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By Eric Zuesse

The May 2nd Ukrainian massacre of anti-regime pamphleteers last year at the Odessa Trade Unions Building, burning these pamphleteers alive there, was crucial to the Obama Administration’s solidification of its control over Ukraine. That massacre was designed to, and it did, terrorize the residents in all areas of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the man whom Obama had just ousted, Viktor Yanukovych. Especially in the Donbass region, Yanokovych had received 90%+ of the votes. In Odessa, he had received three-quarters of the votes. (Later will be explained why this terror against the residents of such regions was necessary for Obama’s purpose of solidifying his control over Ukraine’s government.)

So, the shocking methods of executing these people, and its being done in public and with no blockage of video images being recorded of these events by their many witnesses, and with the newly-installed Obama government in Kiev doing nothing whatsoever to prosecute any of these horrific murderers, there was a clear message being sent to the people who had voted for Yanukovych: If you resist the new authorities in any way, this is how you will be treated by them. This is how you will be treated (and that video was posted to the Internet by the perpetrators and their supporters, by headlining, “48 Russian Subversives Burned To Death In Fire At Trade Unions Building Fire In Odessa,” so that any other ‘Russian Subversives’ would have no doubt. However, those victims’ identities were subsequently published, and all of the victims were actually Odessa locals, none were Russians. The perpetrators were racist fascists, after all; and, so, being a ‘Russian’ meant, to them, being from a hated ethnicity, not necessarily being a citizen of Russia.) Terror was the obvious purpose here, and Obama was behind it, but nazis were in front of it, and they were proud of their handiwork — proud enough to film it and then to display it to the public.

If the President that you had voted for were subsequently to be overthrown in an extremely bloody coup — or even if it had happened in an authentic revolution — then how would you feel? And, if, two months later, people who were peacefully printing and distributing flyers against the illegally installed replacement regime were publicly treated this way, then would you want to be ruled by that regime?

Yanukovych had been elected in 2010 in an election that was declared free and fair by international observers; and, furthermore, according to wikipedia, “All exit polls conducted during the final round of voting reported a win for Viktor Yanukovych over Yulia Tymoshenko.[162][163][164].” But, starting in Spring of 2013, which was as soon as Obama got into position all of his key foreign-affairs appointees for his second Presidential term, after the 2012 U.S. election, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine immediately started organizing, for Maidan square in Kiev, public demonstrations to bring Yanukovych down, and they placed at the head of this operation the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy, a man who had long studied Hitler’s methods of political organization. The troops, actually mercenaries, that provided the snipers who fired down onto the demonstrators and police in Maidan square in Kiev in February 2014 and pretended to be from Yanukovych’s security forces, were trained not by Parubiy but instead by Dmitriy Yarosh, who was the head of Ukraine’s other large racist-fascist, or nazi, organization, the Right Sector, whose CIA-and-oligarch-backed army numbered probably between 7,000 and 10,000. Yarosh selected the best of them for this operation. Whereas Parubiy was the main political organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right, Yarosh was the main military organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right.

So, Obama’s operation to oust Yanukovych was fully dependent upon Ukraine’s far-right, which was the only nazi movement that still retained deep and strong roots anywhere in Europe after World War II. Obama built his takeover of Ukraine upon people like this. As is clear there, they were very well trained. Yarosh had been training them for more than a decade. (He had been doing it even prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union.) Yarosh had carefully studied successful coups; he knew how to do it. Just as Obama had very skillfully selected his political campaign team for his 2008 White House run, he very carefully selected his American team for what would become the chief feature of his second-term foreign policy: his war against Russia, central to which was his campaign to install rabid haters of Russia into control of Ukraine, right next door to Russia (in the hope of ultimately placing missiles there, against Russia). He had groomed Dick Cheney’s former foreign-affairs advisor Victoria Nuland as the spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s State Department (Nuland and Clinton were also personal friends of each other, so she was a skillful choice for this post), and then he boosted Nuland in the second term to the State Department post which oversaw all policymaking on Ukraine. Likewise Obama boosted Geoffrey Pyatt into the Ambassadorship in Ukraine, as the operative there to carry out Nuland’s instructions. Nuland made the decision to base the Maidan demonstrations upon the political skill of Paribuy and the paramilitary muscle of Yarosh. They headed her Ukrainian team.

Wikipedia says of Parubiy, and of Obama’s other Ukrainian operatives:

Parubiy co-led the Orange Revolution in 2004.[5][11] In the 2007 parliamentary elections he was voted into theUkrainian parliament on an Our Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense Bloc ticket. He then became a member of the deputy group that would later become For Ukraine!.[5] Parubiy stayed with Our Ukraine and became a member of its political council.[12]

In February 2010 Parubiy asked the European Parliament to reconsider its negative reaction to former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko’s decision to award Stepan Bandera, the leader of the [racist-fascist] Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the title of Hero of Ukraine.[13]

In early February 2012 Parubiy left Our Ukraine because their “views diverged”.[14] In 2012 he was re-elected into parliament on the party list of “Fatherland”.[15] [Yulia Tymoshenko heads the Fatherland Party; and she had been Obama’s choice to become the next President of Ukraine, but she was too far-right for even the far-right voters of northwestern Ukraine, so Poroshenko won instead.]

From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a commandant of Euromaidan.[16] He was coordinator of thevolunteer security corps for the mainstream protesters.[17] He was then appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.[6] This appointed was approved by (then) new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on June 16, 2014.[18]

As Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Parubiy oversaw the “anti–terrorist” operation againstpro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.[19]

Working directly under Parubiy in that “anti-terrorist operation” or “ATO,” was Yarosh, who in an interview with Newsweek, said that he has “been training paramilitary troops for almost 25 years,” and that his “divisions are constantly growing all over Ukraine, but over 10,000 people for sure.”

On May 14th of last year, there appeared, at Oriental Review, an important news report, “Bloodbath in Odessa Guided by Interim Rulers of Ukraine,” which described the roles of Yarosh, and of these others. It opened: “The information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” It said:

“Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the incumbent president Olexander Turchinov, to prepare a special operation in Odessa. Present were minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valentin Nalivaychenko, and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, the Kiev-appointed head of regional administration of the Dnepropetrovsk region, was consulted in regard to the operation.

During that meeting Arsen Avakov has reportedly came up with the idea of using football hooligans, known as “ultras,” in the operation. Ever since his time as the head of the Kharkov regional administration he has worked closely with the fans leaders, whom he continued to sponsor even fromhis new home in Italy.

Kolomoisky temporarily delivered his private “Dnieper-1” Battalion under the command of law-enforcement officials in Odessa and also authorized a cash payment of $5,000 for “each pro-Russian separatist” killed during the special operation.

Mykola Volvov was wanted by the Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud.

A couple of days before the operation in Odessa Andriy Parubiy brought dozens of bullet-proof vests to local ultra-nationalists. This video shows an episode of handing the vests to the local Maidan activists in Odessa. Take note of the person who receives the load. He is Mykola Volkov, a local hard-core criminal who would be repeatedly screened during the assault on Trade Unionist House gun-shooting at the people and reporting about the “incident” by phone to an official in Kiev.

Preparations

Ultranationalist militants from the extremist Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA-UNSO), who could be recognized by their red armbands, were also used during the operation. They were assigned a key role in the staging of the provocations: they masqueraded as the defenders of the tent city on Kulikovo Field, and then lured its occupants into the House of Trade Unions to be slaughtered.

Fifteen roadblocks were set up outside of Odessa, secured by militants under the personal command of Kolomoisky’s “Dnieper-1” Battalion, as well as Right Sector’s thugs from Dnepropetrovsk and the western regions of Ukraine. In addition, two military units from the Self-Defense of Maidan arrived in Odessa, under the command of the acting head of the administration of the president, Sergey Pashinsky – the same man who was caught with a sniper rifle in the trunk of his car on Feb. 18 on Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev. Pashinsky later claimed that he had not been fully informed about the plans for the operation and had dispatched his men only to “protect the people of Odessa.” Thus, there were a total of about 1,400 fighters from other regions of Ukraine in the vicinity at the time – thus countering the idea that there were “residents of Odessa” who burned down the House of Trade Unions.

Deputy chief of Odessa police and principle coordinator of the operation Dmitry Fucheji mysteriously dissappeared soon after the tradegy in Odessa.

The role of the Odessa police forces in the operation was personally directed by the head of the regional police, Petr Lutsyuk, and his deputy Dmitry Fucheji. Lutsyuk was assigned the task of neutralizing Odessa’s regional governor, Vladimir Nemirovsky, to prevent him from putting together an independent strategy that could disrupt the operation. Fucheji led the militants right to Greek Square where he was allegedly “wounded” (in order to evade responsibility for subsequent events).

The operation was originally scheduled for May 2 – the day of a soccer match, which would justify the presence of a large number of sports fans (“ultras”) downtown and would also mean there would be a minimal number of Odessa residents on the streets who were not involved in the operation, since the majority of the city’s population would be out of town enjoying their May Day holidays.

It should also be noted that Kolomoysky himself was directly connected to the U.S. White House.

If not for this horrific massacre, then the voters in the anti-coup regions would have remained inside the Ukrainian electorate, participants in the May 25th Presidential election to succeed Yanukovych as Ukraine’s new President: they would have been Ukrainian voters because the public sentiment in those regions still was not yet predominantly for separating from Ukraine; it was instead for the creation of a federal system that would have granted Donbass, Odessa, and the other anti-coup areas, some degree of autonomy. But that way, with the moderating influence of the voters in the far southeast, the resulting national government wouldn’t have been rabidly anti-Russian, and so wouldn’t have been, like the present one is, obsessed to kill Russians and to join NATO, for a NATO war against Russia. Obama needed to get rid of those voters. He needed them not to participate in the 25 May 2014 election. The May 2nd massacre was the way to do that. Here was the electoral turnout in the 25 May Ukrainian Presidential election. As you can see, almost all of the voters in that election were located in the parts of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for Yulia Tymoshenko in the 2010 election, against Yanukovych.

Obama did his best to get the nazi queen Tymoshenko elected as Ukraine’s President; but, now that she was publicly and openly campaigning as the rabid anti-Russian that she had always been, and now that even many Ukrainian conservatives had qualms about going to war against Russia, since there was now so much political rhetoric favoring doing that, Poroshenko won, Tymoshenko lost. Poroshenko had played his cards just right: having been a supporter of the Maidan and of the overthrow of Yanukovych but not publicly associated with the nazis. He was even one of the people who informed the EU’s investigator that the coup was a coup, no authentic revolution.

Publicly, Poroshenko gave no hint that he knew that Yanukovych had been framed for the February sniper-attacks that had been organized by the U.S. White House and that the overthrow had been a coup. In fact, on May 6th, just days after the massacre, and less than a month before the 2014 Presidential election, Poroshenko said, “Proof was presented at the Verkhovna Rada’s session behind closed doors today that what happened at the House of Unions can be called a terrorist attack.” (This had to be “behind closed doors” because it was fictitious and thus needed to be blocked from being examined by the public.) By that time, the polls already showed that he was going to win the election, and he knew that his only real audience was the man sitting in the U.S. White House.

Obama didn’t get the more overt anti-Russian President that he had wanted, but he still controls Ukraine. The installation by Nuland of Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the ‘temporary’ new Prime Minister to lead Ukraine after the coup, until a new President would be elected on May 25th, turned out to be permanent, instead of temporary. And Petro Poroshenko can’t do anything that Obama doesn’t want him to do. So: Obama still remains the virtual Emperor of Ukraine.

The people of Ukraine shouldn’t praise or blame either their Prime Minister or their (perhaps merely nominal) President for what has been happening in their country after the coup; they should instead praise or blame those men’s master: Barack Obama. He’s the person who made Yatsenyuk the Prime Minister, and who controls Poroshenko even though he didn’t prefer him over Tymoshenko.

Ukraine is just part of the American Empire now. Any Ukrainian who doesn’t recognize that would have to be a fool. It’s the outright nazi part of the American Empire, but it’s part of the American Empire nonetheless. Obama is the first U.S. President to install a racist-fascist, or nazi, regime, anywhere; and he did it in Ukraine, which has long been the ripest place in the world for doing that sort of thing. The May 2nd massacre was an important part of the entire operation. This is why that important massacre is ignored as much as it can be, in the U.S.

It’s important history, but it’s history that 99% of Americans are blocked from knowing. So: pass this article along to everyone you know (and, via facebook etc., even to some people you don’t know); and they, too, will then have access to the documentation that’s linked-to here, just as you did.
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, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

01 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Kenny Coyle

On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30, 2015, the momentous events that made it possible are recalled

Forty years ago, on the morning of April 30 1975, a column of tanks broke down the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, the headquarters of the Republic of (South) Vietnam.

In the space of an hour or so, the new flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam was hoisted over the palace, signalling the end of 101 years of Vietnam’s colonisation, war and division.
The final assault by the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) and its allies in the National Liberation Front (NLF) took just 55 days — exactly the same length of time, noted Vietnamese military legend General Vo Nguyen Giap, as the historic siege of Dien Bien Phu, which had ended French colonial rule in 1954.

The speed of the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, as it was named, took both sides by surprise.

Military strategists in the North had estimated that military victory would be achieved only in 1976.

In the South, the delusional military dictatorship in Saigon had dismissed any idea that the regime would ever fall despite the withdrawal of US military forces.

Generous military aid from Washington, amounting to $1.6 billion a year, was considered sufficient to see off the communists.

In 1973, US president Richard Nixon had agreed withdrawal terms with North Vietnam in Paris and promised: “Peace with honour,” although it’s fair to say that “Tricky Dicky” was a stranger to both of those concepts.

The Paris deal was described as “half-peace, half-war” by one commentator.

The agreement did not require that the liberation forces withdraw from territory in South Vietnam.

This allowed the southern-based anti-imperialist NLF to regroup its forces and expand its networks in the countryside and major towns.

The US was soon embroiled in a crisis of its own making. Nixon was impeached over the Watergate scandal and resigned in August 1974.

A massive wave of revulsion and cynicism about the US Establishment engulfed those hitherto supportive or indifferent to the war.

The loyal core of US anti-war activists was now joined by mainstream US opinion.
The same year, US government aid to the puppet regime in Saigon was halved and the possibility of a new US invasion receded.

Vietnamese communist leader Pham Van Dong remarked sardonically that: “The Americans will not send back GIs even if we offer them candy.”

In January 1975, a force of just 8,000 VPA soldiers and NLF fighters took the city of Phuoc Binh, capital of the province of Phuoc Long, after a fortnight of fighting.

Other provincial capitals began to fall in quick succession, one after another. In total, all 43 southern provinces were “lost” in less than two months.

But as the legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett remarked: “There is no explanation for the fact that the loss of a provincial capital is synonymous with the loss of an entire province other than that the province had been ‘lost’ for years.”

The speed with which liberation forces advanced had another explanation that eluded both the South Vietnamese regime and its US advisers.

They had calculated that the VPA would be forced to station a regiment in each new province. What happened instead was that local people’s committees took over provincial administration.

Local NLF units emerged from the underground and joined up with many South Vietnamese troops who chose to go over to the side of the liberation forces.

Vast amounts of US-supplied weaponry fell into the VPA’s hands, easing logistical concerns over the lengthening supply chains from the northern bases.

The VPA created an entire squadron from captured South Vietnamese A-37 Dragonfly fighter-bombers.

In April 1975, a unit of specially retrained Vietnam People’s Air Force pilots flew them in formation over Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, where the remnants of the Saigon regime’s air force were based and through which the elite planned to escape in the event of defeat.

When challenged by the air traffic control tower to identify which unit they belonged to, a pilot replied sarcastically: “A Made in the USA squadron!” before bombing the runway and enemy planes below.

Specialist VPA commando units, called dac cong, were used to penetrate enemy positions, gather intelligence, sabotage the Saigon regime’s defences and make contact with underground NLF units. They were devastatingly effective, sowing confusion and panic in the disintegrating ranks of their enemies.

Underground NLF activists were instructed to launch urban insurrections in the heart of the towns and cities.

The term “people’s war” was no military cliche but a fundamental political strategy developed by Vietnamese communists over generations.

VPA and NLF forces swelled, reaching 15 full divisions by the end of April 1975.

The new challenge for the Vietnamese military leadership was how to co-ordinate this unanticipated larger force and to strike before the summer monsoon season began toward the end of May.

The victory of April 30 was the culmination of decades of struggle and years of planning.

It was, as Vietnamese communist leader Le Duan noted, the combination of a remarkable series of political alliances.

First the core worker-peasant alliance was extended to the urban intelligentsia. A second factor was the support offered by the socialist countries, and this at a time when the Sino-Soviet split created enormous but not yet disastrous challenges.

Third, was the solidarity of the democratic and progressive forces within the imperialist camp itself, first and foremost the heroic anti-war movement within the US, but also extending to peace and anti-imperialist forces across western Europe and Australia, whose campaigns had limited and blocked more intensified conflict.

To any visitor to today’s Vietnam, it’s difficult to imagine just how much death and destruction was inflicted upon the country.

Controversy rages around the exact number of deaths. Vietnamese sources estimate a total loss of around three million people between the end of the French colonial war in 1954 and 1975.

US academic and British Medical Journal surveys put the number of deaths between 1965-75 alone at approximately 1.5 million.

The US air force dropped 7.8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than the combined total dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Around the same tonnage again was fired from land and sea units.
An estimated 800,000 tons failed to detonate, contaminating around 20 per cent of its land.

More than 100,000 people have been killed or injured since 1975 by these delayed parcels of death.

Added to this was the widespread use of chemical warfare, napalm and Agent Orange, both of which had been trialled by Britain during its colonial war in Malaya.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs lists 15 diseases associated with the defoliant Agent Orange, ranging from lung cancer to leukaemia, which can be cited by former US service personnel to claim benefits.

All the while, US war crimes against the Vietnamese population, from generation to generation, remain unpunished.

Nine US corporations were given contracts to produce Agent Orange. Two are household names — Dow Chemical, the official chemical sponsor of the London Olympics, and Monsanto, best known today for its genetically modified foods.

The war cast a dark shadow over every Vietnamese family — the losses created one million widows and 880,000 orphans.

In the North, 4,000 out of 6,000 villages were destroyed and 29 provincial capitals were bombed, 12 of which were razed to the ground.

Six major cities, including the capital Hanoi and the major port of Haiphong, were seriously damaged.

The US cynically targeted North Vietnam’s economy, hoping to starve its people into submission.

A total of 400 factories and industrial enterprises were eliminated. The numbers of bridges, dams and dykes destroyed are incalculable.

Neither should we forget that the “American war” also enlisted the forces of its allies. South Korean forces, brutalised by their own civil war and fanatically anti-communist, were responsible for at least half a dozen massacres of Vietnamese civilians.

Australians, New Zealanders, Filipinos, Thais and soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan took part in the conflict.

Even after its humiliating defeat, the US maintained a vindictive economic embargo against Vietnam until 1994.

Vietnam’s victory in 1975 was a triumph for all those who cherished solidarity and resistance against a seemingly invincible imperial power.

The struggle of the Vietnamese people for reunification and independence was, in the words of Che Guevara, the battle of “a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes of a whole world of forgotten peoples.”

Today’s [April 30] anniversary marks not simply an astonishing military success but the affirmation of the unbreakable spirit of these “forgotten peoples.”
Four decades later, let’s ensure that the heroism and sacrifices of the Vietnamese people are not only remembered with reverence but celebrated with pride.
01 May, 2015
Morning Star

 

By Countercurrents.org

Baltimore blazes in protest. Schools, businesses and train stations have been shut down in the city notorious for poverty and unemployment. A state of emergency has been declared and National Guards have been deployed. Two dozen people were arrested. The protests erupted in violent force after funeral of a 25-year black man who died after he was injured in police custody.

Enraged people hurled bricks, looted businesses and set fires in Baltimore on Monday in violence that injured at least seven police officers following the funeral of the black man who died. Protesters ransacked shops and trashed police vehicles. Other cars were set on fire.

National Guard troops fanned out through the city, shield-bearing police officers blocked the streets and firefighters doused still-simmering blazes early Tuesday as a growing area of Baltimore shuddered from riots following the funeral of a black man who died in police custody.

Media reports from the U.S. said:

The disturbances broke out just a few blocks from the funeral of Freddie Gray and then spread through parts of Baltimore in the most violent U.S. demonstrations since looting in Ferguson, Missouri, last year. Part of Baltimore was plunged into chaos

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency in the port city of 662,000 people 40 miles (64 km) from the nation’s capital and activated the National Guard as firefighters tried to extinguish fires set by protesters with baseball bats. A weeklong, daily curfew was imposed beginning Tuesday from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Authorities were struggling to quell pockets of unrest.

Gray’s death on April 19 reignited a public outcry over police treatment of African-Americans that flared last year after the killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, New York City and elsewhere.

After more than an hour of mayhem, hundreds of police moved into glass-strewn streets that witnessed the worst of the violence. Police used pepper spray on protesters. A part of the demonstrators sacked check-cashing and liquor stores.

Police helicopters buzzed overhead while protesters cut a fire department hose. Local and state police in riot gear struggled to restore order as the rioters veered off in different directions, refusing to heed dispersal orders. Earlier, firefighters fought a fire at a CVS pharmacy looted. Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said authorities had had a “very trying and disappointing day.”

The violence that started in West Baltimore on Monday afternoon — within a mile of where Freddie Gray was arrested and placed into a police van earlier this month — had by midnight spread to East Baltimore and neighborhoods close to downtown and near the baseball stadium.

“All this had to happen, people getting tired of the police killing the young black guys for no reason. … It is a sad day but it had to happen,” said Tony Luster, 40, who is on disability and was out on the street watching the police line.

Wary of violent clashes between black youths and police, pastors and community leaders moved into the area to try to calm tensions. Gray’s family had pleaded for peaceful demonstrations.

Thousands had converged on New Shiloh Baptist church in Baltimore’s poverty-ridden Sandtown neighborhood earlier Monday to pay final respects to Gray.

“Today of all days, the family was clear this was a day of sacred closure,” pastor Jamal Bryant of the city’s Empowerment Temple mega-church, who delivered the eulogy, told reporters as the violence spiraled.

“So for us to come out of the burial and walk into this is absolutely inexcusable. I’m asking every young person to go back home.”

At the funeral, Gray’s body was in a white casket. Crowds swayed to hymns at the service, chanting, “Justice shall prevail, peace will prevail” in the church, where a photo of Gray — — was displayed among floral wreaths.

Fear of unrest prompted the University of Maryland’s downtown campus, corporate offices and the city’s famous Lexington Market to shut down early.

President Barack Obama was briefed on the rapidly evolving situation by his newly sworn in Attorney General Loretta Lynch and city mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the White House said.

On Saturday, 34 people were arrested, and six police officers injured, when violence erupted after an orderly rally for Gray outside Baltimore city hall.

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson denounced the “epidemic of murders in the country.” “We have become too violent, too full of hate,” Jackson told reporters before the service. “We need training, employment, housing, access to health, a reconstruction project. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction.”

Gray’s arrest was caught on video by bystanders, and he can be heard howling in apparent pain as his limp body is dragged into the van. Police confirmed Gray requested medical help and an inhaler after he was detained and acknowledged that he should have received medical attention sooner.

Six officers have been suspended with pay pending the outcome of a police investigation that is to be submitted to state prosecutors by Friday.

The US Justice Department, which was already looking into Baltimore’s use of force, has also opened its own civil rights probe.

Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings and about 200 others, including ministers, tried unsuccessfully to quell the violence at one point Monday night, marching arm-in-arm through a neighborhood littered with broken glass, flattened aluminum cans and other debris. As they got close to a line of police officers, the marchers went down on their knees. They then rose to their feet and walked until they were face-to-face with the police officers in a tight formation and wearing riot gear.

Monday’s riot was the latest flare-up over the death of Gray and came amid a national debate over police use of force following the high-profile deaths of several black men in encounters with police — from the Brown death in Ferguson to the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.

28 April 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents.org

Death toll in the Nepal earthquake could reach 10,000 as rescue teams have started reaching isolated mountain villages. Entire mountain villages have been razed to the ground and millions of people are starving as they are cut off from all food supply and communication. Wet weather and cold are making life intolerable. An estimated 8 million people have been affected. Moreover, in the earthquake, 61 people died in India, and China reported 25 people died in Tibet.

Survivors are telling: “We have no shelter, no food and all the bodies are scattered around.” Now, for days, survivors are struggling under open sky with fear of epidemic looking larger.

Media reports said:

The official death toll from the Nepal earthquake has soared past 4,000 people by noon of April 28, 2015. The Nepalese prime minister Sushil Koirala has warned the toll could reach 10,000.

People are still being pulled from the rubble more than 50 hours after the tragedy. Water, food and electricity are in short supply and there are fears of outbreaks of diseases.

People are growing increasingly frustrated by what they say has been a slow government response. Huge numbers of people facing another night in the open or with minimal shelter, amid forecast heavy rain.

The situation is critical in the remote rural regions towards the epicenter of Saturday’s quake. But outside the capital, many of the worst-hit villages in the ridges around Katmandu remain a black hole, surrounded by landslides that make them inaccessible even to the country’s armed forces. Landslides and other destruction delayed attempts to reach the district earlier, but Gorkha, close to the epicenter, is feared to have extensive damage.

The Nepali authorities have begun airdropping packages of tarpaulins, dry food and medicine into mountain villages, but an attempt to land helicopters was abandoned.

The government is only gradually getting a grasp of the destruction in these isolated places. It is nearly impossible to identify which villages are most in need, and how many may be dead or injured.

The chief bureaucrat in Gorkha district, Uddhav Timilsina, said rescue crews were unable even to distribute relief, because they are confronting as many as eight to 10 landslides between one village and its nearest neighbor. He said 250 deaths had been reported so far, but that it would take more time to get an accurate count. “Phone lines are down, electricity is out, roads are blocked, so what can we do?” he said.

1,300 houses in Saurpani, but one resident, Shankar Thapa, said, “all the houses collapsed.” “The whole valley has been destroyed.” He added that it seemed unlikely that more than a few of the 600 residents of Langtang would have survived.

Rebecca McAteer, an American doctor who was one of the first to arrive in the district of Gorkha, told 90% of houses there were “just flattened”. She said most residents were older men and women and children, as the younger men had left to find work elsewhere. Many have also lost livestock and have little food.

A district official, Surya Mohan Adhikari, told that villages around the epicenter were very difficult to reach – cut off by landslides – and that bad weather was hampering helicopter access.

In one village, every home had been damaged or destroyed. Residents of Barkobot village in Sindhupalchowk district said they had had no aid despite being just an hour and a half on good roads from Kathmandu. But helicopters have begun ferrying wounded from Gorkha.

Heavy rain has added to the hardship of thousands of people forced to sleep rough for fourth night. Water, food and power are scarce, raising fears of waterborne diseases.

An estimated 8 million people have been affected by the quake in 39 of Nepal’s districts, and more than 1.4 million need food assistance, including 750,000 who live near the quake’s epicenter in poor quality housing.

People aren’t able to wash their hands before eating, women have no feminine supplies. Even when people have toilets, they are getting clogged up or over used.

People, women and children, the very old the very young, who have lost everything are sleeping outside in the rain.

The heavy equipment for search and rescue, etc. is having trouble getting through the narrow roads in Kathmandu Valley.

As emergency teams reach the areas around the epicenter of the Nepal earthquake, many are warning of scenes of complete devastation.

There is possibility of “high and significant damage” in the regions closest to the earthquake’s epicenter, Gorkha and Lamjung.

There are villages where 70% of the houses have been destroyed.

The epicenter of the earthquake was Gorkha, though very few images have emerged from the region Parts of Gorkha district, like the village of Paslang, have been completely leveled

Mr. Timalsina said 223 people had been confirmed dead in the district but he said “the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured”.

On Monday, an Indian journalist flew over the damage in Gorkha in an Indian army helicopter. The footage shows many low-lying houses, seemingly cut off in the middle of mountains and reduced to rubble.

The journalist, Jugal Purohit, said: “What we are witnessing here are villages completely devastated, destroyed and, in a sense, rubbed off the map of Nepal.”

Matt Darvas, of the charity World Vision, is in the town of Pokhara, further west from the epicenter. He told: “I spoke to one man. He had been [evacuated] in to the hospital where I was, in the very first helicopter. “In his village of 1,100 homes, almost every home was decimated. He estimated 90%. That’s a village of over 2,000 people. “There could be many other villages in a similar case where the entire village is all but gone.”

Teams from many major charities have so far been unable to reach the more outlying areas of the country, but have plans to do so as soon as possible. Many are working with regional partners who are based in western Nepal.

But access to areas such as Gorkha and Lamjung, that are hilly, isolated and heavily forested, was difficult even before the earthquake that caused landslides to block roads.

Mr. Darvas said some parts of Gorkha could take up to five days to reach.

Flattened villages

Sukamaya Tamang, whose parents and brothers are stranded in one of the worst-hit districts, said families there had been left to fend for themselves, with no government help reaching them so far.
Tamang’s family is stranded in Sindulpalchowk, some 100 km from the epicenter of the quake, where homes and roads have been destroyed.

“There are a cluster of nine villages and they have been all flattened out,” said Tamang, who managed to speak to her brother over the phone at their village.

Tamang, 25, said the village has been banding together to care for the injured and help to cremate the dead.

Rescue helicopters have begun to reach survivors in Gorkha. Around noon, two helicopters brought in eight women from Ranachour village, two of them clutching babies to their breast, and a third heavily pregnant.

“There are many more injured people in my village,” said Sangita Shrestha, who was pregnant and visibly downcast as she got off the helicopter. She was quickly surrounded by Nepalese soldiers and policemen and ushered into a waiting van to be taken to a hospital.

The little town of Gorkha, the district’s administrative and trading center, is being used as a staging post to get rescuers and supplies to those remote communities.

Some villages were reachable only by air after landslides blocked mountain roads.

Some women who came off the helicopters were grimacing and crying in pain and unable to walk or speak, in agony three days after being injured in the quake.

Sita Karki winced when soldiers lifted her. Her broken and swollen legs had been tied together with crude wisps of hay twisted into a makeshift splint.

“When the earthquake hit, a wall fell on me and knocked me down. My legs are broken,” she said.

Most of the newer concrete buildings were intact after the quake but remote mountainside villages were reportedly devastated.

Reports from further north are very disturbing. Up to 75 percent of the buildings in Singla may have collapsed and the village, a two-day walk away, has been out of contact since Saturday night.

Local officials lost contact with military and police who set out for Singla. Helicopters have had to turn back because of clouds. A few SUVs with foreign tourists bringing basic aid supplies had begun to reach Gorkha by early evening.

Chaos has reigned at Kathmandu’s small airport since the earthquake, with the onslaught of relief flights causing major backups on the tarmac.

US soldiers

The Pentagon says two teams of U.S. Army Green Beret soldiers happened to be in Nepal when the deadly earthquake struck Saturday are staying to help with search and relief efforts. The 11-person crew of a C-130 cargo plane that brought them to Nepal also is remaining in case of a request to evacuate any American citizens.

Kathmandu shifted 10 feet

CBS News science contributor Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City College of New York, told “CBS This Morning”: “The city of Kathmandu shifted 10 feet — an entire city was shifted by the force of this earthquake.”

“May not be the big one”

An engineer who works on earthquake risks says the 7.8-magnitude temblor that struck on Saturday may not be the Big One for Nepal.

GeoHazards International’s Hari Kumar says: “We were expecting an 8-magnitude to happen along the Himalayas, this is not it.”

Immense seismic pressure is still building up along the Nepal-India border, and he says, “The stress which was developing west of this earthquake has not been released.”

The devastating earthquake was part of a pattern of major temblors that have become so predictable that many seismologists had been expecting this one — and at least one team of researchers warned just weeks ago that a major quake was due in the exact location where this one struck.

“We knew it was going to happen. We saw it in ’34,” USGS geologist Susan Hough told the Washington Post. “The earthquakes we expect to happen do happen.”

One team of researchers not only expected this earthquake to happen, but even pinpointed the location.

Laurent Bollinger of the CEA research agency in France told the BBC that his team had been digging trenches along the fault. Using carbon dating on charcoal samples found in the trenches, they discovered one segment that hadn’t moved in nearly 700 years.

The last time it did was in 1344, and it came 89 years after a segment of the fault east of Kathmandu moved — the same segment of the fault that moved 81 years ago in 1934.

As it’s common for strain to transfer from one part of a fault to another, Bollinger’s team warned at a Nepal Geological Society meeting in early April that the same pattern could occur again. And now that it has, Bollinger is warning that Saturday’s quake may not have been enough to relieve all the pressure.

“Early calculations suggest that Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake is probably not big enough to rupture all the way to the surface, so there is still likely to be more strain stored, and we should probably expect another big earthquake to the west and south of this one in the coming decades,” Bollinger told.

Saturday’s quake has had a far-reaching impact. Death tolls and casualty figures are likely to rise over the coming days, and the risk of landslides on slopes made unstable by the quake mean that the danger is far from passed.

In a sadly prescient turn of events, Laurent Bollinger, from the CEA research agency in France, and his colleagues, uncovered the historical pattern of earthquakes during fieldwork in Nepal last month, and anticipated a major earthquake in exactly the location where Saturday’s big tremor has taken place.

Down in the jungle in central southern Nepal, Bollinger’s team dug trenches across the country’s main earthquake fault (which runs for more than 1,000km from west to east), at the place where the fault meets the surface, and used fragments of charcoal buried within the fault to carbon-date when the fault had last moved.

Ancient texts mention a number of major earthquakes, but locating them on the ground is notoriously difficult.

Monsoon rains wash soils down the hillsides and dense jungle covers much of the land, quickly obscuring earthquake ruptures.

Bollinger’s group was able to show that this segment of fault had not moved for a long time.

“We showed that this fault was not responsible for the great earthquakes of 1505 and 1833, and that the last time it moved was most likely 1344,” says Bollinger, who presented his findings to the Nepal Geological Society two weeks ago.

Previously, the team had worked on the neighbouring segment of fault, which lies to the east of Kathmandu, and had shown that this segment experienced major quakes in 1255, and then more recently in 1934.

When Bollinger and his colleagues saw this historic pattern of events, they became greatly concerned.

“We could see that both Kathmandu and Pokhara would now be particularly exposed to earthquakes rupturing the main fault, where it likely last did in 1344, between the two cities,” explains Paul Tapponnier, from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, who was working with Bollinger.

When a large earthquake occurs, it is common for the movement to transfer strain further along the earthquake fault, and this seems to be what happened in 1255.

Over the following 89 years, strain accumulated in the neighbouring westerly segment of fault, finally rupturing in 1344.

Now, history has repeated itself, with the 1934 fault transferring strain westwards along the fault, which has finally been released today, 81 years later.

And, worryingly, the team warns there could be more to come.

“Early calculations suggest that Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake is probably not big enough to rupture all the way to the surface, so there is still likely to be more strain stored, and we should probably expect another big earthquake to the west and south of this one in the coming decades,” says Bollinger.

28 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Father Dave

It was quite surreal – enjoying the sunshine as we stood on the doorstep of Yarmouk – an area that the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, recently described as Syria’s “deepest circle of hell”! Admittedly, we were on the right side of the dividing line between the ISIS-controlled section of Yarmouk and the greater area controlled by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). Even so, we were “within sniper range”, or so we were warned.

I didn’t take the sniper warning too seriously until one of our guides pointed to a mosque that was only about 300 metres away. “They certainly have snipers in that minaret” he said. He spoke calmly, as tour-guides do when pointing out landmarks. And he wasn’t running for cover either, and neither were the children who were milling about with us at the end of the street. Presumably the takfiri had more important targets to occupy themselves with.

We went into a school, the entrance of which was only a few metres from where we were standing. It was a ‘safe place’ – a compound where the army had relocated families who had fled the ISIS advance. The complex was dotted with mothers with young children and elderly men. Nonetheless, it was evidently still functioning as a school too.

We didn’t speak to the leadership team initially but instead went out into the courtyard and got our boxing gear out. Within moments we had a team of children around us. At first they were reluctant to try on the gloves, but after the first brave recruit had given it a go, there was a predicable clamor of ‘me next’ that lasted until we had worked our way through the entire group.

I assume ‘me next’ was what they were saying anyway. I must learn some Arabic! I’m certain it wasn’t anything nasty. The kids were lovely. They were kids, though some of them must have already seen more than a lifetime’s quota of violence.

It was a fantastic experience – making it to Yarmouk, playing with the kids, laughing and taking photos with the SAA boys. It was exactly what we’d traveled half way around the world to do!

Of course we hadn’t just come to teach boxing. We’d come to see for ourselves the truth behind the media narrative. Various media sources were depicting the people of Yarmouk as the meat in the sandwich – hammered by ISIS on the one hand and pounded by the Syrian Arab Army on the other! From my friends in Syria though I’d been receiving a difference story – that the Syrian Arab Army was doing all it could to relocate people stuck in Yarmouk to safe places outside the firing zone. Of course we couldn’t see the whole of what was going on, but from our end of Yarmouk it was obvious at the Syrian Army was doing all it could to help these kids.

“We lack pillows” the School Principal said to me afterwards, as we debriefed in his office. “We have food and blankets now but no pillows”.

I don’t think he really expected me to bring a quantity of pillows with me on my next visit. Even so, he was focused on his job and ready to accept help from any source.

In truth, the greatest help we can give these people is not to send our troops into their country. Contrary to popular opinion, that’s not the sort of help they want from us.

That’s the update for now, fellow fighters. Thank you for your support in helping us get to Yarmouk.

I hope you can see the significance of this visit. Bringing some joy to these kids and leaving them with gloves and pads (courtesy of our friends at SMAI) was of great value but there is something of much greater significance I hope we can achieve for these children though this visit – namely, help discredit the media narrative that threatens to unleash further violence upon them!

Whatever you think of the Syrian government, it was crystal clear to me from our day in Yarmouk that these people do NOT want our foreign military intervention. That will only lead to more death and suffering.

I’ll be back to you soon. Until then I remain …

Your brother in the Good Fight,

Dave Smith, also known as Fighting Father Dave, is an Anglican Parish Priest, based in Australia.

28 April 2015

By Nile Bowie

The deal reached in Lausanne between Iran and major world powers represents a high point in negotiations aimed at outlining the future of Iran’s nuclear programme. Considerable concessions have been made by both sides, while Hassan Rouhani’s government in Tehran has moved closer to freeing Iran from almost all economic and financial sanctions, a key goal of his administration.

Though the full details of a comprehensive deal will not be finalized until late June and differences remain on various technical and legal dimensions of the programme, a successful settlement of the nuclear issue could open the door to a new stage in the US-Iran relationship, the effects of which have already begun to slowly reshape the region’s existing strategic order.

Iran must now fulfill a number of stringent conditions over the next six to eight months before Western states lift the sanctions regime placed on the country, which have weakened the Iranian economy and wrought widespread human suffering. The tasks are designed to reduce Iran’s breakout capacity, by extending the period of time Tehran would need to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear warhead, if it decided to do build one.

Due to the politicized nature of the issue, it is necessary to address several preliminary facts about Iran’s nuclear program. Though Iran has accelerated its capacity to enrich uranium in recent years, assessments that represent the consensus view of America’s intelligence agencies have continued to maintain since 2007 that there is no hard evidence of Iran’s intentions to develop a nuclear weapon.

Al Jazeera has recently published a secret cable that demonstrates how Israeli intelligence assessments of Iran’s nuclear program are consistent with those of American intelligence agencies. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which has conducted extensive inspections of the Iranian program for years, also concluded that Tehran was not seeking to weaponize its nuclear program.

The Iranian government has consistently renounced the use of nuclear weapons, but has steadfastly upheld its right to maintain a peaceful nuclear program and a capacity to enrich uranium for civilian purposes, which it is entitled to as a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Tehran views the politicization of the nuclear issue as an affront to its sovereignty and a pretext for Western powers to enforce sanctions to undermine and contain the Islamic Republic.

Some of the tasks Iran must now adhere to involve intrusive daily IAEA inspections, a significant reduction of low-enriched uranium stockpiles, disabling two-thirds of installed centrifuges for a period of 10 years, a pledge not to construct any new uranium enrichment facilities or enrich above an agreed percentage, among other stipulations. Tehran must also cooperate and provide access to the IAEA as it investigates evidence of past work on nuclear weaponization.

Upon fulfilling these conditions, the European Union has agreed to lift its embargo on Iranian oil in addition to all other economic and financial sanctions. The Obama administration would then issue waivers corresponding to US extra-territorial sanctions that would deter banks and European companies from financing trade and investments within Iran. The removal of economic sanctions will be a huge boost to the Iranian economy and mutually advantageous for western business interests.

Global corporations view Iran as a largely untapped market with a vast potential for development. Swiss banks have begun positioning themselves to prospective investors as an alternative to European banks that cannot conduct business with Tehran until sanctions are formally withdrawn. Oil and gas companies, automakers, industrial manufacturers, and global aviation giants such as Airbus and Boeing have the potential to profit enormously.

Iran possesses large oilfields along its border with Iraq, as well as the South Pars offshore gasfield in the Gulf along the maritime border with Qatar, one of the largest gasfields in the world. The Rouhani administration’s business-friendly approach, along with Iran’s potential for large oil and gas discoveries and low cost of production, are indications that Iran will resume its position as one of the world’s biggest crude exporters once sanctions are dismantled, placing greater downward pressure on energy prices.

Sanctions have reduced Iranian oil exports by half, from 2.5m barrels a day in 2012 to 1.1m a day, while sources indicate that Iran has a large backlog of at least 30m barrels of unsold crude being stored. Ordinary Iranians will not immediately feel the benefits of sharp inflows of western money and investment, though a strengthened Iranian economy will lift the national mood and solidify the victory of Iran’s pragmatists, who have secured support from political forces that cautiously endorsed the negotiations, such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

In Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress has shown vociferous opposition to the Iranian deal, echoing the hardline stance of Israel and Saudi Arabia. While American companies stand in gain from access to Iranian markets, there are clearly more strategic considerations that have motivated the Obama administration’s policy shift toward Tehran to favor diplomacy on the nuclear issue, when previously the position was narrowly reliant on sanctions, non-engagement and the threat of use of force.
US Needs Iran to Offset Strategic Decline (PT2)

Washington’s web of contradictory alliances, overt and covert interventions, and attempts to consolidate a pro-American regional order throughout the Middle East have resulted in that region becoming more sectarian and violently unstable than at any point in modern history, while the strategic position of the United States more generally is in decline. It is in this context that strategic rapprochement between Washington and Tehran has become more advantageous to American interests than a policy of non-engagement and open support for regime change.

Though engagement and communication between the governments in Washington and Tehran are at their highest point since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there is no understating the mutual antipathy and distrust that both governments hold toward one another. While there are several areas where the interests of Washington and Tehran align, this strategic confluence does not imply that any US-Iran cooperation on issues outside the nuclear deal would be direct or even coordinated.

The Obama administration sees Iran as a potential tool that it can leverage to protect American interests and investments in Iraq, force Israel into greater restraint and compliance, and reduce dependence on its traditional Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia. However, this would not imply that Washington would scale back its attempts to curtail Iranian influence in areas where it suits US strategic interests, such as through support for anti-Assad militias in Syria and Saudi intervention in Yemen to reinstall a pro-American regime.

The Saudi monarchy feels deeply insecure about US-Iran rapprochement after being kept in the dark about the establishment of diplomatic backchannels between Washington and Tehran, while being subsequently excluded from the nuclear negotiations. Riyadh’s opposition to a Western détente with Tehran is grounded in the fear of competing with an economically dynamic, energy-rich rival, which would reduce its own strategic importance and increase the vulnerability of the regime.

Increased US shale production and Iran’s reentry into global energy markets weakens Riyadh’s leverage with Washington, which may be beginning to harbor doubts about the long-term durability of the Saudi gerontocracy’s continued control over the reigns of state power. The Obama administration undertook its policy reversal on Iran because it almost certainly sees the potential for the Saudi monarchy to become a growing liability, an impression that has been spurred on by policy differences with regard to intervention in Syria.

While the United States aided and abetted Saudi Arabia’s export of weapons and radical Salafism to fuel the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the autonomy of the Islamic State (ISIS) group and its expansion into Iraq threatens US interests and energy investments in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region, as well as Saudi national security. Moreover, Iran believes that the US is insincere about fighting terrorist groups like ISIS because it has enabled the rise and condoned the conduct of similar groups in Syria – with the goal of containing Iranian influence – before they turned their guns against Western interests.

Iran is widely seen as the only force capable of defending Iraq from ISIS through its ability to bring together Kurdish troops, the Iraqi Army and the Shiite militias into a coherent force. Iran’s military involvement in Iraq has indirectly protected American interests in Baghdad and Erbil without the US having to deploy troops to engage ISIS in direct combat. In other words, Washington stands to gain by letting Iran clean up the mess created by US-Saudi policies that intended to constrain Iranian influence.

Israel, like Saudi Arabia, is principally opposed to Iran normalizing diplomatic and business relations with the Western world – not over any fantastic existential threat posed by Iran against the Jewish people – because doing so would shift the regional balance of power and constrain Israeli impunity. Tel Aviv is well aware that a nuclear deal that verifies Tehran’s peaceful compliance serves to erode any justification it could have to launch a military operation against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Obama administration is clearly aware that Iran poses no substantial threat to Israel, which maintains an undeclared nuclear arsenal that is entirely unmonitored by the international community. Therefore, the strategic basis of the nuclear deal has more to do with constraining the actions of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Tel Aviv, which has notoriously strained relations with the White House, thus allowing Washington to reap the aforementioned benefits of a strategic rapprochement with Iran.

Furthermore, the Obama administration was inclined to reverse its policy on Iran to avoid Russia and China displacing American business interests as they increasingly deepen strategic relations with Tehran. Washington sees the pragmatism of the Rouhani government and its desire to open to the global economy as the best bet of ensuring the unimpeded flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, at a time when the US is drawing down its military presence in the region. As long as the strategic utility of cooperation with Iran remains greater than the strategic utility of hostility, the United States can be expected to cautiously continue on its current trajectory vis-à-vis Tehran.

Nile Bowie is a Singapore-based political commentator and columnist for the Malaysian Reserve newspaper. His articles have appeared in numerous international media outlets, including Russia Today (RT) and Al Jazeera, and newspapers such as the International New York Times, the Global Times and the New Straits Times. He is a research assistant with the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), a NGO based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

11 April 2015

 

 

By Eric Zuesse

The motivation behind U.S. President Barack Obama’s trans-Pacific trade-deal TPP, and his trans-Atlantic trade-deal TTIP — the motivation behind both of these enormous international trade-deals — is the same, and Democratic U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Sherrod Brown are correct: it is not at all progressive. It is instead to transfer political power away from the public in a democracy, and for that power to go instead to the international aristocracy (i.e., to go as far away from any national democracy as is even possible to go). This is to be done by switching the most fundamental thing of all: the global power-base itself. Instead of that power-base being democratic votes of the national publics, who elect their political representatives who determine the laws and regulations, that national democratic political system becomes instead the exact opposite: the global aristocratic stockholder votes of the international aristocracy who elect the corporate directors of international companies, who will, in their turn, then be selecting the members to the international-trade-panels which, in TPP and TTIP, will, in their turn, be determining the rules and enforcements regarding especially workers’ rights, product-safety, and the environment.

The international aristocracy’s weakening of these national rules will enable lowering wages of the public, who are the people who don’t control international corporations but who control only their own personal labor, which goes down in value to the lowest hourly wage in the entire international trading-area. This new system will also enable minimizing regulation of the safety of foods and other products and thus maximizing the ability of international corporations to avoid any expenses that companies would otherwise need to devote to raising the safety of their products. Those expenses (the liabilities of dangerous products) will thus be increasingly borne only by the products’ consumers. Risks to investors (which is the thing that aristocrats seek most to avoid) are consequently reduced — shifted more onto the public. It will also enable environmental harms to become virtually free to international corporations that perpetrate them, and to become likewise costs that are borne only by the general public, in toxic air, water, etc. Thus, yet another category of risks to investors will be gone. This will increase profit-margins, which go only to the stockholders — not to the public. Profits will thus become increasingly concentrated in international corporations and the families that control them, and losses will become increasingly socialized among consumers and workers — and just generally to livers and breathers: the public. ‘Government’ will increasingly be merely the spreader and enforcer of risks and penalties to the public; and, this, in turn, will enhance yet further the ‘free-market’ ideal of there being less and less, or ‘smaller,’ government; i.e., of there being less and less of ‘democratic’ government. That’s what the aristocracy’s ‘small government’ jag has really been all about: it’s about cost-shifting, from aristocrats, to the public. Thus, the maximum percentage of the costs — for product-safety, workers’ rights, and the environment — become borne by the public, and the minimum percentage of costs become borne by the stockholders in international corporations. In turn, aristocrats will be able to pass along to their designated heirs their thus ever-increasing dominance and control over the general public. Thus, the concentration of wealth will become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer families, a gradually smaller hyper-aristocracy. This is what’s happening, and it will happen now a lot more if TPP and TTIP pass. (According to the most detailed study of the matter, as of 2012, the “World’s Richest 0.7% Own 13.67 Times as Much as World’s Poorest 68.7%.” So: the world is already extremely unequal in its wealth-distribution. TPP and TTIP are designed to increase that inequality.)

Furthermore, President Obama and the Republican Party in Congress (which support him on this, and on all other matters that are of highest concern to America’s aristocracy, such as the defeat of Russia, China and the other BRICS nations — for example, by Obama’s yanking Ukraine away from Russia’s aristocracy and into control instead by America’s aristocracy) are ensuring that America’s aristocracy will be increasingly on top internationally, and these trade-deals are additionally taking advantage of America’s being the top power across both of this planet’s two major oceans: the Atlantic, and the Pacific.

In other words: the United States, with the TPP & TTIP, will be in the extraordinary position of basically locking in, perhaps for the next century, the U.S. aristocracy’s participation in both of the two major international-trade compacts. This commercial lock-in will retain the American aristocracy’s control over the national aristocracies of almost all of the other major industrial nations — encompassing virtually all of the northern hemisphere, which is where most of this planet’s land-mass is located.

Consequently: not only will the global aristocracy control the global public, but the U.S. aristocracy will also control the other aristocracies in ways that will increase their collective power against any non-member national aristocracy; and, so, America’s Empire will be increasingly the biggest global Empire that the world has ever known, by exploiting the publics everywhere, and not only within merely one country.

Obama told graduating West Point cadets, on 28 May 2014: “China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums.” In other words: part of these future military officers’ jobs will be to help make sure that the BRICS, and other countries that have lower per-capita wealth than in America, stay poor, so that America’s aristocrats can send jobs there instead of pay America’s own workers to do it — in other words: get America’s workers competing against ones in poor countries, rather than get America’s investors competing against ones in poor countries. He’s telling America’s military that they are soldiers in this international class-war, paid by the public, but working actually for America’s aristocracy and not for the public, but against America’s public — to drive down their wages, food-safety, etc.

This is the way toward a certain type of world government by the super-rich for the super-rich, keeping them and their appointed heirs in control over the assets of the entire globe — both its natural and its human resources — and using as the local agents throughout the world the local aristocrats, who will be the people who will keep their local publics in line and working for the ever-increasing intensification of the planet’s wealth, in the hands of, first, the global aristocracy, and, second, America’s aristocracy as being the globally dominant aristocracy.

What will remain of local national governments will then become mere shells.

Benito Mussolini, who learned his fascism from the founder of fascism, his teacher Vilfredo Pareto (whom Mussolini called “the Karl Marx of fascism”), who was also the founder of modern economic theory and especially of its Welfare Criterion, which shapes so much of the rest of economics and especially all cost-benefit analyses (such as of proposed means to restrain global warming), explained as follows the “corporationism” that he held to constitute fascism:

“The corporation plays on the economic terrain just as the Grand Council and the militia play on the political terrain. Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director. Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created.”

Following below this article will be Mussolini’s essay on that issue, in which he sets forth what he claims is a post-capitalist, post-socialist, ideology, and which the also self-described post-capitalist post-socialist Barack Obama (as an agent for the global aristocracy) is increasingly putting into actual practice — especially via TPP & TTIP.

Regarding specifically international-trade deals, Mussolini’s master, Pareto, said that the free market should reign supreme and untrammeled by the State in all regards, not only within nations, but also, and even especially, between nations. As I noted in this regard, in my recent book on the historical development of fascism, up to and including our own time:

“Pareto was consistently a free-market purist, since at least 1896. For example, in his 1 September 1897 ‘The New Theories of Economics’ in the Journal of Political Economy, he stated: ‘Were I of the opinion that a certain book would contribute more than any other to establish free trade in the world at large I would not hesitate an instant to give myself up heart and soul to the study of this particular work, putting aside for the time all study of pure science.’ He also said there: ‘We have been able vigorously to prove that the coefficients of production are determined by the entrepreneurs in a régime of free competition precisely in the same way as a socialist government would have to fix them if it wanted to realize a maximum of ophelimity [his invented term for ‘welfare’ in order to obscure the actual value-base so as to enable economists to pretend to be value-free even as they ranked things in benefit/cost analyses that are, in fact, applying his pro-aristocratic or ‘fascist’ theory] for its subjects.” [And notice there Pareto’s slip-up, referring to the government as having not ‘citizens’ but instead ‘subjects’ — the underlying aristocratic assumpion, that the public are ‘subjects’ instead of real ‘citizens’.] Pareto always challenged whether a socialist government would be able to achieve that, but he was here saying that the free market would do it naturally, just like the physiocrats had said that ‘natural law’ should reign instead of any tampering with it.

Pareto set Adam Smithian economics, and the economics of the French physiocrats who had laid the foundation for Smith’s economic theory, upon a basis that subequent economists could then develop mathematically in a way that would hide the theory’s essential fascism — the modernized (i.e., post-agrarian) form of feudalism.

Barack Obama and congressional Republicans are simply carrying this fascist operation to the next level. As for congressional Democrats, they are split on it, because (at least until the new economic theory that I put forth in my new book) no one yet has formulated an economic theory for a democracy; current economic theory has been designed instead specifically for a fascism — an aristocratically controlled State. Consequently, the few progressive Democrats that still remain in Congress are experiencing difficulty to communicate easily and readily to the public what the real political and economic stakes are in Obama’s proposed TPP and TTIP: the transfer of national democratic sovereignty over to an international fascist aristocracy, which will be dominated by American aristocrats. Without that transfer, of democratic national sovereignty to international fascist bodies that represent global corporate management, these deals would be nothing.

This transfer is called Investor-State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS. It is really an emerging, and distictively fascistic, world government. It is not at all democratic, and it is a creeping form of international government which, to the extent that it becomes imposed, reduces national sovereignty. The prior, progressive, type of world-government proposal, which had been fashionable after World War II in order to make a WW III less likely, was based instead upon the idea of an international federation of independent democracies. ISDS has nothing in common with that, the original vision for world government. It is instead pure fascism, on an international scale.

In the first decades after World War II, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vision of an ultimately emerging democratic world government predominated, aiming for an emerging democratic United Nations, which would evolve to encompass in an increasingly equalitarian way more and more of the world; but, after Republican control started becoming restored in the U.S. with Dwight Eisenhower and his installation of the Dulles brothers to control and shape future U.S. international policies, things moved increasingly in the direction of a U.S.-aristocracy-based control over the world (especially with the Allen Dulles CIA coup in 1953 Iran); and Barack Obama is thoroughly in that fascist, overwhelmingly Republican, tradition, even though he is nominally a ‘Democrat.’ Some analysts even consider Obama to be a CIA operative from early in his life. (The CIA, when Eisenhower came into office, placed the CIA’s pro-Nazis into control; and, afterward, this control has only become more deeply entrenched there.) The British journalist Robert Fitch seems to have figured Obama out even as far back as 14 November 2008, right after Obama was elected to become President. Basically, Fitch described Obama as a fascist who had determined to rise to power by fooling progressives into thinking he was one of them. He was portraying Obama as a Manchurian-candidate, Trojan-Horse, Republican-in-Democratic-rhetorical-clothes, conservative operative. He had Obama right, even that early.

As regards not what economic theory but instead empirical economic studies indicate would likely be the result from both the TPP and the TTIP: one independent economic analysis has been done for each of these two international-trade deals, and both of them come up with the same conclusion: the publics everywhere will lose wealth because of them, but aristocrats, especially in the United States, will gain wealth because of them. They’ll probably do what they were designed to do.

As regards what some of Obama’s defenders say about his trade-deals, namely that Investor-State Dispute Settlement is merely a detail and the overall deal is good: that’s like saying that a person’s health is good but the brain or the heart needs to be fixed or maybe even replaced. These people know it’s a bad deal; that’s why they support it. They’re being paid by the aristocracy.

WOULD HILLARY CLINTON BE ANY BETTER?

What, then, about Obama’s intended successor? Would she be any different? Here’s the record concerning that:

On 23 February 2008, Hillary Clinton stood before microphones and cameras, and harangued in angry tones, “Shame on you, Barack Obama!” alleging that two of his campaign’s flyers lied about her positions.

One of the flyers said that her proposed health-insurance mandate would penalize Americans who didn’t buy health insurance. It was true but she tried to deny it. (Only after Obama was elected did he copy her plan by merely adding the individual mandate to his own.) The other flyer which Hillary was complaining about, quoted Newsday’s characterization of Hillary’s NAFTA view in 2006: “Clinton thinks NAFTA has been a boon to the economy.” Hillary now was also claiming that this was a lie. Many in the press blindly supported her accusation against Obama here, because “a boon” was Newsday’s phrase, not hers. However, again, it was she, and not Obama, who was lying. Her 2003 Living History (p. 182) actually did brag about her husband’s having passed NAFTA, and she said: “Creating a free trade zone in North America — the largest free trade zone in the world — would expand U.S. exports, create jobs and ensure that our country was reaping the benefits, not the burdens, of globalization.” This was one of, supposedly, her proudest achievements, which were (p. 231) “Bill’s successes on the budget, the Brady bill and NAFTA.” But Hillary was now demanding that Obama apologize for his flyer’s having said: “Only Barack Obama fought NAFTA and other bad trade deals.” That statement was just a fact, notwithstanding what Hillary, and many of the major U.S. “news” media, were now alleging. (Obama was saving his worst to be delivered to the nation only after he would become President — and, especially, after he would be re-elected and then he could be free to go far-right, which was his genuine inclination even at the start, though he couldn’t achieve the goal if he didn’t first deceive about what his goal actually is, so that he could maybe get into position to achieve it.)

On 20 March 2008, the day after Hillary finally released her schedule during her White House years, the Nation’s John Nichols blogged “Clinton Lie Kills Her Credibility on Trade Policy,” and he said: “Now that we know from the 11,000 pages of Clinton White House documents released this week that [the] former First Lady was an ardent advocate for NAFTA; … now that we know she was in the thick of the maneuvering to block the efforts of labor, farm, environmental and human rights groups to get a better agreement; … now that we know from official records of her time as First Lady that Clinton was the featured speaker at a closed-door session where 120 women opinion leaders were hectored to pressure their congressional representatives to approve NAFTA; now that we know from ABC News reporting on the session that ‘her remarks were totally pro-NAFTA’ and that ‘there was no equivocation for her support for NAFTA at the time’; … what should we make of Clinton’s campaign claim that she was never comfortable with the militant free-trade agenda that has cost the United States hundreds of thousands of union jobs?”

The next day, ABC’s Jake Tapper, at his “Political Punch” blog, headlined “From the Fact Check Desk: The Clinton Campaign Misrepresents Clinton NAFTA Meeting,” and he reported: “I have now talked to three former Clinton Administration officials whom I trust who tell me that then-First Lady Hillary Clinton opposed the idea of introducing NAFTA before health care, but expressed no reservations in public or private about the substance of NAFTA. Yet the Clinton campaign continues to propagate this myth that she fought NAFTA.” She continued this lie even after it had been repeatedly and soundly exposed to be a lie.

Consequently: the only real difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that Obama is a vastly more skilled liar. It’s how he has gotten as far as he has. She probably won’t; she’s the same incompetent now that she was back then.

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, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

Excerpts from George Seldes’s 1935 book about Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar:

APPENDIX 15

Capitalism and the Corporate State
by Benito Mussolini, November, 1933

Is this crisis which has afflicted us for four years a crisis in the system or of the system? This is a serious question. I answer: The crisis has so deeply penetrated the system that it has become a crisis of the system. It is no longer an ailment; it is a constitutional disease.

Today we are able to say that the method of capitalistic production is vanquished, and with it the theory of economic liberalism which has illustrated and excused it. I want to outline in a general way the history of capitalism in the last century, which may be called the capitalistic century. But first of all, what is capitalism?

Capitalism is … a method of industrial production. To employ the most comprehensive definition: Capitalism is a method of mass production for mass consumption, financed en masse by the emission of private, national and international capital. Capitalism is therefore industrial and has not had in the field of agriculture any manifestation of great bearing.

I would mark in the history of capitalism three periods: the dynamic period, the static period, and the period of decline.

The dynamic period was that from 1830 to 1870. It coincided with the introduction of weaving by machinery and with the appearance of the locomotive. Manufacturing, the typical manifestation of industrial capitalism, expanded. This was the epoch of great expansion and hence of the law of free competition; the struggle of all against all had full play.

In this period there were crises, but they were cyclical crises, neither long nor universal. Capitalism still had such vitality and such power of recovery that it could brilliantly prevail.

There were also wars. They cannot be compared with the World War. They were brief. Even the War of 1870, with its tragic days at Sedan, took no more than a couple of seasons.

During the forty years of the dynamic period the State was watching; it was remote, and the theorists of liberalism could say: ‘You, the State, have a single duty. It is to see to it that your administration does not in the least turn toward the economic sector. The better you govern the less you will occupy yourself with the problems of the economic realm.’ We find, therefore, that economy in all its forms was limited only by the penal and commercial codes.

But after 1870, this epoch underwent a change. There was no longer the struggle for life, free competition, the selection of the strongest. There became manifest the first symptoms of the fatigue and the devolution of the capitalistic method. There began to be agreements, syndicates, corporations, trusts. One may say that there was not a sector of economic life in the countries of Europe and America where these forces which characterize capitalism did not appear.

What was the result? The end of free competition. Restricted as to its borders, capitalistic enterprise found that, rather than fight, it was better to concede, to ally, to unite by dividing the markets and sharing the profits. The very law of demand and supply was now no longer a dogma, because through the combines and the trusts it was possible to control demand and supply.

Finally, this capitalistic economy, unified,’trustified,’ turned toward the State. What inspired it to do so? Tariff protection.

Liberalism, which is nothing but a wider form of the doctrine of economic liberalism, received a death blow. The nation which, from the first, raised almost insurmountable trade barriers was the United States, but today even England has renounced all that seemed traditional in her political, economic and moral life, and has surrendered herself to a constantly increasing protectionism.

After the World War, and because of it, capitalistic enterprise became inflated. Enterprises grew in size from millions to billions. Seen from a distance, this vertical sweep of things appeared as something monstrous, babel-like. Once, the spirit had dominated the material; now it was the material which bent and joined the spirit. Whatever had been physiological was now pathological; all became abnormal.

At this stage, super-capitalism draws its inspiration and its justification from this Utopian theory: the theory of unlimited consumers. The ideal of super-capitalism would be the standardization of the human race from the cradle to the coffin. Super-capitalism would have all men born of the same length, so that all cradles could be standardized; it would have babies divert themselves with the same playthings, men clothed according to the same pattern, all reading the same book and having the same taste for the movies — in other words, it would have everybody desiring a single utilitarian machine. This is in the logic of things, because only in this way can super-capitalism do what it wishes.

When does capitalistic enterprise cease to be an economic factor? When its size compels it to be a social factor. And that, precisely, is the moment when capitalistic enterprise, finding itself in difficulty, throws itself into the very arms of the State; It is the moment when the intervention of the State begins, rendering itself ever more necessary.

We are at this point: that, if in all the nations of Europe the State were to go to sleep for twenty-four hours, such an interval would be sufficient to cause a disaster. Now, there is no economic field in which the State is not called upon to intervene. Were we to surrender — just as a matter of hypothesis — to this capitalism of the eleventh hour, we should arrive at State capitalism, which is nothing but State socialism inverted.

This is the crisis of the capitalist system, taken in its universal significance. …

Last evening I presented an order in which I defined the new corporation system as we understand it and wish to make it.

I should like to fix your attention on what was called the object: the well-being of the Italian people. It is necessary that, at a certain time, these institutions, which we have created, be judged and measured directly by the masses as instruments through which these masses may improve their standard of living. Some day the worker, the tiller of the soil, will say to himself and to others: ‘If today I am better off practically, I owe it to the institutions which the Fascist revolution has created.’

We want the Italian workers, those who are interested in their status as Italians, as workers, as Fascists, to feel that we have not created institutions solely to give form to our doctrinal schemes, but in order, at a certain moment, to give positive, concrete, practical and tangible results.

Our State is not an absolute State. Still less is it an absolutory State, remote from men and armed only with inflexible laws, as laws ought to be. Our State is one organic, human State which wishes to adhere to the realities of life. …

Today we bury economic liberalism. The corporation plays on the economic terrain just as the Grand Council and the militia play on the political terrain. Corporationism is disciplined economy, and from that comes control, because one cannot imagine a discipline without a director.

Corporationism is above socialism and above liberalism. A new synthesis is created. It is a symptomatic fact that the decadence of capitalism coincides with the decadence of socialism. All the Socialist parties of Europe are in fragments.

Evidently the two phenomena — I will not say conditions — present a point of view which is strictly logical: there is between them a historical parallel. Corporative economy arises at the historic moment when both the militant phenomena, capitalism and socialism, have already given all that they could give. From one and from the other we inherit what they have of vitality.

We have rejected the theory of the economic man, the Liberal theory, and we are, at the same time, emancipated from what we have heard said about work being a business. The economic man does not exist; the integral man, who is political, who is economic, who is religious, who is holy, who is combative, does exist.

Today we take again a decisive step on the road of the revolution.

Let us ask a final question: Can corporationism be applied to other countries? We are obliged to ask this question because it will be asked in all countries where people are studying and trying to understand us. There is no doubt that, given the general crisis of capitalism, corporative solutions can be applied anywhere. But in order to make corporationism full and complete, integral, revolutionary, certain conditions are required.

There must be a single party through which, aside from economic discipline, enters into action also political discipline, which shall serve as a chain to bind the opposing factions together, and a common faith.

But this is not enough. There must be the supremacy of the State, so that the State may absorb, transform and embody all the energy, all the interests, all the hopes of a people.

Still, not enough. The third and last and the most important condition is that there must be lived a period of the highest ideal tension.

We are now living in this period of high, ideal tension. It is because step by step we give force and consistency to all our acts; we translate in part all our doctrine. How can we deny that this, our Fascista, is a period of exalted, ideal tension?

No one can deny it. This is the time in which arms are crowned with victory. Institutions are remade, the land is redeemed, cities are founded.

Here are two excerpts from the Seldes book’s APPENDIX 9, “the Labor Charter,” a document that dates from 22 April 1927:

Art. 2. Labor in all forms, intellectual, technical and manual, is a social duty. In this sense, and in this sense only, is it protected by the State. From the national point of view all production is a unit; its objects are unitary and can be defined as the wellbeing of the producers and the development of national strength. …

Art. 7. The Corporate State considers private initiative in the field of production the most efficacious and most useful instrument in the interest of the nation. Private organization of production being a function of national interest, the organization of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction of its production. Reciprocity of the rights and duties is derived from the collaboration of the productive forces. The technician, office employee and worker is an active collaborator in the economic undertaking, the direction of which is the right of the employer, who has the responsibility for it.

26 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Bill Van Auken

Saudi warplanes carried out at least 20 air strikes across Yemen Thursday, just two days after a spokesman for the Saudi Arabian military announced that so-called Operation Decisive Storm, which began March 26, had ended and a new phase, described as “Operation Renewal of Hope,” had begun.

The continued bombardment came as UN and Yemeni officials both placed the death toll at roughly 1,000 Yemenis, the majority of them civilians, including at least 134 children.

For millions of Yemenis who have survived the nearly month-long bombing campaign, conditions are growing increasingly desperate.

“The country is going completely down the drain, and I don’t think it is good for anybody to have Yemen completely collapse and in total chaos,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told Foreign Policy in an interview late Wednesday.

The head of Middle East operations for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described the destruction inflicted on the country as “shocking.”

Speaking after a three-day visit to the impoverished country, the ICRC’s Robert Mardini said, “Nowhere is safe in Yemen today. Nearly a month of death and destruction after years of crisis leaves little hope for Yemenis to lead a normal life.”

Describing the humanitarian catastrophe in the capital of Sana’a, he said there was “no electricity, no water, no food, no public services, no garbage collection.” He added that children “are traumatized by the air strikes at night.”

In the latest round of bombings, at least 20 people were killed in the northwestern city of al-Dhale, where Saudi warplanes targeted two schools and a gym.

Even before the dropping of some 3,500 bombs on its cities, Yemen was the poorest country in the Middle East, with some 16 million people—over 60 percent of the population—dependent upon aid for their survival. A US-backed Saudi blockade has cut off that aid.

The brutal bombing campaign has led to increasing charges of war crimes, as Saudi warplanes have struck schools, hospitals, residential neighborhoods and a dairy factory, where 31 workers were killed.

The New York-based group Human Rights Watch warned Thursday that the Saudi-led air assault appeared to involve war crimes in the deliberate targeting of “civilians and civilian objects” and the impeding of humanitarian aid to the civilian population.

It cited in particular the bombing on April 18 of a warehouse facility of the British-based charity Oxfam in the northern city of Sadaa.

“Destroying an aid group warehouse harms many civilians not even near the strike zone and threatens aid delivery everywhere in Yemen,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director for Human Rights Watch.

Oxfam’s Yemen country director, Grace Ommer, denounced the strike on the warehouse as “an absolute outrage.” She said the aid group had informed the Saudi-led military coalition of the location of its offices and storage facilities.

“The contents of the warehouse had no military value,” she said, noting that material kept there was needed to provide clean drinking water to Sadaa’s population.

The Obama administration is directly complicit in the war crimes against the people of Yemen. It has provided logistical support for the bombing campaign, including the aerial refueling of Saudi warplanes, as well as targeting information and other intelligence. It has also rushed bombs, missiles and other weaponry to replenish the supplies of the military of Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf monarchical regimes participating in the war.

Washington has backed the war in order to support the dictatorship of the Saudi royal family, which has long functioned as a lynchpin for US domination and reaction in the Middle East.

The goal of the war is to suppress the so-called Houthi rebels (the Ansar Allah insurgency, based among the Zaydi Shi’a population, which makes up between 35 and 40 percent of Yemen’s population) and restore to power Riyadh’s own stooge, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Hadi was installed as president in a 2012 “election” in which he was the only candidate.

While anxious to curry favor with the Saudi monarchy and placate its opposition to the deal being pursued by Washington and the other major powers on the nuclear program of Iran—Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival—the Obama administration has appeared to grow increasingly wary of the war, which has accomplished little outside of inflicting mass civilian casualties and further destabilizing Yemen.

Among the principal beneficiaries of the war has been Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Previously portrayed by Washington as the premier terrorist threat to the US “homeland,” now, as a vicious sectarian enemy of the Houthis, it has been given tacit support by the Saudis and the US itself.

In an interview with MSNBC late Tuesday, US president Barack Obama acted as if the US was not a participant in the war against Yemen, while indicting Iran for providing supposed aid to the Houthi rebels. Washington has repeatedly charged that the Tehran has supplied arms to the Houthis, while presenting no evidence. Iran has denied the charges.

The Pentagon has dispatched the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt to join eight other US warships off the coast of Yemen amid threats that they could be used to intercept Iranian ships. US defense secretary Ashton Carter refused Wednesday to say whether the US Navy would forcibly stop and board the ships, saying only, “We have options.”

While the Obama administration has claimed it supports a negotiated political settlement in Yemen, and the Houthi leadership has indicated that it also sought such a settlement, it is far from clear such a deal can be reached.

The Saudis have insisted talks are possible only if the Houthis first lay down their arms, and that they must restore Hadi to power. Meanwhile, forces in the south of the country that have resisted the Houthis have indicated they have no interest in supporting Hadi or any other central government leader, but rather want to secede from the north.

The filthy character of the war, waged by a group of parasitic oil monarchies against the poorest country of the region, found expression in a message tweeted by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family and the richest man in the kingdom. He declared that “in appreciation of their role” in the war, he was offering to give “100 Bentley cars to the 100 Saudi [fighter] pilots.” The British-made luxury cars sell for roughly $200,000 each.

The prince’s offer provoked an outraged response on Twitter. One Yemeni replied, “100 Bentley cars to 100 pilots who bombed Yemen. Not a single ambulance to its hospitals they devastated.”

Another Yemeni, who had posted photographs of his bomb-ravaged apartment and his children looking out at the rubble of Sana’a, wrote, “Glad I’m alive. But who’s paying for all this mess? I get blown up, pilots get the Bentleys. Unfair world.”

24 April, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Serge Jordan

The barbarous terrorist attack on the 18 March at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, that claimed 22 lives, represents a watershed in the political situation of post-revolution Tunisia. This appalling event, the first terrorist act of this scale to take place in the heart of the capital, came as a reminder of the stark reality hidden behind the laudatory propaganda of the mainstream media and politicians about the successful “democratic transition.”

But the Bardo attack has also given a convenient excuse for the ruling class to try and speed up its counter-revolutionary offensive on the Tunisian masses, in both the economic and political fields. It appears that the newly-elected President Beji Caid Essebsi’s obsession of “restoring the prestige and authority of the State” has been given a boost. The US government has already announced a tripling of its military aid to the country.

The Tunisian government -whose leading political force, Nidaa Tounes, is partly a recycling machine for old regime supporters and corrupt businessmen linked to the former Ben Ali dictatorship- has seized the recent terrorist strike as a golden opportunity to reassert a heavier State machinery, and to target the social movements and strikes which have been increasing since the beginning of this year.

The official position focuses on the fact that the Bardo attackers were targeting the new “symbol of democracy” that Tunisian institutions arguably represent. This ironically coincides with the new government exploiting this very event to impose a clampdown on democratic rights. A recent report from Human Rights Watch detailed how the government’s new anti-terrorism draft bill, if passed in parliament, would allow extended detention without charge, would see the disruption of public services prosecuted as a “terrorist act”, and justify the use of the death penalty.

Under the guise of the “protection of the armed forces”, another draft law adopted by the council of ministers on 8 April would, de facto, give a status of impunity to the security forces at the expense of people’s freedoms. Among other things, it says that “no criminal liability shall be attached to an agent who would cause the death of an individual in the context of the mission he pursues”.

The shift in language used in the Tunisian press since 18 March also highlights an acceleration of the ideological offensive to shame all the workers and poor people who fight for their rights:

“The gratuitous and manipulated protest movements are threatening the fragile economic balance of the country. Why do we see them everywhere and without any valid reasons? Should Tunisia decree that those who attack the country’s economic fabric must be considered as economic terrorists? And why not after all? Should we tolerate that a handful of badly intentioned people, conducted by saboteurs, manipulators and destroyers, make of our country a new Somalia?” (Directinfo, 14/04)

This comes also with a new spike in vilifications of the revolution itself, and in some cases, the spreading of a perfume of nostalgia for the days of overt dictatorial rule:

“Human rights lose all their meaning in the face of these terrorists” (Touhami Abdouli, Le Temps, 21/03)

“Obviously, we will never ask ourselves the question of why Tunisia had peace during 23 years of dictatorial regime” (Le Temps, 22/03)

This attempt to bury the legacy of the revolution marks a certain re-assertion of the “old guard” within the State and its appendages, that the electoral victory of Nidaa Tounes has unleashed. The composition of the government is no exception. The Prime Minister Habib Essid himself occupied several posts as secretary of state under the Ben Ali regime, and others in his cabinet have similar pedigrees. After the Bardo attacks, some high security officials who had been sacked in 2011 during a mild cleansing reform within the Interior Ministry have been re-incorporated in their jobs. This move is justified by their supposed experience in the struggle against terrorism – a “struggle against terrorism” which, under Ben Ali, was a cover for the harassment, imprisonment and torture of thousands of political and trade union activists. Similarly, two days after the attack, Essebsi argued in a TV speech for the country to accept “painful reforms”, and defended the lifting of all the restrictions on businessmen who are within the scope of lawsuits and travel bans for their connections with the Ben Ali regime.

National unity?

The Tunisian ruling class and its imperialist backers such as the IMF, the World Bank and the Western governments behind them, plans more deregulation of business requirements, privatisations of state-owned banks and other companies, liquidation of the state subsidy system and other neo-liberal measures. All of which have one essential aim -squeezing the revenues of working class families further, while maximising the profit-making avenues for the bosses, the shareholders and the international creditors.

They all hope to exploit the shock following the Bardo bloodshed to push through their anti-working class agenda.

Part of this involves the hammering down of the need for “national unity”. How convenient! A few months ago, the leading parties in the present government, Nidaa Tounes and the right-wing Islamists of Ennahda, were still both trying to convince us that there was an irreconcilable fracture in Tunisian society, between the “modernists” in favour of a “civilian State” on the one hand, and the Islamists in favour of a “religious State” on the other hand. Now that this masquerade has been exposed for what it is, because the enemies of yesterday have now joined hands in the same coalition to the exclusive benefit of their big business friends, we are supposed to be convinced that their “sacred union” should be ours as well.

National unity is a suitable weapon of the ruling class to try and neutralise opposition to its rule, even as its mouthpieces engage in throwing mud at striking workers and communities in struggle. This new mantra for national reconciliation is aimed at deflecting the mounting class anger by rallying the whole country behind a common enemy, and at trying to bind the workers’ hands and feet with their capitalist masters.

But the growing number of disputes taking place in the workplaces, in both public and private sectors, illustrates that a serious gulf is building up between the capitalist class’s wishful thinking and the reality on the ground. Government officials are well aware that beyond the political use of the present state of affairs, they will not prevent serious backlashes from the working class. The repeated militant national strike actions by the teachers’ union since the beginning of the year have given a flavour of what people in power might have to expect for the year to come. The teachers’ strike, last Wednesday, recorded an average participation rate of 95.3 % across the country according to union figures (the highest being in the central region of Gafsa with 99.6%, and the lowest in the northern region of Bizerte with 91%).

In the phosphate mines, in the textile industry, in the postal services, among the pilots, in public transport -numerous sectors have been involved in industrial action in the recent weeks. The UGTT also announced a two-day national strike in the health sector on the 28 and 29 April. A report published on the day of the Bardo tragedy noted that 94 strikes had taken place since the beginning of 2015, including 74 in the private sector. It is becoming clear that the government’s hope of using the terrorism scarecrow to reduce this nascent wave of working class resistance has been extremely short-lived.

The burning question is: when is the leadership of the workers’ movement eventually going to decide to waken up to the burgeoning reality and lead the millions who are striving for action and real change?

Leadership missing in action

While the government pretends to be engaged in a resolute fight against terrorism, its policies of social devastation only increase the sense of hopelessness and despair among the poorest in society, leading to the growth of religious extremism in the country. Poor neighbourhoods that have become a fertile ground for the recruitment of jihadists are, before anything else, areas where state policy has failed in every respect.

This is why the struggle against terror is intimately linked with the struggle to achieve a decisive break from the economic policies pursued by successive governments since the fall of Ben Ali who have all fundamentally applied the disastrous recipes of the old regime.

The Tunisian General labour Union UGTT has called for a “national congress against terrorism”. But its appeal is directed towards the existing capitalist establishment. It even aims at bringing on board the UTICA (Tunisian Union of Industry and Commerce), the national bosses’ organisation, rather than serving as a lever to organise the fight-back against the government and to engage in a serious discussion on building a working class alternative to the continuing austerity and state repression, which is all that this right-wing government has on offer for the Tunisian people.

Since the Bardo museum attack, the UGTT central executive has essentially echoed the government’s rhetoric about the need for “national unity” rather than providing its affiliates with a plan of action worthy of its name, independently from all the manoeuvres of the capitalists and their parties, and challenging the state’s pretensions to set the tone on anti-terrorism.

The lack of lead from the trade union leadership, and from the left-leaning Popular Front coalition for that matter, has allowed a vacuum that has been occupied by pro-capitalist establishment figures. This has meant that the voice of working people, of trade unionists and left activists, of the revolutionary youth, of the unemployed, has hardly been heard in this debate.

The workers’ movement needs its own political voice

In its last paper, the CWI in Tunisia, Al-Badil al-Ishtiraki (Socialist Alternative), draws parallels between the terror of the jihadists and the State-sponsored terror, and pushes forward proposals for actions based on rejecting both, and campaigning for the transformation of all the local and sectorial social battles into a mass political struggle to eventually topple Essid’s government.

At the present time, this might sound like a herculean task. But the present government is much weaker than it seems. More than four million Tunisians (out of a population of eleven million), including about 80% of the youth between 19 and 25 years old, abstained in the last legislative elections. An internal crisis is already affecting the main governing parties. The existence of such an improbable coalition is in itself a sign of the difficulties for the ruling class to assemble in the first place a tool capable of implementing their desired policies.

The apparent “strength” of the present government only betrays the extremely timorous character of the workers’ leaders and their lack of confidence in the class whose interests they are supposed to defend.   The acquaintances between parts of the UGTT bureaucracy and the Nidaa Tounes party have notably acted as a brake on the response, or rather the lack of it, from the UGTT headquarters in the recent events.

A united front of all workers and social organisations, around the militant bases of the UGTT and the left, of unemployed organisations like the UDC (Union of Unemployed Graduates) and of the social movements, is urgently needed to push back the counter-revolutionary offensive. The starting point of such a movement could be the campaign for organising a mass 24-hour general strike in order to bring all the layers in struggle together, on the basis of the total refusal of any economic “sacrifices” or any erosion of democratic rights.

Such a general strike would have to be seen as a springboard towards escalating actions and demands, until the government is given a decisive blow. Local general assemblies and democratic committees of action in the communities and workplaces would help widen the active support base of the movement, by providing a space to discuss and democratically decide the next steps in the struggle. In the long run, the local, regional and national coordination of such bodies could constitute the backbone for a government genuinely fulfilling the revolution’s demands.

All the governments since the overthrow of Ben Ali have failed the revolution entirely, and the present one is no exception. If anything, this cabinet is composed of all the fundamental components of the reaction put together. The struggle for a progressive government of the poor, the youth and the working masses, based on a socialist program of nationalisation of all major industries, banks, and big land properties under the democratic control of the Tunisian people, is what the left and the trade union movement should strategically prepare the people for.

An independent working class political alternative decisively turned towards grassroots struggles, equipped with a militant programme of action, as well as with democratic and inclusive structures, is what is crucially missing at this point. The rise of reactionary religious forces, the electoral victory of a party based on old-regime cronies, the lack of a proper response from the left after the Bardo attack -all recent developments in Tunisia underline the need to urgently rebuild an authentic independent political voice for the working class, the youth and all the people who have carried out the revolution with genuine hopes for a better future.

Serge Jordan works for the Committee for a Workers’ International

22 April, 2015
Socialistworld.net

By Rod Such

On Palestine by Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky (UK: Penguin, 224 pp, US: Haymarket)

When they write or speak about Palestine, few academics on the left command the same attention as Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe. Their latest joint effort, a sequel to the 2010 book Gaza in Crisis, is titled simply On Palestine.

This slim volume, which runs to approximately 200 pages, is notable not only for the many issues on which the two men agree but also for their disagreements. Both center on some of the principal strategic and tactical issues facing the global Palestine solidarity movement.

These include applying the “apartheid model” to Israel, the effectiveness of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, and the debate over the one-state and two-state solutions. For these discussions alone, this book merits attention.

The first part of the book consists of dialogues between Chomsky and Pappe on Palestine’s past, present and future. Editor and human rights activist Frank Barat guides these conversations. He also separately interviews Pappe on the current political situation inside his native Israel and Chomsky on the current role of the United States in the so-called peace negotiations.

Paradoxes

An introductory chapter by Pappe helps frame these conversations. In it, the historian and author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine outlines four paradoxes confronting the solidarity movement.

The first paradox is why international public opinion overwhelmingly condemns Israel’s human rights violations and yet Israel can still rely on the support of Western governments. The second is why Israeli society has failed to acknowledge global opinion and continues to perceive itself in a positive way.

The third is why the Palestine solidarity movement has largely failed to make Zionist ideology the centerpiece of its critique of Israel despite the fact that Zionism is at the root of Israel’s criminality. The fourth paradox is why Israeli propaganda has still largely succeeded in portraying the conflict as “complicated” when in reality, as Pappe puts it, it’s a familiar and simple case of settler colonialism.

To address these paradoxes, Pappe suggests that the solidarity movement needs to introduce a new lexicon that frames the struggle in terms of decolonization, “regime change” and the imperative of a one-state solution. These terms, Pappe argues, give activists a way of getting beyond the old orthodoxy of resolving the conflict through peace negotiations and a two-state solution, which have failed, he says, because Israel is guided by an ideology that seeks to “de-Arabize” all of historic Palestine.

The Israeli government will never cease to seek this goal until it’s confronted with the necessity to end its colonial project, become a state of all its citizens, pay reparations to the Palestinians it forced into exile, and abandon the project of apartheid that is implicit in the two-state solution.

Tantalizing ideas

Chomsky and Pappe agree on many of these issues. The dialogues show both men acknowledging that Israel is a settler-colonial society.

Chomsky notes that this fact probably explains why Australia, Canada and the United States are Israel’s most consistent supporters since the settler-colonial origins of all four countries make them natural allies.

Like any conversation, much of the content in these dialogues is often suggestive rather than grounded in rigorous argument. The two scholars throw out some tantalizing ideas.

Pappe, for example, proposes that Islamophobia is not a recent phenomenon and that it played a prominent role in winning Western support for Israel’s existence. Chomsky says it is critical for the BDS movement to target the US role in supporting Israel since Israel, like apartheid South Africa before it, understands that it can persist as a “pariah state” as long as it has US backing.

Chomsky comes off as much less hostile to and dismissive of the BDS movement in this volume than he was in a notorious article he wrote for The Nation last year. He criticizes advocates of an academic and cultural boycott for failing to prepare the groundwork for their campaign, resulting, he says, in a vulnerability to charges of violating academic freedom.

Pappe disagrees, but despite his defense of the academic boycott, one of the deficiencies of this book — namely the absence of Palestinian voices — becomes particularly glaring here.

Chomsky also appears to be much less rigid in maintaining that US support for Israel is solely guided by its own imperialist interests, an argument forcefully sustained in his 1983 book The Fateful Triangle. Here he appears to envision waning US support for Israel, especially because of the shift in US public opinion among young people.

Peace talks charade

The sharpest divergence between Pappe and Chomsky becomes apparent in part two, which consists of several articles previously published by Chomsky and original contributions by Pappe. Both scholars agree that the peace negotiations have been an elaborate charade allowing Israel to continue to colonize the West Bank.

Chomsky argues that Israel’s conception of a two-state solution is at best a group of isolated, landlocked cantons in the West Bank in which a tiny Palestinian elite enjoys limited autonomy in Ramallah and Gaza exists wholly apart so that a Palestinian state will have no access to the outside world.

Nevertheless, Chomsky believes that a two-state solution is the only realistic one given that there is an international consensus behind it. The US government, he argues, could be compelled to cease providing support for Israel’s violations of international law.

Facing that prospect, Israel might recognize its total international isolation and negotiate a two-state solution based on the international consensus.

Pappe, on the other hand, argues that the two-state solution is no solution at all because it doesn’t address the problem: Zionism as a colonialist movement and Israel as a “racist, apartheid state.” The solution starts, he writes, “within a framework where all [including Palestinian refugees] enjoy full rights, equality and partnership.”

Unfortunately, neither Pappe nor Chomsky invoke the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination. That was the fundamental right denied the Palestinians in 1948, and until that right is exercised, it’s hard to see how the Palestinian people will win liberation from colonialism.

Rod Such is a former editor for World Book and Encarta encyclopedias. He is active with Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace-Portland Chapter and the Seattle Mideast Awareness Campaign

22 April 2015
The Electronic Intifada