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Canada’s Role in the Venezuela Coup
Canada’s Role in the Venezuela Coup
A letter was sent today to the Science for Peace list-serve in response to the Science for Peace Statement on the Government of Canada’s ongoing campaign to overturn the elected government of Venezuela.
Science for Peace is based in the Dept of Physics of the University of Toronto.
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What is most welcome in this statement is its expeditious issue and wide-lensed comprehension of the hypocritically self-serving role of Canada’s state, major mining corporations and banks in the plundering of Latin American societies and interference in their internal affairs to ensure that it can continue on and grow against elected governments seeking self-determination. (now for the first time our foreign minister mendaciously publicly leading the alliance of the externally orchestrated oppression, exploitation and coup in Venezuela).
This exact passage deserves verbatim support:
“Canada has, in recent years, supported the replacement of elected governments in Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti and now in Venezuela, and its relations with Latin America are problematical in broader terms.
Canada provides a financial and legal haven for businesses that exploit labour and decimate the forests, agriculture, and watersheds in these countries. Canadian banks mire these countries in debt and buy up public utilities.
Protests against Canadian mining companies in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia and Guatemala are met with police and military brutality. In addition, Canada needs to maintain a distance from the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Bolsonaro, among other policies, threatens our common future by opening up the Amazon, the lungs of the planet, to deforestation for profit.”
I would like to add, however, that it is not only or primarily “the Trudeau government” that is “shaping its interventionist stance toward Venezuela”. It is, more specifically, Foreign Minister Freeland who also leads Canada and NATO towards massive militaristic operations on Russia’s borders, as well as warlike policies of the violent-coup established government of Ukraine with, as the right-wing states of Latin America, a chilling fondness for fascist military rule of the past.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Exceptional Nation Asserts Its Exceptionalism
The Exceptional Nation Asserts Its Exceptionalism
Washington has chosen a president for Venezuela. I wonder if Trump saw the black humor in doing to Maduro what the Democrats and presstitutes are doing to him.
Few Latin American governments have ever had a government that represents the majority indigenous people or a president who was not of Spanish descent. Chavez in Venezuela perhaps was the longest lasting indigenous leader. His successor Maduro is also indigenous.
Indigenous Latin American leaders are unacceptable to Washington, because they tend to be reformers who represent their country’s people instead of American business and financial interests. Consequently, when a Latin electorate elects a leader who will put them first, Washington overthrows the leader. This is the history of US/Latin American relations.
In the 21st century alone Washington has overthrown the elected presidents of Honduras, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela and overturned the independence of Ecuador that had provided asylum protection for Julian Assange. Washington’s coup with the Spanish elite against Chavez in Venezuela initially succeeded. Chavez was in captivity, but before he could be murdered the Venezuelan people and military forced his release.
Chavez, either because he lacked the power to move against the traitorous Spanish elite or because he chose to display magnanimity, did not hold those responsible who participated in the coup against his life and Venezuelan sovereignty. Washington’s agents, the Spanish elite, were not arrested and retained their control over the media and the economy. Venezuela has substantial oil revenues, but they do not reach the government’s budget or protect the value of the currency. I do not know who controls the Venezuelan oil, but it appears the revenues are being stolen.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Europe’s Debt Crisis: Challenges for the Left, Confronting the Creditors
Europe’s Debt Crisis: Challenges for the Left, Confronting the Creditors
Second part of the interview given to LVSL. Here, the first part:
The Doctrine of Odious Debt. Break the Taboo on Odious Debts and Their Repudiation
LVSL: If we look at the case of Greece in 2015, we see that there was a change of regime when Syriza and Alexis Tsipras came to power, with strong popular support. And yet in the end, Tsipras downplayed and ignored the work of the Truth Committee on Greece’s Public Debt, which you worked for. What are the political factors that interfered with this movement towards a possible repudiation of a portion of Greece’s debt?
Eric Toussaint: Yes, it’s obviously extremely important to analyse the case of Greece. In fact it was simply a matter of Alexis Tsipras being unable to adopt a strategy that was appropriate to the actual context in which Greece found itself. If you look at the Thessaloniki Programme presented in September 2014, which is the platform on which he was elected in January 2015 (see the excerpts from the programme in my article), there was a whole series of very important commitments in it that included a radical reduction of the debt. There were measures that would have brought about radical changes concerning the brutal austerity measures that were being taken, the privatisations, and the way in which the Greek banks had been bailed out. As Prime Minister, Tsipras took an approach that was not at all consistent with his programme and with the commitments he had made.
But what is extraordinary, and absolutely needs to be underlined in Tsipras’s case, is that a few days after he was elected in January 2015 and formed his government, before he had taken any measures whatsoever, on 4 February the ECB cut off the normal flow of cash to Greece’s banks (see this and this).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Monsanto/Bayer Giant Moving to “Genome Edit” Fruits and More
Monsanto/Bayer Giant Moving to “Genome Edit” Fruits and More
Not surprising, Monsanto, today hidden behind the Bayer logo, as the world leader in patented GMO seeds and the probable carcinogenic Roundup herbicide with glyphosate, is attempting to quietly patent genetically modified or GMO varieties of fruits using controversial gene-editing. The “beauty” of this for Monsanto/Bayer is that in the USA, according to a recent ruling by the US Department of Agriculture, gene-edited agriculture needs no special independent testing. The developments are not good for human health or safety, nor will it do anything to give the world better nutrition.
The agrichemical and GMO giant Monsanto, which today tries to keep a lower profile inside the German agrichemical and GMO giant Bayer, is moving into the highly controversial domain of gene-editing of new crop varieties. In 2018 as the company was being deluged with lawsuits over its use of the probable carcinogen, Roundup, Monsanto invested $125 million in a gene-editing startup called Pairwise. The link is anything but casual.
Former Monsanto Vice President for Global Biotechnology, Tom Adams, has taken the post of CEO of Pairwise. In short, this is a Monsanto gene-editing project. In a press release, Pairwise says it is using the controversial CRISPR gene-editing technology to create genetically edited produce. Among their goals apparently is a super-sweet variety of strawberry or apples, just what our sugar-saturated population doesn’t need.
CRISPR gene-editing, a stealth attempt by the global agribusiness industry to promote artificial mutations of crops and, as the world was shocked recently to hear, even humans, as in China, is being advanced, much like GMO crops falsely were, as solution to world hunger.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Globalization is the Demise of Humanity”: Towards an “Economy of Peace” with an Alternative Monetary System
“Globalization is the Demise of Humanity”: Towards an “Economy of Peace” with an Alternative Monetary System
Globalisation is the demise of humanity. That being said, if we want peace, solidarity, harmonious cohabitation, justice and equality – we have to defeat globalisation. And to be able to defeat it, countries which strive to take back autonomy and sovereignty may want to move away from the oppressive fist of the west.
BREXIT offers Europe and the world a formidable opportunity to break loose from the rigged, dollar-based fiat monetary system. BREXIT opens the door for other European Union (EU) nations to do likewise. Different polls indicate that between 60% and 80% of all EU citizens are fed up with the corrupt EU, wanting to leave. In France, whose Mr. Hollande has reached the attribute of least popular President of all times and who is openly called a traitor of the people, a recent survey says more than 85% of the French are against the EU.
Europeans are also worried about the gradual but steady integration of the EU with NATO. A militarisation of Europe with a US-led war machine moving ever closer towards Moscow is a strong and present danger for WWIII – meaning Europe may become again the theatre of war and destruction the third time in 100 years. Encircling China with two thirds of the US Navy fleet in the South China Sea, provoking territorial conflicts via the Philippines, a former colony and a US vassal; and presenting a constant menace with uncountable military bases in the area, all the way to Australia, are no signs of peaceful cooperation by Washington.
Bringing down the EU would break up the Euro and may also break up NATO. This, of course, is non-coherent with Washington’s hold on power over Europe and aggression against Russia.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Europe on the Brink of Collapse?
The Empire’s European castle of vassals is crumbling. Right in front of our eyes. But Nobody seems to see it. The European Union (EU), the conglomerate of vassals – Trump calls them irrelevant, and he doesn’t care what they think about him, they deserve to be collapsing. They, the ‘vassalic’ EU, a group of 28 countries, some 500 million people, with a combined economy of a projected 19 trillion US-dollar equivalent, about the same as the US, have submitted themselves to the dictate of Washington in just about every important aspect of life.
The EU has accepted on orders by Washington to sanction Russia, Venezuela, Iran – and a myriad of countries that have never done any harm to any of the 28 EU member states. The EU has accepted the humiliation of military impositions by NATO – threating Russia and China with ever more and ever more advancing military basis towards Moscow and Beijing, to the point that Brussels’ foreign policy is basically led by NATO.
It was clear from the very get-go that the US sanctions regime imposed on Russia and all the countries refusing to submit to the whims and rules of Washington, directly and via the EU, was hurting the EU economically far more than Russia. This is specifically true for some of the southern European countries, whose economy depended more on trading with Russia and Eurasia than it did for other EU countries.
The ‘sanctions’ disaster really hit the fan, when Trump unilaterally decided to abrogate the “Nuclear Deal” with Iran and reimpose heavy sanctions on Iran and on “everybody who would do business with Iran”. European hydrocarbon giants started losing business. That’s when Brussels, led by Germany started mumbling that they would not follow the US and – even – that they would back European corporations, mainly hydrocarbon giants, sticking to their contractual arrangements they had with Iran.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is the US Planning to Wage War on Russia and China?
Is the US Planning to Wage War on Russia and China?
Interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
Listen to the interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky below.
This is Guns and Butter.
“The Rand Corporation, on contract with the US Army, which commissioned a report examining a war with China. Now, this is called “War With China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable.” The irony of this is that what they examined in this report is whether “we” could actually win a war on China.
Essentially, this is a simulation of a war between the United States and China and it comes up with the conclusion that we’re going to win it. That’s diabolical and it’s criminal. What has China done to the sovereignty of the United States?”
The study (published in 2015) entitled War with China: Thinking the Unthinkable was commissioned by the US Army.
I’m Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter, Michel Chossudovsky.
Today’s show: Is the US Planning to Wage War on Russia and China? Michael Chossudovsky is an economist and the Founder, Director and Editor of the Center for Research on Globalization, based in Montreal, Quebec. He is the author of 11 books including The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, War and Globalization: The Truth Behind September Eleventh, America’s War on Terrorism and The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity. Today we concentrate on the global military agenda, on the evolving restructure of geopolitical alliances, the Nuclear Posture Review, the purpose of the Manhattan Project, and the dangers of nuclear war.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Michel Chossudovsky, welcome again.
MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY: Delighted to be on Guns and Butter.
BONNIE FAULKNER: President Trump’s surprise announcement that the US is leaving Syria caught most people in and out of government by surprise and led to the resignation of Secretary of Defense Mattis. Two thousand US troops will be withdrawn from Syria. What is your assessment of this move?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
FREXIT? The “Gilets Jaunes” will Not Let Go
FREXIT? The “Gilets Jaunes” will Not Let Go
Will France, under Macron – Implosion 2 – become a candidate for exiting the EU thanks to the Yellow Vests?
The “Gilets Jaunes” will not let go. Not even – or especially not – after Macron‘s half-hearted, rather cynical and grandstanding concessions – of “too little and too late” – which when analyzed constitute a new lie, especially regarding the increase of the minimum wage. It was clear from his face, these concessions, of a President who campaigned on the basis of “never make any concessions”, were fake, as fake as his fake attitude of an apologist could be. Even without listening to his words, his body language of arrogance gives him away.
This past weekend, on Saturday, 15 December, another more than 100,000 Yellow Vests were marching on Paris; countrywide some 200,000. The police to oppress them, as officially reported, was about the same as the weekend before, 8,000 in Paris, close to 90,000 throughout France. Military assistance was not missing. Besides, in a state of emergency, who distinguished between police and military?
Interestingly, the international press – the MSM – is taking it seriously. Why? They fear that this relentless movement may spread to other countries, even countries beyond Europe – like “Trump Land”, the United States of America. And why not. The same malaise of capital being shifted upwards to the detriment of the poor and middle class exists everywhere, may even be most pronounced in the US, but nobody talks about it and pays attention to it, lest the people would have awakened to the growing disparity long ago – and taken to the streets massively – within the inner circles of the Washington Belt Way.
Chapeau to the French. Although their forefathers were among the most vicious and miserable exploiters, in human history – when they ravaged for hundreds of years West Africa – and the elite still does, unbeknown even to (most) of the Yellow Vets.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Dances of Disinformation: The Partisan Politics of the “Integrity Initiative”
Is there such a plane of blissful, balanced information, deliberated and debated upon? No. Governments mangle; corporations distort. Interest groups tinker. Wars must be sold; deception must be perpetrated. Inconsistencies must be removed. There will be success, measured in small doses; failure, dispatched in grand servings.
The nature of news, hollow as it is, is to fill the next segment for the next release, a promiscuous delivery, an amoral ejaculate. The notion a complicated world can somehow be compressed into a press release, a brief, an observation, is sinister and defeating.
The believers in an objective, balanced news platform are there. Grants are forked out for such romantic notions as news with integrity, directed to increase “trust in news”, which is tantamount to putting your trust in an institution which has been placed on the mortician’s table. The Trump era has seen a spike in such funding, but it belies a fundamental misconception about what news is.
Funny, then, that the environment should now be so neatly split: the Russians (always) seen to distort from a central programme, while no one else does. The Kremlin manipulates feeble minds; virtuous powers do not. The most powerful nation on the planet claims to be free of this, the same country that boasts cable news networks and demagoguery on the airwaves that have a distinct allergy against anything resembling balanced reporting, many backed by vast funding mechanisms for political projects overseas. Britain, faded yet still nostalgically imperial, remains pure with the BBC, known as the Beeb, a sort of immaculate conception of news that purportedly survives manipulation. Other deliverers of news through state channels also worship the idol of balance – Australia’s ABC, for one, asserts that role.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Original ‘Fake News’? The BBC and the Information Research Department
Last month Ritula Shah presented a BBC World Service discussion programme entitled Is “Fake News” A Threat To Democracy?
Predictably the debate focused on Russian attempts to influence Western populations and political systems.
Asked whether the US has been involved in similar activities, Dr Kathleen Bailey, a senior figure in the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the 1980s, was dismissive:
“We [the US] certainly do not have a budget, bureaucracy or intellectual commitment to doing that kind of thing.”
Carl Miller, the research director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos, also played down the West’s activities:
“I think Western countries do do less of this as a kind of tool of foreign policy than autocracies.”
“Read real journalism” — presumably BBC journalism — was one of the guest’s suggestions for countering Fake News.
Putting this self-serving and self-congratulatory narrative to one side, it is worth considering the BBC’s, and particularly the BBC World Service’s, own relationship to the British government’s own propaganda.
“Directly funded by government [the Foreign Office], rather than the licence fee” the World Service is “deeply embedded in the foreign policy, security and intelligence apparatus of the British state,” Dr Tom Mills notes in his must-read 2016 book The BBC: Myth of a Public Service.
In particular, the BBC had a very close relationship to the Information Research Department (IRD) — “a Foreign Office propaganda outfit which sought especially to foster anti-communist sentiments on the left,” explains Mills, a Lecturer in Sociology and Policy at Aston University.
Set up in 1948, the IRD “was one of the largest and best-funded sections of the Foreign Office until it was discreetly shut down in 1977 on the orders of [then foreign secretary] David Owen,” investigative journalist Ian Cobain reported in the Guardian in July 2018.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Reckless Path to Nuclear Weapons Leaves Us Looking Over the Edge
Reckless Path to Nuclear Weapons Leaves Us Looking Over the Edge
The Doomsday Clock is likely to advance again later this January.
What heralded the United States as a uniquely dangerous force was its creation of the atomic bomb, the world’s first nuclear weapon. Prompting this was Albert Einstein‘s signing of a letter regarding nuclear research, drafted by his fellow physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, then quickly dispatched on 2 August 1939 to president Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The letter detailed a formulation of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type” which “may thus be constructed”, and urged America to pursue the invention of such weapons before the Nazis. Fear of Hitler attaining atomic bombs was Einstein’s sole concern. Roosevelt responded on 19 October 1939 promising to “thoroughly investigate the possibilities of your suggestion”.
After two years of analysis and inquiries, Roosevelt formally established America’s nuclear program on 19 January 1942, called the Manhattan Project – with a final $2 billion budget supporting it ($36 billion today) and employing over 130,000 people.
Einstein himself, whose parents were Jewish, had much reason to be aggrieved with the Nazis. In March 1933, the 54-year-old Einstein was left severely shaken upon learning that men loyal to Hitler had raided his summer cottage in Caputh, a village just 30 miles from Berlin. His lakeside residence was then converted into a Hitler Youth camp. This was the due thanks afforded to Einstein after decades of glittering service to his country.
Einstein, born in the southern German city of Ulm, quickly renounced his citizenship and spent periods in Belgium and England, before settling in America by the mid-1930s.
In September 1933, after a visit to an exiled Winston Churchill, Einstein said of Hitler’s rise to power,
“I cannot understand the passive response of the whole civilized world to this modern barbarism. Does the world not see that Hitler is aiming at war?”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Selected Articles: Media Disinformation and The Protest Movement
In Pictures: The Largest Strike in History Is Happening in India Right Now
By , January 09, 2019
Around 150 million people began a two-day general strike in India today against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anti-Labour and anti-trade union policies in India.
A Majority of Americans Do Not Believe the Official 9/11 Story
By , January 09, 2019
The media has NEVER EXAMINED the evidence or explained the analysis provided by scientists, architects, engineers, pilots, and the first responders who experienced the explosions of the World Trade Center twin towers.
Everything the Western Mainstream Media Outlets Get Wrong When Covering Poor Countries
By , January 09, 2019
From de-prioritizing the lives of locals in poor countries, to downplaying global inequality, racism, and condescension, the way Western news agencies do international news is deeply harmful.
GM Crops, Pesticides, Corporate Duplicity: Bayer Has Never Been Transparent in Its Life!
By , January 09, 2019
Mason is scathing in her response and begins her letter by saying, “Bayer CropScience has never been transparent in its life.” She makes it clear to Baumann from the outset that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto “criminal corporations.”
The War on Syria: Are the White Helmets preparing another Chemical Weapons False Flag?
By , January 09, 2019
It should also be clear that the war is not a War on Terror, since the Western-supported terrorist forces that existed in Syria, dubbed “the largest terrorist army on earth”, is estimated to have numbered almost 500,000 terrorists at its peak.
By , January 09, 2019
The historical facts for the period from 1945 to today show a completely different reality: time and again, democratic states in Europe and North America have participated in wars of aggression and terrorist attacks in the past 70 years.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
GM Crops, Pesticides, Corporate Duplicity: Bayer Has Never Been Transparent in Its Life!
GM Crops, Pesticides, Corporate Duplicity: Bayer Has Never Been Transparent in Its Life!
Open Letter to Bayer CropScience
“This charming company operated a factory and camp at Auschwitz during the WW2. The UK and US governments are now allowing it to control global farming methods, GM crops, so-called ‘advanced technologies’ and pesticides.” – Rosemary Mason
Tireless campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter to Werner Baumann, the chief executive of Bayer CropScience. It is in direct response to Bayer CropScience’s advertisement that was placed in Politico and the Farmers’ Guardian on 19/12/2018 which reads:
“Transparency creates trust. At Bayer, we embrace our responsibility to communicate how we assess our products’ safety — and we recognize that people around the world want more information around glyphosate. This month, we published more than 300 study summaries on the safety of glyphosate on our dedicated transparency website. “
Mason is scathing in her response and begins her letter by saying, “Bayer CropScience has never been transparent in its life.” She makes it clear to Baumann from the outset that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto “criminal corporations.”
Her letter outlines a cocktail of corporate duplicity, cover-ups and criminality which the public and the environment are paying the price for, not least in terms of the effects of glyphosate.
She has sent her letter to various mainstream media outlets. I recently received it and have placed it here, so anyone can access it in its entirety. I urge everyone to read the letter and circulate it on social media.
War Criminals at Large
It is a common misconception that democracies do not start wars of aggression or carry out terrorist attacks. The historical facts for the period from 1945 to today show a completely different reality: time and again, democratic states in Europe and North America have participated in wars of aggression and terrorist attacks in the past 70 years.
There are so many cases that I am not able to list all of them here. As examples, I have selected three events from different decades:
- the illegal attack by the European democracies Britain and France on Egypt in 1956;
- the terrorist attack by the democracy France on Rainbow Warrior, a ship operated by the environmental organization Greenpeace in 1985;
- and the illegal attack by US President Donald Trump on Syria on April 7, 2017.
Because mass media, neither in the European nor the American democracies, openly address and criticize these crimes and because so far the responsible politicians have not been convicted by a court, a stubborn misconception persists in the populations of these aggressor states that democracies never start wars and also never use terror as a political instrument.
But the three examples mentioned show clearly:
Democracies, members of the NATO military alliance and with a veto power in the UN Security Council to protect themselves from condemnation, have repeatedly attacked other countries.
This is illegal. For the UN Charter of 1945, Article 2 (4), clearly states:
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force..[..]
The Charter only allows the use of force if an attacked state defends itself or if the United Nations Security Council has approved the military strike. In all other cases, the UN prohibits war. Terrorist attacks are always prohibited.
The attack on Egypt in 1956
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Is China Preparing for War?
War with China is on the drawing board of the Pentagon. China has responded to US threats and military deployments in the Indo-Pacific region. President Xi Jinping has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to prepare for a possible war.
Addressing China’s Central Military Commission, Xi said
“(a)ll military units must correctly understand major national security and development trends, and strengthen their sense of unexpected hardship, crisis and battle.”
“The world is facing a period of major changes never seen in a century, and China is still in an important period of strategic opportunity for development.”
Xi ordered stepped up military training and exercises, saying China’s armed forces must “prepare for a comprehensive military struggle from a new starting point”, adding:
“Preparation for war and combat must be deepened to ensure an efficient response in times of emergency.”
Days earlier, a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily editorial stressed there’s “no time for slackening in war preparation.”
Part of what’s going on is what Xi called his aim for “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan. Beijing considers the island state a breakaway province, reunification inevitable, by force if “democratic consultations” fail to “reach transitional arrangements for the peaceful development of cross-strait ties,” adding:
“Chinese don’t fight Chinese,” while saying his government “makes no promise to renounce the use of force and reserves the option of taking all necessary means” for reunification, stressing no tolerance for “foreign intervention.”
“(O)ne country, two systems” is the way forward, he said, the approach adopted in reunification with Hong Kong and Macau.
Xi’s remarks followed enactment of the US Asia Reassurance Initiative Act (ARIA), discussed in a separate article – legislation authorizing funding for Washington’s imperial Indo/Pacific agenda, mainly by its military footprint in a part of the world not its own, the way it operates globally.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
