U.S. Supplies ISIS Through Turkey

Eric Zuesse

On Friday, March 4th, the leading opposition newspaper in Turkey, Zaman, was taken over by the Government; and on March 5th, one of the other opposition newspapers, Cumhuriyet, reported that Zaman's separate news-service to other news-media, Cihan News Agency, has now also been disabled on the Internet. (Anyone who goes to the site obtains an error-message.)

The Turkish Government is trying to prevent the Turkish public from knowing that Turkey has been serving as the transit-route by which the U.S. government and its allied Arab oil monarchies (especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar) have been supplying foreign jihadists and weapons (largely U.S. but paid for with Saudi funds) into Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad from power.

Zaman's editor has been imprisoned for publishing such prohibited truths, but somehow his newspaper continued reporting on a court case in which Turkey's President Tayyip Erdogan is accused of breaking Turkish law by aiding terrorists. That continued resistance by the newspaper might be a reason why the Turkish Government has now (as of Friday March 4th) shut it down.

On March 1st, Cumhuriyet, headlined, “Former Justice Minister of Turkey: Erdogan Will Stand Trial,” and reported that, "Former Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk, said that Erdogan's actions 'do not comply with the decision of the Constitutional Court.' He criticized [Erdogan] by saying … 'One day this matter must be settled by the judiciary'.” 

Russian Television had first reported on the case, in English, back on 26 November 2015, headlining, "Turkish newspaper editor in court for 'espionage' after revealing weapon convoy to Syrian militants.” This news-report said that:

In May, the outlet [Cumhuriyet] published photos of weapons it said were then transferred to Syria by Turkey's intelligence agency. … The articles, published on Cumhuriyet's front page in May, claimed that Turkey's National Intelligence Organization (MIT) is smuggling weapons in trucks into Syria and was caught doing so twice in 2014. The trucks were allegedly stopped and searched by police, with photos and videos of their contents obtained by Cumhuriyet.

According to the paper, the trucks were carrying six steel containers, with 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000 heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells. The arms were reportedly delivered to extremist groups fighting against the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, whom Ankara wants ousted from power.

The Erdogan government alleged the weapons were "aid to Syrian ethnic Turkmen tribes people and labeled their interception by local police an act of ‘treason' and ‘espionage'.”

Turkey is a NATO member, and the famous investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had revealed in the 6 April 2014 London Review of Books, that on 20 June 2013 — just a few months prior to the sarin gas attack that Obama blamed on Assad and used as his excuse to invade Syria — the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that America's allies in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad were engaged in “the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida's pre-9/11 effort,” but the U.S. Director of National Intelligence denied that it was true. One U.S. ally there was Al Qaeda in Syria, known in Syria as Al Nusra, (Nusra and Erdogan wanted this gas-attack to provide the excuse that Obama had set as his “red line” to overthrow Assad — a chemical-weapons attack in Syria.) However, Hersh reported, "Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin.” All of that had occurred prior to the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack.

Hersh went on:

The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack [U.S. bombing of Syria] was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration's argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad's guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,' the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria.

Hersh subsequently reported that, rather than go ahead with an operation that the Joint Chiefs considered fraudulent, they sabotaged Obama's policy. On 2 January 2016, Hersh headlined in the London Review of Books, “Military to Military,” and he explained how and why they had done this:

The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama's policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success.' So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. … General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,' said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn't shut up.' 

Obama couldn't be swayed that the enemy were Al Qaeda and other jihadists instead of Assad — that overthrowing him was his top priority. However, Hersh said in his 6 April 2014 article, that Obama had to backtrack at the last moment anyway, because British intelligence reported to David Cameron that the sarin used in the attack didn't come from Syria — that it had been imported; this implied that it was a set-up job in order to ‘justify' invading. Cameron didn't want to be just another Tony Blair. Obama couldn't get his necessary-for-appearances'-sake public cover for an invasion, Britain, as his predecessor had done regarding Iraq. Hersh went on, in that 2014 article:

Obama's move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,' the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.' At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said.

Obama, in other words, was now trapped. He couldn't fire all of his Joint Chiefs — at least not right away; it would be embarrassing, how could he explain it? And the Republicans were eager to expose his Administration's disarray on the matter. So: the story was passed around that Secretary of State John Kerry got Russia to get Assad to eliminate his sarin stocks. Russia's leader Vladimir Putin was happy to help Obama avoid invading his Syrian ally. That was how the ‘news' organizations reported the backtrack — as a rare instance of U.S.-Russian cooperation: good news for everybody. But for Obama, it was actually the way out of a desperately embarrassing situation. And he never gave up his goal of switching Syria from the secular Assad to a failed state whose crucial oil-pipeline routes would be in ‘friendly' (to Saudi Arabia and Qatar) jihadist Sunni-ruled areas of Syria, so that ‘our' Arab ‘allies' (the jihadist-financiing nations, as even Kerry's predecessor Hillary Clinton had known them to be) can grab the world's largest energy-market, Europe, away from Russia. 

Hersh, in his 2014 article, continued:

The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line', a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.')

He closed:

Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey's meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdogan's continued support for the rebels, especially now that it's going so wrong,' the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We're screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdogan, but Turkey is a special case. They're a Nato ally.' 

There is simply too much evidence proving that Erdogan is supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria. This is the reality of NATO: conquering Russia, first by switching its allies (such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc.), is the assignment, regardless of the public's safety. Even if the U.S. weren't backing jihadists directly (which we are), we're backing them by having jihadist governments such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar as allies — instead of as enemies. ‘Our' oil companies and mega-banks are in bed with them, and their top stockholders and executives, and their lobbyists, control the people who control the U.S. Government. The U.S. Constitution's “We, the People …” has become only  those “People.” The rest are now just for extras in crowd-scenes, at political campaign events — and their mass-mind-control is done by their media, ‘our' ‘free press' (who don't report this reality), in ‘our' ‘democracy'.

Erdogan is profoundly angry at the unsteady support he has been receiving from the U.S. government in their joint efforts to eliminate Bashar al-Assad. However, apparently, Obama doesn't feel that the U.S. is yet ready for a nuclear war to be sparked between NATO and Russia — Obama thinks that doing it now would be premature. ‘Color revolutions' and ‘Arab Spring' and ‘Maidan demonstrations', and other populist covers for coups (taking advantage of the local political opposition, which exists in any country), are a far safer way to gradually strip Russia of its allies and turn them into yet-more enemies of Russia — and, only then, can the rip-cord finally be pulled, and Russia be forced to either submit or else die (even if the rest of the world might die also). The U.S. has been doing this boil-the-frog-slowly routine ever since U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush laid the foundation for it in 1990.

As John Kerry recently said, when responding to aid workers at a donor conference for anti-Assad forces, “What do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you want?” Clearly, Erdogan is lots more eager for that than Obama is. Perhaps Erdogan thinks that Putin would just back down. American Presidents, however, aren't so desperate that they feel they need to do it during their own Administration; they can afford to wait until the time is right, even if the plaudits will then go to some future President. Their paymasters will be duly appreciative of the contributions that each one of them has made toward the final ‘U.S.' victory. (Victory for the paymasters, of course.)

So, the American government's charade goes on. But already an MIT analysis — the Lloyd-Postal report — on the sarin attack that occurred 21 August 2013, stated unequivocally that the Obama Administration was lying through its teeth about the matter. They provided excruciating detail showing why “the US Government's interpretation of the technical intelligence it gathered prior to and after the August 21 attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” (That's a tactful, yet passionate, way of saying: “Obama and his Administration were trying to lie this country into invading Syria.”) Yet, Western news-media still simply ignore the evidence (they can do that in this dictatorship), and report that Assad's forces were behind the sarin attack. It's still the official reason why  we're at war against Assad. Was even George W. Bush worse than this?

Seymour Hersh had tried to get his news-reports on these matters published by what had been his regular publisher, the New Yorker, which turned them down; and he tried other U.S. outlets as well, but wasn't successful in finding any that would pay his regular charges — and he had already spent much in order to research these matters. Finally, he obtained a suitable outlet, in theLRB. This is why his recent reports are being published abroad.

Anyone who wishes to know more about what motivates the U.S. government regarding Syria should read the astoundingly brilliant article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., published on an obscure environmental website, February 25th, “Syria: Another Pipeline War.” He tells so much suppressed history there, it's flabbergasting to see it all brought together into one flowing historical narrative — and my checking of the few sources that I hadn't previously known of indicates that his standards for quality-of-evidence that he builds his narrative on are as rigorous and high as mine are — which is rare. I very much respect that. Every high school student should read his article in order to understand how corrupt the U.S. is at its highest levels. The article is a masterpiece of historical writing. But even a masterpiece can have a flaw: his article plays down the role that leading Democrats after Reagan have been playing in GHW Bush's long war to conquer Russia. We're still in the post-Reagan era, just as, between FDR and Reagan, we had been in the post-FDR era. Obama is as rabid a Russia-hater as practically anyone except John McCain would be. If a piece of historical writing is going to be partisan (as almost all are), at least this one is partisan on the less-unacceptable side.

I might write RFK Jr.'s name onto the Presidential line of my ballot in November. There's someone with favorable name-recognition, who clearly has the integrity and depth, and knowledge, to deal with the rot that has overtaken America, if anyone does. Maybe he could win by acclamation, if he wouldn't be knocked-off first. But if the idea of writing in his name goes around like wildfire in the weeks before the November 8th general election, then who knows what would happen? Certainly, if Hillary is on the ballot as the ‘Democratic' nominee, I won't vote for her, though I'm a lifelong Democrat. And I don't want to be forced to vote for Trump (since he's almost totally unpredictable — which still isn't as bad as Hillary). (Besides: Hillary should be in prison for her destruction of crucial public records — State Department emails — to hide her crimes; and The Donald should be in prison for his fake Trump ‘University' commercial fraud. But the corrupt Obama won't allow any such prosecutions.) And there's such beautiful irony here: “Trump: If Elected, I'll Prosecute Hillary.” It's so much like Ukraine! (Cast Hillary as Tymoshenko, and Trump as Yanukovych — and I'd vote then for Trump, so as to avoid the near-certainty of disaster.)

But no intelligent American can be justified in simply not voting for President. That would be outrageously irresponsible. I won't ever do that. Every intelligent and caring person must vote for President — not leave that responsibility to others (which would be unpatriotic — plus wrong and callous — for any well-informed voter). The “anyone but ___” non-voters are mere fools and frauds. They simply don't care enough about the country to do their most-basic civic duty, which is to become informed and then to vote for someone on that basis (though never as a ‘protest vote' — the nation is too important for any mere ‘protest' — but only as a real  vote, for someone who has an authentic chance of winning  the election). Any mere throw-away ‘vote' is like a non-vote. 

That article by Kennedy should be linked to by all of his supporters: it tells more about the man than any number of campaign speeches possibly could. It proves that he's fit for the job, if anyone is. That's one person who doesn't need to campaign for the job. He's an outsider whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is probably among the best there is, and whose heart is unquestionably in the right place — which would be a refreshing and radical change, a change that's of a kind needed now more than ever in the U.S.

But anyway: RFK Jr.'s article is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the horrendous war in Syria. My article here is just a warm-up to it — and, I hope, a totally non-partisan one.

Democracy Ends In Turkey

Eric Zuesse

On Saturday March 5th, Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten (German Economic News) headlined “Turkish Police Storm Newspaper Office Zaman” and reported that, “Turkish police entered the editorial offices of critical newspaper Zaman on Friday night.” Accompanying videos there showed a police-state in which ‘security’ forces stormed through a crowd of protesters (readers of the newspaper) outside, into Turkey’s leading opposition newspaper, which is also Turkey’s leading English-language newspaper, Zaman, and arrested staffers there, taking them away, to who-knows-what fates.

There’s nothing like Zaman in just about any country: for examples, the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, and Guardian, aren’t “opposition newspapers,” though they used to cover the opposition in a moderately fair way, prior to the George W. Bush Administration, 9/11, and “regime change in Iraq.” By contrast, Zaman has constantly been very bold in exposing truths that the regime doesn’t want the public to know. But that’s all past history now — it’s at least as radical a change for Turkey as occurred in America with the Bush regime, which controlled the media as effectively as its successor-regime, Obama’s, has done, and which never needed to employ such blatantly police-state methods as Turkey now is clearly doing.

On Thursday March 4th, Tayyip Erdoğan, the Islamist President of U.S. ally and NATO member-nation Turkey, took over Zaman or Today’s Zaman, where the headline on Friday was: "Court appoints trustees to take over management of Zaman, Today’s Zaman.” Until after that report was filed, this was only a court matter, not a blatantly police-state one — using physical forms of force, including armed ‘security’ forces inside, and water-cannons against demonstrators outside.

Here was that Zaman news-report’s opening:

An İstanbul court has appointed trustees to take over the management of the Feza Media Group, which includes Turkey’s biggest-selling newspaper, the Zaman daily, as well as the Today’s Zaman daily and the Cihan news agency, dealing a fresh blow to the already battered media freedom in Turkey.

The decision was issued by the İstanbul 6th Criminal Court of Peace at the request of the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, which claimed that the media group acted upon orders from what it called the “Fethullahist Terrorist Organization/Parallel State Structure (FETÖ/PDY),” praising the group and helping it achieve its goals in its publications.

The prosecutor also claimed that the alleged terrorist group is cooperating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist organization to topple the Turkish government and that high-level officials of the two groups have had meetings abroad.

The court decision means that the entire management and the editorial board of Feza Media Group companies will be replaced by the three-member board named by the court.

Turkey’s existing conservative regime is typical of conservative governments in using ‘national security’ rationalizations as excuses for clamping down against the public, supposedly in order to ‘protect’ the public. However, the ‘democratic’ gloss over the transition of a democratic government into a dictatorial one can do nothing to maintain as being true the supposition that the nation is a democracy instead of (now) a dictatorship.

The specific ‘national security’ context behind today’s clamp-down and end of democracy in Turkey, is that the Zaman operations were owned by Erdoğan's enemy, Fethullah Gülen, who had self-exiled to an estate in Pennsylvania after objecting to the Islamicization of Turkey’s government under Erdoğan. Gülen is no ‘secularist,’ but he came to insist upon a separation between church-and-state, so that there will be no favoritism by the government toward any clergy, and thus no favoritism by the clergy toward any government or political party. In other words: Gülen preaches a relatively progressive version of Islam.

By contrast: Erdoğan has, consistently since he first entered politics, moved Turkey more and more toward a standard Sunni dictatorship, aligned with the Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia, and who hold authority over Islam’s two holiest sites: Mecca and Medina. Their Islamic sect is called Wahhabism inside Saudi Arabia, and Salafism outside Saudi Arabia. The founder was Mohammed Ibn Wahhab in 1744, when he swore a mutual oath with the gang-lord Muhammad Ibn Saud, for Saud’s descendants to control the government, and for Wahhab’s preachers to instruct the faithful that the Sauds have God’s blessing to rule. Under this agreement, Wahhab’s preachers determine the laws, based upon the strictest-possible interpretation of the Quran, which therefore functions as Saudi Arabia’s Constitution, while the Wahhabist preachers constitute the legislative and judicial branches of the Saud-led government, who are the executive branch — the Saud-clan’s leaders.

Outside Saudi Arabia, the sect is called “Salafist,” meaning that they derive their authority from their ancestors. This feature authorizes royal rule, because royal dictators achieve their ‘right’ to rule on the basis of whom their ancestors were (i.e., their parents, going ultimately back to some founder who was a conquerer). For this reason, all of the Arabic royal families are Salafists. Inside Saudi Arabia, the Saud family are Wahhabists (the Saudi version of the Salafist sect).

The continued membership by Turkey in NATO would mean that there is a NATO that no longer has any vestige of justification for continued existence after the end, in 1991, of communism, of the USSR, and of the Warsaw Pact. Democracy no longer survives as even a vestigial excuse for its continuation.

NATO, from now on, is just a gang of nations whose aristocracies crave to conquer the world’s most resource-rich nation: Russia. (It’s done by picking off, one-by-one, Russia’s former allied nations and bringing them into the NATO gang.) The U.S. and Saud family, and Erdoğan family, as well as the other Arabic royal families, and the controlling investors in U.S. and allied weapons-manufacturers, etc., constitute the chief beneficiaries of continuing NATO, but the conquest of Russia is not at all the primary goal of the residents in NATO-member nations. In fact, it’s not a goal that’s even talked about in their ‘elections.’ If those nations were democracies, they’d abandon NATO, as being representative of dictatorship over them all, not of democracy, in any nation.

But we’re all dictatorships now.

New technologies expand knowledge of early art in North America

Matthew MacEgan

Art objects created by North American peoples of the Paleoindian period (approximately 18,000 to 8,000 BCE), have been found at the Gault Archaeological Site, which is located about 50 miles north of Austin, Texas. The new methods used by archaeologists to identify the objects, employing sophisticated computerized scanning and analysis, suggest that such objects may actually be more common in North America than previously believed.

Artifacts photographed using Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM)

Archaeologists Ashley Lemke (University of Michigan), Clark Wernecke, and Michael B. Collins (both from Texas State University) note that early art in North America dating back to the Paleoindian period, which is when most archaeologists currently agree humans first arrived in the New World, has been considered rare when compared to similar findings in the Old World. This may not, in fact, be the case.

Their findings, based on analysis of incised artifacts from the Gault site, were published last year in an article in American Antiquity, the flagship journal of the Society for American Archaeology.

They attribute this erroneous assumption to problems of recognition and underreporting. In particular, they write, “an expectation to find such artifacts plays a principal role in their identification.” The building of an appropriate analysis protocol that allows excavators to identify engraved artifacts during excavations resulted in one project identifying “more than 100 stones with incised lines as well as engraved bone.”

The Gault site has been occupied by humans consistently throughout the last 14,000 years and sits on land that has been privately owned since the 19th century. After initial investigations were performed by archaeologists in the early 20th century, the land was sold to landowners who established a “pay-to-dig” venue, where collectors could pay a small fee to dig anywhere on the property and keep everything they found.

The first recognition of early art at the site came in 1990 when a collector recovered four small, incised limestone tablets that were associated with Clovis artifacts, a specific designation given to stone tools originally identified at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, that date back approximately 11,000 years. The collector brought them to archaeologists at the University of Texas in Austin, who subsequently conducted test excavations in the area where the artifacts were discovered. They uncovered more incised stones and flakes (the debris of stone tool production), and after publishing their results were contacted by other collectors who had found similar objects but had not recognized them as being incised.

The art artifacts discussed in the 2015 paper consist only of those recovered from systematic excavations—“nine incised stones and one engraved bone from Paleoindian-aged contexts.” However, the authors report that a special protocol has been created and distributed to any excavator working at the site that instructs them on how to fully inspect each artifact for potential engraving. They write that while “some incised patterns are obvious when the artifact is excavated others are more difficult to discern and are sent to the laboratory for microscopic inspection.”

In the laboratory, the artifacts are photographed using Polynomial Texture Mapping (PTM), which helps in the detection of incised patterns that can be difficult to detect even microscopically. PTM captures digital images of the artifacts using multiple lighting angles in order to obtain a more “representative” image. Up to 64 different high-resolution digital images are captured under a dome that has strobing lights positioned in an upward spiral. The data is then collected in what are called “texels” (texture pixels), which can then be manipulated to draw out the different lighting conditions. Researchers can then enhance and examine a multitude of patterns on the stone artifacts.

The engraved artifacts found at Gault help us to better understand the artistic expression of humans living in the Paleoindian period. The authors of the 2015 paper report that the “Gault stones and bone display geometric, intentional, and patterned engraving behavior that may be decorative, ownership marks, or other symbols, which we have classified here as art.”

They write that there are likely other specimens from other sites that have fallen into “miscellaneous” categories that also feature similar incised patterns: “There are many other examples of art dating to the Paleoindian period in North America, including petroglyphs of extinct Pleistocene fauna, one case of painted bones, and other engraved bones, ivory, and lithics [stones].”

They provide a table listing artifacts that feature early art in North and Central America, including objects found in sites in Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming, British Columbia and Tequixquiac in Mexico. All of them have been dated by various archaeologists to between approximately 8,000 and 12,000 years ago.

In addition to the incisions made on such objects, the authors also describe the use of ochre (a red pigment) during the Paleoindian period. This is significant because ochre has been found used on both artifacts and landscapes altered by humans all around the world, both in the archaeological record and in use by modern societies today. “While the use of ochre is not a diagnostic Paleoindian trait,” they write, “it is found fairly consistently from a wide variety of contexts throughout the period including burials, on animal bones, in caches, and numerous domestic contexts.” They also report that there is even an instance of ochre being mined by Paleoindian peoples in Wyoming.

The importance of these discoveries is in the information we obtain about hunter-gatherer societies that existed in prehistoric North America. According to the authors, this information includes how they exchanged information, their social mobility, how they transmitted culture, and how they signaled each other. It also helps dispel myths of primitive savagery that are still sometimes wrongly associated with prehistoric societies in general. Art in prehistoric North America may still be rare in comparison with art found in other parts of the world, but it appears that this has been primarily due to its invisibility.

Now that such discoveries can be made using new advances in technology, researchers can place these artifacts into a larger inventory of art that includes artifacts dating back as far as 100,000 years ago. The authors of the 2015 paper suggest that those interested in this history can have “more detailed discussions of the creation, maintenance, and use of engraved art across the globe” and can “[enhance] our understanding of shared patterns of symbolic behavior over vast amounts of time and space.”

Australia: Qantas reaps record profits by slashing jobs and wages

Terry Cook

Australia’s main airline carrier group Qantas announced last week a 234 percent jump in its first-half profit from July to December 2015, returning $688 million across its operations. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce hailed the best half-year return in the carrier’s 95-year history, reversing a $2.8 billion net loss for the year to June 2014.

Qantas also unveiled a $500 million share buyback, taking to $1 billion the sum returned in less than a year to its shareholders, which are predominantly global finance houses.

While $448 million of the profit increase was attributed to savings on jet fuel, due to plunging global oil prices, the remainder was directly ripped out of the jobs and conditions of the company’s workforce, with the help of the trade unions covering workers at Qantas and its low-cost subsidiary, Jetstar.

Over the past five years, first under the previous Labor government, then the current Liberal-National government, the management of the former state-owned airline has been in the forefront of the destruction of jobs and conditions.

In the first instance, the profits were reaped from the “Qantas Transformation” program announced in February 2014, which involved the destruction of 5,000 full-time jobs, or around or 15 percent of the workforce, an 18-month wage freeze and the slashing of working conditions.

The foundations for that assault were laid in 2011 when Qantas grounded its entire international fleet as a means of smashing workers’ resistance to its restructuring drive. In response, the unions worked closely with the then Labor government, which intervened via its Fair Work tribunal to outlaw all industrial action by Qantas workers. This gave the unions time to impose agreements on their members to deliver management’s demands. As a result, nearly 3,000 jobs were eliminated or contracted out by 2012.

At a shareholders meeting last October, Joyce praised the “commitment” of the 30,000 remaining Qantas workers. They had “been responsible for implementing this program of rapid and significant change.”

In reality, the cost cutting was imposed on the airline’s workers through a combination of outright intimidation and the collaboration of the unions, which systematically suppressed any potential opposition by their members.

Within a month of the 2014 announcement of the “transformation” plan, the Australian Services Union (ASU) ditched all talk of industrial action and brokered an agreement with the company to cut the number of full-time staff by one third at its Sydney airport international terminal via supposed “voluntary redundancies.”

This agreement was hailed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) as a template for implementing all 5,000 job cuts. ACTU secretary Dave Oliver told the media that if Qantas could demonstrate to the unions that “genuine redundancies” were needed, “then our expectation is that the arrangements agreed to between Qantas and the ASU could be applied consistently across the workforce.”

With this assurance, Qantas was able to axe 4,000 jobs by June 2015, as planned, in engineering, catering, freight, cabin crew and airport and flight operations. Throughout last year, the unions also helped the company impose the 18-month pay freeze in work agreements covering thousands of workers.

Working closely with the company, the unions presented, as a gain, a one-off bonus equivalent to around 5 percent of each worker’s salary. In reality, the bonus ties annual pay increases to just 3 percent on the termination of the pay freeze, thereby saving the company millions of dollars. By the end of last year, the airline unions had imposed 24 wage freeze agreements covering more than 10,000 Qantas staff.

Last month, 350 baggage handlers, members of the Transport Workers Union (TWU), employed at Jetstar overwhelmingly rejected a four-year agreement put to them directly by management. The agreement contained an 18-month pay freeze, and required workers to be available for a six-day week without overtime, while committing management to guarantee casual employees only 30 hours of work a week. Many of the baggage handlers are paid as little as $665 per week.

While TWU national secretary Tony Sheldon congratulated the Jetstar workers for “standing together and rejecting this proposal,” the union’s only concern was that management drew up and presented the proposal without the TWU’s assistance.

Jetstar has signalled it will turn to the union to impose its requirements. A company spokesman told the media: “If the TWU want to meet with us again we’ll do so, but the reality is we do not have a better offer to put forward.” He added: “We have been really clear that any new EBA must contain the 18-month wage freeze.”

The TWU’s willingness to comply was demonstrated in February last year, when the union brokered a pay freeze agreement covering 2,600 workers, including airport, catering and freight employers. This deal, the largest single enterprise agreement reached at Qantas, helped set a benchmark to be imposed across Qantas’s operations.

Both in 2011–12 and 2014–15, the cuts to jobs, wages and conditions at Qantas, one of the country’s largest employers, helped pave the way for similar attacks on workers across Australia. Tens of thousands of jobs have been eliminated in basic industry over the past five years, and more than 760,000 people are now looking for work, even by the deliberately under-stated official figures.

Despite the company’s record profit, there is no finishing line for the assault on workers at Qantas or anywhere else. With global competition accelerating since the 2008 global meltdown, Qantas and other major transnational companies will continue to ruthlessly restructure, assisted by the unions.

Airlines worldwide are continuing to shed jobs in cut-throat battles for market share. Last month alone, Air France unveiled plans to cut 1,400 jobs, Ryanair said it will cut 600 jobs and Delta Airlines announced 120 job cuts, while Meridiana and Qatar Airways confirmed they will shed 900 jobs as part of a planned merger.

Against the betrayals of the unions, a globally-unified fight by workers is essential to stop airline workers internationally being endlessly played off against each other, resulting in a downward spiral of worsening working conditions and elimination of jobs.

Report on German poverty refutes propaganda of social recovery

Stefan Steele

Almost one in six people, some 15.4 percent of the German population, were registered poor in terms of income in 2014. This is the conclusion of the poverty report of the Paritätischen Gesamtverbands charity published for the first time in 2016. The report’s co-authors included the organization Pro Asyl, which contributed its expertise regarding poverty among refugees. All the data refers to the period 2005-2014.

The 15.4 percent in poverty corresponds to about 12.5 million people in Germany who “live in households where the [net] income is less than 60 percent of the median income of all households.” Those particularly affected are the unemployed, with a poverty rate of 58 percent; single parents, with 42 percent living below the poverty line; 19 percent of children, who continue to be among the poorest, and pensioners, who, at 15.6 percent, are above the average poverty rate for the first time.

Compared to the previous year, the poverty rate decreased in 2014 by 0.1 percent. The poverty rate decreased statistically in nine of Germany’s 13 states, most notably in Mecklenburg Pomerania (-2.3 percent), Berlin (-1.4) and Bremen (-0.5). Nevertheless, these states continue to head the list of those with the highest poverty rates. In comparison to southern states, the differences continue to be immense.

The slight decrease in the poverty rate, despite these better numbers from some states, can be explained by the fact that both Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, where more than 30 million people live, have recorded an increase in poverty. In Bavaria, which remains one of the states with the highest living standards, the poverty rate increased from 11.3 to 11.5 percent, while in North Rhine-Westphalia it increased to 17.5—a 0.4 percent rise.

The Paritätische Gesamtverband also explicitly noted that “relevant groups are left out” because only people “with their own household” are included in the statistics. This means that an estimated 335,000 homeless and about 764,000 living in care homes, of which around half are dependent on welfare support, are not included in the statistics.

In addition, there are “the more than 200,000 disabled people in inpatient facilities”, about 185,000 living in student accommodation and of course the many refugees who persevere in so-called reception centers under inhumane conditions and make do with a minimum of funds, cynically referred to as pocket money.

Excluding refugees, a total of one and a half million people, or about 1.8 percent of the German population, are not included in the data used to calculate the poverty rate. This alone suggests that the minimum reduction in the overall poverty rate reported can in no way be regarded as an endpoint, let alone as a U-turn, in the almost continuously increasing poverty rate among broad social layers since 2006.

This impression is corroborated by the fact that the already very small change in poverty levels stands in flagrant contradiction to the growth of German economic output, which stands at 1.6 percent. It underscores again how wide the social divide has grown and how few have benefited from Germany’s enormous economic wealth. The editors of the poverty report also emphasize that “economic growth does not ‘automatically’ lead to a redistribution of the additional produced resources, thereby preventing poverty. Quite the opposite, this increasing wealth can lead to a further widening of the income gap and even greater relative poverty.”

It is also significant that the situation of those most affected by poverty changed little, if not worsened, between 2005 and 2014. A group where this is manifested with shocking clarity is that of pensioners: “The poverty rate among pensioners today lies 46 percent higher than in 2005.”

This is illustrated by a contribution by Joachim Rock titled, “Poverty in old age and disability”, using the example of 75-year-old Joseph H., who had worked until he was 71 years old and now has a pension of €416, and must thus rely on welfare. While the number of pensioners in receipt of welfare support was 257,734 in 2003, in 2014 the number is 512,262. This represents an increase of 99 percent, but it is already clear “that the number of people affected by poverty in old age will increase significantly in the coming years.”

This disturbing trend is by no means due to demographic changes or lack of economic success, but the result of a systematic policy of cutting pensions and social benefits. For example, the introduction of the so-called “sustainability and Riester factors” in 2003 and 2005 means “pension increases lag 4.4 percent behind wage increases. By 2029, it will be a further 8 percent. For an average earner with 45 years of contributions this would correspond to a loss of €2,939 a year.”

The largest group of people experiencing poverty remains the unemployed.” Those who are or remain unemployed in this country are not protected from poverty—but on the contrary, are particularly hard hit by poverty”, writes expert Tina Hoffmann in the section “unemployment and poverty”. The worst affected are those who must rely on “benefits from the basic provision for jobseekers,” better known as Hartz IV, where the poverty rate is 84 percent.

In a European comparison, Germany leads the “statistics in a negative sense”. Even the most fundamental essentials of food, clothing and housing are not securely covered by the current Hartz-IV rate of €404 a month: “40 percent of Hartz IV recipients cannot [also] afford payment-liable medical treatments such as dentures or glasses.”

Receipt of Hartz IV benefits also often impacts on social living standards, because recipients “have to restrict their social activities—from the lack of communication possibilities in the absence of the Internet and a computer, to the impossibility of going to a movie or visiting a restaurant”.

This social isolation, exacerbated by the frequent breaking off of relations with former colleagues, is also reflected in the mental health of many Hartz IV recipients and increasingly reinforces a withdrawal from social life. “However, it would be wrong to draw a picture of apathy and total withdrawal. Empirical evidence shows, according to the poverty report, “that in particular the unemployed in East Germany increasingly get involved in voluntary service.”

The overall picture that arises from this report clearly contradicts that propagated by many politicians and the bourgeois media of social improvement through higher employment. This only points ultimately to the fact that even for those in employment it is increasingly difficult to achieve a certain standard of living, because poverty has not diminished at all. While even many mainstream media must now acknowledge the widening gulf between rich and poor, the grave figures contained in the poverty report were usually dismissed in short, superficial articles.

In an editorial in Spiegel Online, under the headline “Social Association: The dangerous blues from bitterly poor Germany”, Guido Kleinhubbert goes so far as to say that the picture drawn by the poverty report would drive “those parts of the population already unsettled by the refugee crisis” into the hands of the [far right] “AfD politicians, NPD scatterbrains and Pegida-brawlers”. It is therefore “irresponsible to create the impression that for many people in Germany it is getting worse.”

This hypocritical standpoint, which simply refuses to state the facts about the standard of living of a large part of the population, reflects the growing fears of the ruling class of a radicalization of the working class. In the face of an increasing social divide, only the working class has an interest in combatting and replacing inequality with a genuinely fair, socialist economic system.

US employment report: Payrolls rise, wages fall

Barry Grey

President Barack Obama seized on the February employment report, released Friday morning by the Labor Department, to tout the supposed “success” of his economic policies and paint a picture of a thriving US economy. The report, which showed a larger-than-predicted growth in private nonfarm payrolls of 242,000 jobs, confirmed that the US economy was “the envy of the world,” Obama told reporters at a White House appearance.

“The fact of the matter is that the plans that we have put in place to grow the economy have worked,” he boasted.” He derided “an alternative reality out there from some of the political folks that America is down in the dumps.” He countered, “America is pretty darn great right now.”

He did not attempt to explain why the “alternative reality,” which his labor secretary, Thomas Perez, attributed to “fear-mongers and fact-deniers,” is believed by tens of millions of Americans, whose anger over economic injustice is dramatically reflected in the current election campaign.

One does not have to look too closely at the Labor Department’s report, however, to get an idea of what is fueling the social indignation of working people in the eighth and final year of the Obama administration. Behind the top-line number for new jobs and the quasi-fictional official unemployment rate of only 4.9 percent, ongoing trends with disastrous consequences for the working class are evident. They account for two other important indices in the report: a decline in average earnings from the previous month of 3 cents, or 0.1 percent, to $25.35, bringing the increase for the year down to just 2.2 percent, and a fall in the average private-sector workweek of 0.2 hours to 34.4 hours, a two-year low.

These two figures arise from the fact that the vast bulk of new jobs created in February were low-wage and a huge percentage were part-time. The low-paying service sector—retail, bars and restaurants, health care—accounted for 245,000 jobs. The reality of recession in basic production was reflected in a 16,000 decline in manufacturing and the loss of another 19,000 mining jobs, bringing to 171,000 the total decline in mining since September 2014. The only better-paying industrial sector that saw an increase was construction, which recorded a gain of 19,000.

Another figure highlights the hollow and socially regressive character of Obama’s so-called “recovery.” The financial cable network CNBC pointed out that according to the Labor Department’s household survey, which is the basis for the unemployment rate figure (the figure on payroll growth is derived from a separate survey of business establishments), full-time jobs increased in February by only 65,000, while part-time positions increased by 489,000. This means that a mere 11.7 percent of new jobs in February were full-time!

These statistics point to the fact that the American ruling class, through its instrument, the Obama administration, has utilized the financial crash of 2008, for which it was responsible, to fundamentally reorganize the US economy, transforming it into a low-wage system. The millions of decent-paying jobs that were destroyed have been largely replaced by poverty-wage, part-time and temporary jobs.

The median household income has fallen sharply. Pensions and health benefits have been gutted, schools closed by the thousands, teachers and other public workers laid off by the millions. At the other end, the Federal Reserve and the US Treasury have pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets, driving up the stock market and bringing the concentration of wealth at the very top to unprecedented levels. This is what Obama lauds as “success.”

Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain mired in long-term unemployment. The number of long-term unemployed, defined as without work for 27 weeks or more, was essentially unchanged at 2.2 million in February. This number has not shifted significantly since last June. The long-term jobless accounted last month for 27.7 percent of the unemployed, a far higher percentage than in any previous period categorized as an economic recovery.

A broader measure of unemployment that includes people working part-time but wanting full-time work and those too discouraged to seek employment registered 9.7 percent last month, nearly double the official jobless rate. There are, in addition, millions of people who have dropped out of the labor market and are not even counted in government employment reports.

While the employment-to-population ratio edged up to 59.8 percent and the labor force participation rate rose slightly to 62.9 percent, both measures remain extraordinarily low by historical standards.

The impact of soaring social inequality and falling living standards for broad sections of the population is reflected in a growing crisis in the retail sector. This week, sporting goods chain The Sports Authority filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and announced it was closing at least 140 of its 463 stores and laying off 3,400 of its 13,000 employees. This follows recent announcements by Walmart, Sears/Kmart and Macy’s of hundreds of store closures and thousands of layoffs.

TVA pension cuts: A new stage in the assault on American workers

Niles Williamson

The announcement this week of cuts to the pensions of the employees of the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) marks a new stage in the drive by the ruling class, overseen by the Obama administration, to take back all of the social gains won by the working class over the course of a century of struggle.

The TVA, the largest public utility company in the US, employs 10,000 people and provides electricity and other services to 9 million residents in an 80,000 square mile area covering significant portions of Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia.

As was noted in Friday’s New York Times, the TVA cuts will breach the “firewall” that up to now has protected federal employee pensions, marking the first time that the federal government makes significant moves against defined benefit obligations. The underfunding of the pension plan by an estimated $6 billion is being used to justify the cuts.

The Tennessee Valley Authority Retirement System (TVARS) board approved a plan on Thursday that would shift workers hired since 2006 from a defined-benefit plan to a defined-contribution 401(k) investment plan. Those hired since 1996 with more than 10 years on the job would see their pensions split between the current plan and the 401(k). This scheme, which still has to be approved by the overall board of directors of the TVA, is slated to take effect in October.

While the plan maintains defined benefit pensions for current retirees, a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) on benefits will be capped at 6 percent. For current employees and retirees under 50, the COLA will not kick in until they turn 65.

The plan approved by TVARS is a slight modification of a proposal put forward by the CEO of the utility, William D. Johnson, to cut $700 million from pension obligations over 20 years. The cuts would not impact a special executive retirement plan that supplements the pensions of those who sit on the TVA’s executive board, including the multi-millionaire Johnson.

Johnson, the former CEO of Progress Energy, received total compensation of $6.4 million in 2015, making him the highest paid federal employee. Expressing his contempt for TVA workers, Johnson told the New York Times that cutting his own pay would not make a dent in the pension system’s liabilities and that maintaining executive pensions was necessary to “attract talent.”

The attack on the pensions of TVA employees is a warning that no section of the working class is exempt from the social counterrevolution being carried out in the interests of the financial aristocracy. The TVA is seen as low-hanging fruit in the public sector since it is exempt from federal regulations that guarantee pension benefits and penalize companies for underfunding pension plans.

The imposition of cuts there will set a precedent for overriding pension guarantees for other federal employees, just as the Detroit bankruptcy, backed by the Obama administration, became the model for gutting public-sector pensions in other cities and states across the country, as well as for attacks in the private sector.

Over the past 35 years, the percentage of workers receiving pensions has been vastly reduced. The share of private-sector workers with a pension has fallen to less than 3 percent from close to 30 percent in 1980. Millions have been pushed into 401(k) investment plans, which funnel retirement funds into the hands Wall Street speculators.

The announcement of the assault on the TVA pension fund follows the Obama administration’s recent gutting of benefits for hundreds of thousands of retired truck drivers, package handlers and other workers covered by the Teamsters Central States Pension Fund.

In a country where 400 billionaires control more wealth than the bottom half of the population and the top 1 percent captures more than 21 percent of all income, it has become a mantra that there is “no money” for pensions, health care or any other social program. Yet hundreds of billions of dollars continue to be paid out in executive compensation.

Millions of workers had their retirement savings wiped out as result of the collapse of the stock market in 2008 and most have never recovered. On average, workers between the ages of 56 and 61 saw their retirement savings fall by 23 percent between 2007 and 2013. Millions more, without any retirement benefits or savings, are entirely dependent on meager Social Security payments.

The assault by the Obama administration on the TVA has a symbolic significance, underscoring the utter hostility of the Democratic Party today to the social reforms carried out decades ago by Democratic Party administrations. The utility was created by the federal government in 1933, marking a high point in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal public works program aimed at heading off a socialist revolution in the depths of the Great Depression.

Modeled to a certain extent on the central planning employed by the workers state in the Soviet Union, the TVA brought electricity and modern farming techniques to a section of the country that had remained mired in poverty and backwardness.

The attack on TVA pensions is the spearhead of a broader attack directed ultimately at the dismantling of the utility as a government-owned entity and its carve-up among corporations looking for new sources of profit. This is but the latest indication of the mortal crisis of American capitalism, which poses the necessity for a mass political and revolutionary response by the working class.

Iranian Regime’s Torture, Abuse Of Political Prisoners Continues

Rahim Hamid

Despite Iran’s continuing imprisonment of large numbers of political activists, dissidents and journalists, Ali Asghar Jahangir, the regime’s prisons chief, claims that there are no political prisoners in the country. In an interview with the Iranian News Agency [IRNA] published on March 2, 2016 Jahangir said, “In our country, we don’t have political prisoners according to the international definition of the term,” adding “We have a very few ‘security prisoners’ – those individuals who have endangered national security – although the number of these prisoners is minimal.”

So how did the regime magically make the countless political prisoners in its jails disappear? By the simple means of failing to define any ‘political’ offences within its legal system. Instead, detained dissidents, journalists, artists, campaigners and activists face charges such as ‘endangering national security’ or ‘enmity to God’, with brutal torture being a standard means of coercing confessions, and death sentences for these ‘crimes’ being routine.

Under Iranian law, defining these prisoners as a ‘threat to national security’ enables the authorities to keep them in ‘pretrial detention’ for months for questioning without granting them access to lawyers or the right to see family members or have any contact with the outside world. The subsequent show trials take place in ‘revolutionary courts’ whose proceedings fail to meet the most basic standards of a fair trial under international law.

In the same interview, Jahangir told IRNA that all prisoners are granted access to a lawyer, social worker and physician, as well as having the right to make phone calls and access to a library and to take advantage of the country’s education system during their imprisonment in accordance with the Iranian penal system. The availability of these rights will surely be welcome news to the tens of thousands of political prisoners who have been consistently denied them to date.

In response to a question from IRNA about reported hunger strikes by many prisoners over their lack of access to any legal counsel, Jahangir, who is also the adviser to the head of the Judiciary of the Islamic Republic, flatly denied the reports: “[Reports of] lack of access to a lawyer are not true in any way; this is a standard right in all prisons and for all prisoners,” he asserted, adding, “Those who are on hunger strike often misuse such strategies simply to get into media and create a name for themselves.”

Despite the regime official’s assertions, countless political prisoners remain incarcerated in jails across Iran, including infamous prisons such as Karoon and Sepidar – both in the Ahwaz region – and the notorious Rajah Shahr Central Prison and GhezelHesar Prison in Karaj, a city to the west of Tehran.

One example among many of the regime’s standard disregard for international law is the deplorable treatment meted out to Ahwazi Arab prisoners detained for campaigning for human rights and for converting to Sunni Islam. Like countless other dissidents in Iran, particularly among minorities, Ahwazi Arabs are routinely detained for months and even years without charge before being tried at show trials.

Former Ahwazi detainees, both male and female, describe being subjected to torture during interrogations by regime personnel, whose methods include physical assault, hanging prisoners upside down, beating them on the soles of their feet, electrocution, rape or threats of sexual assault. The subsequently coerced confessions are the norm, with the Iranian regime’s notoriously weak and corrupt judiciary simply ignoring this wrongdoing.

The horrendous abuse suffered by Ahwazi political prisoner, Majed Al-Boghobeish is, unfortunately quite typical: imprisoned for eight years on charges of ‘endangering national security’ for the alleged ‘crime’ of converting from Shiite to Sunni Islam, was rushed to the Khomeini Hospital in Ahwaz City on January 31 this year for emergency treatment due to suffering life-threatening injuries inflicted by sustained savage torture by staff at the Karoon Prison and throughout the period of his detention. In just one of the incidents, warders who claimed to have witnessed him praying in the Sunni manner broke both his arms as a punishment. According to sources in Al-Ahwaz, Al-Boghobeish was subjected to psychological as well as physical torture by the prison staff, with both being standard, if unofficial, regime policy.

The Ahwazi rights groups have appealed to the United Nations and its constituent bodies and to all international organisations concerned with human rights to put pressure on the Iranian government to fulfil its legal obligations under international law in order to help to bring an end to the systemic and increasing brutal persecution and human rights abuses of Ahwazi activists and all other political prisoners in Iran’s prisons.

Saudi Prince: We Support Israel In Palestinian War

Shubhda Chaudhary

Saudi Prince and entrepreneur, al-Waleed bin Talal made a startling statement to Kuwaiti Al Qabas daily stating that ‘Saudi Arabia must reconsider its regional commitments and devise a new strategy to combat Iran’s increasing influence in Gulf States by forging a Defense pact with Tel Aviv.’ It would deter any possible Iranian moves in the light of unfolding developments in the Syria and Moscow’s military intervention.

He openly stated that ‘I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada( uprising) and i shall exert all my influence to break any ominous Arab initiatives set to condemn Tel Aviv , because I deem the Arab-Israeli entente and future friendship necessary to impede the Iranian dangerous encroachment.’

With the emergence of neo-liberalism and complex interdependence, Saudi Arabia and Israel have had built tacit alliances but they have not been openly embraced. Though, this has now turned into a geopolitical strategic acrimony between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As we are witnessing a regional cold war in West Asia, the media attention has anyway shifted from the Palestinian issue, in spite of the fact that they are currently undergoing a ‘leaderless Intifada.’ But it’s astonishing that Saudi Arabia, the powerful giant for Wahabbi ideology is thinking of deterring its stand in the Palestinian cause.

The manner in which, one after another, Arab states have abandoned the Palestinian cause has now become a convention. But such an unreasonable statement by Saudi Prince reveals the emerging hidden contours of power.

He further mentioned ‘Iran seeks to buttress its presence in the Mediterranean by supporting Assad regime in Syria, added Prince al-Waleed, but to the chagrin of Riyadh and its sister Gulf sheikhdoms, Putin’s Russia has become a real co-belligerent force in Syrian 4-year-old civil war by attacking CIA-trained Islamist rebels. Here surfaces the paramount importance of Saudi-Israeli nexus to frustrate Russia-Iran-Hezbollah axis.’ The quote validates that Russia is bombing CIA trained Islamist rebels which has always been controversial and often called a conspiracy theory. At the same time, it also highlights the insecurity of Saudi Arabia against the emergence of Russia-Iran and Hezbollah axis within the Syrian paradigm.

Prince al-Waleed bin Talal had previously been in news also for supporting the annexation of Bahrain during the Arab Uprising at Pearl Square in Manama, which witnessed complete media blackout though there was massive man-slaughter. The entire idea of uprisings for democracy is so antithetical to the entire monarchial set-up of Saudi Arabia that it has also played a pivotal role in fuelling the sectarian war in West Asia.

Nevertheless, the Palestinian Ambassador to India stated that Prince al-Waleed had later stated that he had made no such statements and they do not hold true. It’s quite unbelievable that any news agency can have the leverage t fabricate such strong views on its own behalf and hence, on meticulous scrutiny, it might have an iota of truth.

Nobel-Prize-Winning Economist Condemns Obama's ‘Trade' Deals

Eric Zuesse

The Nobel-Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the U.S. President, Joseph Stiglitz, went to England to warn the British public, and Parliament, that “no democracy” can support U.S. President Barack Obama's proposed trade-deals, because all of these have a feature built into them, called Investor State Dispute Resolution, or ISDS, which will establish a supra-national authority that gives international corporations the power to sue any signatory nation that introduces new or increased economic regulations regarding product-safety, the environment, workers' rights, or anything else that the corporation alleges lowers the corporation's profits; and because these cases will be tried not in courts that are subject to the given nation's constitution and laws, but instead by private three-person panels of mainly corporate lawyers, and their rulings will not be subject to being appealed within the given nation's court system — the panel's decison will be final. There will be no democratic accountability at all, regarding regulations and laws that are designed to protect the public: environmental, product-safety, and workers' rights. The existing regulations will be, in effect, locked in stone, or else decreased — never increased, no matter how much the latest scientific findings might indicate they ought to be. That's because the international corporations' panels will have powers above and beyond any signatory nation's constitution and laws. ISDS gives international corporations the right to sue taxpayers; it does not give any government the right to sue an international corporation (and that also means no right to sue such a corporation for having filed a frivolous lawsuit against the taxpayers). It's a new profit-center for international corporations, in which those profits are coming from the taxpayers of nations that lose these lawsuits — and these cases will explode in volume if Obama's deals get passed.

Stiglitz was speaking specifically about the TTIP, which is Obama's proposed trade-deal with Europe, and he based his analysis upon the published proposed TPP, which is its companion trade-deal for virtually all nations that are in or on the Pacific. (Wikileaked texts indicate that the TTIP is basically similar to TPP.)

In the article by Huffington Post that reports on Stiglitze's comments was this, from Stiglitz:

"There's nothing to stop you, in TTIP, from passing regulations. You can keep the regulations. You would just have to keep writing a cheque to [cigarette firm] Phillip Morris every year for the profits they lost from what they would have been if they had been able to kill people in the way they had in the past," he said. "Every year you would have to write them another billion dollar cheque.” ...

He said it would mean "any government that passes a regulation that has an adverse effect on the profits of a company can be sued" by that company.

Stiglitz said the lawyers who drafted TPP designed it to be so strict that if governments passed regulations "trying to prevent polonium in baby cereal" companies would sue. "This is not a joke," he added.

Previously, on the basis of a legal analysis of Obama's trade-deals, a leading legal expert at the United Nations, explained why (as my headline summarized it) "UN Lawyer Calls TTP & TTIP ‘a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots'.” That lawyer was saying essentially the same thing as Stiglitz, but from a legal not an economic standpoint.

For information specifically about the motivation behind Obama's trade-deals, see this.

Obama's proposed ‘trade' deals have not yet been passed into law in the United States. Here are the positions of leading U.S. Presidential candidates regarding whether they will favor or oppose them if they become the next U.S. President on 20 January 2017:

Hillary Clinton supports and was actively involved in producing Obama's proposed trade-deals, but they became too unpopular among Democratic primary voters and so during her Democratic Party primary campaign for the White House she reversed her previous verbal position on the matter, just as she did in 2008 when she condemned her husband's more-limited model, the NAFTA, after her having actually helped him to win approval for it in the U.S. Senate.

Bernie Sanders has condemned and voted against Obama's trade-deals consistently. His actions have matched his words.

Donald Trump also condemns Obama's proposed trade-deals, but his opposition, like Hillary's, is merely verbal while he's running for President, and though he (unlike Clinton) has no active record of having helped to produce these deals, he (like Clinton) does have a record of switching his positions in order to win votes. He's not like Sanders; he can't be trusted (or, at least, not intelligently  trusted).

More details about these deals, and their origins, can be found here, which provides the deeper historical context, going all the way back to the U.S. Constitution. 

Specifically regarding the corporate panels that will, in a sense, become an international-corporate world government if these deals become law, the details of that can be found here.

Essentially, what both Stiglitz and the UN's lawyer are saying is that, if these deals become law, then workers' rights laws, and product-safety laws, and environmental laws, won't be able to be increased — not even, for example, in order to meet the verbal commitments that were recently made at the Paris conference on climate change. (Those ‘commitments' to reduce global-warming gases would automatically become not merely unenforceable — which they already are — but they would become outright impossible to fulfill, because any effort to put them into place would produce crippling corporate-lawsuit-imposed fines against taxpayers.)

When Stiglitz said, “This is not a joke,” he was saying, essentially, the same thing as the UN lawyer did: “We don't want a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots. We don't want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law.” He was saying: Don't assume that the future won't be an international-corporate dictatorship, because that now is actually quite likely. If both of these agreements become law, then even the publics in non-member nations will almost certainly become crushed, because they'll be essentially boycotted by international corporations: both employment and consumption will collapse there. The interntional corporations would still come out way ahead, no matter how impoverished those people might become.

President Obama has specifically targeted the BRICS nations for that type of crushing treatment. He says this within a moralistic context in which he also says “the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” He said that on 28 May 2014, when he told graduating cadets at West Point this too: 

“Russia's aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China's economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors.  From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us.”

None of the five BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — is included in either of these two ‘trade'-pacts: Obama was telling America's future military leaders that those are enemy nations, which those future U.S. military officers might be fighting against in their careers, and he was placing that prospect into a broader economic  (not merely military) context. Obama's ‘trade' deals are about lots more than merely  ‘trade.'

It's widely expected that at least the TPP, if not also the TTIP, will become passed into law in the United States at some time between the November 8th U.S. Presidential election and the start of the new Presidency on 20 January 2017.

Both of these ‘trade' deals are being rammed through Congress in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution's Treaty Clause. Apparently, the U.S. Constitution no longer rules in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has never considered the matter (even though it would entail overthrowing a large portion of the U.S. Constitution if it becomes passed into law and sticks). However, if Obama's ‘trade' deals become passed into law, and remain, then what Stiglitz said, “This is not a joke,” will also mean that no intelligent and decent person will want to have children, unless that person wants them to live in a downward-spiralling dictatorship — which is what that would mean (and which would hardly qualify as being ‘decent').

The vote that the American people will be making on November 8th could thus turn out to be the most important vote in the entire history of the world: the stakes are so large — for the entire world. And that's no joke, either. If these proposed deals are not already too late to stop, this could well be the last chance. And to say that isn't ‘apocalyptic,' either: there's nothing at all of ‘Scripture' referred-to here. There's nothing that's at all ‘supernatural' about this. It's pure reality: very hard, very cold, and very real (and very profitable for the international billionaires whose agents have been pushing for this ever since at least 1954).

Pakistan: Kamal’s Dramatic Return and the Fate of MQM-A

Rana Banerji

On 03 March 2016, the former Mayor of Karachi, Mustafa Kamal, held a press conference to announce the formation of a new insofar unnamed political party. His castigation of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement-Altaf's (MQM-A) leader Altaf Hussain as a drunkard and an agent of India's Research & Analysis Wing (R&AW) during the event seems like yet another sinister and calculated effort by Pakistan’s all powerful military establishment to further fragment and decimate the party’s hold over Karachi. Kamal was accompanied at the press conference by another former MQM-A heavyweight, former Deputy Convenor Anees Qaimkhani, who had left the country because of several criminal cases against him. The police/rangers took no steps to arrest him at the event.

Kamal and MQM-A

Rising from humble origins as a telephone operator in MQM supremo Altaf Hussain’s 90, Azizabad headquarters, Kamal completed his undergraduate studies from Malaysia and Wales. From 2003-05, he was the Information Technology Minister in the Sindh provincial government wherein the MQM was in alliance with the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). In 2005, he became the mayor of Karachi, serving a difficult five-year stint during which he is credited to have provided a reasonably efficient, people-friendly and `not so corrupt’ local government there. In particular, he is reported to have contributed to better traffic management, designing the Jehangir Kothari flyover-cum-underpass.

During this period, Kamal maintained cordial relations with the then President of Pakistan, Gen Pervez Musharraf, despite having an uneasy relationship with Sindh Governor, Ishratul Abad - the MQM-A’s most durable, pro-establishment politician.

He was seen as the new face of the educated, upwardly mobile, tech-savvy Mohajir youth. However, as he gained acclaim, his parent party MQM-A was riveted by rifts in the wake of the Azim Tariq and Imran Farooq murders. In 2012, Kamal was 'kicked upstairs' as Member, Senate, a post which he suddenly deserted in August 2013 and left the country - ostensibly for personal reasons (wife’s illness cited). It was rumoured then that Kamal had received death threats from the MQM-A’s hit squad goons and had to flee to save his life. Although he initially left for the US, he surfaced first in Tanzania and then joined Pakistan’s influential estate dealer, Malik Riaz’s outfit in Dubai.

Evolving DynamicsThough Kamal strenuously denied connections with `the establishment’ during his press conference, his sudden re-surfacing at this juncture suggests the Pakistan army and the Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI) would have extended assurances to ensure his personal security in Karachi for the present. It also seems in sync with orchestrated moves by the Pakistan Army Chief Gen Raheel Sharif and ISI Director General Rizwan Akhtar to bring about en masse defections from the MQM-A. In the recent past, there have been rumours also of Gen (retd) Musharraf’s persisting ambition to re-emerge in a political role, with a possible chunk of Mohajir support. Despite best efforts, this has not happened. The Farooq Sattar-led leadership of the MQM in Karachi has remained steadfastly loyal to Altaf Hussain despite the recent court verdict and crackdown against any direct media coverage of the 'Quaid-e-Qiwan’s' long-distance speeches from UK.

In the December 2015 local body elections in Karachi, the MQM-A won 136 seats in six districts, comfortably besting the PPP that won 32 seats, and defeating the Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI)-Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) alliance that won 13 seats. Senior MQM-A leader Waseem Akhtar is now poised to become the mayor of Karachi.

MQM-A's ResponseOn 03 March 2016, Farooq Sattar responded with the MQM-A's own long-drawn press conference, labouriously denying Kamal’s charges, including those against Hussain’s alleged misdemeanours and dictatorial style. He claimed the attempts to tar the party with 'connections to R&AW' were 'old hat', which the party had survived several times in the past. The real test was approbation by the people, which the MQM-A had obtained during last year’s by-elections for NA 246 Karachi and now again, in the local body polls. He condemned this `new effort’ to sustain the `MQM minus one’ formula and asserted that it would fail again.

Nusrat Nadeem, Hussain's remaining trusted party lieutenant in London (Tariq Mir and Mohammad Anwar lost Altaf's confidence after squealing nineteen to the dozen before the Scotland Yard during their money fraud and Imran Farooq murder investigations), also urged the Pakistani establishment to talk directly to the party leadership instead of resorting to such nefarious tactics.

Barrister Saif Ali Khan, Gen (retd) Musharraf’s lawyer defending him in the myriad court cases against him also discounted rumours of support to Kamal, and affirmed his continuing loyalty to the MQM-A.

ProspectsBoth Kamal and Qaimkhani have support within the MQM-A. Their subsequent shenanigans would be watched with interest. The Farooq Sattar press conference was surrounded by several glum faces. A prominent leader, Faisal Sabzwari was absent. Though a major setback, it can, by no means, be said with certainty that the establishment would succeed in its objective of de-fanging the MQM-A by this manoeuvre just yet.