George Monbiot and the Iraq War bullshit brigade
Why the ‘liberal’ defence of the Iraq Body Count falls flat on its face
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The Anglo-American empire is preparing for resource war
The Anglo-American empire is preparing for resource war 
The control of resources remains a core factor in US considerations for sustaining global US hegemony in the face of rising geopolitical influence of its major rivals
Last week, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff released the new National Military Strategy of the United States of America, 2015.
The report’s main theme is that “globalisation” and “demographics” are pushing forward trends that are undermining US military superiority, including its capability to sustain “international order”. It sets out how the US military intends to keep ahead of those trends.
Although imbued with flowery technocratic language, when read closely in the context of recent history, the document is ultimately a blueprint to shore-up a dying empire, and reveals much about the reigning ideology of US military supremacism.
Challenges
“The United States is the world’s strongest nation, enjoying unique advantages in technology, energy, alliances and partnerships, and demographics,” the document observes. “However, these advantages are being challenged.”
The report notes that globalisation is catalysing “economic development” while simultaneously “increasing societal tensions, competition for resources, and political instability”.
Of course, the strategy document does not mention that since 1980, under the age of neoliberal globalisation, even as GDP per head has risen, the “vast majority of countries” have experienced a “sharp increase in income inequality,” as documented by a flagship 2014 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In the wake of the new era of slow growth and brutal austerity ushered in after the 2008 global banking collapse, the risk of the dire economic climate sparking civil and political unrest is increasing. But what the document also misses is that growing risk is itself a symptom of the uneven “economic development” that constitutes GDP “growth”.
– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/anglo-american-empire-preparing-resource-war-1170119289#sthash.zPz1ELd2.dpuf
Western Collusion With Egypt’s Reign of Terror
Western Collusion With Egypt’s Reign of Terror
Germany’s detention without charge of a journalist critical of Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is part of a pattern of Western collusion in Egypt’s war on democracy
Why was Al Jazeera journalist, Ahmed Mansour, detained by German authorities under an Egyptian arrest warrant for three days, before being released without charge?
The popular Egyptian-British presenter, who hosts Al Jazeera’s Arabic-language show “Without Frontiers,” told a press conference this Tuesday that the German government had still failed to explain why he had been arrested and detained in the first place.
According to initial reports, German authorities had detained Mansour on the basis of an “international arrest warrant” and extradition request from Egypt. Of course, there is no such thing as an international arrest warrant.
Political decision
Those vague claims were followed by a more official explanation, put forward by a German government spokesperson, that the Egyptian arrest warrant came through via Interpol’s “red notice” system. In October 2014, Mansour was convicted in absentia – without trial – for the trumped up charge of torturing a lawyer in Tahrir Square in 2011.
But Interpol has confirmed that there was no such notice for Mansour, and had refused to issue the Cairo warrant.
Germany has not signed an extradition treaty with Egypt, and so is under no obligation to consider such a request. So why did Germany decide to accede to the request?
According to the German publication, Zeit Online, before making its decision to arrest and detain Mansour, the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation took the step of asking Germany’s Ministry of Justice and Federal Foreign Office to assess the case against Mansour. Only after those reviews was Mansour detained at Berlin’s Tagel Airport. There can be no doubt, then, that this was a political decision.
– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/western-collusion-egypt-s-reign-terror-1040634338#sthash.NOqnDCOK.dpuf
UK Government-backed scientific model flags risk of civilisation’s collapse by 2040
UK Government-backed scientific model flags risk of civilisation’s collapse by 2040
New scientific models supported by the British government’s Foreign Office show that if we don’t change course, in less than three decades industrial civilisation will essentially collapse due to catastrophic food shortages, triggered by a combination of climate change, water scarcity, energy crisis, and political instability.
Before you panic, the good news is that the scientists behind the model don’t believe it’s predictive. The model does not account for the reality that people will react to escalating crises by changing behavior and policies.
But even so, it’s a sobering wake-up call, which shows that business-as-usual guarantees the end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it: our current way of life is not sustainable.
The new models are being developed at Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI), through a project called the ‘Global Resource Observatory’ (GRO).
The GRO is chiefly funded by the Dawe Charitable Trust, but its partners include the British government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO); British bank, Lloyds of London; the Aldersgate Group, the environment coalition of leaders from business, politics and civil society; the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries; Africa Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, and the University of Wisconsin.
Disruption risk
This week, Lloyds released a report for the insurance industry assessing the risk of a near-term “acute disruption to the global food supply.” Research for the project was led by Anglia Ruskin University’s GSI, and based on its GRO modelling initiative.
The report explores the scenario of a near-term global food supply disruption, considered plausible on the basis of past events, especially in relation to future climate trends. The global food system, the authors find, is “under chronic pressure to meet an ever-rising demand, and its vulnerability to acute disruptions is compounded by factors such as climate change, water stress, ongoing globalisation and heightening political instability.”
Three steps from crisis
Lloyd’s scenario analysis shows that food production across the planet could be significantly undermined due to a combination of just three catastrophic weather events, leading to shortfalls in the production of staple crops, and ensuing price spikes.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The American far-right’s trojan horse in Westminster
The American far-right’s trojan horse in Westminster
Elites are using the Henry Jackson Society to sell surveillance, war, white supremacism, banks, and misogyny
There is a violent extremist fifth column operating at the heart of power in Britain, and they stand against everything we hold dear in Western democracies: civil liberties, equality, peace, diplomacy and the rule of law.
You wouldn’t think so at first glance. In fact, you might be taken in by their innocuous-looking spokespeople, railing against the threat of Muslim extremists, defending the rights of beleaguered Muslim women, championing the principle of free speech — regularly courted by national TV and the press as informed experts on global policy issues.
But peer beneath the surface, and an entirely different picture emerges: a web of self-serving trans-Atlantic elites who are attempting to warp public discourse on key issues that pose a threat not to the public interest, but to their own vested interests.
One key organisation at the centre of this web is the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), an influential British think-tank founded a decade ago, ostensibly to promote noble ideals like freedom, human rights and democracy. But its staff spend most of their energies advancing the very opposite.
More recently, HJS has turned to demonising Edward Snowden supportersand privacy advocates as accomplices with al-Qaeda and the ‘Islamic State’ (IS) — as is also being done by Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times, with its hole-ridden story claiming Snowden’s revelations’ had allowed Russia and China to identify active MI6 agents.
Journalists who have reviewed the Snowden files say that there was nothing in them that would permit MI6 operatives to be identified.
Former senior CIA official Robert Steele, whose books have received endorsements from the past and then serving Chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, said:
“I can state categorically that there could not have been names of either intelligence officers or agents in the Snowden materials. The system simply does not work that way.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
George Monbiot and the Iraq War bullshit brigade
There has been a response to my investigation into Iraq Body Count (IBC) and the people behind it — and longstanding Guardian columnist George Monbiot himself has popped out of the woodwork to give it his official thumbs-up.
The article in question is my INSURGE intelligence piece, “How the Pentagon is hiding the dead,” which critically examines the claims of IBC and IBC-affiliated scholars about the death tolls in Iraq, as well as in other conflicts, mainly Afghanistan and Colombia.
Monbiot, a journalist for whom I have much respect, couldn’t bring himself to say a word in public after news of how my contract was unilaterally terminated by The Guardian for writing on my environment blog about the role of Gaza’s gas in motivating Israel’s military offensives.
But an attack on my critique of Iraq Body Count was enough to break the silence.
My investigation into Iraq Body Count, Monbiot trumpeted on Twitter, is “pernicious bullshit,” which has received a “devastating take-down” by Brian Dean, who runs a blog called ‘News Frames’ and who has apparently been a vocal supporter of Iraq Body Count for many years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Pentagon report says West, Gulf states and Turkey foresaw emergence of ‘IS’
Pentagon report says West, Gulf states and Turkey foresaw emergence of ‘IS’
A US intelligence report reveals that Western support for Syria’s rebels aided and abetted the rise of the ‘Islamic State’ – and the Pentagon won’t deny it
A newly declassified Pentagon report provides startling high-level confirmation that the US-led strategy in Syria contributed directly to the rise of the Islamic State (IS).
The secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, obtained by Washington DC law firm Judicial Watch, reveals that the emergence of an “Islamic State” across Iraq and Syria was foreseen by the Pentagon, as early as three years ago.
According to the internal report, which was distributed throughout the US intelligence community, this was seen as a likely consequence of the West’s efforts to destabilise Bashir al-Assad’s regime in Syria.
Despite that, Western governments continued to coordinate financial, military and logistical support to largely Islamist militant rebel groups in Syria, through allies Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Jordan and Turkey, among others.
A sectarian insurgency
Dated August 2012, the report states that the “major forces driving the insurgency in Syria” comprise “the Salafist, the Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq].”
Immediately after, the document states that these forces are being supported by a Western-led coalition: “The West, Gulf countries and Turkey support the opposition.”
Throughout, the document does not suggest a distinction between “moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and Islamist militant groups, nor between the insurgency and the opposition.
Rather, the document shows that opposition forces engaged in fighting the Assad regime consisted of a combination of overlapping Islamist forces. Singling out al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the document says the terror group “supported the Syrian opposition from the beginning” due to its belief that Assad was “targeting Sunnis”.
The report further describes the insurgency as a “sectarian uprising,” whose increasingly sectarian character attracts “volunteers” from across the region to “support the Sunnis in Syria”.
– See more at: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/pentagon-confirms-west-gulf-states-and-turkey-created-islamic-state-608321312#sthash.acNMhXkJ.dpuf
Energy market madness is the death spasm of the oil age – renewables now!
Energy market madness is the death spasm of the oil age – renewables now!
Current oil price volatility is a symptom of the end of cheap oil, writes Nafeez Ahmed, and it’s destablising the entire global economy. The answer is a major shift to renewables – but the the International Energy Agency, which should be leading the transition, is in the grip of nuclear and fossil fuel interests. Instead the leadership must come from us, the people!
There is, of course, a way out, and it lies in recognizing the growing efficacy and efficiency of renewable energy sources, especially solar, wind and geothermal.
The market price of oil has dipped below $50 a barrel – an event that few anticipated. So low is this price collapse, that it is endangering the profitability of the entire oil industry.
The immediate cause of the price collapse is the US-Saudistrategy of interfering in the oil market. The duo is using oil prices to wage economic warfare by sustaining unusually high levels of production.
With the global economy still limping along in the context of weak demand and slow growth, the supply glut has tumbled the market price of oil with the precise aim of undercutting the state revenues of US-Saudi mutual geopolitical rivals, especially Russia, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.
Despite the apparent low price of oil on international markets, costs of production remain high. Since the peak of cheap, conventional oil around 2005, production has fluctuated on a plateau as the industry has turned increasingly to more expensive, dirtier and difficult-to-extract forms of unconventional oil and gas, especially shale.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Revolution, Part 1: The End of Growth? | Degrowth 2014
Revolution, Part 1: The End of Growth? | Degrowth 2014.
New research suggests that the ongoing global economic crisis is symptomatic of a deeper crisis of industrial civilization’s relationship with nature. The continuation of the crisis, though, does not imply the end of the world – but rather is part of major phase shift to a new form of civilization that could either adapt to post-carbon reality and prosper, or crumble in denial.
We are on the verge of a major tipping point in the way civilization works. Even as so many global crises are accelerating, a range of interconnected systemic revolutions are converging in a way that could facilitate a transformation of the global economy from one that maximizes material accumulation for the few, to one that caters for the needs and well being of all.
That’s the conclusion of a major new book published as part of the ‘Routledge Studies in Ecological Economics’ series, The Great Transition, by Prof Mauro Bonaiuti, an economist at the University of Turin in Italy. Bonaiuti’s book applies the tools of complexity science to diagnose the real dynamic and implications of the global economic crisis that most visibly erupted in 2008.
That crisis, Bonaiuti argues, is not simply a part of the cyclical boom and bust process, but is a symptom of a longer “passage of civilization.” Advanced capitalist societies are in a “phase of declining returns” measured across the period after the Second World War, including GDP growth, energy return on investment (how much energy is put in compared to what we get out), manufacturing productivity, among others.
