~ A Christmas Message ~ 

The Gift of Death

"...Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care... Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it..."
 

By George Monbiot

December 23, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -  

There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub holder; a “hilarious” inflatable zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World wall map. 

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they’re in landfill. For thirty seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations. 

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable). 

But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. 

An electronic drum-machine t-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped i-phone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog: no one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas Day. 

They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away. 

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. 

When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production(2). 

We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers. 

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. 

This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us. 

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot(4). No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. 

It’s grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption. 

This boom has not happened by accident. 

Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask “spending on what?”. 

When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors. 

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. “I always knit my gifts”, says a woman in a television ad for an electronics outlet. “Well you shouldn’t,” replies the narrator(5).

An advertisement for Google’s latest tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7’s special features(6). The best things in life are free, but we’ve found a way of selling them to you. 

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. 

In the US in 2010 a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population(7). 

The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this earth are diminished. 

So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. 

Witness last week’s Moral Maze programme, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it, somehow, with authoritarianism(8). 

When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics. 

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for god’s sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don’t. 

www.monbiot.com

Barack Obama and the Legacy of American Capitalism
By Charles Sullivan  
Democracy is the antithesis of capitalism! But capitalism is the product the U.S. government, the Pentagon, and the commercial media are marketing to us as democracy. 

Continue

The US Imperial State Successful in Stopping the Betterment of the World's People

By Dr. Michael Parenti
The US Empire sees only two kinds of countries in the world: satellites or enemies (or "potential" enemies).  
Continue

The Changing Contours of US Imperial Intervention in World Conflicts
By James Petras
Zionists are deeply committed to pushing the US into more wars for Israel. 

Continue

“Bride and Boom!”
By Tom Engelhardt
We’re Number One... In Obliterating Wedding Parties.  

Continue

Beware Our Leaders
Seymour Hersh: US Deceived Us On Syria

By Jonathan Cook

"...If Barack Obama had not been forced to scrap his plan to bomb Syria, we would now be reading about these deceptions after thousands, or more likely tens of thousands, of Syrian civilians had been killed in allied bombing runs..."

December 14, 2013 Information Clearing House -  

Seymour Hersh publishes his latest, illuminating essay on the machinations of the US security state, this time in regard to Syria. 

Hersh makes a very convincing case that the US had no credible intelligence that August’s chemical weapons attack in Ghouta using sarin was carried out by Assad’s troops but that it did know that jihadi groups there, especially the al-Nusra Front, almost certainly had sarin and could use it.

While reading this piece, I kept thinking one thing: If Barack Obama had not been forced to scrap his plan to bomb Syria at the last minute, we would now be reading about these deceptions after thousands, or more likely tens of thousands, of Syrian civilians had been killed in allied bombing runs.

We might also be reading Hersh (or more likely not reading him, given the likely war hysteria) after US forces had got sucked into a ground invasion as the Assad regime collapsed. Hersh’s piece suggests that the US military had a plan to invade if there was any danger that Assad’s chemical weapons stockpile was in danger of being taken over by the rebels, as would have been inevitable had the regime fallen.

All of this sounds very familiar indeed. It was a rerun of Iraq and the bogus intelligence about its supposed WMD.

There are two important conclusions to be drawn from this story, in addition to the obvious one: that our governments keep lying to us to further their (not our) geopolitical interests and they invariably do so under the pretence of “humanitarianism”.

The first is that, not only do our governments lie as a matter of course, but our media lie entirely in sync with our governments. 

Hersh exposes a catalogue of journalistic failures in his piece, just as occurred in Iraq. He even points out that at one vital White House press conference, where the main, false narrative was set out, officials refused to invite a critical national security correspondent, presumably fearing that he might expose the charade.

Note that this piece by Hersh was rejected by the New Yorker, his usual home, and by the Washington Post, which may not be surprising given that the latter emerges from this article looking like a major offender in this journalistic farce.

Instead Hersh was forced to turn to the London Review of Books, a London literary publication that has on occasion served as a sanctuary for important articles spurned by the mainstream media. (The same happened with Walt and Mearsheimer’s infamous long essay on the Israel lobby, which later became a best-selling book called The Lobby.)

The other is that we as citizens (ruled over by our governments) and as readers (of their media) have to start waking up to these serial deceptions. 

Too many otherwise clever people fall time and again for the false narratives we are spun. 

There is a simple lesson: stop swallowing the so-called intelligence you are being told to justify aggression, most especially when it clashes with the precepts of common sense. 

This should be our position on Iran too.

Similarly, not only must we become less gullible but we must inoculate ourselves against those who are more susceptible to the virus.  

Those of us who tried to warn that we must be wary of official efforts to manipulate the intelligence and our understanding of events were denounced, as always happens in these circumstances, as Assad apologists.

Finally, it should be noted that Hersh’s role in exposing these deceptions, as in so many previous ones, should not lull us into a false complacency. His work does not demonstrate that our media is free and pluralistic. It shows something very different.

There will always be the odd investigative reporter like Hersh at the margins of the mainstream media. And one can understand why by reading Hersh closely. 

His sources of information are those in the security complex who lost the argument, or came close to losing the argument, and want it on record that they opposed the government line. 

Hersh is useful to them because he allows them to settle scores within the establishment or to act as a warning bell against future efforts to manipulate intelligence in the same manner. 

He is useful to us as readers because he reveals disputes that show us much more clearly what has taken place.

Unfortunately, Hersh’s role has been mainly one for the historians. He tells them after the event what really took place inside the corridors of power. 

But he could be so much more important if we listened to him properly. For he keeps repeating the same truth: Beware our leaders.

Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist based in Nazareth, Israel, since 2001.He is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

• Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State (2006)
• Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (2008)
• Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008)

www.jonathan-cook.net

Washington Drives the World Toward War

By Paul Craig Roberts

Not content with sending war signals to Russia and China, Washington has apparently also decided to torpedo the Iranian settlement by announcing new sanctions against companies doing business with Iran. Continue

Palestinians and Israelis Can Coexist if Occupation Ends

By Hussein Ibish

The unstable and unhealthy relationship of dominance and subordination, of discipline and control through violence, built into Israel’s occupation was graphically illustrated this week in two separate, tragic and bloody incidents. Continue

The Wild and Cruel Gap Between Debtors and Creditors

By Ralph Nader

The situation is bad and getting worse. Savers are being turned into “lockbox customers” in peril of having to actually pay the banks to hold their money. Continue

It Is Possible To Be Optimistic
Global Warming and the End of Capitalism

By Gary Engler

If the system you want to build begins with working people around the world taking over the reins of the economy and replacing capitalist minority rule with economic democracy, then that could happen relatively quickly. Continue

It's time to expose the "Trans-Pacific Partnership"

New Corporate Powers In Secret Trade Deal
 
By Cenk Uygur 

Video - The Young Turks 

 

"The Obama administration appears to have almost no international support for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation, according to two internal memos obtained by The Huffington Post.

The memos, which come from a government involved in the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade negotiations, detail continued disputes in the talks over the deal. The documents reveal broad disagreement over a host of key positions, and general skepticism that an agreement can be reached by year-end. The Obama administration has urged countries to reach a deal by New Year's Day, though there is no technical deadline...".* 

The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur breaks it down in this video. . . Continue

Posted December  10, 2013

*Read more here from Zach Carter / The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/08/tpp-trade-agreement_n_4409211.html

Obama Faces Backlash Over New Corporate Powers In Secret Trade Deal
By Zach Carter
One of the most controversial provisions in the talks includes new corporate empowerment language insisted upon by the U.S. government, which would allow foreign companies to challenge laws or regulations in a privately run international court. Continue

Trade secrets: why is the US so quiet on the Trans-Pacific Partnership?

William Pesek

The Trans-Pacific Partnership being pushed by Washington is nothing more than a corporatist power grab, writes William Pesek.

Self-awareness often eludes US officials who push American interests on Asia. John Kerry's visit to Vietnam was a case in point, as the Secretary of State implored the government to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In his pitch earlier this week, Kerry said the US-led trade deal would bring ''transparency'' and ''accountability'' to the communist nation, helping it become a more open society that supports free expression. An odd thought, considering the Big Brother-like secrecy enshrouding the treaty on the US side.

The pro-TPP argument goes as follows: This is the moment Asia's reformers have been waiting for. It is a chance for Japan to take on vested interests, Malaysia to kill growth-stifling affirmative-action policies, Vietnam to rein in bloated state-owned enterprises and Singapore to spur innovation. Think of TPP as an economic Trojan horse - a means of shaking up stagnant political systems by stealth.

Yet the dearth of details about the treaty is exactly why Asia should opt out of the most ambitious free-trade deal in US history.

American lawmakers and civil liberties groups have complained for some time about the opacity surrounding the treaty's terms. Mild grousing turned into outrage last month after WikiLeaks did what Barack Obama's White House refuses to: share portions of the document with the public. The draft of the intellectual property rights chapter by Julian Assange's outfit validated the worst fears - that TPP is a corporatist power grab.

Rather than heed the outcry, the US doubled down on secrecy, refusing to disclose more details.

Hasn't the US wondered why so many of east Asia's most promising democracies have avoided the treaty? The popular excuse for why Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan and Thailand aren't among the 12 TPP economies is that they aren't ready or are trapped by their own timidity. A better explanation is that their leaders realise that truly transparent and accountable governments, to borrow Kerry's own words, shouldn't be leading their people into the unknown.

Take Japan, which spirited a government secrets bill into law without public debate, even though most Japanese oppose it. The ostensible reason for the move by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was to ensure confidential sharing of intelligence with the US in the post-Edward Snowden world. But human rights groups are up in arms over its far-reaching and ambiguous language and the potential jail terms for journalists and whistleblowers. In form and timing, it had TPP written all over it.

''The vagueness of the Secrets Act reflects a basic theme of Japanese governance, which is 'I work for the government, therefore I know more than you, therefore you should do what I say,' '' says Colin Jones, a legal scholar at Doshisha Law School in Kyoto, Japan.

That, in a nutshell, explains the Obama administration's TPP argument: Oh, don't worry, we know what we're doing and it will be fine. The trouble is that this poses a demand for trust, with no opportunity to verify.

You know you have a transparency problem when citizens of a democracy need to rely on WikiLeaks for details on changes to laws on internet use, labour, environmental and food-safety standards, and the cost and availability of drugs.

It is worth considering something Google chief executive Eric Schmidt told CNBC in December 2009: ''If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.''

So why is the Obama administration behaving as if it runs a closed Communist Party state? The answer can only be, to circumvent the legislative process.

''If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, TPP has you in its cross hairs,'' Assange said last month. If instituted, TPP ''would trample over individual rights and free expression as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons''.

Asian governments should reject TPP unless they can tell their people exactly what is in it, and why and how it will affect their lives.

Thanks to Assange, we now know that the US wants signatories to allow patent changes that could raise the cost of food and healthcare in developing nations, including increasing the price of treating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases. Is that progress?

Last month, 151 House Democrats sent a letter to the White House stating their opposition to granting him fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements, citing a lack of congressional consultation. Why have officials from Johnson & Johnson, Cisco Systems and General Electric seen details that sceptical legislators can't?

Asian governments should hold public hearings, encourage debate and let legislatures see and vote on the TPP based on the treaty's fully disclosed terms. If that isn't something they can do, Asians should say no to a trade deal that's as democratic and transparent as a one-party state.


Bloomberg

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/world-business/trade-secrets-why-is-the-us-so-quiet-on-the-transpacific-partnership-20131220-2zqv2.html#ixzz2oPEWw5uv

 

My comment:

The 'Trans-Pacific Partnership' is obviously a misnomer.

It is certainly not a true "partnership". Clearly, it is all about being bullied into increasing corporate power and profits, against the interests of the countries involved and their own people. The TPP talks are shrouded in secrecy, because they have much to hide from the general public.

The Obama corporatocracy is pushing hard to get its way in these secret negotiations with 12-nations, yet it has "almost no international support for controversial new trade standards that would grant radical new political powers to corporations, increase the cost of prescription medications and restrict bank regulation..."

One of those 12 nations even leaked this information about disagreement with the US position in these negotiations, which is at least one good sign.

Why then are these 12 nations allowing themselves to be bullied around by one country?

We are told that "The United States shows zero flexibility," in these negotiations. So much for mutual negotiations. Once again, the US corporate state is trying to bully the 12 negotiating "partners" into accepting terms that benefit US vested interests, at the expense of everyone else.

The dissenting "partners" should stick to their principles, and if the USA does not like it. . . just walk away.

Why can't they just agree to trade with each other on mutually-beneficial terms, in a real partnership, instead of being raped by this aggressive, declining superpower?

Who needs to suck up to the USA anymore?

Let the empire sink! 

Bruce McPhie

Nelson Mandela R.I.P.

The Day Mandela Was Arrested, With a Little Help From the CIA

A CIA agent fingered Mandela for the apartheid regime’s secret police.   REUTERS/Mike Hutchings MH/DBP

 

"One of the great things about the late great Nelson Mandela is that he didn’t hold grudges. How else could he have accepted normal relations with the CIA, which tipped off the white-supremacy regime to his whereabouts in 1962?

According to a 1990 Johannesburg Sunday Times newspaper account, a CIA agent by the name of Millard Shirley fingered Mandela for the apartheid regime’s secret police, allowing them to throw up a roadblock and capture him..."

From antiwar.com . . .

Nelson Mandela, RIP

	Nelson Mandela Dies Aged 95
	Flashback 2008: US Takes Mandela Off 'Terror' List
	Nelson Mandela Obituary
	Mandela in 2002: 'America Is a Threat to World Peace'
	Go Ahead, Politicize Mandela
	The Contradictions of Mandela
	Nelson Mandela: He's Honored Now, but Was Hated Then
	FW De Klerk: World Has Lost a Great Unifier
	Cheney Didn't Regret Opposing Freedom for Nelson Mandela, Maintained He Was a 'Terrorist'

 Getting your history from Hollywood ???

Imagine a documentary film about the Holocaust which makes no mention of Nazi Germany.

Imagine a documentary film about the 1965-66 slaughter of as many as a million “communists” in Indonesia which makes no mention of the key role in the killing played by the United States.

But there’s no need to imagine it. It’s been made, and was released this past summer. It’s called “The Act of Killing” and makes no mention of the American role. 

Two articles in the Washington Post about the film made no such mention either. The Indonesian massacre, along with the jailing without trial of about a million others and the widespread use of torture and rape, ranks as one of the great crimes of the twentieth century and is certainly well known amongst those with at least a modest interest in modern history.

Here’s an email I sent to the Washington Post writer who reviewed the film:

“The fact that you can write about this historical event and not mention a word about the US government role is a sad commentary on your intellect and social conscience. If the film itself omits any serious mention of the US role, that is a condemnation of the filmmaker, and of you for not pointing this out. So the ignorance and brainwashing of the American people about their country’s foreign policy (i.e., holocaust) continues decade after decade, thanks to media people like Mr. Oppenheimer [one of the filmmakers] and yourself.”

The Post reviewer, rather than being offended by my intemperate language, was actually taken with what I said and she asked me to send her an article outlining the US role in Indonesia, which she would try to get published in the Post as an op-ed. I did so and she wrote me that she very much appreciated what I had sent her. But – as I was pretty sure would happen – the Post did not print what I wrote. So this incident may have had the sole saving grace of enlightening a Washington Post writer about the journalistic standards and politics of her own newspaper.

And now, just out, we have the film “Long Walk to Freedom” based on Nelson Mandela’s 1994 autobiography of the same name.  

The heroic Mandela spent close to 28 years in prison at the hands of the apartheid South African government. His arrest and imprisonment were the direct result of a CIA operation. But the film makes no mention of the role played by the CIA or any other agency of the United States.

In fairness to the makers of the film, Mandela himself, in his book, declined to accuse the CIA for his imprisonment, writing: “The story has never been confirmed and I have never seen any reliable evidence as to the truth of it.”

Well, Mr. Mandela and the filmmaker should read what I wrote and documented on the subject some years after Mandela’s book came out, in my own book: Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (2000). It’s not quite a “smoking gun”, but I think it convinces almost all readers that what happened in South Africa in 1962 was another of the CIA operations we’ve all come to know and love. And almost all my sources were available to Mandela at the time he wrote his autobiography. 

There has been speculation about what finally led to Mandela’s release from prison; perhaps a deal was made concerning his post-prison behavior.

From a purely educational point of view, seeing films such as the two discussed here may well be worse than not exposing your mind at all to any pop culture treatment of American history or foreign policy.

Getting your history from the American daily press  ???

During the US federal government shutdown in October over a budgetary dispute, Washington Post columnist Max Fisher wondered if there had ever been anything like this in another country. He decided that “there actually is one foreign precedent: Australia did this once. In 1975, the Australian government shut down because the legislature had failed to fund it, deadlocked by a budgetary squabble. It looked a lot like the U.S. shutdown of today, or the 17 previous U.S. shutdowns.” 

 

Except for what Fisher fails to tell us: that it strongly appears that the CIA used the occasion to force a regime change in Australia, whereby the Governor General, John Kerr – a man who had been intimately involved with CIA fronts for a number of years – discharged Edward Gough Whitlam, the democratically-elected prime minister whose various policies had been a thorn in the side of the United States, and the CIA in particular.

I must again cite my own writing, for the story of the CIA coup in Australia – as far as I know – is not described in any kind of detail anywhere other than in my book Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II (2004).

Extracts from  The Anti-Empire Report #123

By William Blum  

Published December 3rd, 2013

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/123

Iran Gets Short End of the Geneva Deal

By Eric Margolis

December 01, 2013 Information Clearing House -  

After all the gnashing of teeth, beating of breasts and tearing of hair coming from Israel and its American supporters, you’d think last week’s nuclear deal in Geneva has opened the way for Iran to become a mighty nuclear weapons power.   Nonsense.   Coolly examined, Tehran came off with the short end of the stick at the so-called P5 + 1 big power talks in Geneva. 

Here’s why:

Bowing to intolerable sanctions and economic warfare from the US, Tehran agreed to limit uranium enrichment to only 5% (over 80% is needed to make a nuclear weapon). This low level is sufficient only for power generation. Iran is to stop enriching to 20%, the level needed for medical isotopes.

... In short, Iran freezes its modest nuclear program to the point where it can only be used for civilian energy purposes. 

For these major concessions, Iran will be paid $7 billion – of its own money, which has been frozen abroad by US-led sanctions. Some sanctions will be slightly eased. Iran will regain access to some of its gold and cash held abroad. But most of its $ 100 billion in assets frozen abroad will remain blocked. Tehran will be able to sell modest amounts of oil at current restricted levels, and fund some Iranian students abroad. Big deal.

Iran will be finally allowed to buy some parts for its dilapidated civilian airliners that have become flying coffins because of sanctions. But, apparently, not new western aircraft. 

 

The Geneva accord will last for 6 months, then be reviewed.

Given all the American and Israeli talk of war against Iran, it represents something of a triumph for US, Russian, EU and Chinese diplomacy. 

... But that has not quieted the wailing and threats coming from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who has some 200 nuclear weapons tucked away in his basement. Or from America’s pro-Israel lobby and its captive Republican Party.

 

...The US media has also been very biased against the Geneva deal. 

Yet in spite of this, a recent Pew poll found 44% of Americans supported the Geneva accords while only a small number opposed them. 

While Iran has not benefitted from this deal, it has at least lessened the threat of attack. 

The Geneva accord may pave the way to a warming of relations with the west and America’s final acceptance of the Islamic Republic as a legitimate Mideast presence. This prospect that has driven the Israelis and the Saudis into a towering rage.

The campaign to block the Geneva accords has thrust into the daylight the long-covert alliance between Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates on one hand, and Israel. Egypt and Jordan are also members of this anti-Iranian camp. The possible emergence of Iran from US-imposed isolation is already throwing the Mideast into convulsions.

We also witnessed at Geneva another example of the consummate, unblushing hypocrisy that makes France often less than loved. France, which has been selling arms to the Gulf Emirates and has a base in Abu Dhabi, held up the Iran deal claiming it would promote “nuclear proliferation.” This is the same France that originally sold nuclear technology, weapons and missiles to Israel in the mid-1950’s. Quel nerve!

...Polls show Americans certainly don’t want to fight yet another war for Israel’s benefit. PM Netanyahu has gone too far in trying to throw his weight around in America and in humiliating President Barack Obama.

His heavy-handed actions will remind many that the US Congress has been totally corrupted by big money and big media – and needs to be reformed.

As Ben Franklin said, “there is no bad peace; and no good war.” So Geneva, however imperfect, is a step forward. Now, we will watch its foes move heaven and earth to sabotage these accords. 

 

Eric S. Margolis is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist. His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune the Los Angeles Times, Times of London, the Gulf Times, the Khaleej Times, Nation – Pakistan, Hurriyet, – Turkey, Sun Times Malaysia and other news sites in Asia.

Obama’s Ludicrous Afghanistan Declarations

By Glen Ford

December 01, 2013 Information Clearing House -  

The most ridiculous actor in the fictitious U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is not President Hamid Karzai, the hustler the U.S. installed as its puppet after the American invasion in 2001. The real clowns in this charade are those Americans that pretend to believe President Obama when he says the U.S. war in Afghanistan will end on the last day of next year. 

Obama is, of course, lying through his teeth. 

The United States and its NATO allies plan to keep 10,000 to 16,000 troops in the country, occupying nine bases, some of them set aside for exclusive American use – and would remain there at least ten years, through 2024. 

Shamelessly, Obama claims these troops – including thousands from the Special Operations killer elite – will have no “combat” role. It’s the same lie President Kennedy told in 1963, when he called the 16,000 U.S. troops then stationed in Vietnam “advisors,” and the same bald-faced deception that Obama, himself, tried to pull off, unsuccessfully, in Iraq – until the Iraqis kicked the Americans out.

Barack Obama has arrogated to himself the right to redefine the very meaning of war, having two years ago declared that the 7-month U.S. bombing campaign against Libya was not really a war because no Americans were killed. 

In Afghanistan, Obama waves his semantic magic wand to transform the past 12 years of war into 10 more years of not-war, simply by changing the nomenclature. This is hucksterism from Hell.

“There is zero chance of a zero option.”

If there was a Devil, he would be laughing his butt off at Susan Rice, Obama’s National Security Advisor and raving Banshee of War, whose assignment is to pretend that the U.S. might choose the so-called “Zero Option” if President Karzai doesn’t immediately sign away his country to the Americans for the next ten years. 

By “Zero Option,” Washington means it might just pick up its killer soldiers and weapons and leave Afghanistan. But that’s an empty bluff. Since when has the U.S. voluntarily left anyplace it has forcibly occupied? There is zero chance of a zero option. 

But, I am reminded of the events in 1963 Vietnam, when the Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother were overthrown and executed in a U.S.-backed coup. Sending the homicidal Susan Rice to get in President Karzai’s face is definitely some kind of threat.

Far from ending U.S. imperial wars, Barack Obama has expanded the theaters of armed conflict. 

He tried to keep U.S. troops in Iraq, but the Iraqis insisted on the withdrawal terms and timetable they had negotiated with President George Bush. 

Iraq is now paying a heavy price, as the U.S. and its allies arm Iraqi Al Qaida and other jihadist elements fighting to overthrow the government of neighboring Syria. These U.S.-backed jihadists – the same ones the Americans fought against in Iraq for eight years – now wage war against Shiites on both sides of the border.

If there is any hope for an eventual peace in the region, it is that Washington might finally begin to understand that it can no longer control events through brute force, or by using jihadists as surrogates in the Middle East and South Asia. 

Maybe that’s why the Americans have tried to strike a deal with Iran. Maybe President Karzai thinks the winds of change will be sweeping through his neighborhood, soon, and he doesn’t want to go out like the puppet he came in.

Executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Dollar Survival Behind US-China Tensions

By Finian Cunningham

The escalation of military tensions between Washington and Beijing in the East China Sea is superficially over China’s unilateral declaration of an air defense zone. But the real reason for Washington’s ire is the recent Chinese announcement that it is planning to reduce its holdings of the US dollar. 

That move to offload some of its 3.5 trillion in US dollar reserves combined with China’s increasing global trade in oil based on national currencies presents a mortal threat to the American petrodollar and the entire American economy.

This threat to US viability - already teetering on bankruptcy, record debt and social meltdown - would explain why Washington has responded with such belligerence to China setting up an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) last week extending some 400 miles from its coast into the East China Sea.

Beijing said the zone was aimed at halting intrusive military maneuvers by US spy planes over its territory. The US has been conducting military flights over Chinese territory for decades without giving Beijing the slightest notification.

Back in April 2001, a Chinese fighter pilot was killed when his aircraft collided with a US spy plane. The American crew survived, but the incident sparked a diplomatic furor, with Beijing saying that it illustrated Washington’s unlawful and systematic violation of Chinese sovereignty.

Within days of China’s announcement of its new ADIZ last week, the US sent two B52 bombers into the air space without giving the notification of flight paths required by Beijing.

American allies Japan and South Korea also sent military aircraft in defiance of China. Washington dismissed the Chinese declared zone and asserted that the area was international air space.

A second intrusion of China’s claimed air territory involved US surveillance planes and up to 10 Japanese American-made F-15 fighter jets. On that occasion, Beijing has responded more forcefully by scrambling SU-30 and J-10 warplanes, which tailed the offending foreign aircraft.

Many analysts see the latest tensions as part of the ongoing dispute between China and Japan over the islands known, respectively, as the Diaoyu and Senkaku, located in the East China Sea. Both countries claim ownership. The islands are uninhabited but the surrounding sea is a rich fishing ground and the seabed is believed to contain huge reserves of oil and gas.

By claiming the skies over the islands, China appears to be adding to its territorial rights to the contested islands.

In a provocative warning to Beijing, American defense secretary Chuck Hagel this week reiterated that the decades-old US-Japan military pact covers any infringement by China of Japan’s claim on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands.

It is hard to justify Washington and Tokyo’s stance on the issue. The islands are much nearer to China’s mainland (250 miles) compared with Japan’s (600 miles). China claims that the islands were part of its territory for centuries until Japan annexed them in 1895 during its imperialist expansion, which eventually led to an all-out invasion and war of aggression on China.
 

Also, as Beijing points out, the US and its postwar Japanese ally both have declared their own air defense zones. It is indeed inconceivable that Chinese spy planes and bombers could encroach unannounced on the US West Coast without the Pentagon ordering fierce retaliation.

Furthermore, maps show that the American-backed air defense zone extending from Japan’s southern territory is way beyond any reasonable halfway limit between China and Japan. This American-backed arbitrary imposition on Chinese territorial sovereignty is thus seen as an arrogant convention, set up and maintained by Washington for decades.

The US and its controlled news media are absurdly presenting Beijing’s newly declared air defense zone as China “flexing its muscles and stoking tensions.” And Washington is claiming that it is nobly defending its Japanese and South Korea allies from Chinese expansionism.

However, it is the background move by China to ditch the US dollar that is most likely the real cause for Washington’s militarism towards Beijing. The apparent row over the air and sea territory, which China has sound rights to, is but the pretext for the US to mobilize its military and in effect threaten China with aggression.

In recent years, China has been incrementally moving away from US financial hegemony. This hegemony is predicated on the US dollar being the world reserve currency and, by convention, the standard means of payment for international trade and in particular trade in oil. That arrangement is obsolete given the bankrupt state of the US economy. But it allows the US to continue bingeing on credit.

China - the second biggest economy in the world and a top importer of oil - has or is seeking oil trading arrangements with its major suppliers, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela, which will involve the exchange of national currencies. That development presents a grave threat to the petrodollar and its global reserve status.

The latest move by Beijing on November 20 giving notice that it intends to shift its risky foreign exchange holdings of US Treasury notes for a mixture of other currencies is a harbinger that the American economy’s days are numbered, as Paul Craig Roberts noted last week.

This is of course China’s lawful right to do so, as are its territorial claims. But, in the imperialist, megalomaniac mindset of Washington, the “threat” to the US economy and indebted way of life is perceived as a tacit act of war. That is why Washington is reacting so furiously and desperately to China’s newly declared air corridor. It is a pretext for the US to clench an iron fist. 

Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent.