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By Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai

“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”  George Bernard Shaw

It is tragic that civilized nations have fallen from their lofty calling: namely, human rights for all mankind. There is a sad commentary on the state of human rights all over the globe. It seems to me that until there evolves a generally accepted moral duty among peoples and nations to assist all victims of widespread human rights violations by force or other stiff retaliation, human rights enforcement mechanisms will operate haphazardly and whimsically for reasons unrelated to the harm to the victims or the villainy of the perpetrators. It is the job of all human rights defenders to jump-start that moral evolution.

It might be said that never have so many human rights been proclaimed yet been so routinely violated. Think of the ongoing human rights atrocities at present that are going unsanctioned. Myanmar, where civilians are routinely driven from homes and cities are consistently destroyed. Tragic genocide in Syria. Kashmiris brutalized by 700,000 Indian military and paramilitary forces.  The list goes on and on.

The life for Kashmiris has oscillated between grisly and gruesome. Human rights violations are frightful: extrajudicial killings, torture, rape, abductions, arson, and arbitrary detentions. Since 1989, more than 100,000 Kashmiris have been killed. Indian forces routinely commit war crimes with impunity under emergency laws. They do so because the likelihood of punishment by the Indian government is slim to none. The scale of gripping wrongdoing in Kashmir dwarfed what was witnessed in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Southern Sudan prior to international intervention, yet the United States and the United Nations have watched the Kashmiris suffer like spectators at the Roman Coliseum.

Apart from the magnitude of violence unleashed by the Indian military forces against peaceful protesters in Kashmir, the most poignant aspect of the situation is the acute suffering of the whole population caused by the frequent curfews, disregard of normal life, arrests, detentions and sometimes disappearances of innocent civilians by the authorities. This is a situation without precedent in the south Asian subcontinent and with few parallels in the world today. That complacency gives at least the impression that Kashmiri lives and hopes are worth less than those of others. If India believed its rule in Kashmir was by consent rather than by coercion, it would hold a plebiscite with alacrity, just as the Great Britain routinely permits the Scotland to vote for independence

If, however, the world powers and the United Nations are unmoved by international law and moral justice to act, then Kashmiris will be forced to organize their own referendum like in Catalonia, Spain with the assistance of eminent persons of international standing and NGOs to decide their future. If that last alternative is forced upon them, Kashmiris hope that India, with the urging and moral suasion of the international community, will put no obstacles in the way and that the world will honor the results of the free and fair vote.

It is universally acknowledged that Kashmir is a global danger because of spiraling nuclear and missile proliferation in both India and Pakistan, coupled with their respective domestic political instabilities and historical animosities.  A similar consensus agrees that the bilateral India-Pakistan formula for resolving the 70-year-old Kashmir conflict has proven empty, achieving no progress during those long years. For the Kashmir conflict to end, authentic representatives of the Kashmiri people – All Parties Hurriyet Conference — must be senior partners at the negotiating table along with India and Pakistan. No solution will endure without their consent voiced in a referendum.

The gruesome status quo in Kashmir is both legally and morally unacceptable and militarily and economically frightening.  There is no time for further complacency.

In sum, the ingredients of a Kashmir solution are there. What remains are healthy doses of statesmanship and magnanimity of world powers including United States.

Dr. Fai can be reached at: 1-202-607-6435  or  gnfai2003@yahoo.com

By Aída Chávez and Ryan Grim

9 Oct 2017 – Britain’s broadcasting regulator today concluded that Al Jazeera did not violate any rules in its controversial undercover investigation exposing the Israeli embassy’s campaign to target British citizens critical of Israel, a campaign that included attempts to destroy the careers of pro-Palestinian British politicians.

The move by the communications regulator, known as Ofcom, clears the way for a follow-up documentary focused on Israeli influence in the U.S., the existence of which has previously been suspected but had yet to be made public. Clayton Swisher, director of investigative journalism for Al Jazeera Media Network, confirmed it to The Intercept on Monday. The goal of the British complaint may partly have been to delay publication of the follow-up American version, he said. “At the very same time [as the London investigation] — and we can safely reveal this now — we had an undercover operative working in tandem in Washington, D.C. With this U.K. verdict and vindication past us, we can soon reveal how the Israel lobby in America works through the eyes of an undercover reporter,” he said.

The four-part series, “The Lobby,” dug into the Israeli embassy in London, as well as several other pro-Israel lobby groups, and their campaign to “take down” British Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan.

The investigation led to the resignation of a top Israeli official in London, as well as a high-profile complaint that Al Jazeera had broken broadcasting regulations in the United Kingdom. One of the complaints charged the investigation with anti-Semitism, but the government board ruled that imputing such a motive to a film critical of Israel would be akin to calling a series on gang violence racist.

Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wrote to Prime Minister Theresa May in January, calling for a probe into Shai Masot, the Israeli embassy’s then-senior political officer. An undercover reporter secretly filmed Masot discussing a plot to “take down” Duncan, which Corbyn described as “improper interference in this country’s democratic process.” Masot resigned shortly after the recordings were made public.

Swisher, whose writing has also appeared in The Intercept, said that his outlet turned over reams of unpublished audio and video files to demonstrate that its report had not been unfairly edited. “For several months, we were put through the equivalent of an editorial colonoscopy. Turning over emails, different edits, all the raw footage, photos, cellphone messages — basically anything the investigators found of interest,” said Swisher.

Ofcom received complaints about the series from pro-Israel British activists and a former Israel embassy employee. It dismissed all charges, which included anti-Semitism, bias, unfair editing, and the infringement of privacy.

It ruled that as per the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s guidance: “It did not consider that such a critical analysis of the actions of a foreign state constituted anti-Semitism, particularly as the overall focus of the programme was to examine whether the State of Israel was acting in a manner that would be expected of other democratic nations.”

All other charges were also dismissed as Ofcom found the program maintained due impartiality, the footage was not edited in a way which resulted in unfairness, and there was no unwarranted infringement of privacy.

In January, pro-Israel activists in the U.S. began to suspect they’d been infiltrated when footage in America appeared in the British version of “The Lobby.” Tablet began piecing things together and identified the likely hoaxer as a highfalutin British intern who’d dissonantly been renting a fully furnished $5,460 a month corporate apartment.

Swisher wouldn’t confirm or deny the identity of the American operative, but he said that with the American political class focused on foreign intervention in the affairs of the United States, now is an appropriate time to run the follow-up investigation. “I hear the U.S. is having problems with foreign interference these days, so I see no reason why the U.S. establishment won’t take our findings in America as seriously as the British did, unless of course Israel is somehow off limits from that debate,” he said.

Source: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/10/an-al-jazeera-reporter-went-undercover-with-the-pro-israel-lobby-in-washington/

By Gerald A. Perreira

October 20th, 2017, marks the sixth anniversary of the martyrdom of Muammar  Qaddafi, revolutionary Pan-Africanist and champion of the Global South. This day also marks the sixth anniversary of the historic battle of Sirte, where Qaddafi, along with an heroic army, including his son Mutassim Billal Qaddafi, and veteran freedom fighter,  Abu-Bakr Yunis Jabr, fought until their convoy was bombed by French fighter planes. Wounded and demobilized, they were captured by Qatari scavengers and executed by Al-Qaeda operatives

The courageous men of the original Free Officers’ Union, who were guides and leaders of the then 42 year-old Al-Fatah Revolution, demonstrated extraordinary revolutionary fortitude, heroism and audacity in the face of their enemies. As young men in their twenties, they overthrew the Western-installed Libyan monarchy and ushered in the Jamahiriya, and as elders in their seventies, they refused to leave Libya, and instead, fought to the bitter end, on the frontlines, alongside their people. Their example will forever shine as an eternal light in the hearts of all those who struggled alongside them to build the closest thing to a real democracy, and a United States of Africa, that modern history has ever seen. The execution of Muammar Qaddafi and those that fought alongside him, and the destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriya is one of the greatest crimes of this century.

Those responsible, including Nicolas Sarkozy, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron, King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and Emir Tamin bin Hamad Al Thani should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

What we knew all along is now a substantiated and indisputable fact – there was never a mass uprising in Benghazi or anywhere in Libya. The Libyan people in their millions made it clear that they supported the Al-Fatah Revolution.

A coalition of the wicked, comprising US/NATO forces, the semi-feudal Arab regimes of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Sudan, and a rag-tag bunch of monarchists and al-Qaeda linked terrorists inside Libya, that had been working with the CIA and M15 for decades, was assembled, and united in their goal. For them, total destruction was the only solution.

Every attempt was made by Qaddafi and his supporters to negotiate a peaceful solution, including inviting international observers into the country to see for themselves what was really taking place, something the imperialists could not allow to happen. This was their golden opportunity to destroy Qaddafi and the Jamahiriya, a plan they had been waiting to execute for years. There were mass uprisings on either side of Libya, in Tunisia and Egypt. The West had already coined the term “Arab Spring” and was busy hijacking revolts elsewhere. Time was of the essence. In fact, in what can only be described as a frenzy, they may have set a world record for the speed with which they managed to push through the illegal resolution at the UN, their cover for the invasion. The fake news and false narrative machine was in full swing. Within 24 hours
, UN bodies had transformed Qaddafi from a person about to receive the UN Human Rights Award into a man killing his own people. The Jamahiriya was targeted for destruction and nothing was going to stop them.

Foreign forces, including the CIA, Dutch Marines, French and Sudanese military personnel, Qatari Special Forces, Al Qaeda fighters – facilitated by the Saudis, as they are facilitating Al Qaeda in Yemen today, were all in place weeks before the staged protests began in Benghazi in February 2011. This was a well-planned and coordinated operation.

“Sometimes the enemy is the best teacher”

Kwame Ture, revolutionary Pan-Africanist and former executive member of the World Mathaba, opined that sometimes the enemy is the best teacher. He instructed us to study the enemy’s strategy and tactics and to remember that the enemy only goes after those whom they deem to be a real threat to their imperial interests. Pan-Africanist and former president of Guinea, Ahmed Sekou Toure, said that, “if the enemy is not bothering with you, then know that you are doing nothing”.

The forces of US-EU imperialism were always bothering Muammar Qaddafi. They were bent on discrediting, demonizing and finding a way to obliterate him and the Libyan Jamahiriya from its inception in 1969, until they finally achieved their nefarious objective in 2011.

Referring to Qaddafi as “the mad dog of the Middle-East”, Ronald Reagan, in a nationwide broadcast, said that Qaddafi’s goal was “world revolution”, claiming that he (Qaddafi) was promoting “a Muslim fundamentalist revolution, which targeted many of his own Arab compatriots.”

There is an African saying: “Mouth open, story jump out”. What Ronald Reagan was describing sounds like the imperialist plan. It was Ronald Reagan who welcomed leaders of the Afghan Mujahadeen who were fighting the Soviets at the time, to the Oval Office and referred to them as Jihadi freedom fighters. Today as we face Al Qaeda and their various offshoots, including the infamous ISIL, we are witnessing the devastating results of this sinister imperialist game plan. Ever since the days when the British colonial forces facilitated the creation of the Wahhabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the imperialists have encouraged, supported and funded the growth of Islamic fundamentalist groups. They understood that this was imperative if they were to counter the resurgence of an Islamic theology of liberation, in the revolutionary tradition of Abu Dharr al Ghifari, and as propounded in contemporary times by outstanding Islamic thinkers, such as Muammar Qaddafi, Ali Shariati, Kaukab Siddique, Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, Muhammad Iqbal and Mahmoud Ayoub.

Again, we can learn from the enemy. Just as the imperialists and right-wing Christian fundamentalists waged an unrelenting war against the Social Gospel Movement and Christian liberation theology, as articulated by revolutionary theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez, Miguel Bonino, James Cone and Enrique Dussel, they knew very well that Islamic liberation theology must be countered. The enemy understood the power of this theology in term of its ability to act as a bulwark against the imperial hegemon. They knew that this authentic and revolutionary Islam would prevent them from exercising control over an awakened Muslim World.

Reagan was right about one thing, Muammar Qaddafi indeed had a goal of world revolution – it was a revolution that would put the tenets of Islamic liberation theology into practice. Qaddafi’s conception of this revolution was holistic. His revolution would challenge every aspect of Eurocentric epistemology and its inherent racism. The Libyan revolution was more than a social, political and economic revolution; it was nothing short of a spiritual and cultural revolution. This confounded not only the imperialist powers but also their reactionary Arab satraps.

The World Mathaba

The World Mathaba, established by Muammar Qaddafi in 1982, had as its stated mission, “to resist imperialism, racism, fascism, zionism, colonialism and neo-colonialism”. The Mathaba denotes a place where people gather for a noble purpose. Based in Libya, it became a meeting place for revolutionary and progressive forces from all over the world. Similar to the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which became a major intellectual center during the Islamic Golden Age and the University of Sankore in Timbuktu, where scholars of the day converged to discuss and debate ideas and formulate new ideas, the Mathaba became a forum for the advancement of a Third Universal Theory beyond Capitalism and Communism. Prior to the Mathaba, the only international formations for progressive and revolutionary organizations had been the Soviet dominated Comintern, that demanded an ideological allegiance to Marxism-Leninism and the Socialist International, which brought together social-democratic parties. The ideological rigidity of these two international formations excluded organizations and movements that rejected Eurocentric ideologies, including many Indigenous and Pan-African organizations who found a home in the World Mathaba.

Through the Mathaba, Qaddafi assisted all those who were fighting for liberation and self-determination, regardless of whether or not it was in Libya’s geo-political interests to do so. Under Qaddafi’s visionary leadership, material assistance and moral support was provided to the oppressed from every corner of the earth, regardless of religion or ideology. All were helped – from the Roma people of Eastern Europe to the Kanak people of New Caledonia in the Southwest Pacific, to the Rohinga people, who are presently being ethnically cleansed by the Buddhist chauvinists of Myanmar, and who the UN recently referred to as “the most friendless people”. What the hypocritical UN body failed to mention was that they once had a friend in Muammar Qaddafi.

Qaddafi noted on many occasions that the Libyan Revolution had a sacred duty to help all those who were in legitimate need and suffering persecution, since this was in accordance the teachings of the Quran, which was Libya’s constitution The bedrock of Islam is to enjoin that which is good and condemn that which is wrong and unjust. Any Muslim, regardless of their interpretation of Quranic teachings, will admit that the Quran clearly states that the weakest response to injustice is to hate it in your heart, the second weakest response is to speak against it and the strongest response is to oppose it in every way possible.

A Spiritual Revolution

Leader of the Philippine based Moro National Liberation Front, Nur Misuari, in a lecture he delivered in 1990 at the Green World Institute in Tripoli, explained that inserting the word “Islamic” into the name of a country or organization, like the ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ or ‘Moro Islamic Liberation Front’ did not make the country or organization Islamic.

Declaring yourself an “Islamic” country like Saudi Arabia and Qatar does not make you Islamic. To be a truly Islamic society and nation, there has to be a spiritual revolution. A revolution that raises the spiritual consciousness of the people. A revolution that counters the false Islam that the oppressors promote, that abolishes capitalism and the  semi-feudal social relations sustained by the ruling elites in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Sudan. This is why Qaddafi was such a threat to the imperialists and their Muslim surrogates. He was not only propounding dangerous ideas, he was building a new society – a Jamahiriya – a state of the masses, a real democracy based on the revolutionary teachings of the Quran, which according to South African political scientist, Themba Sono, “created conditions for the many to rule themselves”. Sono goes on to explain, “For Qaddafi, this is part of the natural order in which the majority rules themselves rather than for a minority to exercise power over a majority… Qaddafi denies that the emanations from the activity of electoral participants can never be called rule, not only because such rule would be unethical and thereby unstable, but also because it would contradict the very essence and fundamental tenet of democracy, which is, to be tautological, that, naturally, free people must and can rule themselves.”

It was a dangerous precedent that the imperialists could not allow to continue.

As Sono notes in his book, The Qaddafi Green Syndrome: Shaking the Foundations: “Qaddafi does not care to investigate whether or not the people are capable of ruling themselves, for he asks the question, how do we do that without giving the people, not only the right but the opportunity to do so? Who is to know beforehand and therefore to decide a priori that the people are not qualified to rule themselves?”

Dangerous Ideas Indeed

Applying the principles of Qaddafi’s Third Universal Theory transformed Libya from one of the poorest countries in the world, to not only one of the most prosperous countries in Africa, but in many respects, one of the most prosperous countries worldwide. Facts and figures substantiate this claim. Libya had no foreign debt and actually deposited payments from oil revenue into the bank accounts of its citizens. As is by now well documented, Libyans had access to free quality healthcare, free education from nursery  to university level, rent free housing, free electricity, subsidized food – a very high standard of living. Imperialists hate these types of precedents. What if, upon seeing these achievements, other nations decided to disregard the Western-style systems of governance and the neo-liberal capitalist model that simply widens the gap between have and have-nots? What if countries in Africa, seeing Libya’s advancement and prosperity, decided to rid themselves of the bogus liberal-democratic tradition that empowers 1% of humanity to rule over 99%? What if others decided to reject the multi-party electoral circus, designed to divide and fragment our countries along ethnic and tribal lines, and instead, opted for a Jamahiriya or State of the Masses?

Once asked by a journalist, what was the one thing he wanted to achieve most in his lifetime, Qaddafi replied, “to change the world”. And he was coming close. Muammar Qaddafi and the empowered Libyan Jamahiriya were leading the movement to establish a United States of Africa, with a united military and a single currency, a dinar backed by Africa’s gold reserves. This would have actually dethroned the US dollar and shifted the global economic imbalance.  This would have indeed changed the world.

So, on October 20, 2011, the Satanic forces that had been at war with Qaddafi and the Libyan Jamahiriya from its inception in 1969, dealt their final blow to the man known to revolutionaries throughout the world as the Brother-Leader, and to revolutionary Muslims throughout Africa and the world, as the “Commander of the Faithful”.

“If they get past Libya, they are coming for you…”

Six years later and the fallout from this criminal act is still being felt everywhere. Key development projects throughout Africa, financed by Libya, have all grounded to a halt. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, key players in Libya’s demise, are now busy grabbing large tracts of land in Africa. This would not have been possible if Qaddafi was alive. The expansion of AFRICOM, the expansion of US military bases, and the building of new military bases by the Chinese and the Turks in Africa would also not have been possible if Qaddafi was alive. Indeed, there would have been a fierce resistance to the current recolonization and re-carving of Africa if Muammar Qaddafi was alive and the Libyan Jamahiriya was flourishing as before.

Of course, the urgent need to recolonize an Africa that was awakening to its own power and ability to unite and self-determine was the very reason for the overthrow of Qaddafi and the Libyan revolution. It is not surprising that the French led the charge. In March 2008, former French president, Jacques Chirac said, “Without Africa, France would slide down into the rank of a Third World power”. As early as 1957, long before he became president, Francois Mitterrand said, “Without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”.

Libya has been transformed into a dysfunctional neo-colonial entity, where an array of militias squabble over territory and spoils. Its vast landmass has become a safe haven and training ground for ISIL and other Al-Qaeda offshoots. Thousands of Libyans and other African nationals are still detained without trial in what can only be described as concentration camps. Many have been tortured and executed in these same camps, their only crime, being Qaddafi loyalists. Those now in control of Libya hated Qaddafi’s Pan-African objectives. They are Arab supremacists and are persecuting Black Libyans and other African nationals.

Africans who once travelled to Libya to work and send back much needed funds to their families are now crossing the Mediterranean. Entire boatloads of people, including women and children are drowning as they make the perilous journey.  Our ancestors were once captured and forced on to boats against their will, many perished during that crossing, today, we are clamoring to secure a place on boats that are not even seaworthy to escape the conditions created by our former enslavers. Many are still perishing.

Qaddafi would often lament, “the world shakes, but it doesn’t change”.

Workers from as far afield as the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Turkey, Germany, England, Italy, Malaysia and Korea lost their jobs.

The entire refugee crisis across Europe is a result of the destruction of the Jamahiriya.

The push to establish a United States of Africa, which prior to Libya’s demise was a dynamic and energized initiative, is presently a dream deferred. Revolutionary Pan-Africanism has suffered a huge setback. Today’s African leaders, with the exception of a few, are only good for talking Pan-Africanism in the halls of the African Union headquarters. Outside of these confines, they are committed to maintaining the old neo-colonial relationships that keep Africa in bondage.

We Salute You

On this day, all those who resist oppression and tyranny worldwide, salute the great freedom fighter and our Brother-Leader, Muammar Qaddafi and the other revolutionary leaders of Al Fatah. We pay homage to their dedicated and life-long struggle for human emancipation and dignity. We are forever inspired by their steadfast and courageous fight to the end, and by their unwavering faith in, and service to God. We are grateful for their undying love for the African continent and all of humanity. We salute the millions of Libyan men and women who heroically resisted the invasion of their country, and who continue to suffer to this day. We stand in solidarity with the family of Muammar Qaddafi and the families of all the martyrs. We stand in solidarity with the thousands of political prisoners inside Libya and the more than 1.5 million Qaddafi loyalists exiled from their country. We commit our full support to the struggle being waged by the patriotic and nationalist forces to liberate and reunify Libya once again. For the Green revolutionary, death is not the end, but the doorway to a new beginning. Martyrs never die.

20 October 2017

Gerald A. Perreira is chairperson of the Guyanese organizations Black Consciousness Movement Guyana (BCMG) and Organization for the Victory of the People (OVP). He is an executive member of the Caribbean Chapter of the Network for Defense of Humanity. He lived in Libya for many years, served in the Green March, an international battalion for the defense of the Al Fatah revolution, and was a founding member of the World Mathaba, based in Tripoli, Libya. He can be reached at mojadi94@gmail.com.

Co-Written by Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

The NAFTA-2 negotiations seem to be faltering after the fourth round of talks recently held in the United States. The Trump administration is pushing Mexico and Canada aggressively to include provisions from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) in order to renegotiate NAFTA in a way that benefits US corporations. Mexico and the US are under particularly high pressure to complete the talks successfully as each country has major elections in 2018.

News reports of the highly secretive talks describe the negotiations as hitting roadblocks. While this is good news, if it is accurate, this is the time for people in Mexico, Canada and the United States to call for each government to not only withdraw from the talks but also to abandon the corporate model of trade that puts profits before protection of people and the planet. Our view is — if it doesn’t work, don’t fix it, get rid of it and adopt a new and more positive trade model.

Visit TradeForPeopleAndPlanet.org to learn more.

In “NAFTA talks bog down over U.S. demands as latest round concludes,” the Los Angeles Time reports,

“After seven straight days of talks fraught with emotion, officials representing the U.S., Canada and Mexico were at seeming loggerheads over several American proposals that observers fear could derail the negotiations and ultimately cause an unraveling of the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement.”

Further, they report “observers briefed by trade negotiators said the mood during the latest session of talks had turned grim and pessimistic, and that most everyone expected Canada and Mexico to roundly reject U.S. efforts to weaken NAFTA’s regional structure with U.S. protectionist measures consistent with Trump’s ‘America first’ agenda.”

Reuters described a grim reality, writing that the disagreements are so extreme that they could result in the end of the trade agreement:

“Some downcast participants said the demands, unveiled this week in line with Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda, have increased the odds of NAFTA’s demise. At the very least, they could make it impossible to reach a deal renewing the treaty before a year-end deadline.”

CNBC also warned that time may run out — saying the negotiators are working on a schedule that is “a very tight negotiating schedule — described as ‘insane’ by one official.”  The initial goal was to complete the talks in December of this year in order to avoid the Mexican presidential election. The current pro-corporate president, Enrique Peña Nieto, is very unpopular and is likely to be replaced.

The divisions between the countries were on clear display as the round of talks wound down. The Star reports that Canadian “Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland blasted the Trump administration’s NAFTA proposals publicly for the first time in an awkward joint press conference in Washington on Tuesday, the clearest sign yet that negotiations are strained to the breaking point.”

Freeland denounced the US for “an approach that seeks to undermine NAFTA rather than modernize it,” warning that the “unconventional” proposals from President Donald Trump’s administration would “turn back the clock” and put tens of thousands of jobs at risk. Lighthizer criticized Canada and Mexico for refusing to agree to provisions that they previously accepted in the TPP.

Things are going so badly in the negotiations that the parties have decided to take a short break. Rather than meeting every two weeks, they’ve pushed the next round back to a month and the deadline for completion of the re-negotiations into early 2018.

BBC reports that in an October meeting with Justin Trudeau, President Trump said he would pull out of NAFTA and be open to a new bilateral agreement between the US and Canada if the NAFTA-2 negotiations fail.

NAFTA was the start of a long line of disastrous trade deals that put the interests of large corporations ahead of the necessities of people and planet. Now that people see the results of this model of trade such as a race to the bottom in wages and worker’s rights, environmental destruction and an erosion of democracy, there is widespread opposition to ‘free trade.’ This was evident in the large movement of movements that stopped the TPP and stalled the TTIP.

This is the time to be strong and persistent in our demand for an end to NAFTA and a new era of positive trade. Trade agreements could be negotiated in the open with broad input from all sectors of society. Trade agreements could drive a race to the top in wages and worker protections around the world. Trade agreements could also include enforceable environmental standards and promote meaningful steps to address the climate crisis.

For now, the best way to stop NAFTA is to heighten the controversies so that the talks continue to be delayed. As we did with the TPP, we can push the talks into the election season and make our positive agenda for trade a part of campaigns.

If you are interested in getting involved, please sign up at TradeForPeopleandPlanet.org. Remaking trade in a positive way is another route to the future we need.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are direcotors of  www.popularresistance.org

Source: https://www.countercurrents.org/2017/10/19/nafta-talks-falter-time-to-increase-pressure/

By Richard Falk

12 Oct 2017 – This post is a slightly modified version of my presentation to the Human Rights Commission of the Italian Parliament on October 11, 2017. The Commission is composed of members of Parliament, and chaired by Hon. Pia Elda Locatelli, representing the city of Bergamo. The presentation was followed by a discussion and a generally favorable response on the central issue of switching from an emphasis on ‘occupation’ to ‘apartheid.’

An Overview of Present Realities

We meet at a difficult time from the perspective of the Palestinian people: several developments nationally, regionally, and internationally now deprive Palestinians of that glimmer of hope that comes from seeing light at the end of the tunnel; more fully appraised, the situation is not as bleak for Palestinians as the picture of their struggle being painted from a realistic perspective. A series of factors pointing in both directions can be identified, first to highlight the negative developments from a Palestinian perspective, and then to set forth several developments that are positive with regard to the Palestinian national movement aiming for decades to achieve a just and sustainable peace.

1) The foreign policy priorities of regional and international political actors have increasingly shifted attention away from the Palestinian ordeal; developments internal to Israel have deliberately accentuated this inattention to Palestinian goals and rights; of special relevance in these regards are the ongoing wars and turmoil in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Iraq, as well as deteriorating relations and rising tensions of the Iran/US relationship; the moves toward normalization of relations with Israel by the Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia; and the unsteady diplomatic approach of the Trump presidency that seems accurately interpreted as supportive of whatever the Israeli government chooses to do, including even accelerated settlement expansion and a rejection of the Palestinian right of self-determination;

2) Israel and Zionist support groups have launched a variety of initiatives designed to convince the Palestinians that they have been defeated, that their struggle is essentially futile at this stage, and they should move on for their own sake, overtly renouncing their struggle and posture of resistance; the pro-Zionist Middle East Forum, founded by Daniel Pipes has even sponsored a so-called ‘victory caucus’ that basically proclaims an Israeli victory as a way of demoralizing Palestinian activism and global solidarity efforts by treating Palestinian goals as a lost cause;

3) accelerated Israeli settlement expansion without any adverse pushback from Europe or North America, a development that can be regarded as hammering the final nails into the coffin of ‘the two state solution;’

4) the widespread recognition that more than 20 years of diplomatic effort within the Oslo framework failed miserably, with the Palestinians paying a heavy price in territory and credibility for engaging so avidly in a diplomatic process so heavily weighted against them; Oslo’s failure permitted Israel to encroach on Occupied Palestinian Territory in a variety of unlawful ways including especially extending the settlement archipelago, illegally building the separation wall on Palestinian occupied territory, and manipulating the ethnic balance in Jerusalem to make the city as a whole more Jewish;

5) confronting a crisis of viability in Gaza, of both a material and psychopolitical character; not only continuing a decade long blockade that itself amounts to a crime against humanity, but stifling the dreams of young talented Gazans who against all odds have earned foreign fellowships and then are either denied exit permits or entry visas to carry on their studies abroad; this kind of acute frustration, long experienced by Gazans in many forms, is contributing to a new turn among Palestinian youth, who increasingly want to leave Gaza and pursue a more normal life for themselves and their families rather than remain under conditions of virtual captivity to resist and carry on the struggle for empowerment and liberation.

Despite all these considerations, there are aspects of the situation, often overlooked in mainstream media, which seem favorable to the Palestinian struggle:

1) The morale boost that resulted from prevailing in the recent Al Aqsa confrontation concerning control of security arrangements at this site sacred for all Muslims, not just for Palestinians who are Muslim;

2) a more serious renewal of efforts to bring unity to the relationship between Palestinian political tendencies, especially Fatah and Hamas;

3) the growing global support for the BDS Campaign, achieving some high visibility successes prompting corporate disengagements from commercial projects related to unlawful Israeli settlements—G4S, Viola; and persuading some high visibility cultural figures not to perform in Israel—Pink Floyd;

4) Palestine is definitely winning the Legitimacy War waged to build stronger and more activist support from international public opinion; such support has been understood as far back as Gandhi as capable of neutralizing the superior military capabilities of a foreign political actor; throughout the decolonization era, the political outcome of struggles for control of state power were eventually won by the party on the right side of history, not as in the 19th Century by the party enjoying military superiority, which in the second half of the 20th century continued to make colonized people suffer greatly, but no longer able to impose their political will; Zionist/Israeli reaction to this set of developments relating to legitimacy has been to shift the conversation about Israel/Palestine relations from the defense of Israeli practices and policies and away from the substance of Palestinian grievances and rights to mount an attack on the motives of those criticizing Israel’s policies and practices, alleging that Israel’s critics are motivated by anti-Semitism, a smear tactic that also is encroaching on academic freedom, but exposing the weakness of Israel’s position on the merits. Internally, the Israeli public discourse is much more focused on the opportunity of fulfilling the maximalist Zionist goal of incorporating the whole of ‘the promised land’ of biblical Israel into the modern state of Israel;

5) It is my judgment that the biggest development favorable to the Palestinians has been a shift in the public discourse and the articulation of Palestinian demands of peace and solidarity activists from the slogan ‘End the Occupation’ to a clarion call to ‘End Apartheid.’ This shift has been recently legally validated by a UN-sponsored academic study of whether the claim that Israel is an apartheid state stands up to scholarly scrutiny.

The ESCWA Report

The UN Report of the Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) entitled “Israeli Practices and the Question of Apartheid” issued a few months ago, and co-authored by myself and Virginia Tilley, a renowned world expert on apartheid and a political scientist on the faculty of the University of Southern Illinois. ESCWA is a regional commission of the UN composed of 18 Arab states, with headquarters in Beirut. The Report was requested by the member states, and we were invited to prepare the report in accordance with academic standards by the Secretariat of ESCWA. The Report was never intended to become an official UN document, but rather the presentation of the views of two scholars with a background presumed relevant for the preparation of such a study:

– The issuance of the report had two immediate effects: first, it immediately became the most widely read and requested report in the history of ESCWA, and secondly, it produced a firestorm at the UN due to harsh criticisms by the U.S. and Israeli representatives who demanded that the Report be formally repudiated, attacking its authors, and insisting that the UN take prompt action or face the defunding consequences;

– the new UN Secretary General, Antonio Gutterez, dutifully responded by instructing ESCWA to remove the Report from its website; the director of ESCWA, Rima Khalaf, refused to follow such an order, believing in the contents and propriety of the Report; in the end she chose to resign rather than submit to UN censorship, explaining her position in an Open Letter to the SG;

– at this point it is not clear what the status of the Report is within the UN System; it has not been officially repudiated, and in fact the 18 foreign ministers representing the members of ESCWA endorsed the conclusions and recommendations of the Report, and urged their acceptance within the UN; I have no idea as to whether such a response will have any impact;

– as indicated the Report was an academic study, although of an admittedly controversial character; prior to its release, the Report was anonymously vetted by three world class scholars each of whom strongly recommended publication; as well, the report contained a disclaimer that stated that the recommendations and conclusions of the Report were those of the authors alone and did not represent the opinions of the UN or ESCWA; and in fact, the Report has to date received no substantive criticism from those who mounted the UN attack or otherwise; it was a pure show of geopolitical leverage that exposed the weakness of international law and the fragility of open discussion of sensitive issues at the UN;

– it is my judgment that the Report is significant for three distinct reasons:

1) The Report considers whether the allegation of Israeli apartheid is backed by sufficient evidence and persuasive legal reasoning in relation not just to the West Bank, as has been frequently alleged in the past, but in relation to the Palestinian people as a whole; such an inquiry means that if apartheid is declared to exist it applies to Palestinians living in Jerusalem, as a minority in Israel, and in refugee camps in neighboring countries as well as to Palestinians living in occupied Palestine or as involuntary exiles throughout the world; the central legal finding is that Israel has established an integrated matrix of control over the Palestinian people as a people so as to maintain the Israeli state as ‘a Jewish state’ in the face of continuous Palestinian resistance for the entire period of Israel’s existence;

2) The Report reaches its conclusions by relying on scholarly methods of analysis, and by examining and interpreting the evidence of Israeli policies and practices in relation to the relevant norms of international law as contained in the 1973 International Apartheid Convention. The essential finding we reached was that Israel intentionally and continuously was responsible for ‘inhuman acts’ as the means by which to subjugate the Palestinian people as a subordinated ‘race.’ This enabled Israel to govern in a discriminatory fashion as ‘a Jewish state;’ in our judgment the Palestinian people were deliberately fragmented so as to facilitate the maintenance of control over a resisting, initially majority non-Jewish population; this ambition to control Palestine was complicated by the additional Zionist objective of seeking to be and be seen as ‘a democratic state;’ such an objective, given the demographic imbalance, virtually necessitated at the inception of Israel as a state, the expulsion of several hundred thousand Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages to discourage any prospect of Palestinians returning after the war to reclaim their places of residence and way of life; such exclusion was seen as vital if Israel was to achieve and maintain a Jewish majority population within its borders; the Zionist puzzle, tragic for both peoples, was that only apartheid structures could provide a solution to this three-sided challenge—that is, establishing Israel as simultaneously Jewish, democratic, and hegemonic;

3) this Report has been widely used since its publication, and especially to provide political support and intellectual guidance mandating a civil society shift in tactics and commentary from a focus on ‘ending occupation’ to ‘ending apartheid;’ in my view, this is a crucial and timely shift as international law and the UN had been long ignored by Israel, diplomacy and armed struggle had been tried futile and utterly failed, and Palestinian leadership, such as it is, has faced both a series of stone walls and the humiliation of the notorious separation wall declared contrary to international law by 14 of 15 judges of the International Court of Justice. In effect, there is no serious alternative for Palestinians (and even Israelis) committed to a peaceful future than to rid the Israeli/Palestinian relationship of its present apartheid character.

Clearing the One and Only Path to a Just and Sustainable Peace

– peace between these two peoples can only be achieved by a credible acknowledgement of their equality of rights with respect to national self-determination; the apartheid structures that currently subjugates Palestinians epitomizes a relationship of inequality; the core obstacle to peace is apartheid, and once this obstacle is removed a productive diplomacy will become possible so long as it proceeds at all stages on the basis equality, keeping in mind that Oslo diplomacy collapsed because it encoded inequality into every aspect of its framework (U.S. as intermediary, excluding international law) and by adopting a bargaining process that favored Israel due to disparities in power and influence;

– the overriding political challenge is how to clear this path to peace, given Israeli firm control and resistance to even the acknowledgement of apartheid as descriptive of the current relationship between the two peoples; Israeli apartheid cannot be ended without a reformulation of Zionist goals; Israel must be persuaded to become content with an existence within a secular state hosting a Jewish homeland; such an altered stance would require abandoning the insistence on being a Jewish state; such a downsizing of Zionist objectives would actually be consistent with the scope of the original British pledge as set forth in the ultra-colonialist Balfour Declaration (recent archival research evidently establishes that a Jewish homeland was actually the longer term intention of Lord Alfred Balfour, as if this matters a century later); Israeli apartheid will not be dismantled until there is significant further growth of the Palestinian global solidarity movement, including the backing of some governments, especially several key governments in the global South; there would need to be sufficient, sustained global pressure to induce Israeli leaders and citizens to recalculate their interests, leading enough to decide to base their future on cooperation and coexistence with the Palestinians rather than their domination and exploitation; at this point, such an outcome seems unlikely and even utopian, but history has a strange way of staging dramatic surprises, and in such cases where an abrupt reversal of policy takes places, it will be only be admitted as a possibility after it has already been decided upon;

– The South African ending of apartheid was precisely such a surprise; it was totally unexpected in the 1990s that the combination of African resistance and the global anti-apartheid campaign would produce a peaceful transition to a multi-racial constitutional democracy presided over by Nelson Mandela, who until his release was serving a long-term prison sentence as an alleged terrorist; what changed so abruptly in South Africa was not the moral stance of the white elite that had invented and cruelly imposed the apartheid structure as a supposedly permanent solution to race relations in the country, but rather a cold recalculation of interests, and especially a comparison of the balance of advantages and disadvantages of continuing to exist as a pariah state in the world and abandoning apartheid, thereby risking African governance and possible retaliation, yet by so risking, taking a course that would alone restore the international legitimacy of the South African state;

– Of course, there are many differences in the Israeli situation, including Israel’s disavowal of apartheid as relevant to its management of the relationship between the two peoples, as well as Israel’s considerable success in avoiding pariah status within the international community through the practice of sophisticated diplomacy and public relations, backed by an aggressive arms sales program, and above all, by being the beneficiary of the geopolitical muscle of the U.S., as well as enjoying the quieter support of Europe;

– By adopting the apartheid paradigm as descriptive of the Palestinian situation it becomes possible to align civil society activism with international law, and even more important, encouraging the Palestinian national movement to concentrate its efforts on the one and only path that could produce an acceptable peace agreement. Any other approach seems doomed to some kind of appalling continuation of the present oppressive daily circumstances that has been fate of the Palestinian people for far too long. We should all reflect on the excruciating reality that this is the 50th anniversary of the Occupation and the 70th year in which Palestinians and their descendants have lived as refugees. No people should be compelled to endure such a fate.

Conclusion

It requires no great wisdom to observe that the future is a black box. We know that achieving peace and justice for these two peoples will require a lengthy struggle that needs to place its trust in ‘a politics of impossibility,’ or as the poet W.H. Auden once put it: “We who are about to die demand a miracle.” And while awaiting such a political miracle, we should accept our human responsibility to aid and abet the Palestinian struggle for rights, self-determination, and a just peace. The attainment of such goals would also inevitably reshape the destiny of Israeli Jews toward a more humanistic and benevolent future.

Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author, co-author or editor of 40 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs.

Source: https://www.transcend.org/tms/2017/10/the-one-and-only-path-to-palestineisrael-sustainable-peace/

By Kathy Kelly

Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs”  at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons. His punishment for breaking the silence about Israel’s capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons included eleven years of solitary confinement.

Yesterday, reading about President Donald Trump’s new strategy on Iran, Vanunu’s long isolation and sacrificial commitment to truth-telling came to mind.

Donald Trump promised to “deny the Iranian regime all paths to a nuclear weapon.” But it is Israel, which possesses an estimated 80 nuclear warheads, with fissile material for up to 200, which poses the major nuclear threat in the region. And Israel is allied to the nation with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal: the United States.

Israel doesn’t acknowledge its nuclear arsenal publicly, nor does Israel allow weapons inspectors into its nuclear weapons facilities. Along with India and Pakistan, Israel refuses to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. And it has used conventional weapons in numerous destabilizing wars which include aerial bombing of Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank.

Vanunu, designated by Daniel Ellsberg as the “the pre-eminent hero of the nuclear era,” helped many people envision nations in the region making progress toward a nuclear weapons-free Middle East.

In fact, Iran’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jawad Zarif, spoke eloquently about just that possibility, in 2015, holding that “if the Vienna deal is to mean anything, the whole of the Middle East must rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.” “Iran,” he added, “is prepared to work with the international community to achieve these goals, knowing full well that, along the way, it will probably run into many hurdles raised by the skeptics of peace and diplomacy.”

Significantly, since the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” pact with Iran was concluded in 2015, the International Atomic Energy Association has steadily verified Iran’s compliance with inspections. Iran has accepted around-the-clock supervision by IAEA officials. What’s more, “Iran has gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium,” according to Jessica Matthews, writing for the New York Review of Books. Matthews continues:

It has also eliminated 98 percent of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium, leaving only three hundred kilograms, less than the amount needed to fuel one weapon if taken to high enrichment. The number of centrifuges maintained for uranium enrichment is down from 19,000 to 6,000. The rest have been dismantled and put into storage under tight international monitoring. Continuing enrichment is limited to 3.67 percent, the accepted level for reactor fuel. All enrichment has been shut down at the once-secret, fortified, underground facility at Fordow, south of Tehran. Iran has disabled and poured concrete into the core of its plutonium reactor—thus shutting down the plutonium as well as the uranium route to nuclear weapons. It has provided adequate answers to the IAEA’s long-standing list of questions regarding past weapons-related activities.

What do the Iranians think of the U.S. government?  Ordinary Iranians might well think that whatever discontent they have with their own government the U.S. is their most implacable and most immediate enemy. Invective like Trump’s recent words could be a precursor of disastrous invasion.  Many Iranians remember the U.S.-backed coup that ended their democracy in 1953, and they remember the fierce U.S. support given to Saddam Hussein in the brutal eight years of the Iran-Iraq war.

Noam Chomsky rightly names the U.S. Shock and Awe attack against Iraq as the greatest destabilizing force at work in the Middle East. “Thanks to that invasion,” writes Chomsky, “hundreds of thousands were killed and millions of refugees generated, barbarous acts of torture were committed — Iraqis have compared the destruction to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century — leaving Iraq the unhappiest country in the world according to WIN/Gallup polls. Meanwhile, sectarian conflict was ignited, tearing the region to shreds and laying the basis for the creation of the monstrosity that is ISIS. And all of that is called ‘stabilization.’”

Trump’s record of statements and of cabinet appointments suggests that regime change in Iran is a long-term goal. Despite massive involvement in funding and fomenting terrorism on the part of Saudi Arabia, Trump’s evolving strategy for the Middle East strangely emphasizes Iranian impacts on the region, particularly regarding the conflict in Yemen.

Yemen is entering conflict-driven famine, with a correspondingly lethal cholera outbreak, making it the worst of the region’s “Four Famines,” now widely recognized as collectively the worst starvation crisis in the 72-year history of the United Nations. “In Yemen,” says Trump, “the IRGC, (the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp), has attempted to use the Houthis as puppets to hide Iran’s role in using sophisticated missiles and explosive boats to attack innocent civilians in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as to restrict freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.” It is Saudi Arabia and its UAE ally, with crucial U.S. backing, that have been intensely bombing Yemen since 2015 and maintaining a punishing Red Sea blockade against shipments often vital to famine relief. “The Saudi-led coalition’s ships are preventing essential supplies from entering Yemen,” according to an October 11, 2017 Reuters report. The report goes on to assess the dire consequences, for Yemen, caused by blocking and delaying ships carrying food and medicine. It documents many cases in which vessels were thoroughly searched, certified not to be carrying weapons, and still not allowed to enter Yemen.

In a time when 20 million people face starvation, it’s particularly obscene for any country to pour resources into nuclear weaponry.

Mordechai Vanunu took extraordinary risks and endured incredible suffering to rescue the human species from the foolhardiness of building and maintaining nuclear arsenals. I wonder if people worldwide can rise to a level of courage and seriousness needed to simply recognize, and then, where possible, act in response to the world’s real threats. Within the U.S., can several decades of U.S. government bipartisan lying about Iran be overcome with saner, more humane narratives? Can the threat of U.S. invasion be lifted long enough to allow Iran’s people a window for once again considering democratic reforms? Silence about these issues seems ominous. But silence can be broken.

We have Vanunu’s courageous example. Let’s not waste the precious time we have in which to follow it.

Kathy Kelly (kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence, (www.vcnv.org), a campaign to end U.S. military and economic wars.

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/10/15/wrongful-rhetoric-and-trumps-strategy-on-iran/

By Chris Hedges

The American empire is coming to an end. The U.S. economy is being drained by wars in the Middle East and vast military expansion around the globe. It is burdened by growing deficits, along with the devastating effects of deindustrialization and global trade agreements. Our democracy has been captured and destroyed by corporations that steadily demand more tax cuts, more deregulation and impunity from prosecution for massive acts of financial fraud, all the while looting trillions from the U.S. treasury in the form of bailouts. The nation has lost the power and respect needed to induce allies in Europe, Latin America, Asia and Africa to do its bidding. Add to this the mounting destruction caused by climate change and you have a recipe for an emerging dystopia. Overseeing this descent at the highest levels of the federal and state governments is a motley collection of imbeciles, con artists, thieves, opportunists and warmongering generals. And to be clear, I am speaking about Democrats, too.

The empire will limp along, steadily losing influence until the dollar is dropped as the world’s reserve currency, plunging the United States into a crippling depression and instantly forcing a massive contraction of its military machine.

Short of a sudden and widespread popular revolt, which does not seem likely, the death spiral appears unstoppable, meaning the United States as we know it will no longer exist within a decade or, at most, two. The global vacuum we leave behind will be filled by China, already establishing itself as an economic and military juggernaut, or perhaps there will be a multipolar world carved up among Russia, China, India, Brazil, Turkey, South Africa and a few other states. Or maybe the void will be filled, as the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book “In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power,” by “a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral military forces like NATO, and an international financial leadership self-selected at Davos and Bilderberg” that will “forge a supranational nexus to supersede any nation or empire.”

Under every measurement, from financial growth and infrastructure investment to advanced technology, including supercomputers, space weaponry and cyberwarfare, we are being rapidly overtaken by the Chinese. “In April 2015 the U.S. Department of Agriculture suggested that the American economy would grow by nearly 50 percent over the next 15 years, while China’s would triple and come close to surpassing America’s in 2030,” McCoy noted. China became the world’s second largest economy in 2010, the same year it became the world’s leading manufacturing nation, pushing aside a United States that had dominated the world’s manufacturing for a century. The Department of Defense issued a sober report titled “At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk Assessment in a Post-Primacy World.” It found that the U.S. military “no longer enjoys an unassailable position versus state competitors,” and “it no longer can … automatically generate consistent and sustained local military superiority at range.” McCoy predicts the collapse will come by 2030.

Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.

This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”

Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.

“While rising empires are often judicious, even rational in their application of armed force for conquest and control of overseas dominions, fading empires are inclined to ill-considered displays of power, dreaming of bold military masterstrokes that would somehow recoup lost prestige and power,” McCoy writes. “Often irrational even from an imperial point of view, these micromilitary operations can yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the process already under way.”

Empires need more than force to dominate other nations. They need a mystique. This mystique—a mask for imperial plunder, repression and exploitation—seduces some native elites, who become willing to do the bidding of the imperial power or at least remain passive. And it provides a patina of civility and even nobility to justify to those at home the costs in blood and money needed to maintain empire. The parliamentary system of government that Britain replicated in appearance in the colonies, and the introduction of British sports such as polo, cricket and horse racing, along with elaborately uniformed viceroys and the pageantry of royalty, were buttressed by what the colonialists said was the invincibility of their navy and army. England was able to hold its empire together from 1815 to 1914 before being forced into a steady retreat. America’s high-blown rhetoric about democracy, liberty and equality, along with basketball, baseball and Hollywood, as well as our own deification of the military, entranced and cowed much of the globe in the wake of World War II. Behind the scenes, of course, the CIA used its bag of dirty tricks to orchestrate coups, fix elections and carry out assassinations, black propaganda campaigns, bribery, blackmail, intimidation and torture. But none of this works anymore.

The loss of the mystique is crippling. It makes it hard to find pliant surrogates to administer the empire, as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan. The photographs of physical abuse and sexual humiliation imposed on Arab prisoners at Abu Ghraib inflamed the Muslim world and fed al-Qaida and later Islamic State with new recruits. The assassination of Osama bin Laden and a host of other jihadist leaders, including the U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, openly mocked the concept of the rule of law. The hundreds of thousands of dead and millions of refugees fleeing our debacles in the Middle East, along with the near-constant threat from militarized aerial drones, exposed us as state terrorists. We have exercised in the Middle East the U.S. military’s penchant for widespread atrocities, indiscriminate violence, lies and blundering miscalculations, actions that led to our defeat in Vietnam.

The brutality abroad is matched by a growing brutality at home. Militarized police gun down mostly unarmed, poor people of color and fill a system of penitentiaries and jails that hold a staggering 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although Americans represent only 5 percent of global population. Many of our cities are in ruins. Our public transportation system is a shambles. Our educational system is in steep decline and being privatized. Opioid addiction, suicide, mass shootings, depression and morbid obesity plague a population that has fallen into profound despair. The deep disillusionment and anger that led to Donald Trump’s election—a reaction to the corporate coup d’état and the poverty afflicting at least half of the country—have destroyed the myth of a functioning democracy. Presidential tweets and rhetoric celebrate hate, racism and bigotry and taunt the weak and the vulnerable. The president in an address before the United Nations threatened to obliterate another nation in an act of genocide. We are worldwide objects of ridicule and hatred. The foreboding for the future is expressed in the rash of dystopian films, motion pictures that no longer perpetuate American virtue and exceptionalism or the myth of human progress.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” McCoy writes. “Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit—witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.”

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.

Many of the estimated 69 empires that have existed throughout history lacked competent leadership in their decline, having ceded power to monstrosities such as the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero. In the United States, the reins of authority may be in the grasp of the first in a line of depraved demagogues.

“For the majority of Americans, the 2020s will likely be remembered as a demoralizing decade of rising prices, stagnant wages, and fading international competitiveness,” McCoy writes. The loss of the dollar as the global reserve currency will see the U.S. unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds, which will be drastically devalued at that point. There will be a massive rise in the cost of imports. Unemployment will explode. Domestic clashes over what McCoy calls “insubstantial issues” will fuel a dangerous hypernationalism that could morph into an American fascism.

A discredited elite, suspicious and even paranoid in an age of decline, will see enemies everywhere. The array of instruments created for global dominance—wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties, sophisticated torture techniques, militarized police, the massive prison system, the thousands of militarized drones and satellites—will be employed in the homeland. The empire will collapse and the nation will consume itself within our lifetimes if we do not wrest power from those who rule the corporate state.

Source: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-end-of-empire/

By Keith Jones

US President Donald Trump vowed Friday that he will use his presidential powers to blow up the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran unless it is quickly amended to Washington’s satisfaction.

“In the event we are not able to reach a solution working with Congress and our allies, then the agreement will be terminated,” declared Trump. “It is under continuous review and our participation can be canceled by me as president at any time.”

The vow came at the end of a bellicose rant in which Trump denounced Iran as “fanatical,” a “rogue state,” and the “world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” He accused Tehran of fomenting “conflict, terror and turmoil throughout the Middle East and beyond.”

Trump and the US imperialist ruling elite for which he speaks are in no position to be denouncing others for stoking conflict and terrorizing people in the Middle East and elsewhere. For the past quarter-century, the United States has continuously waged illegal wars of aggression across the broader Middle East in which it has killed hundreds of thousands of people, turned millions more into refugees, and destroyed entire societies. Washington has incited sectarian Sunni-Shia conflict and used Islamist terrorists as it proxy fighters, including in its regime-change wars in Libya and Syria.

Trump’s diatribe was billed as an address outlining a more aggressive US strategy toward Iran, aimed at “fixing” the nuclear accord and rolling back Tehran’s “malign” influence across the Middle East. It was the occasion for Trump to make public his long rumored decision to refuse to continue certifying that Iran is fulfilling its obligations under the nuclear accord (Joint Comprehensive Programme of Action), and that the JCPOA serves the US “national interest.”

Under a 2015 law, Congress gave itself the power to quickly re-impose economic sanctions on Iran should the president fail to issue, at 90 day intervals, certification of the White House’s continued support for the nuclear agreement.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani quickly took to the airwaves to give a nationally televised rebuttal of Trump’s speech. “Mr. Trump’s remarks on Iran… contained nothing but expletives and a pile of delusional allegations against the Iranian nation,” he said.

In reply to Trump’s denunciation of the 1979 popular revolution that overthrew the Shah’s despotic, US-installed regime and his attempt to cast the past four decades of American war threats and sanctions against Tehran as Iranian “aggression,” Rouhani said Trump should “study history better and more closely and know what (US officials) have done to the Iranian people over the past sixty-something years and how they have treated the people of Iran… after the victory of the Revolution.”

All the other signatories of the nuclear accord—Germany, France, Britain, the European Union, Russia and China—have repeatedly said that it should not, and legally cannot, be reopened.

As it became clear in recent weeks that Trump was determined to overturn the 2015 agreement, world leaders, particularly the leaders of Washington’s traditional European allies, issued increasingly dire warnings. Scuttling the agreement—whether immediately or, as Trump has now done, by lighting a fuse under it—will, they have warned, greatly exacerbate the war danger in the Middle East. And by demonstrating that Washington arrogates to itself the right to unilaterally modify or repudiate international agreements, the US will, they have stressed, slam shut the door to any diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Korean Peninsula.

Like Rouhani, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, was quick to respond to Trump’s speech. She dismissed the US president’s claim that Iran has violated the JCOPA, declaring that there have been no Iranian “violations of any of the commitments in the agreement.” (In fact, even the Pentagon and US State Department acknowledge that Tehran has implemented the agreement to the letter.)

Noting that the JCOPA was subsequently endorsed by the UN Security Council, Mogherini added, “To my knowledge, there is not one single country in the world that can terminate a UN Security Council resolution that has been adopted. The president of the United States has many powers, but not this one.”

Later, British Prime Minster Theresa May, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron took the rare step of issuing a joint statement to reaffirm their support for the JCPOA, which they hailed as “the culmination of 13 years of diplomacy.”

“We encourage the US administration and Congress,” said the leaders of Europe’s principal powers, “to consider the implications to the security of the US and its allies before taking any steps that might undermine” the nuclear agreement.

Clearly, they are hoping that Trump can still be roped in by senior members of the administration—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster—who oppose abrogating the Iran agreement at this juncture, believing that a head-on confrontation with Iran will cut across US military-strategic offensives against China and Russia and dangerously fray US-European relations and the NATO alliance.

In his remarks on Friday, Trump did not call on Congress to immediately “snap back” sanctions on Iran. He did, however, praise proposed US legislation that would sanction any person or group in any way connected to Iran’s ballistic missile program and a second bill that would declare the sweeping temporary restrictions placed on Iran’s civil nuclear program under the JCPOA to be permanent.

Trump also announced that the US Treasury Department is placing Iran’s entire Revolutionary Guard Corps under sanction for supporting “terrorism.” Given the Revolutionary Guards’ extensive role in Iran’s economy, this action is expected to act as a strong deterrent to foreign investment in Iran.

Trump’s stratagem and hope is that the double-threat of Congress re-imposing sweeping sanctions on Iran’s energy and banking sectors, thereby torpedoing the nuclear deal, or direct action on his part to smash the agreement, will compel the Europeans to fall into line behind Washington in demanding that Tehran “correct” the JCPOA’s “many flaws.”

Trump made no offer to negotiate with Iran, underscoring that he was issuing an ultimatum. He simply outlined a series of non-negotiable demands that would violate Iran’s sovereignty and effectively reduce the country to the status of a vassal state, while implicitly demanding that the other signatories to the JCPOA, especially Washington’s ostensible European allies, put pressure on Iran to capitulate.

These demands include: eliminating the JCPOA’s “sunset” clauses, i.e., transforming the temporary limits on Iran’s civil nuclear program into permanent prohibitions; giving International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors unfettered access to Iranian military sites; and dismantling Iran’s ballistic missile program.

For Iran to accept these demands would be tantamount to accepting neo-colonial status and unilateral disarmament. For decades, Washington, under Republican and Democratic administrations alike, has pursued a policy of regime-change in Tehran while arming to the teeth US client states in the region, beginning with Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The fear and anger in Europe over Washington’s unilateralist course is palpable and deep-rooted. Earlier this week, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel complained that Washington was “replacing the rule of law with the law of the strongest.”

He warned that US “termination of the Iran agreement would turn the Middle East into a region of hot crises” and shut the door to diplomacy with North Korea. The European Union said Gabriel will “have to tell the Americans that their behavior on the Iran issue will drive us Europeans into a common position with Russia and China against the USA.”

The European imperialist powers played a decisive role in imposing the brutal sanctions that ravaged Iran’s economy for four years and are currently in the midst of major rearmament programs. Their disagreements with the US over Iran are entirely bound up with their own predatory agendas.

Since the 2015 nuclear deal, they have all rushed to take advantage of Tehran’s offers of huge commercial opportunities, including in the energy sector. Not only do Trump’s plans to scuttle the Iran deal place these investments in jeopardy; the European powers, which are much more dependent on Mideast oil than the US, fear the economic fallout and the socially destabilizing impact on Europe of a ratcheting up of tensions with Iran.

The anti-Iran hawks in and around the Trump administration have expressed confidence that ultimately the threat of European companies being sanctioned through the US-dominated world financial system for continued dealings with Iran will force the Europeans to accede to Washington’s demand that they join it in a new economic war against Iran.

But there is a growing mood in Europe for a push back against Washington. David O’Sullivan, the European Union’s ambassador to the United States, has said Europe may have to bring forward legislation to protect European companies from the threat of US sanctions.

In arguing for the Iran nuclear accord, President Obama repeatedly said the only alternative was war. What he didn’t say was that such a war would rapidly become a regional war, drawing in US allies like Saudi Arabia and Israel and Iranian-allied groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and potentially Russia and other outside powers.

Military action is certainly under discussion in the Trump administration. Republican Senator Tom Cotton, who has been working closely with Trump and his aides in formulating the administration’s new Iran strategy, told a recent Council of Foreign Relations meeting that if renewed sanctions did not force Iran to submit, the US could launch “calibrated strikes” against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/10/14/denouncing-iran-as-a-terrorist-state-trump-refuses-to-recertify-nuclear-accord/

By Ali Abunimah

Donald Trump’s “America First” foreign policy was on full display Thursday when the State Department announced that the United States is withdrawing from UNESCO over the United Nations cultural body’s supposed “anti-Israel bias.”

Under President Barack Obama, the US had already cut funding to the agency because of a US law that restricts support to UN bodies that recognize Palestine as a state.

UNESCO head Irina Bokova expressed regret at the US decision.

Bokova has previously bent over backwards to appease Israel, including by echoing its false claims of anti-Israel bias at UNESCO.

The extent to which US leaders are willing to serve Israel is demonstrated by a simple thought experiment: it’s impossible to imagine the US pulling out of any world body citing an “anti-Canadian,” “anti-British” or an “anti-French” bias. Even though they are among the closest US allies, such a move would immediately subject the president to accusations from his virulently nationalistic base of putting foreign interests before American ones.

Yet President Trump is likely to hear much praise, and not only from the more right-wing segments of the American establishment.

In April, all 100 US Senators signed a letter endorsing the myth that the UN has an “anti-Israel agenda.”

This means there is not likely to be much critical examination in such circles of the bogus claims of anti-Israel bias.

Israeli smears

In recent months, Israel and its supporters have falsely claimed that UNESCO resolutions have undermined Jewish connections to heritage sites in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

A year ago, Israel attempted to have Jerusalem’s Old City, the site of the al-Aqsa mosque compound, removed from UNESCO’s list of endangered world heritage sites.

That effort came as groups that call for the destruction of the al-Aqsa mosque and its replacement with a Jewish temple intensified their activities, often with Israeli government funding and support.

The Israeli attempt came two weeks after UNESCO had voted to condemn the myriad well-documented ways Israel violates the rights of Palestinian and Muslim worshippers at al-Aqsa mosque and threatens the architectural integrity of the compound.

Israel falsely claimed that the vote denied a Jewish connection to the al-Aqsa mosque site that Jews call Temple Mount.

As a result of that vote, Israel launched a global smear campaign against UNESCO, even likening it to the Islamic State group, or ISIS.

Upholding international law

Some UN officials caved in to the Israeli bullying and distanced themselves from the resolution.

But in May, UNESCO passed a resolution that, in line with international law, called Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem “null and void” and demanded that Israel halt excavations and other works in the city.

Israel again launched a campaign of smears, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu terming the resolution “delusional” and “bizarre.”

The only thing that UNESCO had done was to reaffirm what the UN Security Council had stated just months earlier: that Israel is the occupying power and must abide by international law.

Months later, Israel’s ire was raised again when UNESCO passed two resolutions again upholding international law.

The resolutions recognized Hebron’s Old City and Ibrahimi mosque as endangered Palestinian heritage sites.

Distorting history

Israel again went on a verbal rampage, claiming that UNESCO promotes “lies” and “fake history.”

“This time they decided that the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron is a Palestinian site, meaning not Jewish, and that it’s in danger,” Netanyahu claimed.

The Tomb of the Patriarchs is the name used by Israel for the Ibrahimi mosque, where an American Jewish settler massacred 29 Palestinians in 1994. The site is venerated by Muslims, Christians and Jews as the burial place of Abraham and other prophets.

What Netanyahu did – as Israeli officials often do – is conflate Jewish belief with Israeli control, as if a site cannot be both revered by Jews and located in Palestinian territory. There is, however, no contradiction between a site being Palestinian, on the one hand, and sacred to Muslims, Christians or Jews, on the other.

So what “anti-Israel bias” means in practice is failing to enthusiastically endorse Israel’s distortions and lies aimed at legitimizing its illegal colonization and its attempts to erase any history in Palestine that does not bolster the Zionist colonial narrative.

The US withdrawal comes as UNESCO is set to elect Bokova’s successor this week, a contest that Israeli media have painted as a sectarian battle between a Muslim frontrunner from Qatar and a Jewish candidate from France.

There is little reason to lament the departure of the US from UNESCO. What would be even better is if Israel follows it out too.

Ali Abunimah is Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books. Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.

Source: http://www.countercurrents.org/2017/10/13/trump-puts-israel-first-with-unesco-withdrawal/

By Graham Vanbergen

Can you guess who recently said this? – “Oh, by the way, we’re also going to tax you even more because this Ponzi scheme that we’ve had in play for pensions and for healthcare and for social care for the past 30 years is about to collapse. So therefore we want you to work really, really hard, but when you get to 65, it’s not going to be there. Hands up who thinks that’s a really compelling narrative?”

It was Conservative Justice Minister Dr Phillip Lee who became yet another top Tory to have a go his own party as the annual Conservative conference descended into chaos this year. Lee was speaking at a meeting chaired by the Social Market Foundation, a pro-market think tank!

Lee is not wrong, when it comes to pensions. Since the financial collapse, caused by the banking industry, the pension deficit in the UK has now reached the point, for the first time in history, where it has become the biggest liability to the overall economy.

The decision to cut interest rates last August to their lowest ever is only an admission by the Bank of England that the country is still on a full artificial life support system.

HSBC’s head of European credit strategy Jamie Stuttard warned a year ago that Governor Mark Carney’s monetary policy move means:

“The pension issue is essentially kicked down the road for somebody else to sort out.”

If you have a pension and you’re still quite a few years from claiming it, you should be really worried. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that there is a very real threat to collecting that pension in any meaningful way. What then? The pension deficit is so serious that it has literally mutated from being nothing one year prior to the financial crisis to Britain’s biggest liability just a decade later.

The pension deficit has sprinted way passed the £430 billion mark, increasing at the rate of at least £40 billion a year and according to the Financial Times (paywall) “more than 85% of UK pension schemes are now in deficit.” In less than ten years, that deficit will climb to the point of implosion.

What happened was easy to understand. The banks blew up the system, the country is actually in recession, even though they say it isn’t, which is why it needs almost zero percent interest rates and hundreds of billions of funding in order to get the banks to lend, so they can make money and strengthen their destroyed balance sheets.

In the meantime, pension providers are unable to get returns on the money invested in them, who in reality need at least 5 or 6 percent just to tread water. The only way to get that type of return is to turn up the risk strategy. UK government gilts are providing no return as many have lost faith in the banks, which in turn drives down the rate of return, making matters even worse for the pension providers.

In 1950, there were 7.2 people aged 20–64 for every person of 65 or over in the OECD countries. By 1980, that ratio dropped to 5.1 and by 2010 it was 4.1. It is projected to reach just 2.1 by 2050. The average ratio for the EU projected to reach 1.8 by 2050.

According to a wikipedia entry on the pensions crisis – “Thousands of private funds have already been wound up (in the UK)”.

Add all the investing problems along with a decade of low interest rates to the fact that the pensioners themselves refuse to die at a financially convenient date for the pension providers – and there’s the catch 22 – and you’re in it. But the Bank of England chief Mark Carney is digging UK pensions deeper into a hole.  With loose monetary policy, Carney is currently acting in the hope of staving off an economic crash in the short term. In reality, all he is doing – as mentioned, is effectively kicking the can down the road for others to collect. All the while, the pensions crisis is getting worse every day and when that deficit is declared un-payable, which it technically is already, the ‘haircuts’ everyone will be taking will cause one almighty recession in its own right. By then, he’ll be back in Canada, shielded from the economic firestorm.

The only options with a crisis like is

A) all affected pension schemes offer big reductions to rebalance their liabilities,

B) the government borrows massive sums of money to shore up those liabilities, hugely increasing the national debt

C) the pension companies offer a one-time payoff or buyout to scheme members that cuts their long term liabilities, or

D) they collapse.

The most likely option you’ll be facing is option A or C as the government simply won’t have the money to bail out pensions after bailing out the banks, which they are still doing and D would cause mass protests or possibly worse.

Of course, the entire country could take the pain, allow artificially low interest rates to increase, which will save the pension companies. Then the scale of ‘zombie’ companies who go bust will become apparent, the stock market will fall, investor dividends will dry up, unemployment will rise causing a risky rise in ‘non-performing’ bank debt. It’s a tightrope as you can see.

Eoin Murray, head of investment at Hermes Investment Management agrees.

“QE and ultra-low rates have insulated many companies, and unwary investors, from the dangers that normally lurk; they are now treading a dangerous path. As interest rates begin to meaningfully rise, companies that have been able to borrow cheaply and roll over debt will be exposed. These are the zombie firms that in a normal rate cycle would no longer exist.” Murray went further with a dark warning for investors: “That would mean inefficient companies going bust, but investors also stand to share the pain. Back in 2009 only 2pc of loans issued were “cov-lite”, those which placed few restrictions on a company’s debts and so offered little protection for the investors buying those bonds. By 2013 that was 59pc and last year it hit 75pc, this means the debt markets could be a “powder keg”.

The cost of living and low wage performance has also stopped millions from contributing to pensions, which again, only makes matters worse. This is because ordinary people are already suffering today, let alone being able to invest in their future. One in four households (not individuals, entire households) have less than £95 saved. The savings gap between the wealthy and poor has widened by a huge 25 percent in just the last year. The IMF says this is because average household income is now falling faster than at any time in the last 40 years and according to the ONS is a record since records began back in the 1963.

The result of all this is that one in five have made no pension provision and many millions are facing big future cuts in pension payments or a total wipeout. The other alternative would be to bring in lots of young foreign labour but we have Brexit, and anyway, the new robotics revolution in our factories will only decrease the number of working age people able to contribute.

This problem will have very real consequences for the country and its people quite soon and the Bank of England is fanning the flames of an economic problem set to explode in our faces. Cowardly politicians unable to start the debate on what to do for fear of losing power in the resultant social scandal that should have been dealt with years ago do not help of course.

Source: https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-uk-pensions-crisis-from-prophesy-to-reality/5612539