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Category: Militarism

  • Australia Blindly Follows the United States, Regardless of National Interest

    One of the more disturbing features of Australian foreign policy is engagement in foreign military activities of minimal importance to Australia’s real military needs. It is a policy that has been pursued by both Liberal and Labor governments and it has a very long history.

    In the post-World War II era Australia first became involved in the Korean war from 1950 to 1953. As has been well documented, the United States took advantage of the temporary boycotting of the Security Council by Russia, and that the Chinese seat on the UNSC was occupied by the Nationalist regime that had the previous year lost the Chinese Civil War and moved to exile in what had been previously designated the Republic of Formosa during resistance against the Japanese takeover in the late 19th century.

    The second foreign military adventure that Australia would eagerly join its American masters, yet again, was the war in Vietnam. As with Korea, this was essentially a civil dispute between competing factions. Australia’s involvement in that dispute lasted 10 years until the Whitlam Labor government withdrew Australian forces in 1972, thereby earning the lasting distrust of the Americans. Even the now revealed secretive linkages of the Bob Hawke Labor government to the Americans never fully regained American trust.

    The Vietnam misadventure was followed by Australia’s involvement in the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. That has only just ended with an unseemly Australian withdrawal from that country hot on the heels of President Biden’s announcement that United States troops would be withdrawn by September of this year. Such was Australia’s unseemly rush for the Afghanistan door that they had failed to make proper provision for the hundreds of Afghanis who had loyally helped them and whose lives are now in danger.

    Whether the United States withdrawal actually occurs remains to be seen. The regular force troops are to be replaced by mercenaries, at least 10,000 at last count. An important part of their role will be an attempt to cling onto the lucrative Afghanistan heroin trade, a hugely significant contributor both to United States power and the CIA’s illicit coffers for the past two decades.

    The Australian withdrawal from Afghanistan came immediately after Biden confirmed that United States troops would be withdrawn. Without United States approval it is impossible to believe that Australian troops would have been withdrawn. A likely fatality of the withdrawal will be the abandoning by the military prosecuting services of any trial against the Australian soldiers reported to have been involved in serious war crimes. The explanation for abandoning the prosecution will be the Taliban and the difficulty of working with them. The Taliban are advancing at the speed that apparently even they did not anticipate, and their taking effective control of the country can now only be a matter of weeks.

    The Taliban were initially overthrown because of their alleged refusal to surrender Osama bin Laden, for his equally alleged role in the events of 11 September 2001 in the United States. In fact, the invasion of Afghanistan for multiple reasons was discussed at the first cabinet meeting of the new Bush presidency in January 2001.

    Bin Laden was never more than a smoke screen to obscure the real reasons for invading the country which among other reasons including its vast natural resources, and its geography

    The Labor Party, which had opposed the initial invasion of Afghanistan, did nothing to withdraw Australian troops during their six years in power. This is a measure of the extent to which Australian governments, regardless of party affiliation, obey their American masters.

    The other war that Australia willingly joined despite the complete absence of any identifiable vital Australian interest, was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They are still there, despite a unanimous resolution of the Iraqi parliament in January 2000 and all uninvited foreign troops should immediately leave their country. Again, the Australians took their cue from the Americans who simply ignored the demand of the Iraqi parliament that they should leave.

    There is a similar, but almost completely unmentioned involvement of Australian troops in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq’s neighbour Syria. Despite the demands of the legitimate Syrian government, United States troops continue to occupy the oil producing areas of Syria and are stealing their oil on a daily basis.

    There is absolutely no justification for United States troops to be in Syria, and their continued occupation there is a perfect illustration of the point that United States concern for what they are pleased to call the “rule of law” is utterly meaningless when their geopolitical goals clash with the rights of the offended country.

    It has now emerged, again without Parliamentary debate or even any adverse comment by the Labor opposition, that Australia is involved in the NATO military exercises currently underway in the Black Sea.

    It is almost impossible to be further from Australia’s territorial waters, let alone being able to identify a legitimate Australian interest in this clearly provocative baiting of Russia in that country’s territorial waters. As with almost every other Australian military venture, and especially when it totally lacks any real relationship to Australia’s national security interests, discussion on the point is completely absent from the parliament and from local media.

    The United States is desperately trying to put together a quartet of countries (with India, Japan and Australia) to pursue its interests in the region of the world they call the Asia Pacific. In truth, it is no more than an anti-Chinese coalition cobbled together to assist United States geopolitical interests in a region of the world in which they have no business.

    China is Australia’s largest trading partner, taking 40% of all its exports. It would be difficult to imagine any action more contrary to its own vital interests, than for Australia to join such a manifestly anti-Chinese grouping.

    Unfortunately, as Australia’s entire post World War II history amply demonstrates, when the United States says “jump”, the only Australian response is “how high”? It is a policy choice that is beneficially not in Australia’s interests, yet one they are intent on pursuing. There will inevitably be a day of reckoning.

    The post Australia Blindly Follows the United States, Regardless of National Interest first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • One Nation Under Greed: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

    When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.

    ― Frédéric Bastiat,  Economic Sophisms (1845–1848)

    If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayer always gets ripped off.

    Not only are Americans forced to “spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined,” but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

    With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

    Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

    The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

    Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.

    By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

    As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

    When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

    Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

    On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

    In the prisons: States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full, “regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.” As Mother Jones reports, “private prison companies have supported and helped write … laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.” Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to “boost profits” at taxpayer expense. All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations. No wonder the United States has the largest prison population in the world.

    In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and identification devices has set its sights on the schools as “a vast, rich market”—a $20 billion market, no less—just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

    In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour. Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.  Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford. War spending is bankrupting America.

    In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

    In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”

    Among government contractors: We have been saddled with a government that is outsourcing much of its work to high-paid contractors at great expense to the taxpayer and with no competition, little transparency and dubious savings. According to the Washington Post, “By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are government workers.” These open-ended contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, “now account for anywhere between one quarter and one half of all federal service contracting.” Moreover, any attempt to reform the system is “bitterly opposed by federal employee unions, who take it as their mission to prevent good employees from being rewarded and bad employees from being fired.”

    By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

    By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

    These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

    This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

    This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

    Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few.

    Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

    All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

    It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

    Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it’s a police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices.

    There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.

    Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

    Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

    Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

    Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

    And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

    But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

    What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

    What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the government and its emissaries can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.

    This is not freedom, America.

    The post One Nation Under Greed: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Sends Weapons to Duterte. Filipinx and Palestinian Struggle Are Linked.

    Activists from Filipino organizations march during a May 2021 Chicago rally in support of Palestine.

    “From Palestine to the Philippines, Stop the U.S. War Machine” is a common refrain that has echoed through the streets of the Philippines and the U.S. in the wake of recent attacks in the occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. Despite documented casualties disproportionately affecting Palestinians, with at least 243 dead, 1,900 injured and 90,000 Gaza residents displaced, the Biden administration recently approved a $735 million arms sale to Israel, a package similar to the deal concluded with the Philippines. While the Philippines and Palestine might not be obviously linked in the popular imaginary, there is a complicated web of relations — threaded through militarism, settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism — that binds these entities together. Disentangling these ties and revealing the complicity of the Philippines in the displacement and devastation of Palestinian lives is the solidarity work that is urgently required of us at this time.

    In 2011, I had an opportunity to visit the occupied territories of Palestine alongside a delegation of Indigenous and women of color feminists. During that time, I saw the apartheid wall that divided and displaced people from their homes, the checkpoints where everyone and everything is subject to scrutiny, the neighborhoods where families are pushed out of their homes in the middle of the night, and the corrals that are built for Palestinian workers to line up every day to work in Israel and support the very state that has displaced them. From Hebron, Al-Bustan, to Sheikh Jarrah, we met people who persist and insist on staying in their homes even in the face of everyday acts of violence committed by settlers and Israeli soldiers.

    While much has been written about the complicity of the U.S. in supporting this form of settler colonialism, it is made hyper-visible at checkpoints that regulate passage through the occupied territories. For example, one such billboard I saw baldly declared: “US AID from the American People. The Jalameh vehicle crossing enhancement was funded by the American people through the US Agency for International Development to foster greater trade and development of the Area.”

    As an immigrant from the Philippines and a scholar of Filipinx/Philippine American studies, I recognize that this billboard could just as easily be located in the Philippines to reflect the enduring U.S. empire, sustained and nurtured by U.S. militarism, that continues to support the authoritarian regime of Rodrigo Duterte. Since 2016, the U.S. has provided the Philippines with approximately $550 million in military aid. These arms have anchored and facilitated Duterte’s execution of his own “war on terror,” culminating in the passage of the so-called Anti-Terror Bill in July 2020 — in reality, a “war on the poor” that has resulted in grave human rights violations. To date, the Duterte regime has been responsible for over 25,000 lives lost to state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings, the violent displacement of Indigenous communities, arbitrary arrests and the “red-tagging” of human rights defenders and community leaders suspected of engaging in “terrorist” activities, the widespread suppression and surveillance of the media, as well as countless sexist and misogynistic policies that have led to gender-based violence. This is the same leader who proudly defends these numbers by saying, “It is my job to scare people, to intimidate people, and to kill people.”

    Israel has long been a supporter of Duterte’s regime, serving as one of the major suppliers of arms to the Philippines. While Israel is also the destination of labor migration from the Philippines, with over 30,000 migrant workers currently working there, the precariousness of their working conditions makes this source of employment temporary, tenuous and unstable. Migrant workers receive work permits that allow them to work in the country for no more than 73 months. If their employer passes away, if they are fired or they quit their jobs, their visas automatically expire. Their work permits specifically stipulate that they are prohibited from engaging in any romantic relationships. If they become pregnant, their visas are revoked immediately, unless they agree to have their children deported to their home countries. Following rulings in 2006 and 2009 that mandated the deportation of migrant workers and their children who have overstayed their permits, the implementation of these policies have only escalated since 2017. Just this year, about 39 families, a majority of whom are Filipinxs, have been slated for deportation.

    Approximately 8,000 foreign caregivers arrive in Israel every year, with a majority of them coming from the Philippines. As of December 2020, there are approximately 55,000 caregivers, with Filipinxs comprising the vast majority. The influx of Filipinx workers in Israel, especially caregivers, surged in the late 1980s following the 1987 Palestinian Intifada and the ban on Palestinians entering Israel. Concerned about a labor shortage to care for its growing elderly population, Israel turned to the Philippines to hire women specifically to do this care work.

    As Filipinxs who have lived through various regimes that have occupied and colonized our country, including Duterte’s current authoritarian regime, witnessing the current Palestinian occupation and siege must get us to question the similar effects of prolonged occupation and examine our own histories and positions, as well as our commitments to long-term solidarity.

    We can take inspiration from global Filipinx solidarity movements among workers, students and the youth, and begin this work by dispelling the myths that dominate the public sphere and circulate in our communities; myths that prevent us from engaging in the important solidarity work necessary in these times. Doing so requires we:

    • Recognize that supporting Palestine does not mean supporting anti-Semitism. The critiques against occupation are directed at the state of Israel, not towards Jews or Judaism. They are about Zionism, which is a nationalist ideology tethered to the creation of the state of Israel. But what it has engendered in the process is to justify the military occupation of Palestine, dispossess thousands of Palestinians and establish an apartheid state where a racist hierarchy discriminates against non-Jews (and Jews of non-European descent). As such, movements like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), which seeks to target the state of Israel, is founded upon eradicating all forms of oppression and racism, including anti-Semitism.
    • Recognize that the violence in the region is not a religious conflict. Instead, it stems from a settler-colonial movement that has led to the mass expulsion (Nakba) and forced displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland between 1947-49, and the subsequent imposition of a military regime that created the occupied territories of Palestine. This military occupation is not only the root of this conflict, it has governed Palestinians’ everyday lives and their fight for liberation. There are now over 7 million Palestinian refugees around the world calling for their right of return.
    • Understand the ineligibility of Israel’s articulation of “self-defense” as a legitimating defense of their continued occupation and siege of Palestinians. Israel has weaponized international law in ways that allow it to create the conditions for manipulating existing laws, including humanitarian laws, to justify their incursions in the occupied territories. The apartheid wall is not about keeping Israel safe and secure. It is about controlling every aspect of Palestinian life and livelihood from checkpoints that intensely regulate the mobility of Palestinians, unequal laws that limit their access to employment, relegate them to substandard housing and medical care, and evict them from their homes, such as in Sheikh Jarrah.
    • Recognize that supporting Palestine cannot be seen as a threat to the job security of overseas Filipinx workers who are working in Israel. It is important to recognize that these jobs have also come at the expense and displacement of Palestinian workers. Further, Israel is the same state that is responsible for the forced separation of families, Palestinian and otherwise, as it renders foreign migrant workers as disposable and always deportable. There is, no doubt, a long history of support between the Philippines and Israel dating back to the Holocaust when the Philippines became a refuge for Jews fleeing from Austria and Germany before World War II, as well as the Philippines’ status as the only Asian nation that was a signatory to the 1947 UN resolution creating the State of Israel. But that alone is not an argument for supporting occupation. It is also important to question this relationship and the casualties of such “friendly” ties and to recognize that Israel, the state that claims to employ thousands of Filipinx workers, is the same state that is quick to deport them and whose actions put Filipinx lives on the line.
    • Recognize that we are culpable too: U.S.-funded militarism is a culprit in fueling the extrajudicial killings promulgated by the state of Israel and the authoritarian regime of Duterte. American taxpayer monies are financing arms sales and the building of infrastructure that facilitates such violence. This is at the heart of proposed legislations, like the Philippines Human Rights Act, that will suspend U.S. security assistance to the Philippine military and police, and the U.S. House Resolutions in the wake of the $735 million arms sales to Israel, such as the one proposed by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Ortez, Mark Pocan and Rashida Tlaib, and another by Sen. Bernie Sanders.

    At the end of many political gatherings, Filipinxs might recall a ritual: the call of “isang bagsak” (one rise, one fall) followed by a unity clap to symbolize rising and falling together. Now is the time to demonstrate that unity clap in support of the Palestinian people. Let us draw on the rich traditions of Filipinx resistance to domination and displacement, and respond to the Palestinian call for the global community to take action.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership

    Photo credit: BPM Media – Protest at G7 summit in Cornwall UK

    The world has been treated to successive spectacles of national leaders gathering at a G7 Summit in Cornwall and a NATO Summit in Brussels.

    The U.S. corporate media have portrayed these summits as chances for President Biden to rally the leaders of the world’s democratic nations in a coordinated response to the most serious problems facing the world, from the COVID pandemic, climate change and global inequality to ill-defined “threats to democracy” from Russia and China.

    But there’s something seriously wrong with this picture. Democracy means “rule by the people.” While that can take different forms in different countries and cultures, there is a growing consensus in the United States that the exceptional power of wealthy Americans and corporations to influence election results and government policies has led to a de facto system of government that fails to reflect the will of the American people on many critical issues.

    So when President Biden meets with the leaders of democratic countries, he represents a country that is, in many ways, an undemocratic outlier rather than a leader among democratic nations. This is evident in:

    – the “legalized bribery” of 2020’s $14.4 billion federal election, compared with recent elections in Canada and the U.K. that cost less than 1% of that, under strict rules that ensure more democratic results;

    – a defeated President proclaiming baseless accusations of fraud and inciting a mob to invade the U.S. Congress on January 6 2021;

    – news media that have been commercialized, consolidated, gutted and dumbed down by their corporate owners, making Americans easy prey for misinformation by unscrupulous interest groups, and leaving the U.S. in 44th place on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index;

    – the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, with over two million people behind bars, and systemic police violence on a scale never seen in other wealthy nations;

    – the injustice of extreme inequality, poverty and cradle-to-grave debt for millions in an otherwise wealthy nation;

    – an exceptional lack of economic and social mobility compared to other wealthy countries that is the antithesis of the mythical “American Dream”;

    – privatized, undemocratic and failing education and healthcare systems;

    – a recent history of illegal invasions, massacres of civilians, torture, drone assassinations, extraordinary renditions and indefinite detention at Guantanamo—with no accountabllity;

    – and, last but not least, a gargantuan war machine capable of destroying the world, in the hands of this dysfunctional political system.

    Fortunately, though, Americans are not the only ones asking what is wrong with American democracy. The Alliance of Democracies Foundation (ADF), founded by former Danish Prime Minister and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, conducted a poll of 50,000 people in 53 countries between February and April 2021, and found that people around the world share our concerns about America’s dystopian political system and imperial outrages.

    Probably the most startling result of the poll to Americans would be its finding that more people around the world (44%) see the United States as a threat to democracy in their countries than China (38%) or Russia (28%), which makes nonsense of U.S. efforts to justify its revived Cold War on Russia and China in the name of democracy.

    In a larger poll of 124,000 people that ADF conducted in 2020, countries where large majorities saw the United States as a danger to democracy included China, but also Germany, Austria, Denmark, Ireland, France, Greece, Belgium, Sweden and Canada.

    After tea with the Queen at Windsor Castle, Biden swooped into Brussels on Air Force One for a NATO summit to advance its new “Strategic Concept,” which is nothing more than a war plan for World War III against both Russia and China.

    But we take solace from evidence that the people of Europe, whom the NATO war plan counts on as front-line troops and mass casualty victims, are not ready to follow President Biden to war. A January 2021 survey by the European Council on Foreign Affairs found that large majorities of Europeans want to remain neutral in any U.S. war on Russia or China. Only 22% would want their country to take the U.S. side in a war on China, and 23% in a war on Russia.

    Few Americans realize that Biden already came close to war with Russia in March and April, when the United States and NATO supported a new Ukrainian offensive in its civil war against Russian-allied separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. Russia moved tens of thousands of heavily-armed troops to its borders with Ukraine, to make it clear that it was ready to defend its Ukrainian allies and was quite capable of doing so. On April 13th, Biden blinked, turned round two U.S. destroyers that were steaming into the Black Sea and called Putin to request the summit that is now taking place.

    The antipathy of ordinary people everywhere toward the U.S. determination to provoke military confrontation with Russia and China begs serious questions about the complicity of their leaders in these incredibly dangerous, possibly suicidal, U.S. policies. When ordinary people all over the world can see the dangers and pitfalls of following the United States as a model and a leader, why do their neoliberal leaders keep showing up to lend credibility to the posturing of U.S. leaders at summits like the G7 and NATO?

    Maybe it is precisely because the United States has succeeded in what the corporate ruling classes of other nations also aspire to, namely, greater concentrations of wealth and power and less public interference in their “freedom” to accumulate and control them.

    Maybe the leaders of other wealthy countries and military powers are genuinely awed by the dystopian American Dream as the example par excellence of how to sell inequality, injustice and war to the public in the name of freedom and democracy.

    In that case, the fact that people in other wealthy countries are not so easily led to war or lured into political passivity and impotence would only increase the awe of their leaders for their American counterparts, who literally laugh all the way to the bank as they pay lip service to the sanctity of the American Dream and the American People.

    Ordinary people in other countries are right to be wary of the Pied Piper of American “leadership,” but their rulers should be too. The fracturing and disintegration of American society should stand as a warning to neoliberal governments and ruling classes everywhere to be more careful what they wish for.

    Instead of a world in which other countries emulate or fall victim to America’s failed experiment in extreme neoliberalism, the key to a peaceful, sustainable and prosperous future for all the world’s people, including Americans, lies in working together, learning from each other and adopting policies that serve the public good and improve the lives of all, especially those most in need. There’s a name for that. It’s called democracy.

    The post Why Democracies in G7 and NATO Should Reject U.S. Leadership first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Racist, misogynist, militaristic, imperialistic, homophobic, white Christian supremacy

    Canadians like to think of ourselves as less racist, less right wing and especially less violent than Americans. But two recent events coming after a previous series of mass murders has shaken this belief.

    Four members of a Muslim family were murdered in a hate crime while out for a stroll last Sunday in London, Ontario; two weeks earlier 215 First Nations children were found buried on the grounds of a Kamloops, B.C. Indian residential school; one year ago 22 died during a shooting spree by a Nova Scotia wannabe cop with a severe anger management problem after a fight with his girlfriend; four years ago 26 people, mostly women, were mowed down by a misogynist on a Toronto sidewalk leaving 10 dead; a year before that, six worshippers were shot and killed by a young man in a Quebec City mosque. All murders motivated by right wing hate.

    This isn’t the real Canada, some people say. But it is. And always has been.

    The truth is Canada, the British colony that preceded it, and the French colony before that, were all founded on racist, misogynist, militaristic, imperialistic, homophobic, white Christian supremacy. This is a history we share with the USA, Britain, Australia and New Zealand, all members along with Canada, of the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance.

    Our countries have proudly glorified white male warrior, racist colonialism and participated in it at home and abroad. Our laws, our institutions, our foreign policy, our culture have all been affected by these vile practices and ideologies, and they continue to infect and influence us today.

    And this is not ancient history.

    Born in 1953, I have lived in a Canada with genocidal residential schools, racist laws and immigration policies, that forbade people from voting based on their ethnicity, that ensured property could only be sold to white Christians, that jailed people for their sexuality, that had quotas for Jews in universities, that criminalized women’s reproductive rights and taught me in Catholic school that men were the head of the family and to be proud of the British Empire. The legacy of all that remains alive in me and my country.

    These are historical facts that, if acknowledged, can be confronted, and overcome. But you can’t build a better world on a foundation of lies or ignorance, only on concrete reality.

    And confronting our past is not just “virtue signalling” or part of “woke” culture or some academic exercise or ritual self-flagellation to earn forgiveness for our sins. There are those who revel in and glorify this past and would return us to it, whether we like it or not. Ignoring or whitewashing our history empowers the right-wing extremists who today wish to create something very much like Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead. It is not only our neighbours to the south who are at risk of an authoritarian fascism built upon making America great again. There are people in all the “Five Eyes” who promote racist, colonial, imperialistic, misogynist, militaristic, homophobic white Christian supremacy and will use violence to achieve their goals.

    Having spent the past four years researching and writing about the extreme right in the FAKE NEWS Mysteries, including my latest, American Fascism, there is no doubt in my mind that more violence is coming.

    Fascists are conservatives in a panic. They are panicked because they see the victories of women, people of color, First Nations, anti-racists, the LGBTQ+, unions, socialists, peace advocates, environmentalists and internationalists as threatening. They are funded by some very wealthy people who use fascists as the tip of the spear against economic democracy. At its root fascism is a violent defence of economic and social privilege.

    To combat those who would inflict Gilead upon us, we must understand who we were, who we are and who we would like to be. As many self-help books posit, knowing yourself is the first step to change. That’s exactly why conservatives and fascists glorify the past, defend statues of racists and insist history should focus on instilling patriotism instead of telling the truth.

    To combat them we must educate ourselves and especially our children. Only then can we build a better world, one where all people can live together in respect, dignity and equality. One that is not afraid of positive change. One that can resiliently resist right wing extremism.

    The post Racist, misogynist, militaristic, imperialistic, homophobic, white Christian supremacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Policing and Militarism Go Hand in Hand. We Must Abolish Both.

    Members of the national guard stand outside the Hennepin County Government Center

    Policing and militarism are a two-headed monster that protects and upholds the foundation upon which racial capitalism was built — exploitation of the lives of poor Black and Brown people.

    Although much attention has been placed on recent expansions of police militarization, these threads have long been intertwined. For Black Americans, police have always acted as an occupying force within our communities. But during the 1960s, a decade of unprecedented Black radical resistance, the lines between police and military and national defense became even more blurred.

    On December 8, 1969, the SWAT unit of the Los Angeles Police Department raided the Black Panther Party’s headquarters in Los Angeles, California. Four days prior, the Chicago Police Department had violently raided the home of and assassinated Fred Hampton, the chairman and leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party, based out of my hometown of Chicago. It is in the legacy and practice of militarism that SWAT teams were created — as a means to decentralize and suppress Black resistance.

    As a Black femme abolitionist and organizer from the west side of Chicago, I fight in the spirit of Fred “Baba” Hampton, in a movement that is built upon the community-based power around which the Panthers mobilized to combat militarism, colonialism and occupation.

    The attack on the Black Panther headquarters in 1969 was one of the first publicly known uses of newly emerging SWAT teams, but they quickly spread. Throughout the past two decades, SWAT units have become more heavily armed and funded and used all too regularly as a tactic of instant response in predominantly Black cities, particularly in response to uprisings. The 1033 Program, created as a part of the 1977 National Defense Authorization Act, allows the Department of Defense to supply local authorities with its military-grade equipment. War weaponry, such as assault rifles, riot gear, grenade launchers and military tanks, is awarded to police departments and used to perpetuate harm against Black and Indigenous people putting their lives on the line to oppose colonization, white supremacy and policing.

    The facts are simple: When masses of Black people mobilize, gangs of police move in, and terrorize.

    Since the start of the 1033 Program, around 10,000 law enforcement agencies have received around $7.4 billion worth of equipment.

    This equipment funds the type of raids that killed Breonna Taylor, it funds teargas being used against Black people in Kenosha and Minneapolis, it funds the batons the Chicago Police Department uses to beat youth in the streets, it funds the water cannons used at Backwater Bridge at Standing Rock. It funds the murder of millions at the hands of policing, war, militarism, colonialism and imperialism. It is a never-ending cycle of violence.

    Given all of this, calls to defund police and end wars are bigger than just targeted demands; they are calls to invest in life, abundance and an abolitionist world in which we don’t depend on the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex or policing to sustain our communities.

    This struggle is very personal to me. I am an abolitionist from a city that spends $4.8 million a day and about $2 billion a year on policing — and a city in which taxpayers spend about $38 million yearly to arm, aid in and fund apartheid, genocide and state-sanctioned violence against Palestinians.

    Militarism is a strategy of using violence to keep people in positions of power in control and to maintain the racial, economic and other social hierarchies that uphold this power.

    $4.8 million a day is the allowance police are given daily to uphold militarism in Chicago.

    Divesting from education, mental health services, violence prevention that addresses the root causes, housing, and all other necessities of life keeps the racial, economic and social hierarchies in place that justify the supposed need for police.

    This is why in this same city the yearly budget for mental health services is around $9.4 million — equal to less than two days of the police budget.

    This is why the budget for substance abuse treatment is only 2.6 million — a half-day worth of police budget on any given day. And only $1.5 million is spent yearly in violence prevention — a proactive way to combat violence without the reactionary nature of police.

    This is why in 2013, my elementary school and nearly 50 others — all of which were located on the predominantly Black South and West Sides of the city of Chicago — were closed down in one of the largest public school closures of United States history. The city claimed the closures were due to lack of funding, but four years later, the city proposed spending $95 million to build a police training academy in my neighborhood — where they previously closed schools that they supposedly could not afford to keep open.

    It is why, as a 12-year-old in 2013, I went to community hearings begging then-mayor Rahm Emanuel to keep my elementary school open. It is why five years later, I joined #NoCopAcademy, a youth-led campaign against the city-proposed policy academy — and for a change in notion that community safety is directly tied to policing. And it is why, today, I am organizing around demands to defund police and to get the cops — who are being prioritized for funding above education — out of Chicago Public Schools.

    It is why, as I joined other #NoCopAcademy organizers on the day of the vote over whether to build the police academy, I was beaten in the stairwells of city hall, while Mayor Lori Lightfoot awarded the Chicago Police Department with a new $95 million police school. The violence perpetrated against my being was accompanied by the violence of more resources being poured into state-sanctioned violence.

    It is why my voice was ignored in 2013, and again in 2019 when the cop academy was approved. Now, as I scream Rekia Boyd’s name in the street, chant in her legacy and demand divestment from the institution which was responsible for her death, I am again ignored.

    The 2022 fiscal budget under President Joe Biden requests $753 billion in national security funding. This is a 1.6 percent increase that includes $715 billion for the Department of Defense. In 2016, the military utilized about $610 billion. Just as national defense budgets continue to increase drastically year by year, local police department budgets continue to rise as wars are waged in poor Black communities via hyper-policing, surveillance and police torture.

    Many of my closest comrades from the hood experience trauma from witnessing and experiencing police violence and torture. For nonwhite people — for people who live in hoods flooded by police and abandoned in every other way, and for those of us who watched our sisters and brothers be tortured and targeted by police on a daily basis — conversations about “defund,” “divest” and “abolish” are not new. They are demands, necessities, discussions we’ve been having in our communities for years, and even decades. And for Black Chicagoans, this is about our lives. This violence happens daily. We don’t need another video of Black trauma. We didn’t need to see George Floyd, or Rekia Boyd, or Adam Toledo, or Laquan McDonald or Breonna Taylor be murdered to know policing is violence. We didn’t need to see genocide, war and crisis unfold in Palestine, Yemen or Nigeria to know militarism is violence.

    Police and the military operate under the same practices of militarism. Police move into external communities and occupy. Military forces move into external communities and occupy. The idea that Black and Brown communities need “law and order” and that these institutions implement it alongside safety is flawed. Safety for Black, Brown and Indigenous people doesn’t look like more police. It looks like access and abundance, because when you think about the safest place in the world and the places where you feel most safe, it is very likely that they are places with the most resources and the least police.

    As campaigns to defund and divest from death and to fight for liberation continue, the struggle for an abolitionist world lives on through every chant at an action; every ancestor that shows us the way; every community relationship we build; and all the steps we take to become a global community connected in love, liberation and abundance.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • UN Human Rights Head Urges End to Violence After Troops Deployed in Colombia

    Soldiers stand on patrol outside the Coliseo de Hockey Miguel Calero a day after protests against the government of Colombian President Iván Duque on May 29, 2021 in Cali, Colombia.

    United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet responded to the Colombian president’s decision to deploy thousands of troops after a month of protests by calling for an end to all violence and urging negotiations over key national policies, which had stalled but were set to resume Sunday.

    Bachelet, in a statement Sunday, specifically expressed concern about reports that since Friday, at least 14 people have died and 98 people have been injured in the Colombian city of Cali — one of the primary protest sites over the past month — and that an off-duty judicial police officer and others have fired at demonstrators.

    “These events are all the more concerning given the progress that had been made to resolve, through dialogue, the social unrest that erupted a month ago, following the start of a nationwide strike against several social and economic policies of the government,” she said. “It is essential that all those who are reportedly involved in causing injury or death, including state officials, are subject to prompt, effective, independent, impartial, and transparent investigations and that those responsible are held accountable.”

    “I call for an end to all forms of violence, including vandalism, and for all sides to continue talking to each other, and to ensure respect for the life and dignity of all people,” she continued. “I welcome the commitment voiced by several actors, in Cali and at the national level, to find a negotiated and peaceful solution to the social unrest through talks.”

    Referencing reports that at least 30 people were arrested Friday, Bachelet added that “the fair trial and due process rights of those detained need to be ensured.”

    Carlos Ruiz Massieu, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres’ special representative for Colombia, similarly expressed grave concerns about the country on Saturday.

    The events in Cali and other parts of Colombia show the need to “strengthen dialogue as a fundamental instrument to resolve conflicts,” he said. “In any circumstance, even the most difficult, we must promote dialogue. Consolidating a stable and lasting peace in the country is my greatest wish and, I am sure, that of all Colombians.”

    The demonstrations that began on April 28 were initially sparked by a now-postponed tax reform plan, but protest leaders have since shifted the focus to poverty and police violence in the South American country. World leaders and human rights defenders across the globe have condemned the state’s deadly crackdowns on the protests.

    Citing interviews and video analysis, the New York Times reported that Colombia’s “police officers have fired bullets at peaceful protesters, beaten demonstrators in custody, and fired tear gas canisters or other forms of ‘less-lethal’ ammunition at people from close range.”

    After a month of protests and street blockades, Colombian President Iván Duque on Friday ordered a military intervention. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Some 7,000 soldiers were to be sent out Saturday and in the coming days in the southwestern province of Valle del Cauca and the city Cali.”

    Duque said he would send a “maximum deployment” of troops to Cali “as a measure to protect citizen rights.” He added that “islands of anarchy cannot exist in our country” and “we must always maintain a spirit of understanding the clamor of citizens, of interpreting it and listening to it — but never because of violence.”

    The deployment order intensified concerns about the safety of demonstrators. José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch, tweeted that Duque’s decree contains a “dangerous void” and could have “irreparable consequences.”

    “The orders issued do not include any explicit reference to prioritizing dialogue, avoiding excessive force, and respecting human rights,” Vivanco noted.

    Some Colombians are fed up with the roadblocks — which, according to Reuters, have caused shortages of food and key supplies. The outlet reported that “waving flags and dressed in white, thousands marched in Colombia’s capital Bogota on Sunday to demand an end to protests and roadblocks, as well as to express support for security forces.”

    The demonstrators who have spent over a month in the streets, meanwhile, are fed up with the long-term conditions of their country.

    “There’s no future for young people as things are now,” Sergio Briceño, a 20-year-old laborer at a roadblock near Bogotá, told the Journal. “This is why we’re fighting here for a future.”

    The newspaper noted that protest leaders initially made a list of over 100 demands “that included a prohibition on hydraulic fracking, new restrictions on mining, an end to certain taxes, and limits on the privatization of state firms” to end demonstrations, but it has since been pared down; the list reportedly still includes “a basic guaranteed income for more than half of the country’s 50 million people, a moratorium on home-mortgage payments, a range of subsidies, and a free university education.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!

    What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
    ― W.E.B. DuBois

    I Began My Career Working with Homeless Veterans. Here's What I Learned | Inc.com

    He died. In an assisted (sic) care (oxymoron) home (nope) facility/prison (yes). Homeless for a few years; he was a photographer; and his life went to shit in four years. He overspent on photo equipment, a studio, gave away shoots, and alas, he ended up living in his car, putting the entire inventory in an expensive storage unit, and then he tried surviving.

    I met him when I was a social worker helping him as a short-term veteran (Army, 12 months, no combat) in a housing program, 24/7, where my job was to get him on his feet, get his VA benefits together, get him back on some financial track, and getting him inspired to live.

    He was curious, could run in mixed company, and he was fragile. That is the way of families — estranged, bizarre old men (father) moving on with second and third wives, and just giving shit about offspring.

    I worked for the Starvation Army, one bloody year, and you can read about that hell hole of a fake (maybe not) religious wacko institution (poverty pimps): Here, Here and Here, over at Dissident Voice.

    The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state.

    …The church, the state, the school, the magazine, think they are liberal and free! It is the freedom of a prison-yard.

    ― Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

    He lost one leg to diabetes, and it was typical – small black dot on his foot, and then, living the rough life, cold weather chills in a vehicle, long walks in the cold when the car broke down. Bad diet, and stress.

    They chopped it (the leg) off at the knee. He was having eye/vision issues. He was a smart guy, even did a trivia night for his fellow homeless vets and their families. His memory, though, was flagging. He never wanted to learn how to deal with a prosthetic leg. He was getting more and more confused, obsessed with CNBC-type shit, and anti-trump disease to the max.

    He had to be reminded of everything, daily, and we worked on getting him housing vouchers, and, alas, he was finally getting Social Security, and then, the VA took care of some of his stuff.

    Nursing home kitchens in 'horrible' condition endanger the elderly, advocates say

    He went to a couple of my fiction readings in Portland, and he was always there for my movie nights to watch some documentary that pushed to push against the military mindset, and he was there to listen to me rail and rail.

    He found out his estranged father left some money to him when he died. It was a windfall, and my vet could not handle all the information and financial asides. It took two years to get that money, and he gave one leech a $10,000 loan for some scheme for a new dog food patent (right!), and alas, that leech never paid him back. The vet’s dead, and this deadbeat who pried money from him has no reason to pay back.

    Before death, and after the Starvation Army, my vet got into an apartment (with my help), and they screwed him over. The one ground floor apartment with a large step and stoop, impossible for him to navigate his wheelchair, that wasn’t in the bargain. He already signed the lease and wanted out of the Starvation Army. He and I worked on getting the apartment to build a stone or cement pathway from the back slider, to the parking lot, so he could get his Uber or handicap buses trips.

    It was another eye opener – largest (now #3) property management company in the USA for apartments, out of Texas, and not one of them responded to my emails or calls. Terrible, since that has never happened to me ever in my life. I have always gotten responses, even harsh ones back. From cops, senators, CEOs, IRS, more. These people are human leeches.

    Pinnacle comes in at number three in the rankings for the largest property managers in the country, with 172,000 units under management. The company manages a diverse array of assets, including mixed-use properties, commercial properties, affordable developments, senior properties, and student housing. It also specializes in the turnaround of distressed assets and assisting in the management of HOAs and condo associations. Pinnacle is headquartered in Dallas, Texas, and is currently headed by President and CEO Rick L. Graf.

    So think about that. He had to pay for this walkway, and it was an improvement for that unit, to say the least, so why should he have to pay? He had volunteers with a construction company and from the Rotary Club, and that Pinnacle nixed it. They had to have their vetted company. We are talking about $500 for the job using volunteers and a bonded contractor, versus the $2500 through Pinnacle’s outfit.

    That apartment life did not last long. He was having major choking issues, and cognitive ones. He wasn’t eating right. No phone calls taken, or texts.

    We are talking about a man, 68, no family. He had no one but a friend he met at the Rotary Club and acquaintances. And me, his former social worker. Who happened to move on the Coast, so I was 3 hours from him one way, via car.

    He had to leave the apartment, to a care center (sic). That apartment would not give him a break, since he had to break the lease because of medical reasons. No big deal he was a veteran.

    These are parasites.

    Then, he ends up in one of the larger senior living places, and that was a living hell for him as he slipped more and more, had no decent meals, and never had a case manager for months. Then, lockdown, March 2020.

    Here it is, Wikipedia –

    Brookdale Senior Living owns and operates over 700 senior living communities and retirement communities in the United States. Brookdale was established in 1978 and is based in Brentwood, Tennessee. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Fortress Investments became the majority owner of Brookdale, holding approximately 51% of its share. Currently, Glenview Capital Management (a hedge fund) holds the largest number of shares. Brookdale has approximately 70,000 staff members and 100,000 residents. As of 2018, it was the largest operator of senior housing in the United States. In 2021, a New York Times investigation revealed that Brookdale submitted wrong and manipulated data to the government, thus inflating ratings of the quality of care in Brookdale facilities. Shortly thereafter, the state of California filed a lawsuit against Brookdale, alleging that the company manipulated the federal government’s nursing-home ratings system.

     

    He was paying out of his social security and this money he got from his father: $4100  a month plus another $2000 for “special services.” There were no “Special services.” This happens every minute in the USA. Imagine, a society with how many aging people? How many with chronic illness? Who the fuck has $6100 a month to pay for these scabies outfits? 

    Again, we can either prepare for the ultimate disaster that disaster capitalism gives us, or, put our heads back in that sand:

    In 10 years, more than half of middle-income Americans age 75 or older will not be able to afford to pay for yearly assisted living rent or medical expenses, according to a study published Wednesday in Health Affairs.

    The researchers used demographic and income data to project estimates of a portion of the senior population, those who will be 75 or older in 2029, with a focus on those in the middle-income range — currently $25,001 to $74,298 per year for those ages 75 to 84.

    And it doesn’t look good for that group because of the rising costs of housing and health care. The researchers estimated that the number of middle-income elders in the U.S. will nearly double, growing from 7.9 million to 14.4 million by 2029. They will make up the biggest share of seniors, at 43%.  — Source

    This three paragraphs cited above are from a two-year-old article. You think the plandemic has assisted with this? Socialism is about planning for and building out facilities and holistic ways to help the aging, the poor, the sick. Capitalism is about planning for and setting out a million ways to fleece and fleece people. Maybe blood and plasma and bone marrow transplants are the only way to get through. Or, just donating body and soul to Big Pharma for their Mengele stuff. A 10 by 10 room, with a roommate, and mac’n’cheese six days a week, fasting on Thursdays.

    This is how America runs, as a continuing criminal enterprise, an elaborate multi-layered system of bilking and outright theft, casino capitalism on steroids, and zero concern by the majority of the people with investments, banks (owners) and the elected officials to make safety nets. Who the hell can afford $6100 a month for a studio apartment? Crappy food? Surly workers (underpaid, over worked)? This is prison on a whole other level.

    He had to go to the VA, via ambulance, and with taxis, a few times with this female friend.

    Nursing Home and Care Workers Officially the Most Dangerous Job in the U.S. - Ms. Magazine

    She got him to get a will prepared, and to get some things in order, but he was failing, vacant, not there, and alas, he died August 2020 age 70, and that should never have happened. If I had a community, 100 acres, gardens, small (tiny) homes, pets, chickens, and community conversations, he would NOT have died. Life expectancy dropped because he ended up in an apartment, isolated, alone, scared, and with deeper cognitive issues. A supportive community getting him off his duff, getting him involved, would have saved him. Could save millions of Americans. Hundreds of millions of global citizens.

    So who owns the land, the farms, the concepts of living and aging in place, intergenerational, cooperatives, decent air and water? Dog-eat-dog. And who thinks that a coronavirus lives and breathes in the summer? Oh, that flu season, now 365 days a year, some rain or shine.

    You know, I didn’t get a chance to talk to this vet too much about his concerns around lockdown, the SARS-CoV2, and, well, like many things once a person ages, sometimes talking real stuff about real things is too much for a mind that is going south.

    Not all pandemics are caused by the obvious suspects. Though the media have us whipped up into a frenzy over a select cast of superstar pathogens, the villain in the next global drama may be lurking in the unlikeliest of places; perhaps it hasn’t even been discovered yet.

    “I think the chances that the next pandemic will be caused by a novel virus are quite good,” says Kevin Olival, a disease ecologist from the EcoHealth Alliance, a US-based organisation that studies the links between human and environmental health. “If you look at Sars, which was the first pandemic of the 21st Century, that was a previously unknown virus before it jumped into people and spread round the world. So there’s a precedent there – there are many, many viruses out there in the families that we’re concerned with.”

    Out of millions of viruses on the planet, very few have ever caused a major outbreak
    Olival is not alone. Earlier this year, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates warned that the next pandemic could be something we’ve never seen before. He suggested that we prepare for its emergence as we would for a war.

    Meanwhile, the WHO is so firmly convinced that they have updated their list of pathogens most likely to cause a massive, deadly outbreak to include “Disease X” – a mystery microorganism which hasn’t yet entered our radar.  By Zaria Gorvett, 13th November 2018

    The irony of ironies, I was talking about things like this way before that BBC (bad bad organization) put out these pabulum pieces as quoted about NOV. 2018, a year before the official Wuhan and Italian flu hit (sic).

    The death of the vet, of course, create a nightmare for his friend, designated as the executor of his “estate.”

    Comcast screwed the estate by keeping service going (charging $90 a month) even though he was dead. He had a storage unit that was charging $215 a month. That Brookdale ended up hitting the estate with more bills in the thousands. The apartment complex, Pinnacle, was looking for several thousand for fees and penalties. The bills came in, and the collection agencies rose to the occasion.

    Stop the Cap! » Comcast's Reputation for Bad Customer Service is Legendary and Never-Ending

    And this vet’s friend (sic) who had borrowed the money paid nothing back.

    It is May, 2021, and those proceeds to his small estate have not yet been disbursed. Pandemic lockdown has hurt the process. Two of the beneficiaries are a free clinic that attended to this vet’s needs during his hours of need. And a food pantry out of a church who also helped him with food and electricity money.

    He probably had $340,000 total, most of it in a Morgan Stanley account. Mind you, this is all from his dead old man, and the vet had not expected that. There are tax filing fees, moving expenses for his stuff to a furniture nonprofit, fees for the storage unit. Some prescription bills and other outstanding bills that should have just vanished. The creditors came out of the woodwork, and because I was not a family member, brother, say, of nephew, all those bills got paid. If I had been that family member, I would/could have wrangled many of the bills into either zeroed out bills, or some with a dime on the dollar. It takes letter writing, advocating, and pounding down these leeches.

    Why Morgan Stanley Bet Big on Eaton Vance - The New York Times

    As of May 18, 2021, the five beneficiaries – two nonprofits in need – have not seen a cent. Because the executor has had to do so much, and the fact the vet had no family, my vet’s estate is getting whittled down by that great American tick – middle men, fees, penalties, taxes, this and that amount extracted as part of the ugly middle and middle man/woman mentality of the USA.

    Some people came up to the plate and did pro bono work, but because I was close to this whole thing, and talked with the executor a lot, I see how the total amount that could have been distributed five ways — $70,000 each – might now be even close to $60,000 each. What the beneficiaries don’t know won’t hurt them, right? All those leeches sucking the dead, well, they just don’t know it. It was money they were not expecting, so what’s the big deal.

    That’s not the point. This is a minute-to-minute situation in USA. Millions of people and their families get screwed in the tens of billions each year by the ticks and leeches. I have had to deal with PayDay loan companies, repo men, collection agencies, courts, companies, telecoms and hospitals and others who have their hands out for more and more cuts of many of my clients who were making $730 a month in Social Security, and some way less. I contacted hospitals and businesses and others to get fees and bills reduced or zeroed out.

    Young or old, many of the homeless people I worked with could NEVER work in a competitive work environment. Their health and minds are shot to shit. Much of that (PTSD and complex PTSD) was caused by the Armed Forces, and by the systems of punishment that hit these guys and gals after departing that shit hole.

    Not everything in their lives is someone else’s fault and responsibility. They made bad choices. Booze and drugs, you betcha, took them down. Bad food, bad thinking smoking, and more, deteriorated them at a young age. Trying to pay rent, evictions, etc., all that adds up to the weathering.

    Healthcare | Free Full-Text | Application of the Weathering Framework: Intersection of Racism, Stigma, and COVID-19 as a Stressful Life Event among African Americans | HTML

    Living in a truck or car or tent or in a garage, that also weathers these people. In the end, pre-Covid and now during it, these people are throwaways. The Stock Market is busting at the seams. Zoom school, and Zoom work for the middle class, the new normal abnormal. The rest of the workforce or citizen? Screwed blued and tattooed.

    screwed, blued and tattooed meaning and pronunciation - video Dailymotion

    The irony is that my vet friend “made” more money in that investment account dead than when he was alive.  And we know the great history of Morgan Stanley.

    I’m writing this because I am delaying something bigger, and poetry, tied to the absolute hell hole that is American Zionism a la Israeli Zionism. War crimes that are ten thousand George Floyd’s “I Can’t Breathe” murder.

    And I can’t wrap my head around this in a rural community. No marching here, no groups, and hell, in France and Germany and England, it is illegal to peacefully march for Palestine.

    I’m thinking about Canada and USA, supporting murderous arms and murderous policies of that racist “country.” I am thinking about my vet’s account at Morgan Stanley:

    The broker got him stocks in Walmart, Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Blackstone, BlackRock. This guy was a friend, and asked about investing, and I had a guy in mind, but my buddy went with a friend of the Rotary who said this broker with Morgan Stanley would take care of him. My buddy wanted social responsible investing, and that, alas, is yet another bullshit marketing tool of the masters of the casino capitalist Walled Street.

    Northrop Grumman’s medium-caliber cannons boast unrivaled reliability and  effectiveness. When paired with our exceptional training, services, certified accessories and warranties, the result is exceptional value and performance over the entire gun system lifecycle. The company has produced solid propulsion systems for the Ground-based  Midcourse Defense interceptor, as well as for the Trident II D-5 and Minuteman III strategic missiles. Northrop Grumman has 100 percent propulsion success on strategic production motors. For nearly half a century, Northrop Grumman and its heritage companies have been designing and developing bomb fuses that have stayed on pace with the technological advancements of the time.
    This is a tan vehicle with the

    How many parts in a missile or Bushmaster automatic cannon? Parts equal jobs. Parts designed equal academic jobs. Think of all those people in all those companies, in factories and warehouses, and manufacturing plants, and marketing plants, paint plants, PR plants, all of them down to the web master and the photographer making money on dead Palestinian children. It comes down to that.

    I have relatives whose kids (grown adults) are blonde beauties in the sense of USA beauty, and they are tall, and lean, and they are pulling down $120,000 a year as 28 year old’s, working for one of those California based military death companies.

    Here, five — to include Raytheon, Northrup Lockheed Martin, Aerojet Rocketdyne, Flir Systems

    More listed here —

    Here are California Dreaming Death Machine (139) openings for just one hiring site —

    In 2019, here are the top states, but remember, those figures are not the true amount of money made on death since so much more tied to offensive weapons and space should be factored in. Sort of the multiplier effect of all the businesses service and hard industries making bank because  of those contractors and their employees and their subcontractors and their employees living and eating the California dream, or whichever state listed is the dream. Forget about the billions in Hollywood and their enormous entanglement of people making money off those Tom Clancy, et al crap movies. Death, death, death, even in the form of liberal actors spewing off on this or that thing, but in the end, they love the DoD.

    • California: $66.2 billion
    • Virginia: $60.3 billion
    • Texas: $54.8 billion
    • Florida: $29.8 billion
    • Maryland: $26.1 billion
    • Connecticut: $19.7 billion
    • Pennsylvania: $18.1 billion
    • Washington: $17.8 billion
    • Alabama: $16.0 billion
    • Massachusetts: $15.8 billion

    So, I am having a difficult time focusing, with this Industrial Complex tied to killing Palestinians, and so many other people’s of the world, through the training, outfitting, arming, and educating of the despots of the world. This is a telling interview. Malak Mattar, Dan Cohen and Miko Peled join MintCast to discuss the ongoing Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip.  See interview here.

    I am still processing all of this, trying to listen to Zoom continuing education credited things like trauma and social service workers in a time of lockdown and Covid-19. Things like that, which are bullshit, really. Just amazing bullshit now on Zoom, most of it. But I am just cruising through these people who believe they are thinking and saying something new.

    © 2021. Raymond Nat Turner, The Town Crier. All Rights Reserved.

    BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at https://www.youtube.com/user/zigilow

    BAR’s poet in residence Raymond Nat Turner is an accomplished performing artist. You can find much more of his work at YouTube. 

    +–+

    The acrobats are back…(gimme a bleepin’ break!)

    The acrobats are back—riding bareback and backwards on Donkeys! They’re back juggling hocus-pocus focus groups; Back, spinning Wall Street straw into fools’ gold for the war- mongering mouth of a punch drunk politician. Back hallucinating on FDR Fairytales. Back somersaulting over scarlet streets, strikes and factory seizures; back vaulting over violence/militant eviction resistance

    The acrobats are back—Lilliputian left-Munchkin Marxists—juggling Classless analysis; doing back-flips erasing millions; Tumbling above herds of handcuffed communists, socialists, anarchists, trade unionists who waged pitched battles with Pinkerton-police-national guard-gun thugs. The acrobats are back turning cartwheels; Flipping history on its head— Landing squarely in the laps of generals and statesmen…

    The acrobats are back—flipping LBJ minus 34 dead and smoke-filled skies over Watts/43 dead in Detroit/27 dead, 1400 arrests in Newark; LBJ minus millions marching NO to Jim Crow, war/women’s oppression; Minus martyrs—whose M’s include Mickey, Medgar, Malcolm, Martin… The acrobats are back, dancing in donkey dung down the Yellow Brick Road for the Emerald City Intersectional Empire—strangely resembling the Pentagon…

    The acrobats are back—daredevils who dangled dangerously for 8 yrs. from the Drone Ranger’s dick. They’re back—Capitalist Hill cartwheels and flips—sticking stealth socialist landings as Comrade Schmo plays them like The Great Oz—ominously warning: “Pay no attention to Wall Street-War-Profiteer- Big Pharma/Fossil Fuel-Credit Card Companies behind my thin blue curtain of Promises!” Then he quietly pulls his pistol and mumbles, ”What’s in your wallet?”

    WALL STREET IS WAR STREET: best slogan spotted at #OccupyWallStreet | Not My Tribe
    And the reality is that Wall Street and those Mutual Funds and Exchange Tradeable Funds (ETF’s), all are tied to bombing, booze, tobacco, big pharma, the entire shooting match. Just can’t go to sleep at night, or can’t look myself in the mirror, when thinking about all that time and energy and research and writing, and educating, and the reality is we are what we are — war criminals. Or, read, “Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA“!

    Israeli Forces spokesman Zilberman announced the start of the bombing of Gaza, specifying that “80 fighters are taking part in the operation, including the advanced F-35s” (The Times of Israel, May 11, 2021). It is officially the baptism of fire for the US Lockheed Martin’s fifth-generation fighter, whose production Italy also participates in as a second-level partner.

    Israel has already received twenty-seven F-35s from the US, and last February decided to buy no longer fifty F-35s but seventy-five. To this end the government has decreed a further allocation of 9 billion dollars: 7 were granted by a US to Israel free military “aid” of 28 billion, 2 were granted as a loan by the US Citibank.

    While Israeli F-35 pilots were being trained by the U.S. Air Force in Arizona and Israel, the US Army Engineers built in Israel special hardened hangars for the F-35s, suitable for both fighters’ maximum protection on the ground, and their rapid take-off on attack. At the same time, the Israeli military industries (Israel Aerospace and Elbit Systems) in close coordination with Lockheed Martin enhance the fighter renamed “Adir” (Powerful): above all its ability to penetrate enemy defenses and its range of action which was nearly doubled.

    These capabilities are certainly not necessary to attack Gaza. Why then are the most advanced fifth-generation fighters used against Palestinians? Because it serves to test F-35s fighters and their pilots in real war action using Gaza homes as targets on a firing range. It does not matter if in the target houses there are entire families.

    The F-35s, added to the hundreds of fighter-bombers already supplied by the US to Israel. are designed for nuclear attack particularly with the new B61-12 bomb. The United States will shortly deploy these nuclear bombs in Italy and other European countries, and will also provide them to Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East with an arsenal estimated at 100-400 nuclear weapons. If Israel doubles the range of F-35 fighters and is about to receive eight Boeing Pegasus tankers from the US for refueling the F-35s in flight, it is because it is preparing to launch an attack, even nuclear, against Iran.

     — “F-35s Bombing Gaza

    Books - Democracy at Work (d@w)
     
    Wolff and I have corresponded.
     
    https://youtu.be/ynbgMKclWWc

    The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of over 50 essays, “The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself,” Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that “returning to normal” no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.
     
     “A blueprint for how we got here, and a plan for how we will rescue ourselves” – Chris Hedges
     
    “A magnificent source of hope and insight.” – Yanis Varoufakis
     
     “In this compelling set of essays, and with his signature clarity, intensity, accessibility and deference to historical and present perspective, Wolff has issued not just a stark warning, but concrete reasoning, as to why this time really should be different.” – Nomi Prins
     
    “One of the most powerful and incisive voices in America. As an economist he transcends that “dismal science”, he is a tribune of Main St, a voice of the people.” – George Galloway
     
     “Wolff clearly explains the ways that capitalism exacerbates unemployment, inequality, racism, and patriarchy; and threatens the health and safety of workers and communities – i.e., most of us.” – Jessica Gordon-Nembhard, Ph.D.
     
    “If you care about deeper measures of social health as Americans suffer the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, you will find here a wealth of insight, statistics, and other ammunition that we all need in the fight for a more just society.” – Adam Hochschild
     
    “The current failed system has a noose around all of our necks. Richard Wolff offers an economic vision that gets our society off the gallows.” – Jimmy Dore
    Corporate Welfare Hurts Us All - Imgur
    Source.
    Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world. — Henry Kissinger, interview with the Observer, 1983, on his book, Years of Upheaval 
    New study outlines trillions handed out in U.S. corporate welfare bonanza - Tax Justice Network Corporate Welfare: How Exactly Does It Affect Us As Americans
    The post Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Media Hides Canadian Support for Israeli Apartheid

    The dominant media permit only a narrow spectrum of opinion regarding Canadian foreign policy. Their refusal to report critical information about this country’s foreign policy can be startling. Even journalists who uncover illuminating internal government files put the information down the memory hole.

    Recently Canadian Press journalist Lee Berthiaume reported on Canada’s military mission in the occupied West Bank in “Canadian troops, Mounties get front row seats to Israeli-Palestinian clashes”. The story reports that there are 23 Canadian troops and 3 RCMP members currently part of Operation Proteus, which trains Palestinian Authority (PA) security forces as part of a mission led by the Office of the United States Security Coordinator.

    Strangely, the puff piece ignored how Canadian military trainers and aid have supported the creation of a Palestinian security force explicitly to enforce Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, a fact that Berthiaume previously reported.

    In a 2013 story Berthiaume quoted an internal 2012 note signed by then Canadian International Development Agency president Margaret Biggs that read:  “There have been increasing references in the past months during high-level bilateral meetings with the Israelis about the importance and value they place on Canada’s assistance to the Palestinian Authority, most notably in security/justice reform.” He further quotes Biggs stating, “the Israelis have noted the importance of Canada’s contribution to the relative stability achieved through extensive security co-operation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.” The heavily censored note suggests the goal of Canadian “aid” was to protect a corrupt Mahmoud Abbas led PA, whose electoral mandate expired in 2009, from popular backlash. Biggs explained that “the emergence of popular protests on the Palestinian street against the Palestinian Authority is worrying and the Israelis have been imploring the international donor community to continue to support the Palestinian Authority.”

    Surely this is important background information for a story about the recent work of Canadian troops and police in the West Bank.

    In my 2016 book A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and exploitation I cite Berthiaume’s 2013 revelation as an example of how critical information is reported on and then ignored. “Even when dissidents’ claims are proven by leading reporters through access to information requests,” I wrote, “the result is often sent down the memory hole. Internal government documents unearthed by foreign policy journalist Lee Berthiaume about Canada’s $300 million, five-year aid program to the Palestinians is a prime example…. Berthiaume effectively confirmed that Canadian aid money was used to train a Palestinian security force to serve as an arm of Israel’s occupation. While Berthiaume’s article was reported in a number of Postmedia papers, there was no commentary in a major paper or follow-up stories about Biggs’ internal note or Operation Proteus, Canada’s effort to build a Palestinian security force under the US military’s direction (with the exception of stories in small town papers covering individual police or soldiers leaving for the mission).”

    At the time of writing this I was unaware of the depth of the suppression. Apparently, the information was so efficiently sent down the memory hole that the journalist who uncovered the internal documents won’t even mention it when reporting on the subject!

    And this is not simply a matter of historical interest. Canada continues to plow significant resources into PA security forces. In 2019-20 the military allocated $5 million to Operation Proteus and millions of dollars more in Canadian “aid” supports Palestinian security forces. In 2018 the Trudeau government initiated the $1.25 million “Empowering the Palestinian Security Sector” and the $1.365 million “Security Sector Capacity Building in the West Bank” projects. According to Global Affairs’ description of the latter initiative, “these activities complement the ongoing institutional capacity-building efforts by Operation PROTEUS, Canada’s contribution to the United States Security Coordinator.”

    More recent research continues to demonstrate who this this “aid” is designed to help.

    Drawing on previously classified materials, Carleton criminology professor Jeffrey Monaghan details Canada’s role in turning Palestinian security forces in the West Bank into an effective arm of Israel’s occupation. In Security Aid: Canada and the Development Regime of Security, Monaghan describes a $1.5 million Canadian contribution to Joint Operating Centers whose “main focus … is to integrate elements of the Palestinian Authority Security Forces into Israeli command.” He writes about Canada’s “many funding initiatives to the PCP [Palestinian Civilian Police]” which “has increasingly been tasked by the Israeli Defence Forces as a lead agency to deal with public order policing, most recently during IDF bombings in Gaza and during Arab Spring demonstrations.”

    In a 2019 assessment of 80 donor reports from nine countries/institutions titled “Donor Perceptions of Palestine: Limits to Aid Effectiveness,” Jeremy Wildeman concludes that Canada, the US and International Monetary Fund employed the most anti-Palestinian language. “Canada and the US,” the academic writes, “were preoccupied with providing security for Israel from Palestinian violence, but not Palestinians from Israeli violence, effectively inverting the relationship of occupier and occupied.”

    A great deal of Canada’s supposed “assistance” to the Palestinians — who have less than one-twentieth their occupier’s per capita GDP — is, in fact, explicitly designed to aid Israel. This is information Canadians need to know to judge what the government does with their taxes. But the dominant media largely ignores this and the other innumerable ways Canada supports Israeli apartheid.

    The post Media Hides Canadian Support for Israeli Apartheid first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • From BLM to Palestine: Only a Marriage of Movements can Counter a Marriage of Empires

    On this one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, I’m thinking about settler colonial nations who routinely spend great amounts of capital to militarily and politically repress indigenous and popular uprisings led by the most historically oppressed peoples of the world.

    The United States and Israel—two settler-colonial nation states whose drive to exterminate and replace indigenous peoples with settler colonists has led to unending repression and brutality for decades (in the case of Israel) and centuries (in the case of the United States). These two inherently genocidal projects also happen to be financially, materially, logistically and geopolitically intertwined. They depend on each other.

    As President Biden so aptly put it in his Congressional speech in 1986, “We look at the Middle East. I think it’s about time we stop, those of us who support, as most of us do, Israel in this body, for apologizing for our support for Israel. There’s no apology to be made. None. It is the best $3 billion investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interest in the region. The United States would have to go out and invent an Israel.”

    Israel is described as “the most militarized nation in the world” by the Global Militarization Index. The US provides Israel $3.8 billion a year in cash and weapons, to make sure it is so. The marriage of these two settler empires makes it such that any US Congressional attempts to thwart Israel’s ongoing brutality against Palestinians are probably about as likely to be effective as Hamas’ rockets launched at Israel’s Iron Dome.

    The US also provides Israel massive state-sponsored propaganda, backed by incredibly powerful Israeli lobbying groups like AIPAC, to make sure this funding stays in place and is not ever ideologically challenged inside the United States or Israel. These lobbying groups picked up steam and recruited more right-wing backers during Trump’s tenure, enhanced by his extreme support of Zionism, Netanyahu, the relocation of the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and further funding for Israel’s settler colonial projects. But to be clear, US support for Israel is a bipartisan project, and it has been for decades. Even so-called progressive Democrats like Rep. Mondaire Jones of New York and Rep. Ro Khanna of California, have just signed onto an AIPAC letter, whose aim is to prevent any cuts in funding to Israel, in response to Minnesota Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum’s new bill, HR2590, designed to “block Israel from using U.S. military aid to demolish Palestinian homes, arrest Palestinian children, and annex Palestinian land.”

    AIPAC and its bipartisan allies have also, for decades, functioned to make sure that anyone who dares question “Israel’s right to self-defense” loses all political credibility, career opportunity, and is unilaterally smeared by Democrats and Republicans alike. From AP Press writers who get fired because they used to support Palestine in college, to US Congress members who joke about “the Benjamins,” criticizing Israel in any form has become a form of political suicide inside the United States. Recent attempts to criminalize anyone who supports the BDS movement have become clear violations of the First Amendment according to the ACLU, and yet, US states are moving ahead with these measures, despite legal challenges in the courts. Now that is one powerful international propaganda apparatus.

    So it is against this David-and-Goliath-style backdrop that we see the beginnings of the US-Israeli-military-public-relations façade beginning to crumble inside the realm of US public opinion, as decades of organizing work on behalf of Palestinian human rights begin to slowly trickle up into the halls of Congress. According to a new Gallup poll, there’s a “53 percent majority of Democrats favor pressuring Israel—a 10-point jump since 2018—and progressive figures are clearly betting that the broader electorate is more willing to hear critics out than ever before.”

    This is a significant shift, especially inside a country where both major parties’ unilateral support for Israel has gone unquestioned for decades. And in the last few weeks, we’ve also seen some of the most progressive US Congressional members take courageous stances on Palestinian human rights: Rashida Tlaib’s impassioned speech on the House floor, AOC’s reference to Israel as an “apartheid state,” Bernie’s “resolution of disapproval” and other attempts to block an increased $735 million in additional weapons package.

    These rhetorical shifts are tremendous acts of resistance inside the proverbial belly of the beast. And they certainly represent a broader shift in US public opinion, which we also see shifting internationally, given the massive Palestine solidarity protests throughout the United States, Europe and Australia, over the last few weeks. But make no mistake—these rhetorical shifts inside the US halls of power are not the same thing as fundamentally shifting US policy, which is deeply invested in maintaining and supporting its own economic, geo-political and military interests inside what UC Barbara Sociologist William I. Robinson calls the “global police state.” The following is an excerpt from Robinson’s book, Global Police State:

    The Occupied Palestinian Territory has been transformed into probably the most monitored, controlled, and militarized place on earth. It epitomizes the dream of every general, security expert and police officer to be able to exercise total bio-political control. In a situation where the local population enjoys no effective legal protections or privacy, they and their lands become a laboratory where the latest technologies of surveillance, control, and suppression are perfected and showcased, giving Israel an edge in the highly competitive global market. Labels such as ‘Combat Proven,’ ‘Tested in Gaza,’ and ‘Approved by the IDF’ (Israeli Defense Forces) on Israeli or foreign products greatly improves their marketability.

    These methods of control and repression fine tuned against the Palestinians have been exported by Israel to racist police in US inner cities, Brazilian security forces that patrol the impoverished residents of the Rio favelas, Colombian and Guatemalan military and paramilitary forces in their battles against social movements, Central Asian intelligence officers monitoring human rights activists and journalists, Chinese Army agents developing domestic systems of social control, and corporate clients and repressive states and police agencies the world over.

    Indeed, many Palestinian activists who have found solidarity with indigenous rights activists in the United States have noted, as recently as Standing Rock in 2016:

    Many of the law enforcement officers at Standing Rock have been trained in Israel. The weapons and tactics are identical. The use of high pressure water cannons, rubber bullets, rubber coated steel bullets, the use of attack dogs, and sound grenades are the same in both places.

    And over the last few years, Amnesty International and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have published reports detailing how Israeli training of US police officers has resulted in systematic brutality. Amnesty International’s report cites “widespread constitutional violations, discriminatory enforcement and a culture of retaliation” within the Baltimore Police Department. JVP’s report went on to say, “Police brutality of the kind that led to the death of George Floyd is both deeply embedded in American policing and also reinforced by the exchange of the ‘best practices’ and expertise in counter-terrorism techniques taught to US law enforcement officials during their training in Israel. Thousands of these officials from across the US have been sent to Israel for training, and thousands more have participated in conferences and workshops with Israeli personnel.”

    The Middle East Monitor writes:

    George Floyd’s killing is the latest, but probably not the last, example of classic American policing to mirror Israel’s ‘best law enforcement practice.’ It is being put to deadly use on the streets of America. If black lives really do matter in 21st century America, then the ‘deadly exchange programmes’ with Israel should be brought to an end without delay.

    So this is the fundamental barrier for our movements trying to stop US aid to Israel. For decades, we’ve watched US Presidents offer Israel and Palestine peace deal after peace deal. We’ve seen an inordinate number of trips from Washington to Israel to host diplomatic talks about “two-state solutions.” Throughout all of these duplicitous negotiations, the US government has pretended to be an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It is not. It never has been. It never will be. And while there may be much-welcomed symbolic efforts coming down the pike to pass resolutions condemning Israeli violence as a sort of symbolic offering to human rights groups, the United States will not cut off aid to Israel any time soon. Nor will it ever be able to broker an honest peace deal, as long as its geopolitical, economic and military interests are fundamentally tied to those of Israel.

    Both Israel and the United States are settler-colonial projects whose very existence is based on oppressing and replacing its indigenous peoples, as well as repressing popular resistance movements that emerge within their national borders. Both states now exist within a new global context described by Bill Robinson — a transnational capitalist project of building a global police state against ever-increasing popular uprisings. This is the current political moment in which we find ourselves. These well-intentioned measures from even the most progressive US Congress members are definitely worth celebrating for their rhetorical and symbolic progress. They are not, however, likely to become law, nor result in any fundamental reduction in military aid or support to Israel. We are going to need a lot more to break up the geopolitical marriage of these two capitalist, settler empires. Only relentless, intersectional and international solidarity movements against white supremacy, transnational capitalism, and settler colonialism have the power to do that.

    The post From BLM to Palestine: Only a Marriage of Movements can Counter a Marriage of Empires first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Erin McCarley.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA

    What’s gotten in the way of education in the United States is a theory of social engineering that says there is ONE RIGHT WAY to proceed with growing up.
    ― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

    Exploring Coffee's Past To Rescue Its Future : The Salt : NPR

    We used to research the cup of coffee. School. Mostly community colleges, but at two universities — UT-El Paso and Gonzaga. A lot of evening classes I taught. Even on military compounds, and in prisons, and in the bowels of twin plants in Juarez.

    In the old days, sleeves rolled up, adults and young people in classrooms, computers, paper and white boards at our ready, would get comfortable and uncomfortable. It was not an easy class, those Composition 101 and 102 mandatory (sometimes ONLY) writing classes for college students (I am so for mandatory 12 classes on writing, thinking, media, rhetoric, propaganda, etc.). Food and drinks, music during essay writing, and face to face consternation and confrontation. Cooperation.

    That cup of coffee from the earliest look at where that bean came from originally intrigued the students. Who would have known (we talked about the Colombian exchange, the Doctrine of Discovery, food, animals, other things that came to the Imperialists). Think of the spice islands on steroids:

    The original domesticated coffee plant is said to have been from Harar, and the native population is thought to be derived from Ethiopia with distinct nearby populations in Sudan and Kenya. Coffee was primarily consumed in the Islamic world where it originated and was directly related to religious practices.

    Fun stuff, this sort of research and writing, and deep dive. We turned these assignments into poetry, poster illustrations, research papers on the diseases of coffee, on the power of coffee like so many thousands of other foods and products, crossing oceans. Many a product of empire and racism, and the coffee paper also turned into “Is There Slavery in Your Chocolate?” essays.

    In recent years, a handful of organizations and journalists have exposed the widespread use of child labor, and in some cases slavery, on cocoa farms in Western Africa. Since then, the industry has become increasingly secretive, making it difficult for reporters to not only access farms where human rights violations still occur, but to then disseminate this information to the public. In 2004, the Ivorian First Lady’s entourage allegedly kidnapped and killed a journalist reporting on government corruption in its profitable cocoa industry. In 2010, Ivorian government authorities detained three newspaper journalists after they published an article exposing government corruption in the cocoa sector. The farms of Western Africa supply cocoa to international giants such as Hershey’s, Mars, and Nestlé—revealing the industry’s direct connection to the worst forms of child labor, human trafficking, and slavery. (Source)

    Hear no Evil, See no Evil, Speak no Evil by Gavin Mayhew
    Your Chocolate Pleasure Supports Child Slavery - YouTube

    So much has happened since I first hit the streets as a newspaper journalist in 1977, and so much has changed since I started teaching college classes in research writing and writing and journalism (1983). The “see, speak, hear no evil” paradigm is the destiny of capitalists. It is the way of who we are every waking nanosecond of our lives. Boycott Divest Sanction my ass. This is where I also pretzel myself into contradiction after contradiction. I should be on an island, or just on 20 acres I have near Mount Adams. Eating mushrooms and stitching moss and bark clothing.

    Do ostriches really bury their head in the sand? - BBC Science Focus Magazine

    Capitalism is the cancer, virus, prion, the tapeworm, the carrot and the stick. It is the blood sucker of all concepts. Slavery is Capitalism. We talked about this, in so many ways, not always me railing overtly with my anti-Capitalist thesis. I would bring to class small business owners, restaurant owners, ex-military, nonprofit directors, friends who were homeless, living in garages, artists, and dissidents of many kinds. Another thing that is DEAD in the water.

    Now, you have to get people vetted and approved to come to a classroom. This is the sickness of our lefty culture. The rightwing has already played this card, too. “Why the hell are you bringing a person from Planned Parenthood to your class? Illegal. Stop. I’m calling the president.”

    U.S. Coffee Facts Infographic by Kellen Lester, via Behance This infographic touches coffee consumption stat… | Coffee facts, Coffee facts infographic, Coffee uses

    That coffee, now, looking at a cup, the ecological footprint, the energy used to get a cup of coffee to say, my Spokane students. Because Spokane loves its coffee. The amount of water used to grow a cup of coffee. We’d look at the coffee in Central America, or Colombia. Where that plant is grown. What was bulldozed to bring that plantation there. Who works the finca? Which indigenous group of non-Spanish speakers in Guatemala work these plantation, tends the bushes, picks and dries the cherries. Species lost, pesticides used. Water diverted. And, food crops denied.

    Again, young and older adults, blown away in my classes, since I was teaching them to look deeper at any number of topics, and develop critical thinking and discourse skills, in whatever watered down version I’d get with many students who were coming to college ill-prepared to really write “essays.” Variations on a theme. Just the cup of liquid, first grown and processed in poor countries, takes about 38 gallons of water to grow.

    This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is It-takes-37-gallons-of-water-to-produce-one-cup-of-coffee.jpg

    We’d try and research more and more on the life-cycle of a ceramic cup or Starbucks thermos, and the life cycle and life span of a coffee maker. Embedded energy, waste, mining, slave warehouses, metals, all that fossil fuel to move those metals, cook them, mill them, ship them around the world. Sure, we could look at at sack of dried but not roasted coffee cherries coming from the Guatemala Highlands, and then where it gets shipped by boat, and then moved by truck, and then the actual cleaning and roasting of the coffee. Packaging, and then, that journey is crossing back and forth, over land, in the air, over seas.

    The assignment blows many students’ minds, as it should. In the classroom, and I’d bring in a coffee person, with coffee and snacks, and she’d talk about farms in Mexico and Africa she’s visited. Talk about the flavor, the various types of coffees.

    We’d look at Fair Trade, Beyond Fair Trade, Shade Grown and the like. Socially responsible coffee. I’d talk about how Vietnam — where I had gone and worked — was cutting more and more forests down to grow coffee. Coffee pests and diseases, and soil enhancements with fertilizers. The entire life cycle analysis of as many things we could extract from the coffee history and production, well, it blows students’ minds, and it only works in person. Don’t fool yourself with the fucking mouse, keyboard and Zoom camera/mic.

    We need to talk about the environmental and human and ecological costs of plantation, mountain-razing coffee:

    2.2 A Bitter Brew- Coffee Production, Deforestation, Soil Erosion and Water Contamination | Environmental Biology

    This pathetic Zoom and remote learning (sic) formula is the deadening of the brain. Recall, Americans already have three quarters of their brains (or more) colonized by lies, propaganda, hate, myth, plain stupidity, largely from terrible K12 (prison with smiling teachers) and all the marketing, and a government whose job is to fleece the masses for the company men, and fleecing includes culling thinking and deep analysis.

    All this work, for coffee? Nope, because the students then do some of their own research on any manner of things. Cause and effect, solutions, pro-con, classification, expository, digital rhetoric, and deeper position papers. Research, and while we share sources and do all sorts of things at home, in groups, the big thing is getting the classroom energized, talking, arguing. Debate every minute. We even meet out of class in a, well, coffee shop, and coffee roaster.

    Thinking about origins and perspectives. This is a full-time job as an instructor, in the class with all sorts of human beings there taking in and reacting to the work, the talks, the learning and the discourse. This Zoom shit is the death of humanity as I knew it. Radical Pedagogy, 2003 article!

    Why Online Education Can Never Replace the Real Thing 1

    Always with food, something in the class, mostly evening classes.

    In 1960, the University of Missouri published a short “Guide for Television Teachers.” Across the country, over 100 different colleges offered nearly 500 televised courses to a half a million students. So professors needed pointers about the best way to teach in this burgeoning new medium.

    “Relax,” the Missouri guide underlined. “Try to be yourself.” Male professors should wear “conservative” ties, the guide added, while women should avoid necklines or hemlines that might “cause discomfort or embarrassment” if they leaned over a counter or sat in a low chair. Once they were properly attired, they could loosen up and let their real character shine through. “Remember that the TV camera projects your natural personality best,” the guide urged, “and the more relaxed and natural that you are, the better you will reach your viewers.”

    Slavery: The Original Bitter In Your Chocolate | Chocolate Class

    Who are these children forced to work the cocoa plantations of the Ivory Coast?

    Ask more of your chocolate – Alter Eco

    Shit, those were the days. And here I am, suffering at age 64. I am feeling the burn, the beat-down burn, of more and more people around me stupid, mean, see-speak-hear not evil when it comes to this fucked up Empire, This War Machine. Those were the good old days? Is that my new mindset and refrain?

    See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil by Simulacrumble on DeviantArt

    It is the contradiction to be an American totally — North American, Canadian or citizen of the USA. Every waking and sleeping minute we are covering the world in blood, exploitation, penury, death. Pain and misery is the way of the land. The hollow media, the celebrities in music and film, oh even more viral than the politicians. They are the elite, or the elite’s house boys or house girls.

    “So what can we do but go with the flow? Just let it go. They have all the power, so just live your life as best you can. It’s not that bad. If we don’t bomb the world, steal the minerals, colonize space with weapons, then someone else will. What about China, Russia? I want a family, a job, and just a chance to live on weekends and kayak and smell the moose dung.”

    I am down — really depressed — because of what that cup of coffee assignment represents: I am old. I am no good as a teacher because it is a digital and PC and cancel culture study body. I am down because most of the people I would have worked with years ago on political issues, as artists, well, they are either dead, or brains deadened by the struggle and the losing. I am depressed because that cup of coffee assignment is not lauded. The entire Western Civilization or Western Culture is in various forms of mental illness. That illness grouping includes a million wrong ways to medicate or mediate the illnesses of the minds.

    Mental health: 'Spike in self-harm, suicide ideation amid Covid-19 pandemic' - Times of India

    I am not that, but I am alone, it seems. Now, the coffee, and where it comes from. Do I invest in Folgers Coffee (a division of J.M Smucker Company)? This is what’s depressing me now — my spouse and I are moving some money saved into some investments. Now I have to decide how to put some of it away, or as they say, to invest it. Because there are no interest rates, the average person can’t go to a state bank or any institution and put money into a municipal bond to do some good for society and make a few percentage points above zero. What’s wrong with 4 percent or 5 percent interest? That is the crime, zero or negative interest rates. Criminal. Imagine, there is not one thing on planet Earth, planet Wall Street, planet Retirement Fund which is not heavily tainted with DDDD: death, disease, destruction and destitution. We have been relooking at Socially Responsible Mutual Funds, or ESG’s, and the picture was never pretty:

    ESG Ratings: How can a business' environmental and social impact be measured?

    Oh, you can say, “Broker, find me a fund that isn’t into war, weapons, mining, prisons, guns, germs, exploitation, banks, insurance companies.” It is virtually impossible. You might not want Walmart stock in the mutual fund, but then Amazon and Facebook and Kraft Foods might be in it. Microsoft, Boeing. Any amount of honor or commitment to NOT engaging in investing that gives money to the murderers, the exploiters, the ocean-soil-jungle-forest-wetland-river killers, it is all lost because they all are wrapped up into one big fat thievery corporation — BlackRock and Blackstone and the top 100 banks, hedge funds, and so many other “if-you-can-make-6-or-12-percent-on-yearly-return” investment products are so embedded in the master slavers in Fortune 1000 circles, and even within the 10,000 largest corporations.

    Housing Is A Human Right Stephen Schwarzman Proposition 21 Blackstone

    [Modern-Day Robber Baron: The Sins of Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman]

    The system is rigged for brokers to use brokerage houses, big ones, and those fees — buy, sell, trade, manage — more money and profits made for NOT producing one potato or bicycle. Yet, MBAs and the others in this crew believe that they don’t want their precious children to work the slave fields of Ivory Coast, or to be soccer ball stitchers, or to be at the wrong end of a toxic waste discharge hose. But invest in Hershey’s, or Nike, or Smithfield, well, out of sight, out of mind. Yep, they would not want their precious families bombed with the amazing number of components tied to an amazing number of businesses wrapped up in one missile. Screws, wires, capacitors, metal shrouding, telemetry, paint, seals, nuts and bolts, precision metal parts, tubes and coils and electronic guidance systems and batteries and, well, you get the picture. But goddamn, you can make bank on investing in defense (sic) companies because there is an endless demand by governments to have that shit in stock. We the taxpayer pay for those Hellfire’s:

    Lockheed Martin, Boeing (previous second source), and Northrop Grumman (seeker only for AGM-114L Longbow Hellfire) Unit cost US$150,000 (FY 2021)!

    The Military-Industrial Complex | Hoover Institution

    It’s much more than just those three companies making bank for these missiles. There is an entire contingent (armies) of companies and service economies tied to this murder weapon:

    AGM-114 Hellfire II Missile, United States of America

    Pretty simple looking murder weapon: those companies making tons of money, and the death makes more money for them, in resupplying.

    3d hellfire ii missle missile model

    In the past, I have studied mutual funds I have invested in, to squirrel away some savings, and the picture is pretty ugly. There are no SRI’s that are nothing more than just market washing. Socially Responsible Investing, NOT:

    21 Best Mutual Funds for Investment in 2021-22

    Top Holdings — Axis Bluechip

    Company Sector P/E 3Y High 3Y Low % Assets
    up Infosys Technology 29.50 10.06 1.48 9.36
    equal Bajaj Finance Financial 76.34 10.38 4.36 8.98
    up HDFC Bank Financial 24.82 10.94 6.06 8.97
    up Tata Consultancy Services Technology 34.90 9.05 2.30 7.32
    up Kotak Mahindra Bank Financial 33.90 9.46 4.74 7.12
    up ICICI Bank Financial 23.28 8.05 0.00 7.07
    up Avenue Supermarts Services 178.26 7.41 2.45 5.55
    equal HDFC Financial 23.54 6.82 1.28 5.01
    up Reliance Industries Energy 27.33 8.33 0.89 4.30
    up Divi’s Laboratories Healthcare 57.37 3.15 0.00 3.15
    equal Hindustan Unilever FMCG 68.89 5.27 1.49 2.58
    up Ultratech Cement Construction 34.72 2.36 0.00 2.24
    up Asian Paints Chemicals 85.41 4.24 1.32 2.17
    equal Nestle India FMCG 77.15 4.59 0.00 2.14
    up Motherson Sumi Systems Automobile 147.57 2.08 0.00 2.08
    down Maruti Suzuki India Automobile 46.37 5.83 0.00 1.89
    equal Pidilite Industries Chemicals 86.93 2.55 0.60 1.82
    up Bharti Airtel Communication — 5.50 0.00 1.79
    equal Cipla Healthcare 31.01 2.36 0.00 1.62
    up Wipro Technology 25.80 1.83 0.00 1.55
    down Shree Cement Construction 49.08 1.59 0.00 1.32
    new Tata Steel Metals 17.76 1.21 0.00 1.21
    equal Titan Company Cons Durable 139.72 3.45 0.78 0.98
    equal Dr. Reddy’s Lab Healthcare 44.62 3.21 0.00 0.94
    equal HDFC Life Insurance Financial 99.18 1.82 0.00 0.89

    This is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Fund holdings, in general:

    The Gates Foundation's Hypocritical Investments – Mother Jones

    Top Warren Buffett Stocks By Size

    Here are the top 10 Warren Buffett stocks by number of shares, as of March 31:

    • Bank of America (BAC), 1.01 billion
    • Apple (AAPL), 887.1 million
    • Coca-Cola (KO), 400 million
    • Kraft Heinz (KHC), 325.6 million
    • Verizon (VZ), 158.8 million
    • American Express (AXP), 151.6 million
    • U.S. Bancorp (USB), 129.7 million
    • Bank of New York Mellon (BK), 72.4 million
    • General Motors (GM), 67 million
    • Kroger (KR), 51.1 million

    Look at what Warren Buffett owns as part of Berkshire Hathaway. Products — Diversified investments, property and casualty insurance, Utilities, Restaurants, Food processing, Aerospace, Media, Toys, Automotive, Sporting goods, Consumer products, Internet, Real estate, Railroad

    How Does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Invest Its Money?

    So the average Joe and Jane, if they get a mutual fund or two for some long-term investment, this is the reality — you might be a social justice warrior, an anti-racist campaigner, an anti-war proponent, an environmentalist, community crusader, a socialist, an anti-capitalist, but if you stick your toe just a bit into the pond for minimal investments, just to protect a few thousand dollars here and there, this is what you get — money into the pockets of madmen: school to prison pipeline experts, war lords, surveillance capitalists, drug pushers, bad loan chieftains, medical fraudsters, real estate thugs, polluters, mountaintop removers, river toxifiers, land thieves, propaganda priests.

    I am so serious about this now — where does the money go, and which company is being supported by stockholders shoveling money into their companies? Look at the union busters, at the price gougers, at the political lobbying arms, all these giant corporations and their networks of bunkos!

    You can turn blue in the face decrying Monsanto (Bayer) for its pesticide poisons or Exxon for climate change propaganda or Sackler/Purdue Pharmacy for opioid addictions, but if you have a mutual fund, there is a chance that somehow those companies are entwined somewhere in the formula of a “strong mutual fund.”

    The corporate giants are also demanding that Congress allow the repatriation of about $2.5 trillion stashed abroad without paying more than 5% tax. They say the money would be used to grow the economy and create jobs. Last time CEOs promised this result in 2004, Congress approved, and then was double-crossed. The companies spent the bulk on stock buybacks, their own pay raises and some dividend increases.

    There are more shenanigans. With low interest rates that are deductible, companies actually borrow money to finance their stock buybacks. If the stock market tanks, these companies will have a self-created debt load to handle. A former Citigroup executive, Richard Parsons, has expressed worry about a “massively manipulated” stock market which “scares the crap” out of him.

    Banks that pay you near zero interest on your savings announced on June 28, 2017 the biggest single buyback in history – a $92.8 billion extraction. Drug companies who say their sky-high drug prices are needed to fund R&D. But between 2006 and 2017, 18 drug company CEOs spent a combined staggering $516 billion on buybacks and dividends – more than their inflated claims of spending for R&D. — Ralph Nader

    We all are sinners in capitalism — just paying our tax bill: death and destruction raining down on Palestinians, for example:

    Seven deadly sins: Wealth without work, Pleasure without conscience, Science without humanity, Knowledge without character, Politics without principle, Commerce without morality, Worship without sacrifice.
    – Mahatma Gandhi

    America's Last Snake-handling Cults

    Oh, we all think we have found the formula for living in this insane and murderous country. Oh, we have to put nose to the grindstone. Follow the leaders. Get the jab. Do as you are told. You home is not your castle. There are no 40 acres and a mule. No handouts. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. Pinch your nose, cover your eyes, plug your ears, muffle your mouth!

    What is capitalism for dummies, currency rate of exchange in mexico

    So, you end up throwing in the towel — no purity test, no selective boycotting of this or that product or service. No true anti-Imperialist leaning, when tax filing time comes. Nothing free in this un-Democratic land of thieves, murderers and thugs. Almost every step you take in America is full of landmines, cow pies, toxic puddles and electrified fences. The horizon is one theater of the absurd after another. The amount of nonsense and self-congratulatory verbiage from all manner of people who think they are enlightened or vaunted or above the dirty, scab-sucking, ripoff fray of capitalism, well, that is the self-delusion, the big lie.

    You have a military industrial complex : LateStageCapitalism

    So, the role of k12, and of higher education? One of the key foundations for a society — good education, robust, and deep learning, deep thinking, and systems thinking growing. Under capitalism and consumerism and conformist ideology that is US of Amnesia, there are so many broken things about face to face education, and I have written tons on this. Taking it to Zoom, to televised classes, remote learning, well, all the bad gets funneled into this new normal-abnormal.

    In addition to education, colleges and universities provide indoctrination in the values and shared beliefs that our society deems important. These commonly shared values and tenets must be instilled, importantly beginning in grade school and before (the Jesuit boast, variously stated, is “Give me the first seven years and you can have all the rest”), and continued and reinforced through high school and college.

    It is at the university where young men and women of indoctrinated conviction are most typically apt and able to respond to what is going on in the world around them, perhaps even take to the streets. Indoctrination can be overt or subtle.
    — George Heitmann

    Allentown's Muhlenberg College allowed a limited number of students to live on campus this fall semester.

    The post Try as You May to Deny, but Evil is in Our DNA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted under the Government’s New Precrime Program

    There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America.

    ― James Bamford

    It never fails.

    Just as we get a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, there might be a chance of crawling out of this totalitarian cesspool in which we’ve been mired, we get kicked down again.

    In the same week that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that police cannot carry out warrantless home invasions in order to seize guns under the pretext of their “community caretaking” duties, the Biden Administration announced its plans for a “precrime” crime prevention agency.

    Talk about taking one step forward and two steps back.

    Precrime, straight out of the realm of dystopian science fiction movies such as Minority Report, aims to prevent crimes before they happen by combining widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, precognitive technology, and neighborhood and family snitch programs to enable police to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage.

    This particular precrime division will fall under the Department of Homeland Security, the agency notorious for militarizing the police and SWAT teams; spying on activists, dissidents and veterans; stockpiling ammunition; distributing license plate readers; contracting to build detention camps; tracking cell-phones with Stingray devices; carrying out military drills and lockdowns in American cities; using the TSA as an advance guard; conducting virtual strip searches with full-body scanners; carrying out soft target checkpoints; directing government workers to spy on Americans; conducting widespread spying networks using fusion centers; carrying out Constitution-free border control searches; funding city-wide surveillance cameras; and utilizing drones and other spybots.

    The intent, of course, is for the government to be all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful in its preemptive efforts to combat domestic extremism.

    Where we run into trouble is when the government gets overzealous and over-ambitious and overreaches.

    This is how you turn a nation of citizens into snitches and suspects.

    In the blink of an eye, ordinary Americans will find themselves labeled domestic extremists for engaging in lawful behavior that triggers the government’s precrime sensors.

    Of course, it’s an elaborate setup: we’ll all be targets.

    In such a suspect society, the burden of proof is reversed so that guilt is assumed and innocence must be proven.

    It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.

    What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate.

    Computers now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks, all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

    In this way, with the help of automated eyes and ears, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potential enemies of the state.

    It works the same in any regime.

    As Professor Robert Gellately notes in his book Backing Hitler about the police state tactics used in Nazi Germany: “There were relatively few secret police, and most were just processing the information coming in. I had found a shocking fact. It wasn’t the secret police who were doing this wide-scale surveillance and hiding on every street corner. It was the ordinary German people who were informing on their neighbors.”

    Here’s the thing as the Germans themselves quickly discovered: you won’t have to do anything illegal or challenge the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.

    In fact, all you will need to do is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious to a neighbor, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    The following activities are guaranteed to get you censored, surveilled, eventually placed on a government watch list, possibly detained and potentially killed.

    Use harmless trigger words like cloud, pork and pirates: The Department of Homeland Security has an expansive list of keywords and phrases it uses to monitor social networking sites and online media for signs of terrorist or other threats. While you’ll definitely send up an alert for using phrases such as dirty bomb, Jihad and Agro terror, you’re just as likely to get flagged for surveillance if you reference the terms SWAT, lockdown, police, cloud, food poisoning, pork, flu, Subway, smart, delays, cancelled, la familia, pirates, hurricane, forest fire, storm, flood, help, ice, snow, worm, warning or social media.

    Use a cell phone: Simply by using a cell phone, you make yourself an easy target for government agents—working closely with corporations—who can listen in on your phone calls, read your text messages and emails, and track your movements based on the data transferred from, received by, and stored in your cell phone. Mention any of the so-called “trigger” words in a conversation or text message, and you’ll get flagged for sure.

    Drive a car: Unless you’ve got an old junkyard heap without any of the gadgets and gizmos that are so attractive to today’s car buyers (GPS, satellite radio, electrical everything, smart systems, etc.), driving a car today is like wearing a homing device: you’ll be tracked from the moment you open that car door thanks to black box recorders and vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems that can monitor your speed, direction, location, the number of miles traveled, and even your seatbelt use. Once you add satellites, GPS devices, license plate readers, and real-time traffic cameras to the mix, there’s nowhere you can go on our nation’s highways and byways that you can’t be followed. By the time you add self-driving cars into the futuristic mix, equipped with computers that know where you want to go before you do, privacy and autonomy will be little more than distant mirages in your rearview mirror.

    Attend a political rally: Enacted in the wake of 9/11, the Patriot Act redefined terrorism so broadly that many non-terrorist political activities such as protest marches, demonstrations and civil disobedience were considered potential terrorist acts, thereby rendering anyone desiring to engage in protected First Amendment expressive activities as suspects of the surveillance state.

    Express yourself on social media: The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior. A decorated Marine, 26-year-old Brandon Raub was targeted by the Secret Service because of his Facebook posts, interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for having “dangerous” opinions, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys.

    Serve in the military: Operation Vigilant Eagle, the brainchild of the Dept. of Homeland Security, calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.” Police agencies are also using Beware, an “early warning” computer system that tips them off to a potential suspect’s inclination to be a troublemaker and assigns individuals a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—based on a variety of factors including one’s criminal records, military background, medical history and social media surveillance.

    Disagree with a law enforcement official: A growing number of government programs are aimed at identifying, monitoring and locking up anyone considered potentially “dangerous” or mentally ill (according to government standards, of course). For instance, a homeless man in New York City who reportedly had a history of violence but no signs of mental illness was forcibly detained in a psych ward for a week after arguing with shelter police. Despite the fact that doctors cited no medical reason to commit him, the man was locked up in accordance with a $22 million program that monitors mentally ill people considered “potentially” violent. According to the Associated Press, “A judge finally ordered his release, ruling that the man’s commitment violated his civil rights and that bureaucrats had meddled in his medical treatment.”

    Call in sick to work: In Virginia, a so-called police “welfare check” instigated by a 58-year-old man’s employer after he called in sick resulted in a two-hour, SWAT team-style raid on the man’s truck and a 72-hour mental health hold. During the standoff, a heavily armed police tactical team confronted Benjamin Burruss as he was leaving an area motel, surrounded his truck, deployed a “stinger” device behind the rear tires, launched a flash grenade, smashed the side window in order to drag him from the truck, handcuffed and searched him, and transported him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and mental health hold. All of this was done despite the fact that police acknowledged they had no legal basis nor probable cause for detaining Burruss, given that he had not threatened to harm anyone and was not mentally ill.

    Limp or stutter: As a result of a nationwide push to certify a broad spectrum of government officials in mental health first-aid training (a 12-hour course comprised of PowerPoint presentations, videos, discussions, role playing and other interactive activities), more Americans are going to run the risk of being reported for having mental health issues by non-medical personnel. Mind you, once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, or a dissident watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there. For instance, one 37-year-old disabled man was arrested, diagnosed by police and an unlicensed mental health screener as having “mental health issues,” apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait, and subsequently locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will and with no access to family and friends. A subsequent hearing found that Gordon Goines, who suffers from a neurological condition similar to multiple sclerosis, has no mental illness and should not have been confined.

    Appear confused or nervous, fidget, whistle or smell bad: According to the Transportation Security Administration’s 92-point secret behavior watch list for spotting terrorists, these are among some of the telling signs of suspicious behavior: fidgeting, whistling, bad body odor, yawning, clearing your throat, having a pale face from recently shaving your beard, covering your mouth with your hand when speaking and blinking your eyes fast. You can also be pulled aside for interrogation if you “have ‘unusual items,’ like almanacs and ‘numerous prepaid calling cards or cell phones.’” One critic of the program accurately referred to the program as a “license to harass.”

    Allow yourself to be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun, such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane, for instance: No longer is it unusual to hear about incidents in which police shoot unarmed individuals first and ask questions later. John Crawford was shot by police in an Ohio Wal-Mart for holding an air rifle sold in the store that he may have intended to buy. Thirteen-year-old Andy Lopez Cruz was shot 7 times in 10 seconds by a California police officer who mistook the boy’s toy gun for an assault rifle. Christopher Roupe, 17, was shot and killed after opening the door to a police officer. The officer, mistaking the Wii remote control in Roupe’s hand for a gun, shot him in the chest. Another police officer repeatedly shot 70-year-old Bobby Canipe during a traffic stop. The cop saw the man reaching for his cane and, believing the cane to be a rifle, opened fire.

    Stare at a police officer: Miami-Dade police slammed the 14-year-old Tremaine McMillian to the ground, putting him in a chokehold and handcuffing him after he allegedly gave them “dehumanizing stares” and walked away from them, which the officers found unacceptable.

    Appear to be pro-gun, pro-freedom or anti-government: You might be a domestic terrorist in the eyes of the FBI (and its network of snitches) if you: express libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers); exhibit Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership); read survivalist literature, including apocalyptic fictional books; show signs of self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies); fear an economic collapse; buy gold and barter items; subscribe to religious views concerning the book of Revelation; voice fears about Big Brother or big government; expound about constitutional rights and civil liberties; or believe in a New World Order conspiracy. This is all part of a larger trend in American governance whereby dissent is criminalized and pathologized, and dissenters are censored, silenced or declared unfit for society.

    Attend a public school: Microcosms of the police state, America’s public schools contain almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.” From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment she graduates, she will be exposed to a steady diet of draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior, overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech, school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students, standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking, politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them, and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement. Additionally, as part of the government’s so-called ongoing war on terror, the FBI—the nation’s de facto secret police force—has been recruiting students and teachers to spy on each other and report anyone who appears to have the potential to be “anti-government” or “extremist” as part of its “Don’t Be a Puppet” campaign.

    Speak truth to power: Long before Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden were being castigated for blowing the whistle on the government’s war crimes and the National Security Agency’s abuse of its surveillance powers, it was activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon who were being singled out for daring to speak truth to power. These men and others like them had their phone calls monitored and data files collected on their activities and associations. For a little while, at least, they became enemy number one in the eyes of the U.S. government.

    Yet as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, you don’t even have to be a dissident to get flagged by the government for surveillance, censorship and detention.

    All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.

    The post Total Tyranny: We’ll All Be Targeted under the Government’s New Precrime Program first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Colombia’s Rebellion against the Capitalist System

    Colombia has been burning with the flames of resistance ever since a national strike began on April 28, 2021. The initial impetus for the large-scale demonstrations came from a regressive tax reform. The tax bill came into being due to the necessity of the Colombian state to push down the rising fiscal deficit, which could reach 10% of GDP this year. On top of this, the tight integration of the Colombian economy into the architectures of imperialism has resulted in an external debt of $156,834,000,000 (51.8% of GDP, projected to come up to 62.8%).

    Someone had to pay for this crisis and the ruling class had no interest in doing so. This was demonstrated when the finance minister ignored the recommendations made by the state-appointed expert committee to tax the highest earners first. The attempt to make the workers and the middle layers pay for the crisis was the spark that ignited the masses’ accumulated rage.

    The movement has slowly spread into the larger questions of political economy, openly confronting the structural barbarity of a glaciated plutocracy. This plutocracy has blood on its hands; it has amassed obscene amounts of wealth by relentlessly mowing down the resistance of the oppressed masses.

    Entrenched Violence

    The modern history of Colombia is enveloped in vapors of violence. Between 1948 and 1958, the country was the scene of one of the most intense and protracted instances of widespread violence in the twentieth century. In this period, there was a civil war called “The Violence” between Liberal and Conservative parties which took 200,000 lives. In order to bring an end to civil war, the Conservatives and Liberals made a political pact in 1958, known as the National Front (NF) which established that the presidency would alternate between the two parties for a period of 16 years and all positions in the three branches of government would be distributed evenly between them. Despite this, violence continued until 1966.

    NF barred the Colombian Communist Party (PCC) from conventional political process in 1955 to ensure that its rising popularity was curtailed. In this way, NF helped in the alternation of power between the different factions of the Colombia elite while strengthening the armed forces to suppress popular reforms. After the civil war, capital accumulation consolidated, agri-business interests grew stronger and land concentration increased. Suffocated by the brutal vehemence of blood-tainted profit-making and hamstrung by the closure of traditional channels of opposition, PCC formed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia – People’s Army (FARC-EP) on May 27, 1964, as its armed wing.

    Between 1984 and 1988, the FARC-EP agreed to a ceasefire with then President Belisario Betancur and many of its militants opted for electoral politics by forming a mass-based political party, the Patriotic Union (UP).  In all, UP gained 12 elected congressional members, 21 representatives to departmental assemblies, 170 members of city councils and 335 municipal councilors. Before, during, and after scoring these substantial electoral victories in local, state, and national elections, the military-backed death squads murdered three of the UP’s presidential candidates.

    Over 5,000 legal electoral activists were killed. The FARC-EP was forced to return to armed opposition because of Colombian regime-sponsored mass terrorism. Between 1985 and 2008, tens of thousands of peasant leaders, trade unionists, human rights activists, and neighborhood leaders as well as journalists, lawyers, and congress people were killed, jailed, or driven into exile. As is evident, whenever ordinary Colombians have stood up for life, the governing political caste and the ruling economic class have systematically tapped into the vast power of state terror to chop off any hope for a better future.

    Even today, the same practice of deploying ever greater amounts of violence continues. The director of Human Rights Watch believes that the protests in Colombia have seen a level of police violence previously unknown in Latin America. He claims that on this continent he has never seen “tanks firing multiple rounds of tear gas projectiles, among other things, horizontally at demonstrators at high speed. A most dangerous practice”.

    US Support

    The Colombian elite’s construction of repressive apparatuses has been fundamentally aided by the American empire. Colombia has been witness to a US-sponsored counter-insurgent nation-building project aimed at contesting the rapid expansion of rural guerrillas on Colombia’s endless coca frontier, its mining and energy frontiers, its agro-industrial frontiers, and into most of its towns and even cities. This project has turned out to be purely destructive.

    By the end of the 1990s, there were more than 400 paramilitary massacres annually. Enter US-backed Plan Colombia, ostensibly designed to cut cocaine production in half: 80% of it went to the Colombian police and armed forces, who worked with the paramilitaries against the FARC, or, more often, against the Colombian people who lived in areas where guerrillas were active. From 2006 to 2010, the Colombian armed forces disappeared more than 10,000 civilians and disguised them as guerrilla kills to boost the body count.

    Propped up by a bloated, national security state, the political class became totally dysfunctional, making no move to implement the 1991 Constitution, whose provisions on indigenous autonomy became dead letters. Such was the mockery of the electorate’s existence that the passage of the constitution was preceded by record numbers of indigenous deaths.

    The war machine’s dispossession, disappearance, torture, and massacre of indigenous people left no community untouched. The Afro-Colombians in the Pacific, who had secured provision to collective land title in 1993, following the indigenous model of autonomy through communal land tenure, suddenly found themselves in the thick of death and destruction as their lands were coveted by mining and logging companies as well as drug traffickers-cum-ranchers-cum-paramilitaries.

    Today, Colombia continues to be the stooge of USA, being the largest recipient of American foreign aid in Latin America, and the largest outside of the Middle East. In 2020, Congress appropriated over $460 million in foreign aid, with most of the funds being directed towards “peace and security,” which includes providing training and equipment to security forces. This has translated into the build-up of massive police and military forces that are unleashed against the civilian population whenever the need comes to enforce the neoliberal model.

    Continued Resistance

    On November 24, 2016, the Government of Colombia and FARC-EP signed a peace agreement, the “Final Agreement for Ending the Conflict and Building a Stable and Lasting Peace”. However, this promise of peace has proven to be full of contradictory tensions. Insecurity and inequality continue unabated, despite the promise of stability, inclusiveness and state responsiveness. There can be little prospect of a meaningful or sustainable peace if large sections of society remain vulnerable to violence, insecurity, injustice and other harms.

    However, an entirely elitist architecture of governance has been a part and parcel of Colombia’s history.  Whether it is conflict or “peace”, all types of political periods have been utilized by the agribusinesses, extractive industries, large-scale landowners and rural elites to enrich themselves. Meanwhile, the marginalized have been exposed to further violence and insecurity. The calcified cruelty of this system reached such a level that the subjugated pole could no longer keep quiet; it had to take to the streets to reassert its right to live with dignity.

    Since Duque came to power in 2018, Colombians have led fierce social struggles: student-led demonstrations against corruption and state terror over three consecutive months in 2018; a nationwide strike of teachers, students, farmers and pensioners in support of public education and pensions in April 2019; “March for Life” demonstrations by students and teachers in response to escalation in assassinations of activists and opposition politicians by neo-paramilitaries and police in July 2019; nationwide general strikes against austerity policies and the cover-up of a military-headed bombing campaign that killed at least eight children in the department of Caquetá; and the mass demonstrations that erupted during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in September 2020 against police violence. In the current conjuncture, resistance will continue as the heavy fist of neoliberal authoritarianism disrupts the existence of the majority of the people.

    The post Colombia’s Rebellion against the Capitalist System first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How the United States Helps To Kill Palestinians

    Photo credit: Stop the War Coalition

    The U.S. corporate media usually report on Israeli military assaults in occupied Palestine as if the United States is an innocent neutral party to the conflict. In fact, large majorities of Americans have told pollsters for decades that they want the United States to be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    But U.S. media and politicians betray their own lack of neutrality by blaming Palestinians for nearly all the violence and framing flagrantly disproportionate, indiscriminate and therefore illegal Israeli attacks as a justifiable response to Palestinian actions. The classic formulation from U.S. officials and commentators is that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” never “Palestinians have the right to defend themselves,” even as the Israelis massacre hundreds of Palestinian civilians, destroy thousands of Palestinian homes and seize ever more Palestinian land.

    The disparity in casualties in Israeli assaults on Gaza speaks for itself.

    • At the time of writing, the current Israeli assault on Gaza has killed at least 200 people, including 59 children and 35 women, while rockets fired from Gaza have killed 10 people in Israel, including 2 children.
    • In the 2008-9 assault on Gaza, Israel killed 1,417 Palestinians, while their meagre efforts to defend themselves killed 9 Israelis.
    • In 2014, 2,251 Palestinians and 72 Israelis (mostly soldiers invading Gaza) were killed, as U.S.-built F-16s dropped at least 5,000 bombs and missiles on Gaza and Israeli tanks and artillery fired 49,500 shells, mostly massive 6-inch shells from U.S.-built M-109 howitzers.
    • In response to largely peaceful “March of Return” protests at the Israel-Gaza border in 2018, Israeli snipers killed 183 Palestinians and wounded over 6,100, including 122 that required amputations, 21 paralyzed by spinal cord injuries and 9 permanently blinded.

    As with the Saudi-led war on Yemen and other serious foreign policy problems, biased and distorted news coverage by U.S. corporate media leaves many Americans not knowing what to think. Many simply give up trying to sort out the rights and wrongs of what is happening and instead blame both sides, and then focus their attention closer to home, where the problems of society impact them more directly and are easier to understand and do something about.

    So how should Americans respond to horrific images of bleeding, dying children and homes reduced to rubble in Gaza? The tragic relevance of this crisis for Americans is that, behind the fog of war, propaganda and commercialized, biased media coverage, the United States bears an overwhelming share of responsibility for the carnage taking place in Palestine.

    U.S. policy has perpetuated the crisis and atrocities of the Israeli occupation by unconditionally supporting Israel in three distinct ways: militarily, diplomatically and politically.

    On the military front, since the creation of the Israeli state, the United States has provided $146 billion in foreign aid, nearly all of it military-related. It currently provides $3.8 billion per year in military aid to Israel.

    In addition, the United States is the largest seller of weapons to Israel, whose military arsenal now includes 362 U.S.-built F-16 warplanes and 100 other U.S. military aircraft, including a growing fleet of the new F-35s; at least 45 Apache attack helicopters; 600 M-109 howitzers and 64 M270 rocket-launchers. At this very moment, Israel is using many of these U.S.-supplied weapons in its devastating bombardment of Gaza.

    The U.S. military alliance with Israel also involves joint military exercises and joint production of Arrow missiles and other weapons systems. The U.S. and Israeli militaries have collaborated on drone technologies tested by the Israelis in Gaza. In 2004, the United States called on Israeli forces with experience in the Occupied Territories to give tactical training to U.S. Special Operations Forces as they confronted popular resistance to the United States’ hostile military occupation of Iraq.

    The U.S. military also maintains a $1.8 billion stockpile of weapons at six locations in Israel, pre-positioned for use in future U.S. wars in the Middle East. During the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2014, even as the U.S. Congress suspended some weapons deliveries to Israel, it approved handing over stocks of 120mm mortar shells and 40mm grenade launcher ammunition from the U.S. stockpile for Israel to use against Palestinians in Gaza.

    Diplomatically, the United States has exercised its veto in the UN Security Council 82 times, and 44 of those vetoes have been to shield Israel from accountability for war crimes or human rights violations. In every single case, the United States has been the lone vote against the resolution, although a few other countries have occasionally abstained.

    It is only the United States’ privileged position as a veto-wielding Permanent Member of the Security Council, and its willingness to abuse that privilege to shield its ally Israel, that gives it this unique power to stymie international efforts to hold the Israeli government accountable for its actions under international law.

    The result of this unconditional U.S. diplomatic shielding of Israel has been to encourage increasingly barbaric Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. With the United States blocking any accountability in the Security Council, Israel has seized ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, uprooted more and more Palestinians from their homes and responded to the resistance of largely unarmed people with ever-increasing violence, detentions and restrictions on day-to-day life.

    Thirdly, on the political front, despite most Americans supporting neutrality in the conflict, AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups have exercised an extraordinary role in bribing and intimidating U.S. politicians to provide unconditional support for Israel.

    The roles of campaign contributors and lobbyists in the corrupt U.S. political system make the United States uniquely vulnerable to this kind of influence peddling and intimidation, whether it is by monopolistic corporations and industry groups like the Military-Industrial Complex and Big Pharma, or well-funded interest groups like the NRA, AIPAC and, in recent years, lobbyists for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

    On April 22, just weeks before this latest assault on Gaza, the overwhelming majority of congresspeople, 330 out of 435, signed a letter to the chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Committee opposing any reduction or conditioning of US monies to Israel. The letter represented a show of force from AIPAC and a repudiation of calls from some progressives in the Democratic Party to condition or otherwise restrict aid to Israel.

    President Joe Biden, who has a long history of supporting Israeli crimes, responded to the latest massacre by insisting on Israel’s “right to defend itself” and inanely hoping that “this will be closing down sooner than later.” His UN ambassador also shamefully blocked a call for a ceasefire at the UN Security Council.

    The silence and worse from President Biden and most of our representatives in Congress at the massacre of civilians and mass destruction of Gaza is unconscionable. The independent voices speaking out forcefully for Palestinians, including Senator Sanders and Representatives Tlaib, Omar and Ocasio-Cortez, show us what real democracy looks like, as do the massive protests that have filled U.S. streets all over the country.

    US policy must be reversed to reflect international law and the shifting US opinion in favor of Palestinian rights. Every Member of Congress must be pushed to sign the bill introduced by Rep. Betty McCollum insisting that US funds to Israel are not used “to support the military detention of Palestinian children, the unlawful seizure, appropriation, and destruction of Palestinian property and forcible transfer of civilians in the West Bank, or further annexation of Palestinian land in violation of international law.”

    Congress must also be pressured to quickly enforce the Arms Export Control Act and the Leahy Laws to stop supplying any more U.S. weapons to Israel until it stops using them to attack and kill civilians.

    The United States has played a vital and instrumental role in the decades-long catastrophe that has engulfed the people of Palestine. U.S. leaders and politicians must now confront their country’s and, in many cases, their own personal complicity in this catastrophe, and act urgently and decisively to reverse U.S. policy to support full human rights for all Palestinians.

    The post How the United States Helps To Kill Palestinians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Portland Police Came to Be Armed With Military-Grade Rifles

    AR-15 rifle operators outnumber the 146 Portland officers who are certified to respond to mental health crises. For two decades, the Portland Police Bureau has armed its officers with AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, the result of a tough-on-crime policy that equipped officers with firearms most people associate more with mass shootings than community policing. In response […]

    The post How Portland Police Came to Be Armed With Military-Grade Rifles appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Jakarta Method Never Ended

    Prepare to read Vincent Bevins’s The Jakarta Method in one sitting because it’s impossible to put down. The book is a summation of the US government assisting the Indonesian military in killing approximately one million civilians from October 1965 through March 1966.

    While the Vietnam War got most of the headlines, in Indonesia the world’s third largest communist party was winning hearts, minds and elections — much to the alarm of the United States. After years of cultivating and training the Indonesian military the US decided it was time for the Indonesian working class to put away childish things like land reform and resource nationalization. The two-million strong (but fatefully unarmed) Indonesian communist party, the PKI, had to be exterminated “down to the roots.”

    The mass murder starts on October 7 on Sumatra with a fanatical anticommunist commander named Ishak Djuarsa who trained at Fort Leavenworth. The police and military arrest leftists and their sympathizers en masse. Trusting peasants and factory workers turn themselves in for what they think is routine questioning and are never heard from again. For mass murder to spread so quickly it’s necessary for ethnic and religious fault lines to be exploited and “ordinary” citizens to directly participate in the killings, often under the threat of being killed themselves.

    Most of the killings were summary executions done with knives, swords, machetes, sickles and spears. The flow of small rivers and streams was disrupted by too many dead bodies. Rape, torture, gendered violence, castration and dismembering alive swept across the 17,000 island archipelago from Banda Aceh to Papua. The US provided arms, training, communication equipment and lists of thousands of real and alleged leftists to be killed. US-owned plantations furnished lists of “troublesome” employees. US officials repeatedly sent cables to the leader of the butchery, General Suharto, to kill the leftists faster.

    The Indonesian military “pioneers” “disappearing” people and, before 1966 ends, this will be a tactic of state terror in Guatemala. Soon right-wingers are scrawling “Jakarta is coming!” on walls throughout Latin America. 1968 brings the Phoenix Program (50,000 killed) in Vietnam and in the 1970s Chile adds the new twist of extra-territorial assassination in Operation Condor. The 1980s bring the Nicaraguan contras (50,000 killed) and Salvadorian death squads (75,000 killed.)

    The “Salvador option” migrates to Iraq in 2004 with the US creation of the Wolf Brigade death squad, overseen by some of the same villains in the Central American bloodshed: James Steele, John Negroponte and Elliott Abrams. The Obama-backed 2009 Honduran coup catapults that nation into the number spot in the world for the killing of labor leaders, land reformers and journalists. As I write this the police and paramilitaries of US client narco-state Colombia are gunning down unarmed protesters in the streets of Cali.

    It was one big capitalist party as US media and nearly all politicians cheered on the deaths of “communists” (union organizers, teachers, journalists, students, land reformers) and, after the peace of the dead was established, US oil companies flocked into Indonesia. “Communism” (i.e., the working class majority helping itself) had been “turned back” in the fourth most populous nation on earth. Capitalism’s bloodthirsty media soldiers, like “liberal” New York Times columnist James Reston, called the slaughter “A Gleam of Light in Asia.”

    Besides the million Indonesians murdered, another million were sent without charge or trial to prison camps for decades. Unlike truth and reconciliation commissions established in other countries following government atrocities, every Indonesian government since 1965 has been proud of the slaughter. Westerners party today on Bali beaches where 56 years ago massacres of 80,000 Balinese took place and bones and skulls still wash up. To give a flavor for the madness of the Indonesian ruling class since 1965 — which included killing 300,000 people in East Timor between 1975 and 1999 — it’s best to just quote Bevins:

    Much worse things happened than this to the families of communists and accused communists. In Indonesia, being communist marks you for life as evil, and in many cases, this is seen as something that passes down to your offspring, as if it were a genetic deformity. Children of accused communists were tortured and killed. Some women were prosecuted simply for setting up an orphanage for the children of communist victims.

    In January 1966 Robert F. Kennedy became the only prominent US politician to speak out against Suharto’s carnage. With the Kennedys, though, we always get a dose of historical whiplash as, earlier in the book, RFK and JFK debate sending in marines to overthrow the government of the Dominican Republic. They veto this as too obvious but Bobby helpfully suggests blowing up the US consulate themselves as a pretext to invade. (According to Ron Ridenour’s Russian Peace Threat, Robert Falseflag Kennedy also suggested a similar “Remember the Maine” incident to justify directly attacking Cuba during the missile crisis.)

    Early in the book there are a couple revealing anecdotes about Chinese leaders trying to talk sense into Indonesia’s charismatic but overconfident President Sukarno.

    Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai tells Sukarno that he should have his own armed working class militia apart from the military: “The militarized masses are invincible.” Che told Guatemalan leftists the same thing in 1954 but neither Sukarno nor Arbenz did this and their working classes paid dearly. (Decades later Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez creates the armed Bolivarian Militia of 3.3 million men and women, probably staving off a direct US invasion.)

    Chairman Mao also warns Sukarno that he’s too complacent about the Indonesian military. Mao remains the only leader in history to overthrow his own government and Bevins posits that the bloodbath in Indonesia was a partial impetus for the 1966 Cultural Revolution to purge any bourgeois elements.

    In another early chapter, Richard Nixon admits in private that communists and socialists improve people’s lives and will win elections — if the US lets elections be held. Nixon said this in 1955 about Indonesia and again in 1970 about Allende’s Chile. Over and over, it’s the “good example” of different economic systems that the insecure US ruling class fanatically seeks to crush. The US system has never been able to “compete” without bombs, bribery, brainwashing, blackmail and bullets.

    And you know what? It all worked — just like the FBI exterminating the black left “worked” in the 1960s and 1970s. Today, everywhere, whether Indonesia or the United States, we see the triumph of capitalism: staggering wealth inequality, environmental devastation, endless wars, police impunity, masses ground down to subsistence, homeless people under every bridge, tens of millions afraid that an illness or injury will bankrupt them, indebted, pauperized, surveilled and censored.

    In Youtube interviews Bevins, currently a reporter for the Washington Post, wonders if we’ll look back on the present and see other ignored atrocities. Considering that the Washington Post supported the US destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria, the decades-long and ongoing hammering of Cuba, Iran and Palestine, and the scrupulous ignoring of six million people killed in the Congo by US-ally Rwanda — I’d say we don’t have to wonder.

    What I’m wondering is when Bevins is going to write a story in the Washington Post about the illegal unconstitutional dirty war the US is currently waging on Syria, the illegal occupation of one third of Syria, the US theft of Syria’s oil and wheat, the US sanctions which only punish the Syrian working class, the US/UK domination and corruption of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the US military’s care and feeding of takfiri fanatics and US Congressional complicity in war crimes. Maybe 50 years from now it will be “safe” to tell Syria truths.

    The post The Jakarta Method Never Ended first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • For Eid, Let’s Celebrate the Queer and Trans Muslims Working Toward Abolition

    Three young Muslim women pray at the site of George Floyd's murder

    This Ramadan has been a difficult one for many Muslims. In the U.S., police have continued to murder Black people, interpersonal violence has targeted trans women of color and Asian women, and a rash of legislation has targeted trans youth and Black voters and protesters. Israeli violence against Palestinian people in Sheikh Jarrah, Al-Aqsa Mosque and Gaza has escalated. In India, COVID-19 deaths have surged.

    It is a moment that calls us to organize toward abolition — the dismantling of systems that incarcerate, surveil, police and punish, and the creation of systems that meet people’s needs and support accountability and change — more than ever.

    Now, as Muslims around the world celebrate Eid ul’Fitr and mark the end of the Ramadan, many of us are also reflecting on our collective efforts to help others. During this time of reflection and celebration, I am excited to lift up the efforts that Muslims in queer and trans communities are engaged in to create a just world free of police, prisons and punishment.

    One doesn’t need to look far to see the commitment to abolition among some U.S.-based queer and trans Muslim organizations and leaders. Masjid al-Rabia, a mosque and Islamic community center in Chicago, mobilized volunteers to send care packages to incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims this Ramadan.

    The Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity (MASGD), a national LGBTQ+ Muslim organization, raised over $2,500 for Believers Bailout (a fund that posts bail or bond for incarcerated Muslims). MASGD also encouraged people to support campaigns to free Ashley Diamond (an incarcerated Black trans woman) and Karim Golding (an incarcerated Black Muslim immigrant).

    The Queer Muslim Book Club, a New York City-based organization, held a weekly abolitionist reading group, inspired by reading groups that Believers Bailout has held.

    I got curious about what I see as a pattern of queer and trans abolitionist work during Ramadan, so I reached out to others to learn more. I spoke with Muslims connected to queer and trans communities about how and why they do abolitionist work during Ramadan.

    Not everyone agreed with me about a pattern — one pointed out that many queer and trans Muslims have not yet arrived at an abolitionist outlook, and several explained that their abolitionist efforts during Ramadan are simply a continuation of what they do every month of the year. But what did emerge was a holistic vision of abolition that unifies the personal, political and spiritual.

    Abolitionist Action

    This Ramadan, Mirna Haidar visited their cousin in prison in Lebanon. Mirna, who lives in New York and serves on the MASGD steering committee, goes back to Lebanon to visit family when she can. But they had never met this cousin before. He has been incarcerated for 25 years, most of Mirna’s life, and it has been hard for the family to maintain contact. “It was just too jarring to see him behind those bars, and see the condition he was in… I offered what support I could,” Mirna said. Other family members also felt moved to reconnect with him this Ramadan, and Mirna is compiling family contact information to send to him.

    Visiting a family member in prison may not be what everyone imagines abolitionist work to look like. But Mirna explains that meeting people’s immediate needs — acknowledging and supporting their humanity — is part of an abolitionist approach. “Until abolition, insh’allah, we cannot be selfish with our asks,” she said. “There are people who are currently incarcerated who want halal iftar meals. Those things matter. Being in touch with incarcerated folks and demanding things for them — that is not reform. That is abolition.”

    Like Mirna, Malik Johnson, who works with incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims, named relationships with others as a central to abolition. “For me, abolition is in the fabric of our lives,” he said. “So, it’s not something that you do or that you have to try to get. Meeting kindness with kindness, meeting even adversity with kindness — for me, that’s abolition.”

    When I asked Johnson about common requests of incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims, he reflected that they were often quite simple — a prayer rug, a Quran — but not always easy to realize. Many want someone “to communicate with on a long-term basis…. What they’re requesting really is a best friend.”

    Organizers of a queer Muslim abolitionist Ramadan reading group developed and worked through a syllabus on Islamic, queer and feminist approaches to conflict and harm; the impact of policing and incarceration on Muslims; and other abolition-related topics. “For me personally, abolition is also about examining how I navigate the world and engage with harm that I witness, endure and cause, and how to navigate the aftermath of harm in a way that centers healing, growth and accountability,” Firza*, one of the organizers, said. “It has been so helpful to do this syllabus with others, especially with folks with varying life experiences and relationships to abolition and prisons.”

    Serena W. Lin, another organizer of the reading group, agrees. “People don’t know how to imagine a world without incarceration,” Lin wrote, suggesting that different ways of thinking related to both Ramadan and COVID-19 might help.

    Muslim Justice League hosted an Abolition at the Iftar Table event this Ramadan. Jordan Jamil Ahmed, community organizer of the Muslim Justice League, pointed out that even when organizations and events are not explicitly queer- and trans-led, “many of us working behind the scenes … are a part of the queer community and are invested in abolitionist values.” Malek Ansari*, who attended the event, said it was “wonderful,” and helpful in thinking about how to have “intentional conversations with loved ones about abolition.”

    Masjid al-Rabia, MASGD and Muslim Justice League have also been collaborating with a fourth organization, Reconstructed, to build community and work toward abolition this Ramadan. Reconstructed, a creative magazine and conversation space for all Muslims, is well-positioned to do this work since, as the organization points out, “abolition is inherently creative and imaginative work.”

    But queer and trans Muslims are also organizing for abolition in many other ways, all year round. Mirna has worked to stop military recruitment in New York City-area schools. They note that some people seem to think of the military as separate from law enforcement, but “as a war survivor, I don’t see that separation.”

    Ansari, lead co-coordinator of MASGD and board executive member of Trans Lifeline, educates people about abolition through the Defund Chicago Police Department campaign, and researches the impact of policing on marginalized Chicagoans.

    Throughout the year, Muslim Justice League works to end the Countering Violent Extremism program and defund the police in the Boston area. MASGD has held trainings on legal rights and first aid for protests, and Masjid al-Rabia has held events connecting incarcerated LGBTQ+ Muslims with pen pals and facilitated support groups for Muslims recovering from or exploring harm reduction related to substance use. Reconstructed amplifies the creative work or currently and formerly incarcerated people, as well as those targeted by police.

    Abolitionist Vision

    When I asked people about why they supported abolition, many had answers rooted in their faith. Ansari said, “To me, abolitionist work is a form of worship and following the principles of Islam, a religion that was founded on questioning existing systems that haven’t served us.”

    Johnson commented on the prophetic example of Jesus responding to harm. Mirna, who defines abolition as “accountability without incarceration,” discussed the importance of recovering histories of how Muslim communities responded to conflict and harm prior to colonization. She added, “Since I was a kid, Ramadan was all about thinking about others, and being inclusive of people who cannot join you at the iftar table.” Reconstructed shared the following saying of Muhammad (may peace be upon him), which they note is an “anchoring sentiment” for their work: “Feed the hungry, visit the sick, and set free the captives.”

    The lived experience of being a queer or trans Muslim deeply informs people’s commitment to abolition. Ansari grew up as queer nonbinary Muslim in a community of refugees and immigrants. “Having that perspective has allowed me to see how policing played a central role in enforcing assimilation to survive,” they commented, going on to outline a vision for abolition “where youth are more connected with the older generation, where all of us know how to plant or grow our own food locally, and where work is not a precursor to accessing the resources we need to survive and thrive.”

    Firza noted, “Queer and trans Muslims are not a monolithic population, but there is a shared experience that understands the threat (and unfortunately, oftentimes the lived experience) of violence and punishment simply for being who they are…. I am committed to building community that values growth and does not dispose of anyone.”

    Ahmed agreed, asking, “How can I seek support and alliance from other folks if I am not also showing up for those who experience even more intolerance or violence or degradation?”

    Perhaps all of this is why, as Firza puts it, “Studying prison abolition during Ramadan feels like one of the most Muslim things I’ve ever done during Ramadan.”

    Eid Mubarak.

    *They asked to use a pseudonym for privacy and safety.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing

    Censorship comes in many forms. One of [them] is a colossal moral indifference to official crimes at the highest levels of our government.

    — Ralph Nader, April 17, 2021, Ralph Nader Radio Hour

    Disclaimer: This is not a traditional mainstream or even left-stream book review. However, Steven C. Markoff’s book does play as the impetus and linchpin to my essay, more of an analysis/reaction to his book.  I give The Case Against George W. Bush, high marks. Read Steve’s book. Press your respective legislators to push for an investigation of W.’s crimes. Markoff sets out in the book about how those crimes were committed. I reference those. He completes his case: The evidence is there to prosecute and find guilty the 43rd President of the USA, George W. Bush.

    Nader’s Raiders of the Lost Warriors

    I was hitting the old Ralph Nader podcast a week ago when I stumbled upon Steven C. Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush. Nader had Markoff on his podcast, and both talked about the crimes of W Bush, and even more pertinently, the lack of a criminal case against George W. Bush, as well as the crickets in the so-called liberal media (SCLM) as well in the left press concerning Steve’s book.

    I quickly emailed Steve for a copy of his book to review, and he came back at me with a PDF of this book which, as I have stated, has been iced out of mainstream media: no interviews, no reviews let alone getting Steve into a room one-on-one, or onto a Zoom call with other guests to parse his well-researched, well-quoted book on the crimes of George W. Bush.

    The Case Against George W. Bush by Steven C. Markoff, Hardcover | Barnes & Noble®

    Of course, those crimes are more than crimes of omission, or crimes of secret rendition and torture sites, or the crimes of Abu Ghraib “prison” and Guantanamo. The crime was more than just all the lies about WMD’s and Saddam murdering babies. The big crime was Bush and his Regime of psychotic sociopaths of the neocon variety completely derailing valid, active and clear intelligence that Osama bin Laden was about to make a huge fiery asymmetrical splash on the world stage.

    Markoff lays out the daily briefs, the back and forth communiqués, the speeches Bush and others on his team made which all provides evidence of what “we” know about Osama bin Laden. The entire gambit goes back to the Soviet Union’s role in Afghanistan, then with Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and leading up to the ex-governor of Texas, W Bush.

    Carter Doctrine 25 years before 9/11

    Unfortunately, Jimmy Carter’s man  got the Soviet Union and then USA, all tangled up in Afghanistan.

    The best way for us to understand Afghanistan is to look at the record of American involvement going back four decades and to look at the record requires a reexamination of President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski. From the start, U.S. policy formation surrounding Afghanistan has lived in a realm of magical thinking that has produced nothing but a catastrophe of nightmarish proportions. Brzezinski impacted the future of American foreign policy by monopolizing the Carter administration in ways that few outside the White House understand. In his role as national security advisor he put himself in a position to control information into and out of the White House and when it came to Afghanistan – to use it for whatever purposes he saw fit.

    “Brzezinski was an obsessive Russia-hater to the end. That led to the monumental failures of Carter’s term in office; the hatreds Brzezinski released had an impact which continues to be catastrophic for the rest of the world.” Helmer wrote in 2017, “To Brzezinski goes the credit for starting most of the ills – the organization, financing, and armament of the mujahedeen the Islamic fundamentalists who have metastasized – with US money and arms still – into Islamic terrorist armies operating far from Afghanistan and Pakistan, where Brzezinski started them off.”

    — ‘Magical Thinking’ has Always Guided the US Role in Afghanistan by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

    The Clinton “team” briefed the incoming George W. Bush “team” before his January 2001 inauguration about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. For the younger Bush, he repudiated the evidence trail from so many intelligence sources. His eyes were on Operation Iraqi Freedom, but first called, O.I.L,  which was propagated by Jay Leno incessantly after it was blurted out from the source:

    On the afternoon of March 24, 2003 days after the U.S launched missiles at Baghdad to start the illegal war, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer held a press briefing. After a few minutes, a couple of sentences into the briefing, he verbally stumbled on the name of Bush’s war, stating, “Operation Iraqi, uh, Liberation.”

    Calling it “Operation Iraqi Freedom” officially is just more War is Peace, Lies are Truth bullshit. And that 2001 invasion of Afghanistan ― “Operation Enduring Freedom” – is yet more of the PT Barnum spin, all catalogued in the annals of United States Central Command and U.S. Army War College.

    Trail of Tears, Trails of Evidence

    Markoff’s book is a straightforward record of myriad published records – taped speeches, newspaper articles/Op-Eds, sections from books, redacted memos and top secret records. As a buttress to the asymmetrical history of what happened leading up to and during the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequently all that went wrong in the Middle East, this upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11, Markoff’s book should be required reading.

    But reading isn’t enough for just consuming Markoff’s book, and reading it is not enough for those of us who have been fighting the wars, those in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all the others. What we need is a truth and reconciliation hearing for all those murdered in the September 11 attacks (around 3,000) as well as the countless hundreds of thousands (several million some estimates determine up to today) killed when the USA bombed and razed Iraq.

    The deep links between terror attacks and Southwest Florida - News - Sarasota Herald-Tribune - Sarasota, FL

    Remember that famous photo of Bush reading about a goat to kids in Florida:

    On the morning of September 11, 2001, Bush was at Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota County, Florida, reading “My Pet Goat.”

    Oh, his dedication to inner-city first graders and listening to them recite the goat story is golden. Earlier, Bush had been on the way from his hotel to the school in his motorcade when it was reported to him a passenger jet had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Old commander in Chief Bush believed the crash was an accident caused, perhaps, by pilot error.

    That old goat, man, what a story, so much so that when Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, entered the classroom at 9:06 to tell this president a second airplane had struck the South Tower and that the nation was under attack, Bush stayed on his duff for seven more minutes, following along as the children finished reading the book.

    “Class Goat”

    Goat may be an old West Point term for the man/woman graduating last in his/her class, but one infamous George the Goat from the Army Academy is none other than George Armstrong Custer.

    Unfortunately, the proverbial goat in America’s eyes is the million people murdered and millions more suffering because of the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. Steve’s book lays out the three legal frameworks or cases for prosecuting Bush (and solely Bush, not Bush and Company LLC) for crimes against humanity (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and Bush’s own responsibility for those several thousand who died on that fateful day, September 11, 2001.

    Mathematician Finally Solves Goat Problem: Here's the Answer

    Here’s part of a blurb on the book’s web site, Rare Bird Lit:

    Steven C. Markoff presents sourced evidence of three crimes committed by George W. Bush during his presidency: his failure to take warnings of coming terror attacks on our country seriously; taking the United States, by deception, into an unnecessary and disastrous 2003 war with Iraq; costing the lives of more than 4,000 Americans and 500,000 others; and breaking domestic and international laws by approving the torture as means to extract information. While Markoff lays out his case of the crimes, he leaves it up to the reader to decide the probable guilt of George W. Bush and his actions regarding the alleged crimes.

    Casualties of War — Truth, Honor, Duty to Protect 

    I had cut my teeth as a reporter in El Paso and elsewhere covering and following that other container ship of lies – Reagan’s crew of felons and thugs who philandered the American public with their special form of Murder Incorporated in Central America, and notably, Nicaragua. Or the illegal invasion of Panama under George H. W. Bush. Oh, those invasions, coups, clandestine bombings, proxy wars, incursions, secret operations, PsyOps.

    I even ended up “down south,” in Costa Rica, Guatemala and Nicaragua running into all sorts of odd fellows in the “drugs for guns” continuing criminal enterprise involving some of this country’s more nefarious “diplomats” and “generals” and CIA/NSA scum. Oh, those yellow belly Contras, murdering civilians and bombing schools and clinics for Reagan and Company. Those freedom fighters, AKA, the biggest lying cheats in recent times in Central America, Los Contras.

    And the dead horse isn’t dead, and another author, like Markoff, just couldn’t buy the bs on those Contras:

    Thus, in his 2012 book, The Manufacturing of a President, Wayne Madsen claims, based upon his numerous intelligence sources, that the CIA and Mossad have both been funding these rearmed Contras, and that they have been shipping these Contras arms over both the Honduran and Costa Rican borders.  He claims also that the Honduran government which came to power through the 2009 coup – a coup which the Obama Administration actively aided and abetted to unseat a leftist government which, by the way, happened to be friendly to Daniel Ortega – has been key to helping both support the Contras as well as to provide a staging ground for the covert operations to bring down the Sandinista government.  In other words, Honduras is playing the very same role it did in the 1980s, and the US-backed coup in 2009 – a mere 2 years after Ortega was elected – was crucial to this role.

    — Dan Kovalik

    Of course, the Bush Family Legacy was also all written over that fiasco, and again, it was easy for me to continue my penchant for understanding how rotten the United States is as I am the son of a Vietnam War regular army veteran, who put in 31 years in uniform.

    Lords of War, the Racket that is General Smedley Butler’s war warnings. Or Gary Webb, killing the messenger, the same CIA-infused Washington Post, New York Times and LA Times, to just name a few of the publications that corrupted the real work of Webb uncovering that entire drugs for guns Mafiosi.

    Robert Parry, deceased now, but a journalist who started Consortium News in 1994, with Webb as one of his big stories on how bad the US government is, and how bad the mainstream media has become.

    Here, Parry:

    So what I was seeking by the mid-1990s was some solid ground in which to plant a flag for honest journalism, rather than constantly being forced into retreat, pulled by nervous editors and producers looking over their shoulders out of fear of right-wing retaliation. From solid ground, I thought, we could produce journalism that simply assessed the facts and made independent judgments regardless of who might be offended.

    In 1995, it was my oldest son, Sam, who suggested the then-novel idea of “a Web site.” I didn’t fully understand what a Web site was and Sam was no techie but he demonstrated extraordinary patience in building our original Internet presence. (Back then, there were no templates; you had to start from scratch.) We married old-fashioned investigative reporting with the new technology of the Internet and began publishing groundbreaking investigative articles.

    We followed evidence where it went, even when it flew in the face of the conventional wisdom, such as our work on the 1980 October Surprise issue of whether Reagan and Bush went behind President Jimmy Carter’s back during his Iran-hostage negotiations, much the way Nixon had in sabotaging Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968.

    Not only did we present our own original work but we buttressed investigations by other serious journalists, such as Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News when, in 1996, he revived Ronald Reagan’s Contra-cocaine scandal. When the major newspapers set out to destroy Webb and discredit his revelations, Consortiumnews was one outlet that took on the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

    Yes, we were outgunned. Despite showing that Webb was not only right but actually understated the problem of Contra-cocaine trafficking, we still could not save Webb from having his career destroyed and then watching the big newspapers essentially high-five each other for having helped cover up a serious crime of state.

    The Three Crimes of the POTUS #43 (Secret Service called him Trailblazer)

    I am not going astray here, kind reader. What Steven talked a lot about on the Ralph Nader podcast was how that same media, the So-called Liberal Press, has virtually gone silent on his book, a type of passive censorship that can eat at the soul of any author.

    In reality, the “case against Bush” is the case against mainstream media/press and their close ties to not just the chambers of power, but within their “embeddedness,” inside the ranks, as well as their allegiance to, and participation in, the national security state’s various bureaus of hit men and hit women.

    When I finished the book, I offered the book to everybody that I had quoted, which was… around ninety authors. I offered it to Condoleezza Rice, I offered it to Dick Cheney, I offered it to the [George W.] Bush [Presidential] Library. I haven’t heard from one person about the book.

    — Steven Markoff stated on Nader’s show.

    Interestingly, Markoff incorporates Richard Clarke’s words as a preface to this book. Clarke actually strips culpability from Rumsfeld, Cheney, and others laying the blame on Bush personally. Here, early in Markoff’s book, Clarke puts it clearly in his mind.

    While I may be considered by some to be prejudiced in my judgment, there are facts that any objective observer must accept.

    • First, Bush ignored warnings about the serious threat from Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.
    • Second, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in violation of international law, when Iraq had been uninvolved in 9/11 and offered no imminent threat to the United States.
    • Third, Bush authorized the use of torture and denied prisoners due process, both acts in violation of international law.

    Note that in each case I say that Bush did these things, not the Bush administration. There is a revisionist school that seeks to place the blame on Bush’s vice president, Richard B. Cheney. While there can be little doubt that Cheney encouraged Bush to take many of these actions, it is not true that the president was merely a tool of a mendacious and scheming subordinate.

    The evidence is now clear that Bush agreed with his vice president and knew full well what he was doing. He was an enthusiastic participant, a believer in the war on terror and the war on Iraq. It is true, however, that he did not master or manage the details of either war until the last few years of his eight-year presidency.

    — Richard A. Clarke, in the Forward of Markoff’s book.

    [In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Richard A. Clarke to chair the Counterterrorism Security Group and to a seat on the United States National Security Council. President Bill Clinton retained Clarke and in 1998 promoted him to the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism. Under President George W. Bush, Clarke initially continued in the same position and later became the special advisor to the president on cyber security. He left his government position prior to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003.]

    Markoff uses Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, as a touchstone of sorts. That was in 2007.

    Importantly, Clarke had the necessary government background, involvement, and position to know about what he wrote. When I finished Clarke’s book, I was shocked. Could Bush have really disregarded threats of bin Laden and Al-Qaeda prior to 9/11? If so, was there a compelling reason that Bush spent his political capital and energy going after Hussein? Could it be that George W. Bush’s Iraq War was about oil?

    It occurred to me that while Clarke seemed knowledgeable about terrorists, 9/11, and the run up to our 2003 invasion of Iraq, he was just one person, and his knowledge was limited to what he had personally seen and learned.

    I thought that if I combined details from Clarke’s book with related information from other diverse sources with inside or special knowledge of those times and places, that combined information could produce new and clearer insights about 9/11 and the Iraq War. I then set out to find what additional facts and information were available on those and related topics.

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Torture, Rendition, Yellow Cake, WMD’s

    I remember protesting U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales June 27, 2007, in Spokane, when he showed up to talk about his department under Bush. Many of us were there to protest publicly Gonzales and the Bush administration, for many things, including that 2002 memo written by Gonzales that said Bush had the right to waive anti-torture laws and treaties that protect prisoners of war.

    Oh, the long arm of the “law” that Wednesday afternoon took a good friend down to the ground, arborist Dan Treecraft. He did nothing wrong, but Dan along with another person, was arrested for public disturbance.

    I was there with students of mine from two community colleges where I taught, and alas, even those two respective presidents and chairs of the department where I taught thought they had the right to tell a faculty member what he could and couldn’t do as part of a class assignment on “what it’s like to come out and protest a representative of your/our government who states torture is okay.”

    Ironically, he was in Spokane to talk about “gang enforcement,” and Gonzales  wasn’t alluding to the biggest continuing criminal enterprise Gang called the United States of America.

    Steve’s book is a guide, a probable pathway for lawmakers, voters, and others, including the Press, to ratchet up the attention on George W. Bush the War Criminal, and to put to rest the fawning and ameliorating reputation of Bush as The Painter (sic) Friend of Michelle Obama and Ellen.

    The kicker in Markoff’s book, says it all, quite damningly, but the reality is that the War is a Racket machine is a very fine tuned complex – Big Business Complex: Burger King, et al; Home Depot, et al; Mercenaries ‘R Us, et al; paint, air conditioning, roads, drywall, vehicles, depleted uranium, fuel, water, food suppliers, et al; all those financial products, that medical complex et al; Big Ag, Big Oil, Big Chemical, Big Prison et al, all in the manner of the for-profit system that is subsidized – welfare-ized – by the US taxpayer. Insanity we have already seen in other wars, and that War on Vietnam, not enough lessons learned there? I’ve been up close and personal with that war, in Vietnam as a civilian, and as a son of a wounded regular Army officer, social worker for wounded veterans, homeless vets and their families, instructor of college writing for Vietnam veterans.

    There is no urban legend attributed to those $200 hammers and $600 toilet seats and $2000 each bolts holding the shrouding of Patriot missiles. War is graft central, and how many millionaires and billionaires were created after World War I? Read General Butler’s, War is a Racket.

    Evidence of Crimes as Eight Bullet Points

    This shit is personal to me, as well, since I have had friends and students coming back from Bush’s wars, full of trauma, fucked up beyond repair, walking PTSD warriors with all that resentment, anger and physical outbursts, and nowhere to go. Here is Steve’s book, again, near the end:

    Could the following quote from Payback, a book by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton, in part on the strategy of redirected aggression, explain Bush’s taking our country to war on his misleading and false premises?

    “George W. Bush and his Administration were not stooges at all, but quite brilliant. They read the need of most Americans at the time: to hit someone, hard, so as to redirect their suffering and anger [from 9/11]. The evidence is overwhelming that for the Bush Administration’s ‘neocons,’ the September 11 attacks were not the reason for the Iraq War; rather, it was a convenient excuse for doing something upon which they had already decided. Their accomplishment—if such is the correct word—was identifying the post-9/11 mood of the American people, and manipulating this mood, brilliantly, toward war.”

    It’s difficult to fathom the extent of the death and destruction caused by George W. Bush’s three crimes, but his legacy of death and destruction are of Olympic proportions.

    •  An estimated 2,977 people killed by the attacks on 9/11, and thousands more injured or incapacitated that day. In addition, hundreds if not thousands have died and will die early from the toxic air from the collapse of the Twin Towers and its aftermath.
    • By one count, there were 4,400 United States personnel killed and 30,000 wounded in the Iraq War as of August 31, 2010; tens of thousands more wounded physically and emotionally crippled by participating in that war; millions of Americans and their families destroyed, devastated, and/or traumatized by 9/11 and Bush’s 2003 Iraq War.
    •  As many as 650,000 deaths or more from Bush’s Iraq War, deaths that wouldn’t have occurred but for that war.
    •  Many of our civil rights, and the civil rights of others around the world, were curtailed due to the fear created by 9/11, a fear used by some as an opportunity to weaken our liberties.
    •  Three to seven trillion dollars in costs to our country from 9/11 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Those unnecessary trillions were and will be added to our national debt, a sum burdening our future, the future of our children, and perhaps of generations to come.
    •  Bush’s torture of prisoners puts American soldiers captured in future wars at greater risk of being tortured.
    •  The loss of America’s prestige and moral authority from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq War and torturing prisoners will hurt our country in the years ahead.
    •  Sixteen different US spy agencies on September 24, 2006, concluded that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq since March 2003 has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicals— effectively increasing the terror threat in the years after 9/11—and that the Bush administration tortured detainees and that torture wasn’t effective in securing intel otherwise unavailable.

    Because America invaded a sovereign country without credible reason and tortured prisoners, how can we say without hypocrisy that other countries shouldn’t do the same to other nations or to us? What moral authority do we have to tell others it is wrong to torture?

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Pretty damning, and as I file this review/analysis/rant, that W is at it again, and his stupidity is the stunt, no, smart as a fox, or pet-painting war criminal?

    George W Bush shakes hands with Condoleezza Rice in Washington DC on 5 January 2006.

    In a People interview, the former president said he told his former secretary of state he had written for her. “She knows it,” said Bush, 74, “But she told me she would refuse to accept the office.”

    Bush has been doing press to support the release of his book, Out of Many, One, which features his painted portraits of American immigrants and the stories of their lives.

    He called current-day Republicans “isolationist, protectionist, and, to a certain extent, nativist.”

    “Really what I should have said — there’s loud voices who are isolationists, protectionists and nativists, something, by the way, I talked about when I was president,” Bush said. “My concerns [are] about those -isms, but I painted with too broad a brush … because by saying what I said, it excluded a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem.”

    Shadow of War — Ghosts of the Dead

    We’ll see if People magazine interviews Markoff, and gets a bit under the skin of his fine book, all 360 pages, with a decent bibliography and works cited section.

    His conclusion:

    Regardless of how I or others see what I submit are Bush’s criminal acts, some will continue to argue that while he wasn’t a perfect president, at least he rid the world of the tyrant, Hussein. Yes, he did, but for what reason, by what method, and at what cost?

    In addition to the unnecessary deaths and wounding of thousands of brave Americans, hundreds of thousands of others died and were injured from Bush’s unnecessary Iraq invasion. The trillions of dollars Bush’s war has cost has and will continue to be added to our national debt. A debt saddling our future.

    In conclusion, I believe the evidence in this book shows Bush’s three crimes were reckless, dishonest, and tragically unnecessary.

    I rest my case.

    — Steven Markoff, The Case Against George W. Bush

    Of course, there are gross inaccuracies when it comes to US-induced casualties, and the first casualty of war is truth, for sure:

    Of the countries where the U.S. and its allies have been waging war since 2001, Iraq is the only one where epidemiologists have actually conducted comprehensive mortality studies based on the best practices that they have developed in war zones such as Angola, Bosnia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Guatemala, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan and Uganda. In all these countries, as in Iraq, the results of comprehensive epidemiological studies revealed 5 to 20 times more deaths than previously published figures based on “passive” reporting by journalists, NGOs or governments.

    Taking ORB’s estimate of 1.033 million killed by June 2007, then applying a variation of Just Foreign Policy’s methodology from July 2007 to the present using revised figures from Iraq Body Count, we estimate that 2.4 million Iraqis have been killed since 2003 as a result of our country’s illegal invasion, with a minimum of 1.5 million and a maximum of 3.4 million.

    — Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, March 19, 2018

    main article image

    [Civil protection rescue teams work on the debris of a destroyed house to recover the body of people killed in an airstrike during fighting between Iraqi security forces and Islamic State militants on the western side of Mosul, Iraq. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)]

    For Markoff, it’s the lives that were destroyed by Bush. That is the echo in his words, and the ghosts of those murdered are the shadows between the lines in The Case Against George W. Bush. 

    Roots of Zionism and U.S. Liberty to Iraq and Now Iran

    Alas, I am ending this analysis/response to Markoff’s book, The Case Against George W. Bush, by slogging through another quagmire, and then some reference to books on just who was lobbying to attack Iraq. We have Markoff trying to open up a case against W. Bush, and his book is clear, focused, not one we’d expect in the pantheon of history books or investigative research/journalistic screeds.

    Some writers, thinkers, educators and journalists (such as myself), however, were already looking into the scope of this terror campaign, the implications of US Patriot Act, the entire mess that is Israel’s murderous mucking about in the Middle East with Israel-Firster American corporate heads, administration wonks, politicians and more clandestine and nefarious actors behind the scenes, supreme puppet masters and Svengali types.

    All those Israeli wars led to the destruction of Lebanon, Syria and the biggest obstacle at the time, Iraq.

    And, here I go again, tangentially putting more fuel into the fires that immolated Iraq and which have blazed through the Middle East before and during and since W. Bush and his Klan invaded the Middle East.

    Here, I reference a recent piece by Timothy Alexander Guzman who briefly alludes to the AIPAC/Israel/Israel-firster connection to the invasion(s) of Iraq in his piece, “The Prospect of a Major False-Flag Operation in the Middle-East Grows by the Day: Remembering June 8th, 1967 the Day Israel Attacked the USS Liberty: “It’s was all part of the long-term plan and Iraq was part of that plan, in fact, the most powerful lobby in Washington is AIPAC and the Bush neoconservatives including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams and others who pushed Washington into a war with Iraq. According to John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee)  was a major supporter for the War on Iraq”:

    AIPAC usually supports what Israel wants, and Israel certainly wanted the United States to invade Iraq. Nathan Guttman made this very connection in his reporting [in Haaretz, April 2003] on AIPAC’s annual conference in the spring of 2003, shortly after the war started: “AIPAC is wont to support whatever is good for Israel, and so long as Israel supports the war, so too do the thousands of the AIPAC lobbyists who convened in the American capital.” AIPAC executive director Howard Kohr’s statement to the New York Sun in January 2003 is even more revealing, as he acknowledged “‘quietly’ lobbying Congress to approve the use of force in Iraq” was one of “AIPAC’s successes over the past year.” And in a lengthy New Yorker profile of Steven J. Rosen, who was AIPAC’s policy director during the run-up to the Iraq war, Jeffrey Goldberg reported that “AIPAC lobbied Congress in favor of the Iraq war.”

    — John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, authors of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy

     

    Liberty Survivors Say US Still Downplays Israel's Attack on Ship | Military.com

    [Oh, that anniversary, of the attack by Israel on the Liberty, June 8th (1967)]

    I suppose this entire mess that Markoff catalogues in his book, as a triumvirate of crimes by George W. Bush, could for me, personally, be summed up, in my mind, with President George W. Bush, speaking at the annual AIPAC conference in May of 2004:

    You’ve always understood and warned against the evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a dangerous new century, your work is more vital than ever.

    Steven Markoff doesn’t go there, for sure, and that is what makes Markoff’s book unique, too:  a clean record of the mess and blunder and murderous trail George W. Bush left in his wake as leader of the so-called “free world.”

    The post W’s Chickens Coming Home to Roost, yet the Media Cocks Aren’t Crowing first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO Raises Military Tensions against Russia over False Accusations of Russian Threats against Ukraine

    A new round of disinformation and threats against Russia is being staged by the NATO military powers and their state and corporate media outlets.

    The backdrop is the continued military occupation and aggression by Ukraine in sections of the Donbas region in the east of the country, combined with the Ukrainian government’s ongoing refusal to implement the ceasefire and peace measures of the 2015 ‘Minsk 2’ agreement, Minsk 2 was signed by Ukraine and the pro-autonomy forces of Donbas, with the governments of Russia, France and Germany agreeing to act as guarantors. It was ratified unanimously by no less than the UN Security Council, on February 17, 2014. But this proved of little value in bringing peace because for NATO and its propaganda services, nothing less than heightened military tensions would do. Instead, the world gets a new round of stories of imminent ‘Russian aggression’ or ‘Russian invasion’ against Ukraine.

    NATO head Jens Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter on April 6, “I called President @ZelenskyyUa to express serious concern about Russia’s military activities in and around Ukraine & ongoing ceasefire violations.”

    White House press secretary Jen Psaki chimed in on April 8 (CNBC) with: “The United States is increasingly concerned by recent escalating Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, including Russian troop movements on Ukraine’s border.”

    The same CNBC report offered in its own words: “In recent weeks, Russia has increased its military presence along the Ukrainian border, sparking concerns in the West of a budding military conflict between the two neighboring countries.”

    The seasoned, anti-Russia Globe and Mail daily in Canada baldly asserted on April 10 that there are “too many parallels with 2014”. That’s when, according to the newspaper’s crack anti-Russia writer, “a Russian invasion” of Ukraine saw an “annexation’ of Crimea” and the rise of a “Kremlin fueled conflict” in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine [the former Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk].

    Another tack in the Western media and government propaganda drive is to express bewilderment at why Russia would choose to supposedly act aggressively in recent weeks. “It’s not completely clear what the Russians are doing there, we’d like to understand that more, and that uncertainty is obviously not contributing to a more stable, more secure situation,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on April 7.

    The Washington Post printed a front page story on April 9 saying, “Russia’s motivations for the buildup are still unclear and do not necessarily signal a looming offensive, Ukrainian and Western officials said.”

    The New York Times‘ key anti-Russia reporter, Andrew Kramer, keyed in, also on April 9, with, “Videos of military movements have flooded Russian social media for the past month, shared by users and documented by researchers. Western governments are trying to find out why…”

    No peace in Ukraine because Kyiv and NATO reject Minsk 2 agreement

    Western media carefully avoids reporting the background to the tensions it is stoking, namely that the Minsk 2 ceasefire and agreement remains stalled and unimplemented due to Ukrainian government intransigence, with the blessing of NATO.

    As the anti-Russia Politico.eu reported in October 2020, “The Minsk II peace agreement, brokered and guaranteed by France and Germany, has barely inched forward since Zelenskiy and Putin met in December in Paris [2019] with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel — largely because of the standoff over holding local elections and changes to the Ukrainian constitution that would grant ‘special status’ to the embattled regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.” The text of the Minsk 2 agreement (as distinct from the ‘Minsk Protocol’ of September 2014) is here.

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova laid out the situation in her weekly media briefing on April 9. She blamed “Kyiv’s belligerent attitude” for the rise in tensions, saying this is “still based on the illusion that there can be a military solution to the conflict in [Ukraine’s] southeast. Troops and military equipment are being deployed there. Reservist mobilisation plans are being updated. Ukrainian media are fanning hysteria about a mythical Russian threat and Moscow’s plans to attack Ukraine very soon. All this is happening at the prompting of Kyiv’s Western sponsors, with overt public support… We are calling on the Kyiv authorities yet again to act responsibly and start implementing their obligations under the Minsk Package of Measures.”

    She explained further, “I would like to remind you that throughout this year alone, NATO is planning seven military exercises in Ukraine. The active phase of the Defender Europe 2021 exercise, the most extensive exercise for many years, is to commence near Ukraine soon. This event is to involve 25 states. NATO warships are entering the Black Sea ever more frequently; the number of such visits increased by one-third last year. U.S., British, Canadian and Lithuanian training missions are deployed in the country. It should be noted that Ukrainian service personnel that have been trained by NATO instructors are often sent to the zone of the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ directed against certain districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

    In her briefing of April 16, Zakharova reported: “According to the latest report by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM), the number of ceasefire violations [in Donbas] in the previous two weeks has doubled compared to two weeks earlier, reaching 4,300. The shelling of towns in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions by the Ukrainian armed forces has become heavier. Casualties among civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk are growing. Kyiv continues to deploy more military vehicles and troops in the region. According to SMM reports, Grad multiple rocket launchers, the use of which is banned under the Minsk agreements, have been seen in the settlement of Druzhkovka to the north of Donetsk.”

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Argumenty i Fakty newspaper published on April 8 and reported by TASS, “Things are bad regarding the Normandy format [meetings of the governments of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France]. We can say that under President Zelensky, things haven’t budged either in fulfilling the Minsk Package of Measures or in further agreements achieved in Paris,” he said.

    TASS continued, “Peskov also noted that tensions have been mounting on the contact line. ‘Over the past six months we have heard many times that Kyiv considered the Minsk agreements as dead, that this deal cannot be fulfilled and new documents were needed and so on. This is probably the most dangerous thing,’ Peskov stressed, noting that apart from the Minsk agreements there was no other basis for building international efforts for settlement in Donbas.”

    On April 9, Zakharova also blamed Ukraine’s volatile quest to join the NATO military alliance. “We have taken note of a statement by Ukrainian President Zelensky, who visited Donbas yesterday [April 8] and said that the country’s accession to NATO would supposedly help end the conflict in the region. However, contrary to Kyiv’s expectations, potential NATO accession will not only fail to bring peace to Ukraine but will, by contrast, lead to a large-scale rise in tensions in the southeast, possibly causing irreversible consequences for Ukraine’s statehood.”

    The unresolved conflicts arising from the 2014 coup in Ukraine

    Western media and governments are having a relatively easy time with bamboozling their consumers and subjects, respectively, over events in Ukraine because of widespread ignorance of the recent history of the country.

    In February 2014, a violent coup d’etat against the elected president and legislature of Ukraine was staged by extreme-right political parties and their associated paramilitary legions. The coupmakers successively manipulated prevailing social and economic dissatisfaction among many Ukrainians that had them longing for new economic ties to Europe, particularly if these would expand their right to emigrate and work there. For several years, Yanukovych had considered embarking on a path of greater trade and investment ties with Europe, but in late 2013 he changed course after the Russian government offered substantial expansion of investment and trade ties between the two countries. Several months of violent protests, centered in Maidan Square in central Kyiv, followed.

    Millions of Ukrainians live and work in Poland and other countries in Europe, and millions more aspire to do the same.

    Yanukovych sought refuge in Russia following the coup. An election was staged three months later to replace him and the members of the legislature. In addition to an economic ‘turn to Europe’, such as it has been, the new, right-wing government in Kyiv embarked on an ideological drive to break up the country’s multi-national character and renounce its history as a component of the Soviet Union. An ultra-nationalist ideology with roots in the World War Two collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists with Nazi Germany has become predominant. Widespread measures have been enacted to downgrade if not suppress the status of the Russian language and culture and the shared history of Russia and Ukraine as components of the Soviet Union.

    The coup and its aftermath did not go over well, to say the least, with the large sections of the population that reject the ideology of right-wing nationalism if not neo-Nazism. Opposition to the coup was quick to organize, above all in Crimea but also in the eastern (Donbas) and southern (Odessa) regions of the country and in the center of the country where Kyiv is situated. But this opposition was met with extreme violence.

    Crimea

    Crimea was uniquely placed to resist the coup. Its population is multinational, with approximately 65 per cent of Russian ethnicity and the remainder divided between Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar ethnicities. It was the only region of Ukraine with an autonomous governing authority, the ‘Autonomous Republic of Crimea’ (Wikipedia). Its origins go way back to the self-determination policies of the Russian Revolution which became codified in the constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (founded in 1922). The elected government of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea’ held powers roughly equivalent to U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

    Crimeans voted by more than 70 per cent in favour of Yanukovych during the presidential election of 2010 (the vote result for Yanukovych in Donbas was even higher). Using their autonomous institutions that were preserved through the riotous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union (albeit falling short of the outright independence from Ukraine that so many sought), the Crimean people turned to their autonomous government for protection in 2014 from the coup violence that threatened to engulf their republic at the hands of the ultra-nationalist paramilitaries. The government appealed to the Russian military to help preserve social peace, and it organized a referendum vote on March 16, 2014 to secede from the new, right-wing Ukraine and join (many Crimeans would say ‘rejoin’,) the Russian Federation.

    The vote passed overwhelmingly, and polls during the years that followed showed strong satisfaction with the result, including among the minority Ukrainians and Tatars. An op-ed by three Western researchers published in the Washington Post on March 18, 2020 reported: “Here’s what we found: Support for joining Russia remains very high (86 per cent in 2014 and 82 per cent in 2019) — and is especially high among ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. A key change since 2014 has been a significant increase in support by Tatars, a Turkic Muslim population that makes up about 12 per cent of the Crimean population. In 2014, only 39 per cent of this group viewed joining Russia as a positive move, but this figure rose to 58 per cent in 2019.”

    There was no ‘Russian invasion’ of Crimea in 2014 because thousands of Russian troops were already there by virtue of the military treaty signed by Russia and Ukraine in 1997 (Wikipedia). It guaranteed Russia’s continued military presence in Crimea.

    As to the role of Russian troops in preserving social peace, the evidence for that is overwhelming and positive, as polling has consistently reported. There has been precious little social violence in Crimea in the years following the referendum vote, certainly in comparison to the bloodletting that beset Ukraine during and following the coup. Economically, Crimea has become one of the fastest growing regions in Russia, helped along by the construction of the first, lasting road and rail link between Crimea and the Russian mainland.

    The Kerch Strait Bridge (formally named the Crimean Bridge) fully opened in 2020. It became a vital project for the Crimean peninsula immediately after the referendum vote in 2014 because in response to the vote, Ukraine severed all road, rail and aircraft ties to Crimea. It even severed the pipeline carrying Crimea’s largest supply of fresh water, though the Western ‘human rights’ brigades did not issue a peep of protest and concern.

    Donbas region

    Tragically, Odessa and Donbas regions as well as other regions in central and southern Ukraine were quickly engulfed by violence following the coup. Odessa and Donbas had little, meaningful local governing authority to which to turn to protest the coup and they had little recent history of autonomous political organizing within Ukraine’s highly centralized governing structures. On May 2 in the city of Odessa, right-wing paramilitaries attacked a large protest calling for political autonomy for Odessa and other regions alienated from the central government in Kyiv. The rightists burned down the Trade Union House in the city where protesters had taken refuge, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. The Odessa Massacre passed unnoticed in Western media, or it was presented as a confusing ‘clash’ with no one and everyone to blame.

    In Donbas, right-wing paramilitaries invaded the region beginning in May 2014. But the proximity to the Russian border, long distances from the parts of Ukraine where the paramilitaries had their social base, and the valiant, early actions of small numbers of pro-autonomy military forces bought enough time, over months, for the population to organize armed self-defense and new organs of autonomous political rule. Today, Donbas consists of two ‘people’s republics’ with elected governments—the former Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk (population app. 2.3 million, similar to Crimea) and Lugansk (app. 1.5 million). Travel to Russia and the right to work there and acquire citizenship are freely available.

    The above presents a starkly different picture than the comical presentation in Western media which posits a frightening Russia looming over Ukraine, just waiting for the opportunity to once again ‘invade’ or otherwise ‘threaten’ its poorer and less well armed Slavic cousin.

    Even informative and well-intentioned writers can trip up on the history. For example, in an article published on April 6, writer Vijay Prashad wrote, “In March 2014, after Russian troops entered Crimea, the population voted to join Russia…”

    Another informed writer, Oliver Boyd-Barrett at Bowling Green State University, wrote on April 14 of the “separatist republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk. The term ‘seperatist’ is a perjorative one universally employed by Western media. It ignores the fact that the initial struggle in Donbas was a struggle for autonomy and only turned, over time, against continued association with Ukraine when the latter invaded the region and let fly its artillery and snipers in the heavily urbanized region. To this day, the bombs and shells are still falling, egged on if not guided by NATO’s military trainers in Ukraine.

    Altogether, the referendum vote in Crimea and the formation of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were acts of political self-determination par excellence. Yet liberal opinion in the West and much of left-wing opinion, too, refuse to recognize this fact.

    The terms of the Minsk 2 agreement are crystal clear—they envision autonomy, not independence or affiliation to the Russian Federation, for Donetsk and Lugansk. (Of course, after years of being under direct military attack by Ukraine, it is not at all clear that the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk would accept rejoining the violent, right-wing state of Ukraine, even with an autonomy status.) Until social and political protests in Ukraine proper can loosen the stranglehold of extreme-right ultra-nationalists and NATO military advisors over the country, prospects for peace in Donbas are, tragically, remote.

    The hold of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism in the West

    Liberals and soft-left social-democrats in the West are near-to universal in their acceptance of the received, ‘official’ history of Ukraine and its relations within the Soviet Union, then with Russia. According to this history, Ukraine has been universally oppressed and exploited by the Soviet Union then Russian Federation since its emergence as a modern country following World War One.

    Nazism is whitewashed in this scenario because little attention is paid by its ideologues to the calamitous German invasion and occupation of Ukrainian and other Soviet territory during World War Two. Worse, an ‘equivalency’ school of history has arisen in the West during the past decade or so, according to which the crimes of Nazism are said to be equivalent to those during the same years in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Celebrated author Timothy Snyder tells this version of history in his bestselling 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. A lengthy essay and review sharply criticizing that book by writer Daniel Lazare was published in Jacobin in 2014 and remains essential reading for understanding this history.

    Added to this are the years of the Cold War against Russia following WW2, when an unrelentingly negative image of the Soviet Union was burned deeply into the consciousness of people in the West.

    Many self-proclaimed Marxists in the West, particularly those of Trotskyist origin, share the ‘official’ view of an unrelenting oppression in Ukraine. A key piece of this view is the false claim that the government in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin perpetrated a ‘genocide’ against the peasants of Ukraine in 1932-33 in the form of a deliberate famine. The Holodomor, as it is known in Ukrainian terminology, is officially recognized by many Western governments. Schools and other public institutions in Canada and the U.S. recognize the fourth Saturday of November as ‘Holodomor Memorial Day’ and statues and memorials have been erected in both countries.

    But Holodomor is a myth. There was a ghastly famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Tens of thousands died. But there were famines simultaneously in other parts of the Soviet Union as well during those terrible two years. Soviet government policy of the day contributed to famine conditions because of the chaotic conditions which the rushed policy of collectivization of agriculture, begun in 1928, created. But the larger responsibility for the Soviet famines (plural) of the day were multifold:

    • The backward conditions of agriculture inherited by the Soviet Union from the empire of the Tsarist monarchy overthrown by the Russian Revolution in 1917.
    • The destruction caused by the Western invading armies following 1917, seeking to overthrow the Revolution.
    • The harsh economic embargoes by these same Western powers following the defeats of their military interventions of 1918-1921.
    • And harsh climactic conditions which beset the Soviet Union in 1932-33.

    For all the chaos that collectivization of agriculture sowed, the early 1930s were the last years of famine in the Soviet Union (the war years under Nazi occupation excepted).

    Historian Mark Tauger at West Virginia University is a leading scholar on the Soviet famines of those years. His writings and research and those of other writers can be found here.

    The widespread acceptance of Holodomor theory across the political spectrum in the West was an early sign of the political degeneration that came to hobble so many liberals and leftists in Western countries during the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Attention and research to the evolving Soviet Union fell away. Inattention deepened following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Racist stereotypes against the people of China and Russia that are rooted in the years of the Cold War remained strong in popular consciousness.

    In the case of the Trotskyist doctrine, its was deeply scarred by a founding ultraleftism, notably in its dismissal of the significance of the mixed-economy, New Economic Policy which guided the early Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928, and its formal revival in 1929 of the theory of permanent revolution. The latter displaced the theory and strategy of Vladimir Lenin, proven correct in 1917 and countless times since, of the central importance of an alliance of the working class and peasantry for any successful revolutionary transformation.

    Today’s global political situation is historically unprecedented. Two, large non-imperialist countries—Russia and China—are resisting imperialist diktats and striving for a multipolar world. This creates countless openings for countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea to break from the imperialist strangleholds that marked the latter decades of the 20th century and forge alternative economic and political ties that strengthen national sovereignty.

    The imperialist countries have been waging military threats and economic embargoes against the peoples of Russia, Crimea and Ukraine for nearly ten years now. It is long past due for the progressive people of the world to condemn these policies and campaign to end them.

    This is doubly the case now that China has come squarely into the West’s gunsights. Here, too, the political left in the West needs to rise to the defense of the people and government of China against military threats and economic embargoes.

    Rising imperialist war and militarism, the collapse of social policy as evidenced by the coronavirus pandemic, and global warming cry out for building broad-based social and political movements that unite the oppressed peoples of the world in a fight for a world of social justice. Broad-based anti-imperialist unity should be the strategic path for all those concerned about the fate of the planet.

    The post NATO Raises Military Tensions against Russia over False Accusations of Russian Threats against Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • NATO Raises Military Tensions against Russia over False Accusations of Russian Threats against Ukraine

    A new round of disinformation and threats against Russia is being staged by the NATO military powers and their state and corporate media outlets.

    The backdrop is the continued military occupation and aggression by Ukraine in sections of the Donbas region in the east of the country, combined with the Ukrainian government’s ongoing refusal to implement the ceasefire and peace measures of the 2015 ‘Minsk 2’ agreement, Minsk 2 was signed by Ukraine and the pro-autonomy forces of Donbas, with the governments of Russia, France and Germany agreeing to act as guarantors. It was ratified unanimously by no less than the UN Security Council, on February 17, 2014. But this proved of little value in bringing peace because for NATO and its propaganda services, nothing less than heightened military tensions would do. Instead, the world gets a new round of stories of imminent ‘Russian aggression’ or ‘Russian invasion’ against Ukraine.

    NATO head Jens Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter on April 6, “I called President @ZelenskyyUa to express serious concern about Russia’s military activities in and around Ukraine & ongoing ceasefire violations.”

    White House press secretary Jen Psaki chimed in on April 8 (CNBC) with: “The United States is increasingly concerned by recent escalating Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, including Russian troop movements on Ukraine’s border.”

    The same CNBC report offered in its own words: “In recent weeks, Russia has increased its military presence along the Ukrainian border, sparking concerns in the West of a budding military conflict between the two neighboring countries.”

    The seasoned, anti-Russia Globe and Mail daily in Canada baldly asserted on April 10 that there are “too many parallels with 2014”. That’s when, according to the newspaper’s crack anti-Russia writer, “a Russian invasion” of Ukraine saw an “annexation’ of Crimea” and the rise of a “Kremlin fueled conflict” in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine [the former Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk and Lugansk].

    Another tack in the Western media and government propaganda drive is to express bewilderment at why Russia would choose to supposedly act aggressively in recent weeks. “It’s not completely clear what the Russians are doing there, we’d like to understand that more, and that uncertainty is obviously not contributing to a more stable, more secure situation,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters on April 7.

    The Washington Post printed a front page story on April 9 saying, “Russia’s motivations for the buildup are still unclear and do not necessarily signal a looming offensive, Ukrainian and Western officials said.”

    The New York Times‘ key anti-Russia reporter, Andrew Kramer, keyed in, also on April 9, with, “Videos of military movements have flooded Russian social media for the past month, shared by users and documented by researchers. Western governments are trying to find out why…”

    No peace in Ukraine because Kyiv and NATO reject Minsk 2 agreement

    Western media carefully avoids reporting the background to the tensions it is stoking, namely that the Minsk 2 ceasefire and agreement remains stalled and unimplemented due to Ukrainian government intransigence, with the blessing of NATO.

    As the anti-Russia Politico.eu reported in October 2020, “The Minsk II peace agreement, brokered and guaranteed by France and Germany, has barely inched forward since Zelenskiy and Putin met in December in Paris [2019] with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel — largely because of the standoff over holding local elections and changes to the Ukrainian constitution that would grant ‘special status’ to the embattled regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.” The text of the Minsk 2 agreement (as distinct from the ‘Minsk Protocol’ of September 2014) is here.

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova laid out the situation in her weekly media briefing on April 9. She blamed “Kyiv’s belligerent attitude” for the rise in tensions, saying this is “still based on the illusion that there can be a military solution to the conflict in [Ukraine’s] southeast. Troops and military equipment are being deployed there. Reservist mobilisation plans are being updated. Ukrainian media are fanning hysteria about a mythical Russian threat and Moscow’s plans to attack Ukraine very soon. All this is happening at the prompting of Kyiv’s Western sponsors, with overt public support… We are calling on the Kyiv authorities yet again to act responsibly and start implementing their obligations under the Minsk Package of Measures.”

    She explained further, “I would like to remind you that throughout this year alone, NATO is planning seven military exercises in Ukraine. The active phase of the Defender Europe 2021 exercise, the most extensive exercise for many years, is to commence near Ukraine soon. This event is to involve 25 states. NATO warships are entering the Black Sea ever more frequently; the number of such visits increased by one-third last year. U.S., British, Canadian and Lithuanian training missions are deployed in the country. It should be noted that Ukrainian service personnel that have been trained by NATO instructors are often sent to the zone of the so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’ directed against certain districts of the Donetsk and Lugansk regions.”

    In her briefing of April 16, Zakharova reported: “According to the latest report by the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM), the number of ceasefire violations [in Donbas] in the previous two weeks has doubled compared to two weeks earlier, reaching 4,300. The shelling of towns in the Lugansk and Donetsk regions by the Ukrainian armed forces has become heavier. Casualties among civilians in Donetsk and Lugansk are growing. Kyiv continues to deploy more military vehicles and troops in the region. According to SMM reports, Grad multiple rocket launchers, the use of which is banned under the Minsk agreements, have been seen in the settlement of Druzhkovka to the north of Donetsk.”

    Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview with Argumenty i Fakty newspaper published on April 8 and reported by TASS, “Things are bad regarding the Normandy format [meetings of the governments of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France]. We can say that under President Zelensky, things haven’t budged either in fulfilling the Minsk Package of Measures or in further agreements achieved in Paris,” he said.

    TASS continued, “Peskov also noted that tensions have been mounting on the contact line. ‘Over the past six months we have heard many times that Kyiv considered the Minsk agreements as dead, that this deal cannot be fulfilled and new documents were needed and so on. This is probably the most dangerous thing,’ Peskov stressed, noting that apart from the Minsk agreements there was no other basis for building international efforts for settlement in Donbas.”

    On April 9, Zakharova also blamed Ukraine’s volatile quest to join the NATO military alliance. “We have taken note of a statement by Ukrainian President Zelensky, who visited Donbas yesterday [April 8] and said that the country’s accession to NATO would supposedly help end the conflict in the region. However, contrary to Kyiv’s expectations, potential NATO accession will not only fail to bring peace to Ukraine but will, by contrast, lead to a large-scale rise in tensions in the southeast, possibly causing irreversible consequences for Ukraine’s statehood.”

    The unresolved conflicts arising from the 2014 coup in Ukraine

    Western media and governments are having a relatively easy time with bamboozling their consumers and subjects, respectively, over events in Ukraine because of widespread ignorance of the recent history of the country.

    In February 2014, a violent coup d’etat against the elected president and legislature of Ukraine was staged by extreme-right political parties and their associated paramilitary legions. The coupmakers successively manipulated prevailing social and economic dissatisfaction among many Ukrainians that had them longing for new economic ties to Europe, particularly if these would expand their right to emigrate and work there. For several years, Yanukovych had considered embarking on a path of greater trade and investment ties with Europe, but in late 2013 he changed course after the Russian government offered substantial expansion of investment and trade ties between the two countries. Several months of violent protests, centered in Maidan Square in central Kyiv, followed.

    Millions of Ukrainians live and work in Poland and other countries in Europe, and millions more aspire to do the same.

    Yanukovych sought refuge in Russia following the coup. An election was staged three months later to replace him and the members of the legislature. In addition to an economic ‘turn to Europe’, such as it has been, the new, right-wing government in Kyiv embarked on an ideological drive to break up the country’s multi-national character and renounce its history as a component of the Soviet Union. An ultra-nationalist ideology with roots in the World War Two collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists with Nazi Germany has become predominant. Widespread measures have been enacted to downgrade if not suppress the status of the Russian language and culture and the shared history of Russia and Ukraine as components of the Soviet Union.

    The coup and its aftermath did not go over well, to say the least, with the large sections of the population that reject the ideology of right-wing nationalism if not neo-Nazism. Opposition to the coup was quick to organize, above all in Crimea but also in the eastern (Donbas) and southern (Odessa) regions of the country and in the center of the country where Kyiv is situated. But this opposition was met with extreme violence.

    Crimea

    Crimea was uniquely placed to resist the coup. Its population is multinational, with approximately 65 per cent of Russian ethnicity and the remainder divided between Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar ethnicities. It was the only region of Ukraine with an autonomous governing authority, the ‘Autonomous Republic of Crimea’ (Wikipedia). Its origins go way back to the self-determination policies of the Russian Revolution which became codified in the constitution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (founded in 1922). The elected government of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea’ held powers roughly equivalent to U.S. states and Canadian provinces.

    Crimeans voted by more than 70 per cent in favour of Yanukovych during the presidential election of 2010 (the vote result for Yanukovych in Donbas was even higher). Using their autonomous institutions that were preserved through the riotous years following the collapse of the Soviet Union (albeit falling short of the outright independence from Ukraine that so many sought), the Crimean people turned to their autonomous government for protection in 2014 from the coup violence that threatened to engulf their republic at the hands of the ultra-nationalist paramilitaries. The government appealed to the Russian military to help preserve social peace, and it organized a referendum vote on March 16, 2014 to secede from the new, right-wing Ukraine and join (many Crimeans would say ‘rejoin’,) the Russian Federation.

    The vote passed overwhelmingly, and polls during the years that followed showed strong satisfaction with the result, including among the minority Ukrainians and Tatars. An op-ed by three Western researchers published in the Washington Post on March 18, 2020 reported: “Here’s what we found: Support for joining Russia remains very high (86 per cent in 2014 and 82 per cent in 2019) — and is especially high among ethnic Russians and Ukrainians. A key change since 2014 has been a significant increase in support by Tatars, a Turkic Muslim population that makes up about 12 per cent of the Crimean population. In 2014, only 39 per cent of this group viewed joining Russia as a positive move, but this figure rose to 58 per cent in 2019.”

    There was no ‘Russian invasion’ of Crimea in 2014 because thousands of Russian troops were already there by virtue of the military treaty signed by Russia and Ukraine in 1997 (Wikipedia). It guaranteed Russia’s continued military presence in Crimea.

    As to the role of Russian troops in preserving social peace, the evidence for that is overwhelming and positive, as polling has consistently reported. There has been precious little social violence in Crimea in the years following the referendum vote, certainly in comparison to the bloodletting that beset Ukraine during and following the coup. Economically, Crimea has become one of the fastest growing regions in Russia, helped along by the construction of the first, lasting road and rail link between Crimea and the Russian mainland.

    The Kerch Strait Bridge (formally named the Crimean Bridge) fully opened in 2020. It became a vital project for the Crimean peninsula immediately after the referendum vote in 2014 because in response to the vote, Ukraine severed all road, rail and aircraft ties to Crimea. It even severed the pipeline carrying Crimea’s largest supply of fresh water, though the Western ‘human rights’ brigades did not issue a peep of protest and concern.

    Donbas region

    Tragically, Odessa and Donbas regions as well as other regions in central and southern Ukraine were quickly engulfed by violence following the coup. Odessa and Donbas had little, meaningful local governing authority to which to turn to protest the coup and they had little recent history of autonomous political organizing within Ukraine’s highly centralized governing structures. On May 2 in the city of Odessa, right-wing paramilitaries attacked a large protest calling for political autonomy for Odessa and other regions alienated from the central government in Kyiv. The rightists burned down the Trade Union House in the city where protesters had taken refuge, killing dozens and wounding hundreds. The Odessa Massacre passed unnoticed in Western media, or it was presented as a confusing ‘clash’ with no one and everyone to blame.

    In Donbas, right-wing paramilitaries invaded the region beginning in May 2014. But the proximity to the Russian border, long distances from the parts of Ukraine where the paramilitaries had their social base, and the valiant, early actions of small numbers of pro-autonomy military forces bought enough time, over months, for the population to organize armed self-defense and new organs of autonomous political rule. Today, Donbas consists of two ‘people’s republics’ with elected governments—the former Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk (population app. 2.3 million, similar to Crimea) and Lugansk (app. 1.5 million). Travel to Russia and the right to work there and acquire citizenship are freely available.

    The above presents a starkly different picture than the comical presentation in Western media which posits a frightening Russia looming over Ukraine, just waiting for the opportunity to once again ‘invade’ or otherwise ‘threaten’ its poorer and less well armed Slavic cousin.

    Even informative and well-intentioned writers can trip up on the history. For example, in an article published on April 6, writer Vijay Prashad wrote, “In March 2014, after Russian troops entered Crimea, the population voted to join Russia…”

    Another informed writer, Oliver Boyd-Barrett at Bowling Green State University, wrote on April 14 of the “separatist republics” of Donetsk and Lugansk. The term ‘seperatist’ is a perjorative one universally employed by Western media. It ignores the fact that the initial struggle in Donbas was a struggle for autonomy and only turned, over time, against continued association with Ukraine when the latter invaded the region and let fly its artillery and snipers in the heavily urbanized region. To this day, the bombs and shells are still falling, egged on if not guided by NATO’s military trainers in Ukraine.

    Altogether, the referendum vote in Crimea and the formation of the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk were acts of political self-determination par excellence. Yet liberal opinion in the West and much of left-wing opinion, too, refuse to recognize this fact.

    The terms of the Minsk 2 agreement are crystal clear—they envision autonomy, not independence or affiliation to the Russian Federation, for Donetsk and Lugansk. (Of course, after years of being under direct military attack by Ukraine, it is not at all clear that the populations of Donetsk and Lugansk would accept rejoining the violent, right-wing state of Ukraine, even with an autonomy status.) Until social and political protests in Ukraine proper can loosen the stranglehold of extreme-right ultra-nationalists and NATO military advisors over the country, prospects for peace in Donbas are, tragically, remote.

    The hold of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism in the West

    Liberals and soft-left social-democrats in the West are near-to universal in their acceptance of the received, ‘official’ history of Ukraine and its relations within the Soviet Union, then with Russia. According to this history, Ukraine has been universally oppressed and exploited by the Soviet Union then Russian Federation since its emergence as a modern country following World War One.

    Nazism is whitewashed in this scenario because little attention is paid by its ideologues to the calamitous German invasion and occupation of Ukrainian and other Soviet territory during World War Two. Worse, an ‘equivalency’ school of history has arisen in the West during the past decade or so, according to which the crimes of Nazism are said to be equivalent to those during the same years in the Soviet Union, under Stalin. Celebrated author Timothy Snyder tells this version of history in his bestselling 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. A lengthy essay and review sharply criticizing that book by writer Daniel Lazare was published in Jacobin in 2014 and remains essential reading for understanding this history.

    Added to this are the years of the Cold War against Russia following WW2, when an unrelentingly negative image of the Soviet Union was burned deeply into the consciousness of people in the West.

    Many self-proclaimed Marxists in the West, particularly those of Trotskyist origin, share the ‘official’ view of an unrelenting oppression in Ukraine. A key piece of this view is the false claim that the government in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Joseph Stalin perpetrated a ‘genocide’ against the peasants of Ukraine in 1932-33 in the form of a deliberate famine. The Holodomor, as it is known in Ukrainian terminology, is officially recognized by many Western governments. Schools and other public institutions in Canada and the U.S. recognize the fourth Saturday of November as ‘Holodomor Memorial Day’ and statues and memorials have been erected in both countries.

    But Holodomor is a myth. There was a ghastly famine in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Tens of thousands died. But there were famines simultaneously in other parts of the Soviet Union as well during those terrible two years. Soviet government policy of the day contributed to famine conditions because of the chaotic conditions which the rushed policy of collectivization of agriculture, begun in 1928, created. But the larger responsibility for the Soviet famines (plural) of the day were multifold:

    • The backward conditions of agriculture inherited by the Soviet Union from the empire of the Tsarist monarchy overthrown by the Russian Revolution in 1917.
    • The destruction caused by the Western invading armies following 1917, seeking to overthrow the Revolution.
    • The harsh economic embargoes by these same Western powers following the defeats of their military interventions of 1918-1921.
    • And harsh climactic conditions which beset the Soviet Union in 1932-33.

    For all the chaos that collectivization of agriculture sowed, the early 1930s were the last years of famine in the Soviet Union (the war years under Nazi occupation excepted).

    Historian Mark Tauger at West Virginia University is a leading scholar on the Soviet famines of those years. His writings and research and those of other writers can be found here.

    The widespread acceptance of Holodomor theory across the political spectrum in the West was an early sign of the political degeneration that came to hobble so many liberals and leftists in Western countries during the latter half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Attention and research to the evolving Soviet Union fell away. Inattention deepened following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Racist stereotypes against the people of China and Russia that are rooted in the years of the Cold War remained strong in popular consciousness.

    In the case of the Trotskyist doctrine, its was deeply scarred by a founding ultraleftism, notably in its dismissal of the significance of the mixed-economy, New Economic Policy which guided the early Soviet Union from 1921 to 1928, and its formal revival in 1929 of the theory of permanent revolution. The latter displaced the theory and strategy of Vladimir Lenin, proven correct in 1917 and countless times since, of the central importance of an alliance of the working class and peasantry for any successful revolutionary transformation.

    Today’s global political situation is historically unprecedented. Two, large non-imperialist countries—Russia and China—are resisting imperialist diktats and striving for a multipolar world. This creates countless openings for countries such as Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea to break from the imperialist strangleholds that marked the latter decades of the 20th century and forge alternative economic and political ties that strengthen national sovereignty.

    The imperialist countries have been waging military threats and economic embargoes against the peoples of Russia, Crimea and Ukraine for nearly ten years now. It is long past due for the progressive people of the world to condemn these policies and campaign to end them.

    This is doubly the case now that China has come squarely into the West’s gunsights. Here, too, the political left in the West needs to rise to the defense of the people and government of China against military threats and economic embargoes.

    Rising imperialist war and militarism, the collapse of social policy as evidenced by the coronavirus pandemic, and global warming cry out for building broad-based social and political movements that unite the oppressed peoples of the world in a fight for a world of social justice. Broad-based anti-imperialist unity should be the strategic path for all those concerned about the fate of the planet.

    Roger Annis is a writer and retired aerospace worker living in Vancouver, Canada. His articles are compiled on his website A Socialist In Canada. Each day, the website publishes extensive headlines (with weblinks) of news and analysis in three categories: World, Ecology, Canada. Read other articles by Roger.

    This article was posted on Friday, April 23rd, 2021 at 8:27pm and is filed under Disinformation, History, Media, Militarism, NATO, Opinion, Russia, Ukraine.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden’s Appeasement of Hawks and Neocons is Crippling His Diplomacy

    Biden with NATO’s Stoltenberg (Photo credit: haramjedder.blogspot.com)

    President Biden took office promising a new era of American international leadership and diplomacy. But with a few exceptions, he has so far allowed self-serving foreign allies, hawkish U.S. interest groups and his own imperial delusions to undermine diplomacy and stoke the fires of war.

    Biden’s failure to quickly recommit to the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, as Senator Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, provided a critical delay that has been used by opponents to undermine the difficult shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna to restore the agreement.

    The attempts to derail talks range from the introduction of the Maximum Pressure Act on April 21 to codify the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran to Israel’s cyberattack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Biden’s procrastination has only strengthened the influence of the hawkish Washington foreign policy “blob,” Republicans and Democratic hawks in Congress and foreign allies like Netanyahu in Israel.

    In Afghanistan, Biden has won praise for his decision to withdraw U.S. troops by September 11, but his refusal to abide by the May 1 deadline for withdrawal as negotiated under the Trump administration has led the Taliban to back out of the planned UN-led peace conference in Istanbul. A member of the Taliban military commission told the Daily Beast that “the U.S. has shattered the Taliban’s trust.”

    Now active and retired Pentagon officials are regaling the New York Times with accounts of how they plan to prolong the U.S. war without “boots on the ground” after September, undoubtedly further infuriating the Taliban and making a ceasefire and peace talks all the more difficult.

    In Ukraine, the government has launched a new offensive in its civil war against the ethnically Russian provinces in the eastern Donbass region, which declared unilateral independence after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014. On April 1, Ukraine’s military chief of staff said publicly that “the participation of NATO allies is envisaged” in the government offensive, prompting warnings from Moscow that Russia could intervene to protect Russians in Donbass.

    Sticking to their usual tired script, U.S. and NATO officials are pretending that Russia is the aggressor for conducting military exercises and troop movements within its own borders in response to Kiev’s escalation. But even the BBC is challenging this false narrative, explaining that Russia is acting competently and effectively to deter an escalation of the Ukrainian offensive and U.S. and NATO threats. The U.S has turned around two U.S. guided-missile destroyers that were steaming toward the Black Sea, where they would only have been sitting ducks for Russia’s advanced missile defenses.

    Tensions have escalated with China, as the U.S. Navy and Marines stalk Chinese ships in the South China Sea, well inside the island chains China uses for self defense. The Pentagon is hoping to drag NATO allies into participating in these operations, and the U.S. Air Force plans to shift more bombers to new bases in Asia and the Pacific, supported by existing larger bases in Guam, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

    Meanwhile, despite a promising initial pause and policy review, Biden has decided to keep selling tens of billion dollars worth of weapons to authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms, even as they keep bombing and blockading famine-stricken Yemen. Biden’s unconditional support for the most brutal authoritarian dictators on Earth lays bare the bankruptcy of the Democrats’ attempts to frame America’s regurgitated Cold War on Russia and China as a struggle between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.”

    In all these international crises (along with Cuba, Haiti, Iraq, North Korea, Palestine, Syria and Venezuela, which are bedevilled by the same U.S. unilateralism), President Biden and the hawks egging him on are pursuing unilateral policies that ignore solemn commitments in international agreements and treaties, riding roughshod over the good faith of America’s allies and negotiating partners.

    As the Russian foreign ministry bluntly put it when it announced its countermeasures to the latest round of U.S. sanctions, “Washington is unwilling to accept that there is no room for unilateral dictates in the new geopolitical reality.”

    Chinese President Xi Jinping echoed the same multipolar perspective on April 20th at the annual Boao Asian international business forum. “The destiny and future of the world should be decided by all nations, and rules set up just by one or several countries should not be imposed on others,” Xi said. “The whole world should not be led by unilateralism of individual countries.”

    The near-universal failure of Biden’s diplomacy in his first months in office reflects how badly he and those who have his ear are failing to accurately read the limits of American power and predict the consequences of his unilateral decisions.

    Unilateral, irresponsible decision-making has been endemic in U.S. foreign policy for decades, but America’s economic and military dominance created an international environment that was extraordinarily forgiving of American “mistakes,” even as they ruined the lives of millions of people in the countries directly affected. Now America no longer dominates the world, and it is critical for U.S. officials to more accurately assess the relative power and positions of the United States and the countries and people it is confronting or negotiating with.

    Under Trump, Defense Secretary Mattis launched negotiations to persuade Vietnam to host U.S. missiles aimed at China. The negotiations went on for three years, but they were based entirely on wishful thinking and misreadings of Vietnam’s responses by U.S. officials and Rand Corp contractors. Experts agree that Vietnam would never violate a formal, declared policy of neutrality it has held and repeatedly reiterated since 1998.

    As Gareth Porter summarized this silly saga:

    The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that U.S. power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.

    Unlike Trump, Biden has been at the heart of American politics and foreign policy since the 1970s. So the degree to which he too is out of touch with today’s international reality is a measure of how much and how quickly that reality has changed and continues to change. But the habits of empire die hard. The tragic irony of Biden’s ascent to power in 2020 is that his lifetime of service to a triumphalist American empire has left him ill-equipped to craft a more constructive and cooperative brand of American diplomacy for today’s multipolar world

    Amid the American triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, the neocons developed a simplistic ideology to persuade America’s leaders that they need no longer be constrained in their use of military power by domestic opposition, peer competitors or international law. They claimed that America had virtually unlimited military freedom of action and a responsibility to use it aggressively, because, as Biden parroted them recently, “the world doesn’t organize itself.”

    The international violence and chaos Biden has inherited in 2021 is a measure of the failure of the neocons’ ambitions. But there is one place that they conquered, occupied and still rule to this day, and that is Washington D.C.

    The dangerous disconnect at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy is the result of this dichotomy between the neocons’ conquest of Washington and their abject failure to conquer the rest of the world.

    For most of Biden’s career, the politically safe path on foreign policy for corporate Democrats has been to talk a good game about human rights and diplomacy, but not to deviate too far from hawkish, neoconservative policies on war, military spending, and support for often repressive and corrupt allies throughout America’s neocolonial empire.

    The tragedy of such compromises by Democratic Party leaders is that they perpetuate the suffering of millions of people affected by the real-world problems they fail to fix. But the Democrats’ subservience to simplistic neoconservative ideas also fails to satisfy the hawks they are trying to appease, who only smell more political blood in the water at every display of moral weakness by the Democrats.

    In his first three months in office, Biden’s weakness in resisting the bullying of hawks and neocons has led him to betray the most significant diplomatic achievements of each of his predecessors, Obama and Trump, in the JCPOA with Iran and the May 1 withdrawal agreement with the Taliban respectively, while perpetuating the violence and chaos the neocons unleashed on the world.

    For a president who promised a new era of American diplomacy, this has been a dreadful start. We hope he and his advisers are not too blinded by anachronistic imperial thinking or too intimidated by the neocons to make a fresh start and engage with the world as it actually exists in 2021.

    The post Biden’s Appeasement of Hawks and Neocons is Crippling His Diplomacy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden’s Appeasement of Hawks and Neocons is Crippling His Diplomacy

    by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies / April 22nd, 2021

    Biden with NATO’s Stoltenberg (Photo credit: haramjedder.blogspot.com)

    President Biden took office promising a new era of American international leadership and diplomacy. But with a few exceptions, he has so far allowed self-serving foreign allies, hawkish U.S. interest groups and his own imperial delusions to undermine diplomacy and stoke the fires of war.

    Biden’s failure to quickly recommit to the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, as Senator Sanders promised to do on his first day as president, provided a critical delay that has been used by opponents to undermine the difficult shuttle diplomacy taking place in Vienna to restore the agreement.

    The attempts to derail talks range from the introduction of the Maximum Pressure Act on April 21 to codify the Trump administration’s sanctions against Iran to Israel’s cyberattack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility. Biden’s procrastination has only strengthened the influence of the hawkish Washington foreign policy “blob,” Republicans and Democratic hawks in Congress and foreign allies like Netanyahu in Israel.

    In Afghanistan, Biden has won praise for his decision to withdraw U.S. troops by September 11, but his refusal to abide by the May 1 deadline for withdrawal as negotiated under the Trump administration has led the Taliban to back out of the planned UN-led peace conference in Istanbul. A member of the Taliban military commission told the Daily Beast that “the U.S. has shattered the Taliban’s trust.”

    Now active and retired Pentagon officials are regaling the New York Times with accounts of how they plan to prolong the U.S. war without “boots on the ground” after September, undoubtedly further infuriating the Taliban and making a ceasefire and peace talks all the more difficult.

    In Ukraine, the government has launched a new offensive in its civil war against the ethnically Russian provinces in the eastern Donbass region, which declared unilateral independence after the U.S.-backed coup in 2014. On April 1, Ukraine’s military chief of staff said publicly that “the participation of NATO allies is envisaged” in the government offensive, prompting warnings from Moscow that Russia could intervene to protect Russians in Donbass.

    Sticking to their usual tired script, U.S. and NATO officials are pretending that Russia is the aggressor for conducting military exercises and troop movements within its own borders in response to Kiev’s escalation. But even the BBC is challenging this false narrative, explaining that Russia is acting competently and effectively to deter an escalation of the Ukrainian offensive and U.S. and NATO threats. The U.S has turned around two U.S. guided-missile destroyers that were steaming toward the Black Sea, where they would only have been sitting ducks for Russia’s advanced missile defenses.

    Tensions have escalated with China, as the U.S. Navy and Marines stalk Chinese ships in the South China Sea, well inside the island chains China uses for self defense. The Pentagon is hoping to drag NATO allies into participating in these operations, and the U.S. Air Force plans to shift more bombers to new bases in Asia and the Pacific, supported by existing larger bases in Guam, Japan, Australia and South Korea.

    Meanwhile, despite a promising initial pause and policy review, Biden has decided to keep selling tens of billion dollars worth of weapons to authoritarian regimes in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Persian Gulf sheikdoms, even as they keep bombing and blockading famine-stricken Yemen. Biden’s unconditional support for the most brutal authoritarian dictators on Earth lays bare the bankruptcy of the Democrats’ attempts to frame America’s regurgitated Cold War on Russia and China as a struggle between “democracy” and “authoritarianism.”

    In all these international crises (along with Cuba, Haiti, Iraq, North Korea, Palestine, Syria and Venezuela, which are bedevilled by the same U.S. unilateralism), President Biden and the hawks egging him on are pursuing unilateral policies that ignore solemn commitments in international agreements and treaties, riding roughshod over the good faith of America’s allies and negotiating partners.

    As the Russian foreign ministry bluntly put it when it announced its countermeasures to the latest round of U.S. sanctions, “Washington is unwilling to accept that there is no room for unilateral dictates in the new geopolitical reality.”

    Chinese President Xi Jinping echoed the same multipolar perspective on April 20th at the annual Boao Asian international business forum. “The destiny and future of the world should be decided by all nations, and rules set up just by one or several countries should not be imposed on others,” Xi said. “The whole world should not be led by unilateralism of individual countries.”

    The near-universal failure of Biden’s diplomacy in his first months in office reflects how badly he and those who have his ear are failing to accurately read the limits of American power and predict the consequences of his unilateral decisions.

    Unilateral, irresponsible decision-making has been endemic in U.S. foreign policy for decades, but America’s economic and military dominance created an international environment that was extraordinarily forgiving of American “mistakes,” even as they ruined the lives of millions of people in the countries directly affected. Now America no longer dominates the world, and it is critical for U.S. officials to more accurately assess the relative power and positions of the United States and the countries and people it is confronting or negotiating with.

    Under Trump, Defense Secretary Mattis launched negotiations to persuade Vietnam to host U.S. missiles aimed at China. The negotiations went on for three years, but they were based entirely on wishful thinking and misreadings of Vietnam’s responses by U.S. officials and Rand Corp contractors. Experts agree that Vietnam would never violate a formal, declared policy of neutrality it has held and repeatedly reiterated since 1998.

    As Gareth Porter summarized this silly saga:

    The story of the Pentagon’s pursuit of Vietnam as a potential military partner against China reveals an extraordinary degree of self-deception surrounding the entire endeavor. And it adds further detail to the already well-established picture of a muddled and desperate bureaucracy seizing on any vehicle possible to enable it to claim that U.S. power in the Pacific can still prevail in a war with China.

    Unlike Trump, Biden has been at the heart of American politics and foreign policy since the 1970s. So the degree to which he too is out of touch with today’s international reality is a measure of how much and how quickly that reality has changed and continues to change. But the habits of empire die hard. The tragic irony of Biden’s ascent to power in 2020 is that his lifetime of service to a triumphalist American empire has left him ill-equipped to craft a more constructive and cooperative brand of American diplomacy for today’s multipolar world

    Amid the American triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War, the neocons developed a simplistic ideology to persuade America’s leaders that they need no longer be constrained in their use of military power by domestic opposition, peer competitors or international law. They claimed that America had virtually unlimited military freedom of action and a responsibility to use it aggressively, because, as Biden parroted them recently, “the world doesn’t organize itself.”

    The international violence and chaos Biden has inherited in 2021 is a measure of the failure of the neocons’ ambitions. But there is one place that they conquered, occupied and still rule to this day, and that is Washington D.C.

    The dangerous disconnect at the heart of Biden’s foreign policy is the result of this dichotomy between the neocons’ conquest of Washington and their abject failure to conquer the rest of the world.

    For most of Biden’s career, the politically safe path on foreign policy for corporate Democrats has been to talk a good game about human rights and diplomacy, but not to deviate too far from hawkish, neoconservative policies on war, military spending, and support for often repressive and corrupt allies throughout America’s neocolonial empire.

    The tragedy of such compromises by Democratic Party leaders is that they perpetuate the suffering of millions of people affected by the real-world problems they fail to fix. But the Democrats’ subservience to simplistic neoconservative ideas also fails to satisfy the hawks they are trying to appease, who only smell more political blood in the water at every display of moral weakness by the Democrats.

    In his first three months in office, Biden’s weakness in resisting the bullying of hawks and neocons has led him to betray the most significant diplomatic achievements of each of his predecessors, Obama and Trump, in the JCPOA with Iran and the May 1 withdrawal agreement with the Taliban respectively, while perpetuating the violence and chaos the neocons unleashed on the world.

    For a president who promised a new era of American diplomacy, this has been a dreadful start. We hope he and his advisers are not too blinded by anachronistic imperial thinking or too intimidated by the neocons to make a fresh start and engage with the world as it actually exists in 2021.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 22nd, 2021 at 2:35pm and is filed under Afghanistan, Benjamin Netanyahu, China, Democrats, Diplomacy, Donald Trump, Europe, Exploitation, Imperialism, Iran, Iran Nuclear Agreement (JCPOA), Israel, Joe Biden, Media, Militarism, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South China Sea, Taliban, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, US Defence Department, US Foreign Policy, US Hegemony, US Military, US War Crimes, Viet Nam, War Industry, Xi Jinping, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden’s Drone Wars

    On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan,” just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day’s headline, “Biden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says ‘It Is Time to End the Forever War’” as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on September 11, 2021, almost 20 years after it started.

    We saw this bait and switch tactic before in President Biden’s earlier announcement about ending U.S support for the long, miserable war in Yemen. In his first major foreign policy address, on February 4, President Biden announced “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen,” the war waged by Saudi Arabia and its allies since 2015, the war he called “a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” Biden declared “This war has to end.”

    As with last week’s announcement that the U.S. war in Afghanistan would end, “clarification” came the following day. On February 5th, the Biden administration dispelled the impression that the U.S. was getting out of the business of killing Yemenis completely and the State Department issued a statement, saying “Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP.” In other words, whatever happens in regard to the war waged by the Saudis, the war that the U.S. has been waging in Yemen since 2002, under the guise of the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by congress authorizing the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks, will continue indefinitely, despite the fact that neither ISIS nor Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula existed in 2001. These other “offensive operations” by the U.S. that will continue unabated in Yemen include drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and special forces raids.

    While what President Biden actually said regarding the war in Afghanistan last week was “We will not take our eye off the terrorist threat,” and “We will reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland,” the New York Times could not be far off as they interpreted those words to mean, “Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.”

    It appears from his statements and actions regarding the war in Yemen in February and regarding the war in Afghanistan in April, that Biden is not so much concerned with ending the “forever wars” as he is with handing these wars over to drones armed with 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.

    In 2013, when President Obama promoted drone wars claiming that “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life” it was already known that this was not true. By far, most victims of drone attacks are civilians, few are combatants by any definition and even those targeted as suspected terrorists are victims of assassination and extrajudicial executions.

    The validity of Biden’s claim that U.S. “counter terrorism capabilities” such as drones and special forces can effectively “prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland” is taken for granted by the New York Times– “Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.”

    After the Ban Killer Drones “international grassroots campaign working to ban aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance,” was launched on April 9, I was asked in an interview if there is anyone in the government, military, diplomatic or intelligence communities who supports our position that drones are no deterrent to terrorism. I do not think that there is, but there are many people formerly holding those positions who agree with us. One example of many is retired General Michael Flynn, who was President Obama’s top military intelligence officer before he joined the Trump administration (and was subsequently convicted and pardoned). He said in 2015, “When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” and “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.” Internal CIA documents published by WikiLeaks document that the agency had similar doubts about its own drone program- “The potential negative effect of HVT (high value targets) operations,” the report states, “include increasing the level of insurgent support […], strengthening an armed group’s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”

    Speaking of the effect of drone attacks in Yemen, the young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013, “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants.” The drone wars the Biden administration seems hell bent on expanding clearly damage and set back security and stability in the countries being attacked and increase the danger of attacks on Americans at home and abroad.

    Long ago, both George Orwell and President Eisenhower foresaw today’s “forever wars” and warned of nations’ industries, economies and politics becoming so dependent on the production and consumption of armaments that wars would no longer be fought with an intention of winning them but to ensure that they never end, that they are continuous. Whatever his intentions, Joe Biden’s calls for peace, in Afghanistan as in Yemen, while pursuing war by drone, ring hollow.

    For a politician, “war by drone” has obvious advantages to waging war by ordering “boots on the ground.” “They do keep the body bag count down,” writes Conn Hallinan in his essay, Day of the Drone, “but that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If war doesn’t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn’t it more tempting to fight them? Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do, and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians. Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.”

    The war is never the way to peace, the war always comes home. With the exception of four known “friendly fire” casualties, every one of the many thousands of drone attack victims has been a person of color and drones are becoming another military weapon passed on from war zones to urban police departments. Technical advances and proliferation of drones as a cheaper, more politically safe way for many countries to make war on their neighbors or across the globe make forever wars more intractable.

    Talk of peace in Afghanistan, Yemen, the streets of the U.S., is not coherent while waging wars with drones. We must urgently demand a ban on the production, trade and use of weaponized drones and an end to military and police drone surveillance.”

    Activists Brian Terrell and Ghulam Hussein Ahmadi at the Border Free Center in Kabul, Afghanistan.  (Graffiti by Kabul Knight, photo by Dr. Hakim)

    This article was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2021 at 8:00pm and is filed under Activism, Afghanistan, Drones, Joe Biden, Militarism, Police militarization, Weaponry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Biden’s Drone Wars

    On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, “How the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan,” just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day’s headline, “Biden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says ‘It Is Time to End the Forever War’” as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on September 11, 2021, almost 20 years after it started.

    We saw this bait and switch tactic before in President Biden’s earlier announcement about ending U.S support for the long, miserable war in Yemen. In his first major foreign policy address, on February 4, President Biden announced “we are ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen,” the war waged by Saudi Arabia and its allies since 2015, the war he called “a humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.” Biden declared “This war has to end.”

    As with last week’s announcement that the U.S. war in Afghanistan would end, “clarification” came the following day. On February 5th, the Biden administration dispelled the impression that the U.S. was getting out of the business of killing Yemenis completely and the State Department issued a statement, saying “Importantly, this does not apply to offensive operations against either ISIS or AQAP.” In other words, whatever happens in regard to the war waged by the Saudis, the war that the U.S. has been waging in Yemen since 2002, under the guise of the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by congress authorizing the use of the U.S. Armed Forces against those responsible for the September 11 attacks, will continue indefinitely, despite the fact that neither ISIS nor Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula existed in 2001. These other “offensive operations” by the U.S. that will continue unabated in Yemen include drone strikes, cruise missile attacks and special forces raids.

    While what President Biden actually said regarding the war in Afghanistan last week was “We will not take our eye off the terrorist threat,” and “We will reorganize our counterterrorism capabilities and the substantial assets in the region to prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland,” the New York Times could not be far off as they interpreted those words to mean, “Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.”

    It appears from his statements and actions regarding the war in Yemen in February and regarding the war in Afghanistan in April, that Biden is not so much concerned with ending the “forever wars” as he is with handing these wars over to drones armed with 500 pound bombs and Hellfire missiles operated by remote control from thousands of miles away.

    In 2013, when President Obama promoted drone wars claiming that “by narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life” it was already known that this was not true. By far, most victims of drone attacks are civilians, few are combatants by any definition and even those targeted as suspected terrorists are victims of assassination and extrajudicial executions.

    The validity of Biden’s claim that U.S. “counter terrorism capabilities” such as drones and special forces can effectively “prevent re-emergence of terrorist threat to our homeland” is taken for granted by the New York Times– “Drones, long-range bombers and spy networks will be used in an effort to prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist base to threaten the United States.”

    After the Ban Killer Drones “international grassroots campaign working to ban aerial weaponized drones and military and police drone surveillance,” was launched on April 9, I was asked in an interview if there is anyone in the government, military, diplomatic or intelligence communities who supports our position that drones are no deterrent to terrorism. I do not think that there is, but there are many people formerly holding those positions who agree with us. One example of many is retired General Michael Flynn, who was President Obama’s top military intelligence officer before he joined the Trump administration (and was subsequently convicted and pardoned). He said in 2015, “When you drop a bomb from a drone… you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good,” and “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just… fuels the conflict.” Internal CIA documents published by WikiLeaks document that the agency had similar doubts about its own drone program- “The potential negative effect of HVT (high value targets) operations,” the report states, “include increasing the level of insurgent support […], strengthening an armed group’s bonds with the population, radicalizing an insurgent group’s remaining leaders, creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or de-escalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.”

    Speaking of the effect of drone attacks in Yemen, the young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013, “Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants.” The drone wars the Biden administration seems hell bent on expanding clearly damage and set back security and stability in the countries being attacked and increase the danger of attacks on Americans at home and abroad.

    Long ago, both George Orwell and President Eisenhower foresaw today’s “forever wars” and warned of nations’ industries, economies and politics becoming so dependent on the production and consumption of armaments that wars would no longer be fought with an intention of winning them but to ensure that they never end, that they are continuous. Whatever his intentions, Joe Biden’s calls for peace, in Afghanistan as in Yemen, while pursuing war by drone, ring hollow.

    For a politician, “war by drone” has obvious advantages to waging war by ordering “boots on the ground.” “They do keep the body bag count down,” writes Conn Hallinan in his essay, Day of the Drone, “but that raises an uncomfortable moral dilemma: If war doesn’t produce casualties, except among the targeted, isn’t it more tempting to fight them? Drone pilots in their air-conditioned trailers in southern Nevada will never go down with their aircraft, but the people on the receiving end will eventually figure out some way to strike back. As the attack on the World Trade towers and recent terrorist attacks in France demonstrate, that is not all that hard to do, and it is almost inevitable that the targets will be civilians. Bloodless war is a dangerous illusion.”

    The war is never the way to peace, the war always comes home. With the exception of four known “friendly fire” casualties, every one of the many thousands of drone attack victims has been a person of color and drones are becoming another military weapon passed on from war zones to urban police departments. Technical advances and proliferation of drones as a cheaper, more politically safe way for many countries to make war on their neighbors or across the globe make forever wars more intractable.

    Talk of peace in Afghanistan, Yemen, the streets of the U.S., is not coherent while waging wars with drones. We must urgently demand a ban on the production, trade and use of weaponized drones and an end to military and police drone surveillance.”

    Activists Brian Terrell and Ghulam Hussein Ahmadi at the Border Free Center in Kabul, Afghanistan.  (Graffiti by Kabul Knight, photo by Dr. Hakim)

    The post Biden’s Drone Wars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I Entered My Country’s House of Justice and Found a Snake Charmer’s Temple

    Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Senderos latinos / Latino paths, Honduras, 2019

    Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Senderos latinos / Latino paths, Honduras, 2019

    On a Sunday night on 21 March 2021, gunmen stopped Juan Carlos Cerros Escalante (age 41) as he walked from this mother’s home to his own in the village of Nueva Granada near San Antonio de Cortés (Honduras). The gunmen opened fire in front of a catholic church, killing this leader of United Communities in front of his children. Forty bullets were found at the scene.

    Jorge Vásquez of the National Platform of Indigenous Peoples said that Juan Carlos Cerros had been threatened for his leadership of the Lenca peoples and their fight to protect their land. Carlos Cerros was killed, Vásquez said, ‘because of the work we do’. None of his killers have been arrested.

    Two and a half weeks later, on 6 April, Roberto David Castillo Mejía entered the Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras. Castillo, the former president of Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima (DESA), the company behind the Agua Zarca dam project on the Gualcarque River, came to face charges that he was the mastermind in the 2016 assassination of Berta Cáceres, the leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisation of Honduras (COPINH). The next day, on a plea from the defence, the Court agreed to suspend the trial for the fourth time.

    Before the suspension, the legal team representing Berta and her family presented new evidence that established a wider conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family. The lawyers filed paperwork that showed confirmation of a payment of $1,254,000 from DESA to Potencia y Energia de Mesoamerica S.A. (PEMSA). This money went from DESA’s chief financial officer, Daniel Atala Midence, to David Castillo, who then funnelled it to the military officer Douglas Bustillo, who coordinated the assassination of Berta.

    In 2013, DESA had initiated the construction of a hydroelectric dam without consulting the Lenca community, who consider the river to be a sacred and common resource. Berta Cáceres opposed the Agua Zarca dam and defended the land of the Lenca people. As Vásquez said of the murder of Carlos Cerros, Berta too was killed for the work she did. She was killed, her family says, by a conspiracy that involved the Atala Zablah family, the main financial backers of the dam project. The Atala Zablah family’s company, Inversiones Las Jacaranda, raised their money – despite pleas from Berta – from FMO (a Dutch development bank), FinnFund (a Finnish development investor), and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (a multilateral development institution).

    Bertha and Laura Zúniga Cáceres at a mural made by el Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2021.

    Bertha and Laura Zúniga Cáceres at a mural made by el Colectivo Culturas Vivas, Tegucigalpa, Honduras, 2021.

    ‘We are in a lot of uncertainty’, Bertha Zúniga Cáceres, the daughter of Berta Cáceres, told me; ‘the justice system in Honduras has never cared about this’. The ‘this’ in her statement relates to the role of DESA and its executives. The authorities have been shielding the Atala Zablah family and the ruling party, which had itself tried to collude in the cover-up.

    In 2009, the US government actively participated in and egged on the oligarchy to undertake a coup d’état against the left-leaning government of Manuel Zelaya. Since then, Honduras has been governed by the far-right National Party, whose current leader and Honduran president is Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH). After Berta Cáceres was assassinated, President Hernández’s minister of security Julián Pacheco Tinoco wrote to Pedro Atala Zablah, one of the leaders of the Atala Zablah family and a board member of DESA. He wanted to assure Atala Zablah and his family that the government would not pursue the case with any seriousness; the case, he said, would be seen as a ‘crime of passion’. Zúniga Cáceres tells me that ‘neither did the army act alone nor did the company act alone either’. There is, she says, ‘coordination between the economic and military power centres, which is the essence of the dictatorship under which we live in Honduras’.

    This week, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research published a dossier on the 2009 coup and on the regime of JOH. It looks at how these processes have created a climate of impunity for class violence by the elites – such as the Atala Zablahs – against leaders such as Berta Cáceres and Carlos Cerros, brave people who defend the dignity and land of all people in Honduras. We researched and wrote the dossier with COPINH and Peoples Dispatch (special thanks to Zoe Alexandra). The dossier, Pity the Nation: Honduras Is Being Eaten From within and without,  comes in three parts:

    1. Part 1 details the fact of the 2009 coup, authorised by the United States government of President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
    2. Part 2 unmasks the structure of extreme right terror sown by the coup regime, which has its tentacles deep in the world of narco-trafficking.
    3. Part 3 provides three examples of the broad attack on the Honduran Left: the assassination of Berta, the attack on the trade unions, and the forced disappearance of Garifuna leaders in July 2020.

    The third section ends with a quote from Miriam Miranda, a leader of the Black Fraternal Organisation of Honduras (OFRANEH): ‘We are tired of the lies from the government of Honduras. [Government reports] have no substance. They don’t say anything. They make a joke of us, the Garifuna people. We do not want lies. We want the truth. We want life to be worth more in our country. We have to build new paths. We will continue fighting so that this becomes a reality’.

    In Yoro, Honduras, the people speak of the lluvia de peces, or the rain of fish, which they commemorate with a festival during the rainy season. Miracles such as this, it is hoped, will rescue people from the tribulations of hunger. Roberto Sosa (1930-2011), one of the great poets of Honduras, was born in Yoro, but he moved away from the miraculous toward the politics of the people and the Left. In 1968, he published his finest collection of poems, Los pobres (The Poor), which won the Adonáis Prize. The headline for this newsletter comes from one of the poems from this collection, La Casa de la Justicia. Here’s an extract:

    I entered
    the House of Justice
    of my country
    and found it to be
    a temple
    of snake charmers.

    ….

    Grim judges
    speak of purity
    with words
    that have acquired
    the brightness
    of a knife. The victims – in constrained space –
    measure terror in a single blow.

    Roberto Sosa’s line, ‘I entered the House of Justice of my country and found it to be a temple of snake charmers’, has been quoted often in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 coup and in the years that have followed. After the coup, Sosa said that Honduras had been turned ‘into a jail country’ (en un país cárcel). ‘Today, the entire country is militarised’, Sosa said, but he took refuge in the ‘massive and organised resistance that has not stopped demonstrating against the coup government, a resistance that does not retreat’.

    There is no retreat even today. None for the people of Honduras.

    The post I Entered My Country’s House of Justice and Found a Snake Charmer’s Temple first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Killing Yemen


    The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.

    Origins of War

    Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.

    From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.

    The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.

    Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.

    American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.

    The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.

    It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.

    The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.

    Genocide

    Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.

    The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.

    Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are never allowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.

    Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.

    In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.

    Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.

    With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.

    This article was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2021 at 5:25pm and is filed under Genocide, Islam, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Killing Yemen


    The Yemeni city of Marib is in the thick of fighting between Houthi rebels and loyalists of Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. Marib is the capital of Marib Governorate, lying roughly 100 miles northeast of the country’s capital in Sana’a. It was established after the 1984 discovery of oil deposits in the region and contains much of Yemen’s oil, gas, and electric resources. Marib is the last governorate under the control of the Hadi government, but it has been under increasing attack by the Houthis since early 2020. If seized by the Houthis, the resistance group can use that advantage in negotiations and even continue further south.

    Origins of War

    Hadi administration’s territorial weakness reflects the failure of the 6-year long Saudi-UAE war against Yemen. The origins of the war can be traced back to 2011 when Arab Spring protests erupted in Yemen. Authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had survived in power since 1978, was forced to resign. He stepped aside in favor of Hadi, who was his vice president from 1994 to 2011. Hadi’s interim government was legitimized by way of a February 21, 2012, referendum in which his was the only name on the ballot.

    From the day he assumed power, Hadi began a process of brutal neoliberalization. He steamrolled Yemen into membership of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2012, bringing about egregious amounts of austerity and untrammeled liberalization. Hadi’s first wave of privatizations included 11 of the 12 main sectors of the Yemeni economy with 78 of the 160 subsectors included for immediate liberalization. His open embrace of the World Bank exposed Yemeni companies to competition in the “free market,” a move that promised tens of thousands of layoffs.

    The Hadi government combined a neoliberal orientation with the undemocratic imposition of a new politico-legal structure. Early in Hadi’s mandate, the government arbitrarily rewrote many of Yemen’s laws, including setting in motion a process of federalization designed to benefit specific constituencies and forever weaken those regions known for resisting Yemen’s economic subordination to Saudi and Qatari interests. Faced with these unprecedented abuses of executive powers, millions of Yemenis supported the Houthi movement.

    Houthis represent a religious revivalist movement within the Zaydi branch of Shi‘i Islam led by the sons of Badr al-Din al-Huthi, a notable Zaydi scholar, in the Sa‘ada province on the Saudi border. In the 1990s, Zaydi resistance to Saleh was spearheaded by Hussein al Houthi. Radicalized by the US War on Terror and invasion of Iraq, Houthis founded Ansar Allah, or “Supporters of God”, and engaged in a tireless guerrilla war against Saleh, whom it decried as a puppet of Washington and Riyadh. Thousands joined the Ansar Allah’s ranks, taking its estimated number of fighters from 10,000 to 100,000 by 2010.

    American and international monitoring groups sent down to “assist” in the post-2011 transition openly condemned the popular AnsarAllah, referring to it as an “armed group” in the attempt to delegitimize it. There were even formal efforts to side-line AnsarAllah in the subsequent National Dialogue Conference (NDC) held between March 18, 2013, and January 24, 2014.

    The outright persecution of Houthis proved to be counterproductive, resulting in the formation of a temporary and unstable alliance between the ousted Saleh and AnsarAllah. Even after resigning from the presidency, Saleh retained a lot of support within the security services. In September 2014, Houthi militias, in alliance with Saleh, took over government buildings in the capital while the army stood by.

    It is important to note that when the forces allied with AnsarAllah entered Sana‘a’ they did not formally remove Hadi as interim President. Rather, they established committees that demanded the immediate establishment of a timeframe for elections, an immediate halt to the frantic selling off of Yemen’s assets, and review of all new laws instituted during the Hadi period.

    The Saleh-Houthi association unraveled after two years. On December 3, 2017, Saleh announced he was switching sides, leaving his two-year long alliance with the Houthis and joining Hadi and the Saudis. The Houthis quickly routed his forces in the capital and blew up his house. The next day they stopped him at a checkpoint and killed him too, announcing that they had also avenged al-Houthi – killed by Saleh’s military in 2004.

    Genocide

    Hadi fled to Aden and appealed to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi for military assistance. Saudis and Emiratis proceeded to assemble an alliance of Middle Eastern and African states – Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Eritrea, Morocco, Senegal, Somalia and Sudan – acting in the name of Hadi’s government – exiled in Riyadh. The first Saudi air strikes were launched on 26 March, 2015 to prevent Aden falling to Saleh’s Republican Guards. This was the beginning of genocide.

    The Saudi intervention in Yemen was propelled by the monarchy’s domestic concerns. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS), staked his prestige to a Saudi victory. Just prior to the war, King Salman took the throne and appointed his son MBS as defense minister. MBS appeared on Saudi television the day after the bombing began; he was in the military operations centre, on the phone, talking to pilots, looking at maps — trying to show that he really was in charge.

    Within days of starting the war, Saudi Arabia imposed a total land, air and sea blockade, along with targeting vital agriculture and food supply infrastructure that sustains life for the 29 million Yemenis – all of which constitute war crimes under international law. Yemen imports 80% of its food. The Saudis intercept and impound some aid ships for periods up to 100 days. Other ships are never allowed to dock in Yemen. The delays the naval blockade creates cause food prices to soar, making them unaffordable to most Yemenis.

    Half of Yemen’s hospitals and medical clinics have been destroyed or forced to close since the coalition bombing began. Public health personnel and hospital facilities have been attacked, leading to the closure of health facilities. According to the organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), 92-95% of medical equipment in Yemeni hospitals and health facilities no longer functions. Over 50% of Yemenis do not have access to healthcare, and the other half has access to a “compromised healthcare system” that lacks the personnel, medicine and medical equipment necessary to treat the population’s basic health needs. The coalition bombs cranes used in Yemeni ports, making it impossible to unload medicine.

    In a nutshell, the effects of the imperialist war against Yemen have been devastating: cholera and hunger have arrived on a scale that has not been seen since the last century, with some 20 million experiencing food insecurity and 10 million at risk of famine. An estimated 110,000 have been killed in the fighting, with a death toll of 233,000 overall, mostly due to indirect causes such as lack of food and health services.

    Saudi Arabia has justified the saturation bombing of Yemen by claiming that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy. Given that the Saudis and local allies control the Gulf of Aden, Iranian ships laden with weapons cannot travel all the way to northern Yemen and Sana’a. The same applies to the airspace, which is entirely controlled by the Saudis. While Iran may have managed to send some support and advisors, it is absurd to describe the Houthis as Iranian-backed. Moreover, the Saudi usage of the Iranian bogeyman stokes the sectarian flames of the Shite-Sunni narrative and elides a deeper analysis of the problems plaguing Yemen after the 1990 unification.

    With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in Yemen, the genocidal impact of the war has combined with an epidemiological crisis to generate a perfect storm for Yemenis. However, Yemeni lives don’t matter for the rulers sitting at the helm of our brutal system. War profiteers are least concerned about what happens in Yemen as long as they are able to sell a full range of arms that kill human beings and destroy nations. Without concerted action, the genocide in Yemen will continue, with the profits accruing to the arms industries.

    The post Killing Yemen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hunting in Yemen

    Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

    Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

    Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

    “When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

    Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

    According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

    Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

    As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

    Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

    The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

    Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

    Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

    Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

    Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

    In response, Coe wrote:

    ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

    Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

    While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

    Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

    “The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

    Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

    Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

    The post Hunting in Yemen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hunting in Yemen

    Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

    Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

    Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

    “When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

    Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

    According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

    Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

    As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

    Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

    The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

    Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

    Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

    Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

    Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

    In response, Coe wrote:

    ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

    Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

    While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

    Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

    “The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

    Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

    Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2021 at 1:41am and is filed under Activism, Children/Youth, Crimes against Humanity, Hunger, Hunger Strikes, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism (state and retail), United States, War Crimes, War Industry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Australia Struggles to Find an Independent Voice

    Australia has always struggled to present an independent foreign policy to the world. For example, during its early days as a British colony its soldiers fought in the Crimean war in the mid 19th century, although it would be impossible to identify any Australian interest in that conflict. World War One saw a similar eagerness to die on behalf of the British Empire. To this day the most solemn day in the Australian calendar is 25th April, ANZAC Day, when Australian and New Zealand troops were sacrificed by their incompetent British officers to a hopeless campaign in Turkey during World War One.

    The same saga was repeated during World War II when Australian troops were rushed to North Africa to fight Rommel’s desert army. They were only withdrawn from that theatre following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when defending home territory from the Japanese superseded defending Britain in its European war.

    The fall of Singapore to the Japanese had a profound effect on Australian military thinking. Foremost was the realisation that they could no longer rely on Britain for their safety.  Rather than formulating a plan for having a uniquely Australian tinge to their defence, Australia simply switched its allegiance from the British to the Americans. That allegiance has continued to the present day and is essentially a bipartisan affair, with both the major political parties swearing undying allegiance to the Americans.

    What did not change from the days of allegiance to a participation in Britain’s wars, was an affinity simply transferred to the Americans to join their wars, regardless of the merits, military or otherwise, of doing so.

    Thus Australia was an eager participant in the first post-World War II exercise in American imperialism when it joined the war in Korea. Australian troops later joined in the invasion of North Korea, contrary to the terms of the United Nations resolution authorising the conflict. After the Chinese joined the war when the western forces reached the North Korea – China border, they were quickly expelled back to the southern portion of the Korean peninsula.

    As is well known, the Americans used their aerial domination to bomb the North until the armistice was finally signed in 1953. During that air war every city in the North suffered severe damage. More than 600,000 civilians died, which was greater than the military losses of around 400,000. To this day the war remains technically alive as no peace treaty has been signed. Of the 17,000 Australian troops that served in Korea, there were 340 fatalities and more than 1400 injured, a comparatively small number for a war that lasted three years.

    In 1962 Australian troops arrived in South Vietnam and remained there until January 1973 when they were withdrawn by the Whitlam Labor government. It was Australia’s longest war up until that time. The withdrawal of Australian troops by the Whitlam government incensed the Americans, on whose behalf they were there. The withdrawal drew the enmity of the Americans and was a major factor in the American role in the overthrow of the Whitlam government in November 1975. It is a fact barely acknowledged in Australian writing on the demise of the Whitlam government. It did, however, have a profound effect on Australian political and military thinking. Since November 1975 there has been no recognisable Australian difference from United States belligerence throughout the world.

    The next miscalculation was Australia joining the United States led war in Afghanistan. That is now Australia’s longest war, rapidly approaching 20 years of involvement with no sign or political talk about withdrawing. It is a war that has largely passed out of mainstream media discussion. This ignorance was briefly disrupted by revelations in late 2020 that Australian troops had been involved in war crimes in Afghanistan, specifically, the killing of innocent Afghanistan civilians.

    The brief publicity given to this revelation rapidly passed and Australia’s involvement in its longest war once more faded from public view. The mainstream media remains totally silent on Australia’s involvement on behalf of the Americans in protecting the poppy crop, source of 90% of the world’s heroin supply and a major source of uncountable illicit income for the CIA.

    Australia’s next foreign intervention on behalf of the Americans was in the equally illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. They have simply ignored demands by the Iraqi government in 2020 that all uninvited foreign troops should leave. The involvement of Australian troops in that country, and indeed in adjoining Syria where they have been since at least 2015 is simply ignored by the mainstream media.

    Australia also plays a role in the United States war machine through the satellite facility at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory. That base is one of a number of United States military facilities in the country, another topic that is deemed by the mainstream media as being unfit for public discussion.

    Another unsung role of the Australian Navy is to be part of the United States confrontation with China in the South China Sea where they protect so-called freedom of navigation exercises, despite the complete absence of any evidence of Chinese interference with civilian navigation in those waters. Equally unexplained is the Australian Navy’s presence in the narrow Straits of Malacca, a vital Chinese export waterway.

    Last year the Trump administration resurrected the “gang of four” that is, India, Japan, the United States and Australia, a blatantly anti-China grouping designed to put pressure on the Chinese government in the Indo Pacific region. The measure is doomed to fail, not least because both India and Japan have more attractive opportunities as part of the burgeoning cooperation in trade among multiple countries in the Asia-Pacific who see better opportunities arising from a friendly relationship with China than the blatantly antagonistic options offered by the Americans.

    Australia seems impervious to these signals. It has already suffered major setbacks to its trade with China, not to mention a diplomatic cold shoulder. The political leadership is silent on this development, perhaps unable to grasp the implications of its changing relationship with China. The inability of the Labor Opposition to grasp the implications of the consequences of Australia clinging to the fading American coattails is of profound concern.

    All the signs are that the relationship with its largest trading partner, by a big margin, will continue to deteriorate. Australians seem unable or unwilling to grasp the lesson that its economic problems are intimately linked to its subservient role to the United States.

    There is every indication that their fortunes in Asia will sink together.

    This article was posted on Tuesday, April 6th, 2021 at 1:45am and is filed under Afghanistan, Australia, China, Espionage/”Intelligence”, India, Iraq, Japan, Korea, Militarism, North Korea, Singapore, Surveillance, Syria, Trade, United Kingdom, United States, US Military Bases, Viet Nam, War Crimes, World War One, World War Two.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.