Michael Mann Appeals to, Then Ignores Scientific Consensus on 60 Minutes
By James Taylor – Climate Realism – October 5, 2020
Prominent scientist and climate activist Michael Mann appealed to an asserted scientific consensus to chastise President Donald Trump on CBS’s 60 Minutes program last night. Ironically, Mann himself ignored clear scientific consensus in order to promote his own, out-of-the-mainstream climate change theories.
While interviewing Mann, CBS’s Scott Pelley said, “There have always been fires in the West. There have always been hurricanes in the East. How do we know that climate change is involved in this?” Pelley followed up with, “The president says about climate change, ‘Science doesn’t know.’”
Replied Mann, “The president doesn’t know, and he should know better. He should know that the world’s leading scientific organizations, our own U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and national academies of every major industrial nation, every scientific society in the United States that’s weighed in on the matter. This is a scientific consensus. There’s about as much scientific consensus about human-caused climate change as there is about gravity.”
Mann’s description of the conclusions of the “scientific consensus” however, is exactly the opposite of what scientific bodies report.
As documented in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expresses “low confidence” in any connection between climate change and changes in hurricane activity.
Similarly, as documented in Climate at a Glance: U.S. Wildfires, U.S. wildfires are much less frequent and severe than they were in the first half of the 20th century – 100 years of global warming ago. Moreover, the IPCC reports a decrease in drought conditions – which is the primary climate factor regarding wildfires – in the global region including the U.S. West. Moreover, the IPCC finds no evidence of an increase in drought globally, either.
Ultimately, data, evidence, and scientific facts are far more indicative of scientific truth than a real or imagined consensus of scientists. Yet, to the extent Michael Mann wishes to invoke consensus as a scientific argument, the clear consensus of scientists is that Mann is promoting extreme climate theories that have no basis in reality.
James Taylor is Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute.
Russia slams ‘disgraceful’ ban on founding OPCW chief speaking at UN Security Council on Syria
RT | October 6, 2020
An ex-OPCW chief, sacked under US pressure, has been barred from briefing the UN Security Council about a controversial probe into an alleged 2018 chemical attack in Syria. Russia called it a “shame” and published his speech.
Jose Bustani, a Brazilian diplomat who led the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) from 1997 until 2002, was invited by Moscow to speak at a UN Security Council meeting about the so-called “Syrian chemical dossier,” but his appearance was blocked at the last minute by Belgium, Germany, Estonia, France, the US and the UK.
“What has happened now is yet more sad proof that Western delegations fear the uncomfortable truth,” Russia’s ambassador to the UN, Vassily Nebenzia, stressed while addressing the UN global body on Monday.
He said the six countries had “made history” because the Security Council has never voted “on the presence or absence of a briefer proposed by the [UNSC] president.” Prohibiting the former OPCW director general from speaking was a “shame and disgrace,” Nebenzia concluded, promising to publish Bustani’s statement after the meeting.
UK envoy Jonathan Allen said that Bustani is not in a position to “provide relevant knowledge or information.”
Shortly afterwards, the undelivered speech appeared on the website of the Russian mission to the UN. In it, the sacked OPCW chief raised “serious questions” over “whether the independence, impartiality, and professionalism of some of the organization’s work is being severely compromised, possibly under pressure from some member states.”
As a major example, Bustani cited an OPCW investigation into the alleged use of chemical weapons in the Syrian city of Douma on April 7, 2018. Western governments, and media outlets, maintain that forces loyal to Damascus dropped two gas cylinders as part of an offensive against jihadist forces, killing scores of civilians.
The allegations were used as a pretext for a major US-led airstrike against Syrian government forces later that year. The OPCW launched a probe into the “chemical attack,” and in early March of 2019, the final report by the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) of the OPCW stated that there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that canisters filled with “molecular chlorine” were dropped from Syrian aircraft in Douma.
The final report gave credence to the Western show of force by implicating the Syrian government of Bashar Assad in conducting the attack, which the Syrian authorities vehemently deny.
Shortly after the release of the OPCW report, an internal memo by OPCW engineers was leaked, suggesting the canisters were likely just placed at the site of the “attack,” and did not come from the skies. Still, the final report did not include such information, and a senior OPCW official reportedly ordered the removal of “all traces” of the dissenting opinion, according to WikiLeaks.
Months later, Bustani noted that he was invited to an expert panel which heard the testimony of an unnamed OPCW investigator, who came forward with damning evidence that his own organization had engineered a report based on a flawed conclusion and likely deliberately steered toward the outcome favored by the West.
That expert provided “compelling and documentary evidence of highly questionable, and potentially fraudulent conduct in the investigative process,” Bustani’s statement recalled. The Brazilian diplomat had been so stunned by the testimony that he personally called on the OPCW to be “resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”
However, he continued, the chemical weapons watchdog did not respond to any calls for greater transparency about the controversial Douma investigation. The probe was “hidden behind an impenetrable wall of silence and opacity, making any meaningful dialogue impossible.”
In conclusion, Bustani called on Fernando Arias, the current OPCW chief, to hear the grievances of OPCW inspectors who voiced dissenting opinions on the Douma incident. They “have dared to speak out against possible irregular behavior in your organization,” Bustani argued, adding that it is “in the world’s interest that you hear them out.”
Bustani noted that he had been removed from his OPCW position “following a US-orchestrated campaign in 2002.” Back then, he was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Iraq prior to the 2003 US invasion there. A UN tribunal ruled that his sacking was unlawful.
Netanyahu’s Dirty Laundry Tells All
If you can steal a whole country, what’s a little laundry?
By Philip Giraldi • Unz Review • October 6, 2020
Staff in Washington D.C.’s Blair House, where the U.S. president houses his V.I.P. foreign guests, report that they have begun counting towels and robes after visitors depart. Soap and shampoo resupply is also being closely monitored and a metal detector has been installed in the downstairs breakfast room to prevent silverware losses. The heightened security comes in the wake of revelations regarding the all-too-frequent visits by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been accused of regularly arriving at Blair House with multiple suitcases and bags containing many months’ worth of his dirty laundry, all of which he has washed, dry cleaned and pressed at U.S. taxpayer expense. While most visitors choose to deal with their soiled linen as a private matter, Bibi evidently is quite happy to have his washed for him in Washington.
Apart from the Netanyahu behavior demonstrating his complete contempt for his hosts, the prime minister appears to have an established track record when it comes to questionable behavior. He and his wife Sara have been the targets of several long-running corruption investigations in Israel, some of which remain unresolved. It is the latest in a series of crimes involving Israeli leaders, which have included the rape conviction of former President Moshe Katsav.
But more to the point, it is difficult to avoid the belief that the Jewish state and its hundreds of front organizations operating in the United States are basically both corrupting and impoverishing the United States one bite at a time. My father used to have a typical New Jersey expression describing someone who is obnoxiously persistent in trying to taking advantage of you. He called such behavior “getting pecked to death by a duck.” Lacking a sharp beak, one hardly notices the duck’s endeavors until it kills you. Israel and its proxies are the duck that is bleeding the United States one peck at a time.
There are, of course, the big-ticket items that make the news briefly like the more than $4 billion in annual military assistance that Israel gets, mostly guaranteed for the next ten years. Israel is now seeking $8 billion more on top of that to thank it for making friends with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in a politically motivated White House ceremony. Israel enjoys a number of tax breaks, co-production arrangements and trade concessions that almost certainly amount to more than $10 billion annually in a one-way cash flow to America’s “best friend and greatest ally.” The 1985 United States free trade agreement with Israel alone has benefitted the Jewish state by $144 billion, which is the U.S. deficit on the trade between 1985 and 2015.
One might note in passing that Israel is quite capable of defending itself, to include a nuclear arsenal and the means to deliver it, while its Jewish citizens enjoy a European standard of living, to include free public education through college and state provided medical care that is in part funded by American taxpayers.
But it is on the duck pecking level that the penetration and corruption of the United States becomes clearer. It seems that every week one notes a couple of articles here and there that reveal how Israel and its friends wield tremendous power at all government levels and also in the media. One that resonated in the past couple of weeks described how Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, has signed a bill authorizing the state’s department of motor vehicles to issue car license plates bearing the legend “Florida Stands With Israel.” The Israeli-American Council (IAC) immediately praised the “heartwarming expression of solidarity” which “affirms the strong bond between the State of Florida’s citizens and the Jewish State of Israel. This kind of warmth is why Florida has always been a leading destination for Israeli-Americans.”
Now, DeSantis is no novice when it comes to the sucking up to Israel game. He has been playing the Israel and anti-Semitism cards throughout his political career. In 2018, as a Congressman running for governor, he attacked his opponent Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum during their gubernatorial race as not being a “friend of Israel.” Earlier, as a Congressman, DeSantis sponsored in 2013 the Palestinian Accountability Act which called for the withholding of U.S. aid to the Palestinian Authority until it recognizes Israel as a Jewish state. In 2017, he co-founded the Congressional Israel Victory Caucus.
When DeSantis ran for governor, he predictably promised to be the most pro-Israel governor in America and that the “first delegation [he] would lead would be to the state of Israel.” He then took his entire cabinet with him as part of a 75-person taxpayer funded delegation on a six-day boondoggle at the end of May 2019, meanwhile boasting that “Today I’m pleased to report that I’m keeping that promise. Our delegation will bring business, academic and political leaders to help strengthen the bond between Florida and Israel.” He held a meeting of his Cabinet in the American Embassy in Jerusalem during his visit, the first time that such a meeting has ever been held by a state government on foreign soil. During the meeting he ostentatiously signed a legislative bill “combating anti-Semitism.”
And now one can buy license plates extolling the parasitic relationship with Israel, surely a unique expression of dual loyalty not exhibited by any other state in the union. The Florida relationship is also a perfect example of how Israel’s friends go about setting up mechanisms that will benefit the Jewish state. Israel will be selling its products and services to Florida, enabled by a government in place that is promoting the process and will steer contracts in its direction. In return, Florida will get little or nothing as Israel is a tiny market and has no particular need of anything that the Sunshine State produces.
All such trade agreements are designed to enrich Israel. Another interesting example of how this works at the state level and the abuse that it can produce has recently surfaced in Virginia, where a so-called Virginia-Israel Advisory Board (VIAB) has actually been funded by the Commonwealth of Virginia taxpayers to promote and even subsidize Israeli business in the state, business that currently runs an estimated $500 million per annum in favor of Israel. Grant Smith of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP) has done considerable digging into the affairs of VIAB. He has observed how “VIAB is a pilot for how Israel can quietly obtain taxpayer funding and official status for networked entities that advance Israel from within key state governments.”
And then there is Congress, where a bill has been introduced that will enable Israel to block any U.S. arm sales to the Middle East that it does not approve of, a nearly complete surrender of American sovereignty to the Jewish state. And there is also the Congressman Brad Sherman of California story. Brad, who is Jewish, would very much like to replace recently defeated coreligionist congressman Eliot Engel as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The committee, of course, deals with Israeli issues and Engel was widely regarded as one of the Jewish state’s staunchest friends in Congress. So what did Brad do? He approached a number of Jewish groups to help the process along. In a zoom event hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) he confirmed that “You went to bat for Eliot Engel in a huge way, and demonstrated that you understood how important that chairmanship is… And I won’t compare myself to my good friend Eliot Engel, except to say that when it comes to having one’s heart in the right place, Eliot and I are in the exact same place.” If Brad succeeds, and he probably will, whose interests will he be serving in an important government office? Some might regard such behavior as treasonous.
Also out of California comes the story of some new legislation to combat the scourge of anti-Semitism, much in the media of late together with the shocking news that many Americans are unable to name even a single so-called Nazi death camp or to parrot alleged “facts” about the holocaust. What is described as “holocaust education” is already mandatory in a number of states where studying the American Revolution is apparently optional. Jewish groups have infiltrated boards of education to “advise” on suitable textbooks, which present a positive narrative relating to Israel while also depicting claimed Jewish victimhood. It is now also likely that holocaust education will become mandatory nationwide due to recent congressional passage of the Never Again Education Act.
At the end of August, California Assembly Bill 331 “took a major step toward [California] becoming the first state in the country to mandate completion of an ethnic studies course as a requirement for high school graduation.” Reports of “anxiety and outrage” in the Jewish community over the first draft of the bill had led the members of the 16 member California Legislative Jewish Caucus to quickly move to insert “guardrail” language into the text. The new language will “… prohibit the teaching of any curriculum that promotes bias, bigotry or discrimination, including against Jews or Israelis.”
The issue might seem relatively clear cut, but there was of course a hidden agenda, which was to block any consideration of the plight of the Palestinians or the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which, it was feared, would become part of the curriculum. And the inclusion of “Israelis” as a protected group pretty effectively prohibits any discussion of Israel at all, except, presumably, in positive terms. In California schoolrooms one can criticize the behavior of the United States or Mexico but anything negative about Israel will be forbidden. And California is not alone. Twenty-nine states currently either ban or otherwise punish the promotion of BDS, largely due to the effective lobbying by Israeli partisans at the legislative level in those states.
So everywhere anyone turns, there is Israel, Israel, Israel. So, what’s a little dirty laundry between the “best friends” in the whole wide world? Maybe. But alternatively, it just might be that we Americans are getting pecked to death and all the Trumps and Bidens do is grin and smile while our country is being systematically screwed by a foreign country aided by a domestic lobby that is only in the game to take whatever it can. Wake-up America!
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is https://councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.
How NYT’s Trump Tax “Bombshell” Turned Out to be Yet Another Big Nothing Burger
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 06.10.2020
The New York Times’ report on Trump’s tax returns has missed a number of its apparent targets failing to implicate the president or find his alleged ties to Russia, says Wall Street analyst Charles Ortel, adding that those who leaked Trump’s financial data may face criminal charges and civil damages.
The leaker or leakers who handed Donald Trump’s tax returns to The New York Times may have committed a felony, writes Just the News, a US national news agency founded by American investigative journalist John Solomon.
The NYT disclosure came amid the Democratic lawmakers’ longstanding effort to obtain Donald Trump’s tax returns which is seen by the president’s proponents as a “fishing expedition” aimed at disrupting his presidency and the 2020 campaign, along with the “Russia collusion” story and an attempt to impeach him.
‘The Leaking is a Crime’
In a note to the NYT’s “bombshell” article in question, the newspaper’s executive editor Dean Baquet insisted that the president’s tax information “was legally obtained by reporters”, adding however, that they are not making the records themselves public because they “do not want to jeopardise our sources, who have taken enormous personal risks to help inform the public”.
“Under federal and state laws, income tax returns are confidential”, stresses Wall Street analyst and investigative journalist Charles Ortel. “The rationale is they normally contain extensive amounts of information that filers would not want shared either with the general public or especially with competitors and political rivals”.
Citing Joseph diGenova, a former US Attorney for the District of Columbia, Just the News noted last Friday that if the documents were obtained by an IRS employee, a lawyer or an accountant, the leaking “definitely” constitutes a crime that could result in both criminal and civil legal actions.
In particular, Internal Revenue Code, Section 6103, protects an individual’s tax return information from disclosure to other parties by the IRS. In addition, 26 US Code § 7213 says that it’s a felony if any officer or employee of the United States discloses unauthorised information, including tax returns.
“It is unlikely that Trump or any family member leaked income tax information to the New York Times“, Ortel suggests. “However, it’s possible that disgruntled staff at a law firm or accounting firm may have done so. If true such actions would likely carry criminal penalties, and civil damages.”
Another possibility, more likely, is that federal or state government officials may have leaked this sensitive information to the paper, according to the investigative journalist.
“If true, this would be deeply concerning not simply to Trump and his supporters but to most sensible Americans”, he warns.
Kevin Brady (R-TX), the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, shares similar concerns. On 28 September, he issued a statement regarding the NYT’s story on Trump’s tax return raising the alarm over “the prospect that a felony crime was committed by releasing the private tax return information of an individual” and calling for an investigation into the matter.
‘10,000 Empty Words on Trump’s Taxes’
One might ask as to whether taking these “enormous personal risks” and leaking the president’s tax returns was worth the pain. In other words, did the NYT disclose something really “damning” about the president? According to Ortel, nothing of that kind was reported by the newspaper.
While the media’s story is largely focused on Trump’s alleged tax avoidance, it is not a crime to offset losses incurred against income, the Wall Street analyst underscores.
“Moreover it is common to use options available in relevant jurisdictions to make one claim about the value of a given asset and a different one in a loan application”, he says. “In every case, Trump and his organisation certainly will have worked closely with professionals to make sure that all claims were reasonable and defensible”.
Apart from this, Ortel doubts that a team of New York Times reporters have conducted a thorough and accurate analysis of the president’s documents.
“For a filer like Donald Trump, engaged in so many activities inside the US, tax returns are certainly lengthy and so complicated that professional firms likely are involved in submitting them, including accountants and lawyers”, the Wall Street analyst underscores.
As for left-leaning mainstream media’s claims that “Trump’s tax avoidance is a tax on the rest of us”, they have apparently overlooked the fact that “generations of Trumps employed thousands of New Yorkers directly and indirectly producing incomes and spending that filled tax coffers at federal, state, city and county level”, as Ortel noted in his 29 September opinion piece for The American Thinker.
“So, a fair accounting of all tax revenues created by the Trump Organisation likely will show enormous positive impact overall“, the analyst believes.
What Did NYT Reporters Fail to Find?
Still, it’s more important what the NYT “did not find”, i.e. any proof of Trump’s alleged “collusion” with Moscow which the Dems are continuing to speculate about even though Special Counsel Robert Mueller dug up no evidence to back these assumptions, the analyst notes.
In response to Trump’s unwillingness to release his tax returns after assuming the Oval Office, MSM observers suggested that the documents may show income from Russian sources or debt owed to Russians which potentially could make the president vulnerable to Moscow’s “influence”.
On 10 July 2020, Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution insisted that “once in office, Trump proceeded to do things that raised suspicions about his relationship with Russia”. She claimed that there is no other way to answer whether the president “has been propped up by Russian money” than making his tax returns public.
However, the NYT’s review of the president’s financial documents has apparently hammered the final nail into the Dems’ “Trump-Russia collusion” story, according to Ortel: “Mueller and the New York York Times have failed to produce any evidence of Russian support, state or otherwise, to the Trump political campaign or enterprises”, he stresses.
“The decision to target Trump for theoretical illegal links to Russia clearly seems to be ‘gaslighting’ – bleating these scurrilous charges to distract from actual corruption involving a host of foreign powers going all the way back to Bill Clinton’s days as Arkansas governor forward to the present”, Ortel says referring to the “pay-to-play” scheme allegedly established by the Clinton Foundation.
NYT ‘Disclosure’ Won’t Make Trump Release His Returns
Trump’s tax returns leak bears some resemblance to what happened to Richard Nixon in 1973: nearly two years ago Politico referred to a scenario in which the president could be forced to release his tax returns.
“Disclosing confidential tax information is a felony”, the magazine wrote on 23 December 2018. “If Democrats can’t release Trump’s returns publicly, then they can’t discuss anything they see in them without putting themselves in legal jeopardy”.
The media outlet recollected that in 1973 The Washington Post and The New York Times launched a series of reports raising the question of whether President Nixon “grossly underpaid” what he owed the government.
In October 1973, the Providence Journal-Bulletin obtained Nixon’s tax returns, and released a “blockbuster report” indicating that the president paid just $792.81 in federal income taxes in 1970 and $878.03 in 1971. Nixon submitted to media pressure and agreed to make his tax returns public to restore “the confidence of the American people in the integrity of the president”. However, it did not help Nixon much amid a series of scandals which prompted him to resign on 9 August 1974 in the middle of his second term.
So, will the NYT article about Trump’s tax records affect the president in the same way and force him to publish his returns to clear the air before the election? If this was the trick it did not work, according to Ortel.
“I suspect he will not release any tax return information until, at the earliest, after the election”, the Wall Street analyst presumes. “This decision will further enrage Never Trumpers, but not lessen the enthusiasm that his base has to win re-election for Donald J. Trump”.
As our (un)civil war escalates towards the real thing, America is in throes of unrest unlike any in its history
By Michael Rectenwald | RT | October 5, 2020
Nearly two thirds of Americans believe the US is on course for civil war. One third now support political violence. The first Civil War’s death toll won’t be beaten, but the second’s nation-destroying potential will be unequalled.
The American left and right no longer inhabit a common moral universe. In fact, that imagined universe does not exist. The old, cherished political notions no longer apply, if they ever did. Not only are the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ complete misnomers under the current configuration, but the players are not as they seem, or as they are made out to seem.
First, Trump is hardly the stereotypical right-wing despot that the ‘resistance’ makes him out to be, his rough demeanor and coarse rhetoric notwithstanding. At the same time, the Democrats are hardly the vaunted champions of the ‘working class’ as imagined under the old dispensation. Instead, the resistance to Trump is actually led by an entrenched political establishment, although their supporters apparently remain unimpressed by this minor detail.
Take a look at this ironic and unlikely political alignment. It should go a long way toward understanding the perturbations throwing the nation into convulsions. The resistance includes the Democratic Party machine, the loyal Democratic Party voters, the ‘never-Trumpers’ among the Republican establishment, the permanent bureaucracy or ‘deep state’, the riotous Antifa and Black Lives Matter foot soldiers, and, but for a few isolated and dwindling islands, the entirety of the mainstream media. Given its uncontested hegemony, this establishment-backed resistance inhabits a parallel universe of its own making and projects a fabricated simulacrum as reality.
The resistance establishment controls the official narrative, which includes a few prominent elements: the tropes that Trump is an inveterate liar, a huckster profiting from his incumbency, and a criminal who is committing unspeakable (and undiscoverable) crimes against the nation and humanity at large. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the Speaker of the House, went so far as to call Trump, the sitting president, an “enemy of the state.” This establishment resistance routinely declares Trump a dictator. It now asserts as an incontrovertible article of faith that he will refuse to vacate the White House should he lose the upcoming election.
The death of civility
Despite its own chicanery and possible criminality, the resistance establishment is so sure that its success is guaranteed that Hillary Clinton boldly urged Joe Biden not to concede the election under any circumstances. Rumors have even been floated that a contingent of military generals are prepared to remove Trump from the presidential domicile, if or when it comes to that. And now, since Trump contracted the coronavirus, Democratic Party leaders, a frothing media, and ardent party supporters have been unable to contain their glee at the prospect of his early demise.
As an indication that ‘civility’ is a thing of the past, one may point to the recent spate of tweets by Trump haters openly wishing for his death by Covid. Such posts became so prevalent and glaring that Twitter was forced to introduce a new policy declaring that any tweets wishing for the death of a politician would be removed. Conspicuously missing was any mention of even temporarily banning tweeters who infringe the policy. Such banning is routine for pro-Trump posters – and for far lesser infractions – if they are not contrived by the tech giant in the first place.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are routinely caricatured as a reactionary and irredeemably racist band of blind loyalists, including a significant contingent of white supremacists willing and already engaging in acts of racist violence. Even as Antifa and Black Lives Matter rampage and riot, leaving rubble in their wake, rightwing extremists, we are told, are the greatest domestic threat to national tranquility.
A very American coup?
At the same time, Trump Republicans and their few allies in an otherwise overwhelmingly Democrat-favored corporate media point to a growing body of evidence that a coup has been ongoing since before Trump assumed power. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, recently alleged in a letter published by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), just hours before the first (and perhaps last) presidential debate, that Hillary Clinton orchestrated “a campaign plan to stir up a scandal” – by linking Trump to Russia in 2016. The letter also claims that then-President Barack Obama knew about her intent and role in the contrived affair and did nothing to prevent his former secretary of state from ordering up the concoction.
While the resistance hurls an endless series of increasingly outrageous accusations and epithets at Trump, pro-Trump forces in the state nevertheless continue to pile up dirt on the Democrats and their assets in the permanent bureaucracy. For example, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s investigations into the ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation of the Trump team’s supposed collusion with Russia has revealed evidence that a Russian asset, suspected by the CIA of being a spy, was the underlying source for the “dirty dossier” that prompted the FBI investigation. The committee has pointed to evidence that former FBI Director James Comey knew the dossier was unsubstantiated garbage peddled by a gutter-sniping mercenary hack when he or his staff members submitted FISA applications.
Added to this, the Department of Justice has since reported that more than two dozen phones belonging to members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team were “accidentally” wiped clean of data before the Justice Department’s inspector general could comb them for records.
Ironically, the Senate Judiciary Committee has also asserted that the son of former VP and current presidential candidate Joe Biden, namely Hunter Biden, actually engaged in a kind of ‘Russian collusion’ – when he received a whopping 3.5 million dollars from Elena Baturina, the wife of the corrupt former mayor of Moscow. Hunter Biden then allegedly funneled a part of these funds into human trafficking and prostitution rings. This alleged swindle, gained on the basis of his father’s influence peddling, would be added to the vast sums reportedly collected from corrupt oligarchs in Ukraine, China, and elsewhere.
All of these claims are either scoffed at and deemed conspiracies prima facie, or simply memory-holed by a complicit press. Nothing, it appears, will ever come of any of them.
Meanwhile, the vastly outflanked pro-Trump camp maintains that the attempted coup extends to the upcoming presidential election. Fears are escalating that the Democratic Party’s election machinery has already been set in motion, harvesting fraudulent or otherwise invalid mail-in ballots in favor of Biden. These deep misgivings are compounded by early reports of dumped and discarded ballots for Trump.
Anarchy in the USA
Among the ground forces in both camps, some informed and some merely inflamed by baseless rhetoric, hostility has reached fever pitch. According to Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service, 83 percent of Americans believe that behavior once considered unacceptable is now deemed acceptable in the political sphere. Apparently, this behavior includes violence and threats of violence. Other studies found that 61 percent Americans polled believe the country is headed inexorably towards civil war. Other reports indicate that a nearly equal number of Democrats and Republicans (33 percent and 34 percent, respectively) believe that violence will be justified if their side loses the impending presidential election, up from just eight percent on both sides who believed that three years ago.
The ‘left’ justifies its campaign of violence given the supposedly disproportionate unjustified police violence against blacks. The ‘right’ justifies its pondered response as necessary self-defense and defense of the nation after months of almost unhampered rampages.
Surging gun sales across the country suggest that many Americans fear continued and increasing conflict. First-time gun and ammunition purchases have reached an all-time high. One might reasonably suppose that potential counter measures from pro-Trump ground forces are being seriously contemplated. The prospect of a protracted election controversy has both camps suggesting that they’re booted up and ready for action. Any state response to such action, on the other hand, remains unclear. Who, after all, will have the authority to direct state police forces if Democrats and their supporters claim that Trump’s ‘occupation’ of the White House is illegitimate?
Pro-Trump pundits warn that the violence coming from ‘leftists’ since May has only been a warm-up act for November 3 and beyond. There are so many related and somewhat disparate theories being floated that one’s head is left spinning. But suffice to say, anyone the least bit cognizant of the state of affairs is bracing for a massive confrontation.
‘Things fall apart’
The current and looming strife is demoralizing in the extreme, especially given the utterly incommensurable accounts held by the opposing sides. It is especially alarming to me, living as I do in urban Pennsylvania – a ‘swing state’ with the potential to be a center of a disputed election result that looks to tip over into open mortal combat. I plan on voting in the early morning, then driving immediately to another, probably uncontested, state.
The alarming state of affairs has led me to revisit a harrowing poem by William Butler Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’. The first stanza captures the temper and pitch of the moment so well that I quote in its entirety:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
I met my first grandchild for the first time the other day. And I wept with trepidation for his future.
Michael Rectenwald is an author of ten books, including the most recent, Beyond Woke. He was Professor of Liberal Arts at NYU from 2008 through 2019. Follow him on Twitter @TheAntiPCProf
UN Venezuela Report Omits US Human Rights Violations
By Leonardo Flores | MintPress News | October 2, 2020
On September 23, María Eugenia Russián, president of Fundalatin, Venezuela’s oldest human rights organization, testified to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and decried an attempt by a UNHRC fact-finding mission to erase people who were “lynched, burned alive, decapitated and murdered by extremist sectors of the Venezuelan opposition.” This fact-finding mission had published a report a week earlier that generated sensationalist headlines of “crimes against humanity” and painted a bleak picture of the situation in Venezuela.
However, the 400+ page report has been found to contain serious flaws and omissions, leading to charges that it politicizes human rights – a position backed by the Venezuelan government. But it’s not just Venezuela that has taken issue with the report: Argentina’s ambassador to the Organization of American States denounced it as “biased” and noted that “human rights are not an instrument for taking political positions.”
A parallel mission and attack on multilateralism
Moreover, even the formation of the fact-finding mission is suspect. Since 2017, Venezuela has been working with a different UN institution, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), to strengthen its capacity to guarantee human rights. This cooperation has led to technical agreements and to visits by the OHCHR to Venezuela.
Yet despite – or perhaps because – of this cooperation, the Lima Group, an ad hoc group of nations dedicated to regime change in Venezuela, maneuvered in the UN Human Rights Council to establish a parallel mission outside of the purview of the OHCHR. In the September 2019 debate prior to the founding of this mission, Russián said that it “seeks to thwart the advances between the Office of the High Commissioner and the Venezuelan state, hindering and duplicating its efforts.” She also made a prescient comment: “[the mission] will generate major headlines but will not contribute to resolving the situation.”
Several Venezuelan human rights organizations, including the Venezuelan Association of Jurists (AVJ), denounced the formation of the mission and the subsequent report as an attack on multilateralism. The AVJ notes that according to UN General Assembly Resolution 60/251, “the promotion and protection of human rights should be based on the principles of cooperation and genuine dialogue and aimed at strengthening the capacity of Member States.”
Neither of these principles were adhered to in the report, which means that the fact-finding mission violated the United Nation’s own guidelines. This contrasts severely with the latest update on Venezuela from the OHCHR, which notes that technical cooperation between Venezuela and the UN has led to progress in investigating 93 alleged cases of extrajudicial killings or excessive use of force, as well as the pardoning of 110 prisoners.
Flawed methodology, biased sources and egregious omissions
The first thing to note about the report is that the authors are all from countries that support Guaidó. One of them, Francisco Cox, has close ties to the Chilean Foreign Minister (Chile is one of the Latin American countries leading the charge against Venezuela). In an interview with journalist Anya Parampil, Chilean analyst Esteban Silva noted that Cox “is part of an operation against the government of Venezuela.”
Venezuelan human rights organization Sures considers that the report “lacks academic rigor” as the mission did not step foot in Venezuela “and as such never had direct access to the sources it consulted, including the victims, government officials and official records.” Lending credence to the claim of a lack of rigor is the fact that more than 50% of the report’s sources were links to social and digital media, while just 5% were NGOs.
Misión Verdad, an independent group of Venezuelan investigative journalists and analysts, wrote an exposé of the sources used in the report and found that one of these NGOs, COFAVIC (Committee of Relatives of Victims of the Caracazo), receives USAID funds and has ties to Human Rights Watch, which supports regime change and the brutal US sanctions. None of the NGOs the fact-finding mission contacted even mentioned the case of Orlando Figuera, a young Black man burned alive by anti-government protestors, which has arguably been the most infamous violation of human rights in Venezuela in recent years.
If the report were interested in balance, it would have cited or contacted Venezuelan human rights groups that document right-wing violence at protests and the devastating effects of U.S. sanctions. Five such organizations were contacted for this article: Fundalatin, AJV, Sures, Género con Clase (Gender with Class), and the Committee of Victims of the Guarimba and Ongoing Coup (guarimba is the term used for violent opposition protests in 2013, 2014 and 2017). None of them ever heard from the “independent” mission.
While victims like Figuera are ignored, another detailed critique by Misión Verdad documents the repeated “whitewashing” of political actors linked to violence by presenting them as victims. As analyst Joe Emersberger notes, the report’s treatment of opposition figure Leopoldo López ignores the leading role he has played in destabilizing Venezuela since 2002. López’s regime change strategy in 2014, ‘La Salida’, sparked opposition violence that resulted in the decapitation of Elvis Durán; he was riding a motorcycle down a street booby trapped by protestors with barbed wire. López’s name appears 61 times in the report; Durán’s does not appear at all.
As tragic as it is that a UN mission would engage in the erasure of victims of human rights violations perpetrated by government opponents, these are not even the most glaring omissions in the report. There are two ongoing mass violations of the human rights of all Venezuelans: the violent destabilization of the country by foreign and domestic actors, and the brutal U.S. sanctions. For Gisela Jiménez of Género con Clase, an organization that focuses on the rights of women and sexual diversity, currently the biggest challenge to the rights of Venezuelans is “the threat to the right to live in peace.” Russián of Fundalatin dates the biggest violation of human rights to March 2015, when then-President Obama characterized Venezuela as an “unusual and extraordinary threat” to the United States. Since then, she notes, ”the Venezuelan people have been subjected to violations of their right to health and even the right to life, due to the embargo and the obstruction of imports of medicine, food and supplies.”
The report in the context of a hybrid war
Beyond the bias and politicization of the report, what perhaps damns it most is how it is being used. The omissions on the impact of coups and sanctions enable regime change operatives such as Elliott Abrams, U.S. special representative for Iran and Venezuela, to cite the report as evidence of crimes against humanity while, in the same breath, threatening to cut off Venezuela’s diesel supplies, which has drawn widespread condemnation from NGOs across the political spectrum for the devastating effect it would have on the Venezuelan people.
The report was similarly used by Senators Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin, who referenced it in a letter to the European Union in which they expressed “deep concern” over EU talks with the Maduro government and urged the EU to not monitor Venezuela’s parliamentary elections. This blatant attempt at interfering in and attempting to delegitimize Venezuela’s elections went uncovered by mainstream media, which focused all of their attention on the UNHCR report.
Furthermore, the timing of the report was also suspect, coming just a week before the 2020 UN General Assembly. Its purpose in this regard is clear: to add fuel to the fire in Venezuela and to shift the spotlight from U.S. allies with their own human rights issues. The timely release allowed Colombian president Duque and Chilean president Piñera to cite it and Venezuela in their general assembly speeches. In Colombia, 64 massacres have taken place this year alone, while the Piñera government in Chile was almost brought down by his government’s excessive use of force against peaceful protestors. Yet it was Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó who made the headlines, invoking the report while calling on the international community to exercise its “responsibility to protect” in a YouTube webinar on the sidelines of the General Assembly. The responsibility to protect is a doctrine used as the justification for military aggressions against Libya and Syria, among others.
The fact-finding mission has produced a document that is currently being employed in the furtherance of sanctions, electoral interference and threats of war. To put it another way, the UNHCR report on the human rights of Venezuelans will likely lead to even more suffering for Venezuelans. In the words of Fundalatin President Russián, the threat to the human rights of Venezuelans “becomes graver because of the behavior by powerful states, who in the name of human rights, seek a foreign military intervention in Venezuela.”
Iran Does Not Care about US Election Result: Spokesman
Al-Manar | October 5, 2020
It does not matter for Iran who will win the upcoming presidential election in the US, Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said, noting that there is a clear path for Washington to reverse its hostile policies against Tehran.
“It is not important at all what is said inside the election campaigns in the US. Our criterion is the (UNSC) Resolution (2231) and the JCPOA,” Saeed Khatibzadeh told Tasnim at a press conference on Monday, when asked about the reports that the election campaign of US Democratic candidate Joe Biden has cited a change in the timing of the JCPOA articles after the US’ withdrawal from the deal.
Trump has pulled the US out of the JCPOA and has brazenly displayed his signature on the withdrawal order, the spokesman deplored. “It does not make much difference which party takes the power (in the US). If the US intends to return to the correct path, the road is clear.”
Washington must admit to making a mistake, stop the economic war and terrorism against Iran, return to its JCPOA commitments, and make up for the damages caused by its withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal, the Iranian spokesman added.
In remarks in September, Iran’s permanent representative and ambassador to the United Nations Majid Takht-Ravanchi said it does not matter to the Islamic Republic who wins the US presidential election as long as Washington has not shifted its unlawful policy of sanctions.
In July, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said no matter who wins the 2020 presidential election in the US, the next American administration must compensate the Islamic Republic for the losses that its predecessor has inflicted on the Iranian people.
“It is not important for us who will win the upcoming election in the US, but it is important for us to see Washington rectify its approach towards Tehran,” Zarif said.
History as Warfare: The ‘1619 Project’ and the Plot to Destroy the Republic
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 4, 2020
“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend, will keep the dogs obedient to the whip, as long as this roof shuts out the sky.”
– Marquis St. Evrémonde (from Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities)
A major cultural fight has broken out between Donald Trump’s recently announced 1776 Commission and the NY Times’ 1619 Project.
While Trump’s commission designed to “promote patriotic history” naively paints over some glaring hypocrisies of American history by placing figures like Hamilton, Jackson, Jefferson and Lincoln in the same boat (thus keeping a bit too much bathwater along with the baby), it does represent an important major cultural battle over the soul of America which is now sitting precariously upon a new civil war, military coup threat and total disintegration.
In his recent Sept. 17 speech attacking the 1619 Project and announcing his 1776 Commission, Trump said quite rightfully:
“Whether it is the mob on the street, or the “cancel culture” in the boardroom, the goal is the same: to silence dissent, to scare you out of speaking the truth, and to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their way of life.
“We are here today to declare that we will never submit to tyranny. We will reclaim our history and our country for citizens of every race, color, religion, and creed.
“The radicals burning American flags want to burn down the principles in our founding documents, including the bedrock principle of equal justice under law. In order to radically transform America, they must first cause Americans to lose confidence in who we are, where we come from, and what we believe…. The left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution.”
Attacking the underpinnings of Critical Race theory which attempts to assert that belief in rational thought, hard work and the nuclear family were the result of “whiteness”, Trump invoked Martin Luther King saying:
“where children are not judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, and the crusade against American history, are toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. It will destroy our country.”
What is the 1619 Project?
The New York Times’ 1619 Project, which was unveiled in June 2019 by Nikole Hannah-Jones, attempts to smear the entirety of American history as simply a slave-promoting fraud from the moment the first slave arrived in Jonestown in 1619.
During its short existence, this “project” has quickly won over thousands of academics, and in spite of its proven fallacies (which it had to secretly cover up in Orwellian fashion), Jones was still awarded the Pulitzer Prize legitimizing the fraud in the minds of countless school administrators, policy-makers and academics.
If one truly accepts the claims of the 1619 Project which have become turned into a Pulitzer curriculum and already embedded in 4500 U.S. schools, then America’s dissolution would be no great loss to the world. In fact, one would have to conclude that since the republic was always built upon the defense of slavery (going so far as to paint the British Empire as an anti-slavery bastion which the founding fathers broke away from only due to their fear of having their slaves removed), then America was always… evil.
The First Paradox
If it were true that the creation of the American republic was just driven by a desire to protect the institution of slavery from the abolition-loving British then it should be asked: why did every American state shut down the African slave trade by 1793??”
Don’t believe me? Let the facts speak for themselves.
By 1784, six states in the new nation had voted to totally abolish slavery (Rhode Island in 1774, Vermont in 1777, Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts in 1781, New Hampshire in 1783 and Connecticut in 1784), while the importation of all new slaves was banned by every other state by 1793. The important Northwest Ordinances passed in the 1787 Continental Congress ensured that no slavery would be permitted in the immense North West Territories (giving rise to the later addition of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin as free states). This agreement was established during the 1774 Continental Congress where a non-importation act was signed by all colonies stating: “That we will neither import, nor purchase any slave imported, after the first day of December next; after which time, we will wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.”
Another Paradox
If Britain was threatening to end the slave trade as the 1619 Project authors teach, then why did the Empire override dozens of petitions from the colonies between 1650-1765 demanding an end to slavery? Rather than oppose slavery, the British Royal Africa Company, under the direction of the Privy Council, and Board of Trade enforced the mass important of 8 million African slaves into the Americas during the 18th century alone! These same organizations constantly strove to destroy all efforts to establish manufacturing within the colonies from 1630-1765 which everyone knew was the only effective pathway to liberating a society from reliance on slave labor.
Additionally, IF it were true that the 1776 revolution were driven by the intent to protect the slave economy from the freedom-loving British Empire, then why did England only ban slavery in 1807 and why did they wait until 1833 to begin extending this ban across their colonies?? Did the founding fathers have a crystal ball and act on events that would occur only 65 years in the future? If the British truly hated slavery so much, then why did the empire maintain a global system of subjugation, famine and exploitation across Asia, Ireland and beyond for so many generations?
So what happened? Was the British Empire seriously pushing an anti-slavery agenda? Why did America’s anti-slave trajectory fall apart so soon after the revolution and why did the rot spread to the point of necessitating a Civil War by 1861?
How to proceed with a serious investigation?
The Matter of Money
Since one of the most effective keys to understanding history starts with the question of “who controls the money”, economics is a good place to start.
Approaching the matter this way will cause the inquiring mind to confront the battle between two opposing paradigms of statecraft which defined the world in which the American revolution arose as part of an international phenomenon involving leaders from Russia, France, Germany, Ireland, Spain, India and Morocco.
The battle over what sort of system of economics would govern America after political independence was achieved in 1783 will here become a very valuable question.
Where certain players of that age believed that “value” should be locked into rules of money-worship and profit (which all people desired since money bought pleasure and helped us avoid pain), others disagreed and believed value should be looked for elsewhere. These others believed that value transcended matters of pleasure/pain and touched upon something less transient and more universal… but what?
Introducing Ben Franklin
During the 18th century, these latter forces centered themselves around the figure of America’s “father of founding fathers” Benjamin Franklin who drafted some of the most important policies that led to the sovereign control over currency from his 1729 On the Necessity for a Paper Currency, onwards. Franklin used his powerful printing presses to spread both sovereign banking and anti-slavery pamphlets, books and treatises for decades before the revolution itself was declared in 1775. One of the most powerful anti-slavery books printed by Franklin was the influential 1737 ‘All Slave Keepers Who Keep the Innocent in Bondage’ by Benjamin Lay which argued that any Christian keeping slaves was an offense against God.
Lay wrote: “No greater sin Hell can invent than to prophane and blaspheme the pure and Holy Truth, which is God all in all, and remove God’s creatures made after his own image, from all the comforts of life and their country… and bring them into all the miseries that dragons, serpents, devils and hypocrites can procure and think of”.
In the mind of Franklin and his co-thinkers these issues (economics and slavery) represented two sides of the same fight.
Franklin argued in his many writings that “value” originated in what you create that satisfies the needs of humanity, and not what “things” you possess or wish to consume. Since a society of creators/producers requires sovereign manufacturing to generate real wealth and constant internal improvements of infrastructure to coordinate the development of all parts of a nation under a unified intention, Franklin recognized clearly that the production generated by “slave labor” is a chimera and actually represented a form of “anti-value”. Like heroine consumption today, anti-value simply means any form of “momentary profits” that might even be measurable as GDP and generate money flows, but actually represents a destruction of that society’s ability to sustain its own existence over time. (1)
The reason for this is simple.
Slavery destroys the creative powers of mentation in both the laboring slave who is valued only for their animal labor, and also the decadent slave master who’s potential for creativity becomes narrowly defined by ways to keep the slave under control.
It is thus no coincidence that Franklin also created the anti-slavery alliance in the 1760s and later founded the 1785 Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves” alongside several of his devoted proteges. These proteges included the figures of Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Gouvernor Morris who all happened to become the creators and leaders of the “American System of political economy” premised on the use of a national bank, productive credit, protective tariffs, and large scale manufacturing to promote the economic sovereignty of the new nation. I introduced some of this in my recent essay How to Save a Dying Republic: Hamilton’s Genius.
When Jefferson took control of the Presidency from 1801-1809, a major victory was won for the pro-slavery oligarchs of America who saw immense profits to be gained by spreading their peculiar form of society under a perverse form of Manifest Destiny.
Admittedly, these oligarchs would have been much happier with the victory of Aaron Burr to the presidency in 1801 since an immediate dissolution of the union would have occurred between slave and free states as early as 1804 (to be discussed in a future essay). Unlike Burr, Jefferson was at least against breaking up the Union into northern and southern confederacies (with the free states merging with Canada and the slave states becoming their own nation), and that is why Hamilton (Jefferson’s political nemesis) ironically organized aggressively for his victory winning the fatal ire of Burr.
Sadly, Jefferson’s devout belief in agrarianism, hate for manufacturing, love of slavery, and British enlightenment thinking still made him an instrument for the slave power’s cancerous growth during his terms in office.
The British Empire’s Global Game
By destroying Indian textiles and subduing the “Chinese dragon” with a program of mass opium consumption that would stain the 19th century, the City of London quickly took control of world textile manufactures which created a primary export market for southern slave plantation cotton and a new set of addictions began: the addiction to the easy money derived from cheap slave labor. This proto globalization established a global closed system of controls onto all nations through cash cropping, free trade, speculation and drugs.
By 1840 over 20% of the British population was employed in textiles under such anti-human conditions that Charles Dickens described in his Tale of Two Cities and other writings.
The Best of Times and Worst of Times
With the 1804 murder of Hamilton, and undermining of America’s national credit system between 1804-1836, British free trade grew as protective tariffs were taken down, and credit towards infrastructure projects like the Erie Canal, roads, rail, etc shriveled up. Speculation ran rampant whenever this monetarist system was unleashed driven by booms and busts and the rise of “state-rights” programs that superseded all national initiatives. This process was taken directly from classic divide to conquer tactics which I outlined in my last essay Lincoln and the Greenbacks.
An astute Whig economist looking upon this bipolar process in America (while comparing it to the depressingly stagnant Canadian economic situation of 1791-1850) stated in 1853:
“Though the ratio of the increase of the population has been greater in Canada than in the United States, yet their increase of wealth has barely kept pace with the population, and they are as poor as they were half a century since. They have enjoyed the blessings of Free Trade with England all the time, we have only a part of the time. Whenever we have attempted to supply ourselves by our own industry, with the comforts and necessaries of life, we have improved our condition as a people; and during the intervals of Free Trade and large importations of foreign goods, we have relapsed again into a condition bordering on bankruptcy; while the Canadians have been constantly exhausted, and kept so poor by Free Trade, as to be unable to get sufficient credit to have even the ups and downs of prosperity and bankruptcy in succession.” (2)
The Slave Power Spreads
By 1836, the 2nd National Bank was officially killed after a mass propaganda campaign convinced a duped mob that it was an instrument of tyranny in America, and over the coming 6 decades, the only five presidents who would make any serious effort towards reviving America’s nationalist system would end up dead while in office (Harrison in 1841, Taylor in 1850, Lincoln in 1865, Garfield in 1880, and McKinley in 1901). The man who is today celebrated for having “killed the bank” and “paying Americas debts” was in reality a force of pure destruction. Jackson “paid the debt” by cutting all infrastructure projects and unleashing mass speculation which resulted in a devastating 1837 bank panic that drove the nation into discord and depression. An unrepentant racist, Jackson also gave enormous assistance to the slavocracy by emptying the southern lands of Cherokee in the genocidal “Trail of Tears” and giving the land over to cotton planting oligarchs loyal only to their profits, “way of life” and the British Empire.
This story is told in all of its ugly detail in historian Michael Kirsch’s groundbreaking 2012 study “How Andrew Jackson Destroyed the United States”.
Between 1801 to 1840, southern cotton exports exploded from 100,000 bales/year to 1 million bales/year with 80% of the exports going to Britain. The City of London-Wall Street-New Orleans triangle dominated the world system with New Orleans representing over 12% of all U.S. banking capital. The southern slave states grew to represent the world’s fourth biggest economy through the support of the British Empire both financially and also in the logistical support needed to import mass slavery into the Americas. This degeneration proceeded slowly until the presidencies of Jackson and his handler Martin van Buren, but after this, cotton exports increased to 4 million bales/year by 1860 and the slave power grew immensely under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 that ensured the spread of slavery west of Mississippi.
While many radical abolitionists in the USA and British Canada then advocated the dissolution of the union as an alternative to civil war, stronger souls like Frederick Douglass recognized the higher historic fight at hand. As a lesson to modern anarchists who believe in the 1619 Project and feel no sorrow at the burning of America under a new civil war today, Douglass took the time to research history, and broke with William Lloyd Garrison (the leader of the abolitionist movement) defending the Constitution in 1852:
“I differ from those who charge this baseness on the framers of the Constitution of the United States. It is a slander upon their memory… In that instrument [the U.S. Constitution] I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing; but interpreted, as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a Glorious Liberty Document. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? Is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? It is neither. While I do not intend to argue this question on the present occasion, let me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slaveholding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it”.
This higher understanding of history and the principles of the Constitution caused Douglass to ally himself with Lincoln where he worked with all his might to recruit 200,000 black soldiers to the cause. Later in life, Douglass attacked British free trade and “cheap labor” in defense of the Nationalist system writing in 1871:
“Cheap Labor, is a phrase that has no cheering music for the masses. Those who demand it, and seek to acquire it, have but little sympathy with common humanity. It is the cry of the few against the many. When we inquire who are the men that are continually vociferating for cheap labor, we find not the poor, the simple, and the lowly; not the class who dig and toil for their daily bread; not the landless, feeble, and defenseless portion of society, but the rich and powerful, the crafty and scheming, those who live by the sweat of other men’s faces.”
The British Hand Behind the Civil War
During the entirety of the Civil War, the British Empire’s guiding hand could always be felt, from supplying the south with battle ships, weapons and finances to providing logistic and diplomatic support internationally. Even British Canada was given over to the Confederacy’s intelligence headquarters which deployed spying, money laundering, and terrorist operations against the Union during the entire war.
Speaking to the British Parliament, Lord Robert Cecil (Marquis of Salisbury) expressed Britain’s logic succinctly when he said in 1861:
“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…. With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.”
A future installment will tackle the role of British operations in Canada that organized the murder of Lincoln, sabotaged the industrial reconstruction of the South, and undid the internationalization of Lincoln’s system around the world during the 19-20th centuries. This sabotage of potential created the foundations for the creature embedded within America now organizing a new Civil War and dissolution of the republic once and for all.
The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com
(1) In the minds of those dirigistes like Franklin (including the Colbertist school of France, and its international leaders like Jonathon Swift, Daniel Dafoe, and Cotton Mathers in America who all wrote pamphlets supporting manufacturing over slave labor), a machine produced by the creative mind of man can accomplish the work of 100 laborers- thus liberating those laborers from the demands of the material forces of nature and freeing them to develop their powers of mind.
(2) Ezra Champion Seaman, Essays on the Progress of Nations (1853), p. 599
Will Lebanon be the next US-NATO humanitarian war?
By Steven Sahiounie | Mideast discourse | October 2, 2020
The waters off Lebanon are the scene of a gathering Armada of French and American naval ships. What appeared at first to be a humanitarian response to the devastating Beirut Port explosion on August 4, is now feared to be the prelude of the next US-NATO humanitarian war.
French President Emmanuel Macron blamed Hezbollah and all of the Lebanese politicians Sunday and warned of a new civil war. “I’m ashamed of the Lebanese political leaders. Ashamed,” Macron repeated.
He accused them of “collective betrayal” while putting their parties and personal greed above the needs of the Lebanese people.
Some political observers now believe that Lebanon may well be going the way of Somalia, as evidenced by the characteristics of a failing state, such as lack of governance, corruption and incompetence, chronic humanitarian problems, and persistent social tensions.
Prime minister-designate Moustapha Adib stepped down September 26, and Lebanon’s Central Bank reserves may soon dry up and the government would no longer be able to subsidize basic goods such as fuel, medicine, and wheat.
Macron has been pressing Lebanese politicians to form a Cabinet made up of technocrats that can work on urgent reforms, and Macron has traveled twice to Beirut since August 4, while making it a personal mission to try to repair the devastated country, which some see as a neo-colonial farce.
Macron criticized the Lebanese system of sectarian politics, “as if competence was linked to religious confession.”
He lambasted Hezbollah demanding to know its characteristics and identity, and he criticized Lebanese political leaders from all parties and dynasties. Each Lebanese faction has found a foreign godfather and has ended up as a pawn in a regional and international chess game. Tens of billions of dollars have reportedly been looted by politicians and deposited in European and American banks.
US-NATO Humanitarian wars
In 1999 NATO updated its ‘Strategic Concept’ to allow members to defend not only other members but also conduct ‘non-Article 5 Response Operations’. It would be under this mechanism that a US-NATO military operation, along with an Arab Gulf coalition, would be used to attack, invade and defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Since 2002, it was agreed that NATO forces could be sent “wherever they are needed,” regardless of the location, and in 2006 the NATO Response Force (NRF) of 25,000 troops has been fully operational.
US President Bill Clinton and NATO waged the humanitarian war on the former Yugoslavia, which broke a larger nation into ‘bite-sized’ pieces.
Critics of the US-NATO bombing of Yugoslavia have argued that certain attacks forming part of the campaign violated international humanitarian law. Noam Chomsky argued that the main objective of the US-NATO war was to force Yugoslavia into the Western economic system since it was the only country in the region that stood alone in defiance of the US world domination.
Hezbollah targeted by US-NATO war machine
Hezbollah’s prominence in the Lebanese government caused foreign donors and investors to stay away, because of US sanctions targeted on anyone with ties to the group, based on their designation as a terrorist group.
Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, said on Tuesday, “We welcomed President Macron when he visited Lebanon and we welcomed the French initiative, but not for him to be judge, jury and executioner, and ruler of Lebanon.”
Nasrallah has headed the group since 1992 as Secretary-General; however, its military wing is considered as a terrorist organization in 21 countries, as well as by the Arab League and the European Union.
Hezbollah’s 1985 manifesto listed its objectives as the expulsion of “the Americans, the French and their allies definitely from Lebanon, putting an end to any colonialist entity on our land”.
In 2008, the Lebanese government unanimously recognized Hezbollah’s existence as an armed organization and guarantees its right to “liberate or recover occupied lands”.
Hezbollah is an armed resistance group, as well as a political party that has seats in Parliament through free and fair elections. Their ally in Parliament is the ‘Amal Movement’, and together they hold the majority of Parliamentary seats. In a democracy, the majority rules and this is why recently Hezbollah and Amal insisted on choosing the Finance minister, which became a conflict point in the view of Macron.
Hezbollah is resisting the Israeli occupation of Shebaa Farms, an area in the far south of Lebanon. Moreover, Hezbollah also is resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine. At one time, all of the Arab world demanded the rights for the Palestinian people, who have lived under brutal military occupation since 1948, and the UN has ratified resolutions calling for a 2-state solution, where Palestine would be given the land of the 1967 borders, and both Israel and Palestine would live side by side in peace.
In 2017, Ron Prosor, former Israeli ambassador to the UN said Hezbollah was then “10 times as strong now as it was in 2006, and its military infrastructure permeates Lebanon.” He added that Lebanese President Michel Aoun has also “embraced” Hezbollah’s arsenal as “a principal element of Lebanon’s defense.”
Many critics tried to blame Hezbollah for the Beirut Port blast on August 4, but the Lebanese officials and locals admitted that Hezbollah had no access to the Port, or authority over it. Even officials known to be antagonistic of Hezbollah admitted that the blame would not plausibly stick on Hezbollah. The exact cause is not known, but it may have been an accident borne of corruption and ineptitude, or it could be sabotage, according to President Michel Aoun. MP Machnouck, member of the Sunni-led ‘Future Party’ stated he was convinced Israel was responsible.
The elimination of Hezbollah is Israel’s top priority
A former director of Israel’s Counter-Terrorism Bureau, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Nuriel, said that another war between Israel and Hezbollah was “only a question of time.”
Hezbollah is the only force that Israel has faced that has caused the Israeli Defense Forces to retreat without success. Defeating Hezbollah is a top Israeli priority.
Under the Obama Administration’s Middle Eastern policy, Iran became a negotiations partner, while pressuring Israel to conclude a peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Netanyahu recently gave a virtual speech to the UN Security Council, in which he displayed a detailed map of Beirut, and he predicted the location of where a future explosion would occur, and he blamed Hezbollah for having a weapons factory and warehouse at the location, which was a residential area. During the Netanyahu speech, Nasrallah was also giving a live televised speech in Lebanon and was told what Netanyahu had claimed. He immediately invited all media to go to the location that Netanyahu portrayed in his map, and inspect for themselves if there were any weapons or warehouse present. Later, the media arrived, and live local TV coverage showed that in fact, the location was a cooking gas canister factory. This confirmed the Israeli accusation was false and led experts to assume a direct connection between the Port blast, and the Israeli proposed blast in Netanyahu’s map.
The Israeli occupation of Lebanon
Israel occupied the south of Lebanon for 23 years, during which men, women, and children were imprisoned in Khiam Prison, where they were routinely tortured, abused and many died. Hezbollah aligned with many other Lebanese resistance groups, who resisted the occupation vociferously until Israel gave up and left in 2000. The south of Lebanon is populated by both Shite Muslims and Christians. The steadfastness of Hezbollah is remembered by those Lebanese citizens. However, the North of Lebanon was never occupied and lived free of fear, oppression, and intimidation which may have influenced many Lebanese citizens to either support or reject Hezbollah. As they say, “Your view depends on where your seat is.”
Using ISIS as ground troops by US-NATO
Recently, the Lebanese Army fought fierce battles against Radical Islamic terrorists near Tripoli in the north, in the area of Wadi Khalid.
In 2016, Efraim Inbar, an Israeli scholar, and the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies wrote, “The continuing existence of ISIS serves a strategic purpose,” and added that ISIS “can be a useful tool in undermining” Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia and should not be defeated. He wrote, “Stability is not a value in and of itself. It is desirable only if it serves our interests,” and stressed that the West’s “main enemy” is not ISIS; it is Iran.
Saudi Arabia part of the Coalition against Hezbollah
The King of Saudi Arabia rarely gives speeches; however, he made a televised speech in which he accused Hezbollah of the Beirut Port blast, apparently unaware that that accusation has been debunked. This is the same King who summoned Prime Minister Saad Hariri from Lebanon to be kidnapped and forced to resign in Saudi Arabia. It was President Macron who personally negotiated Hariri’s freedom.
It appears that Saudi Arabia will be among the first Arab countries to send support for a US-NATO attack on Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah.
Steven Sahiounie is an award-winning journalist and political commentator.
US Bipartisan Bill Would Allow Israel Veto on Arms Sales to Arab Countries
Palestine Chronicle | October 4, 2020
Lawmakers at the US House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan bill on Friday that could allow the occupying state of Israel to veto any American arms sales to the Arab countries.
The proposed bill “would require the President to consult with the Israeli government to ensure [qualitative military edge] concerns are settled” in respect to weapons sales to Middle Eastern countries, read a statement by the office of lead sponsor Representative Brad Schneider.
The proposed legislation also asks the US President to inform the Congress of the potential impact of the planned deal on Israel’s military superiority in the region, no later than 60 days after receiving a request to sell arms and military equipment to countries in the Middle East.
Most of the sponsors are members of the Democratic Party, including Jewish lawmakers Schneider, Elaine Luria, Max Rose, Josh Gottheimer, Ted Deutch and Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
The bill came in the aftermath of the UAE-Israel normalization deal on August, under which the UAE would purchase cutting-edge weaponry such as F-35 fighter jets.
Russian Envoy Says Moscow Has No Problem Selling Iran S-400
Al-Manar | October 4, 2020
Russia’s ambassador to Iran said Moscow is open to the delivery of S-400 air defense missile system to Tehran.
In an interview with Resalat daily, Levan Jagarian said Russia has no problem in delivering S-400 missile system to Iran.
The envoy emphasized that the US’ threats would “by no means affect” Russia’s arms cooperation with Iran, according to Tasnim news agency.
“As already announced by the Russian deputy foreign minister, Moscow is not afraid of Washington’s threats, honors its commitments, and is prepared to carefully consider Iran’s proposals for arms purchases after October 18,” Jagarian stated.
He was referring to the date when the UN arms embargo on Iran is going to terminate under the 2015 nuclear agreement and the UNSC Resolution 2231.
Earlier in August, the United Nations Security Council rejected a proposal to indefinitely extend the arms embargo on Iran.
The embargo on conventional arms is due to expire on October 18 under the terms of the Iran nuclear deal, signed in July 2015 and officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
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From the Archives
Examples of hate speech by Israel against Palestine
1. “There is a huge gap between us (Jews) and our enemies, not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience. They are our neighbors here, but it seems as if at a distance of a few hundred meters away, there are people who do not belong to our continent, to our world, but actually belong to a different galaxy.” Israeli president Moshe Katsav. The Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001
2. “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more”…. Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel at the time – August 28, 2000. Reported in the Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000
3. ” [The Palestinians are] beasts walking on two legs.” Menahim Begin, speech to the Knesset, quoted in Amnon Kapeliouk, “Begin and the Beasts”. New Statesman, 25 June 1982.
4. “The Palestinians” would be crushed like grasshoppers … heads smashed against the boulders and walls.” Isreali Prime Minister (at the time) in a speech to Jewish settlers New York Times April 1, 1988
5. “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” Raphael Eitan, Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defence Forces, New York Times, 14 April 1983.
6. “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to.” Golda Maier, March 8, 1969.
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