North Korea And The Nuclear Question

Chandra Muzaffar

As expected, the North Korean leadership has escalated its rhetoric in the wake of the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) new, harsh sanctions on Pyongyang.

Whenever the international community speaks or acts against North Korea, it responds with threats of ‘attacks’ against Washington and/or Seoul. This time North Korea, it is alleged, has fired half a dozen rockets about 100 to 150 kilometres into the sea off its eastern coast. It is meant to be a warning to South Korea.

Most analysts dismiss it as ‘mere posturing’. No one expects North Korea to go beyond this though there is perhaps much more anger in Pyongyang over the recent UNSC Resolution.They are the toughest sanctions ever imposed on Pyongyang. Key sectors of the economy are targetted. This includes mineral exports and North Korea’s access to international transport systems. This is the fifth time that the UNSC has imposed sanctions on North Korea. The first was after it tested an atomic device in 2006. The UNSC vote this time was unanimous. China’s endorsement of harsh sanctions in particular has hurt North Korea which knows that China is its only real ally.

This is why while supporting sanctions against its ally, China has also emphasisedthe importance of opening a dialogue with North Korea. It does not want North Korea to be pushed against the wall. Beijing knows that if North Korea becomes even more isolated, it may become even more irrational and aggressive. Russia is also of the view that dialogue should be the priority. It is hoping that the comprehensiveness of the sanctions will persuade Pyongyang to enter into serious talks with its neighbours and other actors such as the United States.

For both China and Russia, dialogue is vital for yet another reason. They fear that the situation precipitated by North Korea’s nuclear test in January and long-range rocket launch in February may be exploited by South Korea and the US to tighten their military grip over the entire region. In fact, formal talks have begun between Seoul and Washington on the possible deployment of an advanced US missile defence system in South Korea. The THAAD system is an anti-ballistic missile system which smashes into enemy missiles either inside or outside the Earth’s atmosphere during their final flight phase. China and Russia are strongly opposed to the deployment of the THAAD system since it will impact adversely upon the military balance inthe region and increase tensions among states that are already confronted with major bilateral issues.

In the ultimate analysis, the real challenge confronting North Korea and South Korea; China and Japan; Russia and the United States is not so much North Korea’s posturing or the efficacy of UN sanctions. The only way to dissuade countries outside the formal ‘nuclear weapons club’ from acquiring nuclear weapons is to ensure that ALL states without exception eliminate their nuclear weapons stockpiles and refrain from manufacturing nuclear weapons and indeed, all weapons of mass destruction. It is utterly hypocritical of the US or Russia or China to demand that North Korea refrain from nuclear testing when none of the big powers is making any move towards total nuclear disarmament.

The time has come for the citizens of the world to mount a massive global campaign for the elimination of all nuclear weapons and all weapons of mass destruction.

The Other Side Of The Global Crisis: Entropy And The Collapse Of Civilizations

Jacopo Simonetta

When we discuss the impending crisis of our civilisation, we mainly look at the resources our economy need in a growing quantity. And we explain why the Diminishing Returns of resource exploitation pose a growing burden on the possibility of a further growing of the global economy. It is a very interesting topic, indeed, but here I suggest to turn 180 degrees around and take a look at the "other side;" that is to what happens where the used resources are discarded.

Eventually, our society (as any other society in history) is a dissipative structure. It means that it exist only because it is able to dissipate energy in order to stock information inside itself. And there is a positive feedback: more energy permits to implement more complexity; and more complexity needs, but it also permits a larger energy flow. This, I think, is a crucial point: at the very end, wealth is information stocked inside the socio-economic system in different forms (such livestock, infrastructures, agrarian facilities, machines, buildings, books, the web and so on). Human population is peculiar because it is a large part of the information stocked inside the society system. So, from a thermodynamic point of view, it is the key part of “wealth”, while from an economic point of view people can be seen as the denominator of the global wealth.

The accumulation of information inside a system is possible only by an increment of entropy outside the same system. This is usual with all the dissipative structures, but our civilisation is unique in its dimension. Today about 97% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass is composed of humans and of their symbionts and we use about the 50% of the primary production (400 TW?), plus a little less than 20 TW we have from fossil fuels and other inorganic sources.

At the beginning, our modern civilisation performed in the same way that all the others in the history: appropriating energy forms such food, livestock, commodities, slaves, oil, carbon and so on. And throwing entropy to biosphere in different forms such as pollutants, ecosystems transformations, extinctions, heat and so on; while throwing entropy to other societies as war, migration, etcetera.

As the industrial economy overruled and substituted all the others, it became the only one economy in the world. And so, necessarily, found more and more difficulties to dissipate energy outside itself. In practice, sinks become problematic before wells do. But remember that in order to implement its own complexity, a dissipative system needs a growing energy flow, that is it needs cornucopian energy wells.

Today, both global pollution and massive immigration into the more industrialized countries evidence that our system is no more able to expel entropy out of itself. But if entropy is not discharged out of the system, it necessarily grows inside it. And when there is more energy, there is more entropy in a typical diminishing returns dynamic. Maybe, we can see here a negative feedback which has stopped the economic growth and that will possibly crash the global economy in some decades.

If this reasoning is correct, the political and the economic crisis, social disruption and, finally, failing states are nothing less than the visible aspect of the growing entropy inside our own meta-system. Eventually, global society is so large and complex which is articled in many correlated sub-systems and we are managing in order to concentrate entropy inside the less powerful ones: some yet problematic countries, lower classes and, especially, young. But these phenomena produce political shifts, riots and mass migrations to the core of the system. This means that also the elites have lost the capability to understand and/or control the internal dynamic of the global socio-economic system.

In the meantime, the overloading of the sinks is starting to cause the deterioration of the wells. It evident, for instance, with air and water pollution, ocean acidification, mass extinction, ecosystems disruption, and much more. In the end, as the economy grows, the global system necessarily looses the capability to dissipate energy, condemning itself to disruption.

We can find the same phenomenon at smaller scales, such as for a single organism. such as a single human being. If a good energy flow is available in the form of food and heat, a baby can develop into a strong and healthy adult. Good flows of energy during adult life mean a better life and the possibility to develop culture, skills, art, science and a to keep one's health for a long time. Insufficient energy means starvation and illness. But it is also true that if the body absorbs a quantity of energy larger than its capability to dissipate it, then we have are problems such fat, illness, obesity and, finally, a bad life and premature death.

We found the very same phenomenon at larger scales as well. The Earth as a whole is also a dissipative, complex system. It does not have any problems with its main energy well: the Sun. We can be sure that the 86.000 TW that we receive from the sun on the average are not going away, although they will gradually increase over very long time spans. But the whole biosphere is collapsing in one of the most serious crisis it ever faced during the 4,5 billions years of its history. This crisis is the result of the human activity that reduces the capability of the ecosystem to dissipate the energy input, in particular as the result of the greenhouse effect caused by the combustion of fossil fuels. So the internal entropy grows with the consequence of harming even more the ecosystems and reducing complexity. Possibly leading to a global disaster at a geological scale.

In conclusion, I suggest that, in the coming decades, entropy will be a much challenging problem than that of the energy supply. Only a drastic reduction in the energy input could save the biosphere. But this is a high price to pay because a reduction of energy flow means necessarily a reduction of complexity and information stored inside the human sub-system. It means misery and death for the human population, although it means also hope for the future one (assuming that it will exist, but humans are too adaptable and resilient to go extinct as long as a functioning biosphere exists) So, new civilizations will appear but, in order for that to occur, the present civilization will have to collapse fast enough to leave a livable planet to our descendants.

Violence On The Factory Farm: How Not To Feed The World

Colin Todhunter

The amount of meat humans eat is immense. In 1965, 10 billion livestock animals were slaughtered each year. That number is now over 55 billion. Factory farming is the fastest growing method of animal production worldwide. While industrialised nations dominate this form of farming, developing countries are rapidly expanding and intensifying their production systems.

Violence on the farm

A new virtual reality film project by Animal Equality shows the public how a factory farm operates. The film focuses on how pigs live out their lives from birth to death – from the perspective of a pig. It is clear that it is not just the pig’s final death that is brutal but its whole life

The film shows how a factory farm pig is born in confinement (and into its mother’s excrement), its tail is docked and teeth clipped and it is castrated (if male) - all without pain relief. It is separated from its mother, which has been pinned down by a metal bar, and will never see the outdoors.

If the pig is female, ahead of it lies a life of artificial insemination and the taking of its children by humans over and over again, for as long as it remains fertile. Males will be taken to be fattened and will again live in overcrowded cages without stimulation, often leading to mental distress played out by biting other pigs in the cage, and fattened for five months until slaughter.

It is a life worse than that of the worst incarcerated prisoner, yet its only crime is to have been born. And immediately before having its throat cut, the pig can see its own fate as other pigs are hung up in front of it, struggling and bleeding.

Animal Equality is an International animal advocacy organisation that is dedicated to defending all animals through public education, campaigns and investigations. It works to create a more just and compassionate world for animals and is active in many countries. Its film does not go in for sensationalism. What we see appears to be an ordinary factory farm from where the public’s food increasingly derives.

Hidden filming inside factory farms shows that, from pigs and cattle to chickens, the stories are similar and the treatment of animals often barbaric. Various organisations have posted short films about the practices and standard abuses of animals within factory farms that take place in many countries (for example, Mercy For Animals has carried out numerous undercover operations in the US and Canada, which can be seen here, and Animal Equality has conducted similar investigations across Europe).

Why factory farms – why meat?

It is commonly claimed that we need to massively increase the amount of food we produce to feed a growing world population. Another claim is that chemical-intensive (GM) agriculture and factory farming is the only way to do this. These claims are erroneous.

The world already produces enough food to feed the anticipated increase in global population, and various official high-level reports state that small-scale/family farms using ecologically friendly methods are better placed to feed a growing population if adequately invested in (see this and this). Small farms already feed most of the world (see this as well), whereas factory farming belongs to a globalised model of chemical-intensive, mono-cropping and export oriented food and agriculture that produces and fuels food poverty and insecurity.

Moreover, if as a species we were to cut down on meat consumption or even eradicate it from our diet, we could feed the world more easily.

However, meat eating and factory farming are fuelled by government policies. The heavily subsidised meat industry has encouraged people, especially in the US, to eat more much meat than is necessary. A more healthy, non-meat based diet is being discriminated against due to the meat industry’s taxpayer-subsidised cheap meat (see this, this and this).

It comes as no surprise then that, according to the United Nations Population Fund, “Each US citizen consumes an average of 260 pounds of meat per year, the world’s highest rate. That is about 1.5 times the industrial world average, three times the East Asian average, and 40 times the average in Bangladesh.”

And all this meat eating has a huge impact.

A 2010 report from the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Panel of Sustainable Resource Management declared: “Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth and increasing consumption of animal products… A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.”

Livestock needs land, which places pressure on wildlife habitat and forest. Livestock is the world’s largest land user. Grazing occupies 26% of the earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface, and feed crop production uses about one third of all arable land. Producing 1kg of meat through typical industrial methods requires 20kg of feed for beef, 7.3kg for pork and 4.5kg for chicken (see this).

The above-mentioned 2010 UN report explained that western-type dietary preferences for meat would be unsustainable in future, given that the world population is forecast to rise to 9.1 billion by 2050. Demand for meat is expected to double by this date, and meat consumption is already steadily rising in countries such as China, which once followed more sustainable, vegetable-based diets.

David Pimentel, professor of ecology in Cornell University's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, implies a switch to a diet based on vegetable protein could have massive implications:

"If all the grain currently fed to livestock in the United States were consumed directly by people, the number of people who could be fed would be nearly 800 million."

According to Pimental, animal protein production requires more than eight times as much fossil-fuel energy than the production of plant protein while yielding animal protein that is only 1.4 times more nutritious for humans than the comparable amount of plant protein.

Far more energy is put into animals per unit of food than for any plant crop because cattle consume so much more grain as they produce as meat. Animal farms use nearly 40 per cent of the world’s total grain production. In the US, nearly 70 per cent of grain production is fed to livestock. If humans continue to eat more and more meat, it means we’re not just going to destroy more forest and use far more land and water, but we’re also going to manufacture more chemical fertilisers and pesticides to grow the feed. We will thus be creating far more pollution and greenhouse gases.

Meat and water

Meat production also places a great strain on fresh water, which is going to become an increasingly scarce resource in the coming years. John Anthony Allan, professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, argues that the average meat-eating US citizen consumes five cubic meters of water compared to half of that which vegetarians consume. But not all meat is equally water-intensive.

He adds that beef requires 15,500 litres of water per kilogram compared to chicken, which needs 3,900 litres per kilogram. So, at the very least, consumers could think about reducing their beef consumption since it requires the most unsustainable water footprint.

In her book, Stolen Harvests, Vandana Shiva says that for every pound of red meat, poultry, eggs and milk produced, farm fields lose about five pounds of irreplaceable top soil. She also states that the water necessary for meat breeding comes to about 190 gallons per animal per day, or 10 times what a normal Indian family is supposed to use in one day, if it gets water at all.

The great Ogallala aquifer in the US is the largest body of fresh water on earth. The water in it is left from the melted glaciers of the last Ice Age. It is not replenished from rainfall. Author John Robbins notes that more than 13 trillion gallons of water are taken from the aquifer every year. More water is withdrawn from the Ogallala aquifer every year for beef production than is used to grow all the fruits and vegetables in the entire US. Robbins states that it’s only a matter of time before most of the wells in Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico go dry, and portions of these states become scarcely habitable for human beings.

Of course, much has also been written about the impact of modern agriculture on the climate as well as the massive adverse health, social and environmental impacts across South America, which supplies much of Europe with its (GM) animal feed and in doing so drives ecocide and genocide (see Helena Paul's piece in the link).

One last point should be made about the one billion cattle currently alive and the manure produced. In traditional, sustainable systems of agriculture, manure is part of a holistic cycle: it’s fertiliser. But in modern factory farms, this waste is not cycled through the farm because there’s just too much of it. Instead, waste is stored in manure ‘lagoons’, which emit methane and, even worse for the environment and climate, nitrous oxide.

For instance, in North Carolina hog production has increased faster than anywhere else in the US. The hogs produce over 19 million tons of manure each year and most of it gets stored in lagoons. Many of those lagoons flooded and burst when Hurricane Floyd swept through the region in 1999. Hundreds of acres of land and miles of waterway were flooded with excrement, resulting in massive fish kills and millions of dollars in clean-up costs. The lagoons' contents are also known to leak out and seep into groundwater.

Sustainable agriculture and less meat

Factory farming is now a global phenomenon. For example, just 40 years ago the Philippines’ entire population was fed on native eggs and chickens produced by family farmers. Now, most of those farmers are out of business. And because world trade rules encourage nations from imposing tariffs on imported products, they are forced to allow cheap, factory-farmed US meat into the country. These products are then sold at lower prices than domestic meat. There is therefore pressure for local producers to scale up and industrialise to compete.

The route to feeding the world sustainably and equitably depends on a model of agriculture that first and foremost is locally centred, serves local communities and is based on ecologically sound organic practices, including agroecology. In other words, a model of agriculture not dominated by factory farming, manipulated global markets, transnational agribusiness, commodity speculators, petrochemical interests and giant retailers as well as trade agreements and rules which act to undermine localised, smallholder farming (described here). It also involves cutting back on global meat consumption.

Small farms are more productive, more resilient and more beneficial to local economies than factory farms: they tend to ensure local food security, employ more people and money (and food) tends to stay within the locality. Yet, despite this, small farmers are being displaced and larger factory farms are being planned, which will employ fewer and fewer people, thus sucking the life from local communities. They will grab the lion’s share of taxpayer subsidies (as is the case, explained here and here) and send even more small farms to the wall.

Of course there is a lot more that could be said about the issues at hand, but, in finishing, we should not lose sight of two points that are key to this discussion.

First, neoliberal capitalism is sowing the seeds of humanity’s destruction. It is stripping the environment bare through unsustainable levels of consumption and institutionalised economic plunder, the latter of which involves the programmed eradication of indigenous, productive agriculture. In doing so, the world’s ability to feed itself is being destroyed.

And the destruction of rural livelihoods and communities is for what? Agriculture and food poisoned with chemicals and the mass incarceration of animals who suffering is hidden from public view; an urban-centric model of ‘development’ defined by greed and narcissism on the one hand and austerity and poverty on the other; all to be played out in polluted, congested mega-cities shaped by powerful private corporations which seek to colonise and mould the very essence of existence, from cradle to grave, from field to plate.

Second, there are deep-seated questions to be asked about how we as individuals personally regard our mass slaughter and wholesale exploitation of animals on factory farms. Should we be treating animals more humanely in agriculture, or should we even be producing animal products for eating at all? Even if our consciences can continue to live with this, in the long run it will be not only impractical to expand factory farming and increase meat consumption but, based on the evidence presented here, catastrophic to do so.

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.