often, supporters of GM promote the technology as a proxy for deep-seated social, political and economic factors that are responsible for poverty and hunger.

What they also choose to sideline is false claims concerning yields pertaining to GM mustard (any improvement in yield is due to hybridisation, not GM technology), which could soon be the first food crop to be officially sanctioned in India. They also put forward fallacious justifications for embracing GM mustard (to reduce over-reliance on imports) that conveniently ignore the impact of trade policies that seriously undermined the indigenous mustard industry and India’s inability to attain self-sufficiency in this foodstuff.

If we want science and objectivity to guide us where GM is concerned, surely it would be best to adhere to proper procedures that are open and transparent rather than engage in “unremitting fraud” and secrecy in order to force GM onto the commercial market in India And surely it would be better to root out and call to account the conflicts of interest that are fuelling the pro-GM agenda in India.

When so much faith is placed in a patently flawed report to make a case for smoothing the progress of GM in India, are we to conclude that what we are reading is just an example of poorly researched journalism?

Or should we conclude what we see is a case of more pro-GM spin?

Europe is firmly in the grip of winter, and the Balkans are covered in snow with temperatures below freezing. Nonetheless, one government after another is closing its borders and sending hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees back to war zones that they have risked their lives to flee.

The Austrian government closed its borders last Wednesday. Already at the beginning of the week, it made clear its intention to send more refugees back to Slovenia. Then on Wednesday, a conference was held on refugees between leading Social Democrat (SPÖ) and conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) politicians to impose an upper limit for refugees. Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP) justified the decision by stating, “A joint European answer cannot be expected”.

Austria is the first European Union (EU) country to impose an upper limit for refugees. This was in no small part a response to measures taken by Germany. Also on Wednesday, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière (Christian Democrats, CDU) extended border controls for an undetermined period of time. Germany has already refused entry to 2,000 refugees this month at its border with Austria.

In Vienna, Austrian Chancellor Werner Feymann (SPÖ) told the press that in 2016, Austria would only accept 37,500 asylum seekers. Including the 90,000 refugees who remained in the country last year, an upper limit of 1.5 percent of the population would be reached.

The Social Democratic chancellor embraced the arguments of the notorious anti-immigrant ÖVP interior minister, Johanna Mikl-Leitner, announcing a strict review procedure at the border.

“If we undertake more controls, we will find out more”, Feymann bluntly told Austrian broadcaster ORF. If people cannot credibly explain why they want to come into the country, they would not be allowed in. Feymann had ordered a report by the foreign, interior and defence ministries to determine “everything that is legally possible” at the border.

At the Spielfeld crossing on the Austrian-Slovenian border, a 4-kilometre-long border fence is being constructed. Last Sunday, the government deployed 200 soldiers to the Slovenian border. Their task is to examine the refugees and their luggage and deport all of those unable to provide valid travel documents. In the first three weeks of the year, Austria has already deported over 1,000 refugees.

Croatia, Serbia and Macedonia are also in the process of closing their borders. In a rapid domino effect, one country after another is re-establishing posts at its borders. Slovenia closed its borders at the beginning of last week and also announced the introduction of an upper limit for immigrants.

The Serbian government immediately adopted measures to make it more difficult for immigrants to enter the country. A government spokesman stated that Serbia would in the future accept refugees on its territory only if they were seeking to claim asylum in Germany or Austria. “From today onwards … no more migrants can travel through Serbia unless they explicitly state an intention to claim asylum in the territory of Austria or Germany”, Prime Minister Alexander Vulin toold Serbian news agency Tanjug.

Croatia’s interior minister also announced that his country would from now on ask every refugee if they intended to apply for asylum in Germany or Austria. In the Balkan country, the government of Tihomir Orešković has just begun its period in office. Since the highly indebted country is heavily dependent on the EU, it will seek to do everything demanded by the EU, including stricter measures targeting refugees.

Macedonia responded on Wednesday morning by rejecting 600 refugees at the Greek border, including many children. The AFP news agency cited a police spokesman in Skopje, who said that Macedonia was reacting to a request from Slovenia. The blockade was lifted again on Thursday evening, but not for all refugees.

Those people arriving at the border already have behind them the grueling journey of crossing the Mediterranean through Turkey and Greece during the winter. The Greek coastguard reported that on Thursday alone, it had saved 73 refugees from the Aegean Sea. For one young child, help came too late: the child died a few hours after arrival on the island of Lesbos. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 87 people have already drowned in the Mediterranean this year.

The chain reaction of border closures has completely undermined the Schengen agreement between EU states. Introduced in 1985, Schengen is a key element of the European Union and meant that border controls between European countries were eliminated. On Monday, EU interior ministers met in Amsterdam to discuss extending border controls for two years.

EU Council President Donald Tusk warned last Tuesday that the Schengen agreement could fail entirely. He called upon all heads of government to back a joint EU concept before the Brussels conference scheduled for March 16-17. The content of this concept would be negotiations with African states about “repatriation”, military action against so-called smuggler bands, and better securing of the EU’s external borders—all measures that will put the lives of refugees at greater risk.

In addition, “combatting the causes of flight” is being used as a justification for military interventions in the Middle East and North Africa, and the expansion of wars in Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and North African states.

What is to happen to the refugees shut out because of the new upper limits is unclear. The EU has already announced plans to build detention centres and so-called hot spots along the Balkan route and distribute refugees across all EU countries. But Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary have firmly opposed the quota system, and many other countries have silently boycotted it.

The plans are equally bureaucratic as they are inhumane, since refugees often try to travel to countries where they have relatives or friends. They are not only denied this option on organisational grounds: the EU countries, led by Germany, are creating miserable conditions to deter refugees from coming.

On Thursday it was revealed that not only Denmark and Switzerland, but the German states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, would search refugees arriving at the border and confiscate money and valuables. This was confirmed by Bavaria’s interior minister Joachim Hermann (Christian Social Union, CSU) to the Bild newspaper, who said, “Cash and valuables can be secured if … a claim for reimbursement exists or is expected against the person”.

In Bavaria, refugees will be permitted to retain €750, and in Baden-Württemberg only €350. Such measures recall the Nazi era, when the National Socialist regime robbed the Jewish population of all their possessions.

On Friday, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls reaffirmed initial Socialist Party (PS) statements after the November 13 terror attacks in Paris carried out by the Islamist State (IS, or Daesh), that the current state of emergency in France must be made permanent.

In an interview with the BBC while attending the economic summit in Davos, Switzerland, Valls proclaimed that France is waging all-out war with IS. “As long as the threat is there, we must use all available means,” he said, adding that the state of emergency must stay in place “until we can get rid of Daesh”.

He continued,

“In Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia we must eradicate, eliminate Daesh, it is a total and global war that we face with terrorism. … We will have to live for decades or for many years with this menace or this threat and that’s why it’s a war. There are many generations that will have to live with this and the crisis will have to be managed in north Africa and the Middle East.”

The implications of Valls’ statements are staggering. Like Egypt, now ruled as a military dictatorship by General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a personal friend of President François Hollande, France is to be run under a permanent state of emergency lasting generations, perhaps forever. According to Valls’ statement, the French people have effectively lost fundamental social and democratic rights guaranteed to them by the French Constitution.

As if in a slow-motion coup d’état, the ruling elite is moving to transform political life in France, creating an authoritarian regime. Under the state of emergency, public protests are banned, there is no guarantee of freedom of the press or freedom of assembly, and no judicial oversight of arbitrary searches and seizures carried out by police. Already, the government banned protests against the COP21 ecological summit in Paris after the November 13 attacks and put the organizers under house arrest.

Police can enter anyone’s house, search without warrants, and arrest people on mere suspicion that they are a threat to public order. The state has sentenced Goodyear workers to prison for striking and struggling to defend their jobs, even after Goodyear itself dropped all charges against them.

The arguments provided by Valls to justify the indefinite suspension of democratic rights are a pack of lies. IS (Daesh) is not an unstoppable foe that poses an existential threat to the French Republic and to the French people, leaving the French state no choice but to suspend democratic rights in order to safeguard the very survival of the French people.

IS is, in fact, a political asset of the ruling class of France and of all the major NATO countries. It is a militia operating in Iraq and Syria, financed and backed by key French allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, as part of the regime change operation to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

This organisation emerged from wars launched under Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, who played a central role in pressing for a war, ultimately led by all the NATO powers, against Libya. The NATO powers, led by the United States, France and Britain, encouraged Islamist fighters to come to Libya to act as proxy ground forces whilst they provided aerial bombardments. Many of these Islamist forces were then dispatched from Libya to Syria, as the spearhead of the NATO war for regime in Syria.

Valls’ claim that France and its allies are engaged in total, global war with IS does not hold water. Rather, IS and the reactionary attacks it has carried out in France are being invoked as a pretext to push through vast attacks.

As late as last year, Hollande insisted that France would only attack IS in Iraq—where Paris had joined Washington in bombing IS in 2013 to prevent IS from toppling the US puppet regime in Baghdad—so as to avoid weakening opposition to Assad by attacking IS in Syria.

In his February 5, 2015 press conference after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Hollande explained that France would not bomb IS forces in Syria, but only Iraq. He said, “It is in Iraq that we direct our efforts. Why? Because it is in Iraq that there is a state, sovereignty, and army that can struggle against IS and ensure the reconquest of lost territory.”

That is, Hollande was willing to shield and rely upon IS as a tool of various twists and turns of French and NATO policy against Assad. When IS emerges as a domestic policy issue, however, the PS suddenly insists France is engaged in an all-out war on IS in which no democratic right can be allowed to stand in the way of the assertion of state power.

The claim that the assault on democratic rights is primarily a response to the IS’ terror attacks is a political fraud. This assault is the response of the French ruling class to the worsening class and geo-strategic contradictions of international capitalism, preparing above all for war against the working class.

As a presidential candidate, Hollande said his enemy was “finance”, but once in power, he has pushed for austerity and war on every front. While collaborating with German Chancellor Angela Merkel to impose deeper austerity on the Greek people, he launched wars across Africa and the Middle East and worked closely with the Obama administration to threaten Russia. Social inequality is reaching explosive levels, and Hollande had to admit last year that France now found itself on the brink of “total war” with Russia.

Besides the danger of a major international war waged with nuclear weapons, Hollande fears social anger developing in the working class under conditions where the PS and its political and trade union satellites are thoroughly discredited. The response of the PS has been to dub Hollande a “war president” and a conscious turn towards military and authoritarian forms of rule within France.

During the French invasion of Mali in 2013, French presidential advisors at the Elysée told Le Point that they were hoping for a “Falklands effect.” While the war was presented to the public as part of a struggle against Islamist terrorism, the PS’ main concern was to shift official public opinion far to the right, so as to be able to impose a drastic austerity program.

Pointing to the similarities between the Falkland Island (Malvinas) war and French imperialism’s wars today, Le Point journalist Anna Cabana wrote:

“When the Argentine troops landed on the Falklands in 1982, Margaret Thatcher decided to reply militarily. The Iron Lady [Margaret Thatcher], deeply unpopular at the time due to her drastic free-market reform policies, embarked Britain on a military adventure that ensured her re-election in 1983.”

The PS’ incendiary and politically criminal policy of launching wars of aggression in an attempt to anti-democratically impose anti-working class policies at home has failed, however. The looting of much of Africa and the Middle East did not make PS austerity any more popular, and social and international tensions have only grown since 2013.

Unable to win over the masses of working people, the French ruling class is preparing to stake everything on a ruthless attempt to repress them.

The following is the text of a complaint filed with the BBC.

Submitted via BBC Complaints webform

Dear Sir / Madam

Syrian government ‘to let aid into besieged Madaya’ – BBC News, 7 January 2016

As evidenced by the copy below [1], at 50 seconds in the original version of the above BBC report a young man is shown passionately addressing cameras as Jim Muir’s narration states:

“Back in October when the last food got in things were already bad enough.”

However the scenes of the young man date from at least July 2014, when the You Tube video below was uploaded. Further, the title of this video claims that the scenes were shot in Yarmouk refugee camp, not Madaya.

Screengrab showing date of upload to You Tube of scenes featuring young man

I note that some scenes, including those of the young man, have been removed from the version of the report which is now available on the BBC website.

Please can you explain how the scenes of the young man came to accompany narration describing the situation in Madaya in October 2015 and why the subsequent re-editing of the report has not been acknowledged on the BBC website.

Yours faithfully

Robert Stuart

https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/

Note

[1] A copy of the original report is also saved here.