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By Pepe Escobar

Fascist Franco may have been dead for more than four decades, but Spain is still encumbered with his dictatorial corpse. A new paradigm has been coined right inside the lofty European Union, self-described home/patronizing dispenser of human rights to lesser regions across the planet: “In the name of democracy, refrain from voting, or else.” Call it democracy nano-Franco style.

Nano-Franco is Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose heroic shock troops were redeployed from a serious nationwide terrorist alert to hammer with batons and fire rubber bullets not against jihadis but … voters. At least six schools became the terrain of what was correctly called The Battle of Barcelona.

Extreme right-wingers even held a demonstration inside Barcelona. Yet this was not shown on Spanish TV because it contradicted the official Madrid narrative.

The Catalan government beat the fascist goons with two very simple codes – as revealed by La Vanguardia. “I’ve got the Tupperware. Where do we meet?” was the code on a prepaid mobile phone for people to collect and protect ballot boxes. “I’m the paper traveler” was the code to protect the actual paper ballots. Julian Assange/WikiLeaks had warned about the world’s first Internet war as deployed by Madrid to smash the electronic voting system. The counterpunch was – literally – on paper. The US National Security Agency must have learned a few lessons.

So we had techno power combined with cowardly Francoist repression tactics countered by people power, as in parents conducting sit-ins in schools to make sure they were functional on referendum day. Some 90% of the 2.26 million Catalans who made it to the polls ended up voting in favor of independence from Spain, according to preliminary results. Catalonia has 5.3 million registered voters.

Roughly 770,000 votes were lost because of raids by Spanish police. Turnout at around 42% may not be high but it’s certainly not low. As the day went by, there was a growing feeling, all across Catalonia, all social classes involved, that this was not about independence any more; it was about fighting a new brand of fascism. What’s certain is there’s a Perfect Storm coming.

No pasarán

The “institutional declaration” of overwhelming mediocrity nano-Franco Rajoy, right after the polls were closed, invited disbelief. The highlight was a mediocre take on Magritte: “Ceci n’est pas un referendum.” This referendum never took place. And it could never take place because “Spain is a mature and advanced democracy, friendly and
tolerant”. The day’s events proved it a lie.

Rajoy said “the great majority of Catalan people did not want to participate in the secessionist script”. Another lie. Even before the “non-existent” referendum, between 70% and 80% of Catalans said they wanted to vote, yes or no, after an informed debate about their future.

Crucially, Rajoy extolled the “unwavering support of the EU and the international community”. Of course; unelected EU “elites” in Brussels and the main European capitals are absolutely terrorized when EU citizens express themselves.

Yet the top nano-Franco lie was that “democracy prevailed because the constitution was respected”.

Rajoy spent weeks defending his repression of the referendum by invoking “the rule of law such as ours”. It’s “their” law, indeed. The heart of the matter are Articles 116 and 155 of a retrograde Spanish constitution, the first one describing how states of alarm, exception and siege work in Spain, and the latter applied in “order to compel the [autonomous community] forcibly to meet … obligations, or in order to protect the … general interests.”

Well, these “obligations” and “general interests” are defined by – who else, Madrid and Madrid only. The Spanish Constitutional Court is a joke – it couldn’t care less about the principle of separation of powers. The court congregates a bunch of legalistic Mafiosi/patsies working for the two parties of the establishment, the so-called “socialists” of the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) and the medieval right-wingers of Rajoy’s People’s Party (PP).

Few outside Spain may remember the failed coup of February 23, 1981 – when there was an attempt to hurl Spain back into the long dark Francoist night. Well, I was in Barcelona when it happened – and that vividly reminded me of the South American military coups in the 1960s and 1970s. Since the coup, what passes for “justice” in Spain never ceased to be a mere lackey to these two political parties.

The Constitutional Court actually suspended the Catalan referendum law, arguing that it was violating the – medieval – Spanish constitution. This disgraceful collusion is crystal-clear for most people in Catalonia. What Madrid is essentially up to amounts to a coup as well – against the Catalan government and, of course, against democracy. So no wonder the immortal civil-war mantra was back in the streets of Catalonia: “¡No pasarán!” They shall not pass.

Brussels does demophobia

Rajoy, thuggish, mediocre and corrupt (that’s another long story), lied even more when he said he keeps the “door open to dialogue”. He never wanted any dialogue with Catalonia – always refusing a referendum in any shape or form or transferring any powers to the Catalan regional government. Catalonia’s regional president, Carles Puigdemont, insists he had to call the referendum because this is what separatist parties promised when they won regional elections two years ago.

And of course no one is an angel in this hardcore power play. The PDeCaT (the Democratic Party of Catalonia), the main force behind the referendum, has also been mired in corruption.

Catalonia in itself is as economically powerful as Denmark; 7.5 million people, around 16% of Spain’s population, but responsible for 20% of gross domestic product, attracting one-third of foreign investment and producing one-third of exports. In a country where unemployment is at a horribly high 30%, losing Catalonia would be the ultimate disaster.

Madrid in effect subscribes to only two priorities: dutifully obey EU austerity diktats, and crush by all means any regional push for autonomy.

Catalan historian Josep Fontana, in a wide-ranging, enlightening interview, has identified the heart of the matter: “What, for me, is scandalous is that the PP is whipping up public opinion by saying that holding the referendum means the secession of Catalonia afterwards, when it knows that secession is impossible. It is impossible because it would mean that the Generalitat would have to ask the Madrid government to be so kind as to withdraw its army, Guardia Civil and National Police from Catalonia, and to meekly renounce a territory that provides 20% of its GDP … so why are they using this excuse to stir up a climate reminiscent of a civil war?”

Beyond the specter of civil war, the Big Picture is even more incandescent.

The Scottish National Party is sort of blood cousins with Catalan separatists in its rejection of a perceived illegitimate central authority, with all the accompanying negative litany. SNP members complain they are forced to cope with different languages; political diktats from above; unfair taxes; and what is felt as outright economic exploitation. This phenomenon has absolutely nothing to do with the EU-wide rise of extreme right-wing nationalism, populism and xenophobia – as Madrid insists.

And then there’s the silence of the wolves. It would be easy to picture the EU’s reaction if the drama in Catalonia were happening in distant, “barbarian” Eurasian lands. The peaceful referendum in Crimea was condemned as “illegal” and dictatorial while a violent attack against freedom of expression of millions of people living inside the EU gets a pass.

The demophobia of Brussels elites knows no bounds; the historical record shows EU citizens are not allowed to express themselves freely, especially by using democratic practices in questions related to self-determination. Whatever torrent of spin may come ahead, the silence of the EU betrays the fact Brussels is puling the strings behind Madrid. After all the Brave New Euroland project implies the destruction of European nations to the profit of a centralized Brussels eurocracy.

Referenda are untamable animals. Kosovo was a by-product of the amputation/bombing into democracy of Serbia by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; a gangster/narco mini-state useful as the host of Camp Bondsteel, the largest Pentagon base outside of the US.

Crimea was part of a legitimate reunification drive to rectify Nikita Khrushchev’s idiocy of separating it from Russia. London did not send goons to prevent the referendum in Scotland; an amicable negotiation is in effect. No set rules apply. Neocons screamed in vain when Crimea was reunited with Russia after shedding tears of joy when Kosovo was carved out of Serbia.

As for Madrid, a lesson should be learned from Ireland in 1916. In the beginning the majority of the population was against an uprising. But brutal British repression led to the war of independence – and the rest is history.

After this historic, (relatively) bloody Sunday, more and more Catalans will be asking: If Slovenia and Croatia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the tiny Baltic republics, not to mention even tinier Luxembourg, Cyprus and Malta, can be EU members, why not us? And a stampede might be ahead; Flanders and Wallonia, the Basque country and Galicia, Wales and Northern Ireland.

All across the EU, the centralized Eurocrat dream is splintering. It’s Catalonia that may be pointing toward a not so brave, but more  realistic, new world.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-future-of-the-eu-at-stake-in-catalonia/5611953

By True Publica

In July 2017 director Michael Oswald’s latest film, The Spider’s Web: Britain’s Second Empire was premiered at the Frontline Club in London. It has since had several screenings in London and public screenings can be organised from November onwards.  This fascinating interview just published in Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten explores what inspired co-producers Michael Oswald and John Christensen to make a film documentary about London’s role as the world’s pre-eminent tax haven.  Oswald and Christensen also talk about how London might develop once Brexit kicks in, exploring the possibility of deepening the City’s tax haven role through further tax cuts for the rich and more rolling back of financial market regulation and other social protections.

The key inspiration, according to Michael Oswald, was Nicholas Shaxson’s best-selling Treasure Islands, which explained the way in which the formal British Empire morphed into a spider’s web of tax havens gathering financial wealth from across the world and funnelling it through to the City. As Oswald explains, this helped to re-establish London as the financial capital of Capital:

At the time of the British Empire, Britain structured its economy not around manufacturing and productive sectors, but around finance. City of London banks provided the financing for the Empire and the colonies would pay interest to the City.

As Britain’s Empire declined, City of London institutions were increasingly confronted by circumstances that limited their ability to function and make a profit. It was out of this need that various financial interests sought to fashion for themselves spaces in which they could continue to operate and profit. In order to create these spaces they used the expertise developed during empire and the territorial remnants of the Empire, such as Britain’s dependent territories, financial expertise and networks established during Empire and the knowledge of how to establish, run and benefit from an international financial system.”

Much of the expertise built up during the final decades of the formal empire was focused on ways to avoid paying taxes both in the colonies and in Britain itself.  In the 1920s and 30s offshore companies and trusts were increasingly used to avoid and evade paying taxes.  In the 1950s, with the emergence of the London-based Eurodollar market, international banks found themselves able to operate in a virtually unregulated financial market which the authorities – in this case the Bank of England – treated in a totally laissez-faire fashion.

As Christensen says in the interview, successive British governments have not only turned a blind eye to the British spider’s web of tax havens, they have actively supported its growth by blocking international attempts to tackle it:

“Britain has consistently voted against creating a globally representative inter-governmental body to shape a framework of rules to strengthen international cooperation on tax matters. Britain has successfully resisted international pressure to take effective action against its tax havens in the Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and other British dependencies.

I have observed British officials blocking attempts to strengthen international cooperation on tax information exchange by keeping discussion on offshore trusts off the agenda. This happened as recently as 2015 when Prime Minister David Cameron pushed to have trusts excluded from information exchange processes. This is a pivotal issue since offshore trusts are key to the British tax haven secrecy model. Britain has also spent years blocking EU attempts to make progress towards a common approach to taxing multinational companies (the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base).”

Fast forward to the present and it seems clear, especially post-financial crisis, that Britain’s reliance on the City as the engine of growth in the UK economy is a risky development strategy. Christensen again:

“The British economy is heavily reliant on external trade in services which is dominated by financial services. Any shock to the financial services sector, for example arising from being denied access to the EU Single Market, would be highly damaging to the economy.”

Which raises the inevitable question about where the British spider’s web might go post-Brexit.  Many of the services previously provided from London cannot be provided without the Single Market, which will require London-based banks and law firms to establish permanent establishment with the EU-27.  The British tax havens see new market possibilities in China, India, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa, but this will probably involve laundering ever larger amounts of dirty money and enabling ever more tax avoidance.  The problem, as Christensen sees it, is that Britain has failed to plan for industrial diversification for decades and now faces limited development options:

Prime Minister May and her finance minister have already indicated that deepening Britain’s tax haven role is an option. This is a sign of weakness since a race-to-the-bottom on regulation, secrecy and corporate taxation would probably expose Britain to risks relating to financial stability and fiscal sustainability.”

Is this a viable development strategy?  Unquestionably there will be winners: oligarchs, kleptocrats and the multifarious aristocrats, bankers, lawyers, spooks and retired politicians who benefit from Britain’s tax haven empire.  For the vast majority of people in Britain, however, hosting the world’s largest tax haven has no benefits whatsoever and offers only the prospect of further relative decline and social division.  As Oswald comments in the interview:

This is something we explore in the documentary, in the case of the US and the UK, services do not make up for the reduction in industrial capacity. Michael Hudson explains that it is through attracting international capital whose origins may very well be criminal that this has become a possibility in the US and the UK.”

Read the full interview here.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-city-of-london-capital-of-an-invisible-empire/5611057

By Prof. James Petras

America has the greatest inequalities, highest mortality rate, most regressive taxes, and largest public subsidies for bankers and billionaires of any developed capitalist country.

In this essay we will discuss the socio-economic roots of inequalities and the relation between the concentration of wealth and the downward mobility of the working and salaried classes.

How the Billionaires become Billionaires

Contrary to the propaganda pushed by the business press, between 67% and 72% percent of corporations had zero tax liabilities after credits and exemptions … while their workers and employees paid between 25 – 30% in taxes. The rate for the minority of corporations, which paid any tax, was 14%.

According to the US Internal Revenue Service, billionaire tax evasion amounts to $458 billion dollars in lost public revenues every year – almost a trillion dollars every two years by this conservative estimate.

The largest US corporations sheltered over $2.5 trillion dollars in overseas tax havens where they paid no taxes or single digit tax rates.

Meanwhile US corporations in crisis received over $14.4 trillion dollars (Bloomberg claimed 12.8 trillion) in public bailout money, split between the US Treasury and the Federal Reserve, mostly from US tax payers, who are overwhelmingly workers, employees and pensioners.

The recipient bankers invested their interest-free or low interest US bailout funds and earned billions in profits, most resulting from mortgage foreclosures of working class households.

Through favorable legal rulings and illegal foreclosures, the bankers evicted 9.3 million families. Over 20 million individuals lost their properties, often due to illegal or fraudulent debts.

A small number of the financial swindlers, including executives from Wall Street’s leading banks (Goldman Sachs, J. P. Morgan etc), paid fines – but no one went to prison for the gargantuan fraud that drove millions of Americans into misery.

There are other swindler bankers, like the current Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin, who enriched themselves by illegally foreclosing on thousands of homeowners in California. Some were tried; all were exonerated, thanks to the influence of Democratic political leaders during the Obama years.

Silicon Valley and its innovative billionaires have found novel way to avoid taxes using overseas tax havens and domestic tax write-offs. They increase their wealth and corporate profits by paying their local manual and service workers poverty level wages. Silicon Valley executives ‘earn’ a thousand times more than their production workers..

Class inequalities are further reinforced by ethnic divisions. White, Chinese and Indian multi-millionaires exploit Afro-American, Latin American, Vietnamese and Filipino workers.

Billionaires in the commercial conglomerates, like Walmart, exploit workers by paying poverty wages and providing few, if any, benefits. Walmart earns $16 billion dollar a year in profits by paying its workers between $10 and $13 an hour and relying on state and federal assistance to provide services to the families of its impoverished workers through Medicaid and food stamps. Amazon plutocrat Jeff Bezos exploits workers by paying $12.50 an hour while he has accumulated over $80 billion dollars in profits. UPS CEO David Albany takes $11 million a year by exploiting workers at $11 an hour. Federal Express CEO, Fred Smith gets $16 million and pays workers $11 an hour.

Inequality is not a result of ‘technology’ and ‘education’- contemporary euphemisms for the ruling class cult of superiority – as liberals and conservative economists and journalists like to claim. Inequalities are a result of low wages, based on big profits, financial swindles, multi-trillion dollar public handouts and multi-billion-dollar tax evasion. The ruling class has mastered the ‘technology’ of exploiting the state, through its pillage of the treasury, and the working class. Capitalist exploitation of low paid production workers provides additional billions for the ‘philanthropic’ billionaire family foundations to polish their public image – using another tax avoidance gimmick – self-glorifying ‘donations’.

Workers pay disproportional taxes for education, health, social and public services and subsidies for billionaires.

Billionaires in the arms industry and security/mercenary conglomerates receive over $700 billion dollars from the federal budget, while over 100 million US workers lack adequate health care and their children are warehoused in deteriorating schools.

Workers and Bosses: Mortality Rates

Billionaires and multi-millionaires and their families enjoy longer and healthier lives than their workers. They have no need for health insurance policies or public hospitals. CEO’s live on average ten years longer than a worker and enjoy twenty years more of healthy and pain-free lives.

Private, exclusive clinics and top medical care include the most advanced treatment and safe and proven medication which allow billionaires and their family members to live longer and healthier lives. The quality of their medical care and the qualifications of their medical providers present a stark contrast to the health care apartheid that characterizes the rest of the United States.

Workers are treated and mistreated by the health system: They have inadequate and often incompetent medical treatment, cursory examinations by inexperienced medical assistants and end up victims of the widespread over-prescription of highly addictive narcotics and other medications. Over-prescription of narcotics by incompetent ‘providers’ has significantly contributed to the rise in premature deaths among workers, spiraling cases of opiate overdose, disability due to addiction and descent into poverty and homelessness. These irresponsible practices have made additional billions of dollars in profits for the insurance corporate elite, who can cut their pensions and health care liabilities as injured, disabled and addicted workers drop out of the system or die.

The shortened life expectancy for workers and their family members is celebrated on Wall Street and in the financial press. Over 560,000 workers were killed by opioids between 1999-2015 contributing to the decline in life expectancy for working age wage and salary earners and reduced pension liabilities for Wall Street and the Social Security Administration.

Inequalities are cumulative, inter-generational and multi-sectorial.

Billionaire families, their children and grandchildren, inherit and invest billions. They have privileged access to the most prestigious schools and medical facilities, and conveniently fall in love to equally privileged, well-connected mates to join their fortunes and form even greater financial empires. Their wealth buys favorable, even fawning, mass media coverage and the services of the most influential lawyers and accountants to cover their swindles and tax evasion.

Billionaires hire innovators and sweat shop MBA managers to devise more ways to slash wages, increase productivity and ensure that inequalities widen even further. Billionaires do not have to be the brightest or most innovative people: Such individuals can simply be bought or imported on the ‘free market’ and discarded at will.

Billionaires have bought out or formed joint ventures with each other, creating interlocking directorates. Banks, IT, factories, warehouses, food and appliance, pharmaceuticals and hospitals are linked directly to political elites who slither through doors of rotating appointments within the IMF, the World Bank, Treasury, Wall Street banks and prestigious law firms.

Consequences of Inequalities

First and foremost, billionaires and their political, legal and corporate associates dominate the political parties. They designate the leaders and key appointees, thus ensuring that budgets and policies will increase their profits, erode social benefits for the masses and weaken the political power of popular organizations.

Secondly, the burden of the economic crisis is shifted on to the workers who are fired and later re-hired as part-time, contingent labor. Public bailouts, provided by the taxpayer, are channeled to the billionaires under the doctrine that Wall Street banks are too big to fail and workers are too weak to defend their wages, jobs and living standards.

Billionaires buy political elites, who appoint the World Bank and IMF officials tasked with instituting policies to freeze or reduce wages, slash corporate and public health care obligations and increase profits by privatizing public enterprises and facilitating corporate relocation to low wage, low tax countries.

As a result, wage and salary workers are less organized and less influential; they work longer and for less pay, suffer greater workplace insecurity and injuries – physical and mental – fall into decline and disability, drop out of the system, die earlier and poorer, and, in the process, provide unimaginable profits for the billionaire class. Even their addiction and deaths provide opportunities for huge profit – as the Sackler Family, manufacturers of Oxycontin, can attest.

The billionaires and their political acolytes argue that deeper regressive taxation would increase investments and jobs. The data speaks otherwise. The bulk of repatriated profits are directed to buy back stock to increase dividends for investors; they are not invested in the productive economy. Lower taxes and greater profits for conglomerates means more buy-outs and greater outflows to low wage countries. In real terms taxes are already less than half the headline rate and are a major factor heightening the concentration of income and power – both cause and effect.

Corporate elites, the billionaires in the Silicon Valley-Wall Street global complex are relatively satisfied that their cherished inequalities are guaranteed and expanding under the Demo-Republican Presidents- as the ‘good times’ roll on.

Away from the ‘billionaire elite’, the ‘outsiders’ – domestic capitalists – clamor for greater public investment in infrastructure to expand the domestic economy, lower taxes to increase profits, and state subsidies to increase the training of the labor force while reducing funds for health care and public education. They are oblivious to the contradiction.

In other words, the capitalist class as a whole, globalist and domestic alike, pursues the same regressive policies, promoting inequalities while struggling over shares of the profits.

One hundred and fifty million wage and salaried taxpayers are excluded from the political and social decisions that directly affect their income, employment, rates of taxation, and political representation.

They understand, or at least experience, how the class system works. Most workers know about the injustice of the fake ‘free trade’ agreements and regressive tax regime, which weighs heavy on the majority of wage and salary earners.

However, worker hostility and despair is directed against ‘immigrants’ and against the ‘liberals’ who have backed the import of cheap skilled and semi-skilled labor under the guise of ‘freedom’. This ‘politically correct’ image of imported labor covers up a policy, which has served to lower wages, benefits and living standards for American workers, whether they are in technology, construction or production. Rich conservatives, on the other hand, oppose immigration under the guise of ‘law and order’ and to lower social expenditures – despite that fact that they all use imported nannies, tutors, nurses, doctors and gardeners to service their families. Their servants can always be deported when convenient.

The pro and anti-immigrant issue avoids the root cause for the economic exploitation and social degradation of the working class – the billionaire owners operating in alliance with the political elite.

In order to reverse the regressive tax practices and tax evasion, the low wage cycle and the spiraling death rates resulting from narcotics and other preventable causes, which profit insurance companies and pharmaceutical billionaires, class alliances need to be forged linking workers, consumers, pensioners, students, the disabled, the foreclosed homeowners, evicted tenants, debtors, the under-employed and immigrants as a unified political force.

Sooner said than done, but never tried! Everything and everyone is at stake: life, health and happiness.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-billionaires-become-billionaires/5612125

By Marjorie Cohn and Jonathan Moore

Watching the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick 18-hour series, “The Vietnam War,” is an emotional experience. Whether you served in the US military during the war or marched in the streets to end it, you cannot remain untouched by this documentary. The battle scenes are powerful, the stories of US veterans and Vietnamese soldiers who fought on both sides of the war compelling.
The toll in human terms caused by the war is staggering. Nearly 58,000 Americans and 2 to 3 million Vietnamese, many of them civilians, were killed in the war. Untold numbers were wounded. Many US veterans of the war suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. More US Vietnam War vets have committed suicide than died in the war.  However, those numbers do not begin to tell the complete story of the war.

The US Engages in Chemical Warfare

In one of its most serious omissions, the series gives short shrift to the destruction wreaked by the US military’s spraying of deadly chemical herbicides containing the poison dioxin over much of Vietnam, the most common of which was Agent Orange. This is one of the most tragic legacies of the war. Yet, aside from a few brief mentions, the victims of Agent Orange/dioxin, both Vietnamese and American, are not portrayed in the series. More importantly, the ongoing harm created by this chemical warfare program is never mentioned.

Agent Orange/dioxin was an herbicidal chemical weapon manufactured by US chemical companies like Dow and Monsanto and sprayed by the US military from 1961 to 1971. Dioxin is one of the most toxic chemicals known to humankind. Approximately 3 million Vietnamese and thousands of US and allied soldiers were exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin.

The US government was aware that the use of poison as a weapon of war was forbidden by international law well before it authorized its use in Vietnam.  In fact, the US government suppressed a 1965 report, called the Bionetics study, that showed dioxin caused many birth defects in experimental animals. It was not until the results of that study were leaked that the use of Agent Orange/dioxin was stopped.

Horrific Birth Defects

Those exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin often have children and grandchildren born with serious illnesses and disabilities. There is a virtual unanimity of opinion within the international scientific community that exposure to Agent Orange/dioxin caused some forms of cancers, reproductive abnormalities, immune and endocrine deficiencies, and nervous system damage. Second- and third-generation victims continue to be born in Vietnam, as well as to US veterans and Vietnamese-Americans in the United States. For many of them and their progeny, the suffering continues.

Mai Giang Vu was exposed to Agent Orange while serving in the Army of South Vietnam. He carried barrels of chemicals to spray in the jungle. His sons were unable to walk or function normally. Their limbs gradually “curled up” and they could only crawl. By age 18, they were bedridden. One died at age 23, the other at age 25.

Nga Tran, a French Vietnamese woman who worked in Vietnam as a war correspondent, was there when the US military began spraying chemical defoliants. A big cloud of the agent enveloped her. Shortly after her daughter was born, the child’s skin began shedding. She could not bear to have physical contact with anyone. The child never grew. She remained 6.6 pounds – her birth weight – until her death at the age of 17 months. Tran’s second daughter suffers from alpha thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder rarely seen in Asia. Tran saw a woman who gave birth to a “ball” with no human form. Many children are born without brains; others make inhuman sounds. There are victims who have never stood up. They creep and barely lift their heads.

Rosemarie Hohn Mizo is the widow of George Mizo, who fought for the US Army in Vietnam. After he refused to serve a third tour, Mizo was court-martialed, spent two and a half years in prison and received a dishonorable discharge. Before his death from Agent Orange-related illnesses, Mizo helped found the Friendship Village where Vietnamese victims live in a supportive environment.

Dr. Jeanne Stellman, who wrote the seminal Agent Orange article in Nature, said,

“This is the largest unstudied [unnatural] environmental disaster in the world.”

Dr. Jean Grassman, of Brooklyn College at the City University of New York, stated dioxin is a potent cellular disregulator that alters several pathways and disrupts many bodily systems. She said children are very sensitive to dioxin, and the intrauterine or postnatal exposure to dioxin may result in altered immune, neurobehavioral and hormonal functioning. Women pass their exposure to their children both in utero and through the excretion of dioxin in breast milk.

These were some of the witnesses who testified at the International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange, held in Paris in 2009.

An Empty Promise of Compensation

In the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, the Nixon administration promised to contribute $3 billion for compensation and postwar reconstruction of Vietnam. That promise remains unfulfilled.

In 2004, both US veteran and Vietnamese victims sued the chemical companies who knowingly manufactured Agent Orange and other herbicides, which they knew contained an unnecessary but lethal amount of dioxin. The victims were prevented from suing the US government because of the doctrine of sovereign immunity. Despite agreeing to compensate US veterans in an earlier lawsuit for some maladies caused by their exposure to Agent Orange and other herbicides, the US government and the chemical companies maintained before the courts and to this day that there was no evidence to support a connection between exposure and disease.

The efforts by veterans’ groups and others to take care of our vets has resulted in a compensation scheme administered by the Veterans Administration. It annually pays out billions of dollars to veterans who can demonstrate they were in a contaminated part of Vietnam and have an illness that is associated with exposure to Agent Orange.

Unfortunately, the Vietnamese who were exposed to Agent Orange on a scale unheard of in modern warfare have been left out in the cold. The failure to include this history in the Burns/Novick series is unconscionable. Indeed, one could argue that even the mention of Agent Orange in the series was seriously misleading. For example, in the last episode, the narrator notes the spraying campaign but does so against a verdant backdrop of green fields and abundant crops.

The actions of the US government and the US manufacturers of Agent Orange and other deadly herbicides is a moral outrage. The US government has funded the cleanup of dioxin at the Danang airport, only one of the 28 “hot spots” still contaminated by dioxin. But this effort ignores the damage caused to the people who live there and eat the crops, animals and fish from the surrounding area. All of these hot spots need to be remediated.

The Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2017

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California) has introduced H.R. 334, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2017, which has 23 co-sponsors. The bill would lead to the cleanup of dioxin and arsenic contamination still present in Vietnam. It would provide assistance to the public health system in Vietnam directed at the 3 million Vietnamese people affected by Agent Orange. It would also extend assistance to the affected children of male US veterans who suffer the same set of birth defects covered for the children of female veterans. It enable research on the extent of Agent Orange-related diseases in the Vietnamese-American community and provide them with assistance. Finally, it would support laboratory and epidemiological research on the effects of Agent Orange.

Contact your representative and ask him or her to sign on as a co-sponsor of H.R. 334. Effective compensation for Agent Orange/dioxin victims is a moral imperative.

Marjorie Cohn http://marjoriecohn.com/, a veteran of the antiwar movement, is on the national advisory board of Veterans for Peace. She is co-author (with Kathleen Gilberd) of “Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent” https://www.amazon.com/Rules- Disengagement-Marjorie-Cohn/ dp/0981576923/ref=sr_1_1?s= books&ie=UTF8&qid=1507478600& sr=1-1&keywords=rules+of+ disengagement. And she served as one of seven judges from three continents at the International Peoples’ Tribunal of Conscience in Support of the Vietnamese Victims of Agent Orange http://www.vn-agentorange.org/ paris_2009_tribunal_ execsummary.html, held in Paris in 2009.

Jonathan Moore was one of the attorneys who filed a lawsuit to gain compensation for Vietnamese who were exposed to Agent Orange/dioxin. Cohn and Moore are co-coordinators of the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief & Responsibility Campaign http://www.vn-agentorange.org.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-vietnam-war-is-not-history-for-victims-of-agent-orange/5612535

By Eric Zuesse

To say that the U.S. public don’t care if ‘news’media lie, is shocking, but I shall here present evidence that it actually is true — not in some mere theory, but in empirical fact.

A typical example of Americans not caring about the truthfulness, nor even about the honesty, of their sources of alleged ‘news’, is that, during the period of October 3rd through the 5th, there were two news-reports both of which were true, but which, when taken together, display the total disconnect between newsmedia-honesty, on the one hand, and the confidence that the American people have in the nation’s ‘news’media, on the other.

One of these two news-reports was published on October 5th by the anonymous blogger who has come to be, amongst readers who closely follow and investigate the war in Syria, the most-trusted source of reporting on it, and the article was headlined, “Russia Issues Third Warning Against U.S. Cooperation With Terrorists”, and it provided links to each of the three recent instances in which the U.S. Government was cooperating with ISIS to defeat Syria and its defender Russia, in Syria. It summarily described the ways in which the U.S. had been exposed (but not by U.S. ‘news’media) as having been providing vital intelligence and other crucial assistance to ISIS, in ISIS’s efforts to overthrow and replace the existing Syrian Government (headed by Bashar al-Assad). That report should be read by anyone who proceeds further here, because it covers events that were certainly of top international importance and that might even precipitate war between the U.S. and Russia, but which were reported little if at all in U.S. ’news’media.

Of course, it would be very bad for U.S. ’news’media to allow the U.S. to become involved in a nuclear war against Russia and to have hidden, from the American public, the U.S. Government’s provocations which had produced such a war. The U.S. here was helping ISIS kill Russian and Syrian soldiers in Syria, who are trying to eradicate ISIS and all other jihadist groups there (including Al Qaeda etc.). Obviously, ISIS is not popular amongst the American public; and, for the United States to be constantly condemning ISIS in public, while secretly assisting ISIS to kill Russian troops and Syrian Government troops inside Syria (whose Government had invited Russia into the war to assist it to survive the onslaughts from ISIS and from the other U.S.-backed fundamentalist-Sunni jihadist groups who are backed also by Saudi Arabia and by some other fundamentalist-Islamic Sunni governments, as well as by the U.S. Government), would be disapproved of by the American people, if they were to have been informed of it. Some Americans would even be disturbed to recognize that the U.S. and its allies in Syria are all invaders there, very unlike those Russian troops are, because Russians are allies of the existing government — quite the opposite of invaders (such as the U.S. and its allies there). Some Americans dislike not only ISIS, but invaders and invasions, on basic principle. But American ‘news’media are very supportive of all of the U.S. Government’s invasions — Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc. So, that was a very important article about very important matters that are being hidden from the U.S. public by the U.S. ‘news’ media.

The other news-report was from Reuters, and it headlined, on October 3rd, “The press, branded the ‘enemy’ by Trump, increasingly trusted by the public: Reuters/Ipsos poll”.

The report about the three warnings from Russia, proves (as do many other evidences) the deceit, the selective covering-up of crucial facts, by the U.S. press. It’s not a “press” in the democratic sense, but instead a pro-invasion propaganda-operation — it is a propaganda-operation (as that October 5th article proved, and I have documented also many times, such as here, here, and here). However, Reuters reports that “The poll of more than 14,300 people found that the percentage of adults who said they had a “great deal” or “some” confidence in the press rose to 48 percent in September from 39 percent last November.”

How much sheer lying has been exposed (but not by the press) about America’s press, during that time? I, and many others who are not in the press, or who are no longer in the press, have reported plenty of it (such as I’ve linked-to here, and others are, in turn, additionally linked-to in each one of those articles about our scandalous American press-institution). Here, then, are a few of my own recent reports about important context for accurately interpreting this Reuters article, which is intentionally not mentioned (but is instead hidden) by Reuters:

One, just a few weeks ago, headlined “U.S. Near Bottom In Public Trust Of Newsmedia” and reported that:

“According to the most extensive study ever done of the public’s usages of, and trust in, the newsmedia in their country — a study that (in late January early February) scientifically sampled thousands of people in each one of 36 different industrialized countries — the United States scored #28, which was in the bottom 22% of all 36 nations, regarding the public’s trust of the newsmedia.”

That study was done by the Reuters Institute, under the title “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017”. That title was credited in my rews-report, as being its source; and, so, my article about the “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017” should show up in a Google seach for “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017”, but it does not (which raises a question about the search-engine). However one other news-report about the “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017” does show up in a google search of that title: the Irish Times headlined “Report shows trust in news higher in Ireland than International average”, and it opened:

“Irish people under the age of 35 are more likely to pay for online news, according to the latest Oxford Reuters Digital News Report published today. The report notes that, despite growing up with free online entertainment, younger people have developed the habit of paying for some media. In Ireland, the 18-24 and 25-34 age groups are most likely to pay for online news, at 12 per cent and 13 per cent respectively. Irish people have a strong interest in news and have higher levels of trust in the news media than the international average, according to the report.”

Furthermore, a duckduckgo.com search for that Reuters title, “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017” shows an article headlined “Media Coverage for the Digital News Report 2017”, and that’s a news-report from, and published by, the Reuters Institute itself; and you can see there what the titles are of the news-reports about it, which Reuters itself had found and reported in their own story, and none of those titles would be of any interest to the general public, all of those titles were published only in the trade press for the journalism industry and for the public relations (or propaganda) industry (it’s now actually one industry-group). The news-report that I had done, didn’t show up anywhere, but it was the only general-interest news-report that had been based upon that massive Reuters Institute study, the only report focusing on what is of general interest in it.
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All the rest of the ‘news’media had ignored it altogether; and, though I submitted that news-report, the only one ever about the general-interest findings contained in the “Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017,” to all U.S. general-interest ‘news’media, the only media which published it, were: washingtonsblog, informationclearinghouse, off-guardian, greanvillepost, and rinf, plus mirror-sites of any of those (all of which sites are even smaller than those). So, unless a person happens to follow those sites, the individual won’t know anything of the important findings in that massive Reuters study.

And, my news-report on it pointed out that the Reuters study showed far below-average public confidence in the ‘news’media by Americans as opposed to the global average. But when, just a few months later, Reuters did a story which showed that Americans’ trust in the ‘news’media had increased, that merited a Reuters news-story to the general press, even though their global study, which had been published just months earlier, and which showed widespread distrust by Americans of the ‘news’media as compared to the publics in other countries, Reuters informed only PR agencies and ‘journalism’ corporations and professors about that study, and without any indication ever to anyone that the distrust of the press by the publics in a few countries, such as France and America, was very high (and that it was astronomically high in Greece and in Korea — only 23% trust in each). The ‘news’media hide their rottennesses, instead of investigating and reporting them.

Obviously, the press does a big cover-up job on its own rottennesses, which are institutional, and not merely “a few bad apples.”

Other news-reports that I have done on this subject include, for example,  a report about how the press hid from the public the fact that when George W. Bush said on 7 September 2002 that the IAEA had found that Saddam Hussein was only six months from having a nuclear bomb, the press hid from the public the IAEA’s prompt and repeated statements that they had never issued any such finding or report at all. The invasion was based on such lies and cover-ups. After commonly repeated instances such as that, going on for so many years, and always hiding that the U.S. Government is lying in order to invade some country or other, why doesn’t the U.S. public yet recognize that the U.S. press is what one finds in a dictatorship such as the U.S. has been proven to be, and not an authentic journalistic institution at all. If the Greeks and Koreans have a 23% level of trust in their ‘news’media, is the only reason for Americans’ having a 38% level of trust (as shown on page 21) the U.S. media’s greater effectiveness at fooling its public?

This news-report will (as I routinely do) be submitted to all U.S. national ‘news’media for publication. How many do you think will publish it? And, how many of those will be major ‘news’media? Just google the headline here, “U.S. Public Don’t Care if ‘News’media Lie”, in order to find out which the honest few actually are. But don’t trust Google, either. The entire media-institution is rotten. And, it’s not because of errors. It’s because of the lies and the cover-ups, which are systematic, and which pump things to support the ideology that’s called “neoliberalism” in economics, and “neoconservatism” in foreign policies. It used to be called simply: “imperialism.” It’s the modern ideology of dictatorship. It’s the ideology of the American press, and that’s an overwhelmingly documented fact — no mere hypothesis, at all.

The U.S. ‘news’media drown the public in neoliberal-neoconservative propaganda. And that’s the reason why online-searching for this headline won’t find this article at the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, CNN, Slate, etc. — not at any of the ‘news’ media that pumped in 2002 and 2003 for invading Iraq. Nothing has changed about the U.S. press during at least the past 15 years. And the American public just don’t much care that they’re being constantly lied-to by the major ‘news’media and are voting on that deceived basis.

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

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/u-s-public-dont-care-if-news-media-lie/5612498

By Gaither Stewart

When in 1978 the 31-year old Afghan Communist politician-activist, Mohammad Najibullah, arrived in Tehran, “exiled” to neighboring Iran as Afghanistan’s Ambassador, I had just left Iran where I had worked throughout the year of 1977. Najibullah’s political party, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) had come to power in Kabul in April, 1978 in what is known as the Saur Revolution, the name of the month in the Afghan calendar when the Communist Revolution took place. Far from united, the PDPA was divided into two factions: the more revolutionary faction (Khalq-People’s) that first took power in Kabul in that crucial year of 1978 (crucial in both Afghanistan and Iran), preferred to have the charismatic Najibullah of the Parcham faction (Banner)of the PDPA far from the halls of power.

Moreover, the entire country was divided, much of it opposed to the Communist revolution. The chief resistance forces were the also divided,the U.S.-supported Mujahideen. One might conclude that the Afghan War was a proxy war, between the USSR and the USA, the USA to control these two contiguous countries near the top of the world, Iran and Afghanistan, both bordering the Islamic part of the Soviet Union; the Soviet Union to defend itself from incursions into its Islamic republics in Central Asia.

As subsequent history would show, Najibullah’s approach to resolving the civil war in Afghanistan was quite different from that of the PDPA faction heading the government which favored more rapid steps toward the realization of the socialist revolution. However, for the observer today, Najibullah’s more political National Reconciliation policy (which failed) between the government and the Mujahideen opposition and the clergy is a key to understanding not only contemporary Afghanistan but also Afghan-Soviet relations in general and the withdrawal of Soviet troops ordered by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989: the significance of the 10-year Soviet military presence in Afghanistan should not be underestimated.

Since 1979 the 110,000 Soviet troops had guaranteed the relative stability of the Afghan Communist PDPA government. Though the U.S.-backed Mujahideen guerrillas already controlled many parts of the country, they were unable to defeat government forces and dislodge the PDPA government in Kabul as long as Soviet troops were present. The Soviet leadership had to know that that stability would quickly break down when its last soldiers departed.

Things had begun changing with the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev to power in Moscow in 1986. Though Soviet-controlled Afghanistan was a dangerous place to be, one of Gorbachev’s gravest mistakes was to pull his troops out of Afghanistan in 1989, leaving Najibullah and his government to face the growing firepower of the Mujahideen … and the threat of U.S. intervention. The then President Najibullah understood this quite well and did all in his power to convince Soviet authorities to leave their troops in place.

IRAN

The Islamic Revolution in neighboring Iran—also in crucial 1978-79—resulted in the overthrow of the U.S.-supported Pahlavi dynasty at that time under Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The Iranian Revolution was a violent and widely popular overthrow of a ferocious U.S.-inspired regime installed after the CIA-organized overthrow of the democratically elected government led by Premier Mohammad Mossadegh on August 19, 1953. The initial success of the leftist forces in Iran’s Islamic revolution must have been an inspiration to Najibullah.

The oil boom in Iran of the 1970s had accelerated the gap between the rich and poor in both city and provinces. I had never seen such display of wealth as in the palatial mansions at the top of the city of Tehran where some the world’s richest people lived and whose excrements literally trickled down the stinking open sewage ditches running along the streets downhill to the poorest neighborhoods in the lower city …symbolic of the enormous disparity between rich and poor.

To be sure, as has been said time and again, inequality truly kills. Example: life expectancy in 1970 in pre-revolutionary Iran was 58%; today, 70%. In neighboring Syria, it was 70% in 1970. Moreover,adding to the widespread hate for the Shahinshah’s regime was the presence of tens of thousands of unpopular skilled foreign workers and foreign entrepreneurs like the one I was associated with in search of lucrative contracts in fields ranging from infrastructure construction to heavy industry, mining and even the production of tiles at which Persians were masters. Most Iranians were angered by the fact that the Shah’s family was the foremost beneficiary of the income generated by oil so that the line between state earnings and family earnings blurred. No one should believe that the last Pahlavi Shah was a benefactor of the Iranian people; he was a tyrant and, in effect, a U.S. puppet, a key part of U.S. efforts to control the entire region.

I was in Tehran during most of 1977 as an interpreter for a newly formed Italian company before being named its Iranian representative. Though I understand zilch about the business world I came to love Iran and its people and considered the proposed job an excellent short-term opportunity to learn the country. In that capacity I witnessed some of the demonstrations against the Shah that commenced in October 1977 since the hotel I lived in was in the lower town near Tehran University and foreign embassies, the area where major demonstrations took place. Marxist groups, primarily the Communist Tudeh Party and Fedaeen guerrillas, had been weakened considerably by the Shah’s repression. Despite this the leftist guerrillas played an important role in the final February 1979 overthrow of the Shah, delivering the coup de grace to the U.S. installed regime. Many of the most powerful guerrilla groups—the Mujahideen—were leftist but also Islamist even though they opposed the reactionary influence of the clergy.

Together with armed guerrilla of the People’s Fedaeen, remaining elements of the Tudeh Party, plus various Islamist groups and the powerful organization of the Bazaarists, the revolutionary movement developed from the general unrest in the country, widespread poverty and the terror of the notorious secret police, SAVAK. As protests grew in intensity in late 1977, I watched as people surrounded trucks carrying young army troops some of whom threw down their guns and jumped down to join the crowds. In other places instead a more hardened military opened fire and reports circulated of thousands of victims. At that point the company I was to work for collapsed and like many foreign entrepreneurs abandoned Iran.

I too returned to Rome from where I tried to follow events in Iran. The revolution itself emerged from the widespread civil resistance. Between August and December 1978 strikes and demonstrations paralyzed the country. The Shah left Iran on January 16, 1979. Invited back to Iran by the transitional government, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was greeted on his return to Tehran by millions of Iranians. Shortly after, the royal reign ended definitively when rebels overwhelmed troops loyal to the exiled Shah, bringing Khomeini to power. Iran voted in a national referendum to become an Islamic Republic on April 1, 1979.

At that time I knew little about the events underway in neighboring Afghanistan. I first became acquainted with the name Najibullah, when he headed the Communist Party in Kabul in the 1980s. With the support of the Soviet Union, he became President of Afghanistan in 1987… by the way the only period in my memory when any semblance of order existed in chaotic Afghanistan. Dr. Najibullah must have learned much from the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

KABUL

Though divided by internal conflict among the tribal peoples and by foreign intervention for centuries, Afghanistan had made some progress toward modernization by the 1950s and 60s, toward a more liberal and westernized lifestyle, but obligated to cater to the conservative factions. Exotic and Oriental Kabul at that time was an “in” place for the international elite who frequented Afghanistan to visit the soaring mountains of the Hindi Kush, the huge central area of Afghanistan, in a way truly the top of the world. After the assassination of his father, Mohammad Zahir Shah succeeded to the throne and reigned (not ruled) as monarch from 1933 to 1973. In 1964, he had promulgated a liberal constitution that produced few lasting reforms, but instead permitted the growth of unofficial extremist parties of both left and right. Because of the turbulence at home, the king went into exile in Italy in 1973 and lived in the Rome suburbs near my residence. I tried to get an interview with him but never got past his secretary-watch dog; he had allegedly survived an assassination attempt in 1991 so was extremely stingy with interviews.

Though officially neutral during the Cold War, Afghanistan was courted by both the USA and the Soviet Union: machinery and weapons from the USSR and financial aid from the USA.Progress was halted in the 1970s by a series of bloody coups and civil wars. One will be surprised that despite modernization, the average life expectancy for Afghans born in 1960 was 31.

Dr. Najib as Najibullah was called because he had a degree in medicine from Kabul University became the President of Afghanistan in 1987 at the age of 40. Born in 1947 in Gardiz, the son of a prominent Pashtun family, he joined the Parcham faction of the PDPA in 1965 at the age of 18, became an activist and was twice jailed for his militancy. His faction of the Communist PDPA was in disagreement with the Khalq over the proper path to Communism in Afghanistan, the Khalq favoring more rapid steps toward the realization of Socialism than the Parcham.

Since his return from exile in 1980, the longest and most important part of which was in Moscow, Dr. Najib headed the dreaded Khad, the secret police, during which time he personally acquired a reputation for brutality: torture and execution of the opposition was the norm, as its was in Iran, as in most of the world today. He had the close support—if not control—of the KGB. His Khad was modeled on the Soviet Committee of State Security (KGB), was militarized, grew in size to the point it allegedly had 300,000 troops, and was considered effective in the pacification of wide parts of the country.

MOSCOW

In an attempt to give the Afghan story a personal touch, I have added this curious historical coincidence. I moved to The Netherlands in 1978 where I broke into Dutch journalism with articles about Iran. As a result of published articles in the press and my stay in Tehran I somehow became an advisor to a prominent TV producer who at the time was working on a series of specials on Iran. Since I had studied Turkish at Munich University and had become interested in the Soviet Central Asian republics, the former Russian Turkestan, especially Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikstan which border northern Afghanistan, I proposed a series of colorful reportages on landmarks in the Central Asian republics such as Samarkand and Bokhara. So in late spring of 1978, armed with a stack of Dutch TV credentials I set out for Moscow.The plan was to interest Soviet television in a cooperative effort.

I finally met with a person at the Ostankino TV center and presented the idea of a cooperative production of Soviet and Dutch television about Soviet Central Asia. In retrospect I came to understand that Moscow TV people must have thought I was insane: an American representing Dutch television proposes a joint TV production about the vast area bordering with Afghanistan and the Soviet-backed Communist government in Kabul in a struggle with a U.S.-backed opposition. Ludicrous. Moreover, and unbeknownst to me, Najibullah was also present in Moscow lobbying for a Soviet intervention in his country to bolster the Communist government in Kabul while I was proposing a TV production about areas between Moscow and Afghanistan. Soviet TV people were not interested and I instead cut a ridiculous figure, while Dr. Najib’s contacts were extremely interested in his proposals and in him personally. His major sponsor was the powerful KGB, a relationship which lasted until the bitter end of his life.The documentary series I proposed was about the lands over which Soviet tanks and armored cars would pass not many months ahead  on their way to Afghanistan, accompanied also by the young Afghan political figure, Mohammad Najibullah.

KABUL

Once back in Kabul, Dr. Najib became the director of Khad, the secret police, which operated under Soviet control. Not only an intelligence organization, it was a military force. It had tanks, armored vehicles and helicopters. A state within the state, Khad was charged with both counter-intelligence activities and intelligence gathering to eliminate active and potential opponents and counterrevolutionaries. Dr. Najib might have taken his cue from Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Cheka, the predecessor of the KGB. On how to combat counter-revolutionaries, Dzerzhinsky said in 1918:

“Don’t think that I seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not now in need of justice. It is war now—face to face, a fight to the finish. Life or death.”

That was also the belief of Che Guevara decades later. And that must have been the guideline for Mohammad Najibullah, who reigned with an iron fist over Khad from 1980 until he became head of the party and President of Afghanistan in 1987.

Once in power, Dr. Najib undertook his National Reconciliation policies. He eliminated the word Communist and references to Marxism from a new Constitution in 1990, labeled Afghanistan an Islamic Republic (as in Iran), introduced a multiparty system, freedom of speech and an independent judiciary. Yet the Mujahideen—which controlled wide parts of the country—refused to join in. With U.S. and western support the fanatical Taliban (religious students) emerged and conquered the country. When in 1992 they took Kabul, Dr. Najib found refuge in the United Nations compound where he lived until 1996. On September 27 the Taliban took Najibullah from his refuge, castrated him, dragged him behind a car over Kabul streets, finished him with a gunshot and hung his body from a traffic post.

In conclusion, some results of the Thirty Years War in Afghanistan are clear: the USA dream of control of these lands at the top of the world, in Afghanistan and Iran, was shattered. I tend to think of Iran and Afghanistan together. Twenty-five years of oppression and exploitation were too much for Iranians who rose up, made a revolution, and ousted America. Russia too lost something in Iran while Ayatollah Khomeini ruled; now that has been overcome and Russia and Iran are today allies … against aggressive Yankee imperialism. Iran was thus lost to the USA but Afghanistan seemed and perhaps in the minds of some

Neocons continues to be a promising alternative. No oil but lots of poppies and valuable land and location. Soviet Russia had dreamed of a Soviet-friendly progressive Afghanistan to protect and secure its vast Islamic regions extending from the Caucuses to the Far East. It failed to quell the ruly, untamable Afghans as Americans cannot still today. Though U.S.-supported Mujahideen could not defeat in battle the Soviet-supported government in Kabul in the 1980s, it at least convinced the Russians to abandon a lost mission and to leave, a lesson that the USA has continued to learn and unlearn for 16 years. On the flimsiest of excuses it too invaded indomitable Afghanistan in 2001 after 11 September … andis still there flailing at windmills, unable to completely abandon another lost war.

Dr. Najib is gone. The dream of a Communist Afghanistan is gone. The Soviet Union itself is gone. But a defeated America still hangs on in a tiny portion of the complex country of Afghanistan.

Gaither Stewart is a veteran journalist, his dispatches on politics, literature, and culture, have been published (and translated) on many leading online and print venues.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/afghanistan-us-sponsored-al-qaeda-freedom-fighters-were-used-to-railroad-the-formation-of-a-secular-socialist-government/5612543

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

“The Sociology of Justice”, which is the timely theme of The Philippine Sociological Society’s 2017 National conference at UP Cebu must be understood in relation to an unfolding New World Order which destroys sovereign countries through acts of war and “regime change”.

In turn, large sectors of the World population are impoverished through the concurrent imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms. This New World Order feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women.

October 7, 2017 marks the 16th anniversary of the October 7, 2001 illegal US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. Michel Chossudovsky, University of the Philippines, Cebu, October 7, 2017

We are at the juncture of the most serious crisis in modern history.

In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, in the largest display of military might since the Second World War, the US has embarked upon a military adventure which threatens the future of humanity.

War is presented as a peace-making undertaking. The justification for these US-led wars is the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) with a view to instilling (Trump style) Western “democracy” Worldwide.

Global warfare sustains the neoliberal agenda. War and globalization are intricately related.

What we are dealing with is an imperial project broadly serving global economic and financial interests including Wall Street, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Oil, the Biotech conglomerates, Big Pharma, The Global Narcotics Economy  and the Media  and Information Giants.

Also, September 11, 2001 followed by the invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, also marks the official launch of the so-called “global war on terrorism” which has served as a justification for US-NATO led wars and interventions in the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and South East Asia.

The Global War on Terrorism is Fake

Amply documented, Al Qaeda and its various affiliates including ISIS-Daesh are creations of US intelligence.

Pre-emptive Nuclear Doctrine

Meanwhile, a major shift in US nuclear doctrine has occurred with the adoption of the doctrine of preemptive warfare, namely war as an instrument of  “self defense”. The ideology of preemptive warfare also applies to the use of nuclear weapons on a pre-emptive basis. In 2002, the US administration put forth the concept of preemptive nuclear war, namely the use of nuclear weapons against enemies of America as a means of self defense.

The Trump administration is openly threatening the World with nuclear war. How to confront the diabolical and absurd proposition put forth by the US administration that the use of nuclear weapons against Iran or North Korea will  “make the World a safer place”?

Where is the Antiwar Movement?

Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the antiwar movement is dead.  Piece-meal activism often funded by Wall Street prevails, focussing narrowly on environmental concerns, climate change, racism, civil rights. Invariably war and the extensive war crimes committed by US-NATO as part of an alleged counterterrorism agenda are not the object of organized public dissent. The motto is a non sequitur: “we are against war, but we support the war on terrorism.”

War propaganda prevails, thereby providing a human face to US-NATO atrocities and human rights violations. In turn, the governments of the countries which are the object of US aggression, are casually accused of killing their own people.

Media disinformation turns realties upside down. North Korea is not a threat to global security. Belgium with 20 B61 tactical nukes deployed under national command has a larger arsenal than the DPRK (allegedly 4 nuclear bombs).

These B61 nuclear bombs in five undeclared European nuclear weapons states (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Turkey) are targeted at both Russia and the Middle East.

The mainstream media has failed to warn public opinion that a US led nuclear attack against North Korea or Iran could evolve towards World War III, which in the words of Albert Einstein would be “terminal”, leading to the destruction of humanity.

“Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbor the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.

In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!”  (Fidel Castro Ruz, Conversations with Michel Chossudovsky, October 12-15, 2010)

I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. (Albert Einstein)

The anti-war movement is dead, nuclear war is not front page news.

The justification of America’s long war is to “make the world safer”.

War is presented as a humanitarian endeavor. Global Security requires going after al Qaeda as part of an alleged counter-terrorism campaign.

The world is led to believe that  the Islamic State and Al Qaeda are threatening the World. The truth is that Al Qaeda and its  numerous affiliates  as well as the Islamic State (ISIS-Daesh) are without exception creations of US intelligence. They are intelligence assets.

When a US sponsored nuclear war becomes an “instrument of peace”, condoned and accepted by the World’s institutions and the highest authority including the United Nations, there is no turning back: human society has indelibly been precipitated headlong onto the path of self-destruction.

From Colonialism to Post-Colonialism

Post-colonial history is a continuation of colonial history which established America’s contemporary imperial agenda, largely as a result of the displacement and defeat by the US of the former colonial powers (e.g. Spain, France, Japan, Netherlands). This US hegemonic project largely consists in transforming sovereign countries into open territories, controlled by dominant economic and financial interests. Military, intelligence as well economic instruments are used to carry out this hegemonic project.

Militarization marked by more than 700 US military bases and facilities worldwide under the unified combatant command structure indelibly supports a global economic agenda.

Moreover, this military deployment is supported by US macro-economic policy which imposes austerity on all categories of civil expenditure with a view to releasing the funds required to finance America’s military arsenal and war economy.

Military intervention and regime change initiatives including CIA sponsored military coups and “color revolutions” are broadly supportive of the neoliberal policy agenda which has been imposed on indebted developing countries Worldwide.

The Globalization of Poverty

The “globalization of poverty” in the post-colonial era is the direct result of the imposition of deadly macroeconomic reforms under IMF-World Bank jurisdiction. The Bretton Woods institutions are instruments of Wall Street and the corporate establishment.

The time path of these reforms –which has led to a process of global economic restructuring– is of crucial significance. The early 1980s marks the onslaught of the so-called structural adjustment program (SAP) under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank. “Policy conditionalities” largely directed against indebted Third World countries are used as a means of intervention, whereby the Washington based International Financial Institutions (IFI) impose a set menu of deadly economic policy reforms including austerity, privatization, the phasing out of social programs, trade reforms, compression of real wages, etc.

It is worth noting that a parallel process of neoliberal economic reform –which largely consisted in privatizing as well gradually dismantling the welfare state– was instigated in the 1980s in the US and Britain under what was described as the Reagan-Thatcher era.

Post-Cold War Era Reforms

A second phase of economic restructuring commences at the end of the Cold War with drastic economic reform packages imposed on Eastern Europe and the Baltic States, the Balkans as well as on the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union (e.g. Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan).

Concurrently in Western Europe the Maastricht Treaty –which came into force in 1993– was imposed on the member states of the European Union. What was referred to as the The Maastricht criteria (or  convergence criteria) which eventually led to the formation of the eurozone largely consisted in imposed the neoliberal policy agenda on the EU member states. These Maastricht criteria also served to derogate the sovereignty of individual member states.

Maastricht is a structural adjustment program (SAP) in disguise. Essentially Maastricht and the subsequent instatement of the eurozone contributed to paralyzing national monetary policy, foreclosing the use of internal public debt operations as an instrument of national economic development. The requirements of budgetary austerity imposed under the “Maastricht criteria” limited EU member states ability to finance their social programs leading to the gradual demise of the post World War II welfare state. The public debt is taken over by the European Central Bank (ECB) as well as private creditors.  The longer term impacts are mounting external debts as well as debt conditionalities and the repayment of debt from the proceeds of an extensive privatization program.

It should be mentioned that this phase of restructuring also coincides with the inauguration of the World Trade Organization (1995) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which has been conducive to a dramatic  transformation of the North American economic landscape, leading to the demise of regional and local level economies throughout North America.

In turn, the 1990s coincides with an extension and expansion of NATO, including massive “defense” expenditures which are not the object of neoliberal austerity measures. In fact quite the opposite. Neoliberalism feeds the Military Industrial Complex.

What is at stake is the “Thirdworldization” of the so-called developed countries leading to mass unemployment in several EU countries including Spain, Portugal and Greece, whose economies are now subjected to same IMF style reforms as those applied in Third World countries. What this signifies is that the Globalization of Poverty has extended its grip, leading to the impoverishment not only of the former Soviet block countries and the Balkans but also of the so-called high income countries of Western Europe.

More generally, the 1990s coinciding with NATO’s “humanitarian” war against Yugoslavia is the launchpad of NATO’s military buildup as well as  the globalization of NATO beyond it’s North Atlantic boundaries in the post Cold War era.

The Asian crisis of 1997-98 also marks an important threshold in the evolution of the neoliberal economic framework, pointing to the ability through speculative manipulations of foreign exchange and commodity market to literally destabilize the national economy of targeted countries. In this regard, institutional speculators have now the ability of artificially pushing up the price of food staples, or pushing up or down the price of crude oil.

The Global Cheap Labor Economy

The neoliberal agenda characterized by the imposition of strong “economic medicine” (austerity measures, freeze on wages, privatisation, repeal of social programs) has in the course of the last 30 years supported the extensive delocation of manufacturing to cheap labor (low wage) havens in developing countries. It has also served to impoverish both the developing and developed countries.

“Poverty is good for business.” It promotes the supply of cheap labor commodities worldwide in industry as well as in sections of the services economy.

This global process of economic restructuring (which has reached new heights) relies on compressing wages and the cost of labor worldwide while at the same time reducing the purchasing power of hundreds of millions of people. This compression of consumer demand ultimately triggers recession and rising unemployment.

The low wage economy is supported by exceedingly high levels of unemployment, which in developing countries are also the result of the destruction of the regional and local production not to mention the destabilization of the rural economy. This “reserve army on unemployed” (Marx) contributes to keeping wages down to their bare minimum.

China is the most important haven of cheap labor industrial assembly with 275 million migrant workers (according to official Chinese sources). Ironically, the West’s former colonies, as well as countries which are the victims of US military aggression and war crimes (e.g. Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia) have been transformed into cheap labor havens. The conditions prevailing in the aftermath of the Vietnam war were in large part instrumental in the imposition of the neoliberal agenda starting in the early 1990s.

Cheap labor is also exported from impoverished countries (India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Indonesia, etc)  and used in the construction industry as well as in the services economy.

High levels of unemployment serve to maintain wages at an exceedingly low levels

Aggregate Demand

This global economic restructuring has been conducive to a dramatic increase in poverty and unemployment. While poverty is an input on the supply side favoring low levels of wages, the global cheap labor economy inevitably leads to a collapse in purchasing power, which in turn serves to increase the levels of unemployment.

Cheap labor and the compression of purchasing is the mainstay of neoliberalism. The transition from demand oriented Keynesian policies in the 1970s to the neoliberal macro-ecoomic agenda in the 1980s. The neoliberal economic policy agenda applied Worldwide sustains the global cheap labor economy. With the demise of demand oriented policies, neoliberalism emerges as the dominant economic paradigm.

Structural Adjustment in the Developed Economies

This generalized collapse in living standards which is the product of a macroeconomic agenda, is no longer limited to the so-called developing countries. Mass unemployment prevails in the United States, several EU countries including Spain, Portugal, Greece are experiencing exceedingly high levels of unemployment. Concurrently, the revenues of the middle class are being compressed, social programs are privatised, social safety nets including unemployment insurance benefits and social welfare programs are being curtailed.

Underconsumption

The generalized collapse of purchasing power is conducive to a recession in the consumer goods industry. Commodity production is not geared towards the basic necessities of life (food, housing, social services, etc) for the majority of the World’s population. There is a dichotomy between “those who work” in the cheap labor economy and “those who consume”.

The fundamental injustice of this global economic system is that “those who work” cannot afford to purchase what they produce. In other words, neoliberalism does not promote mass consumption. Quite the opposite: the development of extreme social inequalities both within and between countries ultimately leads to recession in the production of necessary goods and services (including food, social housing, public health, education).

The lack of purchasing power of “those who produce” (not to mention those who are unemployed) leads to a collapse in aggregate demand. In turn, there is surge in the demand for “high end luxury consumption” (broadly defined)  by the upper income strata of society.

Weapons and Luxury Goods. The Two Dynamic Sectors of the Global Economy

Essentially, while global poverty contributes to underconsumption by the large majority of the World’s population, the driving force of economic growth are the upper income markets (deluxe brand names, travel and leisure, luxury cars, electronics, private schools and clinics, etc).

The global cheap labor economy triggers poverty and underconsumption of necessary goods and services.

The two dynamic sectors of the global economy are

1. Production for the upper income strata of society.

2. The production and consumption of weapons, namely the military industrial complex.

Neoliberal policy  is conducive to the development of a global cheap labor economy which triggers decline in the production of necessary consumer goods (Marx’s Department IIa).

In turn, the lack of demand for necessary goods and services triggers a vacuum in the development of social infrastructure and investments (schools, hospitals, public transportation, public health, etc) in support of the standard of living of the large majority of world population.

The global cheap labor economy alongside the restructuring of the global financial apparatus creates an unprecedented concentration of income and wealth which is accompanied by the dynamic development of the luxury goods economy (broadly defined) (Marx’s Department IIb) .

Department III in the contemporary global economy is the production of weapons, which are sold Worldwide largely to governments. This sector of production in the US is dominated by a handful of large corporations including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, British Aerospace, Boeing, et al.

While neoliberal policies require the imposition of drastic austerity measures, the latter apply solely to the civilian sectors of government spending. State funding of advanced weapons systems is not the object of budgetary constraints.

In fact, the austerity measures imposed on health, education, public infrastructure, etc, are intended to facilitate the financing of the war economy, including the military industrial complex, the regional command structure consisting of 700 US military facilities Worldwide, the intelligence and security apparatus, not to mention the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons which is the object of a one trillion dollar allocation by the US Treasury to the US Defense Department. This money is ultimately trickles down to the so-called defense contractors, which constitute a powerful political lobby.

The reproduction of this global economic system is dependent upon the growth and development of two major sectors (departments): the Military Industrial Complex and the Production of High Income and Luxury Consumption.

High income luxury consumption for the upper social strata is combined with the dynamic development of the weapons industry and the war economy. This duality is what generates exclusion and despair.

It can only be broken and dispelled through the criminalization of war, the closure of the weapons industry and the repeal of the gamut of neoliberal policy instruments which generate poverty and social inequality.

How to Reverse The Tide of War and Globalization

The people’s movement had been hijacked. The antiwar movement is defunct. The civil society organisations which have all the appearances of being “progressive” are creatures of the system. Funded by corporate charities linked to Wall Street, they form part of a politically correct “Opposition” which acts as “a spokesperson for civil society”.

But who do they represent? Many of the “partner NGOs” and lobby groups which frequently mingle with bureaucrats and politicians, have few contacts with grass-roots social movements and people’s organisations. In the meantime, they serve to deflect the articulation of “real” social movements against the New World Order.” While the neoliberal paradigm is the focus of their attention, the broader issues of war and regime change are rarely addressed.

The programs of many NGOs and people’s movements rely heavily on funding from both public as well as private foundations including the Ford, Rockefeller, McCarthy foundations, among others.

The anti-globalization movement is opposed to Wall Street and the Texas oil giants controlled by Rockefeller, et al. Yet the foundations and charities of Rockefeller et al will generously fund progressive anti-capitalist networks as well as environmentalists (opposed to Big Oil) with a view to ultimately overseeing and shaping their various activities.

The mechanisms of “manufacturing dissent” require a manipulative environment, a process of arm-twisting and subtle cooptation of individuals within progressive organizations, including anti-war coalitions, environmentalists and the anti-globalization movement.

The objective of the corporate elites has been to fragment the people’s movement into a vast “do it yourself” mosaic. War and globalization are no longer in the forefront of civil society activism. Activism tends to be piecemeal. There is no integrated anti-globalization anti-war movement. The economic crisis is not seen as having a relationship to the US led war.

Dissent has been compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, climate change) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement. This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits as well as the World Social Forum.

The Development of a Broad Grassroots Network

What is required is ultimately to break the “controlled opposition” through the development of a broad based grassroots network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making pertaining both to war and the neoliberal policy agenda. It is understood that US military deployments  (including nuclear weapons) are ultimately used in support of powerful economic interests.

This network would be established at all levels in society, towns and villages, work places, parishes both nationally and internationally  Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a means to breaking the legitimacy of war among service men and women.

The first task would be to disable war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation. The corporate media would be directly challenged, leading to boycotts of major news outlets, which are responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain.  This endeavor would require a parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of  the war and the global economic crisis, as well as effectively “spreading the word” through advanced networking, through alternative media outlets on the internet, etc.

The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political authority, is no easy task. It would require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It would also require eventually unseating the war criminals, and indicting them for war crimes.

Text of Michel Chossudovsky’s keynote address to the Philippine Sociological Society (PSS) National Conference, University of the Philippines, Cebu, October 7, 2017.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/from-global-poverty-to-exclusion-and-despair-reversing-the-tide-of-war-and-globalization/5611619

By Colin Todhunter

The increasingly globalised industrial food system that transnational agribusiness promotes is not feeding the world and is responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises. Localised, traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalisation.

Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina or palm oil production in Indonesia, transnational agribusiness and global capitalism cannot be greenwashed.

In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate PR, many take as given that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. There is the premise that water, seeds, land, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful, corrupt transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

These natural assets (‘the commons’) belong to everyone and any stewardship should be carried out in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf, not by private transnational corporations driven by self-interest and the maximization of profit by any means possible.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot notes the vast wealth the economic elite has accumulated at our expense through its seizure of the commons. A commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit but for the steady production of prosperity or wellbeing of a particular group, who might live in or beside it or who created and sustain it.

Unlike state spending, according to Monbiot, a commons obliges people to work together, to sustain their resources and decide how the income should be used. It gives community life a clear focus and depends on democracy in its truest form. However, the commons have been attacked by both state power and capitalism for centuries. In effect, resources that no one invented or created, or that a large number of people created together, are stolen by those who see an opportunity for profit.

We need only look at how Cargill captured the edible oils processing sector in India and in the process put many thousands of village-based workers out of work. Or how Monsanto conspired to design a system of intellectual property rights that allowed it to patent seeds as if it had manufactured and invented them. Or how India’s indigenous peoples have been forcibly ejected from their ancient forest lands due to state’s collusion with mining companies.

As Monbiot says, the outcome is a rentier economy: those who capture essential resources seek to commodify them – whether trees for timber, land for real estate or agricultural seeds, for example – and force everyone else to pay for access.

While spouting platitudes about ‘choice’, ‘democracy’ and ‘feeding the world’, the corporate agribusiness/agritech industry is destroying the commons and democracy and displacing existing localised systems of production.

“[Economies are being] opened up through the concurrent displacement of pre-existing productive systems. Small and medium-sized enterprises are pushed into bankruptcy or obliged to produce for a global distributor, state enterprises are privatised or closed down, independent agricultural producers are impoverished” (Michel Chossudovsky in The Globalization of Poverty, p16).

As described here, for thousands of years farmers experimented with different plant and animal specimens acquired through migration, trading networks, gift exchanges or accidental diffusion. By learning and doing, trial and error, new knowledge was blended with older, traditional knowledge systems. The farmer possesses acute observation, good memory for detail and transmission through teaching and story-telling. The same farmers whose seeds and knowledge were stolen by corporations to be bred for proprietary chemical-dependent hybrids, now to be genetically engineered

Large corporations with their proprietary seeds and synthetic chemical inputs have eradicated traditional systems of seed exchange. They have effectively hijacked seeds, pirated germ plasm that farmers developed over millennia and have ‘rented’ the seeds back to farmers. Genetic diversity among food crops has been drastically reduced, and we have bad food and diets, degraded soils, water pollution and scarcity and spiralling rates of poor health.

The eradication of seed diversity went much further than merely prioritising corporate seeds: the Green Revolution deliberately sidelined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding.

We have witnessed a change in farming practices towards mechanised industrial-scale chemical-intensive monocropping, often for export or for far away cities rather than local communities, and ultimately the undermining or eradication of self-contained rural economies, traditions and cultures. We now see food surplus in the West and food deficit areas in the Global South and a globalised geopoliticised system of food and agriculture.

In India, Green Revolution technology and ideology has merely served to undermine indigenous farming sectors centred on highly productive small farms that catered for the diverse dietary needs and climatic conditions of the country. It has actually produced and fuelled drought and degraded soils and has contributed towards illnesses and malnutrition, farmer distress and many other problems.

What really irks the corporate vultures which fuel the current industrial model of agriculture is that critics are offering genuine alternatives. They advocate a shift towards more organic-based systems of agriculture, which includes providing support to small farms and an agroecology movement that is empowering to people politically, socially and economically.

Agroecology: taking back power

Much has been written about agroecology, its successes and the challenges it faces (see this, this and this). A prominent strand of the agroecological movement regards this model of agriculture as a force for radical change. It offers a political-economical critique of modern agriculture and the vested interests that determine it.

In this respect, Food First Executive Director Eric Holtz-Gimenez argues that agroecology offers concrete, practical solutions to many of the world’s problems that move beyond (but which are linked to) agriculture. In doing so, it challenges – and offers alternatives to – the prevailing moribund doctrinaire economics and outright plunder of a neoliberalism that in turn drives a failing system of GM/chemical-intensive industrial agriculture.

The scaling up of agroecology can tackle hunger, malnutrition, environmental degradation and climate change. By creating securely paid labour-intensive agricultural work, it can also address the interrelated links between labour offshoring by rich countries and the removal of rural populations elsewhere who end up in sweat shops to carry out the outsourced jobs: the two-pronged process of neoliberal globalisation that has devastated the economies of the US and UK and which is displacing existing indigenous food production systems and undermining the rural infrastructure in places like India to produce a reserve army of cheap labour.

The Declaration of the International Forum for Agroecology by Nyeleni in 2015 argued for building grass-root local food systems that create new rural-urban links, based on truly agroecological food production. It went on to say that agroecology should not become a tool of the industrial food production model but as the essential alternative to that model. The Declaration stated that agroecology is political and requires local producers and communities to challenge and transform structures of power in society, not least by putting the control of seeds, biodiversity, land and territories, waters, knowledge, culture and the commons in the hands of those who feed the world.

The more the power structures that shape modern agriculture are understood and the consequent devastating effects are made public, the more urgent the need becomes to establish societies run for the benefit of the mass of the population, and that means a system of food and agriculture that is democratically owned and controlled. This involves prioritising localised rural and urban food economies and small farms (both rural and urban) that should be shielded from the effects of rigged trade and international markets. It would mean that what ends up in our food and how it is grown is determined by the public good and not powerful private interests, which are driven by commercial gain and their compulsion to subjugate farmers, consumers and entire regions, while playing the victim each time campaigners challenge their actions.

There are enough examples from across the world that serve as models for transformation, from farming in socialist Cuba to grass-root movements centred on agroecology in Africa and India.

Agroecology must be regarded as a key form of resistance by food producers and both urban and rural communities to an increasingly globalised economic system that puts profit before the environment. Whether in Europe, Africa, India or the US, agroecology can protect and reassert the commons and is a force for grass-root change that should not be co-opted, diluted or subverted by the cartel of powerful biotech/agribusiness companies. This model of agriculture is already providing real solutions for sustainable, productive agriculture that prioritise the needs of farmers, consumers and the environment.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-battle-against-the-global-food-conglomerates-the-seeds-of-agroecology-and-common-ownership/5612557

By Amelia Smith

“This village is a Muslim-free zone,” reads a sign hanging at the entrance to a village in an area of Myanmar outside Rakhine state. The orders are directed at the country’s Rohingya population, an ethnic group of around 1.3 million that live mainly in Rakhine and who have been described as the “world’s most persecuted minority”.

It’s not difficult to see why. Since 1992 the Burmese government has imposed heavy restrictions on the Rohingyas. If they want to travel from one town to the other they have to pass immigration checkpoints and to do so the administration must grant them permission.

Because requests are regularly turned down the Rohingyas have become isolated within their own country:

“They’ve kept us in an open air prison for more than 25 years. Since 1978 they are propagating and they are brain washing the public that these people are invading the country, that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh,” says Nay San Lwin, an activist and blogger who has adopted the prefix “Ro” on social media to identify himself as Rohingya.
“This is our own native land,” he continues. “We gave them an open channel to debate with us but nobody dares to debate with us because they know they are lying.”

“We entered the Rakhine land before the seventh century, then the Rakhine Buddhists invaded us in the eleventh century. Those living in the southern part were driven out from the southern side to the northern side. [Then they said] these people are invading our country from the northern side. It’s similar to Israel and Palestine’s history, as we know Palestinians became like the immigrants.”

As Muslims the Rohingya already live in a majority Buddhist country but the military, says San Lwin, want Myanmar to be “pure Buddhist”. To achieve this they stoke tension between the Buddhists and Muslims and try and force the Rohingya to flee:

“Rakhine has two or three insurgency groups fighting for the land. The Burmese government always creates communal problems and keeps them busy so they are always fighting with the Muslims and they have no time to fight with the Burmese government.”

In addition to this Rohingyas are barred from entering certain professions; they are discriminated against in the education system, in health services and when they are practicing their religion.

When Myanmar won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1948 the Rohingya were recognised as an official ethnic group and enjoyed full citizenship rights. But in 1974 the government launched operation Jasmine and took away their citizenship and national registration cards.

After it had effectively rendered them stateless some 270,000 Rohingyas fled the country. Under the 1982 citizenship law the government asked everybody to apply for a new citizenship card, many of which were refused on the basis that Myanmar did not recognise them as one of its 135 ethnic groups.

In 2001 San Lwin left Myanmar legally to work in Saudi Arabia because back then his parents were officials of the state and had citizenship. But eventually the embassy stopped renewing his passport, he became stateless, and he migrated to Europe.

A particularly vicious wave of violence against the Rohingya began in August this year when the military launched an “anti-terror” operation, beating, raping, shooting and torturing Rohingyas and burning down their villages.

If you count the Rohingyas who have previously fled the country, there are now roughly 800,000 who are seeking refuge in neighbouring Bangladesh. Videos posted on social media capture hundreds of Rohingyas walking through mud and water barefoot, their possessions gathered in bundles on their back.

Much of the anger has been directed at Myanamar’s de facto leader and Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who has failed to condemn the army’s abuses and has instead labelled the Rohingya terrorists, argued that the military are victims of a misinformation campaign and even accused women of reporting fake rapes.

Suu Kyi seems to be indifferent to her long fall from grace. Over 400,000 people have signed an online petition to strip her of her peace prize, led by those who campaigned for her release in the late eighties when she was held under house arrest for her efforts to bring democracy to a country living under a military dictatorship and was consequently revered as a symbol of peace.

“She was my hero too in the past,” San Lwin tells me. “We supported her, all Rohingya supported her; our expectation was that the Rohingya’s situation would change if she got into power. But sadly the opposite is happening. We did many campaigns when she was under house arrest – demonstrations in UK and France, online petitions, we celebrated her birthday.”

When Suu Kyi founded the National League for Democracy (NLD) party in 1988 many Rohingyas joined her party in northern Rakhine state, San Lwin tells me. In the 1990 election four candidates from northern Rakhine stood but they didn’t win mainly because the Rohingyas had their own political party.

“All the Rohingya members got their identity cards from the party and on those cards the Rohingya name was clearly mentioned. Now all those party members are denied their existence,” he says.

Between 1948 and 2015 Rohingyas enjoyed their full voting rights and were elected into parliament. Whilst Suu Kyi was under house arrest one of the founders of the NLD branch in Buthidaung Township, U Kyaw Maung, was arrested repeatedly by military intelligence and tortured to death for refusing to resign from the party.

San Lwin doesn’t think there are any Rohingya left who still support Suu Kyi:

“She never took the side of the Rohingya people or the other ethnic minorities. She doesn’t want to lose her position because she struggled for many, many years to get this position, that’s the reason she’s not condemning [the violence]. On the other hand she’s taken the side of the military, which means she’s against us. Also she’s denying our existence.”

On the whole, news coverage in the West of the latest atrocities have been pretty accurate, reckons San Lwin. However India – where Islamophobia is rising and hate crimes against Muslims are increasing – is pumping out a lot of fake news whilst China is simply a propaganda machine for the [Myanmar] government, says San Lwin.

Officially, the Myanmar government is not allowing any reporters – or unofficially any aid – into Rakhine state but earlier this week the Chinese media visited the area.

“One of the reasons they are burning all the houses and clearing the land is they have an agreement with China,” says San Lwin.

The $10 billion Kyauk Pyu Special Economic Zone Project agreed between China and Myanmar will see oil and gas pipes built in Rakhine state and has been criticised by activists who question whose land will be appropriated for construction to begin, and where the people living there will go.

San Lwin believes that the main reason behind all this violence is not necessarily this project. Neither is it the physical appearance of the Rohingya, nor their ethnic group or the language they speak. The problem, says San Lwin, is their religion.

Ethnic groups such as the Dainet or the Marmagyi share the Rohingyas physical appearance, language, tradition and culture yet are not Muslims, so they are recognised as official ethnic groups and have been granted full citizenship rights. Other Muslims in the country, says San Lwin, are also suffering:

“[The military] have a plan to wipe out all the Muslims in the country. This is the long-term plan. In 20 years, after they have cleared all the Rohingya population, there will be other ethnic cleansing of the other Muslim minorities in the country.”

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-military-plan-to-wipe-out-all-muslims-in-myanmar/5611256

By Colin Todhunter

Foreign capital is dictating the prevailing development agenda in India. There is a deliberate strategy to make agriculture financially non-viable for India’s small farms, to get most farmers out of farming and to impose a World Bank sanctioned model of food production. The aim is to replace current structures with a system of industrial (GM) agriculture suited to the needs of Western agribusiness, food processing and retail concerns.

The aim here is not to repeat what has been previously written on this. Suffice to say that the long-term plan is for an overwhelmingly urbanised India with a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and Walmart-type supermarkets that, going on current evidence (see 4th paragraph from the end here), will offer a largely monoculture diet of highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food based on crops soaked with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security.

Thanks to its political influence, Monsanto already illegally dominates the cotton industry in India with its GMOs. It is increasingly shaping agricultural policy and the knowledge paradigm by funding agricultural research in public universities and institutes. Its practices and colonisation of institutions have led to it being called the ‘contemporary East India Company‘ and regulatory bodies are now compromised and riddled with conflicts of interest.

Monsanto is hard at work with its propaganda campaign to convince us all that GM food is necessary to feed the world’s burgeoning population. Its claims are hidden behind a flimsy and cynical veil of humanitarian intent (helping the poor and hungry), which is easily torn away to expose the self-interest that lies beneath.

With an obligation to maximise profits for shareholders, Monsanto seems less concerned with the impacts of its products on public health (whether in Argentina or the US) or the conditions of Indian farmers due to its failed GM cotton and more concerned with roll-outs of its highly profitable disease-associated weed-killer (Roundup) and its GM seeds.

To ensure it remains ‘business as usual’, part of the relentless message is that there is no alternative to the chemical-intensive/GMO treadmill model of farming (which by now, any informed person should know is nothing but a lie). Monsanto has done every foul thing possible (including bribery and fakery) to ensure its business model dominates and that critics are smeared or crushed. As a result, we have an increasingly dominant model of unsustainable industrialised food and agriculture dominated by green revolution ideology and technologies (and wedded to and fuelled and driven by powerful commercial and geopolitical interests), which involves massive social, environmental and health costs.

Rejecting Monsanto’s neocolonialism

In 2015, trade and agricultural policy analyst Devinder Sharma asked the following questions during a debate on Indian TV about rural population displacement and farming:

“Why do you want to move the population just because Western economists told us we should follow them? Why? Why can’t India have its own thinking? Why do we have to go with Harvard or Oxford economists who tell us this?”

His series of questions strike at the heart of the prevailing development paradigm in India. It is a model of development being dictated by the World Bank and powerful transnational agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and Cargill.

Monsanto’s mindset is based on the conquering and control of nature.

Let us turn briefly to Raj Patel:

“Modern farming turns fields into factories. Inorganic fertilizer adds nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorous to the soil; pesticides kill anything that crawls; herbicides nuke anything green and unwanted—all to create an assembly line that spits out a single crop… .”

Contrast this with the ethos and principles of agroecological approaches to farming, which works with nature, as set out here.

Monsanto’s business model thrives within a system of capitalism and a system of agriculture propped up by the blood money of militarism (Ukraine and Iraq), ‘structural adjustment’ and strings-attached loans (Africa) or slanted trade deals (India) whereby transnational agribusiness drives a global agenda to suit its interests and eradicate impediments to profit. And it doesn’t matter how much devastation ensues or how unsustainable its model is, ‘crisis management’ and ‘innovation’ fuel the corporate-controlled treadmill it seeks to impose.

Devinder Sharma is thus right to ask why can’t India have its own thinking.

And India does have its own thinking. Environmental scientist Viva Kermani:

“It can quite easily be said that Hinduism is the world’s largest nature-based religion that recognises and seeks the Divine in nature and acknowledges everything as sacred. It views the earth as our Mother, and hence, advocates that it should not be exploited. A loss of this understanding that earth is our mother, or rather a deliberate ignorance of this, has resulted in the abuse, and the exploitation of the earth and its resources.”

Kermani notes that centuries before the appearance of the modern-day environmental movement and Greenpeace, the shruti (Vedas, Upanishads) and smruti (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, other scriptures) instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred; that like humans, our fellow creatures, including plants have consciousness; and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered. She adds that this understanding of and reverence towards the environment is common to all Indic religious and spiritual systems: Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.

According to Kermani, the Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes. So much importance was given to trees, that there was also Vrikshayurveda – an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees. It contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.

On the other hand, Kermani notes that the Western religions, especially Christianity, viewed this nature worship as paganism, failing to recognise the scientific and spiritual basis of the relationship between man and nature and how this is the only way to sustain ecological balance. Christians were made to turn all their love and adoration for nature towards their one and only god, who was a jealous god. The elements of nature then became devoid of all divinity and were left to be conquered by man.

Whereas the Christian belief is that nature is destructive and therefore has to be conquered, according to Kermani, the Dharmic view propagates conservation of the nature and advices man to live in harmony with nature without indulging in exploitation. Hindus strongly believe that the world is one family and thus the divine is also seen in animals and are protected. The deification of animals, therefore, has led to the protection of many species of animal. The recognition that every animal played a role in creating an ecological balance, allowed people to live in harmony with animals.

Kermani concludes by saying:

“Today’s environmental crisis demands a response. The world is grappling to find solutions to multiple crises of the environment. Technology is considered the panacea. For Hindus, the environment is not protected because of the selfish urgency to save biodiversity and hence save human future, but because it is the Dharmic way of life and hence a righteous duty that all humans are obliged to perform.”

And before critics say this is all well and good, but how can India possibly feed itself without chemicals, without Monsanto or Bayer, without agritech inputs? Such people should know that India is self-sufficient in many staples and was traditionally more productive prior to the imposition of green revolution ideology and technology. Moreover, such ideology and technology has undermined an indigenous farming sector that once catered for the diverse dietary needs and climatic conditions of India and it has actually produced and fuelled drought, degraded soils, illnesses and malnutrition, farmer distress and many other issues.

Playing god

Similar processes that destroyed the essential link between humans and nature played out in the West long ago. Many of the ancient pagan rituals and celebrations (that early Christianity incorporated and co-opted) helped humans come to terms with some of the most basic issues of existence (death, fertility, good, evil, love, hate, etc.) and served to sanctify their practical relationship with the natural environment and its role in sustaining human life. The planting and harvesting of crops and various other seasonal activities associated with food production thus became central to various beliefs and customs.

For example, Freyfaxi marks the beginning of the harvest in Norse paganism, while Lammas or Lughnasadh is the celebration of the first harvest/grain harvest in Paganism and Wicca and by the ancient Celts.

Humans celebrated nature and the life it gave birth to. Ancient beliefs and rituals were imbued with hope and renewal, and people had a necessary and immediate relationship the sun, seeds, animals wind, soil and rain and the changing seasons that nourished and brought life.

Discussing Britain, Robert W Nicholls explains:

“The cults of Woden and Thor were superimposed on far older and better-rooted beliefs related to the sun and the earth, the crops and the animals, and the rotation of the seasons between the light and warmth of summer and the cold and dark of winter. These ancient beliefs were so well established that whatever the name of the great god who for the moment was favored by the state rulers, whether Mithras or Woden – or Christ – the old practices, so essential for the fertility of the crops and for good luck in life, were maintained in farming communities until Christian decrees and the feudal system led to their final attrition.”

Nicholls reaffirms the importance of agriculture in these beliefs by adding:

“Little is known about the religious beliefs that sustained the rural population of pre-Christian Britain… The range of pagan deities – earth, water, fire, the sun, stone, and wood – supported as they were by agrarian production, suggests a religion that had a sound practical base. Two illusive figures appear as a backdrop to rural beliefs and demonstrate a male-female, winter-summer bipolarity: an ancient Earth Mother, who preceded the rise of later goddesses and grain deities, and a horned god of the hunt, who was the pivotal focus of a totem cult of stag masqueraders.”

In the 1950s, Union Carbide produced a series of images that depicted the company as a ‘hand of god’ coming out of the sky to ‘solve’ some of the issues facing humanity. One of the most famous images is of the hand pouring agrochemicals on Indian soils. As Christianity co-opted traditional pagan beliefs to achieve hegemony, corporations steeped in the Western mindset that Kermani speaks of have also sought to depict themselves in a god-like, all-knowing fashion.

But in more modern times, instead of using spiritual/religious ideology to secure compliance, they have relied on neoliberal economic faith and dogma and have co-opted science and scientists whose appeals to authority (not logic) have turned them into the high priests of modern society.

Whether it is fueled by Bill Gates, the World Bank’s neoliberal-based rhetoric about ‘enabling the business of agriculture’  or The World Economic Forum’s ‘Grow’ strategy, the implication is that the India’s and the world’s farmers must be ‘helped’ out of their awful ‘backwardness’ by the West and its powerful corporations – all facilitated of course by a globalised, corrupt system of capitalism.

The same farmers who Viva Kermani says have “legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts. Instead, they were reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of the poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry.”

The same farmers whose seeds and knowledge was stolen by corporations to be bred for proprietary chemical-dependent hybrids, now to be genetically engineered.

And what is the result of the war on nature, farmers, traditional agriculture and the environment?

We see the capturing of markets and global supply chains for the benefit of transnational corporations involved in food production. We see the destruction of natural habitat in Indonesia to produce palm oil. We see the use of cynical lies (linked to palm oil production) to corrupt India’s food system with genetically modified seeds. We witness the devastating impact on farmers and rural communities. We see the degradation of soils, health and water resources.

And we see Monsanto making huge annual profits, and its CEO Hugh Grant and VP Robb Fraley being amply rewarded. Grant brought in just under $12m in 2015. Fraley raked in just under $3.4m. In January 2015, Monsanto reported a profit of $243m (down from $368m the previous year). Greed and ego trump all else. Farmer suicides are little more than collateral damage. And environmental degradation is a price worth paying.

In India today, we have a BJP-led government that espouses politically expedient Hindu nationalist sentiments. And yet it is selling out the nation to foreign interests whose beliefs and actions are opposed to much of what traditional Hinduism stands for in terms of its ecological heritage. Where is the logic?

The logic is fairly easy to decipher: what is happening has little to do with Hinduism or nationalism, however defined, and everything to do with a Wall Street backed Indian political elite suffering a severe bout of Stockholm syndrome, in awe of its captors.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/monsantos-violence-in-india-the-sacred-and-the-profane/5581536