Global Warming Zaps Oxygen

Robert Hunziker

Take a deep breath. A recent scientific study reveals disturbing loss of ocean oxygen. Unnerving climatic events like this justify ringing and clanging of the bells on the Public Square, all hands on deck. In particular, and as expected, the culprit is too much anthropogenic-induced global warming or idiomatically speaking, human activities such as planes, trains, and automobiles… burning tons of coal. Somebody must do something to fix it… ah-ah-ah!

According to Denise Breitburg, lead author marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center: “The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on the Earth’s environment.” (Source: The Ocean Is Losing Its Breath, University of Californian-San Diego, Science Daily, January 4, 2018)

A team of scientists with GO2NE (Global Ocean Oxygen Network) created by the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission conducted a sweeping all-encompassing study of the state of ocean oxygen: “In the past 50 years, the amount of water in the open ocean with zero oxygen has gone up more than fourfold. In coastal water bodies, including estuaries and seas, low-oxygen sites have increased more than 10-fold since 1950. Scientists expect oxygen to continue dropping even outside these zones as Earth warms,” Ibid.

According to Vladimir Ryabinin, executive secretary of the International Oceanographic Commission that formed GO2NE: “Approximately half of the oxygen on Earth comes from the ocean.”

Today, there are actual dead zones where oxygen has plummeted so low that life suffocates. Not only, low oxygen that doesn’t suffocate life still stunts growth, hinders reproduction, and promotes disease. In short, low oxygen stresses the entire ecosystem. According to the “legendary ocean researcher” Dr. Sylvia Earle, as recognized by the Library of Congress, and referred to as “Her Deepness” by The New Yorker and former Chief Scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) but resigned and started Mission Blue “to save the ocean”: “The ocean is dying… All of us are the beneficiaries of having burned through fossil fuels, but at what costs? If we continue business as usual, we’re in real trouble.”

If only, a wish list, key federal positions that impact the planet, like the presidency (Trump) and heads of departments, like the EPA (Pruitt), had a smidgen of Dr. Earle’s mindset, knowledge, and consciousness, the great biosphere Earth would have a fighting chance, but no. Regrettably, they are at war with the planet. Their timing in office could not be worse! Indeed, the U.S. economy is the world’s largest at 25% of world GDP. Its impact on the climate system exceeds all others.

Metaphorically, comparing biosphere Earth to a passenger plane traveling from NY to Paris, nobody notices when half a dozen rivets pop off the fuselage. And, nobody knows when another 10 or 20 pop off. The plane still flies, but as rivets continue to pop off and the fuselage loosens and opens up the plane starts losing altitude. Passengers notice.

Similarly, biosphere Earth has lost many, many rivets but in contrast to the passenger plane scenario, scientists like Dr. Sylvia Earle and Dr. James Hansen, former top climate scientist of NASA, have already noticed, and they forewarned society before the fuselage rips apart, before passengers notice. Consequently, according to Paris ’15, the world takes warnings by scientists seriously and acts to repair the damage, but will it be soon enough? Some scientists don’t think so.

Examples of earthly rivets popping off: (1) “Ocean seasons are changing as a result of too much heat and CO2… The scale of ocean warming is truly staggering with numbers so large that it is difficult for most people to comprehend.” (Dan Laffoley, IUCN Global Marine and Polar Programme), (2) In 2017, the Gulf of Mexico’s Dead Zone, where oxygen is so weak that fish die, is the largest ever at 8,800 square miles. (NOAA), (3) The deadly trio, or fingerprints, of mass extinctions, including global warming, ocean acidification, and anoxia or lack of ocean oxygen at current rate of change are unprecedented in Earth’s known history. (Alex Rogers, Oxford, scientific director State of the Ocean), (4) Oceans have lost 40% of plankton production over past 50 years, threatening loss of one of the major sources of oxygen for the planet. (Boris Worm, Killam Research Professor, Dalhousie University/Halifax) Many more examples of earthly rivets popping off are extant but time and space limit.

What if the aforementioned airline pilot announced: “This is an urgent message from your pilot: Rivets are popping off the fuselage. Fasten your seatbelts!”

In reality, that’s happening now, earthly rivets are popping off all over the place, and even though scientists are warning of rivets popping off or “tipping points” in the climate system, America’s president Trump relies upon sources like Fox News and the Heritage Foundation for science knowledge. Therefore, it’s guaranteed he’ll never even hear the compulsory final announcement: “Fasten your seatbelts.” Well, come to think of it, it’s way too late then anyways.

America Loves Islamic Terrorists (Abroad): ISIS as Proxy US Mercenaries

Geoff Dutton

By all accounts, wherever the Islamic State has gained and held territory, its residents suffer terrible oppression and deprivation. Unless you are on their wavelength, you most likely agree that ISIS rule has been calamitous for its subjects. Both Obama and Trump have pointed out their badass nature on numerous occasions, not so much in sympathy for those they oppress but to raise fear levels of ISIS-inspired badassery here at home. And yet, both regimes have actively, secretly, and materially supported the advance of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, fully aware of who they were and what they were up to. Say what?

According to a RAND study based on satellite imagery in Syria and Iraq, urban infrastructure, agriculture, electricity suffered greatly under ISIS and some towns were depopulated virtually entirely: “It’s been almost three years since ISIS fighters swept into the city [Ramadi, Iraq] in the blur of a sandstorm, and two years since Iraqi forces swept them back out. RAND’s satellite data showed destruction in almost every neighborhood in the city; every bridge was demolished. The city was once home to nearly 300,000 people; RAND’s data suggest no more than 36,000 still lived there after ISIS.”

The RAND document didn’t mention that all this pain and suffering might not have transpired but for US policies conducive to and even aimed at helping ISIS expand its savage dominion. But then why would it, given that the think tank often thinks and speaks for elements of the national security state?

According to an article published in the journal Studies in Conflict and Terrorism by Prof. Daniel Byman of Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, summarized by Insurge Intelligence,

“Some of the most important foreign fighter movements in the world today receive massive and explicit state support, while still others rely on states to tolerate their fund-raising, transit, recruitment, and other core activities.”

Byman goes on to implicate Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, Pakistan, and Turkey as enablers of foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq, passing the buck to US allies—not surprising given that Byman formerly headed up the Center for Middle East Studies at the RAND Corporation  and was a staff researcher for the 9/11 Commission.

The Insurge article notes “a declassified Pentagon intelligence report from 2012 revealed not only that the US government had been aware of the policy of its allies at the time, but seemed to approve of the strategy despite anticipating that it might culminate in the appearance of an IS-type entity.”

Could it be the US approved of its regional “allies” support of jihad because our leaders deemed it to be in the national interest? If you find the logic of this puzzling, troubling, or simply unbelievable, you’re not alone. There’s no way that American corporate news media, obedient servants to the deep state that they are, would have blown this whistle or explained what the US wants or how it gets it. Exposing US complicity in enabling ISIS would simply contradict  the official war-on-terror narrative too profoundly.

Throughout living memory, US covert operations have retained religious and nationalist extremists and compliant local chieftains to send wind-up toys to topple unfriendly “regimes” in the region (i.e., governments that don’t want US military bases on their soil), and have worked with Saudi Arabia, Gulf States, Turkey and Israel to carry out off-the-books operations to provision them. The result has been to buy some time for the empire and its partners in crimes against humanity at tragic and unaccounted costs to the nations and communities affected.

The BBC (11/13/17) exposé describing how the US-led coalition of Kurdish and Arab partisans provided ISIS fighters, their families, and their weapons safe conduct out of besieged Raqqa caught the US Military flat-footed as it scrambled to construct a narrative for this untoward act of hospitality. After months of savage fighting and bombardment, a brokered truce, followed by a nervous convey of hired lorries to the Syria-Iraq border, courtesy of Uncle Sam. Newsweek (11/14/17) and other news outlets picked up the story (see BBC video, courtesy of CBS News), along with some dissembling (amplified by this Voice of America dispatch) from the US Command:

“We didn’t want anyone to leave,” Colonel Ryan Dillon, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, the Western coalition against ISIS, told the BBC.

“But this goes to the heart of our strategy, ‘by, with and through’ local leaders on the ground. It comes down to Syrians— they are the ones fighting and dying, they get to make the decisions regarding operations,” he added.

Around 250 ISIS militants departed, with 3,500 of their family members leaving with them. An official described as a “Western officer” was present but did not take part in the discussions for the deal.

Canada’s Centre for Research on Globalization (11/27/17) notes that the Raqqa exodus eerily resonates with one Donald Rumsfeld arranged for Taliban fighters from Kunduz, Afghanistan in 2001:

In late November 2001, according to Seymour M. Hersh, the Northern Alliance supported by US bombing raids took control of the hill town of Kunduz in Northern Afghanistan: “[Eight thousand or more men] had been trapped inside the city in the last days of the siege, roughly half of whom were Pakistanis.  Afghans, Uzbeks, Chechens, and various Arab mercenaries accounted for the rest.” (Seymour M. Hersh, The Getaway, The New Yorker, 28 January 2002.)

Also among these fighters were several senior Pakistani military and intelligence officers, who had been sent to the war theater by the Pakistani military. The presence of high-ranking Pakistani military and intelligence advisers in the ranks of Taliban/ Al Qaeda forces was known and approved by Washington.

And the Raqqa evacuees’ final destination? Just recently, the Islam Times (2/7/18) reported, the US is at it again in Southwest Asia and the Middle East by relocating defeated ISIS fighters to Afghanistan. That tidbit came from Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces via Tasnin News Agency.

His statement followed a commemorative meeting with supreme leader Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Khamenei, who told military leaders “Today, the most oppressive and cruel system among the world is the US government. You’ve witnessed the brutality of ISIS. The US is worse than ISIS. The US government is the system that created ISIS and the like. It facilitated their attacks and initiated these crimes… The same hands that created ISIS as a tool to oppress people in Syria and Iraq and carry out crimes against them are today seeking to transfer ISIS to Afghanistan after its defeats there.”

The same article quoted Russian special presidential envoy Zamir Kabulov, who asserted “We have been carefully monitoring the genesis of the Afghan wing of ISIS over the past three years…The ISIS has nearly 7,000 active fighters, without taking into account several thousands of reservists,” also noting that the Taliban has 600,00 to 700,000 cadres in Afghanistan.

The story was echoed in several other Middle Eastern news outlets, but not by Western news media, which focused on US air bombardments on ISIS forces in Northern Afghanistan. The bad guys in that region are generally presumed to be mobilizing to overrun central Asian countries like Uzbekistan. In southern Afghanistan, the US may be attempting to direct IS fighters to attack Iran, which their Kurdish cadres have been doing for some time from strongholds along the Iran’s rugged Northwest border with Iraq.

All this could simply be Iranian and Russian propaganda. It surely is, but that doesn’t mean it’s fake news. In the absence of journalistic boots on the ground, eyewitness reports, leaked secret memos, or relevant aerial imagery we have no way of telling.

Given America’s ongoing vendetta against the Islamic Republic, there is every reason to suspect the US military enables such incursions. Those 7,000 IS cadres, how have they managed to reach Afghanistan? The ones exiting from Syria and Iraq would have to discreetly cross close to 1,000 miles of Iranian territory or be ferried by air. Which vector seems more likely? Do their families go with them? Who’s providing transportation and hospitality? Do they chow down American Military MREs? Do they get to keep their cell phones? How can we tell? Does the CIA have an answer line?

So is the US is caging up IS with Taliban hoping they’ll eat each other up? Or, is it, perchance, urging them to form an alliance and that will be nudged toward Iran? Don’t count that out. It would be par for the stupid course of events the US has unleashed in the region.

Are Modern Cities Sustainable?

Susan Roberts

Around 4 billion people, or more than 50 % of the world’s population, now live in cities. By 2050 that percentage is expected to rise to 75%, as the world population soars to 9.7 billion. Fifty of those cities will be mega cities, i.e. concentrations of people in excess of 10 million. There are already 10 hypercities, each housing more than 20 million people, which was the size of the population of the entire world at the time of the French Revolution. How many of these mass conurbations there will be by that time is anyone’s guess, because the rate at which cities have grown over the last thirty years is simply unprecedented. This accelerated urbanisation of the world is a direct result of globalisation, both its intended and unintended consequences. And what the newly arrived urbanite can expect from that development will largely depend upon whether or not he has been invited to the party.

To get some idea of the remarkable speed of this urbanisation it is instructive to compare the growth rates of some of these new cities with that of the city of London in Victorian England. As Mike Davis points out in ‘Planet of Slums’, (reprinted in 2007, and so already woefully behind on current figures) from 1800 to 1910 the population of an increasingly industrialised London multiplied 7 fold. But compare that with Dhaka, Kinshasa and Lagos, which over a far shorter period, (1950 to 2000) have experienced population increases by a factor of 40. What is even more remarkable is that this influx of people occurred not against the backdrop of developing industries and expanding labour markets, but just the opposite. It happened at a time of “falling real wages, soaring prices and skyrocketing urban unemployment.”

When we think of modern cities we probably imagine tall buildings and smart, glassy office blocks, fancy restaurants and designer shops, all brightly lit and fashioned out of concrete and chrome: shiny, new and expensive. But actually the burgeoning size of many of the new cities in the global south is due to an influx of indigent people as many forsake the countryside and move to the metropolis, giving these sprawling developments a look far more shanty town than shopping mall. Without power, infrastructure or even basic sanitation, and often precariously located, with precious little room to build, it is hard to imagine why anyone would choose to join the multitude of slum dwellers endeavouring to eke out an existence within the crevices of urban life.  And the numbers are set to increase. There are already over one billion people living this way. By 2050 that number is set to reach three billion, which means that one in every three, or maybe even two, people on the planet will be living in a slum. The specific reasons for these mass migrations vary but can be traced back to a single word: Globalisation. There has been a corporate takeover of the land: a new colonialism, forcing millions of people from the countryside. Enclosure, one of nascent capitalism’s earliest acts of vandalism has been exported, stealing land and destroying rural communities all over the globe; forcing the dispossessed to seek refuge on the grubby fringes of urban life. Failing crops, land clearance for industrial agriculture, quarrying, mining, deforestation, dam building and other forms of land grabbing by private corporations are the ugly progeny of globalisation now assaulting the rural poor. Of course there has been resistance, but in the face of ‘increasingly hardening police states’, another child of globalisation, resisters have been imprisoned, labelled ‘terrorists’ and even killed.

It isn’t only in the cities of the global south that Davis’s worrying term ‘surplus people’ has gained traction. Urban centres in the north have also sought to rid themselves of an undesirable excess. For, unsurprisingly, the legacy of industrial capitalism in the north is the presence of a large working class citizenry situated right at the heart of city life. Or, at least it was, until aggressive gentrification took hold in the 1980s and began clearing out working class neighbourhoods for, what was deemed to be a more suitable, i.e., affluent, ‘creative elite’.  Richard Florida, the urban studies theorist, and creator of the ‘Bohemian Index’, (which supposedly measures urban creativity), who championed much of the early gentrification movement in London and San Francisco, makes no bones about focusing on the ‘regenerational skills’ of those he dubbed ‘the creative class’. Although he now regrets that the ousted ‘service class’ has had to ‘take it on the chin’. Florida isn’t alone in drawing on some pseudo Darwinian logic to justify stealing from the poor. But his distinction between the entitled creative class and the disentitled service class strikes a disturbingly Huxleyan tone. Maybe he thinks the poor should wear khaki.

Clearly the working class are being deprived of what French philosopher, Henri Lefebvre insisted was the right to urban life, but they are not alone. In recent years it has become increasingly difficult for demonstrators to exercise their democratic right to protest within the precincts of the city.  A study of public space in the UK capital conducted by the Guardian newspaper showed that more than 50 of London’s formerly public areas have been sold off to private corporations. Paternoster square, right outside St Paul’s Cathedral, (now mischievously renamed Tahrir Square after Occupy London was evicted from the spot) and  Bishops Square in Spitalfields are just two spaces now owned and run by private concerns. Many of these locations still look ostensibly public. It is doubtful that anyone out shopping, on their way to work, or engaged in any other ‘co-operative’ activity, to use the new urban-military parlance, would notice anything different. But try taking photographs, unfurling banners, gathering in numbers or acting in any way deemed to be ‘non co-operative’ and the private security guards will soon move in. It isn’t only the privatisation of land that has effectively cordoned off areas from protest. As Stephen Graham articulates in ‘Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism’, what we can expect, with ever increasing globalisation and urbanisation is the stealthy militarisation of urban centres all over the world: a development Graham refers to as ‘deeply technophiliac state surveillance projects,’ permeating every space and activity of city life. In many ways we are almost there; nobody can be so naïve as to believe that car registration recognition systems, extensive CCTV coverage (soon 642,000 cameras will be up in London alone), oyster cards that log you in to the travel networks and the extended deployment of specialist information gathering police teams are about anything other than mass surveillance, tracking and control. Certainly anti-capitalist protests in recent years have been met with mass incarceration, water cannon, tear gas and even rubber bullets, which would seem to confirm what Graham’s military informants have been telling him: the city is the new battle zone.

When Lefebvre insisted we have a right to the city, he wasn’t referring simply to the right of the individual to access the city’s resources. Lefebvre meant something far more fundamental than that because he recognised that the city influences who we are and how we behave; essentially it controls our future. And he saw that it is only when the people have the power to change the city that they have power over their own development, which is precisely why urban elites are deploying military technology to keep the people out. Within cities themselves, however, there is already an existential battle underway. A battle which concerns our very survival as a species. Because what is now being tested, every day, all over the planet, is whether such massive artificial constructions are actually sustainable at all. Eugene Odum, ‘the father of modern ecology’ dubbed cities ‘parasites on the countryside’ because they pose such a drain on natural resources. Simply maintaining the material infrastructure of an urban development, i.e., keeping the buildings up and running, is hugely expensive in ecological terms, let alone bringing in food and water for the inhabitants and taking out all the waste. Modern cities are essentially consumption centres, which have been designed and built to absorb surpluses of capital and to protect the centres of economic and political power. Dr William Rees, of the University of British Columbia, who created the ecological footprint analysis with Mathis Wackernagel, describes modern cities as “entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it.” According to Rees, New York requires a supply base almost 1000 times the geographic size of the city itself. Tokyo requires an area twice the size of Japan to maintain it. A recent study showed that the 744 largest cities worldwide require more carbon dioxide sequestration than the entire world’s forests could provide. Dr Rees is clear, “sustainable cities is an oxymoron”.

And Cape Town may be about to prove Dr Rees’s point, as Day Zero dawns and the city runs out of water for its 3.7 million inhabitants. It will be instructive to see how the burden of water depletion is actually shared by Capetonians, bearing in mind that a quarter of the population live in ‘informal’ settlements i.e., shacks, and already share communal taps. For a city that has a booming tourist trade, is surrounded by golf courses and has a fair proportion of luxury real estate – gated and with pools, (a substantial number of which are second homes), running out of water will certainly be an inconvenience, but it will be the poor and the diminishing middle class who bear the brunt. The rich are investing in private boreholes, if they haven’t already secured their own water supply, and a desalination plant is being built for a luxury hotel chain. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, South Africa remains one of the most unequal countries in the world, with Cape Town standing out as a particular jewel in the crown of wealthy elites both at home and abroad. With a dramatic escalation in population: almost 80% in 20 years, and decades of diminishing rainfall, one might have imagined a major investment in water infrastructure was overdue, particularly bearing in mind that a million inhabitants of the city  live without basic sanitation. However, such flagrant water inequality didn’t prevent Cape Town from scooping up the international prize for “World Design Capital of the year” in 2014; so we can rest assured that running out of water is unlikely to adversely affect its rating on the ‘Bohemian Index’.

Olympic Games Make US Regime Paranoid and Unpredictable

David William Pear


Despite all the efforts of a paranoid and unpredictable US regime, the Koreans are making peace not war during the 2018 Winter Olympics. The US is furious and pulling out all the stops to tarnish the Games, and it is trying to put South Korea back on the US colonial leash. South Korea’s democratically elected peace-president Moon Jae-in is showing signs that he is not an America poodle on a short leash.

Even during the Olympics, the US feels threatened by peace, unity and cooperation. Like a drone hurling bombs at wedding parties and funerals, the US regime tries to sabotage the Olympics’peaceful spirit.The US feels the need to flex its military muscle in order to feel strong and powerful.  A large group of high value targets which the US cannot controltriggers analgorithm ofparanoia in want of a signature strike.The US habit is to shoot first and ask questions later.

US Weaponized the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics

As Obama said , “I have two words for you, Predator Drone.” It worked for Obama during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi. For almost eight years Russia had been preparing for the celebration of its emergence from the ashes of chaos sown by US neoliberal economists that preached privatization, looting ofstate enterprises, and austerity for Russian citizens during the decade of the 1990’s.

The US economic advisors to Russia’s president Boris Yeltsin led Russia down a yellow brick road they said would lead to a golden transformation from communism to Western-style capitalism. When the neoliberal transformation turned into aneconomic train wreck the US Nobel Prize winning economists from the Chicago School of Economics said it was just a temporary hard landing. The Russians had had enough of US-style voodoo economics and elected Vladimir Putin as their leader. Putin told the Chicago boys thank you very much, showed the economic shamans and their cronies to the exit door and kicked them out of Russia. The US would never forgive Putin and they would go on to do everything they could to shun, vilify and regime-change him.

During the years while Vladimir Putin was engineering a recovery of Russia’s economy, the US regime was spending $5 billion plotting a coup d’etat in Ukraine. The putsch came while Russia wasdistracted celebrating the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014. To prepare the US public for a resumption of a US-led Cold War the international cartel of Western propaganda organs had beenlaying the groundwork of anti-Russian propaganda for years. The Russia vilification project was to smear Vladimir Putin as a thug, homophobic killer of journalists, invader of Georgia, and an evil dictator.  Later Putinwould be accused of invading Ukraine.  Western anti-Russian propaganda turns the truth upside down.

While the Russians and the rest of the world celebrated in Sochi, fascist agent provocateurs instigated a violent overthrow of Russia’s neighbor (and the heart of Russia’s historical civilization) Ukraine and its democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovych.

After the coup became a fact on the ground, fascist groups such as Svoboda, Right Sector,OUN and the Azov Battalion became emboldened, especially after the visit to Ukraine by CIA director John Brennan in April 2014.  Fascists supported by the US were given military aid;and they are hero worshipers of Stepan Bandera,and his ideology of anti-Semitic white supremacy and Ukrainian nationalism.  Ukrainian nationalism advocates the ethnic cleansing of Ukraine in what is called anti-terrorist operations (pogroms), indiscriminate shelling of cities and the massacreof civilians.

Ukrainian fascists have committed lynches and atrocities against those that opposed the putsch; oppose fascist Ukrainian nationalism, Russian speaking Ukrainians, Jews, homosexuals, non-whites, and ethnic Russians.  Ukrainian fascists have been responsible for violence such as in Odessa where scores of anti-coup activists were burned to death in the House of Trade Unions building, reminiscent of WW2 war crimes of forcing people into buildings and burning them alive.

When the historically Russian Crimean Peninsula’s ethnic Russian population voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia, Putin would be accused by Western propaganda of invading Crimea.Western propaganda kept making front page news that Russia had invaded Ukraine with little green men, but when the evidence proved false the retractions were buried.

Many Russians have relatives, friends and deep ties to Ukraine.  It is to be expected that some Russians wouldvoluntarily jointed the Donbass and Lugansk (eastern Ukraine) separatist movements and self-defense forces.  Russiastill openly sends truck convoys of humanitarian aid to the cutoff eastern Ukraine, and has acknowledged having limited covert personnel in Donbass and Lugansk, but no invasion.

The US, which has illegally invaded dozens of countries since World War Two, chose to lead an economic sanction regime against Russia over its annexation of Crimea, its limited involvement in Ukraine, and Russia’s legal military aid to Syria.  The real motive of the US seems to be to intensify the Cold War for geopolitical reasons.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up Department

In the you can’t make this stuff up department: US educated and John McCain buddy Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of Georgia who attacked ethnic Russians in South Ossetia and Abkhazia in 2008, was given Ukrainian citizenship in 2014.  Saakashvili had fled Georgia to avoid criminal arrest.  In 2015 he was appointed the mayor of the Odessa region; along with many other carpetbaggers to Ukraine.  In 2017 Saakashvili was stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship and he fled to the US. He is now wanted by Ukrainian authorities.

For those that don’t remember, Saakashvili was the one who set off the Russo-Georgia war, which Western propaganda turned upside down and accused Putin of invading Georgia.  Is it a coincident that this all happened during the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics?  More likely, it was a coincident and had to do with US elections.

Saakashvili attacked South Ossetia and Abkhazia during his friend John McCain’s failed presidential bid against Barack Obama.  McCain tried to use the trouble to boost his election chances, which were about sunk.  McCain who is virulently anti-Russian embarrassed himself by saying,“today, we are all Georgians“.  That battle cry against Russia gave him little traction.  McCain still says he is a Georgian, but his old friend Saakashvili is a man without a country.

US Politicizes 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics

For the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea the US has been ramping up tensions and imposing more economy killer-sanctions (i.e. embargo-blockade) on North Korea.  South Korea is championed for the propaganda value that democracy and Western-style capitalism produced its miracle economy; while it is said that North Korea cannot feed its own people:  so let’s add tougher sanctions?

Miracles only happen in fairytales, and South Korea’s miracle economy took billions of dollars in US aid, and a US $55 billion bailout of South Korea’s in 1997.  South Korea did not develop under Western democracy and capitalism; it developed under military dictatorships and a planned export economy.

In 2017 the US regime got a sneaking suspicion that things were not going as planned. The feisty South Korean people said they had had enough of the US-backed president Park Geun-hye, granddaughter of the US-backed military dictator Park Chung-hee, who ruled from 1963 to 1979. In late 2016 the South Korean people began mass protests, holding candlelight vigils demanding the impeachment of Park Geun-hye.

Candlelight vigils have become a tradition of South Korean protesters since the 2002 killing of a South Korean girl by US occupation soldiers. When the soldiers were being court martialed by the US military, the South Korean people held candlelight vigils demanding justice. They didn’t get it. The soldiers were found not guilty, but the non-violent candlelight vigils continued as a tradition of political protest.

The candlelight vigils against Park Geun-hye grew in 2017 until the South Korean parliament was forced to respond and impeach Park for corruption and influence peddling. Park Geun-hye is now in prison, where her grandfather should have once been too, if an assassin’s bullet had not found him first in 1979. Her grandfather had also been a collaborator during Korea’s humiliation of Japanese colonialism. Collaboration and corruption run in the family.

In the May 2017 elections that followed Park’s ouster the South Korean people, especially the younger generation, said they had had enough of US instigated animosity between them and their Northern brothers and sisters. Moon Jae-in ran an election campaign on a platform of anti-cronyism with industry, increased social programs for the people and a Sunshine Policy 2, similar to that of former President Kim Dae-jung. Moon won a landslide victory on his platform of peace and social justice.

The US regime has been sulking, plotting and hyperventilating with sarcasm, saber rattling and retaliation against both South Korea and North Korea for resuming relations that had been put on pause in 2008 with the election of hardliner Lee Myung-bak. Before Moon could even take office in May, the US regime humiliated him and caused him to lose face in April by putting THAAD missiles in South Korea. Thousands of South Koreans protested against the THAAD’s, but since the US has military operational (colonial) control in South Korea the peoples’ protests were ignored. Instead the US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson rained on the Sunshine before it even dawned.

In April 2017 Tillerson was already advocating tougher economic sanctions against North Korea.  For months now the US has been raising the volume of the rhetoric against North Korea, threatening war, installing THAAD missiles, shipping more nukes to Guam, and tightening the screws of the embargo. All options are on the table except the diplomatic option.

Vice President Pence even refused to stand with everyone else during the opening ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.  That was more than bad manners in Korea where face and harmony are socially important, and it reflects badly on the US.  According to the Korean Times, Pence later said that he was “opposed to inter-Korean talks until North Korea agreed to start negotiations on denuclearization”.

Pence continues the propaganda word games on negotiations: it is the US that refuses to negotiate until North Korea meets certain preconditions.  The US will not even say what the preconditions are and may not know itself.  The US vacillates on talks from one day to the next and depending on who is speaking:  Trump, Tillerson, Pence orthe State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert.The North Koreans have consistently offered to negotiate without any preconditions.  The mainstream media rarely is honest, usually telling the public that the North Koreans “refuse to come to the negotiation table”.

To make sure that he spoils the good mood of the Olympics, Pence announced that the US would, “soon unveil the toughest and most aggressive round of economic sanctions on North Korea ever”. An embargo is war by other means.  Christine Ahn of Women Cross DMZ said to The Real News Network that the US economic embargo is a “policy of strangulation”.

The embargo is siege warfare likethat used in the Ancient Era.  The US is holding North Korean children hostage, and it isliterally saying that it will kill one North Korean child every day until North Korea bends to the US will.  This is barbaric, uncivilized and inhumane.  It is a war crime and a crime against humanity.  It is against the Geneva Conventions, even though the embargo was authorized by the UN Security Council.

After the First Gulf War and during the 1990’s UN Security Council embargo of Iraq, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) reminded the parties involved that:

“Any decision by the Security Council to impose economic sanctions in the course of an armed conflict has to be in conformity with international humanitarian law, in particular with the provisions on relief for needy civilians as set out by the Fourth Geneva Convention.”

With the knowledge of hindsight we know that the economic embargo against Iraq killed over 500,000 Iraqi children.  Even knowing that, the former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a person without a human conscience, said on television that “IT WAS WORTH IT”.

Any coercion of one country against another is aggression, especially if that country is acting within it legal rights as a sovereign nation. North Korea has broken no international law and it has as much right as South Korea, Japan and the US to have nuclear power for electricity, to test missiles; and it has as much right as the US to have a nuclear arms program and nuclear bombs.

North Korea has not committed aggression against any other country or threatened to attack anyone except in self-defense. The US, its allies and the UN have overstepped their bounds in punishing North Korea for what it has every legal right to do. If the US is so concerned about nuclear proliferation, then it should start living up to its own obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which the US has not done, and go talk to their friends Pakistan, India, and Israel.

It should be remembered that the US was the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Korean Peninsula.  It is a violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty for the nuclear armed US to threaten a non-nuclear power, which is why North Korea has developed nuclear weapons.In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower unilaterally nullified paragraph 13(d) of the 1953 Armistice Agreement and introduced nuclear weapons into South Korea (YouTube).

Economic embargos kill by restricting the imports of food, medicine, fuel and other essentials. Economic embargos deny the victim the ability to export its products in exchange for hard currency, puts a freeze on their foreign assets, and makes international monetary transactions nearly impossible.  In the 21 st century economic sanctions, embargos, blockades, call them whatever; they are siege warfare, and a weapon of mass destruction.  Embargos kill civilians and non-combatants indiscriminately and disproportionately.  It is by definition a war crime.

North Korea has proven that the US propaganda that it refuses to sit at the negotiation table is a lie. The North Koreans have offered time and again to negotiate with the US, it has offered to suspend its nuclear program, and North Korea has even offered multiple times to negotiate a final peace treaty to the Korean War, which ended in 1953 with an armistice, but not a final peace.  North Korea and South Korea are at the negotiation table now.

North Korea and South Korea are meeting, talking and marching under a unified flag. The US is throwing a tantrum and accusing Kim Jong-un’s extended olive branch as being a dirty trick. The US says that Kim Jong-un is just trying to divide South Korea from the US. The US regime is humiliating South Korean by saying that they are weak, off the colonial leash, and going it alone without paternalistic protection.

Conclusion

South Korea and North Korea have taken the initiative to resolve their differences peacefully.  The US is trying to abort the peace process, it is acting aggressively, it is engaged in war by other means, and it is illegally imposing an embargo on North Korea.  The embargo is siege warfare and a weapon of mass destruction that kills indiscriminately and disproportionately non-combatants, especially the young, the elderly and the sick.  The US is committing a premeditated war crime and a crime against humanity.

The US has victimized Korea since the US first invaded it in 1871.  The US backed the Japanese subjugation and colonization of Korea when the US mediated the Treaty of Portsmouth ending the Russo-Japanese War in 1905.  The US interfered in the Korean Civil War of 1950 to 1953, killing several million Koreans and destroying every city, town, village and the civilian infrastructure in North Korea and much of South Korea.  The US has refused repeated offers by North Korea to negotiate a final peace treaty to the Korean War, and the US has perpetuated the unnatural division of Korea.  Korea deserves the liberation and independence the US promised them at the end of World War Two in 1945.  All the US needs to do is get out of the way and let the Koreans decide their own destiny.

Public brawl erupts between Australian prime minister and his deputy

Mike Head

In what has rapidly become an acute political crisis, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the Liberal Party, and Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, the leader of the rural-based National Party, have gone into what amounts to an all-out political war against each other.

Over the space of two weeks, a report that was first splashed in Murdoch tabloid newspapers about Joyce having an affair and expecting a baby with his former media advisor Vikki Campion has become a vehicle for seeking to oust Joyce and possibly the government itself.

While the corporate media is saturated with headlines about the “Joyce affair” and “sex bans,” the conflict clearly has deeper roots. It has brought to new intensity the underlying tensions wracking Turnbull’s fragile government and the Liberal-National Coalition itself.

Turnbull called a media conference last night to effectively make Joyce’s position untenable. He described Joyce’s conduct as “appalling” and a “shocking error of judgment.”

The prime minister sent Joyce on “personal leave” and urged him to consider resigning. Turnbull also declared an immediate ban on sexual relations between government ministers and staff members.

In parliament just 48 hours earlier, Turnbull had insisted that Joyce retained his confidence and would act as prime minister while he travelled to the US for discussions with the Trump administration. Yesterday, as his own role in shielding Joyce came under fire, he suddenly urged Joyce to take leave, allowing Senator Matthias Cormann, the Liberal Party’s Senate leader, to become acting prime minister.

National Party MPs, who had just decided to keep supporting Joyce, immediately warned Turnbull against trying to “blast out” Joyce, accusing the prime minister of meddling with their party’s leadership.

Today, Joyce called his own press conference to denounce Turnbull for causing “further harm” and “hurt” by “pulling the scab off” his affair. He branded Turnbull’s comments “inept” and “most definitely unnecessary.”

Joyce also accused Turnbull of improperly intervening in the National Party. “There is nothing that we dislike more than implied intervention into the party processes of the National Party,” he said. “We are an independent political unit.”

Labor Party leader Bill Shorten then staged his own press conference to declare: “The PM and the deputy PM are now at war with each other.” In this “full-blown political crisis,” he called on Turnbull to either sack Joyce or be shown to lack “the courage to be prime minister of Australia.”

This afternoon, at yet another media conference, Turnbull sought to paper over the differences, denying any effort to criticise or “influence the National Party or its deliberations in any way at all.” He claimed the Coalition was “very strong,” despite his and Joyce’s criticisms of one another’s conduct, and refused to answer more questions.

In the meantime, former government minister Kevin Andrews also weighed in against the prime minister. He urged Turnbull to delay a trip to the US until the “circus” was resolved, “one way or the other.” Andrews is a prominent member of the conservative wing of the Liberal Party, which backs Turnbull’s ousted predecessor Tony Abbott and is politically closer to the National Party. This points to rifts intensifying in the Liberal Party, as well as with the Nationals.

Many unanswered questions remain about the origins and exact motives behind the unleashing of the allegations against Joyce. His affair with Campion was known throughout the media and political establishment for many months, including when Joyce was forced to quit his parliamentary seat last year and stand for re-election as part of the reactionary nationalist witch hunt over members of parliament having dual citizenships.

Scandals, usually involving salacious sex and/or personal corruption allegations, are invariably created to prosecute political and strategic agendas demanded by powerful ruling class interests, and to distract public attention from events of far greater significance.

For days on end, the headlines in the media have been dominated by the “Joyce affair,” and not the threats posed by the Trump administration’s preparations for wars against North Korea and China. Today’s headlines are all about “PM bans sex,” not yesterday’s declaration to a United States congressional hearing by incoming US ambassador Admiral Harry Harris that America must prepare for war against China, with Australia as a crucial US ally.

Joyce has long been regarded in ruling circles as a loose cannon, too erratic and tied to export-dependent mining and rural business interests to be counted on as reliable. These concerns have mounted as the Australian political establishment tightens its commitment to Washington, ratchets up military spending and whips up fears of “Chinese interference” in Australia, while pushing the corporate agenda of company tax cuts and the slashing of wages, conditions and social spending.

Joyce has no differences whatsoever with the US alliance. But he has cautioned against alienating the Chinese regime, reflecting the interests of sections of the Australian capitalist class, including mining magnates, whose fortunes depend heavily on iron ore, coal and other exports to China. Last month, Joyce declared it was “really important we understand that we are intricately linked to the commerce of the People’s Republic of China” after his Turnbull ministerial colleague Concetta Fierravanti-Wells denounced Chinese aid projects in the Pacific.

This week, two mouthpieces of the financial elite stepped up their attacks on Joyce as a self-proclaimed “agrarian socialist” who has built his political career on pursuing the sectional interests of mining and rural businesses. An Australian Financial Review editorial urged Turnbull to find a way to remove Joyce, denouncing him as a “big-spending agrarian socialist” who had made a “populist attack on the big supermarkets” and whose inland rail project “is an economic pork barrel.”

The Australian’s contributing economics editor Judith Sloan produced a long list of Joyce’s “appalling policy positions,” including “re-regulation of the sugar industry in Queensland,” shifting the pesticides-agricultural chemicals regulatory agency from Canberra to his electorate and remaining “silent about alleged theft of irrigated water” in the northern parts of the Murray-Darling Basin.

There is nothing progressive in the attacks on Joyce’s personal relations or Turnbull’s edict, via a ministerial code of conduct, banning consensual sexual relations in ministerial offices. Just last Friday, Turnbull dismissed a similar proposal that won support in the US, saying: “Adults can conduct their ­relationships, if it’s consensual, ­respectful, that’s their right.”

Turnbull’s about-face has been hailed by media commentators, such as Joanne Gray in the Australian Financial Review, as another victory for the fundamentally reactionary #MeToo campaign, which has destroyed the careers of numerous artists and entertainers, often on the basis of unsupported or even anonymous accusations.

The sexual harassment witch hunt lumps together genuine crimes like rape and domestic violence with a much broader range of actions that should never become the subject of dismissals and public humiliation, including consensual sexual relations or even unwanted gestures of affection.

As the Joyce saga demonstrates, puritanical accusations of extra-marital affairs, of which there is no shortage in Canberra and other capitals, can set precedents that can be used to remove anyone considered an obstacle, or even unreliable.

In all the agitation against Joyce by the mass media and upper middle class feminists, joined by the Labor Party, there is not a skerrick of opposition to the underlying agenda of war preparations, austerity and overturning of basic democratic rights.

The Liberal-National Coalition and its pre-World War II predecessors, based on the divergent interests of different factions of the capitalist class, have historically proved too divided and unstable to impose the kind of deep-going attacks on working-class conditions that are required in times of economic breakdown and war.

The rupture that has erupted in the Coalition, which has a bare one-seat majority in parliament, could trigger the government’s fall, fuelling a deep-going crisis of the political and corporate ruling class. There could be moves for the installation of another pro-business and pro-US Labor government. Labor, however, is also deeply unpopular, with its votes falling to historic lows in the last two federal elections.

Squalor, violence and death: The deterioration of UK prisons

Peter Reydt

More deaths have taken place in UK prisons in the opening weeks of the year. On January 31, Khader Saleh, a 25-year-old man from Tower Hamlets, was found dead in the afternoon with multiple stab wounds in another prisoner’s cell at London Wormwood Scrubs prison.

Saleh was declared dead by paramedics at around 3:20 in the afternoon. Four prisoners were arrested, of whom three have now been charged with murder. Police told his family that Saleh had been stabbed seven times with a metal blade.

Saleh moved to the UK 13 years ago from Somalia with his mother, three older brothers and sister. A BBC report quoted his brother, Said Yusuf, saying that the family had been left “devastated” by the attack. “He was a young man trying to move on in his life. He recently got married and had a one-year-old son,” said Yusuf adding, “We thought he was in a safe place in prison.”

Prisons in England and Wales are far from safe places. The Annual Report of the Independent Monitoring Board for Wormwood Prison, published last November, states, “Wormwood Scrubs remains a dangerous environment for staff and prisoners alike with multiple violent incidents on most days.” It reports that despite serious efforts to combat this situation, Wormwood Scrubs remains a “dangerous place” with 40 to 50 violent incidents occurring in a typical month.

Some media reports suggest that Saleh’s stabbing was carried out in a gang attack involving up to 10 people. One noted, “25% of violent incidents are gang-related, and it is disappointing that more is not done to disrupt gangs.”

This situation is not unique to Wormwood Scrubs.

According to Ministry of Justice data, assaults and serious assaults inside UK jails increased to a record high of 27,193 incidents in the year to June 2017. Since 2007, assaults have increased by 80 percent.

This came just three weeks after an inspection at Nottingham revealed a high level of violence, assaults and use of force by staff in a prison where the use of drugs is rife.

More than two thirds of Nottingham prisoners reported that they had felt unsafe at some time, and more than one third at the time of inspection. There were more than 200 assaults, both on prisoners and staff, in the previous six months. In the last two years, there have been eight suicides and the level of self-harm has increased. The prison has been described as “fundamentally unsafe” and “in a dangerous state.” This was the third time in a row that HM (Her Majesty’s) Prison Nottingham has been given the lowest safety grading.

This situation at Nottingham prison led the chief inspector of prisons, Peter Clarke, to invoke for the first time the “Urgent Notification Protocol.” This requires the Ministry of Justice to publish an action plan within 28 days to tackle concerns raised.

Since the beginning of the economic crises in 2008, funding for social provisions has been gutted. A decade of austerity by Labour and Conservative governments did not stop at the prison gates, which are severely underfunded and understaffed.

In November, analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that under current budget plans, there will be a further £12 billion cut in welfare spending by 2020/202—with a real-terms cut of 22 percent for the prison service.

Offenders are being left to rot in facilities not fit for human habitation. According to official figures, the prison population in England and Wales stood at 84,474 with a “Usable Operational Capacity” of 86,760. This has been roughly the same for the last six years. Prisoner numbers increased constantly in the period between 1993 and 2011, from around 44,000 to almost double that number today. In other words, prisons are full to bursting as the conditions are deteriorating even further.

Another prison making the headlines was HM Prison Liverpool. In January, the official report of an unannounced inspection in November 2017 revealed the “worst conditions ever seen,” according to the inspectors. The prison is in a general state of disrepair and filth. There were more than 2,000 outstanding maintenance jobs and areas that are so dirty they are too hazardous to be cleaned, and it was infested with rats and cockroaches. Some prisoners are held in cells with exposed electrical wiring and filthy, leaking lavatories.

In his report’s introduction, Clarke describes the abysmal living conditions:

“Many cells were not fit to be used and should have been decommissioned. Some had emergency call bells that were not working but were nevertheless still occupied, presenting an obvious danger to prisoners. There were hundreds of unrepaired broken windows, with jagged glass left in the frames. Many lavatories were filthy, blocked or leaking. There were infestations of cockroaches in some areas, broken furniture, damp and dirt. In one extreme case, I found a prisoner who had complex mental health needs being held in a cell that had no furniture other than a bed. The windows of both the cell and the toilet recess were broken, the light fitting in his toilet was broken with wires exposed, the lavatory was filthy and appeared to be blocked, his sink was leaking and the cell was dark and damp. Extraordinarily, this man had apparently been held in this condition for some weeks.”

As shocking as the conditions described in these reports are, they do not come as a surprise, but are further expressions of a general deterioration in the prison system.

Year after year, reports document how prisons are becoming hellholes unfit to hold human beings.

Inmates are deprived of their most basic needs. Jails are dilapidated and vermin-infested. The prison population is at maximum capacity, while staff levels are in decline. Drug abuse is rife; prison violence both between inmates and involving staff is at an all-time high. Frightened of being assaulted, many inmates do not dare leave their cells. Mental illness is widespread, with growing numbers driven to self-harm and suicide due to the degrading and hellish conditions.

As a consequence, tensions in the prison population are at breaking point with prison disturbances and riots becoming the norm. In the last year alone, there were riots in HM Prisons Lewes, Bedford, Swaleside, Hewell, the Mount Prison in Bovingdon and twice in Birmingham.

Many prison guards are indifferent and callous. On a daily basis, inmates are confronted with physical violence by fellow inmates and prison officers. Official reports of incidents of prison guards using their batons are on the increase. In the case that the violence spills over into riots, specially armed and prepared police are being deployed.

Riots against the grim conditions they face represent the only form in which inmates can express their grievances. The response by the state is further repression. Just as in wider society, the armed bodies of the state, including the army and the police, are being built up while opposition to the deterioration of the social conditions of the working class are being violently suppressed. If anything, this can be seen most nakedly in the prison system.

The National Tactical Response Group (NTRG), a team of prison officers specially trained for disturbances in prisons, was deployed 580 times in 2016. In addition, so-called Tornado teams—another elite group that is separate from the NTRG—was deployed 19 times in the same period.

In October of last year, there was a riot at HM Prison Long Lartin in Worcestershire during which 81 prisoners at the high-security facility attacked prison officers and took over a wing. Tornado squads were deployed to quell the disturbance.

This was the first disturbance of its kind in a maximum-security prison, marking a further step in the deterioration of the prison system. In response, Rob Preece, spokesman for the Howard League for Penal Reform, said, “We do not expect to see disturbances like that in the high security estates and this will be giving a great deal of course for concern.” The Prison Governors Association proclaimed that it should be “ringing alarm bells at the most senior level.”

Honduras turns to online censorship and spyware to clamp down on protests

Andrea Lobo

The Honduran Congress is currently discussing a bill to fine or ban social network companies and Internet providers that don’t eliminate “illegal content” within 24 hours or disable “illegal” accounts. If approved, all content that the Internet companies or the Honduran authorities deem as “discrimination, hate speech, insults, threats or incitement to perpetrate violence or crimes” would be proscribed.

The ruling class has decided that its police-state crackdown on dissent is not enough to silence popular opposition. The killings of 72 journalists since 2001 (CONADEH [National Commission on Human Rights]), the 123 environmentalists assassinated since 2010 (Global Witness) and the more than 30 Hondurans killed in the widespread and ongoing protests in working class neighborhoods against the fraudulent and unconstitutional “re-election” last November have taken their toll. But more than intimidating the population, these actions have inspired determined popular demands for an end to the death-squad regime placed in power by the ruling elite and Washington.

The current National Party (PN) administration under Juan Orlando Hernández—a direct extension of the military regime installed after the 2009 coup backed by the Obama administration—has only escalated its use of death-squad activities against workers and youth and its harassment of the press outlets that support the Alliance of Opposition, widely believed to have won the last elections.

On top of the destruction of the transmission lines of UNE TV and Radio Progreso last year, journalists covering the protests leading up to the January 27 presidential inauguration were severely beaten on livestream on Facebook by the riot police as superiors ordered them to “f*ck up” (montarle verga) the reporters.

The “incitements” that the government feels compelled to keep from the public, include videos of police and military shooting live rounds at protesters, illegally barging into houses or preventing people from leaving them, throwing tear gas into homes, beating up elderly bystanders in protests, preventing fatally wounded protesters from being taken to medical centers and medical centers refusing to attend them. Such videos and the generalized denouncements online against the repressive acts of the state are legitimate exposures of a tyrannical and murderous regime.

In terms of economic policies, the new Secretary of Finance, Rocío Tábora, brazenly laid out to El Heraldo the government’s plans to intensify the current right-wing program after the inauguration. They “will scrape down the budget to have austerity measures,” including a new IMF deal, and leave the fate of the impoverished majority in the second poorest country in Latin America to the profit motive of the private sector. Her words are those of a bureaucrat who doesn’t care about the masses, portraying confidence in the state’s ability to keep them in the dark and silence them.

For its part, Washington and the European powers have backed the electoral fraud and encouraged the turn to police-state measures of rule. A February 8 report in the Guardian shows that the British government approved sales of sophisticated military and spy technology to Honduras, including equipment to track online messaging services like WhatsApp.

The director of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), Bertha Oliva, speaking to Sojourners this week, denounced “a level of espionage and infiltration that we’ve never seen before, that you only get in countries that are at war.” The daylight killings, espionage and censorship efforts in Honduras are only a naked expression of the drive to dictatorship by the ruling class internationally in preparation for an intensification of the class struggle and war.

The Honduran social media bill is largely based on the new Network Enforcement Law in Germany, which forces Internet companies to censor “unlawful content” within 24 hours or face fines of $59 million. Facebook responded by building control centers with hundreds of employees to enforce this, which it has also created and expanded in the US. The entire bourgeois establishment has backed this measure, with the so-called Left Party calling for the protection of citizens from “verbal attacks, hate speech, and character assassination” online.

Last December, the Deputy Chamber in Mexico unanimously approved a ban now enshrined in the Federal Civil Code on any online attack, “true or false, determined or undetermined” to shame any person. While other sections in the Civil Code defend free speech, this seems to be a first, calculated step towards implementing censorship of online content.

In an eager initiative by the tech giant, Facebook tested a side feed to hide news content last year in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia, leading to massive drops in viewership to alternative news sites.

In the US, the intelligence agencies, corporate media and Democratic Party have led a hysterical campaign alleging Russian interference in the US elections using “fake news,” in an attempt to criminalize and censor political opposition online, with Facebook, Twitter and Google taking measures to demote or block socialist, progressive and anti-war news and analysis.

In Honduras, President Hernández called on the United Nations on Monday to set up talks with the bourgeois opposition, while calling for an investigation into “how the maras [gangs] and organized crime participated directly in the elections to favor the Alliance.” Since his unconstitutional and fraudulent re-election, Hernández has tried to legitimize his regime’s repression by attributing the ongoing working class protests against electoral fraud to gang activity.

Such arguments have extended to online repression, including the bill’s reference to criminal activity. Last Wednesday, the day the debate on the bill was started, the PN legislator who introduced it, Marcos Paz Sabillón, promoted the measure by alleging that he had received death threats on social media, at the same time making the unsubstantiated and seemingly counterproductive claim that “90 percent came from fake profiles.”

In fact, what this government has shown is that the escalating militarization and attacks against democratic rights have been aimed not at drug trafficking and gangs, but against working class opposition. The police chief appointed by Hernández, José David Aguilar Morán, is currently under investigation after the Associated Press published a report revealing that in 2013, as then-chief of Honduran intelligence, he was actively preventing the authorities’ interception of truckloads of cocaine trafficked by the Atlantic Cartel.

Last year, the Rivera Maradiaga brothers, leaders of the Cachiros Cartel, testified in a court in New York that they had collaborated with president Hernández’s brother in a money-laundering scheme and later paid hundreds of thousands of dollars into Hernández’s presidential campaign and directly to his predecessor, Porfirio Lobo. Hernández’s campaign manager, Hugo Ardón, along with other officials in the Lobo administration, were exposed by InSight Crime as having approved government contracts for companies run by the Cachiros.

Historically, the regional importance of Honduras for US counterinsurgency efforts and preparations for war against the influence of rival powers has been closely bound up with organized crime and censorship. The constitutional basis for the censorship bill is contained in Article 75 of the 1981 Honduran Constitution, allowing for “ ex ante censorship to protect the ethical and cultural values of society.” This was a document imposed by a military junta that was beginning a full-scale war, in collaboration with the Reagan administration, against the new Sandinista government in Nicarague and the Castroite and other left nationalist groups within Honduras.

During this time, the CIA had set up a streamlined flow of weapons to Honduras, with officials ordered to look the other way when narcotics were loaded onto the airplanes for the return trip to Florida. Gen. Paul Gorman, former Southern Command chief, testified in 1987: “Everything I know from human intelligence [deleted] would suggest that anybody that was in the game of subversion down there was in one way or another involved with drugs.”

The relentless efforts by the Hernández administration to drown protests in blood and suppress opposition online with the full backing of the US and European governments and corporations exposes the bankruptcy of the opposition’s appeals to tools of neocolonial rule like the OAS and UN. The only alternative for Honduran workers and youth is to liberate their struggle from the chains of the national bourgeoisie, including the Alliance and its pseudo-left backers, and organize an independent struggle alongside all sections of the working class, also facing attacks on democratic rights and living standards across the Americas and internationally.