Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Corporate and “Progressive” Democrats Threaten Medicare Itself

Sanders, Jayapal, and more…

By Charles Andrews | Dissident Voice | March 1, 2019

The Democratic Party won a majority in the House of Representatives in the November 2018 elections by making health care one of its top “messages.” Yet events from Bernie Sanders’ bill of 2017 to legislation that “progressive” Representative Pramila Jayapal introduced on February 27, 2019 show that the Party is on its way to destroy Medicare.

For decades activists identified the prize as “single payer health care.” The program would issue a Medicare card to everyone, like the one senior citizens get now. The card would be good at any doctor’s office, clinic, hospital, laboratory, and prescription pharmacy. These largely private businesses would be reimbursed from a public single-payer fund. The fund would receive broadly collected tax revenues; the patient would pay little or nothing at the reception desk, and no monthly premium. This is guaranteed, comprehensive health care.

In other words, single payer is Medicare for all, carried to completion by eliminating Part B premiums and by more comprehensive coverage including prescribed drugs.

Health care activists always agonized over the colorless name “single payer.” A few years ago many of them began to speak of Improved Medicare for All. Actually, it had been in the title of the benchmark bill, H.R. 676, when congressperson John Conyers introduced it in 2003. A few years later he shortened the title to The Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act. The text remained stable, and although the bill went nowhere in Congressional committees, H.R. 676 became the centerpiece of organizing. It is readable, only thirty pages of double-spaced large type. Hundreds of trade union locals and councils endorsed this model legislation in a steady stream year after year.

The health care industry has enjoyed a long-term phase of expansion, like railroads in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Back then, the new way of moving heavy goods and people was amazing and useful; today, new biological and biochemical understanding makes possible longer life, survival from a heart attack, restored clarity of vision, and so on. In both situations, capital has had strong pricing power and taken fat profits. And just as anger at railroads swelled into a populist revolt against The Octopus (Frank Norris’ novel about the Southern Pacific railroad corporation), people today are angry at insurance corporations, pharmaceutical monopolies, and hospitals, whether or not they call themselves “non-profit.”1

Opinion polls measure growing support for single payer health care for all. Employers continue to raise the employee cost of coverage, or simply not provide a health benefit. Health insurance purchased individually on the so-called exchanges of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) turns out to be full of exceptions like a slice of Swiss cheese.

Sanders Promotes Health Care for All Then Undercuts Conyers

Popular support erupted into a political force when Bernie Sanders launched his presidential campaign at the end of April 2015. Record-breaking crowds filled his rallies around the country. The top three issues in a Sanders speech rotated – sometimes including inequality of wealth and income, sometimes climate change – but he always revved up on health care for all. It had been the cause of a few thousand health care activists. Now Improved Medicare for All became a challenge to the neoliberal establishment. For the first time in forty years, people were on the verge of a mass campaign for a major gain in their quality of life and their security.

It did not happen. Sanders did not win the Democratic presidential  nomination. He returned to the Senate, making an implicit or private deal with the party: he would speak as a independent progressive, but he will act on all serious matters as an unannounced Democrat.

Doing something about health care for people largely fell out of public view. Health care activists carried on. Policy aficionados spun proposals. Sanders had used the issue in his campaign, but sustained mass organizing for it did not happen.

Then in September 2017, senator Sanders introduced his “Medicare for All Act.” S. 1804 is three times as long as H.R. 676, and the reader must unravel cross-references within the text. Sanders made no mention of Conyers’ H.R. 676 at his press conference. Since then, no one has asked him the obvious question: Why didn’t Sanders simply introduce the text of H.R. 676 in the Senate?

The “Buy-In” Trap

Sanders’ bill would actually undermine Medicare. It would set up a “Transitional Medicare Buy-in Option and Transitional Public Option.” Sanders portrayed it as a four-year period (longer if necessary) to bring people of age 55 or over into Medicare, then down to age 45, then down to age 35, then everyone. This scheme is the very opposite of guaranteed single-payer health care for all.

How is Medicare financed today? Most of the money comes from payroll and income tax revenues, not enrollees’ Part B premiums, by a ratio of 3½ to one.2 We all pay into Medicare. At the moment when someone needs care, she gets it, period – without financial worry. That is the single-payer principle, and Medicare implements it, although not entirely, since enrollees must keep up-to-date on their Part B monthly premiums, and there are some co-payments for services.

Expanded and Improved Medicare for All would eliminate premiums and co-pays. That is what H.R. 676 declared, but in Sanders’ S. 1804 people younger than 65 could “join” Medicare by paying fat monthly premiums (a “buy-in”). People who want to sign up this way would use the notorious Obamacare exchanges.

Trade union campaigners for genuine Medicare for all, H.R. 676, wrote in a December 11, 2018 letter:

Unlike HR 676, S 1804 inserts supposedly incremental steps of public options and Medicare buy-ins for four years prior to arriving at a real single payer plan. Because S 1804 expands care while maintaining the private insurance companies, costs will skyrocket before the savings of single payer kick in. The incremental steps will become a roadblock rather than a path to single payer. Perhaps the worst part of this inclusion of the public option and the Medicare buy-in is the reinforcement of the false notion that there should or must be transitional steps to single payer. Neither the public option nor the Medicare by-in are based on sound policy. To place them in the bill for even a short period of time endangers the single payer goal.

— All Unions Committee for Single Payer Health Care, HR 676, Kay Tillow, coordinator

It is a neat trick: under the guise of expanding Medicare, you make it more dependent on premiums. You change it from a public good, like the neighborhood fire station, into a commodity insurance product that individuals buy. You make health care dependent on the patient’s finances.

This perversion of Medicare is not only a fraud upon people of age 55, 45, or 35. It is a threat to Medicare itself. Whenever Medicare seems headed for a financial crunch, real or conjured, the pressure in Congress will be to shift more and more toward a premium- and co-pay-financed program rather than one supported by general and progressive tax revenues – and to take chunks of medicine out of Medicare.

An independent in name but a Democrat, in fact, senator Sanders at his press conference happily introduced several corporate Democrat co-sponsors of his bill. Behind closed doors he had let them write sections of S. 1804! The public option section was written by senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “One part of the bill that I worked with my colleagues to put in was the ability for every American to buy into a nonprofit public option as part of a four-year transition…,” she said during the news conference introducing the bill.

A public option is a competition with insurance corporations rigged in their favor. They know how to repel potential enrollees who are likely to need expensive care. A government health plan cannot and, of course, should not play that game. It can either raise premiums, or it can turn the program into something like its poor cousin Medicaid. Either way, it cannot become improved Medicare for all.

Democratic Party: “Death to H.R. 676!”

Two important bills stood in contradiction to each other: one for Expanded and Improved Medicare for All (H.R. 676), the other a threat to Medicare itself (S. 1804). Conyers’ bill has been the acknowledged model legislation since 2003; Sanders introduced his in 2017.

But words do not move on their own. The corporate Democratic Party soon put H.R. 676 on the chopping block. Representative John Conyers was pushed out of Congress in a #MeToo incident, resigning from a hospital bed, denying the charges but not up to the rigor of a fair hearing if he could get one.

Somehow, sponsorship of H.R. 676 went to new congressperson Pramila Jayapal. 3 She immediately announced that she was in consultations to rewrite it. In the meantime, she surrendered the number 676 that had been reserved for Conyers’ bill since 2003. It was issued to military legislation on January 17, 2019.

After the Democrats won control of the House of Representatives in the November 2018 elections, it became more urgent for them to gut single payer health care for all. Otherwise, they might have to deliver. Representative Nancy Pelosi, during a post-election whirlwind of bargaining to make sure she became Speaker of the House, agreed to help advance the same scheme that senators Sanders and Gillibrand had put into S. 1804: a buy-in to a premium-based option for people age 50 to 64. Jayapal, who also praised Pelosi during her run for Speaker, spoke out of both sides of her mouth. “I would prefer to have a reduction of the age of Medicare so that more people could qualify but not a buy-in, because that continues the problems that we have right now.” She said lowering the eligibility age “would be an appropriate way to go where we’re taking a step forward towards a system that will ultimately cover everybody.”

The Buy-in Trick Again

Representative Jayapal introduced H.R. 1384, her replacement for the Conyers’ model, on February 27, 2019. The 119-page bill is a masterful card trick. On one hand, it maintains the ban on premiums and co-payments, and it specifies a broad list of covered medical services, including some never proposed before in such legislation.

On the other hand, Jayapal copied Sanders’ big step backward – an optional “buy-in” transition period with premiums, only shortened from his four years to two. (After the first year, minors up to age 18 and people 55 and older would move automatically into the new system.) H.R. 1384 states:

The Administrator shall determine the premium amount for enrolling in the Medicare Transition buy-in, which may vary according to family or individual coverage, age, and tobacco status,… (H.R. 1384, Title X, Subtitle A, Sec. 1002 (e)(A))

Since Conyers introduced H.R. 676 in 2003, his bill never had a premium-based buy-in. Why does Rep. Jayapal think a buy-in period is necessary?

With a buy-in transition, the first experience people would have with the new system would be yet another commodity insurance plan with monthly premiums. This is a recipe for political failure. During those two years the tentative new system would soon be under attack as financially unworkable and just not popular enough.

People could buy in if they wished as individuals through the notorious Affordable Care Act exchanges (“Obamacare”). Because of the extensive benefits, the plan would be one of the most costly choices. Unaffordable for most as an individual premium plan, trying to compete in an unreformed health care system with its bloated costs, the buy-in would attract few enrollees. Enemies of genuine universal health care will pounce on the result, demanding that genuine Medicare for All be postponed and turned into a supplement of one kind or another to corporate health insurance.

Only H.R. 676 delivers guaranteed healthcare for all, the equal care for all of which our advanced society is capable. Bernie Sanders and Pramila Jayapal, just like openly corporate yet arguably less devious Democrats, cower before insurance capital, pharmaceutical capital, hospital capital, etc. These parasites demand that healthcare be a set of commodities that some can afford and others cannot. The people or the dollar – that is the inescapable choice.

  1. A nominally “non-profit” hospital today is not the church-run charity that it might have been a hundred years ago. Non-profit simply means that the corporation is tax-exempt. It does not pay dividends to stockholders, but it still makes a profit. Banks share in the loot, and layers of executives are paid millions of dollars. Affiliated for-profit clinics and labs may suck profits out under cover. Examine the Sutter Health and Kaiser hospital chains in California, for example.
  2. Medicare trust fund trustees’ report, 2018, pp. 45 and 78.
  3. Jayapal went to elite Georgetown University, got an MBA after that, worked on Wall Street on leveraged buyouts, switched to executive positions in several nonprofits, sat a mere two years in the Washington state senate, and won election to the House in 2016.

Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Corruption | , , | Leave a comment

Remapping of Palestine: Why Israel’s erasure of Palestinian culture will not succeed

By Ramzy Baroud | MEMO | March 1, 2019

“Everything Palestinian in Jerusalem is targeted by Israeli occupation,” said Palestinian Archbishop of Jerusalem’s Greek Orthodox Church, Atallah Hanna, on 29 January  during a meeting with a delegation from the medical aid organisation Doctors without Borders.

“The Islamic and Christian holy sites and endowments are targeted in order to change our city, hide its identity and marginalising our Arabic and Palestinian existence,” the archbishop added.

Hanna, who has been at the forefront of the Palestinian Muslim and Christian struggle against Israel’s Judaisation schemes, is, of course, correct in his assertion that Jerusalem is targeted. But the truth is that there is a systematic campaign to strip not just the holy city of its Palestinian character, but also the whole of Palestine.

A few days after the Palestinian Christian leader made his comments, Israeli authorities carried out excavations in the historic Al-Bahr Mosque in the city of Tiberias, on the western shores of the Sea of Galilee. In its place, Israel aims to establish a museum, a practice it has used many times in the past in order to erase historic symbols of Palestinian existence.

Israel’s disregard for the historical rights of Palestinians is deeply rooted in Zionist ideology. Indeed, from the very start, Zionist ideologues promoted the idea that Palestine was a place bereft of culture or heritage – an arid desert, waiting for Zionist pioneers to make it “bloom”.

For those claims to acquire a degree of plausibility and for the myth of Palestine as “a land without a people for a people without a land” to be solidified, the Zionist movement needed to erase the very existence of the Palestinian people.

After the establishment of the Israeli state, its leaders never made it a secret that this is indeed their intention. “It is not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist,” Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir (1969-74) said in an interview with the Sunday Times in June 1969.

The notion that Palestinians are not a people with a collective sense of nationhood has remained a defining concept of Zionism until this day and has spread well beyond Israel’s borders. American Christian evangelicals are particularly avid supporters of the idea, which has led some American politicians to also publicly embrace it. In 2011, for example, then US presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told the Jewish Channel that the Palestinians were an “invented people“.

Disappearing Palestine map

The practical application of this idea has meant that the construction of anything Jewish Israeli – whether it is cities, settlements, bypass-roads or numerous edifices of art, culture, religion and so on – has had to take place in parallel to the demolition and erasure of Palestinian cities, villages, streets, homes, cultural and religious sites.

On 19 July  2018, the Israeli Knesset passed the “Nation-State Bill“, practically making apartheid official by defining Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people and marginalising Palestinians, their history and language. However, that bill was the mere culmination of decades-long efforts.

During the British mandate, the colonial authorities, for example, were using predominantly Arabic names of localities, towns and villages; there were some about 3,700 of them. By contrast, there were just 200 Hebrew toponyms, most of them being names of Jewish settlements, including new ones that were being built under the patronage of the Zionist movement. This was quite indicative of the demographic distribution and land ownership in Palestine at the time (at the beginning of the British mandate in the 1920s, the Jews, including newly arrived settlers, were just 11 per cent of the total population).

However, as soon as the Israeli state was created against the will of the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab population of the Middle East, a vicious campaign to “remap” Palestine was launched.

A 1948 letter sent to first Israeli Interior Minister Yitzhak Gruenbaum read: “The conventional names should be replaced by new ones … since, in an anticipation of renewing our days as of old and living the life of a healthy people that is rooted in the soil of our country, we must begin in the fundamental Hebraicization of our country’s map.”

Soon after, a government commission was created and tasked with renaming everything Palestinian so the new state can lay its claim on towns, villages and various other geographical areas.

Another letter written in August 1957 by an Israeli foreign ministry official urged the Israeli Department of Antiquities to speed up the destruction of Palestinian homes conquered during the Nakba. “The ruins from the Arab villages and Arab neighbourhoods, or the blocs of buildings that have stood empty since 1948, arouse harsh associations that cause considerable political damage,” he wrote. “They should be cleared away.”

Early Zionists were wrong. Destroying Palestinian villages, changing street names and demolishing mosques and churches cannot succeed in erasing a nation’s sense of identity.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , | 2 Comments

Remember the Maine? CIA Intervention in Venezuela

Photograph Source National Museum of the U.S. Navy
By David Rosen | CounterPunch | March 1, 2019

In January 1897, Frederic Remington, a 19th-century painter famous for his depictions of the Old West, was on assignment in Havana for William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal to illustrate Spanish atrocities against Cubans. He sent a telegram to Hearst, noting: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble. There will be no war. I wish to return.” Hearst replied: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.”

One year later, on February 15, 1898, the battleship USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana Harbor. Pres. William McKinley ordered the battleship sent to Havana on January 25th to observe the growing tension between the U.S. and Spain. The explosion killed 268 of the crew’s 354 men and shocked the American public.

The U.S. press went wild with headlines proclaiming, “Spanish Treachery!” and “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy!” Hearst and the Journal offered a $50,000 award for the “detection of the Perpetrator of the Maine Outrage.” “Remember the Maine, to Hell with Spain!” became a rallying cry.

To this day, no one knows what caused the explosion. Initial reports claimed the ship was sunk by a naval mine. Later investigations, one in 1911 and another in 1974, hypothesized that it was a coal dust fire. Still others believed it was due to sabotage, some speculating it was a covert Hearst operation to increase his newspaper’s readership.

While McKinley sought to maintain peace with Spain, Theodore Roosevelt, the Sec. of the Navy, led the war faction. He insisted, “Let the fight come if it must. I rather hope that the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.”

On April 21, 1898, the U.S. declared war on Spain. The sinking of the Maine climaxed pre-war tensions, a provocation that accelerated the breakdown in diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Spain. The war last 10 weeks and the U.S. was victorious; it took temporary control of Cuba (although it still controls Guantanamo Bay), control of the Philippines (until 1946) and ongoing control of Puerto Rico and Guam. Provocations can work.

***

Americans will likely never know the complete role the CIA has played – and likely continues to play — in the campaign to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela.  (Claims of “national security” are used to hide the truth.) The Trump administration’s Troika of Evil – VP Mike Pence, Sec. of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton – seem to be plotting the overthrow of the Maduro government. One can well assume that the CIA, along with other agencies of the U.S. military-industrial complex, have been recruited to destabilize Venezuela, if not worse. Given this, one can wonder if another provocative act like the sinking of the Maine will be orchestrated to legitimize a domestic coup – or U.S. military intervention — in Venezuela.

Since Pres. James Monroe proclaimed what became known as the “Monroe Doctrine” in 1823, the U.S. has actively intervened in the affairs of innumerable countries across the globe. Since its establishment in 1946, the CIA has played a key role in U.S. interventions, whether through destabilization campaigns or an outright coups, especially in Latin and South America and the Caribbean.

A review of a dozen or so CIA interventions between 1954 and 2002 is suggestive as to what might be playing out in Venezuela.

Guatemala,1954 – the CIA launched the so-called Operation PBSuccess against president Jacobo Arbenz in support of United Fruit Company and bombed Guatemala City.

Haiti, 1959 – the CIA intervened to halt a popular movement to overthrow the puppet dictator, Francois Duvalier; according to one report, “over 100,000 people were murdered.”

Brazil 1964 – the CIA backed a coup against the democratically-elected president Joao Goulart who threatened to tax U.S. multinational corporations.

Uruguay, 1969 – CIA agent Dan Mitrione trained security forces in torture as part of Operation Condor; the agency pushed a coup that installed a military dictatorship led by Juan Maria Bordaberry.

Cuba, 1961 – the CIA-backed Cubanexiles and oversaw the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in the wake of the Cuban revolution of 1959; repeated CIA attempts to kill Fidel Castro failed.

Bolivia, 1971– the CIA orchestrated a coup against Gen. Juan Jose Torres, installing Gen. Hugo Banzer who imposed a violent dictatorship.

Chile, 1973– the CIA backed Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s coup against Pres. Salvador Allende, imposing a dictatorship that last 17 years.

Argentina, 1976 – the CIA installed Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla in a coup as part of the Dirty War to overthrow the Peronists.

El Salvador, 1979 – the CIA supported a 1979 coup fearing a popular insurgency that culminated in the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero (February 1980) and four American nuns (December 1980); in 1984, it financed Jose Durate’s campaign.

Grenada, 1983 – the CIA began efforts to destabilize the Marxist government in 1981 that led to the U.S. Marines invading in the country in ‘83 allegedly to protect about 1,000 American students on the island.

Panama, 1989 – the CIA orchestrated Operation Just Cause to overthrow its long-time operative, the drug trafficker Manuel Noriega, that left 3,500 civilians dead.

Peru, 1990 – the CIA backed Alberto Fujimori presidential election who renamed himself National Intelligence Service director, dissolved Congress and locked up the justices of the Supreme Court.

Venezuela, 2002 – the CIA backed mutinous army officers who briefly deposed Pres. Hugo Chávez in a coup attempt.

The CIA has also been involved in numerous other political and military campaigns in the region.

***

On February 15th, the U.S. celebrated the 121st anniversary of the sinking of the USS Maine. Since then, the U.S. has engaged in numerous military and political interventions in countries across the globe.  Since its founding in 1947, the CIA has been the lead federal entity in foreign interventions and is likely playing a key role in the destabilization of Venezuela. Little information about the agency’s role in Venezuela has been reported, but suggestive rumors are circulating.

Earlier this month, a 21 Air cargo flight from Miami International Airport was seized by government authorities in Valencia, Venezuela, transporting 19 assault rifles, telescopic sights, radio antenna and other materiel likely for anti-Maduro forces.  The flight company denied all knowledge of what it was shipping.  The company that chartered the flight, GPS-Air, flatly rejected any claim that it had shipped weapons. As McClatchy reported, “Only a fool would try sending guns out of the [Miami] airport,” said Cesar Meneses, GP-Air’s cargo shipping manager.

Last year, a rumor circulated that the CIA was involved in an attempted assassination of Pres. Maduro. While giving a TV broadcast speech in February 2018, an explosion disrupted the event and Maduro blamed Colombia for the attack, saying later on, “I have no doubt that the name [Colombian president] Juan Manuel Santos is behind this attack.” Trump advisor Bolton denied any U.S. involvement, insisting on Fox News, “I can say unequivocally there is no US government involvement in this at all.”

It’s unlikely that the American public will know the role the U.S. military-intelligence apparatus, especially the CIA, is playing in the attempted overthrow of the Venezuelan government. A direct military intervention in the grand old sense of Cuba, Panama or Grenada seems unlikely. Unfortunately, the Troika of Evil – Pence, Pompeo and Bolton – are likely scheming for a provocative incident similar to the sinking of the Maine.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Fake News, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

Here’s why US-North Korea talks will continue to fail

By Darius Shahtahmasebi | RT | February 28, 2019

US President Donald Trump’s failure to make any meaningful progress with North Korea was an expected outcome of the recent summit, but not for the reasons the mainstream media and regular talking-heads want you to believe.

The so-called summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi this week was a predictable flop. According to the US President himself, he ended up walking away from the summit because “it was all about sanctions.”

“Basically they wanted the sanctions lifted in their entirety, and we couldn’t do that,” US President Donald Trump stated.

As Trump also eloquently noted, “sometimes you have to walk, and this was just one of those times.” Though, that being said, he did explain that it “was a friendly walk.” Apparently, the two leaders exited the venue of their talks without even attending a planned lunch together. I’m not sure how friendly the walk can be if you walk in the opposite direction from each other, but if there’s one thing I know about Trump it’s that he is a friendly guy.

Given the current media climate on the issue of North Korea, I can’t say I’m all the surprised with the outcome of the summit. Despite Trump and Kim’s grandiose and laughable compliments towards each other, and despite the fact that NBC reported the US was considering waiving its demand for full accounting of Pyongyang’s nuclear program, we all knew at the end of the day that little could be achieved between these two nations because of the core issues at stake here. Some of us just disagree on the real reasons why this relationship was doomed from the outset (and some of us are just plain lying to you).

For example, former national security adviser under Barack Obama, Susan Rice, has just written an article published in the New York Times (NYT) entitled: “Can Trump Avoid Caving to Kim in Vietnam?” In her opinion piece, and I am not making this up, she actually cites the idea of “further concessions to the North Korean dictator,” like a “peace declaration” as being one of the two main risks of the Hanoi summit, unless the US receives irreversible concessions in return.

Say, what? In what universe is a “peace declaration” a risk, even if there are no concessions made in return? And what does that even mean? If peace is declared, that is a concession in itself, is it not?

Oh, but we need to ensure that North Korea dismantles all of its nuclear weapons and delivery systems first before we can even possibly discuss peace. Or as Rice puts it, not dismantle, but actually “eradicate.”

“To move the needle,” the warmongering hawk writes, “the United States and North Korea will need to agree on a series of incremental, reciprocal steps that would build mutual confidence as part of a road map to full denuclearization. Such steps could combine verifiable constraints on North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs with limited sanctions relief and movement toward achieving a final peace agreement. Reasonable constraints would include opening up declared North Korean facilities to international inspectors, halting further production of fissile material and ballistic missiles, codifying Mr. Kim’s announced testing freezes and nonproliferation pledge and obtaining firm commitments from North Korea to declare the totality of its nuclear and missile infrastructure.”

Where have we heard all of this before? It seems as though – and correct me if I am wrong – but that we have already tried these strategies multiple times with varying degrees of ruination. Most famously, the US tried to convince the world that Iraq needed to disarm its non-existent nuclear weapons, only to get increasingly impatient when Iraq couldn’t do the literal impossible and reduced the country to rubble. The same also took place in Libya, a nation which previously held the highest standard of living out of any country in Africa.

In fact, North Korea cites Libya as an example of why it will never give up its nuclear weapons supply. If you dig deeply enough, you will even find proof that the US and the UK, actually gave Libya a “script” indicating what the North African nation needed to do and say in order to rehabilitate itself into the global community. Fast forward just a few years later, and Barack Obama and his NATO cohorts were bombing Libya.

Speaking of concessions, even irreversible concessions, it is actually now quite well-documented (yet hidden from plain sight) that North Korea would make huge concessions in rolling back its nuclear program – but on one condition. As MIT Professor Noam Chomsky once explained, the reason is “that it calls for a quid pro quo. It says in return the United States should put an end to threatening military maneuvers on North Korea’s borders, which happen to include under Trump, sending of nuclear-capable B-52s flying right near the border.”

“Maybe Americans don’t remember very well,” Chomsky also stated, “but North Koreans have a memory of not too long ago when North Korea was absolutely flattened – literally – by American bombing. There was literally no targets left.”

Just so we are clear, Chomsky is not exaggerating that last point in the slightest.

The reason we don’t hear about North Korea’s willingness to make meaningful concessions often can be found in almost any major media outlet, though let’s just use the Washington Post as an example, with statements such as:

“[North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un] has shown no interest in talks — he won’t even set foot in China, his biggest patron. Even if negotiations took place, the current regime has made clear that ‘it will never place its self-defensive nuclear deterrence on the negotiating table, as one envoy recently put it.”

Even a recent NBC scoop appeared to be quite dumb-founded when it advanced the notion that the “Trump administration is hoping to get a significant concession from North Korea on Yongbyon [the Yongbyon nuclear reactor], but it’s unclear if the U.S. can offer something in exchange that Kim would accept.”

It seems to me that there are a lot of things that North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un would accept, so it baffles me that the mainstream media are unable to even discuss this issue properly. Though, if you do happen to read far enough some articles here and there, you will find a vague mention of it, as in this piece which says: “While the United States has long demanded that North Korea give up all of its nuclear and missile programmes, the North wants to see the removal of a US nuclear umbrella for its Asian allies such as South Korea and Japan.”

Why are we having a US-North Korea summit anyway? What exactly is the threat that North Korea has demonstrably proven to be? That it fires missiles into the sea on occasion? Trust me, I feel for the fish and the environment, but as far as international human rights conventions are concerned, which as we know the US government loves to pride itself on its ability to attack other nations for a lack of upholding, North Korea’s so-called “rogue” behavior barely even pales in comparison to that of the United States.

So why does the media continue to pander to this idea that the US war machine is in any way, shape or form, bringing North Korea to the table of etiquette and decorum and why does the media give voices to those people who undermine any meaningful progress on the question of avoiding war with Pyongyang?

It pays to remind ourselves that if we are going to hold North Korea to these ridiculous standards, that it has in fact conducted no nuclear or intercontinental ballistic missile tests since 2017. The US, on the other hand, is still assisting Israel in its destruction of Gaza, is still assisting Saudi Arabia in its destruction of Yemen, is still bombing the rest of the Middle East into oblivion and is currently threatening war against Venezuela, Iran, all the while reigniting a new and revamped Cold War with Russia and China, just to name a few.

Even as I type, two supposed US allies who do have known and ready nuclear weapons appear to be throwing stones at each other, yet denuclearization seems to be nowhere to be found in media discourse when we examine the history of the ongoing conflict between India and Pakistan.

Still, to all those in the corporate media decrying that the Hanoi-based summit was a waste of time, they need not fret. While in Vietnam, the Trump administration managed to ink a deal with Vietnam for 110 Boeing planes worth billions of dollars. Seems to me like it was a very lucrative and fruitful time in Vietnam, particularly for the people who matter the most: corporations that thrive as part of the US war machine.

Coincidentally, these are the same people who benefit the most when any chance of a US-North Korea peace process fails miserably. Go figure.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 1 Comment

How Amnesty International is reinforcing Trump’s regime-change propaganda against Venezuela

By Joe Emersberger | The Canary | February 26, 2019

Amnesty International‘s reports, by their nature, require readers to trust their honesty and impartiality. But there is ample reason not to trust them. Because Amnesty has ignored grave human rights abuses in plain sight in Venezuela while demonizing supporters of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Shortly after meeting with Juan Guaidó (whom Donald Trump and a new Iraq-style Coalition of the Willing have anointed as Venezuela’s interim president), Amnesty put out a report that reads like a barely disguised attempt to reinforce, from a ‘human rights’ angle, the military threats against Venezuela from Trump and his henchmen.

Team Trump as Venezuela’s “Only hope”?

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Amnesty’s Americas director, said:

International justice is the only hope for victims of human rights violations in Venezuela. It is time to activate all available mechanisms to prevent further atrocities.

And the report stated that:

[C]ountries genuinely concerned about the human rights situation in Venezuela should explore the application of universal jurisdiction.

Amnesty’s allegations about Venezuela are serious and, if true, deserve condemnation. But there are numerous reasons to question the group’s honesty, impartiality, and public statements.

Somebody should ask Amnesty, for example, to list the countries which are “genuinely concerned”. How many Saudi–arming countries like the US, UK, Canada, and France are on that list?

As Amnesty released this report, the threat of a US military attack on Venezuela disguised a “humanitarian aid delivery” could not be more obvious. Never mind that Venezuela is, in fact, receiving foreign aid with authorization from the Maduro government. US National Security Advisor John Bolton and Senator Marco Rubio have repeatedly made Mafioso-like threats against Venezuela’s military and Maduro. Trump himself has been repeatedly threatening a military “option” since 2017 (the year he reportedly asked “Why are we not at war with Venezuela?”).

Amnesty ignorning Trump’s attack on right to health and food

At the same time, Amnesty has refused to denounce Trump’s financial sanctions which have been in place since August 2017 and whose impact on the entire economy has been crippling. By now, the sanctions have cost Venezuela’s government well over $6bn in revenues in an economy that imported $11.7bn in goods in 2018. Before the deep and sustained collapse in oil prices (and oil production, which nose-dived as the sanctions began), Venezuela’s economy had been importing about $2bn a year in medicines.

It is important to remember that, in Venezuela’s case, Amnesty has been very explicit in pointing to economic problems as human rights abuses. Last year, when they wrote to me refusing to denounce Trump’s sanctions, Amnesty said:

Amnesty International does not take a position on the current application of these sanctions but rather emphasizes the urgent need to address the serious crisis of the right to health and food which Venezuela is facing. In terms of human rights, it is the Venezuelan state’s responsibility to resolve this.

As I’ve noted at The Canary, Amnesty has now updated its position on Trump’s sanctions. It absurdly asks Trump to please be careful and “monitor” the impact of new sanctions that he imposed in January. The new sanctions directly cut off revenues that the Venezuelan government obtained from sales to the US. Amnesty’s continued refusal to acknowledge that a devastating attack on the Venezuelan “right to health and food” has been ongoing since August 2017 is appalling. And that alone is an excellent reason to doubt the honesty and impartiality of their work on Venezuela. Because any credible human rights group would demand an immediate end to all the economic sanctions Trump has imposed.

Violent crime in Venezuela

Amnesty also stated in its latest report that:

The more impoverished areas of Caracas and other parts of the country were particularly affected and stigmatized, registering the highest numbers of victims, who were later presented as ‘criminals’ killed in clashes with the authorities.

There’s no doubt that Venezuela’s security forces have committed crimes. The Maduro government has conceded as much. And Venezuelan police officers were arrested for crimes perpetrated during the violent protests of 2017. In June 2017, Defense Minster Vladimir Padrino López publicly warned security forces in remarks broadcast on state TV that he didn’t “want to see one more national guard perpetrate an atrocity”. Those protests were the fifth US-backed effort to oust the government by force since 2002. Trump is now leading the sixth.

It’s also important to remember that Venezuelan security forces have confronted a very high homicide rate (since long before the current government came to power) and police officer death rate. At the same time, the country has been plagued by violent US-backed protesters for years, who have done things like burn Afro-Venezuelans alive in the streets and murder police officers. And today, it faces the very grave threat of US invasion that would install the most violent opposition groups into power.

We can only imagine how security forces in a country like the UK would behave under the above conditions. Young men have been sent to prison in Britain, for example, simply for writing Facebook posts that advocate riots. I made some of these points last year in response to a similar UN report that was hyped by Reuters.

Venezuela’s very real homicide problem (and violent US-backed opposition problem) could indeed allow security forces to pass off extrajudicial executions as “fighting crime” or as self-defense. But it can also allow apparently partisan groups like Amnesty to distort the situation in support of Trump’s regime-change agenda.

Propaganda groundwork for dirty war on Maduro supporters?

Amnesty said in its report that:

There is a strong presence of pro-Nicolás Maduro armed groups (commonly known as “colectivos”) in these areas, where residents depend to a large extent on the currently limited state programs to distribute staple foods.

Again, the “limited state programs” would be the ones Trump has been viciously attacking through sanctions since 2017. Also notice how Amnesty casts as thugs the organized poor people distributing food to millions of people – up to 60% of households according to an opposition-aligned pollster (Datanálisis).

As George Ciccariello-Maher explained in We Created Chavez, the history of poor people organizing and arming themselves (quite understandably) for self-defense in Venezuela’s poorest neighborhoods goes back decades. It’s not new.

It is Maduro’s supporters in poor neighborhoods and in the countryside, however, who – armed or not – will be violently targeted if the US-backed opposition takes power; especially if they do so in a coup or through a US invasion. Amnesty appears to have little concern about “stigmatizing” them, though, and negligible concern about Trump’s attack on their “right to health and food”.

All of the reasons above make a powerful case for questioning the integrity and objectivity of Amnesty when it comes to Venezuela. And for the sake of peace and justice, we should hold Amnesty to much higher standards.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Deception, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , | 1 Comment

US Urges ‘Calm’ While Stoking India-Pakistan Conflict

Strategic Culture Foundation | 01.03.2019

International powers this week anxiously urged India and Pakistan to avoid further escalation of military confrontation. Given the two nations have gone to war on three occasions during the past seven decades and are both nuclear armed, the international concern is palpable.

The US has lately joined calls by Russia, China and Europe appealing for restraint, and for the Indian and Pakistani leaderships to negotiate a resolution to avert a catastrophic slide towards conflict.

American President Donald Trump, while in Vietnamese capital Hanoi for a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, claimed that the US was mediating to defuse the crisis between India and Pakistan.

“We’ve been in the middle trying to help them both out,” said Trump.

Incongruously, however, the Trump administration has in fact acted in an opposite fashion, to inflame the recent tensions between New Delhi and Islamabad.

Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have both issued statements which “support India’s right to self-defense against terrorism”. The US officials have also laid the blame on Pakistan for sponsoring acts of terrorism by militant groups in Indian-controlled Kashmir. The northern territory of Kashmir has been the cause of bitter dispute between India and Pakistan ever since they gained independence from Britain in 1947.

The massacre of over 40 Indian troops earlier this month on February 14 in the Indian-side of Kashmir has sparked outrage among the wider Indian population demanding revenge. The suicide bomb attack was claimed by Kashmiri militant group Jaish e-Mohammed (JeM). India claimed that Pakistan had a hand in the atrocity through its support for JeM, which the Pakistani authorities denied.

The mounting of air strikes by India this week deep inside Pakistani territory on a militant training camp – purportedly in retaliation for the Kashmir massacre of its troops – represented a dramatic escalation. If India had limited its strikes to Pakistani-controlled Kashmir the retaliation could perhaps have been argued as being proportionate. But the violation of Pakistani territory – some 50 kms west of the historical Line of Control – was arguably an act of war. The last time Indian warplanes struck inside Pakistan was in 1971 during the two countries’ third and last war.

Not surprisingly, Pakistani fighter jets have subsequently launched strikes on Indian-controlled Kashmir. There were also further alleged incursions by Indian warplanes, two of which were reportedly shot down by the Pakistani side. Pakistan also lost one of its jets in a shoot-down but the aircraft apparently crashed inside its territory.

Tensions have boiled over further with the capture of an Indian pilot by the Pakistanis who released video footage of him apparently injured with a bloodied face. That led to outcry in New Delhi that Islamabad was in breach of the Geneva Convention concerning treatment of prisoners of war. Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has vowed to return the Indian pilot as a gesture towards de-escalation.

Nevertheless, the tensions and danger of an all-out war continue to mount. There have been several reports of heavy artillery cross-border exchanges between Indian and Pakistani forces. While both governments say they don’t want a war, the dynamic could explode beyond their control.

The Kashmir dispute is certainly fraught with enormous historical difficulties bestowed by baleful British imperialist legacy of partitioning land and people with such contempt for indigenous rights and traditions, as well as from cynically playing partisan politics for imperial advantage. Washington’s contemporary meddling in Indian-Pakistan affairs has echoes of past British subterfuge.

Pakistan’s relations with Kashmiri militant groups whom India denounces as “terrorist” is only part of a complex equation. Another part of the equation is India’s intensive militarization of the province and its alleged abusive occupation of territory and people who aspire to be part of Pakistan. The region is predominantly Muslim.

If a peaceful resolution is to ever succeed there must be an earnest process of demilitarizing the entire Kashmir area. That onus is primarily on India.

One thing that is certainly not constructive is the simplistic and clumsy way that the United States has intervened recently by pointedly taking the Indian side of the narrative. For senior Trump administration officials to proclaim India’s “right to self-defense” against implied Pakistani-sponsored terrorism is in effect a green light for New Delhi to launch air strikes against its neighbor.

That reckless advocacy by Washington is predictably leading to a spiral of violence which ultimately could result in an all-out war between two nuclear states.

President Trump’s self-congratulatory tone about supposed mediation between India and Pakistan is far off the mark from reality. The Trump administration’s belated words appealing for “restraint” and “calm” are belied by the earlier words from Bolton and Pompeo giving India a license to commit acts of war.

Of course, what would one expect from the American side? The Trump administration is currently in the throes of violating the sovereignty of Venezuela with threats of military invasion against that South American nation. Washington has completely lost its compass on international law and norms of conduct.

There are indeed deeper reasons for why Washington would like to see a conflict between India and Pakistan blow up. Such a confrontation would cause major geopolitical problems for China, which is historically an ally of Pakistan but which has also recently endeavored to build a rapprochement with India. Stoking a confrontation in South Asia would serve Washington’s interest in destabilizing China and Russia’s strategic plans for economic integration of Eurasia.

India and Pakistan’s political leaderships must keep cool heads and think of the bigger global picture. Only recently, India’s Narendra Modi and Pakistan’s Imran Khan were expressing an aspiration for improving ties between the two South Asian states. They must resist playing politics for internal political gains, and they must resist being manipulated by external powers which seek to gain advantage at the expense of Asian divisions. The historical thorn of Kashmir can be resolved if India and Pakistan entered into a genuine and mutual compromise.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Aletho News | , , | Leave a comment

“UK Decision to Blacklist Hezbollah Indicates London’s Servile Obedience to US”

Al-Manar | March 1, 2019

Hezbollah on Friday lashed out at UK over its decision to blacklist the Lebanese resistance group, stressing that the move indicates London’s “servile obedience” to the US.

In a statement released by the group’s Media Relations Office, Hezbollah stressed that it is a resistance group against the Israeli occupation, and that “any state which embraces, fund and support terrorism has no right to accuse Hezbollah or any other resistance group of being terrorist.”

The decision indicates that the “UK government is not but a subordinate that serves the American master,” Hezbollah said, noting that London, through this decision, antagonizes the people of the region in a bid to please Washington.

“Terrorism accusations fabricated by the UK government won’t deceive the free people across the world,” the statement said.

Hezbollah also said that the free people in the UK “know very well who created terrorism in our region, and who funded, supported and covered crimes committed in Syria, Iraq and Yemen,” referring to the US and its “international and regional tools.”

The UK decision is an “insult to the feelings, sympathies and will of the Lebanese people that consider Hezbollah a major political and popular force represented in the Lebanese parliament and cabinet,” the statement added.

Hezbollah concluded the statement as stressing that nothing will prevent the Lebanese resistance group – who have confronted both Israeli aggression and the Takfiri terror- from going ahead with defending Lebanon, its freedom and independence.

March 1, 2019 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , | 1 Comment