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By Paul Craig Roberts

Greenpeace has done that part of the world whose representatives are so corrupt or so stupid as to sign on to the Trans-Pacific and Trans-Atlantic “partnerships” a great service. Greenpeace secured and leaked the secret TTIP documents that Washington and global corporations are pushing on Europe. The official documents prove that my description of these “partnerships” when they first appeared in the news is totally correct.

These so-called “free trade agreements” are not trade agreements. The purpose of the “partnerships,” which were drafted by global corporations, is to make corporations immune to the laws of soverign countries in which they do business. Any country’s sovereign law whether social, environmental, food safety, labor protections—any law or regulation—that impacts a corporation’s profits is labeled a “restraint on trade.” The “partnerships” permit corporations to file a suit that overturns the law or regulation and also awards the corporation damages paid by the taxpayers of the country that tried to protect its environment or the safety of its food and workers.

The law suit is not heard in the courts of the country or in any court. It is heard in a corporate tribunal in which corporations serve as judge, jury, and prosecutor.

In other words, the “partnerships” give global corporations the power to overturn democratic outcomes. Allegedly, Europe consists of democracies. Democracies pass laws protecting the environment and the safety of food and labor, but these laws democratically enacted reduce profits. Anything less than a sweatshop, with starvation wages, no environmental protection, no safety legislation for food or worker, can be overturned at will by global corporations under the terms of the “partnerships.”

Only a traitor, a well paid one, could sign such a pact.

In my opinion, corporate taxation can also be overturned as it obviously reduces profits.

The Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific “partnerships” have been conducted in secrecy. The reason is obvious. Had people known how they were being sold out, there would have been a firestorm of protest. The corporate shills and their propagandists in the financial media could deny my revelations, because I had no official documents to release.

The “partnership” agreements are treaties. Under the US Constitution, treaties are the prerogative of Congress, not the prerogative of an executive brance appointed Trade Representative who represents not the people but the corporations seeking the advantage. To avoid the US Constitution, the agreements are defined as non-treaties. You see how the groundwork for corruption is established.

The way it works is that the appointed US Trade Representative “negotiates” with appointed trade representatives of other countries. Any resistance to the deal is overcome with bribes and intimidation. All of the negotiation is conducted in secrecy. When the trade representatives sign on to the deal, it is presented to the legislatures of the countries. The legislators are told that they must approve the pact and not endanger all the hard work that has gone on for so long and that is in everybody’s interest as attested to by all of the bribed and coerced trade representatives.

These “trade pacts” originate in the US, because American global corporations and the American mega-banks are the largest players in the world economy, and the agreements that the corporations walk through the process give the American companies economic hegemony over the countries that sign the agreements. The Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific “partnerships” are tools of US financial imperialism.

Today (May 3, 2016) I debated on Press TV Sean O’Grady, the financial editor of the UK newspaper the Independent. It is extraordinary that O’Grady took a line totally opposite to that of his newspaper. I suggested to him that perhaps he should read his own newspaper.

Today an article in the Independent reported that the leaked “documents show that US corporations will be granted unprecedented powers over any new public health or safety regulations to be introduced in future. If any European government does dare to bring in laws to raise social or environmental standards, TTIP will grant US investors the right to sue for loss of profits in their own corporate court system that is unavailable to domestic firms, governments or anyone else. For all those who said that we were scaremongering and that the EU would never allow this to happen, we were right and you were wrong.”

As I understand it, the situation is worse than the article describes. TTIP applies to laws already on the books, such as France’s laws against GMO seeds and food products.

The Independent article continues:

“Today’s shock leak of the text of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) marks the beginning of the end for the hated EU-US trade deal, and a key moment in the Brexit debate. The unelected negotiators have kept the talks going until now by means of a fanatical level of secrecy, with threats of criminal prosecution for anyone divulging the treaty’s contents.

“Now, for the first time, the people of Europe can see for themselves what the European Commission has been doing under cover of darkness – and it is not pretty. The leaked TTIP documents, published by Greenpeace this morning, run to 248 pages and cover 13 of the 17 chapters where the final agreement has begun to take shape. The texts include highly controversial subjects such as EU food safety standards, already known to be at risk from TTIP, as well as details of specific threats such as the US plan to end Europe’s ban on genetically modified foods.

“The leaked texts also reveal how the European Commission is preparing to open up the European economy to unfair competition from giant US corporations, despite acknowledging the disastrous consequences this will bring to European producers, who have to meet far higher standards than pertain in the USA.

“According to official statistics, at least one million jobs will be lost as a direct result of TTIP – and twice that many if the full deal is allowed to go through. Yet we can now see that EU negotiators are preparing to trade away whole sectors of our economies in TTIP, with no care for the human consequences.

“The European Commission slapped a 30-year ban on public access to the TTIP negotiating texts at the beginning of the talks in 2013, in the full knowledge that they would not be able to survive the outcry if people were given sight of the deal. In response, campaigners called for a ‘Dracula strategy’ against the agreement: expose the vampire to sunlight and it will die. Today the door has been flung open and the first rays of sunlight shone on TTIP. The EU negotiators will never be able to crawl back into the shadows again.

“For those of us in the thick of the EU referendum debate, the contempt shown by the TTIP negotiators to the people of Europe is the most potent reminder of the democratic deficit at the heart of the EU institutions.”

You can read the Independent article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/ttip-leaks-shocking-what-are-they-eu-us-deal-a7010121.html

The revelations are disconcerting for the British and European peoples. For example, the Independent reports that TTIP could cause the privitazation of the National Health Service and the UK Parliament would be powerless to stop it. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/ttip-could-cause-an-nhs-sell-off-and-parliament-would-be-powerless-to-stop-it-says-leading-union-a7006471.html
See also: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-is-ttip-and-six-reasons-why-the-answer-should-scare-you-9779688.html

In our debate Sean O’Grady performed as a shill, a propagandist for the corporate interests behind TTIP. He said that it was a free trade agreement that benefitted everyone just as NAFTA and other such agreements have proved to be the case. Tell that to all the displaced American workers.

He said that it was unfortunate that the secrecy had possibly hurt the agreement’s prospects and that it would have been better if the pact’s provisions had been known as they were negotiated. That way, he said, the agreement would not be threatened by the shock effect of the leaked documents.

O’Grady also claimed that no one has thus far agreed to the pact despite the fact that the representatives have agreed to the pact. Perhaps what he means is that legislatures have not
given their approval.

The headline on the Independent article thinks the leak will prevent approval: “After the leaks showing what it stands for, this could really be the end for TTIP.” If so, O’Grady regards it as a great loss. For the global corporations, of course, not for the peoples it would exploit.

The Greenpeace revelations should deep-six the pact, but I am uncertain. French president Hollande says, provisionally, that France will not sign the pact as it is. In other words, give us some fuzzy language to make it look like we got it fixed.

The EU’s chief negotiator, Ignacio Garcia Bercero, a likely recipient of a large bribe, rushed to the defense of TTIP by declaring Greenpeace to be “flatly wrong.” Bercero’s statement makes no sense. Greenpeace released the official documents. No one denies that the leaked documents are legitimate. So apparently Bercero’s position is that the official documents are wrong. He sounds like a guy working hard for his money.

Bercero, went on to say, according to the BBC, that “it is not correct to say the US is pushing for lowering of the level of protection in the EU.” This is an amazing lie ! Those who are trying to put a good face on the leak themselves admit that this is precisely what the US is trying to do. They claim that the Europeans haven’t yet given in.

It is disingeneous for Bercero or O’Grady or anyone to pretend that TTIP has not been from the very beginning about establishing global corporate hegemony over the governments of democratic countries. I pointed this out when the corporations first made their move. There is no doubt whatsoever that the Trans-Atlantic and Trans-Pacific “partnerships” are about giving global capitalism immunity from the laws of sovereign countries.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilla Malmstroem is, according to the BBC, “steering the TTIP talks.” Malmstroem, another likely recipient of a large bribe, says: “I am simply not in the business of lowering standards.” http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36185746

Her statement is misleading. She is not in the business of lowering standards. She is in the business of making it possible for global capitalism to overthrow all standards, high and low.

From my encounter today with Sean O’Grady, a person whos integrity I no longer respect, I expect the corporate bought-and-paid-for Western financial press and governments to close ranks and discredit the leaked documents as some kind of Greenpeace “conspiracy theory.” Even in my presence, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Wall Street Journal editor, O’Grady had no compunction about misrepresenting to my face the agreement as a good one harmed only by secrecy. If it hadn’t been secret, said O’Grady, it would have been OK.

All of the blather about free trade and tariff reduction is mere cover for the only purpose of TTIP, which is to establish American economic imperialism over the peoples whose governments sold them out for money.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

04 May, 2016
Paulcraigroberts.org

By Eric Zuesse

The great investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in two previous articles in the London Review of Books (“Whose Sarin?” and “The Red Line and the Rat Line”) has reported that the Obama Administration falsely blamed the government of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad for the sarin gas attack that Obama was trying to use as an excuse to invade Syria; and Hersh pointed to a report from British intelligence saying that the sarin that was used didn’t come from Assad’s stockpiles. Hersh also said that a secret agreement in 2012 was reached between the Obama Administration and the leaders of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, to set up a sarin gas attack and blame it on Assad so that the U.S. could invade and overthrow Assad. “By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.” Hersh didn’t say whether these “arms” included the precursor chemicals for making sarin which were stockpiled in Libya, but there have been multiple independent reports that Libya’s Gaddafi possessed such stockpiles, and also that the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi Libya was operating a “rat line” for Gaddafi’s captured weapons into Syria through Turkey. So, Hersh isn’t the only reporter who has been covering this. Indeed, the investigative journalist Christof Lehmann headlined on 7 October 2013, “Top US and Saudi Officials responsible for Chemical Weapons in Syria” and reported, on the basis of very different sources than Hersh used, that “Evidence leads directly to the White House, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey, CIA Director John Brennan, Saudi Intelligence Chief Prince Bandar, and Saudi Arabia´s Interior Ministry.” And, as if that weren’t enough, even the definitive analysis of the evidence that was performed by two leading U.S. analysts, the Lloyd-Postal report, concluded that, “The US Government’s Interpretation of the Technical Intelligence It Gathered Prior to and After the August 21 Attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” Obama has clearly been lying.

However, now, for the first time, Hersh has implicated Hillary Clinton directly in this “rat line.” In an interview with Alternet.org, Hersh was asked about the then-U.S.-Secretary-of-State’s role in the Benghazi Libya U.S. consulate’s operation to collect weapons from Libyan stockpiles and send them through Turkey into Syria for a set-up sarin-gas attack, to be blamed on Assad in order to ‘justify’ the U.S. invading Syria, as the U.S. had invaded Libya to eliminate Gaddafi. Hersh said:

That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody, who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.

This was, in fact, the Syrian part of the State Department’s Libyan operation, Obama’s operation to set up an excuse for the U.S. doing in Syria what they had already done in Libya.

The interviewer then asked:

In the book [Hersh’s The Killing of Osama bin Laden, just out] you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets [for the planned U.S. invasion of Syria] provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only — nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure. What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?

Hersh responded by saying that the U.S. tradition in that regard has long been to ignore civilian casualties; i.e., collateral damage of U.S. attacks is okay or even desired (so as to terrorize the population into surrender) — not an ‘issue’, except, perhaps, for the PR people.

The interviewer asked why Obama is so obsessed to replace Assad in Syria, since “The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups”; and Hersh replied that not only he, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “nobody could figure out why.” He said, “Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period.” This has actually been the case not only since the Party that Assad leads, the Ba’ath Party, was the subject of a shelved CIA coup-plot in 1957 to overthrow and replace it; but, actually, the CIA’s first coup had been not just planned but was carried out in 1949 in Syria, overthrowing there a democratically elected leader, in order to enable a pipeline for the Sauds’ oil to become built through Syria into the largest oil market, Europe; and, construction of the pipeline started the following year. But, there were then a succession of Syrian coups (domestic instead of by foreign powers — 1954, 1963, 1966, and, finally, in 1970), concluding in the accession to power of Hafez al-Assad during the 1970 coup. And, the Sauds’ long-planned Trans-Arabia Pipeline has still not been built. The Saudi royal family, who own the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, don’t want to wait any longer. Obama is the first U.S. President to have seriously tried to carry out their long-desired “regime change” in Syria, so as to enable not only the Sauds’ Trans-Arabian Pipeline to be built, but also to build through Syria the Qatar-Turkey Gas Pipeline that the Thani royal family (friends of the Sauds) who own Qatar want also to be built there. The U.S. is allied with the Saud family (and with their friends, the royal families of Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman). Russia is allied with the leaders of Syria — as Russia had earlier been allied with Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, Hussein in Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya, and Yanukovych in Ukraine (all of whom except Syria’s Ba’ath Party, the U.S. has successfully overthrown).

Hersh was wrong to say that “nobody could figure out why” Obama is obsessed with overthrowing Assad and his Ba’ath Party, even if nobody that he spoke with was willing to say why. They have all been hired to do a job, which didn’t change even when the Soviet Union ended and the Warsaw Pact was disbanded; and, anyone who has been at this job for as long as those people were, can pretty well figure out what the job actually is — even if Hersh can’t.

Hersh then said that Obama wanted to fill Syria with foreign jihadists to serve as the necessary ground forces for his planned aerial bombardment there, and, “if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’ So, they actually pushed a lot of people [jihadists] to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas.”

However, it’s not actually part of America’s deal with its allies the fundamentalist-Sunni Arabic royal families and the fundamentalist Sunni Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, for the U.S. to supply the salaries (to be “paying for them,” as Hersh put it there) to those fundamentalist Sunni jihadists — that’s instead the function of the Sauds and of their friends, the other Arab royals, and their friends, to do. (Those are the people who finance the terrorists to perpetrate attacks in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, India, Nigeria, etc. — i.e., anywhere except in their own countries.) And, Erdogan in Turkey mainly gives their jihadists just safe passage into Syria, and he takes part of the proceeds from the jihadists’ sales of stolen Syrian and Iraqi oil. But, they all work together as a team (with the jihadists sometimes killing each other in the process — that’s even part of the plan) — though each national leader has PR problems at home in order to fool his respective public into thinking that they’re against terrorists, and that only the ‘enemy’ is to blame. (Meanwhile, the aristocrats who supply the “salaries” of the jihadists, walk off with all the money.)

This way, U.S oil and gas companies will refine, and pipeline into Europe, the Sauds’ oil and the Thanis’ gas, and not only will Russia’s major oil-and-gas market become squeezed away by that, but Obama’s economic sanctions against Russia, plus the yet-further isolation of Russia (as well as of China and the rest of the BRICS countries) by excluding them from Obama’s three mega-trade-deals (TTIP, TPP & TISA), will place the U.S. aristocracy firmly in control of the world, to dominate the 21st Century, as it has dominated ever since the end of WW II.

Then, came this question from Hersh: “Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?” His interviewer immediately seconded that by repeating it, “So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational.” Hersh replied simply: “I don’t know.” He didn’t venture so much as a guess — not even an educated one. But, when journalists who are as knowledgeable as he, don’t present some credible explanation, to challenge the obvious lies (which make no sense that accords with the blatantly contrary evidence those journalists know of against those lies) that come from people such as Barack Obama, aren’t they thereby — though passively — participating in the fraud, instead of contradicting and challenging it? Or, is the underlying assumption, there: The general public is going to be as deeply immersed in the background information here as I am, so that they don’t need me to bring it all together for them into a coherent (and fully documented) whole, which does make sense? Is that the underlying assumption? Because: if it is, it’s false.

Hersh’s journalism is among the best (after all: he went so far as to say, of Christopher Stephens, regarding Hillary Clinton, “there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel”), but it’s certainly not good enough. However, it’s too good to be published any longer in places like the New Yorker. And the reporting by Christof Lehmann was better, and it was issued even earlier than Hersh’s; and it is good enough, because it named names, and it explained motivations, in an honest and forthright way, which is why Lehmann’s piece was published only on a Montenegran site, and only online, not in a Western print medium, such as the New Yorker. The sites that are owned by members of the Western aristocracy don’t issue reports like that — journalism that’s good enough. They won’t inform the public when a U.S. Secretary of State, and her boss the U.S. President, are the persons actually behind a sarin gas attack they’re blaming on a foreign leader the U.S. aristocrats and their allied foreign aristocrats are determined to topple and replace.

Is this really a democracy?

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

 

01 May, 2016
Strategic-culture.org

By Farooque Chowdhury

Condition of labor in today’s world is not difficult to gauge. News on labor’s working and living condition is in abundance, which help comprehend the conditions within which labor survive in the present day world.

State of societies also gives a picture of labor’s condition. Afghanistan or Iraq, Libya or Syria, Greece or Ukraine, Egypt or Sudan, the UK or the USA is only a few examples. A number of societies have already experienced imperialist onslaught or financial and other crises related to capitalism or the so-called austerity measures, which brought devastation and death, eviction from home and unemployment, slashed real wage and anti-labor legislation. Everyday existence is the only question that life faces there in these societies. There’s little scope for labor to get mobilized, chalk out and raise demands, express opinion. A number of laws in a number of advanced capitalist societies virtually make unionization difficult, which is hard to identify at first and easy glance. In countries, unionization is falling. It requires serious search to get the fact from these societies. Modern slaves are now well-known fact in many modern economies.

Another angle of the issue also helps see the present condition of labor: profit. The quantity of profit shows the extent labor was robbed over the years as profit comes from whatever surplus labor is appropriated. Moreover, there’s monopoly superprofit – “surplus of profits”, as Lenin defines, “over and above the capitalist profits that are normal and customary all over the world.” (“Imperialism and the split in socialism”, 1916) It comes by intensively appropriating labor, over-pricing and -valuing, and robbing non-monopoly enterprises, small producers, countries having productive investment by monopolies, by financial operations. “A handful of wealthy countries […] have developed monopoly to vast proportions, they obtain superprofits […] they ‘ride on the backs’ of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in other countries […]” (ibid.) John Perkins in his The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man Paperback tells the ways trillions of dollars were robbed from countries. It’s a story from Ecuador, Honduras, Seychelles, Vietnam. It’s a story from Turkey. Are other countries free from the loot? Greece, Spain, Portugal? Rest of the countries within clutch of imperialism and with colluding governments? People including labor are coerced to submit to “policies that make the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Imperialist wars and interventions have aggravated the situation. At the end, there remains profit and superprofit.

Let’s look at a randomly picked portion of profit/superprofit over the last few years:

“US banks posted $40.24 billion in net income during the second quarter, the industry’s second-highest profit total in at least 23 years, according to data from research firm SNL Financial. The latest profits are just below the record $40.36 billion recorded in the first quarter of 2013.” (The Wall Street Journal, “U.S. Bank Profits Near Record Levels”, by Robin Sidel & Saabira Chaudhuri, August 11, 2014)

New York Fed economists Tobias Adrian, Michael Fleming, Or Shachar, Daniel Stackman and Erik Vogt wrote in the blog Liberty Street Economics (“Changes in the Returns to Market Making”): Profits have soared since the global financial crisis at the five biggest US banks. From 2009 to 2014, the combined net income of J.P. Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley annually averaged $41.73 billion, up from annual average of $25.08 billion from 2002 to 2008. (The table on net income for the five largest US dealers exceeds pre-crisis levels) (Reuters, “Profits at big U.S. banks soar since crisis: New York Fed”, by Richard Leong, October 7, 2015)

Citing Federal Deposit Insurance Corp Matthew Heller writes: The US banking industry finished 2015 with a strong fourth quarter. In its latest Quarterly Banking Profile, the FDIC said federally-insured commercial banks and savings institutions reported aggregate net income of $40.8 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015, up $4.4 billion (11.9%) from a year earlier. The proportion of banks that were unprofitable in the fourth quarter fell from 9.9% a year earlier to 9.1%, the lowest level for a fourth quarter since 1996. (“U.S. Bank Profits Climb 11.9% to $40.8B”, CFO.com, CFO Publishing, New York, February 24, 2016)
Swiss banks saw their profits rise during 2014 to close to 19.5 billion Swiss francs although their staff count declined in the year. Announcing its annual update on Swiss banks, the country’s central bank SNB (Swiss National Bank) said on June 18, 2015: 246 out of the 275 banks in Switzerland recorded an annual profit, taking total profit to CHF 14.2 billion in 2014, from CHF 11.9 billion in the previous year. The number of staff working in banks decreased by 1,844 to 125,289. (The Economic Times, “Swiss banks’ profit rises; staff count down”, June 18, 2015)

Swiss bank UBS on February 2, 2016 reported net profit for 2015 up 79 percent at 6.2 billion Swiss francs, ahead of a consensus forecast compiled by Reuters of 5.75 billion Swiss francs. The wealth management business reported its best annual pre-tax profit since 2008. (CNBC.com, “UBS profit up 79% amid ‘paralyzing’ volatility”, by Julia Chatterley & Antonia Matthews”, February 2, 2016)

Canada’s top banks saw their fourth-quarter profits edge higher in 2014. Combined, Canada’s five biggest banks — Royal Bank, TD Bank, Scotiabank, Bank of Montreal and CIBC — earned $7.4 billion of net income during the quarter, up slightly from $7.3 billion a year ago. Their profits for the year climbed to a total of $31.7 billion, from $29.2 billion last year. National Bank, the country’s sixth largest lender, reported fourth-quarter net income of $330 million, up from $320 million a year ago. The bank also boosted its dividend for the third time in the past year. (The Canadian Press, “Canadian Banks’ Profits Top $31.7 Billion In Fiscal Year, But ‘Challenges’ Loom”, by Alexandra Posadzki, 12/05/2014 & with update 02/04/2015)

Australia’s big banks will next week hand down interim profits of almost $16 billion (The Australian, “Big banks set to face more scrutiny as profits near $16bn”, by Michael Bennet, April 25, 2016)

Armaments industries are a good indicator of the joyful journey of profit. A report by Rob Garver in The Fiscal Times said:

“[H]ow well have U.S. defense firms done in the past few years? To put it in context, in the past 24 months, the U.S. stock market has been on a nearly unprecedented tear. Since April of 2013, the Standard & Poor’s 500 index has soared, increasing in value by more than 30 percent. […]

“Since April of 2013, the Dow Jones U.S. Aerospace and Defense Total Stock Market Index has grown at double the rate of the S&P, increasing in value by 60 percent”. (“U.S. Defense Industry Outperforms S&P by 100 Percent”, April 20, 2015)

Another report, two years prior to the above report, in USA Today said:

“The business of war is profitable. In 2011, the 100 largest contractors sold $410 billion in arms and military services. Just 10 of those companies sold over $208 billion. Based on a list of the top 100 arms-producing and military services companies in 2011 compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 companies with the most military sales worldwide.

“These companies have benefited tremendously from the growth in military spending in the U.S., which by far has the largest military budget in the world. […] SIPRI noted that between 2002 and 2011, arms sales among the top 100 companies grew by 51%.”

Based on the SIPRI report, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 biggest weapons companies, looked at sales figures for two years through 2011, among other metrics. Following “are the 10 companies that profit the most from war”:

10. United Technologies – arm sales: $11.6 billion, total sales: $58.2 billion, gross profit: $5.3 billion, total workforce: 199,900.

9. L-3 Communications – arm sales: $12.5 billion, total sales: $15.2 billion, gross profit: $956 million, total workforce: 61,000.

8. Finmeccanica – arm sales: $14.6 billion, total sales: $24.1 billion, gross profit: $ 3.2 billion, total workforce: 70,470.

7. European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company – arm sales: $16.4 billion, total sales: $68.3 billion, gross profit: $1.4 billion, total workforce: 133,120.

6. Northrop Grumman – arm sales: $21.4 billion, total sales: $26.4 billion, gross profit: $2.1 billion, total workforce: 72,500.

5. Raytheon – arm sales: $22.5 billion, total sales: $24.9 billion, gross profit: $1.9 billion, total workforce: 71,000.

4. General Dynamics – arm sales: $23.8 billion, total sales: $32.7 billion, gross profit: $2.5 billion, total workforce: 95,100. The company announced layoffs in early March, blaming mandated federal budget cuts.

3. BAE Systems – arm sales: $29.2 billion, total sales: $30.7 billion, gross profit: $2.3 billion, total workforce: 93,500. BAE noted that its outlook “constrained”, “likely due to the diminished presence in international conflicts and government budget cuts.”

2. Boeing – arm sales: $31.8 billion, total sales: $68.7 billion, gross profit: $4 billion, total workforce: 171,700.

1. Lockheed Martin – arm sales: $36.3 billion, total sales: $46.5 billion, gross profit: $2.7 billion, total workforce, 123,000. “In the fall of 2012, the company planned on issuing layoff notices to all employees before backing down at the White House’s request.” (“10 companies profiting the most from war”, by Samuel Weigley, 24/7 Wall St., March 10, 2013)

A year later, a Bloomberg News report by Richard Clough said:

“Led by Lockheed Martin, the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.

“Investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq, said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer at Chicago-based BMO Private Bank.

“‘As we ramp up our military muscle in the Mideast, there’s a sense that demand for military equipment and weaponry will likely rise,’ said Ablin, who oversees $66 billion including Northrop Grumman and Boeing shares. ‘To the extent we can shift away from relying on troops and rely more heavily on equipment — that could present an opportunity.’

“A Bloomberg gauge of the four largest Pentagon contractors – excluding Boeing … – rose 19 percent this year through yesterday, outstripping the 2.2 percent gain for the Standard & Poor’s 500 Industrials Index.

“Lockheed, the world’s biggest defense company, reached an all-time high of $180.74 on Sept. 19, when Northrop and Raytheon also set records. General Dynamics, the parent company of Maine shipbuilder Bath Iron Works, traded at $129.45 on that day, up from $87.74 a year ago. That quartet of companies and Chicago-based Boeing accounted for about $105 billion in federal contract orders last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“Even with revenue at Lockheed, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Falls Church, Virginia-based Northrop down 4 percent since 2011, non-U.S. sales have climbed 9 percent during that stretch. The four companies also have pared expenses, including reducing their combined workforce since 2011 by 23,000 people, or about 6 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

“‘We haven’t seen so many territories and borders called into question since World War II,’ said BMO Private Bank’s Ablin.” (Portland Press Herald, “U.S. defense industry’s profits soaring along with global tensions” September 25, 2014)

There’s a similar tale of profit-game from Europe. Ron Fraser writes:

“Even as the Greek economy continues its agonizing collapse, with the nation struggling to submit to extreme austerity measures being enforced by its masters in Berlin, the nation’s unelected technocratic government is overseeing a giant fiddle of the books involving the channeling of bailout money into the coffers of Germany’s armaments industry.

“To counter Turkey’s aggression, Greece has spent huge amounts on defense budgets — as much as 4.3 percent of gross domestic product, proportionately the highest among the EU nations.

“Who has been the greatest beneficiary of this defense expenditure? The major supplier of defense equipment to Greece: the German armaments industry.

“How much have EU elites actually manipulated ongoing Greek-Turkish tensions for the advantage of the European Union’s thriving defense industries? As one Greek source observed: “In this volatile game of geopolitics, the bosses of Euro ‘family’ have always been playing the major role in cultivating and manipulating an unguaranteed stability in the area, thus creating market conditions for their influential military industries to flourish. German defense corporations in particular have been major contractors with the Greek (and Turkish) army for more than two decades” (Antibaro.gr, Nov. 29, 2010).

“The facts are that Greece’s coffers have been substantially drained into huge profits for German defense industry barons. This includes multibillion-euro contracts for Greece to purchase big-ticket military hardware ranging from tanks to missiles to naval vessels, including submarines.

“‘All these sum up to hundreds of billions of euros and, under other circumstances, could have been more than enough to balance the Greek budget deficit and even drastically alleviate the external debt,’ that same Greek source observed. ‘One thing is for sure, those billions were added to the profits of German industrialists, bankers and intermediaries.’

“Since that report came to light, the Greek economy has been brought to the brink of catastrophe, with the prospect of inevitable default on its debts being very real by the end of the first quarter of the current year.

“The saving grace for Greece may well be the degree of influence that German defense industry corporate elites and their bankers have in terms of convincing the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank to cough up another tranche of euros in their interests. An unnamed source is quoted by German news source Zeit Online as observing that “If Greece gets paid in March the next tranche of funding (€80 billion is expected), there is a real opportunity to conclude new arms contracts” (January 5).

“Zero Hedge reports that, ‘after the Portuguese (another obviously stressed nation), the Greeks are the largest buyers of German war weapons.’ The same source contrasts this huge expenditure by Greece on armaments amid the general state of the Grecian economy, with ‘the country’s doctors only treating emergencies, bus drivers on strike, and a dire lack of school textbooks and the country teetering on the brink of drachmatization […]’ (January 9).

“When the EU was threatened with the collapse of the Greek economy, German defense industry chiefs held the Greeks’ feet to the fire. Rather than cancel out on existing contracts, permitting the release of funds to support basic services within the ailing Greek economy, the German government defense contractors enforced Greece’s contract obligations.

“The effect of this scenario has been that Greece is treating as a priority the payment of its obligations to the German armaments industry using the very bailout funds received to ostensibly revive its dying economy.” (The Trumpet, “German Arms Industry Profits at Greek Expense”, January 11, 2012)

This seemingly endless and unfathomable profit and superprofit have its origin: at the cost of labor. In Greece, how is labor surviving? In Africa, what’s the condition of the diamond diggers? In Spain and Portugal? In India? In the US? Country after country labor, broadly, carries the same story: exploitation and deprivation, low wage and harsh living condition. Uncertainty and indignity are part of labor-life. Labor is exploited so that profit gets generated. Labor is deprived of all aspects of life: material conditions for a livable life and rights.

“An estimated one million diamond diggers in Africa”, say a number of diamond related literature, “earn less than a dollar a day. This unlivable wage is below the extreme poverty line. As a result, hundreds of thousands of miners lack basic necessities such as running water and sanitation. Hunger, illiteracy, and infant mortality are commonplace. Because children are considered an easy source of cheap labor, they are regularly employed in the diamond mining industry. In some areas of Africa, children make up more than a small part of the workforce. One survey of diamond miners in the Lunda Norte province of Angola found that 46% of miners were between the ages of 5 and 16. For children trapped in the diamond mines, life is full of hardship. Children work long days, often six or seven days a week.”

This story – source of cheap labor, long working days, seven days a week – is overwhelming in countries. The so-called informal sector, the “honorable” self-employed, labor in small enterprises, labor facing the threat of outsourcing, competition with illegal and migrant labor create the same story. Slums are one of the easier points to know working people’s life as “a large share of factory workers lives in slums and informal colonies around industrial areas.” (Labour regimes in the Indian garments sector: capital-labour relations, social reproduction and labour standards in the National Capital Region, by Alessandra Mezzadri and Ravi Srivastava, (Report of the ESRC-DFID Research Project ‘Labour Standards and the Working Poor in China and India’), October 2015, published by the Centre for Development Policy and Research) What do the Dhaka-, Cairo-, Manila-, Mumbai- slums show? What do the workers’ life in Ludhiana, Bangalore, Chennai, Tiruppur and Okhla (Delhi) show? It’s a dark, dingy-life. It’s desolate and destitute. And, slums are integral part of exploitative economy.

Europe, economically and politically much advanced and powerful than Asia-Africa-Latin America gives a clearer picture, which helps compare similar situation in the underdeveloped hemisphere. Think Differently, Humanitarian impacts of the economic crisis in Europe, an October 2013 report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said:

In 2011, a quarter of EU’s population was at risk, having increased by 6 million since 2009 to 120 million in total. Whilst other continents successfully reduce poverty, Europe adds to it. […]

Almost half of Bulgaria’s population was at risk in 2011. Seventeen EU countries record more than one-fifth of their population as poor or excluded. This includes almost one third of the population in the most recent new member state, Croatia. […]

Poverty is on the increase in France, Romania, Spain, Sweden and many other countries …

The 68-page study report said: Europe is sinking into a protracted period of deepening poverty, mass unemployment, social exclusion, greater inequality, and collective despair as a result of austerity policies. The grave impact of the crisis was not confined to the crisis-ravaged, bailed-out countries of southern Europe and Ireland, but extended to relative European success stories such as Germany and parts of Scandinavia.

European Observatory of Working Life’s report Impact of the crisis on working conditions in Europe (July 9, 2013) covered the 27 EU member states and Norway. The report said:

Throughout this report the following pattern emerges – rising insecurity, less choice, wage freezes and the feeling of “not being all in it together”.

It found “higher levels of work intensity (workload, work pressure and job demands) […] in economically restructuring workplaces”, and diminished “choice possibilities of workers”.

The report Destitution in the UK by Suzanne Fitzpatrick, Glen Bramley, Filip Sosenko, Janice Blenkinsopp, Sarah Johnsen, Mandy Littlewood, Gina Netto and Beth Watts found more than a million people across the UK are so impoverished they don’t have enough food, clothes, heating, shelter and toiletries. The report commissioned by UK charity the Joseph Rowntree Foundation was released on April 27, 2016 is based on a two years-long study. The report found: 1.25 million people, an agonizing figure, were destitute during 2015, 312,000 of whom were children. About 80 percent of these were born in Britain.

These people are humiliated and isolated. Persons considered destitute included those who:

[1] “had been forced to sleep rough”;

[2] “had no meal or just one per day over a period of 48 hours or longer”;

[3] “were unable to heat or light their home adequately for five or more days”; and

[4] “lacked weather-proof clothes or had to go without basic toiletries”.

A look at a randomly picked area provides further facts. The report on the garments sector in the India’s national capital region, cited above, says the following:

“[H]arsh, even sometimes violent, patterns of labour subordination in the industry are indisputable. In many countries, garment work could even be classified as ‘hazardous work’, based on the unsafe practices on which the industry seems to rely. Glaring examples of systemic malpractices in the sector, exposing workers to high degrees of danger and risk, have sadly emerged in the past three years across Asia.” (p. 38)

“It should be noted that the first disaster known in the history of garment production is the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire, in New York City. It happened on March 25th 1911. Tellingly, over a hundred years apart, the NYC and South Asian cases reveal strikingly similar modalities. In all cases, evidence suggests that workers were locked into the factory premises. Recently, garment workers have been again subjected to high degrees of danger, risks and violence. In January 2014, the Cambodian government ordered its military and police to open fire on its own garment workers, who were on the street demanding an increase in minimum wages. These cases show how then informalisation of labour in the sector signifies much more than low wages and lack of benefits; it is effectively permeated by violence, and characterised by brutal patterns of disciplining, control, and subjugation of the workforce.” (pp. 38-9)

“Previous studies […] highlight the following employment trends at work in the NCR:

“1) The garment workforce is heavily composed of contract-workers […]
[…]
“3) A significant share of the garment workforce in the NCR is composed of homeworkers, due to high levels of value-addition in product cycles
“4) Both women and children work as homeworkers
“5) Homeworkers seem to be recruited and managed by contractors
“6) Overall, workers in both factories and homes are considered vulnerable as they are exposed to uncertain and casualised working conditions
“7) Unsurprisingly, levels of unionisation are extremely low
“8) So far, both national labour laws and corporate codes of conduct imposed by global buyers seem largely unable to improve working conditions.” (p. 41)

“Only six (1.7%) workers in our sample had written contracts. Most workers saw themselves as being casually employed (50.9 per cent) while 47.4 per cent saw themselves as being regularly employed (indefinite, oral contracts). Thus nearly half the workers see themselves as being in indefinite employment, although they do not have any contracts.” (p. 108)

“Work hours in the industry are long, particularly during peak periods, when they could be as high as 15 to 16 hours a day. […] 42.9 per cent of workers reported that their normal work hours were 6 to 9, while 50.9 per cent said that they worked between 10 and 12 hours and 6.2 per cent said that they worked an average of 13 to 16 hours per day. The highest work intensity is clearly in the large workshops, where 67.7 per cent of workers said that they worked for 10 to 12 hours and 29 per cent said that they worked for more than 13 hours a day.” (p. 120)

“Fifteen per cent of the workers in the sample say that they do not get breaks on public holidays and a similar percentage (14.2%) indicate that they do not get a weekly day-off while 15.6 per cent ― sometimes get a weekly day off.” (p. 126)

“[T]here is a thick haze of dust and particle pollution in some departments, especially in large factories. The main health risk undoubtedly comes from the nature of work – requiring focused attention and fixed postures, as well as long hours. Hours, as we have seen, are especially long in the workshops. Dust and particle pollution is regarded by workers as the main cause of health risk in the garment industry (i.e., by 79% of workers across all firms), followed by eye strain (39.1% of all workers). Accidents are regarded as a smaller but a significant source of health risk, with 7.9% of workers perceiving these to be the major health risk […]. In the workshop segment, however, eyestrain is seen as the biggest source of health risk, and the percentage of workers complaining of dust/particle pollution is highest in the export sector and in large enterprises.” (p. 128)

“No safety equipment is provided to workers in workshops but units in the factory sector do provide some equipment, mainly dust masks.” (p. 128)

“Exhaustion, eye strain, back pain and allergy are the most common occupational health problems mentioned by the workers”. (p. 129)

“Garment workers whom we have interviewed live in congested surroundings, often several workers to a room, which are located in urban and peri-urban villages and slums. The density of habitation in these localities is extraordinarily high and basic amenities are poor. Typically, land owners build tenements which are provided to workers on the basis of a monthly rent, and shared. Toilet and bathroom facilities are shared floor wise or across the building. Workers share these rooms with co-workers who could be related or unrelated.” (p. 143)

“The quality of housing for workers is also poor, with one-third of them describing the construction as semi-pukka and two-thirds describing the construction as pukka [brick/concrete made]. Access to toilets and bathrooms and to drinking water is crucial. But only 7.6 per cent of workers had access to a toilet attached to the room or inside the house. In all other cases, toilets and bathrooms were common in the building premises or workers used public toilets. Only 38.1 per cent of workers had access to tapped drinking water inside their premises while 33.6 per cent used a tap water facility located outside the premise and 23.2per cent used a handpump outside their premises. Another 5.2 per cent of workers mentioned other sources such as borewells.” (p. 145)

Do the human stories from the 21st century UK or India, sound different from the reality Engels found in 1844-’45 and, based on his findings, depicted in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) or far different from today’s toilers in Africa and Asia?

A contradictory reality emerges: higher profit or superprofit, and “deepening poverty, mass unemployment, social exclusion, greater inequality, and collective despair”, “rising insecurity, less choice, wage freezes”, “higher levels of work intensity”. Are not there relations or contradictions in the reality? Is there any reason that can make the reality in the underdeveloped hemisphere better than the European reality? Is the reality basically different from the reality that gave rise to the world workers’ May Day? In this May Day, the questions, basically old, demand renewed search.

Farooque Chowdhury, a Dhaka-based freelancer, has authored/edited three books in English (Micro Credit: Myth Manufactured (ed.), The Age of Crisis, and What Next? The Great Financial Crisis (ed.), and doesn’t operate any blog like “Farooque Chowdhury’s Blog”.

01 May, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Khaldun Malek

“No condition of life to which man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him” – Tolstoy

The recent expose’ of the so-called “Panama Papers” brings to light again the morally troubling issue of tax havens and the flight of capital from taxation. The fallout from this, as is now widely known, has had serious political implications. There is already a major political casualty in the form of the former prime minister of Iceland, who resigned amidst allegations of financial impropriety by a member of his family. Politically, the issue remains a highly charged one; even David Cameron, who in recent times was one of the most vocal proponents of reforms to curb the excesses of the financial truancy of both rich corporations and individuals has not been entirely absolved from the scandal.

Some financial analysts have claimed that this is merely the tip of a very large iceberg. If true, the implications are staggering, because it gives pause to even the deeply worrying report recently published by Oxfam highlighting the global inequities of wealth which exists today. While economic inequality is a serious source of concern, it is merely a part of a larger pattern of discrimination and deprivation that afflicts all societies in the present. This question extends to far more than just economic ones; in fact, arguably the fixation on economic inequality is in danger of shifting attention away from more fundamental questions of social justice and fairness. It also gives an undue emphasis on an economic solution rather than a real one.

One of the key, though somewhat under-emphasised, aspect of Thomas Piketty’s global best-seller has not been to show the extent of the gaps between the rich and the poor but rather more pertinently how periods where the gaps have narrowed have been the rare exception rather than the rule. This in a sense gives us a more realistic appraisal of history. Seldom has the pursuit and agglomeration of wealth given pause to anything other than its own validation. If history is any guide, the impulse to accumulate wealth and power for its own sake is a universal drive that seems to transcend faith, cultures, language, politics and geography – as much as most faith and wisdom traditions counsel us against the deep spiritual and social ruin that will eventuate from such a pursuit. But in a global public culture dominated by a vain and arrogant, but more problematically, parochial ‘secularity’ promoted by the West and their allies, such discourses carry little weight.

Worryingly, even among the more visibly religious nations, there seems to be little enthusiasm to find alternative visions of progress and development.Even so called ‘alternatives’ to the dominant paradigms might not – on closer scrutiny – be so different. I think underneath the enthusiasms amongst Muslim nations, for example, over so called“Islamic” finance, the same ideological drives persist. Financial institutions no doubt understand its attractions as a marketing exercise; a more affluent, growing Muslim middle class enthusiastically embraces a means of increasing their wealth whilst palliating their ‘spiritual’ concerns!As global banks pursue this new wonderful marketing vehicle, we see hordes of both private and public conspirators – government agencies, university academics, financial consultants and so on – selling the public this new ‘product’!

However, at its centre nothing changes, and the practices of the past (profiteering for its own sake, the continued hegemony of the institutional structure of the present financial system, the ongoing valorisation of liberal capitalist values et al) continues. The terms of the process are now couched in a different language but the functioning and logical aims of the exercises remain the same. Moreover, the way in which global society speaks of the problem today – the way it has been conceived and what has been perceived as its effects is quite removed from similar episodes of social and economic distress in the past. I’ll come back to this later.

I’d wager that even the Wall Street Sit-In, applauded globally as a powerful indictment of the failures of a financial system run amok (a dubious pyramid scheme dressed under the sanctimony of the world’s most respectable financial institutions), symptomatizes the widespread moral vacuum surrounding the issue. Exemplified as a serious mass movement critique of developments which eventually led to the financial crisis of 2008, what it truly reflects is a reaction against the symptoms of failure rather than an outright questioning of the moral validity of its causes. In other words, one cannot help but wonder whether many of those who came would have bothered to do so if they had not themselves been affected by the fallout. If the prevailing system had continued to lavish the same returns it had done prior, would have there been a call to re-examine its principles or values? And what exactly are the majority angry about? The failure of the system? Or of the principles which underpin them? Then why is there a la
cuna of serious attempts to frame these issues in broader terms? If we do not take the time to think within the context of the kinds of society we are trying to build, then to paraphrase Santayana, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past in an unending vicious cycle.

One thing is clear. History tells us that the cycles of boom and bust is a natural part of the economic order. However, what is peculiar to the current malaise, is a seeming inability to articulate the problem(s) within any kind of moral compass. The way we talk about economic activity is disconnected to any view of how this is an intrinsic part of how we imagine the kinds of societies we wish to have. Even when we are angry about disparities between the rich and poor, this is seen and discussed in isolation from thinking about wider morality. It has not always been so. Even in the most celebrated totem of free-market thinking, Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, published more than two centuries ago, the idea of free enterprise and the freedom of exchange, was an attempt to augment a liberalism and individual autonomy thought in the best interests of an Enlightenment morality. Free trade was seen as a critical element in the flourishing of a ‘good’ society. It was grounded on a moral claim (what Smith terms as
“moral sentiments”), not the kind of vacuous argument put forward today by economists talking about “efficiencies”.

This laxity, described so vividly by Tony Judt, as ‘economism’ (“the invocation of economics in all discussions of public affairs”) is frankly, intellectually lazy. He asks a deeply pertinent question, “why do we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities troubles us so?”. Why is it we no longer seem to have the wherewithal to question the present in fundamental ways? Why is it so difficult to conceive “a different set of arrangements to our common advantage”? And perhaps most worryingly, we appear to lack a sufficient vocabulary to enter a public discourse without need for an arbitrative reference to profit and loss, or what Judt refers to as an “etiolated economic vocabulary”.

These questions are, of course, not new. Decades before the publication of his report which became in 1942, the foundation of the British welfare state, William Beveridge had given a lecture in Oxford in which he bemoaned the dangers of obscuring proper political philosophy with classical economics in public debates. In some ways anticipating the intellectual malaise we face in the present, he warned of the deleterious effects of restricting public policy considerations to mere economic calculus.

We seem to live in an age where the functioning of society is seen in almost purely instrumental terms. The economic and commercial, the pursuit of leisure, securing justice and fairness, political participation and the fulfilment of spiritual needs and religious obligations are almost always discussed and seen as separate realms of values and conduct – microcosmic and through separate flows of life seemingly unconnected with one another. This is of course, a false depiction of the human condition. Under such conditions, it is extremely difficult – if not downright impossible – to speak of ‘society’ in a collective and holistic sense. All things are judged in their own terms and in their own sense; it is almost as if the kind of Thatcherite verbiage (“there is no such thing as society, merely individuals” and so on) we thought we had left behind in the 80s, has quietly subsumed the principles of public debate over everything from education, health, transport, housing and so on.

Over two centuries ago, one of the key figures of the European Enlightenment, and perhaps its keenest observer of the emergence of commercial capitalism, Marquis de Condorcet, anticipated the dire prospects that “liberty will be no more in the eyes of an avid nation, than the necessary condition for the security of financial operations”. For many of us today, this may actually sound too familiar for comfort.

Khaldun Malek is an academic who is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).

29 April 2016.

Friends decline my invitations and I have taken to sleeping outside under the trees, to avoid becoming a magnet of death for my family

By Malik Jalal

I am in the strange position of knowing that I am on the ‘Kill List’. I know this because I have been told, and I know because I have been targeted for death over and over again. Four times missiles have been fired at me. I am extraordinarily fortunate to be alive.

I don’t want to end up a “Bugsplat” – the ugly word that is used for what remains of a human being after being blown up by a Hellfire missile fired from a Predator drone. More importantly, I don’t want my family to become victims, or even to live with the droning engines overhead, knowing that at any moment they could be vaporized.

I am in England this week because I decided that if Westerners wanted to kill me without bothering to come to speak with me first, perhaps I should come to speak to them instead. I’ll tell my story so that you can judge for yourselves whether I am the kind of person you want to be murdered.

I am from Waziristan, the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. I am one of the leaders of the North Waziristan Peace Committee (NWPC), which is a body of local Maliks (or community leaders) that is devoted to trying to keep the peace in our region. We are sanctioned by the Pakistan government, and our main mission is to try to prevent violence between the local Taliban and the authorities.

In January 2010, I lent my vehicle to my nephew, Salimullah, to drive to Deegan for an oil change and to have one of the tires checked. Rumours had surfaced that drones were targeting particular vehicles, and tracking particular phone signals. The sky was clear and there were drones circling overhead.

As Salimullah conversed with the mechanic, a second vehicle pulled up next to mine. There were four men inside, just local chromite miners. A missile destroyed both vehicles, killed all four men, and seriously injured Salimullah, who spent the next 31 days in hospital.

Upon reflection, because the drones target the vehicles of people they want to kill in Waziristan, I was worried that they were aiming for me.

The next attack came on 3 September 2010. That day, I was driving a red Toyota Hilux Surf SUV to a ‘Jirga’, a community meeting of elders. Another red vehicle, almost identical to mine, was some 40 meters behind. When we reached Khader Khel, a missile blew up the other vehicle, killing all four occupants. I sped away, with flames and debris in my rear view mirror.

Initially I thought the vehicle behind was perhaps being used by militants, and I just happened to be nearby. But I learned later the casualties were four local laborers from the Mada Khel tribe, none of whom had any ties to militant groups. Now it seemed more likely that I was the target.

The third drone strike came on 6 October 2010. My friend Salim Khan invited me to dinner. I used my phone to call Salim to announce my arrival, and just before I got there a missile struck, instantly killing three people, including my cousin, Kaleem Ullah, a married man with children, and a mentally handicapped man. Again, none of the casualties were involved in extremism.

Now I knew for certain it was me they were after.

Five months later, on 27 March 2011, an American missile targeted a Jirga, where local Maliks – all friends and associates of mine – were working to resolve a local dispute and bring peace. Some 40 civilians died that day, all innocent, and some of them fellow members of the NWPC. I was early to the scene of this horror.

Like others that day, I said some things I regret. I was angry, and I said we would get our revenge. But, in truth, how would we ever do such a thing? Our true frustration was that we – the elders of our villages – are now powerless to protect our people.

I have been warned that Americans and their allies had me and others from the Peace Committee on their Kill List. I cannot name my sources, as they would find themselves targeted for trying to save my life. But it leaves me in no doubt that I am one of the hunted.

I soon began to park any vehicle far from my destination, to avoid making it a target. My friends began to decline my invitations, afraid that dinner might be interrupted by a missile.

I took to the habit of sleeping under the trees, well above my home, to avoid acting as a magnet of death for my whole family. But one night my youngest son, Hilal (then aged six), followed me out to the mountainside. He said that he, too, feared the droning engines at night. I tried to comfort him. I said that drones wouldn’t target children, but Hilal refused to believe me. He said that missiles had often killed children. It was then that I knew that I could not let them go on living like this.

I know the Americans think me an opponent of their drone wars. They are right; I am. Singling out people to assassinate, and killing nine of our innocent children for each person they target, is a crime of unspeakable proportions. Their policy is as foolish as it is criminal, as it radicalises the very people we are trying to calm down.

I am aware that the Americans and their allies think the Peace Committee is a front, and that we are merely creating a safe space for the Pakistan Taliban. To this I say: you are wrong. You have never been to Waziristan, so how would you know?

The mantra that the West should not negotiate with “terrorists” is naive. There has hardly ever been a time when terrorists have been brought back into the fold of society without negotiation. Remember the IRA; once they tried to blow up your prime minister, and now they are in parliament. It is always better to talk than to kill.

I have travelled half way across the world because I want to resolve this dispute the way you teach: by using the law and the courts, not guns and explosives.

Ask me any question you wish, but judge me fairly – and please stop terrorizing my wife and children. And take me off that Kill List.

Malik Jalal is represented by the charity Reprieve

12 April 2016
http://www.independent.co.uk/

 

A wide-ranging interview tied to his new book, “The Killing of Osama Bin Laden.”

By Ken Klippenstein

Seymour Hersh is an American investigative journalist who is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his article exposing the My Lai massacre by the U.S. military in Vietnam. More recently, he exposed the U.S. government’s abuse of detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison facility.

Hersh’s new book, The Killing of Osama Bin Laden, is a corrective to the official account of the war on terror. Drawing from accounts of a number of high-level military officials, Hersh challenges a number of commonly accepted narratives: that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the Sarin gas attack in Ghouta; that the Pakistani government didn’t know Bin Laden was in the country; that the late ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi in a solely diplomatic capacity; and that Assad did not want to give up his chemical weapons until the U.S. called on him to do so.

Ken Klippenstein: In the book you describe Saudi financial support for the compound in which Osama Bin Laden was being kept in Pakistan. Was that Saudi government officials, private individuals or both?

Seymour Hersh: The Saudis bribed the Pakistanis not to tell us [that the Pakistani government had Bin Laden] because they didn’t want us interrogating Bin Laden (that’s my best guess), because he would’ve talked to us, probably. My guess is, we don’t know anything really about 9/11. We just don’t know. We don’t know what role was played by whom.

KK: So you don’t know if the hush money was from the Saudi government or private individuals?

SH: The money was from the government … what the Saudis were doing, so I’ve been told, by reasonable people (I haven’t written this) is that they were also passing along tankers of oil for the Pakistanis to resell. That’s really a lot of money.

KK: For the Bin Laden compound?

SH: Yeah, in exchange for being quiet. The Paks traditionally have done security for both Saudi Arabia and UAE.

KK: Do you have any idea how much Saudi Arabia gave Pakistan in hush money?

SH: I have been given numbers, but I haven’t done the work on it so I’m just relaying. I know it was certainly many—you know, we’re talking about four or five years—hundreds of millions [of dollars]. But I don’t have enough to tell you.

KK: You quote a retired U.S. official as saying the Bin Laden killing was “clearly and absolutely a premeditated murder” and a former SEAL commander as saying “by law we know what we’re doing inside Pakistan is homicide.”

Do you think Bin Laden was deprived of due process?

SH: [Laughs] He was a prisoner of war! The SEALs weren’t proud of that mission; they were so mad it was outed…I know a lot about what they think and what they thought and what they were debriefed, I will tell you that. They were very unhappy about the attention paid to that because they went in and it was just a hit.

Look, they’ve done it before. We do targeted assassinations. That’s what we do. They understood—the SEALs—that if they were captured by the Pakistani police authorities, they could be tried for murder. They understood that.

KK: Why didn’t they apprehend Bin Laden? Can you imagine the intelligence we could have gotten from him?

SH: The Pakistani high command said go kill him, but for chrissake don’t leave a body, don’t arrest him, just tell them a week later that you killed him in Hindu Kush. That was the plan.

Many sections, particularly in the Urdu-speaking sections, were really very positive about Bin Laden. Significant percentages in some areas supported Bin Laden. They [the Pakistani government] would’ve been under great duress if the average person knew that they’d helped us kill him.

KK: How did it hurt U.S./Pakistan relations when, as you point out in your book, Obama violated his promise not to mention Pakistan’s cooperation with the assassination?

SH: We spend a lot of time with [Pakistani] generals Pasha and Kayani, the head of the army and ISI, the intelligence service. Why? Why are we so worried about Pakistan? Because they have [nuclear] bombs. … at least 100, probably more. And we want to think that they’re going to share what they know with us and they’re not hiding it.

We don’t really know everything we think we know and they don’t tell us everything… so when he [Obama] is doing that, he’s really messing around with the devil in a sense.

…. He [Bin Laden] had wives and children there. Did we ever get to them? No. We never got to them. Just think about all the things we didn’t do. We didn’t get to any of the wives, we didn’t do much interrogation, we let it go.

There are people that know much more about this and I wish they would talk, but they don’t.

KK: You write that Obama authorized a ratline wherein CIA funneled arms from Libya into Syria and they ended up in jihadi hands. [According to Hersh, this operation was coordinated via the Benghazi consulate where U.S. ambassador Stevens was killed.] What was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s role in this given her significant role in Libya?

SH: The only thing we know is that she was very close to Petraeus who was the CIA director at the time … she’s not out of the loop, she knows when there’s covert ops. … That ambassador who was killed, he was known as a guy, from what I understand, as somebody who would not get in the way of the CIA. As I wrote, on the day of the mission he was meeting with the CIA base chief and the shipping company. He was certainly involved, aware and witting of everything that was going on. And there’s no way somebody in that sensitive of a position is not talking to the boss, by some channel.

KK: In the book you quote a former intelligence official as saying that the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the Joint Chiefs as being insufficiently painful to the Assad regime. (You note that the original targets included military sites only—nothing by way of civilian infrastructure.) Later the White House proposed a target list that included civilian infrastructure.

What would the toll to civilians have been if the White House’s proposed strike had been carried out?

SH: Do you really think that at any time this is discussed? You know who’s sanest on this: Dan Ellsberg. When I first met Dan, it was way early—in ’70, ’71, during the Vietnam War. I think I met him before the Pentagon Papers were around. I remember him telling me that he asked that question at a meeting while planning the war [regarding B-52 targets] and nobody had even looked at it.

You really don’t get a very good hard, objective look. You can see a movie in which they seem to do it, but that’s not really so.

I don’t know if [regarding Syria] they looked at collateral damage and noncombatants, but I do know that in wars in the past, that’s never been a big issue. … you’re talking about the country that dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki.

KK: In a recent interview with the Atlantic, Obama characterized his foreign policy as “Don’t do stupid shit.”

SH: I read the Jeff Goldberg piece…and it of course drove me nuts, but that’s something else.

KK: As you point out in your book, Obama originally wanted to remove Assad. Isn’t that the definition of stupid? The power vacuum that would ensue would open Syria up to all kinds of jihadi groups.

SH: God knows I can’t tell you why anybody does anything. I’m not inside their head. I can tell you that the same question was asked by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—Dempsey—which is why I was able to write that story about their going, indirectly, behind his [Obama’s] back because nobody could figure out why.

I don’t know why we persist on living in the Cold War, but we do. Russia actually did a very good job. They not only did the bombing that was more effective than what we do, I think that’s fair to say. Russia also did stuff that was sort of more subtle and more interesting: they renewed the Syrian army. They took many major units of the Syrian army offline, gave them R&R and re-equipped them. Got new arms, got a couple weeks off, then they came back, got more training and became a much better army.

I think in the beginning, there’s just no question, we wanted to get rid of Bashar. I think they misread the whole resistance. Wikileaks is very good on this…there’s enough State Department documents that show that from 2003 on, we really had a policy—not very subtle, not violent, but millions of dollars given to opposition people. We certainly were not a nonpartisan foreign government inside Syria.

Our policy has always been against him [Assad]. Period.

One of the things that comes across just in the current stories about all the travails we’re having about ISIS allegedly running all these terror teams in Brussels and in the suburbs of Paris… it’s very clear, ironically, that one of the things France and Belgium (and a lot of other countries) did was after the Syrian civil war began, if you wanted to go there and fight there in 2011-2013, ‘Go, go, go… overthrow Bashar!’

So they actually pushed a lot of people to go. I don’t think they were paying for them but they certainly gave visas. And they would spend four or five months, come back and do organized crime and get in jail and next thing you know they’re killing people. There’s a real pattern there.

I do remember when the war began in 2003, our war against Baghdad, I was in Damascus working for The New Yorker then and I saw Bashar and one of the things he told me, he said, ‘Look, we’ve got a bunch of radical kids and if they want to go fight, if they want to leave the mosque here in Damascus and go fight in Baghdad, we said fine! We even gave them buses!’

So there’s always been a tremendous, Why does America do what it does? Why do we not say to the Russians, Let’s work together?

KK: So why don’t we work closer with Russia? It seems so rational.

SH: I don’t know. I would also say, why wasn’t the first door we knocked on after 9/11, Russia’s? They just had a terrible 10-year war with Chechnya. Believe me, the Chechen influence in the Sunni world in terms of jihadism is strong. For example I’ve been told by my friends in the intelligence community that al-Baghdadi (who runs ISIS) is surrounded by a lot of guys with experience in Chechnya. A lot of people involved in that operation did.

So who knows the most about jihadism? You look at it from the Russian point of view—we never like looking at things from other people’s point of view.

KK: In the book you quote a Joint Chiefs of Staff adviser who said that Brennan told the Saudis to stop arming the extremist rebels in Syria and their weapons will dry up—which seems like a rational request—but then, you point out, the Saudis ramped up arms support.

Seymour Hersh: That’s true.

KK: Did the U.S. do anything to punish the Saudis for it?

SH: Nothing. Of course not. No, no. I’ll tell you what’s going on right now … al Nusra, certainly a jihadist group… has new arms. They’ve got some tanks now—I think the Saudis are supplying stuff. They’ve got tanks now, have a lot of arms, and are staging some operations around Aleppo. There’s a ceasefire and even though they’re not part of it, they obviously took advantage of the ceasefire to resupply. It’s going to be bloody.

KK: Just to be clear, the U.S. hasn’t done anything to punish or at least disincentivize the Saudis from arming our enemies in Syria?

SH: Quite the contrary. The Saudis and Qatar and the Turks put money into those arms [sent to Syrian jihadis].

You’re asking the right questions. Do we say anything? No. Turkey’s Erdogan has played a complete double game: for years he supported and accommodated ISIS. The border was wide open—Hatay Province—guys were going back and forth, bad guys. We know Erdogan’s deeply involved. He’s changing his tune slightly but he’s been deeply involved in this.

Let me talk to you about the sarin story [the sarin gas attack in Ghouta, a suburb near Damascus, which the U.S. government attributed to the Assad regime] because it really is in my craw. In this article that was this long series of interviews [of Obama] by Jeff Goldberg…he says, without citing the source (you have to presume it was the president because he’s talking to him all the time) that the head of National Intelligence, General [James] Clapper, said to him very early after the [sarin] incident took place, “Hey, it’s not a slam dunk.”

You have to understand in the intelligence community—Tenet [Bush-era CIA director who infamously said Iraqi WMD was a “slam dunk”] is the one who said that about the war in Baghdad—that’s a serious comment. That means you’ve got a problem with the intelligence. As you know I wrote a story that said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the president that information the same day. I now know more about it.

The president’s explanation for [not bombing Syria] was that the Syrians agreed that night, rather than be bombed, they’d give up their chemical weapons arsenal, which in this article in the Atlantic, Goldberg said they [the Syrians] had never disclosed before. This is ludicrous. Lavrov [Russia’s Foreign Minister] and Kerry had talked about it for a year—getting rid of the arsenal—because it was under threat from the rebels.

The issue was not that they [the Syrians] suddenly caved in. [Before the Ghouta attack] there was a G-20 summit and Putin and Bashar met for an hour. There was an official briefing from Ben Rhodes and he said they talked about the chemical weapons issue and what to do. The issue was that Bashar couldn’t pay for it—it cost more than a billion bucks. The Russians said, ‘Hey, we can’t pay it all. Oil prices are going down and we’re hurt for money.’ And so, all that happened was we agreed to handle it. We took care of a lot of the costs of it.

Guess what? We had a ship, it was called the Cape Maid, it was parked out in the Med. The Syrians would let us destroy this stuff [the chemical weapons]… there was 1,308 tons that was shipped to the port…and we had, guess what, a forensic unit out there. Wouldn’t we like to really prove—here we have all his sarin and we had sarin from what happened in Ghouta, the UN had a team there and got samples—guess what?

It didn’t match. But we didn’t hear that. I now know it, I’m going to write a lot about it.

Guess what else we know from the forensic analysis we have (we had all the missiles in their arsenal). Nothing in their arsenal had anything close to what was on the ground in Ghouta. A lot of people I know, nobody’s going to go on the record, but the people I know said we couldn’t make a connection, there was no connection between what was given to us by Bashar and what was used in Ghouta. That to me is interesting. That doesn’t prove anything, but it opens up a door to further investigation and further questioning.

This interview was lightly edited for readability.

Ken Klippenstein is an American journalist who can be reached on Twitter @kenklippenstein or email: kenneth.klippenstein@gmail.com.

20 April 2016

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

Having removed the reformist President of Argentina, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Washington is now disposing of the reformist President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff.

Washington used a federal judge to order Argentina to sacrifice its debt restructuring program in order to pay US vulture funds the full value of defaulted Argentine bonds that the vulture funds had bought for a few pennies on the dollar. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/27/us-vulture-funds-argentina-bankruptcy These vultures were called “creditors” who had made “loans” regardless of the fact that they were not creditors and had made no loans. They were opportunists after easy money and were used by Washington to get rid of a reformist government.

President Kirchner resisted and, thus, she had to go. Washington concocted a story that Kirchner covered up an alleged Iranian bombing in Buenos Aires in 1994. This implausible fantasy, for which there is no evidence of Iranian involvement, was fed to one of Washington’s agents in the state prosecutor’s office, and a dubious event of 22 years ago was used to clear Kirchner out of the way of the American looting of Argentina.

In Brazil, Washington has used corruption insinuations to get President Rousseff impeached by the lower house. Evidence is not necessary, just allegations. It is no different from “Iranian nukes,” Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” Assad’s “use of chemical weapons,” or in Rousseff’s case merely insinuations. The Secretary General of the Organization of American States, Luis Almagro, notes that Rousseff “hasn’t been accused of anything.” The American-backed elites are simply using impeachment to remove a president who they cannot defeat electorally.

In short, this is Washington’s move against the BRICS. Washington is moving to put into political power a rightwing party that Washington controls in order to terminate Brazil’s growing relationships with China and Russia.

The great irony is that the impeachment bill was presided over by the corrupt lower house speaker, Eduardo Cunha, who was recently discovered to have stashed millions of dollars in secret Swiss bank accounts (perhaps his pay-off from Washington) and who lied under oath when he denied having foreign bank accounts. You can read the sordid story here:

US Complicity? After Vote to Remove Brazil’s President, Key Opposition Figure Holds Meetings in Washington

Kirchner and Rousseff’s “crimes” are their efforts to have the governments of Argentina and Brazil represent the Argentine and Brazilian peoples rather than the elites and Wall Street. In Washington these are serious offenses as Washington uses the elites to control South American countries. Whenever Latin Americans elect a government that represents them, Washington overthrows the government or assassinates the president.

Washington is close to returning Venezuela to the control of the Spanish elite allied with Washington. http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/2016/04/new-coup-plot-hatched-in-venezuela.html The presidents of Ecuador and Bolivia are also targeted. One reason Washington will not permit its British lapdog to honor the asylum Ecuador granted to Julian Assange is that Washington expects to have its own agent back in as President of Ecuador, at which time Assange’s asylum will be repealed.

Washington has always blocked reform in Latin America. Latin American peoples will remain American serfs until they elect governments by such large majorities that the governments can exile the traitorous elites, close the US embassies, and expel all US corporations. Every Latin American country that has an American presence has no future other than serfdom.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.

23 April, 2016
Paulcraigroberts.org

By Pratap Antony

We humans have been in existence for less than 1% of life on Earth – In the short time of our existence, we have impacted everything; every part of our small blue planet. Our home!

We have been around for only 200,000 years – Archaeologists have calculated that humans originated about 200,000 years ago in the Middle Palaeolithic period in southern Africa, and migrated out of Africa around 70,000 years ago and began colonizing the entire planet. We spread to Eurasia around 40,000 years ago (there is no geologic boundary between Europe and Asia – so they are combined as Eurasia.) and Oceania (roughly Australia to Fiji), and reached the Americas just 14,500 years ago.

Humans are a member of a species of bipedal primates. We walk upright. We also have opposable thumbs so we can grip ‘things’. We have, what we think of as a highly developed brain. And so, we have called ourselves ‘homo sapiens’. In Latin, “Homo” means “man” and “Sapiens” means “wise”. Wise Men.

Dinosaurs existed for 135 million years – It is estimated that dinosaurs were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for 135 million years, from 231.4 million years ago till around 65 million years ago.

Dinosaurs lived for a greater time on the planet than man. Scientists explain the extinction of dinosaurs with one or two hypotheses – that the extinction was due to an extraterrestrial impact, such as an asteroid or comet, or, a massive bout of volcanism.

We humans though, have been around for a comparatively short while, yet we are making ourselves extinct due to our own activities.

In our short existence, we have impacted every corner of the world with smog, with acid rain; by breaking-up habitats and causing extinctions.

We have taken the route to deforestation to make more room for ourselves. And, through sheer cruelty and indiscriminate killing, we have disturbed the ecological balance of nature. Birds and animals are dying and gradually getting extinct. Seasons and the soil have been changed harmfully. We are waging ecocide to garner greater power to ourselves. We are cruel without remorse and we hold nature, environmental issues, truth and justice in contempt. We will soon be wiping ourselves out due to man-made climate changes and devastation of food and water supply. And, we also wage war with each other. We are killing ourselves.

Our excuse – Cleansing, development and progress – The irony of it all is we justify our destructive tendencies as intervention and manipulation – for cleansing, development and progress. And we do this because we suffer from a delusion that sees us as being separate; we think that we live in a higher plane than everything else. But trees, birds, animals and men are all inseparable parts of nature.

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

~ E.F. Schumacher

We humans are part of the same ecosystem. Each creature on this planet has a reason for its existence and is as important to life on earth as we (humans) think we are.

We are dependent on nature. Nature is not dependent on us. When we destroy an ecosystem, we are destroying life that depends on that ecosystem. Humans and nature are powerfully linked and co-evolving. All living things in an ecosystem depend on all the other things – living and non-living – i.e. organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings for continued survival, to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet. All the actions and reactions that take place and affect one part of an ecosystem, affect the whole ecosystem in some way or the other.

We are only one small part of the web of life, yet we, in this short time of our existence have treated our planet so shoddily and with such a callous contempt that we have irreversibly damaged our planet and shortened our own existence on the planet.

When nature cannot defend itself there will be a backlash. Nature cannot resist our wiles and will eventually succumb to our destructive tendencies. When forests are mined for minerals and other resources and laid bare of all their biodiversity, desertification will take place. Lakes, rivers and water resources will dry up.

There is no wisdom in man killing what sustains man … and with it, humankind!

The backlash will not be nature fighting back! But, of nature as we know it, dying out!

Homo Sapiens… Wise Men. Not at all!? Our wisdom is highly disputable. Dinosaurs were considered unintelligent, due to the small size of their brain compared to their body size. They existed for 135 million years. They didn’t kill themselves. But, man is destroying mankind.

Our planet is not in danger. Humans are in danger. From ourselves. Humankind is on the road to extinguish ourselves. Sooner rather than later. The future for all of us is bleak. The planet will continue as it has for the 99% of the time before man, it will adjust and continue. Perhaps with other life forms, other vegetation, other landscapes.

The earlier we learn to curb our innate inclination to be brutal, to pollute and to annihilate, and the earlier we will learn to live with compassion and in peaceful co-existence with ourselves and with nature, the better it is for us and our continued existence.

“When we respect the environment, then nature will be good to us. When our hearts are good, then the sky will be good to us. The trees are like our mother and father, they feed us, nourish us, and provide us with everything; the fruit, leaves, the branches, the trunk. They give us food and satisfy many of our needs. So we spread the Dharma (truth) of protecting ourselves and protecting our environment, which is the Dharma of the Buddha. When we accept that we are part of a great human family—that every being has the nature of Buddha—then we will sit, talk, make peace. I pray that this realization will spread throughout our troubled world and bring humankind and the earth to its fullest flowering. I pray that all of us will realize peace in this lifetime and save all beings from suffering”. Maha Ghosananda (1929 – 2007) revered Cambodian Buddhist monk – known as the Gandhi of Cambodia

Pratap Antony, Passive activist/Active pacifist writer on ecology and environment, compassion and humanity, dogs, social justice, music and dance.

22 April, 2016
Countercurrents.org

Sanders’ Jewish socialism, his recognition of the injustice of the occupation, is a rebuke to those in the U.S. and Israel who believe Jews should only care about other Jews’ freedom and dignity. No wonder they’re trying to marginalize him.

By Max Berger

As Jews in the U.S., we are taught over and over about the history of our persecution. American Jews are applying the lessons we learned from that history — and the reality of our current situation — by supporting Bernie Sanders.

The out-of-touch American Jewish establishment — and some of their funders on Wall Street — believe the lesson of the history of Jewish persecution is to join with the powerful to protect ourselves. Many Jews in America believe our safety lies in becoming a part of the American empire, white supremacy, or corporate capitalism.

But as this generation comes of age in an economy wrecked by greed, a society alienated from each other by the gospel of individualism and the violent lies of racism, in an empire laid bare by the foolishness of conquest, we are looking for truth-tellers who defy the corrupt political and economic establishment. Bernie Sanders resonates with this generation of American Jews because he speaks with a prophetic voice that is at the heart of our tradition.

It is no mere coincidence that the voice calling us to wholeness by speaking the truth of our interconnection amidst the ruins of our division is a Jewish voice.

The tradition of democratic socialism that Bernie comes from has deeply Jewish roots — and has never been more relevant than it is today. Bernie comes from a long tradition of Jews who believe that striving for all people to enjoy the fruits of freedom and justice is the essence of being Jewish. The tradition of Jewish socialism comes from understanding that we are a people who have been dehumanized for who we are, and divided from our neighbors, throughout history. It is based on a commitment to our mutual interdependence as both a matter of self-interest and profound moral belief.

“I am very proud of being Jewish and that’s an essential part of who I am as a human being,” Bernie Sanders has said. When asked to define what being Jewish means to him, Bernie said, “[Being Jewish] means all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.”

This message speaks deeply to those of us who have seen the failure of capitalism run of, by, and for Wall Street and the billionaire class; of a foreign policy and an American Jewish establishment guided by fear and hatred; of a political system run by big money funders. To millions of young people — Jew and Gentile alike — this vision of a society bound together across difference is the obvious remedy to the challenges we face. To Jewish socialists, there is nothing more Jewish than looking into the face of another people and recognizing our common humanity. This message is no longer confined to the Polish factory workers, New York tenement residents, or kibbutzim of the 1920s and 30s — it is deeply relevant to American Jews today.

When we look at the immigrant community in this country and see their vilification and exclusion, we recognize the courage of our ancestors who fled from lands that offered neither hope nor safety.

When we look at the millions of black lives that have been devalued and destroyed, we recognize the history of how whiteness was used by those who wanted to erase us as a people.

When we look at the poor and working class people of this country, we recognize the ghettos we were forced into and the sweatshops we worked in and organized against.
When we look at the Palestinians and see their dispossession and displacement, we recognize our own history of exile and persecution.

As an American Jew, I am tremendously proud that Bernie Sanders has shown an entire generation of Americans — of all races and religions — that it is possible to overcome fear with hope, division with unity, and hatred with love. Whatever happens with Bernie’s campaign, he has popularized the notion of political revolution and democratic socialism, and won over millennials by such an overwhelming margin that it’s inevitable his message is the future of the Democratic Party and politics in the U.S.

It’s time for all Jews to take heed of his message. Bernie’s version of Jewish socialism harkens to a time when our people’s belief in solidarity and unity was not confined to those who shared our blood. It was in those moments of Jewish solidarity with other peoples – in the strikes against the sweatshop bosses, in the early kibbutzim that brought people together across race and religion, in the movements against racism and patriarchy — that made us a light unto the nations. It is a stern rebuke to those in our community — in the U.S. and in Israel — who believe Jews should only care about the freedom and dignity of other Jews.

Far from being an obstacle to overcome, Bernie’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a huge attraction to the young Americans Jews who are flocking to his campaign. His recognition of the humanity of Palestinians and the injustice of the occupation is yet another sign that he shares our values. The rise of groups like IfNotNow, a youth-led movement against American Jewish support for the occupation, is a testament to the generational shift in our community from hatred of Palestinians to a belief in our shared fate. While some in the Jewish American establishment strive to marginalize Bernie and his movement by suggesting we’re self-hating Jews who don’t care about Israel, it just goes to show how badly out of touch they are with the future of our community, and the values of our tradition.

The values of interconnection and togetherness across difference that Bernie espouses are the future of American politics — and the politics of the American Jewish community. Instead of running from those values in fear, or denying their essential Jewishness, I’d like to invite the rest of our community — in the U.S. and in Israel — into their power and righteousness.

This year in New York. Next year, god willing, in Jerusalem.

Max Berger is a political organizer, trainer and writer in New York City. He was one of the leading participants in Occupy Wall Street and a founding member of IfNotNow.

16 April 2016

By Afro-Middle East Centre (AMEC)

The recent handing over of two islands – Tiran and Sanafir – to Saudi Arabia by the Egyptian government emphasises that the Sisi regime remains so in need of external support to buttress its domestic control that it is willing to anger significant sections of the population. The islands’ importance to Israel and the fact that Israel agreed to the handover also point to strengthening cooperation between Tel Aviv, Riyadh and Cairo in an effort to contain Iran’s resurgence.

The announcement about the islands was made as the Saudi king, Salman bin Abdul Aziz, undertook his first official trip to Egypt since acceding to the thrown in January 2015. Other deals signed during his visit included a twenty-two billion dollar agreement for Saudi Arabia to supply Egypt with energy, and the establishment of a sixteen billion dollar joint Saudi-Egyptian investment fund. Recent tensions between the two regional powers had heightened after Egypt’s refusal to commit troops to the Saudi war in Yemen, and because of Egypt’s support for Russia’s Syrian intervention. Egypt is also critical about strengthening ties between Riyadh and Ankara, and because of the Kingdom’s support for Yemen’s Muslim Brotherhood Islah party. Tensions had been simmering since Salman became king, however, with his suspicion that Egypt’s military ruler, Abdel Fatah el-Sisi, had plotted against his acceding to the throne.

Riyadh nevertheless views Egypt as an important ally in its attempt to counter growing Iranian influence in the region, and sees its large and well-equipped military as a critical deterrent to Iran’s regional forays. Moreover, Egypt’s Sidi Kerir port and SUMED oil storage terminal can be used by Saudi Arabia to slow down and disrupt Iranian oil exports. Before 2011 Iran had dispatched over 200 000 barrels of oil per day from the port, has used the storage terminal for oil shipped to Europe since diverting shipments through its own Kharg Island port causes a month delay. With this agenda, Salman has reduced his criticism of Egypt – and especially of Sisi – and continued to buttress it. Significantly, however, recent assistance packages to Egypt have been more as loans and investments than aid; only around two billion of the sixty billion in recent deals is aid.

But there is also a third player involved; for the transfer to have occurred Israel’s approval was required in terms of the 1979 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt. The two islands essentially block access to the Red Sea from the Gulf of Aqaba, thus blocking access to the critical Israeli port of Eilat. Israel thus regards control of the Tiran Straits and the waters around both islands as critical since much of its maritime trade passes through en route to Eilat. A perception that this access would be disrupted was a major factor informing Israel’s involvement in the 1956 Suez crisis and 1967 six day war. They were twice captured by Israel, which controlled them from 1967 to 1982. Guarantees over waterway access were thus key stipulations in the Camp David agreement. The transfer of the islands means Israeli vessels will now traverse Saudi waters to reach Eilat.

Tel Aviv’s acquiescence and statements by Israeli and Saudi officials indicate that firm guarantees had been provided by Saudi Arabia regarding Israel’s freedom of navigation through the Strait of Tiran. Israel has been informed about the secret negotiations regarding the islands from the beginning, and written guarantees that Riyadh would abide by the terms stipulated at Camp David were given in talks that involved Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the USA. (Although Israel and Saudi Arabia are officially in a state of war, they have collaborated on a number of issues recently, and Riyadh had informed Israel about then-secretive nuclear negotiations between the USA and Iran.)

For Egypt, transferring the islands to Saudi Arabia has little negative strategic implication. The islands are uninhabited, have few resources, and technically belonged to Saudi Arabia though administered on its behalf by Egypt since 1950, when Saudi Arabia requested Egypt to play this role, believing that Egypt could protect them from Israel. Returning the islands was thus an opportunity to renew Egypt’s relationship with Saudi Arabia, and to continue receiving assistance for Egypt’s stalling economy and Sisi’s power base.

The move has elicited much criticism from Egyptians, especially since Sisi had inserted a stipulation in Article 151 of the 2014 Egyptian Constitution prohibiting territorial transfers. The clause was intended to augment Sisi’s nationalist credentials, and because the army garnered support for its 2013 coup by arguing that the former president, Mohamed Morsi, was ceding parts of Sinai to Hamas, and endangering Egyptian sovereignty through his alliance with Qatar.

Sisi thus argued that the island transfer restores sovereignty to Saudi Arabia, which owns the islands, and was not a ceding of Egyptian territory. But prominent political figures such as Hamdeen Sabahi, Khaled Ali, Ayman Nour and the Muslim Brotherhood criticise this reasoning, and Ali has lodged court papers to halt the deal. Although this sees some fissures in the regime’s support base, it is unlikely to pose a significant threat.

16 April 2016