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The Real Reasons For the Iran Agreement

The Real Reasons For the Iran Agreement

Obama is being praised as a man of peace for the nuclear agreement with Iran. Some are asking if Obama will take the next step and repair US-Russian relations and bring the Ukrainian imbroglio to an end?

If so he hasn’t told Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland or his nominee as Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Paul Selva, or his nominee as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine General Joseph Dunford, or his Secretary of the Air Force, Deborah Lee James.

The other day on Ukrainian TV Victoria Nuland declared that if Russia does not “fulfill its obligations,” by which she means to turn all of Ukraine over to Washington including Crimea, a historical Russian province, “we’re prepared to put more pressure on Russia.” During the past week both of Obama’s nominees to the top military positions told the US Senate that Russia was the main threat to the US, an “existential threat” even. With this level of war rhetoric in play, clearly Obama has no interest in reducing the tensions that Washington has created with Russia.

In my last column I wrote that the agreement with Iran does not mean much, because Washington can renew the sanctions at any time merely by making false charges against Iran. Obama knows this even if Lindsey Graham and John McCain pretend that they don’t know it.

The US and its proxies continue to murder people over a large area of the earth. Clearly Obama is not a man of peace, and neither are his European enablers and the United Nations. So what is the reason for the accommodation with Iran after many years of rabid demonization of a country for no other reason than the country insisted on its rights to nuclear energy granted by the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty?

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Greece’s Lesson For Russia

Greece’s Lesson For Russia

“Greece’s debt can now only be made sustainable through debt relief measures that go far beyond what Europe has been willing to consider so far.” — International Monetary Fund

Greece’s lesson for Russia, and for China and Iran, is to avoid all financial relationships with the West. The West simply cannot be trusted. Washington is committed to economic and political hegemony over every other country and uses the Western financial system for asset freezes, confiscations, and sanctions. Countries that have independent foreign policies and also have assets in the West cannot expect Washington to respect their property rights or their ownership. Washington freezes or steals countries’ assets, or in the case of France imposes multi-billion dollar fines, in order to force compliance with Washington’s policies. Iran, for example, lost the use of $100 billion, approximately one-fourth of the Iranian GDP, for years simply because Iran insisted on its rights under the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Russian journalists are asking me if Obama’s willingness to reach a deal with Iran means there is hope a deal can be reached over Ukraine. The answer is No. Moreover, as I will later explain, the deal with Iran doesn’t mean much as far as Washington is concerned.

Three days ago (July 14) a high ranking military officer, Gen. Paul Selva, the third in about as many days, told the US Senate that Russia is “an existential threat to this nation (the US).” Only a few days prior the Senate had heard the same thing from US Marine commander Joseph Dunford and from the Secretary of the Air Force. A few days before that, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff warned of a Russian “hybrid threat.”

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Retired General: Drones Create More Terrorists Than They Kill, Iraq War Helped Create ISIS

Retired General: Drones Create More Terrorists Than They Kill, Iraq War Helped Create ISIS

Retired Army Gen. Mike Flynn, a top intelligence official in the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, says in a forthcoming interview on Al Jazeera English that the drone war is creating more terrorists than it is killing. He also asserts that the U.S. invasion of Iraq helped create the Islamic State and that U.S. soldiers involved in torturing detainees need to be held legally accountable for their actions.

Flynn, who in 2014 was forced out as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has in recent months become an outspoken critic of the Obama administration’s Middle East strategy, calling for a more hawkish approach to the Islamic State and Iran.

But his enthusiasm for the application of force doesn’t extend to the use of drones. In the interview with Al Jazeera presenter Mehdi Hasan, set to air July 31, the former three star general says: “When you drop a bomb from a drone … you are going to cause more damage than you are going to cause good.” Pressed by Hasan as to whether drone strikes are creating more terrorists than they kill, Flynn says, “I don’t disagree with that.” He describes the present approach of drone warfare as “a failed strategy.”

“What we have is this continued investment in conflict,” the retired general says. “The more weapons we give, the more bombs we drop, that just … fuels the conflict.”

Prior to serving as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Flynn was director of Intelligence for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. During his time in Iraq, Flynn is credited with helping to transform JSOC into an intelligence-driven special forces operation, tailored to fight the insurgency in that country. Flynn was in Iraq during the peak of the conflict there, as intelligence chief to Stanley McChrystal, former general and head of JSOC. When questioned about how many Iraqis JSOC operatives had killed inside the country during his tenure, Flynn would later say, “Thousands, I don’t even know how many.”

 

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Obama Administration Finds New Way to Let Criminal Banks Avoid Consequences

Obama Administration Finds New Way to Let Criminal Banks Avoid Consequences

Three top Democrats are accusing the Department of Housing and Urban Development of quietly removing a key clause in its requirements for taxpayer-guaranteed mortgage insurance in order to spare two banks recently convicted of federal crimes from being frozen out of the lucrative market.

HUD’s action is the latest in a series of steps by federal agencies to eliminate real-world consequences for serial financial felons, even as the Obama administration has touted its efforts to hold banks accountable.

In this sense, the guilty plea has become as meaningless to banks as their other ways of resolving criminal charges: out-of-court settlements, or deferred prosecution agreements. “Too Big to Fail” has morphed into “Too Big to Jail” — and then again, into “Bank Lives Matter.”

Sens. Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Maxine Waters fired off a letter to HUD on Tuesday, saying they believe that the timing of the change was designed to clear the way for two banks recently convicted of federal crimes — JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup — to continue to make Federal Housing Administration-insured loans. Last year, JPMorgan Chase wrote $1.67 billion in FHA loans, and Citi wrote $342 million, according to data from the Congressional Research Service.

On May 20 of this year, JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both entered a guilty pleaon one felony count of conspiring to rig foreign currency exchange trades, the largest market on the globe.

Five days earlier, on May 15, HUD slipped a notice into the Federal Register, seeking to alter its standard loan-level certification form, known as HUD-92900-A. This form must be filled out for lenders to receive FHA insurance, which reimburses them if the homeowner falls into foreclosure.

 

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How Fascist Capitalism Functions: The Case of Greece

How Fascist Capitalism Functions: The Case of Greece

There is democratic capitalism, and there is fascist capitalism. What we have today is fascist capitalism; and the following will explain how it works, using as an example the case of Greece.

Mark Whitehouse at Bloomberg headlined on 27 June 2015, “If Greece Defaults, Europe’s Taxpayers Lose,” and presented his ‘news’ report, which simply assumed that, perhaps someday, Greece will be able to get out of debt without defaulting on it. Other than his unfounded assumption there (which assumption is even in his headline), his report was accurate. Here is what he reported that’s accurate:

He presented two graphs, the first of which shows Greece’s governmental debt to private investors (bondholders) as of, first, December 2009; and, then, five years later, December 2014. This graph shows that, in almost all countries, private investors either eliminated or steeply reduced their holdings of Greek government bonds during that 5-year period. (Overall, it was reduced by 83%; but, in countries such as France, Portugal, Ireland, Austria, and Belgium, it was reduced closer to 100% — all of it.) In other words: by the time of December 2009, word was out, amongst the aristocracy, that only suckers would want to buy it from them, so they needed suckers and took advantage of the system that the aristocracy had set up for governments to buy aristocrats’ bad bets — for governments to be suckers when private individuals won’t. Not all of it was sold directly to governments; much of it went instead indirectly, to agencies that the aristocracy has set up as basically transfer-agencies for passing junk to governments; in other words, as middlemen, to transfer unpayable debt-obligations to various governments’ taxpayers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Framing Iran: Thomas Friedman’s War Wish

Framing Iran: Thomas Friedman’s War Wish

It is stunning to me how well the Iranians, sitting alone on their side of the table, have played a weak hand against the United States, Russia, China, France, Germany and Britain on their side of the table…..

For the past year every time there is a sticking point … it keeps feeling as if it’s always our side looking to accommodate Iran’s needs. I wish we had walked out just once. When you signal to the guy on the other side of the table that you’re not willing to either blow him up or blow him off — to get up and walk away — you reduce yourself to just an equal and get the best bad deal nonviolence can buy. [Emphasis added.]

Friedman glosses over the fact that it is not “him” (foreign minister Javad Zarif perhaps?) who would be blown up in a war against Iran. It would be countless ordinary Iranians, who have done nothing to harm the American people. Those same innocent people would be harmed, admittedly in more subtle ways, if the P5+1 “blew off” Iranian negotiators because that would mean no relief from long-standing U.S.-led sanctions that have devastated the Iranian economy, creating food and medicine shortages among other inhumane consequences. Sanctions are acts of war. Would someone tell Friedman?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

President Obama Accepts Slavery in Order to Win TPP Trade Deal

President Obama Accepts Slavery in Order to Win TPP Trade Deal

This was first reported by Reuters on July 8th, under the headline “Exclusive: U.S. Upgrades Malaysia in Annual Human Trafficking Report.” Reuters announced: “The United States is upgrading Malaysia from the lowest tier on its list of worst human trafficking centers, U.S. sources said on Wednesday, a move that could smooth the way for an ambitious U.S.-led free-trade deal with the Southeast Asian nation and 11 other countries.”

Zach Carter at Huffington Post headlined, later on July 8th, “Obama To Upgrade Malaysia On Human Rights Despite Mass Graves,”  and he reported that U.S. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) issued a statement saying: “If true, this manipulation of Malaysia’s ranking in the State Department’s 2015 TIP report would be a perversion of the trafficking list and undermine both the integrity of this important report as well as the very difficult task of confronting states about human trafficking.” 

 

However, Senator Menendez, himself, has, behind the scenes, pushed for Obama’s TPP and other mammoth ‘trade’ deals, including TTIP and TISA, even despite these deals allowing participating countries to look the other way and not prosecute when international corporations hire killers to assassinate labor union organizers in a given U.S. trade ‘partner’ country. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wikipedia as Propaganda Not History — MH17 as An Example

Wikipedia as Propaganda Not History — MH17 as An Example

Screen Shot 2015-07-08 at 7.17.43 PM

Wikipedia articles are more propaganda than they are historical accounts. And, often, their cited sources are misleading, or even false.

On 15 August 2007, the BBC headlined “Wikipedia Shows CIA Page Edits,” and Jonathan Fildes reported that, “An online tool that claims to reveal the identity of organizations that edit Wikipedia pages has revealed that the CIA was involved in editing entries.” I.e.: What the CIA doesn’t like, they can (and do) eliminate or change.

More recently, on 25 June 2015, an anonymous reddit poster, “moose,” listed and linked directly to 18 different news reports, in such media as New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, Mirror, Guardian, and Newsweek, reporting about wikipedia edits that were supplied not only by the CIA but by other U.S. Government offices, and by large corporations. That person opened with a news report which implicated Wikipedia itself, “Wikipedia honcho caught in scandal quits, defends paid edits,” in which Wikipedia’s own corruption was discussed. Most of the other news reports there concerned unpaid edits by employees at CIA, congressional and British parliamentary offices, the DCRI (French equivalent of the U.S. CIA), large corporations, self-interested individuals, and others. One article even concerned a report that, “All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) changed a Russian language version of a page listing civil aviation accidents to say that ‘The plane [flight MH17] was shot down by Ukrainian soldiers’.” Basically, wikipedia has been revealed to be a river of ‘information’ that’s polluted by so many self-interested sources as to be no more reliable than, say: “New York Times, Washington Post, Telegraph, Mirror, Guardian, and Newsweek.”

And that’s not reliable at all. For example, everybody knew in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling WMD “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” because they had read it in such ‘news’ sources as that. Consequently, even when wikipedia links to those sorts of articles, it can be propagating lies. 

 

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A Fine Balance: China’s Need for Resources and Stability in the South China Sea

A Fine Balance: China’s Need for Resources and Stability in the South China Sea

The shift in demographic and economic weight from Europe to East Asia has intensified over the past 20 years, which makes East Asia and its coastal areas increasingly important – a critical shift in current and future international relations dynamics underscored by the United States’ (US) “Pivot to Asia” or East Asian foreign policy of the Obama administration. Four Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members, plus China/Taiwan either partially or fully claim sovereignty over the South China Sea and its territorial features: islands, reefs, and atolls. Given the importance of the South China Sea’s islands and sub-soils, we seek to assess whether a Chinese policy towards the South China Sea’s territorial disputes endangers regional stability and cooperation.

Economic and Strategic Importance of the Spratly Islands

China’s extensive borders, surrounded by sea and a rich diversity of neighbors, from large Russia, unstable Afghanistan, to maritime neighbors such as the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan, presents a host of security challenges. The South China Sea forms part of the complexity of China’s border security challenges. The following claimants surround the South China Sea: China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Territorial disputes contribute to regional volatility. The Sea is considered a flashpoint for conflict in the Asia Pacific Region. There are two groups of islands in the South China Sea: the Paracel and Spratly Islands. China, Taiwan, and Vietnam claim all of the Paracel and Spartly Islands, while Malaysia, the Philippines, and Brunei only claim parts of the Spratlys. Claims put forward by China, Taiwan, and Vietnam are historically based, whereas claims made by Malaysia and Brunei are based on the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLoS), the proximity principle, and the continental shelf principle. The Philippines’ claim is based on proclaimed discovery of unclaimed islands in 1956.

 

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U.S. Wealth-Concentration: The Most-Accurate Current Estimates

U.S. Wealth-Concentration: The Most-Accurate Current Estimates

CURRENT REALITIES:

Wealthiest Tenth (10%) of Americans Own 75% of America; They Draw 40% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Hundredth (1%) of Americans Own 43% of America; They Draw 20% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Thousandth (0.1%) of Americans Own 22% of America; They Draw 8% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest Ten-Thousandth (0.01%) Own 11.2% of America; They Draw 5% of All U.S. Income.

Wealthiest 0.0025% (Forbes 400) Own 2.75% (of all trackable privately-held wealth, not including ‘non-profits’ that are controlled by them).

That last (2.75%) is this $2.29 trillion divided by this $83,296 billion (representing all of the privately owned wealth in the U.S.), in the final quarter of 2014.

Incidentally, the wealthiest tenth are worth over $1 million and draw incomes above $200,000; so: they’re all “millionaires” in common parlance; all of the “top 10%” are.

Following will be mirror-images of the above-cited breakdowns:

Poorest 90% of Americans Own 25% of America; They Draw 60% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99% of Americans Own 57% of America; They Draw 80% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99.9% of Americans Own 78% of America; They Draw 92% of All U.S. Income.

Poorest 99.99% of Americans Own Less Than 88.8% of America; They Draw Less Than 95% of All U.S. Income.

Poorer 50%: Comprehensive figures for the wealthier and poorer 50% of Americans haven’t been published as recently. However, for the year 2010, the wealthier 50% of Americans owned 98.9% of America, and the poorer 50% of Americans owned 1.1% of America. That was the year after the crash had supposedly ended in 2009. The last prior year in that same study was 2007, the economic peak, and it showed the wealthier half owning 97.5% of America, and the poorer half owning 2.5% of it. In other words: the losses from the Wall Street economic crash went overwhelmingly to the poorer half of the U.S. population (their wealth going down from 2.5% to only 1.1% of America’s total), because of the bailouts to Wall Street. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

 

Not Learning from Mideast Mistakes

Not Learning from Mideast Mistakes


Apparently, the United States, perhaps Great Britain and almost certainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia are on the brink of a major escalation of war in what we now can call “the former Iraq and Syria.” But is this rational? Are we drawing lessons from our interventions in the past? Is there a realistic post-intervention plan? How much will intervention cost? And, finally, will it accomplish the presumed objective of making the situation better with more security for them and for us?

These are questions we should be asking now – not after the fact. Perhaps somewhere deep in government council rooms these questions are being asked. If so, those asking them are certainly not sharing their answers, if they have any, with us. And since we will be paying the bills for whatever decisions are adopted, we have what in government usage is called a “Need to Know.”

Barack Obama, then President-elect, and President George W. Bush at the White House during the 2008 transition.

I have no access to the thinking of the inner circles of any of the relevant governments, and from the sketchy and undemanding accounts in the media, it does not appear that anyone else has better access than I do. What I do have is 69 years of observation and study of the Middle East of which four were spent as the Member of the U.S. State Department’s Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Groups Encourage Transparency, Ask Obama For Honesty About Corporate Spending

The Sierra Club sent a letter to President Obama this week, urging the President to make good on his promise of increasing transparency in Washington. Specifically, the environmental group wants the administration to be forthright about the political spending of mega-polluters and their government contracts.

Courtney Hight, director of the Sierra Club’s Democracy Program, issued the following statement after the letter was sent: “Corporations and big polluters already have too much power and influence on our government and our elections. The President has an opportunity to bring more transparency to the billions poured into our system from corporations by issuing this executive order. This action alone won’t bring all corporate election spending into the light of day, but it will begin to lift the curtain and let some light in.”

In addition to the Sierra Club, other signatories include the NRDC, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the League of Conservation Voters, and several other prominent environmental groups.

The groups are hoping that President Obama will issue an executive order forcing any company seeking or receiving a government contract to publicly disclose their lobbying and campaign spending. While this information is mostly available, the process of connecting the dots between spending and contracts is a bureaucratic nightmare.

An executive order from the president would take the guesswork out of the equation and create a system of transparency that is severely lacking in the current system.

The Sierra Club has good reason to be concerned. The available data shows that some of the country’s biggest polluters are also the recipients of some of the largest federal contracts.

In 2012, for example, 17 of the top 100 recipients of government contracts were listed as some of the worst polluters in America. These companies included General Electric (2nd in the U.S. at the time for air pollution), Shell, Exxon, Halliburton, and BP.

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Revolution’s Matchstick

Revolution’s Matchstick

Fighting The Trans-Pacific Partnership

Rolling down the corporate-political assembly line is a trade deal so treasonous to the peoples of the world that it should serve as revolution’s matchstick. The treaty is secret, but one fact is well known: the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement is being negotiated by transnational corporations without a single US legislator present. Each time I hear this, my eyes blink in disbelief. Without a single legislator present … without their presence at negotiations, without so much as seeing a draft of the deal, and most treacherously, without objection or outcry at their exclusion! President Obama has requested our legislators to “fast track the TPP”, which would allow him to sign the deal prior to sending it to Congress for approval or disapproval. If they agree to this, then Congress eschews its right – and its responsibility – to reject parts of the trade deal and reopen negotiations.

This complicity on the part of our legislators sinks an iron weight in my gut. It smacks not of exclusion, but of willing collusion with transnational corporations that have a proven track record of criminality, destruction, and abuse. In my short lifetime, large corporations have been responsible for poisoning two major gulfs with oil spills, blowing up more than five hundred mountains, destroying numerous watersheds, wrecking the food system with toxins, and causing one in six Americans to be evicted from their homes. They have used the media apparatus to deny the existence of climate change, fomented wars, and obstructed truth and justice so often that it is practically an “industry standard.” The list of grievances can be only partial here, but these abuses alone must sound the alarm bells of our conscience. The largest trade deal since the North American Free Trade Agreement is being written in secret by unelected entities that have consistently abused the global population for the sake of profit.

A single thought rings bell-like in my mind.

We must revolt.

 

Top German Politician Blasts Nuland & Carter: “F##k US Imperialism”

Top German Politician Blasts Nuland & Carter: “F##k US Imperialism”

With intra-Europe relations hitting a new all-time low; and, having already been busted spying on Merkel, Obama got caught with his hand in Hollande’s cookie jar this week, the following exultation from one of Germany’s top politicians will hardly help Washington-Brussells relations. As Russia Insider notes, Oskar Lafontaine is a major force in German politics so it caught people’s attention when he excoriated Ash Carter and Victoria Nuland on his Facebook page yesterday… “Nuland says ‘F*ck the EU’. We need need an EU foreign policy that stops warmongering US imperialism… F*ck US imperialism!”

Here is the Facebook post (in German):

 

Lafontaine  has been an outsized figure in German politics since the mid-70s. He was chairman of the SPD (one of Germany’s two main parties) for four years, the SPD’s candidate for chancellor in 1990, minister of finance for two years, and then chairman of the Left party in the 2000s. He is married to Sarah Wagenknecht, political heavyweight, who is currently co-chairman of Left party.

Lafontaine’s outburst came a day after his wife, Sarah Wagenknecht, blasted Merkel’s Russia policy in an interview on RT. 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Europe’s Complicity in Evil

Europe’s Complicity in Evil 

On September 5, 2009 I addressed an international conference in Austria on the subject of Europe’s subordination to the US and, thus, the absence of any constructive criticism of US foreign and domestic policies. Karel van Wolferen, whose website is http://www.karelvanwolferen.com, kindly reminded me of my address to the conference when he he sent it to me with his supportive response. Both are available below. You can see from my address and from Karel’s response that the reckless direction of US foreign and domestic policy has been known for many years. Yet the recklessness continues

Europe’s Complicity in Evil
[An address by Hon. Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., Chevalier, Legion d’Honneur, to Mut zur Ethik Conference, “Sovereignty or Imperialism,” Feldkirch, Austria, September 5, 2009]

There is a widespread supposition that Obama, being black and a member of an oppressed race, will imbue US foreign policy with a higher morality than the world experienced from Bush and Clinton. This is a delusion.

Obama represents the same ideology of American “exceptionalism” as other recent presidents. This ideology designates the United States as The Virtuous Nation and supplies the basis for the belief that America has the right, indeed the responsibility, to impose its hegemony upon the world by bribery or by force. The claim of American exceptionalism produces a form of patriotism that blinds the US population to the immorality of America’s wars of aggression.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

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