The economy of the state of Israel that enables it to treat the international community with such contempt, is dependent entirely upon its trade with the EU single market. And that, apart from any other consideration, is another important reason for the UK to vote to leave the European Union.
The position of the EU as Israel’s primary trading partner is enabled under the EU-Israel Association Agreement, notwithstanding that Article 2 of that Agreement very clearly states:
“Relations between the parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this agreement.”
It is a blatant fact that Israel – as illegal occupier of the Occupied Palestinian Territories has been in gross breach of this provision since the very inception of the Agreement and yet the EU has turned a blind eye to the continuing violations that include the illegal settlement of over a half a million Israelis on Palestinian soil in a deliberate effort to prevent the establishment of an independent state for the largest indigenous people of the region.
The reason for this intolerable state of affairs is unquestionably the influence of the lobbyists embedded within the councils and committees of the European Union at virtually every level in Brussels and elsewhere, who exert a corrupting effect upon EU political and economic policy in order to skew EU political decisions, funding and bilateral trade to the favour of the (non-member) Israeli state.
A vote to divorce the United Kingdom from the EU would clearly indicate British rejection of such artificial and dangerous ‘arrangements’ that have such an adverse impact upon both regional and world peace.
June 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Illegal Occupation | European Union, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, UK, Zionism |
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Rational Voters and Irrational Experts
Large swaths of the US electorate are voting for rational choices against a system controlled by an economic and political oligarchy.
Rational choice is based on experience with political leaders who pursue policies which lead to a trillion dollar financial crises and bailouts which impoverish millions of mortgage holders and working family tax payers.
Rational rejection of the established leadership of the major parties is based on an understanding of the futility of relying on their campaign promises.
Rational commitments to ending inequality and overseas wars which weaken America, has led to greater emphasis on making America strong and transforming the domestic American economy and security system.
A vast array of electoral analysts have ignored the rational socioeconomic and political choices of the American electorate and repeatedly rely on psycho-babble, claiming that contemporary voters are reacting out of ‘anger’ and ‘irrational emotionalism’.
Sanders and Trump: Appeals to the New Rationality?
The woeful blindness of political experts is in large part a product of their own hostility to the rise of two Presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, who challenge the established party and economic leadership.
The Sanders campaign proceeded along the lines of a political polarization between big business and the working class; demanding higher taxes for the wealthy and greater social spending for public health and education for the working class.
Sander’s sought to unify racial and ethnic minorities and majoritarian workers with progressive gender, religious and environmental movements.
The Trump campaign sought to mobilize white American majorities among workers, small business people and professionals, who are downwardly mobile and have been marginalized by globalization.
Sanders emphasized a refurbished class identity. Trump promoted a new nationalist symbolism. Yet in many ways the establishment opposition, the parties, mass media and the economic elite, are far more hostile to Trump’s ‘nationalist politics’ than Sanders’ democratic socialist program and class appeal.
It appears that Sanders willingness to come to terms with the Democratic elite and back Clinton’s candidacy when he lost the nomination, is far more acceptable to the establishment than Trump. According to all known precedents, the Democratic Party allows progressive candidates to post advanced socio-economic campaign platforms to secure working class voters, all the better to tank them in favor of business-warmonger policies once in office.
Trump’s initial nationalist-anti-globalist rhetoric aroused greater animosity from business, liberal and militarist elites than Sanders’ occasional critical comment.
Trump’s nationalism was rooted in popular and reactionary appeals. On the one hand he spoke of relocating multi-nationals from abroad to the US. On the other hand, he demands the expulsion of over ten million Mexicans from the US labor market.
His anti-globalization-business relocation strategy lacked several essential ingredients: he did not specify which multi-nationals would be affected; nor what policies he would apply to implement the trillion-dollar return.
In contrast, Trump was precise in naming the immigrants to be expelled; the police methods to expel the target population; and the border security system to blockade their entry.
Trump’s Electoral Victory and Neoliberal Right Turn
Trump’s successful nomination led to an appeal to big donors for campaign funding and endorsements by Republican neo-liberal Congressional leaders like Paul Ryan. This has led Trump to downgrade his anti- globalization, economic nationalist politics, in favor of his chauvinist ethno-racist appeals.
Trump’s current electoral strategy seeks to unify the hard neo-liberal elite with the ‘patriotic’ white working class.
Trump’s ideological vehicle to the Presidency no longer attacks globalization. Instead he relies on arousing public support by stigmatizing ‘anti-American’ minorities and targeting Clinton’s reactionary and corrupt policies.
Trumps’ “Make America Strong” propaganda follows closely in line with Obama’s headline attack on China’s steel exports to the US markets.
Trump’s “Make America Strong” policy follows Obama’s systematic assault on the World Trade Organization’s for rejecting US agricultural trade subsidies. More recently, in tune with Trumps rhetoric, Obama unilaterally dictated the membership of the WTO’s trade settlement process.
Obama blocked the reappointment of an independent South Korean lawyer who opposed Washington’s violation of WTO rules. Rather than look upon Trump as an anti-establistment “populist” his policy would follow Obama’s promotion of business lobbies against the WTO.
Trump follows Obama’s policy of favoring globalization only insofar as Washington controls the international institutions that run it. Trump follows Washington’s imperial policy of packing global institutions with its vassals.
Trump in the Footstep of Sanders
Trump’s embrace of the neo-liberal business elite follows Sanders submission to the Democratic Party bosses. Trump hopes his mass base can be deluded from his right-turn embrace of the economic elite by increasing slanders and provocations, turning them against working class Mexicans by accusing them of stealing jobs, crimes and drugs. Trump’s mass meetings of almost exclusively white working and middle class voters in Mexican-American regions of California are designed to provoke violent protests.
Trump gains nation-wide nationalist support by circulating videos of NBC, CNN and ABC reports depicting peaceful white Trump supporters being “terrorized and beaten up by mobs of (Mexican-American) protesters”.
Trump appeals to his “Americans” to denounce and “stand strong” against demonstrators waving Mexican flags and burning the Stars and Stripes alongside Trumps’ “Make America Great” hats.
Trump’s turn to the neo-liberal Republican elite means he will heighten his repressive and anti-immigrant policies. Trump will be aided by mindless violent protesters and provocations “overcoming the police” at anti-Trump rallies. Trump effectively engages in the “propaganda of the deed”; linking “disloyal foreign immigrants” waving the Mexican, not the US flag.
The realignment of the Republican Party brings Trump into the arms of the hardline neo-liberal Congressional-Wall Street elite. This shift means Trump’s ideological and mass base needs to be redirected toward greater hostility to domestic enemies – Mexicans, Muslims, women and ecologists.
Trump is especially counting on the incorporation of Sanders’ electoral machine into the Clinton campaign. White workers face to face with Wall Street warmonger Clinton will be less likely to reject Trump’s embrace of the rightwing Congressional business alliance.
Trump will deflect working class opposition from his turn to the neoliberal Congressional Republicans by targeting Clinton’s big business and covert, illicit government operations. Clinton’s gross violations of federal laws, her felonious communications and liaisons with foreign officials could hand the Presidency to Trump.
Trump has gained working class voters in West Virginia, Ohio, and many other rust-belt states because of Clinton’s free trade and anti-working class history.
Trump’s electoral victory will hinge on his capacity to cover-up his neoliberal turn and to focus voters’ attention on Clinton’s militarist, Wall Street, conspiratorial and anti-working class politics.
June 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism | Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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Hillary Clinton is the most qualified person to “rule the world”, if she can get around the “insane” US Constitution
OffGuardian | June 11, 2016
With the democratic nomination now officially all but certain (Sanders, quite obviously, never had a chance), the Guardian has thrown their full editorial weight – such as it is – into a pre-emptive defence of Hillary’s record and an hysterical celebration of the “progress” that the election of this particular bank-backed, corporate-bought, war-hawk would (apparently) demonstrate.
First there was Jonathan Freedland’s anaemic plea that Sanders’ voters get in line and stand with Clinton against the “true enemy”, Jill Abramson followed with gushing sentiment and simpering praise. And then? Then came Polly Toynbee, going full Guardian. Never go full Guardian.
The headline:
Those out to demonise Hillary Clinton should be careful what they wish for”
“Demonise”, in this instance, seems to mean “accurately describe her political career and possible criminal activities”. If you can demonise someone by holding a mirror up to their face, chances are that person is a demon.
“The choice of the next US president is now so stark that it’s time the left put aside its sneers and pray that this strong woman will get to rule the world”
“Rule the world?” Does the US president rule the world? I think I missed that particular UN resolution. As I recall, the POTUS doesn’t even wield supreme executive power within their own nation, the US constitution prevents that… but we’ll get to that later.
As for the starkness of the electoral field – I have to say I agree with Toynbee there. The choice between a bombastic orange billionaire, who sometimes seems to be running for president as an elaborate prank, and a proven corrupt and dangerous war-hawk, backed by lunatics like Victoria Nuland is indeed a stark one. Nuclear winter type stark. Perhaps literally.
This is a time to celebrate. At last, a woman leads a major US party to fight for the presidency.
Yes. At last, a woman. It doesn’t matter who the woman is, what she has done, how much she cheats to get there. Irrelevancies used to “demonise” her. Hillary is a woman, and thus her being president is A Good Thing… because progress. This is going to be key to Clinton’s campaign, and you will hear it a lot. It’s one of only 2 real tactics the Clinton camp have at their disposal. “What’s the other”, you ask? Simple: Lying. A lot of lying.
… as the first woman to enter the White House, she will also step through the door as by far the most qualified and experienced arrival there for generations…”
Now, this isn’t technically a lie… but only because we don’t know what Toynbee means by “qualified”. If being a shambolic Secretary of State and highly unpopular first lady makes you qualified then sure. If being proven to lie for your own benefit, time and time again, makes you “qualified”, or being firmly behind every American military intervention for the past 25 years… then I guess Hillary has qualifications to spare.
… a searing firestorm of abuse… Why so fierce, so unreasonable, so vitriolic?”
This is called a strawman. Having made a statement, one which is not backed up by any citations or quotes, she will attempt to “explain” this fictional phenomenon with some cloying cod psychology:
If you are naturally left of centre, especially if you are a woman, yet you find you instinctively dislike her, ask yourself why. There may be some good reasons…
So, liberal traitors – especially the female liberal traitors – why do you “instinctively” dislike Hillary Clinton? I mean there may be some good reasons, for example:
… she’s not as radical as Sanders; she is not a natural rabble-rouser at rallies; she is the wife of a past president; she’s called “robotic” in her careful choice of words; and as a flesh-presser she warms the cockles of few hearts.
To rephrase: You may not like her because she has no principles, is a bad public speaker, her election reeks of nepotism or she comes off as cold and sociopathic. Toynbee volunteers these facts – and we should note that these are the qualities the media list when they are trying to make her look good.
There are others: You MAY not like her because she planned and executed an illegal coup in Honduras, the destruction of Libya and execution of its head of state, she backed the Afghan and Iraq wars, she lied to cover up for a pedophile by blaming his 12 year old victim, the many alleged crimes, or any of the other callous and dreadful instances of dishonesty and self-aggrandisation she has taken part in.
These are the reasons you MAY think justify your “instinctive” hatred of this woman. But Toynbee knows better. She knows why you REALLY don’t like her – It’s because you’re a misogynist who doesn’t understand how tough it is for a woman:
If women of the left do break into the bastions of power, the sisters often view them as sell-outs to the establishment, as if permanent outsiderdom and victimhood is the only true mark of feminism.
You see? You “instinctively” dislike her, because you assume she must be a member of the establishment. That is the burden of the female “liberal”. You start a few wars, attend a few Bilderberg conferences, get a few million dollars donated to you from the most powerful banks in America, speak at the Council of Foreign Relations a few times and suddenly – BOOM – you’re viewed, unfairly, as part of the establishment.
But, putting aside the forced gendercentric argument and massive intellectual dishonesty, there’s some far more worrying agenda being whispered subliminally into the minds of Guardian readers here – Hillary’s greatest opponent is not the Republicans, it’s not the patriarchy, it’s not the other women who so resent her rise to power.
No, it is the law itself:
Unlike most, she knows how to wield the power levers, insofar as the insane US constitution allows any president to carry out their manifesto.
The United States Constitution is insane folks. I’m not sure which specific part of the most important egalitarian legal document of all time Toynbee has taken issue with – and she declined to answer when I asked her on twitter. But there’s a lot of good places to start.
For one thing: Limiting the power of the chief executive, making them answerable to the legislative body in order to prevent tyranny? That is obviously stupid when your head of state is a WOMAN who only wants to be nice. No, that has to go. The three separate branches of government should obviously be reshaped into a supreme executive with control over both legislative and judicial bodies. After all, how can you expect to implement a “manifesto” when you don’t have absolute power?
Free speech? Well, this is an antiquated notion, from a time before “progress” when people didn’t understand what was definitively correct. Now that we have reached consensus on what is “right” and what is “wrong” there is no need for freedom of speech – and in fact it is a hindrance, as people will only abuse their “right to free speech” by spreading propaganda, or broadcasting opinions which we have all agreed are wrong. As the Guardian has made clear many times, free speech is meaningless if people use it to bully and disenfranchise minorities. If free speech is being used to inflict hatred and tyranny on women, ethnic minorities or the trans community, then what use is it? Free speech doesn’t mean hate speech… but unfortunately banning hate speech DOES mean banning free speech sooo…. yeah.
Right to bear arms? Absolutely crazy. The very idea that civilians having access to firearms is important as a general principle in guarding against tyranny is foolish. There isn’t going to BE any tyranny anymore, because we’ve handed absolute power over to a woman who has banned the “tyranny” of “free speech”.
This frightening statement gives us a flash of the future – of the agenda already set in place. The US constitution has been largely ignored and misinterpreted for years to excuse totalitarian laws, such as the Patriot Act. But when Clinton is president, it will come under full-blown attack. Make no mistake: Clinton will be president, there’s no doubt about that. The election will be fixed, either literally like in 2000 and 2004, or more subtly by simply making the alternative bizarre and unelectable – as in 2008 and 2012. The latter possibility even explains the rise of Trump.
I don’t know if the man is genuine or not, I don’t know if he really believes he can win, but I understand his role. He is there to guarantee a Clinton victory. That’s why the press talks up his “violent” supporters, and balloons any and every tiny comment he makes into “racism” and “sexism”. He exists so that people like Toynbee can say this:
Outside, the world looks on aghast at any possibility America could choose a racist, sexist brute over a feminist with a long track record of standing up for the right causes.”
… and has there be a tiny kernel of truth to it. A very tiny kernel.
Consider professional wrestling. It’s fake, everybody knows that, it only just barely pretends to be otherwise. An elaborate action-based soap opera, with wild stunts and expensive tickets. That is all that American democracy has become. In wrestling it is predetermined who will win, they have labels for their wrestlers. First there is the Face, the hero, the good guy. He fights fair, he has a noble cause. He wears the American flag like a cape. When his music pipes up, we cheer because we’re supposed to. And the other guy? He’s the Heel. He’s obnoxious, he cheats, he’s mean for mean’s sake and smiles when we boo. And when your Face is Hillary Clinton, you need a HELL of a big Heel. Enter Donald Trump. A cartoon character. The caricature of the everything we’re supposed to hate about the GoP.
The fact that Clinton has still somehow contrived to be behind him in the polls tells you all you need to know about the desperate struggle the media face in turning Clinton into a believable hero.
Regardless, Clinton WILL be President. But it won’t be a sign of progress, it will be a neon display highlighting everything that has gone wrong with the American political system. It won’t be because she’s a woman, or a liberal, or an idealist. It will be because she sold her soul to finance her ambition for fleeting prestige and the appearance of power.
Rarely has any candidate so deserved their place.
In this case I tend to agree with Toynbee – never before has a candidate SO obviously worked SO hard to become president. Never before has a candidate so brazenly sold out the values they were (at best) pretending to hold dear. Never before has a candidate so artlessly and obviously lied about so many things. Never before has a candidate been so open and obvious about the Faustian pact they needed to make to get where they want to go, so obviously played the political game of the oligarchs who really run the country, in order to get her pay-off.
Editorials such as Toynbee’s will appear on the regular all through the campaign, all variations on a theme, all attempting to re-write Clinton’s history and hinging on the worst kind of puddle-deep identity politics. The truly tragic part is that they KNOW they are lying, they KNOW they will be called on it, they KNOW what they ARE, and they resent us for telling them. That’s why they say stuff like this:
And if you want a reminder of what women like her are up against, just read the comments that will no doubt follow this.
The comments, as you’d expect, were full of people commenting on her obvious bias, pointing out her half-truths and correcting her glaring factual errors. In the world the Guardian wants Clinton to build, this will be called “demonisation”.
And it will be illegal.
June 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Hillary Clinton, The Guardian, United States |
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Emails recently released by the State Department give more information on how a securities trader and big-money Clinton donor was appointed by her office to the International Security Advisory Board (ISAB), a group that advises the Secretary of State on nuclear weapons and other security issues.
According to the State Department’s own website, members are “national security experts with scientific, military, diplomatic, and political backgrounds.” The current members show a lot of generals, ambassadors and academics.
So it seemed odd to ABC News that Clinton felt that Rajiv K. Fernando, pictured, qualified for the group, since his background is in high-frequency stock trading and Internet “ventures.” He has donated heavily both to the Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton’s two presidential campaigns, and the Obama campaigns.
The newly released emails show he was added to the panel by then Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills. ““Raj was not on the list sent to [the Secretary of State]; he was added at their insistence” reads one 2011 email from Wade Boese, Chief of Staff for the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, to a press aide.
Fernando’s appointment even confused some staffers, the emails reveal. One press aide wrote internally, “it appears there is much more to this story that we’re unaware of,” and “it’s natural to ask how he got onto the board when compared to the rest of the esteemed list of members.”
That press aide wrote in a separate email: “We must protect the Secretary’s and Under Secretary’s name, as well as the integrity of the Board. I think it’s important to get down to the bottom of this before there’s any response.”
— Fernando declined to comment at the time, and promptly resigned from ISAB.
— The Clinton campaign declined to comment. Why did she decline to comment on a person she hand-selected to advise her? If it’s all just a witch hunt, say so, and explain why.
— The State Department put out a statement saying the ISAB is meant to reflect “a balance of backgrounds and points of view.” Including apparently unqualified points of view. That’s diversity, Clinton-style!
BONUS: Raj Fernando is a superdelegate for Clinton!
June 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception | Clinton Foundation, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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Media report that presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is meeting with advisers in Vermont on Sunday.
This last week, many spoke laudingly of the recently deceased Muhammad Ali.
As some noted, Ali’s great contribution was not being a talented athlete, heavy weight champion — there are many such prominent sports figures, but they don’t play a historic role. His true greatness came because at the height of his fame and powers, he challenged an oppressive system: He refused to go into the Army during the Vietnam War. It cost him a great deal of money and stature — and tremendously helped the world and assured his canonization.
Sanders has a similar opportunity now. As pundits are voicing alleged ecstasy over Hillary Clinton “shattering the glass ceiling” by becoming the first female presidential nominee of a major political party, the first female president in Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has been ousted in a defacto coup. This has been fostered by establishment media in Brazil, as for-profit media often plays the role of king maker in ways stark and subtle in every country, including the U.S., as we’ve seen in this current election.
Rousseff’s cabinet was diverse, both in terms of gender and ethnically. The new government is all white males. Rousseff was set to investigate corruption, including in the Brazilian Senate, and the coup was planned out by corrupt senators. Indeed, the anticorruption minister in the new coup government was recently forced to resign when a tape was leaked about how he was trying to cover up corruption. All this and more is being done with U.S. government silence and tacit support.
Certainly, Sanders has challenged the power of Wall Street and the wealthy from within the Democratic Party. But, largely because of the role of the media in fostering a mantle of celebrity around Hillary Clinton (and Donald Trump for that matter), they are the likely nominees.
But perhaps, for all the good that Sanders did, he might feel a measure of remorse for what he hasn’t done: Spoken serious about the U.S. government’s role in the world. Even in his discussions of inequality, he’s confined himself to inequality inside the U.S. But what about global poverty?
Has Sanders been moved by slums in Latin America? Refugee camps in the Mideast? Stark poverty in Africa? Sweatshops in Asia? He went to a Vatican conference where Bolivian President Evo Morales also spoke. They chatted. What can be built from that? How can progressive leaders work together globally? How can movements cross boundaries? Are not movements weakened when they confine themselves to national barriers?
Ali took himself out of his comfort zone. He focused not just on getting a seat on a bus for himself, and not just for African Americans, but spoke against the Vietnam War. Sanders has not transcended himself. As Ben Jealous has said, Sanders “has been giving the same damn speech for 50 years.” Well, that’s not necessarily a good thing. There are people living in horrible conditions around the world, in large part because of economic, political and military policies determined in marble facade buildings in Washington, D.C. Sanders has been remarkably mute about that.
The power of the establishment rests in large part because of its global connections. But progressive forces have been reluctant to wield such power. Recall shortly before the invasion of Iraq, there were quasi-global protests against the war on Feb. 15, 2003. Just after that, the New York Times called the peace movement “the second super power.” Yes, that didn’t stop the war, but that was because there was only some global solidarity late in the day. The answer is more solidarity sooner.
And now, Sanders has campaigned in all 50 states. It’s late in the day, but not too late for him to break the wall and seriously engage the rest of the world. That should start with going to Brazil and meeting with Rousseff. It would help overturn the coup, thus doing a tremendous service to the people of Brazil and it would put the heat on the U.S. government regarding its behind the scenes machinations. It would also highlight the fake feminism that surrounds the Clinton campaign. Do we want women in officialdom simply so that they can be as murderous and corrupt as men have been? Or do we want a different kind of politics that is inclusive in terms of gender, but that is based on solidarity and uplift rather than “I got mine”?
Clinton’s crimes on foreign policy constitute quite a rap sheet. Sanders has at best scratched the surface. From bombing Libya, to voting for the Iraq war, to backing Netanyahu, to backing the Honduran coup and responsibility for the killing of Berta Cáceres, it’s a gruesome tail that few have really come to grips with.
And perhaps Sanders, struck by fear of Trump, desperately wants to look away. He doesn’t want a sun rise, he wants a sunset. Does he want to be a pawn in the Clinton machine? See the roles that other past “insurgent” candidates play now: Howard Dean, Jesse Jackson, Dennis Kucinich. They played the role of what Bruce Dixon has called “sheepdogging” — they ended up being little more than a tool of the Democratic Party establishment to get presumably serious progressives to end up supporting an increasingly pro-corporate Democratic Party. That same fate of accessory or marginalization awaits Sanders.
Now, the consultants and “advisers” he’s meeting with this weekend are probably pushing Sanders to accept what bread crumbs he can get from Clinton & Co. After all, they have their careers to think about, and their careers are with the Democratic Party machine or some appendage of it.
But real power, real greatness, doesn’t come from accepting such a role. That’s why we remember the name Muhammad Ali and forget many, many others.
June 12, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, War Crimes | Bernie Sanders, Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton, United States |
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RT traveled to the site of the most avoidable public health emergency of the decade, interviewing those who defied authorities and spent their time and money to uncover the lead poisoning that has affected thousands of residents of Flint, Michigan.
“The water is not safe yet. And we are traumatized by the unknowns of tomorrow: what is this lead going to do for our community? What does it mean? Moms are coming to clinic, they just hear “brain damage” and “irreversible neurotoxin,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha told documentary-maker Miguel Francis-Santiago, when he visited the city earlier this year, to find out that while Flint may have left the headlines, the impact of years of errors and cover-ups has not been smoothed over.
“There is no treatment for lead, there is no lead pill, there is no lead antibiotic… There’s not some magic thing that we can do to reverse this,” said Hanna-Attisha.
A prominent pediatrician, Mona Hanna-Attisha personally undertook testing for blood lead levels in local children, following hundreds of complaints of fatigue, nausea and malaise resulting from drinking the discolored, often strange-smelling liquid that flowed from Flint’s faucets after it changed its water source in 2014.
Hanna-Attisha noted that dangerous lead levels had doubled in just a matter of months, but her findings were disregarded by top local officials, who repeatedly claimed that the water was safe in public, even as they already noted concerns in private.
As her claims have been verified, her critics have been forced to apologize, while Hanna-Attisha’s research has been published, and she has been awarded a PEN prize for speaking out.
Hanna-Attisha said she was doing her job, but Virginia Tech Engineering Professor, said he went “a bit crazy” – spending over $100,000 of his own money to conduct a study to definitively prove contamination after being dispatched to conduct a study in 2015.
Edwards correctly pinpointed the problem with the multi-million dollar filtration plant the local authorities began using just over two years, to save money by pumping and treating water from Flint River, instead of purchasing it from Lake Huron.
“If they had just followed the law, if they’d added a corrosion inhibitor, that switch to Flint River water would have actually saved money, none of these problems would have happened, you know. If they had just put that phosphate in the water, we wouldn’t have had the pipe leaks, wouldn’t have had the lead in water, wouldn’t have had the legionella,” said Edwards, referring to an outbreak of the disease that killed 10 people in the months while the plant was operational.
But Edwards reserves his harshest words for senior regional Environmental Protection Agency official Susan Hedman, who he says “incredibly” used her role to “cover-up” the crisis, keeping Flint residents oblivious to the harm they were doing themselves, just as Edwards himself was going round houses and warning residents to avoid the water. Hedman has since resigned.
While many lives were saved through the intervention of several public crusaders, others were not.
Nakiya Wakes already suspected something was amiss when her two children’s hair started falling out after being washed with local water, but pregnant with twins at the time, she did not know that worse was to come.
Late last year, she suffered two miscarriages, losing one child after the other.
“I feel like if they would’ve let the city of Flint know this, my babies would have been born on February 11 of 2016. Back in 2015 when I was coming home from the hospital I got a letter from the City of Flint saying that pregnant women and people 55 and over should not be drinking this water,” she told Miguel-Santiago.
“So I got to thinking then, I just lost my babies, what is in the water? So… I immediately had my kids tested for lead, and they tested 5.0, they tested positive for high levels of lead. They can’t tell me long-term what’s going happen to my kids?”
The full documentary will be broadcast on RT on June 12, and every day until June 14 on RTD.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Deception | Human rights, United States |
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Alena Kimbrough in Liang Luar cave on Flores
There are many who will not like this recent paper published in Nature Communications on principle as it talks of the hiatus in global temperatures for the past 20 years or so, that the Little Ice Age was global in extent, and that climate models cannot account for the observations we already have let alone make adequate predictions about what will happen in the future. It also makes what has happened in the past 50 years seem a little less unusual. This is however an interesting paper that deserves wide consideration, but as it doesn’t tow what some regard as a “party-line” it will probably get few mentions in the media.
Researchers working at the Australian National University Research School of Earth Sciences have discovered century-scale patterns in Pacific rainfall and temperature, and linked them with global climate changes in the past 2000 years. These past El Niño (ENSO) oscillations in the Pacific Ocean may have amplified global climate fluctuations for hundreds of years at a time. Member of the team Alena Kimbrough says, “We’ve shown ENSO is an important part of the climate system that has influenced global temperatures and rainfall over the past millennium…Our findings, together with climate model simulations, highlight the likelihood that century-scale variations in tropical Pacific climate modes can significantly modulate radiatively forced shifts in global temperature.”
The team measured trace elements and stable isotopes in stalagmites from the Indonesian island of Flores and used them to reconstruct ancient rainfall, comparing them to records from East Asia and the central-eastern equatorial Pacific. They found that northern hemisphere warming and droughts between the years 950 and 1250 corresponded to an El Niño-like state in the Pacific, which switched to a La Niña-like pattern during a cold period between 1350 and 1900. They found periods of predominantly El Niño-like patterns for several hundred years that alternate with La Niña patterns, impacting on global climate over the last 2000 years. Climate models cannot reproduce this.
“Our results highlight significant discrepancies between the proxy records and model simulations for the past millennium. Critically, these discrepancies coincide with century-scale anomalies in the strength of the Pacific Walker Circulation. We cannot rule out the possibility that some of the low-frequency Pacific variability was a forced response to variable solar intensity and changing teleconnections to higher latitudes that are not simulated by the models, or that non-climatic processes have influenced the proxies… the paleodata-model mismatch supports the possibility that unforced, low-frequency internal climate variability (that is difficult for models to simulate) was responsible for at least some of the global temperature change of the past millennium.”
The researchers say that the La Nina-like pattern is thought to be a factor contributing to the recent so-called ‘warming hiatus’ and earlier twentieth century cool and warm decades. “Therefore, our analysis of multicentury hydroclimate variability suggests that projections of tropical rainfall patterns, and global temperature extremes, will remain uncertain until paleoclimate records and models consistently capture the lower-frequency variability, and associated feedbacks, in the tropical Pacific.” Lead author Dr Michael Griffiths from William Paterson University, in the United States, added, “Until we can model this lower-frequency behaviour in the tropical Pacific, one can only speculate on how the warming will play out over the next few decades.”
Thus we have another natural climatic change mechanism that is relevant to how we asses the climatic changes that have occurred in the past century and in recent decades.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular |
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Thanks to FBI meddling, a straightforward electronic communications privacy reform with bipartisan support and barely any opposition is now stalled, and is dangerously close to dying this session.
The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) became law in 1986, and hasn’t been updated since. The statute, which governs law enforcement access to electronic communications, contains an obsolete clause enabling government agencies to obtain stored communications without warrants as long as the records are over 180 days old. This provision made more sense when the law was passed, at a time when computer data storage was expensive and most people couldn’t afford to store anything in digital form for as long as 6 months. Today, when storage is cheap and many people have emails dating back a decade in their Gmail inboxes, the law makes no sense. For years now, advocates including the ACLU and major tech companies have been furiously lobbying to update the law. This year, the House finally passed an ECPA modernization bill, which if enacted would do away with the 6 month rule and instituting a warrant requirement for content across the board—no matter how long the information has been sitting in your Dropbox folder or Gmail account. After the unanimous House vote, I and others expected the reform to quickly move through the Senate and get a signature from President Obama. Finally!
Alas, that’s not what is happening.
Unfortunately, the FBI intervened, and now the bill has a poison pill in it. Republican Senator John Cornyn attached an amendment to the bill that would vastly expand the FBI’s power to use much-abused ‘National Security Letters,’ or NSLs, secret subpoenas. Email privacy supporters Senators Pat Leahy and Mike Lee have said they will pull the bill from consideration instead of allowing their efforts to be coopted by the FBI—which intends to broaden its surveillance authorities, instead of contract them, as the email privacy bill intends.
“Unfortunately, some Senators on the committee have decided late in the day that this bill should be a vehicle to move an unrelated and controversial expansion of the use of national security letters by the FBI,” Lee said. “Such an expansion would swallow up the protections this bill offers to the American people. While there are other concerns we had hoped to negotiate, the national security letter amendment is something I cannot in good conscience have attached to this bill.”
FBI Director James Comey has said getting the NSL power extended to internet information is his organization’s top legislative priority.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | FBI, Human rights, United States |
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THE EU is not defending workers’ rights as the Remainiacs never cease to claim.
In fact the EU is directly behind the huge assault on wages, pensions, collective bargaining and other workers’ rights across the EU, including the current battle going on in France.
Moreover it is being done in contravention of its own treaties in a typically bureaucratic and Byzantine way.
Officially, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU, Article 153.5), explicitly states that the EU has no competences in the area of wage policy.
Yet this has not prevented EU institutions such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) or even the European Council from demanding wage “moderation” across the EU.
The Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPG), regularly produced by the Commission since 1993, always included demands for wage “moderation.”
However a new system of European economic governance began to emerge in 2010 with the adoption of the controversial, neoliberal Europe 2020 strategy, which included a yearly cycle of EU economic policy co-ordination.
This explicitly includes wage policy which is considered the most important adjustment variable for promoting “competitiveness.”
The legal basis for this new form of “authoritarian neoliberalism” as it has been called comprises above all the Euro Plus Pact adopted on the initiative of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy in March 2011.
As a result, while EU competence over wage policy is still expressly forbidden, with the Euro Plus Pact wage policy intervention at EU level is now mystically allowed.
Now the EU issues annual policy recommendations for all member states which must then be transformed into national “reform programmes” whose effectiveness will again be assessed by the EU.
The annual economic co-ordination cycle was further developed in 2011 with the adoption of a package of five Regulations and one Directive.
The so-called “six-pack” contains two new major instruments in order to intensify economic policy co-ordination: one is the establishment of a new system of surveillance and the second is the introduction of fines on those countries that fail to comply.
The 2013 Treaty for Stability, Co-ordination and Governance (TSCG) further reinforced mechanisms to enable the EU to “co-ordinate and monitor the economic and budgetary policies of the member states.”
Each February the Commission publishes detailed reports on each country and their “progress.” This year’s report pointed out an “excessive” imbalance — too much public expenditure and a lack of competitiveness.
However, it recorded “substantial progress in the matter of reducing the cost of labour and retirement pension reform.”
On April 13, the French government adopted its EU National Programme of Reform (NPR) and acquiesced to EU demands for “giving more latitude to companies, to adapt wages and working hours to their economic situation” — ie huge changes to French employment law.
It is this that French workers are fighting against.
The scope for EU attacks on wages and collective bargaining expanded most rapidly in those crisis-hit countries which rely on “bailouts” from the EU and/or the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In exchange for bailouts, these countries had to introduce “reforms” laid down either in so-called memorandums of understanding with the Troika of EU, European Central Bank (ECB) and IMF in the case of Greece, Ireland and Portugal, or in “stand-by arrangements” with the IMF, in the case of Hungary, Latvia and Romania.
These policy measures comprised attacks on wages, social services and public ownership and far-reaching labour market “reforms” including the abolition of systems of collective bargaining.
There is a simple reason for this — where there is no collective bargaining there is a decline in wages.
For the hard-line German member of the ECB Executive Board Joerg Asmussen, labour market “reforms” such as removing collective rights are even “the key if a country wishes to remain within the euro.”
As a result attacks on workers at national level are being driven by a new EU interventionism in an unprecedented way.
For example prior to the 2008 crisis, Romania had a legal system that supported dialogue between trade unions, employers and the government, resulting in widespread collective bargaining at all levels.
By 2011, at the behest of the EU, the government had scrapped all collective agreements and changed, without parliamentary debate, the main labour laws, making it impossible to have cross-sectoral collective agreements.
The recession was thus exploited by the EU and a compliant government in Bucharest as a pretext to rip the guts out of the existing industrial relations system and lower labour costs.
Even the EU-funded European Trade Union Confederation general secretary Bernadette Segol identified two fronts where collective bargaining is coming under attack: the decentralisation of bargaining and allowing employers to ignore trade union bodies in favour of non-union bodies.
Addressing the theme of Social Europe, she points out that “policies that are being implemented are attacking industrial relations systems, putting pressure on wages, weakening public services and weakening social protection.
“These are the core aspects of the social model,” confirming the view of many observers that the model is now dead — if indeed it was ever alive at all.
Brian Denny is a spokesman for Trade Unionists Against the EU.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Economics | ECB, European Commission, European Union, Human rights |
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As many as 3,000 more bank accounts, allegedly tied to the Lebanese resistance movement of Hezbollah, reportedly await freeze in the coming days under pressure from the United States.
Those to be affected include “employees, partners, customers affiliated with the party,” Saudi daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported on Friday, citing a source within Lebanon’s Central Bank.
On December 18, 2015, US President Barack Obama signed into law the Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Act.
The legislation says Washington will target those “knowingly facilitating a significant transaction or transactions for” Hezbollah or any individual, business or institution linked to the group.
As per the law, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has been tasked with releasing names of the entities it considers to be associated with the group.
Governor of Lebanon’s Central Bank Riad Salameh has so far ordered 100 accounts frozen in line with the Treasury’s instructions as any failure to abide by the law will result in US sanctions.
“If anyone is suspicious, there can be no leniency, even if the customers have millions of dollars, because the negative repercussions in not abiding by the [US] law will be catastrophic on the bank,” the source said.
Interviewed by the CNBC, Salameh recently said, “Our priority is to keep Lebanon on the international financial map, so we have taken a resolution that we will implement that US law in Lebanon, and we have put in place a structure to do this, to satisfy the objectives of that law.”
On Thursday, Hezbollah reacted to the remarks, saying Salameh’s position “shows that the monetary policy has lost its sovereignty.”
Hezbollah is credited with defending Lebanon against two wars launched by Israel, the US’s strongest ally in the region, in 2000 and 2006.
In recent months, Saudi Arabia, another staunch ally of the US, has also been targeting the resistance movement.
Earlier in the year, Riyadh imposed sanctions on four Lebanese firms and three individuals it accused of having links to Hezbollah, among its other measures against the movement.
Analysts say Hezbollah has come under such pressure due to its involvement in anti-terrorism military operations in neighboring Syria.
The resistance movement has been successfully helping the Syrian army fight Saudi-backed Takfiri militants in order to prevent the Syria conflict from spilling over to Lebanon.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Wars for Israel | Hezbollah, Lebanon, Syria, United States, Zionism |
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A Canadian court has awarded $13 million in non-diplomatic assets seized from Iran to the families of Americans who died in several attacks globally, which had allegedly been sponsored by Tehran between 1983 to 2002.
The judgment by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, obtained by AFP on Friday, found Tehran responsible for financing and training Hamas and Hezbollah operatives, who carried out eight bombings or hostage-takings in Buenos Aires, Israel, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia over a period spanning nearly 20 years.
“Terrorism is one of the world’s greatest threats,” Ontario Superior Court Justice Glenn Hainey said in his decision. “The broad issue before the court is whether Iran is entitled to immunity from the jurisdiction of Canadian courts for its support of terrorism.”
The ruling for the $13 million payout does not affect Iran’s diplomatic property in Canada but does touch non-diplomatic properties and a list of frozen bank accounts. Tehran did not immediately comment on the court judgment.
The suit was heard under the 2012 Justice for Victims of Terror Act, which allows the families’ victims to collect damages from state sponsors of terror groups. In Canada, Iran is designated a sponsor of terrorism.
The judgment on June 10 mirrors a recent American court ruling against Tehran that was also won by families of the terrorist attack victims in the United States in Spring. Iran has promised to battle the decision in international courts.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Aletho News | Canada, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, Justice for Victims of Terror Act |
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The 13th report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Ukraine between 16 November 2015 and 15 February 2016, when the Minsk Agreements were in force, has come as a shock to Kiev.
According to the UN, more than three million people live in the areas directly affected by the conflict. The exact number of people who have left Ukraine-controlled territory is still unknown, although rough estimates range from 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. The Ukrainian government has estimated that more than a million people have left southeast Ukraine for Russia, Belarus and Europe. This figure does not match that of the Russian federal migration service, however: in 2015, around four million Ukrainians crossed the border, with nearly 2.6 million settling in Russia. More than a million people have arrived from southeast Ukraine. Residents of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions are permitted to live freely in Russia.
The discrepancy in the figures clearly shows that Ukraine is not interested in keeping track of its citizens, whether within the country or abroad. This means that one of the aims of the military campaign launched in the east of the country is to displace the population from the area of conflict, predominantly to Russia. Given that refugees from the republics to Ukraine are facing discrimination in access to public services, according to the UN report, the authorities in Kiev do not seem to want the residents of Donbass either.
The UN also states that those living close to the contact line (nearly 800,000 people) are particularly suffering, and the lives of these people are constantly at risk. The UN mission believes that the assistance being given to the residents of Donbass is insufficient, even given Russia’s humanitarian convoys, although the fact that it was Ukraine that shut down all the social programmes and introduced the ‘blockade’ unfortunately remained beyond the scope of the report.
The UN believes that the permit regime introduced by Ukraine and the disorder at checkpoints are negatively reinforcing the isolation of those living in the DPR and LPR. Queues of up to 300-400 cars waiting on either side of the checkpoints are observed on a regular basis and this recently ended in tragedy. Due to the fact that the Ukrainian checkpoint is not open at night, civilians who had been queuing in their cars overnight were fired at by the Ukrainian side using illegal-calibre weapons (122 mm), resulting in the deaths of five people, including a pregnant woman.
During the period covered in the report, the Ukrainian armed forces have advanced even further into populated areas and the numerous attacks on the residential areas of Horlivka, Shakhtarsk and Debaltseve are also mentioned in the report.
Since the Minsk ceasefire agreements entered into force (i.e. since 15 February 2015), there have been 843 civilian casualties – 235 killed (216 adults and 19 children) and 608 injured (554 adults and 44 children). At the same time, the UN mission notes that it is unable to attribute some of the victims to either side of the conflict. It also emphasises that the real number of those killed and injured could be higher than that given in the report.
The number of people missing is particularly shocking. The Ukrainian side has reported 741 persons missing, while the DPR has registered 420 missing persons. In addition, the UN mission has ascertained that approximately 1,000 bodies held in morgues in government-controlled territory have still not been identified.
And once again the numbers are crying out that the Ukrainian government does not believe people to be important. The number of persons that Kiev has declared missing is a third less than the number of unidentified bodies! And the numbers also ignore the mortal remains in areas where hostilies took place – search operations are virtually non-existent. As the UN report states, there is not even a dedicated mechanism in place to gather statements from the relatives of missing persons.
The UN mission has also not taken into account the number of unmarked graves in cemeteries. The overwhelming majority of missing persons should not be looked for in the Donetsk and Luhansk republics, but among the thousands of bodies that have already been quietly buried or are still lying in morgues. It is possible that the official number of those who will never return has been hugely underestimated.
The efforts of the Ukrainian side aimed at searching for and identifying those killed and those missing are referred to in the UN report using the word «inaction».
Kiev cannot admit that to avoid responsibility, it is secretly carrying out a policy of ‘unidentified bodies’. It is also being suggested to relatives that missing persons are being held captive by DPR and LPR ‘separatists’.
The report concedes that some people recorded as missing may be alive, but are being held in secret places of detention either in the republics or in Ukrainian-controlled territory.
The UN mission has finally figured out that the secret prisons and torture in Ukraine are an established system that has become part of the state and its policies. Of the 1,925 criminal investigations launched into allegations of torture in 2015, 1,450 were closed.
The report has also provided yet more evidence that it is not a civil war. It is a war between those who seized power by means of a military coup and the people of Ukraine, a war that is hypocritically being referred to as an ‘anti-terrorist operation’.
As noted in the report, «throughout the country, OHCHR continued to receive allegations of enforced disappearances, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, and torture and ill-treatment of people accused by the Ukrainian authorities of ‘trespassing territorial integrity’, ‘terrorism’ or related offenses, or of individuals suspected of being members of, or affiliated with, the armed groups».
People are not just being tortured, but are also being executed without trial. In Sloviansk, for example, the basement of the local college is being used for this purpose. A basement used for torture and summary executions was also discovered by UN inspectors in Izium, Kharkiv district. In addition, «a network of unofficial places of detention, often located in the basement of regional SBU buildings, have been identified». The SBU also has such basements in Odessa and Kharkiv. In February 2016, between 20 to 30 people were detained in the basement of the Kharkiv regional SBU building, and the vast majority of prisoners were not arrested in accordance with legal procedures and were not charged.
The report also notes that the SBU obtains confessions of terrorism using torture, and those who sign the confessions are told that should they complain, then their families, including their children, will also be made to suffer. The Security Service of Ukraine refers to such methods as the use of «proportional» and «justified» force.
The 13th report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Ukraine appeared on 3 March 2016, but it is only now that the information bomb has exploded following an article in The Times, in which Ivan Simonovic, UN assistant secretary-general for human rights, talks about the report and also about five secret SBU prisons that a delegation of the UN Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture was not allowed access to, resulting in the delegation cutting short its visit to Ukraine…
The 13th report also completely destroys the myth that there are thousands of prisoners in the DPR and LPR. There is no trace of the thousands – in February 2016, the SBU gave the UN mission a list of 136 people who are allegedly being detained in custody in the republics, but nothing is known about this for sure. The list provided by the DPR authorities, however, looks completely different. «Some 1,110 persons were detained by the Government of Ukraine, including 363 members of the armed groups. This includes 577 people arrested for ‘their political views’ and 170 civilians ‘who have nothing to do with the conflict’», says the UN report. The SBU has gone overboard by essentially creating a system of concentration camps. The UN report likens the actions of the SBU to the seizure of hostages.
It has been impossible to keep the scandal hushed up, but while this regime exists in Ukraine, investigations into its criminal activities will be carried out along the same lines as the investigations into the people burned alive in Odessa on 2 May 2014. Namely that the executioners will remain free or under house arrest while the victims are imprisoned. For years.
June 11, 2016
Posted by aletho |
Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | DPR, Russia, Ukraine, United Nations |
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